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“We try to do everything in a timely manner,” says Freeman, who farms in southwest Georgia’s Miller County. “The good Lord helped us out last year and everything fell into place. The main thing at the end of the season was staying on top of irrigation.”

Freeman’s high yields and efficient operation have earned him the honor of being the 2011 Farm Press Peanut Profitability Award winner for the Lower Southeast Region. He also was the 2010 State Winner for the Georgia Peanut Achievement Award.

One-hundred-degree temperatures were common last summer in south Georgia, and such extremes quickly dried out the sandy soils farmed by Freeman.

“At mid-season, when we were putting out Temik, the soil thermometer had gone up 6 degrees in one day, and that was how quickly the water was leaving us. But when it got to be harvest-time, we had almost perfect weather all the way through, with picking and digging. The last day we got through picking, it started raining late that afternoon, and it rained 1.5 to 2 inches. We just had a great year, with grades in the 75 to 76 range,” he says.

Freeman says one of his keys to efficiency and holding down costs is that he doesn’t spent a lot on labor, working with one full-time employee and his son, Nolan.

“We do a lot of the work ourselves, and most of our equipment is paid for. You can’t farm with junk, but we try to take care of our equipment and make it last as long as possible. We update as we go along, as we did with the twin-row equipment and the auto-steer, but I try to put back some money for things like that.”

It also helps to have good neighbors, he adds. “For more than 20 years, we’ve swapped out work with our neighbors. We help them pick peanuts and they help us. Rather than pick by the ton and swap money, we just swap out hours of labor, and it always evens out.”

Third-generation farmer

While he isn’t sure it saves him money, he uses his own equipment for drying peanuts.

Freeman has been farming on his own since 1981, when his father passed away. “I’ve been farming since I was old enough to work, but I started having to make all of the decisions at that time. I’m a third-generation farmer. My daddy grew peanuts and was a yield winner in the 1970s,” he says.

Freeman says he’s not doing anything different from other farmers. “We just try and make it all come together, and if everything falls into place, it’ll come out right. In some years, everything clicks, and in some years, it doesn’t.”

He also grows corn and plants rye for winter grazing.

“I never grew any cotton because I would have had to rearrange everything we were doing. We already had the equipment set up for our current rotation, so we just stuck with it. We would have had to drop something if we were going to grow cotton,” says Freeman.

All of the land owned by Freeman is in one location. Over the years, he says, his father bought land as it became available and added on to the size of the farm.

“I stick with the same acres each year,” he says. “And even when the price fluctuates, I don’t change my acreage. We’ve got a three-year rotation, and I stick with about 165 acres of peanuts. We plant rye in the fall, and that also helps out with our rotation.”

All of Freeman’s cropland is irrigated, and in dry years, he has had to feed cows.

“We’ve got silos, and if I didn’t have feed put up, I probably would have had to sell cows because it has been so dry. I wouldn’t start farming without irrigation. Several years ago, I started using IrrigatorPro for scheduling irrigation on peanuts, and we also use the program for corn.

“Our soils are sandy, and even though we thought we were irrigating enough, I always wondered if we really were. IrrigatorPro gives us a heads-up on how fast our soil moisture is being depleted. It has contributed to our high peanut yields, especially last year when it was really dry.”

Freeman runs all center pivots, with groundwater sources. He plants the Tifguard and GA-06 cultivars.

“One of the main pests for us is nematodes. They can be the difference between making 1 ton per acre and 3 tons per acre. I’ve grown Tifguard for two years now and have been well pleased with it. I don’t think it would work in all soil types because it has smaller stems than GA-06. In a light, sandy soil like we have, even in a wet year, you can dig them without any problems.”

He also uses Telone for nematodes, and like other growers, he doesn’t like the idea of losing Temik. “We came back with 10 pounds of Temik last year at pegging, and that plan worked well. I have enough Temik for this year, but next year, I might have to depend totally on Tifguard. I’ve always liked the idea of a little extra insurance.”

Freeman plants whenever the Peanut Rx disease risk index recommends, usually around May 20, in twin rows.

“We had tomato spotted wilt virus so bad on one farm that Georgia Green had just about played out. We planted the GA-03 variety, but they didn’t grade as well. With GA-06, I’ve had grades as high as 81.”

For peanut disease control, Freeman starts with Bravo and sulfur. He uses a seven-spray program, starting with Folicur on the third spray.

“This program works well for us. Folicur by itself won’t cure leafspot. If the weather gets wet, we narrow the two-week intervals between spraying, maybe to 10 to 12 days.”

New weed control approach

Freeman used Valor for weed control for the first time last year and was impressed with the results “I’ve never liked using Gramoxone in extreme heat. It takes a long time for peanuts to recover, even with irrigation. Last year, there weren’t any weeds out there for us to burn down when we used Valor. I don’t know if it was luck or if Valor was that good, but we’ll use it again this year.”

He follows Valor with Cadre.

Resistant Palmer amaranth pigweed hasn’t been a problem for Freeman yet, but he has seen it in neighboring fields. It helps, he says, that he uses atrazine on his corn crop.

In 2011, Freeman sprayed one time with Karate for insects. “In past years, we’ve had to put something in with our leafspot sprays for worms. They didn’t show up last year. With IrrigatorPro, we check thermometers every day, and we can see insect problems when they start.”

Looking ahead to the challenges facing peanut growers, Freeman says stability is the greatest need in farming today.

“We need to be able to plan ahead, and it’s hard to do that sometimes. All of agriculture is a strategic resource for this country, and it needs to be kept strong. Education efforts are falling short in agriculture, and people are starting to become out of touch.”

Freeman says producers need to continue to fund research, even in a time of tight budgets. “If it had not been for the new varieties we have now, I’d almost be debating whether or not to continue growing peanuts. Tomato spotted wilt virus had gotten very bad here. If want to continue to make progress, we can’t put the brakes on research. It’s tough times, but we need to keep it going.”

Years ago, he says, people couldn’t see the benefits of the space program, but technology like the auto-steer tractor is a direct result of this research.

“It’s one of the best pieces of equipment I’ve bought, with yield increases being at least 500 pounds per acre. If I couldn’t run it, my son could. You can get in and stay on the row. I had to buy a new tractor, but Auto-Steer paid for itself in one season.”

In addition to their son, Nolan, who will be attending college in Bainbridge in the fall, Freeman and his wife Leslie have two daughters, Haley, a student at Georgia State University, and Karlie, who is at Valdosta State University.


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Headlines > News > Expendable Launch Vehicle Status Report

Expendable Launch Vehicle Status Report

Published by Klaus Schmidt on Sat Oct 17, 2009 6:47 am via: source
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(NASA) – Spacecraft: Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
Launch Vehicle: Delta II 7320
Launch Pad: SLC-2, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
Launch Date: Dec. 7, 2009
Launch Window: 6:10 – 6:23 a.m. PST

At the Astrotech payload processing facility on north Vandenberg, work has been under way this week to set up the necessary ground support equipment for loading of the cryogenic hydrogen which will be used to supercool the infrared telescope during its six months of observations. The vacuum pumpdown of the spacecraft is now under way and will be followed by testing at cryogenic temperatures. This will be followed by two weeks of activity to load and then freeze the cryogenic hydrogen.

Build-up of the Delta II rocket at Space Launch Complex 2 now is scheduled to begin next week with hoisting of the first stage into the launcher on Monday. The three solid rocket boosters will then be attached on Oct. 21, and the second stage will be hoisted atop the first stage on Oct. 22.

Spacecraft: Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
Launch Vehicle: Atlas V-401
Launch Pad: Launch Complex 41, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.
Launch Date: Feb. 3, 2010
Launch Window: 10:53 – 11:53 a.m. EST

Propulsion system testing and leak checks of the spacecraft were completed this week and went well with no issues reported. Some minor battery panel modifications are currently under way.

The Atlas rocket first stage booster is set to arrive by air at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Oct. 26, followed by the Centaur upper stage on Oct. 29.

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Ball Aerospace Completes Performance Testing for James Webb Space Telescope Aft Optics Subsystem

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has completed all performance testing for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope aft-optics subsystem (AOS) under contract to the Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Since May of 2012, the AOS has undergone a series of tests including thermal and vibration, followed by cryogenic testing to demonstrate that it can withstand the rigorous vibration environment of the rocket launch and remain precisely aligned in order to function at extremely cold temperatures in space. The AOS will remain at Ball Aerospace to be used during integrated testing with the flight actuator drive unit and AOS source plate assembly. This AOS is the final optical subsystem of the James Webb Optical Telescope Element to complete integration and test activities at Ball Aerospace.

"Each optical element that Ball Aerospace is building for the Webb is extremely sophisticated and the successful completion of another milestone brings us one day closer to the launch of NASA's next major space observatory," said Ball Aerospace President and CEO David L. Taylor.

The AOS is a precision beryllium rectangular optical bench that houses the tertiary and the fine steering mirror installed at the center of Webb's primary mirror. The AOS is surrounded by a shroud that eliminates stray light, and two large radiator panels that keep the assembly cold. This subsystem collects and focuses the light from the secondary mirror and feeds it into the science instruments.

Ball is the principal subcontractor to Northrop Grumman for the optical technology and lightweight mirror system for NASA's Webb Telescope. In total, Ball has designed and delivered the Webb's 18 beryllium primary mirror segments, secondary and tertiary mirrors, a fine steering mirror, and several engineering development units.

In September 2012, Ball began the process of shipping the finished Webb primary mirrors to Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The remaining mirrors will arrive at Goddard this year, awaiting telescope integration in 2015. The Webb is on track for an October 2018 liftoff.

The Webb telescope is critical for future infrared observations and will serve as the premier observatory of the next decade.

Roz Brown
Media Relations Manager
+1 303-533-6059, cell: +1 720-581-3135

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. (http://www.ballaerospace.com) supports critical missions for national agencies such as the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA and other U.S. government and commercial entities. The company develops and manufactures spacecraft, advanced instruments and sensors, components, data exploitation systems and RF solutions for strategic, tactical and scientific applications.

Ball Corporation (http://www.ball.com) is a supplier of high quality packaging for beverage, food and household products customers, and of aerospace and other technologies and services, primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ more than 14,500 people worldwide and reported 2011 sales of more than $8.6 billion.

Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.


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Secrets of Success

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This Sparked Me!

Weight maintenance comes from consistency - making the right-for-you choices every day.

This means living mindfully and understanding that decision-making is critical. Avoid saying "whatever!" Instead, ask yourself, "does this choice add or detract from my health?" And remember, you're worth the best!!
- Submitted by MADEIT3 9/11/2013 in Staying Healthy | 1 Comments
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KALIGIRL 9/11/2013 9:53:00 AM

    Here's to living mindfully!

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Updates on Locked-Out NHLers in Europe & the AHL – December 29, 2012.

Latest on Evgeni Malkin, Ilya Kovalchuk, Daniel Briere, Milan Michalek, Jordan Eberle, Taylor Hall and more.

KHL.RU: Evgeni Malkin had a goal and two assists and Ryan O’Reilly potted two goals as Metallurg Magnitogorsk blanked Metallur Novokuznetsk 6-0. Sergei Gonchar also had two assists.

Ilya Kovalchuk scored game winner for Saint Petersburg in Friday's KHL action.

 Kovalchuk scored game winner for Saint Petersburg in Friday’s KHL action.

Ilya Kovalchuk scored the only goal as SKA Saint Petersburg edged Slovan Bratislava 1-0. Sergei Bobrovsky made 27 saves for the win.

Viktor Stalberg collected a goal and an assist as Atlant Moscow Region downed Yugra Khanty-Mansiysk 5-3.

DEL.ORG: Daniel Briere scored the game-tying goal early in the third for Eisbaren Berlin, which went on to beat ERC Ingolstadt 3-1.

HOKEJ.CZ: Milan Michalek scored in a losing cause as HC MOUNTFIELD fell 5-3 to Pirates Chomutov.

THE AHL.COM: Jordan Eberle scored the shootout winner as the Oklahoma City Barons edged the San Antonio Rampage 3-2. Eberle also had two assists, as did teammate Taylor Hall.

Cody Hodgson scored twice as the Rochester Americans down the Lake Erie Monsters 4-1.

Bobby Butler scored twice in a losing cause as the Albany Devils fell 3-2 to the Binghamtom Senators. Robin Lehner made 35 saves for the win.

Brayden Schenn scored one of the Adirondack Phantoms two goals as they fell 4-2 to the Providence Bruins.


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The Million Dollar Programming Prize

Netflix's bounty for improving its movie-recommendation software is almost in the bag. Here is one team's account

Photo: Randi Silberman

It’s 7:50 p.m. on 1 October 2007 at AT&T Labs, in Florham Park, N.J., and three of us are frantically hitting the ”refresh” buttons on our browsers. We have just submitted our latest entry in the year-old Netflix Prize competition, which offers a grand prize of US $1 million for an algorithm that’s 10 percent more accurate than the one Netflix uses to predict customers’ movie preferences. Although we have not reached that milestone, we are hoping at least to do better than anyone else has done so far; if we can make it to 8 p.m. with the best score, we’ll win a $50 000 Progress Prize. For most of the summer we’d been ahead of our nearest rivals by a comfortable margin, and as recently as 36 hours before this moment, our victory still seemed to be a slam dunk.

The previous day, though, the lead had started to slip away from us. First, the teams then in fifth and sixth places merged, combining their talents to vault into second place, making us nervous enough to submit our best effort, which we had been saving for a rainy day. But before our improved score appeared, we were hit by another combination when our two remaining serious rivals joined forces to tie us. Worse, their entry had come 72 seconds before ours, meaning that in the case of a tie, they’d win.

Seventy-two seconds! Could we lose this thing for being a minute too late? Then we realized that there were still 25 hours left, and we still had one more chance. We had to make it count.

We began to receive offers from other competitors to combine our scores with theirs. We politely declined them and planned strategies for our last submission. Sure enough, these bumped up our score by a few hundredths of a percent, at which point we could only wait to see the final score from our newly allied foes.

Since 1997, when Netflix, of Los Gatos, Calif., came up with the idea of sending movie DVDs through the mail to subscribers, its customer base has grown to 10 million. That success stems, in part, from the company’s giving quick and easy access to movies. But just as important is the Netflix recommender system, Cinematch, which helps customers get the most out of their memberships. The better the system predicts people’s likes and dislikes, the more they’ll enjoy the movies they watch and the longer they’ll keep up their subscriptions.

As a new subscriber to Netflix, you have several ways to choose movies on the company’s Web site. You can browse by genre or search by keyword for a title, actor, or director. After receiving your selections by mail or over the Internet and viewing them, you return to the site to order more movies. At any time, Cinematch lets you rate any movie you’ve seen by clicking on one to five stars.

As is the case with other recommender systems, such as those of Amazon, the Internet Movie Database, and Pandora, it’s in the customer’s interest to vote thoughtfully, because doing so helps Netflix figure out his or her tastes. Yet even if the customer declines to offer this feedback, Netflix still notes which movies the subscriber actually orders. After the customer has rated a handful of movies, the algorithm will start recommending titles based on the rating the algorithm predicts the customer will give.

Recommending movies that customers will enjoy is a complex business. The easy part is gathering the data, which Netflix now accumulates at the rate of some 2 million ratings a day. Much tougher is to find patterns in the data that tell the company which movie a customer would enjoy, if only the person would watch it.

Netflix developed Cinematch to tackle this job using a well-known prediction technique (described below), which it designed to handle the billion or so ratings it had already logged. However, while incorporating so many ratings added to accuracy, it also took a lot of work just to keep up with the increasing scale, let alone to test alternative prediction schemes.

The Netflix researchers were nevertheless curious about the many other techniques for making similar predictions that had been published in the scholarly literature. The problem was that those studies had relied on public data sets containing on the order of a few million ratings, and it would take the small Netflix team a long time to explore how well these alternative techniques worked at a scale a thousand times as large. That is, if they did all the work themselves.

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, suggested running a contest. He observed that Netflix had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And the company had already staged a contest internally between the standard Cinematch system and an alternative algorithm, which did slightly, tantalizingly better.

The Netflix team came up with the basic structure of the contest. They would provide 100 million ratings that 480 000 anonymous customers had given to 17 000 movies. The data set would just fit in the main memory of a typical laptop, allowing almost anyone to compete. Netflix would withhold 3 million of the most recent ratings and ask the contestants to predict them. A Netflix computer would assess each contestant’s 3 million predictions by comparing predictions with actual ratings. The system would use the traditional metric for predictive accuracy, the root-mean squared error (RMSE). The more accurate a set of predictions, the smaller the RMSE will be. The score would then be reported back immediately to the contestant and reflected on an online leaderboard for all to see.

Each such scoring provides valuable information about the hidden ratings--so valuable, in fact, that under certain circumstances it could be used to game the system. The teams were therefore scored once a day, at most. But to help teams estimate how well they might do, Netflix also provided them each with a small representative data set and the score Cinematch had been able to attain for it. Contestants could use that set to test their systems as often as they wanted.

On 2 October 2006, Netflix launched the competition, and within days thousands of teams from hundreds of countries signed up. Within weeks the Netflix Prize Web site was getting hundreds of submissions per day. An online forum was created so that participants could share ideas and techniques, even code. Even more gratifying to Netflix, within months a handful of teams did several percent better than Cinematch. The question then was how much the accuracy would improve in the first year.

Like most of the other top competitors, the three of us at AT&T Labs consulted the rich body of research on ways of solving problems in this domain, known as collaborative filtering.

One of the main areas of collaborative filtering we exploited is the nearest-neighbor approach. A movie’s ”neighbors” in this context are other movies that tend to be scored most similarly when rated by the same viewer [see illustration, ”The Neighborhood Model”]. For example, consider Saving Private Ryan (1998), a war movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks. Its neighbors may include other war movies, movies directed by Spielberg, or movies starring Tom Hanks. To predict a particular viewer’s rating, we would look for the nearest neighbors to Saving Private Ryan that the viewer had already seen and rated. For some viewers, it may be easy to find a full allotment of close neighbors; for many others, we may discover only a handful of neighboring movies. Our version of the nearest-neighbor approach predicted ratings using a weighted average of the viewer’s previous ratings on up to 50 neighboring movies. (We have since developed a way to use all past ratings, allowing an unlimited number of neighbors.)

A second area of collaborative-filtering research we pursued involves what are known as latent-factor models. These score both a given movie and a given viewer according to a set of factors, themselves inferred from patterns in the ratings given to all the movies by all the viewers [see illustration, ”The Latent-Factor Approach”]. Factors for movies may measure comedy versus drama, action versus romance, and orientation to children versus orientation to adults. Because the factors are determined automatically by algorithms, they may correspond to hard-to-describe concepts such as quirkiness, or they may not be interpretable by humans at all. Factors for viewers measure how much the viewer likes movies that score highly on the corresponding movie factor. Thus, a movie may be classified a comedy, and a viewer may be classified as a comedy lover.

The model may use 20 to 40 such factors to locate each movie and viewer in a multidimensional space. It then predicts a viewer’s rating of a movie according to the movie’s score on the dimensions that person cares about most. We can put these judgments in quantitative terms by taking the dot (or scalar) product of the locations of the viewer and the movie.

Both collaborative-filtering techniques work even if you don’t know a thing about what’s in the movies themselves. All you need to care about is how the viewers rate the movies. However, neither approach is a panacea. We found that most nearest-neighbor techniques work best on 50 or fewer neighbors, which means these methods can’t exploit all the information a viewer’s ratings may contain. Latent-factor models have the opposite weakness: They are bad at detecting strong associations among a few closely related films, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003).

Because these two methods are complementary, we combined them, using many versions of each in what machine-learning experts call an ensemble approach. This allowed us to build systems that were simple and therefore easy to code and fast to run.

What’s more, our ensemble approach was robust enough to protect against some of the problems that arise within the system’s individual components. Indeed, the solution we had just submitted on 1 October 2007 was a linear combination of 107 separate sets of predictions, using many variations on the above themes and different tuning parameters. Even so, the biggest improvements in accuracy came from relatively few methods. The lesson here is that having lots of ways to skin this particular cat can be useful for gaining the incremental improvements needed to win competitions, but practically speaking, excellent systems can be built using just a few well-selected strategies.

We don’t want to give the impression that heaping together a lot of methods was enough to reach the leaderboard. The Netflix Prize data set poses some huge challenges beyond its immense size. For one, there was enormous variation among viewers and among movies. A rating system must be sensitive enough to tease out subtle patterns associated with those few viewers who rated 1500 movies, without overfitting thingsthat is, expecting prolific raters’ patterns to apply to the many more users who rated 15 or fewer movies. It can indeed be hard to make predictions for a viewer who has provided just a handful of ratings. We improved existing ad hoc methods, designed to address this concern rigorously.

Another critical innovation involved focusing on which movies a viewer rated, regardless of the scores. The idea is that someone who has rated a lot of fantasy movies will probably like Lord of the Rings , even if that person has rated the other movies in the category somewhat low. By replacing numerical scores with a binary who-watched-what score, the data set is transformed from one with mostly missing pieces (the cases in which users don’t rate movies) to one that is completely full (using the value 1 when there are ratings and a 0 when there aren’t). This approach nicely complemented our other methods.

Finally, at 7:58 on that fateful October evening, all of the scores for the top teams were posted for the last time on the leaderboard, and ours came out highest, with an 8.43 percent improvement on Netflix’s algorithm. Our nearest rival scored an 8.38 percent improvement. We didn’t do well enough to land a million dollars, but still, we won.

While we’ve since come very close to the goal of 10 percent, experience has shown that each step forward is harder than the one that came before it, presumably because we’ve already exploited most of the clues in the data. Nonetheless, we continue to made progress. During 2008 we mined the data for information on how users’ behavior changed over time. Later, we joined forces with another team to win the 2008 Progress Prize. Currently we stand at 9.63 percent improvement and are still working hard on the problem.

Now that the confetti has settled, we have a chance to look back on our work and to ask what this experience tells us. First, Netflix has incorporated our discoveries into an improved version of its algorithm, which is now being tested. Second, researchers are benefiting from the data set that the competition made available, and not just because it is orders of magnitude larger than previous data sets. It is also qualitatively better than other data sets, because Netflix gathered the information from paying customers, in a realistic setting. Third, the competition itself recruited many smart people in this line of research.

In any case, the new blood promises to quickly improve the state of the art. Such competitions have invigorated other fields. The various X Prizes that have been offered for advances in genomics, automotive design, and alternative energy have shown an excellent return: By some accounts the recent $10 million Ansari X prize, awarded for suborbital spaceflight, generated $100 million of private investment in space travel.

The competition also validates the concept of collective intelligence popularized in James Surowiecki’s 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds (Anchor Books). He argues that the sum of many independent votes is often superior to any one vote, even if made by the greatest expert. For Netflix, the vast number of independent ratings allows for surprisingly good predictions. The power of this collective intelligence is also being harnessed in, for instance,’s product recommendations and the collaborative editing of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. With the rise of social networks on the Web, we can expect to see and contribute to even more powerful examples in the coming years.

About the Author

Robert M. Bell, Chris Volinsky, and Yehuda Koren worked together at AT&T Labs Research, in Florham Park, N.J., where they competed for ”The Million Dollar Programming Prize”. Jim Bennett, who was vice president for recommendation systems at Netflix, helped organize the competition to build a better movie recommender. Bell is a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Volinsky has been director of the labs’ statistics research department since 2003. Koren now works for Yahoo Research, in Israel.


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Definition of a Child With a Disability

Presentation to the Governor's Task Force on Educational Excellence, November 6, 2003

A child with a disability means a child evaluated by an individualized education program (IEP) team as having mental retardation, a hearing impairment including deafness, a speech or language impairment, a visual impairment including blindness, serious emotional disturbance, an orthopedic impairment, autism, traumatic brain injury, an other health impairment, a specific learning disability, deaf-blindness, or multiple disabilities, and who, by reason thereof, needs special education and related services.

34CFR §300.7


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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Apple iPad - the new iPad 3th generation

Apple has official released the new generation of iPad.
It comes with renting display, 5Mpix camera and quad core A5x processor and lte.
You can pre-order now and selling starts in a few days.
See for more informations.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Spinatmensch updates

I'm too busy at the moment for real blogging, but I've changed some new things.
For example I've add googles authorship, switched my blogger profile to G+ profile and such small things which are not visible.
This article about spinatmensch is also posted by blogger iPhone app.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Step 1: Become a member of social networks

First of all I need to become a member of all social networks - I don't want be a homeless anymore ;-)
So I created a facebook account and additional a face-book page which is available at

I already got an twitter account at

I was connecting fb-page and twitter so my status updates from fb are shown at twitter, and my twitter tweets are shown at my fb-page - quite easy.

But I've also a blog at and I also created a Tumblr account.

Ok you can also connect Tumblr to twitter which is connected to fb-page, but I don't want to have the small tweet on my fb-page-wall! I want to have a regular post with preview-image, link to my blog's! Hmmm...

So I'm trying

Connect different social networks

Today I’m trying some social network overkill.

I try to connect following:

#facebook-page, twitter, tumblr, blogspot, linkedin, google-reader

So my goal is to find out how I can connect all these social networks. I don’t want to check, post, tweet… on all these networks by hand. I just want to have only one service which I can use to publish and update my things on all these networks.
Google Instant Pages Prerendering Can Inflate Analytics Stats

Monday, July 25, 2011

Semantic web -

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google decide to bring up more semantic to web and you can find information's about that at
As You can see there are some things which are duplicates to new html5 elements.

Currently Googles rich snippets tool doesn't show up all new semantics.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Google Maps UI Update

Mybe it's one of Googles test, but it seems that the layout of maps has been updated to a better design.
I hink all which are using touch-devices will be happy about that.


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Global Leadership Summit – Visalia

August 8, 2013 @ 3:30 pm – August 10, 2013 @ 12:00 am
Visalia First Assembly
3737 South Akers Street
Visalia, CA 93277
See website for pricing info
Visalia First

Lead Where You Are…

The Global Leadership Summit exists to transform Christian Leaders around the world with an injection of vision, skill development, and inspiration for the sake of the local church.

This year’s speakers include Pastor Bill Hybels, General Colin Powell, Bob Goff (author of Love Does), filmmaker/producer Mark Burnett, Dr. Henry Cloud, Pastor Andy Stanley and MUCH MORE!

The Summit meets at Willow Creek Church and is simulcast live to over 230 host sites in the U.S., including Visalia First Assembly, New Harvest Church in Clovis, and New Life Center in Bakersfield.

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I’m working with my daughter’s school on a project about local food, so Wednesday I stopped in for a little show-and-tell about the sort of food that grows in New York vs. elsewhere. (Apples and grapes, natch. Pineapples and mangoes, nada.) I’ll admit I had visions of doing my own Jamie Oliver-style Q&A, complete with a dramatic reveal and confused kids. But thankfully my 5- and 6-year-olds did know their fruits and veggies. Impressively so.

I got there right as the kids were finishing lunch and munching birthday popsicles brought in by one of the boys in my daughter’s class. I’m not unreasonable. I allow the occasional brightly colored junk even if I cringe the whole time and then spend the rest of the day peeling my daughter off the ceiling. Balance, right?

This time, though, I wasn’t feeling generous. Maybe because of the irony — um, fruit and veggie talk — or maybe because I’d only last week written a blog post on artificial colors. Or maybe because the kids (mine top of the list) were bouncy during the talk. (Knowledgeable, but bouncy.) Whatever the reason, it made me cranky. So later, at home after the presentation, I asked my daughter why she’d chosen the green popsicle, the only one of the choices that was obviously artificially colored. (The popsicles were made partly with fruit juice and fruit, but apparently some varieties still needed a chemical color boost.)

Turns out she’d been handed the popsicle by the birthday boy, and one of the (well-meaning) teachers had told the kids, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” So Tess didn’t ask for one of the (naturally colored) berry flavors that she would have preferred anyway. “And Mama,” she added, “I didn’t know it had food dye in it.”

That’s when deja vu hit. We’d had a similar incident last summer, only then the culprit was a blue ice cream bunny. Then, like now, I’d reached my limit. And then, like now, I’d written about it. So I’m going to pull out that piece (originally published in one of my regular columns) and reprint it here. And tonight I’m going to watch the newest episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and try not to get too riled. We’ve got it pretty good by comparison, but the collective stakes are high.

Blue in the Face: Trying to make sense of a junk-food world

Many of us preach moderation when it comes to kids and junk food. My husband and I chose another buzzword: education. By teaching our kindergartner about nutrition and how food affects our bodies — by giving her tools to make good choices rather than simply making them for her — we hoped she’d carry the lessons through to adulthood. We figured we couldn’t easily change the world we live in, but we could change the way we live in it.

Until the blue bunny incident. Then I realized that it’s got to be bigger than us.

I’d read a New York Times article about an anti-junk food mom in Manhattan who, among other things, e-mailed shrill missives to school board members and required her children to deposit school-provided junk food into a plastic container (for her after-school accounting, one assumes). I had mixed feelings. This mom was so right about our country’s epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, and about how a deluge of sugar, trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, and artificial colors and flavors has no place in learning environments. But her methods were so wrong.

So I was feeling pretty good about my own low-key crusade. Our daughter didn’t have sugar until nearly preschool. Ditto chips and all that. And we’d been offering healthful foods right along, substituting our own snacks for ones provided in school and at kid activities. But we’d done all this quietly, never telling anyone else how to raise their children, never harassing school officials.

The closest I’d come was sending a carefully worded e-mail to the director of a day camp my daughter had attended. I suggested there were better alternatives to the neon-hued ice pops the kids were getting every afternoon. The director countered that this was a tradition and that kids deserve special treats on hot days (akin to the commenter on the New York Times article who wrote that giving kids cake and popsicles is a “God-given right”).

I pushed back with a little did-you-know about how certain ingredients (like food dyes, a known stimulant for hyperactivity) affect kids’ health and behavior. But in the end I conceded that we could just as easily supply our own whole-fruit popsicles next year. End of story. No drama. No picketing outside the camp.

But then I picked my daughter up from a different day camp three weeks later. And there was the blue bunny.

She and I had talked that morning about the ice cream truck. It was an end-of-week ritual at this camp, and I wanted her to be able to enjoy it with everybody else. It’s the same reason we’re fine with cake at birthday parties and candy on Halloween and Easter. Plus there’s no quicker way to create a kid with food issues than to deny them simple sugary pleasures.

But here’s where that education thing comes in. My daughter knows that food dye is one of the things we try hard to avoid. And it’s generally easy, because though color might dazzle her at first, one bite usually makes her realize that just because something is pretty doesn’t mean it tastes good. So I asked her to pick an ice cream treat that wasn’t obviously colored. And I thought we were good.

But I forgot something. She’s 5. And bunny-shaped ice cream bars are hard to resist.

The scene: I get out of my car and hear “Mommy!” I turn, smiling. Then I’m frowning, trying to figure out what’s all over her face. Blue. It’s blue. “Did they just finish painting or something?” I’m wondering. Then there’s excited talk of blue ice cream bunnies with gumball eyes. I feel my blood pressure rise.

“What happened to no color?” I manage to ask, trying to keep my cool. “I forgot, Mommy,” says my blue-streaked daughter, already doing that fidgety food-dye dance. “I just really wanted the bunny!”

Well of course she did. What kid wouldn’t? So then I got mad. Not at her, but at the camp. At the ice cream truck. At the system, whatever that is. Why do we even have food like this available? It’s not even technically food, at least by certain definitions. But it’s everywhere in our schools, our camps, our kids’ sporting activities.

When she was tiny, I’d been fine handling these affronts. Packing more healthful snacks for preschool? No problem. Substituting almonds and whole-grain graham crackers for the lollipops handed out after her sports class? OK. Asking her to drink water instead of sugary drinks at camp? Sure.

We explained all this to her, letting her know it was OK to make choices different from other kids and hoping we were laying the foundation for when she’d be making choices on her own — like when the ice cream truck pulls into camp. But I was coming around to the opinion that our singular efforts weren’t enough.

Our daughter actually makes pretty smart food choices and has developed a palate that favors unprocessed food, so it seems to be paying off. But what about the kids whose parents don’t have time to sort this out? The ultimate responsibility for a child’s health and well-being lies with parents, but schools and other stewards of childhood have a responsibility, too, to educate themselves and read labels and take the time to offer options that are good and good for you.

When Mark Bittman, author of “Food Matters,” spoke at an event here in July, someone in the audience asked how we can ensure that children grow up to make smart food choices. Kids aren’t born craving Pop-Tarts and Cheez Doodles, Bittman pointed out. Those are learned habits, acquired tastes.

But they can be unlearned, too. Even in school.

The addendum to this story is that the second summer camp — which is run by the school my daughter now attends — has asked me for ideas not only for healthy snacks for this year, but also for recipes the kids can cook each week. For now, though, the ice cream truck stays.

Am I alone in getting worked up about this stuff? What pushes your buttons?

Update as of April 26: This week I’m entering this post in the Get the Junk Out blog carnival. Check out the link for other posts about food additives. Also see my April 2 post on artificial colors. (It’s about using Easter egg dyes to teach kids the difference between natural and artificial colors, but there’s also a lot of background information about dyes.)

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{ 22 comments… add one }

  • Karen Bannan April 9, 2010, 6:00 pm

    We have had the same issues since my little one was, well, really little. It’s very frustrating when other moms look at you like you’re the crazy one as you hand your child a healthy alternative.

    Keep up the good fight, Christina.

  • Frugal Kiwi April 9, 2010, 6:09 pm

    I don’t do well with food dyes. I was in my twenties before I figured it out. Red velvet cake, red Chinese BBQ pork and other super red foods are the worst culprits for me. But we can’t expect children to figure that sort of thing out. Sadly, we can’t depend on manufacturer’s to make responsible choices. If one company doesn’t make blue bunny ice cream, another will.

  • Dana Cardona April 9, 2010, 9:04 pm

    What pushes my buttons:
    Birthday cake and ice cream… and the drink served:
    I happen to think cake and ice cream is plenty of sugar. ;P
    I don’t care if it’s organic apple juice made from local apples (increasingly rare… most apple juice now comes from China where there are few if any environmental regulations, so I’m going to assume the juice is full of pesticides and what not, not to mention the fossil fuel that was burned getting it here… and it’s not like there’s an apple shortage in NY State!!!); cake and ice cream goes nicely with good old H2O in my book.

    • Christina April 10, 2010, 3:56 pm

      Juice! Indeed. For birthday parties, we always get a big jug of water with a spigot so kids can serve themselves. (Cuts down on waste, too.)

  • Kelly April 10, 2010, 8:55 pm

    I recently began following your blog. I have had struggles with preschool menu and supply substitutes sometimes. I work full time and have 2 kids, so it is really hard to be consistent. But I try. I have been one to confront the preschool administration at times. This summer will be a new experience, with day camp for my oldest daughter, and I’m already fearful of what is to come, but I want her to have a fun summer before she starts Kindergarten. Once there, I will be able to control much more.

    Thanks for sharing so much!

    • Christina April 11, 2010, 10:35 pm

      Welcome, Kelly. You might have seen another post in which I wrote that we supplied our own snacks through two years of preschool. That worked very well for us. But last summer was the first time we did all-day summer camp, and that made me nervous about food all over again. Turned out, though, that I needn’t have worried (except for the neon ice pops and blue bunny).

      The first camp’s director was pretty clueless when I questioned her about the ice pops (not only about the food dye, but also when I noted the irony of an active outdoor camp claiming to replenish kids’ energy with HFCS-laden crud). So I knew I wasn’t going to gain an ally there for future reform. (As it turns out, we’re not going back to that camp, though not because of the food.)

      But the second camp director was incredibly responsive and, as you saw above, open to suggestions. Yes, the ice cream truck stays, but I’ll deal.

  • Sarah April 12, 2010, 2:35 pm

    I think the thing that pushes my buttons is… me. I’m a Johnny-come-lately to this whole food awareness business and I’m frustrated by my lack of knowledge in this area until now. The things I’ve learned since I began this little project of mine have me absolutely floored and I can’t believe I’ve been putting these things in my body for so long without question. And what’s worse: in my daughter’s body. She’s just turned three and while she’s no junk food junkie, she’s a little more addicted to the society-prescribed “toddler food” than I would like. I’m frustrated that I didn’t educate myself before she was born so that I could have been making different decisions for her along the way. Now I feel like I’m having to break habits and introduce new ones, instead of having instilled them all along. And there’s no arbitraility pickier creature about food than a human toddler. One day veggies are “yuck” and the next day she can’t get enough.

    I do feel lucky, though, that she is only three and that’s plenty of time to begin discussions about food and artificial colorings and reading labels. I’ve been having her cook with me lately and as she pulls the chair to the counter she inevitably says, “Yay, broccoli!” so I’m getting somewhere. I just wish I had started her on this path rather than joining it now.

    I’m going to have to do some thinking about the whole lunch and snacks at daycare thing. Our daycare lady is Sri Lankan and used to feed the kids her own cooking every day. She’s gotten away from that, though, as her business has grown and now the standard lunch is corndogs or mac and cheese. I need to have a conversation with her about what the kiddos are eating, but I’m going to have to tread carefully.

    • Christina April 12, 2010, 8:56 pm

      Sarah, a lot of us have had that WTH moment. But don’t look back (and definitely do not beat yourself up!). Just look forward and think about all the positive things you’re doing now. Be sure to check out my next post (going up tomorrow morning). It contains some resources that might help your daughter in that transition. Your daycare situation does sound tricky, given that you have a solo provider. But since she used to cook herself, one option might be to tell her how nice that was and how much you miss it (or something like that). Maybe that could be the opening you need. Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

  • Ryan Platte April 12, 2010, 3:55 pm

    OK, this post clarifies my own thinking about your earlier posts about talking with children. Folks are agape when they see our line of 5 boys all politely refusing refined-sugar products (well, the three that have reached the age of four, that is!). But they do it because it’s something we talk about in detail at home; they believe it’s bad for them and that we are giving them something better.

    The fact that several members of our family have suffered badly from illnesses that have improved as our mineralization has improved makes this perhaps a more imminent issue for us than other families.

    • Christina April 12, 2010, 9:12 pm

      I’m impressed. My daughter is pretty savvy and self-regulating, but offer the kid a cookie and she’ll take it. She might not eat all of it, though, and she does look to me for approval first, so I’m counting that as a win.

  • Ruthie Oland April 14, 2010, 12:05 pm

    Dear Christina,

    I love your blog. I thought you would be interested in The Equal Exchange Organic & Fair Trade Fundraising Program… a socially and environmentally-responsible way to support your school or local community group, while making a difference in communities abroad. In addition, the program comes with free educational tools to teach kids about where their food comes from.

    Check out: http://www.equalexchange.coop/fundraiser

    All the best to you!

    • Christina April 14, 2010, 4:20 pm

      Welcome, Ruthie, and thanks for the info.

  • Pamela April 14, 2010, 9:52 pm

    My recent challenge with nasty artificial flavored and colored refreshments being given out at kids’ activities was at my son’s hockey class. Without asking or informing the parents, the coach gave the kids melted slushy “juice” to drink during their break. My son had literally never had this before and loved it! It appeared that it was 50% of the reason he liked hockey class. Now, I’m not married to the idea of him playing hockey but I do want him to stick with it for awhile so I was hesitant to nix the slushy. Plus I get tired of always being the freak parent who objects to the status quo. But finally I couldn’t put up with it anymore so I set out to find a healthier alternative that would make him happy and give me peace of mind. Fortunately, my first attempt worked: I mixed organic tart cherry juice with a bit of maple syrup and added Perrier. He loved it. Then I asked him if he liked it better than “Coach Jason Juice” as we call the slushy.He did! And he is willing to drink our homemade juice treat from a thermos during class break! However, I admit that when I explained it to the coach I said, “We are having an issue with the colored juice,” implying that my son may have an allergy to the dye. It was a bit of subterfuge though not an actual lie, but, as I said, I get tired of being the freak health food parent sometimes!

    • Christina April 15, 2010, 1:07 am

      Great story. Sounds like a good solution to an all-too-common problem. Though how long is the class? Do you think the kids actually need a snack? One of these days I’ll blog about my thoughts on the snack culture that has pervaded every class/extracurricular/storytime/playgroup. It’s crazy-making how everything has a food component.

      • Pamela April 15, 2010, 4:47 pm

        The class is only 50 minutes and it’s very physical but I don’t think the kids really need a drink break, certainly not for slushy! The soccer class we did at the same place had a water break, which was good. But I don’t feel that I can ask my son to have nothing or have plain water when all the other kids are having a drink “treat.” That’s a good way to raise resentful kids who may eventually rebel and eat all the junk they can get their hands on! We are very careful to give him something tasty and healthy when other kids are having treats, and talk about why we eat differently. The great thing is that he almost always likes the healthy alternative better! Though I draw the line at lolly pops when we go through the bank drive-up window- they always see the kids and offer them lollies, which drives me nuts. I carry organic lolly pops with me for treat “emergencies,” but the bank is just not one of them!

  • Angie April 21, 2010, 8:31 pm

    I hear ya about the ice cream truck. I’ll be bringing it in for Mack. Tess is more than welcome to join in. Coconut milk ice cream & hemp milk ice cream are very popular in my house as are the whole-fruit frozen fruit treats.

  • Tiffany May 10, 2010, 1:49 pm

    I somehow recently stumbled on this blog and I love it and commend all of you parents for having children educated about food. I must ask though, in a world of pressures to fit in and such, how in the world do you get them to not want to eat “artificial colors”. I am recently married and trying to have children…some advice in how you have achieved this would be wonderful!

    • Angie May 10, 2010, 7:30 pm

      Hi Tiffany. It’s different for every child as to how they come to the point where they don’t want to eat the bad stuf. In my daughter’s case, she can’t have artifical food dyes because of the way it affects her behavior. That is the push for her. Even at 6 & 1/2 she knows how bad they are. She knows what they do to her. She hates that feeling of not being in control. My son, who is 9, has seen how food dyes affect his sister and he tends to stay away from them. Occasionally he will have something with artificial color but more and more he is asking for non-food-dyed alternatives. I guess if you start young, like at the begining, you’re kids will pick it up and soon it will become intrinsic. I made my kids’ babyfood because they both had dairy issues (and it was in so much of the jarred baby foods) and because my husband is a vegetarian and we wanted to raise the kids that way until they could start to make informed choices. I really feel that the start we gave them in infancy and toddler-hood has stuck with them. Children are so into “monkey-see monkey-do” so use that to your advantage. My kids will sooner pick up a carrot and hummus or fruit than candy or sweets because they see us do it. Make sure that they don’t see you eating anything that you don’t want them to eat. My philopsophy…..if I don’t want them to eat it, I just don’t buy it. If they want fruit snacks then they get the organic fruit leathers by Cliff or Archer Farms etc. My son doesn’t care for them but that is the only choice I give him so basically, fruit snacks are out of his diet. If they want chips occasionally, it’s Cape Cod or something else in the organic foods section. No Doritos, Fritos, etc. I’ve had to be the bad guy many times but in the end it’s worth it. They get over it and they understand why I make the decisions that I make based on food. They are not perfect when it comes to food choices. I try my hardest to educate them about what they put in their bodies but I can’t be with them all the time so I just have to trust that they make the right decisions when I’m not around. Good luck with your future family!

    • Christina May 11, 2010, 11:37 am

      So glad you found the blog. To your question: We’ve talked with our daughter since she was very young about how chemicals (including fake colors) affect our bodies. Basically, we tell her that many foods contain ingredients that don’t come from nature, or that have been altered so much that they no longer resemble their natural origins. We talk about how, when we eat these ingredients, our bodies feel yucky, and how, if we eat enough of them, we can become sick. We’ve also talked about how food dyes and other additives, in particular, can make her feel hyper and out of control.

      And, truly, once you start talking to kids about this stuff and they realize how good real food tastes, it becomes easier. Because even if they absolutely must try the blue cupcake (because their friends are or just because it’s pretty), soon enough they realize it doesn’t taste very good. It’s a beautiful thing to see my daughter taste something at a party and decide after one bite that she doesn’t want anymore. Not saying that happens all the time, but, when it does, it’s awesome.

      The tricky thing is when she asks why other people eat this stuff regularly. Then I explain that not everyone realizes yet how bad some things are, but that they’re still learning, and so are we. (She hasn’t asked yet, in any depth anyway, why food companies even make this stuff. But when she does, I’ll give her the kid-friendly explanation of government subsidies, corporate greed and bad food science.)

      Not sure if you saw my other post on artificial colors. It was about how I used natural Easter egg dyes to help make tangible the difference between fake dyes and colors that appear in nature. The post also had a lot of background info about food dyes in general.

      You’re at a big advantage in starting to think about this already!

  • Nina June 22, 2012, 12:39 pm

    We had a mom at baseball that would pass out Ding Dongs and Ho Hos after EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. I didn’t even realize that people still bought those things let along thought it was okay to pass those little chemical bombs out to other people’s kids. I am okay with an occasional treat, like you said, but every single game? Oy!

  • Leann June 22, 2012, 3:10 pm

    I recently started the Feingold program with my kids. While the education about how things effect us has been eye opening, I have turned into one of those “freak out” moms. We are involved in a lot of activities, and have had to provide alternatives for everything. My kids are always having something “different”, and I’m always saying “NO”. I’m re thinking this and trying to find a balance. I like your approach. My concern in easing up is how my kids view the change, and whether they will make good choices on their own. Especially when they are offered the bad things sooooooo often.

  • Thank goodness for your blog. I sometimes think I’m alone….I started off upsetting a few moms in preschool last Sept as was trying to change the class snack from processed snacks to us providing fresh fruit or vegetables. Then I tried to get them to do away with the juice, it was impossible. Through the school year I’ve got a bit slack as I was fed up of being perceived as the healthy food nut, but now it’s summer and we’ve had end of school celebrations. I am truly horrified by the amount of junk I’ve seen. Brightly colored cupcakes, ice pops, hideous. Thanks for inspiring me to get back on my crusade. It is so important to protect these perfect little bodies! The positive is my 5 year old twins had their first McDonalds experience at an airport and BOTH refused to eat their breakfast as it tasted funny….a small victory!

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ApunKaChoice » Article » No regrets about KKR dumping Ganguly: Shahrukh Khan
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No regrets about KKR dumping Ganguly: Shahrukh Khan

Shah Rukh admits it was a risky decision
By Indo-Asian News Service
Sat, Nov 17, 2012 05:40:36 GMT

No regrets about KKR dumping Ganguly: Shahrukh Khan HT Leadership Summit
Shahrukh Khan admits that KKR took a big chance when they decided to leave Sourav Ganguly out of the team; but the success of the Kolkata Knight Riders under Gautam Gambhir has left them with no regrets.

Bollywood superstar and Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) co-owner Shahrukh Khan has no regrets that cricketer Sourav Ganguly was dethroned as captain of the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise. In fact, he admits, they took a "big chance" to have a Kolkata team without 'dada'.

Shahrukh Khan, who was at the Hindustan Leadership Summit 2012 Friday, was questioned: "Are you at all ashamed the way you treated Sourav Ganguly?"

He replied: "No."

Moderator Vir Sanghvi then cross questioned: "You think you treated him right? He was humiliated by your team, that was okay?"

"I humiliated? My team did... they should apologise. I did not. I have no regrets at all. The team decides and the coaches decide, and I am not being diplomatic with this."

"I think we treated him well enough. Having said that, I think he is one of the greatest players the country has, but in that part of format of cricket, after three years, maybe the team management did not think it that way," added the 47-year-old.

Nevertheless, Shah Rukh admits it was a risky decision.

"To be honest, we took a big chance - to be in Kolkata and not to have dada... (But) I think we have proven that this team has done well with the leadership of Gautam (Gambhir) and the team management behind. So no regrets," said SRK, whose team walked away with the IPL trophy this year.
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By Jim Caple
Page 2

"I've forgotten more baseball than this guy knows."

– Lou Piniella, responding to Curt Schilling's criticism that he's forgotten how baseball is played

The Top 10 things Lou Piniella has forgotten about baseball

10. Where he put the keys to the bullpen cart.

9. Who's on first?

8. That while it stinks to manage a last-place team, it really, really stinks to manage a team owned by George Steinbrenner.

7. Which alternate jersey the Devil Rays are supposed to wear on Sundays.

6. The big-league record for triples in a season.

5. The second verse to "Cotton-Eye Joe."

4. Whether it's "I before E" when signing a baseball.

3. Marge Schott's favorite brand of scotch.

2. That you have to unhook a base before attempting to heave it into the outfield.

1. Why the hell he ever left the Mariners anyway.

Jim Caple is a senior writer at His first book, "The Devil Wears Pinstripes," is being published by Plume. It can be ordered through his Web site,