onoway

I was wondering if you are still happy with your pickling adventures and if the fermentation lock sold at pikl-it (or whatever that store name was), is the same as a fermentation lock for making wine? Their locks seemed a little pricey..

I'm beginning to feel like a second class citizen because I'm not obeying what is convenient for BBO. I know BBO is free and I do appreciate that. Now, however,all of the new features.. much of what BBO offers.. is not available to me because I am on download. That's a choice which is reasonable for BBO to demand people make and I have no quibble with it. But... I BUY the time with the GIBS, they are NOT free. I'm not very happy knowing I am paying for a second string product. Sorry Fred - it isn't just the cards it's basically the whole thing. I find the web version irritating and nonintuitive to move around in and the chat system awkward and annoying. The cards used to give me a headache, don't know if they would be better now. I don't like not knowing who else is kibbing at a table with me. I just don't like it. Demanding everyone like it is like demanding everyone like calamari or opera, some people just don't. There's no question it is highly impressive and a remarkable achievement and I am in awe of what you and others have done, but it's not for me. I thought -and think- that you got it amazingly right the first time, even if it didn't include some of the bells and whistles the web version has. I understand that BBO got to be too big for that format to manage so a switch was necessary. But when eventually the download version is no longer being supported I will go back to other endeavors and Bridgemaster. I was considering replacing my laptop with an Apple and decided not to because then I would HAVE to use the web version, that's how much I dislike it.

The bid actually was 2nt at the table and one kib snorted and said no expert would ever make that bid. He suggested the bid should be 4♥. I saw that bid as being unilateral and suggested a somewhat different hand than it actually is. In other words, pretty much the same discussion as here.:)

I was wondering about something the GIBS did the other day and was told that since I use the download version I am stuck with the unimproved GIBS. Is this the case? I know that the download fossils like me are unable to access the new features but GIBS are not a new feature. I have tried the web version a number of times and can only stand it for about half an hour before I flee back to download, sorry. People keep telling me to work through the pain and after a couple of weeks I will be able to handle the web version, but the cards already give me quite enough pain, that's not what I come to BBO for.

Rita MacNeill A wonderful singing voice and a generous spirit.

I had a somewhat different reaction to the article. It didn't appear to me to be saying people should not be afraid but that if they react entirely out of that fear then the bomber has won. He or they have captured the power to control the behaviour of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people because people have given them that power out of fear. One other article I read somewhere today mentioned the IRA bombing in London and how basically the average Londoner ignored the event although the police were obviously busy. I think that's what he was trying to get to in the article, not that people shouldn't be scared but that they should try not to become hostage to the fear. OTOH London went through the Blitz so bombs going off and blowing people up are not entirely out of their experience, so a very different history. However people react, it's a horrible and insane thing for someone to have done and I hope that the police are able to find the scumbag quickly.

Terrible day. Cowardly and vicious are exactly the words. Sympathy to the families of those killed and the people maimed or hurt. It's hard to imagine, it all seems so entirely pointless.

That's because regulations won't allow them. Even the food trucks have faced an uphill battle in lots of places. Which was my point in responding to JDeegan about government regulations opening up new opportunity...doesn't appear to work that way.The government isn't prepared to let citizens take the risk of food poisoning (even though it still happens anyway in spite of all the regulations).

[hv=pc=n&s=s4hqjt652dakj52c2&d=n&v=b&b=13&a=p1c]133|200[/hv] so what is the bid for south and why? This hand came up for discussion among the kibs tonight with a difference of opinion.

Ok Finally got into the Forums.I will open a table in the PUBLIC club > BRIDGE A LA CARTE at the following times: WEDNESDAY April 17 and 24th: New York (eastern time) 9 pm = Adelaide time THURSDAY 10:30 A.M. and THURSDAY April 18 and 25: New York time 2PM = London 7 pm or Frankfort 9 pm I'll stay there for an hour each time (min) to try to help things get going, and this will be for the next two weeks, since this is sort of short notice. Anyone who is interested in this is invited to turn up and discussion about time is open; this was a best guess. what happens after 2 weeks depends on what happens in the next two weeks. Partnerships are certainly welcome but not necessary. The reason to be in the Bridge a la Carte club is (I live in hope) to avoid the nonsense that goes on in Main. Once people get to know other people they can make their own arrangements if they want,of course. I am trying to work around at least three time zones for each session so that's why the times are as they are at present.

Another point is that the key phrase is "properly done".Some regulations are bizarre, as having to have a separate sink designated only for washing hands. I have seen such a sink passed by inspectors when it wasn't even looking as though it was hooked up to anything, it was just attached to the wall. Nobody missed it, they washed hands in one of the three other sinks in use. But if an inspector had wanted to, they could have forced the owner into spending several thousand dollars to hook that sink up. Just because. Also, government regs are often ignored as any food inspector or anyone who has ever prepared or taken a food safe course can tell you. Basically no city I have ever heard of has enough inspectors to see if regs are being followed. Most places, nothing much happens even if they aren't unless it is a serial violation or extremely severe, like one restaurant having skinned coyotes in their freezer. That one hit so many buttons at once they could be and were shut down. However, as in most cities, the owners could just clean things up, change their business name and open up again. In most places, once approved for business it's a gamble whether or not a place will ever get inspected again unless someone brings the place to the health department's attention. I bet every single person knows someone who has had at least mild food poisoning at one time or another, which suggests that something was very far indeed out of order with how the food was being handled. So it's actually often more stringent to get going now than to keep on once you've had the initial inspection, even if there are health regulation violations from the ongoing business.

Not sure I agree. I believe the fastest growing segment of business in food service industry is the food truck business. They are causing any amount of controversy in some cities because they are seen by restaurants to have huge advantages. It generally takes a very large amount of money to start a restaurant, quite a bit less to start a food truck business. Those who start there can then make enough money to fund a more traditional style of restaurant. However, from the interviews I've seen, most of the owners would prefer to have more trucks out on the road, and at least two are working on franchises. Several owners cited fewer hassles as the major advantage. It's a very interesting development. New restaurants often are higher end enterprises, and with fewer people able to afford them...... So wanna be restaraunteers fight back by taking to the streets maybe? B-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification One note out of the article: The Sahara is currently expanding south at a rate of up to 48 kilometers per year and another: Desertification has played a significant role in human history, contributing to the collapse of several large empires, such as Carthage, Greece, and the Roman Empire, as well as causing displacement of local populations. end quote How much present day desertification has to do with climate change and how much to simply abusing the earth is debatable but unpredictable shifting weather patterns make food production much more difficult, especially if the land is aleady under stress.

I also listened to that interview..it was clear that the agenda for this new 10 page APPLICATION to be allowed to make any representation at the "hearings" was to stop discussion and input from anyone with any concerns. They aren't even stand alone questions, people apparently have to cross reference with links to something not even on the application. It's absurd and clearly just a road block.Then the gov't will try to say that nobody came forward with opposition to what they are doing to do anyway. Typical of Harper. Don't need to be shooting people to have a dictatorship in Canada these days, just a majority in the house, an ego the size of the galaxy, an eye for loopholes in the law that nobody with any ethical sense would ever think to look for much less take advantage of, and an obedient bunch of personally programmable Reform/conservatives MPs.

It's the wall...you dont want the people you don't get the rain B-)

I think that times have changed quite a bit since your youth Ken. At least in Canada, government has consistently punished small businesses in favor of big ones. A prime example a few years back was that some big meat packing plant had a problem with e-coli. The government's response was to make new regulations that applied to ALL no matter what size, and within 6 months around Edmonton alone at least 5 small butcher outlets, some of them 2nd or 3rd generation had been forced to shut down because the costs of the upgrades just could not be justified. This scenario was repeated all over the country. Fifteen or so years later, B.C. is just now getting around to thinking about giving the little guys some slack as THEY had done nothing wrong and had had no problems with the previous regulations. I don't know of any other provinces revisiting the issue at all. The same sort of thing happens in the States. Big packing plants which process thousands of chickens a day need only ONE tracking number for ALL the chickens processed that day. Joel Salatin has a typically small butcher shop where he processes birds he raised and is forced to have a tracking number for EACH bird, in spite of the inspectors themselves admitting that problems are infinitely more likely to occur in the big plants, not in the small butcher shops. So his overhead is higher because of specific government regulations which are more onerous for small operators than huge companies. Aside from all the relatively new regulations (officially nobody is allowed to take a loaf of homemade bread or a dozen chocolate chip cookies to a farmer's market unless they have made them in an äpproved kitchen - separate from the family kitchen with a designated fridge and a special sink allocated just for washing hands, for instance); there is also a spiderweb of government grants and subsidies which follow the old adage of the only way you get money is if you don't need it, which also didn't exist years ago. I doubt it is any different in other areas of business. On top of that, businesses in small towns used to be able to compete because the big box stores pretty much kept to big cities. Walmart changed all that and has been responsible for closing down thousands of small businesses when they started moving into much smaller centres. People who don't have/feel any security about money/work tend to shop on price points and few small outlets can challenge Walmart there.So not only was the small businessman out of business, his employees often went from a decent living wage to minimum wage at Walmart, being the only jobs available. Big businesses which outsource jobs make things worse..a story this week about one Canadian bank which is aleady making obscene amounts of money had their regular staff train people then they were all laid off and the jobs outsourced to the people they had trained. I don't think this sort of thing happened much if at all years ago but seems fairly common now. How is a businessperson supposed to compete when the others in his business are paying a fraction of his costs for employees, with no perks such as unemployment or health care? What are those people who just got bounced out of a job they were doing well enough to train others to do it, supposed to do now? They are going to be looking to pinch every penny til it screams for mercy because at least in Canada unemployment benefits are capped at a rate which might have paid the bills years ago but surely won't now, with housing costs alone having risen by something like 400% in the last ten years or so. They are highly unlikely to be able to start a small business even if they were so inclined. Most small businesses fail for lack of capital they say, and it would appear that it would normally take a whale of a lot more capital now to start a business with any hope of success than it did years ago, unless you happen to be exceptionally lucky or clever or both. On top of that, a lot of people are now choosing to shop online, which puts even more pressure on small businesses. Competition has gone from relatively regional to world wide. As far as a university education goes, I bet any of us could point to any number of people with degrees who aren't working in their area and may not be working at all. I knew a guy with a PhD from Yale who was driving cab because he couldn't get any other work. I also know people who have been refused work because they were over qualified. That actually happened to me as well at one point which was bizarre..I was moving from one province to another and Canada manpower refused to give me contact info about a job because I was "overqualified" for it. Apparently it was better for me to be not working than working in a job 'beneath' me, no matter if I wanted to work there. So education is no longer the golden ticket it may once have been. It seems to me that people might be willing to risk more if they didn't feel as though the government really isn't that happy about people showing a lot of initiative. It's one thing to be taking on a challenge but when you never know if the government will shut you down because of something someone else did it puts a whole new dimension on it. People who beat the odds deserve kudos esp if they treat their employees with respect.

That's what we used to do with the team matches in IAC. They were at fixed times but any two teams in a match could agree to play at a different time if their normal time was going to be a problem. They were quite successful for a number of years. Not sure what is going on with them now. It's a lot of work even so, and captains regularly quit because they get fed up trying to deal with people not showing up without notice.

Car explosions/burning in the movies will be SO much easier to manage. Come to think of it, propane is maybe already pretty easy..such vehicles aren't allowed in underground parking lots (here, anyway) for fear of same.

maybe so, but the implication for most people would likely lead them to expect at least one room with permanently installed carpet, not just the stairs. So it isn't more efficient as then everything has to be doublechecked to see if the agent is using words in the way that most people use them or if he/she is using words in a sort of technically accurate but having an unexpected spin on them which makes everything s/he says suspect. oops I wrote the post then got busy with something else and all the othe posts didn't show up until after I came back and posted this one. So apologies for belaboring the point.

Most political leaders today are apparently mainly motivated by self interest and the possibility of getting reelected. Most seem in truth somewhat less than fervent in their desire to see a country better off for their tenure, if they even think about it in such terms. The write-up reminded me of those about Pierre Trudeau who roused the same intensity of rage or glee with his policies. Whether they agreed or not, few doubted that what both Prime Ministers did was what they felt was best for the whole country. Here was a (leader). When shall we see such another....

Seems as though there was..what generally seems to happen is that people don't really commit to things online, assuming they will always be there. Of course, if enough people do this then things drift into oblivion which is possibly what happened. A couple of people left messages on BBO for me but my computer crashed and I lost them. So what I am thinking is I will set up a game in a week or so and alert people as to when and where on this thread and we shall see who shows up. It would be a start anyway

While people argue about if or how much of a problem we are/will be facing, other people are getting on with finding solutions for problems already here for many and lurking aound the corner for more, including many in North America. This is a "high tech" version of air sinks. I had to wonder just how abusive people had been to the environment at some point to have no ground water when the air there holds such a high percentage..nevertheless an ingenious solution which has been scaled up from simpler systems.

This was placed in an area of not many people as the country there was in the process of desertification and could not support many people. Indeed, one of their early concerns was whether or not it could be brought to support 300. Now it's not only supporting that 300 but myriads of other people as well who come there to learn and study or just visit. The lands downstream outside their boundaries are also getting observable benefit. There has been a trend in that this and other permaculture techniques are most often being used on land which is considered beyond help, dead to the possibilities of being useful.It's like waiting until a wound gets gangrene before tending to it. Some of these have been in areas of such low rainfall that even without abuse of the land, it was extremely difficult to get it to produce much. Permaculture techniques are bringing such lands back to health and productivity. Some few farmers are changing over before their land is so drastically abused, but the transition to sustainable agriculture isn't moving as fast as it would if governments and universities were less dogmatic about old techniques. However, it IS happening. One thing is absolutely clear, it cannot be done without trees and plants to hold and shelter the soil.Come to think of it; an early version of this was what brought the Canadian prairies out of the dust storms of the 30's. Scientists finally found a grass which could grow in conditions which beat everything else to death and then trees could survive as well. Once some trees and grasses held the soil in place, then other plants could survive as well, and the land started to heal. This was all thrown away by the present Canadian government when it dismantled everything to do with that program and put all the buffer land up for sale which had been held for community livestock grazing only for the past 80 years, no grain farming which would bare the soil and lead to wind erosion again. They also stopped the program which provided shelterbelt trees to stop the wind at low or no cost to farmers who otherwise would not be able to afford them. Ignorance in pursuit of short term gain. In contrast, some States are STARTING such programs. It also can't be done without taking into consideration how the natural systems operate and working with them. It's a waste of effort to demand water flow freely uphill for our convenience, which if not literally what people expect, reflects the attitude of way too many, including scientists, who insist we can bullyrag nature into doing our will no matter what without consequences.

Always have the option of just making the GIBS wait until you feel ready to continue. Unlike a lot of players they are very patient and won't give you a hard time.

My understanding was that the problem was basically thrown out to the world and of the people who responded most said it could not be done and all the others (except Holtzer) said it MIGHT work with extensive use of concrete and technology,(in much the same spirit that the Army Corps of Engineers revamped the Mississippi water catchment system years and years ago,I suppose.) I cannot now find the site that I got that info from so can't say if it's true or not. I believe the Grace Foundation put up money to put this in motion, what percentage and who else was involved in the funding I don't know. It's likely all in his book, which I have not yet got. Anyway, I found a video of the Project in Portugal