Cool off and Relax at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store

Play it cool this summer with a refreshing stop at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store for great choices on the menu and throughout the store. From June 24 through August 11, fresh-picked favorites are ready to make a road trip memory and add a helping of flavorful fun to every summer day."Fruits and vegetables fresh from the garden produce a summer to savor with bountiful blackberries, broccoli, lettuce, pineapples, and red ripe tomatoes," said Cracker Barrel Chef Bill Kintzler. "From the new Berries n' Buttermilk Pancake Breakfast and the Grilled Chicken n' Pineapple Salad to classic favorites like Strawberry Shortcake and the fresh-off-the-grill Pacific Salmon Patties Country Dinner Plate, our guests will find refreshing choices."

Beyond the crop of fresh produce served, guests can pick out plates, mugs and accessories from an exclusive farm-inspired collection that is arriving soon for table and home. Car-friendly candy, snacks, and toys are ready for the road and Books-on-Audio make the miles fly by. Cracker Barrel Old Country Store's custom gift baskets and bundles make great picks to give to friends and relatives along the way.New Berries n' Buttermilk Pancake Breakfast. Three buttermilk pancakes are loaded with Wild Maine Blueberries and topped off with fresh, sweet blackberries. Comes with a side of warm raspberry syrup plus two Grade A eggs cooked any way guests choose. Served with a choice of thick-sliced hickory-smoked bacon, smoked sausage patties, or turkey sausage patties, 7.99. Pancakes only, 6.39.

Sunrise Sampler features timeless breakfast classics all on one plate. Includes smoked sausage, country ham, thick-sliced bacon and two Grade A eggs cooked to order. Comes with grits, Sawmill Gravy, and homemade buttermilk biscuits along with real butter and the best Preserves, Jam n' Apple Butter available. Served with fried apples and hashbrown casserole, 7.89.Egg Sandwich starts with two Grade A eggs cooked to order then adds fresh-sliced tomatoes, and a spread of mayo serviced open face on warm and toasty sourdough bread. Served with a choice of fried apples or hashbrown casserole, 4.39.

Staten Islanders, you'll dig a bit deeper for Starbucks

It's not a big jump, but the already-pricey pleasure of Starbucks is going up.The hike for some brewed drinks will increase an average of 1 percent across the country starting Tuesday.A West Brighton resident waiting on a rather long line at the outlet on Victory Boulevard at Bradley Avenue on Monday morning, first  shrugged when told of the increase."I can't start my day without my grande red-eye a medium coffee with a shot of espresso, Advertising may seem like an obvious," said the West Brighton resident.Some are questioning why a price increase comes while coffee costs are falling.The price for many drinks, including medium and large brewed coffees and Frappuccinos, won't change in most the 11,000 Starbucks in the nation.

Small brewed coffee and other drinks could increase in price by 10 cents or more."Less than a third of beverages will see a small increase in most stores," Lisa Passe, a Starbucks spokeswoman, told The Huffington Post.She noted that the increases will vary by region and may apply to different drinks.The falling coffee costs are expected to continue, adding to Starbucks' profits.Earlier this month, a Janney Montgomery Scott analyst issued a note to investors saying Starbucks is likely to benefit from lower coffee costs for the next few years. Based on the price of a coffee contract at the time, Mark Kalinowski estimated that Starbucks would pay about half the $1.4 billion it did for coffee in 2012, The Huffington Post reported.

Starbucks has said that coffee represents one of its many costs and accounts for less than 10 percent of overall store expenses. Others include rent, labor, marketing, equipment and other ingredients such as milk, sugar, artificial sweeteners, syrups and flavorings.

Advertising may seem like an obvious

There's no question that photos are among our most precious possessions. But while they were once thought to be irreplaceable, that's really no longer true — if you have them backed up in the cloud. What a feeling it will be when we all have the peace of mind that every photo that's important to us, even those taken years ago using film, are safe and sound in the cloud and can be reprinted, reframed and re-hung, anytime we want. That sense of security is easily worth tens to hundreds of dollars a year, in my opinion, and that's why consumer cloud services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Microsoft SkyDrive are sure bets for being profitable. For photo and video startups looking to compete with the larger horizontal cloud players, the key is focusing on the user experience, since that's much harder for larger players that need to focus on other types of files in addition to photo and video.

Advertising may seem like an obvious way to monetize online personal photos and video clips, but it's actually a very tricky business model for a pure-play online photo hosting and sharing company. The challenge is scale and context. First, you need a lot of page views or large news feed volume for an advertising business to work. So even if your business does intend to use advertising, it's not the appropriate focus for the early days of your company, since Job Number One should be getting traffic. Second, if you're lucky enough to get to scale, then it's very difficult to implement an ad model that doesn't freak out your user base. The issue is that people don't generally want to see ads next to their cherished family photos.True, the hope of being acquired is a far cry from building a sustainable business model. But this long-shot approach is the most common I see from the dozens of photo and video-related companies that launch each month.

There are enough high-profile acquisitions for companies with no business model that it doesn't even seem that weird to have a photo business with no contemplated business model these days. However, for every Instagram — or even SocialCam — there are hundreds if not thousands of shelved photo and video companies.To make money off of digital photos and video clips, you can either monetize the photos by selling tangible goods, digital derivatives or peace-of-mind cloud storage, or you can use the photos as currency to monetize your community through advertising. If none of those will make you enough money to sustain and grow your business, then you should hope that your technology, user base or scale will be strategically complementary to an acquirer that can gain revenue in one or more of those ways. The long-term industry winners will have a blend of these business models but, interestingly, there aren't many examples of such companies today.

Mavericks brighten day for West kids

During an opening ceremony, Rolando Blackman, a former Mavs player and the organization's director of player development, joined West Mayor Pro Tem Steve Vanek and others in exhorting the youngsters to “stay hydrated." The only breaks during the morning were for quick lines at the water stations.“This activity is certainly better than sitting in a wrecked home," West resident Beulah ?Zahirniak said. “Many of these kids are in counseling trying to deal with what happened to them and the town. This draws them all together to enjoy something in sports."While the players taught some of the boys and girls the tricks of their trade on the basketball courts, members of the Dallas Mavericks Dancers taught jazz, hip hop and pom routines to girls in the gym.

“I know some of the Mavericks leaders, and I called them to see if they'd be willing to do something like this at the start of the summer," Gerik said. “General Manager Donnie Nelson contacted leaders in West, and they said to come on down. These kids really need something like this, and you can see how happy they are."Gerik credited Paul Monroe, Mavericks' vice president of ?marketing and communications, with the massive organizing ?effort.Monroe said he was glad to do it.“We couldn't have done it without a lot of people coordinating on both ends," Monroe said. “It's been a pleasure."Former school board member Ann Vanek, wife of the mayor pro tem, said the benefit of the Mavs' visit was apparent on the children's faces.“It's the start of summer right after the disaster, and some of them are dealing with the loss of homes, Is Twubs the Next Big Twitter Chat Management Tool?, all kinds of disruptions in their lives," she said. “This helps them get out of that and into something that will help them grow."

High school principal and basketball coach Wayne Leek praised the ever-expanding concept of community since the blast.“The families have leaned on the community, and by that I mean the region and all of Texas, and the community has leaned back," he said. “The disaster has affected all the kids a little differently, but they can come out here and forget it all for a day and then remember this for a long time."The Mavericks gave each participant a voucher for four tickets to a Mavericks preseason home game next season, according to a written announcement that also thanked Academy Sports & Outdoors, Dr Pepper, Gatorade, Gandolfo's, The Graphics Group and Ruthie's Rolling Cafe for assistance with Saturday's event.The camp continued with competitions in the afternoon and ended with a “Guns & Hoses" basketball game with teams formed of members of local police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians.

Is Twubs the Next Big Twitter Chat Management Tool?

Oracle has fixed an issue in which its time zone updating tool for Oracle JDK Java Development Kit 7 had been removed and apologized this week for any trouble caused.In a bulletin issued Monday, Oracle's Henrik Stahl, senior director of product management in the Java platform group, said Timezone Updater Tool, or TZUpdater, had been removed on March 8 from Oracle Technology Network, as part of maintenance connected to the end of public updates for Oracle JDK 6. The company had noted the tool was only available for Oracle Java SE Standard Edition support customers. TZUpdater enables an Oracle JDK or JRE Java Runtime Environment user to patch their installation with the most recent time zone data. TZUpdater taccommodates daylight saving time changes in different countries.

"An unintentional side effect of this change was that it became impossible to keep Oracle JDK 7 up to date without a support contract, which is not in line with our policy: The most recent version of the Oracle JDK will always be available royalty-free, including any tools required to keep it up to date," Stahl said. The tool is now available for public download again from OTN."To all of those in the Java community who were affected by this, we apologize for any confusion or inconvenience we caused and we are grateful to those of you who reached out to us directly to bring this to our attention," Stahl said. And because it was built within the guidelines of Twitter's new update to its API, it looks like the add-on won't be targeted by the San Francisco-based company.

While Oracle has a goal of making sure the most recent versions of the JDK and JRE contain the most recent time zone data so that a separate tool is rarely needed, this is not always possible given the timing of time zone updates. Oracle is reviewing its development process to determine what guarantees can be put in place for the gap between a time zone update and it being available as part of a JDK/JRE release. The company also will continue to make TZUpdater available for the most recent JDK version.And if you're concerned about keeping up with the dialogue on Twitter, the Twubs interface separates host messages from the regular feed, allowing participants to follow along more easily.

Land-speed record breaker Walt Arfons dead at 96

The man who pushed the limits of what was possible in racing and became the first person to successfully strap a jet engine to a car to pave the way to decades of innovation, died Tuesday at Summa Health System.Walter Charles Arfons, 96, who was born in Muncie, Ind., but moved to Akron at a young age, designed, built and drove the world's first jet-propelled car in 1959. Five years later, he designed and built the turbojet-powered Wingfoot Express that Tom Green drove on Oct. 2 to set a world land-speed record of 413.2 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.Three days later, half-brother Art Arfons broke the record at Bonneville at 434.03 mph in the Green Monster that originally was a project of both Walt and Art Arfons.

Lacking the normal methods of research, state-of-the-art equipment and support teams that normally accompanied such an endeavor, Arfons worked exclusively out of the back of his own shop, Arfons Mill and Hardware, now a Summit County historical landmark. Arfons had to do without the experience and extensive education that his competitors had — when he bought his first jet engine off an old Vought F4U Cutlass, a plane used in the military, he was denied the manual, as it was classified-Our Towns — but made up for it with what ingenuity and grit he could muster in the little space that he had in the back of a hardware shop.

Arfons' oldest grandson, Mark Stiff, essentially grew up working alongside Arfons and his jet engines. From the age of 5, Stiff was hooked, and he stayed in that shop until he was done with college.“I hung around the shop every opportunity I could get," Stiff said. “Where else can you go that has jet-engine cars that can go well over 200 miles-per-hour just sitting in the back? It was kinda like a fairy tale to grow up in."Some of Stiff's first memories are of traveling with his grandfather to sites like St. Louis, almost like a carnival, where Arfons would race his new inventions. Stiff says Arfons visited 49 of the 50 states with his cars trying to earn enough money to put food on the table. There wasn't much that slowed him down.

Our Towns

Nevins said MainStreet Warner Inc. plans to involve schoolchildren in keeping the park “green" and teaching them about sustainability.Although the terraced amphitheater built into the hillside of the park is finished, the final aspects of the stage itself are still being completed by the volunteer build team.Peter Ladd, Bob Shoemaker and Charlie Betz are three Warner residents who have donated copious amounts of time and energy into constructing the stage over the past year. The three have headed the effort to build the post-and-beam stage using a unique 13th-century barn design that employs what's known as raised-bottom chord trusses.The design involves an extremely complex frame and is rarely used in construction anymore, but Ladd said the result will be a substantive timber-frame building that leaves a legacy for future generations.

“It takes a lot of hard labor and a lot of time," he said. “I'm starting to see why people don't build this way anymore."Throughout the complicated design and measurement process, the volunteers did not hire any engineers or architects to assist them. Even though the three lead builders work in carpentry, Ladd said the project has stretched their knowledge and abilities extensively.“It's just a bunch of guys making their best guess.and showing what a bunch of local people can do," he said. “Everyone is putting in their bit of ideas and advice and experience. It's a great collaborative building with human capital."

All three men hold full-time jobs, which they have balanced with spending about two days per week working on the community park stage with a handful of other volunteers.“We just made the commitment and fit it in," Betz said. “The people we work for have been patient with our schedules, and we made the time."In the past few weeks, the builders have brought the timbers they built off-site to the park and have installed the trusses. Before the stage is finished, they need to place the roof and close its side walls.Despite the progress, Nevins said the project is about $20,000 short of the amount necessary for its completion, and the nonprofit is “going all out" trying to raise the money.But once the funds are secured and the project is completed, Warner will gain an incredible asset, Ladd said.“I think it's really wonderful for the community," Ladd said. “I'm really looking forward to its opening. The fact that it will be open and accessible to the kids or anybody. . . . it's a resource that will keep the town strong."

Get medical updates from every AFL club ahead of Round 11

With the oil on the seafloor degrading slowly or not at all, the worry for the ecosystem is what continued exposure will do to animals. The eggs and larvae of fishes are particularly susceptible to oil contamination, even at concentrations as low as parts per billion, says Steven A. Murawski, also a professor of marine science at USF. He's also concerned about species that burrow into sediments and is studying a species of tilefish as well as the king snake eel. Murawski emphasizes that the toxicity concerns at this point have more to do with the health of the fish than with human exposure from consuming fish. He also notes that some fish in the Gulf, such as tuna, live for 30–40 years. Population effects from exposure of their young might not appear for years.

A fuller picture of Macondo spill effects on the Gulf may yet emerge. Companies involved in the oil-spill disaster are in the middle of a trial to determine whether they acted negligently and how much oil spilled. Under the Clean Water Act, fines could be as high as $4,300 per barrel if the judge determines that the companies were grossly negligent. Many studies have been sequestered for use in the trial, and researchers look forward to their release.“At the end of the day, this will be the most well-studied oil spill along with the biggest oil spill in history,” Murawski says. Hopefully that knowledge can be put to good use for the next spill, in the Gulf or elsewhere, to control and mitigate its impacts quickly.

David Mackay moved gingerly after copping a knock early in the match. He was eventually subbed out largely ineffective with just five disposals. Brodie Martin butchered the ball while Sam Kerridge had nowhere near the space he had against North Melbourne.Matt Wright was the standout with 25 disposals including nine clearances. Matt Jaensch was next best with three goals from 13 disposals for Sturt while Aiden Riley and Brad Crouch remain in contention. Meanwhile, Sam Shaw's recovery from a hamstring injury is on track with the key defender to return through the state league as early as next week.No shame in losing to Fremantle. They're flag contenders, no doubt. But the ugly loss could come at a cost with the Crows up against Sydney (home) and Richmond (away) before their Round 13 bye. They got away with one against North Melbourne, but the threat of a 5-7 start is far from acceptable for a team which got within a kick of a Grand Final last year. Sam Jacobs' return to form was a highlight and bodes well ahead of Saturday's run-in with in-form Swans Shane Mumford and Mike Pyke.