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MARTINSVILLE, Ohio — Tucked away in the den of his 127-year-old farmhouse, Ed Winkle huddles over his computer. The screen’s soft glow lights up his eyeglasses, reflecting messages about tractors, corn hybrids and crop insurance.

Winkle is checking the latest postings on his favorite Internet farm forum. Advice from fellow farmers around the country has enabled him to increase his corn and soybean production, better market his crops, learn how to rebuild engines and get good tires for his tractor.

Online message boards and chat rooms are replacing rural coffee shops and feed mills as places for farmers to talk farming and trade tips as more of rural America goes online.

“You get the best thinkers in agriculture,” Winkle said of the forums. “You’re mixing such a diverse group of people — from different areas, from different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of farming.”

Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 48 percent in 2003. More than two-thirds of them still use dial-up modems.

The popularity of online farm forums has grown as well, said Mack Strickland, an agricultural engineer at Purdue University. Some forums claim to have as many as 30,000 registered users.

Enthusiasts say the forums have improved farm production and saved farmers precious dollars by helping them avoid costly mistakes in planting, fertilizing, equipment buys and maintenance. And forums have enabled farmers — many of them miles from their nearest neighbor — to educate one another and build community.

“We all like to talk to folks like ourselves who have the same problems,” said Stan Ernst, a marketing instructor at Ohio State University’s department of agricultural economics. “We have so much riding on many of our decisions economically that you’ve got to find people with experience.”

“It’s enough time to have a cup of coffee and a conversation and learn something,” he said. “It’s just rearranged who their neighbors are, in a sense. You can’t help but think that has changed farming to some degree.”

Rural America has lagged behind the cities in Internet usage, especially broadband, because wiring the population-rich cities is more profitable, and wiring the countryside more expensive due to long distances and natural barriers.

Now, farmers and existing rural businesses are becoming more reliant on the Internet to be competitive, and rural communities are becoming more aggressive in seeking Internet access. They see it as a way to attract white-collar jobs, and urban dwellers who have moved to the country are demanding it.

Paul Butler, who grows corn and soybeans on 260 acres in Macon, Ill., returned to farming four years ago after 25 years in the computer business. He doubts he would have made it without online advice from fellow farmers.

“I would have made a lot of expensive mistakes,” said Butler, 39, who has a broadband connection. “Purchasing seed is a pretty complicated decision. It was nice to have 20 unbiased people that weren’t selling seed that could give me an opinion on it.”

Farmers have to decide themselves whether the advice they get is sound. Agriculture.com’s Walter said he tries to screen out the hokum, blow- hards and occasional shyster. Purdue’s Strickland said some users give opinions not based on fact or research.

Although he seldom posts a question, Neer, who works for a farm equipment manufacturer, devours the information he sees on precision farming, using the forums to shop for equipment.

and information about tractors and combines that are steered by computers linked to global positioning satellites.

Machinery, the universal language of farmers, is a hot topic in farm forums. So is when the best time is to take crops to market for the best price. Sometimes the talk veers away from pure farming.

In a recent exchange, an Illinois farmer complained that the starter in his pickup truck was acting up. A fellow farmer replied that the electric solenoid atop the starter was probably worn out and the contact sticking in the closed position.

“I would put a whole new starter on it,” he wrote. “Fix it now before it ruins the flywheel teeth.”

Cheryl Flannery is the director of information-technology security, compliance and risk management at Air Products and Chemicals, the $8 billion chemical and gas supplier. Her responsibilities cover everything from information-technology security strategy, to policies and practices, to overseeing electronic and forensic investigations.

Flannery also serves on the Chemical Sector Cyber Security Program Steering Team, a group set up by the Chemical Information Technology Council (ChemITC)—an organization of chemical companies that addresses common technology issues—to drive cybersecurity practices and guidelines across the industry. She talked last month with Baseline editor-in-chief John McCormick.

Q: How does the Chemical Sector Cyber Security Program look at the issue of cybersecurity?

A: The way we look at information security and cybersecurity, because of the industries we’re in, is really twofold. There’s the traditional information-technology side, which deals with all your traditional business systems. The other aspect is the manufacturing and control systems—we do have many systems that control the operations of our plants.

So that is one thing that is different from, say, financial services. They don’t have that other half of actually controllin manufacturing and operations.

We are very similar to other industries in our concerns around viruses and worms and malicious software—certainly the continued, growing threat of identity theft and malicious code. We’re concerned about the loss of intellectual property. So we have many of these same concerns.

But we also are concerned about a blended attack, where a hacker could try to break in and [then] cause harm—physical harm—to one of our facilities and have a physical outcome, not just a business systems outcome.

Q: How would one of these blended attacks happen?

A: Over the past seven [or] eight years, in order to gain efficiencies, those systems [were built] to allow support from really anywhere across the company. You don’t have to physically be at a location. They were connected to the traditional business network. It did open up more vulnerabilities.

So a lot of the effort over the past few years has been [on] how we can better protect these systems and actually add some layers of protection in between the normal business-systems network and the manufacturing-and-control systems networks.

Q: How do you go about protecting them?

A: One of the things that a number of companies have done is [put in basically] a firewall—another layer of protection—between the business system network and the process control network.

Q: What else?

A: A second thing we’ve done is to work with the process control vendors and industrial automation vendors to better protect their software and add some other security features.

Another simple thing that we’ve from a policy and architecture perspective is to say that the sole purpose of those computers [running the plant] should be to run the plant. They should not be general-purpose computers that can read e-mail or surf the Internet.

Even though they are on the network, you can set them up to not allow them to have browser access.

Q: You mentioned working with the vendors to get them to build in more security to their products, but with the type of systems used in chemical plants, that presents its own challenges, doesn’t it?

A: If you look at the operations of a chemical plant, you may have a plant that is running for years and years without a shutdown. And many of these systems are operational for 20 to 25 years. So many companies don’t want to spend the money to upgrade to a newer system.

Q: I haven’t heard of any major incidents in which a chemical plant manufacturing system was compromised. Does that make it tougher to convince people to maintain a level of urgency?

A: One of the biggest preventative techniques you can use is awareness education. What we’ve done in the chemical sector program, as well as within many of our chemical companies, is provide some awareness of different incidents that have happened. We’ll go back to incidents that actually happened in other industries that use automated systems.

So, for example, when the Slammer [worm] hit back in 2003, there was actually an [infection] at a nuclear power plant. There was also [an incident] back in 2001 where a hacker got into [the systems for] the port in Houston. I think people are surprised that incidents can happen and that they do happen.

Everybody already knows, or should know, the ONE tip that all special effects houses have for getting the most brilliant work possible: call them early. This is such a universal thought that all those interviewed for this article said it without hesitation. However, this truism is but the tip of the iceberg. There’s more to it than that, and the following scenarios give examples of how each special effects house solved particular challenges when creating effects for recent spot, music video or television series work And, as always, Post catalogs what tools the artists are currently working with, as well as what they will be looking for at next month’s NAB show.

CHALLENGE AND SOLUTION: Two days before shooting the music video, the client called from Atlanta. Could The Orphanage visual effects artists re-create a Jeep spot effect that showed a vehicle shaking off mud like a dog? The video producers wanted a 4×4 to splatter mud on a record executive. The Orphanage had less than 10 days to turn it around.

A quick conference call explained what the client needed to do on set technically Director Chris Robinson was given explicit instructions so he could deliver the proper plates. In-house, CG artist Kevin Baillie modeled the truck, painted it, texture mapped it, animated it and then comped it into the shot that was about :04 long. He used Alias/Wavefront Maya V.x4 on a Power Mac G4 dual 800 MHz with 1 GB RAM and a nVidia GeForce 2MX dual 1.7 GHz Pentium 3 Xeon with 2 GB RAM and an nVidia Fire GL4.

“We actually overdelivered,” explains executive producer John Benson. “We were so concerned with such a short turnaround, the only part we thought we’d be able to complete was the car shaking and having the mud fly off, and not actually have it settle in and be completely clean. But Kevin decided to take it beyond what we had promised, so he delivered the full shot of the car starting to shake, the mud flying off of it until it was completely clean and settled in to a still car. The cut used it all… They were very happy that they got more than what they were actually anticipating.”

The Orphanage was founded in 1999 by three former ILM visual effects artists, part of that ICM’s Rebel Mac group that discarded its SGIs in favor of Macs. That philosophy still holds at The Orphanage, which offers production, post and proprietary technology called Magic Bullet. The Orphanage is beta testing to get Maya fully up and running on Mac. Its visual effects work — everything but character animation — is used in features, television, spots and music videos.

TIP: The Orphanage sticks to the Rebel Mac philosophy of “one artist, one shot.” “All of our artist are generalists,” says Benson. “We have some who are a little bit stronger in one thing than another, but it’s very important for us to have artists who can take a shot, bring it online, model it, animate it, comp it in and handle all the traditional TD lighting,” says Benson. “From a client perspective ‘one artist/one shot’ actually saves time, which translates into saving money. Because one of the biggest constraints in commercials and music videos is time, it’s very important we’re able to do as much as we can given whatever the constraints are.”

TRUISM: “Whenever possible, the greatest outcome is going to happen when we’re brought in at as early a stage as possible,” says Benson. “If clients wait very long they get stuck at a position where they might not have the same options available to them if they would have approached the visual effects company earlier on in the process. If they bring someone who technically knows what’s available and what could happen, then I think they’re going to squeeze more out for their budget. With agencies and commercials we love to get on board even before they’ve selected a director.”

NAB SHOPPING LIST: The tech team will be looking at I) the status of new rendering solutions, specifically those with support for Maya and Global Illumination .

2) the progress of realtime solutions for editing, compositing and color correction; Quantel’s iQ, da Vinci, Piranha and Discreet among others.

3) Electric Image Universe with new rendering support for Global Illumination and Mac OSX;

4) updates to 24p HD and SD cameras by Sony, Panasonic and others.

5) the progress of Adobe’s support for Mac OSX.

CHALLENGE SOLUTION: The agency challenged the directors to capture the car moving in a visually unique way. The result was a car as viewed by a camera on a bungee cord. The challenge for the A52 team, headed by visual effects supervisor and Discreet Inferno artist Simon Brewster, was to do the impossible: find some way to use a virtually unusable shot of very violent movement, clean it up and track it with the car.

Good fundamentals will make your mis-hits more like your good shots–the secret to lower scores

It seems like every student who comes to me for a lesson wants to be “more consistent.” A noble aim. But what is consistency in golf terms? Years ago, Ben Hogan used to say that on a good day he would be happy with the way he hit maybe only three or four shots. That means he hit 10 times that many less than perfectly. On the face of it, that isn’t very consistent. Yet, as we know, Hogan was one of the greatest ball-strikers of all time. In fact, players paired with Hogan would swear he never missed a single shot! Is consistency, then, in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps.

Hogan’s mis-hits were so close to his perfect shots that only he knew when it was a miss. And that’s the main point: Consistency is all about getting the quality of your mis-hits as close as possible to the quality of your good shots.

The key to that kind of consistency is in your fundamentals. You have to improve them to be able to hit enough good shots and to improve your mis-hits so you achieve a higher degree of consistency. The five most important fundamentals that lead to consistency are: (1) your grip, (2) your ball position, (3) your alignment, (4) your tension level and (5) your balance from address to the end of the follow-through. To understand them better, turn the page.

1. Have a consistent GRIP

You have to hold the club so you can cock your wrists properly, maintain a square clubface and keep the club from flying out of your fingers–but not so firmly that any tension goes past your elbows.

That said, you are far better with your lead hand in a stronger position than a weaker one. That’s why I like to see the back of the top hand angled at roughly 45 degrees to where you want the ball to go. A pencil stuck in the back of your glove, as shown here, will tell you if your hand is in the right position.

To prove my point, try the exercise shown on the next page. Put the back of your left hand flat against, say, the side of a golf cart. Now push.

Try it again with your left hand turned into a stronger position. Push again. Big difference. The stronger grip allows you to generate a lot more power. And the more power you have, the less you have to use, so any tension in your grip can safely be reduced.

2. Find consistent ball position

High-handicap golfers don’t always understand that you have to hit down on the ball to get it up in the air. I see them trying to scoop or lift it up. They then place the ball forward in their stances to facilitate that scooping motion. But the ball shouldn’t be played that far forward.

Good players hit down on the ball with the shaft leaning toward the target approaching impact (above), so they trap the ball between club and ground and trust that the ball will spin up into the air. Practice on the range to find the ball position that allows you to do this.

When you have developed confidence in that position on the range, the problem of ball position still isn’t over. You still have to contend with uneven lies on the course. The solution, however, is simple. All you have to do is make a practice swing (right), find the bottom of your clubhead arc, then stand so the ball is there when you actually come to hit it.

3. Aim and ALIGN consistently

When it comes to aim and alignment, most people don’t even know what to aim! They aim their body at the target, then align the clubhead to the body. That’s backward. You should aim the clubface, then position your body to the clubface.

Try this: Take your right forefinger (the clubface) and aim it straight at your target. Then take your left forefinger (your body) and aim it parallel to your right finger (above). See how far left of the target your body should aim? Imagine if your left finger (body) were pointed at the target. Your right finger (clubface) would be pointed way to the right of where you want the ball to go. That problem, of course, leads to another: If you are aligned to the right, your instincts to make the ball go where you want it to will override your desire to make a correct swing. You’ll end up trying to pull the ball back to the left–a recipe for pulls, slices and a variety of other problems.

4. Maintain consistenT TENSION

Physical tension is not necessarily bad. For example, you want to have a sense of lively tension in your feet and legs at address. But–and here is the key–you don’t want that tension spreading into your hips. You also want some tension in your arms and fingers. But, again, you don’t want that tension to get past your elbows. And that’s the problem: Too many golfers have tension in their necks, chest and shoulders. They can’t turn. They can’t swing their arms.

It is important to get your tension level correct at address. Too much at the start will cause it to “evaporate” during your swing. Too little and you’ll seize up at some point in the swing. What you want is an even flow to your tension. You want it to be relatively constant from beginning to end.

International car shipping is the service you will undoubtedly
require if you want to transport your car over a long distance.

As the name suggests, it entails a company putting your car onto
a ship at one destination and then ensuring it’s safe arrival at
the other side. Depending on the company you choose to complete
this service for you they may also be responsible for getting
your car to and from the shipping docks. Some companies offer a
door-to-door service. Many different people and organizations
enlist the help of a shipping company for several different
reasons. Individuals use shipping companies to transport valuable
vehicles, antique cars that can’t be driven over longer distances
and even just to transport the family car to a new home while
they fly. Companies may use a shipping company to move their
fleet cars during a relocation and showrooms obviously use them
for transporting their cars from the manufacturers to there
showrooms.

Recent years have seen a massive increase in imported cars,
especially from Japan, where top quality and high performance
cars can be acquired for some of the lowest prices imaginable.
This increase is also seeing many more individuals needing an
international car shipping company to bring the cars into the
country.

What is included in the price you pay for international car
shipping?

As with most things the price you pay for your international car
shipping is pretty much dependant on the car shipping company you
choose and before you make your final decision you should be very
careful that you have been comparing like for like. Some shipping
companies will include a number of value added services that the
cheaper company may not offer. In order to be sure you are
getting the best deals make sure you read all of the terms and
conditions on the site. Here is a short guide to selecting the
most cost effective international car shipping company for your
needs:

1. Get quotes from as many companies as possible.

2. First of all you should consider any services that you
definitely require; perhaps you have to have door to door
delivery in which case you would only consider those companies
that offer door to door delivery in their price. Be sure to
exclude anyone who doesn’t offer any of the essential services
you require regardless of how cheap their prices are.

3. Now write down which services and extras each of the companies
remaining offer. Also write down the price.

4. Remove any international car shipping company that is way
overpriced unless they offer something significant that the
others don’t. Also remove any company that offers very few of the
services you would like (not essential, but preferred).

5. You should either be left with one offer that is noticeably
cheaper than the others while still offering the same products.
If so, this is the most cost effective solution for you.
Alternatively, if the prices are all similar and one offers many
more services, that is the most cost effective solution.

6. If, however, there are several international car shipping
companies left with similar prices for similar services then it’s
time to ring back and get them to offer you that little something
extra.