Greater Anglia services affected by crew availability
What are the strikes all about?
Got questions about the Greater Anglia and tube strikes this week? Here’s our explainer on the situation.
Greater Anglia is facing a staff strike today
#GAdispute - Industrial action announced for Greater Anglia today and on Thursday 5 October
— National Rail (@NRE_GA) October 3, 2017
A14 Eastbound near Huntingdon: Stop start traffic
There’s currently stop-start traffic on the A14 Eastbound between A1(M) / B1090 Alconbury and J23 A141 Spittals Way (Spittals Interchange).
M11: Slow
One lane closed is closed on the M11 this morning and there is slow traffic due to emergency repairs Southbound at J14 A14 / A428 (Girton / Cloverleaf interchange). Lane one (of two) is closed before the entry slip road.
Good morning!
Hello and welcome back to another live Cambridge news traffic and travel blog. First off, let’s take a look at the roads around Cambridge...I agree with the sentiment, but there's quite a few other moral characters. The black cop from "Another Toothpick", Vic Musto, Sal Vitro. The common thread with these characters is that they are all working class, blue collar guys that get screwed over by the mob. The cop loses his job. Vic Musto had to pay for Eric's college when Davey gets deep in debt. 
Lots of people like to take out of this show that everyone is a selfish, immoral hypocrite and incapable of happiness but I don't think that's the point. The people we see on the show who are happy and content usually start to struggle the second they come into contact with Tony. People can be fulfilled in the simple things in life, like working hard and doing a job well, but the mob loves to take advantage of those people. For all the glory of the Mafia, eventually we've all got to come to terms with the fact that the message of this show is portraying how rotten and putrid these guys are who make a life of leeching off of the hard work of others.Dr. Laurette Willis founded PraiseMoves Fitness Ministry in 2001 and has been certifying PraiseMoves Instructors around the world since 2005.
Each one has a related scripture to help you memorize the Word of God as you refresh your body and are TRANSFORMED by renewing your mind on the Word of the Living God (Romans 12:2).
We have trained Certified PraiseMoves Instructors offering in-person and online classes all over the world!
Power PraiseMoves Class!
Enjoy this challenging, enlightening, invigorating Power PraiseMoves Class with Certified PraiseMoves Instructor of the Year, J.K. Landon!
Online experiences that evoke the serendipity of traditional retail—complete with aisles of shelves—make shopping fun again. And they’re pandemic-safe, too.
The virtual store is back—and it’s the best retail experience we could have gotten during a COVID-19 lockdown.
Rather than resembling a printed catalog transformed into online form, as most e-commerce sites do, virtual stores use either 3D renderings of an environment or Google Street-View-like sequences of stitched-together photographic images of a physical location. They replicate neighborhood shopping, letting you walk through aisles and peruse items on display. They safely scratch the itch to be in a local store. But you don’t have to wear a mask, rush in and out, or worry about others not wearing masks or standing too close.
One example I visited for holiday shopping is Cost Plus World Market’s “World of Joy” virtual store, a pop-up online extension of the 243-store specialty import chain. Open only for the holidays this year, World of Joy allows customers to shop via a zoom-and-pan interface that works on PCs and mobile devices.
World Market’s World of Joy seems to have been set up in a warehouse-like area, but it captures the feel of the chain’s mall locations.
The fun of shopping at my local Cost Plus World Market comes in part from wandering about to see what’s new, and the serendipity of finding just the right item. I haven’t set foot in a shop for months, was in need of holiday gifts, and worked on one of the first virtual walk-through environments at Apple in the 1990s—so World of Joy checked all my boxes.
The experience is modeled on a neighborhood World Market store, with wooden shelves of goods and the same familiar visual merchandising as the chain’s mall outposts. However, the captured footage was not created in an actual store, but rather a space set up to look like one, set up in a larger area that is bounded by white curtains rather than walls. It looked like a cross between an exhibit at a trade show and a full-blown World Market.
The controls are easy enough to manage, letting you click or tap your way around the store. Click on snowflake icons, and you can jump to shelf areas containing specific products or groupings. It’s easier to browse than to find specific items, as areas are not labeled and the “Floor Plan” option resembles a strange retail Advent calendar, with 50 sections that don’t indicate what they contain until you’ve clicked through to one. There’s also a “Dollhouse” mode, which offers a 3D rotatable view of the World of Joy with zones you can click.
Wandering around World of Joy, you might stumble across the popcorn poppers on your way to the decorative pillows.
Once you’ve selected a product, a more conventional website window opens on top of the shop with more information and the ability to place the item into a shopping bag. In general the World of Joy offers a smaller selection of merchandise such as games, clothing, kitchen items, and general holiday decor, and it is worth noting that it doesn’t sell alcohol, which is a staple of World Market’s offline stores.
When it comes time to actually buy products, World of Joy transitions to a more conventional online-shopping interface.
Having been at home for such a long time, I loved roaming around, jumping to various shelves and seeing what was available. Each aisle had enough familiarity in its design language to make me want to look at the products. I even liked using the Advent-style floor plan to randomly pick sections of the store to visit.
The engine that drives World of Joy is from Matterport, a company that offers a 3D data platform that enables a space to be turned into an “accurate and immersive digital twin.” Matterport has also built virtual stores for Lily Pulitzer, Andersen Windows and Doors, Micha-Paris, Herman Miller, and others. Ferguson Bath, Kitchen, and Lighting Gallery, which has 250 showrooms across the U.S., has digitized 70 local showrooms using Matterport’s technology, with plans to add another 60.
These stores may be part of a new trend, but they also recall an earlier era. Even before the web, people were creating virtual walk-through environments. In the early 1990s, pan, zoom, and select interfaces were circulating in the technology community—some using video, and others based on rendered graphics. Dan O’Sullivan at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program put his apartment online via a telephone interface that controlled prerecorded video on CD-ROM. “Dan’s Apartment ” gained a cult late-night cable TV following, and O’Sullivan interned at Apple around the same time that it was developing QuickTime, its multimedia framework.
In 1991, the same year that Apple released QuickTime, the company demoed The Virtual Museum, a 3D walk-through museum with exhibits on scientific topics that was released on CD-ROM in 1992. As an Apple employee at the time, I worked on this project, which allowed people to fly over the surface of Mars, see plants grow over time, and even to watch a galaxy unfold.
After the Virtual Museum’s release to museums and educational institutions worldwide, I spent some time investigating how it was used. One of the key findings was that people loved walking through the museum once, but after that, they wanted quick access to content. Fortunately, Apple provided a clickable floor plan; after a single walk-through, people used the map for reference.
As the web began to take off, some early commerce sites simulated traditional retail stores, complete with “shelves.” Some were built with Apple’s QuickTime VR, a method for transforming images into clickable pan-and-zoom panoramic environments. But with home bandwidth still an issue in the pre-broadband era, these walk-through environments didn’t become an enduring part of online retail. Instead, shopping evolved to emphasize grids, lists, still images, and carts, with the occasional video.
That is, until the coronavirus came along and we stopped being able to go into stores and embraced online shopping as our main mode for exploring the outside world. A recent Wall Street Journal noted that some retailers, such as Ralph Lauren, were reproducing exact replicas of offline locations in order to “stoke the fire” for future in-store visits once the pandemic has passed.
Ralph Lauren turned stores such as its Beverly Hills location into ambitious digital recreations.
Ralph Lauren offers several faithful online walk-throughs of its stores; I dropped in on the Beverly Hills location, because I’ve been there and wanted to see how the digital