FedEx Cup playoffs hitting their peak

NORTON, Mass. ? ?Fever Pitch,? the 2005 tome to the end of Boston?s curse, it wasn?t, not with two playoff events, four Fall Series tilts, a Presidents Cup and more silly stops than one season can stomach. But as a litmus test for the game?s ever-evolving postseason Deutsche Bank Championship, Monday was a sign of progress.

The FedEx Cup playoffs may never resonate like postseasons in other sports, a concept complicated by the intricacies of a game dominated by independent contractors and a history written at the majors, but on Monday the Tour?s experiment took a step forward, if not with the masses then with the men who vie for the Cup. Or maybe it?s the $10 million jackpot waiting at the end of the road in Atlanta.

Not that it mattered to Ernie Els, who has used these end-of-days playoffs to rekindle a competitive fire that had been missing; or Chez Reavie, a Tour outcast of sorts that wasn?t just playing for his playoff future but his year. And certainly not for Webb Simpson, who in three short weeks has vaulted from prospect to prohibitive FedEx Cup favorite.

Cynics will dismiss the playoffs as a money grab ? millionaires playing for millions, and, essentially, the postseason has amounted to little more than that for four seasons. But on Monday at TPC Boston, the cash dash delivered a product that was well, playoff-like.

The money may bring the players calling, but it is the thrill of the hunt that the collective savors.

?The joy I get from what I do is not from money. It?s about getting into playoffs and the thrill of trying to win,? said Simpson, who closed with an eventful 65 and laid two birdies in extra frames on Reavie to take his second Tour title in three weeks.

That the dramatic finish put Simpson in line to win the Cup filled with $10 million was of less interest to him than a pair of clutch birdie putts in overtime to clip Reavie.

Let the record show that although TPC Boston is often maligned with the title ?bomber?s paradise,? the layout served as an equal opportunity scoring-fest, rewarding the plodders as well as the ponders on Monday.

Two-way traffic is the sign of any good championship, but on Monday at TPC Boston the flow resembled that of Interstate-495, deadlocked on the northbound side with vacationers returning from Cape Cod following a holiday weekend, but nearly abandoned headed south.

No fewer than five players held a share of the lead through a windswept afternoon, and that didn?t include Bubba Watson who began the day with a one-stroke advantage but quickly became an afterthought as the traffic ahead picked apart TPC Boston.

Even before Watson teed off he?d fallen behind Brandt Snedeker, who played his first five holes in 4 under. By the turn the top spot was shared by world No. 1 Luke Donald, Snedeker and Simpson.

But as the wind and pressure picked up on the back side, players fell away. Donald airmailed the green at the 12^th, caught his third shot heavy, his fourth thin and penciled in a double bogey-6, while Snedeker was undone by three late bogeys. Leaving just Reavie, who birdied four of his last eight holes and was nursing a one-stroke lead before he flew the final green and failed to convert his 12 footer for par.

It was about the only thing Reavie missed all day.

TPC Boston may be a bomber?s course, but the playoff came down to the week?s top two putters. Simpson ? who had 13 one-putt greens on Monday, including the playoff ? finished tied for third in putting and first in ?putts made distance,? tied with Reavie.

For Simpson, his putting epiphany occurred during his opening round at the PGA Championship when he noticed on the 15^th?green that his routine to line up putts was much faster during the round than it was when he practiced. Since he?s adjusted, he?s 2-for-3, adding the Deutsche Bank to his Wyndham Championship title.

?It was a big turning point that we worked on and trusted it,? said Simpson, who carded all four rounds in the 60s (69-68-67-65) to finish at 15 under.

Yet playoff pressure transcended the leaderboard. There was Els, who has now played his last three events facing FedEx Cup elimination, grinding down the stretch to crack the top 70 and advance to the BMW Championship in two weeks. He birdied the last to finish 68^th.

When asked if he could compare the pressure he felt on Monday to that of trying to actually win a tournament, Els? response was telling: ?It?s worse. You screw up on 18 to win a tournament you still get second place and $600,000. Screw up here and you?re going home.?

Chris Stroud could relate. Following a double bogey at No. 14 he figured his playoffs were over. ?I knew I?d blew myself out there,? he said.

It is a measure of the playoff?s growing appeal, however, ?it was Stroud that drew a media crowd following his round ? not playing partner Hunter Mahan, whose closing 66 gave him a however-fleeting clubhouse lead at 10 under.

?I saw I was 76 (in FedEx Cup points) on 15 green (following a double bogey-bogey stretch) and figured I needed to birdie the last three to have a chance,? Stroud said. There was no birdie-birdie-birdie finish. Instead, he nearly holed his second shot from 232 yards at the par-5 closing hole for a tap-in eagle to advance to the third round of the playoffs.

Geoff Ogilvy, however, may have been the ultimate playoff poster child. Following bogeys at Nos. 14 and 16 he also assumed his postseason days were numbered, but a birdie at the last lifted him into, and Kevin Na out of, the top 70.

?I get rewarded with a trip to Cog Hill,? said Ogilvy, a back-handed comment considering the Australian?s antipathy toward the Rees Jones redesign in Chicago, but compelling stuff none the less.

What the playoffs lack in ?curb appeal,? they seem to be making up for at the grass-roots level with the rank and file. Just ask Reavie, who just days earlier had cut short an explanation on his limited Tour status ? essentially he currently is?not?qualified to play the Fall Series but he is in the Tour Championship ? for an impromptu moment of show-and-tell.

As he rolled up his right pant leg to expose a 6-inch scar, the byproduct of ACL surgery last June that sent him to an extended stay on the ?DL? and a questionable Tour future, he allowed himself a moment of self-indulgence: ?I just want to win,? he said after Friday?s round. Four days and 56 holes later he was still overwhelmed by the thought.

?It's unbelievable,? an emotional Reavie allowed. ?Starting the year on a medical (exemption) and not knowing what's going to happen, to be able to go to the Tour Championship is a goal. It's what I wanted to do.?

No, the Tour?s postseason is not quite ?Fever Pitch,? but it?s getting there.

Source: http://www.golfchannel.com/news/rex-hoggard/playoff-halfway-point/

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Why your organisation needs a disaster recovery plan in the wake of ...

With DigiNotar joining the ranks of Comodo, StartSSL and RSA as a trusted third-party security organisation successfully compromised by hackers, enterprises need to move past the shock and begin formulating their own compromise recovery and business continuity plans.

People have not given much thought to the impact or ramifications of a certificate authority (CA) compromise. This attack against DigiNotar marks 2011?s fourth major breach of a trusted third-party security provider ? and both the stakes and the targets are higher than ever.

There will be more breaches of third-party trust providers like this in the future, and additional organisation s and governments agencies will be affected if they don?t take certain steps.

Hackers apparently used the fraudulent certificate to intercept Iranian users? email, among other items. The attack went undetected by the users because their browsers trusted the DigiNotar certificate. A third-party trust provider represents an extremely high value target for hackers.

Once an attacker can access and steal trust credentials, they can commit various cyber-criminal acts in pursuit of their own nefarious agenda.

SSL and PKI remain solid and reliable technologies. That does not mean that enterprises can relax. They need to be aware that any individual third-party trust provider, like a CA, can be compromised and is therefore a known risk. And known risks require solid, well-conceived contingency plans.

Mozilla, Google, and others have implemented browser updates that will revoke trust in DigiNotar-signed certificates, which will safeguard users of those browsers, The ripple effects of a hack like this do not stop at the browser.

All enterprises need to look at their highest-value assets?servers and applications where sensitive and regulated data flows, and that are protected by certificates. Plans must be in place to recover anytime the trust provider is compromised.

There are three very specific steps organisation s must take to deal with a compromised CA. First, they must use multiple CAs so that if one is compromised, the other non-compromised CA and its issued certificates and keys are available for continued use.

Most companies know better than to put all of their eggs in the same basket. This is a well understood principle of business continuity and disaster recovery ? always have a backup resource available. Our experience is that most everyone follows this practice today.

Second, organisation s must have an accounting of all the CAs that they use as third party trust providers. Third, they must have a complete inventory of the owner and location for each certificate in the enterprise. This often numbers in the thousands and even tens of thousands or more in Global 2000 organisations.

And finally, every organisation must have an actionable and comprehensive plan in place to recover from a CA compromise. The time to recover needs to be measured in hours, not weeks or months. Most enterprises have glaring holes in their certificate inventories.

In many cases organisations tell me they have 3,000 certificates installed, for instance, and by the time I?ve fully assessed the situation, the number of certificates and keys ends up being two or three times that number. That many unidentified certificates represents a significant unmanaged and unquantified risk.

Further, few organisations have a management platform in place that gives them the power to replace compromised certificates quickly. Otherwise, the replacement of known, compromised certificates is largely a manual effort.

This forces organisation s to continue operations in a compromised condition ? possibly for many months ? while the thousands of compromised certificates are manually replaced. In some cases that may not even be an option and entire systems may have to be shut down until remediated.

None of us knows where the next breach will occur, or whether it will occur in a week or three months. Enterprises must ready themselves to respond immediately if they implement the four steps of CA compromise recovery.

The very serious implication is that you better wake up. Get out of denial. Understand that this is a huge issue of business continuity. And don?t think yow won?t be compromised, because you will.

Author profile: Jeff Hudson

A key executive in four successful, high-technology start-ups that have gone public, Jeff Hudson brings over 25 years of experience in information technology and security management. Jeff has spent a significant portion of his career developing and delivering leading edge technology solutions for financial services and other Global 2000 companies. Prior to joining Venafi, Jeff was the CEO of Vhayu Technologies. Vhayu was the market leader for the analysis and capture of market data, and was acquired by ThomsonReuters. Prior to joining Vhayu, Jeff held numerous executive leadership posts, including CEO and cofounder of MS2, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Informix Software, CEO of Visioneer, and numerous senior executive posts at NetFRAME Systems and WYSE Technology. He started his career with IBM. Jeff earned a B.A. in communications at the University of California, Davis.

MORE ARTICLES FROM Security

Source: http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/why-your-organisation-needs-a-disaster-recovery-plan-in-the-wake-of-diginotar-hack/

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Marshall Fine: Actress Jessica Chastain is having a big year

When The Debt reached theaters on Sept. 2, it represented the third film Jessica Chastain currently has in theaters - with two more opening before the end of the year and still another playing at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Talk about hitting the ground running.

In the past four years, Chastain has starred in seven films, most of which have come out in the past six months. She's been working almost nonstop since graduating from Juilliard in 2003. But she suddenly finds herself cast as Hollywood's latest "It" girl, thanks to roles in The Tree of Life, The Help, The Debt and the upcoming releases, Coriolanus, Take Shelter, Texas Killing Fields and Al Pacino's Wilde Salome.

When you're playing tag, however, no one wants to be "it" - and Chastain is doing her best to be "not it" right now.

"If you're the 'It' girl, that means that, soon, you'll be out of fashion," she says in a telephone interview. ""I want to be the girl who lasts. I'm the person who just wants to work with amazing people."

Or to play them: In The Debt, she portrays an Israeli agent who is the flashback version of the present-day character played by Helen Mirren. In the film, she's part of a squad of agents - including Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington - on a mission to capture a Nazi war criminal who is still alive in East Berlin in the mid-1960s. As such, she had to learn to handle herself physically, so she could look convincing in the film's fight scenes.

"I'm not really a fighter," Chastain says with a laugh. "I'd never thrown a punch in my life. But before we started filming, I worked with a wonderful teacher from the Israeli army who taught me Krav Maga three times a week. Since I'm small, I had to learn to use my body weight to my advantage. I had to be squirrelly; I also had to learn to use pressure points so the other person's body would go where I led them.

"During the fight scenes, I used that research to ground me. And I have a dance background - I wanted to be a ballerina when I was younger - so I had that connection to my body. A lot of the fight scenes are like a dance; you count the rhythm. If you're off by a beat, someone gets hit in the face."

Like Jesper Christensen, who played the agents' quarry: "There was a moment where my hand grazed his chin accidentally. In that take, we both looked so fierce - but afterward, I gave this big gasp and covered my mouth with my hands. Fortunately, it was no big accident."

This interview continues on my website.

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Follow Marshall Fine on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hollywoodnfine

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marshall-fine/actress-jessica-chastain_b_950242.html

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Remnants of Lee pose flooding threat across east (Reuters)

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) ? Tropical Storm Lee's remnants brought threats of flooding from the Tennessee Valley to New England on Tuesday, while those in the storm's wake continued to face power outages and blocked roads.

The National Weather Service issued flood and flash flood watches and warnings from the southern U.S. through the Appalachian Mountains and into the northeast.

Tornado watches were in effect in the Carolinas and Virginia.

Heavy rains will continue through Thursday. Between four to eight inches of rain are expected, though some areas could see up to 10 inches.

"These rains may cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides," the weather service said.

According to AccuWeather.com, weather systems from the tropics could bring more heavy rain and flooding to the Atlantic seaboard through mid-September.

Chattanooga, Tennessee was experiencing some flash flooding and power outages, with nearly 10 inches of rain soaking the city since early Monday.

The 9.67 inches that fell in a 24-hour period beginning at 2:30 a.m. local time Monday broke the single-day rainfall record of 7.61 inches, set on March 29-30, 1886.

"Starting Sunday evening, we had a cold front start to move into our area, which was pulling up copious amounts of moisture from what was left of Lee," said meteorologist Kate Guillet, whose Morristown, Tennessee office keeps track of the weather in the eastern part of the state.

"It gave us some widespread, significant heavy rainfall across our area."

The rain caused flooded roadways, stalled cars and the backup of sewage pipes in areas including Knoxville, she said.

The good news was that creeks were beginning to level off and didn't look like they would leave their banks, said Amy Maxwell, spokeswoman for the Hamilton County Emergency Management Agency in Chattanooga.

"The only thing we're having concerns with is the ground is so saturated with the water that we have received that trees are coming down and falling on homes," she said, noting that 32,000 customers were without power at noon local time.

Officials in Alabama's coastal Orange Beach, Gulf Shores and Dauphin Island said the weekend's rough waters kicked up new tar balls onto beaches.

Jeff Collier, mayor of Dauphin Island, said the barrier island's beaches were experiencing an increase in the amount of oil-related debris washing ashore.

But Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon said the size and volume of the tar balls there did not seem any more substantial than for the past several months.

Crews there have collected between 40 and 60 pounds of tar balls each week since the cleanup from the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was announced complete.

"We haven't seen any signs yet of the worst-case scenario, and we're going to give (the surf) two to three days to settle down," Kennon said.

About 108,000 power outages remained in Alabama on Tuesday evening, with 101,000 of them in the Birmingham metro area, according to the Alabama Power utility company.

The outages resulted from a mix of Tropical Storm Lee and a cold front from the north, Pigott said.

Power outages and flooded streets meant an extended Labor Day holiday for many students in central Alabama, where some school systems were closed and others opened late.

Two 17-year-old kayakers -- who had gone missing as the storm's remnants caused Mobile Bay to swell -- were located by Alabama Marine Police late Monday and were being treated for exposure and hypothermia.

(Additional reporting by Tim Ghianni in Nashville, Kelli Dugan in Mobile and Peggy Gargis in Birmingham; Editing by Jerry Norton)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weather/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110906/us_nm/us_storm_usa_lee_flooding

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Video: How Do You Play Volatility?

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/44409710#44409710

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Playing better golf | Ballethnic Photos

Golf can be a tricky and intriguing video game liked by folks round the entire world. The knowledge of playing golf is gratifying in by itself, what when using the picturesque courses, companionship of fellow golfers as well as relatively unlimited number of cases that present on their own. Nevertheless it constantly seems to be far more enjoyable as you can reduced your score. A Golf GPS unit will help you do just that. It might make the sport far more gratifying and furnish invaluable specifics to help you make the right shot.

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The golfing GPS has changed the way in which persons perform golfing. Rather of attempting to calculate and guess distances to objectives and hurdles, which includes a golfing GPS you?ve gotten rather exact yardages at your fingertips anywhere you will be for the program. Depending for the individual product you are able to readily acquire the length to anything ? the pin, the front or back again for the green, bunkers as well as other hazards. Some golfing GPS units also provide you with a nice overhead view of all kinds of things, rendering it significantly a lot easier to imagine your environment and resolve for the most effective shot or club.

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Source: http://ballethnicphotos.com/sports-and-recreation/playing-better-golf/

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Labor Sec'y urges joint Dem-GOP effort on jobs (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Labor Secretary Hilda Solis says both political parties must come together to attack slow economic growth and high unemployment.

Solis says "we do need everyone to be on board" with President Barack Obama as he tries to create a better hiring environment across the country.

Solis says she doesn't want to give away what Obama will tell the nation and a joint session of Congress in Thursday night's primetime speech. But she tells NBC's "Today" show that he'll push programs such as investment in infrastructure, special assistance to dislocated workers and a continuation of payroll tax relief for middle-class workers.

She also says that Obama is "very mindful of what the needs and concerns are of those individuals who have been out of work for so long."

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Online:

http://on.today.com/p73ZvT

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110905/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_labor_day_jobs

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