Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer, poet and wartime fighter pilot. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian immigrant parents, he served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot and, subsequently, an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of acting wing commander, he rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, he became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century", his awards for contribution to literature include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. In 2008, The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, his children's books for their unsentimental, macabre darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters.

His books feature an underlying warm sentiment. His works for children include James and the Giant Peach and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine, his adult works include Tales of the Unexpected. Roald Dahl was born in 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Wales to Norwegians Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl. Dahl's father had immigrated to the UK from Sarpsborg in Norway and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s with his first wife, a Frenchwoman named Marie Beaurin-Gresser, they had two children together before her death in 1907. His mother immigrated to the UK and married his father in 1911. Dahl was named after Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, his first language was Norwegian, which he spoke at home with his parents and his sisters Astri and Else. The children were baptised at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff. Dahl's sister Astri died from appendicitis at age 7 in 1920 when Dahl was three years old, his father died of pneumonia at age 57 several weeks later.

That year, his younger sister Asta was born. Dahl's mother decided to remain in Wales instead of returning to Norway to live with relatives, as her husband had wanted their children to be educated in English schools, which he considered the world's best. Dahl first attended Llandaff. At age eight, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers at the local sweet shop, owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman named Mrs. Pratchett; the five boys named their prank the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924". Gobstoppers were a favourite sweet among British schoolboys between the two World Wars, Dahl referred to them in his fictional Everlasting Gobstopper, featured in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl transferred to St. Peter's boarding school in Weston-super-Mare, his parents had wanted him to be educated at an English public school, this proved to be the nearest because of the regular ferry link across the Bristol Channel. Dahl's time at St. Peter's was unpleasant.

After her death in 1967, he learned. Dahl wrote about his time at St. Peter's in his autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood. From 1929, when he was 13, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire. Dahl disliked the hazing and described an environment of ritual cruelty and status domination, with younger boys having to act as personal servants for older boys subject to terrible beatings, his biographer Donald Sturrock described these violent experiences in Dahl's early life. Dahl expresses some of these darker experiences in his writings, marked by his hatred of cruelty and corporal punishment. According to Dahl's autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher. Writing in that same book, Dahl reflected: “All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed to wound other boys, sometimes quite severely... I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it.” Fisher was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, crowned Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

However, according to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, the caning took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. Dahl said the incident caused him to "have doubts about religion and about God", he was never seen as a talented writer in his school years, with one of his English teachers writing in his school report "I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended." Dahl was exceptionally tall. He played sports including cricket and golf, was made captain of the squash team; as well as having a passion for literature, he developed an interest in photography and carried a camera with him. During his years at Repton, the Cadbury chocolate company sent boxes of new chocolates to the school to be tested by the pupils. Dahl dreamt of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr Cadbury himself.

The S-125 Neva/Pechora Soviet surface-to-air missile system was designed by Aleksei Isaev to complement the S-25 and S-75. It has a shorter effective range and lower engagement altitude than either of its predecessors and flies slower, but due to its two-stage design it is more effective against more maneuverable targets, it is able to engage lower flying targets than the previous systems, being more modern it is much more resistant to ECM than the S-75. The 5V24 missiles reach around Mach 3 to 3.5 in flight, both stages powered by solid fuel rocket motors. The S-125, like the S-75, uses radio command guidance; the naval version of this system has the NATO reporting name SA-N-1 Goa and original designation M-1 Volna. The S-125 was first deployed between 1961 and 1964 around Moscow, augmenting the S-25 and S-75 sites ringing the city, as well as in other parts of the USSR. In 1964, an upgraded version of the system, the S-125M "Neva-M" and S-125M1 "Neva-M1" was developed; the original version was designated SA-3A by the US DoD and the new Neva-M named SA-3B and SA-N-1B.

The Neva-M introduced an improved guidance system. The SA-3 was not used against U. S. forces in Vietnam, because the Soviets feared that China, through which most, if not all of the equipment meant for North Vietnam had to travel, would try to copy the missile. The FAPA-DAA acquired a significant number of SA-3s, these were encountered during the first strike flown by SAAF Mirage F.1s against targets in Angola - in June 1980. While the SAAF reported two aircraft were damaged by SAMs during this action, Angola claimed to have shot down four. On 7 June 1980, while attacking SWAPO's Tobias Haneko Training Camp during Operation Sceptic, SAAF Major Frans Pretorius and Captain IC du Plessis, both flying Mirage F.1s, were hit by SA-3s. Pretorius's aircraft was hit in a fuel line and he had to perform a deadstick landing at AFB Ondangwa. Du Plessis's aircraft sustained heavier damage and had to divert to Ruacana forward airstrip, where he landed with only the main undercarriage extended. Both aircraft were returned to service.

The Soviets supplied several SA-3s to the Arab states in the late 1960s and 1970s, most notably Egypt and Syria. The SA-3 saw extensive action during the War of the Yom Kippur War. During the latter, the SA-3, along with the SA-2 and SA-6, formed the backbone of the Egyptian air defence network Many of Egyptia Engineering officers are have more experience to treat the hard problems in the system of Sa-125. In Egypt, March–July 1970 Soviet battalions of S-125 17 Shooting shot down 9 Israeli and 1 Egyptian planes. Israel recognized the 5 Phantoms in 1970 and in 1973 another 6 A USAF F-16 was shot down on January 19, 1991, during Operation Desert Storm; the aircraft was struck by an SA-3 just south of Baghdad. The pilot, Major Jeffrey Scott Tice, ejected safely but became a POW as the ejection took place over Iraq, it was the first daylight raid over Baghdad. On the opening night of Desert Storm, on 17 January 1991, a B-52G was damaged by a missile. Different versions of this engagement are told, it could have been a S-125 or a 2K12 Kub while other versions report a MiG-29 fired a Vympel R-27R missile and damaged the B-52G.

However, the U. S. Air Force disputes these claims, stating the bomber was hit by friendly fire, an AGM-88 High-speed, Anti-Radiation Missile that homed on the fire-control radar of the B-52's tail gun. Shortly following this incident, General George Lee Butler announced that the gunner position on B-52 crews would be eliminated, the gun turrets permanently deactivated, commencing on 1 October 1991. A Yugoslav Army 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade 3rd battery equipped with S-125 system managed to shoot down an F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft on March 27, 1999 during the Kosovo War near village Budjanovci, about 45 km from Belgrade, it was used to shoot down a NATO F-16 fighter on May 2. During the war, different Yugoslav SAM sites and the SA-3 shot down some NATO UAVs. On 17 March 2015, a US MQ-1 Predator drone was shot down by a Syrian Air Defense Force S-125 missile while on intelligence flight near the coastal town of Latakia. In December 2016, ISIS forces captured three SA-3 launchers after they retook Palmyra from Russian and Syrian government troops.

On April 14, 2018, American and French forces launched a barrage of 103 air-to-surface and cruise missiles targeting eight sites in Syria. The Russian military claimed that thirteen S-125 missiles launched in response destroyed five incoming missiles. However, the American Department of Defense stated; the S-125 is somewhat mobile, an improvement over the S-75 system. The missiles are deployed on fixed turrets containing two or four but can be carried ready-to-fire on ZIL trucks in pairs. Reloading the fixed launchers takes a few minutes; the S-125 system uses 2 different missile versions. The V-600 had the smallest warhead with only 60 kg of high explosive, it had a range of about 15 km. The version is named V-601, it has a wing span of 2.2 m and a body diameter of 0.375 m. This missile weighs 953 kg at launch, has a 70 kg warhead containing 33 kg of HE and 4,500 fragments; the minimum range is 3.5 km, a

Marine Villa is a neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri; the neighborhood is located just south of the large and historic Anheuser-Busch Brewery complex along the bluffs of the Mississippi River. It is further defined by Cherokee Street's Antique Row on the north, Gasconade Street on the south, South Broadway and Jefferson Avenue on the west, the Mississippi River on the east; the Marine Villa neighborhood lies along the Mississippi River, just a few miles south of downtown St. Louis. Part of the St. Louis Commons, this area was subdivided and gridded in 1855, with many of the early developments in the neighborhood being small farms and brickyards; some of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood are small frame and brick farmhouses built in the 1860s, many in the form of a flounder house, a simple but unique vernacular home of one-and-a-half stories with a shed roof. With the construction of a north/south roadway called Carondelet Avenue, Marine Villa was able to continue developing as the city's population grew and expanded from the downtown core.

The Lemp Brewery relocated from downtown to the northern edge of the Marine Villa neighborhood in the 1860s, the neighborhood saw an influx of German immigrants who came to the neighborhood to work at several of the nearby breweries, including Lemp, Anheuser-Busch, the Cherokee Brewery. In 1890 the streetcar came through the neighborhood, creating an explosion in population and construction. Most of those buildings are still standing, give the neighborhood its dense and historic architectural character. Along with the streetcar route, bustling commercial districts developed along Cherokee Street, South Broadway and Jefferson Avenue. Constructed of brick, most of these commercial buildings are of two or three story construction, with first floor storefronts and residences above. Many are used today as they were intended, with small businesses occupying the first floor; these commercial districts are now home to the Chippewa-Broadway Business Association and the Cherokee Antique Row District. Surrounding the shopping districts the neighborhood is characterized by single and multi-family historic brick homes, built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These homes exhibit a range of architectural styles, including Second Empire, Queen Anne, Italianate and many localized and vernacular interpretations of the more recognized styles. In 2010 the neighborhood's racial makeup was 55.4% Black, 37.7% White, 0.3% Native American, 1.4% Asian, 3.0% Two or More Races and 2.2% Some Other Race. 6.4 % of the population was of Latino origin. Home Neighborhood website

Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may create one or more new file systems; the first part of the formatting process that performs basic medium preparation is referred to as "low-level formatting". Partitioning is the common term for the second part of the process, making the data storage device visible to an operating system; the third part of the process termed "high-level formatting" most refers to the process of generating a new file system. In some operating systems all or parts of these three processes can be combined or repeated at different levels and the term "format" is understood to mean an operation in which a new disk medium is prepared to store files; as a general rule, formatting a disk leaves most if not all existing data on the disk medium. Special tools can remove user data by a single overwrite of free space. A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage, read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.

The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes but starting with the 1301 IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks of different sizes. The disk subsystems on the IBM System/360 expanded this concept in the form of Count Key Data and Extended Count Key Data. Modern hard disk drives, such as Serial attached SCSI and Serial ATA drives, appear at their interfaces as a contiguous set of fixed-size blocks. Floppy disks only used fixed block sizes but these sizes were a function of the host's OS and its interaction with its controller so that a particular type of media would have different block sizes depending upon the host OS and controller. Optical discs only use fixed block sizes. Formatting a disk for use by an operating system and its applications involves three different processes. Low-level formatting marks the surfaces of the disks with markers indicating the start of a recording block and other information like block CRC to be used in normal operations, by the disk controller to read or write data.

This is intended to be the permanent foundation of the disk, is completed at the factory. Partitioning divides a disk into one or more regions, writing data structures to the disk to indicate the beginning and end of the regions; this level of formatting includes checking for defective tracks or defective sectors. High-level formatting creates the file system format within a logical volume; this formatting includes the data structures used by the OS to identify the logical drive or partition's contents. This may occur during operating system installation. Disk and distributed file system may specify an optional boot block, and/or various volume and directory information for the operating system; the low-level format of floppy disks is performed by the disk drive's controller. For a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, low-level formatting writes 18 sectors of 512 bytes to each of 160 tracks of the floppy disk, providing 1,474,560 bytes of storage on the disk. Physical sectors are larger than 512 bytes, as in addition to the 512 byte data field they include a sector identifier field, CRC bytes and gaps between the fields.

These additional bytes are not included in the quoted figure for overall storage capacity of the disk. Different low-level formats can be used on the same media. Several freeware and free software programs allowed more control over formatting, allowing the formatting of high-density 3.5" disks with a capacity up to 2 MB. Techniques used include: head/track sector skew, interleaving sectors, increasing the number of sectors per track, increasing the number of tracks. Linux supports a variety of sector sizes, DOS and Windows support a large-record-size DMF-formatted floppy format. Hard disk drives prior to the 1990s had a separate disk controller that defined how data was encoded on the media. With the media, the drive and/or the controller procured from separate vendors, users were able to perform low-level formatting. Separate procurement had the potential of incompatibility between the separate components such that the subsystem would not reliably store data. User instigated low-level formatting of hard disk drives was common for minicomputer and personal computer systems until the 1990s.

IBM and other mainframe system vendors supplied their hard

The Baltimore Bombers were an American indoor lacrosse team based in Baltimore, Maryland. They were a member of the North American Lacrosse League; the Bombers played their home games at Clarence H. "Du" Burns Arena in the Baltimore City neighborhood of Canton. The franchise was announced as an expansion member of the North American Lacrosse League on August 26, 2012; this made the thunder the first professional indoor lacrosse team to call Baltimore home since the Baltimore Thunder left in 1999 to become the Pittsburgh CrosseFire, the first professional lacrosse team of any kind to call the Baltimore region home since the Baltimore Bayhawks moved to Washington, DC in 2006. Scheduled to start their first season against the expansion Rhode Island Kingfish on January 5, 2013, the first game for the Bombers was January 12, 2013 against the Boston Rockhoppers; the Bombers won this game in 17-16 in overtime. On March 8, 2013 it was reported the Baltimore Bombers had folded. General manager and head coach, Hunter Francis noted that "...the economics didn’t work."

This news broke on Laxdirt.com and on their Facebook page. Just two days before, the Bombers posted about a giveaway at the game scheduled for March 10. ✝ Folded mid-season Baltimore Bombers official Facebook Baltimore Bombers official Twitter

Hemsedal is a municipality in Viken county, Norway. It is part of the traditional region of Hallingdal; the administrative centre of the municipality is the village of Trøym. Hemsedal lies on the Norwegian National Road 52. Hemsedal is located 220 km northwest of 273 km from Bergen. In 1897, Hemsedal was separated from the municipality of Gol to become a municipality of its own; the Old Norse form of the name was Hemsudalr. The second element is dalr, which means "dale" or "valley"; the Norwegian word hems is named after the valley of Hemsedal. The coat-of-arms is from modern times; the arms were designed by Stein Davidsen. The arms show a gold lynx head on a red background. Hemsedal stave church is believed to have been built between 1207 and 1224, is first mentioned, as Ecclesia Aamsodal, in the accounts and diaries of the Papal nuncios sent to Scandinavia to collect tithes in 1282–1324. In 1327 it was mentioned under the name Skodvinar Kirkja i Hemsudali; the church was dismantled in 1882. Hemsedal Church was built during 1882 as a replacement for Hemsedal stave church.

It was constructed of wood on the basis of plans by architect Johannes Henrik Nissen. It has 500 seats; the organ was built in 1888 by Olsen & Jørgensens orgelfabrikk and was restored in 1976. The church is associated with the Hallingdal deanery of the Diocese of Tunsberg; the valley has traditionally had small and medium-sized farms that were scattered on the valley bottom on both sides of the river and along the slopes. Because of the high altitude, farming has concentrated for the most part on livestock and dairy, use of summer shielings has been important for the farms, which could not find sufficient pasturage in the valley bottom. Most therefore had milking stations on the shielings. In the 1647 cadastre there was only one farm in Hemsedal large enough to pay full taxes. In addition, there were a number of enterprises; the estimated population was about 400. Until the mid-19th century, the population increased steadily. In 1845 there were 1,775 people in the village. However, the population declined again over the next 75 years.

In 1920 it had fallen before once more starting to increase. Skogstad Hotell was completed in 1905 as the first hotel in the village. Before that, in the latter half of the 19th century, a road had been built through the village with the hope that it would become a major route to Western Norway. However, things changed with the opening of the Bergen Railway in 1909. Hemsedal once more became a detour. After the World War II, new places to stay were established in the valley, such as Vangen Pensjonat at Tuv and Lykkjaheim Pensjonat. A tourist agency was established in 1939 and in 1952 suggested building a ski lift in Hemsedal, but this did not happen until 1959, when Fossheim Pensjonat created the Tottenheisen, a 350-metre ski lift behind the inn at Ulsåk, serving the first piste in the village, Tottenløypa. However, this lift was torn down in 1961. Hemsedal Skisenter opened at Holdeskaret in 1961, a few years planning began for tourist development. Over the five years beginning in 1980, a series of new businesses aimed at tourists were established.

The first chairlift, opened in 1983. Tourism has continued to grow in economic significance for Hemsedal. More than half of visitors come from abroad. Hemsedal is now popular in the summer season, due to opportunities for fishing, climbing, cycling and other activities; the municipality is bordered to the north by Vang and Vestre Slidre, to the east by Nord-Aurdal and Gol, to the south by Ål and Hol, to the west by Lærdal. Lakes in the region include Juklevatnet. Hemsedal's economy has traditionally been is based on agriculture and is now driven by tourism. One of the first tourists in Hemsedal was the Norwegian polar explorer Fritjof Nansen, who visited in 1898 and stayed at the Bjøberg Fjellstue. Today Hemsedal is a popular destination, with Hemsedal Skisenter the main attraction. About 70% of all visitors come in the winter season and most of the remaining 30% in the summer months. Hemsedal Skisenter is the second largest ski resort in Norway; the ski centres in Hemsedal and Grøndalen were bought in 2000 by the Swedish company Sälenstjärnen, which changed its name the following year to Skistar.

Skistar owns Trysil Ski Centre, Sälen and Åre, Vemedalen and Hammarbybacken in Sweden.Øvre Løkji is a museum farm from which there are several trails up into the mountains. Hemsedal's cross-country stadium is located at Gravset and is the starting point for a large network of trails to Lykkja and Gol, including 10 km of lighted trails. Hemsedal Bygdetun is located at Øvre Løkji in the village of Ulsåk; the museum has artifacts from the early 18th century. Rjukandefossen waterfall is located in the vicinity of the village of Tuv Hemsedal Top 20 offers mountain climbing during summer months. Josef Monsrud was a Norwegian forester and resistance member during World War II. At the age of twenty he joined the resistance Osvald Group