CONCORD, N.H. (AP) ? Edward Geddes already had spent two long days on the mountain when the weather turned. Battered by wind and soaked by rain ? "like shower baths of ice water" ? he clung to a rope and pressed on, even after the rain turned to ice that coated his clothing and left two of his fingers crooked for the rest of his life.
It was 1916, and the crew assigned to help Geddes rescue New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain had given up. But Geddes continued the work alone, drilling 11-inch holes into the granite and installing turnbuckles and rods to hold the ledges in place.
"When the men Col. Greenleaf had hired to help me all deserted, I did not intend to be beaten. I leave it to you to judge whether I had time to play or not," he wrote when the work was complete.
Thanks to Geddes' efforts and those of others who followed, the 40-foot-tall natural rock formation that resembled an old man's face remained suspended 1,200 feet above Franconia Notch until May 3, 2003, when it smashed to the ground. Over the years, it became the state's most recognizable symbol ? the Legislature adopted it as the state emblem in 1945, and it still appears on the state quarter, highway signs, license plates and countless souvenirs.
A decade after the Old Man's demise, the famed stone profile is little more than a historical footnote to the state's youngest residents. But it remains a beloved family member to others, including the descendants of Geddes, a granite quarry superintendent from Quincy, Mass., who performed the first repair work on the Old Man nearly a century ago.
Ronald Geddes, 71, was a toddler when the man he knew as Uncle Ed died in 1944. But his father ? Edward Geddes' nephew ? was close to him, and Ronald Geddes grew up hearing about his connection to the Old Man.
"He was very focused, very wiry, and he was fearless," Geddes said of his great-uncle. "He suffered, and he prevailed."
Geddes, who lives in Boston, visited the Old Man many times growing up and as an adult. And while his first thought was always how proud he was that "someone in our family actually did that," he also understood what drew countless others to the site.
"It became a symbol of something. It had a magical, spiritual quality," he said.
Although no one knows how old the Old Man of Mountain was before it fell, several groups of surveyors working in the Franconia Notch area took credit for discovering it in 1805. It quickly became a popular tourist attraction and inspired many works of art and literature. Statesman Daniel Webster compared it to the signs hung outside shops to indicate specific trades: "Shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there he makes men."
Edward Geddes, who returned to the mountain in 1937 amid rumors that the Old Man was about to topple, offered a slight tweak to that quotation after his measurements showed the rocks had not moved even a sixteenth of an inch in 21 years.
"I came to the conclusion that the words of Daniel Webster should be extended to read that once in a while New Hampshire as well as producing men produces a few 'liars,'" he said, according to an article published in the Quincy Patriot Ledger at the time.
Although Geddes was followed by other equally devoted caretakers who protected and patched up the Old Man in later years, Mother Nature had the last word.
Soon after the profile's 2003 tumble, a nonprofit volunteer group began raising money for a $5 million multiphase memorial dedicated to the Old Man, but donations dried up after the first phase was completed in 2011 and no further work will be done, said Dick Hamilton, a board member of the Old man Legacy Fund.
More than 25,000 people visited the memorial site last summer, but it's unclear whether it will continue to attract visitors. Some visitors who left reviews on the travel website tripadvisor.com said they appreciated learning more about the Old Man's history, but others complained that it wasn't worth the trip.
At a Concord playground Thursday, 8-year-old Alexis Tramontozzi of Goffstown paused for a moment when asked if she had ever heard of the Old Man of the Mountain before replying with a definite "no." Her grandmother, Eloise Frank, said her family always stopped to see the Old Man when they took vacations in the White Mountains when she was a child, but she is unlikely to ever visit the memorial site.
But that doesn't mean she wants the state to find a new symbol.
"I think it should stay," she said. "What would you change it into?"
In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and 5,000 others attended a 150th birthday party for the Old Man at the Cannon Mountain tramway parking area. On Friday, a much smaller ceremony is planned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Old Man's fall.
Ralph Geddes, another great-nephew of the profile's first repairman, will be driving up from his home in Raynham, Mass., much like he did a decade ago.
"The morning I heard he fell, I went straight there," he said. "I needed to do it. It was in my family."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nh-honors-old-man-10-years-formations-fall-163851178.html
indiana autoimmune disease news channel 9 insanity workout mass effect 3 launch trailer yelp huntsville al
Educational platform?Treehouse?is announcing today that it has raised $7 million in Series B financing from Kaplan Ventures, with participation from its existing investor, The Social+Capital Partnership.?The round follows the $600K in seed financing it raised in October 2011 from Kevin Rose, Reid Hoffman, David Sze and Mark Suster, among others, which was followed by its $4.75 million Series A in April of last year. Treehouse has raised more than $12 million to date. Treehouse launched in late 2011 on an ambitious mission: To help anyone learn to code and design for iOS, Android and the web, regardless of their technical know-how. By combining the video-based approach of Lynda.com and learn-to-code platforms like Codecademy, Treehouse aimed to create an educational platform that leverages video, quizzes, a splash of gamification and project-based learning to help aspiring app developers and engineers learn the trade. By charging students between $29 and $49 for access to its library of video content, realtime practice engine, in-depth interviews with experts and workshops, Treehouse was quick to reach profitability, and by September, more than 12,000 people (ages 7 to 50) were paying for its platform. Since then, its user base has grown to more than 25,000 active students. In conjunction with its new capital, the startup is also announcing today that it is in the process of launching its first high school pilot program, which aims to train high school seniors to be job-ready for engineering positions without needing a university degree. The program will run for six months and cost $9/month, per student. Treehouse’s move into high school follows on the heels of its “College Scholarship Program,” announced last fall, in which it offered 5,000 “Gold” accounts to college students in the U.S. for free — for a full two years. Because Gold plans typically run $50/month, this worked out to $3 million worth of free Treehouse education — the equivalent of what students would have had to pay out of pocket. Treehouse Founder and CEO Ryan Carson told us at the time its motivation was, essentially, a response to the absurd cost of higher education — a cost that is expected to continue rising. To combat this unsustainable cost, Treehouse set out to offer students of all ages a comparable quality of education, without those costly student loans. The startup’s push to reach both high school and college students is part of its effort to
You probably already know you should store tomatoes outside of the fridge for better shelf life. If you want your tomatoes to last as long as possible, how you store them?stem-end up or down?also can make a big difference. 
Well, it looks like the developer meetup over at Twitter is underway and information is making its way out over Twitter about it. It sounds like Twitter is unveiling some new Twitter Card types, which are its way of displaying embedded content within tweets and it’s all about mobile apps. Tomorrow, the cards will be released, and the hope is to get deeper linking and engagement into other apps you may have on your phone. This could be for shopping, taking a poll or just about any other interaction you can think of. Other Card types include things like embedded photo galleries, as these tweets show: Developers have long wanted more access to this prime real-estate, which could turn Twitter into a valuable resource to sell goods, digital music or anything in between. Sadly, press wasn’t invited to tonight’s gathering, but the tweets are flying. AllThingsD had originally reported last week that this was going to be what we’d see. CEO of social polling app, Seesaw, Aaron Gotwalt seemed pleased: A blog post has also popped up on the Twitter dev site, giving a bit more explanation and direction on app installs and deep linking within apps: One of the most important features in the new Cards is the ability to allow users to download your app (if the user doesn’t already have it installed), or deep-link into your own app (if the app is already installed on the user’s mobile device). The ability to enable app installs and deep-linking is globally available across all Twitter Card types – you’ll just need to add a new set of markup tags as detailed below. App Installs By adding these new footer tags to your markup, you’ll be able to specify downloads for users who’ve not yet installed your app on their device. This will work across iPhone, iPad, and Android (Google Play). Please note that if you have an iPhone app, but no iPad-optimized app, you should include the iPhone app id, name, and url for both iPhone and iPad-related tags. When no value is provided, the Cards will simply render a “View on web” link pointing to the value in twitter:url. Below is an example of what the prompt will look like if the user does not have the app installed: Deep-Linking If a user does have the application installed, you can specify a deep-link into the correlated resource within