A Casual Traveler


Book Description

A Casual Traveler is a collection of short stories and poems that chronicle my adventures and misadventures around the world. Let me take you to exotic countries in Southeast Asia, and Central or South America, to explore great cities like Buenos Aires or Seattle, and ancient sites like Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. I'll introduce you to interesting people from around the globe, and share my culinary experiences with strange and gourmet food. Sail with me on a wooden Junk boat in Ha Long Bay. Take an exhilarating motorcycle ride across the country or to the top of Pike's Peak in the Rocky Mountains. Get off the beaten path, I dare you. Follow me to places that you have only dreamed of. Take a trip with A Casual Traveler.




A Casual Traveler


Book Description

A collection of short stories and poems that chronicle Edmond Gagnon's adventures and misadventures around the world. Let him take you to exotic countries in Southeast Asia and Central of South America, to explore great cities like Buenos Aires or Seattle, and ancient sites like Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. He'll introduce you to interesting people from around the globe, and share culinary experiences with strange and gourmet food. Sail with him on a wooden Junk boat in HaLong Bay. Take an exhilarating motorcycle ride across the country or to the top of Pikes Peak in the Rocky Mountains. Get off the beaten path, he dares you. Follow Edmond Gagnon to places that you have only dreamed of. Take a trip with A Casual Traveler.




Go in Health


Book Description




The Reluctant Traveler


Book Description

This is a must-read for World War II buffs! The narrative was written from the perspective of an Eastern European youngster growing up on the losing side of the conflict during the war years. This is a saga that spans Paris in the 1930s to Sofia, Bulgarias capital, in May 1940, just prior to the victorious Nazi armies that paraded in Paris on June 14, 1940. At the time of their arrival in Sofia, Bulgaria remained neutral. On March 1, 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis and later on declared war on the USA and Great Britain. That action invited the systematic bombing of Sofia, resulting in the family having to relocate to a safer location. The chosen location was in what used to be Northern Greece, a city called Serres, where the family lived until the fall of 1944 when the German armies were forced to retreat, which meant that the family had to move back to Sofia. At the end of the war, the family decided to leave Bulgaria as soon as possible. In spite of many obstacles, the family was able to reunite in Prague and, from there, spent some time in a couple of displaced persons (DP) camps in Rome and Naples. Eventually, they sailed from Naples to Buenos Aires and five years later, flew to New York City, the final desired destination.







Bloody Friday


Book Description

Best Friends Patrick Kelly and Jimmy Flynn from Belfast, share a common dream of a better life beyond the borders of their small island. In his quest to see the world, Patrick Kelly joins the military. He’s sent to Vietnam to fight the spread of communism. Jimmy Flynn is mad at the world and he joins the IRA. He fights a war against his own countrymen, in the name of religion. Norm Strom joins one of the largest street gangs in the world, becoming a city cop. He learns the true value of police informants in his fight against crime. The story begins on Bloody Friday, in Belfast, Ireland, and follows the characters to places like the jungle in Cambodia, and cities like Boston, Detroit, Toronto, and Windsor. Their personal lives and relationships unfold and intersect with each other, both in love and war. Women, drugs, and guns are the common denominator that eventually draws them all together for a fatal reunion. In their individual endeavors to either fight crime, or profit from it, one of them will have to pay the ultimate price.




Building a Travel Risk Management Program


Book Description

Building a Travel Risk Management Program: Traveler Safety and Duty of Care for Any Organization helps business and security professionals effectively manage traveler risk by showing them how to build a complete travel risk program. While global corporate travel risks are increasing exponentially, many security and business managers are not well-versed in the rapidly changing global landscape of travel risk, nor do they fully realize the multitude of risks their companies face if they don’t comply with their legal obligations—“duty of care"—for protecting their employees from foreseeable harm, which can cost a company in the form of extensive fines, productivity loss, business interruptions, stock price loss, litigation, and even potential bankruptcy. This book is the first to bridge the gap between the topics of travel management, security, and risk management. It serves as a reference point for working with other departments, including human resources and legal, paving the way for better internal cooperation for travel managers and security managers. In addition, it helps organizations craft a travel risk management program for their unique needs that incorporates the most important policies and procedures that help them comply with legal obligations. Illustrates common mistakes that can have a devastating impact across the entire enterprise with real-world examples and case studies Includes testimonies from corporate travel risk security experts on best practices for meeting the constantly changing duty of care standard Presents best practices for reducing the risk of exposure and liability Offers models for effectively promoting and advocating for travel risk management programs within the organization Compares laws like the UK s “Corporate Manslaughter Act (considered one of the world’s most strict legislative standards) to similar laws around the world, showing how compliance requires constant supervision and process improvement




Mad Travelers


Book Description

At twenty-three, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations—war torn cities, disputed territories, and remote or officially off-limits islands at the margins of the map. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel by finding ingenious ways to bring the world’s most widely traveled people to difficult-to-reach and forbidden places. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was. Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth delves deep inside the subculture of country collecting, taking readers to danger zones like Mogadishu and geographical oddities like Norway’s nearly impossible-to-reach Bouvet Island. Along the way, this raucous tale of adventure and international intrigue illuminates the perils and pleasures of wanderlust while examining a fundamental question: why are some people compelled to travel, while others are content to stay home? Mad Travelers is a perceptive and at times hilarious account of how the pursuit of everywhere put the world’s greatest travelers at the mercy of a brilliant young con man. Soon to be an HBO documentary.




Travel


Book Description




Requirements Engineering for Software and Systems


Book Description

Solid requirements engineering has increasingly been recognized as the key to improved, on-time, and on-budget delivery of software and systems projects. New software tools are emerging that are empowering practicing engineers to improve their requirements engineering habits. However, these tools are not usually easy to use without significant training. Requirements Engineering for Software and Systems, Fourth Edition is intended to provide a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical and practical aspects of discovering, analyzing, modeling, validating, testing, and writing requirements for systems of all kinds, with an intentional focus on software-intensive systems. It brings into play a variety of formal methods, social models, and modern requirements writing techniques to be useful to practicing engineers. The book is intended for professional software engineers, systems engineers, and senior and graduate students of software or systems engineering. Since the first edition, there have been made many changes and improvements to this textbook. Feedback from instructors, students, and corporate users was used to correct, expand, and improve the materials. The fourth edition features two newly added chapters: "On Non-Functional Requirements" and "Requirements Engineering: Road Map to the Future." The latter provides a discussion on the relationship between requirements engineering and such emerging and disruptive technologies as Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Affective Computing. All chapters of the book were significantly expanded with new materials that keep the book relevant to current industrial practices. Readers will find expanded discussions on new elicitation techniques, agile approaches (e.g., Kanpan, SAFe, and DEVOps), requirements tools, requirements representation, risk management approaches, and functional size measurement methods. The fourth edition also has significant additions of vignettes, exercises, and references. Another new feature is scannable QR codes linked to sites containing updates, tools, videos, and discussion forums to keep readers current with the dynamic field of requirements engineering.