General contractor

A general contractor (main contractor, prime contractor) is responsible for the day-to-day oversight of a construction site, management of vendors and trades, and the communication of information to all involved parties throughout the course of a building project.

Description

The general contractor is a manager, and possibly a tradesman, employed by the client on the advice of the architect, engineer or the architectural technologist or the client him/herself if acting as the manager. A general contractor is responsible for the overall coordination of a project. A general contractor must first assess the project-specific documents (referred to as bid, proposal or tender documents). In the case of renovations, a site visit is required to get a better understanding of the project. Depending on the project delivery method, the contractor will submit a fixed price proposal or bid, cost plus price or an estimate. The general contractor considers the cost of home office overhead, general conditions, materials and equipment as well as the cost of labor to provide the owner with a price for the project.

Steve Pink

Steve Pink (born February 3, 1966) is an American actor, screenwriter and director. He is the director of the comedy films Accepted and Hot Tub Time Machine, and the co-writer of the films Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity.

Life and career

He is an alumnus of Evanston Township High School, Columbia College Chicago, and University of California-Berkeley (graduating in 1989 with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies), and a contemporary of John Cusack, Jeremy Piven, and D.V. DeVincentis. Together, Pink, Cusack and DeVincentis formed a production company, New Crime Productions, which produced both Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity.

In 2010, he directed Hot Tub Time Machine. He was also a producer on the 20th Century Fox release Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.

Filmography

Acting credits

Granite

Granite /ˈɡrænᵻt/ is a common type of felsic intrusive igneous rock that is granular and phaneritic in texture. Granites can be predominantly white, pink, or gray in color, depending on their mineralogy. The word "granite" comes from the Latin granum, a grain, in reference to the coarse-grained structure of such a holocrystalline rock. By definition, granite is an igneous rock with at least 20% quartz and up to 65% alkali feldspar by volume.

The term "granitic" means granite-like and is applied to granite and a group of intrusive igneous rocks with similar textures and slight variations in composition and origin. These rocks mainly consist of feldspar, quartz, mica, and amphibole minerals, which form an interlocking, somewhat equigranular matrix of feldspar and quartz with scattered darker biotite mica and amphibole (often hornblende) peppering the lighter color minerals. Occasionally some individual crystals (phenocrysts) are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic texture is known as a granite porphyry. Granitoid is a general, descriptive field term for lighter-colored, coarse-grained igneous rocks. Petrographic examination is required for identification of specific types of granitoids.

NRAM plc

NRAM plc (previously Northern Rock (Asset Management) plc) is a British asset holding and management company which was split away from the Northern Rock bank in 2010. It is currently under public ownership, due to the bank's nationalisation in 2008. The company continues to service a residential mortgage book of approximately £50 billion.

NRAM comprises the bad debts of the former Northern Rock bank and is described as the "bad bank". The remainder, Northern Rock plc, was designated the "good bank", and in 2012 was bought by Virgin Money. Since nationalisation, the assets of NRAM have been sold off in parts, most recently with the sale of £13 billion of mortgages and loans to Cerberus Capital Management in November 2015.

History

Northern Rock (Asset Management) plc was renamed from Northern Rock plc on 31 December 2009, and the following day the banking assets were split off into a new company called Northern Rock plc. Therefore the current legal entity which exists as Northern Rock (Asset Management) company is in fact the company of the Northern Rock Building Society (founded 1965) which turned into a bank in 1997.

Granite (Stifter)

Granite (original German title: Granit) is a novella by Adalbert Stifter, included in his collection Colourful Stones, 1853 (original title: Bunte Steine). On a walk, the grandfather of the protagonist tells him the story of a family of resin extractors' vain endeavour to escape and the rescue of two children. It is the revised edition of the novella Die Pechbrenner, published in 1848.

The Story

The narrator remembers an event from his childhood, in Bohemian Horní Planá: cart grease was smeared by a passing resin extractor onto his legs. After entering the living room in this way, dirtying the recently mopped floor, he was scolded by his mother. In order to console him, his grandfather took the child for a walk to a neighbouring village, and, on the way, told him a legendary story, which he himself had been told by his own grandfather. A resin extractor wanted to escape the oncoming plague and fled into the deep woods. However, this did not help, and his family died; only the resin extractor’s young son survived. The boy met a little girl who had lost her way, and, under his guidance, they both found their way out of the wood. Some years later, when the youth had become a young man, he sought the girl from that episode and it emerged that she was the Lady of the Castle. He followed her and achieved prosperity and esteem. This is the story of the grandfather.