The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frickin. We're live here at EMC World 2014. This is the Cube. The Cube is a live mobile studio. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Jim Hauska is here. He's the director of technology, classified ventures, LLC, cars.com. Jim, welcome to the Cube. Glad to be here. So cars.com, we were talking off camera a little bit. You guys were founded in 1997, right in the middle of the bubble and you survived that bubble unlike many companies. So first of all, congratulations. And great to have you on the Cube. Yeah, glad to be here. So, classified ventures, cars.com was founded in 97 as you talked about. And essentially, we're owned by, it's a joint venture with several media companies, Gannett, Belio, Graham Holdings, Washington Post and the Tribune Company. And essentially the newspapers knew that there was a paradigm shift coming and they knew that technology or advertisements were moving away from paper and they would be moving into the digital realm. So they had the forewithal to get together and come up with a plan to basically take their business digital. And here we are today almost 20 years later. So it's a joint venture between a number of media companies, is that right? That is correct. So five media companies, represent ownership in cars.com. And it's privately held? It is privately held. Okay, and at one point, it must have had just back in the, in 1999 for example, it must have had just the, what a 50, 60 billion dollar valuation or something. So, were you there at the time? I was not, I've been here for about five years. Okay, so, well I was going to ask you how things have evolved and how things have changed. But, well, five years is a long time. So how, in the past five years, how have things evolved? How is the whole venture working? Obviously you guys are very successful. Maybe you can give us some metrics or whatever you can share. Yeah, we've been tremendously successful. I've been here since 2009 and we've seen double digit growth every year both in revenue and up income and increased site visitors, et cetera. I would say that from the perspective of what has changed from a technology perspective, in 2011 we went through an agile transformation where we wanted to basically improve the time it takes for us to bring product to market. We went from doing, you know, kind of a waterfall 20, 30 projects per year with a lot of upfront planning and really, you know, not that much success to an agile methodology where we're probably doing over 450 releases per year in our new agile framework and we've been able to deliver superior products and services to market through our mobile and web applications. Can you talk about your data architecture a little bit? Sure, so obviously we are looking to leverage data as a means to a competitive advantage. We have traditional enterprise data warehouse architectures and we have more modern data frameworks we're looking at in terms of in-memory caching and in-memory grid solutions, modern data fabrics, looking at Hadoop and HDFS as a means to basically collect data, analyze the data and make determinations in real time in terms of how we can deliver customized content to consumers consuming our mobile and web applications.  You've got a little bit of each, right? Yeah, so we have our traditional kind of structured content that we're housing in either our Teradata or on the VMAX in terms of a block platform and we have unstructured content specifically around images. That's an area where EMC's been tremendously a great partner in terms of our deployment of Isilon. We've been able to take, essentially, if you look at our web applications, they're generating 4.7 billion requests for images per month. So we're leveraging Akamai as a CDN partner to offload maybe 60 to 85% of that, but that still leaves our internal dynamic imaging infrastructure serving over a billion images a month. So there's basically two components to that. The first is Liquid Pixels as a kind of dynamic rendering tier and that has basically, let's say 15 nodes connecting to a shared file system on the Isilon S series that's basically the origin for all of our image processes. I think I heard you say before you're dabbling in or utilizing Hadoop technologies, is that right? Yeah, so we've recently started to look at some HDFS Hadoop MapReduce deployments on commodity hardware and are also looking at what Isilon could offer in terms of decoupling the compute from the storage component and being able to leverage, let's say, the same data across different protocols across object across HDFS. I was listening to Bill Richter the other day in one of the sessions and he said that HDFS is one of the, is the fastest growing part of the Isilon business. So are you going to use HDFS or Isilon based? Currently we're doing some proof of value testing on a TED node cluster that's running on basically two U commodities, just the UCS hardware, but coming out of that we're definitely going to look at if Isilon makes sense in terms of basically being a centralized repository that we can tier in and out of based upon those needs. Yeah, the reason I ask is because you think about it, we talk to a lot of practitioners and they just use the off the shelf drives and especially when they're doing sandbox type of stuff. So the question would be what would be the appeal of doing something like Isilon and HDFS and what would be the potential drawback? Simplicity, manageability, quick time to deployment would be all appealing from an Isilon perspective. And the CapEx is going to be a little higher. In terms of I guess there's this traditional mindset within the Hadoop community that if it's not data locality of storage, it's not efficient. But if you look at like leading edge companies in terms of web scale companies like Facebook, they've already realized that they need to be able to decouple the compute from the storage via a high speed rack at the high speed top of switch rack. And because they were either had too much compute or too much storage and they were essentially purchasing excess capacity they weren't effectively utilizing. Because they were buying it in blocks. Because they were essentially buying it as a all in one compute network storage, one or two you pizza box. Interesting, so. It's interesting. We'll talk a little bit about agile methodology and how that transformed your company, not only in the software development, go to market, how you guys are rolling out functionality but how about in terms of the way you operate?  I would say tremendously both from an infrastructure perspective as well as from a development perspective. Essentially before there wasn't the worry about not being able to keep up with the demands of the business. Now there's the worry of we need to be able to keep up with the demands of the business because the business is driving top line and bottom line growth for our company and as we make more money we invest more in technology and the cycle continues. So we definitely needed to put in place technologies that are innovative that basically provide us with competitive advantage to deliver our products to market faster. And the other thing you got to have more flexibility in the way you grow that infrastructure because if you're not doing waterfall with these scheduled releases once every so often but this continuous rollout I imagine based on uptake and new features, kind of reacting to real time information as to what's working and not working you got to be able to flex up pretty quickly. Totally, we used to have a very big blue footprint in terms of hardware and middleware infrastructure and we've been migrating to best of breed solutions. So we pulled in EMC VMAX with Cisco UCS as our compute infrastructure as well as VMware as our virtualization layer and we're looking at various other VMware assets from a cloud orchestration automation perspective. We've also deployed leading edge technologies like Splunk and CompiWare Dynatrace around kind of log aggregation, data visualization, being able to track transactions from the end user browser all the way to the back end. So really having full visibility not only from an infrastructure perspective but from how the end user experiences our applications. And I think that's a paradigm shift that the storage industry is going through from the perspective of we used to design storage from an infrastructure perspective and now we're looking at storage from an application-centric point of view looking at policy-driven automation and other things that can really provide value in terms of this faster-paced agile product development lifecycle that's really necessary to compete in today's modern business world. And I wonder if I could take on that last comment. So, right, taking the application view of the world that's what you guys always want that the industry has struggled to get there. But to the extent that the industry's been able to do that it was all in application silos and you get purpose-built systems for silos. Are you constructing an infrastructure that, for the lack of a better term, call it more horizontal where you're able to support more applications across the portfolio or are you actually purpose-building infrastructure for different apps? It's probably a combination of both. Obviously we talked about we have some appliance-based solutions that are providing very specific needs which are kind of more tactical than strategic, you could argue, because you're choosing to solve things in a certain vertically stacked way, vertically integrated stacked way. But I would say the overarching premises or kind of approach that we've been looking at is horizontal and scalability at all tiers. Meaning that traditionally in a three tier or four tier architecture, you struggle when you get down to the data fabric tier because it's not necessarily horizontally scalable in the way that let's say a web or app tier is. So really looking at how we can leverage modern data fabrics that create horizontal scalability that enables to basically abstract away some of the constraints associated with vertically scaled components of your architecture such as like OLTB type components. Jim, your company's growing very fast. Is your IT budget growing very fast? I would say not as fast as the company is growing but we have been able to make a lot of strategic investments in technology innovation that have made a lot of headway for us. But still it's never, the demands of the business are always growing faster than your ability to support it from a financial perspective. So does that mean that your IT budget as a percentage of revenues is declining? If the revenues are growing faster? I would say it's not, it's, I don't know off the top of my head exactly but I would say that we've been remaining relatively stable and even trying to say other ways we can take it down a little bit. If we have major purchasing cycles where we're bringing in large amounts of whatever it may be, the next year we may not have that same major purchasing cycle because we have maybe a three year asset life on whatever we just brought in. So you still have the do more with less pressure but because you're so high growth you actually have the luxury of getting more funding than many IT organizations. Yeah, so I would say that but it's still the do more with either the same or maybe not do more with less but do more with the same and when the demands are being increased upon you then it's do more with less essentially. Okay, so how much of your time do you spend trying to figure out, if you had to take a pie, how much of your time do you spend trying to figure out how to do more with less versus how to drive business value with new initiatives? We take the viewpoint of anytime we're looking at a new initiative we need to know what's the question, what is the business value? How is this going to enable the business? How is this going to help us drive profitability, consumer engagement, et cetera? Do you allocate some percentage to kind of green field opportunities that are kind of the classic 10% go off and explore and experiment because there might not be an immediate evident So we have a really strong architecture team that participates in a lot of different POCs and kind of exploration of new technologies and then generally speaking, we look to deploy the ones that we know are going to provide immediate business value and then we keep our eyes out for maybe industry trends or things that are changing over time that we still need to be aware of but maybe are not actionable at a given point but we try to spend a significant portion of our time looking at the strategic and how we get out in front of the business or stay in line with the business versus kind of being left behind. So if I use the old metagroup taxonomy, run the business, grow the business, transform the business, obviously, small portion of that's going to be transformed, right? You can't have the whole budget being transformed but run the business and grow the business. Grow the business seems to be, I'm inferring anyway, a big part of your emphasis. Yeah, we have a very big portion of our efforts related to growing the business. For example, when we were talking about the Icelon cluster, if you're serving billions of image requests per month, we had essentially a legacy platform serving that that not only presented organizational risk from a DR perspective, it also was very difficult to manage and it was not performing. When we brought Icelon in, we were basically able to reduce our kind of core image-serving processing timeframe during peak from one second to 100 milliseconds or during non-peak traffic from 250 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds. So now we're essentially serving that 100 milliseconds across the board which is essentially a 252,000% increase in performance. Not to mention the manageability in scalability is just way, way better than what we had before. We used to dread having to, we were spending a lot of time managing our storage versus getting insights out of our data. When you say you're bringing Icelon in, are you bringing in a box, are you bringing in a solution, is it a combination, are you having to build that solution, is EMC helping you build that solution? How does that all work out? In this case, we have a relatively simplistic three-node S-series cluster in production that has roughly around 250 million images on it, maybe 150 million or so which are active and dealers as they're updating their inventory, they want to get that inventory off their lot. We have roughly 20,000 dealer customers. They want to get that inventory off their lot as soon as possible because they're paying interest on that inventory. So they want their pictures of their vehicles to be on the site as quick as possible. Right now it's around 35 minutes in terms of time to glass and when those images come online. So we really were looking for ways not only to improve the speed at which we get things online but also make the customer experience better. You're not going to go out and buy what is one of your more expensive purchases in your lifetime, a car, without being able to see a lot of detailed images that entice you to go to the dealership to test drive that vehicle per se. I'm curious over time with the whole big data and lots of different data sets out there, have you guys started to bring in any other kind of third party data over time to enhance your solution? Yeah, so we use a variety of third party data aggregators that basically pull in data from dealer management systems that DMI, ADP is an example of one of them. So they have access into all the dealer management systems and as dealers update their inventory, we have a feed process that basically pulls those into our systems. And there's another area where Iceland provided a lot of value in terms of we used to be able to process around 80,000 images an hour meaning downloading them from the dealer aggregated services. And now we can do almost 300,000 images per hour. So we've been able to, and in all likelihood those images are of higher pixelation or in terms of quality per se. How do you protect all this unstructured data? We have, from the perspective of our images, we leverage replication from our primary data center to our secondary data center which serves as both a DR and a staging performance testing environment. So from that perspective, we try to rely on replication as much as possible either at the application layer or the infrastructure layer, but then we also have inline, duplicated backup solutions, data domain, semantic backup, snapshotting technologies, other things like that. So. Jim, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'll give you the last word here. Talk to your peers. What kind of advice would you give them in terms of if they're struggling with this multi-structured data problem? What would you tell them is the thing they should be most focused on? I would say look for a very specific use case that's going to drive business value and then be a champion and drive that business case through. And then once you see the successful results of that and you're gaining the benefits of it, you can use that to kind of cascade into your next endeavor. Don't try to start small and iterate. Don't try to eat the elephant in one bite. All right, Jim, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff Frick and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World 2014. We'll be right back.


You've got three love to your life, I guess. One root of football is family, and who's the other one? Frank Lampard. You know, love is a strong word, but it's one that fits. I think growing up always, my family were all Chelsea fans. I was a Chelsea fan myself and still am. Having someone like Frank Lampard a part of such a successful Chelsea squad and being able to idolise someone like him is really special to me and something that I've seen grow throughout my football career is seeing little bits and parts of his game that I've tried to mirror and show and broadcast as much of my own. So it's an unbelievable experience to be able to be a part of this whole journey up until now and to have him come to our stadium, Western Sydney, it's something I'd never imagined. Well, I'd love to leave a legacy here at the Wanderers. I mean, much like him, he spent time at West Ham, but I think he'd say Chelsea's his club. He still says it to this day. He was able to manage there. He captained our club. His career was, I think, Chelsea. And I think for me, if I'm speaking with similarities with him, I'd love to leave a legacy here. I've spent a better half of my whole career here. So to leave a legacy here wouldn't mean a lot to me and to sort of mirror what he did at Chelsea and mirror it here. You know, if I could live up to half of what he did, it would be an unbelievable career. No way. I feel weird. Oh, that's Frank Lambert. I'm feeling jaded, man. Frank, how are you, man? Pleased to meet you. You good? Yeah, I am.  Huge fan of yours. That's great. Appreciate it. That's insane. This is insane. My whole life. My whole life. I think when I really understood what was going on, you could say one thing to Frank Lambert. Just thank you. Yeah, just thank you. It's hard because he wouldn't know who I am in the normal circumstance, to say just thank you for not only his playing career, but him as a person, how it's influenced me. And him not probably ever realising that, but yeah, just thank you. No, no, that's... Thank you. Oh, wow. Wow. Thank you so much. J-A-R-R, I'm doing it. Yeah, double R-R-D.


Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which is often initially a small business. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship has been described as the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. Well definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses. Due to the high risks involved in launching the startup, the significant proportion of startup businesses have to close due to lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis, lack of market demand or a combination of all of these. The broader definition of the term is sometimes used, especially in the field of economics. In this usage, an entrepreneur is an entity which has the ability to find and act upon opportunities to translate inventions or technology into new products. The entrepreneur is able to recognize the commercial potential of the invention and organize the capital, talent, and other resources that turned an invention. Into a commercially viable innovation. In this sense, the term entrepreneurship also captures innovative activities on the part of established firms, in addition to similar activities on the part of new businesses. Entrepreneurship is the act of being an entrepreneur, or the owner or manager of a business enterprise who, by risk and initiative, attempts to make profits. Entrepreneurs apt as managers and oversee the launch and growth of an enterprise. Entrepreneurship is the process by which either an individual or a team identifies a business opportunity and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. Early 19th century French economist Jean Baptiste say provided a broad definition of entrepreneurship, saying that it shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield. Entrepreneurs create something new, something different they change or transmute values. Regardless of the firm size, big or small, they can take in entrepreneurship opportunities. The opportunity to become an entrepreneur requires for criteria. First, there must be opportunities or situations to recombine resources to generate profit. Second, entrepreneurship requires differences between people, such as preferential access to certain individuals or the ability to recognize information about opportunities. Third, taking on risk is unnecessary. Fourth, the entrepreneurial process requires the organization of people and resources. The entrepreneur is a factor in and the study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the work of Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. However, entrepreneurship was largely ignored theoretically until the late 19th and early 20th centuries and empirically until the profound resurgence in business and economics since the late 1970s. In the 20th century, the understanding of entrepreneurship owes much to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s and other Austrian economists such as Karl Mencher, Ludwig von Meyses and Friedrich von Hedeck. According to Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship employs what Schumpeter called the gale of creative destruction to replace in whole or in part inferior innovations across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products including new business models. And this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. The supposition that entrepreneurship leads to economic growth is an interpretation of the residual endogenous growth theory and as such is hotly debated in academic economics. An alternate description posited by Israel Kurtzender suggests that the majority of innovations may be much more incremental improvements such as a replacement of paper with plastic in the making of drinking straws.


So we usually organize the chart of accounts by code, in essence, account number, but when we add new accounts to the system, we want to make sure that we put a code in place that is in alignment with the type of account that we're going to be setting up. So in other words, you really want to think of the chart of accounts kind of in order of account type, and then when you're adding new accounts, make sure that you do so so that it is in alignment, the code that is with the type of account that you are setting up. So to just understand that a little bit more in detail, notice these chart of accounts are making the balance sheet in the income statement. If I go to the balance sheet, we overall have assets, liabilities, equity accounts, and then we have the income statement income cost of goods sold and expense accounts. That is in essence the order of the chart of accounts. So you can think of it as in essence the balance sheet on top of the income statement.


Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and it's Friday, so it is weigh-in day. We're gonna talk about my week. We're gonna talk about my weigh-in and we're gonna talk about this week's Weight Watcher's Workshop topic.  Make sure you're subscribed. Your bell notification is turned on because I do a weigh-in every single Friday and I do upload five videos every single week. Don't forget to check out the description box down below for nutrition coaching. Highly recommend personalized two U macros and calories. This is how I've lost and maintained 140 pound weight loss. I also have one-on-one coaching for accountability. To ask questions or talk with me directly. Links and discounts to my favorite things are also down in that description box. So let's talk about my week, the Weight Watcher's Workshop topic and of course, this week's weigh-in. Had a fantastic week. I actually had a really good week. We had some exciting things happen this week and really the most exciting thing, not weight related but in my life related is that Lola had her final chemo session on Tuesday. So she's finished the entire CHOP protocol for chemo and now the neurotic dog mom and niece coming out. I wanna check her lymph nodes like 80 times a day hoping that she stays in remission. Fingers crossed. They say that the average remission is about a year. That's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping it's longer. She's doing really, really well and it's a bit of a relief both financially, time related and of course for Lola that she's finished with chemo. So send all your good vibes, thoughts Lola's way for a long, healthy remission. One not so exciting thing that happened this week is I started my monthly cycle on Tuesday. Man, it was a rough one. I was not feeling good straight out of the gate on Tuesday. I was very thankful that it was a rest day for me for working out because I just wasn't in any physical condition to work out. It was Lola's chemo day. It's my filming day. I was really grateful for that. This month cycle's been a little rough. I've had quite a bit of unsettling feeling. She's spent a little bit extra fatigued which is a little bit of a bummer but I was able to get in all of my workouts. I actually got in my three days at boot camp, my days in the gym and killed it despite everything. For me, it's all about consistency and if I'm able to get to the gym and do my workouts, it's just such a huge part of my life and it's become a consistent part of my routine. And one of the main reasons that I've been able to maintain my weight loss and lean down my body is consistently working out. Even though I didn't feel 100%, I still nailed my workouts and I feel really good about that. I also feel really good about my food choices. I had a fan, a Tastic Week food choice related. I had a donut this week. I just tracked it. I moved on. That's one of the beauties of tracking macros and calories is a donut doesn't use up all of your calories or points for the day.  The donut was delicious, by the way, it was from Dunkin. That is one thing from Dunkin that I think is really good. Are there donuts? Their coffee is not always so much but their donuts are delicious. And tonight is my boot camp girls night. I'm so excited. We're going to see the new Barbie movie and then we're going to dinner. We're all gonna dress up in hot pink and wear anything Barbie motif. I'm super excited. It's going to be a great time. My boot camp girls night every month is something I really, really look forward to. And I have been dying to see the Barbie movie. So overall, despite the little bit of a setback, my week has been fantastic, which of course I'm super, super grateful for. Before I talk to you about my weigh-in, let's chat about this week's Weight Watchers Workshop topic. That is what to eat in tricky situations. I think this is a fantastic topic. We all end up in tricky situations. I know for me I can end up in tricky situations pretty frequently. Maybe you're almost out of points. Maybe you're feeling hangry or maybe you're off track just following a particular scenario. These types of things are going to happen during our weight loss journey. And there's some tips and tricks on how to navigate this. Situation, running low on points or hungry between meals. Find a go-to solution. Create a meal or snack using a favorite high protein zero point food like chicken breast or eggs and fiber rich produce. Make it work for you. Buy in prep ingredients now so they're ready in the moment or stock your freezer or pantry with quick prep foods like frozen edamame and canned tuna. Maybe the situation is you're off track and you want to reset. Use the app's recipe finder or what's in your fridge tool to map out a delicious meal featuring low point foods that you love. Set your table and plate your food like you're at a restaurant. This can help make the meal feel special and get you excited about your comeback. And lastly, maybe you're at a restaurant with a tons of options. Decide how many points you want to spend then look for foods that you know you can enjoy in that range. The restaurant finder in the app can help. And if you're unsure of points, values for specific restaurant or menu items, guesstimate or use items from a similar spot to help guide you. If these whole situations seem obvious, great because these are things we're going to encounter like I said, regularly throughout our weight loss journey. Planning go-to foods ahead of time is essential. And one other thing I want to point out and is probably really should be your biggest take back from today's video is don't starve yourself all day because you're going out for dinner. All that's going to happen is that's going to backfire. You're going to get to dinner and you're going to overindulge because you didn't fuel your body throughout the day. Eat normal throughout the day. Just choose lower point, lower calorie, smaller portions throughout the day to have enough in the bank for going out for dinner. But don't starve yourself all day because you have a dinner or event coming up. Like I said, I promise you that's going to backfire. You want to be able to incorporate foods that you love throughout your weight loss journey, kind of like my donut that I had this week and still reach your goals. And as always, I want to share three fast facts with you from Weight Watchers. Number one, incorporating the foods you love can help make healthy eating more enjoyable. Number two, leaving on lower point, go-tos unlocks more opportunities to enjoy higher point favorites. And number three, identifying go-to foods ahead of time saves you from having to mull over what to eat in challenging situations. Fail to plan, plan to fail. It's my favorite saying because it's 100% true. Plan ahead and make sure that you're fueling your body throughout the day so that you're not becoming angry or ravenous before a special event or meal. That's really going to help you stay on track and still enjoy your life. Eating in tricky situations can be tricky, but if you have the right tools in your pocket, you can navigate these and still reach your goals. It's time to jump into my weigh-in, but before I do, I have had so many messages this week, DMs on Instagram, messages in my Facebook group, comments on my YouTube channel.  I use my Fit Track Scale and I love everything about it. Not only is the scale super accurate, it's a smart scale. So it's going to tell you water weight, muscle weight. It's going to give you all of the health information and everything is done on an app. In fact, you can track your weight in the Hume app for the Fit Track Scale. I love this feature because when I weigh in, I just connect it to the app and it keeps track of my weight, but it also keeps track of all of the other health pieces. It lets me know how is my body changing muscle-wise? How is my body changing fat-wise? Am I retaining more fluid on this day than I did on this day? The invaluable information that the Fit Track offers is invaluable. I love the size of the scale. It's small, it's compact. It's easy to store and it is incredibly, incredibly accurate. Like I said, mine is from the brand Fit Track. It is the Dara 2.0 scale. What's also really cool about this scale is more than one person in your family can use it. So Troy has his own settings on the scale compared to my settings on the scale. So when I step on, I weigh under my settings. Troy weighs under his setting. And the app is 100% free. It's very cool to be able to log everything into the app. I used to log my weight in to lose it, but that was just one more step that I had to take. And with the Fit Track scale, it automatically does it for me. A couple more features of the app that I love is it has personalized health monitoring, predictive health analytics. So it analyzes your health data to identify different patterns. Super user-friendly, super easy to understand. It has data-driven coaching. So you can get personalized weekly action programs to help you build behaviors that stick. It gives you a progress report, which I love. And you even have the option for a virtual nutritionist, which will help you optimize your diet. Now, along with the Fit Track scale and app, I highly recommend having your personalized macros and calories done. I can do that for you. And that way you have that data to compare with the health and weight data of the Fit Track. The scale is extremely, extremely affordable. And I have a special discount for you as well. So I'll put the Fit Track scale down below, all the discount information. That is the scale that I love.   I love that it has the app and I love all of the additional health data besides weight because you guys know that the weight on the scale isn't the whole picture that the Fit Track gives you. So speaking of weight, let's talk about my weight. So you know that I gained three pounds when I returned to working out a couple of weeks ago. Last week I lost a pound. I'm kind of in that in-between stage right now. Am I still wanting to lose weight? Fat or am I wanting to maintain my weight? I'm still in the recovery process for my cosmetic surgery. I'm only two months out, a little over two months out. And the recovery process can take up to six months. So it doesn't make sense for me to declare maintenance or fat loss mode until that six months is up so I can see kind of how I heal what my body looks like. How am I feeling after full recovery? So right now I'm just kind of in the maintained stage and if I lose a little bit, great. If my weight goes up or fluctuates a little bit, that is fine too. You guys know that maintenance is not a number. It's a range. So I actually have a range that I like to stay in a five pound window. Girl never gets out of that five pound window. If I do, then I rein it in because that is how I'm going to be able to maintain my weight forever. So speaking of maintaining, I am exactly the same weight to the ounce as I was last week. Now, like I said, I lost a pound last week. I'm right where I wanna be weight wise. I'm at the bottom of my five pound window, which is where I love to be and I'm feeling really, really good. I'm feeling strong. I'm feeling fit. I'm feeling healthy. I'm loving the data that I'm seeing on my fit track scale.  I'm just feeling really good and I'm completely thrilled 100% with a maintain. I will go ahead and put up here on the screen how much weight I've lost total and my current weight for reference. I know this really helps you guys out to see what my actual weight is. And yes, lean muscle can make you look a lot smaller than the scale says and we are here for it. Now I wanna hear from you guys. Let me know how was your week? How was your weigh-in? Let me know if you use the fit track scale, if you love it as much as I do and don't forget, it will be linked down below for you with a discount code. And what are your thoughts on eating in tricky situations? And if you have any tips, we would love to hear them. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you in tomorrow's pretty massive grocery haul. Have a wonderful Friday. I love you and I'll see you in the next one.


here's a shot let's play it there's no sound what's over there what let me go and out okay so character goes in thief with a tie that definitely works i mean the question is before i go into the animation is the idea is that this guy is breaking in it's not his house because otherwise he wouldn't get out unless it's another person's house that they know of maybe he thinks that someone is cheating on him and he goes and checks i don't know there's a bedroom here because if that's the bed there could also be something where i think maybe in terms of pushing the tension because right now what's happening my general impression is that it's all a bit even and spliny in kind of it's moving it's moving it's moving it's moving it's moving it's moving whoa it's moving it's moving it's moving it's moving and so on versus you can do all this goes in does that and then and it's just kind of hold hold then look back a bit then maybe the door is opening a little bit and it goes to maybe a bit of a sliver and you can see maybe a character maybe it's a kid i don't know like something and then that prompts him to go oh no no no no i gotta go i gotta go maybe during all of this could also be i mean you could do this where you do this all dark with some white dots and it's nighttime and maybe you could have a light here and it's not it's not super bright again enough so that we can see the character but it's still a night timish thing because i would assume he would break it at night and if it's the day then maybe that would be a whole different story or something else and then all of this happens this happens here and then you have that moment like i said of waiting and then the door handle rattles a bit and stops he has looked like this pause the door slowly opens and that lets in more light and then you can have a bit more ambient light coming in he looks over there but all he sees is that the door is slowly opening and he thinks someone is opening it and now i'm adding a lot more work to your shop but hear me out the door right is opening more light comes in but it's it was the cat or the dog was my dog in open hand doors with the handles here and it's a dog that comes in that sniffs around or it's a human that's really sleepy they could have you know the the thing over their eyes so they can sleep they're almost sleepwalking going in anything that is slow that he can't see because the door is not completely open that gives him time to get out because i'm only saying this and i know i'm adding a lot of work and that is very destructive in terms of notes but you're saying here i would like to add the shot to my show reel so i'm just thinking in terms of okay here's your character comes in this is a problem to okay that's a fair problem to have and they need to get out but if no one's coming nothing's happening or the audience has no inclination that something's happening or coming in there's no sound or anything right it's pretend we don't work with sounds there is no reason for the character to rush so they could also be a uh not annoyed that doesn't work looks around maybe uses the lamp to open this you know this is a whole different situation so for me i'm seeing all of this just because well this is problem number a but the urgency is because of problem number two and we have a door in frame so you might as use might as well use this as a story point something's happening again doors doors opening it could also be that this is happening he does this door handle opens or does some shaking he goes looks over what if there is not this but it's a table it's like a night table and there's a chair in front of it and he kicks the chair so that the chair goes and perfectly hits this in the air right and this is blocking this so now you don't have to animate any of this here you can just show the door opening a little bit rattling but the chair is um what's it called it's just it's stopping the door from opening he was just really you know very good at throwing this over there or you do something where he goes oh grabs the chair and with a maybe you should change the colors you can't see anything or the character is really uh you know able to bring this over that's my awesome drawing and puts the chair there and then scrambles back and has those crambley legs to go back there does all of this you know that's pushing more maybe the door is bending over he looks back a bit and then does this and instead of this it's actually the other leg so that you can have the head this way to look because he's freaking out because maybe now the chair fell and he's about to get out and I wouldn't do this either because if he's in such a hurry this to me feels more like all right it's Wednesday I gotta get to work like how he exits oh okay versus no no let me get and there's someone's coming here doors opening the chair slowly breaking then you have this and it's more of a character falling over it's finally open and you can see the the legs are just he's just falling jumping out and trying to get out of there more in a hurry so I think that's how I I'm approaching this critique where it's think about what you want to do to me this is less about the animation where he kind of magically watch out you get the sections here he kind of magically gets up there's no sense of weight he's kind of floats up I think I have some body mechanics imposing issues he feels very stiff when you got the body arms and head all moving as one here so I do have technical animation notes but the thing is none of these matter to me at this point because I have more watch out the sections more story and conceptual thoughts on this which obviously you can completely ignore and just say nope I want to do this let me just critique what the animation is doing and then it would be stuff like twin poses two more offsets you know work on the line of action so that it's not just this it would be more like sneaking really arms up maybe really trying to be quiet and then you have to decide is this guy clumsy you have this here because I'm seeing props right to me I'm going oh let's play with props then what if he bumps into this because he's looking at something else and then you got the the lamp that stumbles and almost falls and then he rushes over to to hold the lamp and then puts it back so is he a clumsy thief burglar is it like a mr bean type of thing or he is super smooth so should maybe still dress differently and comes in here as well like a stealthy ninja but then this is now causing a problem but that's why he is so adept at kicking the chair and it locks in place perfectly and then it's just him how to get out of there even though I'm really good at my job this is a problem that's new and you mean like I would just play with is this guy good at his job dropping a burglar or not is he getting somewhere because he forgot something you know maybe there's a suitcase here you know me like I would think of it the scenario who the character is why they're going in there what's the what's the purpose of this so he doesn't really look like a regular burglar or a thief not saying that they don't look like this this is your you know your uh whatever he has a tie I know to me just because of this because it's not these stereotypical ski mask type of thing where they don't want to be seen he doesn't care about his face is he's desperate I don't like I have so many questions about this in terms of what is the you know the the the typical thing of what is the motivation why is the character doing this and then is this a brand new place he is breaking into or not is this a familiar place is this his own place for some reason is a friend's place then you're showing all of this do you want to play with this or not is maybe someone sleeping in here did he accidentally go into a bedroom and didn't know it was the bedroom now has to be quiet because someone is sleeping in here or the door is already open and someone's in the bathroom and then again realize he's in the wrong room and now that person is going to come out to go back to bed and so on I know this adds more work with the second character but I think you can look at what what are the ways of raising the stakes so can't get out but there needs to be a sense of urgency because he you know someone's coming that's why he has to get out and so on and so on and so on so I'm gonna leave it at that lots of thoughts for you to think about to filter through obviously you don't have to do anything I said but hopefully it's a springboard of ideas and something to consider all right thanks all right there's an email you can sign up you can start whenever you want you can submit whatever you want you get 16 submissions either way a like and subscribe would be awesome all right thank you


Item number SCP-666-J Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures D-Class and Gerald are the only ones allowed to get on any vehicle that Dr. Gerald happens to be driving. Prepare a number of body bags equivalent to the number of passengers on any vehicle that he happens to drive, minus himself. Additionally, medical teams must be on standby if Dr. Gerald will be traveling through a populated area, or any form of potentially hazardous environment, such as a nuclear power plant, chemical refining plant, etc. Description All individuals who board any vehicle, or form a transportation that Dr. Gerald himself is controlling in any form, are assured to die. Testing has shown that even those who escape vehicles he's been driving are doomed. They are generally struck by another moving vehicle within minutes. In such cases where the passengers aren't near any other vehicles, they will favorably suffer from apparent anxiety-induced heart attacks. Dr. Gerald himself, oddly enough, always survives whatever horrors he puts a vehicle through. Additionally, all potentially hazardous objects seem to become even more dangerous if he's manning a vehicle under general vicinity. Nights penetrate more than their sharpness would accord. Only benign oil tankers become moving bombs that will detonate with the slightest touch. Buildings lose any significant rigidity, and pedestrians seem to lose all forms of self-preservation, throwing themselves into his path. A mere bicycle ride can inflict the devastation of an EF-3 tornado. Addendum 666-1 Dr. Gerald is NEVER to come within 25 meters of SCP-462. Addendum 666-2 Plans are being made to construct a vehicle which can contain SCP-682 long enough for Dr. Gerald to actually drive it. Dr. Gerald was told to take an ordinary school bus full of D-class to a nearby site. He somehow managed to end up in a demolition derby.  The results of Dr. Gerald driving through the town of ████████ on a moped. A research team hypothesized that rollerblades are technically vehicles. We tested our hypothesis by having Gerald skating through the ORIA's headquarters in Tehran. They were right. 10-07 AM, March 15th to ██████, approximate velocity for ████ kilometers per hour. 10-07 AM, March 15th to ██████, death toll. We have this tract of land over in ██████, just in case we have some sort of vehicular SCP that needs to be decommissioned. Coincidentally, it's also the only place that Dr. Gerald is able to drive without permission.


We met at Exeter University where we were both studying ecology so we both got an interest in the natural environment and natural history. Bill went on to do a postgraduate education to do some teaching and I trained as a nurse. Our first main job where we combined keeping livestock and doing a bit of nature conservation was in Yorkshire where we worked in a field study centre. We acquired our first cow and some sheep and we moved around the country quite a lot. We went to Cheshire, to Gloucestershire, to Somerset, taking all these animals with us. This was all career moves. Yeah, yeah, trying I guess to find the perfect combination of keeping grazing animals and having sites that they could do some really good work on. That's how we ended up coming up to Bankhouse Farm because that was exactly what the wardening combined with the small farm as well gave us that opportunity. We came in 1992 just before Christmas. The idea was that the tenant would do some part-time wardening for the trust and also work towards putting some of the livestock from the farm out onto other areas that the trust was managing for nature conservation. In the late 80s people like the National Trust and English Nature who was back then now Natural England, the Wildlife Trust and the RSPB, they had all managed to acquire these lovely nature reserves largely because they'd been abandoned by farmers. It was a very difficult job when they finally woke up to the fact that without grazing animals all this what had been lovely open limestone grass was turning into secondary woodland and scrub and bracken. I guess the thing that has probably made the biggest difference was the arrival of the stewardship schemes, agri-environment schemes, which luckily for us came in just when we got here in 1992. So there was the ESA was already underway in the Lake District and then something called the countryside stewardship scheme came in operating everywhere. I think we've got 16 different landlords so there isn't a one size fits all. We can claim what's called basic payment now, the area payment that's intended for supporting farming activities and the landowner or the site manager, the conservation organisation can claim the agri-environment scheme payments. And that sort of division of the spoils makes for a very stable and equitable relationship. Both sides need each other and so we do have a stable source of income because the areas of land that we're providing this grazing on are quite large then it kind of underpins pretty well everything we do. The breeds that we have are all native breeds. They do much better than any of the sort of continental breeds out in the sort of more remote areas. So we've got mainly red poles, we have a red pole bull and we've got five or six beef short horn cows but their calves are all crossed with the red pole bull. And we also have got a few blue grays that we have left. The youngest calf was only born yesterday morning. I guess the main difference is that the focus of our business is not meat production. It's about using them as conservation volunteers. So whilst we do produce beef and lamb at the end of their useful time on these reserves, that's not the main purpose. And I guess one of the big differences is that the cattle certainly are a lot older than any commercial beef enterprise would allow them to be, largely because in order to graze some of the sites like Ingleborough over in the Yorkshire Dales they have to be mature. They have to have developed a really good mature rumen. It's harsh conditions out there, especially in winter. It can be harsh here too. I forgot my coat as well. We make our own hay, as you can see. So we have a few hay meadows which we wouldn't use any artificial fertilisers on or improve in any way. Other than using, on a fairly sporadic basis, the muck that we accumulate, which isn't a huge amount. For most of the animals, it's almost totally dependent on what they can get from the particular land that they're on. We are the more convey conservation grazing company and the key word there is grazing. So the animals are meant to be doing that work and that's how they deliver the conservation benefits. So we would be failing quite significantly if we had a system that depended on feeding them artificially. So the hay is really just back up. The other element to it is that the meadows where this material is made are themselves a conservation feature. So when we first came to Bankhouse Farm at Silverdale, the National Trust were very keen that the meadows there could be made more species rich. Having gone through a period where they were fertilised and receded with a very small number of species. So one of the things that we particularly wanted to do was to increase that species richness in these meadows. And although we're not at Bankhouse Farm any more, we still have other meadows, other people's meadows that we manage in the same way. And so hay making is a kind of long standing element of the whole system. And in our minds it's just as valid as the nice bits of limestone grassland and heath and other habitats. They manage the grassland. So where you have grassland in its own right, the grazing will mediate the kind of plant community in a way that just tones down the dominance of the more aggressive species, particularly the grasses. And that will allow the more sensitive, the smaller, less vigorous things to compete. And so that paves away for a more just a richer variety of things. But that diversity brings flowers, brings diversity of insects. This fodder that the cows are tucking into is very rich in different species. It's not just the standard ryegrass clover mix that most dairy farmers would. So it has lots more species in it and that's good for nature conservation. It's also good for the cows. A lot of farmers would look at this stuff and they'd say, well it's gone bad because it's all turned black.  And antioxidants are one of the things that we now know are good for us because they protect us from diseases and cancer and that kind of thing. And we noticed quite early on in this that the cows actually seemed to be looking for the black bits. They would come in and if they saw us putting some feed out in front of the barrier like this and it had a lot of this stuff in, they would push each other out of the way to be the first to get to it. We're organic so in terms of the use of medications and things that we can use to deal with parasites we're fairly strictly controlled by that. Because the cattle are outside the year round we have very few problems with external and internal parasites. The density of stock on the areas is relatively low so we don't have those kind of problems that intensive systems have. If an animal does need any kind of medication then obviously the animal welfare is a priority and we can use antibiotics if necessary. And our main problem would be something called liver fluke which they pick up just in certain situations where the ground is very wet and favours the development of the snail that acts as an intermediate host for the liver fluke parasite. So we know that if we have to put the animals in those situations they're quite likely to pick up the liver fluke but we don't rush to treat them anyway. We wait to see if they begin to show signs. Usually they stop putting on condition and with sheep they'll get a bit anemic and so if you're looking for those symptoms then you can spot them in time and treat just those animals. Because we have a closed herd so all these animals are familiar with the places that they go to they build up an immunity so we know that probably the cattle are carrying liver fluke and we've found that because we've done tests and found that they are but they're perfectly fit and healthy. Ticks are another massive problem here. Cattle come down from wheat barrel absolutely covered in ticks but none of them appear to pick up any of the tick-borne diseases. The only time we ever had that was when it was a cow that we bought in a long long time ago before we had a closed herd. We've never taken animals to markets, auction markets or anything like that so when they've left us they've gone straight to the abattoir. Places like Ingleborough where we've got quite a large number of cattle because it's a big site. There tend to be cohorts that are already about the same sort of age, six, seven, eight years old. So they would probably go as a group as an organisation that markets organic meat so they would go off there and because they're older they tend to go into the sort of organic baby food or pie processing. Rather than sort of prime steaks and things like that but by that stage they're very big animals although they've been slow in getting there. So although they don't get the premium for being a bit over age they do get a reasonable price for being organic and just by sheer weight of them as well. We have a relatively small customer base of people that are interested in buying locally grown meat and they know the provenance of it. So we maybe do about three animals a year and some lamb and mutton that we can supply locally and that's usually sold just in sort of relatively small freezer packs. The signs are that the demand is building as a result of COVID. Certainly since lockdown things have got much more interesting in that quarter. There's a choice to be made though. Do we invest more time in marketing the products directly which is very time consuming but provides a better sort of financial return? Once you've got your market or do we use our scarce resources just to concentrate on the grazing management and then allow the animals to maybe go into what I think we'd have to admit was a less sustainable market. But the other side of it of course is that our costs are very low. Where we are delivering these agri-environment scheme payments for the landlord then the rent will be correspondingly low because most of the money that we're facilitating is through the agri-environment scheme. Our input costs are very low because we're not buying fertilizer, we're not buying loads of feed, we're not buying loads of medicines. The main costs are really our time. The sites are quite widely scattered so there's a lot of transport costs but it stacks up. The methane question certainly become a big issue and of course it isn't just about methane now, it's also about the land that these animals are occupying and whether it could be better utilized for growing trees or for rewilding. There's such a lot of debate about the role of livestock, red meat, ruminant production. We first became aware of it as an issue that we were going to have to confront probably in 2005, 2006 and our first response was it doesn't affect us. We're just doing a form of livestock production which reflects what nature intended with no inputs based on the grazing management, operating at stocking intensities that are in line with what the land can support. Given that that would be not so different to what was happening when there was no farming, there would still have been ruminant animals grazing these landscapes, producing methane and as far as we know it caused no global warming. So as long as we could stick to those principles we thought we ought to be able to say we weren't part of the problem but these things don't play out quite as you think they do sometimes as they ought to. And very quickly the argument focused on extensive grazing because the animals take longer to finish so they're hanging around producing more methane during their lifetimes. Other systems for calculating the carbon footprint of livestock take much more account of what the landscape is doing that is associated with these livestock. So when you include the carbon that's being sequestered by the soils and the trees and the habitats if you like then you will get a very different result. All the evidence that's being gathered at the moment by researchers show that meat that's produced from a primarily grass based diet is much richer in essential fatty acids that people need to maintain all aspects of their health. A lot of the sites that we do graze have got trees on and we really see the benefits of agroforestry and combining the grazing and browsing and the animals choose themselves. We see them going to plants that you would think the kind of perceived wisdom is they shouldn't be eating you because it's poisonous but actually they tuck into you quite happily because they know how much to eat. And we gather tree hay which we can take out to them as well and they really show preference quite a lot of the time for going for leaves. If you can combine the trees with pasture then it's a win-win situation because you've got the best both worlds. There's some evidence to suggest that cows that have access to browse actually produce less methane because the tannins in tree and shrub leaves mediate the processes of the rumen, the bugs, it's the bacteria in the rumen that are producing this methane. There's always been a lot of interest in what we're doing. Most of the time we've been here I've been asked to go and give talks. For a long while now I've done this at the university and I talked to the students about conservation grazing and I was being asked by individual students whether they could come and help. So we had a couple of students who would just come and do that and one of them was very keen and stayed on and then eventually he found employment elsewhere and went on to have a career in environmental management. So that's when this whole apprenticeship idea started and I think yes probably they had for us. There's usually been outside funding available so that we didn't have to pay their wages that was supplied from outside sources but we would dedicate the time to showing them ropes and they got training at college for particular skills that they would need to go on and do it professionally in their own right. We're also members of Cumbria Farmer Network who hold regular meetings and you've delivered talks there and various interest groups that we participate in. I think within the realms of nature conservation there is a willingness to share experience and knowledge and to make sure that people aren't constantly having to re-infend the same way. So we're just part of that culture.