Today I'm sitting down with a very interesting guest because this guest is not a Linux distro maintainer It's not a programmer or developer by trade today I'm gonna talk to a theology professor who has a real love for free and open source software and is a strong advocate for free and open Source software, and I'm talking to Corey Stefan professor Stefan. Please introduce yourself Yes, thank you for that great introduction So I'm really pleased to be on distro tube I've been a fan of this channel for years since since back in the obscure window manager project days Before DT got all of his fancy equipment at all that so so and it's really I've really learned a lot from it So so as he said my name is dr. Corey Stefan Corey for good old Derek here and I I Currently serve as assistant professor of theology and fellow of the core at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas So I'm a Catholic historical theologian professionally and by education But I also and together with that Do some advocacy for free and open source software? I've given a talk for the free BSD foundation I've written a couple of articles for the free BSD journal I've given a talk for the free and open source developers European meeting FOS stem. I blog about this stuff and Perhaps most directly related to my work. I always tell my boss that we should be using free software and I have a statement on software freedom at the end of all of my class syllabi where I promise my students that I will work to Ensure that they're able to have software freedom As much as reasonably possible within the context of being at the University within my classes, so People say I'm a free software zealot, but you are the real diehard here Well, how did you get into? Linux and BSD free and open source software and how did you discover that philosophy? Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. So When I was a freshman or sophomore in high school in the Ubuntu 8 days, I Had of my first laptop computer and it was it was slow It had I think 500 megabytes of RAM which to the gray beards will sound like well That's rather a lot, but you know even for that time that was quite low The standard was two or yeah, it was because I also had a machine during the Ubuntu 804 time and I was running 512 megabytes and even then web browsers would just run at a snail's pace. Yeah, exactly So it came it came with Microsoft Windows That I almost say something crude I'll censor that out. No, I'll leave it in It came with Microsoft Windows and I I was looking for something better something that would be more efficient Something that had a lot more customizability also with regard to workflow because even then I did not like being limited And how I set up my working environment I was only doing high school work things, but I didn't like being limited and I You know did what I did what any Millennial does When you what do you want to find an answer to something with regard to computers? I think I was still using Google in those days What's interesting? Yeah, the 2008 period was a real explosion in Linux desktop popularity back then because that was The Vista days where people That were using XP and loved XP really hated Vista Right it was Vista and so I found Ubuntu and it was on GNOME 2 then and oh my goodness Did I ever fall in love with it and with the compius desktop or are they out in the effects? Yeah, that was great And then you know, I went back and forth with different things. I I was a Mac guy for several years, but basically Macs became worse and worse over time too and once again, I found myself dissatisfied and they went wait a second I have all this background. I already did some of this like work in high school and so let me pick this up again and That's how I found distro tube and that's how I how I found Robo Nuggets free BSD channel and just kind of bit by bit. I I grew You know all self-taught and I went from zero to hero so I went from you know using menjaro GNOME addition to to Using a combination of having read every word on every page of Michael Lucas is glorious absolute free BSD Great book by the way for anyone interested in Unix like OS is it all it makes you better at Linux and better at everything to do with this stuff and a combination of that and and Derek's videos, especially those about Specter WM and window management Window manager Regulations and things like that and I wrote my own dot file dot files from scratch I called them a theological dots. They're on GitHub and I've in the FAQ I have a little imaginary FAQ. Of course, nobody's asking me questions about this I did get an email or two about them, but I've an imaginary FAQ And one of the questions is why are these called theological dots and I make a little joke, you know Well, they're not blessed by a priest or something. It's just I'm a theologian Uses my dot files for a research and writing and it's great, you know Because you know things like having a database of of ancient Greek texts and a Bible study tool with six texts open in parallel So tarot for reference management library office with a bunch of extensions The best of those definitely is this little known, but really powerful ancient Greek extension for library office It does spell checking even on Byzantine Greek. That's quite accurate. It's amazing And so I can have all this stuff open in parallel all, you know tiled for me and oh, it's just wonderful And so yeah, it's been it's it's and I just love exploring things to you I think that's probably a trait that that just about all scholars share in common is, you know, we're nerds and we were You know, I was just telling my students yesterday How do you know that the kid who's going to become a scholar? It's the four or five six year old who won't stop asking his mother and then his teacher. Why why why? And so that was me and it still is me Yeah, I would say that's very similar to my path as far as time frame and then some of the reasons Behind why I got into Linux and a lot of this stuff is really just to learn It's just I was interested in in it and I wanted to explore it. It wasn't necessarily out of Necessity, I wouldn't say, you know, I had to move to Linux. It was more of Yeah, I just wanted to explore this avenue and the more you go down it. It's just such a deep rabbit hole You'll never learn everything like there's it's impossible to learn everything It really is impossible to learn everything getting back to your work at the university I know one of the big reasons why you advocate so strongly for free and open source software is because you want to really champion Privacy especially for your students because these days here in the u.s. Especially in the schools and universities more and more Really ever since the lockdown but even before the the lockdown started These schools are forcing their students to use proprietary software proprietary spyware in many cases Where students have to keep a camera and a microphone on them all the time even when they're doing their school work at home And of course, there's some serious privacy concerns related to that and not to mention Proprietary software when you force kids to buy into one particular piece of closed-source proprietary software You don't necessarily know what that company is doing with this information Because they're also getting the video feed and the audio feed from your students What's happening with that information? No one knows so you want to speak a little bit on that? Oh, that's exactly right. So I actually a blog post I wrote early in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic um, I wrote um a part of it was writing about this problem and it's you know instructors at at colleges and universities found themselves saying Oh, well, I've never done any kind of remote testing before and so I'm just going to default to using something like a lockdown browser where You know, you're you're letting your computer system be hijacked by proprietary code and There are people monitoring your every move even if your pupils in your eyes Dart one way because you're thinking well, there are all kinds of problems with this Um, I mean, of course, it's running proprietary code. You don't know anything about it hijacking a person's private computer running on their own home private You know internet connection Who wrote the chrome extension that these kids had to install? I mean, that's another thing the universities They don't even think about that stuff. It's not um, and it's not equitable So I actually recently had a student write to me in confidence to say Dr. Stefan, I'm really glad that you're doing this because I have a sibling who has autism And he's always flagged by remote testing services as a cheater Because he can't keep his eyes focused in one direction and I'm going well, how is that that's not even remotely pun intended fair I mean, that's absurd. I mean he should you know, he or she should be able to have You know the same educational experience as everyone else is having and that shouldn't matter And so there are you know, lots of alternatives for remote testing There uh essay writing always works and something that I really like to do is have Face-to-face video chat oral exam kind of like this and just have it be very Welcoming you can have your notes open. I I don't want to see your bedroom I just want to talk to you And students really thrive doing that and um, and they appreciate that I'm not saying I'm going to be You know, I appreciate they appreciate that I specifically say I'm not going to be taking over your systems But oral examinations require the teacher To work a little harder and I think in some cases, you know that that part of the problem is just The school system is trying to be economic as far as their time, you know, unfortunately No, that's exactly right.   It's tricky, right? It's it's it'll be a tough problem to solve But I do think having a camera having to be on a person in their home Is also a tricky situation. I know technically they're at school but In real life, they're at home and we've had court cases here in the u.s. here recently Especially Involving the workplace where companies have fired people from working at home because they refused to put on a camera on them While they were working at home because for privacy reasons. They're like, no, I'm not turning on the camera while I'm in my house And companies have fired these people in courts have Ruled in favor of these people that got fired saying no, you can't force your employees to have this camera on in their house No, that's exactly right. And um, I've heard of cases where companies are hiring say from silicon valley who are doing this And um, I can wow can I ever commiserate with that because of course software development is You know 10 it's nine parts planning and one part executing and it's the exact same for me as as a historical theologian It's nine parts gathering all of my resources reading them taking notes on them and one part writing And so if I had somebody, you know spying on me while I'm working and saying, oh, you haven't typed a single word in the last three hours Well, that would be very damaging because I might not have typed a word in the last three hours But I might have been working really hard, you know to figure out what some obscure piece of greek is saying Or whatever it is, but but um, and I think another important point is the cost The fact that so many college students obviously Are not wealthy. They have to borrow money to even go to school borrow money to buy books And and forcing kids sometimes to pay for proprietary software. I think is really unfair No, that's exactly right. So so at the university of st. Thomas I have a lot of first generation students and they're really bright and very hard-working. I love my students. They're great But you know, they they not all of them can afford very much some of them, you know, they come in and You know, the best piece of technology they're able to have is a beat-up old Retired, you know work laptop that an uncle gives as a gift, you know, something like that um, or it's an old, you know iPad 2 or something like that and you know, if if the tools that that we're requiring them to use do not run on those devices That's not equitable. And not only is it not equitable I actually am of the opinion that it's breach of of at a catholic university of our own Ecclesial law regarding the fact that we're supposed to strive to make our educations Accessible to as many people as possible now tuition is the greatest hurdle to that And part of that involves getting more donations and all of that But things that we can do as instructors to help with it are include things like well Not requiring brand new multi hundred dollar textbook purchases, but rather not not forcing students to buy a mac book Which is something many. Yeah, exactly. You know, all of those things we can so so yes You have to buy resources to be a student but Making sure that it's it's limited and sensible and that it's all these are things that you actually need You actually need this textbook, but you can buy used and it maybe Can be a lower cost version or you can you know, you have to have a laptop computer or something You can use for writing, but you don't need to be running anything high powered You can just use laboon to and fire up You know abby word and write your paper write, you know something like that, you know, very simple So so that's exactly right. Heck, you don't even need a graphical environment on linux to use text editors There's so many command line text editors Like there's literally not a machine that doesn't have enough power to run the command line No, that's that's right. That's right. Just about anybody can write a beautiful school report using wattack with phim That's exactly where I was going. You know, once you get into to them and la tech at the command line. I mean, that's so many Especially once you get into the math and sciences, especially require students to eventually learn la tech anyway Exactly. So even in theology, I I make a strong point of of really strongly encouraging students to to Um start learning The tools that they're going to need to use in their respective majors and really in their chosen career fields Even within my class. So I'll say things like, you know, you're doing a skit a group skit for class today Well, if you're in communications, go use, you know, this this open source script writing tool that you might use If you go work in multimedia, uh, you know for a news network or something and figure it out And that'll be a part of your grade.  That's not that's Very rarely the most efficient way to make use of a computer It's it's only most efficient with dialing a phone number or something like that And there's no awareness of that among students today Um, and so I try to get them to have that awareness Yeah, there is this thing called la tech and if you're in computer science or chemistry I want you to go Dabble in it if you if you have that desire to do so to to you know, be somebody writing lab reports or Or you know, that sort of thing. I want you to dabble in this stuff. And uh, yeah, that that's that's another thing that really um, I make a point of doing that And and I try and it's just it's a weird kind of flex too because now you have some of your students That are also taking a physics class and they tell their professor they know la tech now. Where'd you learn it? Well Dr. Stefan, I'm not teaching. I'm not teaching them la tech. I'm just saying I encourage you just pushing them in that direction, right? To be totally clear, but but um, but I like that weird flex. That's really funny. Um, yeah I and and then also, you know, I try to put into practice what I preach. So, um, I I contacted the head of it and I said, can I install a new linux on this laptop that you've given to me? I know that kde will work out of the box with the docking setup you put in my office and um, You know nice people, but the answer is no so I brought my raspberry pi from home with free bsd on it and that's what i'm using in my office right now because um, you know on the on the microsoft windows set up set up ire it provides I can't even install anything No, so how am I supposed to do my work if I have to make a phone call when I want to install zotero or librae office or or uh the terminal emulator that I want to use so I can be keeping an informative IRC open on the side and this is the problem with with the workplace in general these days and so many Places of business have their computers locked down, especially their windows machines locked down in such a way many times they're running inside virtual machines And you you really can't do anything you're you have no permissions at all to do anything on that particular operating system on that machine And it really does limit The amount of work you're able to do sometimes I've run into this situation before as well Yeah, yeah, it really it really can be now. Let's talk about uh, some of the free and open source software Not just for your students that you think is important for your students, but for you personally What what free and open source software is important to you and in your work? Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's a great question So I think it's always just about what the best tool is for the given job So right now i'm talking to you in manjaro kde with um Bismuth so I can have all of my tiling window manager key bindings and all set how I like them and all of that Is that uh, is that manjaro arm on the pie or is this on a no, this is on a think pad So it's it's the 64 You know, okay amd 64 um, but uh But I have you know Previous d on my pie in my office and that that ends up being mostly like for doing emails and things like that But so yeah, because I was asking because if you were on manjaro on the pie I was going to have to rethink uh what the pie could do because this has been a great Stream so far as the video feed and all oh no, no, no, no this is this is this is orders of magnitude more powerful than a pie The pie doesn't keep up with video conferencing not at all not even the pie for I bet the pie five will but I hope so. Yeah, yeah um It's close. It just skips a beat Um, it's the pie four does the pie four is so close to being able to be a desktop replacement Yes, other than the cpu is the bottleneck. Really. It's just not quite. Yeah, that's right. That's right um, so anyway at that level I I I really believe in using the tool for the job So manjaro katie because I'm on I'm docked with my think pad here and docking works out of the box Everything does with the latest linux kernels and manjaro makes it really easy to set up the latest kernel and all that I'm even able to choose what kernel I want, which is pretty nice You don't find a rolling release distribution unstable because that's what I get asked all the time Well, uh, I do um, actually you do. Okay. Yeah, um, I've had some problems actually with the rolling release in the past so, um There was a libre office fresh branch Update that was pushed as a part of a manjaro update that made my whole dissertation uneditable for a day That's not fun I've run into the same problems because I depend on obs Caden live and gimp. I use those three tools almost every day to do what I do So I've decided I can't have those rolling anymore I don't install them through pacman anymore. I have app images for them all and I just never go get the new version If the version I'm on is working. I just keep that app image I never want that thing to update because the update the only thing it's going to do is potentially break something It's not going to give me anything If what's working is working. There's there's no need to have it rolling. No, that's right. So I So I like it and I don't there are pros and cons Yeah, I think with this exact setup here basically as soon as like, uh Debbie and stable has has a newer has a newer kernel I'll just stick with I'll just switch to that and stay with that for time eternal and you know, it's just different needs I don't I really don't need the rolling other than that's Everything works out of the box right now with this exact setup. So again It's all about the best tool for the job and then this for this job. That's minjaro right now Yeah, if I didn't do what I do with videos and didn't need sometimes to test out the latest and greatest software I would be a Debbie and stable user. That's kind of What I was before starting youtube I always ran Static release distributions the idea of running a rolling release just seemed ridiculous to me Until I needed to actually test some of this software and then it kind of makes sense Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. If I ever retire from youtube though. I'm going back to debian That's going to be the quotation that everyone places in the comments. I'm going to get hate comments I'm being very I'm trying to be very politically neutral with regard to what Unix like operating system is best and then and then you know, you just said that it's kind of a Anyway, as far as some of the tools that I that I use for myself those software applications that are available That are all free and open source. I've talked about zotero. That's really really potent for citation management and one thing that's great about that is I mean, there there's a firefox extension and a libre office extension And so all three then of those great open source tools just work together seamlessly I'll be you know, if most library database websites are running the same software and Or the same database rather. Um, I didn't say that quite correctly. Anyway, There most of them are running the same stuff and zotero detects that stuff automatically in the extension So you just click add to library in the firefox extension and then poof It's there in zotero locally and being synced with zotero's secure server and then it's just, you know a quick either keystroke command or one click in the libre office document to add that citation and it is so Seamless and powerful and it's all completely free and open source software. Um, and then within Firefox, I use a ton of extensions that are really useful for work It is very straining on the eyes to read student work for example on a computer screen So being able to switch everything to dark mode.  I normally am running a A venerable suite of extensions a latin language spell checker the greek extension that I was talking about earlier It's it's just called ancient greek and it's available for open office in libre office One of the things about with free and open source software. We have a ton of really good spell checkers We have a ton of good translation programs Like a lot of people that come from like the proprietary software world I think would be shocked at how well we do in that particular area. No, that's right. So so another yeah A couple of things right there. I use a bunch of command line utility tools. There's one called whitaker's words that's existed for Decades now, but it's a latin word parsing tool and it is so potent that it's unbelievable and uh, You know, you can compile it in any unix like os it's in the a u r You know so on and so on and so normally I I just type latin Enter in my terminal emulator and poof. I can I get this great word parsing where I get the declension I get a short definition and wow does that ever sit? I mean the number of hours saved from doing that Versus opening a big physical lexicon and flipping through the pages is absolutely uncanny I use a greek bible in the terminal So and and latin bible in the terminal luke smith actually Here's here's another one that's going to invoke some comments for this video But just to talk about his repositories that he hosts in github Some a couple of things that he hosts that are really great For community service as a whole are these terminal based Bibles and you just I can type grb for greek bible and then say, you know mark one and poof There's mark one in in the the original new testament greek or in the latin fall gates By the way for people looking thinking about this stuff. Oh, I'd like to do some of this alacrity is actually almost essential to use because You really have to be using a modern Terminal emulator that has full modern unicode built into it from the ground up Or the polytonic greek text, for example, just doesn't show correctly. So it doesn't show in the in the in the is it Uh, the suck suckless terminal. It doesn't show an s t is pretty good with unicode code But it's not alacrity and I can tell you one that's terrible URX vt, which I know is popular is like the worst terminal for unicode That's right. Yeah. Um, yeah, actually I've tried both urx vt and s t and polytonic greek doesn't show correctly in either of them But it shows beautifully and in any any monospace font that has polytonic greek The uh, the hack font has a really nice polytonic greek. Um, um hack nerd whatever And so those those um, and that all shows really nicely in alacrity So, um, that's just an aside, you know for people who are listening thinking Oh, I might like to get into the sum of this You're you're gonna have a really bad time unless you're using the right Software that has full modern unicode built from the ground up because it won't it won't display all of the characters So then you just get annoying boxes or nothing Well, that's that's another thing with the terminal emulator getting back to not just the special characters But also drawing boxes or you know, some of the mathematical stuff people like to do the ligatures You know, if you pick the wrong terminal emulator a lot of that stuff is just not going to render Oh, sure. Um, let's see. What else? Oh, um So i'm not a bible scholar I'm dealing with the history of christianity mostly in my work And then my teaching is mostly in kind of theology as a part of Traditional catholic liberal liberal arts But of course I deal with biblical texts all the time as a part of my work And there's this cute based free and open source tool that runs on the sword project called bible time And bible time it seems like nobody knows about it, but it's available in every unix like os's Repository and it is super powerful and the developers are really responsive to comments to the work in github I've made at least a couple of points of feedback that they've said. Oh, yeah, we love this idea It's nice to hear feedback from somebody who's using this professionally Let us work to improve that You know for you and that's sort of that sort of thing is really great And is something that I encourage people to do as as you're looking to get into the free and open source software world Always give that feedback something with free bsd that i'll just point out that relates to that is I was getting really annoyed with LibreOffice and free bsd because it wasn't compiled with java by default And you have to have java the java flag enabled at compilation of LibreOffice to use just about any extensions But I thought you know what this is a really friendly community And so I went into irc to the free bsd desktop channel and one of the the People who maintains the LibreOffice port for free bsd was right there And I said look for anybody who's going to use a full-size office software suite rather than a lightweight something else extensions are a big part of that because we're probably using it professionally and we probably need the extensions that Let us do our jobs professionally and within a matter of two to three hours He had enabled that flag for all builds of LibreOffice for all of free bsd And that is just really cool to have those community connections And I think a lot of people imagine that some of these software Maintainers dev some of the package maintainers for various Linux distributions or for the bsd operating systems They imagine that these people are not going to be friendly Yeah, but that's usually not the case because I've seen people I've seen people go to like a linux distributions forms or irc chat and say hey, I really depend on this program It's not in your repo and within hours somebody will package it just because that one person has for it You know people do this in their free time too, you know for you know just out of the goodness of their heart That's exactly right. Um funny Another related story to that and just a real testimony to the friendliness of the free bsd Ports maintainers and kind of community overall In the talk that I gave for the free bsd foundation. I said, you know zotero We run it in wine We there is there's a group of us running a free bsd forum thread about how to keep zotero running But I said look we need either zotero or jab ref Which is another open source citation management tool just for the sake of people Doing professional work whether it be in the natural sciences or the physical sciences Or mathematics or history whatever doing this kinds of these kinds of professional You know scholarly work or writing We need one of those two tools to be In the ports in the ports tree and packaged And so I I issued a little challenge a little call to arms And i'm really proud to say that now there are not one but Ports of zotero in the free bsd one that's based on linux later on the linux compatibility later And a layer and one that is a native build and they're both available So you can just do pkg install zotero pkg install librae office and they both work together now But you know that responsiveness um and you know rather than complaining If if you're not a person who's writing the code first here are a few really key rules to live by that Are somewhat prevent professionally inspired by me I guess by just because of the kinds of things that I do but also just being human If you're not writing the code always just say thank you And um and if you don't know how to make the change Find a really respectful targeted way to ask the question for the change to happen So don't just you know go on some tirade in a public facing forum about something Join a private irc room and say you know Hey, mr. So and so I love that you're doing this Can we talk about an idea to make this better for people doing this kind of work? And that's a great way to make positive change Especially when you're not paying these people anything to help you When some cases these people are not asking for payment. They're just there As just a service to the community really it's just In a lot of ways it's altruism, right? They're just trying to Which probably now that I think about it you being Catholic Part of your faith altruism. I think maybe that's probably why you gravitate maybe to free open source software. I don't know Maybe i'm making a connection there that isn't there. No, there is a connection there. Um, it's um, you know inspired inspired By faith and by just the kinds of things that I do that for example all of my educational Video lectures that I release on odyssey. I have under a creative commons license, right and it's you know I want there to be academic freedom and I like the idea of the free exchange of ideas. I like that It's very important to me that we all be working together to it for the work that I do supporting people's education You know that sort of thing and um, yeah, and I should mention that uh, absolutely, right? I had actually met you on odyssey that's how how we Did this interview set this up because of my channel on odyssey and you're on odyssey No, that's exactly right. And um, yeah in in y odyssey. This is a great a great line to go down. Um, So when I was going I'm very deliberate about all of these things I I was going to find um in my new so in my new position I needed I knew I needed to make a lot of video lectures and Lessons and help guide students through really challenging dense Readings and things like that a lot of students where maybe their parents You know english is not their first language and so getting into really dense readings It's just a matter of guiding and I'm really I love doing that It's so rewarding and so much fun But I wanted to pick I needed to pick a platform that was accessible to students and immediately intelligible to them while respecting their software freedom and not putting me at risk of corporate censorship because Being a catholic theologian. What are the kinds of topics that I have to talk about all the time?  Yeah But but actually why am I there? I am there because I could not think of a better way to protect my own academic freedom And my students software freedom simultaneously than being in odyssey. And so is it perfect? It's absolutely not perfect. The whole cryptocurrency thing there is It's it's goofy to be frank, and I'm really glad that my students just ignore that and and I What they've moved away from it recently because now you can actually take donations and us dollars and I think that's going to become the preferred See on the platform now that that's available Right. See that's that's not why I'm there. I'm not looking to get paid extra by being there But yeah, just the idea of having um, it was built from the ground up with with with Freedom in mind is just very potent. Well as people imagine that like there's nobody Moderating odyssey if there's nobody in charge. That's not the case Certainly they have to take down anyone involved in any illegal activity because it is a u.s. Based company. They have to follow us law but unlike youtube They don't have a bot that goes around That's triggered by certain words or images and thumbnails And that's the problem with youtube is it's all automated and 90 percent more than 90 percent of the stuff that gets flagged in youtube Did not need to get flagged. It was false positives essentially and that's what frustrates creators Because you put in so many hours of work in something and then youtube just deletes it or sometimes they delete entire channels Band people kick them off the platform for no reason And that's really that's right. That's right. I come to think of it Maybe I shouldn't have used those words because this video is also going to be on youtube Well, it'll be all right thankfully I'm to a size where they're not as quick to jump to Where I they'll still demonetize a video but I can appeal And they it always gets reversed. I've never actually had anything that was actually striked on my channel It was striked for a legit reason and thankfully I've been able to get all of them reversed at some time or another one of them It took me almost two years though for them to finally monetize one of my videos on q-tile Because something triggered the algorithm on a video where I was scripting in python I don't know what I said while I was you know writing the python code, but something triggered Oh, you know those tiling window managers. They're so they're you're hacking so so therefore you're doing something You know mischievous. Well, I think that's great that you're on a free and open source A platform like the library protocol odd is odyssey being a front end to library So when I say you're a free and open source zealot and a diehard I mean that's that's really the case because you're not on youtube at all. Are you I well, I mean I have a google account and right well everybody has to everybody has a youtube account I guess technically but but so I so I you know I I am on like I subscribe to some channels there, but generally I don't I won't comment there or anything like that and And also here's you know youtube has just become less user friendly over the last couple of years I've seen the comments. Yeah, if you're not using uBlock origin You know or another effective ad blocking tool some videos are unwatchable because the problem with youtube too is It's a social network. There's a social aspect to it with the community and the comments but when youtube removes so many comments because of their algorithms and Again, more than 90 of the comments they remove or just false flags that For whatever reason google decided to remove these people's comments for for no reason really benign comments And that frustrates people that are trying to have a conversation when you can't have a conversation because the comment You took time five minutes to write this paragraph and then it just instantly gets deleted You know that that's that causes people to explore alternatives No, that's right And um, yeah, and you know, maybe somebody watching this video in five years will be in a situation in which there are better Alternatives or better places to host video content, but for right now. I just decided on odyssey Well, Cory one last thing I wanted to talk about with you for free and open source software Getting away from the software you use for work and you know for business essentially right to earn a paycheck What about software for fun for an open source gaming? Oh, what a great question. Um, so obviously zero ad is the best free and open source Computer game and maybe the best computer game that exists So I I love zero you have a point with that one. Yeah, I think it's one of the best I think it's the best real-time strategy game out there. Oh, it's so fun. Yeah, it's you know, it's built So I don't get much time for to do that sort of thing I'm just so busy with work and uh, my wife and children and uh, so on but um The historian though you being you know really as a theology professor you deal a lot with history Yeah, you probably love the historical aspect of all the various historical figures in the game all the heroes, of course are Real people that you know led these civilizations Yeah, the the the makers of zero ad Something that I love about the project and and one reason why I really say yeah, it's It's definitely the best free and open source game out there right now Although there are several that are really great and fun to play I mean there are flight simulators and space simulators and all these things, but I mean One thing that's so great about it is there they have a really fanatical attention to detail and I love that I mean there's you it couldn't be like that with a proprietary project because it You you really just have to have a community-based project where a bunch of eyes are looking over it And it's people doing it for the love of the thing for for there to be such fanatical attention to detail I mean in the forums people are citing Scholarly publications about ancient civilizations as the reasons for You know making certain decisions about what their units ought to look like or what characteristics they ought to have The the and the greek civilizations There's three of them in the game that the fact that the characters speak greek Would you click on them greek the romans? They speak latin that and and the pronunciation for those things is it's all of it is actually Exquisitely done as in I am I don't know Um who the people are behind that I I I want to look into that But i'm certain that they've that they've had professional consultations that I think this is a situation where being open source Helps them because they can source all of this pronunciation from people all over the world that would be much more Familiar, you know for example the correct Greek and latin and persian, you know all these languages that are in the game That a proprietary company would actually have to go probably pay people to do where You could just put out a call to the community and they'll take care of translation for you Yeah, and it's not just that I mean it's It's it's restored or the what we typically call restored ancient pronunciation So it's even at the level of we want it to sound as close as we can approximate to how the people sounded In you know in antiquity speaking these languages and oh my goodness.  In fact that um, I I've been asked to teach a greek class this spring And I'm planning on using zero ad if my dean is listening to this video lecture I'm using going to use zero ad as a highly effective educational resource So that's for my boss but um, but but you know, there's team building in there The um, and the greek is grades and and it's just yeah, it's a lot of fun and you can run it on anything It's available in every, you know, it's available as an app image. So you can run it on any gnu linux distribution It's in the free bsd repositories open bsd net bsd mac os microsoft windows if basically if a person is running a computer that has a reasonably Recent graphics card or an integrated one from a recent processor the person can run Can run zero ad and that makes it a lot of fun too because you can like, you know, I can play, you know Against like my brother and I will play against each other and You know, totally different. I can host it on a think pat for heaven's sake, you know, that's that's something Well, I love zero ad so that's great to hear and I again, I think but yeah, if you're a fan of history You'd love the game. I think everyone should check out that game. Yeah, and you have my professional imprimatur that it's That it's that it's um that wow have they ever done a good job with the attention to detail I mean, it's a game so fun is first but those other the attention to detail with with making the heroes and And all their characteristics that they have and the architecture and everything is just It's really good One minor gripe I have with the game is the name of the game zero ad People often make the mistake of thinking there is actually a year zero ad Because I even back in my school days, you know, people would talk about the year zero or zero ad Or and it's like no because one bc the year after that was one ad. There was no zero. There's no year zero Right, which is why they named it that was to be clever because it's imagined time that never existed Just you know, just like for example, you know, it was you know, it was never the case that Most of these civilizations were at war with each other the romans the romans were never at war with you know with with You know like the egyptian civilizations like you have right and the chinese and the indian civilizations and yeah But um, but it's what you can do the spartans and the persians and that makes sense Right, right. So you can relive the movie 300 We are sparta.  Um, you know One other thing that I just like to point out. I know that we're winding down here Is that while I tend to stand alone right now in the world of catholic theology It's not as though The things that i'm advocating and the reasons for them are entirely without precedent I mean at the vatican archives There are 80 000 manuscripts that are being digitized. This is a multi decade long process And the file type that's been chosen for that is the open imaging file type that nasa produces And why well, it's really high quality And it's an open standard that will never go obsolete So so if you're going to go through this extremely expensive extremely technically Um, precise process that takes years and years and years with a whole team of scholars and so on Well, of course, you need to have it be an open standard Now you can't use a proprietary format not for something that you want to Be able to be Opened centuries from now. Yes, and if you choose proprietary software, it's going to be obsolete within a few years The company that made that proprietary format could be bankrupt within your lifetime, right? So it's not like it's going to be around 500 Thousand two thousand years from now those documents will be lost if you depend Yeah, that's that's exactly right and and it's supposed to be the end goal for that project is to have basically all of the Vatican archives available For the whole world In a digitized format and of course they really have to be largely locked down in their physical form Because that's the only way to protect many of them, right? But once you've digitized them Then anybody can look at them in really high quality graphical images from anywhere in the world with a high speed internet connection And you know that project is under is under work and there are other projects like that where it's well, of course It's it's just using open standards because the open standards are what are have the best odds of security They're one of the best odds of Long-term usability. They're you know, um so on and so on the list just goes on of the benefits of you have Employing open source software never dies. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It'll still be yeah So those images the idea is that somebody could could write a tool to use them on whatever, you know Quantum computers were using you know, 250 years from now So right which is really beautiful to think about building that for posterity now Well, that's a good point. Well, Cory, would you like to disclose any contact information? Where can people follow you online? You got any social media accounts? Obviously you have an odyssey channel Sure. So if anyone is is interested in watching videos from from a free software geek But they're instructional videos about catholic theology and history and liberal arts. You can of course go to my odyssey page That's my channel is just cory stefan phd But but the website which is where I blog and I blog about using free software and I kind of keep everything consolidated there Is just cory stefan.com c o r e y s t e p h a n dot com I like to keep things nice and simple. Um, I don't like to manage a huge online presence. I like to manage one tidy Uh, little professional presence. And so that's what it is. Um, and so that's the best place to go I'll be sure to link to those in the video description for this video as well Sure. And oh and if somebody wants to write to me to ask questions about anything I have a little contact form right there and um, unlike a lot of Private website contact forms. I keep that up to date and I always respond immediately when somebody writes to me there So that's the best way to get in touch with me. Great. Well, Cory Thank you for talking with me today and thank you for all your hard work in promoting free and open source software And I especially appreciate that you're fighting for your students as far as privacy rights and in our school systems and university So I want to thank you for that Well, thank you so much and thank you for the work that you do. Um, I always I know that some people might think oh, you know, Derek Taylor of distro tube He has just this really cool job where he just gets to sit around and talk about Canoe Linux and free software all day and it is a really cool job And he does there's an there's a degree to which that's what's happening But I always Describe you first as an educational content creator as in you are teaching people how to be Really empowered to take ownership of our digital lives and wow is I mean thinking about it in those terms It's it's so much more than just a really cool job. It's also a really important job I appreciate that Cory. Well, thanks for hanging out with me and I hope you have a great rest of your day Yeah, see you too. Take care. Thanks. Peace


Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. Joe for jaskiescasebreaks.com coming at you with a quick little Salo Pack break. 2019, 2020, Panini, Mosaic, basketball, Salo Pack number 349 with a chance at five spots in that 11 box mixer. This is the last one we have to do. So in a separate video will be that mixer itself. Let's see who wins those last five spots after we do the break itself. As always, we always do the break first. Big thanks to you and you. Appreciate it everybody. There, all teams are in. Let's roll it. We have to memorize it four and a three, seven times for each list for names and teams. One, two, three, and seventh and final time after seven, we've got Matthew down to Patrick four and a three, seven times for the teams, one and seven and final time. We got my Lakers down to the Celtics, my rivals get all that in there. All right. Now I'm not going to read off all these names. It's just just too much, but I'll just show you the first half of the list right there. All right. The second half of the list right there, Nick Hova, Palakins, Guy with the Gris. We've seen some kind of rare, but we have seen some surprises in these Salo packs. So you never know. Let's print. Let's rip. Good luck. There's everybody right here. Thank you. Thank you. No, that was our last one last night. Gone. If we had more, we definitely would have put it back on the site. I think Jason might still have some personals of that on the, on our Instagram channel though. Oh, a Zion base. Nice. There you go. See, he told you there could be some surprises here. That goes to Nick Hova and the Palakins. Not a silver, no parallel, but still strong. Nice pack. Let's see. Pink camos. What do we have here? DeLon Wright, Marcus Smart, and a Kendrick Nun. What a pack. Guy with the Miami Heat. Kendrick Nun could significantly raise his stock during the playoffs. So, track Miami. There you have it. Nice. Great pack. All right. Now, everyone still has a shot at those, those mixer spots. So five, the top five. So let's grab Gabe down to Sean and everybody in between. So it'll be the top five after six, top five after six. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, and six. All right. So everyone from number six down to 30, thank you for giving this a shot. Congrats to Joe P., Patrick K., Nick K., Jeff, and Guy. There you go. You guys are in the mixer. Thanks for watching. Great. And with us, I'm Joe. Mixer coming up next. Bye-bye.


What's the biggest ick in a guy? When he talks badly about like a female family member on the first date. Why? Because it just shows like a general disrespect in how he's going to treat me in the future. It's actually pretty good advice, honestly. Yeah, if he treats his mom or his sisters poorly, most likely that's coming your way. Wow, man, usually these videos go a completely different direction.  What does that mean? He switches lanes too much.


Now, the ubiquitous sensor network services have to be provisioned to the end users through an architecture. So, the functional requirements from that architecture are going to be based on certain entities. These entities are referred to as objects, which are involved in providing or obtaining certain services. So, we will start with the understanding of objects. Now, whatever is around us, tangible or intangible, can be considered to be an object, similar to something like a class or an object in object-oriented programming. So, these objects can actually be connected through NGN because we are talking about the USN services in NGNs. These objects, once physical, are for instance, some devices, sensors, terminals like PDAs, laptops, even vehicles, cars, ships, trains. Then we have the logical objects. Logical objects are what we attribute as the identity which we wish to assign to the physical objects. It is mostly done through identification mechanisms. If you recall, we had the identification module IDM. And then, how we want these to be presented in the context of NGN virtually, like what name would we like to give to these objects and how these objects would be accessed and managed. So, broadly speaking, the objects are separated from the NGN through some intermediary known as a gateway. Now, this gateway is basically used for translating the proprietary or object-specific lingo into NGN-compliant traffic and messaging formats. So the objects actually have different capabilities and there's a whole domain known as web ontology. In web ontology, the objects are characterized by a variety of definitions and perspectives and parameters. So in simple terms, we can think about different types of objects. For instance, are these objects some resources or these objects are the content with certain resources? Are these objects fixed or mobile? Are these objects, if they're physical, are these operated from the mains, that is 220 volts, 50 or 60 hertz power supply or battery? Are these human-managed objects or human-controlled objects or these are? The objects which can be managed by machines, also known as the machine-to-machine communication, are these objects IP-enabled or not because IP-enabled actually simply means plugging them or interfacing them in the NGN architecture. So there are some interesting devices which are used in certain standardized networks like IPv6 over low-power, low-data-rate, wireless, personal-area networks, six-low-pan. There is a group in ITF known as the six-low-pan working group that is continuously working on standardizing these devices so that these objects, aka devices, are accessible to end-users for a variety of services. Then we have RFID sensors. All these essentially are the objects. Now the objects are associated with services in a variety of ways. For instance, certain objects need certain services. Certain objects provide certain services. Certain objects facilitate certain services. So broadly, the USN services need certain capabilities. For instance, connectivity is a requirement for these objects. Then networking capability across a variety of protocols and standards to have some kind of openness and interfacing like ANI application to network interface which allows these services to be usable or used by certain objects. Then we have the context awareness and the object-to-object interaction. So if we look at the overall functional architecture, we can broadly categorize it as the end-user functions or the network functions. Most of the responsibility of the network functionality is handled by NGN. It has a very well-defined, very fine mechanism for identification, handled through identity management functions. Then purely network management functions. Then we have the strata. The services are offered through the service stratum which manages and controls services. Then we have the transport stratum. Now the network-to-user interaction is through ANI and the end-user interacts with the network through UNI interface. The end-user functions are what we already know. End-user is interested in managing, using, defining, offering certain objects. So each object is characterized by certain functionality like information collection, storage, processing, communication, etc. And then we have the end-user with the front-end with its own services and transport mechanisms which talk to the NGN. So overall, this functional architecture meets the NGN vision of service provisioning when sensor network services are to be offered under the guise of USN.


Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou School Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books, Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about inspiration, welcoming adversity, and building a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is our superstar comedian from Hawaii, who is selling out shows many places he goes. He is Tamua Tuenay, and today we are going Beyond Comedy. Hey, Tamua, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Hey, what's up, Rusty? Thank you for having me, man. I'm so honored to be here. Tamua, today is my 250th episode, and I am super excited to have you as my guest today. Oh, 250, that's an awesome number. Thank you. Thank you.  And I want to ask you, what were some of the things that you enjoyed playing football in high school? That's right. That's true. Yeah, I graduated 2014 at Punahou, and football was my passion. I come from a big football family, so I kind of just went right into it since I was a small kid. I enjoyed Punahou. I've been there from 9th grade on, 9th grade to senior year, and I had Akali Anay as my head coach, and it was just fun, just being around the boys. I learned just a lot of hard work, working ethic, integrity, discipline, and I think I use a lot of those qualities I learned at Punahou in my career today. That's just coming from an athlete's background point of view. But I really enjoyed Punahou. People asked me, was Punahou tough, education-wise, because I came from a public school, elementary and middle school, and then high school, I went to Punahou. But honestly, it wasn't that hard. Maybe because I was taking easy classes, but I really enjoyed it. I hope my kids get to go there, my future kids, and I think it's the best school in the world. Well, Tamua, you know, I applied to Punahou. I didn't get in. I went to Damien. So, you know, just so happened, I was the head coach there for 22 years. But Tamua, after you graduated Punahou, you went to University of Hawaii and you played football there, and your dad and your uncle played in the NFL. Now, did you have hopes of playing in the NFL after playing college football? That was the dream.  A lot of people know him more, Mark Tuine, he played like 15 years, won three Super Bowls, two Pro Bowls, and they're giants, you know, they're both like six, five, you know, and then there's me, five, eight, but I'm still waiting for my growth spurt. Hopefully next week, Thursday, it'll come in, but yeah, I went to UH to play football. Actually, I never played football. I just went practice football. I was only on the practice team, but I only got it. I was like fifth string. The only time I got in the game is when we were winning by 45 points, but that never happened in 45 years. So, it was tough, but yeah, I mean, that was always the dream was to become an NFL football player, like my dad, like my uncle, and that's probably one of the main reasons why I went to UH, you know, I could have easily went to a smaller division school, like a D2 or D3. I was getting highly recruited out of high school by them, and I'll probably want to have way more playing time, but I wanted to stay home and follow in my dad's footsteps because he went to a university in Hawaii as well, and he wore number 88, and that's why I wore number 88 in honor of him. But yeah, that was the dream, but it never happened. You know, I never, I never grow. I only grew wide, only grew wider, but that's actually how I found my career today was because I took a stand-up comedy class at UH, and it's funny how, how things happen, you know, and everything happens for a reason. If I didn't go to UH, I don't think I would ever become a comedian, you know, because I don't know any college that offers stand-up comedy classes, and they don't even offer it anymore at UH, but I just so happened to be there at that right time to take that class. It was, it was my favorite class. I mean, I mean, that's the only thing I use now, right, is just from that class, but we only had four people in the class. That's a fun fact. We almost had to cancel the class. We had to beg some people to stay in the class to keep it going. But, but yeah, it was, it was, it was fun. I remember, I'm trying to remember the teacher's name. Nick something was just some, some mainland guy teaching, teaching comedy. And I took the class just to get an easy A and just for fun, you know, and my teammate of mine, Hunter Hughes, I asked him, I was like, Oh, do you want to take this class just to, you know, play around? And we took it and me not expecting, I didn't know that you had to perform at open mics throughout the semester. That was part of the criteria of the class. You have to go to like three open mics. And I was like, as soon as I signed up, I was like, Oh, I don't know if I want to do this. I didn't know I had to perform. I thought we were just watching stand-up comedy specials and maybe learning about joke formulas or, or something. But, but I ended up staying, staying in and I ended up enjoying it. I got an A, got an A plus actually in that class. Thank God. Right. And, and I'll never forget our final exam.  It was at Anna O'Brien's, which is a Irish pub bar right by University of Hawaii. Jose Dynamite, if you guys know who he is, he's a local comedian and a comedy promoter here in Hawaii. He was running the event. That's his spot that he has weekly shows. And he saw me there. I did my 10 minutes, absolutely killed. You know, the whole football team showed up. You know, some of my, my family came and he invited me again to come back, Jose, to do like, I think it was open for Paul Ogata, another former comedian that lived in Hawaii. He still, he still does comedy in the mainland. And I was nervous. I was like, okay, I'll do it. And then I just kept going, kept going. And then I started doing some stuff with Ogatae a little bit.  And if it wasn't for that class, if it wasn't for going to UH, you know, and following my dreams, that's, that's the message I like to give to, to kids and the youth is that it's okay if a door closes, you know, you know, there's going to be another door right down the road, opening up again. And everything happens for a reason. You learn lessons. You know, I take all the stuff that I learned from football, from my dad and my uncle and all the years at Punahou, at UH, you know, and I try to use it in my career today. But yeah, if it wasn't for UH, I don't think it would have been a comedian. See, thank God for UH and Timur since then.  I mean, how does that make you feel to be selling out shows now? It, it, it's, it's awesome. It's like, it's like amazing feeling. I don't really like realize it till I look back, like how you're saying now, like, well, I really sold out, you know, six shows and Tacoma, Washington, you know, I never would have thought I would be up there doing comedy because I only started recently touring since last year. I did a little, you know, a little soft tour. I kind of hit like all the local spots that would have a lot of my fans there. I did a little poll on social media and I found out where people are. And it was cool. We had some good shows there, but this year it kind of, I kind of took off even more. I'm also with a, with an agency this year. I'm with a CAA, Creative Artists Agency. They're a big agency in comedy and music. So they're just putting me all over the place. Like they even got me playing in Chicago at the end of the year. And I don't know anybody in Chicago. So I don't, I don't know how it's going to go. So we'll see what happens. But it's definitely a good feeling knowing that I can sell out and do Hawaii comedy in the mainland. People don't realize that us Hawaii people were all over the world. You know, it's crazy. Like even like in the Tacoma, that was the most recent show I did. And there were so many people I would say like, so we sold out six shows that's over like about 1,700 people total. And it's, it's, it's cool to see that. And it's a good strategy too because yes, there's a lot of Hawaii people, but it's not all Hawaii people like they would bring their friends like, Oh, check out this guy. Check people that don't know me, you know, so my fan base is growing and that's the goal is to just grow. And I'm just thankful that I can do that.   And what would you say is the funniest thing that you've seen at one of your shows? Um, funniest thing, there's a lot of things that happen. I mean, just. Let's see what I wouldn't say is the funniest, but like the fire alarm went off one time.  Just make sure, okay, nobody leave.  You know, so that's, that's like a challenge. I would have to deal with that kind of obstacle.   But if something like that, I try to like just let the security handle it. And I don't want to make it escalate even more. Another thing I, I seen someone fall down when they try to sit on a chair. I guess they missed the chair and just, ah, that too. I didn't want to bring attention to that, but just to myself, I'm like, oh, that's, that's pretty funny, you know, but, and also just like talking with people. I mean, you never know like what, what's going to happen at a comedy show. And like the things people say or the things like stories of how these, this couple met or what this guy does for a living. It's just, it's just hilarious.  And the more shows you do, the more easier it gets. It's called crowd work in, in the comedies, you know, terminology. And yeah, you just, it's just fun to just be with the crowd. And the great, the great thing that I love about comedy is that every show is different. You know, you never know what's going to happen. And yeah, that could either hurt you or make you better, you know, so that's, that's fun. Well, Timoa, it's clear that comedy is your passion. I mean, this is definitely your purpose. I mean, you were meant to do this.  And how would you describe or explain your comedy style? I would say it's definitely observational. It's kind of like an exaggerated version of myself of what I go through on the everyday basis.  And then I want it to click in their mind and be like, I know who that, I know that guy.  Oh, that, that looks like that guy I saw at Home Depot the other day. You know, so I familiarity and relativity. I want everything to be relative. That's the main goal. And I like to just, you know, I'm kind of witty on stage.  And a lot of it is improv to on the spot. Family friendly to clean. I keep it clean made that decision from the beginning. Based on Augie T and Andy boomer tie. They told me if you want to make it big in Hawaii, you got to stay clean and they're definitely local comedy legends that I always looked up to. But yeah, observational, clean, fun. Just going to have overall good time.  I mean, everybody can go to your shows and to more I like when you talk about your kind of educating all of us about pigeon and the two words the kind and can right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because you really that's that actually happened because you know, um, being on the UH football team, we have a lot of people from the mainland, you know, and, and they try to adapt to the local culture. And a lot of them try to speak pigeons. I just got a total. I'm like, yeah, you just just got to say the kind and can and just use it in the correct cadence and whatever you're talking about. Going to make sense. Can rock. Can, you know, so those are fun to talk about. And if no can, no can, right? No can, no can. Can can if no can bottles. Recycle. Recycle. Yeah. I can. To more, I was cracking up watching you do that whole skid. I mean, that is that that is hilarious.   It's such an impressive thing to watch you on stage, doing your impromptu situations. I mean, and you said earlier, it's like sometimes it just writes itself right. It just writes itself. Sometimes it doesn't work to, you know, if you come to my live shows, maybe this person is just, you know, not as entertaining or he's not as interesting or he's not giving me any, any good answers or he's shy or whatever. I'll just, I'll just move on. But I was, I was like, deathly afraid of talking to the crowd at first before I would just, you know, run through my jokes, run through my material, like a robot. And then as the years went on, I got more relaxed, you know, that's the main thing in comedy. You want to feel like it. First of all, it has to be live, you know, I did, I did zoom comedy, like maybe one or two shows during the pandemic and it doesn't it doesn't work.  That's why. But, but in comedy, you got to have that live interaction.  You're just on the floor. And as the years gone by of me doing it a lot, you know, almost every week, I got better at it, you know, and I realize I can be more relaxed on stage, you know, I can I can get involved with the crowd and but not too much to make them take over the show, you know, just just a little bit because they love they love being part of the show. They love they love the me being spontaneous, you know, that's what gets big laughs, even if it's a small joke, they would laugh real hard because they know that I didn't prepare that. And that just happened in the moment. And all of us witness it together. That's what everyone loves about crowd work. And I try to try to do that and sometimes it doesn't work sometimes it does but the more you do it, the more it works. Well, it seems to be working a whole lot when I'm watching your shows and and to more you've been doing a lot of short skit videos and posting it on social media and those are hilarious I mean you're you're expanding your reach through social media I mean that that one where he said, I mean everybody on Kauai knows everybody right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.  But when the pandemic hit. That's when my whole, you know, game plan shifted. Everything was closed. You couldn't do any live entertainment. I had a, at that time during the pandemic I had a monthly show at Kauai golf course at honey's restaurant every second Fridays of the month I would have a headlining show. And I would get a good amount of people coming in a lot of family and you know a lot of friends on the east side of the island and I was happy that I got that gig.  And I was just at home thinking like okay what am I, what am I going to do am I just not going to do comedy anymore I don't know how long this whole lockdown is going to last, you know, but then some of my friends said oh you should post some of these stuff on on social media. And I was like nah I don't want to I don't want to do that no one's going to no one's going to watch it. You know, but I did. I never forget I did my first video I put up was this toilet paper drug dealer. I was like dealing acting like a drug dealer but dealing toilet paper because that was a hot topic at the time was the toilet paper. And the day I posted it went on the news, you know all the new stations they reposted it and I was like okay I guess this is what the local people want. And then it was like every week I'll pump out at least one or two videos of like these job profession skits you know whether it's construction or working at lows. You know, being a barber, I'll just pump these out and am I following grew and grew and grew. And when I finally had the green light to do live shows again. I did that blue note, which is this jazz club in town. I put up two shows, and then it instantly sold out. And that never did happen for me. And I was like, Oh, like what do we, what do we do now. People are like, Well, you just just add another show. So we added another show is sold out out of the show sold out. And I ended up selling out like 18 shows at Bruno, which was like three consecutive weekends Friday, Saturday, Sunday, two shows each night for three weeks straight. And, and that was all because of social media and I love because of the skits. So now I just do two and two like I just, there's my stand up side, and my skit side and I try to push everything towards my stand up because nothing can be live shows. But I really enjoy making these Instagram skits and it wouldn't have happened if the pandemic didn't happen. You know, so I'm blessed with that.  And I think, like the whole over being kind of like triggered a lot of people but you can look at it in a positive or negative way, you know, so I kind of just have a lot of time on my hand so I'm just going to make videos online. You know, and see what happens. So always look at things in a positive way.  I mean, I watched your short video skit of the local TSA agent being so serious. I'm cracking up.   So that was fun to shoot and a lot of it is like friends to and family, you know, I would run the idea by them and they'll give me feedback and they'll tell me to maybe use this or you got to talk about that. Or I'll call people that that actually work like in the TSA, you know, I'll call people that actually work in that job profession and say, Okay, what's what's the linglor on here, you know, because I want people to want people to watch it and the general public to laugh at it. But I also want like TSA agents are people who are in that field to be like, Okay, how does he know like this is type of, you know, how does he know that all these terminology but that brings back what I said earlier, everything got to be relative. Everybody got to be relatable. You know, that's the main thing if they can relate to this, it's going to be fun. Well, you're brilliant. And I want to I want to talk with you about some of the concepts in my books. One of the concepts is welcoming adversity, overcoming obstacles. And, you know, it's it's a mindset, you know, we can choose to look at things is in a positive way we can choose to look at things in a negative way.  What are your thoughts about that and what are what some obstacles that you have to overcome. That goes back to what I said like everything happens for a reason I take every obstacle that I that comes my way as as a lesson, you know, big one is the pandemic that I just mentioned. It would be I'd say when I so I don't really want to talk about this too much, but I had a previous manager. When I first started, but I ended up getting rid of him. Just so that I can, you know, work on myself more and just just want to go separate ways. And that was kind of tough for me to make that decision. And then when I did that, I kind of got a new agency, which was CA. And now things are a lot better as well. That's one obstacle as well.  They don't know who I am. Next thing you know, maybe this maybe just because the timing is off where you got to do more advertising.  You got to just kind of say like, yeah, why not me, you know, put the comma somewhere else like why it can be me, you know, can always can. And I try to look at it as motivation.  So even younger comics come up to me and they asked me for advice, I try my best to help them out.  I definitely believe that another yeah, another big obstacle was realizing that I'm not going to play football. You know, I touched on it earlier because football was my was my life. That's what I did since I was a little kid. And to finally give that up was was tough for me, you know, and then I came into comedy realize that. Oh, yeah, another obstacle. When I first started doing comedy, I was working down at the docs at Hawaii stevedores, and which is a amazing job. If you're from Hawaii, everybody wants that job, you know, so I was working there and I was doing comedy at the same time, and ended up missing work because I'd have to do this gig here. And that's what I was just doing shows here in Hawaii. And then my dad works at the docs too. So we had a long talk and I told him that I'm going to have to just want to just do comedy, you know, and it was tough on him because he got me in in the job and, you know, everybody wants that job and it looks kind of bad that I'm just leaving that job just to do comedy, you know, like what you're going to do comedy. You can make so much money at this job. Why are you doing comedy. I just stuck to my, you know, my roots, what I believed in, and turns out I'm doing great right now. And who knows where else God will take me or where the path will take me but yeah, if you want if you believe in something and you truly work hard, just take it, you know, follow Well, to more. I mean, I, it's amazing how many obstacles just came out all of a sudden, but I'm definitely going to get you the books this week, because you got to you got to have inspiration got to have that mindset and and to more in what ways would you say comedy is similar to sports. I compared to football, definitely stand up comedy. If you ever playing football or even a sport tennis, I guess, as well, you know, you get that pregame jitters, you're nervous.  It's actually bad to be not nervous.  I personally believe that. So you both get that same feeling that adrenaline rush, you know, pregame jitters and football, you get that first play that first hit that first tackle, or that first pass or whatever.  Once you tell that first joke, you hear that first laugh, you know, it kind of eases away.  But yeah, definitely similar. There's a lot of similarities with football and comedy or sports and comedy. I mean, I both sweat, you know, both of them I was sweat. I sweat on stage. I sweat it on the field. Yeah. And you deal with adversity as well.   I'm an audible. I'm not going to talk about this topic. I'm going to switch over to something else already. So it's all hand in hand. It's both performing, you know, you're sweating. It's all the same. And that's why I'm grateful that I have an athletic background. And I learned all those qualities in sports and football, and I can use it on stage. Kamua, I want to ask you one more thing before we wrap up. What's a big future goal of yours? A big future goal of mine would probably be to get like this big, a big special, you know, either whether on Netflix or HBO or Showtime. Hopefully it comes soon. That's that's the plan. My big time goal before was to sell out the Blazell Arena and, you know, I already did that already last year, which I'm so grateful for. But yeah, this time I want I want to, you know, get a special definitely grow my audience more, you know, which I feel like I have a pretty strong audience in the main and sorry in Hawaii. And the goal is to just, you know, broaden more in the mainland. There's that I try not to look too far ahead.  I mean, yeah, I had that idea, but I don't really focus on that. I just take it day by day, month by month, year by year, you know, so, but right now I really want to get like a big special in a big. A well known network company, whether it's Netflix or HBO or Showtime or one of those, one of those things and hopefully that happens soon. Well, we definitely need to make that happen and to more you. It's so impressive you've been building this superior culture of excellence for some years now. And it's so great to see you be successful and yeah we got to get all of Hawaii to have that big special to happen and to more really want to thank you for taking time to be on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. I had an awesome time. Yeah, I can't wait to see this when it airs, you know, I'm excited, but yeah, thank you. I'm blessed and honored to be here. Thanks, Tamua. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Tamua and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha. Thank you.


Hi everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is Shilpi Gupta and today I'm here to talk about what to expect when transitioning to product. Let's get started. Little bit about me. I'm a senior PMT, which is product manager technical at Audible, which is an Amazon company. I have about 14 years of overall work experience in various domains, including CPG, retail, financial services, media and entertainment. This diagram shows my career path so far. I started out as a software engineer and I worked on many projects in data warehousing and BI space. As I get more experience, my role matured from a software engineer to technology analyst and then to technology lead. After spending a few years as a technology lead, I decided to transition into management and so I took up a role as technology manager and I managed a team of 15. At that time, I felt that I could create more value through my work by honing my business skills and I decided to pursue MBA full-time. Since I had background in tech, I decided to go for an MBA program that was specialized in tech. After completing my MBA with specialization in product management and strategy, I took up a role as product manager in data science and machine learning space. I formed a small team so I was responsible for both product as well as program management. After spending some time in that role, I decided that I only wanted to focus on program management and I joined Audible as a senior TPM. As I was progressing in my role as TPM, I was continuously reflecting on my career journey and thinking about next steps and how I want to take my career forward. That's when I decided to transition to product management. In this presentation, I will talk about my transition journey and I will also share some resources that I have found helpful throughout my transition journey. I also want to say that although this presentation is focused on transitioning to product management, most of this framework can be applied to any career transition. Let's dive in. After I transitioned, a lot of folks reached out to me for coffee chats to learn about my experience. When I reflected on those conversations and my transition journey, I came up with this framework which comprises of three different phases, research, prepare and transition. Although I will go through each phase and sequence, I want to emphasize that this journey is more like an agile project where you iterate and continuously improve and course correct rather than a waterfall where you have a distinct start and end of a phase. So first step is to conduct your research, right? And within your research, the activities that you will do will fall into three main categories, reflect, explore and review. You need to first reflect on why you want to transition and then explore target roles and also review your skills. And of course, these can be done in parallel because the insights that you gather from each of these can be used to refine the other phase as you learn even more. So let's dive deeper into each of these. So starting with reflection, I think this is the foundation of any transition journey. It is crucial that you are crystal clear on why you want to transition. What is your deepest motivation that is driving you towards making this transition? There are many different ways to do this. You can do journaling or mind maps and my personal favorite is a five-wise framework in which you repeatedly ask yourself why till you get to the bottom of your motivation. This technique is commonly used in root cause analysis and I have found that it works well for this use case as well. So here's an example of starting with product management. Ask yourself, why do I want to transition to product management? And that also could be, well, because I want to product manage customer-facing products. Then you ask yourself again, why is product managing products important for me? Well, the answer could be because I want to work on creating vision for products and working on their road maps. Then ask again, why is working on vision and road maps important? You might discover that it is because all of these involve thinking strategically. Then ask yourself why strategy important could be that because working on defining strategy involves decision making, which also involves a lot of accountability, risk-taking and ask yourself again, why is making strategic decisions important? The answer could be because making those strategic decisions is where we have the biggest opportunity to make an impact. So again, this is just an example. Try doing this. I think it's a really good exercise for self-awareness and reflection. Next, let's talk about exploration. This is where you dive deeper into the specific roles that might interest you. Because product management role can vary so much depending on your company, on your target company and even within the same company. So go for coffee chats with other product managers in your target company. Understand what their day looks like because very often the actual work that people do is not fully described in the job description. So I think it's best to talk to someone who's actually doing that work to understand what their job involves. So talk to them about the challenges that they face and then reflect if you are up for those challenges. Ask them about their recent launches or a product that they worked on that they're super proud of and this will really get them excited and interested in the conversation. Also ask them about the opportunities that they came across and see if those opportunities excite you. Next, start looking at the relevant roles based on both your skills and your interest. Also remember that industry knowledge is super important for product management. So try to look for roles in an industry in which you are already experienced. So in a way you are product managing your career, right? You're establishing the grand vision for your career and then working on a roadmap to realize that vision. It is about taking those stepping stones that can take you from point A to point B in your career roadmap. For example, if your goal is to transition to product management role in robotics and you have background in analytics. You can start as a PM in analytics or BI area and then you can build your skills in data science, machine learning and then transition to being a technical PM for maybe machine learning products. And then you can choose to specialize in a specific type of ML area, for example robotics or even Alexa. So next let's talk about review. So once you have identified the relevant roles, look at the skills that are required to perform those roles. And you can gather this information from the job description, from the coffee chats that you have had and after that spend time reviewing your own skill set. You should identify the transferable skills based on both your current job experience and also your prior job experience. And this is where you should also start working on the stories from your work experience that you can tell to demonstrate how you have applied those skills in the past. And the output of this exercise should be a skills gap analysis, something that looks like this. For example, these are the common skills for a product manager and you might already have some of these and you may have to work on some of these. It's important to identify your areas of improvement so that you can work on bridging those gaps. Next let's look at prepare phase. After spending some time doing research, you can start preparing. As I mentioned earlier, this whole process of transition is iterative and you can do most of these activities in parallel and iterate. So for prepare phase, let's start with closing the skills gap. So once you know your areas of improvements, you can select the method that works best for your needs. You can go for training. There are a lot of schools out there, including business schools that offer focused executive education. For example, we have MIT or NYU. And if you're looking to improve upon your technical skills to transition to a technical role such as PMT, you can go for boot camps. For example, Flatiron offers a boot camp in data science. Even though as a PM, you may not have to work on creating models, but having that knowledge, it's super helpful in understanding and also contributing to the discussions and making those trade-offs that you as a product manager will be responsible for making on a daily basis. And my personal favorites are the courses from Udemy and Coursera. But before you enroll, be sure to check out the syllabus to ensure that that course has the required depth for your needs. Webinars are also a great way to get an overview of a topic and you can also find references to the resources that you can explore later. And last but not the least, books are a great way to increase your knowledge and also for practicing interview questions. And I've listed a few of my favorites here. Next, let's talk about networking. I recommend using this time to network with people who have gone through similar transitions. So in the research phase, we were talking to people who are doing those roles in your target companies. In the prepare phase, we are talking to people who have gone through similar transitions because understanding the challenges that they faced, the resources that they found helpful are super helpful for your own transition. And in my case, understanding the process of transition was also crucial because in my org, a transition from program to product had never been done before. I also recommend finding a mentor who can guide you through this process. They can hold you accountable for making progress towards your goal and also staying true to your career roadmap. They can advise you when to course correct because after all, this is an iterative process and being agile, adapting to new information, that's the name of the game. And last but not the least, mentors can connect you to their network and this can also open new opportunities for you. And although I did not put a bullet point for it, but initiating that conversation with your manager is also super important and depending on your situation, you can choose to do so. In my case, throughout my career, I have regularly had career focus discussions with my managers and I found those discussions extremely helpful at every stage of the career, including my transition. Lastly, let's look at gaining experience. So if you're looking to gain experience as a product manager, you can look at pro bono opportunities for nonprofits. For example, you can check out US Digital Response. It had volunteer opportunities for PMs a while ago and you can also consider small companies, companies that can't afford hiring a full-time product manager, but those are also great opportunities for you to gain some practical experience. Another great way to gain practical experience is to learn on the job. You can volunteer to take up PM responsibilities within your area of work. This is an excellent way to get taste of product management without making it too formal or official. And you can also consider internal job rotation, something that I did for my transition. And for those of you who don't know, job rotation is a temporary work arrangement in which you work in some other area or a role for exploring it. This is also an opportunity for management to evaluate your fit for the role and also for you to experience that new role, new position. And also, these are great opportunities to practice putting on that new lens to look at things because as a product manager, you will be faced with a lot of ambiguity and the way you think about things will shift. For example, if you're transitioning from program, it might mean that you now have to look beyond those timelines and dependencies and think more about the overall vision and business value of the product. If you're an engineer, then you have to practice looking beyond solutioning to now understanding how to evaluate those different trade-offs and what features truly deserve to be included part of your MVP. Next, let's talk about the final phase, which is transition. Although most of this applies to any job hunt, I think this completes our topic of transition and offers some helpful reminders. So for transition, use artifacts from your research and prepare phase to demonstrate your competence and readiness and find your next best opportunity. So first and foremost, update your resume so you can focus on showcasing your product management skills. Since you're transitioning, see how best you can adapt your resume to showcase the skills that are valuable for your target role. Be sure to add that certificate of course completion or maybe your volunteer experience to your resume to show how you work towards bridging those gaps in your skillset or lack of practical experience. And remember to update your LinkedIn as well because that's a great way for you to reach out to recruiters and for recruiters to find you. Next, leverage your network. Reach out to the contacts from your coffee jabs to find more opportunities. Attending a conference or a product focus meetup, these are also great ways to grow your network and also reach potential recruiters. And lastly, start applying to jobs and interview. Before going for actual interview, spend some time researching the company. Because as I mentioned before, product management looks very different across different orgs. So if you haven't done so already as part of your research and preparation, meet some product managers in your target company to understand their peculiar ways of product managing products. I also strongly recommend doing some mock interviews. Your friends and family can also help here and you can practice selling your stories in front of the mirror. Some companies require you to do whiteboarding, so be sure to practice that as well. And lastly, I cannot stress this enough, but be sure to treat this as an iterative process where you learn, practice, apply and then repeat. It is all about continuous improvement and establishing that feedback loop into each of the phases that we discuss. And also remember that it's completely okay to change course. As you go through the process, there is also this possibility that you might decide that this target role is not for you and that's completely fine. Because even if that turns out to be the case, this exercise will help you increase your self-awareness and help you understand your inner motivation. So this completes the transition framework. Next, let's talk about some of the FAQs from my coffee class. So first one, I'm due for a promotion in my current role. Should I transition before my promotion or after? Well, it's a choice that you have to make based on your career goals and aspirations. But in general, transitioning at a lower level, it's easier as the bar is lower as compared to more senior roles. So my advice is that if you know for sure that you're going to transition, it might be worthwhile to transition first and then work towards getting promoted in that new role. Should I bring up my intention to transition with my manager? So even outside this transition process, it's a good practice to have career focus one-on-ones with your manager at least once a month. Many times our one-on-ones, they become very tactical and we use that time to talk about immediate work items. But it is important that we have that continuous dialogue about our career path with our managers.  This is something that worked for me. But if for any reason you believe that your manager won't be supportive for your transition, then it's best to seek guidance from a mentor and then work towards that transition process. Should I look for internal opportunities or apply externally? I feel that moving internally is always easier. Most companies try to retain the talent and they are generally supportive of their employees' career aspirations. And you also already know a lot of folks in your current org that you will cross paths with even in your new role. So having said that, you also have to consider the kind of PM roles that you're interested in and if those are available in your current company. Like I mentioned before, in the research phase, spend time thinking about the next logical step, the next stepping stone that will take you closer to your vision. And if that is available in your current company, I highly recommend just jumping on that opportunity. I like the idea of being a PM but I'm not sure if this is the right path for me. And this is where I suggest folks do the things that I talked about in the research phase. You need to reflect on your internal motivation and be very clear on the why. And also you can go for internal job rotation. That is a great way to experience product management without fully committing to it. Is it too late in my career to transition? No, never say never. Well, we all have days at work when we feel uninspired. But if you feel that way on most of the days, then I think it is better to transition to something you enjoy doing rather than being stuck in the wheel. So I would suggest just cut your losses rather than waiting for too long. I don't have a PM title in my resume, but I have performed PM duties. Does that count towards practical PM experience? In my opinion it should, but unfortunately most of the recruiters don't see it that way. And it is not entirely their fault. They are looking for someone who has managed products before. And the easiest way to cut through the noise is to look for the word product management in the candidates experience. So when I was talking about the prepare phase, I recommended working for nonprofits or small companies to gain that practical experience. So having that experience will help you get the interview. And while interviewing, you can definitely tell stories from your prior work experience to demonstrate your product management skills. And last question, how long does it take to transition? Well, this entirely depends on you, your experience and your target role. I recommend choosing an industry that you are already experienced in so that your transition is quick. And also share your transition plans with your mentors and your trusted friends who can really hold you accountable to make steady progress towards achieving your goals. And this completes our FAQ section. That's all I had to share today. I hope you found this useful. And if you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you so much. Take care.