Hey everyone, Shaber1000 here. I'm sitting on the tailgate of the truck. It's 1130 at night-ish, we'll check here in a minute. I'm gonna do a review for you guys on this little flashlight that came in with that Ozark Trail Kit because I feel I didn't do it justice. I feel it deserves a good and honest review. And I'm gonna put it up against a couple other lights that I have here. We're gonna talk about them and we're gonna see which one might be best for you in certain situations or for me or for whatever. So stick around and let's check these lights out together. There's gonna be a lot of information in here as much as I can give you that is. So stick around and let's get to this. Okay guys, like I said, it is 1136 at night. Monday, February 8th, it's 66 degrees and it's supposed to be warmer tomorrow. So I brought my phone out here for a reason because I have some information on these lights. Hopefully you can see them pretty well, but I figured I would start the video out here because this is where we're gonna be trying these lights out. Okay, so first, what we have here. Now this one here, if you guys remember, came in that Ozark Trail camping kit, okay? First thing we're gonna check out some machete because we need a machete. Okay, so let's go ahead and open this up. This is just the cheap Walmart thing. Now if you noticed, I was trying to turn that to zoom it, but you don't have to do that. You actually slide this out and in. So that's pretty cool. This runs on three AAA batteries. It is 160 lumens and it will go, it's 60 meters. It is one LED, you can probably see that in there, and it will go 60 meters, which would be, what, 180 feet-ish right in there. So we'll get to the prices of these here in a minute. So I have this. I also have this ever ready flashlight here. One of those cheap, takes the big square, six-volt batteries, and if you can see in there, it has one, it's sitting in my garage. It has one LED in it as well. We'll get, again, we'll get to the prices. And we have this hyper-tough. Just cheap, they call it a flashlight, but this is more like a spotlight. Okay, it's got a little stand. Now this is a rechargeable light. USB right there. Okay, this is hyper-tough. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through each one of these. I don't know what the lumens is on this. We'll have to check again. This one is 300 lumens, okay? So now this one, I can't find it online by itself. Okay, now I did find a kit. I'm gonna bring it up right now. Shit. Okay, I did find a kit on eBay. Now, it's a combo with batteries, and I'll show it to you here in just a second. And here's what it is right here. It comes with a headlamp. It looks like you get, what, six batteries. So each one takes three AAA batteries. So this is the only one I could find. Well, it's not the only one, but that I could, without buying that whole $30 kit. Now this one is $15.60, okay? So let's read more about this. Now I noticed there is a seal in the bottom of this where you open this up to take your battery pack out. There is a seal in there. So I am not claiming that to be waterproof. I'm guessing it is water resistant. So you can use it out in the rain and such. Right there, what it says is one time six LED zoom, aluminum flashlight with three modes for high, low, and flash equipped with 160 lumens up to two hours of battery life in a range of 60 meters. Okay, so that would be six times zoom is what it is, but it's one LED. All right. And like I said, it comes with the headlamp that has a one by three LED headlamp with three modes for high, low, and red flashing lights, 130 lumens brightness with a range of up to 60 meters and includes six AAA batteries. And so like I said, for 15, let's just round it off to the highest number, okay, which would be $16. All right, that's this one. So let's say that's the price of half that kit and you get a headlamp, I know what you're thinking. Well, it's not a very good deal. I think it is to me. Now, maybe not to you, but in my personal opinion, now I'm not getting sponsored by any of these guys. I'm not getting paid by them. Okay, I just have their lights. And I happen to really, really like this one. To me, this is just by itself. I wouldn't hesitate to pay $15 for this, you know, on its own. Okay, now let's go to this Ever Ready. This is just one of those cheap Ever Ready flashlights. I brought it up here. Oops, sorry guys, I'm behind the camera. So let's go to the Ever Ready. There's a bunch of different places you can get them, but that particular one there is, you can get it at $9.59, let's say $10, okay, at Napa. And it does come with a battery. Let's see, where else can you get it, that particular one. It says Publix Delivery, $8.19. It's the same thing you get that battery, but you have to have a $10 minimum order, okay. And the Ever Ready, which was, I'm gonna get two here in a minute, but the Ever Ready battery through this company, Ace Hardware, is $6.49, which would be $7, because eventually you're gonna have to buy another battery, right? Okay, so there's that. Now let's go to the HyperTuff, okay. This one you can see is all dirty, well used, because I have used this a lot. We've used that fishing, camping, I've used it around the house, under cars, whatnot. Now what I found on that one is, I did find it at Walmart online, only three left for $12.88, let's call that $13, okay. It is 300 lumen, as I said, with a rechargeable battery, okay. I don't, it doesn't, I'll give you some of the, well just, it's real quick here. It says double housing with rubber cover and trigger locking switch, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, LED indicator turns green when fully charged, half the size and weight of comparable halogen spotlight, okay. So this is actually considered a spotlight, so it does have the, you can, you know, you can set that thing up, okay. And it does have a trigger switch, so you can, you know, hands-free. It is rubber, but if you can see down in there, there is one little LED. I'm thinking they're all the same LEDs, okay. Now, and it is, it is a lot lighter than this. I don't know about half the weight, but it is a significant lighter than this because these six-volt batteries are huge and big. You guys have seen them, the big square batteries, which I can show you right now. Now you can get the cheapest batteries I found for these or those cheap heavy-duty batteries from Dollar General for three bucks. Now I don't know if you can convert these to rechargeables, you know, buy a battery kit for rechargeables, but dang man, what are you gonna pay for that, you know? Now this I can buy at Walmart, fairly reasonable, AAA rechargeables already have chargers. I've got AA's and AAA rechargeable batteries in a lot of my paranormal investigation kits. In our mics, we have the rechargeable AA batteries. Like I say, you pay up for them, but you don't have to buy them once in how long. You go buying, like I said, what'd this say, two hours.   You buy a pack of those 10, 10 pack or whatever, 20 pack of these batteries for like three bucks.  They don't even last a month in a remote control. I can television remote control, okay? So I will end up putting rechargeables in these. Now these two here I did not buy, they were her fathers, okay?  So I think it should be a fairly decent comparison, okay? So let me get you set up pointing down the street and we'll shine these lights and I'll show you which one. I do not have my head lamp on. The light that is on right now is our light that we bought at Walmart for 30 bucks, which we use this thing all the time, guys. Now it's still, to me, it's not worth 30 bucks. If that light came with a rechargeable battery, I would say 25 to 30 would be fair. It's still cheaply made.  If you go turn that light, it drops and so there's a lot of things I don't like about it. Right now I would say $15 would be plenty for that and this is my hand warmer. This is what I'm running that light on. Okay, so let me get you set up out here, guys and let's put these things to the test starting with the hyper tough. Okay, guys, here's the hyper tough. Now there is a street light behind me. There's nothing I can do about it and there's a street light way down there and my neighbors have one here on the left of us. But here is the hyper tough. Here I'll put you in. I don't want to turn my headlamp on and contaminate anything, but there's the hyper tough. Okay, so now I'm going to take you off a night vision. All right, now we're going to turn this on.  Now that is shining way down the street there, okay? Now like I said, the little flashlight is only 160 lumens, this is 300. All right, but I can't adjust this in any way. So now let's go get the ever ready. Okay, again, guys, I have you on night vision just for a second to show you this is the ever ready flashlight, okay?  Okay, ever ready?  And there's this. Now it's not bad. Don't get me wrong, it is not bad. It does not shine down nowhere near as far, but it does shine down in good ways, okay? There's on the telephone pole, all right? So yeah, it's a decent light. First cheap as it is, but the batteries. I mean, come on, they're huge and everything. We're gonna get to that too. All right, now let's shut this off and let's go with the little baby light and let's see how well it does. And again, night shot, okay? We have our, well, my little favorite light here. Okay, so let's get this turned on. Let me get you off of night vision here. All right, now let's turn this on. There we go, look at that. Now that is all the way in. So I am guessing, yes, that is shining. It's 160 lumens, I am pretty impressed with that. And if you ask me, I do believe that is shining 180 feet, 60 meters, all right? There's the telephone pole, but what I can do with this, okay? See that's, let me show you something here. If you're looking for something on the ground, see, you bring it up, pretty impressive, right? I think so. Now let's pull this out, let's go on out here. And I'm just gonna slide this out like this or slide it back in like this and there we go. Now look at that. I look over here in the woods, wow, amazing. Then down on the ground, closer you get, you know the shine over here in the woods again. And one more time we will get the camera to focus. And I got a car coming. So, okay, so there you go guys, there is that one. All right, real quick before we go into house, I'm back here at the truck. I'm shining across the street. There is Jerry's old house, so we'll kind of shine right over here. Got the hyper-tuff right here. There's the hyper-tuff. It's a great spotlight, okay? There's the hyper-tuff. Now we have Mr. Everettie here. Now this battery, guys, this ain't bad, but this battery is, it's almost, I mean, I've only used this a couple of times. It's probably got maybe 10 minutes on it, okay? On this battery. And it is one of those cheap dollar store batteries, I do believe if I remember right. So there's that one. And the hyper-tuff is not a full charge either. It's probably got maybe 20 minutes on it. And the little flashlight, the Ozark Traillight here, has, look at that. This has about 15 to 20 minutes on it as well with cheap batteries. I know this is not science, guys, but I'm not a scientist. I don't have all the equipment to do all that. And besides, this is not something that science has to be involved in. You gotta look at it and see what your eyes and go, is that gonna be the light I need? You follow what I mean?  I'm not gonna do that because everybody has their own take on their batteries. They have their favorite batteries as well as I do. I like the rechargeable. Some people like just buying cheap batteries. So it's not, you know, that's not gonna help us out any. I'm just showing you the difference in these, okay? Now, let's go ahead and pull this back. And there we go. Nice, okay? So out. And back in. And just for fun, let's turn my headlamp on here, okay? I like this thing. Okay, guys, so we're back in the house. Hopefully you can hear me okay. I don't wanna talk loud because it's probably going on midnight now. Yep, 12.02. I don't know if the camera's fuzzy or if it's mine. In conclusion, my opinion, this is by far gonna be my go-to light. I wish I could buy just this light by itself without the headlamp. I can't find it. So I wish I had another one of these. These lights are fine to keep around the house. You know, we've used both of these fishing, okay? Um, this light is not very impressive at all. Big, bulky, heavy, and the batteries, I don't care even $3. I mean, this thing, even with a brand new unused battery, this thing will not light up hardly any brighter than what you saw outside. Just a cheap, this light here, it's a bad ass, okay? It's killer, it's a great flashlight. Great to have on the boat. It is rechargeable, and it is hands-free.  As far as a flashlight, this is not a flashlight, per se, it's more of a spotlight. It'd be great on the boat, but look at this thing, guys.  Put this in your tackle box. You have a big tackle box. Put this in your toolbox. You have to have a big toolbox like I've gotten still.  Now, this thing, guys, I think for the money by far, if you want, keep this in your glove box, your toolbox, your tackle box, your pocket, keep it in your boat, keep it in your drawer and house, look at that, it's small. I mean, it's, okay, here's my glasses. We all know by how big a pair of glasses is. There it is, you know? I mean, does have a lanyard. Now, the next one of these I get, I'm gonna pay up for it and I'm gonna get the 550 lumen. But if I can't find one of these, cause I'd really like to, cause like I said, this came in the Christmas present I got. I'd like to get monkey one of these. So if I have to, what I will do is I'll get the, you know, for 15, 16 bucks, I will get her one with the headlamp, you know, it's always good to have a headlamp, but I'm sold on these now. I do want to have another one of these 160 lumens.  And like I said, it's got, whoops, there's high, there's low and there's the flash mode. Now, the reason why I didn't show you that on this one, it's on or it's off, that's it. There's no modes. I didn't show you any modes on this one cause it's on or it's off, there's no modes. They're standard. Where that beam, however that beam shines, that's what it is. This, you know, you can open it up or close it. This is a great light. I'm sold on this light and the set band light. Like I said, these two lights, think about it, maybe in your application, you would rather have one of these. If you're Gator hunting down on Florida, that's a thing. I know if you're Coon hunting, you usually have your lights on your head, but let's say, you know, you've got a friend with you, he can shine this up in the trees with you. It's perfect for that. It's great on a boat. If you have someone that's out front holding it for you, shining down the river or the lake or whatever the case may be. It's a great light. Don't get me wrong, especially for the money. It's an awesome light. If you have a use for a spotlight, that's big. But as far as my go-to light, it is gonna be this one. Now we will still take this camping and night fishing and, you know, using out in the backyard, shining on the trees when it's storming, because we like to look at the trees. Now we both have one. So we will, because we call our camp, so this is not really a big deal for me to carry.  This is 300 lumens. This is 160 and you saw the comparison.  So, but we got a call today just real quick. Our kitchen, our cabinets and countertops, they're in. They actually wanted to come today. They was going to come this afternoon, but her husband or something had something else to do. And besides, then they said tomorrow, but I think Monkey wants to be here. Monkey's got to work tomorrow. She's got a big day, a long day. So they're going to be here next Monday. So Sunday, I will be bringing you along with me. We're going to rip these out of here and get everything ready for them to come in. They're talking like it's going to be one day. I don't know if it's only going to be one day or not. Now after that's in, I still have to change the light switch. I'll have to remove or relocate the light switch. I've got a, over at the stove, you know, there is a, there is a receptacle. It's behind our refrigerator right now that I will run over and it'll be in the side. You'll see once we get this all set up, it'll be in the side of the bar. That way I can plug in mixers and stuff like that. So anyway, just wanted to let you know that we're happy and we're excited. So no more call 911 up there. So there you go guys. I mean, my personal favorite is this one. Like I said, depending on your application, you may go, I can't never use that little thing. Now, as far as dropping it or longevity, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's, it's those arc trail. It's cheap Walmart stuff. Okay, so, but, you know, I've, I've bought Ozark Trail tents. We have one right now. It's been awesome. Every Ozark Trail tent I've ever owned has been awesome. I like Ozark Trail and Coleman because they're good products and they're affordable. You know, for people like me and you and, you know, affordable products and it is, it is aluminum. And I'm sure I'm going to be dropping it. And like I said, I believe it is water resistance. I don't, I don't think it's waterproof. This one's not waterproof. I don't even think this one's water resistant, though I have had it in rain with no issues. The hyper tough. I've never had any issues with that. And I've had it in pouring down rain. This, I wouldn't even consider it this. I don't think we'll have a problem with it. I used it the other night camping, used it and rain a few times. Never had an issue with it. So like I said, depending on your application, I'll let you be the judge of which one you want to buy. But in my situation, if you, if you are in, you know, if your application calls for it the way mine does, this is the one you're going to want. I mean, even for boating, this would be fine. But speaking of boating, if you're boating and you're going to have to have another person up front, if you're gator hunting, you're going to want this. You know, this is the one you're going to want. But for backpacking to keep in your toolbox or your glove box, you're not going to want this. You're going to want this. So, you know, if you're used to using a smaller light and that's your go-to light is a smaller light like a tactical light, which is just like a tactical light. Only it doesn't say tactical.  Now it looks just like a tactical light. How would you spray paint that black? Who the hell's got to know, right? But I don't care because I'm not a cheap asset. I just can't afford the good stuff. And in my opinion, if this thing lasts me a year and I got to buy another one and it lasts me a year and I got to buy another one last me a year, you know. Come on, think about it. $15 a pop, right? And three years. So you're looking at what, $35? Now I had a friend, he swore by his tactical lights, but he had to buy one every year and a half to two years and he was paying $70 to $80 for him. So I would still be ahead of the game if I got to buy one of these once a year. You follow what I'm saying?  If you're used to use the smaller lights or just sticking your toolbox or whatever, you're gonna wanna go for this. Stay away from these things, guys. I can't believe they're still selling them, but I mean, think about it.  And then another battery is $3 and these batteries don't last long. I guarantee you, if I left this turned on for an hour, it'd be dead. I'm sure I got 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes on this one and it's still bright as hell. This one I know I've got about, let's just say 20 minutes on the charge on this one, maybe even more and it still won't strong. So that's what I like about this. This is rechargeable. So USB it, so that's a good thing about this. So these two lights are well, well worth the money, guys. The HyperTuff, it is a, what is it? It's a model 9930. Let me check here and see just to make sure. I'm pretty sure that's what I looked up. Yeah, 3.7 volt rechargeable. It's a 2000 milliamp lithium ion battery. It's a 7.4 watts. And yes, it is the model 9930. Now this one, I don't know what the wattage is or the milliamp hours because it's, it takes three 1.5 volt AAA batteries. So whatever that would be, the rechargeable is gonna have more milliamp hours. So that's probably why this is not, it doesn't say anything about that because each battery's different, you know, in milliamp hours. So yeah, these two are well worth the money. They both get a thumbs up, but for my uses, this is gonna be my go-to light. We will use this on the boat. We will use a camping. This is gonna be my go-to light. Working on cars, trucks, whatever. Camping, night fishing, just whatever. This is gonna be my go-to light, like I said, and this is gonna be my second light. I'll call it my second favorite. Like I said, it's on or off. That's it. This one, I can adjust and everything. So I'll be using this more, but they both get a thumbs up from me, the HyperTuff and the Ozark Trail light. So awesome. Like I said, it's up to you guys. Whatever you're used to, Bob means I'm not trying to get you to switch from whatever kind of equipment you use or anything like that. I'm not trying to do that. And I'm not trying to push these certain products because I don't work for them. I'm not getting paid for it. But I will tell you, this light is a good light and this light is a good light. I know this light, her dad's had a couple of years, quite a few years. You can see it's dirty. I've dropped it. I'm sure he's dropped it. This thing has been in the rain. It is rubber, you know, right there. I've never had an issue with it. It does take a little while to charge, but I've never run it clear dead. So I just, just every so often, I'll just plug it in and let it charge up. So there you go, guys. That is my review. You know, if you're looking for cheap lights, those are the two I would recommend right off the bat.  They're not worth it, man. To me, in my opinion, they're not worth it. If I was made of money, I don't think I would go out and buy.  I can't afford those. I don't like Mac, so I will shop at Harbor Freight for certain things. I gotta get what I can afford. Craftsman and wrenches, they're okay. Nothing in my book compares to snap on. A lot of guys like Mac. I don't care for them. I don't like the feel of them. And I've broke more Mac tools than I ever broke a snap on. That's just for an incident. So like I said, I know this light here is longevity, it's awesome, and it's very durable. This, like I said, it's aluminum. It's, you know, I mean, it's almost the same weight as this. But so this, but backpacking, you know, I mean, you can take this or you're gonna take this. Car camping, you're gonna take this or this. You'll probably take this in all honesty, but I will take this because I can put it on my belt because you can get those, you can buy sheets for these things so they can stick in your belt. It's got a lanyard, a little lanyard. You can't put your hand through it. You can put your fingers through it and you can hang it on stuff. So anyway guys, enough rambling. I hope that helped and I hope you all have a great week and a better weekend coming up. So just keep in mind, if that helps you, please let me know in the comments below or if you have or if you used any of these products, please let me know in the comments below and we'll discuss it and chat about it because that's always fun hearing other people's stories and, you know, somebody might have had one of these that was pure junk because, you know, you can get bad ones. I just, I know this is a good one. Somebody might have one of these that just stopped working, you know, who knows. But I like to hear in the comments and it also helps our other viewers too to read through the comments and see who's had what problems or what the characteristics of them are and things like that. So please feel free to comment below. I would appreciate it. And with that being said, I'm going to say Shebear, the myth man legend. I'm gone for now. You all have a good one and we'll chat at you soon. Bye-bye and take care.


Hi, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Sink Tech Hawaii on a given Thursday, and it's Talking Tax with Tom. That's Tom Yamachika. He is the president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, and we gain so much knowledge and insight from him. Welcome back to the show, Tom. Morning, Jay. How are you doing? Thank you for having me back on the show. Absolutely. So let's talk about the title question is what's happening with the procurement code in the state in the face of all these chained proclamations? The finding terms, Tom, what is a proclamation and what is a chained proclamation? And then I'm going to ask you, what is the procurement code? OK, so today we're going to be talking about not so much the tax part of state government but the spend part. The procurement code, which is what we're going to get to in a moment, tells us how we can spend the money that the legislature has appropriated. But before we get there, we probably realize that we're under a state of emergency. And the proclamation is the piece of paper that the governor signs to tell all of us that we are under a state of emergency. And he then, with that piece of paper, invokes some emergency powers that are granted to him under our laws. Whenever you have an emergency, the governor has the right to do a few extra things. So one of the extra things that he gets to do in an emergency is he gets to spend laws that interfere with the orderly operation of emergency response. Things that make it tough or inconvenient or inappropriate to do when you have an emergency. But the initial emergency proclamation was, as you might imagine, some months ago. So emergency proclamations only last for 60 days. But what the governor has been doing, he's been chaining them. And what I mean is, before the end of the 60th day, he issues another emergency proclamation saying, oh, we're still in emergency. I still find that we're in emergency. And then the end date is 60 days from that proclamation. We are now on the 12th supplementary proclamation, which is the 13th in the series. And this obviously has been going on a very long time, since each one can last up to two months. So we're on the 13th, 12th supplementary proclamation. And there are 20 pages of laws that are suspended. And just as a general overview, one of the things that we talk about in government is buying things, or procuring things for the use of government. And this is governed by a procurement code that tells people when they need to go out for bids, what kind of competition are they looking for, when you have exemptions to competition, and when losing bidders can fight and do what's called a bid contest. In one sentence, in the 12th supplementary proclamation, and of course in a few before that, the entire chapter constituting the state procurement code is made inapplicable. It's suspended in total. So where does that leave us in terms of the government being able to buy stuff? Well, what that means is the government can buy what it wants, when it wants, and is answerable to know it. Wow. So in an ordinary time, pre-COVID, the procurement code had some troubles. I mean, there was always a lot of criticism of the procurement code. And as you say, there were contests under the provisions for contesting the awards of procurement code contracts. It was never a wonderful time. And a lot of people didn't like it. A lot of people criticized it. There have always been efforts to try to fix it, make it more equitable, make it more, we call it, incorruptible. More fair. More fair, thank you. And it never really came to rest. And I don't know, I haven't done the data on this, but I imagine that the number of contested cases and other litigation that flows from disagreements under the procurement code in this state have probably increased, just as state spending has increased. And I suppose this happens in a lot of states, because every state has a procurement code. But I suggest, and I'm interested in your thought about it, is the procurement code has not been a better roses here in Hawaii, am I right? Well, it's better than nothing. And nothing is what we have now. Yeah, let's talk about that. What you imply in your comment that what the governor could have done is just take out the part, for example, that slows everything down for the three bids, whatever it is, the bidding process, and streamline the bidding process. But I guess he didn't want to go to the trouble of doing that. What I think the governor should have done is that if the agency had a real bona fide emergency purchase, something they had to do because of COVID-19, you could have the director of the agency certify, hey, we're doing this because of the COVID-19 emergency, and then it goes through without being burdened by the law. But the procurement code applies to all government purchases. It applies to public-private partnerships. It applies to the stadium. It applies to RAIL because I think it also applies to two city procurement. So why do you think he cut it with this kind of dull ax and by just taking it all out in total right away in one sentence instead of done a more surgical job on it? My guess, and it's purely a guess, is that he went to his agency as in he says, OK, now that we're in an emergency, what has prevented you from doing your job? And one of the comments that came back was, well, we've got to go out for bids and do emergency purchases and stuff. And the governor said, OK, fine, we'll get rid of that. They come back and say, well, people from the press and from the public pester us for information and government records all the time. OK, we'll get rid of that, too. Oh, we have difficulty under the open meeting law, the sunshine law, because we're not even opening the buildings. So how can we get the public in there? OK, fine, that can go, too. And it went something like that. A wish list of whatever troubled anybody, we just repeal it, make it disappear for the duration of COVID. That's what it sounds like. It's the easy way. It didn't require a lot of work. I mean, nobody sat and drafted on this and nobody sat and figured out what residual provisions should stay in place. That's interesting. But I think, arguably, he's going on trust. He's saying to his agencies, and I suppose he's saying to his bidders, I'm going to trust you to be fair. I'm going to trust you not to rip off the state. I'm going to trust my agents here, my officials, to behave in a way so that there is accountability and fairness.  No, not at all. What was his expectation? I think the first thing that the expectation was was to shut off the information flow. It's too much trouble. We can operate better if nobody's bothering us. So that's why, I mean, that's consistent with, number one, suspending the open records laws, suspending the meeting laws with the chief of staff, Lidita Qayama, going down to the agencies and telling everybody to shut up. I'm talking about the procurement code now. I mean, don't you think his expectation was that people would act in an accountable and honorable and honest manner? I suppose. Whether they actually do that is very much a question. My next question, I mean, are they? Well, we don't hear. That's the problem. The information flow is pretty much stopped. Although the governor has since walked back on his open records request prohibition or suspension. So one side, there's actually three sides to this. One is we're going to suspend it in substance procurement code. Two is we're going to freeze the information. So you won't be able to find out exactly what we're doing. In order to let these contracts. And I guess the third is, does it work? We have emergency things. Nobody can deny that. We have emergency things in terms of getting testing in place. We have emergency things and getting tracing in place and people to do it, both the machinery and the people. And then we have emergency things in terms of managing the lockdown, like quarantine, like the enforcement of the rules that apply to the public and tourists and the like. So query without the procurement code, this kind of dark hole there, is it working? Is he actually having a benefit? Is he able to achieve testing in a way that would reflect the free for all notion of doing it without the procurement code? Is he able to achieve tracing unfettered by the procurement code, a better kind of tracing? Is he able to do the deploy and do what is necessary to handle the enforcement of these things and quarantines in the absence of procurement code? Is it working? I think that's very much open to question. The whole contact tracing effort before pretty much fell flat on its face for several reasons, probably none of which had anything to do with the procurement code. There's now a new leadership in place. The four-person team, as I read, that is handling the contact tracing response. One of the four is not within government. And it seems to be working better. But again, I'm not really sure that the procurement code had anything to do with it. Troubles me on that is that for a time, thanks to some special federal money from the Surgeon General, we were able to do a free testing. And that stopped suddenly without a replacement, without any continuity. And now that's no longer available, no longer happening. It strikes me that if you wanted to continue it, you'd have to acquire test kits. And you'd have to arrange people to make that happen. And that would be covered by either a procurement code process or no procurement code, one way or the other. And I don't see anything happening to replace the Surgeon General's Initiative. So where a few weeks ago, I could have gotten a free test in a number of places very quickly, very easily, that's no longer available. So I'm saying, why didn't the state continue that and perpetuate this very important benefit? Well, that's a very big question. I mean, we had talked in an earlier show about the appropriations that the legislature had made of the emergency monies that we got from Uncle San. And how a number of them were a line item vetoed by the fifth floor. And that kind of left me scratching my head in and of itself, because why are you restricting your own agency's flexibility to use the money that never came from you in the first place? But that's what they did. And it really doesn't, it's not obvious to me where the authority for any further spending over and above the caps that were line item is coming from. I don't think the governor has inherent authority to spend money. He's got to be appropriate at that by the legislature. That's a job. Why do I feel, Tom, that if you were the governor, or if I were the governor, or if the two of us were working together as governor, we would have found a way to perpetuate that test program, because we would have realized it's critical to suppressing the curve. Right. I mean, what is currently happening is, again, very much open to question. There is new leadership. That said, new leadership hasn't been in place very long, and we're not really sure what they're doing.  You know what, Tom, I don't agree with you about that. We're in an emergency. You mentioned that. All this is an emergency. I wouldn't give them any time. They have to hit the ground running.  That's really not acceptable. They have to do it right now. They have to step in and do it right now. Furthermore, I don't think if you asked a person on the street, who are they? He would know, or she would know. They haven't really talked to us. They haven't said what their plan is and what they intend to do and how they want us to be confident and why. I don't think that's acceptable. We're in an emergency. Nobody is telling us, nobody is doing anything. They're all getting ready for some next chapter. Not acceptable. Yeah, I agree with you on that front. I mean, we are in very trying times and we need swift responses and we don't seem to be getting it. If that means they have to work 24 hours, work 24 hours, lives are at stake. This is not casual. There are no weekends here. Anyway, that's- Yes, the virus doesn't recognize weekends at all. Yeah. So anyway, let's go to the next one, tracing. Tracing is very problematic. And I suppose that in a world of procurement code, you would go out and you would get machines, you would get software, you would hire people, you'd have to go through all that process and it would take you a while in the state of Hawaii to organize a tracing program with the machines and the software and the people and the space, I suppose. And now we have a bit of a scandal, a disruption, call it, of what was going on before, which was inadequate. And we're supposed to be, now we're supposed to be tracing. And so my question to you is there's the lack of the procurement code because of the emergency, the chained emergency proclamations help. Have you seen it help? I haven't seen where it makes a difference. But again, I'm not really questioning the need for speed in procurement when it comes to actual emergency stuff. I'm questioning the need for getting rid of the procurement code in areas where there is no emergency.   And both of those projects are going to involve billions of taxpayer dollars with a B. I got it. Well, you mentioned there's been what, a dozen of these proclamations and they've pretty much all said the same thing. We are repealing temporarily the procurement code. So if anybody there on the fifth floor was listening or thinking about this, they would say, well, you know, maybe that was a little bit too broad. Maybe we really don't care about rail right now. We care more about testing and tracing and quarantines and enforcement of these rules, like safe space. And so maybe we should revise this general statement and the proclamations, all of them, one after the other all chained together. Maybe we should get smarter about it and limited. So it doesn't apply to rail and it doesn't apply to the stadium. It only applies to things that are truly emergency. But that hasn't happened, has it? No. The, and as you said, the reaction of the administration has been to eliminate stuff with a broad brush. We're not just getting rid of the part of the law that impedes our ability to function in emergency. We'll get rid of the whole law. Yeah. The entire chapter goes down to 2Bs. Right. And we'll make it open swath here. It's the parting of the Red Sea, no law. On the other hand, now that we have this open channel without law, we actually don't do anything. That's very troubling to me. We should have found a way to obtain test kits galore here for everybody as much as they wanted and free and apply all the resources necessary to test everyone anytime. We should have done the same thing with tracing. We should be tracing galore. And I can tell you from the people I've spoken with in the tech community that the Department of Health hasn't really tapped into their expertise. It hasn't asked them to create the dashboards and the software and the tracing database functionality that could make Hawaii, you know, that we could suppress the curve. We haven't done that. And I would say our tracing program for all that I know and I think I do know is on yellow legal pads. That's how we keep a record of this. That's how our tracers trace to the extent we have tracers. Now, a real procurement would have involved A, emergency over the weekend overnight and B, it would have gotten procured, all these things that we need to do this right away. We haven't done it. We're a banana republic on this. And so we need to have more than two fax machines. Exactly. Receiving reports of the contact tracing program. Yeah. And I guess, you know, the other point, I'm not sure how it connects up. Maybe you can think of how it does. I mean, is the enforcement of these rules, the enforcement of social distancing, the enforcement of masks, you know, the enforcement of the quarantine. You know, I firmly believe that when a tourist tells you, hey, I'm not getting pre-checked, but I will stay in my hotel room for two weeks after I get to Hawaii, looking up at the sun in the sky and the surf and the ocean and the hula girls, I'm gonna stay in my hotel for two weeks. I don't believe that's being done. I don't know how the police can ever enforce. And we have, one of our hosts goes out on Waikiki Beach with his cell phone. And he takes pictures of all these people on the beach without masks and without social distancing, only a few yards away from the police station there on Waikiki Beach. And you say to yourself, exactly what resources shall we be putting into trying to enforce the quarantines or the social distancing rules or the mask rules? It's really remarkable. I don't know if that's subject to what we're talking about here today, the procurement law, but it's certainly a failure. In fact, I think we have a multiple, a multilateral failure of our efforts to stop the COVID. Well, I mean, certainly the loosening of the restrictions on the procurement code was, you know, looking at it charitably, intended to help speed agencies' response. But I think you bring up a great point that okay, where is the agency response? We got to see it. We got to see that it's coming and it's coming quickly and it's coming, you know, in the speed that is normally associated with the emergency that it is. Is that happening? No. No, and frankly, if I was procuring, you know, I did see one advertisement on television and said, where am I asking? It was by the state health department. But I mean, I think they ought to be literally covering the media with warnings, with dramatic warnings, emergency warnings, about having people follow the rules. People are not following the rules. They say that the police have given 44,000 tickets out. Actually, most recently, 55,000 tickets, you know, for violation of social distancing or masks. Whatever that is, whether it's true or not, it's not working. Surely there's a way to make that work. And people are snubbing their nose at it. Tourists are snubbing their nose at it and nobody is applying the resources and the will, you know, to make it happen. If we made it happen, we would be able to suppress the curve, for sure. Yeah, one of the things that helps in the enforcement effort is trust in government. You see it on Kauai. People trust their government in Kauai. You know, the entire population turns into vigilantes and they're getting a lot better in terms of enforcement because you take off your mask in view of somebody on the street.  You know, walk with it as it happened. So Tom, here we are talking about the procurement code and how it's been effectively repealed for the duration really, whatever that may mean. I mean, whether it's three months more or six or nine or a year or more, who knows whether a vaccine will work or even be accepted by the public. But my question to you is if you were running this, if you were running the law end of it, the procurement code end of it, what would you do? I mean, the answer may be obvious from our discussion, but here at the end of the show, I would like to ask you that. What would you do? Again, I would go back to something along the lines of, if it's a real emergency and it can be certified as such and probably be by the department head or wherever, let it go through. But if it doesn't have anything to do with the emergency, follow the rules, like the literature enacted them and was signed into law beforehand. And what about the funding? I mean, you're into that for the tax foundation, right? I mean, would there be a question of funding and to the extent that funding is necessary, even quote, emergency funding and quote, in the context of all that we've seen come and go this year, what would you do to make sure there was funding? Well, we would, I think need to get the legislative leaders and the governor on the same page and figure out who's spending what and if the governor is basically going hog wild and saying, well, I don't really care what the legislature does.  You know, we need something to ensure that our system of government just doesn't break down. Because it's, there's a danger that it would devolve into some kind of dictatorship. Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, to me, the takeaway from all of this is that emergencies like COVID test the quality of our leadership and we can see much more clearly how qualified our leaders are. They also test our adherence to the rule of law and to our respectful law. And I guess in this case, you can- And our confidence in government, yeah. Yeah, we haven't done a good job. So this is good that we have this discussion and we take a look at it. I hope somebody's listening, Tom. Very important points. Thank you very much for appearing today and for this discussion. And thank you for having me on the show, Jim. Aloha.


We spoke about something that he and I both have great passion for, which is sanitation. You know in India the Swach Bharat Abhyan. Mr Modi is the number one change maker in the sanitation space globally. Absolutely number one. There's no one who comes close. And I'm not a strong political person as such, but in terms of his social impact in this very important field, no one in the world has come close. The Swach Bharat program is the biggest sanitation infrastructure program in human history. Nothing comes close. You know Mr Modi's impact to create social will and political will for this issue in India has been enormous. And I think this social impact is unquestionable. This is one of the most important things that I've seen happen in India in the 15, 20 years that I've been visiting your country.


But there are moments how close my daughter cried, seriously, because my real mom would call me and she wouldn't want to hear anything done. Give it, what are you waiting for? Doris is like, what is it? You know and when this is not a pleasant news to talk about but then unfortunately I have a first cousin who have only one child. Unfortunately she lost the child. When she lost that child it became a topic like I was a family topic. Everybody calls me and use that as an advice why I should add more kids to mine. And I wasn't in a position to explain what I was going through either. So I always take it to cry.  I go to Facebook and fool social media and fool my pains away. Yes basically I will be fooling with friends in buses and laughing or as if I am aimless, no. The pain was too much to bear. So that was the only thing that was sustaining me at the point. There are points I am on Facebook fooling. I am in the hospital bed like after miscarriage. I am covering the hospital bed but I can't put that in the social media. So you wouldn't know where I was at that particular moment.


This study examined the effectiveness of PITACs, a new type of drug designed to degrade specific proteins, by studying their interactions with two targets, SMARPA2 and BRD4. By analyzing the ternary complexes formed between these targets and PITACs, researchers were able to determine how the structural features of the PITACs affected their ability to bind to the targets and degrade them. They found that the more tightly bound the protac was to its target, the higher its degradation rate. This suggests that the size and shape of the PITACs can be used to optimize their degradative properties. Furthermore, they developed a computational model to estimate the amount of surface area of the ternary complex that is buried within the interface, which correlated well with the measured binding affinity. These results provide a framework for optimizing PITACs for maximum efficacy. This article was offered by Ryan P. Wurz, Won Rui, Ken Delamaja, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Welcome everybody back to the independent investor channel. This is really where the lion's share of the wealth has kept and These accounts were started with $1,500 some about 12 13 years ago or so and they've sizably grown up to a hundred thousand dollar accounts Looking at about 130 in this account I'm glad to profile the holdings for you guys take you in and and share with you guys what we've been able to build over time Certainly don't want you guys tune in into a message like this and saying you can build something like this overnight. This has not This has been built over a number of years some monitoring some work has gone into building this portfolio. I approach Investing that way I approach it as a wealth builder And if you're willing to kind of resonate with that idea that you don't need to be Trying to get rich overnight Approach it with some discipline and some scale You can render the same results as maybe maybe even better And that's the beauty of it is sharing a message that I know can impact The masses out there looking to get involved in investing for the first time very cool stuff So we'll drop you into the account and show you how we're progressing This is a pocket of wealth in one of my self-directed. I will say again self-directed Directed Roth IRA accounts the designation over the account is self-directed. So I don't get charged for any of the Buying and selling activity that happens within this portfolio. I don't get charged for any of the funding that goes on in this portfolio Finally, I do not get charged for any of the dividend reinvestment programs that goes on within this portfolio, which is super super important to me I basically invest for free in this in this account The only fees that I would incur on the very bottom line is the little bit of fee that I own The expense that I paid a vanguard, which is point zero three T on the vanguard's S&P 500 I also own the VBK, which is a small cap index. There's a small Expense that's associated with that. I believe it's point two six So That's it to own the single stock. There is no charge for that. I get my dividend reinvestment for free I've bought the stock for free. I can trade as I will in this and whatever profits are rendered are in fact Tax-protected profits. So we'll start with the passive element in this There's probably three or four elements within this portfolio to speak about from a from a pillar perspective What I mean by that is you don't necessarily have to look at the individual products and say, okay Well, Ryan owns Facebook now. I have to go buy it myself Facebook's a great company, but that's not the idea stay with me The idea is that you identify those elements or pillars within the portfolio or the account Specifically that I put to work and ask yourself. Can I put the same? Element or pillar to work for myself the answer is yes, okay Try to walk you guys through The thought process that's behind each of these and not just necessarily Come on to YouTube and say I own this you need to own it, too That's not constructive as a matter of fact. It can be deconstructive in a lot of different ways Okay, so the two passive elements within the portfolio. I'm not gonna get too crazy with this just shy of a $10,000 bill in the S&P 500 That's 25 shares. That's a nice position In this the vanguard small cap just behind it at 15 shares. That's about a $4,400 bill in small caps. That's it. You get the S&P 500 you got the small caps You got the entire domestic stock market From large and mega cap all the way down to the small cap Taking care of now it is small cap growth So it is a little bit tailored there if you just wanted to go ahead and buy the mix You could through VB That is a VB that's gonna have a mix of your growth and Value small caps so you can choose either way the vanguards value is VBR So those are the three products that cover the small cap market from a market cap perspective And you can seek out your exposure either way you can win on either with with any of the products to be honest with you That's just how I choose to go about seeking my exposure within this this account. It makes sense It makes sense. This is my wife's account It makes sense for me to put a little growth there Because I've got small cap value in my account, and I've also got some small cap exposure Within my thrift savings plan so it makes sense for me. That's it for the passive element the largest Position that I have in any of my portfolios across the spectrum is dividend growth This portfolio is reflective of that as a lion's share of the wealth is devoted to the dividend growth strategy For a lot of you guys that don't understand the dividend company is going to be one like a McDonald's, right? Where I've added in here 25 shares of McDonald's at $5,800 position a position like Microsoft $6,600 25 shares of Microsoft in here some big banks a JP Morgan falls under the dividend growth strategy Disney falls under the value investing Dividend growth strategy here at 30 shares so 5,300 in Disney Healthcare we've got Bristol Myers in the dividend growth old tech Cisco Nice 3% yield or which has done quite well just over 5,000 So cumulatively these companies add up to a pretty good dividend rendering within this portfolio Where I would say that dividend growth. Yes, is the lion's share of my portfolio. I would also stress the importance of recognizing that other elements have a real shot at adding to your bottom line and Emboldening this particular bucket and it can mean the same for you if you don't put all of your eggs in one basket in other words to derive a strategy that is all growth or All passive or all dividend growth if you have been with me a while You've known that I've been an advocate of doing it all the entire time I Don't I think at certain times you can say well, this is the best way and there is no other way and I think the market unfortunately gives that type of latitude to people to offer their opinion as ill-founded and and not fact-based as that is I think that's an unfortunate application in stock market investing in that all too often We pursue one specific strategy and we live and die by that strategy I say do it all if the bottom line is about money You're gonna have certain strategies that are making out like a bandit while others are suffering and vice versa The whole idea that over time your portfolio goes up and to the right. That's that's what it's all about So so Disney and you get Chevron in the energy category here and bold in that energy Holding up a little bit in the dividend growth category of mentioned JP Morgan Chase as well as Wells Fargo as a small step in position at 25 shares in the financials fintech with with visa is in fact the dividend growth company 25 shares there in that company Just kind of scanning through the list here. I've already mentioned McDonald's and Microsoft Realty income is the biggest real estate REIT Position that I hone quasi. I'm glad to own this within the Roth You could really start to build a position and realty income $680 is gonna buy you 10 shares of realty income. I think that's appropriate for any Roth out there. I Think it fits well. I think being that they're unqualified dividends really works well in a Roth I I highly enjoy owning the raw the REITs in the Roth's it works And help protect those unqualified dividends within the account. So good stuff Pepsi in the value category dividend growth. Absolutely and Nice dividend payer there fantastic investment at over 36 shares of that company healthcare Pfizer Some big Dow components really anchor this portfolio. I don't get screwy With my money nor do I expect you to do the same if you tune it into my channel to get the next AMC Or GameStop you're you're in the wrong place. I don't have a lot of attention to that I mentioned it really as a punchline really because I think that That way of speculating on the market is absurd and I know there's people out there that have made money and good on you I'm that that's awesome. You should sell it all and just copy what I do because what I do is good Investing that way speculating in that manner with your money. You can you can lose you can win either way But you need to ask yourself whether or not you win be a gambler or you want to be an investor, okay? I'll leave that answer up to you proctor and gamble there and the staples category the Dow component Works really really well United Health Group another Dow component at 10 shares And that really what rounds out the portfolio the final Dow components of Verizon and Walmart, right? Telecom and and Wal-Mart in the staples category as appropriate. So just a very very strong portfolio There's a couple elements of of hyper growth. There's large cap growth. I've gotten Facebook Which is the loan big compass a big position eighty five hundred dollars twenty five share position in Facebook and a couple positions that are speculative in nature Small and medium cap companies as appropriate so far being the one in the financials category down big I knew it would with the we're gonna just continue to hold that monitor it. It'll be fine long term We're just taking some short-term pain right now highly honest up on the upswing there 2200 shares of this Specific portfolio on highly on and that really rounds out the small cap growth within the portfolio So about a hundred and thirty thousand in this little dab of cash. That's really a Full review of this account the Roth IRA number one and You know, it's a lot of fun to roll these out and see how these accounts are progressing This is real money built up from an account that I started You know ten fifteen years ago or something, you know, it's amazing how fast life goes And it's amazing how fast your money will grow In in compliment to that time that's ever passing for each and every one of us So with that guys, I really appreciate your your time And if you like the message that we got coming through it and make sure and subscribe to the channel Leave your comments at the bottom of the video hit the notification bell the thumbs up on the video if you enjoyed the content Transparency where that we're putting through on the channel. Absolutely appreciate the support there Thank you so much for tuning into the message and good luck in your investment future


So good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here. So what I would like to talk about is some of the lessons that we learned. So the Triple O project, I'll get a little bit into the details of what Triple O is, but we're going to try to present today's. Some of the lessons we've learned while trying to containerize OpenStack as part of the Triple O deployment tool that some of us actually work on. As well before we get there, actually. So this is me, one of us, younger and naive. I'm not just naive. Thank you all again for being here. I work at Red Hat. That is my Twitter Hunter. I love feedback, so if you like the presentation, I know the app has some ways to provide feedback, but if you prefer to tweet me or email me, that is my Twitter Hunter, and that is my email. If you don't like the presentation, that is not my Twitter Hunter, and that is definitely not my email, and you can forget I was here. But jokes apart, really, if there's anything that you would like to provide, even if there's missing content, because you did it as well and turns out that you did it better than what we actually did, I want to know that. So by all means, feel free to contact me. I look forward to that. Couple of disclaimers. I tend to speak really fast, so I'm sorry in advance. I'll try not to drop any F-bombs during my presentation, but that might happen. And the last disclaimer is that what this presentation actually is, again, like a whole bunch of things that we learned that I kind of like tombed into slides in really short statements, and I'll try to explain those to you, but you don't really have to follow them all. They actually just worked for us, but they might actually not work for you. So again, if there's anything missing here, by all means, do alert us now. So Triple-O, you probably saw me adding this slide in the last 30 seconds before we started the presentation, because I realized that I had a whole bunch of slides explaining what we learned, and there was no slide actually explaining what Triple-O is, and some of you might actually not know what Triple-O is. So Triple-O stands for OpenStack and OpenStack. It is a deployment tool that uses OpenStack services wherever it's possible to deploy OpenStack as well. It is an upstream project. It is an official OpenStack project, an official deployment tool that you can use if you want. And yeah, and that is, I think, as much as I want to say about Triple-O, because I would like this presentation to be as agnostic about Triple-O as possible, and more about the things that you might want to consider when putting OpenStack in containers. So first and foremost, the why, I'll go through three or four motivations or things that actually motivate us to start doing this job here, to just work here. So there's deploying OpenStack, first and foremost, I believe. Deploying OpenStack is relatively easy, really. And the real hard work comes on day-to-operations when you have to keep OpenStack running. So whenever you have to upgrade OpenStack, whenever you have to do some changes or just have your users actually using OpenStack, and so you've got to maintain the lifecycle of OpenStack. That is the hard part. So this is one of the things that we kind of kept in mind when kind of diving into this topic and figuring out whether this was something that we really wanted to do or not. So one thing we would like to achieve by doing this is service isolation. So being able to have services, OpenStack services, or any other service that OpenStack depends on as isolated as possible from the rest of the clusters so that we can have more, I guess, run our control on the services and the way that we deploy those and the way that we run those. So service isolation and the dependencies isolation, so each one of these services that we install, either OpenStack services or other third-party services, they come with a set of dependencies that I have that we also wanted to isolate so that whenever there's an upgrade in process, we won't be updating dependencies that other services might still be depending on and probably breaking our environment. So these are all things that you might have heard already many times when it comes to pitching containers, but, again, this is actually stuff that we would like to achieve in our deployment and that we believe it is beneficial for OpenStack deployments. Ease of upgrades, again, many things we've heard before about when people pitch containers, but it does make the upgrades somewhat easier. It does not solve all the upgrades problem. There are many upgrades problem that you need to face or that you will face whenever you try to upgrade OpenStack, but it solves some of the problems when it comes to getting the whole package, getting the isolated service and actually running it and moving from one of the processes to another. And if you do it in a more distributed fashion, it does it like, I've not talked about whether you're using Docker or some COE or what container runtime you're depending on, but depending on what container runtime you're using or whether you're using a COE or not, it might also make your upgrades more dynamic and easy to scale by using the orchestration capabilities of that COE. And it provides also some deployment flexibility. So if you use a COE in this case, more specifically, like Kubernetes, for instance, then you won't be tight. So what we do right now, we have very specific nodes that are used for very specific services and those are pretty tight. So if you use a COE or Kubernetes that you have some extra flexibility because you can let Kubernetes orchestrate these services for you based on the way you label and the way you create your cluster. And again, I understand some of the things that I'm saying here might be over simplifying the whole progress, the whole process, but just bear in mind that the high level feature that we actually want to gain from doing this. And there is a scalability. And again, once you have, if you run these on Kubernetes or you run OpenStack on some other container runtime and you have the tools for scaling your nodes, it'll make easier for you to just tell the COE to go ahead and scale your services and add more containers to your entire infrastructure. And again, it is not as simple to scale on a computer and we know that, but for the rest of the API services and some of the controller services, it does make it simpler to actually add more nodes to your cluster. So these are probably the main reasons, hopefully I'm not forgetting any obvious reason, but these are probably the main reasons that we started like diving more into this. Besides all the feedback from users and people that are actually interested in running OpenStack on containers because they believe it runs better based on their own experiments and deployments. So once you've answered whether, why you want to do the whole thing and why you want to go down this road, the other things that we need to answer and this is a question that we kind of like faced ourselves is what exactly we want to containerize. So OpenStack is not just like a set of APIs. There's a whole bunch of other pieces that come into play whenever you deploy an OpenStack cluster. And there's all the OpenStack services, all the libraries and dependencies that OpenStack services depend on. There's all the third-party services that OpenStack depends on like databases, message keys, et cetera. And like even Liberti or like an OpenV switch, like all these things and tools and third-party software that OpenStack actually depends on to work properly. So three probably obvious ways to answer these is you can containerize some OpenStack services and like leave outside all the third-party services and some services of OpenStack you don't want to containerize. So you might want to containerize only the API nodes, the API services like Nova API or Glance API, Synod API, et cetera. Because those are probably the ones that will give you less trouble whenever you want to upgrade them, whenever you want to scale your environment and whenever you want to create configuration files, et cetera for them. Those are the ones that are probably easier to maintain. And if you go down this road, that means that you're gonna leave the more complex services outside and like Nova Compute and Synod Volume and let those run in the host because you know how to run them already. This is assuming that you have already a OpenStack cluster running already. And you will leave like all the third-party services running on the host as well, like MariaDB or RabbitMQ because containerizing some of those services that need to be highly available and that you need to provide some other guarantees for is harder when you try to move them into Docker or even Kubernetes just now getting the proper semantics to support stateful applications. So this is one way. So we'll give you a very hybrid approach where you just have like the API services that you might want to scale more and leave the rest of the things on the host so you have more control and they are closer to the metal, I guess. And then you can only containerize all the OpenStack services and leave the third-party services outside containers. And again, you go ahead and you containerize all the API nodes, schedulers, et cetera, et cetera. And then you containerize also the Nova Compute nodes and, sorry, the Nova Compute service and the CinderVolume service. And then you leave in the host services like Libbird or OpenTheSwitch or MariaDB, RabbitMQ, et cetera, et cetera. What this gives you is more consistency because you know that all your OpenStack, everything, every process that starts with OpenStack so that it's built by the OpenStack community, you know that you have all of them in containers and it gives you an extra consistency in your deployment and then you know that all the third-party services are running on the host. And this is not possible with every third-party service side. This assumes that if you're doing this, this assumes that you can talk to these third-party services using the network because you cannot, if you're containerized and unless you're running stuff in Docker, but again, I'm trying to keep this as technology-agnostic as possible, but unless you're running things in Docker that you don't really want to access the host directly from the runtime from the container. So, and the third option is containerizing everything. You just put OpenStack and all the third-party services in containers. And this is probably the hardest option because that means that you now have to figure out how to containerize MariaDB, RabbitNQ and all the third-party services like Liberty and OpenVswitch, which is a problem solved for some of them because people have done it already in other deployments and with other tools. But for other services, it's actually not a solved problem and it's something that the community, the OpenStack community has also worked on and tried to figure out in the best way possible. So we like hard challenges, I guess, and this is the option that we actually went with. And I guess one of the motivations behind this is mostly consistency. We want to eventually be able to have a fully containerized OpenStack deployment, including third-party services so that we have a very consistent, again, deployment that we can ship. And eventually, all these can also even run on whatever, like an atomic hose or something like that, that it only has and only supports containers. So that is kind of like the mindset where you can even have your own self-installed container that will do some magic stuff. But anyway, there is a way far in the future. What I want to say is that this is the option we went with mostly striving for consistency and trying to unify the tools as much as possible. And B also have some overlap with what other tools in the community are doing. Triple O is not the only tool doing this in the OpenStack community. So one thing that we actually wanted was to be able to collaborate with these other communities and as much as possible. Also, I'm overcaffeinated and I'm on a sugar rush, so I might talk more than usual. How are we gonna do this? So this is probably the fun part of the entire presentation, I hope, because this is where the actual lessons learned. And I don't think that this list is exhaustive or anything, but these are the ones that I remembered being problems or causing discussions among the team and upstream in the middle list. So let's forget the tools for a second. Let's forget that this is Triple O and let's forget that there are other tools doing the same thing. Let's review a little bit the architecture and how you wanna do this thing. So one of the things that we learned, but kind of like we didn't really fail here because we were already doing it as part of the bare metal deployment we use in Triple O. But one of the things you wanna keep in mind is that you want to label your nodes. This is something that you can, most like almost all COEs have, like you can put names and labels on your nodes and have sets of nodes that you will consider compute nodes and have sets of nodes that you will consider volume or storage or whatever. Do it. If you're running this on Kubernetes, for instance, don't just run your Kubernetes cluster and just throw open stack services at it and say like, hey, just go and be smart about it because Kubernetes is not going to be smart about it.  Or that is probably the recommended way to do it and that doesn't really exactly have to be that way. But that's what you probably wanna do. That's because more, because if that knows, if the Nova, if you don't do that and then the Nova Compute goes down, then you have like very inconsistent deployment where there are some virtual machines that are running but Nova Compute is not responding and then you don't even know the state is basically broken. It's kind of like, in my mind, when I think about compute, I think about Nova Compute and everything that Nova Compute depends on. So that's how I like to see this and it's just make it simpler to architect the entire deployment. So label your nodes, make sure that you use enough labels so that you can also tell your COE and assuming that you're using a COE. This doesn't really work with Docker unless you have another tool that will do that for you. But if you're using a COE like Kubernetes, you want to tell Kubernetes how to run the services but you want to also use enough labels so that you don't have to tell, so that you can explicitly tell Kubernetes where to run the service instead of telling Kubernetes where not to run a service. What does it mean? It means that if you're running, if you're labeling, if you only label your compute nodes, that means that for running your API nodes, you will probably have to tell Kubernetes, run these services in all the nodes that are not compute. You want to give it like probably positive filters or segments to the COE whenever you're running the service. So you want to tell it, go and run these service in the API level nodes instead of telling it, go and run the services in the nodes that are not compute. So just be smart about the labels and try not to overdo them. I think I even have a slide about overdoing labels. One service per container. We have one service per container and when I say one service, I don't mean Nova, Glance, Cinder. What I mean is Nova API is one container. Nova scheduler is one container. Nova compute is another container. LibreD is another container. So we have every service in a single container because we want them to be isolated from each other so that we'll have more control over a single service over each one of these services whenever it comes to you, whenever we have to manage the entire cluster. So this also makes, I believe, simpler the config generation because you know you want to generate in that container, you want to generate the configuration files for that specific service and you don't need to generate configuration files for more than one service because you have them bundled in the same container and also makes updating the image easier because, excuse me, because if you have two services in the same container, say like LibreD running with Nova compute in the same container, and there's a new version of LibreD you'll be forced to also restart the Nova compute service whenever you want to upgrade LibreD. The same thing happens if you want to upgrade the Nova compute and you don't really want to upgrade LibreD. So have a single service per container because it gives you more control. It's like having like a package per service in a bare metal deployment, I guess. Avoid containers placement as much as possible. I know I just said I'll label your nodes and tell your COE and where to put your containers and where to run them, but if you're using a COE, in the case you're using a COE like Kubernetes, one of the reasons for using a COE is so that it'll schedule services for you because the Kubernetes schedule is supposed to be smarter than you and it not always happens and but if you rely on it and you just tell it to go and run some of the services without telling it exactly where to run them, it'll balance the load and it'll try to run the services in the nodes that they're not extremely loaded, I guess, or overloaded with work and it'll help you scale them horizontally and it will give you the flexibility that we also talked about a little bit earlier. So telling like placing services manually is not really bad, but it's also not good to overdo that and it would be better just to let the COE make some decisions by itself, using the data that it has and the status of the cluster and the health checks and the state of the entire thing, the entire deployment. So try not to be extra, try not to be smarter than the COE, I guess. In some of these operations. Separate the bootstrap tasks. So one thing that if you run, well, actually, it's not really specific to open stack services. Like most of the services that you run, like databases, like open stack services, they have like some bootstrap operations that you need to go through whenever you want to run them for the first time. So if you wanna run Nova, you're probably going to install Nova first and then you'll have to create a database for Nova and eventually you'll have to synchronize the database and then and only then you'll be able to run Nova and I'm pretty sure I'm missing some steps in between, but there's this list of tasks, there's this list of operations that you have to go through before you're able to run this service. This is what I consider to be called the bootstrap task for these services and most of them, if not all of them, have them, at least for synchronizing the database. So you gotta run them at some point. If you have your service containerized and you don't have it installed in your bare metal, you'll have to figure out a way to run these bootstrap stacks, tasks from the container itself, which means, so when you install Nova, it'll install a tool that will help you synchronize the database, right? If you don't have it in bare metal, that tool is inside a container and one solution that some people have adopted is, well, you know, like when you run the container, we'll check whether this task and this tool have been run already and if it hasn't been run already, then we'll run it and then eventually we'll just run the service and it'll do that in a single operation. You don't want that, you don't want that because it is not, it'll be really extremely hard to guarantee the consistency of your cluster if you do that and because sometimes there might be race conditions if you run the containers at the same time, they might try to synchronize the database at the same time, so you want to have control over these bootstrap operations. You want to run them in very specific times. You want, they are bootstrap operations, right? You wanna run them once when you install the service and probably once when you are doing upgrades. Other than that, I just want to run the frigging service. So keep them in separate tasks and what we do now, the way we are doing it in triple L right now is we reuse the same container because it is the one that has the tools and what we do is we run the container with the bootstrap operations and we basically override the entry point so that we can run the bootstrap operations and once those operations have been run, once those tasks have been run, we then run the actual service.  I mean, unless you try to query the API, it's going to be fine to just run Glance API before you run the SyncDB. But again, we try to keep an order so that we follow the same consistent architecture for all the services. So first run all the bootstrap tasks and eventually run the container and you have to run these tasks manually using your tool, whatever tool it is that you're using. Don't put everything in the same entry point for the container because that's not gonna end well. Structure your images. So for this thing, we're actually using coli images and the coli images have a gray structure. When I say structure, I actually mean layers. You can have different layers in your container images and this is something you really want because so you can install common packages in the base layers of your images and eventually just install the service-specific packages at the very top of the topmost layer of your image.  So the problem with this structure though is that if you need to upgrade, I don't know, one of the base packages that are in the first or the second layer, you'll end up having to update all your images. And Ryan, I don't remember the number exactly but I think we're over 120 images for OpenStack, for base OpenStack deployment. So those are like a zillion of images really. Like if you try to, if you run coli build, it'll take two to probably three hours to actually build them all from scratch. So if you update one of the packages at the base layer, you'll end up having to run all the builds for all the images and that's gonna take some time. But you do want to have some structure in your images so that you can control what goes into each layer and you know what you're going to deploy at a very specific time and then you can have different versions. And it's very interesting how the layers work for the container images. You don't want to abuse mounts, which we're actually kinda doing. So you can, it's very easy once you have the containers and you run them and you need to solve some of the problems, like if you're running, if you are migrating from a bare metal deployment into a containerized deployment and you already have your database running on bare metal and then you want to run the container with MariaDB, there's a question of how do I migrate the data from the bare metal node into whatever storage container that I want to use for my containerized MariaDB. That is a question that needs to be answered and one easy solution is just mount varlib mySQL into the new container and let it access it, right? So it's very easy. It is probably dirty, but it works. And since it is easy to do that when you're using Docker at least, it might be easy to also do the same thing for many other things that you will need access for from the container. And one of the things that happened to us is that we ended up adding more and more and more mounts and bind mounts into the container. And now we have, I believe like we have many of them for different reasons, which like details that I really don't want like don't want to get into right now, but if you happen to be doing this, try to avoid using or abusing of the mounts and the bind mounts that you can put in container. One reason you want to avoid this is because if you eventually decide to move from whatever, like whatever container runtime you're using, like Docker for instance, if you ever decide to move from that into a COE like Kubernetes, then you'll have a huge problem because you're not supposed to be accessing the host path from the container. And if you do that and Kubernetes decides to just schedule your container somewhere else, your MariaDB container into a node that doesn't have the data, then you'll try to access VARLY, MySQL in a container that doesn't have your data. So there is a huge problem that is now going to be solved by just accessing the data from the host. So if you're not planning to ever move into a dynamic scheduling but service like Kubernetes, then I think you'll be fine, but again, like try not to abuse them because eventually, unless your deployment tool is extremely smart, eventually you'll want to move to something else and let the COE make some decisions for you and have that flexibility again, like that we talked about a little bit earlier. You want to set the host name into container. This was not extremely obvious to us, I think, or it just slipped our minds when we were doing the first implementation and we run into issues when we're using Puppet to do some stuff in triple O. And I don't remember exactly whether it was a Puppet issue or whether it was some other issue, but it happened to us that we were not really setting the host name and when we were running, when we ran the synchronization tasks and we tried to access the database to, actually when we tried to access the database to create the database for each service and this was done by Puppet now, I remember. And we, well, the connection was failing because it was trying to use the host name which was not set in the container. So remember to set the host names if you need and you can use the DNS, it's even better, but if you're not using a DNS and you just want to rely on your host names, it's perfectly fine, just remember to set them. It is important for your networking and your container life. Generate config files from the container. So I guess this is the only slide that I have that is very specific to triple O and the way we do things. But I think it is valuable to also mention what the solution we adopted here. And so one of the problems when working on deployment tools is actually generating the config files that will then be used by the services to run properly. And we're using, like I said, we're using Puppet for that in triple O. And the first solution that we adopted, so one of the things, so Puppet needs the software to be installed in the container or in the host to actually be able to generate the config file. So one of the problems we had is that if you try to generate the config files for a service that is not installed then it's not gonna be able to do it. One solution we adopted at the very beginning was we'll have this single container that we call agent where we're going to install all the open stack services and we'll keep all the config files in there so that whenever we run Puppet in that container it'll be able to generate the config file and then we'll copy those config files into the right containers. It is kind of like confusing, but there was this master actually agent container that had all the config files. It worked well for a single service. Then it just didn't scale very well. One of the reasons is that if you ever need to upgrade your container or your open stack cluster and you want to update the Nova API service you will also have to update your agent container because you need to update the config files in the agent container and regenerate the config files and then copy those into the new Nova container that you're running. So what we did is, this was actually a dense idea, what we did is we ditched that agent container and we installed Puppet in every container as the very base layer of the container image. We installed Puppet there and what we do is whenever we need to generate a config file we use the same container image that we used to run the services but we just call Puppet inside a container. It generates a config file for that service, for that specific version and it does it once and then we just reuse that config file in that same container. So it solves a lot of the problems that we had with the whole. And again, we want to simplify upgrades and using the agent container was actually just going to make it more complex which is something that we really don't want to do. So this worked very well for us. I'm pretty sure if you're using different technologies you're not gonna need a solution like this but if you ever run into a similar problem this is something that you could actually do and it works pretty well. Logging, oh my God, logging. When we started running the containers actually it was, we got to the point where we were running all the containers and it was like, okay containers are running. Now let's see if the services are actually running and the services are actually responding as they should be responding. And very few of them were. And then the problem is, how do we figure out what's going on in the container, what we fucked up I guess. And one of the things we found out is that when you got into the container is we actually didn't have good logging because the config files that we were generating were based on our old bare metal deployment which means that they were all configured to log into VAR log. And when you run a service in container like the standard way of doing it, the recommended way of doing things is that you will have your process logging into standard output and then you can just access that log using the Docker tools and stuff like that. Which was not the case for our services because they were configured to just log into VAR log and which meant that we had to get into the container every time, go and read the log files whenever, if they were there because sometimes they weren't even there because the user that was running the service inside the container didn't have permissions to create the file. So it was a mess. So I guess what I wanna say is that there's not a standard way or a consistent way to do logging in and out the site deployment. Not that I'm aware of. Most of the services just log to VAR log. Most of the deployments that I know of, they just log to VAR log. There are other deployments that use login services like Flow and D or an entire elk stack to store the logs which is perfectly fine. And when you're moving things to containers, this is not what we're doing but I truly believe you want to have a hybrid solution. You want to log into standard output and also log into a file so that you won't change entirely the way that your deployment works right now. And this is one of the other cases where we abused of the mounts because we basically got them, we basically mounted VAR log inside a container so that we would still log into VAR log inside a host and we would be able to reuse all the tools that we had already to analyze the open stack deployment. I'm not saying this is gonna stay like that but this is another solution that you have. Recommended way it is if you can log into standard output and also have your log files, that is probably the best way to do it. You can have like a data container where all your log files go and also have the services log into standard output. And this is great because then you can have all the tools like I mentioned before like Flow and D going through the containers and collecting all the logs for you and having them centralized in a single place if you really want. Or you can have like eventually like even have like the same open stack service login straight to Flow and D. And I think there's a plugin that you can put in the container runtime that will just do it automatically for you and there's a bit of a digress. But anyway, yeah, just bear in mind that log into standard output is great but I would also keep log into files because there are many tools that just parse files and analyze them in proper way which is at least the tools that we were using. And I guess one of the biggest questions is whether to COE or not to COE. So COE stands for containers orchestration engine AKA Kubernetes and services alike. So you have your container, you tell this tool, this COE to please run that container and it'll dynamically schedule the container for you. So one of the big questions is whether to go into some tool like this or just going to a simple container runtime like Docker or Rocket. And this rule depends on your taste and really what you want to do. Just bear in mind if you decide to use a container runtime and not depend on any COE, you'll lose some of the flexibility that we talked about before unless your deployment tool is smart enough to provide that flexibility to you. So you cannot tell unless you're using Docker swarm but you can tell Docker to just please go and dynamically schedule a container for you. You can tell a Docker demon to run the container for you in that specific node but you cannot give a Docker demon a set of nodes and tell it to just please run the container in some of these nodes and you decide what the best way to run it is. Which is something you can do with Kubernetes or Docker swarm or some other COEs. So our decision was we want to eventually run everything on a COE Kubernetes but before we get there we're just gonna start with Docker and start migrating bare metal deployments into container runtimes and eventually when once we've figured out some of the basic difficulties and challenges that there are with running open stack on containers then we're gonna start the migration into specific COEs. Things that we still haven't figured out quite yet. I think there's just one actually. This is the only one that came to mind is choosing the right storage driver. Like I said, like the first phase we're using we're mostly using Docker. One thing that we have not figured out yet is what was the best storage driver for this. Like there are good documentations we kind of know what storage drivers. So you can have different storage drivers for a Docker and the device mapper is the default one which basically writes things into a loop device which is extremely slow and is not good for production. But you have other options there. Like there's one that runs on ButterFest and there's another one that uses overlay to and there are different drivers with different performances and different recommendations for different environments like production and development, testing, et cetera. There are some that are faster but less reliable. There are some others that are more reliable but a little bit slower. So which one is the best one? Probably overlay two is the answer there but I don't believe we've done enough test on the CI environments upstream to actually have proper numbers to back this statement. And with that I'd say these are all the things that I believe were relevant to mention here and that I think they're great and we learned in the last, what, six months, seven months? I don't know, not really long but yeah. So do you have any questions? There's one. One more question. Could you kind of summarize the current state in terms of what's working, what's not working, what's targeted for which release? So I believe, so the open stack deployment, the over cloud deployment is actually, so we're able to deploy the other cloud on containers. The over cloud deployment is actually working. The CI is broken right now, I think, as of last week it broke but we've been able to run over containerized over clouds already, the target is to release all that during, what release are we in? Pike? Yeah, in pike. And we want to release all that by the end of this development cycle. And the key thing is migrating all the bare metal deployments into a containerized one so that we don't have to support two. And of course not break existing deployments or backwards compatibility, which is a key thing that we want to preserve in triple O. Liz? All right, I think there's another question. Yeah, are you going to use the COE to replace high availability services like Pacemaker? It's a very good question. And I forgot to mention Pacemaker, actually. So I think for now, for pike, at least, where the aim is to actually containerize Pacemaker or use Pacemaker remote for controlling some of the HA dependent services like MariaDB, Rabbit and Q, et cetera. And I don't know, hopefully when we move to the COE, yes, the goal is to replace Pacemaker entirely and just rely on the HA capabilities of the COE. More question about the, are you using load balancing on services like Rabbit and Q when you containerize them? Yeah, right, so we're keeping the same architecture for the pike release, at least. We're keeping the same architecture as we have for bare metal. So yes is the answer. And whenever we move to the COE, then again, we would rely on whatever is available in the COE itself like Kubernetes. You're very welcome. There's one more question. Are you working with the Atomic project yet? I saw it in the slides there for a second for kind of the containerize operating system. Yeah, I mean, like eventually, whenever we managed to containerize everything, you would be able to run OpenStack on Atomic in theory. I think we've done it, actually. Well, it won't work anymore because now we're depending on some stuff that runs on the host. But eventually, yes, you'll be able to do that. You should be able to do that, yeah. Not for pike though, just wanna clarify that. Any more questions? Alrighty, well, thank you.


Good evening. I am defying LMSM face-as-the-news. Now, let's start off with Lagos. Yes, Lagos said governor Babajideh Songhulu says his government will continue to collaborate with the private sector through meaningful partnerships, as well as interventions from all stakeholders to provide children with skills to prepare for a greater tomorrow. The governor gave the assurance today while speaking out his tears, children's day celebration held at the police college ground in Kejia, Lagos plus the correspondent Lav Ikuku Oyadoku tells us more in this report. Children's Day is celebrated annually on May 27 in Nigeria. It is dedicated to celebrating children all over the world. Just like previous years, this celebration drew schoolchildren from across the local governments and the local council development areas taking part in the memorable event not even the rain could stop them. Governor Songhulu was represented by his deputy governor, Dr Obafemi Hamzad. The governor assured the kids in his speech that his administration will keep working to provide them with the necessary skills for a self-sufficient future and make sure that no child was left behind. Songhulu added there are a number of initiatives and intervention programs for the steps children have been implemented by the state's administration since 2019. The governor used the forum to further re-echoed efforts put in place by his administration to improve teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools across the state. Songhulu also said his administration has reduced, through the Project CERO program, the rate of out-of-school children by reabsorbing them. Abolaji Abayome is a permanent secretary, ministry of education. Earlier in his welcome address, Abayome said legal state has recorded some enviable results in the performance of pupils and students from our public and secondary schools in the last four years. He attributed the performance to enhanced funding in the education sector by the Songhulu administration. Aside the traditional march past, other highlights of the children's day's celebration includes symbolic registration of Nazrin and primary one pupils to the state public schools by the governor, Love Ikuku Uyuduku. Plus, TV News.