Sometimes the charm is, sorry for the very unantiklimactic start, but my name is Tina Quill, and I'm very, very happy to be here with you guys today. So I was asked to talk a little bit about my life, speak a little bit about my career, sorry my little out of breath, a little bit about my career as a cellist, and as a soundtrack recording artist, so I don't know if anybody recognized that piece, well probably in the back. So that was a main theme to the new Wonder Woman movie. It first appeared in Batman vs Superman, and the main melody, even though it kind of sounds like electric guitar, it was actually cello. It was actually the electric cello, so I was very lucky to have been able to work on that main theme with Hans Zimmer. So yeah, I'll just start from the very beginning. I have about, oh god, only 13 more minutes. Alright, better hurry up. I have about 13 minutes to tell you guys a little bit about my experiences and some of the lessons that I have learned. The year was 1985, and that was when I was made in China. Yay, like a lot of things, right? And so my parents, they are both classical musicians, and they're also extremely conservative, and yay, okay. They're extremely conservative. They have since then been unconservatized, if that is a term, by myself, but so this is basically what happened. So they grew up during the Communist Revolution in China, and they were both in the Army, like most people were, it was a requirement to be in the Army, or they would send you out to the farms to work as a farmer for a year, so they both chose to join the Army and actually play in the Army Orchestra, so that's how they met. And you know, when I think back, I was thinking earlier this morning, I'm like, what? I know that my parents are very conservative, and I think Asian culture in general is more on the conservative side, but what is it that made them so extremely conservative to the extreme? And I think just growing up in that kind of Communist mentality where everything, nothing should stand out, standing out is bad. You only want to do what is acceptable, what is known, and so being classical musicians, their dream for me, of course, was for me to join an orchestra, which is beautiful, because I love classical music and I still do play classical music, but growing up, so I was forced and coerced, let's just say forced, I won't go into detail. There might have been some locked doors involved in keys, but I was forced to practice for usually about eight to ten hours a day on top of going to normal school every day since I was seven years old, and to be completely honest with you, as a child, I was extremely unhappy, because I think, of course, I wanted to go out and play, go on field trips, none of which I was allowed to go on, and for me, my youth was really just a training ground of you have to practice, you have to be the best, you have to be a good classical musician, which I'm really, really grateful for now, because I think it built the foundation of the technique and muscle memory that is really, really important to have as a musician whatever genre of music it is that you're playing. So, yeah, I practiced for eight to ten hours a day, and also my parents did not allow myself and my little brother to listen to anything but classical music, much like in communist China, where most types of music were banned, were outlawed, so I think it just kind of carried on from there, and so they said, you can't listen to anything, it's the devil's music, it's bad, and I think the most dramatic experience that I had music-wise that really affected me a lot was when I was in seventh grade, so I was a really nerdy kid, very shy, I would have died already if I was in front of an audience like this, I was super, super shy, always had a book in front of my face when I was walking down the hall, so I wouldn't have to look at anyone in the face in case they looked at me, and there was this guy in seventh grade, his name was Luke, and I had a crush on him because he was very strange, it was a very conservative neighborhood in San Diego that we lived in, and there weren't that many goths or punks, but he was like the token school goth, and he wore black lipstick, he had like long black hair down his shoulders, but he also had these really thick coke bottle lens glasses, he was kind of like this, you know, they always slide down his nose, so he was kind of a nerd and a goth at the same time, which I thought was, oh my god, that's like awesome, right? So he was a nerd goth, and I would like kind of follow him around sometimes during lunch, and at that point in my life, I was, I really was attracted to things that were different, I think, because when you put confines on something or somebody, a lot of times, obviously the psychological reaction is that you want to do the opposite, so I wanted, I was attracted to things that were strange or dark and aggressive, so I'm like, oh, I want to be cool like Luke.  So that was that phase just to give you a little bit of background. And so one day Luke says to me, he said, hey, have you heard of Marilyn Manson? And I said, no, who is she?  I'm like, okay, so I ran home, it was the Antichrist Superstar CD from Marilyn Manson. Just the name of it, I'm like, oh, this is like this is really bad, you know, but I'm just gonna listen to it because I think he's kind of cool. So I had this boombox in my room, a really old boombox that we bought from the next door neighbor at their garage sale, and had a CD player and two like tape decks in the front so you could like, you know, make your own little mix tapes, and I put the CD in, I turned it to the lowest possible volume, I put my ear up next to the speaker so my parents couldn't hear me from the next room. And I play the track, The Beautiful People.  Because I was so I was so closed in this environment of I don't want to say close mindedness because it's not their fault, but just, you know, stick with what you know, don't don't deviate from the norm, you know, so, and I just never heard anything like that. And it was so like raw and carnal and aggressive and just something that was, you know, a part of we're humans. So we are intelligent beings, but we're also animals, you know, so I think it just really spoke to the visceral part of me. And after I heard that I just started having this obsession with, I guess like alternative kinds of music, industrial music. But after that, so that was a middle school, but after that I continued, you know, being a good classical girl. And I did all the local competitions I played with orchestras. And then I received a full scholarship to USC for classical cello performance. So of course, I went that route. And then when I got to college, so up until then this, I didn't even know that this thing existed. So I played only classical music. And then when I got to college, I one day discovered because I saw this thing called internet and internet, I remember was like invented or first came out when I was maybe end of elementary school. I'm almost 33, by the way.  So and I remember they would send out these AOL disks. But again, my parents didn't allow me on the internet either. So I just really had no idea about anything in the outside world. And when I discovered that they had electric cellos, at the time I was completely broke. I had no money, you know, so I finally was able to get qualified for a student. It was like a union bank student USC credit card with barely just enough credit so I could buy myself a different electric cello, a cheaper model. And I started experimenting and it took about, I would say a good two or three years to figure out how to play standing up because the positions are very, very different from when you're playing sitting down. And just to gain experience, I posted ads on Craigslist because at the same time I also was trying to make even though the scholarship covers the tuition, it didn't cover living expenses, books, which are extremely expensive in college. So I had to figure out a way to support myself as well. So I put up ads on Craigslist every day. I was very adamant about making sure I posted every day, sometimes two or three ads a day, saying I am willing, you know, cellists for hire, I will do any kind of, you know, cello that you might need. So I played endless, you know, weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, engagement parties. It was just everything you could think of. And I also played with a lot of bands and artists on the Hollywood strip. And I think a part of that also at the same time, even though I was doing it for money, not very much, you know, 30, 40 dollars for a gig. It also helped train me to get used to a different type of atmosphere, to play in clubs. Because before then I'd only played with, as a soloist, with orchestras, you know, as a child cellist, and really in the classical environment. So it was a really, really great learning experience. And then I would say about three years after while I was in school, it became very, very difficult to balance work, you know, trying to make enough money to survive.  And then trying to experiment with the electric cello. So I dropped out of school. And my parents, you know, both of them had simultaneous heart attacks. They were like, what? Oh my god, what are you doing? But I really thought that I owed it to myself to try to figure out if there's possibly something that I could do with the electric cello. And so it, I was, you know, out of school for a couple years. And by then I had kind of been struggling, really honestly, struggling for maybe four and a half years. I remember at this point, I was living in a garage, but not a complete garage. Ladies and gentlemen, I was half a garage because the owner still parked this car in the other half. And there was this like divider wall, but it wasn't really a wall. It was like a plastic paneling that he probably got at Home Depot. And there was no air. There was no, oh, there's air. There's no air conditioning. There was no heat. There was a bathtub, which I thought was like super, super awesome. And there was a bathtub. And I loved jacuzzi. So I found this, it was like $10 from a really strange discount catalog. And I said, turn your bathtub into a jacuzzi. And you plug it into the wall. And it literally, there's like one little stream of bubbles that kind of comes out. So there's no pressure, but I would like, I remember I pushed my back against him and be like, yeah, I have my own jacuzzi.  So there was a bathtub. There was a toilet. In the kitchen, in the kitchen, there's no stove. There's no fridge. So I had a mini fridge. I bought one of those hot plates from a Tarjay for, I remember at $23.99. And I'm like, score. So I, and the rent was $6.50 a month, including utilities. And I just, you know, any money that I made from gigs, from these Craigslist gigs, I just put away to try to, I guess, conserve so I can figure out a way to spend it to put it into my own career. And then, so, you know, you have four or four years of that. And I got to the point where I'm like, this really isn't working, you know, like every month I was struggling to figure out how to pay rent and just really, really, no one likes to live like that, right? Like shopping at the clearance sections of grocery stores. And so I said, I need to put everything I have into this like vision that I have and figure out if I'm just delusional. And if I am, I'm going to go the classical route like my parents wanted me to. I'll go back to school because they still offer. They said, if you want to come back, you can come back. You know, I'll be a classical cellist. I'll join an orchestra. And so in the year 2009, so this is five years after I moved to LA for college. I put all of my life savings. And at that time, it was a little under $6,000, which, you know, was a lot of money to save for a musician. And I put it all into this music video, which you can see on YouTube. So my very first music video is called Queen Bee. And it is a heavy metal version of the flight of the bumblebee. And I actually had like a dream, not to get all, you know, fru fru on you guys, but I had a dream about what it would look like.  I was like running to Ralph's in the morning trying to buy the bagels and stuff. So I really did as much of it myself as possible. But anyway, long story short, my thought was that, okay, if I put out a video where I can show people what it is that I want to become not when I'm what I am right now, but I want to play electric cello. I want to be kind of like the equivalent of what a lead guitar player would be to a band, you know, and my dream was to play with either Marilyn Manson or Ramstein or Metallica. And I thought, okay, maybe if I put up a music video on this new website called YouTube, maybe if I do this, somebody will like see it and they'll show it to them, and then they'll invite me on tour and then my life will be complete, you know, and it'll be finished. So, so I did the video and I waited for about a week after it was released. Of course, I didn't get a phone call from any of these bands. And I thought, Oh, Lord, you know, I've that's it. I have no money. I'm broke and nobody wants me. So but it was like eight days after the video came out, I got a phone call. And it was Hans Zimmer. And at that time I did not this was in 2009. So I did not I actually honestly didn't know who he was because to me, I didn't even think about soundtrack music. I thought music just magically appeared in TV shows and movies. It didn't occur to me that there was this entire industry, you know, a huge multimillion dollar industry behind score score work. And he said that he had seen my music video and that he wanted to know if I wanted to be a soloist on the score for Charlotte Holmes, the first one. And I said, Yeah, of course. So I went in and then two days later, another composer, John Debney, who wrote the music for the new jungle book movie, the live action one, Passion of the Christ. And he at the time he was working on Iron Man 2. And he actually wrote to me on Facebook. And he said, Hey Tina, I'm John. I saw your video. I was wondering, instead of hiring an electric guitar player, I saw your video. I thought maybe you could come and play some solos on the new Iron Man 2 soundtrack. And I thought, this is really strange. This was not my intention at all. But that's just kind of how it happened. So when people ask me, Yeah, like, what made you want to get into the soundtrack world and recording world? And I was completely by accident. And then after that, this was, I would say two years later, I also received a call from the Cirque du Soleil. And I did run away and joined the circus from 2011 to 2013. I was in the Michael Jackson, the immortal world tour we played here in Atlanta. I think that was back in 2012. And also the same thing I asked them, I'm like, because usually you have to audition, you have to go through a whole process. And they said, No, we saw your like really crazy video on on YouTube. And we had to edit some parts of it out to show our, you know, our casting people. But could you do something like that for one of our shows? And they offer me a position on that show or two other shows that were in development. And of course, I took that opportunity because it was like, you know, regular income for a while. And funny enough, my parents, that was the first time that my very conservative parents actually, I guess they approved. And I think it's extremely ironic because my character in the Cirque du Soleil show was kind of this alien. And so it was like an alien electric cello player. And I had this Swarovski crystal outfit that was designed by Michael Jackson's wardrobe designer who did all the costumes for the show, except the the pants, it only had one leg and the other pant leg, like half a butt cheek was hanging out. And so it was not a conservative outfit. And then I was wearing a bra. And so it was a lot of skin. And I thought my parents, again, it's just one heart attack after another. But they were actually okay with it. And the reason was because I was an employee. I got paid every two weeks, I had health insurance. And they said, Oh, you have health insurance. And I said, Yes, you get paid every two weeks. I said, Yes, they're good. So, so, you know, and like bless them now they're extremely they're very, very supportive. Oh, God, I think I'm out of time. Sorry, guys. All right, I'm going to try to wrap this up. And so anyway, I did that. Then I came back from the circus. And I, while I was in the Cirque du Soleil, I started studying and taking courses online in investments, you know, in stocks, peer to peer lending. And so that's when I started, I spent, I had this app. It was called my budget app. It's a free app. And I spent I kid you not $20 a week for two years. That's all I spent. So I would take money from money, not money. Sorry, I would take food from craft services, from catering. Hey, no shame, not too much. You know, I needed to leave food and stuff for the other acrobats. But just a little bit. And I spent literally nothing and I invested everything. So that was really also the beginning of my passion for I guess, I guess, a wealth building.  So I need to I need to hurry this up. Well, I'm going to be in a panel, I think around two o'clock in the Hanover room later today. So I'll talk more then. I think I will play one more song for you guys. Is that OK? OK. This is from my absolute favorite TV show. I did not play on the original score for this just so you know, so you guys know. But this is kind of my version of it. It is Game of Thrones. So just give me 20 seconds. OK.


Welcome to the Monday, October 7th meeting of the Montpelier Design Review Committee. Our committee, I'll let the staff and members introduce themselves. First of all. Hannah Smith. Meredith Crandall. Staff. Stephen Everett. Eric Gilbertson. Benjamin Cheen. Our committee is advisory to the Development Review Board, so we will look at each of the applications and move them forward. Do I hear any other comments ahead of time, or do I hear approval of the agenda? Do I hear a motion? Second. All in favor of the agenda, raise your hand. We'll move forward to actually to the application for five West Street. Jonathan Hertz. Actually, the time we filled it out. You could come up here. They're not going to hear you. Come on up. That's the owner. Okay. That changed last Tuesday. We closed. Yeah. The time we filled out the application, the Hertzes still owned the house, but we were anticipating closing on October 1st, and we did. Oh, good. We filled up. I think the application. Congratulations. I'm going to make one comment. If you change who's talking, make sure the microphone's pointed at you. You can actually pull it forward. And describe the application and the changes you want to make to the house and garage. So it's twofold. One, the roof is in rough shape. Probably should have been replaced a couple years ago, particularly over the dormer. So we wanted to get a new roof, still the asphalt's architectural shingles. Same color. Same color? Yeah. No, it's slightly different. What's the color called? It's a gray asphalt. Yeah. The name is on there. It's a state gray. State gray. Thank you. We were going to go with gray because we're also, you know, considering or wondering about changing is the cedar shakes have to be, some of them have to be replaced and re-stained. As well as more immediate is the trim, particularly around the windows. It's chipping, so we're worried about getting that painted soon.  So I have the actual paint chips that they provided as some color options. And the interesting thing is you wanted some feedback from the Designers and Communion maybe some choices. Is that right? This is just an opportunity to know what, particularly like a 1910 home, I want to keep with what would be fitting, but the brown is very dark and the yellow with it doesn't look very good anymore. And so it's freshening it up. So that's why we picked that particular color roof. You're proposing to change all the yellow trim to white trim? Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yes. And then the shutters you want to keep would make them black. If we were to change the siding to a different color to like a light gray or something that looks New England color gray, then I would change the shutters to black. If we had to keep it brown for whatever reason, historically that's the color it's always been, or I don't know what color shutters would go with brown. Maybe keep them green then. So the biggest thing to start with is what color do you want the shakes to be, the shingles on the house.  Tell them what you want. What I think would look nice. If you take a raw shingle and put it on the house and leave it exposed to the weather, the side facing the sun will turn brown. The other side, the north side in particular with rain on it and moisture and not much sun will turn dark gray. It might take a year or two. It'll take a while. But if you look at Cape Cod houses on the Cape, most of them are gray because of salt water in the area near water, so you get more of that gray color than a brown. But again, anything facing the sun will turn brown just the patina from the weathering. So your pick if you want to go with a dark gray. I wouldn't go with a light gray is okay, but it tends to stain easier. You'll see stains on it. So that's what I really need to help with because basically I just ran over and grabbed some. And I think testing a few is important, but I was thinking of a light gray. There is another home on the green that did a dark gray. So we're open. So some sort of gray. Light gray is fine. Just understand your maintenance is going to be much higher. Okay, forget that. How many times over 20 years do you want to paint that? So dark gray. That's your call. This dark or it needs to be darker for the dirt. For the body color, the darker the better. Okay. For several reasons. If you look at the houses just up and down the main streets in town. And that's not a main street, but if you look at houses on the street, anything that's a lighter color, watch it over a few years. You either have to hose it off or repaint it because it tends to pick up dirt. A medium to a darker color won't show that as much. Okay. And then black for the shutters.  Some of the green shutters are so dark they're almost black. Yes, that's true. There's actually a color, Sharon Williams has one, that we like for lattice work. We like dark around the base and it's called green black. And it's a beautiful green color, but it's really, really dark. And it hides dirt really well, especially splashed back on a lattice against the ground. It's a color that paint has shuttered green, which is a very dark green. It's traditional in New England. Again, a color like that. Again, when you look at this color, I mean it may be dark brown, but in that it shows very dark there. But the advantage of it is lower maintenance and it hides just natural dirt that accumulates in houses have to be washed off occasionally. And the lighter colors just show it quicker. So, Dr. Gray, that's what I would like if that is fitting with that style house and what you'd like. I mean, I want it to look nice, of course. I think these are probably pretty close to original colors. We've done these scraping, and they're probably not, since you're still in the house for some hours. All right, yeah, we have the, I know the, the trim is, you know, beyond chipping and scraping. You can see the wood in a lot of places, and I don't see any other color, besides the yellow. These are probably the original colors for the house.  What brown is actually a yellow-based color. So, you have four groups, blue-based, yellow-based, and the yellow is fairly traditional with dark brown. But you can do, if you do a gray, you can do a cream color, but you don't want yellow and the cream color, because it clashes with the gray, but you can get a different base with the gray. And a good, you know, good paint store can give you some ideas about that. There are actually some of the paint stores, you know, any of them around here, have traditional color combinations that will show you if you pick a dark gray what colors go for trim, shutters, and everything else. So, you know, if you can do dark brown or dark gray, again, they're both traditional colors. I mean, you can do a lighter gray. No, no. I would, if you're going to go with white, I'd go with an off-white. It's a little more creamy color. There's a lot of white paint. Those columns are pretty stark contrast, which you may not want. Right, okay. And all the eaves and rakes are pretty good size on this building, too. Yes. We were talking about paint and that stain. The different painters have been talking to me about that, that sometimes there's like a new paint that might last longer. I'm confused. I thought it was stain. But they have, like, one of them talked about priming first, and so I was confused. How would you prime if you're staining? Right. So, I'm not really sure what would be recommended. Like, well, whatever's going to last longest. Probably the longest line lasting is an opaque stain. So, it doesn't have any of the pigment or feller in it, so it doesn't peel. So, I don't put that over brown. I'm not going to put that over brown. Actually, you can use a, you can look it up under consumer imports or any of the recommendations, but there's actually a company called Bear. It makes a solid color stain, and it's a deconciting stain. And on inciting, it's supposed to last for 25 years, and it's a really good quality product. And again, any of the paint stores usually have a good quality as well. Did the BEHR bear product? BEHR. It's carried at Home Depot exclusively. But you can also check with Sherwin Williams or Albashon's Carey's Benjamin Moore, and they have some good quality stains too. But you may want to check on a consumer reports website because they've tested all of stains, solid color stains, as far as how long they last and for the least amount of maintenance. And they have the dark colors as well. And you can spray it on or brush it on or whatever. And then as far as the trim, you probably would want to go with a paint. But when you paint trout, particularly in areas where there is chipping or peeling, if there's moisture that's an issue, there is a urethane-based primer that you would want to put on. It's not cheap, but it solves your problems. Our experience has been, then instead of repainting every three years, I've got 12 years right now on paint that's been put over that primer. And there's different brand names, but there's one that we use in the past with good luck. And again, there are others. It's a funny name. It's called Mad Dog. But it's a urethane-based primer. And that works really, again, around kitchens and bathrooms on the exteriors where there's moisture that comes through that tends to pour along your trim near roof lines where it tends to peel a lot. That stuff works great. Sometimes paint doesn't stick very well to the new cedar. There's so much oil in the cedar that you probably need some kind of treatment. I wouldn't know what it was. A lot of people just let cedar... Actually, the bare-solid stain works really well on that. Yeah, good. And it was well as holder. It's just that there's so much oil in cedar that paint tends not to stick until it's wet after a while. But you're choosing to... You want to do a new roof and you're trying to decide the color of the shingle of the roof with projected ideas of what you want to do on the exterior. Yeah, because we didn't go with a brown roof. I don't know if it's already... We've already paid for the roof. It's already been closed. Yeah, it all needs it. The roof is in the roughest shape, but the trim is completely peeled off in a lot of places down to the woods. That's the second most important. And then the shingles. There's a lot that are curled and broken, too. That doesn't seem quite as high priority as the roof and the trim, but clearly they all need it. Are you hoping to try and do the exterior color this season? No, I think for the shakes we'll take it next season. And even the trim, ideally would be this season, but knowing, you know, labor when you get people in, it's already cold out. Until we were in the house, just looking out the windows, like, oh my gosh, I hope I don't get rocked this winter. You don't have as much problem as rock. Well, I mean, there's no pain on the parts of it. It's just wood. Yeah. Okay, good. It'll last over the winter, though, because stuff doesn't rot much in the winter, but it's frozen. Oh. Is your intention to do the roof this winter, or way off this fall? Yeah, right off the winter. I mean, the roof, yeah. Good strategy. Start at the top, work your way down. Right. And when they put the new roof on, make sure they put a good drip edge on it. That'll keep the water away from the trim. Yeah, and gutters, too, we were, look at how the inspector said to look at gutters. I guess I think it has gutters on the, it has gutters on the back, but I think we hadn't thought all the way through. Cutters or diverters, just remember that when water comes off the roof in the winter and then refreezes, your gutter fills with ice. Yeah. So, look at that from the public way. The trees around there that the gutters will fill with leaves as well. Yeah. Right. They make actually a, it's not a gutter, but it's a diverter that mounts on your trim in a problem area.  But it doesn't fill with ice or leaves. Yeah. We need to go shopping with you. And our gutters will write it down. A lot of things to consider. Yeah. You know, gutters can work well in certain locations, but there is maintenance involved as well. So, just so you know this is all recorded, so you can go to the city website and we'll listen to it, if there's anything, and I'm taking notes too, so. Are you choosing the architectural shingle just because that, you were replacing what was there, or because that's a look you're interested in? I think first we were trying to look for a shingle that would last, you know, last a long time. I think the last shingles there only, I think they just did it in 04. It really hasn't been that long, but they were IKO shingles, which I guess had a lot of problems. So we were looking at architectural shingles. One of the best records in Burlington only uses certain teed. Yeah, we'd heard good things. We'd have a lifetime shingle that technically will last 100 years. It's the same though. The thing about it is, every shingle just takes four nails. So if you put a $10 shingle up or a $40 shingle up, it takes the same amount of labor to install it. Yeah, exactly. So if the product lasts longer, actually the product, a certain teed makes one called a premium shingle that's like a minimum 50-year warranty, and it's not a bunch more than anything else. It's $90 a square. And they come in great color choices. And we looked at the certain teed and Simon then ended up looking at the Owens Corning architectural shingles. It was finding that balance. A few of the things we read said they were close. But they were more affordable. But then we saw us where the certain teed probably was. That's the only one that there's a riffraff in Burlington who's actually done City Hall and a lot of the big buildings in Burlington and when they do shingles on the old historic houses up there, that's the only shingle he'll use as a certain teed. He says, I don't like callbacks, so... My question is aesthetically, versus a three-tab shingle versus an architectural shingle, were you making the choice for the architectural based on you were excited about it or based on that you were trying to... Does this have an architectural shingle order? They look different. They look radically different in appearance. No, the architectural versus the three-tab. I think the decision was really more from where we read it. It sounded like in general the architectural were more durable and would last longer than the three-tabs. So that was the main... If you look at the shingles around this picture here, it is an architectural shingle. That looks like an architectural shingle to me. That's why I thought you were trying to be consistent. They used to have problems with architectural shingles because it channeled water profile and it would erode in between the shingles, but I think you got that figured out. The other thing you want to do is don't let anybody lobel an estimate without putting water and ice shield over the entire work.  Your insurance company will love you for doing it. I appreciate the aesthetic aspect of things. Maybe we should consider that the shingles be... I think a three-tab looks nicer. I think an architectural is something that has come along in more modern days. It's nice for the roofer because they don't have to think as much. It just kind of blends and sort of looks like a little bit of a mess versus having all straight, really nice lines like a three-tab, which is what I would imagine was probably on here originally, but it is more work and I haven't studied it a lot. Probably wood shingles to begin with. Do you know when the house was built? They say about 1910. 1910? Yeah, they might have used a wood shingle back then, the late 1800s, early 1900s. And actually that's what the architectural shingle replicates is the original shake rooves. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Although it sounded like you said you'd already ordered the shingles. I don't have been handling the shingles. Yeah, we did. Although we need to follow the backup that I've heard from. Not exactly what I'm going to call it today to find out where the process is. It's a beautiful house. Yeah. Any exterior changes on the garage? Driveway. Yeah, well, there's a new driveway. There's going to be a new driveway, not next to the garage, but over in front of the house. Can we talk about that, or is that a DRB? You can. It's mostly a DRB item. They're not going to be putting in any landscaping or anything, really. But they're taking something out. I would like some advice on aesthetics on that, because it's tricky. There's a stone wall on First Avenue, like a beautiful... Yeah, you might be familiar with it. Striking. You can see it a little bit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And then Sean went over with, from Public Works. What's that? What's that? And they found a spot, which is the proposed spot. But then, and I didn't want to interfere with Carolyn's garden. But I think it's just asparagus and raspberries, which have overgrown that we could move. And the driveway could potentially go on the right side of the property line, which might look better. No. It came out really dark on here. So wait, I'm a little confused. So you're saying you might actually be able to move the driveway to the other side away from the corner? He was worried about it being in her garden. Mm-hmm. And I talked to Audra, and she said to bring it up at the meeting, because it's too late to send. So instead of over on the left by the corner. Yeah. So it's sort of like the driveway is more like as to the left of the front, walkway to the front door, that it might look better. It's not as convenient to us, but it might look better on this Henshin's property line. Like over on the right side. And Audra said it was zero foot offside. I had assumed it was probably an offside. I don't know. The funny thing is if you move it there, you don't have to go to DRB. That's why we were trying to get you to go over there before. Sorry. That's okay. I was just worried about her garden. It's not like a bad thing to do two by the, even though there's technically zero foot offset. So I'm sorry. The other... So you had Zach wanted it here instead of on First Avenue. Right. I can't even remember what the foliage is like there at the boundary line. Is it a lot of bushes and shrubs there? Because then you have issues with set lines. On West Street. No, it just be... No, there's raspberry bushes there. Raspberry bushes are the spare guests that are like plentiful that could be divided and moved. And on their property? On the neighbor's property? No, they have a few kind of low forest, but it's mostly all grass on their property there. And then I was thinking the driveway wouldn't even... It could maybe end. It doesn't have to go to the side of the house. I don't know. It could just do that. It just has to be eight and a half feet wide by... I can sort of... Are we still talking about the one that's sort of drawn on? Moving that over to the other side of the house. Next to the property line. Over to here. But still on West Avenue. And this is... The reasons not to put it over here were protecting somebody's garden. Well, our garden now. Now that it's closed. Well... One of the reasons that they... We noticed how beautiful the garden was and Sean particularly looked at the work, like the way she designed it and we didn't want to destroy it because they were really touched and wanted us to have it because we noticed that garden. So it didn't feel right to me to do anything to destroy that garden that she made. But a gardener friend of mine looked at it and the garden would still be fine. It's just some asparagus and raspberries on the side. So I think... You know, it might look better to put it over there than kind of going more in the front of the house, having a car in the yard. It's a beautiful house from a street and I think it would be nice to... I wouldn't want to destroy that unit. Minimize the car. So yeah, I'd love your opinion. I'm where the best place for the driveway is aesthetically. And in the picture you can sort of see the light gray on the picture, the circle and the lens coming out. That's the stone work right there. That's like the stone path in the garden. So we didn't want to mess that up, but as you can see closer to the property line, it's just all dark and that's where it's just like raspberry bushes and asparagus. So we thought we could put the driveway there. And that would be your driveway, the U News? Yes. And then the renter would park down here in the first avenue. Is there an apartment would be above? It would be above the garage. So this is important. This is my staff report. So that has the actual Google view, street view on it. I think there were some other pictures in there as well. I just have a spare. That's what's going to the DRB. I'm going to look at my other one to make sure... You might be able to amend your application right at the beginning of the DRB hearing. Do you know how to do this? I think in this, at the moment, it's proposed to go on the lawn. Yeah. And now we're talking about putting it over here in this garden. I don't have that aerial view, but I'll come to figure out how to do that. I didn't want to mess with somebody else's phone. Sorry. Put it on West Street. Back it up. On the map, it says 12 feet by 20 feet or 30 feet? I can't tell. It was going to be 12 feet by 30. I think it was 30 feet deep. But then you said it might not need to be that wide. It needs to be that wide. It needs to be a minimum of 12 feet wide. It doesn't necessarily have to be 30 feet deep. Every parking space needs to be at least 18 and a half feet deep. So that's from the property line in. That 30 feet measurement is from the roads that's over the sidewalk and however far the... I also heard that not less than 8 and a half. That's how wide a parking space needs to be. The curb cut needs to be a minimum of 12 feet wide. Because there's different things coming to play. There's the curb cut width which is a whole separate state standard that the Department of Public Works applies when they give you your access permit. And then there's your parking space limitations and how those all play in together for a residential driveway. So the curb cut could be 12 feet. And then can narrow out. It would be a safer location to be further away from the intersection of First and West. Yup. Are you one car, two cars, three cars? How many cars are going to live in this driveway? One and a half. We have a vehicle that needs some leaf and a super... You're going to need to charge it sometimes in the garage. Well, we could put up the... We could put the charger potentially off the side of the... For some reason I can't get an aerial view from Google Maps on my phone meter. But... I'll do the staff part for the head of color pictures. That's right there. There's going to be a different aerial. It didn't come out very well. Yeah, I've got the street view. I was just trying to get the aerial, but it didn't come out very well. So, yeah, any of your thoughts on if it would be better to move the driveway or just no objections to moving the driveway at location would be... It feels better while I have sensitivities and appreciation for people's gardens. I do feel like it makes sense to move that parking spot to the other side of the house. Yeah. And I don't... We should talk after this, but if you do want to move it over there... That's going to be more than... That's going to be well more than 10 feet and where the current location is more than 100 feet from your next closest intersection moving it to the other side, we can probably at the beginning of your part of the DRB meeting to say we're amending our application and no longer need DRB review and they might be able to just finish it and send it back to me. The other question I had was waiving the need for a driveway because there's public transportation. I forgot to bring that up, too. That's a whole... Because there's a bus stop up there at the college. You didn't ask that before, so I couldn't go through that whole analysis. You could try and get that from the DRB. It would be a verbal amendment to your application so we can talk about that. I think it's pretty challenging in the winter, so it might be a good idea to have a driveway. Because you're talking about also having your accessory dwelling unit and them needing the parking space. When there's a parking ban, I don't think there's anywhere for us to park. I would try and put in the driveway. Personally, having lived in Montpelier, it's nice to be able to get off the street when there's a heavy snow. The garage is behind the house down here. Right. Is there any accessibility from this side to put the driveway in here that would put you to the closest side of the house and not have to bother with the front? Yeah. On first, there's the stone. There's the stone wall. There's some trees that were problematic and then talking to Zach, too. He said he'd strongly prefer being up on West Street because when you're coming up first you hit a stop sign so there's not really much risk. You're not hitting that curve turn hard to hit somebody pulling out whereas turning from west on to first, you're both going downhill and you don't have to stop in that direction. It's much more dangerous. That was his preference for West. It's pretty steep there, too. It is steep, yes. Folks that it gets icy in Maryland first. The way that people will own the house before you, they would park in the garage, then come up through and then enter the back side of the house, is that? Or how do they navigate parking? Well, I noticed when we were... I noticed that sometimes I think maybe they had a car in the garage and the second car they parked because it was a leaf. They parked diagonal in the driveway because it could fit that way. Or they... we were told by the realtor that they would park in neighbors' driveways and have to walk back to the house in the winter because... I think they had the garage used as a workshop. I think they used... So I think they parked the leaf in the driveway there in front of the garage and then parked their van I think was the other car.   They're about halfway, probably about halfway between the garage and the corner of first and west. The stone walls here and they continue up that side. Do you own new windows or doors or anything in the garage? No, I think our... the only question there what we'll be meeting with Chris Lumbra just about you know what to make sure that it's proper for egress and that sort of thing. So I mean if we were told to change it we would but we don't have any plans of our own or demolition. Garage door and everything. Garage door or what are they? Yes. There's an entrance to the apartment from the backyard on that level and then there's stairs that go down into the garage and then he also said the window needs to be big enough so I don't know how which way the window opens that's the only thing that I guess we really have to make sure that the egress is safe but I wouldn't really want to change those windows so I don't know what we can do. The one that you're talking about are the ones on the side of the garage or which one do you see? I'll shoot. And if for some reason Chris says you need to change one of the windows on the garage you can come back. Come back with the plan because this is the window since it would work. That's the actual renovations for the apartment where you think about doing this this fall or that's just going to be next spring. No probably in the spring you have to get it together. So you can have time to work out that final design and then come back if you need to. One of the things that is beautiful about the house is the way that it sits from the street and if there was a way in thinking about the driveway and the car and just how to minimize that as much as possible I appreciate that. Side or the front? Well, it would be sweet if you could still park down on first but that feels like that doesn't feel reasonable to ask. And so improving the driveway up to the west street if you know to the right side as much as possible and making it feel to be away from the center of the house as much as possible. Whichever side you put it on I think it would be fine. I mean you can work with some landscaping to screen it so that it's you know you just not an open yard with two cars parked in it and screen it with some plantings or And I think there's ways you can put, so it looks like it's gray stones or something like in the concrete you can put so it doesn't look like a black. Yeah, black. Yeah, I don't want to say. Well I don't know how, so it looks like it's almost like a cobblestone or something. It's the color of the stone. You're at the pipe for shoveling and plowing but getting concrete pavers that are allowed for plants to grow through them gets sort of like you can place them as a driveway material and you can drive on them with grass. The Natural Resources Council has shown on the corner of Bailey and Baldwin. Oh, yeah. Baldwin. Depending on what you have underneath those those actually would count as permeable and so they wouldn't add to your impervious surface on the property. Okay. Because water can infiltrate through. It's not going to create additional storm water or not. So that's actually a nice idea. They actually make masonry.  Yeah, something. And again it looks like pretty much like your lawn most of the time. I've got some legal paper here if you need more notes. A little more space. Does anybody want to make any statements about any other proposals or options? It seems like you're trying to do a nice job and treat the house with sensitivity. We appreciate that. I have questions if you can be resources outside of this meeting for asking about Driveway again and I think Sean has taken pretty good notes. But the other thing is if you know people in the community I can tell more about the history of the house. He can tell you who to talk to. That's what I mean, yeah. I would check the national register nomination on Thursday. I can't remember this in the district. He's also a good resource over there. We know too. I'm trying to even remember if this is... I don't think it is. I don't think it's on the historic register. It's not. No, it's not. So I don't know where else I would go for the history of the house. I've always liked the house but I don't know what you think particularly about it. Maybe check into the real estate transactions. We have it back to the 60s. Yeah. And then of the university up there, I think? The other you can find out information if you go to the city directories. The Calicover Library has those. And it's listed by address and then with owners and everything. They stopped doing those 20 years ago. If you go back, I know I've done that with our houses. Trace the owners because you can just go through and look at that address and trace who the owners might be. Depending on who the owners come up with you might be able to find somebody who can have connected to some other historic situation and find something else that way. Possibly. And then to be clear as far as getting the roof and the colors are we okay to go with a dark gray? They're going to give you some options and here are the recommendations for it. I just said that pink colors may be dark brown or gray color with compatible off-white trim colors and darker gray or black shutter colors again compatible with the main body color of the house. So you have options. And again you can explore those options with some of the paint stores. They have some really nice color charts that show historic colors and combinations thereof. And for instance if you open one of those up there's a myriad of colors. You can pick a dark gray color for the house and then it'll give you compatible trim colors and shutter colors and accent colors. So that'll be our next step. We'll go to the paint store and then when we settle on the ones that fit within that should we email Meredith and say this is what we went with. You don't need to tell me what you went with. And if you have a couple of choices like if you say well I like this one get a sample color of each and just start smearing some on and see which one you like better. Because sometimes you get the actual color on the house and one will have a really nice depth to it and the other one will be I don't like that as much. With the samples you just don't get the kind of texture that's behind it. Well that and you have the different sides of your house too and you have some parts of your house that are much more in the shade and some that are much more in the sun it might not be a bad idea to take enough to do a swatch of a color and then pick another side of the house and just check it. That makes sense. And you can watch it over the winter and think about it. That's a good idea. It looks in the snow in the mud. It's not a bad idea. People say, where are you moving? Oh, you mean the amazing brown house. So I don't know if people are going to think of it not being brown. It'll be the amazing house on the corner. I think it's an attractive color though. No matter what you do some people are going to find it wasn't right. There are actually some colors that you'd be surprising how close they look. It's between a brown and a gray and a light. It's hard to tell which it is. And that might be fun to try to find something in between. Right. Everyone can be compromising everybody. Everyone will see what they want in it. We're not helping you much with the color. No, it's very helpful. But it's your house. You pick the one that you like the most. I didn't know about the design review committee before but I figure you do this all the time. And you know it would look good in certain neighborhoods. I just kind of wanted to hear that you thought that that was a good color. As a preservation person I've been doing historic preservation for a long time. I would say do some paint scraping to look at it. And if that's the original color I would certainly tend towards just leaving those colors. I would. Or if you go a shade darker maybe again it's hard to tell what was the original color of the house. If those shingles have been up there for 50 years they're darker now just from aging. Or they might be lighter from aging. Not in Vermont. You also don't want to live in a house where you don't like what color it is. Yes. I don't mind the brown. I just wanted to brighten it up. It's a painter's suggestion that got me to think differently about the house. Thank you. We're going to go through the criteria still. I'll get you your recommendation for it. There's the criteria and again we made the comment that paint colors may either be the dark brown or gray with compatible all white trim colors. And again darker gray or black shutters that again were compatible with the body color of the house. The criteria number one preservation or reconstruction of the appropriate historic style of the proposed projects in the historic district involves an historic structure acceptable harmony of exterior design with other properties in the district acceptable compatibility proposed exterior materials acceptable compatibility proposed landscaping no changes proposed with this application prevention of the use of incompatible designs buildings color schemes exterior materials acceptable location and appearance of all utilities no change in lighting anywhere in relation to parking or anything else on the house. Like light fixtures? No. Okay. Lights are burned out as long as putting a light bulb inside the fixtures works. I don't want to do any more than that. Recognition of and respect for view quarters and significant vistas including gateway views of the seating of state house acceptable all in favor of the application as proposed. The other thing you might look at is there's a number of different like pattern books that architects work from or people actually built from and this is a really typical shingle style sort of a cloning of rival shingle style house and you might just kind of check on the internet and see I can't think of who might have any of those pattern books around but it just it'll just give you some ideas about the pattern books the one that have like the design of what the whole outside of the house looks like in this works. I've seen those in their for sale on just above my name but both of us. I guess is at the good date but they suggest paint colors there's a whole book out on paint colors for different style houses too. Just beside beside his name it's fine. So what will happen is this will go back to okay we need to talk after this because we got to see what we're going to do for DRB if you want to change where the drive link goes or not. So that meeting starts at 7. But either way eventually it'll come back to our office and we'll issue you the permit and you'll go copy the recommendation for that too. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Good luck with your project. Move forward. This is a sign of window replacement. Placement of two new windows and the new signage. Our next application I'm sorry. That's okay. We're 15 East State Street. I think we know who you are so. You know who I am. And you know who we are so describe what you're doing. Well we're moving our real estate brokerage to where the back here was. I think the only real changes would be a couple of front windows for that entry L code. Initially I was really hopeful to move it's about 11 feet deep so it doesn't look it in this sketch but it really goes in all and we'd hope to have the doorway straight ahead going in to be more welcoming and unfortunately there's a large DLI beam right through the middle of there and I think it's a great expense to try to find a way to move it but it just it goes all the way up three floors it just there's a point which I had to say I can't do that so basically there'd be two windows the same material as the front windows on either side of it as you go in. So at least one would walk into that all covency some light and something other than just a clapboard wall and the door would stand as current location which is to the right. So I think that's probably the only physical change and then the sign inches to take the current sign we have now at 81 Main Street and get that freshened up and repainted they will actually shorten it by I think about nine inches so it fits in that block over the doors to fit properly and then we also have the blade sign proposed because obviously this location doesn't have quite the prominence of our current one. Now are you moving out of your current location? We are. What's going in there? We need a great retail use for it we don't have one yet but we've moved our property operations into the blanchard block we basically separation of property management brokerage and we had everything under one roof in our current spot. Where are you going to put your revolving We're going to have an retirement party for that for babies been around I don't know how many million times since 1971 People are fascinated with that thing they just stand there We have a more contemporary version we're going to use at this place but it won't be Well it's LED lighted Really? I think there's something pretty awesome about it Oh it is and we kept it going my dad found that at a realtors convention in San Francisco in 1970 and the guy who made them selling real estate but we bought parts from him before he did so we kept it running for decades you know the local clock maker on Norfield Street was his name Mr. Barlow He used to do it, Morrison kept it running then he died and it's been just like if you have a great use for it Not for that but so you own that space that you're in now and where you're leaving is going to be vacant something really cool is going to go in there You'd really like retail if possible We've been there since 71 before we were there so it's probably been since the 1950s there's been a retail use in that location and it's one of the best retail spots in town Incredible corner Are you moving for less space and more space Less space and it was time to update where we are we did it 15 years ago and we could just update where we are but it wouldn't be the right thing it's not the right configuration it's just not working that well the world has changed with the internet our office was like a public library on Saturdays where people used to come in and go through the MLS books and get the info now they do that at home on their computers we don't need all the round tables where you can sit around and sort through books so those are the three changes the two signs and the windows and I think we may also put parking signs in but they're on the side toward Harry Sheridan there's a few parking spaces none of the signs are lighted there's very wonderful adequate lighting from the city street lights there how big is your office where we are about 2100 feet really curious to see what do you think we'll be out by the end of the month the beard still owns the building oh good when I called you on the district key question oh that's right my first experience with district key you didn't have one of your relief valves blow off today did you no and again the sign the sign over the doorway will look like that basically it's that sign, it's the same sign we have over the front now they're going to cut a few inches off each end and make it fit into the frame space is that a wooden sign I think so, I don't know wooden wood made it for us 12 years ago or so it's a sparky potter he's doing this one too that means it's a great work yes any comments, questions, suggestions from anyone we have to do two separate sets of criteria because of the sign is separate from the window installation so I'll run through the this is for the windows in buildings preservation reconstruction of the appropriate historic style of the proposed projects in the historic district or involves an historic structure acceptable harmony of exterior design with other properties in the district acceptable compatibility of proposed exterior materials acceptable compatibility proposed landscaping not applicable prevention of the use of incompatible designs, buildings, color schemes or exterior materials acceptable location of appearance of all utilities no change in lighting or so not applicable recognition of and respect for view quarters and significant fisters including gateway views of the city and state house acceptable all in favor of that portion of the application raise your hand both at the same time and through the sign criteria preservation reconstruction of the appropriate historic style of the proposed projects in the historic district also an historic structure acceptable harmony of exterior design acceptable compatibility proposed exterior materials acceptable compatibility proposed landscaping not applicable prevention of the use of incompatible designs, buildings, color schemes or exterior materials acceptable location and appearance of all utilities no changes recognition of and respect for view quarters and significant fisters including gateway views of the city and state house acceptable actually they're all the same as on the first one that first portion number two conformance with city skate placement and design recommendations acceptable compatibility with subject property and adjacent properties acceptable show not obscure significant architectural details acceptable consistency and uniformity multiple signs not applicable here all other signs on the building outside of there CB2 and OP districts illumination internally lit not or prohibited that's acceptable pennants and banners are prohibited not applicable individual letters of fixed painter directly on the building or structure are encouraged the signs proposed or acceptable in this location application all in favor of the sign application ratio you can sign each of those above my name there and down below there okay thank you very much good and that's it administrative yeah it's a lot less moving finding a dynamite for your okay thank you good luck and we have the minutes from September the third and the 16th on the third we have to do probably one at a time because I wasn't here on the 16th so all in your second for the third all in favor of the third minutes raise your hand and Mr. Mead Eric raised his hand Steve, Eric and Ben I see the absent I'll move to 16th then notably absent these are tough meetings so Eric, Hannah and Ben for the 16th Eric moved already oh all second all in favor of the 16th minutes September 16th that's also approved three thank you I'm pleased to have yours in my pocket brand new regulations the city had a spring for binders I thought you had a binder I can make you a fresh binder if you want one anybody who wants a fresh binder I can make you one I got lots of binders and do I hear a motion unless anybody has anything else do I hear a motion to adjourn certainly your second okay all in favor of adjournment raise your hand meeting is adjourned


All right welcome everybody. I'm Charles Herring chief technology officer and co-founder at WIDFU. We're going to talk about building global cyber grid sharing data cross clusters on Cassandra up on I'm gonna get off the stage for a second so I can see my screen but up on the site we have CharlesHerring.com is my personal blog we have this talk some other talks all reference are also up there my social media things if you'd like to connect please do and we can Continue the conversation. So a little bit on the agenda We're gonna cover for the scope of the project that we're working on. How do we distribute a configuration? Across our clusters the idea or theories of predestination of data. How do we configure key spaces? Dealing with natural language processing graph processing and federating data ops So a little bit about the scope of what we do in the WIDFU project It's taking in tons of data from different organizations different users customers storing it processing it For a wide array of different personas. So your standard security operations center folks are the guys that are knocking Bad guys off the network stopping responding dense in response Auditors that are doing audits for compliance regulatory legal issues insurers law enforcement. So reporting crime Investigating crime dealing with national security. So it's about bringing everybody together In utilizing data sharing data sharing intelligence in a way that can draw drive down cybercrime So we're talking about hundreds of organizations that are bringing in hundreds of gigs or tens of ten or more terabytes of data each day The data may have to be Stored for years So you're talking about a lot of data stored a lot of data in motion And we want to coordinate some of that data if not all of that data across multiple clusters So from an input output perspective in each cluster. We're looking at different data sources coming in So syslog messages from servers from different applications networking data coming from the network infrastructure. This also includes Flow logs from AWS VPC. So any communication any record of metadata of conversations Agents on different endpoints shipping that data in and then connecting to hundreds of difference of APIs and pulling that data into each cluster The clusters communicate in an upstream or a downstream capability so If the cluster wants to push data to another cluster it can if it wants to pull data from another cluster It can we'll talk about how we do that along the way So inside of each cluster. There are different components that are responsible For different different parts of the processing. So we have data ingestion that's going into a Kafka topic And so this is just a raw message. So we have transported different types writing to a topic That the contents of that topic are subscribed or consumed by a natural language processor That's analyzing those raw messages to comprehend. What does that signal mean? Where did it come from? What are we supposed to do from it? How's it what product created it? How do we parse it and then that's put into a separate topic? That data is then consumed by a graph processor To understand the relationships that are inferred from the signals that are being received Then we're going to analyze on a different topic What we're learning from that graph and we're going to create units of work reporting different types of analytics Those will go into Kafka and those will be written as different streams into Cassandra With 5.0 coming out we're working on vectorizing or using vectors and that data for prepping for generative AI and other LLM so Another issue that we sort of have is it deploys everywhere, right? So we have some that are deployed on Raspberry Pi some that are deployed in multi Multi-cloud multi-data centers so each node can deploy However, it needs to be deployed So whether that's a piece of physical hardware some in some place inside of a public cloud private cloud Across data centers so each node can be configured Whatever on whatever fabric it needs to be deployed upon So handling that how do you connect different? Data nodes processing nodes Kafka nodes in a cluster that are potentially geographically dispersed Different network topologies So to do that we use an agent a demon that Receives an input from either a user that's manually spinning up a new node or an orchestration script that tells us where it is So what data center are we in what rack are we on the license key which helps identify? What what customer organization what user cluster is this thing a part of and what role should we spin up? Is it just going to be a date new data node or we're going to do Kafka? What is its role going to be Then the agent uses that data goes to Consolidated Service which we call library or with food library and says give me the basic information I need to join this cluster And so it comes back with the seed nodes that it might need from Cassandra We use some brokering for shared secrets so that it can join the cluster and so it has the secret It has a configure configuration and then the agent pulls the docker images that it needs So if it's Cassandra pull a configured docker Image of Cassandra and spin up that container or if it's Kafka or if it's one of our NLP agents Whatever needs to be configured it does Launches that container it joins the cluster and then it ships metrics up the library on My website I do have another talk called metric driven DevOps It sort of goes deeper into how all this coordination happens and how we ship Metrics feel free to grab that you don't even need to give me an email address and then all those all those issues alerts metrics boil up to library that come to the wit-hoo Support personnel they go to the cluster they go to the end user and customer So this idea of predestination of data is how I describe the overall philosophy for processing multi-cluster data for many types of persona so in Data in particular or data broadly in cybersecurity in particular We've taken a philosophy of putting all of the data into data lakes and With the idea that we're going to figure out the questions later. We'll re-index the data We'll figure out what we're going to do with it, but this This philosophy that we leaned into is when we receive a signal We need to know everything that's going to happen in the life cycle of this piece of information How will it be transformed into new information who will query it? How long will it live so giving at a time to live when it when it dies and so Understanding sort of everything that could possibly happen in the entire life cycle of this piece of information It's critical to how we handle information Which means we're constantly having to interview the different personas looking at different end games of the evolution of that data so in building out the schema or The tables in the key space or the key space configuration We tend to start with we tend to start with a simple replication strategy on replication factor three, but when we have things like Multi-data center and so we network topology we can move You know move that as it needs to be done But the key part here is how we construct tables so the partition key and I'm going to walk over here for a second, but the partition key is Are you on you are on laser is the org ID and Field we call partition and so the org ID is a unique identifier For that organization and normally a UU ID Or not usually it is a UID that's validated from library So when you join the whole cyber grid your your user your customer data is Generated as tagged with this UU ID and Then the partition is generally a time new UID But it doesn't have to be and it's our way of limiting how much data goes into a partition So how do we avoid hotspots anybody that's ever run into hotspots knows that they should be a much more graphic term for what that is It's a painful horrible situation so Having this allows us to have non collision in how we're shipping data. We're able to keep a given organizations data separate from a query perspective And in previous instances, we use a separate key space per org ID but Cassandra does have a limitation as you start scaling out the number of tables and key spaces the cluster becomes and degrades right as Impacts performance negatively so by putting it all in a single key space the overhead in the mem tables and Those pieces is much easier to deal with The cluster key is just a time you ID of when we inserted that row So that's all that we need to know about that and then all of the data goes into The object field which is going to be a JSON object So when we're talking about a raw record coming in that we are extracting fields That's going to create a JSON object that JSON object Will be stored here. So we're not doing any indexing Inside of Cassandra. I'll talk about how we do queries and indexing in a second But so these two form our partition key our cluster key and you know combined. This is our primary key So when we're doing scan, so if we for instance are wanted to do a query on a Time-based so everything that happened the last hour we can use do a table scan Using the time you ID on the partition as criteria If we want to what we commonly do, which I'll talk about in a second is do a full fetch of the partition, which is a very kind query to Cassandra We also use compression which blew my mind because I'm an old guy and compression used to mean that makes everything slow But it turns out because our bottleneck is on IO on disk IO and network IO Shrinking that down in compression has a huge impact on performance and then TTL Telling it when we're going to die always set a default. There is a default where he said or not of course, but managing that on the inserts So when we're inserting data, there's really three level three types of Principles that we take in this one is no hot spots. No hot spots. No hot spots So counting how many rows we're putting into a partition. So Whatever the inserting code is it's counting. That's one. That's two. That's three. That's four and then when it hits the max level It's no longer going to use that partition key. It's gone And then we're also going to while we're creating the inserts. We're going to index What is in that? What is in that given partition? So in the case of artifacts we're tracking things like client IP username so it would be an array a JSON array of Client IP and every client IP those observed in that partition and then we're going to save that in the Partition summary so we have one row for the partition in the partitions table and then we have The artifacts table that or different types of objects And then also setting TTL, you know One of the greatest things in Cassandra is the freed elite. So Putting a death date. When is this row going to expire? When is it going to naturally be garbage collected? out of the out of the system One reason we do it this way where we put the indexes inside of a JSON structure instead of using a natural Cassandra index is We're looking at 100 200 500 different indexable fields and when we start doing that in Cassandra, we start running into non-linear scale So each node gets more expensive if we go that way so by not adding the indexes our scope is much smaller I am sort of excited to see storage attacks indexing. It's coming out in five. We'll be at that talk later today But that's currently how we do that. So when we're fetching We start if we want to get a specific records that says for instance, give me all of the rows that have user name John Doe What we that existed in the last Day or 10 days, whatever we start by fetching the partition summaries So give me the partition summaries in the time range. Give me all of them and check do those summaries have The criteria in them. So is John Doe in it if it is that partition Is a candidate for pulling for doing it for doing a pull full pull on the partition So then we just once we have that list We just go by each partition and fetch the pull partition and then we just do a reduce of the rows That met the criteria and it sounds like a lot to do compared to you know, select all where That's where the thing but it's very effective when you're talking about Multi-petabyte clusters of data across hundreds of indexes It's it's a linear search that's predictable in the amount of time that it takes based upon The time range and it's also very friendly to Cassandra. You're not asking for to stress out Merkel trees and all of that I'm going to time so Real quick on this on more receiving messages. We're using approach from natural language processing That has a database of semantic frames. So what where does this message come from? How do you extract it? What is this IP address? What is this timestamp? Everything there is to know about the message is loaded in the memory on the processor and Then it outputs in JSON format the artifact if it doesn't know it goes up and we start doing our research So we have machine learning we reach out to the vendor we figure out what the thing is and we update The frames and the reason we do that I'd love to do LLM here But it would be bonkers computationally expensive to do that on you know message rates of a Million a second right this you couldn't do that many inferences currently So once we have the artifacts we build a graph out of them So this is just sort of a pseudo of some extracted field This is a DHCP lease renewal this machine exists. It has this IP address at this time. That's its MAC address Get another artifact that tells us that user one is logged into that machine file z's present on it You get some more nodes some more relationships Another one tells me that the IP address belonging to client a talked to a thing called server b So we're tracking all of these relationships these artifacts are building a contextual graph of what those artifacts are describing And then we're also understanding. What is the intent? Why did it tell me this it was telling me this because there's a malware exploit or whatever So now that we have a graph that's sitting there. We're persisting that to Cassandra We're able to analyze the graph in this case look for this is a data theft a multi-stage data theft attack or crime that occurred and From this we can analyze this graph and Generate metrics how many of these have occurred what types of tools were used So you're doing graph level a unit of work level analysis Also, this is the standard JSON structure and you know rendering this is pretty easy. There's a great library License under MIT called side escape JS that we use for that And so now we're just down to moving JSON around to make this magic work, right? Jason is great compresses great It has great entropy it's you can't do rest without JSON So you already have now the way that we share information across the internet is in this JSON structure We can nest data so that artifact can be Generated the node in the graph can be a child of that it can be a child of the incident It can be a child of the campaign and you can sort of go from the system to the atomic inside of a JSON structure without limitation and we're also not having to go and Do an alter alter key space or alter database and we need to change or augment a JSON structure and so There was another talk it is I gave in Grand Rapids earlier in the year on How all this works if you're looking at the operational side, but you know, we're talking about the sharing JSON objects of Incidents threat intelligence publication of bulletins You can publish a job in a JSON format to search all your data Then give me the results and then shift that back up to a different cluster when you're subscribing, right? So we're just doing Get JSON put or post JSON and that can be really any type of information and then we're just inserting it With that same partition key so the org ID was org ID is unique the partition is unique from this other cluster So when we're doing an insert Into a different into a different key space On a different cluster. There's no collision, right? So you're able to do the same type of querying that way and then you're left with the ability then to have this federated system to where you can have maybe Universities working inside of a conference. They're able to share data and operations with More expensive more experienced personnel up here. Maybe shipping that up to law enforcement when crime is be reported so Pretty simple way of shipping data. Once you just once we think through how do we create the data? How do we collect it evolve it save it as JSON ship it as JSON? so I'll take any questions, but you want to find my social media or these this talk or any other talks That's me Charles herring. There's also the with food blog If anybody there's also educational stuff, so if you want licensing to play around with The software we have that that's free and then there's my email. I think I am out of time I have one minute does anyone have a question? You may applaud oh wait there's a question. Yes All inserts so it's a configurable setting so in a cluster you may so Some organizations some users may need to keep the raw record for a year or five years So that would dictate what the TTL would be on the insert of the partition or the artifacts was a configurable setting So it's that's not a universal TTL. It's configured per cluster and the same thing for the units of work the incidents How long do we want to keep those those are being inserted? They're also Immutable so it is configurable and are going to change based upon Whatever the requirements of the given cluster is You know that's a good question. It's the It's that it's that whatever the default compaction strategy is because we have Because of the TTLs. It's a very simple compact compaction. There's no whole not a whole lot They have to work around on that one. It's the nice thing It's the way I still had we talked about in the team is whatever Cassandra likes. We're gonna do it that way We're gonna make it as easy or easy on her. I don't know if it's her or her pronouns, but As we can but thank you very much for the time. I look forward to chatting with you later