All right, let's get started. Thanks for coming to our talk. My name is Will Foster. I work for Red Hat on the scale and performance team, mostly on the DevOps kind of systems administration side. My name is Kambi Zagaipur. I work with Will, also in DevOps on the performance and scale team at Red Hat for OpenStack. So today, we're going to talk to you about Tristack.org. Tristack is a community OpenStack sandbox that we run in our free time. It's a volunteer effort. We're just going to kind of dive into some of the details and hope our slides behave here. So what is Tristack? So Tristack is a free, publicly available OpenStack cloud that's available for the general public. It's absolutely free to use. And it's purely for the point of advocacy for the OpenStack platform. So it was created in 2011 by some folks at the OpenStack Foundation. And we've done some significant overhaul of the environment. We've revamped it quite a bit. And it's also changed hands a few times. But it's an OpenStack Foundation project. So all of the hardware and the resources, both the expertise to run the environment as well as all of the server and network infrastructure comes from corporate sponsors. And it's volunteer community-operated as well. So we spend a portion of our time on kind of the development and operation side doing upgrades, keeping things running, fielding requests for any sort of feature enhancements. But in summary, it's really just a place to kick the tires for OpenStack. OpenStack's a very complex project. There's a lot of parts to it. It's very modular. It's also one of its strengths. But it's not trivial to set up and operate yourself. There's always a hardware requirement. There's lots of different components to pick and choose from. So the goal of TriStack is to kind of make this as simple as possible for the average person to simply just log in, poke around, spin up some instances, and just kick the tires and see what's changed from the current release to the former release to the current release. I just want to look at the slides up here. The exact same thing happened at our previous talk. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the roadmap that we have for TriStack. So we're currently on the Liberty release. And we have a parallel deployment of Newton as well that's not quite publicly available yet. We're going to go through some of the steps that we're working on to open that up and cut everybody over to the Newton platform. In the span of 2016, we've tripled the original hardware footprint of the environment since its inception in 2011. And we've also doubled the public IP address space. And this would be a slash 23 public network that provides neutron floating IP addresses for tenants and people that use the environment. So let's get into some of the details of what comprises the hardware, what it looks like. You're kind of at a disadvantage because I can see what's here on the slide, but I'm just going to explain it to you. So the presence is in East Coast US Data Center. There's a slash 23 public IP address space. And we have a mix of Dell hardware. We have some 1U R620 machines that were donated recently by Red Hat. We have some FX2 blades, as well as some C6105s. So it's really kind of a hodgepodge of Dell gear. Some of it originally was also donated by Dell for the project. On the switching end, we have a couple of Juniper switches. And we've just upgraded the back end network to 10 gig. So we have a mix of Dell Force 10 and Juniper switches on the back end. But we take hardware donations, and we're happy with whatever we can get. So this might be more effective if all of you close your eyes, and you just kind of imagine what's happening. We're on it. We try to do is turn the laptop around and have everyone just huddle around us. That might be more effective. So imagine if you were on this mystical journey in the halls of data center excellence. And we're going to talk about this free awesome platform that you can use, but you can't see. But you have to just look at it. So what we were going to show you was what the TriStack data center looks like. And so we had some pictures as well. And it looks like the 16 by 9 aspect ratio slides are just flickering too much with the presentation mode. We had the same thing off of another Linux box and another presentation. So apologize for that. All right, now we're back in business here. So this is the TriStack data center. There's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary with this picture at all. It's just a typical corporate data center. What you see here in the picture are lovingly referred to as the data center cats. Now they've been there ever since I have been involved with the project. No one's really sure where they came from. They just kind of hang out and chill. I think they're multiplying because more of them show up every time that we go there. They are completely benevolent though. I think at a certain point, this one fixed Neutron. So that was really nice. We were stumped on a Linux network namespace issue. And let's call him Chester. Chester popped in there and fixed it for us. It was wonderful. So kind of moving on to some of the use cases of TriStack. TriStack is really for anyone. It's aimed towards developers because it's a place that you can go and spin up an application. You can test it, how it performs on an IIAS platform like OpenStack. You can spin up any manner of maybe a DevStack environment or a blog or whatever you want to do within our very loose rules that we have for operating the environment. But it's really about kicking the tires and it's about taking the complexity out of deploying OpenStack, managing it, heaven forbid shaking down your CIO to get extra hardware to test out a cloud implementation. So we've taken all that complexity away from you or to all that complexity out of the way for you. So you simply can just log in and get to work. OK, so a couple more use cases. This is one of the ones that I'm most excited about in academia. We've been approached by a few universities that are teaching classes on Python development and computer science and interacting with APIs. So OpenStack provides a very robust set of APIs and it's perfect for collegiate level computer science courses, learning how to program, learning how to interact with web services, things of that nature. So we're ecstatic that we have use cases like this. There's a university in Slovenia that had a Python course and so about 50 to 60 students signed up and they had their own dedicated accounts and they were able to run through their whole course using the Tri-Sack environment. And then most recently in Cork, Ireland we had a computer science course, about 100 people using the Python API against Neutron and some other things. And so we welcome more universities and academic institutions to approach us if they'd like to use Tri-Sack. It's kind of a learning tool. Another just one more thing I want to point about the academia angle is that it's extremely important to expose people to open source software early on. When someone is learning about technology in school, it's very important that they're not myopic about the technologies that they're exposed to. So OpenStack is a very good sandbox for people to get exposed to interacting with APIs, a greater development community, and I'm really excited about that part. Lastly, one of the other use cases is with Manila development. So I'm not going to go too much into this slide but if you're curious, you want to ping Ben Schwartzlander, who's the PTL of the Manila project. We have a dedicated NetAppFaz system that some development goes on there and there's a couple of milestones that are hit every release using the gear on Tri-Sack. So we talked about the use cases. Let's kind of look at what the metrics look like. All right, look at these big numbers here. So 26,500, that is the number of people of all time since 2011 that have created an account on Tri-Sack and logged in and used the service. It's important to note that this other number, around 4,800, usually goes between 4,800 to about 5,500, that is the current active users on the current release that runs on Tri-Sack. So every six months, we upgrade to the newest release of OpenStack, at least that's our goal, and we reset the environment completely. So those kind of user statistics are reset and then counted again. And then you have some other metrics here, about 300 instances a day, 7,500 a month, and around 800 to 1,000 active Neutron networks. So it's quite a bit of demand for rather small amount of hardware. So if you look at those same metrics, kind of in a graph form, this is a Grafana dashboard that we use. So Grafana is one of the operations tools that we take liberal use of to help us kind of illustrate the environment, show the health, the status, any kind of trending information is really useful for us. And you're gonna probably see a few more of these throughout the talk. And this is just average usage, we see kind of dips and spikes here. One thing I did wanna point out, on the right-hand corner, you see instances over time, you're gonna see this kind of healthy, trending slope of up and down of resources. And the reason for that is that, in order for us to service a very large user base, and to give everyone enough time on the platform, we have to pull back resources occasionally. So when you have an instance, it's good for one day, it gets reclaimed. Now you're free to use the API, we have all the APIs open, you only need to log in once to get your API keys, and you're free to re-spin your instance back up. But we have a set of tools and kind of automated scripts that go in and make sure that we don't overuse the resource allocation that we have. So going into tooling a little bit, I don't wanna spend too much time on these, but these are some of the tools that we use. We use a combination of Puppet and Ansible, it really depends on what we're doing. I'm of the notion that there's not one configuration platform, configuration management platform, that solves every problem. So we might typically use Puppet for open stack deployment, but we would use Ansible to set up some of our infrastructure services, do kind of routine runs to change the state of a certain machine from its current state to its attended state. And we kind of balance out what makes sense at the time for us. These are kind of splitting categories. So we talked about Grafana and Graphite. Graphite is kind of the graphing and trending arm of some of the tools that we use. We also make heavy use of the elastic search stack. So we tend to opt for use log stash, but that's also interchangeable with Fluent D as well. The idea behind that is that we wanna aggregate all of our logs into one location. We don't really wanna be in the business of having to go to individual machines to check certain events and things that are happening. And open stack provides a lot of logging, a lot of it's useful, but some of it's not. So it also gives us the ability to kind of filter out noise from things that actually mattered to us or things that we would need to take action upon. Lastly, we have monitoring bit and there's a lot of solutions out there. There's a lot of great open source monitoring tools. We happen to stick with Nagios because it's what we know. We've been using it for about 10 years now and it's not gonna win any website awards. It's extremely ugly, but it gets the job done. And we're gonna dive a little bit into some of the monitoring checks that we put into place that kind of fill the operational gaps that you get from when you deploy open stacked and when you actually start to manage it at a large level. And lastly, there's a new tool called Browbeet. So I don't know if any of you guys were just at the Browbeet talk that we gave, but the projector's being a little nicer than it was at that talk.  But Browbeet is a performance scale testing tool for open stack. So we try to treat performance and scale like CI. So anytime that we do a new deployment of open stack, we run it through various tests, rally workloads, other scenarios to make sure that it's performing at an acceptable level before we open that up to the general public. So this is everybody's favorite monitoring system here. Web pages were mastered in the 1990s, so Nagios needs no further work whatsoever. It is perfect. So what I wanna bring your attention here is we have a check here that's a custom check that goes through the environment and hits pretty much every gamut of the life of an open stack instance. It starts out by spinning up an instance. It creates a router, sets a gateway, attaches a floating IP address, pings a floating IP address. Then SSH is into the instance, runs an arbitrary command and then collects the results and then spins everything down. It does this every 15 minutes. The reason for this kind of exhaustive test is that if any point one of these actions fail, we get alerted. That means something is wrong on the back end. And pinging an instance or let's say you get a public IP address up, you can hit it with ICMP. It doesn't mean that it works. You could very easily in lots of cases be able to ping an instance and not be able to SSH into it. So the metadata service could be down or there could be any number of issues on the back end that you're not aware of. So I'm just, the point of this is kind of illustrate that out of the box, you're not done. The fun just begins when you get open stack deployed. There's significant gaps in some of the tooling and some of the operational needs. And this is also gonna differ depending on your cloud. I mean, every deployment's gonna be different. The needs of tri-stack are gonna be significantly different than, say, a public cloud that your company might run. You know, the fight that we have is around a huge amount of demand and very little fun at resources. So we do our best with Brisbane Gap with tools. So kind of onto that theme, there's four major areas that we do clean up. These are all custom tools that we've written to basically reign in the resources of the environment and ensure that we have an optimal level of resources for new users to kick the tires. It's really just what it says. And we'll pull the floating IPs back every half day. Network gateways get cleared every day. Cinder volumes get deleted every 48 hours. And instances get deleted every day. So we may go back and revisit this retention rate, but right now, this is kind of the sweet spot that we're at that balances user demand versus having capacity to serve the general public. And again, all the tools that we referenced today are all open source, they're all in GitHub, or they're all of a pretty well-known component or ancillary piece of infrastructure that is used with OpenStack. So this is the Grafana view of kind of that calling activity. So again, you can kind of see the instance count at the very top here. These are VMs that are spawned and spun down. And we can see that the reclamation is fairly smooth across the board. There is one interesting part here. If you see this kind of plummet, this drop off, it looks like the US stock market. The routers with gateways here, plummet it down. That's a very abnormal thing to see in what is normally very concurrent, very smooth graphing. And that indicated to us an abnormality. Next slide.  Yeah, so as Will said, when we looked at this, we realized that how we're doing housekeeping in TriStack is not relinquishing some of the resources. So at one point recently, and you can see what the date line looks like, this was in mid-September, we started seeing posts where folks were unable to allocate floating IPs to their tenants. And we knew that we should have been relinquishing those, as mentioned in one of the slides. Every 24 hours, the floating IPs were relinquished, the gateways were being cleared every 12 hours. And we started to look at why that's not happening, as we dug deeper into how we're doing our house cleaning. We actually found a bug in the Neutron CLI tooling that we submitted upstream, which was causing the CLI tools to fail, and we were relying on those CLI tools to work correctly. So by making use of visualization tools like Grafana, we were able to see that, oh, we can definitely see that there's something a little odd with the way that the relinquishing is happening. And then as we dug deeper, we fixed our scripts and we filed a bug upstream. And as you can see at that point moving forward, there's a lot more of the cleared gateways which gave back the IP addresses to TriStack so that users can allocate them for their application testing. And just some further automation pieces. The upstream infrastructure folks do a very good job of automating all of their systems, having very intelligent build processes and peer review built into their infrastructure. So one of our goals as well is to kind of align whatever makes sense and whatever we can to how they're doing things. So one example of this is if you go to tristock.org and look at the website content, the CSS content and the other stuff on the website, that is managed in Garrett and Git, exactly how OpenStack code would be managed when you submit a patch upstream for review and ultimately inclusion into OpenStack code base. We do the same thing with the web content. So we're trying to mirror all of our activities and kind of our pipelines and our workflow processes to be near the same as upstream infrastructure if not actually consuming some of the same resources. Another bit of automation too is all the service alerting goes to IRC bots as well just to make sure that we're aware of them and that we can take action if something breaks. Cool, next slide. Yep, so there's quite a few challenges that we've had to overcome with running a big service, especially a free service. And the main one is just this overarching theme of demand and growth. We're gonna always be fighting this battle of surge of demand and not enough resources to combat that and to kind of deliver longer running SLAs for people for their instances. So we're constantly tuning and kind of fighting this. Security is another one and it's probably the most interesting one. When you run a big public service out on the internet, you get some very, very interesting use cases. I hesitate to call it use cases. We had one gentleman who was hell bent on torrenting Justin Bieber albums. So I believe that anyone should be able to listen to any kind of music that they like, but they shouldn't use like a free public cloud service for it. They should do that in whatever means they needed to. So we've had to develop some rather creative tooling to track usage of floating IP addresses of timings and other things that, again, don't ship out of the box with OpenStack or maybe they're not recorded in the Neutron database or anywhere else. And we've had to kind of bridge the gap to have a good paper trail and a good audit trail so we can pinpoint when someone's abusing the service and being a bad neighbor, we can get that person off of the project and they don't want to pack to other people who might come behind them. So a little more on that record keeping and audit that Will is talking about. The biggest, or the resource that which we have the toughest time with is the floating IPs and the gateways within Neutron. So one of the things that's true about OpenStack or about TriStack is that it's a global resource. So you've got people coming in from all over the world. You've got folks in Australia, you've got folks in Africa, you've got folks in North America. They're all over the place. So as far as the housekeeping goes, maybe traditionally in a production environment you might do housekeeping during your maintenance window that might be a designated time but we couldn't necessarily do that with TriStack without impacting somebody around the world. So the fairest way that we could come up with doing the reclamation of resources, specifically the public IP addresses, which we have a shortage of, was to track the time of allocation. And within Neutron there's actually no field in a database where you can use Neutron CLIs to list the floating IP and have it tell you that this floating IP was allocated at a specific time.  So when tenants spin up a router and then they allocate the gateway or they allocate a floating IP into their project, we start tracking that and then we actually, we record the time of allocation so that as we go back and reclaim those resources, we can give people the appropriate 12 hours or 24 hours of time to use their resources. And the other thing is that you have folks that are bad players out there, like for example the Bieber Bandit that Will mentioned, when they start doing torrents, we might get a cease and desist order from the data center that says, hey, you've got somebody running a torrent of content that they cannot legally download, so we need you to stop. Well, that IP address gets reclaimed by us, that VM that might have been running a bit torrent client is destroyed, but the next user that comes along might be doing something absolutely legitimate, they just have an application that they're testing, they happen to get that same floating IP, so when we go back to look at our records, we need to make sure that the bad users are the ones that then essentially get removed from the tri-stack group, so currently the access to tri-stack is managed by way of a Facebook group that you can join, and if there's somebody that does something nefarious, like the Bieber Bandit for example, we just remove them from the tri-stack group, and we know exactly when the cease and desist order came in because the reports will tell us and we'll go back and look at our records and make sure that the right person gets dinged for that behavior. And other than that, I think that the other thing that I wanted to point out is we don't want to reinvent wheels, so there are tools out there that you can use against your open-stack deployment. One specifically powerful tool is OS Purge that you can use to clean up resource allocation, but it's a heavy-handed hammer, so when you point OS Purge at a tenant, you can tell it that you want to clean that tenant out entirely, it doesn't disallow the user from using your open-stack deployment, but it does clean up all of their VMs and all of their neutron networks and routers and so forth, but if you have active use case going on against tri-stack for example, and you just launched a VM, we don't necessarily want to clean out your tenant, so we use our own record tracking to make sure that when we run OS Purge, it's those users that have come in and tried tri-stack and now they've gotten a feel for what open-stack is like, but they're just not coming back because now they get it, so those are the ones that we clean out so we can kind of combine OS Purge with our own record keeping so that we can effectively keep resource utilization under control and allow everyone to have a very user-friendly experience when using tri-stack, so the other thing that I wanted to talk about is that we're constantly revamping the environment, we're doing- Next slide, please. We're doing refreshes of the environment, so as the demand on the environment grows, we may need to expand the hardware footprint. The latest round of hardware refreshes were donations from Red Hat's Scale and Performance Lab, where we had some deprecated hardware that was no longer under warranty, so we donated that into tri-stack. We're always keeping up with the newest releases, so we actually have a Newton release that's on deck. In this particular case, we did skip Mitaka, but we're not, typically we don't do that, so Newton's what's on deck because of better integration with federated identity, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and we're also looking to phase out Facebook authentication, so currently what you have to do when you log in is you click a Facebook login button. That's all custom code that's been integrated into Horizon, and it's not the direction that OpenStack is going with as far as federated identity, so we wanna get away from doing that as well in tri-stack. So we talked a little bit about the newest hardware expansion, so I'm not gonna talk much about that. There's also some 10 gig networking that we also donated for backend connectivity as the current Liberty release only has one gig connectivity on the backend. Next slide. So as mentioned, what's on deck is a Newton-based deployment. After summit, we're gonna spend a significant amount of time to try to get the federated identity authentication piece working. We're envisioning is that we would put a free IPA instance up that's gonna be available under the tri-stack domain that's gonna be a self-service portal so that users can come in and create an identity for themselves. We would go through an approval queue, and once we activate those free IPA accounts, there would be an option within tri-stack's login page to use that federated identity to make use of tri-stack. Another option that we're also looking into is to use the foundation's open ID connect endpoints as well. So if you have a foundation login via launch pad, you can just log in to tri-stack. And lastly, we also want to reintegrate the network, NetApp storage backend for storage testing and Minoa testing. And here's some details about the open IDC stuff that in previous talks about tri-stack, and we've talked about moving off of the Facebook auth, this is kind of in progress now, and this is how we're doing it. So we obviously can't deprecate a federated login service without having a replacement. So our goal here is to have several choices. And as Combee's pointed out, the launch pad login, so if you're already logged in to Garrett review or openstack.org or any of this, your end goal is that your credentials are carried over to tri-stack, that there's no further authentication needed and that we get you to use tri-stack faster and get you to kick the tires and be on your merry way. So in as far as the deployment details, I think it's been mentioned a few times now, we're currently still actively on the Liberty release, but we have essentially cut the use case of the number of compute nodes in half in order to be able to stage the next release, which is Newton, which is what's on deck. Once we have Newton fully integrated with the federated identity login working, we're gonna consume the Nova compute nodes from the Liberty release, basically deprecating that environment. And as we get ready to do the next release, closer to the release time, we're gonna go ahead and split that environment back up in order to be able to put on deck the next release without impacting the ability for users to log in. It just means that the overall capacity of the environment will be diminished while we're deploying the next release. All right, and kind of using the staged approaches, minimal downtime, really no downtime at all, because at this point, we're really just flipping DNS records. So the Newton deployment is already up, it already works, and we're making some serious progress in getting the OpenConnect stuff working with the patchy as well. So a bit of a plug for our orchestration, benchmark orchestration and workload tool called Browbeet. Some of you may have been at the previous talk, but basically what Browbeet lets us do is to automate the workloads in order to validate that environment is ready for use. And when we do put the next release of OpenStack on deck for TriStack to use, prior to turning it over to the end users, we do run through a battery of workloads that we orchestrate with Browbeet. Specifically, we're interested in some of the rally-driven workloads that test things like how does OpenStack perform when you launch a large number of VMs simultaneously, which is very typical in the TriStack use case. Sometimes you see things falling over if you have a surge of usage and folks coming in and launching too many networks simultaneously, that can also cause some workload issues. So when you run Browbeet, if you haven't looked at Browbeet, I encourage you to download the slides and take a look at it. There's a whole slew of Ansible playbooks that you can run that really make it easy for you to put the workloads against your OpenStack deployment in place and visualize the results. I'm not gonna go too deeply into the technical aspects of it, but I will show you on the next slide what a typical rally run may look like. So next slide, please. So in this case, we ran a rally workload to launch a large number of VMs. And if you look at the individual rally workload, you can kind of see where the spikes are. Initially, when a large number of VMs were launched, you can kind of see where the performance numbers differ. But overall, you should see kind of a steady performance number. And while this rally run was in play, we were also looking at Grafana, which is the other tool that we use extensively to visualize performance data that is coming back from our various environments. Next slide, please. And in this case, what we're seeing is a very healthy sawtooth pattern that this gave us a very comfortable indication that this environment was in fact functioning within our expectations and that there wasn't anything out of the ordinary going on. There are different metrics that we're visualizing here. Bandwidth utilization, system load, number of VMs being launched. So everything is within standards there. So we were quite happy with that. And as far as how we use the tools that we've talked about so far, there is a Git repository of all of our tooling that help automate this stuff that's gonna be on the last slide. So you can all go and check that out. I encourage you to check it out. And if you have any improvement suggestions, I would welcome suggestions and feedback. We're on IRC as well, externally on free nodes. So you'll have that information as well. Next slide, please. All right, so this is a list of... Well, when it shows up... What's going on here? Anyway, what you're supposed to see is a slide of a list of all of the original founders of TriStack. I don't know if there's anyone here in the audience, the original folks. Nachi was at our last one, but just kind of the folks who founded the project and then the current team that works on it as well. I just wanted to give a shout out also to our Facebook moderators that jump in and help answer questions and kind of keep order. Rain Lander, thank you. And Matias Range, they've been instrumental in helping us answer questions on the forums and really reinforcing that kind of community feel. So thank you guys for your time. And again, TriStack is for humans on Earth. Next slide, please, the last slide. It's limited only to humans and only to Earth. When we do make contact with extraterrestrials, we will probably change the policy. But again, it depends on how aggressive they are. So everyone's seeing Independence Day, probably both of them. I'm at odds with my colleague here. I think that aliens should be allowed to use TriStack. I mean, we just have to cross that bridge when we get there. We're just gonna have to agree to disagree. Anyway, that's another topic of discussion, but it's open for anyone on the planet. It's purely an advocacy platform. We just want you to check out OpenStack with all the complexity involved in getting it installed and managed and running. So we'll take questions. We've got a few minutes here, and thank you for attending our talk. Appreciate it, guys. If you don't see any mics, but... There's a mic here. Okay, any questions? Any comments, questions? Suggestions. Better support for Linux. With the display, maybe? Right, so yeah, the question was, what OpenStack opponents do we provide? Everything out of the box. Anything that you would get in a vanilla deployment. So currently, we do limit on Liberty, we do limit people to upload their own glance images. We've had some contention on the storage in with just not having enough space, and we've unfortunately had people upload many, many copies of Windows Server, which we don't officially support there, but we will preload and update the latest version of any cloud OS that's available, including core OS and any of the other derivatives. Our only kind of rule there is that it needs to not be copyrighted. It needs to be freely available. It needs to come from a verified source so that there's checksums and we can make sure it's a secure image. Other than that, we're happy to put anything else up there. I think currently we also disable Solometer. We've had some performance issues with Solometer, but the current Newton deployment, everything is enabled across the board. So you should have all the functionality available there. I don't believe that we include Sahara yet. I think that's still an optional component. If there's enough, again, if there's enough demand for it, we're also happy to deploy anything optional. VPN is a service, Firewall is a service, whatever that doesn't come with Newton or Ricotta, we're happy to go and set up if there's enough demand for it. Yeah, I think the biggest challenge really is for us that we're doing this on our own time, basically. So as far as our full-time job on performance scale at Red Hat, beyond that, whatever time we can find to contribute to TriStack is what Will and I will do. And the more open we make the platform, the more likely it is that it's gonna be abused to some extent, as far as the content being on there that's copyrighted, the more open it is, the more we have to do verification that people aren't putting Windows images out there when they shouldn't be or whatever. So that's the tough part. Yeah, but it's also a lot of fun and we've learned a lot as well. We've hit a lot of open-stack bugs. We normally would not have encountered and gotten fixes for those. We've hit a lot of stuff around Neutron. Before we had a lot of the culling scripts kind of fine-tuned, we would hit all sorts of Linux and Net Namespace issues and things with scalability. So for us, it's also been a really good learning experience and kind of our goal here also is to take what we learned from this platform and push that knowledge upstream and file bugs were appropriate and submit patches were appropriate, so. As for the resources that we mentioned, by the way, we're gonna put those up on, maybe Browbeetproject.org as a blog post can point to this because there's slide decks that you might be interested as well as the GitHub repository references that are on the slide that I'm looking at that you guys cannot see up there. It's a beautiful slide. I wish you guys could see it. Did you have a question, sir? No, not really. I'm aware of a lot of a few other clouds specifically around CI. We are working a little closer with upstream infrastructure than we were before, but this is really purely an advocacy platform. This is, there's no SLA on the environment. Every 24 hours instances are pulled back and it's a best effort sort of endeavor, but it's that way for a reason. Our kind of goal is to accommodate a large swath of use cases and to tear things down and deploy the newest version as soon as possible, even going pre-production as well if we need to. So I do think that they fit a somewhat different use case, whereas if someone's running CI on a cloud, they want permanency on their tenants, they don't want floating IPs dressed to be pulled out from under them and things of that nature. So I do think that while there are a lot of parallels, what we're doing with TriStack, I think is really more on the advocacy end and less on any kind of permanent use case. We have worked with the RDO-CI group in getting their RDO-CI moved temporarily into TriStack and exempted them from the house cleaning that we do to get rid of instances when they were actually in transit because part of their environment had to go offline and they needed a publicly accessible cloud in which they could run CI. So we do collaborate closely with the various teams as well as the infra team. So, but like Will said, it's more of a sandbox environment. So if people want to see what does TriStack look like when it's stood upright, they can come in to TriStack and have a look because it is a daunting task to deploy OpenStack, no matter what the method is that you use to deploy it. It's a blessing and a curse because the modularity I think is the strongest bit, the biggest benefit of OpenStack that you pick the components that you need. You don't get this kind of box solution that gets dropped on your door and you have to fit your infrastructure and tools around that. Instead, you can kind of mold OpenStack to be what to fit your needs. So it's kind of the opposite of what a lot of the vendor offerings would be in the proprietary cloud space. So the modularity also comes with a responsibility to and usually manifests itself in complexity. So our goal is to kind of remove that complexity for people. All right, well, if you have any more questions or you want to talk, we'll be hanging out around here and thanks for joining us today. Thanks guys.


How are you competing in this environment these days with Amazon, with social media, and yet you get people coming into these stores? You know what? I think it goes back to the strategy. When I first came here in 2010, we put together a strategy and most of the strategy relies on self-help initiatives. So there's four major pillars to the strategy. The first one is product, first and foremost will always be our number one priority. Number two, business transformation through technology. So a lot of money and a lot of time invested in systems. Number three was alternate channels of distribution. When I first came here, we were really just a kind of sleepy North American brick and mortar only retailer. And we really, we had no international business. We had no franchise business. We had no wholesale business. And we had a very small penetration of our digital businesses. And then the fourth pillar is fleet optimization and really looking at the fleet and understanding what is the appropriate amount of stores we should have, particularly with what's going on with digital.  So as I said, a lot of that relies on self-help initiatives, not really what's going on in the macro world. So we've been able to do a lot at Children's Place by helping ourselves. Thank you.


So, in a kind and gentle universe, you'll only ever have to do one transformation. But you don't live in that universe. Very often you have to do several transformations, one after the other. And we can perform several transformations, one after the other, but it's important to perform the transformations in the specified order, since we can end with very different results if we change the order. So, for example, if I shift something three units to the right, then reflect across the y-axis, I may end up with something very different than if I reflect across the y-axis first, then shift three units to the right. So, let's see what happens. Suppose the graph of y equals 3x plus 5 is shifted two units to the right, then reflected across the y-axis. Find the equation of the new graph. Also, let's find the equation of the graph produced by performing the transformations in the opposite order. So, again, we have our formulas for the transformations, but we don't really need them. If we shift the graph two units to the right, our original points x, y will go to the new points capital X, capital Y, where our new x and y coordinates are, which we can solve for the original x and y coordinates. We'll replace these in our original equation, do a little algebra, and if it's not written down, it didn't happen. The equation of the graph produced by shifting two units to the right will be y equals 3x minus 1. Well, that's one transformation. We still need to reflect the graph across the y-axis. So reflecting the graph across the y-axis takes our original coordinates x, y, and sends them to a new set of points, capital X, y, where solving for our original lowercase x and y, and we'll replace and simplify to get our new equation. And so, when we do that second transformation, reflecting this across the y-axis gives a graph with the equation y equals negative 3x minus 1. This happens if we do the transformations in the opposite order. So first we'll reflect the graph across the y-axis, so our new x and y coordinates will be, we'll solve for the original x and y coordinates, and replace, do a little algebra. So if we reflect the graph across the y-axis, the equation of the new graph will be y equals negative 3x plus 5. The other transformation requires us to shift two units to the right, so our new x and y coordinates will be, and again we'll solve for the original x and y coordinates, and replace and simplify, and summarize if we shift the graph to units to the right, the equation will be y equals negative 3x plus 11. And so we can compare if we reflect first, then translate, we get one equation. If we translate first, then reflect, we get a different equation, and the order of our transformations is important because we'll end up with very different graphs.


Do you have any tips for anyone who's thinking of setting out to make a podcast? Off the top of your head, what would your top tips be? I think, just do it initially in the first instance.  People always say like, how do you get into it? I always say like, well, do you write? And the person is like, no, I really want to get into writing. And I'm like, well, you're never going to get into writing unless you write. You've got to do that thing to sell it off. You've got to be the kind of person who just kind of desperately wants to do it, has to do it and has this burning need to get things out there. The great thing about podcasting and writing and podcasting is that they are things that you can do yourself. They're not dependent on other people. You can't really act by yourself. That's kind of the definition of madness. But you can write by yourself and you can record by yourself and you can edit it by yourself and you can put it out there by yourself. Build it and they will come, hopefully. So that's, I guess, my first tip. Obviously, listen a lot to what else is out there and make sure you're not doing something that feels like what a lot of other people are doing or even what one other person is doing in a very high profile way. Don't try and deliberately ape. There's a lot of people. Law is a very popular podcast. Law, L-O-R-E, telling the creepy folktales and that sort of thing. There's a load of a podcasting that. There's so many other podcasts with somebody sitting in their room retelling a murder or a folktale kind of thing. You kind of do feel after a while how many of these does the world need. So try if you can to do something original that you don't feel is out there. You're not seeing hundreds of versions of. And then from that, I think just obviously do try and think about a way to monetize it. Is that about trying to go out there and speak to some potential sponsors, looking for a brand? So again, this is a horrible, tawdry commercial side of make a podcast. But is your idea in any way something that a particular company might be interested in sponsoring? If it's a football podcast, is there a sports channel or a sports website or whatever who might want to sponsor it? There's a huge demand, I'm told, for business podcasts. And there are lots of people out there wanting to sponsor business podcasts. There's loads of companies that want to get their name on a podcast that business people listen to. So there are certainly some genres that are probably lend themselves better to finding sponsorship. We've haunted with ghost stories. Are there any companies out there that require the undead as their customer base? But being pragmatic, being passionate, being pragmatic. And then just building your audience, being somebody who gets yourself out there on social media and tries to make connections. We've haunted. We got out there and we just contacted so many paranormal groups and also skeptic groups. We had these two potential listener bases that did overlap. But skeptics and paranormal fans who seemed very separate but did overlap. Did you contact them before or after? After release, really, because we were so preoccupied with making it. So we got out there and did a lot of it ourselves. We got on Twitter and we contacted directly influencers within the skeptic world and the paranormal world. And I went and did lots of entries on loads of popular paranormal podcasts and paranormal radio stations over in the States. And those things tangibly boosted our audience. You could see every time I went on those shows, a lot of people coming on board and a lot of new listeners, like sometimes thousands of new listeners would come in through having done a popular paranormal podcast. And I just think the podcasting world is such a kind of community, such a joined up kind of thing that if you are getting on other people's podcasts to promote your own, that's the best advertising you can have because people are listening to those podcasts, have a relationship with those podcasts and connect with those podcasts and so they might like yours as well. The host of that show is endorsing your podcast. But at the same time, endorse other people's podcasts on your show as well.  But I think that's the way to kind of spread the word about your stuff, getting on other people's shows and getting other people's shows on yours. If you can get the host of a popular podcast to come on your show, then that might bring more people to listen to you. That's Danny Robbins. This is the podcast producer's podcast with me, Neil Mossy. It's a place where podcast producers share their tips and experiences so that everyone can start a podcast and keep going. There's details of how to subscribe in the description. Thanks so much for getting to this point in the podcast. And thanks again to Danny. The links to him and his podcasts are in the description. And if you've got this far into the podcast, it's really good to have you here. Why not give me a thumbs up or a comment or tweet me? It would be lovely to hear from you. There's also details in the description for where you can find the next episode. Can you please help my daddy get 1,000 subscribers? Just click on his face. Thanks. Bye.


Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're going to explore monochromatic painting But we have a very special figure to do that. That's right I got my hands on one of Miniax Kickstarter models The link for Miniax Kickstarter is down in the description. You can go check that out There are three models in total all with this wood elf type theme I picked this one because she's the most sinister of the bunch and I just really liked the figure and thought it was super cool and I want to tell a story about This woodland being who goes through and is part of the unseely court and is sapping the life From the other creatures of the forest But I want to do so through one color. We're going to explore one color monochromatic painting in this case it will be green and Just because we're painting all in green doesn't mean there's not lots of ways we can explore contrast Variance and keeping the piece to a high level of visual interest. So thank you to Scott so much for sending this along and letting me paint it and This is going to be a really fun challenge. So Let's get into it. Let's strict techno man sir. That is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style All right So we're starting with a nice big selection of greens and some other colors are gonna mix in when you're doing monotone There's two ways you can go first You can get out every green paint you own and every single tone and try to integrate them all Secondly you can start from just sort of one green and then start mixing in other tones like Let's say you want to lighten it or darken it shift it more to the brown tone at its Complementary colors to get a neutral yellow it out. Whatever what I've decided to do here is both So what we're gonna do is we're gonna first get all the colors on the palette I really want to walk you that I don't normally show setting up my palette cuz who cares But in this case I want to show you sort of my thought pattern So I start by taking all these different greens and getting them out there and in fact by the end of this I will add more greens to this this won't be the end of them and So as we get all these greens then we're gonna go ahead and get out all the other colors as well and I want to make sure that there's plenty here to mix into the You know into the the greens so I can go from a very bright color to a very dark color to a Complementary desaturated color all over the place depending on whatever I need We start by of course setting out some skin Progressions this is gonna be my initial pattern Mixing in the whole red to get a deeper color and then into the lighter ones to get even lighter colors and progressively lighter values Now none of these are super interesting But they'll serve our purpose for our initial sketch that we need to do on the skin All right So now it's time to start blocking in some skin and I'm gonna show you most of this through the face Since it's kind of the most expressive area with lots of different volumes on it I'm starting from a very dark dark dark green tone here, and it's gonna look silly at first. Don't worry There are multiple challenges. We're gonna need to cover first I need to understand the light placement and I'm going to do that effectively with the greens and then progressively lighter mixes I'm value sketching over the top of my zenithal because I need to be precise with where I'm gonna place all these tones and then Eventually lay in the other hues. So all my initial work is just about capturing light Nothing more. I'm not too worried about how this is ultimately gonna look or how smooth it is I'm just trying to make sure I understand where all the volumes are what needs to be bright What isn't I did this relatively quickly this only took a few minutes 20 or 30 minutes to sort of sketch out the colors across the whole figure because I was being rough and fast but it was about understanding with a Progression of the greens. I'm gonna use exactly what needs to be bright and what needs to be dark now Why didn't I just rely on the zenithal because the zenithal is not precise enough and I have a specific lighting scheme I want to use here The zenithal helped me as a guide to made the figure easier to read So even though I'm covering it with many layers of opaque paint It still helped me to see the fig to make it more visually accessible as I'm putting these down Once I have my Progressions and sort of the bands of color in place And you can see how rough that is especially down there on the leg and things like that around the eyes and that's fine I don't I don't need it to be smooth right now But once I have this full progression in place and take it even brighter than it needs to be and that's one of the keys When you're gonna work in this sketch style always sketch brighter than you're going to finally aim Because you want to be able to knock things back use glazes bring in other colors Bring in other shades as you mix those other hues and bring other colors into it that will darken it You want to make sure that super bright value shows through Hence why I'm pushing this sketch so far. Now. I never that none of this is pure white This is all just going up to the brightest white ice yellow Or sorry brightest ice yellow light green mix here one of the challenges here with something like this especially with skin is that Skin has a lot of different hues to it lots of different tones We're used to looking at skin and our fellow humans and seeing quite actually a wide array of Desaturated colors regardless of the individual skin tone. There's lots of oranges and purples reds Blues all these types of things occur in skin tone naturally Especially when it interacts with ambient light say you're looking at someone under moonlight versus under artificial light Something like that So what you'll see me do here is play a lot with the skin tone to really try to set those tones Create those subtle transitions and make sure things stay interesting while still all staying in the green spectrum, so Let's keep going Now this next part is going to seem completely insane But I'm effectively using the bone the sort of buff color Which is a slight bit of green into it and placing it off the high highlights because I want to work in a little bit more of that yellow brown white tone that is buff and It's helping me to set some other interference colors This I think is a way that most people don't think about painting of sketching out a value transition in a color and then Adding in these different hues and then bringing it all together at the end But it really does help especially with something like skin. I generally wouldn't do this if I was doing it I don't know like a robe or something because it just doesn't have the level of color variation and Variation of hue that you need to see in skin. I need to make this interesting even though it's all green So as a result, that's why I'm working in now. I've moved up to an even brighter color with more ice yellow mixed in You're gonna see me work some pink into this, you know all these different tones I lean much much heavier onto the like the mix is mostly those non green colors It's just a little bitty bitty tab of green in it And I'm doing that because I want to get those other Colors mixed in to provide that critical tonal variation that makes us recognize something even if it's completely green as skin Then I'm gonna come back in as you see me doing here with a very thin green glaze Now this is my original green mid-tone just turned into a glaze And I'm just gonna glaze over the figure For the most part I'm glazing over everything just very lightly very thin Now you might ask yourself This is a lot of trouble you're doing here Vince is all this worth it Why so much effort on the face on the skin? Face and skin are the areas of the model that people will tend to look at the most So I'm paying a ton of attention to the thing that is gonna catch people's eyes first as humans we are trained to look at faces and We recognize things that don't look right in stuff like skin even when it's an alien color Because we've spent our whole life looking at other human beings shirts Claw you know clothing and stuff like that it can look like a million different things We don't have the same biases and preconceived notions. It doesn't matter what skin color it is We have expectations about how light interacts with it about sheen and about the variation of hue We're gonna see across it as such it's taking them So my my attention is being mostly drawn to that skin and to that Face especially especially doubling down on that but all of it's getting touched And you can see how now what I'm doing is working on a mid-tone mix so it's not quite as green It's my first one. It's got a little bit more of the colors integrated and working those around Now comes a really really important step I take some of that yellow ochre mix with just a little bit of thin green and we're gonna give that a nice little glaze But this time I'm not hitting the highest areas this time I'm pushing around the mid-tones about 60 percent of the model 60 70 percent of the model I want to get that rich yellow tone into the miniature because that yellow tone Again is going to be that feeling of life of warmth We tend to recognize Living beings as having warm tones in them in other humans That's often reds and purples and things like that Browns but with a being like this that has green skin We want to make sure we work in those strong yellow tones Because that will make it feel more alive like it's in sunlight like it's in a real light situation And it's something that's really there and alive and existing So working in that yellow glaze not only hides some of my inconsistent blends, which is hey, that's pretty nice Because it's just another glaze of the top to help smooth things down But it also increases the tonal variation and makes it feel more alive It's a really potent color. By the way, those kinds of yellow glazes those work over basically any color skin tone So that's just a great tip for the future Regardless of what skin tone you're painting and you can see how I work it all the way around the model here again Not covering the whole thing about 60 percent is what I'll lay down and then you'll see me feather it out Into that other area to sort of smooth out the glaze In the parts that are darker. I work a little heavier version of it that way It hints it more because when it's the very dark green or stuff like that It's not really gonna have much of an impact So I need to get in there and get a little bit more aggressive with it be aggressive be aggressive Next up I'm going to start working down some of my shadows These are the light glazes as we've worked through these paints. They've gotten progressively thinner my initial sketches were basically layers my My secondary colors that I was adding were very thin layers now. We're down into very very thin glazes And this is basically whole red with just a touch of the deep green integrated when put Over its complementary color of green it acts as a absolutely wonderful Natural shadow and again working in those red tones makes it feel more alive All right in between shots that I obviously blocked out the rest of the colors because I needed to get an idea of what I was Dealing with here, but all I did is lay down a base tone of the different greens and sort of blocked everything And you can see that's that's what I'm doing here is just turning these belts into that sort of phthalo green I used no blacks and no whites throughout this so These dark brown boots are just complementary colors mixed together to get something near black In fact, let's talk about black. How do we make black when we have no actual black in our palette? Well, here I've mixed phthalo green phthalo green Which has a little bit of just sort of a blue green with a deep hole red and what you get is a wonderful black Approximation there's a little more color and visual interest than normal black using colored Blacks I guess what I would call it like black tones, but they're not they don't actually have any pigment that is black in it They only have actual colored pigment in them hue Is a great trick your dark color your ultimate shadow color is much more visually interesting But it still serves the same function. You can see how now that everything's lined how much cleaner it looks The next way we're gonna create contrast I'm sorry my hand is right in the way the light unfortunately the next way we're gonna make contrast is through texture since I don't have Color hue available to me to make contrast We've got to do other things now Yes, I can still work value light and dark and you saw me doing that a lot with the skin with this rough Cloak robe things she's wearing. I figured it would be scuffed up. She's walking through the woods and it's a leather So I laid down a bunch of just scratchy scratchy dots hashes lines just rough Texture no skill to it just took a thin brush and started chopping at the thing making tiny hashes slashes dashes and dots Then I'm gonna glaze over it with a nice Transparent green you can see a lot of that gets covered up a lot. That's okay We're gonna do that multiple times. We want to create a lot of variants and that small amount creates that visual Confusion that extra noise It helps us balance it out And you notice all my highlights are really rough. I'm not trying to make them smooth on this Even when that the thin yellow green I just used to start creating my highlight over the top of the previous scratches I did Was very very thin and roughly applied Now I just start integrating more yellow white or more yellow bone actually Into the green mixture and again just rough Slashes hashes dashes and dots right that's all it is my highlight here is done completely through texture This is a great trick for something like metal if you have problems with non-metallic metal One of the great tricks is to just highlight it through these kinds of slashes and hashes and stuff You don't need to be smooth. It will look realistic Once again going back to the glazes to smooth it all out and off camera I went in and did more of the hashes and dashes and stuff Again just to pop the final highlight a quick note on the progress for this piece almost everything You see me doing on camera. I repeat again about two or three times off camera So I'm just not gonna record me doing the same thing three times but repeating the same process helps to add to both the smoothness and the density of the translucent paint Texture is also what we're gonna do with the wood now here over this deep brown wood Which I made by just mixing brown and dark green We are going to basically just catch a lot of little lines and striations of like wood texture She has a wood arm and sort of a wood skirt I'm not the one who made her fashion choices, you know, I'm not telling her. Do you want to tell her? And I do that evenly all around the thing to create the texture now to bring the green back into it I'm just gonna lay this green glaze Over everything over the whole shoot and match all that texture that I just did The trick is the deep brown will basically not react to this glaze at all because it's so thin and transparent But the bone color that I use to do the tracing absolutely will The problem is it doesn't respect the light and everything needs to heed the light So once I've done that I go back in this time with a not just the pure bone But with a bone mixed with the green Very thin mix of it and I start creating more sharp lines and Reinforcing the existing lines around the areas that would catch light and with a structure like this I think it can sometimes be confusing for people Don't think of the thing like it's little parts think of it like it's one smooth volume So that arm I'm just thinking of it like a big arm and highlighting it accordingly Now I want to deepen the shadows so I go back in with a second glaze and once again same thing Don't think of it like a little bunch of individual lines. How would you shade the arm? Well, you'd put the shade along the bottom of the surface Okay, well, that's exactly what I do here. It doesn't matter that it's made of a tiny bunch of time tiny little branches We still treat it as one volume This is just me drawing leaf texture on her tiny leaf leggings This is a very hard thing to film. These are extremely tiny little lines Because I'm trying to do the veins of leaves in there But again adding this small amount of texture to a very, you know Small area just helps to set everything apart and always have something to discover when you're looking at the piece Let's talk hair Okay, so she has green hair doesn't matter what color hair is Her hair is dark I laid down that base coat and then effectively gave it kind of a deeper Wash with my original black color you saw me make just to kind of create some deep ridges in there Now as I start highlighting it, you notice the first highlight color I do I'm not just tracing the strands. I lay it down thick and Wide in the area where I want the light to catch and I didn't change paint colors there This is just a second application of the same paint color in the shadow areas of the hair I trace the lines in the main area where it's going to be lit You see how I apply a full thick brush stroke. I want this tone down in the shadows Whereas in the shadow areas this becomes the highlight as We progress up, which is what all this is going to be me just progressively doing lighter and lighter colors I will start making thinner and thinner lines covering less and less and less Not only just Horizontally in the hair but vertically as well.  I keep shrinking them But also I keep making them thinner vertically just tracing thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner individual strands making sure that I've captured The the light feeling like it's getting thinner each time right The last thing I do here is just take some of my original green and just kind of glaze it back in place to smooth Everything out some of that phthalo green and as I do this I'm also going to go ahead and reinforce some on the other side I have most the light falling on the left side of her because that was the visually interesting side But I realized I had sort of under highlighted this side. So I just go back and complete the same progression Now comes a real challenging question Most things you can tilt towards the color green like the way I tilted the wood You know her hair or something like that. It doesn't feel a lot of place But when we come to certain things like gold gold simply feels like it should be some color that is gold So as we look to deal with those we have to think about how we don't alter the color itself We still leave the gold having a yellow hue to it But how we integrate that green into the larger color without Overwhelming it and that's really a way that you can express The wholeness of the hue in a monochromatic piece So you can still have those other colors or other elements here and there but you integrate green Maybe it's as a shadow or as a highlight Maybe it's as just a pop color could be things like, you know, you integrate it in through weathering anything like that There's lots of interesting ways to work color into your painting and doing so only makes the piece more visually expressive more compelling and more interesting Green gold, how do we do that? All right, let's talk about the nature of gold Non-metallic metal in general is recognized through its progression of containing lights darks and lights falling in the correct places We would expect them to more than it is by its color Even in the case of gold and as a point of fact although gold doesn't weather or stain or oxidize and so on and so forth It does look different depending on the light. It's in and the ambient Surroundings we have very green light. Assuming that she's in a green forest. She is a green model So my initial tones. I'm laying down as these yellow were all these deep yellow greens And I'm working them to focus again the light on the same area That left side of her face where there's the light of the hair the stronger light on her face And it will also be the stronger light on the gold But I'm still giving all of the bars whatever of this strange necklace attention So I work my way up Progressing through adding more up to bone and then slight touches of the ice yellow But I always have a little touch of that green integrated in The other important thing I want to point out to you here is that I'm heating the edges every time We recognize non-metallic as having sharp edges So I'm always tracing those out keeping those strong as I progress I'm also applying them to the tippy tippy top of it of each bar You see how there's those little light catches right around the top One of the most powerful things you can do in creating non-metallic or just model painting in general is Constantly be alternating light to dark light to dark popping a little highlight at the tops of your Progressions every time you create a dark if you can create a light right next to it do so You see how I have these little white spots at the top of the gold bars of her necklace Because then that makes that visually pop out if I had only pushed all the light toward the bottom Where it would sort of naturally fall It would actually be much less visually interesting. So reinforcing these lights as you see me doing there is really important Finally to reinforce the green I take some of that green that I have That sort of green yellow and I just re-glaze it into the shadows Building up those deep shadows through progressive layers of green Alright, so there she is I think she's looking pretty good even though she's monotone She's all in green. We can do it. You could stop here if you wanted to do something like this But you know what I'm gonna do now. I know this is about monotone painting, but um This is also a series called hobby cheating. So we're gonna cheat and We're gonna add a pop color That's right folks. This suddenly became not just a monotone painting tutorial But also a pop color tutorial and I'm sorry these details are very small And I have about two inches of depth of field zoomed in like this. So here we are We're gonna add magenta as a pop color and talk about pop colors in general The story here is I want to show that she's drawing the magical essence out of this little being and absorbing it into herself So we want to create a color triangle and that's the most important thing when you're adding a shock color to your miniature That's very different. It needs to be balanced. Her triangle is going to be this thing's heart and eyes her inner palm of her left hand and her eyes all glowing the same color to sell the magical Transference I begin by laying down some thick magenta right around the areas Then applying a thinner glaze of magenta in the broader area because we're playing In not truly OSL, but more of a little magical glow So yes, it is playing with a little bit of light and a little bit of OSL But what we really want to do is sell the effect that this area is rife with some kind of magic That's filling the air that she's sapping out of his dead heart So I start adding in a little bit more brighter colors to the magenta just integrating the ice yellow that I had previously used and Building up the progression towards there The reason I glazed the magenta all around the thick application of it was because I want to create that glow So it needs to end in a soft glaze all light casts Need to end in a soft fade of the color. They can't suddenly end light doesn't work like that With hands when you're doing magical hands You need to basically push the light towards the top of each hand muscle and create a sort of sketch of the hand in the palm My next step is to go in with pure ice yellow and just kind of pop out Each area where I want it to be brightest Now we're not gonna actually leave it ice yellow because if we add it to just white it won't sell It won't look like magical energy. It'll just look like it's something super highlighted or reflecting a tiny bit of light But when we do our next step, we have to lay down white first So you can see how here I pick out each of the individual little pads of the hand toward the top As well as the thumb and things like that Now we take some golden high-flow fluorescent pink, which is a wonderful thing to cover over white It has zero covering power on its own. You have to put it over white if you want it to do anything and or you can use it straight and it can just be like your glaze for your fading glow and Putting that over the top of all the white it will so pop and Suddenly we have these small but aligned balanced triangle of bright pink which sells the magical energy transference Of the creature to her and really helps to make the thing feel more green more alive and most importantly more interesting So there we go. She all came together in the end I'm gonna run some pictures here over the top of me talking as I go through this This was a really challenging piece especially the skin tone But once I felt like I got that in the right place I think the rest came together nicely and you saw how we used both slight integrations of other colors to vary the green But also the application So how we used rough textures in some place stippling in some places Smooth textures in other places, right? How much we varied the amount of highlight Making certain areas of the piece feel very flat like it wasn't reflecting a lot of light Like it's wool or cloth and some people some areas in the in the piece feeling much brighter more satiny more reflective of light There's lots of ways to achieve contrast without relying solely on hue And I tried to explore a lot of that to make the various elements of this piece stand apart even though basically She's just a jolly green elf making her way through the woods slowly sucking the life out of other forest creatures for Endless magical power You know just that old chestnut So I hope you enjoyed this if you did give it a like Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday If you've got any questions drop those down in the comments as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time You


Hey guys, so a lot of you have been asking about when the refuse slot for this year is going to open. In my opinion, it's going to open really soon. We already saw one batch of refuse slots open up which was basically for people with refusal in 2022. And I think that the next set of refuse slots which will be for 2023 refusers is going to open up real soon, probably in the next 10 days, that means end of July. So brace yourself, be ready and make sure that your DS160 forms are complete. Your preparation is on track and of course keep tracking and monitoring the system really regularly. We'll also bring all these slot opening updates right here on this channel, so stay tuned for that. And once these slots open up, very likely that the interviews are either end of July or the first 10 days of August.


One two three four. So on today's episode of trying to vlog in the Netherlands We are sitting in the park And this park is actually really close to the place where Elaine's friends live. They let us have their apartment for the first How many days are we living here? Four days? Yeah, we leave tomorrow to an AirBnB So for the first four days let us have their apartment and we are sitting here in the park It's a really beautiful place and Yeah, I mean the whole time we're here. I didn't even realize the park was here. I knew it was here I wanted to show you so it's called Wilhelmina Park and it's named after our former queen and there's also a Statue over here so we'll go there in a bit But it's kind of a golden hour now, even though it's winter So I thought it would be nice to see it now because the autumn colors, I'm sure you see them in the background They are coming really, you know They are popping So yeah, we'll take you guys along and Of course vlogging in the Netherlands show you around show your experiences and chill with us Catch you when we see the queen start you right that you right? Yeah, okay in a bit Over here looks like a fire eater It does look different, but over here it looks like a fire eater or a fire breather 1980 to 1962 That is a long time So the queen And she's very important because she got this through the second world war if I'm correct If you're correct, you don't remember your history 1962 Yeah And she used to be on our coins Before we got the euro Right, I can't show the golden now because we won't have it anymore, but Okay, that's what's my history Sweet This could be the best thing that I'll ever know I'm gonna name this vlog discovering your neighborhood now. We are in a rosario a little rose Park or garden Lane has a date with a new boyfriend. Did you think you were gonna do that? Do you think that was what it was but okay, that's a lot of name


Our fall season is packed. The men are going to do 14 dates of our competition. The women are doing 12. They're doing three to a days. The women are going out to Ohio, going to New York, and going to Virginia to play the best teams in those areas. The men are doing the same. I'm real excited with the new guys we have coming in, new girls, and with the returners. We should be competitive. And that's what I want. With the men, we brought four freshmen coming in. One boy, Sean Dow, made all state in Connecticut. He's been practicing every day here already. I brought three girls in. And Megan McGill from Mercy High School has been playing all every day. So I'm real excited with what I brought in. They're going to compliment my returners. Practice is a hard thing. I set up a practice on Fridays from 1 to 2.30 for the women, 2.30 to 4 for the men. But it's very hard because we play on weekends. I have developed a trust with my players that they go up to Piney Branch, which we belong, and practice on their own. The amount of practice they're doing. They're at the course. The pro called me yesterday. And he said we're being flooded with Stevenson players. They're coming up all the time to play. And when you got over 20, that's a lot.


Welcome back to my channel and welcome if you're new here happy Friday, it's Friday yet again, and it is the last Friday of May Can you even believe that in a couple of days 2020 is halfway over and whoo it has been a year It has been a challenging Frustrating year for a lot of us and I just am flabbergasted that the year is about half over. It's crazy I did want to let you guys know kind of how my week has been I do have a couple of updates from my coach on the WW workshops that I wanted to share with you guys So I just logged my weight into my app just attended my virtual workshop So I want to let you guys know a little bit on how my week went and I have some updates as far as Weight Watchers studios in-person meetings from my coach at least for my area I don't know what it will be in your area But kind of a few updates as far as what she shared with us today in our workshop So my week overall went really well, but this week my friends is my favorite time of the month Yep, my cycle is here. It actually started early in the week. I think it was Monday or Tuesday So it's been a little bit of a challenging week as far as feeling tired and fatigued and just blah You guys know how that is during your cycle My food has been pretty good because I was super hungry last week Remember I did have a little bit of a game last week because I was just super hungry all week Which makes perfect sense now But this week I struggled with motivation and feeling tired and fatigued and really wanting to do my workouts Wanting to do really much of anything. I did get in two or three workouts I don't remember this week including a super session on Memorial Day where I actually got in an Hour and a half of Jazzercise, which was incredible. I burnt a ton of calories So this week overall went pretty good considering it is my cycle and we just don't always feel our best this week So that is kind of how my week went in a nutshell. If you're new make sure you're subscribed We'd love to have you stick around thumbs up this video. It really helps out my channel Now let's jump into what we talked about at the virtual workshop, and then I'll share my way in results The workshop this week we talked about habits and habit loops So we kind of started off with a habit that we have that we don't even think about that's really second nature to us So think about that what's a habit that you have that you literally don't think about so I was thinking of morning routine One habit I have is brushing my teeth. It's something. I don't even think about I get up I just do it before bed. I just do it, but it wasn't always that way as kids It took us time practicing and really developing brushing our teeth as a habit It wasn't something that just automatically happened So think about a habit that you would like to have that just isn't second nature to you And that's what we're going to talk about this week is turning that Habit or want of a habit into something that you just habitually do that becomes a habit loop for you So take a habit that you would like to have and turn it into a habit loop The first step is identifying the habit that you want to have the second step is having a cue Something that cues you to do that habit and the third step of a habit loop is giving yourself a reward So let's go a little bit more into these three steps And I'm going to share with you a habit that I Want to start having be just second nature to me and how I'm going to do that using the habit loop So the very first step is choosing a habit that you want to make into a permanent habit Try to choose something that takes five minutes or less and something that you can actually have a cue for so Let me share mine with you So I thought about this as I drove to the parking lot here to film this video About a habit that I would like to implement and that habit for me is Pre-tracking now that I am tracking both points and calories and macros for me tracking all of my food for the day Seeing where it fits within my points calories and macros and making adjustments is something that I've been doing Not every day, but is a habit that I definitely want to develop and something I do want to be doing every single day So for me that habit is pre tracking my food at the beginning of the day So the second step in the habit loop is getting a cue triggering a cue So think of something that you do every single day that will trigger you or cue you to do your new habit So for me when I make my coffee in the morning I always sit down After I've made my coffee because I like to just kind of sit and enjoy my coffee in the morning I will pre-track my coffee. So for me that cue is going to be sitting down and enjoying my coffee I'm now going to pre-track my entire day in both the Weight Watchers app and the Lose It app To see where I'm falling points wise calorie wise macro wise and right then in there making any adjustments to Meals and snacks throughout the day to get me where I want to be in all three of those areas So I do this every day I like to sit down whether it's on my couch in my office at my kitchen table and enjoy my cup of coffee So that is my cue to pre-track my food and a third step in the habit loop is rewarding yourself We all want to do things if there's a reward at the end of it Of course, we don't want to make the reward for this new habit to be food But we want to do something whether it's physical or sensational So for me knowing that my day is pre-tracked in my tracker and in the Lose It app Literally makes me feel happy and accomplished and also it makes me stay on track It's huge you guys if I have everything tracked for the day I don't want to waiver from that because I don't want to have to go back in and Retract that food and make modifications and adjustments. So for me having it pre-tracked is huge Helps me stay on track helps me reach my goals And it's definitely a habit that I need to continue and put into place Because I see much more success when I pre-track my food. I stay on track. I don't waiver I get my water in I have things to look forward through throughout the day Whether that be a dessert or a dinner that I can't wait to have or a lunch So for me, that's kind of the habit loop that I want to create So I want you guys to think about what is a habit that you would really really like to have now? It could be tracking related. It could be exercise related Maybe it's food related or water related think about a habit that you really really want to have that you know Is going to help you in your journey and then put it into the habit loop Decide on what that habit is decide on a cue for that habit and a reward. So I absolutely love this I have heard of the habit loop before I've just never implemented it into my weight loss journey But it's funny because this last week I was thinking about goals for this week and the first goal that came to mind was pre-tracking my food So it comes perfectly in sync with what WW has for this week's topic So that is the habit that I'm going to create starting this week I'll share with you guys next week how that went was I able to create that habit? Did I pre-track how did that go and how did that work as far as my weight loss goes? So I think it's a great great tool to really think about that habit loop because the better high Quality habits we have that benefit us in our weight loss in our life in our career The better all of those things are going to work out for us So I think this habit loop is outstanding and I'm excited to try it this next week with my pre-tracking So I shared with you guys kind of how my week went I'm proud of myself for the workouts that I got in my food was pretty good I stayed within my calories and points most of the days Overall, I feel like I had a really good week. It's just this darn being a girl once a month That just puts a big wrench into my weight loss plans. So when I stepped on the scale this week I lost point four. So I'll take it normally during my cycle. I gain or stay the same So the fact that I had a loss is a huge huge win for me So I am gonna go ahead and put here on the screen my total pounds lost for the month of May I'm happy with that Considering the situation we're in as a nation as well as just life happening this month a couple of weeks that I struggled I'm really happy with that overall weight loss And I'm one step closer to reaching that 50 pounds loss in the year of 2020 Which as you guys know was my goal. So I want to talk a little bit about Workshops and WW I know that there has been a ton of rumors out there I understand that WW had to fire which is more of a furlough or a layoff About 4,000 employees nationwide and apparently they did this via zoom now I don't have all the details nor do I really want to contribute to gossip and things that go around on Social media and the internet about Weight Watchers. I love Weight Watchers. I support Weight Watchers I understand that in this time Sometimes having to do those tough things via zoom is just kind of what has to happen now If someone is a furloughed or laid off They most likely can collect unemployment and they most likely are able to maintain their benefits and sometimes even receive a severance Package as you know my career of choice prior to doing real estate was HR So I'm very well-versed in what happens during furloughs and laying off So I don't know what happened with WW and again. I'm not going to Speculate or gossip But with that being said they have also decided to close quite a few studios some studios or are corporate studios and some studios are Independent studios so you would have to reach out to WW via the chat or Email or call them and ask them if your particular studio is corporate Or if your studio is independent and whether or not your particular studio is going to Continue to be open and flourishing when this whole COVID-19 is over So my coach today let us know that our studio isn't going anywhere In fact the studio I go to is one of maybe four in my town And I live in a pretty big city and it is very very busy all of the workshops are full So I kind of figured mine would stick around She also said that none of the studios in my area will even think about reopening Until the month of June is over So it looks like we have an entire another another month of zoom meetings And it sounds like this is the case for a lot of area So again double check with Weight Watchers get on the online or your app and chat email Call whatever works for you and get accurate information for your area and try to not get involved in the gossip and Speculation that you're seeing on YouTube. I've seen a few videos come out already about this and they say that they know What's going on? But unless you are part of Weight Watchers, you don't know what's going on And if you have a friend that works at Weight Watchers I can pretty much guarantee that they had signed an NDA a non-disclosure agreement and are not able to talk about it outside of Weight Watchers because that leads to disciplinary action up to termination We did non-disclosure agreements all the time in HR So I would say get the information directly from Weight Watchers if you have a question on your studios and with that being said I'm okay with the zoom meetings. Do I like them as much as the in-person workshops? No, but I'm still feeling like I'm getting something out of the Meeting I'm getting a topic. I'm getting motivation. I'm still weighing myself at home. I have the accountability of that I have the accountability of you. I also can get on my zoom meeting a half an hour early and have a one-on-one Session with one of the coaches or one of the guides So I think that Weight Watchers is doing a great thing by allowing us to attend these zoom meetings Now if the zoom meetings aren't your thing hang in there you guys the in-person meetings sound like that They will be back as long as they're back in your area. It's just going to be a matter of time So again check with your local Weight Watchers via chat email phone and get information that is accurate for your area So that's kind of what she shared with us. So it sounds for me another month of zoom meetings I'll continue to share of course what we talked about here on my channel So it's basically like you're at a workshop anyways and that way it keeps me motivated I can share my weight with you guys and continue to build that community here on YouTube So if you're not part of my Facebook group, I encourage you to head over and join us It is such a supportive place to be we have over 15,000 members You can ask questions get guidance even have a shoulder to lean on if you need it on the Facebook group So I'd love for you to come over and join us if you're looking for that little extra bit of support And again if you're new I do a weigh-in video every single Friday So make sure you're subscribed hit that little button and the bell so you're notified of course when new videos are uploaded It really helps me if you guys give this video a thumbs up if you like these wands it helps my channel It helps me know to continue to do these Friday chats and weigh-ins with you guys So I want to hear from you guys how you're doing. How was your week? Did you gain? Did you lose was it what you expected? How are you doing throughout the whole pandemic and not being able to attend the in-person workshops? How is that making you feel of course leave comments questions down in the comment section? I love interacting with you guys I hope you have a wonderful beautiful Friday Enjoy your weekend and I'll see you guys tomorrow in my grocery haul and I have a fun grocery haul coming out tomorrow That includes a taste test so definitely stay tuned for that. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me this Friday I love you. I hope you're doing well staying healthy happy and strong and I'll see you tomorrow in the grocery haul. Bye guys