When researching my last video on how Vikings actually looked, I came across a really interesting working paper from Oxford University. They looked at the height of English men over a span of 2,000 years, through analysing skeleton remains. In order to establish average height, the authors used skeletons from men filmed all over England in different archaeological sites, men between 21 and 49, and analysed the size of their femurs, or thigh bones, and then extrapolated average height from there. One fascinating aspect of this study is that the height of men increased in the land we call England today during the Roman occupation, which ended in 410 AD, with men growing from 167 centimetres to 170 centimetres during this time, or 5'5". The researchers noted that the rise in average heights coincided with the Romans introducing a more improved water supply and sanitation system, and that diets also became more varied around this time. After the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, there was not an immediate drop in heights. This was not seen until around 600 AD. The paper highlights previous research suggesting that health may have deteriorated when populations moved out of the towns and cities set up by the Romans, abandoning their more hygienic water supplies and waste disposal systems. Plague and pestilence then became common, and infectious diseases are known to have increased at this time, with archaeological evidence also suggesting that diets were inadequate. Average heights then started to increase again after the Norman conquest of 1066 By the end of the early medieval period, heights had increased to 172 centimetres, increasing to 173 centimetres in the 1100s, edging closer to heights achieved at the start of the 20th century. After 1200, heights started to decline, and archaeological evidence shows that at this time, the rural populations were decreasing, farmland had become degraded, and there were shortages of crop seeds. It also notes that other research has suggested temperatures turned colder over the century, with weather becoming far more challengeable until the early 1300s. The early 1300s started with the Great Famine, 1315 to 1317, which may have exaggerated the decline in average heights, but the paper says men had started getting shorter several decades before. After the Black Death of 1348 to 1350, average heights grew, with the paper noting that this coincided with a boost in agricultural production. From 1400 to the early 1650s, mean height reached 173 to 174 centimetres. The early years of the 1600s were unusually healthy, and the paper notes that the introduction of poor laws may have contributed to better health for poorer sections of society. Heights then fell after 1650, falling to around 169 centimetres in the late 1600s. A decline that continued until the early 1800s says the study. The nature of work had changed after 1650, and manual labour became more common, and the toll on the body thus became more demanding. The authors note that during the Industrial Revolution, the demands of workers were much greater than in medieval times. The increasing number of working days, coupled with poorer working conditions, could be why average height went down even though wages grew after 1650. But what about closer to today? Well the Office for National Statistics done a study in around 2010, and it showed that the average man in England was around 5 foot 9 inches, or around 175 centimetres, 175.3 to be exact. Thanks for watching, please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. You can support this work through Patreon, buymeacoffee.com, or donate through PayPal, all the links will be in the description below. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you next time.


Happy to be here. For those of you who don't know, I'm Jacob Kelly. I'm a regional extension agent on the commercial horticulture team down in southwest Alabama. So we're the ones getting all the weather and trying to stay dry. But I'm going to go ahead and jump into it. I'm going to be talking about budding citrus today and some techniques we might use for that. So it may be tempting, especially for homeowners to plant an orange or lemon seed after they've gotten a fruit from the store. But this is usually a bad idea because it takes so long for these things to fruit. And the fruit may not be edible when you get to that point, you know, five to seven years. So how long it's going to take for that seed to develop into a plant that can produce fruit. And then you've waited all that time. And it may not be edible.  And a lot of this stuff is not as frost tolerant as we need it to be. So to make up for all this time and to get the best of both worlds, we like to bud our citrus and take cultivated varieties that we know will work and put them on cultivated varieties of rootstocks that we know can withstand our temperatures. And then we're off to the races. I'm going to go over some definitions real quick. So let's talk about grafting and budding real quick. It's the act of joining two cultivars of the same or similar species together to produce a new plant with desired characteristics that we want. So grafting is usually using a piece of a stem or a branch with multiple buds on it as a scion. Grafting budding is just using a single bud with the bark around it as our scion. Budding is our preferred method of choice with citrus because it's easy and quick to do. We can pump out a lot of plants and a relatively short amount of time. A budded citrus tree or any grafted tree has two parts, the scion and the rootstock. Our scion is the above portion of the ground, above ground portion of the tree. That's our selected cultivar. That's going to produce the fruit that we want it to produce. And the rootstock is the lower trunk and roots of this new tree. So we use different cultivars for scion and rootstock to give us the benefits of both. And I'm going to go over some of those cultivars of rootstocks that we use in Alabama on the next slide. But real quick about cambium. The cambium layer is a layer of actively dividing cells between the xylem and the phloem of the plant. This is one of the growing points of the plant. There's apical maristems on the tops of shoots. And then there's these secondary maristems that help the plant grow out wider, like a trunk getting wider. And that's the cambium. Cambium is a secondary maristem. So when we graft a budded plant, we've got to ensure that we get cambium to cambium contact. So that's the cambium of the scion and the cambium of the rootstock have to come in good contact or the graft will not take and will just be left with our rootstock. And lots of those are not as fun to play around with. So rootstocks come in all shapes and sizes and forms. Common rootstocks that we can use in Alabama are swingles, trifoliate arms, Volk or Volkimer lemon and sour orange. In Alabama, we like to use trifoliate arms. I don't recommend using swingle anymore. It's one of the old timers. It's been around for a while and it has some frost tolerance, but it just doesn't match up to the frost tolerance of trifoliate arms. We can get trifoliate arms down well below freezing. And if you attach a satsuma on a trifoliate orange, you've got a pretty frost tolerant plant down to the mid-20s at least. There are two cultivars of trifoliate orange. We have Rubidot and Flying Dragon. Rubidot is our faster-growing, larger cultivar, and Flying Dragon is our slower-growing, dwarfing cultivar. I would stick to one of these two if we're going to grow citrus outside. If you've got a greenhouse, then any of those other options might be a better fit for you. It just depends on what you're looking for. What you're going to need for budding are hand pruners to remove your budwood. Budwood is just wood with bugs on it. Think of it that way. And a budding knife or razor blade. I like to use a razor blade. A buddy tape. It's your polyethylene tape and it stretches. It was originally made for burn victims, but turns out it works really, really well for grafting and budding of plants. And then I like to keep a sharpening device around, whether that's a wet stone or some sort of knife sharpener, so I can keep my blade sharp. And this is so that I can make sure that I get a good, clean, straight cut so I can get that good cambium contact. When we're selecting budwood for our sign, we usually want to collect wood from this season's flush that has just become mature or hard. You'll recognize this by a more rounded stem like that picture shown. The stem's a little bit more rounded. That top one is we're getting into a little bit of new flush. It's hard enough to use though. So you can see there's still some angles on those stems, but between in the inner nodes or between the leafs and buds, it's a little bit more rounded. That's kind of what we're looking for. This wood's going to be harder than the fresh flush. And the fresh flush is going to be quite flimsy and very angular and a little bit harder to deal with. And you're not going to get any take from that stuff, so we want to stay away from it. And it can be budwood next go around. We would like this budwood to be similar in diameter to our root stock that we're going to be budding onto, but a lot of times this isn't feasible. So as long as your bud is smaller than the root stock diameter, you're probably okay. All right, let's get into the dirt. Let's go back to teabudding. Teabudding is preferred by most of our growers because it's easy. You have a high success rate.  The bark needs to be slipping for a teabud. And that kind of looks like that picture on the left. You can see that bark separated away from the rest of the plant pretty easily. And we need budwood available. All three of these things need to be met so we can teabud.  The procedure goes as follows. We want to collect our budwood, remove the leaves, and keep that budwood moist, sharpen, clean, sanitize our budding knife or razor blade, and make a vertical cut one to one and a half inches long through the bark of the smooth area of a root stock. There's going to be thorns and leaves and stuff. We want to avoid all that and get a smooth piece, like on that picture to the left. After we make our vertical cut, we're going to make a horizontal cut. This can be made at the top or the bottom of that vertical cut. If you make it at the top, it's going to be a true teabud. And if you were to make it at the bottom, it's an inverted teabud. This is all based off of preference. I prefer an inverted teabud myself. You can use the point of the knife to lift the edges of the flaps, like in that picture. I always start from the intersection of the horizontal and vertical cut and work my way away from that incision towards the opposite end of that vertical cut. When the bark is slipping well, when you get into really warm months like July, this should be really easy. Try not to touch any of the internal portions of the root stock or the bud with your fingers, because oils from your skin will likely reduce the rate of success. So either wear gloves or try to grab the bud by the stub that's left over from that leaf petiole when you're moving it around. Try not to get your oily hands on it. After you make your cuts in the root stock, you need to remove your bud from the bud wood. We're going to remove our bud wood by slicing underneath it as flat as we can. We really just want the bark and the bud around it, so you're going to follow through underneath that bud and come up a little bit, and you're still going to leave a little bit attached. Come back with your knife and at a 45 degree angle above that bud, kind of notch it, and it will remove that bud from the rest of the bud wood. That just makes it easier to handle and slide up into your bud cut. So we would do that, maybe a quarter of an inch or a half inch above or below that bud. So we have a little bit of bark on there to play with. We want it to be a flat smooth cut so we can get good cambium or cambium contact. If you scoop that bud out, which I was really bad about when I first started budding, you get a lot of wood behind the bud, and that wood is going to keep that cambium from contacting the cambium of the root stock and everything will dry out, and that's no good. That will reduce your rate of success. So after we remove the bud, we want to insert it into our root stock. If any of this plant material is allowed to dry out, we're going to reduce our success. So we want to slide our bud up in there under the flaps, and if you do everything right, it'll be completely enclosed like that picture on the left there. And then we want to wrap our buddy tape around it. We begin wrapping above or below our incisions, whichever you prefer. The main thing is that you want to ensure that you keep constant positive pressure when you're going around that stem. We want pressure to be the same all the way around, and that's going to secure that bud in place. When you've gone about a half inch above or below where your incision was, you can make a loop and put the top of your tape back through it to hold everything in place. And after you're done, you've just performed your first T-bud graft. So we want to keep everything wrapped up for 14 to 21 days, but really not more than a month. And if you've done everything right, when you remove the tape, the bud should still be green and you should be able to see a very thin, visible callus around the edge of that bud. If you remove this tape too early, the bud may still be green. However, it may turn brown and dry out and die, and then you've got to start back over again. So it's important to be patient when you're grafting citrus. All right, when our bark is not slipping on our root stalks, we need to use a chip bud. And we cut out the bud the same way. And then we go to our root stalk and our root stalk, we're going to do a thin upward cut on the root stalk and then a second cut to make a notch at the top. You can kind of see it there in those pictures. And then we're going to slide our bud up into that notch and it should hold by itself without you having to hold it in there. And then we take the same as we would for our T bud. Like I said, this is better for if I'm trying to do some grafting late August, September, trying to get that last flush from the citrus on some root stalks and things like that. That's a good time to use your T bud. So you can get those last few graphs in there. So after we remove our wrapping and our bud and everything has formed a union, we're going to try to force this bud.  One of them is apical dominance. Oxen flows with the flow of gravity down from the apical meristem. And it suppresses all buds below it. It keeps lateral buds from growing out. So what we want to do is remove that apical dominance by bending that tip of that, the tip of the root stalk under our bud. We call this bending in the industry and we bend instead of cut because we still want the leaves to collect, you know, they're still solar panels and we still want them to collect sunlight and deliver photo assimilates to our plant, to our bud and roots so everything can keep growing. But we don't want that oxen getting in there and disrupting our bud from jumping out. So after our scion has started to grow four to six inches or more, we can remove that upper portion of that root stock. It's got enough of its own solar panels. It's going to keep taking off. And now we've got our new citrus tree. And any suckers you might see growing after you bend that root stock over, just go ahead and remove those. They're going to be stealing from the bud we want to grow. So we got to take those out. As our scion grows out, we'll need to stake it so we can get good vertical growth. If this is in a container, it'll be ready to plant in 20 to 24 inches. And when we plant, we want to pinch the top or remove the apical dominates again in some way so that the plant can start to feather out and we can get good branching. And then you're off to the races. You can get fruit in as little as a year or two from the bud and after it's growing out and things like that. So that's all I've got on budding. I hope you have lots of success. And if we've got time for questions, I'm here to answer them. And, you know, if you live in Southwest Alabama, I'd be happy to come and show some of my growers how to do some budding on their farm and so they can be successful. And I have to pay so much to get somebody else to come in and do it.


Hello everybody, Ian here. Welcome back to Thursday Theorist. Before we jump into this episode, I want to let you know, just giving you a heads up, that Thursday Theorist from here on out will be every month. I know I haven't done one, well I did regulators, but I hadn't done one for like two months before that. The reasoning for this is all the books I have left to reread are long. It's the entire, well not the entire, from the wastelands on from the dark tower. I'm almost done with the wastelands. I don't guess when through the keyholes that long, but I have at least the last five books if you count when through the keyhole to go. And I also have the black house and then the institute coming up. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on. There's some short story collections I have to reread to recheck. Things like I think just after Sunset I have to reread that one. There's about a dozen episodes left, so you're looking at a year's worth of content. Starting this week, no this coming week, this next week, sorry I'm shooting all these around the same time. Starting next week I'm going to be doing the actual reviews for Stephen King's work all the way from Kerry all the way up to the institute. There's some that exist already like for today's episode. There's already a review up for the talisman. And there's also ones for the Bachman books so far. I believe there's one for the outsider for Sleeping Beauty, for Gwendi's Button Box, that kind of thing. But I haven't done the majority of his catalog. I've done Thursday theorists with tiny reviews at the beginning. But anyways, that's what we're doing going forward. There will be plenty of King content for those of you who are only here for the King content. I assure you we have plenty to do. Even after Thursday theorist wraps there's other ideas and things I have as far as Stephen King content. But today we are talking about the talisman and this Bulbul cover.  But the hard cover isn't much better. And I showed it in the review. The first edition isn't much better. I mean, it's okay. I guess it's better than this one with the car and the wolf on the lonely road. I don't like it. It's very plain and very generic looking. And the photoshop or whatever artwork this is, is just really, really bad. Anywho. So if you want to check out my review for the talisman, my spoiler free review, I'll leave a link down there in the doobly-doo. But today we are going to focus, because there's going to be a long video, aside from all this talking I'm doing at the beginning, it's going to be a long video, because I found a ton of stuff that is not mentioned online I couldn't find anywhere. Could there be some random sub thread somewhere? Of course there could. And I don't use Reddit. So this stuff's on Reddit. I don't know about it. What I did was I checked the Stephen King Wikia, or Wiki, powered by Wikia. And then I also checked StephenKing.com and I checked both the Dart Tower connections and the user submitted connections, none of which I'm going to be discussing here.  It's worth a laugh. You just go check that out. One person makes a connection between the town of Danville and Patrick Danville from the final Dart Tower book, which I think is kind of reaching. But fans of the series here will know that I've reached myself at some times, but I always try to root. I always have a wild theory and then I try to root it actually in the universe itself.  We're going to go ahead and get into it. I'm going to start right off on page six. There is a reference to a movie called Blaze. Now we know from the introduction to Blaze that Stephen King wrote Blaze way back in the way back before this one was published. One thing we need to keep in mind as we're going through this episode of Thursday Theorist is the time frame in which Stephen King and Peter Straub wrote this book. Once again, I'm not this Peter Straub Theorist. I don't know that much about him. I haven't even read all of his work, especially not his last five. So I'm not as well read where he's concerned. So if there's any connections to Peter Straub's stuff, please leave it all down here in the doobly-doo, as long as it's not a spoiler because I do plan on eventually reading all of his stuff. To this day, I've read Julia, if you could see me now, Ghost Story, which is fantastic by the way, Shadowlands, that's great also, Cocoa, and I think that's it. I keep getting installed on Floating Dragon, but we'll get there eventually. Okay, so the mention of a movie called Blaze that the mother, Jack's mother, ends up winning an Academy Award for, I believe. By the way, let's stop here. There's going to be spoilers for the entire book. There might even be spoilers for everything Stephen King has written. I always give this warning. We may not tackle every single book in his collection, but I want you to be aware that I'm just going to get going, and there might be spoilers. So if you're not well read on Stephen King, I probably suggest you either go back and watch the series from the beginning, or just go read the damn books. Let's get back to the theories video. Okay, so on page 80, Slope mentions a train. There's a lot of this stuff, and we'll get to Black House also, but there are some fan theories that I am enjoying right now about the Institute, because the cover has a boy on a train. So I'm wondering at this point, if all of this is going to tie back around, I'm also wondering if the Institute is the third Jack Sawyer novel without Straub, because we were told back in 2005 by Straub that they were working on a third book, and King in 2006 or 2007, I'd have to look at the interview again, but King said that they were working on another novel, and all of a sudden, there's no more talk about a third Jack Sawyer novel. So it seems like they were going somewhere else with the trains, with the train idea, and having a train on the front of the Institute has given me, has sparked even more. Having read fan theories, there's a Tony's King page, I think it is, on Instagram. I can't recall if that's it or not. I'm sorry, but I think he brought up this idea first, that the trains were connected to the talisman, and well, actually the black house. But we'll get to that when we get to the black house. Right now, we're focusing on this one. Page 121, I'm going to go ahead and read this one. I don't remember exactly what my note was. Oh, yes. He was trying to fasten the front of his uniform over his bulging gut while holding a curly French horn-like instrument at the same time. Now I'm not saying this is the horn of Eld. I'm saying that the horn of Eld is carried by guards and knights and all that stuff. So could this be a kind of not running joke, but a running theme with characters in mid-world? Could these characters just carry around these horns and maybe the horn of Eld is almost like Excalibur kind of deal? I don't know. It's a wild theory, but it piqued my interest, so I thought I'd tell you guys about it. Let me know what you think down there in the doobadoo. Page 392, I don't know. This is completely nuts. This one blew me away because nobody's mentioned it, not a single person, but on page, in this edition anyway, it's on page 392. This edition of the book, probably all the paperback copies. He mentioned Sidewinder Colorado.  It's definitely the mountain because he talks about a mine. We're going to get to the mine stuff again here in a second. Not really mine stuff, but you'll see. He mentioned Sidewinder, and nobody, Sidewinder is of course where the Shining occurred. It's where the Overlook Hotel was located, and nobody online that I can find has mentioned that whatsoever. Now we have a hard connect. I had some loose connects for the Shining, but either I didn't catch this the first time I read it or just completely slipped from my memory because I don't care too much for this book, but watch my review for that. So it's a hard tie, and this book has a hard tie connection to the Dark Tower series. So we have our hard connection for the Shining. Also, Carrie, let's see here, Carrie, Abros from Dr. Sleep, Charlie from Firestar, all these different psychic abilities or telekinetic abilities or whatnot. There's also all these kids are breakers, and we'll go into breakers more as we get to that discussion because there's a lot of spoilers for the Dark Tower stuff when I start talking about breakers. All right, next up at page 449, they talk about the Rainbird Towers. Now I didn't bother looking this one up, so Patrick, if you want to check your list, your search and find for King, isn't the agent in, let's see here, Firestarter, the Native American man, isn't his name Rainbird? I think it is. Loose connection, loose connection. Let's see here, and let's look at, we're going to talk about how all these books tie together, but I want to look at the publication date for, I think this was what, 80? For, let's see here, Firestarter. Let's see here, yeah, 1980. So all of this stuff, there's a five-year period that I'm going to focus on here in a second, even when discussing the Tabitha King book. The Blasted Lands are the Blasted Lands, the Wastelands, I think they are. I think it's the same area, the train, trains go through there, well there's a train track through there, at the very least, and of course we know Blaine the Mono in the Wastelands, that's all we're going to talk about there, but there's another connection for you. There's a huge, and I didn't notice this at first until my friend Patrick Costin sent me an email about how many times the color green pops up in the Stephen King universe. And then in this one, I saw it everywhere. If you know the ending of Wizarding Glass, you will know that green, or emerald green, is an important color, but there's green bottles, green hallways at Richard Slope School, green metal, green sand. There is so much green in this book, I can't help but feel like it is an illusion to something. And if it is an illusion to Wizarding Glass, I don't know. But I do feel that it is an important thing, maybe on, I don't really want to reread this book again, but maybe I'll find more of the green stuff in the black house. I can't remember a whole lot about that book. I'm actually looking forward to it. I've heard from some people they liked it more than they liked the talisman, and these are people who didn't like the talisman, but people who love the talisman tend to hate black house.  But we'll see. Okay, there's Quonset, he talks about wolves, the Quonset Huts in the book, and it seems awfully familiar to where, what was it, Jake goes in, is it Wolves of the Kala? I think it is. Jake goes to the Quonset Huts and finds all the bodies everywhere. I'm wondering if that scene in Wolves harkens back to this little village community from wolf. Then let's see here. We're going to go, we're going to say one more thing, and then I'm going to go to the final note. So this is, this is a stretch, but bear with me. There's, during the night segment at the end of the book, even though I believe that that section was written by Peter Straub, there is a certain red-eyed entity that inhabits the suits of armor there at the end of the book. The more I read about it, the more I saw similarities to tack from, I don't have it over here, but from the regulators and from desperation.  You know how in regulators, spoilers for regulators, I know I said this at the beginning, but these are big spoilers. You know how in the regulators, all the eyes are popping out of the head, what is said that the eyes exploded in this one, and they have the red-eyed entity, and we have tack who has red eyes. Now I'm not saying that the regulators was written way back then, I'm saying that Stephen King maybe took from this section to do the monster from that. Now I've already connected, I've already theorized that the entity known as tack is nothing but those red lights, just like I believe the entity it is the dead lights. That is, they are nothing but the lights. At the same time, at the same time as all of this, you look toward the wizard's rainbow, the different colors of that, and then you have the talisman in here. I mean, if the talisman isn't one of the balls, I don't know what it is. I mean, it's either all of them or one of them. The talisman does feel like it is all of them, is what it feels like, like they're all encased in that because they're talking about all the worlds and galaxies and everything. Okay, now we are going to go talk about Gwendi's button box. It's up here in the stack, I'm not going to drag it out, but in, and here's where the connections come into play with all these books being written at the same time. I said a long time ago, well not a long time ago, when I did a small world by Tabitha King, when I did my theory video on that one, I said, I brought up that one of the characters talks about a box that you could press a button and something would happen in the world. And it's, it's a character's thoughts, it's like, I always thought about this box that, you know, whatever, it sounds like Gwendi's button box. Even though it's the imagination of that character and it's not an actual item in the story, it does feel like Gwendi's button box. And a small world was, let's see, I don't want to move the figure, but I think it's between 81 and 84. That's really the time frame we're working on here. Also, between 80, it was just basically 80 and 85, there's a bunch of stuff that Stephen King bundled together, like he got the idea of how to end it and connect all the worlds while he was writing the wastelands. And he wrote it between 81 and 85, I believe. I know it's published in 86. Now, going back to Gwendi's button box, on page 263 of this edition of the book, I'm going to read you an entire section. Also another thing to keep in mind in the talisman, when people flip and go to the territories, items become either subtly different or massively different. Like, what does the guitar pick turn into? I can't remember. But the guitar pick turns, well, the guitar pick is a pick in the territories, and I can't remember what it is in the real world. But that's what I keep on wanting to call the dude, Jake, Jack.  But here, interlude, Slote in this world, two. From the pocket of his bulky parka, he had bought it convinced that from the Rockies East, America was a frigid wasteland after October 1st or so, now he was sweating rivers, Morgan's Slote took a small steel box. Below the latch were 10 small buttons and an oblong of cloudy yellow glass a quarter of an inch high and two inches long. He pushed several of the buttons carefully with the fingernail of his left hand pinky, and a series of numbers appeared briefly in the readout window. Slote had bought this gadget, billed as the world's smallest safe, safe in Zurich, according to the man who had sold it to him. Not even a week in a crematory, oven would breach its carbon steel integrity. What do we know about Wendy's button box? Wendy's button box has all these buttons on it, and every time she pressed a button, she got a shiny new coin. This item from Morgan's Slote is a bank. Now, is Morgan's Slote a Twitter of Randall Flag? I don't know. We do know of his Twitter in the book, but there are other worlds than these. So that's where I am at with this one. We will continue this discussion in the next episode of Thursday Theorists for The Black House. From that point on, we are going to be finishing up the novella collections, the short story collections. We are going to finish up everything in that time frame.  So did I miss anything? Let me know down there in the comments below. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Thursday Theorist Review. I'll talk to you guys there. Bye-bye!


How's everyone feeling today? You're still fresh despite the fact that it's a little bit late and a little bit hot in Singapore today Well, obviously not inside luckily So welcome to my presentation so I'm Niels Let me tell you a little bit about my background. I was born in Germany Many years ago lived in Holland for a while moved to Indonesia three years ago. So technically I'm a neighbor of Singapore For the previous three years. I was a WordPress freelance developer Done multiple customizations on WordPress.org WooCommerce I wrote plugins created themes. I'm organizing WordCamps in Denpasar and in Ubud Next week. I'm actually organizing the WordCamp in Jakarta and capital of Indonesia. So feel free to join by and Since probably two months. I'm working for automatic the company behind WordPress which is fantastic and as the previous speaker already said we totally treat our Employees not as assets, but as friends and and and we share Love and happiness amongst the team and I think that's that's very crucial in order to to become a really successful company so that you don't really see employees as as Someone who just has to do the work but but really as a as a friend So today's talk is about D-Tab so it's a little bit more technical I want to share some insights from my experience as a developer and the thing is what does D-Tab actually stands for So D-Tab is an acronym for D as development T for testing a for acceptance and P for production. So what does that mean? Who in here is a developer? Please raise the hands Okay, so we have a couple of developers Who face the situation that you get an urgent call from a customer? You need to adjust something you log in you make the change and you end up with the so-called widescreen of death Sounds familiar Right never touch a running system. It's always tricky. So the thing is why should you use a D-Tab environment in first place So I'm talking more about how to set it up. But the thing is oh I'm not loud enough. Okay. Thanks. So why should you use a D-Tab system in first place? Wouldn't it be much easier just to log in and do the change? Well, the problem is that there's always that risk that you actually Bring down the site and especially if it's an e-commerce site Which has a high turnover? You don't want to to to bring that site down at any given price So the system needs to keep running so the first thing you can do is what starting developers do They log into the system. They make the change. They bring the system down. They have to explain the customer that they Kind of mess it up. Nothing works anymore Customers frustrated clients of the customer are frustrated probably the developer starts to get sweaty and and and Worry is about losing their customers. So it's not really a good relationship the next level towards a full D-Tab environment is if we integrate an additional step and Even beginning developers figure that out relatively soon So a better approach is that you actually take your project offline So on the left hand side, you can see the D which stands for development Whereas on the right hand side, you can see the P which is the production environment So usually when you when you work on a client side, you clone the side Take it down to your computer, which also has the benefit that you can work offline So if the internet connection went down Which now and then happens in Indonesia, especially on Bali You can still work on the project and once that project is running and and and you implemented all the features as Required by the customer. You can technically upload it to the server. So that's a much better approach than to Operate on an open heart and and and by touching the production system the problem is That scenario it could work on your local machine and as soon as you deploy it You can still bring that server down Probably you have different software versions. You have some library dependencies You have different PHP versions. So there are a couple of cases that can actually happen which still lead to an issue so Example number two is a much better scenario than the example Number one. I just see that I messed up the numbers. Sorry for that So that is a much better scenario But it's not perfect yet. So the next step would be If we integrate an additional stage So now you can see we have a development environment, which usually is my local machine From the development environment. I push all my changes to a testing environment and Once everything is tested and works according to the specifications, then I push it further to the production environment The big advantage of having a testing environment is usually my testing environment runs on the same server as the production environment So I'm using the same libraries. I'm using the same Server settings. So I know when the tests actually succeed I can push it further to production and it might not affect anything That is a DTP. So now the question. What is the DT AP DTAP environment? so and a DTAP environment is Highly recommended when you deal with sensitive data So this is how a DTAP environment looks like. So you have the development in first stage Once the code is is implemented you put it to stay to testing. So on testing you can run All kind of tests to see if it works Once these tests succeed you push it further to an acceptance environment The acceptance environment is not for you as a developer, but it's for your customer so your customer can run extensive checks on the functionality and see if everything works according to the specifications without touching the production system.  So as a developer I can play around with the with the testing environment. I can deploy at any given time without affecting the customer. So and Once I push everything to acceptance then it's up to the customer and then I don't touch the acceptance system anymore Once the customer approves all the changes these changes can then be pushed further to the production environment And to give you an example when to use such an environment I created an application for the university in Amsterdam the hospital so they have thousands of patient records and They want me to to create the application, but at the same time they don't want to give me access to their personal records Which is logical like I don't need to know these these data and these are pretty sensitive data. So what we did actually is I Put all my changes from development to testing once they're tested I gave a sign to the IT department the IT department then pushed my changes further to acceptance And at the same time they took the real data from the production environment and pushed it back to the acceptance environment So I at any given time I could never access the acceptance environment but on the acceptance environment my customer could actually check the System and the new functionality. Sorry for that Could test the implemented Functionality with the real client data So there are a couple of strategies how to do that. I already mentioned one of the strategies So how to deal with with with changes how to deal with content how to deal with commits We always say changes go up Content goes down So that means when I implement a new feature I start from development Then I push it to testing then I push it to acceptance and then it goes into production at a final stage With the content I do the other approach. So the content The latest version of the content is always on the production version. So from production I actually push that content down to acceptance from acceptance down to testing and from testing down to development Of course, it depends on the customer. So in that example with the university in Amsterdam They only push the data from production to acceptance and then they make a cut and I say, okay We don't push these data any deeper Because then we release we lose control of these data. So you need to come up with your own test data But if you work on a regular project It's always a good idea when you start development that you make a dump of the database first and take that content all the way Down to development Implement your features and then push your features all the way up to production So there are a couple of naming conventions I developed over time. So you do have development testing acceptance Production so usually I use the subdomain DEF for development For testing, I usually use alpha for the acceptance. I usually use beta And I don't really use www because it's simply a subdomain some customers like it because it's Little bit more traditional and it looks like a real website. I had a couple a few customers who told me. Oh, there's a www Missing it doesn't look like a website to me Well in that case you just add a www and This is a slightly different naming convention I also use DEF in in in that scenario for testing you can use testing for the acceptance environment You can use acceptance or you can use staging Yeah, and and with the development you can add a www if required That's the end of my presentation, but I'm happy to answer all your questions you have Thanks for your patience Yep So my question is how do you manage all the four environments at once? Do you use any kind of tools or what? Yeah, I'm using a plug-in called all in 1wp migration, which is For me it works best because I can create a dump of the entire system and move that that dump around Usually I create an SQL export from the production system Which I bring down to my development environment and then I implement the features and from there I simply create a dump and an import these dump on higher levels So for me they works best It always depends on the environment friends of mine. They also use vagrant or to use Docker and and they use automated scripts But to me personally wp or all in one migration that that is my secret weapon Yeah, I think there's a question in the back Just in regards to the same That same issue. What about dealing with we commerce and live order sites in terms of pushing data To so from a acceptance server straight to a live server because obviously you don't want to overwrite any live orders And things like that which can become quite troublesome. So you're only pushing part of a database Yeah, that's a very good question when dealing with a WooCommerce system I usually don't push these data around because you're absolutely right If I create a dump now and I push it back in a week I would technically lose all these data. So when dealing with WooCommerce system, I don't create full Dumps, but I simply commit the single changes So yeah, it's a little bit more tricky and then I really need to go through my my git history and see okay Which files did I actually change and I manually? Yeah at these files. Yeah After I make it back up first Anymore questions Yeah How do you do all the commits to different environments and all that because like this something which like I'm not very familiar with So maybe we can go into a bit more detail about how exactly do you do the committing and stuff? Yeah, so the question is how do I deal with version control wide? so I'm using bit bucket Which is kind of a replacement for github the beauty of bit bucket is that it technically has the same functionality as GitHub with the difference that in github You can only use it when it's open source so everyone can access the code which if you work for a for a paying customer You usually don't want to open up that code and and have that project available to the entire world But I use git all the time and I Truly believe that that the more commits you do the better it is so I don't Implement massive features, but I break it down into really small User stories or small requests. I implement just a single request at a given time I commit it and then I do the next one and the next one and the next one and that gives me the Flexibility that that when something breaks I can always do a rollback to a given stage and I can also kind of cherry pick different commits So does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. Can I ask another question? Like you make use of any continuous integration or continuous deployment tools? At the moment not The thing is I was a one-man army and my projects were Rather small. I Totally agree that that continuous development and continuous integration is a is a very important role In my projects it was it was Yeah, not necessary is the wrong word, but I never really used them. Do we have any more questions? No, okay, then thank you very much, and if you have any more questions about WordPress automatic By the way, we're still hiring you can find us in the front at the automatic table and Enjoy the rest of the day. I hope I see all of you at the after-party and make sure Don't miss the contributor day tomorrow because tomorrow we as far as I know we work on the core We work on the theme. We probably do a couple of translations And if you really want to get your hands dirty with WordPress and see all the ins and outs I can highly recommend come tomorrow and see how it actually works under the hood Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of the webcam


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com with the one box break of 2020 Topps Inception Baseball, one box picker team number Sweet 16. Now, this could be a pretty sweet break, ladies and gentlemen, because at the end of the break I'll re-randomize your names and the top two names win transcendent spots. We did get another case in break three. Big thanks all of these folks for getting into it. No cardinals is this unfortunately, but we sold 29 spots, so one in 29 is going to get a transcendent. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it one and a four, five times. One, two, three, four, and fifth and final time. After five times, we got Aaron down to Colin. One and a four, five times for the teams. Fifth and final time, we've got the Marlins down to the Toronto Bluebirds. All right, there's the first half of the list right here. There's the second half of the list down here. Let's alphabetize by column B by team. And no one's really going to trade, right? You're not going to trade. You just want to see who wins those transcendent spots. That's what it is. That's what it's all about. Printout is the same as the sheet or as the screen, Google sheet that you saw before. There's Seth Brown to 50, Oakland A's. That'll be for James. It's a pretty cool set too. I really like this. Behind Max Scherzer is Tony Gonslin to 245. That's a pretty good start last year. Who's got my Dodgers? Aaron Salinas with the Dodgers gets the Rookies and Emerging Stars autograph. Quick one box break. Now, let's see who wins those two transcendent spots. It's going to be top two after three times. Thanks everyone for getting in. There'll be multiple mini breaks like this to get into transcendent. So keep trying the rest of you right here. Thanks for getting in. And congrats to, you can stop trying Matt McCray and you can stop trying Joseph.  A $450 value. I'm sure we'll break it at some point over the next few days. So keep tripping away at it on jaspeaskasebreaks.com. We can do it tomorrow if you want. We'll see you next time for that break. Bye-bye.


at 80 minutes past 12 and a wet start to the day here in the northwest and winds are going to increase as we know through the afternoon becoming strong then this evening and there's an orange weather warning coming in for the northwest and that is from six o'clock so Alan O'Reilly from Kerala Weather joins us now Alan a second big storm in a matter of the days where what direction is this one coming from? it's pretty similar actually to Asia the last storm so it's out to the west it's going to track to the northwest the center of the storm between Ireland and Iceland but it's quite a big storm it's got a large kind of outer band and large wind field so that heavy rain is is from the outer bands of storm Jocelyn but the winds are really starting to pick up now and they'll really get going in the next few hours and then the worst of the winds will hit the west and the northwest after six o'clock when that orange warning comes into effect now the orange warning says in effect until two a.m but probably the worst of the winds are going to be between six and probably midnight but it is going to gust again over possibly 110 kilometers an hour so you're looking at you know I suppose problems and not the problems for those that areas that have still no power which is a lot of areas obviously in the west and the northwest and anything that's been weakened any trees anything maybe that's hanging on or people haven't noticed maybe is damaged then Jocelyn's going to come around and probably give it its final blow in some cases which is obviously not going to help matters the rain will ease off there will be still showers but the heaviest of rain will clear through the afternoon so the rain will be less of a problem this evening it's mainly the wind it's hard to be precise about these things but you'd be hoping that Jocelyn just won't be quite as powerful as Isha yeah no it won't be as powerful in terms of peak wind speeds and wind gusts but it's still you know compared to Isha it's probably kind of a compared to the worst storm we've had in the last year and so in its own right Jocelyn will be a significant enough storm but no compared to what has gone and we won't be seeing the ghosts of over 130 kilometers an hour most likely maybe get near to some of that on the very exposed coast but the weather models don't show the same level of winds I mean they've they've fairly clearly showed the red level winds in the north west for Isha but they're not showing this for Jocelyn but as I say it's still a significant enough storm in its own right why so many storms this season is there you know is there something bigger at play is it is it down to global warming or is it just one of them things yeah look it's a bit one of those things but certainly climate change is playing a part in terms of the intensity of the storms and the amount of moisture that they're holding and but we have seen we have seen a lot of storms in the past I think it was 2016 we got as far as k and so we have seen that in the past but we were very lucky last year we didn't get our first name storm until august and so it's kind of just weather being wetter and then on a little bit extra unfolds from climate change in terms of the the velocity and the power of these storms the jet stream has been powering them up and and the jet stream really is coming right over us again which is that conveyor about the storms and then the really cold weather in the north america that intensifies the power of the jet stream which powers up these storms and but we do look to see a bit of a break coming early days and next week because the jet stream looks to be moving more north of us and but we do have unsettled weather and a bit cooler weather coming up so it's it hasn't been nice and I think certainly the cold weather had its challenges but it's a lot easier to get out and about under blue skies and frosty weather than it is um under this kind of wind I know obviously you had snow in the north west when most of us down the rest of the country was dry and obviously that melted snow on top of the heavy rain yesterday has risen river levels quite high again so we don't see as much rain from the storm but obviously any rain fall top falling on top of flooded areas can cause problems and as you've mentioned already what could cause problems this time around is trees and structures that have already been weakened by isha yeah that's it exactly a friend of mine in in the west coast in claire uh tree just came down in his power line in the last half hour and he said like the tree had stayed during isha but now it's come down but it may well have been weakened by isha so that's exactly what you're going to see and obviously the sb crews have been doing formidable work I mean absolutely unbelievable to get back over 170,000 people reconnected but they're going to be hampered as well during this weather because obviously they can only work when it's safe to do so so that's going to obviously add delays and as they say it's not particularly cold but it's not particularly warm so you know houses start to get cold pretty quickly when you don't have a heating fan for two days so um I suppose maybe just check in on the elderly and the vulnerable if you're in an area that has no power because make sure that people are able to stay warm all right well listen thanks to that thanks to my name for taking a wee bit of time out and and giving us that update Alan appreciate it look after yourself take care


As much as I enjoy a classic horror movie, there's always predetermined horror tropes that you come to expect, and when a movie can be terrifying without these typical scares, that's what gives way to the feeling of real horror. There's been a trend in recent times where directors such as Ari Aster and Darren Aronofsky who push the limits of horror to not scare, but disturb the viewer. They can be referred to as psychological thrillers, but I guess you could call them uncomfortable horrors. In movies such as Aster's Midsummer, the first thing you notice is the majority of the movie being in broad daylight. There's no relying on shadows and what can't be seen. We see the events of the film as clear as day, whether we like it or not. Aster has written and directed two feature films, 2019's Midsummer and 2018's Hereditary. Although Hereditary could be seen as a literally darker version of Midsummer, both films have very similar themes on the surface in the form of pagan rituals, however also on a deeper level. Profound grief is an emotion that Aster uses as an undertone throughout both films, Hereditary and Midsummer. Both films have tragic events that are pivotal for the film's direction and overall story arc. The grief is not just implied, the viewer is confronted headfirst with the unbearable situations that the characters find themselves in. This is not to say these movies are without cliche horror tropes. Aster himself has said that to make a horror movie and scare your audience, the rules of horror are unavoidable and without them it can be difficult for the film to be seen as scary or even classed as a horror at all. You just need to know how to use them. However, one of the primary methods that is used to add to the uncomfortableness of the films is the use of long takes. Aster has said in interviews one of his favourite films is 2015's 45 Years, which is a movie that is made up almost entirely of long takes and relies on the actor's expressions to carry the scene rather than the events of the scene. Shots of a character's emotions that is left too long subconsciously helps you to mirror what they are feeling as there are no edits to distract your attention. Usually these shots are used to prolong the unpleasant feeling the character is going through and you as the viewer cannot escape it. And even in runtime these movies are long, the director's cut of Midsummer runs for over 171 minutes and that's a long time to spend in this unpleasant and uncomfortable world that Aster has created. All of these elements wind up the tension so much that by the climax of Aster's films you're left with a sick feeling in your stomach that leaves you reeling long after the credits roll and instead of being scared of the dark, Midsummer leaves you scared of clear sunny days. A similar director, Darren Aronofsky is notorious for creating films which are not only controversial but polarizing. You either cannot stand his films or you love them, there is no in-between. The best example of this is 2017's Mother. The poster for this movie explains my point best. With the reviews on the left singing its praises as a brilliant and mind-blowing masterpiece and the right-hand side saying that people are going to hate this movie and the review of completely off the rails is probably a review both sides can agree with. Mother also had one of, if not the best trailer I've ever seen. These days with trailers filled with spoilers, the teaser for Mother was only audio. Just a black screen with minimal text announcing the cast. I'll show you the teaser now. Apologies in advance for the quality as the only footage available online for this trailer was filmed in a cinema. What were you doing in their luggage? Was this beautiful? Who are they? They've come here to see me. Come quick. God help you. All I'm trying to do is bring life into this house. You're insane. Mother! Mother! Get out of my house! Mother! Mother appears to be a tame drama about a couple who lives out in the middle of nowhere. But it isn't until an uninvited couple outstay their welcome that things get real crazy. Crazy to the point that your eyes are seeing things that you cannot process as it's just too much. I'm talking horror to the point of existential biblical crises. But dialing Mother back to what it is at its core. There's something about antagonists that outstay their welcome. Home invasion horrors if you will. Take 2007's Funny Games for example. Two young men who simply refuse to leave and torture the family both emotionally and eventually physically. Funny Games also makes use of long takes. This shot of Naomi Watts in the aftermath of her home invaders goes on for way too long. But the magnitude of what has just happened sinks in whilst this shot plays out. The lack of camera motions and the lead actor's emotion again gives the viewer no distractions. Enforcing the viewer to feel what the director wants them to feel. Many directors have said that they prefer long shots to usual sequence shots as they also have the advantage of everything happening in real time and not relying on editing to get the take they need. The other advantage being that the actors in the scene can get more of a grasp of where they need to be emotionally throughout the shot. As there are no breaks and often no time off camera whilst the shot plays out. Many directors use this technique to show off as they like to see how long they can hold a shot without it getting too long as it's a tricky skill to learn when the audience has had enough. Previously I've spoke on the problems of modern horror, the overuse of cliches to the point that you are able to count down to a jump scare. But these movies don't break the tension with tropes like this and instead just wind the suspense tighter and tighter and don't give you the luxury of relief. For me, that's the new standard of horror.