Well, welcome to day two of Vlogtober.  It is so freakin' long, y'all. Like, it's like past the nips. It's pretty long. Um, but I, whoa, hold on. Yeah, hi. Okay, so I stopped at Bob's Produce Ranch because Bob's is everything. And I got a few things for dinner. Um, it's like, I don't know. I don't know what time it is. So I'm gonna pull my phone out in just a moment here. But the place that I get my hair done at is really, really close to Bob's Produce Ranch over in Fridley. Let me pull my phone out so I can see what time it is. My appointment is at 6.45. But, um, I left the office at 6. Because it's not that far away. It's 6.31 at the moment. So I've got like 15 minutes to sit and eat and chat with y'all. But, um, I got this. It's the Bob's Ranch Supreme at Potato Salad. It's so good. I actually used to work at Bob's Produce Ranch when I was a little child. Actually, not little, but, you know, like what, 16? I think I was 16? Anyways, I used to make this stuff. And it was so flippin' good. And this is, I mean, clearly, Potato Salad is like not the best thing for you. But it was like this. Or like a burger from like a fast food joint. So I figured, you know, this is a little bit better for you. And the best part is, you guys are probably gonna get grossed out. But, um, there's like eggs in it. I love eggs. And for good measure, I did get some grapes. Not a lot. But I figured if I don't eat them, I can just leave them in the car and I can snack on them on the way home. Because it's about an hour drive back home. But today at work it was hectic and busy. I actually got up later today because I knew I was gonna have this late appointment. So I took Doyle out twice, which was good. I think he enjoyed that, randomly. But, you know, every time he gets to go outside, it's a good day for him. So even though I woke up super late, um, and did all of that stuff, I still did like almost another hour of overtime today at work. When I get back to work tomorrow, I basically have a full day of work in the computer for me. So, yeah. Um, I don't know, yesterday was like pretty chill and then today was just like, the floodgates opened and that's what's gonna happen. Like, oh my gosh. But that's okay, I'm getting my bearings and all that stuff, but it's just taking time. But that's alright. I almost feel like, because today's Tuesday, I feel like today should be like a Thursday, already in my week, because it's been challenging without my co-worker that's supposed to be training me. So, that's been quite difficult. But she'll be back next Monday online and, um, she's moving this week. If I haven't said that. I don't know if I've said that, but she's moving this week. So, she's got this week off and then she'll be online on Monday. Thank goodness. Yeah, but things are going pretty alright. But it's just a lot. But I think it's just gonna take time and, um, I'm feeling more comfortable every day. So, yeah. I don't think I've shown you guys. Okay, so, I sent my hairstylist lady a picture of what I wanted my my new furs to look like. So, I figured I would show you guys because then we can do like a before and after and be like, oh, did that look like that? Oh, is it gonna focus? No. Oh, there it goes. That is what I want my hair to look like. So, we will check back at the end of this. I'm gonna eat the rest of this because I've got like, seven minutes now.  I'm not sure. I think that she knows that I do YouTube. I think we talked about it before. But, like, it's been a long time since I've even gotten my hair cut and, um, Miss Gal's the last one that cut my hair and that's back when it was right here. So, it's been a long time. So, anyway, I will check in with you guys when more things start happening and or my hair is chopped and colored. So, brown-haired Emily is going bye-bye. She's gonna be kind of a blondie. That's what's gonna happen. Alright, this hair is going bye-bye. Bye! I just wanted to say one more goodbye to the long hair. It's hella long and it's time to say bye-bye. I don't know if I'm actually gonna have any good lighting after my hair's done because it's gonna be so freakin' light but maybe I can take some video inside. Yep. I'm gonna save so much money on shampoo. It's gonna be ridiculous! So, this is clearly a look. I've got paper all over my head.  I kind of feel like a little bit of a nun.  Hmm. So, the hair has been chopped. It's all on the ground right there. But yeah, this is what's happening. So I'm hanging out and letting the dye do its stuff and I'll show you a little bit what's going on in there. Alright, the hair is done. This is kind of bad lighting because it's really dark out. Yeah, it's pretty light kind of. It'll get lighter as I shampoo and things like that. But, yeah light and fresh and good stuff and I got, I don't know, like five, six inches cut off and she blow-dried my hair. So it's really kind of straight. When I have my hair shorter like this it tends to kind of get this weird wave in it. Just because it's not being weighed down as much. So, anyway this is the new do and goal for myself and you guys remind me too January is the beginning of the year. It's also the, like my birth month. I'm committing to coming back in June while coming back in January and getting a fresh trim and maybe getting like some more like, I don't know, getting some more color put in as well. Maybe even a little lighter or maybe a little darker. I don't know. Remind me at the beginning of the year if for some reason in January I don't have a hair appointment and you guys know I will because I will probably put it on Instagram or something. If February rolls around and I haven't done it yet you guys need to keep me accountable, okay? Deal? Deal. Alright, so me and my new hair which by the way is like super super soft. My stylist, I'm like, oh it feels so nice. I'm like, why can't you like come home and like shampoo me every day? She's like right, I know. But it always feels like so much nicer when someone else does it with their products and whatever. So anyway, I am going to drive home. Doyle is probably just dancing in his kennel and needs to go outside. So I'm gonna go do that and I will see you guys when I get home. Alright, so I am at home. The hair looks like this in this light. I don't know. It's hard to tell. It's not like super blonde but she kind of like went off of my like normal color if that makes sense. And then just kind of like lightened from there. So it's a whole lot lighter than what it was but it's hard to tell because it's like really dark outside. But I just got back from walking a Doyle dog. Hi, buddy. Hi, buddy. I know. It's so exciting. And he's wet because it's kind of raining outside. Oh, actually let's look at the hair with this light. It just, I don't know, whatever. I think we need tomorrow to really look at it guys. I think we need tomorrow. Alright, Doyle? Yeah? Okay. But today has been a long day. It's almost 10 o'clock.  So it's time to take the makeup off the tradition. I gotta take the makeup off guys. Even though it's not a lot of makeup it's still makeup nonetheless. And I can't handle having makeup on when I'm home. Very rarely do I actually wear makeup at home. Just makes my skin feel better to have it off and for it to breathe and do its skin thing, you know? But anyway. But yeah, I really like my new hair and like I said before, you all have to keep me accountable for you know, in January if you guys don't see me going to the hair salon you guys have permission to yell at me on social media because I do need to keep up with it a little bit more than I have then clearly because it's been almost 2 years like it's been more than a year and a half and less than 2 years since I got my hair cut or colored. So yeah. It was high time for myself to do something. So yeah. And oh here I'll tell you something in just a moment. I just want to like Doyle, why are you in here? I can hear his little pokey paws. So the reason I went with this length, I was going to get it just a little bit shorter and maybe next time I will I wanted to be able to still put my hair up in like a ponytail because when I'm sleeping, I sleep with a ponytail or like a top knot on the top of my head. I'm just going to like do it right now because I'm about to go to bed in like a hour or two. But I can't handle my hair like I feel like it's choking me a little bit so this is what my ponytail will look like. I don't know if you guys can see it or not but I think it's just perfect and again I can always get it like a little bit shorter next time which will be just fine but I usually go to bed just like this where I have like a little kind of knot at the top of my head like hey guys so anyway that's why I went with this length. I'm pretty sure today's vlog has not been that interesting because it's basically me getting my hair cut in color and all that good stuff but I'm really excited about it I'm just very excited guys um Doyle didn't notice a difference he didn't say anything to me he's just the worst sometimes Doyle there he is did you notice my new hair no he didn't he didn't notice at all but anyway now that my hair's back up and Doyle's creeping in the background just as usual yep um I am gonna hang out for just a little bit um maybe just about an hour so and then I am going to bed because it's time it's almost time guys but um I don't think I'm gonna get to edit tonight I don't think I'm gonna import the footage though and um just pups around a little bit and then I'm gonna go to bed so yeah hopefully tomorrow will be a little bit more interesting you never know what's up my sleeve for tomorrow but um that's gonna be it for today for vlogtober I hope you guys enjoyed day two and seeing my new hair let me know what you think in the comments let me know what you think I should do next time if I should go darker lighter shorter leave it long I don't know let me know what you guys think it's like your opinions even if I don't agree with them I still like to hear them so yeah that's it for me thank you guys so much for chilling with me today and I'll see you in the next one bye guys well folks it's time to kick it old school


Computers keep changing the world, but their power and safety is limited by their rigid design. The T2Tile project works for bigger and safer computing using living systems principles. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday updates. This is the sixth update of the T2Tile project, let's get into it. Last time we were supposed to have gotten to talk about the fork bomb, that sort of basic question that comes up in people's minds once they know that we're dealing with this extremely parallel, extremely distributed computation. Once you have some kind of element and add them in there, that it's only job in life is to reproduce itself into the spatially adjacent spot, what happens? How do you control the uncontrolled growth? Talk about that today. I don't have an absolute answer for it, but then I have an argument that there is no absolute answer and then I do have a strategy which I'm interested to see what you folks think of. I was supposed to work on the Ubuntu packaging for ULAM-4 and Splat and MFM. I did look into it a little bit, but I didn't get much done. I do have an excuse, I'll tell you about that in a minute. The goals for next week are, well, we have a new version of the board, the carrier board for the whole T2Tile is pending and I sort of thought it would be in by next week, but we'll see. At any event, it's time to get really serious about getting ULAM-4 out of there out there and move it out. So that's the plan. Yeah, so these web companies these days that are, you know, you're speaking to some faceless, who knows what, a zillion time zones away from you, they've usually gotten really quite good if we're giving you very incremental feedback about exactly where your order is. So I'm a little bit distressed because I'm not sure what's going on with the board order. It's now been sitting in this start production phase for over a week and I don't know, that surprises me a little bit. I don't know if something's messed up about that or if seed is just, you know, really busy or if I screwed something up. Don't know. So we'll see whether we have board in hand by next week, which I sort of assumed we would. So that's the story there. This past weekend I was in a panel discussion up in Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Institute, one of their annual meetings. And it was really great. There were three of us on this particular panel talking about the future of computation. I was giving my normal stuff about let's get beyond hardware determinism and definite scalability and so forth. There was a quantum guy there and a guy talking about thermodynamics of computation. It's all very interesting. Lots of really smart people. So we agreed on the panel that each of us would do a little five minute intro and then we'd have discussion and then we'd discuss with the audience. So I did one slide just giving the pitch. They wanted to know the future of computation. I showed them figure one from the past to Beth at past path to best effort that takes us from 1940 to 2039. You want the future? Here it is. So that was really good. The SFI science was tweeting about it and the tweet did some fairly good business by my standards of multimedia, social media, powerhouse. So that was all very good. There was one weird little thing which I sort of hesitated to bring up but I feel like I kind of need to because it's part of the plot of what's going on. So Alan Kay, one of my heroes, was at the meeting. He spoke on a panel after, a while after the panel that I was speaking on on Saturday and he actually made an oblique reference back to me. He didn't say my name but he said, you know, the previous speaker distributed computing in the presence of noise. That's called the internet. People don't really understand about the internet anymore. They just take it for granted. And so he was dressing me down. He was schooling me for not having recognized that I had just reinvented the internet. You know, so how am I supposed to react to that? I mean, I didn't speak to him. I would have at the evening reception but I don't think he was there. You know, so I thought about this quite a bit.  I am honored to have my work mischaracterized by Alan Kay.  How could he know that it isn't, that it's far from that there's a million distinguishing characteristics that are sort of important and fundamental about a definite scalability versus the internet and so forth. So how could he possibly have known? The fact that I was only given five minutes to speak was sort of supposed to be obvious but whatever. So in the end, in the bottom line, I'm really sincere that, you know, it's nice that he sort of knows far enough about it to think that this is just a reinvention of something from long ago that isn't being appreciated. So in the end, I am calling that progress. I am bringing up the T2 tile project progress meter and we are now advancing. We've got a long way to go. But that was kind of cool. All right. So that was this week and that was part of the reason doing that whole panel and so forth is, you know, so I lost a couple of days as far as nerding out. All right. The fork bomb question. So, hey, Andy X brought this up a while ago. Is there any known defense against the fork bomb? The thing that just keeps reproducing every time it gets a chance and all its reproductions try to reproduce and those and so forth. It seems like cancer or worse, like the fears and atomic bomb incinerating the atmosphere unstoppable chain reaction. Kyle, the scientist added a little more recently, you know, when we're talking about splat, how we have the dot rule that matches anything. So an at with a dot next to it means, you know, next to me, I'll match anything. How about a cell type that's only read only so that it could overrule. So somehow like if we had an at dot rule and we tried to overwrite it with something, well, then it wouldn't work or something like that.  We are the gods of these rules. We are defining the laws of physics for what we want this thing to do. And what do we want it to do? So here's the fork bomb in splat. The name of the element, the fact that it's symmetric. Me with anything next to me gets replaced with a me in another copy of me. All right, let's let's just do it. Oh, and one of the other things that I did do this weekend on the way to getting an MFM and splat all packaged up was I did a little work on splatter. So we now actually have like a little bit of help. And one of the one of the things that I like, I think every program should provide this. Well, then most programs do these days. So we can make a demo dirt or something like that. Go into it. And then if we do splatter dash I for initialize, it writes out a whole bunch of stuff for us. Directories make files and notes files or anything in the notes directory, but it's there if you used and it actually creates a little element.  The underscore recall matches an empty space. So if we see an empty space, we'll replace it with two of us. Otherwise, we'll just hold. And so that all just gets generated automatically. Whoops. Not what I wanted yet. And so we can just make it. And we actually are getting the copyright information starting to come out now and just all the stuff that we should do. We're actually going to ship some software and eventually this thing will. There we go. Okay. And here we are. Here's my element. We can make it and it grows. Now, again, whoops. This particular one is meant to be a friendly one. So if we have a defensive line, this is not the clearest defensive line. I don't even know if it is a defensive line or not. Then it should survive. The fork bomb shouldn't pass through it or our friendly fork bomb, which is really hardly a fork bomb at all. As far as the philosophical computational question about what to do about these things. Okay. So the point is that's splatter dash I it's in the GitHub. It's in the repo, but nowhere else as yet. So let's make let's make a real fork bomb here first. Whoops. Yikes. That's not what I wanted to do. So we have to go find out here back down into. Okay, there we go. Now we'll make fork bomb dot splat elements fork bomb. I'll just do minimal stuff here. Symmetries all rules me with anything next to me goes to me. I mean, just for fun, we point out that we could have written it this way. It doesn't matter because symmetries also symmetries all and we'll let this grind through. It'll take a little while because it's not that the dog sings well for all this code. We're just trying to figure out what we actually want to do. All right. And now. Oops. Now we've got a mean fork bomb. Actually, what the heck we could put it up against a friendly fork bomb and see what happens there. You should be able to guess. Yeah. Friendly fork bomb does not have much to say against the mean fork bomb. So what are we going to do about this? If we went if you went to MFM rocks the other day, you would have seen the anti fork bomb. Now how the heck could that possibly work? Well, let's get out of here.  And so let's try this one. All right. So now we have anti fork bomb. So we'll make an anti fork bomb and we have a fork bomb. And so we'll see what happens. The anti fork bomb is just a happy little thing wandering around minding its own business until it sees. Didn't work so well. Did it? Let's try another one. All right. We'll make. Oops. There we go. Okay. That's more like what we want anti fork bomb to do. And the idea is the anti fork bomb sort of fills space, but very lightly, not very densely. And when it sees a fork bomb, it goes nuts. And it the key to the success of an anti fork bomb is that it has to be able to reproduce faster than the fork bomb. And so let's take a look at the code. See how this works. So I've taken fork bomb here and I've added a little object orientedness because it makes things more convenient. So down here, the rule looks exactly the same as before me with anything next to me replace it with two means. The only thing that we did here is we added a base class and inheritance. We said a fork bomb is a subclass of a quark called Q fork bomb. How do we know it's a quark? We don't really accept by convention. We have quarks beginning with Q. But here it is. This is the entire declaration of the Q fork bomb. The Q fork bomb quark. It has no data. It has no methods. It has no nothing. It's just a flag class so that we can recognize things. Anything that inherits from Q fork bomb is something that anti fork bomb wants to attack. Now this is kind of a strange thing. When you think about it, why would fork bomb choose to do that to allow it to be identified? Another issue in, you know, fundamentally if we're talking about this, if we're imagining that unknown splat code is going to be coming from the world at large, there's really nothing much we can do. So all of this design that we're doing here is like, okay, if we're trying to build sets of elements that are going to work together and they're going to have unexpected emergent properties, they're going to interact with stuff in ways that we might not intend because this is not serial determinism. We do not get to say what global boot time is like, what happens at the one and only moment where everything begins. And so we can't even pretend that we're going to control it by having one domino knock over the other, knock over the other and so forth so that even if there's a million dominoes elsewhere, if they're not part of the official little path that we've created, none of them will fall over. That's not the way this works. We're building fundamental transition rules, basic types of dynamical behavior in different classes, and we want to know, well, you know, they're supposed to be used in this way. Our intention is to be used in this way. If you start them up under normal circumstances, they will go through this kind of progression and they will do this and that. But that doesn't mean that's the only configuration that can happen. So having these discussions, having these design thinking about how are these things going to play together when they're not in a configuration that we really intend is very important. So, all right, there's the fork bomb. And here's anti-fork bomb. And so a little bit more complicated.  And, you know, every programming language, every semantics, every model of computation has its weird little quirks. This is one of them. In the movable feast, what happens at the edge of the universe? What happens when you get to the edge of tile and there is no tile next to it? Now, from the point of view of the MFM and event window, the event window is always 41 sites. Manhattan Distance of 4 around me in the center. But there may not actually be 41 sites that are really alive, that are actually real. And that is, in fact, detectable. And in the normal way that splat is written, if you write a rule down here, so we're saying B, we're trying to match a B. What is a B? Well, we don't know. We have to look up here. We're basically saying B is a bomb. If B, and this is where we're taking advantage, ooh, this should probably really wants to be Q fork bomb. Well, we'll leave it for now. So what would happen if we're trying to match a B? But in fact, there's nothing there. There's no universe there. We've reached the end of the universe. Or maybe not the end of the universe, just there could be a tile missing in the middle or a tile that's not responding. There could be a hole in the universe. If we didn't say given B, and true, which is kind of a special syntax, it's a little bit general. That means that even if we're asking this B match on a site that doesn't even exist, go ahead and match if you can. All right? And in this case, when we say vote B is a fork bomb, that means wherever we say this, it's going to look what's actually there. And if the thing is a fork bomb, it's going to count one vote by default. And if it's not a fork bomb, it'll count zero votes. And in particular, we want to go ahead and count zero votes if it's non-existent space at the end of the universe. That's what given B true does. And so there are five different things we can do. We can do given, vote, check, and change. That's four. Is there a fifth one? I can't remember. In this case, we're using three. Given B true means go ahead and match B's against non-existent sites. Vote B is a fork bomb means pick, count a vote for every one of these things that is a fork bomb. And change B means when B appears on the right-hand side of a rule like it does down here, then do this code. And this code is essentially ULAM code. So we can't actually do the entire matching in just splat. We do escape back to ULAM to do more normal, sentential type expressions because not everything is well expressed spatially. That's fine. Even though splat stands for spatial programming language, we're not pretending that we're trying to cram everything into the model of spatial relationships. We're just trying to make spatial relationships easy to express and splat does that. Okay. So what it does is it says if any of the B's on the left-hand side match, then the vote will be greater than zero. And the default rule is to say, does this rule match or not? It matches if everything on the left-hand side has at least one vote. So we get a vote for ourselves. AdSign gets a vote for itself. If any of those B's is a fork bomb, then we get at least one vote coming out of that. So the rule as a whole matches. We then go to the right-hand side and we say change. Well, if the event window, the current site is a fork bomb, then replace it with a copy of us. That's the rule. So that's how anti-fork bomb works. If it ever sees any one or more fork bombs in its immediate eight neighborhood, then it replaces them all with itself. And that's how it beats the fork bomb. The fork bomb just did one squared a ton. So if we started with one fork bomb here, then at most we'll have two fork bombs after one event takes place here. But in principle, we could go from one anti-fork bomb to nine anti-fork bombs in a single go. That's how it works. We have to be able to outrun the bad guys with the good guys. Well, but you know what this is going to happen, right? Well, what happens if we have a meaner fork bomb that says, you know, suppose I have anything on either side of me and now we can go from one fork bomb to three fork bombs in a given go. And that's what we've got here. So we've got... We can take a bomb two and we can put it down. And if we now do a bomb two against an anti-fork bomb, it's going to be bad. Well, actually, let's make a bunch of anti-fork bombs. It's bad. But we can correspondingly... Whoops, we can have anti-fork bomb twos that grow in response. And now we're in good shape against fork bomb two. So you see how this is going to go. The obvious limit is... Stop there. Fork bomb four. What are you going to do about that? The fork bomb rule says, if I am surrounded by 40 other anythings, replace them with copies of me. This is now writing at the maximum speed it's possible. We've completely filled the event window with us in a single event. Is this legal? Sure, it's legal. We can do it. And anti-fork bomb four tries to do the same thing as best it can. The only problem is that it goes ahead and thins itself out if it hasn't got anything that it needs to do. So if we come in here with a fork bomb four, we are completely wiped out. Get some anti-fork bomb fours going here. And then this is where we end up. It's a stalemate of sorts where depending on who gets the edge, either side may win. In this particular case, the fork bomb has a slight edge. Why? Because the anti-fork bomb, you can see it. The anti-fork bombs, they start to die out once they don't see any fork bombs because they're kind of trying to be the good citizens. They're trying to say, I would like to leave as much space available for other computations to happen while I just patrol to make sure these nasty fork bombs that won't leave any space for other computations to try to happen. But that in fact means their growth rate is slightly less than the full-on fork bomb. So this is looking pretty good. Maybe not. But thinking about it from the big picture, regardless of who wins this war and once again the bad fork bombs won again, it wasn't very good for any other computation that was actually happening in this space. So how are we going to fix this? Let's watch this one through the end. We'll see. There we go. Okay, this is the ending that we think we want. Right now we've got the entire universe full of mustard out veterans coming back from the World War of the fork bombs versus the anti-fork bombs that are gradually thinning out and making space available, but it has to be plowed and settled completely from scratch. It was a completely burnt earth, scorched earth that was created left behind by the war. All right, so that's it. So the simple fork bomb reproduces itself once. We can beat that with something that erases the things faster than them. But if the event window is fixed, which it is by the architecture, and you're allowed to rewrite the event window arbitrarily, which was the basic rule that we were settling on, then at best we get a stalemate with a slight edge for the bad guys. The bad guys just overwrite everything as fast as they can. The anti-fork bomb guys, you can make a more sophisticated anti-fork bomb that doesn't muster out as quickly, that will stay inflamed, will stay aroused for a period of time, that they don't see any fork bombs. And you can get it so that it's basically 50-50, but you can't really do better than that. So how are we going to make the decision? It's easy to say, oh, well, just don't worry about it. Make it impossible to replace a dot with something. But you need to replace a dot with things. When you write rules that actually do useful stuff, you're writing all over the place. So philosophically, how do you break the tie? You've got a bunch of one type of element that's making all these transitions, is writing all over the place. You've got a bunch of other elements that are making all these transitions, writing all over the place. How do you tell which one is good and which one is evil? Now, when you're doing game design, balancing a game is very similar to this process, these kinds of questions. How do you decide how to make a weapon powerful but not too powerful and so forth? We built into the game, we have the player. Now, if it's a player versus player, then we kind of want it to be all balanced out so that it comes back just to the differences in the player playing the game. But we don't know who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. So what I want to do, you know, finish on this is suppose we say we're going to give the edge to the incumbent. Whichever guy is already there, meaning that that site has not been written lately. The guy's been sitting there doing whatever it is, flipping a few bits but not very many. And here comes fork bomb. Its hallmark is that it's doing tremendous amounts of writing. It's doing writing extremely rapidly. And that's what we want to detect. We want to somehow say, if you're doing too much writing, we're going to slow you down, we're going to make your events fail a little bit and so forth. Whereas if your growth rate is more sedate, then you'll have a higher probability of success. Is that guaranteed to do what we want? No. If we have a dug in situation, a dug in bunch of guys that for whatever other purpose we think they're evil, well, they're going to be very powerful because they're going to be incumbent evil. But it's the only way that I can think of that breaks the symmetry between who's supposed to be the good guy and who's supposed to be the bad guy. We're going to say the good guys are there first. And because we're going to engineer it that way, that when we power up a tile, we'll seed it with what we want. So that's the fork bomb question. I will stop with that. At the moment, there is no implementation of incumbency. None of that exists in the movable feast machine. I've had some ideas about how to simulate it, how to implement it, but it's not implemented yet. So that's all for the future. What do you think? Is there a better solution? Is there any solution? Not sure. But if we're going to be gods, gods defining the laws of physics of this indefinitely scalable universe, it's on us to take these questions seriously. Next update will be in a week. Thanks for watching.


Hello everyone and welcome again to Think Tech for another edition of Tourism 101 where we're talking about everything that has to do with tourism. Our guest today is a very special woman in our community who together with her husband had built a very successful small business enterprise on the heels of the hospitality industry. We're talking about Shah Thompson and together with her husband Jack Tihari Thompson have been able to employ thousands of people through the years through Tihari Productions and next year they'll be celebrating their 50th anniversary. Shah, good morning and welcome to our show. Aloha. Thank you for inviting me. I can't believe next year is 50 years. Where did the years go? He must have started when you were two years old. Yeah, there you go.  Tell us about growing up in Kali and going to Farrington High School where Jack also went to school. I'll tell you, I am so grateful for the visitor industry, you know, next year. They're actually writing a legacy book on Tihari Productions and it's founders. That's us. And I made a joke with them and I said, I thought you had to discover penicillin before you get it, you know. But the visitor industry is so important that they felt I've been a part of it, we've been a part of it for coming up 50 years. So they're doing a book and we'll have a great gala and I want to say thank you to the industry, the whole industry, but mainly different organizations that help bring us to where we're at today. So yeah, this is what a kupuna looks like, okay? Now, Jack and you met at Farrington High School. We did. Yes. Yes, we're high school sweethearts. And did you know back then when you were a song leader at Farrington High School and Jack was a star athlete that one day you folks would be having this very successful business? I truly did not because Jack really is a shy, kind of quiet guy and as you know, I'm loud and so I didn't and quite frankly he was a gentleman, meaning his father was part of the Navy and so he came to Farrington High School with his shirt tucked in and he wore loafers and I come from a very big Hawaiian family and my brothers are rough guys and so all of us girls were tomboy and I thought, I thought quite frankly he was a little bit too much gentleman for me, but as we worked together and we did work together before we were married at the old Queen's Surf, Pukapuku Otea. 1965 and I saw this handsome, handsome person and I thought, but eh, he's too quiet, was meant to be. We just made 53 years married, just made 53 years, very good and and 16 mopuna, 16 grandchildren. That's my claim to fame by the way. So I want to talk about what you know, I mean your first name is really Charlene. Yes. Your first name is Charlene and your second version is Shah and Jack of course is known as Tehati. Tehati, yes.  Okay, let's start with Tehati. He was this shy guy that would come when we were dating and pick me up after work at three in the morning because in those days you had three shows that ended, it started at 1.30 in the morning at the old Queen's Surf and he'd pick me up and we were dating. And finally everybody went to the World's Fair and there were no knife dancers and he said to me, you know, I wonder if I can learn that dance. I said, yeah, you're Samoan, oh you should learn it but I didn't believe that he would try it. Well, everybody went away and my mentor, Elaine Frisbee said, can your boyfriend dance? I said, oh yeah, he's very good. Well, the first day he danced I was certain that I was going to break up with him, I was certain and he'll tell you the story, he was so bad and today he'll say that to all of our knife dancers because we have 12 world ranking knife dancers in our company. My son is included and he'll say, I was so bad but God bless me, look at that. I learned this dance and look at all these kids that we employ that can do it so well. And my name, Shah, coming from Charlene, the kids in Kalihi where I grew up, never used ours. I was never Shah and I can tell when people don't know me from business organizations they'll call the company and say, may I speak to Shah please? And they say, we don't have a Shah here. So they never said ours so I became Shah. And then Karen, they made it really known as Shah because she started writing the Shah of Waikiki, you know, even though it's spelled C-H-A-A. So that's how we got our names, Tehati and Shah. Great. Now, let's talk about the company itself. Today you are and Jack are basically in retirement having turned the company over to Afatia and Misty. How has that transition been, the two of your children now actually running the company, making the day-to-day decisions? Are you really completely out of it? No, I'm still the CEO. I knew they were going to catch you there. I tried to. It was difficult for them. They tell me it was difficult for them because it was hard to let go. And I guess so. I didn't think so. I'd go in and check and give my opinions but they didn't listen to it. They have taken it to a different level. I mean, it's no longer an MC introduction. My daughter is a research specialist. And this is what she went to school for. So she will research the area or the district where the shows are at and she'll bring back all the facts of Hawai'iana and how it derived its name, how the helumua was helumua before it became Waikiki. And so they did bring it up. When we were first married and having our babies and working day jobs, what my mother called real jobs, we didn't have the time. You needed to be cute and you could dance well and you worked for a lesser amount of money. Today it's a business. It's a big business because that's what they went to colleges for. That's what they went to school for. And they look at the company different. I used to know every single employee. I knew every one of their children. I went to every baptism. I went to every graduation. I can't do that anymore, not with a thousand employees. But I'm the old lady and he's the old man and when we go we get our enjoyment by them just saying, wow, we met Tihati and Shah, you know. But Misty and Afatia, they just know what to do. That's why you sent them to good schools. They... And those good schools were? Oh, heavens. One went to not Columbia, Colorado State University and of course, Afaa was the first string running back for June Jones at the University of Hawaii. And Misty majored in journalism, what kind of journalism though? Whatever. In journalism, Afatia was in business. And they tell us that they think differently from us. So I... But I always say, but for the grace of God, there go I, so you too. And I say that because they say, you know, she's from Kalihi Valley Housing. That's why she says that. But I use that example all the time. You were born on Port Lack Road, I was born in Kalihi, so we do have a little bit of a difference. Great, great. Now, they obviously had some big shoes to fill because when you and Jack were in charge of the company, I remember back in 1986, you were voted the Hawaii small business of the year. And then later on, you folks were inducted into the Hawaii business hall of fame. So they don't really feel that pressure of having to do well because they've been brought up in the company, obviously. And then also now putting their own stamp and going for it. Today, you still have 1,000 employees and how many shows throughout the island? I think it's 13 or 14. Our latest was the Olani, the Disney Olani. We opened that and we're grateful for that, very nice. But every show is different. So what they tried to do when we were doing it, we'd teach all the employees and everybody had a separate show and you knew it. Afatia and Misty taught, made sure that every show knew every other show, they knew all the dances. Therefore, if Maui is short of two performers tonight, you fly them over from Honolulu. So it's a whole new thing. I mean, we worked so hard that, and I was still teaching at the time, we teach Maui and we teach a big island and we teach Kaua'i and then I'd say, what numbers, what are we doing? What is, what's happening there? But they have themed it and they've named every show. We were just always Tihati Productions, Tihati Productions on Hyatt, Tihati Productions at Hilton. Today, you go to the Teh Moana Nui at the Princess Kaua'i, separate format, anyway, every show has their own identity, their own theme, because it's in a different district. And that's what they've done, the research that Misty Mokehana has done. It's very different. So we go and we enjoy it a lot.  Oh, Evans. And, you know, luau shows, wine shows, Polynesian shows, sometimes come and go, depending on the market, depending on the interest, sometimes depending on ownership. So what has been the secret that has kept Tihati Productions alive and well and continues to be one of Hawaii's best small businesses? You know, Mufi, a lot of people will think this is a cliche, but for Jack and I, the book that they're writing, the legacy book of Tihati Productions, we said to the writer, we want to make sure that the reader understands that we understand, but for the grace of God, there go I. I mean, we believe that with our whole heart and soul.  When I got my degree from Hawaii Pacific University, and Jack drove me every night. Every night. A Bachelor of Science, I might add, in Judicial Administration. Yes. Yes. When I did get it, I thought, but I'd gotten all the kudos and the business hall of fame and the small business and many others already. What is this going to do for me? And honestly, for those that sit on boards, you understand, you don't get the respect until you have that pala pala. And I thought, but I used to talk them down without the pala pala. So my point is, it's very important, education, the degree is important. But again, but for the grace of God, because I did all of that before I got it. And now that I have it, nobody asked me about my Judicial Administration thing. They still asked me about tourism. And boy, am I grateful for tourism. Have you had some mentors along the way, both you and Jack, they sort of served as role models and examples of it? I did. I did. Well, Elaine Frisbee, for instance, was one. Mike Kumuulis, Rose Mauna Kea Lane, Myrtle Lee was my tourism industry mentor. And the reason is entertainers don't get long contracts. You get it for a year. Sometimes you don't get one. You get it for a year. And then maybe they'll renew it or maybe they'll just roll it over or maybe before Myrtle Lee left the industry, she called us in and she said, you too deserve this. And we were the first entertainment company that got a five-year contract, and that just shot us. I mean, other hotel general managers followed suit and said, why would she trust these kids? And so now with 13 or 14 shows, whatever it is, Myrtle started that, Myrtle Lee. And don't you also lend your expertise to training folks from other countries that want to do? Oh. Remember a few years back, wasn't it Thailand? Yes, yes. 150 performers on a stage, and it was a 500, 5,000 seating supper club. And they would bring your food on skates. I kid you not, they'd bring it on skates. And I remember when we left simply because there was a civil war. And I was there in the White House—no, they're not a White House—in the palace when the king made the two opposing parties crawl and make friends. That was very impressive. But we left shortly after because the war was still on, but at least the king had his say with everybody, chill. This is both our country. So the visitor industry and our occupation sure afforded Jack and I an awful lot of travel and experience, you know. We've been more than halfway around the world. Well— But I trained. I trained them about this. Absolutely. But we're going to be coming up on our next segment here after we take a pause for the cause because we're here this morning talking with Shaht Thompson. As you can see, she's so full of energy.  We're going to talk about her community involvement, for example, and her latest venture in the tourism industry. Have you heard of the Blue Note Hawaii? That's Shaht Thompson. We'll talk about that after we take this break. We'll pause there. Once again, we're here in Think Tech, Hawaii. This show is called Tourism 101, where we delve deep into the tourism industry. Talk about things that are happening, especially as seen through the eyes of people that have a track record of making things happen. So happy to have Shaht here this morning. And together with her husband Jack, they're coming up on their fiftieth anniversary of the Hottie Productions in Hawaii. Right back. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaiiania all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lowe, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech, Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fashion health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Our guest today on Tourism 101 is Shaht Thompson. We've talked about the beginnings of the Hottie Productions, how they met as Sweethearts and Kalihi, and certainly now have developed a very successful company. But I want to delve into the other side of Shaht Thompson that may not be as well known to folks outside the industry of how involved she is. I mean, here's a woman who's been on the police commission. She's been involved with the Law United Way. She's been involved in fundraising activities. She also has accomplished so much that the Girl Scouts made her a woman distinction, she was the distinguished woman of the year, and also the mother of the year by the American Mothers Association. So Shaht, I know you don't like the spotlight, China, but you've done so much, and I want to focus on how much you inject due to give back to the community. You're not two individuals that are kind of hoarding it for your immediate family. You're always looking to help. It could be schools. It could be your fellow entertainers. It could be causes that are going unnoticed in the community. And when you get involved, all of a sudden everybody goes, oh, Shaht's involved, we've got to give. Well, I think one of the awards that I appreciate the most and I'm most proud of is Mother of the Year for the State of Hawaii. Because I believe everything happens in a home, everything. And when they called me, American Mothers Inc. called me, I said, what is that? I thought every, I mean, I'm sure most mothers do exactly what I do. Yes, you do make the home lunch and yes, you go to PTA meetings and yes, you, but I think we owe a debt to mothers that work and our mothers.  Let's tell them what you do, what you actually do. We raised our own four children and eight more. They were either relatives and came from families that didn't have as much or anyway. We raised 12 children. And everyone, the line dulls when it comes to the children I bore and the hanai that we raised, they are all very close even today. And on Sundays at the church, everybody comes to the Port Loc Thompson's house because we have the best food on Sundays. We have a huge kongai and everybody eats and they don't go home. We watch TV or the kids are swimming or whatever and they lie out on the floor. There's bodies all over the floor and then we have dinner together. So, it's a big deal. This is one of the reasons I appreciate the mother of the year award mostly.  And you saw the size of my boys. I see that, believe you me, I believe you me. So let's talk about the tourism industry in general. You've said repeatedly during this segment with you of how blessed we are to have a wonderful tourism industry. What do you see as some of the challenges going forward so that we can maintain the best of what the industry has offered through the years? I especially like the fact now that because you and Jack have been such proponents of the importance of the culture. We see that much more reflected in everything that we do about tourism. Yes, yes. I think for one thing, and like you said, I've been around for 50 years. I think that we must continue to be sure that there's an even allowance for both the visitor industry and the residents. Because some of the residents that don't understand what we're doing, sometimes think we're the big bullies that do everything for tourists. Not so, not so. There are many, many, and we may run out of time. But there's many perks or benefits for the local people to get involved with tourism. My mother, for instance, during her time, was very anti-tourism. However, she learned through me, first of all, when she came to Puku Puku Atea to see me dance, she thought that I should put more clothes on. So that was the one thing. But then she realized that the benefit that tourism affords the local people. And it's not just jobs. We meet people from abroad that we have made, Tiahti and I have made lifetime friends with. And they understand our plight. We understand theirs. We must continually, the visitor industry is our responsibility to make sure that the visitor, the resident, is included and involved in whatever we do in tourism. First of all, we do have too many people now. I'm going to get scolded for that. No, no, no, go ahead. Aren't we 10 million visitors now, or 9.5? Very close to it, yeah, 10 million. And I say this to all the general managers. I'm with every chain, Hilton, Hyatt, Sheridan, you name it. I say, the parking is going to kill the local person here. Now I understand that part of it too. But we must continually remember that that's not all that Hawaii is tourism. It is our number one industry. But we also have much more to share from the local residents, much more. So if you get a chance to stay in a resident's home, stay. We do that all the time. We invite people. And of course, my daughter calls our house a Grand Central Station. But people stay with us all the time. And you leave a lasting effect on those that don't really know Hawaii or island people. And I don't just mean the Hawaiians. Because right now, the Filipinos are our largest ethnicity. And they are as warm and as wonderful as the Japanese people in Hawaii. Hawaii people is Hawaii. So what would be your message to government officials or tourism leaders in terms of making sure that we stay connected with the community and that we have our ear to the ground and we're listening as much as we're talking about their concerns that need to be addressed if we're going to have an industry that truly is going to be prosperous and advantageous for everyone who calls Hawaii home? I'm thankful for some of the legislators, not all. Some of the leaders, I don't think are with it at this time. I don't think. I don't think they talk. I think they talk only to their followers, maybe, only to—I think that they need to be more inclusive. I really don't think we're—and I think that the different organizations of tourism, one of my favorite ones is the Aloha visitor, Jessica, and Shucks, but she takes care. Jessica Lonnie-Lash. Thank you. They do a great job and they don't try to take credit for anything.  I really think that our politicians need to be more effective in working with all the different organizations and not try to make brownie points. You must listen to the Hawaiians. They have a plight. You must listen. I mean, I don't talk about—I don't think radically. They don't have to do that, but they need to listen and not exclude people. So you're saying that they need to come out of their offices more, get out in the community, be open to criticisms, suggestions. That's what I meant about don't just come to have your picture taken. And the people know. They really know, which makes me very sad that you are not involved, but I'm not going to say those things. Let's talk about what you've done to show the advantages of being involved with the visitor industry. One of the things that I give Hugh and Jack big kudos on is I've seen you folks many times when a fellow entertainer, when a fellow leader in our community who's going through struggles, going through hardships, whether it be for medical expenses, in some cases they've passed on. And you folks never hesitate to come up with a fundraiser where you bring the industry together, where they get to demonstrate that aloha and compassion for each other. And you put everybody in a good place by doing that. I have had the privilege of serving in areas like that, like a good friend that just left us down whole. I ran his funeral. Our sweet, sweet Willie K. who had cancer, we had a big fundraiser for him. But more importantly, that's just the nature of Hawaii's people. I mean, the first ones to call and say, Shah, so and so is Seiko, or Shah, the school needs help. And I just go. I think it's, honestly, I think it's a gift that I maybe was born with and love it and don't think I deserve any kudos for that. I just think that that's part of what Hawaii is all about. I'm not the only one that does that. Visitor industry is amazing. Entertainers absolutely always, you know, we come in and we do a huge show and everybody comes to see the named performers and we raise all the money. I'm most proud that I gave Skippitya's $12,000 in Farrington High School football team did not have money for helmets. And we gave Skippitya's because I'm a Farringtonian. And when we celebrated our 25th year, mind you, we're going on to our 50th. But when we celebrated our 25th year, we gave Evercent. We gave, I don't know what it was, $50,000 to St. Louis High School. We gave to Farrington. We gave to the Waikiki Improvement because I really believe we made all our money because of the Hotel Association. So we're going to do it again next year. And I'm so grateful that we have the privilege to do that. I mean, give money away. People need the money. And so I want to say on behalf of the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association, we really are very grateful to Tehati Productions with you and Tehati leading the way and setting aside some funds many years ago that we were able to now use that for what we call the Downhole Legacy Award. I didn't even remember doing that, but I'm so grateful that we give it to a student of Hawaiian ancestry that wants to pursue music, arts, culture, and entertainment in college. And then hopefully that will be their profession. And thanks to you, we can do that every year. Well, we do have an arts scholarship from Tehati Productions. Anybody that wants to get into the business, because I don't know a business tougher than entertainment. I mean, when we started, we'd work for next to nothing. Downhole gave us our first break, and we were paid for 12 performers. We had 35, called every relative we had, especially Tehati. He has relatives. And so it's just part of our nature to help advance entertainment in the islands. And because of that, in essence, we're helping tourism and loving it. Grateful for it. So in parting words here, and the last question I'm asking of you. So what would be your advice to that person now who is thinking about a career and has all these choices before them? And maybe they have an inkling to go on the visitor internship, but they're thinking, ah, it's a service industry. It is. It depends on tourists coming here. What would you say to that person? I would say, like I say to all the kids, follow your dreams, but be true to yourself. Don't try to do something that you know you're not serious about. Don't go in for just the money. Follow your dreams, and hang in. Don't be afraid of anything. Well, as you see, we've been very blessed this show to have Shah Thompson. She certainly leads, by example, I've known Shah and Tihati for a long time. Her exuberance, her appearance today is just as it was back in the day. And we really appreciate all that she's done. And most importantly, she's passing it on now to the next generation of leaders. I'm big on mentoring. And they've obviously done a great job of mentoring. I miss T and Afatia, that they are going to continue the legacy of Tihati Productions. Thank you, Mufi. Happy to be here. Mahalo Nui Law, and we'll see you next week when we have our next show. We're scheduled here on Think Tank to be able to, again, focus on tourism one-on-one. What makes this industry take what we need to do in going forward to assure that all the challenges are there, that we have solutions for them to ensure that this industry remains nocoy. Mahalo.


Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget, Rick Admiral William Lesher, announced the release of the Department of the Navy proposed fiscal year 15 budget Tuesday. The $148 billion budget provides the resources that allow us to preserve our warfighting advantage. The fiscal year 15 budget focuses on funding for forward presence and investing in people and future capabilities. The budget also funds increases in career see-pay and career see-pay premium that recognize and reward sailors and marines that are spending time at sea. It funds a high deployment allowance that compensates for the rigors of extended deployments and it pre-stores critical skills bonuses to retain our most highly skilled sailors. Money will also be available for ship steaming, flight hours, maintenance and base operations. From the Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Tyrell Morris.


Typical flying day for us, we'll probably log between six and seven flying hours. We get the targets, we'll get on the ground, make sure the targets are there, the locals, and we'll spray them. That's your spraying, the lower the better. One and a half to two metres, that's perfect. We get a great coverage onto the ground of that because the wind is very, very strong here as well. They really do hit the windscreen, it's looking like this the whole time. When that does happen, we turn away and we try to avoid them because it can damage the aircraft, it can damage the blades, and then they can get stuck into the radiator, the oil cooler as well. Hopefully we can nail these little locusts and show that we can do it.


Hi everybody it's Sam here thank you for watching today so for this week's Sunday surprise I'm going to show you how to make these open diorama cards actually made these during a really lovely craft along there was 10 of us and it was a competition win so I showed everybody how to make this card so what I mean by open diorama is I wanted to be able to create a scene but have the swinging elements and I didn't want them to be restricted within that area because usually when you make a diorama this is solid but I've opened it up so it means that you can have your little characters or whatever you have swinging you know really nicely and they can swing outside of the card so you can see this one here is using this was the swing collection that I launched about six to eight weeks ago and it's using the characters there and it's that jungle scene and then this one is using my recent fun at the fair collection so I've taken elements of the three different fun at the fair rides and I've built up this scene here and again you can see on the back this one's actually got acetate on it as well but all of those pieces swing you can kind of just see it through the top there it looks really nice from the front the acetate on this does really stabilise it this one still works really well but I think it I think it looks nice as well with the acetate but it's entirely up to you and then of course you've got all your space on the back and they do fold flat I've added this top piece without that will fit into a six by six envelope I mean that will go into a bouncy envelope you know pretty well if not one of my box envelopes and I'll pop that up now but this one I have made bigger so I pop it in one of my seven by seven or eight by eight box envelopes so let me show you how to make them so I'm going to make another circus themed one today but if you have the older swing collection here I use the paper pad so the swing card jungle scenes and then I used the orangutan and then the chimp on the two stamps that says it's the just chilling and hanging around and then these are the flowers and the the leaves there and you can see I've just built that all up and then I've used the sentiment just hanging around which is this one here and then on the back I've added the little signpost there as well I also then took the swinging elements from the swing set and that's what I've added inside there so again those of you that have that that's how I've done that one but for today I'm going to use the circus theme so this is what the sunday surprises are about it's about how you can mix and match my collections together but you can also make other fun fold cards with them as well so it's just giving you more inspiration so this is the paper pad I've used this is the fun at the fair paper pad and I'm taking the balloons again so it's going to be pretty much the same as this one in terms of the decoration I really like that paper and I think it worked quite well with the card stock that I chose I'm not using anything from the swing boat but I wanted to show this one because one of the ladies in the craft along she used this die here for the because I'm actually going to use the baskets here from the chair swing but if you don't have this set and you have the boat then take these ones here and use them as your strips and then you can add your basket just you know cut a rectangle shape and you can build that up that way so that's what I just wanted to show that one but I'm taking the basket here and then also the top there the tent top and then this die and you can see I've created that so anybody who's got the chair swing you know how to put it together anyway they're the pieces I'm using and then did I use anything from that one no I didn't but that's the ferris wheel and then there's the sentiment so I've just taken different stamped images and the sentiment there as well I've got this square from my own stash I'll give you the sizes to that in a minute so anybody can make this card shape but if you've got any of my mate a surprise that I'm using then obviously you can follow and make it pretty similar to mine so I've got a template here so you want two pieces of six by ten and a half cardstock so I've already done one there so with this one you're going to score along the ten and a half side bring it up so you can see both you're going to score at six inches and then every half an inch so six and a half seven seven and a half eight eight and a half nine nine and a half and ten okay then you want to pop it on its short side with all of those score lines at the top and you're now going to do these two lines here they're actually going to be cut lines as well but it's I just like scoring it first so you're going to score it three quarters of an inch down to that first score line so to the six inch score line so all the way down and then at five and a quarter all the way down again you'll do that on two pieces we're now going to cut all of that section out so if I bring this one in you can see exactly what we're removing there I've already put the concertina fold in them but you can see that whole section that we're removing so I'm just going to get rid of this and then if you want to just fold it in over on that six inch score line okay and then I'm going to grab or use these scissors here so I'm going to cut down those three quarter inch score lines that you just made like so and then you can fold those away from you and then you can just cut that piece out okay next you want to decide what's going to be the front and the back so the back one I'm going to have here with all of this on the left hand side this is going to be the front one and I've got everything on the right hand side now don't do the concertina fold yet because you want to cut your aperture but first of all you want to stick your pattern paper down so I'm going to just stick the front so that's this one here this is five and three quarter squared and then this piece is five and three quarter square but this is for the back but you don't want to stick the back one down yet because we want to stick the tabs on first and then stick this over so then everything's nice and neat so you just want to stick your front one down first of all okay next I'm going to die cut this square now you can have any shape if you've got circles if you've got the swing collection in the set there you have the circle and also the decorative aperture there so you can use those but I'm going to use this one here so the measurements are it is just over four and a half it's about four and five eights of an inch squared four and a half would be fine but I'm going to sit that in the middle here I'm just going to tape it down and run that through my die machine okay so I've just taken that one away now I've used the cloud glue so that is going to start to once that dries completely it's going to become nice and strong but I am now going to add the acetate behind so this is a piece of five and three quarters squared and I'm going to stick that behind here and that's going to bring back that stability again to this piece so it's completely optional but I do think it looks quite nice okay so that's all in place and now we want to add the folds to these pieces here so you want to fold both of them in and then fold back on the next score line and then forward back forward back forward back and then finish with it facing forward so I'm going to hold that up and I'm going to go through it again so you're folding it in so it's a mountain and you want to end with a mountain so this piece is facing inside the card so again fold it down and then folding back forward back forward back forward back forward back and again finishing with it facing forward and you want to do exactly the same on the other piece okay so I've got both pieces there so this is the front piece so this is facing out to the right this is facing out to the left flip this one over now and you want to add glue to the bottom of both of these you do one at a time just add the glue there and then the fold here is going to go right to the edge and then you're going to fold that you're basically sticking it right up in that top corner and then this one down in that bottom corner and just fold them down and you'll see your card how it's going to fold flat and that's the dimension it's about a quarter of an inch or the thickness that you're going to have of that card okay now you can stick down your pattern piece so you can see it's just going to disguise those tabs so they're not so visible so I'm just going to again add the glue again using the clear all purpose so that's just going to start to strengthen the back and by the time I add another mat and layer to the very back for my area for my message it's just going to strengthen even more okay now you want to start adding in your kind of supports along the top and the bottom so you want six pieces that are three quarters of an inch by five and seven eighths so I'm going to add my glue onto the first kind of so you've got your mounting fold your first piece that comes in here this mountain you're going to add the glue to that piece there again on that side and I'm just going to sit that over the top there and again over that one again just make sure it runs nice and flush with the card and because it's the same width as these concertina pieces it will fit nicely in between them there okay so if I just hold that up you can see now we've got this little gap and that's where you can start to have the first things swinging and then you just want to repeat that on the bottom one so again just fold that first one in and then just sit that piece over the top okay next you want to die cut if you've got the swing collection you want to die cut this one here again it's from this set so it's this die just fold it in half add your glue and just fold it in half so you've got a piece like that so if you don't have this die set you just want to cut yourself a piece that looks like this and punch a hole at the bottom the size the width is entirely up to you because everyone's going to have different things to hang onto theirs but now what i'm going to do is i'm going to stick this behind this strip and just kind of hover this piece so you can see where about you want that to go so i'm just going to take my glue so you just want to make sure that you've got you've got enough space hanging down there it's about about three eighths of an inch squared kind of hanging down there with a hole punched in the middle but you can see now that's going to fit there quite nicely so i'm just going to use my brads and i'm going to use the red ones here so i'm just going to pop that through and then i'm just going to open it up again just like i showed you in the other video so just use a poke tool to kind of open it up if you can see any of your split pin you can always cut them as well so i'm just going to snip those pieces so now i can see that that hangs really nicely and swings i would also then suggest that you start sticking down you know your character because again you're going to start building up on top of this so i'm going to pop the little badger here so i'm just going to pop some glue on the bottom part i'll add the little like treats on them in a moment but you can see now just i just like adding as much as i can it just then helps me plan everything else out so that's all in place so next you're going to bring the next mountain in and you're going to add your glue onto that one if you want to have more hanging on this back piece and just you know make more of these pieces you could have three all along the back there and build up you can stick you know i was sticking the leaves onto them along the bottom as well for me on these this style the bottom is more just there to again stabilize the card i'm just going to now add another strip across and then just fold the other one on top and that's just going to make sure everything is always nice and flat and do the same again on the bottom okay and then i'm going to have two now on the back of this second strip so it's the badger and the the pig there so again i've got these so i'm just going to add the glue i can see roughly where i need that to go so i'm going to go in there i've just got the same amount hanging down again okay and just pop that one i'm just laying them there just so i can make sure i'm happy with the placement but that looks good to me and then i'm going to grab my brads again get those attached and add little critters as well and then again folding in that next mountain up in the glue and you're going to lay down the last of those strips on the top and bottom and then i'm going to finish with the last two and they're going to go just about there so you can see i've got them all staggered so i'm just going to lay that one there and again just detach these add the brads and pop a little critters in so that's everything stuck down there i've also added their little treats they've got a little flag and popcorn and things now if you forget to stick anything down here and we you know you've already then closed it up you can still get in the side and you can swing things out and you can still add to them so you know don't think that once it's all stuck down there's no way of adding more because you can do now on this one here i also added this panel here but i think i'm going to add it onto the very front this time it kind of gets a bit lost so that's all i'm going to do for this piece now so i'm going to add my glue to the top of this one and also this one and then i'm just going to close the card up and again you want to stick them right up into the top and bottom corners of the card and just push it down and you'll see everything fit within that six by six size okay then i've got this piece that i'm going to stick along the top here so i'm just going to use some foam for that and then i'm going to stick that one over the top so again i'm going to add the foam like so and then i'm going to attach the sentiment at the top and then i'm just going to decorate the bottom a little bit with just some of the ticket stubs from the paper pad and some of the stamped images from the sentiment stamp and there's the finished card so i've just added these are just like i said the stamps from the sentiment stamp set that goes with the fun of the fair and that's from the paper pad sentiment at the top there and you can see if i hold it this way they all swing really nicely and you can just about see i can't lie it down because they just don't they don't go right but you can see they've got us really good swing to them and then when it i'll see all stops it looks really lovely displayed so you've got all that space so i would just do a five and three quarter by five and three quarter pattern piece or like a nice color that matches the front and then do a piece of five and a half by five and a half in white and you can stamp on that in the middle as well and then you've got that all ready to write your message so i've just brought the jungle one back in there as well just so you can see it in a different style so you know it works with any stamps and dies that you have you can create any scene you want with this style especially if it's swinging i just i want to show you different ways to use the dies when you buy them they're not just a one hit wonder you don't have to just use them for how they're meant to be i will continue to share new ways and keep you inspired so i hope you've enjoyed this idea from me today i will link everything in the description box below as always there'll be more tutorials popping up now if you want to go and watch one of those next and if you haven't subscribed and you've enjoyed today if you hit the subscribe button click the little bell that's just next to it and then that way you'll be notified every time i upload a new tutorial thanks for watching and i'll be back again soon bye


Hi everyone, this is Chichu. Welcome to my channel and welcome to a little morning harvesting of some of the fruits and herbs and stuff that were grown in our backyard in our patio really. And what I want to do right now is it's like six o'clock in the morning and we've got a live stream coming up in about four hours or so regarding just the politics economics. So I thought I'd take the time right now to harvest some, let me show you this, some black currants that we've got growing, right? And these have been ripening slowly, so we've been munching on them. It was a lot fuller than this, but right now basically all of it is ripened and I'm gonna, it's sort of a bush shrub down here. So I'm gonna harvest this stuff and I thought I'd show it to you. And the taste of the black currant, let me bring this closer, is sort of pungent, right? It's, it tastes very unique. It's different than the red currants. The red currants are very sharp and tangy. They make amazing jam, red currants. But the black currants, I don't know what type of jam that would make. I've never tried them. We have done with red currants and red currants are, wow, wow, wow. This is the first time growing black currants. We got this, this bush, this shrub from a friend that brought it over a couple of months ago. He was moving and he had a couple of shrubs that he needed to, he needed to find homes for. And we volunteered, right? Take a look at this one. Nice, eh? Harvesting your own little berries in the morning. That was good. Fun. And this stuff is, is amazing for you, right? So good for you. And I'll rotate this so you see the rest of it. Before a live stream, harvest some berries. And there's lots, lots of stuff going on in terms of politics and economics and stuff, right? So it should be an interesting live stream that we're going to do on Twitch. Got a little bit of geopolitics and economics and censorship. Because what happened yesterday was Twitter, oh, Big Brother Twitter. They suspended a major Julian Assange account that was fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of journalism. And they suspended Unity for Assange. Those are some of the live streams I've been, until like last month, they were doing a live stream every Friday, talking about what's going on with Julian Assange, right? So they suspended that account. Just imagine. Just imagine. Take a look at that. This one's a big one. Wouldn't munch it on this one. They had a lot more. I'm gonna bring the bowl. I'm gonna bend this over. Okay, sorry if you can't see it. I don't want any of them. I don't want to lose too many during the picking process. So I got my bowl under me. Or under this. Not under me. And just in case they fall, they'll fall in the bowl. I'll show you how much we got so far. After I finish this little, this bunch here, initially, initially a lot of the black currents were when they were ripening, they were falling off.  So we're trying to munch away at them as fast as we could. And it gives a red color. You squish it. There's the inside. You can see it. Nice, delicious. There's some little guys too. Why not? They got nutrients. Antioxidants. Let me put this over here as how much we got so far. That's a nice black current off a couple of branches. Oh, we got some here. You get bunches like this and they're fuller as well. This poor guy was in transit about a month and a half ago. So they got a little shocked. Big ones. Powerful taste. My squished one. Take a look. When you squish it, you get like red color. I'll wipe this off. Here it is. Here's a squished guy. The birds have already stopped chirping this morning. They start early. It's very quiet actually in terms of bird activity. It's funny in the spring. Last month the birds were going crazy. There's so much stuff going on. Springtime, I guess, right? A friend of mine showed me a little quote about birds chirping. About how human beings like the sound of we laugh and relax to the sound of birds trying to mate. Right? That branch. These two branches are harvested. Let's rotate this. See what else we got. There's a little bug. A little beetle. Show them to you guys. Is he a beetle? Yeah, some kind of beetle. See if he'll focus. Well, he's not dangerous. Off you go, little guy. This would be amazing in cereal, eh? There's one that's a little dried up. So it's time to harvest. There's some that are drying up. That was no juice at all. Oh, there's a wasp. Are you a wasp or a bee?  You're not a yellow jacket, though. The yellow jackets are a hard car. Delicious. How much we got so far? A nice haul so far. I'll power up before the politics. Live stream, we're going to be doing. The Q&A session, I guess. That's what we're calling and we're loading them on. A bit shoot on YouTube. If they're a little too sensitive, we're not loading on the videos on YouTube just because the wasp is going crazy. So what are you doing with my black currents, man? We'll definitely need some powering up before the live stream today. The censorship is playing hard, right? In our society, the suppression of information. Roger Waters put a little video yesterday talking about what's going on on Twitter with a big brother with the police state. In mentioning, I sort of wrote down his comments and shared it around. What did he say? His quote was, well, you can go to my either gap or mine or Twitter feed to get the exact quote, but going by memory, he went. He had a little two minute rant, two minute video he put out where he was like, you are big brother. We guessed it before, but now we know for sure, you are the police state. You are for the forces. Those were Roger Waters' comments. So most likely that'll come up today. It should because as we've talked about before, what's going on with Julian Assange is one of the most important things in our societies. Take this more over here. There's another one I missed. Do we mention another one? It feels stronger already. Take this, take this, take this, take this. Birds are starting out now. They're late today. Colder, so maybe that's why. I heat spell for a couple of weeks and then it got cold. There's like little bugs on the thing. Here's another beetle. There's a lot of these little beetles. There's a lot of little beetles on this shrub. I guess they like the black currants. This is the last bunch of them. Oh, there's a couple more down there. Let's grab these guys too. They're bear naked. Oh, this one it wasn't as ready. It's more reddish than blackish when it's not ready. But all of these are black now. Almost anyway. There's a little beetle on the edge of the glass trough now. I don't know if it's a beetle or not, but look like the other guy. There's another little guy. Oh, squished it. He's like, where is our shrub? This is where we ended up harvesting.  Fantastic. Thank you very much, Mr. or Mrs. Blackberry or black currant bush. And if you take a look, oh, here's another guy. I don't want to miss this guy. And behind me, let me move this over. Behind me, these guys are grapes. We got sort of a wall of grapes here. It's got a lot of these grapes. And what we're going to do is here, I'll show you. I'll pick this guy. Now take a look at this.  But one thing we do with grapes is when they get this size, I'm going to wait until they get a little bit bigger, probably a day or two. And I'm going to harvest the ones that are this size off the grape vines. Because what we end up doing is I end up washing these, picking them, washing them, and then putting them in the freezer. And I have a bunch in the freezer right now. And this is called Ore in Farsi. And other, like Armenian, we use it as well and stuff. But I believe it's Iran and Persians that sort of started using this originally. But we use this, we pick this, and we use it for cooking egg plants. There's an eggplant dish that we make. So we end up spraying this around and it gives it a seriously tangy, tart taste. Yeah, it needs about a day or two more. Okay. Some of them, some of them will take another week. Because they're not all ripening at the same time, right? Because plants, what they like to do, they don't want to ripen all their fruits at the same time. Because if they ripen all their fruits at the same time, there's less probability of propagation in general, right? Some, I think, plants are symbiotic with animals when they come around and they're all ripen, they eat them and they propagate their seeds and stuff. But in general, plants don't want to ripen it all at the same time. They ripen slowly over a few weeks. That gives them more probability of animals eating them and the seeds propagating, going to different places and getting root in next year, next season, or a couple of seasons down the road, they grow, right? Yeah, but some of these I'm going to harvest. Some of them, like if you take a look at this one, you know, they're still little. This one, there's still little. This one will take another couple of weeks for it to reach this state, right? But these two I think we can harvest in a day or two. Day two, three, four days, two days.  And for sure, we're going to let some of the grapes ripen to eat some of the grapes because they're really sweet grapes, these ones. Like when they're ripen and if the animals haven't eaten them, because one year we came out here, I think it was last year, there's a whole bunch of ripened grapes and we harvest a little and we let some of them ripen a little bit longer. For a couple more days, we came out and they were all gone. The squirrels got to them and ate them all up. So we've got to get them before the squirrels and the birds get them, right? So that's about it. I just want to show you guys just harvesting our black currants. And what we're going to do is I'm going to go set up for our live stream, Politics, Economics, Q&A live stream that we're going to do and we're going to talk about some of the events that are taking place recently on Twitch. And you're definitely welcome to join us on Twitch whenever we do those live streams. And hopefully, well, I don't say hopefully, if it's not too sensitive where the algorithms on YouTube and the thought police on YouTube and the censorship on YouTube will not ding our channel by uploading the video. I will also upload it on YouTube as well as always on Bitchu because the thought police are not active on Bitchu. That's a freedom of speech platform. And that's where you'll find almost everything that we produce on Bitchu and almost everything, most of a lot of things that we're producing are appearing on YouTube as well. Okay? I hope you're having a fantastic today's Saturday, Saturday morning. And by the time you watch this video, maybe Saturday, maybe Sunday. And I guess I'll see you guys in the next video or the next live stream. Bye for now.


Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Chasne has travelled to the United States of America for several meetings, including key engagements with cruise industry officials in Miami, Florida. As St. Lucia and the region prepare for the reopening of the cruise sector, anticipated in July of this year, Prime Minister Honourable Chasne, who coaches the Committee for the Caribbean and the Americas, has been playing a lead role in curriculum on this issue. The Prime Minister's discussions with cruise lines will also centre on the development of St. Lucia's southern cruise port. The Prime Minister upon return to St. Lucia will quarantine for a 14-day period in accordance with COVID-19 protocols. In the Prime Minister's absence, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries, Physical Planning, Natural Resources and Cooperatives Honourable Ezekiel Joseph serves as acting Prime Minister.


You know, that is the main congress in this year and there are so many new important things presented exactly and especially on ash. So to me, I have to say it's no one key presentation, but generally the box of presentation focusing on bi-specific, risk-specific antibodies, cortisol therapy, all these new immunotherapy tools which we now can already use in real world and real practice. That's probably the main highlight for me if you're talking about myeloma and treatment, but not only myeloma.


Let's jump over to our man, Teddy Kegstad, folks. We talk to Teddy every Wednesday at 40 past the hour. Teddy writes an outstanding newsletter, The Tiger Forex Report. He publishes it with issues every Monday and updates when warranted. Today's a great day to sign up for The Tiger Forex Report, folks, because not only are currencies running so much in this market as usual, but Teddy's got a webinar tonight, four till five, a 60 minute webinar. It'll be live. It's taking place in our Discord Room. All subscribers gain access. If you can't attend live, it will be archived as well up on your member's page tomorrow. You subscribe for 30 days, folks.  I'm looking forward to the webinar tonight. It's a special time in this market, man, with everything going on. Teddy Kegstad, good morning. Good morning, Tommy. Boy, where do you wanna start, Teddy, man? First, let's give the listeners and the viewers a little bit of a glimpse, if you can, about what you're gonna be talking about tonight for the hour with subscribers to The Tiger Forex Report at four o'clock Eastern time. Teddy. Well, we're gonna talk about, obviously, the major forex currency pairs. We're also gonna talk about yields, talk about crude oil, the dollar index, and also the upcoming Fed meeting, and basically how I put the newsletter together every week. What are my ways of putting my outlooks on each market and in any given situation? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna basically do a walkthrough of how I break down things when I put the newsletter together, especially when I'm not thinking about just the next day, but actually what's gonna happen over the next week or so. I can't wait for it, man. I'm gonna be in that room for sure. And listen, folks, if you've been following the program, Teddy's had some great calls, whether it's talking about the dollar index, whether it's talking about crude in particular, the shape, so much of what's going on. And Teddy, maybe we started off with the dollar index, because I always read your letter on Monday, man. I read to check it out, because just like we talked about, things are so important right now with yields, with currencies driving so much of the action. And the dollar's got a little bit of a pullback and maybe give the viewers, the listeners, because that was kind of right near maybe a potential correction zone and how you look at that dollar index and what you're looking as we kick things off. Can we do that? Yeah, absolutely. The dollar index is actually pointing down towards our correction zone right now. So right now, I remember on Friday, if every day you call for a bottom or a top in the market, eventually you're gonna be right. So in the reality is we've had a lot of volatility that came out of nowhere on Friday afternoon and followed through into Monday. We had a big, big, big reversal in the dollar index. You gotta remember, on Friday morning, the dollar was actually pushing highs. It was looking for a breakout to the upside, not a retraction, you know? So, and because of the news that was basically, that was put out by the different media outlets was saying that the Fed was gonna stop raising interest rates. Well, they're going to eventually, that's for sure. But we know that they're not gonna stop raising rates at least for the next two meetings, that's for sure. There's at least two, three quarter rate hikes coming. Jerome Powell has been very staunch and hasn't even said about, he's gonna take this foot off the gas anytime soon. You know, now we know that, yes, next year they should start pulling back where maybe instead of doing three quarter rate hikes, they start going to a quarter point or maybe they skip one meeting or two but with the intention of still raising rates. Like we know that we're coming into that environment but that's still half a year away. You know, we still have the Fed meeting next week and then we have another Fed meeting in December.   And I would say that probably what you're gonna see is like for instance, we had a dollar index was already getting hit over the last two sessions. Yields were pressing higher up until yesterday morning. You know, so now we got a short-term buy signal in the 30 year Treasury bond futures. You know, but that's a counter trend move and that's a perfect setup for going into next week. Yields should pull back as we get into Tuesday which the markets are gonna go flatline into Tuesday and then Wednesday. You'll probably see the bonds trading another two, three basis handles higher. The dollar index trading around the 109 to 107 area maybe bot churning around in that area.  We know that they're gonna raise the rate another three quarter point in December. So what's gonna happen?  You know, and I think that that's probably the way it's gonna shake up. I would be very cautious right now. I think it's a rally to sell if you're buying into any of these other currencies versus the dollar. It's pretty cool, man. You put the move on, you know, daily just going back. I mean, the moves have been so large steady and you've been talking about it. You get a bounce, man. You're nowhere near as in even just talking about Fibonacci numbers jumping to the 10 year for instance on a Fibonacci basis, man. A three, eight, two is almost three full points higher. And that's just from the move we had from August, going August, September, it's not even October. So that's getting a three, eight, two bounce of a move that's been less than three months old. And you could go three points higher. And I'm not saying you will because that's almost one 14, but that's actually the high as well from earlier this month, which is pretty interesting. The high from one 13. What do you wanna jump to next Teddy, why? How about the end? I wanna talk about the end. What do you wanna talk about? Well, if there's been volatility anywhere, it's been the end. I mean, longs and shorts have both had to gotten chewed up over the last few sessions. I mean, and Friday was indicative of that. And see, this is where I think you can see like why we had such volatility on a Friday, because at that point, European markets are closed, Asian markets are closed, only the algos are really on. And this is where AI has, I think, really causes problems with the markets, especially when they're thin. Because one of the things that AI programs are driven on, all these like algos is the news. They have filters for Twitter, Facebook, CNN, CNBC, all this stuff. So when they all of a sudden get this major media outlets broadcasting everywhere, the Fed is stopping the raising of rates. Don't you think that influences the algos and causes these very big erratic erroneous moves that come off only when these things come out? And I think that that's what's generating. And the reason you get this volatility, it's kind of like I saw this great demonstration of where AI has a lot of flaws and has a long way to go. If you ask AI to show you a picture of a salmon fisherman or a person fishing for salmon, you know what they're gonna show you?  Like because it's not, there's certain things that it just, there's so many other variables that it's common sense to us that still isn't programmed into AI. It doesn't get that or it may never get that because that's a human thing, you know? So when I think that that's what we're running into with these moves, so I would say that, you know, before you listen to the news, listen to what the other Fed share people said last week, especially two of them that said, they're all for the Fed keeping this stance on raising rates and continuing to combat inflation and not let up on it for a while, you know? So that doesn't mean that they're gonna be putting the brakes, you know, come December. I think that this is just a corrective environment that we have over the past couple of days.   Now maybe they will, right? Maybe the data will line up and give them the room to pause after they go 75, 50, a quarter or something, which is almost like a best case scenario, but that means that we need some big numbers that just have not come in. Every single month that's been, you know, CPI is hot. Look at the last two months when the CPI came out, folks. The market just collapsed, let alone we rebounded last time, but there's huge misses on that CPI number, which is pretty interesting. Can you hang with us for this break, Teddy? I wanna go over the crew contract a little bit. We'll get back, okay? Folks, stay tuned. We're gonna be coming back with our man, Teddy, Kegstad, and please, we're gonna go on break for three minutes. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk a little bit of crude. We'll finish up the conversation. Head on over to the front page of TFNN, folks. Try out Teddy's newsletter. Try it for 30 days. You'll be in that room for the webinar tonight. We'll be right back in three minutes. Stay tuned. Welcome back, folks. We're talking to our man, Teddy Kegstad. We're talking some commodities, some currencies, and let's jump right into crude, Teddy. We've got crude accelerating higher today. We're pushing 87 bucks at 86, 66. What type of price action are you looking for this crude contract right now? I'm watching that $90 level. I think that right now, this market's been wedging. We put it in the report this week, looking for a breakout, and I think that if we get above 90, then we're heading towards that key area of 93.75, and that's gonna be a nice little upper-end test. Are we just gonna be in a range trade consolidation market here? Are we gonna have stability, at least at these higher prices? Because if we're going to have that, that's where we're gonna run it. We should run into the roadblock. If not, then that means we have higher prices ahead, and I would say we're gonna be going back up above 100. So right now, the market obviously has been in the downtrend since, what is it, since the beginning of the summer, since I think the middle of June, but it bottomed out at the end of September. So, and I think that right now, between the low that was set in September and somewhere up around $93, that's your range trade. So if we're just gonna consolidate, that's where we'll be. But at least on an hourly basis, and now on an intraday basis, on a daily starting as of today, we are breaking out to the upside, meaning we're pressing the wedge. So the market's been wedging this way and this way come under this point. We're starting to look like we wanna break out to the upside. I'm looking for $90 is the key level. I think that's the first step. If we can sustain a trade above there, be cautious selling into it. I think that we could have a breakout to the upside, especially, I mean, things aren't exactly great in the world right now. So when I've been saying look out for wintertime, especially you gotta think that the spreads for the wintertime, they're gonna start getting really bullish and I think that's gonna help to lift the pricing also. It's pretty cool, everything that's in flux as a trader, man. And I agree geopolitically, man, you talk about Russia, whatever you talk about, China in terms of how that may impact the price accrued. Teddy, we appreciate the time as always, man, the education and we look forward to the live webinar tonight at four o'clock. See you this afternoon. Okay, we'll see you then. Thanks so much, Teddy. Take care, guys. Folks, check it out. TigerForex Report, the friend page tfnn.com comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and stay tuned. We got our man Basil Chapman up live next. Thanks so much, folks. Have a great Wednesday.