comic book haul comic book haul comic book haul comic book haul comic book haul okay let's do check this out check this out now there's two comic books I bought I bought both two comic book hauls I bought both of these on eBay one of them was from a local seller it's this one in a bag I just pick it I go to the store pick it up right okay Alfie while everyone I have to go do some some homework and do laundry for the week ahead as I said in Gilded it has been a great chatting great chatting with you all over the years thank you for being so kind to me and giving me great convos I'll be back at some point love you all salut Alfie happy laundry day and thank you for sticking around for a few years man we'll be here man always welcome to come by okay salut salut and I hope you enjoy your bill Hicks break I know elder God this isn't the $400 haul the $400 haul is coming okay this haul here let me get my get my pages ready let me get my pages ready check this out okay this haul the total for this haul was I'm scrolling up I'm scrolling up the total for this haul was oh what I already paid a hundred and it came out to about a hundred there this 145 dollars Canadian okay so the total for this haul was a hundred 45 dollars make sure I do this properly okay check this out I'm gonna show you these two first these two I want to pick it up and the the seller was like I can't believe you picked these up for a dollar each all right these were dollar each okay let me confirm that but up yeah one was a dollar 25 issue number two number one was a dollar 25 Canadian by the way an issue number two was a dollar he told me he's seen these things go for a hundred a pop okay elder God it's only after you lost everything that you free you're free to do anything exactly right check this out this is from 1994 okay I live 1994 I gotta bring this up again I should have written all the stuff down whoops hey come on when these come out I think mid 1990s early to mid 1990s this is fallen Empire magic the gathering right number one number one and number two okay so magic the gathering fallen Empire number one and number two the reason that these are expensive is they got booster packs in the back and these are sealed by the way their bags sealed I put them in mylar bags okay so they got booster packs magic the gathering fallen Empire booster packs from like 1994 I think okay the best year of my life God says Alfida how are you doing salutations right so number one number two was a dollar this one was a dollar this one was a dollar 25 Canadian all prices Canadian okay great deal a great deal great deal sealed booster packs yeah so take a look if these are I put them in mylar bags I could crack this open seal booster packs and the comic is sealed in like the you know their poly bag thing right and these are sealed right I'm not gonna open it I'm not gonna open it yeah this is mylar bag I had to put these in mylar I had to put these in my luck I didn't put them in I didn't put a backing board there because I didn't want the backing board to put pressure on the card the booster packs right so fantastic great deal great deal check out these ones okay I'll show you these ones check out these ones I still have my fallen Empire comics from when they came out nice nice nice these guys let me tell you how much these babies were this is strange tales number 113 okay paid 1850 for this and this is strange tales number 119 and paid 1150 Canadian again prices okay and these are Jack Kirby art dick heirs art and Stanley Stanley what he called script okay so the strange tales number 119 what this was fair value okay nice pick up nice pick up nice pick up protein no salutations welcome to our live stream this one was graded it's a lower grade it's graded a good this is graded a good 1150 okay this one graded at good very good for 1850 Jack Kirby Steve Ditko okay oh sorry this one Jack Kirby Steve Ditko and I believe the cares is in there as well okay this one it says it's got a spider-man cameo event Avengers number four house ad so I guess maybe that kicks up the price but they both of these were fair value they weren't amazing they were good deals but there weren't amazing deals right they weren't like a dollar need for those all the God I just turned 75 due to desire needs for those comics oh okay this one I gotta hold on we've got to do twitch censorship painter's tape here look at painter's tape here baby night are you a fan of Alan Ford I'm not much into comics but I did read that one back in the day Alan Ford you mean Alan Moore I don't know Alan Ford I don't know Alan Ford I don't know Alan Ford who's Alan Ford that doesn't ring a bell you'll see this is this is Igrat number two Vrotech comics 1996 Glenn dancing from the Misfits number one graded and near mint minors also this was a good deal and I paid how much did I pay for this I can't I don't know how much I paid for this let me see how much I paid for this I paid 550 Canadian for it good price good price good price okay very nice very nice I like this I like this okay nice I like it I like it he had a few of different numbers from the series I was only able to get my hands on this one what are those stickers these stickers if you feel back there is a reveal but we can't do it here we can only do it on rumble but we're live streaming on both so sorry gang that's so every day they're wrong okay so this was a good price near mint minors not bad not that happy with this this one you guys know I love Bisley right this is Vrotech number three Vrotech illustrated beautiful beautiful and paid 550 Canadian for this as well okay 550 Canadian for this as well and again what's his name then Danzing Bisley Malara Corbin Pearson's whole bunch of different people right awesome awesome love the metal love the metal beautiful beautiful now this one was a great deal okay this is golden age comic romance comic wedding bells number 10 no number 13 sorry number 13 graded at fine the other one was graded near mint minus 2 graded fine and I paid $10 Canadian for it great price not sorry $9 Canadian for it great price great price quality comics from 1956 in fine oh actually this this would actually be early early silver age because it's got the comic code on there so early silver age sorry not golden age right I watched the year slip by summer serenade I wanted her man I want yeah 1956 right what does that say once and for all will you marry me either you love me or you don't I don't I I do love you but I her I'm all mixed up she says I'm all mixed up when they're all mixed up you walk away maybe right so this was a great deal $9 and the guys are pretty good grader right he teaches a university so graded fine 67 years old nice this one this one was expensive this one was by a long shot the most expensive one this is Atlas comics precursor to Marvel graded at fine minus which is Marvel comics love romances number 35 John Romita okay let's see this John Targ Targ Targ Tangeon John Romita Stanley J Scott Pike okay 8450 Canadian okay Romita yeah yeah yeah can't mess with this can't mess with this and this is go straight up golden age right straight up golden age 1954 love romances and this was not a bad deal it wasn't as great of a deal as I hoped but a pretty good deal Cheryl that outfit nice I got my lawyer on this so it's like glaring let me take off the mylar see if we can get a better look on it without the glare I got in a plastic bag as well born I put in my art to protect it from UV nice cover mid-high grade nice bye we taught up on our archive our court there is this Alan Ford N127 publication date Alan for collection language I don't know I don't know Alan Ford at all pearls gloves and all haha pocket outfit nice so this was good this was good I like this we got another haul that it was shipped to me okay so this was one haul local I want to pick that up no shipping it was just tax on it right and we got an eBay haul okay eBay eBay I can't show you this part because the dresses and stuff is on it so let's crack this open where's my exact one these guys were expensive okay these guys were expensive no gloves yeah I didn't have any gloves sure it should have had gloves nice nice wrapping right let's get the bubble stuff make sure we don't drop any of these kitty cats might eat it up foamy things nice nicely packaged so we're gonna crack this open so there's only two comic books here serious packaging drop and more protect them pale pale green painters tape I've never seen this color before the ones we get here darker green these ones I was very happy about fair value did you guys see the address no you order kitty play stuff not getting placed up foamy stuff check this out let me show you this let me show you this very good very good very good okay days 1948 1948 yeah yeah yeah it's Italian this huge here in the Balkans thought it was famous were well no I don't know it at all baby not baby Knights Alan Ford check this out jumbo comics number 109 good girl right she nah Matt Baker artwork in this right this one and now these are US prices cost 61 dollars US okay 61 dollars US the shipping was only eight dollars for the whole thing right jumbo comics 109 from 1948 Matt Baker fiction house fantastic this is and by the way this is low-grade this is good good minus the covers detached the inside page the I think the center for was detached but the cover is beautiful right like there's no chunks missing from the cover so just for that I would give it more than a good minus good right 28 viewing on rumble currently sick awesome salute to the rumble community gang welcome to our last stream we just started a live stream on rumble recently and gang on Twitch so this I would say is a good it's it's fair value I would say but as far as I'm concerned jab one two three thank you very much for the follow salute salute I guess I got a drink more more whiskey rough fast I don't even I don't want to even start down the golden age rabbit hole love the comics indeed we talk oh I gotta get my rumble chat oh what's going on where's my rumble chat there's my rumble chat awesome rumble chats there night I guess it is known to European comic connoisseurs yeah beautiful and I couldn't figure out find out who did the cover but there's Matt Baker in this let me read you guys who the artists aren't are on here okay but I'll beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep this one we got Rob Webb okay Jack Cayman pooh pooh pooh giant among giants Matt Baker wow wow wow and Matt Baker is huge like Jack Cayman is gigantic right and Matt Baker is huge because he was as far as I know really the first black comic book artist but he's not famous because he was not the first but one of the first from that period 1948 keep in mind right but he did ladies the artwork he did was phenomenal beautiful artwork beautiful artwork I'm very happy to have this very I've been slowly trying to get some Matt Baker stuff going right golden age good girl jungle comics and stuff the next one this one was I thought I think this one was a good deal okay I think this one was a good deal snap crack a bump right jumbo comics 91 graded at very good minors ended up paying 48 us for this so this haul with the two comic books cost $127 US right okay $127 US whatever that comes out to Canadian like hundred 160 and yeah around 160 a little bit more can you actually a little bit more hundred 170 Canadian right hundred hundred twenty seven dollars US graded very good minors Matt Baker Matt Baker artwork and who else is on here I couldn't figure out who did the cover I couldn't figure out who did the cover okay but let me tell you again this is Rob Robert Webb Jack Cayman again Morgan Thomas okay Matt Baker and Jack Cayman yeah fantastic fantastic Bill Gibson possibly doing the script right and very good minors that's a good grade for that period 1946 1946 fantastic very happy about the spot $58 I think is a good deal okay this is gonna be sought after forever really Sheena Jungle Queen spore sable thorn tiger very nice very nice very nice very nice beautiful cover right beautiful cover very happy about this and before I leave feedback for the seller and the seller is legit I'm gonna crack this open and flip through the pages make sure it's complete because they're supposed to be complete right nice and I want to check out the Matt Baker artwork right he died early unfortunately to 1940s comics golden age beautiful beautiful jumbo comics very nice I have maybe three four handful of these right low grade low grade nothing high grade the high grade extremely expensive so that's a great comic book all great comic book all these two with the magic boosters from 1994 snap crackle pop for dollar a pop very good very good very nice I will say crack it open but no glia yeah I can I can't crack it open like this will fall over maybe we do a comic book reading of it okay maybe maybe we do a comic book reading of it what I'm gonna do I'm gonna put these get rid of the foam is here put the comics in here so they're safe hot legs that's what exercise does like if you want to know how far society is fallen right take a look at pictures from the civil rights period from the name 1960s take a look at the people protesting there and how in shape they were right and take a look now right or take a look at yeah dollars see that I bought the magic the gathering stuff with the booster pack sealed comic books number one right from 1994 at the beginning stages of magic the gathering right one was a dollar the other one was a dollar 25 Canadian even great deal the comic bookstore owner was like I can't believe you got these for a dollar I'll show them again these are the best deals a dollar each fallen empire with booster packs very nice very nice you know what's strange see that you look back at super old pictures nobody has glasses on oh really oh I didn't notice that I noticed everybody was in better shape it wasn't way better shape right way better shape so great hall game salute to great comic book halls right Rafa's Rafa's fallen empire was the biggest let down of card set was it was it I don't know I don't know I wish I was buying magic the gathering back then man that would be sweet we got a light the cigar again we got a light the cigar again that's see that that's a steal and a half yeah that's a steal and a half


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018.  Hey, welcome back everyone live here in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services, AWS re-invent 2018, 52,000 people here. Two days, second day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage here at theCUBE. I'm John Verde, Dave Vellante, Dave, six years we've been doing theCUBE. We've been to all re-invents that for the first year. We've been a customer. We've been following these guys. Plus the summits. Plus the summits, great ecosystem, and VMware and VMworld, similar dynamic. We're going to talk about that now. I'll see the new announcement on-premise, it's huge. Want to dig into our guest, Sanjay Poonin, who's the Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Sanjay, great to see you, CUBE alumni. Many times, thanks for coming back again. John and Dave, pleasure to be here. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. Congratulations on all the success. Wonderful booth and presence here, and I think this is becoming the mecca of all IT events. We have our new video cloud source on L and AWS where we're ingesting over 110 videos. We'll have 500 short video clips behind it, tons of blog posts, tons of coverage. There's an insatiable appetite for Amazon and web services content, as Andy pointed out in my interview with them, and it's just the beginning. You guys at VMware, really, I mean, talk about a similar moment in the history of the computer industry, and VMware was, when you guys recognized the sea change of operators on IT and cloud developers coming together, you guys were very proactive two years ago. Ragu, yourself, and the team, Pat, we're going, hey, you know what? Let's just align. Cultures are fit with Amazon. Let's co-develop, let's ride the wave together, and let's see where the chips fall. Which is basically, oh, simplified, but that's kind of what happened. So much has happened. I saw Ragu last night at the Greylock partner event. This is a historic moment. Good outcome so far. Deep partnership, meaningful partnership. A lot of resonance in the marketplace. You guys are iterating and raising the bar. That's Amazon talk for success. How do you feel? Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely right, John. We, if you think about how this has evolved, you know, five years ago when I joined VMware, I felt like cloud and containers, the two C's were our big headwinds. We've turned those headwinds now into tailwinds, but it took some catharsis from us. We had VCloud Air, our own public cloud. We had to divest that. And I think the Amazon VMware coming together when we announced it two and a half years ago was like a Berlin Wall moment, where you had the US and Soviet Union getting together. That was good for world peace. People were surprised because these are two purported enemies now, and it really built trust and step by step launching VMware on AWS, announcing RDS on VMware, the beginning of on-premise. And then today, announcing Outposts, it's just an example of not just, you know, the validity of VMware as a hybrid cloud leader, but the strength of this partnership. We have a very special relationship with Andy, Pat, myself, our group, spent a lot of time with that team. And often you can't tell when our engineering teams meet when an Amazon engineer and a VMware engineer are apart from each other. They're like finishing each other's sentences.  It's real stuff. And the culture of the engineering culture of VMware, which has been a core, you know, cultural thing, the DNA of VMware is technical. Very community-oriented, Amazon, technical, very operationally efficient, good community. This is a good fit there. I got to get your perspective though on how that is going to evolve, specifically around on-premise. Certainly Andy Jassy validates on-premises with the announcement at VMworld, which you guys covered. Pat Gelsing uses words like dial tone, Kubernetes, mentioned containers. Andy, when I asked Andy, you know, you told me in theCUBE five years ago that everything's going to the public cloud. Change of tune, you might have, I pin you down. No, John, you can pin me down all you want. He says good leaders are self-aware. He said, our customers wanted this and he's cool to it. And the partnership with VMware highlights that this is not going to happen overnight. He recognizes the duration, the role of on-premise. And then he also says that the data center is like a big edge. So if everything's cloud, what you guys basically announced with Outpost is cloud, public cloud everywhere. So just, there's no public, private, it's just cloud. This is a game changer because- Absolutely. Just, why wouldn't I want to buy this product? I mean, first off, congratulations on scoring that interview. Not many people have access to Andy that way and you guys have built a very good relation. I thought that interview you did with him was phenomenal. There was a special point in that, John, where you tried to get him to talk about Outpost, it's before you announced it, which is will Amazon go on-premise? So a couple of months ago when Andy called us and Matt Garmin to talk about this project under NDA, it was a continuation of those RDS type discussions where we've basically said, if you want to do anything on-premise, you should do it with VMware because you're going to have to go through this door called VMware. We are the de facto king of the on-premise private cloud world. Many of these customers are used to our tooling, vSphere, vMotion. They want anything to run on VMware. So from that became a sequence of discussions that really, really evolved very quickly and well so that we can announce this together. I mean, Andy had three guests on stage and only one partner and that was VMware and that's an indication of the strength of this partnership. Vice versa of the 50,000 people here, probably all of them have VMware on-premise. So if Amazon's going to do more on-premise, why not do it with the leader in that area of VMware? And we want to be in the software industry, be de facto standard for software defined infrastructure. And that's a special space that we can fill. Well, the amazing thing to me is here's VMware, no public cloud, Amazon wouldn't even say the word hybrid or private cloud, doesn't use private cloud, but it wouldn't say hybrid before. You've now emerged as the tandem de facto leader in hybrid cloud overnight with an ecosystem that all wants to connect and partner with VMware and all wants to partner with AWS overnight.  I mean. I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we were the first to start using the term hybrid three, four years ago as we did it. It took a while because I think a lot of customers and some of the public cloud vendors felt it was going to be binary, all public cloud and no private cloud, but they began to realize you need both. But your point on the ecosystem also surrounded, I just came back from meeting one of the top SIs in the world. They're betting big with us because they see this as the place for both of them and they're also betting big with AWS. The system integrators are all over this. The security vendors all over this Palo Alto Network Splunk want to see. Often many of these companies come to us and say, you have cracked something special in your relationship with Amazon. How did you do that? And how can we follow that model? We're happy to share a playbook of how we think about ecosystem. So we want to create a platform just like Amazon's a platform where everybody, SIs, tech vendors, software vendors can all plug into. And the other observation I make is, you know, previously the distance between infrastructure players and the guys who really are driving application value, the application developers was quite a distant. Now it's closing with infrastructure as code and it's just so transformative for organizations. I think, and one of the things that's making that is microservices and containers. And as you know, since we last talked, we acquired Heptio. Think about Heptio, they're the founders of Kubernetes. And they left Google, started their own company, Craig and Joe, and we're excited about that. That platform will augment PKS, which was our big best in containers, and become something that could run on premise or in a public cloud environment like this. We acquired Cloud Health. Cloud Health is a multi-cloud management tool for costing resource management. That becomes something that could sit, a lot of Amazon reps actually refer Cloud Health as the preferred way to get your insights into, so we're beginning to see this now a lot more clearly than we did two years ago, thanks to this partner. So Sanjay, I know the outposts, super excited to be covered on SiliconANGLE, zillion stories on our site on this whole event, but it's not going to be shipping for about a year. But you guys already have some working products now. What's the current track to that shipping? Because when that comes out, that'll be a game changer. Why would anyone want to buy hardware again? Michael Dell wins either way, because he's got VMware. But others will sell hardware. This is real, it could be a killer blow, but I don't want to, you can comment on that if you want, but what's in between that one year? You've got product now. Out of customers move along. Yeah, I think there's some very tangible things that, first off, VMware Cloud on AWS is, as you've described, the best hybrid cloud option. You get the best of the on-premise world in public cloud, we announced hundreds of customers. We have a goal to get to thousands of customers and then tens of thousands of customers. We're going to continue down that march. I want to have a significant number of our 500,000 customers. If Amazon has 40, 50% market share based on some of the numbers that Andy shared today, a significant number of our customers have Amazon, we should get them onto VMC, VMware Cloud and AWS. Secondly, we do have, we announced project dimension, some edge computing capabilities running on existing hardware players. So we are beginning this journey ourselves in terms of cloud managed on-premise environment, right? Project dimension was announced before this and that will run on Dell and Lenovo hardware and that's well and good to go that will have edge IoT use cases. And then when Amazon comes and get this ready, we would have learned a lot about this market, which is really kind of this edge computing market cloud managed. So we're not going to be, we're going to plan and do the other pieces. Much of the software components that VMware is building is not completely from scratch code. We're taking NSX, one of the most important components that VMware's adding to Outpost is NSX, okay? We're not rewriting NSX, we're taking the NSX and applying this now to a use case that's very much like that because we've adapted NSX now to be container friendly, cloud friendly. We've added NSX into the branch, fellow cloud. So those are the things that were, there's no rest for the weary at VMware. And that gives you a consistent networking model which is not trivial as we talked about. One of the things that I'm excited by and intrigued by is, I know it's nuanced but I see it as a key point, containers sometimes don't meet the security boundary issue. So you guys can run a VM around a container and run it under the covers with Lambda at super lightning speeds. It's not like a 10 seconds instance to stand up. So that means there's more opportunities to create more abstractions around Kubernetes and maintain security. There's so many benefits from this integrated kind of concept of consistency of operations for the software developer. John, you're absolutely right. Part of what we're trying to do is that word you talked about, consistent infrastructure and operations. Consistent infrastructure and operations. And the container, if you've been seeing some of the ads in San Francisco Airport, we have some in London and a few other airports in New York, you'll see an ad that says containerware. It's playing on the word where, VMware. We want to be everywhere, W-A-R-E. And if you think about the container being as pervasive as the VM in the future, I'm not going to say we're going to change the name of the company to be containerware, but we want it to be as pervasive as VM has been in VMware. So we have tens of millions of VMs in the 20 years we've had. Maybe there'll be 10 times as many containers. We want to become that de facto platform and containerware starts to take over, right? What is that Kubernetes based? And we'll partner with the best. We partnered with Google there, we partnered with Pivotal, some of it with LAN on AWS, some of it with LAN on Azure. And you get a lot of the flexibility you have with that microservices platform. So since you guys are on more of the software side, obviously Amazon's got software, but you guys actually are going to be much more broader, multiple clouds. As Amazon moves up the stack, I would imagine that as customers, I'm not going to buy into only one cloud. There's other clouds out there. You guys can become a real strategic reversal between clouds. So we were debating will customers have certain instances and say different clouds for especially unique things, but yet run still horizontally scalable on premises with VMware across multiple clouds. I think, John, it's going to be a lot like the hardware market was 20 years ago. It started to evolve into two or three major players. What's today Dell, HPE, Lenovo, at the time it was IBM, they had divested into Lenovo, Cisco. In the storage place, two or three. I think the public cloud is not going to be three, five, 10, it's going to be two or three, maybe four. And then maybe in China or Alibaba. So already we have certain tools that cloud health proposition is to manage cost resources across multiple clouds. So we began to be already thinking about what does a multi-cloud world do? That said, in areas like this, which is a data center offer, we felt it was good for us to focus and get VMware cloud and AWS to be the best hybrid cloud option. Give that a couple years rather than trying to do everything and do it poorly. When you peanut butter your approach and try to do a lot of things with various different, so this is why we put a lot of special attention on VMware cloud and AWS. We have an offering with IBM. We announced something with Alibaba. And due course, VMware will need to have multiple cloud offerings. But I feel like this partnership and the specialty and the specialness of this has really benefited both sides. Well, it's going to be very interesting because IBM just made a 34 billion dollar validation of multi-cloud. So, and we talk about competition all the time and it's evolving. We have a very good relationship with IBM. And listen, you have to be reasonably nuanced in your partnerships, okay? So we're going to partner very heavily with IBM Global Services. We're going to partner very well with IBM Cloud. We're going to compete really hard with Red Hat. That's okay. Well, we'll compliment Linux, the bulk of their revenues, Linux. But make no mistake, we're going to compete hard with OpenShift. That's okay. That doesn't mean our IBM relationship is competitive. There's one piece of that, a very small part of the Red Hat revenue OpenShift that we overlap. The rest of it is complimentary. We can be nuanced. It's sort of like walking into a gum. We can do both. And that's how we play. Before you wrap.  We think very highly of you.  However, you got to interview Sushmita in India, a true Bollywood superstar. Yes, amazing actress, beautiful, talented. That must have been quite an experience. Well, I got to tell you, I was very intimidated. I opened, because somehow I get assigned all these interviews to do. Malala, I'm usually on the opposite end. Your end, Malala and Condoleezza Rice. And I told her I was really intimidated by it. She said, why? I said, it's the first time that I'm usually not tongue tied. But I did not know how to explain to my wife that I was going to be interviewing Miss Universe. Okay, and she's like, what do you guys do at VMware?  But it was a good interview. I mean, listen, for the India audience, we were celebrating our 20 year anniversary. She is an amazing woman who has achieved something that very few Indians have. And we wanted our Indian audience there to see that women can be successful. She's a big supporter of more women in business, fairness, equality, no prejudice, equal pay, all those things that we stand for, which is part of our values. And if it worked for the India audience, she probably, I don't know if she would have worked at a VM world. We had Malala there. Oh, Malala, that's fantastic.  We do these because we want to both teach our employees something, but also inspire them. And sometimes these speakers help with that cause. Sanjay, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. I know you got to catch a flight. Big day today for you guys at VMware. Congratulations. Thank you very much for having me. Great to see you. Great commentary, great insight. Sanjay Poonan, COO at VMware, breaking down the announcement of AlPost's relevance and impact of the market. And more importantly, the VMware, AWS relationship secure, bringing you all the action, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, hundreds of video assets coming, tons of posts on SiliconANGLE.com where all the coverage is. We'll be right back with more after this short break.


Some members of the APC and BIOSA state have called on the national leadership of the party to wade into the lingering crisis which has factionalized the party in the state. The methods call when a chieftain of the party from Abuja visited the state. A correspondent, Jesse Essay, has the details. These are members of the Ruben Initiative for Good Leadership and Accountability. The group is championing campaigns for reconciliation and now it extends its invitation to a close associate of the national chairman to get first hand information. I invited him to come and witness what we are doing here in the state so that he can also relate to the national chairman of the All Progressive Congress APC. The truth is, we, the followers, the members of this party, it is not all that well with us because of this unity of our leaders. So the mission here is for our leaders to come together and work together so we can win the forthcoming elections. They want the party's national leadership to act quickly to save the party. When your national comes into this matter, we know there will be peace because they also look up to the national because they are our leaders. They are their leaders too. And by the grace of God, we will also hear testimonies of some nationalists calling them and they are also coming to eat. If everybody, all our leaders continue to draw their strings in their different ways, then when it comes to the time for primaries, then everybody will hold his primary in different places and that will bring problems to us and that is why we want all of them to come together. It's not a passable ban. Most of us would have left the party. The guest sympathizes with them saying something urgent needs to be done. The people gathered here, the different people that spoke, at least you have heard what they said. Something has to be done. What I have seen here has really touched me.  Once people speak up, that is when whoever is there can be able to hear, listen and act. The group promises not to rest on its oars until their warren leaders reconcile. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Welcome back, it's still the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. January 15th every year is always marked by Nigerians around the world as the Armed Forces Remembrance Day of the country where the Air Force, the sacrifices, the heroism of the United Nations Armed Forces are celebrated. Now it starts with the launch of the Armed Forces Remembrance Day emblem, an appeal fund you can see we have our own emblem on today. And of course this year the Armed Forces Remembrance Day celebration was held with Nigerians celebrating and remembering the efforts of the Armed Forces across the 36 states of the country and the FCT Abuja. Of course social media was awash with a lot of beautiful words and videos praising and celebrating the Nigerian Armed Forces to look at the Armed Forces Remembrance Day and what it means for Nigeria, the implications and whether we should be celebrating anything at this point. We have as guests this morning on the breakfast retired Connell Hassan-Stan Label. Good morning to you Connell Hassan-Stan Label, thanks for joining us on Plus TV Africa. Thanks so much Kofi, thanks for having me once again. Do Nigerians have any reason to celebrate its Armed Forces bearing in mind the security situation in the country in recent years? Yeah, thank you once again. Of course Nigerians have reason to celebrate the fall in Europe, these are gentlemen who have laid down their lives for the rest of us to be alive, who have laid down their lives for the unity of our country. Of course we have everything to celebrate them despite the ongoing situation. Okay Connell Sambu, I would also like to ask what would you say are the challenges of the Armed Forces as we are in the midst, I mean we are actually currently in the midst of an insurgent and combatant security challenges. What would you say are the challenges of this Armed Force men? You mean the challenges are to the veterans or you mean the entire Armed Forces? The entire Armed Forces? Of course our challenges are enormous I would say, given the current situation in which we find ourselves, we are in a nation at war as of now. So the challenges are meeting the requirements in executing this war. We know how much that could be deep into our budget, more so when there are also certain sectors within the economy that also require huge sums of allocations. Talking of very important sectors like education and health. What are the things addressing the issues within the Armed Forces? What would be the greatest challenges for now? We are going to talk about issues of non-power. Since we are at war, we need to put a bit of strength now to ensure that we have enough men to execute the war. And also given our own peculiar situation in Nigeria, whereby besides the wars to be done in the North East, we also have all sorts of problems all over the country requiring the presence of police. I would not have enough policemen to police the entire nation. So the military has got to be drafted in, if that is done, it further depends on the need for manpower. Besides manpower, look at funding, there is a need for huge funding now to be diverted to the military to meet a lot of commitments here and there. You can't keep soldiers in the field without feeding them, and you feed them, I would say, beyond what they need, because a hungry man cannot really give you the best. We have logistics and equipment issues within the Armed Forces that must be addressed. Look at the Tokano Aircraft, but how much it costs us. And several other equipment, we are now talking about the need for drones. People like us are already screaming, why don't we have drones all over the entire place, given the huge cost of drones, so we have drones, when we address the issues of drones, when we address the issues of drones, we have taken a great deal of the logistics and equipment issues required in the field. Because with the absence of manpower, when you bring in certain equipment like the drones and so on, you'll be able to fill up the gap to a greater extent. If we are hesitant at recruiting, and I want to know why we are hesitant at recruiting in the unemployment situation in the country, that's why. But anyway, how about welfare and motivation? We could go on and on and on. The issues are just there. But with time, I believe we shall summon them. We shall summon them. We have already seen some rays of hope. I think we shall summon them. Thank you very much Colonel Hassan Standlabo. We'll come back to the issues around the wealth of the military in the Nigeria of today, but I'm sure you'll agree with me that the Nigerian Armed Forces of Nigeria, the AFN, is widely celebrated all over the world. With its involvement in peacekeeping in the United Nations, the economic community of West African states with ECOMOG and other West African interventions, even with the African Union, a very fantastic track record. But when we look at the performance of the Nigerian Armed Forces at home, some Nigerians have raised some concern about that performance. What would you say about that? The contrast between the performance and the conduct of soldiers on assignment abroad versus the conduct performance and results of the Nigerian Armed Forces with conflicts within its borders? You're taking me to an area I really don't like discussing because it's always making me want to do a comparison between leadership at a strategic level in my country and probably what we'll have outside coming in from international organizations like the UN. Indirectly, you're trying to tell me why is it that we perform so well outside and today we are not setting lapses and so on. Well, I will tell this introduction and I will explain. I was the first officer commanded from the military to have commanded the men in the Darfur.  I did that. My unit, my disposal, six Hilux patrol bands, all under my command. I repeat, all under my command. The point I'm trying to make here is this. When we want a job done, my unit was virtually involved in patrol. We keep the communities safe. And those who were under my command, at any moment of the day, I could hop into any of those things and move up and survey the entire community. Okay, we still have a conversation. Yes, are you there? We're trying to reconnect with him, but it's quite interesting. Of course, the fact that the Nigerian Armed Forces is being celebrated by Nigerians. I saw the post on social media. Very interesting, different designs. Almost every major corporate organization put a good word out there for the Armed Forces. For me, I think that the unit is a time where we should pay attention to the struggles and the challenges of the Armed Forces as it were. Of course, we respect that they're supposed to discharge their duties. But I'm hoping that we're able to connect with him. Then we'll probably get an answer, share his thoughts on that. So we're here of cases where these heroes that have actually fallen left families and have children and all of that. How far have we cared and catered for their needs?  But we do have Cornel Hassan back on the line. Can you hear us? Cornel Hassan, Stan Lambo, can you hear us? Just like me. I'm not loud enough. Okay. We're working on that and I'm sure that we'll have very strong audio. But the question here now is there's been an outcry by families of fallen heroes that they have been neglected by the Nigerian government and some of them are talking about life insurance, no payment and they're unable to take care of their kids. Is this the reality of, you know, families of fallen heroes? Well, I want to believe that I talk to you very well. There are lots of some issues with the veteran community that needs to be addressed. And that's why some of us are proud as well as we have come to see as the annual Ritual of Generic Exchange. Okay. Being more of a city. Can we just concentrate in addressing the problems of this veteran? What sort of problems exist as we speak right now the veteran community in Nigeria is being called thirty-four months of the minimum wage area. Twenty-four months. That's two good days. That was fighting at the December last week. We're already a question for everybody. There's problems to be addressed. Look at the medical issues of the veteran. How come a veteran in Nigeria does not have 100% medical overview? When we are talking about people in Nigeria who are within the age of sixty or seventy and above, the birth of the issues they have medical issues were derived from oppression while in the military. Why are we now abandoning and neglecting them? Only to say more. It's the birth of this. We just have to address this issue. And make this room happy. Do I start recording the road again? How much time do we take in the program? There is this analysis called the Community Development Analysis. What is made to take care of the veteran when they retire? This analysis takes care. It is made to divide them from faring out actions that are to be criminalized in Nigeria's case. The state rate of this allowance is still at issue today. These are monies that our allowance that are paid in several other civilized countries. It has gotten to a lot of where we are. All sorts of drama is going on. Rather than saying this, we have to address this money. We have to address this. There are all sorts of things. Sorry to interrupt you, but where is the issue coming from with all these monies being owed for so many months to the families of retired heroes and soldiers? Is it from within the military establishment or is it from the executive arm of government? All of them. The government or the administration in power is complicit. Simple. All of them. Whether it is the military hierarchy, whether it is the minister of finance, whether it is the president, somebody who is able to say or not say or look if the ministry are addressing the problem. The military administration brought it here It has its own problem. The ministry of defense is there. It has its own problem. The ministry of finance is there. It has its own problem. The ministry of defense is there. It has its own problem. It is the government. Also, can somebody just put his upon himself to address this issue and stop adoraging the majority of slave veterans on the streets. The streets are packed. They have to run around as soon as they participate so that they do not embarrass the generation. It's all over now. Everybody has stepped up. It should be addressed. So are you saying that the ceremony, the events every 15th of January is just a ceremony and it doesn't really translate to development under any impact on the lives of the people who still live and those Okay, so my question is are you saying that the event every 15th of January the remembrance day as we know it's an event that has happened every other time and of course on the 15th Nigeria celebrated across the entire country. Are you saying that it's just a ceremony and that there's no impact on the community, the veteran community that you have mentioned my sister, the average specter are in Nigeria today. It's not a happy man with the Nigerian state. All these generations it's over taking to them because as far as they are concerned or as far as we are concerned that money would stand there. It's union to stand in all those cases and it would have run a long way in addressing some of these problems it would have run a long way in addressing some of these problems The whole ceremony is to a good number of us because we are not doing the right thing and that is why even the day as presented by the spirit together are refusing to cry because they know you are not doing the right thing I don't know that's of the case Okay, Retired Colonel Hassan Stan Lambo that's that's quite a statement to say didn't even watch it on television it shows how you and possibly other retired and soldiers and members of the armed forces feel about what's happening and I do hope that the message is being passed on to your authorities that they need to take the welfare of our retired soldiers and the families of those who are fallen heroes very seriously because you're saying it's not just about the 15th of January alone and some corporate organizations yeah yes sir please go the minister of health is the doctor the level minister who we've had involvement of corporate Nigeria recently of course one airline and some other companies have come out to offer free services or discounted services to to the rank and file members of the armed forces and what rule can the private sector and corporate Nigeria play as far as the army veterans are concerned to also help some of these things that you're completing about we could have a structure on ground or a platform on ground which allows for the public to make the mention of where you are okay which could be managed not by government official government official to bring it up not by government official not by government official short money to be managed commonly by a team from veterans themselves and first of the donors now for the first money taken as the department to be made either the way of short loans to enable veterans to be able to have a look of a two or three bedroom the the the fund itself the stuff that it is more of a philanthropic platform so in the course of training we should be very very like every three percent of the month salary per month of budget the amount is going very very however the money at the end of the day should be why so that is in a philanthropic you know a source that comes in to be able to such a platform to be created certainly i'm not so excited to be put like a chief executive officer of a peace airline that has just come up with some a form of recognition to the veterans community there is not a voting committee in the peace airline with a lot of veterans to vote for and so on this is what we find at vote we could also let me say be a several shopping complex okay like shop price and so on okay guys i had a better time when you shop you enjoy a reasonable amount provided you're able to put an identity card okay this is common in you right and i'm not so proud of this all right very interesting having you on the breakfast right here on plus tv africa a retired connell hasen stand number it's been a pleasure having you and we do hope that the things improve and change and we'll continue to have this conversation to pass a message on to those in authority that are soldiers are veterans are very important to us thank you very much sir all right then that's the much sure that we can take at this point in time the size of the short spin and like you know very interesting conversation absolutely i would definitely return with the breakfast tomorrow time again is seven o'clock but if you missed out on any part of the conversation it's all right to follow us on facebook twitter and instagram what plus tv africa and do subscribe to our youtube channel plus tv africa lifestyle i am messy but we do have a great day ahead it's a great doing this with you merci for the first time my name is kofi bartels and we'll be back tomorrow


It's been a real pleasure to be here at the UPU's first trade post forum and to have the focus on MSMEs and women entrepreneurs and how we can bring them deeper into the economy because they're really the engines of growth going forward. They're the engines of job creation, of innovation and of dealing with inequalities. So I think we have to find a way for the postal system and the postal service to work for small businesses and for women entrepreneurs. The first thing is to change the image of the post office. It is a modern place that can facilitate the trade of goods and services for small and medium-sized enterprises. It can be a hub, an internet hub, a facility hub, a way for small businesses to be able to store their goods, for example, for them to be able to learn from each other, for them to be able to have training, technical assistance, capacity building through partnerships between the post office and other organizations, including standards bodies and other board agencies. I think the post office for the 21st century has got to really work to bring MSMEs and women entrepreneurs closer to where they can easily and cost-effectively trade. You know, digital is the future. We saw this during the pandemic that those small businesses that were able to very quickly pivot online and sell their goods online were those that survived. So we have got to give small businesses the capacity to trade via e-commerce systems to be able to market their goods via e-commerce platforms and to be able to manage the inventory issues that they will have to manage as well. So I think that there is a real need, an economic need, a developmental need for governments, international organizations and importantly the private sector to work together to make sure that there is an ecosystem of MSMEs that are able to get onto the e-commerce highway and use digital tools to be able to improve the way that they market and improve the reach of their goods and services.


Hello, I'm Jason Johnston, a senior content developer with the Outlook Ecosystems team. In this video, I'm going to show you how to connect your Node.js app to Office 365 and do a basic calendar sync. So to start with, I've got this basic Node.js app that we developed in the first video in this session to do the authentication piece. We're going to build on that work and add calendar sync. So let's go ahead and get started. In order to do all of our API calls back to the Outlook calendar API, we'll use the Node Outlook library, which is a lightweight wrapper around the REST APIs. So the first thing that we want to do there is install that library using NPM. And once that's installed, we need to require it in app.js. Okay, so if we go back to the app that we implemented earlier, we were left with this sync button that we haven't implemented yet. It's pointing to a slash sync route in our app, so let's start by implementing that. Okay, so there's a lot here, so let's go through it bit by bit. So we use the Outlook base namespace for this functionality, and the reason that we do that is that Node Outlook is, as I said earlier, very lightweight. It implements a few basic functions, but it also implements the ability to use any API call even if we haven't implemented a wrapper around it. That's what the base namespace is really for. So the first thing that I do here is use the set API endpoint function to point all of our API calls at the version 2.0 Outlook endpoint. We're going to make some use of some of the new features in version 2.0 during this, so we'll use that endpoint. The next thing that I do is set the anchor mailbox to the user's email. This is why we went through the trouble of extracting the user's email from the ID token in the first session. And then I set a preferred time zone. This is a new feature in the version 2.0 endpoint. The ability to specify a preferred time zone and have all calendar times returned in that time zone so that you don't have to do all the calculations yourself. Okay, so to start with, we're going to manually configure our API request since we don't have a wrapper around it. The first thing that we do is set up the request URL. When you're doing calendar sync, that all works off of the calendar view endpoint in the API, which is a view on a window of time. We're going to do this for a week starting from today and seven days out. So we set this to the me calendar view. Next we're going to set up that time window, as I said. The start date will be today at midnight and the end date will be seven days from that time. Then we're going to set some prefer headers, which will enable the sync functionality that we're after. There's a couple of prefer header entries that we need to add. One, we need to set odata.track changes. That tells Office 365 that we want to be able to synchronize data as changes come in. The next thing that we set is our max page size. Here we're saying five, which will limit the return results for each call to five results. Now we package up all of those things that we built before into this API options object, which gets passed to the make API call function. Now that we have that there, let's go ahead and run the app and see what happens. As you can see, we have basically a raw dump of the JSON response for our synchronization request. We get back an event entity for each item on the calendar up to the maximum of five that we specified. So great. We see that that works. But what happens if we have more than five items or changes come in after we do that initial sync? How do we continue to get changes? Well, if we take a look in the response, here at the end we have this item called odata.delta link. This is how we continue on with our sync. So the way that calendar sync works is that the request that we just made is considered the initial sync request. From that, we always get a delta link included in the response. So the next thing that we should do is issue a second call to that delta link. If there's more changes, we'll receive them. If there are no more, we'll receive an empty response. The response will include a delta link if there are no more changes. And at that point, we can save that delta link and periodically make calls to it to get any changes that come in. If there are more changes, more than the maximum that we have set in the prefer header, we'll get a next link instead. So after the initial sync, we can look if there is a next link, there are more changes. If it's a delta link, there are no more changes and we can wait however long we want to wait until we do the next sync. So with that in mind, let's modify our code a little bit to save the delta link and use that on the next call to sync. So here I'm checking our session to see if we've saved a sync URL. And we'll use that instead of the basic me calendar view. If it's not there, then we'll just use the base URL. But in order for it to be in the session, we need to save it. So let's come back down here to where we process our response and save our delta. Now we're taking a simplistic approach here for this demo. If there's a next link, we save that as our next sync URL. Otherwise, if there's a delta link, we save that. We'll use whichever one we get back. So now that we have that, let's rerun the app and see what happens. Okay, so we'll do our first initial sync and we get back five items. Now if we click sync again, we get one more item that used the delta link to get further information. Now if we click sync again with our new delta link, we get back no changes. So we've received all the changes that are there. Let's take a look at the code in pages.js that actually renders those changes that come in. So we basically take the changes that come in and loop through each one of them. We check if there is a reason property on each change that's said to deleted. If we have that, then we know that it's a deleted item rather than an added or updated item. Deleted items are a little different in that you don't get all of the properties on the item since it no longer exists. You do get back the item identifier. So if you're saving this into a back end somehow, keeping them in sync, it's a good idea to be able to find the item in your back end based on the item identifier so that you can remove it. If it's not a deleted item, then we just set the entry in the table to use the subject of the appointment and add it into our table. Now let's take a quick look at what happens if we add an item after we've completed our sync. So we'll go to the user's calendar and we'll just add an item here. Now if we switch back to the app and do another sync, we should see the new item that we just created. And we'll see the flip side of that. We'll delete the item and do another sync. And this time we get back a delete change with the ID of the item. And that's it. We've done basic synchronization functionality. Join us in the next session where we'll take a look at doing a little bit more with the calendar, viewing items, updating items, and deleting items, all from our app. Be sure to check out dev.outlook.com and dev.office.com for more information and getting started materials for Node and other platforms. Thanks for watching.


Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am your host, Melinda Moulton. And today my guest is Roxanne Scully. Hey, girlfriend. Hey. Thanks for being here on my show today. Thank you so much for having me. Well, let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. There's a lot about you, but let me just see if I get this right. Community organizer, restaurateur, developer, redeveloper, retailer, meditation instructor, entrepreneur, athlete, resort owner and change maker. Did I miss anything? Sounds good. Perfect. Didn't want to miss anything.  And I'm so excited to be able to interview you today and share you with my viewers. So let's get right at it, Roxanne. Tell us a little bit about your childhood, where you grew up and a little bit about your youth and growing up. Great. Well, so I grew up in a small town. It's a town in mid-state New York, Johnstown, New York. It's really, I think the population is like, I don't know, 10,000. So definitely a rural upbringing outside of Albany, outside of Saratoga Springs. I grew up very simply with a very nuclear family for people in my family, my brother, my mother, my father, extended family in the area as well. And yeah, my childhood was pretty simple, basic, loving and also quite tough now looking back.  So that has really shaped me as an adult. Well, you and I share in that. My mother also had an alcohol problem. So we share in that. We'll talk about that. Yeah. We get together. So who would you say is your greatest inspiration? And tell us a little bit about your teen years and where you went to school and what landed you here.  Well, that's a big question, Melinda. I don't know if I have a specific person, I would name that. I would say that I had many, many, many teachers and mentors along the way from childhood educators in school system, public school system to my martial arts dojo instructor. I was into the martial arts when I was a teen. And I think that shaped me to other friends and family members and nature has been a huge teacher. So I think it's really kind of broad. And I don't think I can answer that question specifically with one person. So you're comfortably inspired by things that you are engaged in. Yes. That's a gift. That's a gift when people can be inspired by just what's around them and their moment. So you're one of those moment inspirational people. Yes. So what about your teen years and your college years and meeting girls? All that good stuff. So yeah, teen years, I think I was, like I said, I was highly inspired by martial arts and the discipline and the body centered awareness that came with all of that. I got dealt deeply into that in my teen years. I had great friends that surrounded me. I was always kind of like... Excuse me, what kind of martial art was it that you were engaged in? Tell us a little bit about it. I did a Shodokan karate, a small dojo there in Johnstown, New York. Michael Campos was my instructor. And I think what I learned and loved there was not only like my own body's wisdom, but my ability to tap into being a woman in a mostly male dominated sport. So I'll just leave it at that. I excelled in sparring and kattas and I would perform and go to competitions, local competitions. And I just remember feeling like I, not special at all, but like that I was kind of special in the field and that I think really empowered me at a young age. Well, but there's a lot of people out there who thought you were special and you are special. You're very special. So tell us a little bit about running into this gentleman who ended up becoming your husband and your lover and your business partner. Well, how did that all take place? Yeah, how did that all take place? Russ Golly, how did that happen? Yeah, it was really serendipitous actually. I ended up doing really well in my public high school. I did not come from having a lot of financial backgrounds. So I got a scholarship to St. Lawrence. And so I ended up going there because it makes a lot of financial sense. And also it put me into a world that was a little different than the one I grew up in. It was very, at that time St. Lawrence was very much a private school environment, small private school with a lot of people who had a lot more means than I had. So that was a learning curve in and of itself. And I did a lot of growth there and I really resonated with some people there. And one of the people was this guy, Russ Golly, who was in my friend group. And we were actually very, very good friends all through college. I was always dating someone else and he was always dating someone else. And then we fell in love senior year. It was actually just, we both kind of fell in love. It was really kind of strange, but maybe universal. I don't know, influence there. And then I moved with him out to California after college. So we graduated at St. Lawrence and moved out there. And I feel like that was another big influential period when you asked earlier about the person, I think more of place. And so California became kind of a place for me to do a lot of internal growth. And so yeah, Russ and I moved out there and then he asked me to marry him about five years later and we moved back and that's when we moved back East. So where in California were you? We were in a place called Santa Barbara. Oh, Santa Barbara. Yeah. And a beautiful place to be in your 20s as you can imagine, wild and free as we were. And did a lot of restaurant jobs there. And that's I think when I really kind of solidified that whole idea of working in the restaurant business and service industry. And although I never worked in the kitchen area, I did have a lot of growth in the front end of the house. And that's kind of certainly later at the spot restaurant. Were you a surfer? I was not a surfer in California. Talk about that. No, no, no, no. I was a water girl from growing up on lakes in the Adirondacks and I was a big water skier. My dad's a big water skier. So I knew water, but I knew lakes. And so when I moved out to California and became immersed in the ocean, it was pretty scary. Like I was scared of sharks. I was scared of like the waves. I was, you know, my guy friends would go surfing and there were no other women out there that much then. And so I was like, no, this is not for me. And then so it was years later in my 30s when I fell in love with surfing. And now, yes, I am a surfer. And now you are a surfer girl? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, talk to, talk to, so you came back to, you came back to the East Coast. Did you come to Burlington or did you go other places before you landed here? Yeah, so that's a little story there. Russ and I wanted to come back to be closer to family as we started to think we wanted to be married. We asked me to marry him. So we moved back here and we had three places that were intriguing to us when we were considering coming back. We wanted to be near water. So it was Rhode Island. We wanted to maybe be under the ocean. So Rhode Island was in the mix and then Boston because we might want, maybe we want to be in your city. You know, I don't know. And then Burlington showed up in the outdoor magazine as a place to raise family and it's up and coming. And he and I had gone when we were friends at St. Lawrence, we came and went to a samples concert and we're like, oh, Burlington is really actually kind of cool. So do we know anyone there? And we had a friend who lived here. So we moved here, sight unseen really, we'd been there once and decided to kind of just give it a shot. And to be honest, it didn't really settle with me right off the bat. I mean, we moved from Santa Barbara, which was beautiful. And we moved here in October, which you can imagine, stick season. And yeah, so it was not really, other than the lake, I was like, why is this so, why am I here? But then the people, the people that I started to meet and the relationships that I started to form just, yeah, I think kept us rooted here. And you understood the weather because you were, you know, from the Africa Springs and were you a skier? I was a skier, yeah, I did love to ski at that. At that time, I would say that was my biggest winter sport, skiing, cross country skiing, downhill skiing. So yeah, so just getting outside, connecting with nature, like the beautiful spaces that we have here in Burlington. I mean, that was something that I definitely think held us here. And a great community.  And what inspired you to do what you started to do? What was that spark? Yeah, it inspired the two of you to do what you first did, which was I believe the spot, right? Yeah, I think that, you know, so at the time, so what year was this? What year was this? 97, 97. Okay, thank you. Yeah, so 97. So, you know, I can say all these things now reflecting back, right? So at that point in time, when I moved back, you know, I was in my late 20s and I, you know, I got my degree in government for all things from St. Lawrence, four years there. And then when we went to St. Lawrence, I went to Santa Barbara, I, I don't know. I decided I needed to go back to be a teacher. I had some teaching in my lineage with my three aunts and they're all teachers anyway. So I became a teacher. And so I went, you know, I have four more year schools, school years of becoming a teacher out in California, elementary ed. And so when I moved back, you know, I, it was in that timeframe of teaching when it was like really hard to get a job. Like there weren't teaching jobs. Like there, it was for some reason, it was just really hard. So I became a paraeducator. I worked in Charlotte Central School. I also worked in Huntington and I did a lot of like paraeducated stuff, even though I had a full-on teaching degree. And then I landed my first teaching job at JFK Winooski. I was a fifth grade teacher there for a number of years. And that was in the public school system. Anyone who's worked in that knows what that's all about. So it's pretty broken system. And I also had a big heart. And I, so anyway, I didn't last too long. I burned out pretty quickly there. And so when I ended up getting pregnant with my first child, Baxter, I just left to the school system and I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. But anyone who knows me, that doesn't, there's a lot in me that needs to be expressed. And so when Russ and I saw this opportunity to transform this gas station, we decided to go with a restaurant. And with my background in the restaurant business and also I think Russ and my ability to call in humans to help when needed, we were fortunate enough to gather enough people and resources to make the spot restaurant happen. And so that's kind of where my focus went when I was a young mom, was being a mom and being a involves in that first business. So talk about the theme of the spot. And for all of my viewers who I'm talking with Roxanne Scully, the owner of the spot, it's on Shelburne Road. There's three of them now. There's one down the waterfront. There's one in your facility at Hula. And then there's the one, which your first one, which was on Shelburne Road. So talk to us a little bit about the vibe and the food because it tells us a little bit about how that came about. Yeah, I think it was just like this really great gift that I think Russ and I have of just like following our passions and like whatever we love to do, we like to bring other people along to do it. I think that it was Russ who was like, what if we make it like a surf, we have all these like great surf art and whatever like make it like a surf style restaurant. And then we had this really great restaurant that we and all the great food from California, all this fresh local like food idea. We just put together this menu. And I know I remember saying like, I just want people to be able to come and get whatever they want. Like I remember that was like, something that I really, and of course the chefs that I had were not so keen on that, but I really pushed that agenda because I really wanted that. I wanted to be able to go and be like sub the avocado for the spinach. And so we had to build your own omelet idea and the safari, the morning safari and all that kind of stuff. So it's really not, it was like, that's what I think Russ and I brought to it was the spirit of it. Less of like, how, what, why, how are we gonna do this? So luckily we had enough wonderful humans that worked with us around this idea and that created this, helped our vision become a reality. Does that make sense? An incredible restaurant. And it's really the morning to go to. It's the meeting place. You're gonna have a morning meeting or a lunch meeting. That's where you go. And you're right. You can get whatever you want in whatever way. I mean, I always, my favorite person there's Natalia and every time I'm there, she just, she goes, I know what you want. And off she goes. It's a great restaurant. So congratulations on that. Then you expanded to the waterfront, which is a very similar vibe, but you're right on the water. And let's talk a little bit about the Hula Lakeside incubator space, because that's where there is another spot. Talk to us a little bit about, because I think you did the spot and then you moved into the Hula incubator space. So talk a little bit about that transition. Yeah. So I think that was, you know, after it was, there's a few other things in there that kind of like landed us, I think here. Well, I mean, there's so much. It's, we did the spots restaurants, but then we also did the window wave surf shop. And all of these spaces just sound like they're like businesses, but they're really communities of people and intention. And again, it's not something that we were like really driving or efforting, making happen. It was just kind of serendipitous and one thing rolled into the next kind of like a giant snowball. So I think after we kind of created this community around the water and then we lived close by and we would ride our bike by the Blaja Oven Factory.  We actually just wanted the beach area of this whole enterprise. And that turned into the Burlington Surf Club, which is a place where people gather to do water sports. And also I run camps. I run she, girls, strong, healthy, empowered girls camps out of there, I've been surfing camps and that sort of thing. But then this became the next, well, it became the next kind of iteration of this whatever is running through Russ and I. And that is this now a community space to really cultivate the shared wisdom that we have here in Burlington, connection and innovation in a bigger way. I don't know, hopefully I'm making sense here. And that seemed to be the next thing that needed to happen for us. And that's what we've created here at Hula. And I mean, it just keeps surprising me with what's kind of coming out of here. And I know like a very small amount of what's coming out of here. Well, it's an extraordinary space and you have remarkable businesses. And anytime you walk in, there's lots of incredible stuff happening and you give an opportunity for people to come in and just work there for the day and open up their computers and do their work. And everyone I talked to is at some point in time who's doing anything that's really exciting will have had a spot in your Hula incubator space. So congratulations on it. I'm just somebody who's into redevelopment. I'm just blown away what you've done down there. Now I want to talk a little bit, I know the Wind and Ways, which is WND and WBS surf shop, which is off of Pine Street, that's that you are a retailer, right? That's your- Yeah, on the outside it looks like a retail shop. And on the inside, I guess it does too. But I think there's a bigger intention there and that's this connecting people to nature, connecting people to healthy lifestyles. And like I said, it's a community of people. I mean, now we've been in business for over 10 years and in the middle of winter, you can go into a space and feel something, right? I love it. Feel like connection and opportunity and hope and, I don't know, that's what I hope that Wind and Ways is. Well, I love your clothes, quite frankly. Yeah. And you can go online. Is it windandwaves.com? What's the website? W- Yeah, that's it. And it's WND, Ampersand, WBS. No, WNDN, as in Nancy, WBS.com. And so it's also got great, great products and great, great clothes. And then we're gonna move, because there's so much about you, we're gonna move from Wind and Ways surf shop on Pine Street, check it out everybody, to your resort in Puerto Rico. I mean, that's remarkable and fabulous too. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, it's a great story there as well. Yeah, Villa Playa Maria is a place in Rincón, Puerto Rico that we started, I guess it's about eight years ago now, it's two villas right on the ocean, it's ocean side. And there's a long story there, but basically it's another great connection with a wonderful human who basically said, Roxanne, you need to come down here. And I went down and I felt an energy. And I was like, this is amazing, we need to do this. And then we were so lucky to be shown this place and we renovated it. And over the course of the last eight years, we've run all sorts of things from retreats, corporate retreats to, I run mindfulness meditation retreats now three times a year. We do open stays where people come down and just rent rooms and kind of connect with Roxanne. We rent it out to people we don't know and it's just a business. But it's a really, truly beautiful place. And again, it's place, it's this beautiful place in connection with nature and letting that just do the magic that happens when people of like mind and spirit and wanting to just grow and evolve and with curiosity and wonder connect in a place. Yeah, like Rincón.  Can you give us the website for the resort? What is it? Sure, it's just villaplyamaria.com. Villaply? Plyamaria. Plyamaria.com. Yeah, dot com. It's beautiful. And Puerto Rico is such a beautiful, beautiful place. So let's talk a little bit about a film that you all made recently called the film for the dream with Ben Gravy. And it's a hero story about Ben's journey to sobriety and he surfed in all 50 states. Tell us a little bit about that film. That's incredible. I feel very, very honored and grateful to have been given this opportunity. It's an incredible film for everyone. It was incredibly humbling and beautiful to work with a team of people to create something like this. And I am a recovering alcoholic. So I was deeply touched by Ben's story. And yeah, I just think it's an incredible thing to check out. And I just, like you said, it's a hero's journey. So it's incredibly inspiring. And I guess the message of the story is through hard work, anything is possible. And I feel that's true. Yeah, I feel that's a true statement. Nothing comes easy sometimes it does. And when it does, that's great. But it does take effort and perseverance and a knowing and a reaching for something greater than what you have in this very moment. Well, you are a perfect example of all of that. And I myself too have not had a drink in 20 years. So here, here on that in solidarity with you. But it's a great, it's an incredible film. So for my viewers, film for the dream, the story of Ben Gravy's journey to sobriety, Google it and check it out. Let's talk a little bit about your meditation because you hold meditation sessions at Hula. And tell us a little bit to my viewers how they could get involved or can they get involved or what has meditation done for you? Yeah, wow, okay, that's a lot. Let's see, real succinctly. So I did create, I have some wonderful humans, younger women who have taken me on to kind of get me kind of in a vein of sharing more of what the gifts have been given to me. So I do have a website, roxanskully.com. And there it's very much just a placeholder right now but there are retreats that I do that are always available on that website. And also it gives my, I have two weekly gathering, meditation gatherings via Zoom. If I'm home, it's in person, but I do Zoom from Puerto Rico. So one is Tuesday at 12 o'clock. That's just a short set, 15 minute, the Pasana style, which I'll tell you about in a second, meditation, no sharing. And then on Thursday, 515, I have a 45 minute group. It's a 20 minute set guided by me and then a little bit of sharing if you want to. So those are my two gatherings right now that I do that are open to everyone. And then as I said, I do three retreats a year down in Puerto Rico. Those are two are closed, one is open right now, meaning they're just sold out. One is open in February. So I have about four more slots open for that one. And again, you can go to my websites to see when those are. And the Pasana is, I'm schooled under Tara Brock and Jack Cornfield. They are the Pasana style meditation teachers, mostly body centered, breath centered practices. And then just in general mindfulness, I teach a lot of, I do one-on-one mentoring with people, 30 minute sessions for that as well. And right now everything is kind of word of mouth. I just, yeah, I only have so much energy, but I'm very, this is my focus now. I am, I truly feel like it's probably, through a lot of hard work, I've been given a little bit of a gift here to spread this beautiful practice. And yeah, so that's it. So to my viewers, because I'm gonna, I'm going to join you on a Thursday. I'm gonna have to change an ongoing appointment that I have every Thursday at five o'clock it's actually my piano lesson, but I'm gonna have to change that because I wanna do your 45 minute meditation. To my viewers, it is Roxanne with two ends and it's a C, Scully, S-C-U-L-L-Y dot com. And if you're interested in getting involved in meditation, go to Roxanne's website and you can get involved. What a great gift you're giving the community as, as always, I mean, all the work that you do is a gift to other people. And one of the amazing things about, about you, and I think about Russ too, is that in my interview with him, as well as with you, you always give credit to other people. You always, I mean, anything that you've done and accomplished is always the result of other people who have been involved. And there's not a lot of humanity who is, who does, who does that. And I so deeply appreciate that in both you and Russ is that, is that your, your gratitude about the people around you, who, who have been on this journey with you is, is, is all about the love, right? Right? Yes, yes. And you couldn't have said it better. I mean, I couldn't have said it better than what you just said. I feel so honored and grateful for who I have been touched by and continue to be touched by. And I, I very much feel like people who come to me with a question or think of me as their mentor, I'm learning from them as well. So I just, I'm, if, if there's any message I would want to get across is that there is no siloing. There's no, I've got this figured out. There's no, this is the one person. It's like all collectively together. I am super hopeful for what is to come. So, so interesting because my question, as we're marching or tiptoeing to 2023, my final question for you in our interview is any words of wisdom for young people? You have, is it, is it three sons that you have? I have two sons. Yep. But many other sons too, that I call sons, but yes. Well, there you go. You've got a lot of sons. So the words of wisdom for young people today in the world that they're living in, what, you know, Roxanne Scully, what would be your words of wisdom for, for young people today? This is a piggybacking on what I just said. You do not need to do this alone. You're not meant to do this alone. We are a collective and we're all connected. And the more we can lean into that awareness and touch into that in whatever way speaks to you, find it, there's the answer. Fantastic. So what's next for you? We have a few minutes left. What is the next iteration of Roxanne Scully? What's going on? Well, ma'am, I'm about to embark on a really amazing project with a dear friend spent in the making for about five years. It's something called Babarusa. It's an immersive art experience that we're hoping will be at the heart of Burlington to help heal people. So thank you and gather. You and Teresa, and all the people that I've been a supporter of that too. Here with her and her husband and you and my efforts to save Memorial Auditorium. And this is such a perfect, perfect use of this building. And so talk about the cosmic gather to create this. I have no doubt in my mind that that is exactly what is going to happen at Memorial Auditorium and no one better to take for that extraordinary building. So to you and all that you do and bring to our community, I'm so grateful to know you and I want to get to know you better. Our community, thanks you for all that you've done. And to my viewers, what a great half hour with Roxanne Scully and to all of you, I want to wish you a happy new year and I want you to know that there is hope for a better world ahead and let's move into this year with that in our hearts. Okay. Thank you, Melinda, so much for having me on your program. I appreciate it so much. Thank you, my friend.