I think the biggest one and the easiest one to understand is that there are so many point solutions out there to solve individual problems in IT and those drive inefficiency. In some situations, it makes sense to go out and buy the best MDM solution, the best server monitoring solution, the best end user remote access solution, right? But ultimately, if you keep doing that, if you keep adding solutions to your pile instead of a stack, it turns into a pile, right? And so one of the biggest challenges that I see is tools problem. Hi, this is your host, Sapil Bhartia, and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk. Today, we have with us Peter Britton, Senior Director of Customer and Product Marketing at Ninja One. Peter, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's my pleasure to talk to you and if I'm not, I think this is the first time you and I are talking. I think I'm talking to someone from Ninja One for the first time. So I would like for our audience to learn a bit about the companies, to also talk a bit about what do you folks do? Our mission is to help companies manage devices more simply. Managing endpoints, whether it be a server, a workstation, a laptop, whatever it may be, is always a challenge. There's so many different kinds of devices. There are people working in so many different types of environments, and there are so many different ways that people work in need support that it's always been a challenge to manage them effectively, secure them effectively, and provide support in a way that drives productivity and satisfaction in your employer base. And what we've done is built a platform that allows you to manage all of your endpoints in a single pane of glass in a really automated and efficient way that kind of gets around some of the challenges of legacy endpoint management solutions, like requiring on-premises infrastructure or requiring a PhD to use. When you talk about endpoints, talk a bit about what is the scope of Ninja One. Our bread and butter has been for a long time everything from servers, networking devices, virtual machines to end user devices like laptops and workstations. Over the past year, year and a half, we've also been developing additional capabilities around devices for things like IoT devices with a Raspberry Pi. And our upcoming release of mobile device management capabilities will allow us to extend from everything from smartphones to servers, if you will. What kind of struggle you see customers, enterprise customers face in managing these devices where even you feel sometimes, hey, these are still some of the rough edges that even you folks have to kind of address. I think the biggest one and the easiest one to understand is that there are so many point solutions out there to solve individual problems in IT. And those drive inefficiency. In some situations, it makes sense to go out and buy the best MDM solution, the best server monitoring solution, the best end user remote access solution. Right. But ultimately, if you keep doing that, if you keep adding solutions to your pile instead of a stack, it turns into a pile. Right. And so one of the biggest challenges that I see is tool sprawl. So what we've done is by bringing all of your devices into a single pane of glass, we've really helped reduce one, reduce the cost and complexity associated with tool sprawl to we help custom companies automate more effectively. Right. So if everything's in a single pane of glass, you can leverage automation to really expand your capabilities that act as a force multiplier for you. But then three, it's really hard to say that you have a good understanding of your environment if all of your environment is managed in different places. And so I think the single biggest benefit of single pane of glass is visibility across your whole IT estate. So I would say that is the single biggest challenge as the number of devices and the types of devices have grown. But there are others as well. There's the trading cost of having all those different tools. There is the silent nature of data when you have different teams managing different devices with different tools. There's a host of others, but I think those are the big ones. As we are talking about the ecosystem, the market itself is evolving. As you're talking about new end points, how is Ninja one evolving? And if you can also talk about some latest features update that you folks made to your offerings, as I mentioned, we really started out in the traditional device space, so laptops, workstation servers, some of the infrastructure stuff like networking devices and virtual machines. And as we have grown and as we have evolved and as we moved up market, we realized that those are not the full set of devices that people need to manage. And so for us, our biggest evolutions are coming out really hopefully in the near future with things like our mobile device management capability set, Raspberry Pi will hopefully come out sometime next year, adding more devices that you can manage and get that single pane view. I think that's the biggest way that we are addressing the changing market. Of course, since we are talking about new features of this, talk a bit about summer 2023 release, what are the features announcement that you folks made there? Yeah, so we've just completed our rollout of our summer 2023 release, and it's probably our biggest release in the past two years. And what I like most about it is there are three kind of pillars of this release. One is we're providing more visibility in our platform. The second is we're providing more opportunities for automation. And the third is it's very, very customer driven. You know, at Ninja, we have a maniacal focus on our customers and their needs and wants. And I think probably more than any release we've done in a long time, this one is very customer driven. So if you look at some of the features that are included, the vast majority of them are very big customer asked things that our customers have helped friction with, or they've been asking for for a while and we're finally able to deliver on. I'll give you some examples under the category of visibility. We have three kind of big features in this release.  And we know how important that is for any IT team to know how their devices are patched, how they're secured and what the stance is so you can take action. That's one. The second one is our device grid, which gives you a customizable operational report that you can see any device or sets of devices or subsets of devices in any kind of customizable view. So if I want to see the operating system, you know, the IP address and what policy is managed under, I can have one view that looks like that or a totally different view that looks like, you know, alerts, AV threats and I don't know, MAC address for whatever reason. So I have this much more customizable and filterable operational report. And then third is an update to our condition set. These are our monitors, things that allow you to proactively see issues on a device. And when those configurations or statuses are met, you'll get a proactive alert that tells you you need to go solve it, right? Those three things kind of together give you a lot of visibility. But every single one of those were a big ask from our customer set. They have been asking for these things for, you know, whether it be three months or six months or a year and they go and use our public roadmap to vote on them. And these are all incredibly highly voted features. On the automation side, we have two big features here. Our software package repository, which is just a way to upload installers and customize them and build these custom packages that you can then host in Ninja and deploy software much more easily through. And second, our dynamic script forms, which allow you to abstract your automation out a little bit more effectively so that your frontline texts can actually automate, you know, more dynamically, more efficiently and really give them access to automation. The software package repository, for example, had over a thousand customers who had asked for it, right? And we're finally delivering on it after we spent, you know, quite a while totally redesigning and reimagining what software deployment would look like in Ninja. So I think the customer driven nature of the release is the thing I'm most excited about. When we look at automation, we also talk about AI. And these days, we are talking a lot about generative AI. The fact is that we have been using AI for a very long time. What kind of scope do you see either for Ninja one or for your ecosystem of things like, you know, generative AI, charge, kind of things? I think this is this is fine to include. Ninja one is conservative in some ways in that our tool gives you a lot of control, which means that. We have to be conservative with how we roll things out because you have control over such a broad state of devices for any given company. There's risk to that. Now, we believe that the benefit is worth the risk. But when we roll things out, we need to make sure that we have done everything we can to minimize risk. So that's a good preamble to we do see a role for AI in generative AI in what Ninja does. But we are not willing to deliver on that at this point until we have done the thorough risk assessment needed, ensure that anything we build delivers on that in a high impact and low risk way. And so you do see generative generative AI being used in our industry in very sort of entry level ways. And we want to make sure that what we bring to market eventually when that day comes is high impact, low risk and really changes the lives of our customers for the better. When we look at this latest release, how much of this was driven by customer demand or customer feedback versus things coming from Ninja one? Yeah, thanks for that question. So, you know, we're, as I said, we have this maniacal focus on our customer base. And we have an advisory board. We meet very regularly with our customers. We have a public roadmap that allows them to go in and make suggestions and vote on what they want to see. And so that is always something that we include in how we prioritize our roadmap. We are always trying to balance, you know, true innovation with customer asks. I'll give you a really good example here. Our dynamic script form feature, which came out in the most recent release, is something that customers hadn't asked for. What they had asked for was more ability to automate and an easier way to automate so that, you know, entry level technicians or level one, two, one and two technicians can actually access automation in a really, a really easy way. And so I think this is a forward situation, you know, people would have asked for faster horses, but what we did instead was completely redesign how we deploy scripts so that you can build automations more effectively. Your level three technicians can or your engineers can build these really impactful automations and then hand them off in a way that's really easy to deploy to lower level technicians who may not know scripting languages or how to automate. And so everything we do goes through the lens of the customer, but sometimes we're trying to do something truly new and unique on top of what our customers asked for. What do you think that you folks are working on which we can expect later this year? I think the biggest one, the one I'm most excited about is mobile device management. It will be our biggest expansion of capabilities in a long time in terms of ability to manage new device types. As people continue to work in remote and hybrid environments, as companies realize the threat posed by remote work and by people accessing customer data on their own personal mobile devices, we recognize the need to manage mobile devices single pane. And that our ability to deliver on that will dramatically change how effectively we can really say a truly unified endpoint management solution. Peter, thank you so much for joining me today. Of course, talk about NJ1 and new features, a new addition that you folks made. Thanks for all those insights. And I would love to chat with you folks again. Thank you. Thank you.


毋elj They would be talking about ansbrushes and most specifically how he to automate some tips and tricks that I picked up over the course of the last few years around how to think about automation in a way that I think they get a little bit more sensible or sane so I've been roughly 20 years in IT at this point 10 years I have been useت uns Expect for 10 years Ofther and I will be talking a little bit about the project that who is actually my first project, so it's a ten-year-old project, but still, I think that we have done some things right, felt a lot of things wrong and I had a lot of learning from it. And now I work in reddit as a specialist social architect for Ansible. So the project that started my experience with Ansible has been a project that was a little bit messy. Let's put it this way. Zato sem vzal v tem družu, da je to počkala, da je to komplex, da je to počkala, da je to problem, ali je to počkala, da je to počkala, da je to počkala, da je to počkala. Zato, da je to počkala? Prvno, smo se pravno izvahili na javno objev, kaj je tudi tudi tudi tudi 300 glasbši instalacije. Glasbši je aplikacija vsega, kaj je tudi vsega vsega vsega. Zato, da je bolj, je, da tudi tudi tudi tudi 1 aplikacija per kustim. Tudi tudi tudi tudi 300 kustim, kaj je tudi tudi tudi tudi tudi 300 kustim. Unfortunately, it wasn't the same version of Glass Fish, because they started at 4-0, and then some customers had some issues with 4-0, and they started to roll out at 1 to some customers, I mean, obviously to the customers that actually complained about the issue, and then they found other issues, so they started to roll out at 4-1-1, but they're only to the customers that have issues. več smo je Úgostje. Kaj je odličaj na pen, vznujem, da apliko so odličaj, da ni glasbila, kotSS, če je je vznjutil, bo ne vznuteno večil. To je zautokratil vše tvoje je groundingo, že tega aplikacije tega mimo aprèsnijo odlečnejo, pri ježi pri moženje, a potem vznut so 50k in ledje. v kompletivnih števstvih situaciju, na Centros 5, vsega na Centros 6, vsega všeč nekaj, in 300 nekaj instansovih mi SQL, ker, da bo, da nekaj, jih je vsega aplikacije per kastelj, da nekaj je vsega mi SQL per kastelj. Nekaj, zelo pogledali mi SQL z RPM in nekaj ni vsega mašinje. In jaz sem zelo, da taj požibili proti dobro 60, zelo izmah mi je poživila. A, da je ovo počel, tudi sem mojazil 5 skripov per skor. Točno se vedno začeli. Tako, da je dobro vsega, rešar, točno se. In točno so ni vsega. In jaz si nekaj, če ste prišli izvajati vsega in jaz se potrebno viče. As you can see, it's not a very linear situation, but I am sure that with some slight differences, but still same concept, you can find in your organization exactly the same situation. I have been a consultant for many years, I've worked in Reddit as well for many years as a consultant, as a presale person, and I've seen a lot of different cases where this is roughly the same situation everywhere. So we started to search for a solution for this problem, and we were looking for an automation system. That was the only thing that was clear at the beginning, and very easily we started to add requirement, the first one that had to be simple, because why add more complexity to something that is already kind of complex. Second, it has to coexist with what is already running, because we are talking about a business that is in production. All those customers are running these applications in production, and they are running their whole company based on this application, because this is a mission-critical application for the customers. So everything needs to be smoothly moved to automation without any interruption or issues for the end customers. It does need to keep the same security model, because we are talking about PCI DSS applications, so credit card applications that manage credit card numbers, therefore if you change the security model, you have to re-audit everything, which might be a little bit more complex than we would like to. And it has to be kind of self-documenting, in the sense that at least we have to have just one thing, not two, code and documentation, so it has to be together, code and documentation, so that effectively we can be sure that over time we don't have a drift between the documentation and the code. And this was a requirement that I added for the customer, in the sense that it was not a requirement for them, but it became clear to me that that was a very important point, it had to be edempotent. Now, what do we mean by edempotency? I think that edempotency is a great concept, very absurd sometimes, but very useful. So it's a property of certain operations that allows you to ensure that only the first time the operation actually changes something. From the second time onward it will not be changed with some asterisk. So, some examples of edempotency, x equal 100, no matter of the value of x at the beginning, after the first run it will be 100, and from that moment onward it will always be 100, so effectively it will not change. Another one is x equal x at the zero. It can be any number, then it becomes one, and then stays one. So, going into the IT sector kind of thing, echo a string to a file replacing the whole file, so only one major sign, it's edempotent, because no matter on the content of the file, after the first execution it would be stable and it would be just test. Now, so, what is non-edempotent? An example would be x equal x multiplied by two, because the first time is, let's say, one, and then become two, and four, eight, and so on, and so forth, so effectively it's not edempotent. And another example is very similar to the previous one, but we have two signs of major, which means that effectively we are just appending to the file, which means that every time we execute the file will have one more line than the previous one. Now, there are some major cases here to be aware of about edempotency, and the first one is yamupdate. Yamupdate is not strictly edempotent, because it relies on repositories, which is the one that you are fetching your RPM from, and if your repository actually changes the content, so if there is a new version available of your RPM, then you will have a change. So I would not exactly define this as edempotent, but obviously edempotency in math is everything is easy, it's either right or wrong, in the real world it's a little bit more mixed. For the same reason, yaminsol, something, can be edempotent or not, based on the state of the repository. Now, all these can be fixed in a way, or mitigated, if you manage your own repositories, so you don't use RedS repositories, Fedora repositories, but you use something like Satellite, for instance, that would allow you to actually check and be the one that creates the changes in the repositories, so even then it's not edempotent, but still it's something that you can control and manage. WGET, same thing, if you WGET you can have different issues with edempotency, the first one is that the source changes, which might not be ideal, and the second is data corruption, WGET should fix it or fail, but still it can be a little bit tricky to speak about edempotency in a situation where you WGET from an unknown source. If you WGET from your own server, then it's easier, and also if you are managing your own server and you put in the file name, also the version, then it becomes way easier to ensure edempotency. Another example of something that can be thought as edempotent, but actually it's not, we only have one major sign, so effectively in theory it should be edempotent, but we are dumping a variable, so that variable value can change. I have seen servers with terabytes of data being completely wiped out due to this issue, and not with Ansible, with Bash, but the thing was the same, because removing variable slash rf variable slash asterisk, if variable is mp, it will nuke your server, so be very aware that variables can be very useful, but also very dangerous. Ansible was the solution that we found, because otherwise it would not be installed, but still why. First of all, it was agentless. Agentless means that we didn't have to install anything on the single machines, but just create a new service that would handle some complexity. Second, it connects to the machines, VSSH, it can also connect to other, with other protocols to machines, but in our case it was only nuke, so effectively SSH was obviously the choice we went for. And does not care about the state of the rest of the machine, which means that if you tell Ansible that it needs to handle a specific file, for instance, it will only care about that file, all the rest of the machine who cares. And this really helped us to do that slow migration to automation. And a big advantage is that it applies changes in a sequential way, which means that if you look at a playbook, first thing that you see is the first thing that Ansible is trying to do, and then the second, the third, and so on. This makes the whole thing very simple. And it can seem obvious that something executes in a linear way, but actually in a lot of automation systems, this is not the case, because they try to optimize by parallelized operations, and this also creates a way more complex situation. And it has a very gentle learning curve. As we'll see a little bit of YAML code, YAML is fairly straightforward. I would argue that Ansible is not configuration as code, is configuration as data, because I would not really define YAML as code. And Ansible Playbook can be easily read by even non-technical people, so like auditors, we are in a PCI DSS environment, so we have auditors every three to six months in asking questions, and be able to tell to an auditor, this is exactly what we are doing, can help, not to all auditors, but at least to some. And it's very simple to set up. And another big advantage that it has, and it was a deciding factor in the end, is that it's a Swiss life tool. Effectively, you can use it to provision new systems, you can use it for deployment, for configuration, for whatever you want. So the initial setup is simple, we say, but how exactly simple? You first create SSH keys, if you don't already have them, you should already have them, but you can maybe create one specific for Ansible, that could be a good idea, and then you start to distribute those SSH keys, create a git repository, where you will put your Ansible code into. Yes, you can do it without git, you really don't want to do that. You create the first inventory, where you list all your machines, and you are done.  Now, which playbook should you write now? Because we have the whole environment ready, now what? So you need to select a process that you want to automate, your first process to automate. How to select it? First of all, it should not be a critical operation. If you are trying to do something critical as first thing, it will probably not go too well, try to with something very easy. It should be a very well understood process, hopefully by you, or by whoever is writing the automation, because if you understand the process, it's very easy to automate it. If you don't understand the process, it's going to be more complex. Also, because while if you do the operation yourself, it's interactive, so even if you do a mistake, the console will tell you, that's wrong parameter, wrong whatever, with automation, it's a little bit more indirect. So if you don't know exactly the process, it can become much more longer, the effort to automate it. And it should be easy to test. So whatever thing your process you select, it should be a process where you have a clear understanding of the process and how to prove that the process actually was successful or not successful. It should be or it could be at least a boring thing that you should be doing or and say, you know, I don't really want to do this, but I can automate it, which can be fun. And you should have a little bit of time. At least the first few times, the time to automate the process is longer than the time of executing the process. It should not be like millions of time longer, but still if it's a process that you usually run in five minutes, probably it will take you 30, 60, 90 minutes to actually automate it. So if you are in a rush, it's not probably a good time. So let's see the first process that we did was actually the provisioning of those application servers because we had new customers in the pipeline that had the requirement of having new server deployed. So the first part is understand what is the process. This was not the process. The process, when I ask, OK, which is the process that you are following, it was basically a 30-step-strong process. We worked first on the process, changed the process, made it sensible, and at that point we automated the sensible version of the process. It's much easier, much simpler, much quicker. So you install Java from RPM in that case, create the Glassfish user because for reasons they wanted to have a different user for that, install Unzip, download Pajara, which comes in a zip file, and that's why we had installed Unzip. Unachived Pajara, set Pajara file ownership to be owned by Glassfish and create the systemd unit to start it. This is the process that we use for bare metal servers. For share servers it was slightly different, but still same idea. So how do you automate it with Ansible? You create a playbook, such as this one, and as you can see, with very little changes in wording, you can find the previous steps after the name. So ensure we have Java installed, ensure that we have Glassfish user, ensure we have Unzip installed, ensure Pajara installer is present, and so on. And as you can see, we have a few lines in between that are the actual Ansible code, and they are very similar. I mean, obviously it has a module, it has some parameters, and so on, but still if you read one or the other, it kind of feels like the same. And if you have both available, it's way easier to understand them both. And this is the second part of the same process, and as you can see, we had seven points here, four steps here, three steps here, seven again. So we started from a process that had seven steps, we end up with seven steps of automation. This is a good thing. If you start with a process that has three steps, and then you end up with more than three steps in the automation, your process was wrongly mapped. You have to map your processes very well to ensure that your automation will follow exactly as you predict. Some consideration around this. First of all, if allowed, redesign your process before you automate, or while you are automating it, because it's going to be easier. Second, simpler is better. So if there are steps that are no longer required, try to remove them, and then eventually we add them if they are still required. And another thing that we worked on was the automation of users. So the lifecycle of a user, in every company is slightly different, but roughly it's like this. You create a user on certain machines, you add the user to certain groups, you add SSH keys for this user to actually begin, and then time passes, and at a certain point, you will delete the user on all machine that it has access to because that person maybe does not work there anymore or for other reasons. So, same here as the previous one, we can very simply automate the creation of the user, we simply have the built-in user module, we pass the name, the shell, the groups already here, as they present, ensure SSH keys are available, we copy the SSH keys to the target machines. Those are the public SSH keys, not the private ones.  And we can remove users in a very similar way. Now, some consideration around this, it's very easy with Ansible to create distributed batch scripts, which is what exactly we have shown now, but that is not edempotent. So, it's very good to know that you can do it, it's very good to do it, but be aware that that is not edempotent, that is not something you should aim to, but it could be a good stepping stone. Ansible will improve the consistency of your environment, even if using non-edempotent way, but you are not leveraging the whole tool. And then automation is a step-by-step process. So, don't try to automate like this, try to automate like in the second way, which is basically try to create something easy that solves your first issue, and then over time, it will, you will improve your scripts, your code to make it even better. But don't try to big bank the whole environment at the same time, because it will not really work. So, we wrote the second version of the user automation. The first one was not edempotent, so it was okay at the beginning, but not really in the long term. So, we decided to create a file, a YAML file that describes the user that we want to have in our environment. So, we have the user file and the user admin, for instance. And we could have many more of them. And then we changed the first script that we have seen to use with items and iterate basically on that file. This allows us to have effectively edempotent way of creating users and ensuring that all users are always available in the right machines. Now, this does not cover the delete part of users. That was something that we continue to handle in a non-edempotent way, because it's a little bit more complex and there are some security concerns around removing users. So, that was not changed over time, but still, this was a good example of something that started as a script, a distributed script written in Ansible that then became something edempotent. So, wrapping up, Ansible can provide you with simple way to automate distributed processes, if that is your stage of automation. Start with some low hanging fruits and then build on top of that. If possible, rethink processes, don't try to automate whatever process someone tells you that that is the way we are doing things here. Try to understand what exactly they are trying to achieve and then create a good process to actually achieve that result. Aim for complete lifecycle automation, but work over time toward it, don't rush it. And in a way, try to work for a complete company automation, so effectively to automate all processes within a company, or organization, group, whatever, but same thing as before, don't rush it, it's an overtime process. Automation has a huge impact on people, even more than processes.  And when we are talking about automation, that is even more scary for people, because the first thing they think about is, great, I'm now going to be replaced by this thing and be fired. Which is not usually the case, I mean, obviously there are some cases where that is the case, but 99.9% of times in my experience, automation, such as Ansible, does not mean people being fired. Simply means that people will change their role, will change a little bit how they work, will change their processes, but over time everything is fine, no one is going to be fired due to this. And there is a big point that is critical, which is be intelligent, be specific on what you are automating. If you have a process, a long process, and that process has a certain speed, that speed is probably the speed of the slowest component or the slowest step of the process. If you automate or increase the speed of anything before or after that step, it will be just a waste. If you want to increase the speed of a process or the efficiency of a process, you have to identify the weak link and then work on that part, not the rest of the process, otherwise it's just a waste. So thank you, and if there are any questions, we have still some minutes. So the question is how big should roles and playbooks and so on be to be useful, so not too big, not too small. Well, my answer is there is no right answer to this in the sense that it's absolutely okay and that is usually how it works that you start to create a role and over time it becomes bigger and bigger, and at a certain point it's like, okay, that's too big, let's split that out, but that is exactly the iterative process you should be going through because there is no right answer of, oh, it's 57 lines because it really depends. I have seen some roles that made sense and they were written below 20 lines, others that were more than 1,000 lines, still kind of made sense, but still it really depends on your specific environment. My rule of thumb is a role should be as big as possible, but it should be able to run exactly the same in different environments without any change, so that means that if, for instance, you are installing Linux and MySQL and you are doing it in the same role, probably it does not really work well because there will be some cases where you only want Linux or MySQL, but if it's a very big role that is configuring maybe an oracle rock, then it's fine. As long as every time you install oracle, you are installing an oracle rock, so that is a little bit my thumb rule. Yes? So the question is around which text editor to use around Yaml. This is absolutely a personal choice. My personal choice is VI. I think it's the best tool ever, but I do understand the fact that 90% of people that use Ansible or Yaml code does not use VI and is very well off without it. So I personally find VI, for instance, very comfortable because I can grab stuff on the command line, on in VI, I can open multiple tabs, multiple windows at the same time. I mean, this is my workflow. I think that over time you have to find your workflow, what works for you, and it could be VS code, it could be VI, it could be something else. It really depends on how you are used to behave and interact with it. Yes? So I think the question is about what is the best way to handle a lot of playbooks that are automating a big environment, and I think the real point is it depends on which stage you are in automation. If we are talking about an early stage automation where usually you are running playbooks yourself, having multiple playbooks can be okay, I think that over time, when you reach to a point where effectively you can nuke your whole environment and recreate it from scratch just with automation and you can run automation over and over because it's completely dempotent and so on and so forth, I would expect you not to have many playbooks. I would expect you to have maybe many playbooks because you want to do something specific in some cases, but roughly your environment should be described in roles more than playbooks, and then I would usually have all playbook that simply calls every single role for every single environment and that would be also part of my CICD system where every time I commit something, it then triggers that playbook to be a rerun and therefore my environment to be aligned to my last change into the Git repo. But those are very different situations based on the level of maturity of the automation within that environment. Yes? So there is no easy way because it's basically a problem of proving the impossible of something or the non-existence of something, so it's a little bit tricky. The way we have handled that in this case was basically that in... Yeah, don't worry. So how we solved it was very simply in a very short amount of time, we had one user per machine and it was the answerable user. That was the only user that was allowed to connect to any production system. We have decided at a certain point that was the good strategy before we had for a certain amount of time a number of users that were non-root or non-sudo users, and it's an overtime process. I think that ultimately the only way to really solve the users issue is not having users at all, on machines. Yes, and that is a big problem. So if, for instance, is the absence of something within a file, then I would use a template for the file and then replace the whole file with exactly the content I want. With the users, in theory, you can do the same because users are justified entries in the user's file. So effectively, in theory, you could do the same with that, but handling users can be critically problematic in if something goes wrong or in another situation like this. So the question is about get structures for ansible playbooks and roles. If I recommend to stick with the recommended version or not, my answer is yes, I do recommend to start with the recommended layout and then start from there. Now, those are not strict rules. Some of those are. So, for instance, the folders within a role have to be named certain way and so forth, but roughly the whole organization of files is not a strict rule. And there is a reason for that because you have to be able to change it if it does not fit you. Now, if you want to move out of the standard, read the standard very well, try to understand why they did what they did and understand if that really does not apply to you or should apply to you and what is your situation. But if for you, it makes sense to have a different structure, definitely have a different structure. So, thank you. And with this we are out of time, but I will be here and probably just outside the door. Thank you.


Over-the-counter antacids are probably the most important source for human aluminum exposure in terms of dose. Melox, for example, taken as directed, can exceed the daily safety limit more than 100-fold, and nowhere on the label does it say not to take with acidic beverages such as fruit juice. Washing antacid down with orange juice, for example, can increase aluminum exposure 8-fold, and citric acid was worse, the acid found naturally concentrated in lemons and limes. Just as sour fruits can enhance the absorption of iron, which is a good thing, through the same mechanism they may enhance the absorption of aluminum. Raising the question, what happens when one adds lemon juice to tea? Previously I concluded that the amount of aluminum and tea is not a problem for most people, because it's not very absorbable. But what if you add a lemon? No difference between tea with lemon, tea without lemon, or no tea at all in terms of the amount of aluminum in the bloodstream, suggesting that tea drinking does not significantly contribute to aluminum actually getting inside the body, the lemon juice or not. Now they're talking about black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong tea. What about the red-zinger herbal tea, hibiscus? The reason it's called sour tea is because it has natural acids in it, like citric acid, might that boost the absorption of any of its aluminum? Well, a greater percentage of aluminum gets from the hibiscus into the tea water, but there's less aluminum overall. The question is, does the aluminum then get from the tea water into our body? We don't have that data, so to be on the safe side, we should assume the worst, that the hibiscus tea aluminum, unlike green or black tea aluminum, is completely absorbable. In that case, based on the state and the World Health Organization weekly safety limit, we may not want to drink more than like 15 cups of hibiscus tea a day. That's based on someone who's about 150 pounds, but so if you have a 75-pound or 10-year-old, a half gallon of tea a day may be theoretically too much. And more extensive testing more recently suggests levels may be as high as twice as much, so no more than about two cups a day for, excuse me, two quarts a day for adults, or a quart a day for kids every day, or pregnant women. And hibiscus tea should be completely avoided by infants under six months, who should only be getting breast milk anyway, as well as kids with kidney failure who can't efficiently excrete it. The study also raised concern about the impressive manganese level in hibiscus tea. Manganese is an essential trace mineral, vital component of some of our most important antioxidant enzymes, but we probably only need two to five milligrams a day, and four cups of hibiscus tea can have as much as 17, averaging about 10. Is that a problem? Well, women given 15 a day for four months, if anything, only saw an improvement in their anti-inflammatory antioxidant enzyme activity. This study, using 20 a day, similarly showed no adverse short-term effects, and importantly showed that the retention of dietary manganese is regulated.  If we take too much in, our body decreases the absorption and increases the excretion. So even though tea drinkers may drink 10 times more manganese, get 10 times more a day, 10 or 20 milligrams a day, the levels in their blood is essentially identical. So there's little evidence that dietary manganese poses a risk. That was regular tea, though. We don't know about the absorption from hibiscus. So there on the side of caution, we should probably not routinely exceed the reference dose of 10 milligrams per day. So that's only about a quart a day for adults, half a quart for a 75 pound child. So that's actually changed my family's consumption. Given the benefits of the stuff, I was using it as a substitute for drinking water, so like, you know, two liters a day. And I was blending the hibiscus petals in, not throwing them away, effectively doubling aluminum content and increasing manganese concentrations by about 30%. So given this data, I've cut back to no more than about a quart of filtered hibiscus tea a day.


All the girls are on me. Damn. Everybody pay attention. This right here is my pretty boy. Boys, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Chuck it up. Deep passes are your friend here. Squared 25 plus yard passing touchdown and you get 9 points. You get 12 points if you're able to throw one for 50 plus yards. This game mode was made for me. The only times I end up really scoring is when Tyreekill burns somebody and I just lob it deep to him. This is insane. Yo, and if we actually can go 6-0 right there in the left first 6-0 victory, you get a free 95-96 overall wide receiver tight end. That is badass. So I'm going to make this little mini-series, I think. We're going to go hop into some games. You can't lose any, so if I lose some, I can't really make a series.  And then in the next video, you'll see me play the rest of them and hopefully we can get all 6 wins, get a 95-96. This is going to be crazy. I know this is going to frustrate some of you, but I don't have a center or a left guard and I don't feel like going and buying one even though I totally could. So that's kind of ugly. I got anger at tight end. TY Hilton and Tyreekill because they're so fast. I feel like they can burn people over the top. And then Sammy Walkins, he was just on my bench, I'm fine with that. Mike Vick, for obvious reasons. Barry Sanders, Lorenzo Neal, and then Defense is beautiful as always. They should be ball hawking in the back because everyone's going to be throwing the ball on us, but that's it. I'm ready to hop in. Let's go do this. Alright, our first time trying out this chuck it up game mode. Let's see if we can actually not suck. And our opponent's going to run them all. Alright, our first pass play, he's just going to lob it. That was not smart. Oh, he runs a draw plays. A 30-13. Now we just got to make sure he doesn't get this. I'm going to go with the QB myself. Yo, Gilmore, 360 pick. Yo, let's get nine points. Let's get nine points real quick right here. And he is not in it, so that's a good sign already. Oh, can I hit that? I thought we were going to do it on the first play of the game. That's what she said. This is not, yeah, this is just, this is nine points. I'm on the 30 yard line. If I get the touchdown from here, it's nine points. So let's do that.    No, no, no.  That was so dumb. Lots of blitzes coming in here. Play action. Oh, Bobby Wagner almost gets the pick. I'm coming in hot. Play action. Play action. Oh, I wanted that safety. I didn't get it, but that puts us at fourth in one. Let's see where he wants to go with it. Yes! Okay, so from the eight yard line, it doesn't matter how you score. It's only 50 plus and 25 plus. So we can run this ball in. All right, second goal. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Let's go. Michael Vick gets in. Seven is the all very good start. Very good start. Got everybody in coverage right now. He wants to go Michael Vick and we got him early. No! What are you doing? Sometimes you just have to laugh. What? Come on, baby. Come on, baby. Let's go. Can I do it again? Play action. I can do it again. 100%. Yes, that's my ball. I don't even know if that was a good pick. You are asking me to give myself 12 points right now. 12 points. 12 points right there. You're blind. Look at that. 20 to 0 with 10 seconds left in the first. Literally hitting this quarterback. Impressive performance. Yo, when you get that, you know it's a rough day for your opponent. Second in 18, he had his mic in for a while and now it's just out. No, I missed. I goofed. All right, first and 10. I'm coming in. Oh, no. Maybe I shouldn't have came in. We just can't let him score a TD. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. If I can stack him here, I'm going to pull him out of field goal range. Come on, baby. No, we don't get there.  How does that work? Shouldn't I have gotten a fast interference there? Oh my God. He's going to run the fake on me. And I don't get to him in time. Quick snap. Yup. Shit. Quick snap. Quick snap. Yup. And the sack. It's just dumb.  I'm going to sack you every time. Watch. Watch. Let's go. House, house, house, house. We've got to take to the house. Come on. No. Oh my. Barry probably will get. Yeah, he got to it. Yo, I can't believe I messed that up. That's such an easy juke, dude. And at some point I figured he's got to quit. He's just got to.  Yo, my, my man has the pharaoh jerseys on. I respect it. Uh, let's see where he's going to pass. He doesn't get anything off. Yo, I didn't even realize we got the sack. This is a good start. You what? You're not quitting. This guy has one of the best teams I've ever seen in this game. This guy has a straight up 98 overall right now. Let's go. Ooh, we have pretty similar teams. Bimboop. Yo, this guy just got mad.  Oh, that's so rough. Can I get one of them? Can I get some of them blocks? Bimboop. Yo, you're shitting me. This is game second and six. He's going to throw it underneath again. Got nothing. Oh, slip screen. Nice play. Got an attack. Okay, he does hit him out there. Frank O'Hara's. Let me show you what I'm doing. I'm acting like I'm doing the same thing, but I'm in a pass pro now. So if he tries to throw it quickly, oh my god, that was going to be picked. That's what I was saying. I was saying we're going to pick it off if he does that again. Let's see what he does now. Okay, the slip screen. Nothing. Fourth and two. Take your field goal. All right, that's good. 10 to seven. That's a really good stop. Maybe Tyree Kill could open. I'll just take that. I think he might have been getting open, but I was too scared.  I can't believe that play actually worked. 12 points off of that. We just went from seven to 10 to 20 to 10. All right, we're going to try this again. Make him think we're blitzing. Okay. He throws a duck. Duck, duck. And now we got to pick. I don't know how that happened, but yo, we got to go back to the same play. That was so open. We got to go back to it. All right, let's just get some blocks for a sec. There it is. No, no, no. I threw him out at that time. And thank god. Yo, it's there though. It's literally so open, you guys. All right, just hold that block for a sec. Hold it for a sec. Hold it for a sec. Yo, same thing.  I honestly could have taken that probably a little more directly up the field. He's got a spy on me, I think. Wait. Wait. Oh, if I hadn't gotten ankle tackled right there, that was 100% the touchdown. Say quads is about to get a touchdown. Money. That was too easy. Too easy. Sayonara. You're gone. Oh my god. It's easy. Three and all boys. Are we three and all? Are we three and all? So we're three and all. So we're three and all. Does that mean that we're going to pull a Sean McVeigh and start pulling off the gas pedal and not throw the bombs that we always throw? Absolutely not. That just means we're going to throw more bombs. Is it really going to be a touchdown? Same guy, same play.  Let's go. That's nine points, right? 10 to zero. Good start. Yo, you're kidding me. It's not 10 to zero. I spoke too soon. That hasn't happened to me in a long time. Wow, it's going to be a long day for our friend here. First and goal, baby. That's so easy. I feel bad. I feel a little bit bad. Second and 17, he's finally gone into a wide set, but man, he is struggling right now. He has five wide receivers and we're blitzing eight. Oh my god. And he goes to the one guy who has a corner on him. What is wrong with you? Who's going to get it? Who's going to get it? Oh my god. He literally... You're making this a little too easy, my friend. He just left his Xbox. He's just getting delayed games now, so he definitely won this one. Your peer has been kicked for excessive delay. That puts me off four wins. Now granted, some of them were a lot easier than others, but we had a really good game in there. I'm totally happy. I'm ecstatic because if I can squeeze out two more wins, I get an N18 95 96 wide receiver slash item. That's dope. Okay. Well, that's it for today's video, guys. I'll make sure I show you those last two games, probably in another video, so probably two total videos on this. But that'll be sick. Hopefully we can come out with the win. It's like our own little mini Super Bowl series. I like it. That's it, guys. Thanks so much as always. See you in the next video. Peace. And now I'm pounding on my man's half me out like a light. Hey, yeah, like a light. Hey, yeah, like a light. Hey, slept through the pipe.


Podcaster Natalie Brunel looks at Bitcoin as a path for achieving the American dream. The principles that Bitcoin stands for, individual freedom, economic opportunity, sovereignty, those were always really important to my parents and that's what they instilled in me. Last year, Natalie quit her job as a journalist and launched the CoinStories podcast, where she interviews the leading personalities in the crypto space. In this video, Natalie tells us about her mission as a Bitcoin educator. She also explains why we should look at Bitcoin as a completely different asset from the rest of crypto, especially in these dark times for the industry. Before we get started, don't forget to like the video and subscribe to our channel. I'm Giovanni, your host. Let's get into it. So Natalie, let's start with your background first. You had a quite successful journalistic career. You were working for major news outlets like Reuters and ABC News. Then last year, you decided to go full-time into crypto. So can you tell us what motivated you to drop your previous career and join full-time in the crypto industry? Sure. So I really believe that Bitcoin is the solution to so many problems that exist in our society and I think that two things really stood out to me that informed my decision. Number one, I'm a first-generation immigrant. My family came to the US in pursuit of the American dream and my parents grew up under communism. So really the principles that Bitcoin stands for, individual freedom, economic opportunity, sovereignty, those were always really important to my parents and that's what they instilled in me. And as I watched them work really hard in order to be able to afford a home and a mortgage for us, for my brother and I when we were growing up, they lost everything in the financial crisis of 0809. So I started my career with sort of this predisposition that something is wrong and something is broken in the fundamental system. It's almost rigged against the little guy, the worker like my parents were, and I wanted to better understand what that was. And so I started my journalism career really not having great financial literacy, but I was reporting on issues that really hit home to me because I would watch in every single city that I worked in, homelessness was increasing, poverty was increasing, the wealth disparity was increasing, public corruption was increasing. And yet I really didn't understand why these problems existed until I started to study Bitcoin. So I discovered Bitcoin in 2017 while I was a news reporter and it really allowed me to start to connect the dots with, you know, how much everything is related to our broken financial system. Our money is broken and I started to better understand how Bitcoin could really fix a lot of these issues, at least address them, maybe not overnight, but really in the long term if we set up this beautiful new foundation. And so I became passionate about it. I started my podcast just to learn more about the people that are in the space, learn more about their voices, why they had conviction for Bitcoin, what their backgrounds were, their origin stories. And the podcast grew organically and I was able to leave my job and I felt that my mission, it would be a much more fulfilling mission and career to spread the education on Bitcoin and how it can address so many of our societal issues as opposed to remaining in the role that I had as a journalist. And now I would like to ask you, among all the personalities in the crypto industry that you interviewed, which one is the most fascinating for you? The one that you find the most inspiring? I mean I had the chance this week to once again interview Michael Saylor who's always such a voice of reason and just so brilliant in the way that he articulates Bitcoin and metaphors surrounding the ecosystem. I've had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Booth who's one of my favorite authors. He wrote The Price of Tomorrow. I recently spoke to him about everything that's happening in the current financial system and how Bitcoin presents the most amazing opportunity. I talked to Lynn Alden recently. She's I think the most brilliant mind when it comes to macro and she was on my podcast recently once again to talk about everything that's happening with the Federal Reserve and inflation and Bitcoin's price drop. So I've had the chance to interview a lot of people that I really admire and who I think are doing a lot of amazing work just educating the public on what this asset is and what this technology is and the potential of it. So you often point out the distinction between Bitcoin and everything else. Would you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximist? Yes, I really believe in free markets and capitalism. So if people want to invest in other tokens or currencies based on their own risk tolerance, then that is their business. But for me personally, I just find that the potential of Bitcoin to be the world's most powerful savings technology is really important to me because I think that especially here in the U.S. where I grew up, we went from being the world's largest creditor nation and everyone had this real concept of saving to accumulate capital, to accumulate wealth. We turned into the world's largest debtor nation. Everybody is in consumer debt and housing debt and school debt. And I think that's really sad. I don't think that that leads to a lot of production or progress. I think it leads to these bus bubbles, booms and busts in our economy. And I think it leads to greater wealth disparity. And I think it's really important to be able to save so that you can plan for your future. Otherwise, you start thinking a lot more in the short term. So Bitcoin presents that opportunity to me. I see it as digital property, as a savings technology. And that's why I focus my energy on that because I see its upside potential is almost unlimited. As opposed to the other currencies, I view them as securities where I have to worry about who's creating them, who's expanding the supply, who might be hired or fired. What experiment are they trying? Are they going to cash out? And I don't want to worry about timing the market. I'd rather just spend time in the market with Bitcoin. Right now we are seeing the markets in turmoil, partly because of what happened with Celsius, a centralized lending platform that allegedly had some insolvency issues. So, of course, some of these claims need to be verified, but it's still a fact that it froze access to customers' money. So what do you think? Can Bitcoin be taken separately from all the infrastructure around it? Well, certainly things in this ecosystem are connected. And I think on the base layer, there is Bitcoin. There is the monetary protocol and the network. And then on top of that are these other layers, these applications, these exchanges. And I think it just shines a spotlight that people really have to be careful. And when you see companies emerge that offer tokens or they promise yields that may sound too good to be true, well, perhaps they are. And I think Bitcoin, at the foundation of that, is the safest place that you can be. It's volatile, certainly, in the short term, but in the long run, the performance has spoken for itself and the whole concept behind it is to be trustless, is to take individual sovereignty. Whereas when you add these layers on top of it, these other applications and third parties, now you introduce trust. And so do you trust those entities? Do you trust those companies, those token issuers? So you often point out that Bitcoin is apolitical, according to you. So can you expand on that thought? Yes, I really believe that Bitcoin is the most democratic form of money that has ever existed. I love the fact that it can never be controlled, manipulated, inflated. And we've never really had a system of money like that that can't easily be taken under control or can't easily be confiscated by a power. And I love the idea of separating money from power, money from politics, because I think that that is at the root of so many of the problems that we have in many countries. And so Bitcoin, I see as really appealing to, you know, in the US, we have two parties, really. We have the left and the right. It seems like you can't fall anywhere in the middle. These days. And yet it appeals to both sides. It allows for financial inclusion and for a whole new population of people who were previously disenfranchised or left out of the traditional system to have access to generating and accumulating wealth. And that should, you know, be important to the people on the left or the progressives. And then on the right, Bitcoin also stands for smaller government and individual freedom and sovereignty. And I think that that should be important to the folks on the other side. And so I see this as this beautiful almost bridge to both sides where it really allows us the opportunity to take back power and create a system that's based on value as opposed to one that really allocates capital and advantages to the very few that are at the top, the people who are closest to the money printer, the people who are politically connected. I think that our incentive system is really broken because of our system of money and politics. And I think Bitcoin can address that because no one can control Bitcoin. Everyone has a seat at the table. And I think it allows us to sort of reorder our economy based on supply and demand, based on the goods and services people bring to the table, based on maybe real interest rates, which we haven't seen in a really long time, really based on value as opposed to where you're at in terms of the pyramid or the social structure. So I view Bitcoin as apolitical and I hope that it's the one thing that can sort of bridge that gap, bridge that divide, especially here in the US. And now I would like to touch upon your vision of the future. So now we are in a very tough situation in the crypto markets. We are probably in a full-fledged bear market. Still, can you maybe name a few milestones that you hope to be achieved in the near future for Bitcoin and crypto in general? I think one of the biggest milestones that will happen will be on the regulatory front. I think that policymakers as well as big institutions are starting to take Bitcoin seriously.  They certainly, it's certainly more in reach than it was when it was in the high 60s. And so I'm going to be watching for regulation developments, just signifying that Bitcoin is a digital property and that maybe there's more fair accounting that can be done to allow institutions to invest. And the other cryptocurrencies, I think, will be deemed securities. And so I think that as this regulation unfolds, as the government tackles things like stablecoins, altcoins, and Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin will have a spotlight on it as pristine collateral, as a savings technology, and really as digital property. On the other hand, don't you think that this latest turmoil in the crypto industry, these issues that are affecting trust in several platforms is going to affect also Bitcoin and then making the regulatory process more painful for Bitcoin as well? I think it's going to put a spotlight again on just the idea of trust when it comes to exchanges and third parties and the companies that arise in this ecosystem on top of Bitcoin. And I think that there needs to be regulation there. There needs to be regulation of crypto exchanges and of the tokens that come out that make big promises. Whereas I think Bitcoin is great as it is. It doesn't need to be touched. It just needs to be clarified to people and people need to get education on it so they really understand what they're investing in and they can make the appropriate decisions of how and where to invest in it. Okay, now final question. Let's talk about price movements. So I know that you don't have a crystal ball, but maybe you would like to give us some price prediction for Bitcoin for the next few months, let's say by the end of the year. Well, I wish that I had a crystal ball and obviously humans are not great fortune tellers. Otherwise, a lot of us would not have necessarily bought in the 40, 50, 60 range if we knew it was going to go down into the low 20s. But listen, I think that Bitcoin's price will go lower before it goes back up because of the larger macroeconomic forces that are in play right now. I think that the Federal Reserve, which has so much power in terms of the whole global ecosystem of our economy, I think that they're trying to take inflation seriously. They're trying to tighten the balance sheet, raise interest rates, and something in the system is going to break. I think that there are already signs of a liquidity crisis forming. And I think in that event, just like it did in 2008 and 2009 and in 2020 when the pandemic first hit, I think that that's going to cause a giant red candle down before ultimately the Fed comes in and tries to save the economy and print money again and reinflate the bubble. Unfortunately, every time they do that, they make the situation worse in terms of wealth disparity because all that money flows into assets and the majority of people in the world don't hold their own assets. But also it makes them lose more and more credibility. It makes people lose credibility in the U.S. dollar, in the Federal Reserve, and currencies in general that are controlled by governments. And so I think that that once again will be a great value proposition for Bitcoin as more and more people learn about it. But I think that Bitcoin will suffer from a crash or a bust before it really takes on its destiny of getting to those all-time highs or becoming a global reserve currency. So I think more volatility ahead and it will probably go a bit lower before it goes higher. Yeah, let's hope it doesn't go too low because we are already quite low in terms of price, but I'm definitely optimistic for the long term. So thanks a lot, Natalie, for being with us today. And I hope to see you soon on our show again. Thank you.


We go back to the previous turret groups across the country have thrown their weight behind the candidacy of Vice President Yemio Shibaju as a presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress in the 2023 general elections. The groups under the aegis of the Progressive Project, TPP, aims at garnering support for Professor Shibaju as the next president of Nigeria. The report just presented from our studios. It is a gathering of like minds. Also objective is to ensure that come 2023, Nigeria's second-in-command Vice President Professor Yemio Shibaju succeeds his principal, President Mohammad Bori. We are also suggesting to this gathering that we'll be very happy, we'll be very, very happy if each and every one of us is carried along. We have to go back to our state to make sure that all the state stakeholders, we have to follow the one and third order that converts our principal. Representatives of the convening group say Vice President Yemio Shibaju has a pedigree to lead and deliver the dividends of democracy to Nigerians. What we are selling, what the Progressive Project is selling, is the personality of the Vice President. We need to first of all identify that. The Vice President has its personality that is unique, that everybody on the streets identified with him. So why don't we come up and say this man is good enough for the job? I have no doubt. It's a bad Nigerians decision. It has gotten to that point. 2023 will be a new, a new, a new raise. And Yemio Shibaju from his ordinary lifestyle has shown that he has physical and spiritual contentment. And when you have somebody who shows such tendencies, now it is solely with that ideas come in because the person will list him. The unique selling point for the Vice President is his brilliance, gentleness, man of God. And if you look at the situation in the country today, those are the things we lack. Professor Shibaju is not somebody who will see ahead and say, no, this man I will not key into from the beginning. We decided to key into him because he is like a gift that God has given to Nigeria. He has always been going through different levels of baking, right from the state through up to his position now. And from everything we have seen around him, from his credentials, from his vitae, we know that yes, this man is really an asset to Nigeria. The atmosphere is already being charred up with political gladiators from the two main political parties positioning themselves for a showdown on who occupies Aso Rock, the country's highest seat of power in 2023.


Well, well, Prime Minister, congratulations to you, sir. President Betwatani and the Prime Minister. Nice to see you, sir. How are you? Well, come in. Hey, Mr. President. He's got the power in him. You know, we don't see him at the phone. Our conversation will be limited for a while, because we're going to be in a real way. He's got the power in him. He's got the power in him. He's got the power in him. Actually, the most important part of visiting talks is the phone call. He's got the power in him. Yeah, yes. What is the same picture with a thousand words? A picture with a thousand words? Yes. Is your third visit? Yes, sir. No, this is the fourth. Actually, it's the fourth. We're providing this coverage. Yes. Yes, something was wrong. I came here with 23, with 24, with 26. Yes. Thank you, Mr. President. It should be. We're going to miss, of course. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, Senator Baker said he'd be the one to turn out the lights here at the White House. Does that mean the lights are out on your administration? I think I'll visit the Senate. I'll just know that. I think there's a change that's occurred. Did you see the trade figures as one of Mr. President? It's one of the best trade reports in some time. Something like under $10 billion for the monthly report. Do you have a comment on that? Maybe a half-assignment because it shows that we have continued to bring down the trade deficit. It has been on a very continual decline. And it's been brought about this time by not only an increase in exports, but as a decrease in imports. Could we clarify your position, Mr. President, on the business of plant closing? Would you support a move in Congress toward a voluntary provision of plant closing that would not be mandatory? We already have that. And we have a number of plants that have relations with their unions that in their union labor contract have provisions for that. It is just that I believe that excessive controls of regulations by government we've seen comparison with some of our trading partners that have too much of that. And they've not been able to have an economic expansion. Will you seek more military aid for the Congress, Mr. President, or is that a lost cause? This is something that's under discussion. Are you going to miss Howard Baker? What? Are you going to miss Howard Baker? What kind of job has he done, Mr. President? He's done a fine. This is Lordy North's senate, but you came over here and sent out this point to us. You've got to go. This way, cameras please. This is Mr. Jacob. This way. He's quite a photographer. Come on. Come on. Come on. Minister Jaime, I'd like to begin this session by giving you a few of my impressions of the summit meetings with Gorbachev. It's a play from Moscow believing that U.S.-Soviet relations are in better shape now than at any time in the past decade, perhaps in the entire post-war period. I think it's clear that Gorbachev wants to reform the Soviet economy, but it'll take him a long time if he succeeds at all. He's also making political changes, though their extent is less clear. And he, of course, there's no question, he has some opposition within his own government to what he's trying to accomplish. So that I think that meanwhile, even in our hopeful optimism, I think we have to consider that the Soviet Union will remain a potentially dangerous adversary abroad in a controlled society at home until we have more evidence of what he intends and what his success is. I also think the Moscow summit added an important building block in establishing ways to solve our problems with the Soviet Union. We'll continue talking to the Soviets on regional issues, arms reduction, human rights, and bilateral exchanges here and into 1989 and hopefully beyond. One more general point. I was impressed by Moscow and impressed by the people I met. I met with students at their university, religious leaders and a group of refuseniks and dissidents and then with, they have a Writers Association with not only fellow writers but with artists and people from the theater and so forth and beyond that we had opportunities for some informal meetings just with people on the street and that was the biggest surprise of all. The absolute sincere friendship with which we were greeted by the Russian people. I wasn't quite prepared for that in view of the propaganda they've been subjected to for so many years but it was really it was a real warm enthusiasm on their part. I think we struck some important blows for human rights in our meetings and quoting Solzhenitsyn in Moscow was kind of a milestone throughout the my public remarks but we'll continue to press particularly on the human events. On arms reductions we made some solid progress on what we call the start treaty that's the 50% reduction and we tabled our positions on mobile missile verification and air launch cruise missiles and on the whole the Soviet response was positive. There are important issues remaining and we'll keep plugging away at them. In defense and space, sharper differences remain. The Soviets are still trying to cripple or get us to give up on our strategic defense initiative and not yet agreed to correct their treaty violations of the ABM treaty. So I think having said all that I should defer to you now. You might have something in your agenda you would like to bring up or any questions you might have. Thank you very much.


I hope that you are still waiting for this very last paper. I'll be doing my best to make it as interesting as possible, though I find it a little hard coming after you, Marie, with these really amazing textiles. So, but I'll try to show some wonderful ones as well. Yes, I'm Charlotte Rimmstatt from the National Museum of Denmark and together with the Ulle Mannering and on behalf of Ulle and myself, I'll be presenting this paper on pillows and mattresses in Scandinavian Viking-age graves, and that is primarily focusing on the Danish ones. So, as we all know, when a person dies, the body can be dealt with in several ways. And we know this from many archaeological contexts where people have been cremated, embalmed, buried in upright or prone positions, or put to rest underneath a burial mound. And all of these ways of burying must reflect an understanding of death and of the dead that we can unfortunately only get a glimpse of. In some Scandinavian Viking-age burials, the dead is lying on layers of feathers and downs, as we have just heard in the Belciarum, as if to ensure a comfortable eternal rest. But what do these feathers and downs actually represent, and why are they present in the grave? In the following, I shall present some of the Danish Viking-age graves with preserved feathers and downs, and we shall explore the connection between death and sleep. So, at the National Museum of Denmark, we are currently working on a project called Fashioning the Viking Age. And it's focusing on the variation of textiles and textile productions and garments of the Viking Age. And in the project, we seek to reconstruct two garments, a male and a female garment, based on the rich textile materials from two burials, the Maman and the Vilehoj Burials, both in Jutland and dated to the late 10th century. However, finds of feathers and downs in both burials indicate that some of these textiles may not derive from clothing, but from the bedding of the grave. The rich Maman burial was discovered in 1868. The excavation was done unprofessionally by local farmers who literally dug into the grave mound, ripped out the finds, and just spread them all over town. So, but fortunately later on, most of the things were gathered again and sent to the National Museum of Denmark where the finds are exhibited today. The grave dates back to around 970 AD, and it consisted of a wooden chamber with a coffin inside and many grave finds. Among other things, the famous Maman axe, as you can see here with silver decorations. There was also a wooden bucket and a large candle of beeswax and several well-preserved textiles. So these are only some of the textiles from the grave, but you have here two cape bands of silk and needle binding in the middle, and then tablet woven bands. We also have two woven bracelets, also with tablet woven bands and a tabby woven silk, and then here's another loose tablet woven bands. There are quite a lot of them. We also have a lot of fragments of two-one twill embroidery, two-one twill with embroidery on. And the motifs are, I know it's very difficult to see, and a canvas leaves here, and here we have two animals facing each other. We also have birds and other four-legged animals, leopards and human face masks. Only a few human bones were preserved in the grave, but the dead had clearly been supported by an underlay of feathers and downs. And though the excavation was done in great haste, even the smallest fragments of these feather lumps were collected, and today they are still preserved, and therefore we can see that the grave bedding must have consisted of at least three different types of feather and down-filled objects. The first one is what I chose to call a mattress, just for you to understand what I mean. And it's around 18 lumps of feathers and downs, the biggest one around 36 centimeters in diameter and two to three centimeters thick, and it lay underneath the dead person. Some of these lumps still have imprints of the human bones, and vague imprints in the feathers indicate that the bolster could have been of plant fibers, perhaps flutes, flags. Secondly, smaller feather fragments were also present, only a few millimeters thick and covered in leather on both sides. And on several of them, traces of tabloid woven bands were found, indicating that this might have been a small leather cushion, perhaps edged with these tabloid woven bands. And hay or straw is present underneath the leather, and it may have covered the gray floor of the grave bed. Straw is well known to have been used as the bottom cover of beds from the Middle Ages and even well into modern times, so it's actually not surprising to find it as the lowest insulating layer of the grave. And last but not least, we have an almost complete pillowcase made of tabloid woven wool and dyed blue. The pillow has a complex construction pattern consisting of a very long piece of textile that has been folded into a pillow with a seam at the back, and then two drop-shaped gussets has been inserted on each long side, creating, as you can imagine, a shallow middle and then a long, oh, high ends. The seams are covered with raised fishbone stitches done with red wool thread, but the filling of the pillow is somewhat of a mystery because not a single feather or down has been found inside today. Perhaps the feathers were removed right after the excavation, but that would still leave some tiny, tiny traces, I imagine, but perhaps it's more likely that the pillowcase was filled with something else, possibly a plant material, which is not preserved, but we still have some microscopic traces of plant fibers that seem to confirm this, and it could be from linaigrette, but we haven't done any further analysis on these so far. So, not too far from the Marmel burial, another rich burial was excavated in 1880, the Wilhoit burial, and it contained a woman of high status buried in a wagon bed. Amongst the grave finds were a spindle roll, a pair of scissors, and a beet necklace. And this is actually a little bit of a wrong picture because the necklace didn't look exactly like this. Here the beads have been collected into this little tiny bracelet today, but they were originally mowing out in the grave as a necklace, which also included a coin that had been pierced in middle. Both textile and leather fragments were preserved, such as tabular woven textile with an interwoven cross-decoration, like this. Tabular woven bands on top of fur, and even a leather shoe. Actually it's a pair of shoes, you can see here, still with the toe bones preserved inside. The rest of the body and the garment, the fur and the feathers had all decomposed into flat cakes, thus creating a complicated micro stratigraphy for us archaeologists to decode. But also here the feathers and gowns seem to have been used as a soft and comfortable underlay for the dead. The bolster itself is most likely a green or blue 2-2 twill, which has been fold and is found in connection with the feathers. And the layer sequence clearly shows that this green or blue textile must have been connected somehow with the feathers, and such a weave was actually used for sheets in the Middle Ages, known as velmy. In order to keep the small feathers and gowns from flying out, it was necessary for the textile to be tightly woven, and often also full, except if the feathers came from the bird Greep, whose feathers easily stick together, I have been told. There was also a lot of fur and skin fragments in the grave, as you can see here, which may come from parts of the bedding as well, could be a leather sheet, but we don't know that. So over the years, the feathers and gowns from the two graves have been put through tests for species identification with very differentiated results, going right from chicken to duck, and to, yes, greep. And we have now once again taken out samples for species identification from the mammon and velary burials, and the results will arrive in a short amount of time. So unfortunately, I can't tell you what it is today. But greep feathers supposedly also occurred in King Gorm's grave in Yelling in Denmark, where they have been interpreted as the filling of a pillow. And in two of the burials from Birke, near Stockholm in Sweden, feathers were also recorded, though recent looks at these graves makes it a little bit unsure if it's actually feather or maybe fur. It's very hard to see, but we'll look into that. Also from the Ulseberg ship burial from Norway, which you've heard a lot about today, in that grave, more than 30 kilos of feathers were found, possibly deriving from a huge mattress. The bolster has not been identified, as the feathers today stick to many different textiles. But also in the Rolfsøy burial from the 10th century, feathers and downs were recorded, and possibly also in many more graves. And if you know of any, welcome to let me know. I'll be fast. Right. So feathers seem to be connected to special graves, which makes sense, as it took many hours first to collect enough feathers and downs, then to clean and dry them before they were sewn into the pillowcase or bolster. And the rest of the people were, of course, bound to fill the beds with other materials, such as straw, harps, mass and wool scrap or whatever came in handy. What seems to be clear from most of the grave context is that feathers were used for items, whether it be duvets or pillows, that people lay on and not something that covered themselves with. And this must somehow reflect the sleeping habits for the living people of their Viking age. A dead person does not need a soft underlay, but the living must have seen death as a sort of eternal sleep and therefore provided the necessary bedding equipment in the grave. The link between sleep and death was by no means new in the Viking age, as in the Greek mythology, the knight goddess, Nyx, was the mother of both sleep and death. And in the Scandinavian Bronze Age, people also buried on cow's hides and with blankets on, supposedly the way one could also have slept. So burying people in a manner that represented the idea of sleep or sleeping thus appears to be a tradition with long roots. The connection between death and sleep is further underlined by the finds of whole beds in burials, as in the aforementioned also bed burial, where at least four beds were preserved and these are freestanding beds, perhaps made for traveling. They're made of beech and one of them is elaborately carved with animals' heads. So the bed is only one meter and 65 meters in length, centimeters in length. And the average Viking age man was about 173 centimeters long and the woman about 158 centimeters long. So in order to fit the bed properly, one might have slept in a half sitting position and pillows would have come in handy as a back support. So the large pillow from the mom and grave may have been used this way. And such a broad pillow was later called a hoedyne in Danish, meaning a duvet for the head. A different kind of pillow was found in the grave of St. Canute in Ulse from around 1100 AD and this square pillow is made of exquisite silk from Central Asia and was used deliberately as a head support. So at least two kinds of pillows were probably found in a well-equipped bed. And it may have been as in much later times that the amount of bedding equipment was a synonym for the wealth of a family. The more duvets and pillows, the more wealth and power. And we also have another bed here from Krakstal which is much longer. It's over two meters long and there must have been used a lot of duvets and pillows in order to fill that up. The Icelandic sagas also mentioned benches alongside the houses and bed closets for people to sleep in but how common the freestanding bed versus these other bed types was is hard to say. The written sources offer limited information about the use of feathers, bedding equipment and the use of straws. But there are some. In the saga of Erik the Red, we hear about a woman sitting on a cushion filled with feathers and it's the same as Ida has already mentioned. A high seat was made ready for her with cushions to sit on. They should be filled with chicken feathers. That pillows were actually used as a head support. We hear in the saga of Laksdyllarna where Thorsten comes home in a sad mood. Thorsten then went home and was very sad. He went into the living room and sat down and asked to have a pillow underneath his head. It happened. The waitress saw that his tears ran onto the pillow. References to straw bedding is found in Gisla saga where a guy named Reu is hiding Gisla in a bed. He took out all the bedding textiles from the bed and said to Gisla that he should lay down in the straws and then he put all the bedding textile on top of him again. And in the Ida by Gisla, I'll do this quick, sorry. We hear about the bedding for a wealthy woman named Thorgan. She opened up her chest and took out valuable bedding textiles. She covered the bed with English sheets and a silk blanket, just as a curtain and other things, so valuable things that people had never seen the like which makes me, of course, think of the sheet that you mentioned. So several sagas mentioned the dead as living inside that grave mound. And in the dead, if the dead were somehow seen as still alive, obviously they would still need their precious sleeping gear and their life after death. And even though the Aslandis sagas must be used with great care, one thing is sure, both sleep and death came in many variations. But altogether, the fellow filled duets and pillows should be seen as special objects, perhaps even high status objects, on the same level as the silver decorated acts and the wonderful other textiles. So not only was it important to lie comfortably when sleeping, the luxurious underlay would also follow you in death and literally underline your importance in the afterlife. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.