And welcome to Data Diversity Talks, a podcast where we discuss with industry leaders and experts how they have built their careers around data. I'm your host, Shannon Kempe, and today we're talking to Teresa Ansek, the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services. More and more companies are considering investing in data literacy education but still have questions about its value, purpose, and how to get the ball rolling. Introducing the newest monthly webinar series from Data Diversity, Elevating Enterprise Data Literacy, where we discuss the landscape of data literacy and answer your burning questions. Learn more about this new series and register for free at DataVersity.net Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kempe and I'm the Chief Digital Officer at DataVersity, and this is my career in data. A Data Diversity Talks podcast dedicated to learning from those who have careers in data management to understand how they got there and to be talking with people who can help make those careers a little bit easier. To keep up to date in the latest in data management education, go to DataVersity.net forward slash subscribe. And today we are joined by Teresa Ansek, the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services, and normally this is where a podcast host would read a short bio of the guest, but in this podcast, your bio is what we're here to talk about. So Teresa, hello and welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here and I just want to mention, give a shout out, thanks for being on our recent Enterprise Data Governance Online conference, you gave an amazing talk that everyone is still raving about. Thank you. Make sure you haven't checked that out, make sure you do. So, tell me, you are the data governance strategist at Acura Business Services. First, what is Acura Business Services and what is it that you do? Acura Business Services is a data governance strategy and slash consulting, but mostly strategy. Company that I started, I think I got a DBA back in 1996. And so I started working with companies in data warehousing early on. And I had, I was putting together for different organizations, high performance data warehouses with a team of programmers that were skilled and SQL programming and ETL. And so we did, I did that for a while and then I got, I got bored and wanted to move on. So I took a deep dive into data visualization and I started helping people pull together their business intelligence together. And I was much deeper dives than I think is normal. And then I went into business intelligence team development, where I was putting together data operations and helping organizations really focus on their production level projects and making sure that the health and wellbeing and care and data quality of their data pipelines were in top health. And then came along data governance and I was like, Oh my gosh, it was like lightning and thunder and it was just like this is what you need it all along so I am now fully enveloped in data governance and helping organizations create roadmaps for their policies, procedures and bringing together all of the dimensions so that everyone can contribute to and draw from the centralized governed area and have activities that normally are not value added become highly value added and get their capacity back. That is awesome. I love that. So, before I get more into that, let's back it up a bit. And so tell me, Teresa, when you were very young, is this what you dreamt of? I'm going to be, I'm going to specialize in data governance when I grow up. I was going to be on MTV when I was very young. I am so glad that the internet was not around in those days. I waited tables for a long time. I knew that I wanted to do something in computers. In the early 90s, I worked for almost nine years setting companies up on automating their accounting packages because the PC came out in 1982. And there was all kinds of accounting possibilities and people were just racing towards that automation in their work environment so I spent a good deal of time consulting just in setting up accounting and finance which was a really great start to doing data governance. There's a lot of similarities. But I never had to teach accounting while I was setting it up. And now I'm finding that when I'm setting up data governance, I'm actually teaching data governance at the same time. So it makes it a little bit more exciting. Oh, that's nice. So how did you, so you just spent, this has been your career. Yes, I've been doing this for 30 years. Yep. That's amazing. So, tell me, so having worked with data for, for that long and almost your whole career. What, what is your definition of data and how do you work with it. Wow, what is my definition of data I remember early on. I was working on a data project, it was a big extensive data project and we were not, nobody on the team was getting much sleep. And I had this dream that I was inside the application and everything was moving and blocks and they were blue blocks and pink blocks and they had different cues and they were traveling through space going to different destinations and I was like, Oh, this is data and I was looking at I was like in it okay so that's a little weird. I, I think of data as a puzzle, I think that the wall of information that organizations are dealing with is growing higher and wider every week. And the challenge is being able to identify the bricks in the wall that are critical to the operation, and then take meticulous care of those bricks as an asset. And so, being able to adapt to the growth of information that organizations are dealing with, and keep them maneuverable and adaptable and consistent and curated and quality is what I find to be very exciting to me. My nieces and nephews are young and we're at the family party and they say entry so what do you do and I tell them I get paid to do puzzles all day. Because it kind of it kind of is very similar to that it's like this is the puzzle and the problem and we need to solve it. So, that's kind of how I think of data. I love that, you know, I have conversations with a lot of different people who are constantly struggling to communicate what it is they do for a living. I love that answer. I told a story about my daughter we were driving home in a car from Tennessee and she asked me what is data governance and she was in a 13 hour car ride with me. Oh, that poor girl I think she wanted to run out of the moving vehicle because you know I'm so passionate about it I started explaining to her. And the good thing she came home and changed her major and she is she went into information technology after that and since graduated so kind of been that painful. I love that. So, well tell me okay so let's dive into that passion a little bit. So, as you so data governance is was your aha moment and that's your, that's your discovered passion. You know, a lot of what I built the agenda around is people struggling to, it's because we run into so many people struggling to understand what data governance is get data governance buy off in their company.  It sounds like it's just about policy and laws and, and so let me ask you what you think data governance is and why people should use it. I, that's interesting. I was posed with a question this past week by leadership at an organization, and they were like well why should we do data governance I mean who's even asking for it, and why do we need it, and I responded with. Why do you need finance. I mean think about it I can write checks without an accounting system, we can write checks and we can make deposits. So why are we spending all this money and finance department and keeping track of our payables and receivables and things like that. And I know that that is a different, but when you put it that way. Imagine if you pulled your finance department out of the company and people have done it for years for centuries we didn't have debit and credit accounting. But now we do. And can you imagine not having that in your organization but can you also imagine trying to convince an organization that doesn't have it that they need it. I can convince them of all of the debits and credits and that how the system works and and the difference that it'll make for them and regulatory and being able to track whether they can afford to make a business decision, and what their total liabilities are compared to their assets. It's a big conversation. And so I think that what I've tried to do is hone my abilities to be able to take this complex thing and boil it down and help people understand why they need it. And sometimes putting it the way I just did can be impactful, hopefully tell me what you think. And that is a great comparison. I've never heard it put that way but it makes so much sense because you know how do you make great business decisions with so much business so many business decisions are made on the financials right, you know, and what you have and what you need and where you can reallocate those those expenses so. So I love that so it explained but tell me more about data governance and the benefits that people that companies can have from implementing great data governance. Yeah. I think it really, there's two things that I see. When I hear the leadership saying, you know, I don't understand what we need data governance and and what is the benefits. There is a lot of things that they may not have enough transparency around in their data ecosystem. So, for instance, we have 18 adverse data events this month. Here are the adverse data events and I'm telling you how much each event cost us. So this event was a third party vendor that sent the wrong data three days in a row the data went through our whole system and people consumed that data, made decisions on that data and then we had to backtrack, then we had to do an emergency fix and production. Then we had to do all this communication that data event was a $27,000 data event to fix not to mention the risk and the other things, but are the leaders aware that this even happened. Are they getting that transparency this is why the Executive Council is so important because the Executive Council should be aware of how many adverse data events we have. How many details failed last month. How many people did it take to fix it. How many assets were impacted by that and how many individuals were looking at those assets or wanted to look at them and had to wait to make decisions based on that. And so if you don't have any way of providing transparency around those types of events. It's very difficult to see the need for and the benefit of data governance in your organization. Another example is just how much more lean and efficient your entire IT operation and data consumption layer is the application upgrade upstream. Now we if you have lineage we can identify all the downstream assets and make sure that they're in alignment. With when they go to production, we've put our new and improved assets and it's it's transparent to our customers that we just had a major upgrade and modified 17 different fields from our data consumption layer. And that is good. You can be proud of yourself with that. If they passed that project, they would call and say here's a list of things that are going to change and here's the date they're going to change and then the bi team would get the list. And then they would have to open all the, all the tables and ETLs where they can fit and find all of that. Well, we just did that for them and cut the project expense down by 25%. But they don't know that that is a benefit of this. So it's really the focus and getting the executive council to understand the health and well being of the data ecosystem to participate in the adverse data event and get real with the cost. Third party data is some of the worst data I see in organizations. And so one of the techniques that I used was to bring the vendor relationship manager and now I have a business owner at every adverse event. So as long as we were just dealing with it and somebody in the bi team was calling somebody at the company and then betwixt the two of them, they were getting it fixed and this vendor was like, so frustrating. We said, when we're frustrated, you're going to be frustrated with us. We're just sucking the joy in the capacity and the morale out of the team. We need visibility so that you can see that there's a problem here. And when we got that visibility and started reporting that up, they were like, this is unacceptable. I can't believe this has been going on for so long. So a lot of my clients I'm working to get transparency around these events, educate the executive council on the benefits of data governance, but just explain to them how it's going to turn these non value added things into value added things when you have data governance tools, transparency collaboration, and, and you're making it available for everyone. That's really important, you know, just to point out there I just, so one of the biggest things that you do in part of data governance is communication. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a big component who are you communicating what to on what media how often, but it gets more complex than just pulling together communication when we're trying to get our transparency around data events, and reporting back logs and things like that. It's communication and education and training. With a robust catalog of courses offered on demand and industry leading live online sessions throughout the year, the Dataversity Training Center is your launchpad for career success. Browse the complete catalog at training.dataversity.net and use code DB talks for 20% off your purchase. So let me, I'm trying to figure out a couple of different questions here that in this couple things that I want to touch on but let me let me go back to my original questions. And I'll come back to this a little bit do you see the importance of data management and the number of jobs working with data increasing or decreasing over the next 10 years. I want to say, it's a hard call because I originally I saw them increasing but I think they're going to change. I think they may level off but I think that the, the style and the tools are going to change. I think that with chat GPT and the opportunities for AI to monitor and respond. I think that with the advancement of being able to create the data quality proactively and send the quality back to the business for remediation before it breaks your downstream assets. I think those things are going to change. I think that the data stewards sitting on the business side are going to have a broader role in identifying data definitions, helping us curate the reports and things like that. So there, there, I think it's going to change I think for a long time data and business intelligence teams were were kind of isolated. And we had the pipelines and it was all kind of magic that we and we alone did and I think that that is going to expand. So, although the, I think that the data professionals are going to be doing more and exciting. I think that the morale is going to increase because we now are very proud of what we're doing and we don't feel like we're just trying to run roughshot across a sprint to get an asset into production that's going to break 13 times over the next month. We know those terms we know where to find them in the business glossary we know we've got reusable codes so we can gather it the same way it's been gathered all along. And we're confident when we put it out there, you're confident in what we're putting out there as a customer so I think it's going to be an exciting time to be in data. And I think that the sum of the items in data are going to be sprawled through the organization, I think everyone's going to have a responsibility to increase their capability and responsibility to the data of the organization. So what advice then would you give to people looking to get into a career in data management, maybe specifically data governance. Data governance is not for the week. There's a lot of explaining there, you have to be okay with adjustment pivoting. As challenges with focus, there is always that data owner that is not that's going to dip out because this isn't what they signed out for this isn't my role I'm over here trying to run a business what are you talking about. So you'll have the data stewards that want to put in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are sandwiches with peanut butter and jelly in them. As definitions, and we need to be able to use a lot of different techniques to really bring the consistency and the company together and the same goal. So somebody that's new working with data is an exciting time. It's the tools are amazing and rich and vast and the environments are complex. So you've got Kafka streaming you've got AWS you've got to no dough and then it's just so cool when you get into this robust ecosystem. And you come in with data governance and and start pulling all of that metadata into a single source and the benefits so a new person coming into data, come on in and it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. Very good advice. So, okay, how do you keep up with the technology that's coming out because it's pretty it's evolving pretty quickly nowadays right. It is. I am going to say that for that I have a large network of people I'm in a lot of the forums online asking questions. I reach out to my, I reach out to friends that I worked on my teams from 10 years ago, shout out to Victor, and Peter.  What did you find out. And it's just been great you find other people that are just as passionate about it and I don't know passionate obsessed. But I also found in communities, especially communities like the Dataversity which I love you guys. There are so many people that are willing to take the time to help each other to learn, point them at something, give them a document share something that they might have other it's not all about the money. So, you know, I'd like to give the world a coke. I'd like to get them all on data governance. Do love that about the community. I said that everyone is so willing to help each other out and it is saying enough I think I've said it in a few of these, but let me say it again. If you need help, there's so many people willing to help. I know, I know, it's great. I want to come back a little bit to the data governance then so if I were a company, looking to start a data governance initiative. What would be your advice and Okay, I call myself a strategist because sometimes when I'm working with larger companies they've got a very extensive maturity assessments that they come in that are 600 questions or more. And they do this very, very fancy thing and they present you with 717 to 70 page PowerPoint presentation. And that's not what I do. What I do when somebody calls me in and says, we're looking at this what do we need I first want to, I'd go through five, five exercises what are your drivers. I've tried to do this before and stopped and what stopped you. Where did we go wrong. Where are what problems are you start trying to solve and what is your data strategy if your strategy is that you're doing data governance because you have a data lake that is going to look like a different roadmap. And then if your strategy is that you're looking at, you know, plugging into your data warehouse or understanding your data ecosystem for privacy management. So if privacy management is then is your number one data strategy then we're going to plug into that so I really need to plug into your data strategy. Future vision, if you don't have one I want to help you carve something out and see, you know, let's try this on and let's try this on. What is your view, what do you think data governance is. Part of that conversation is level setting the definition of data governance because that's where you find that one person is like data governance is based on policies and you enforce the policies and you publish them and you hold people accountable to the policy and then it's like well wait a minute let's take a look at our data demand layer and find out what what terms are being used the most on our assets because you know we need to deliver consistency. So, what is your flavor of David data governance I, I try to focus on delivering consistency if you are using a formula. And in that formulas on 27 reports, I want to make data governance. It help ensure that that is the same calculation on all 27 reports, you'd be kind of surprised how often it's not. You know, some fireworks to, but being able to say we're getting it from the same place, we're handling it with quality standards. We're delivering it the same way in in the most efficient way. And we're delivering the definition and understanding it consistently. That's that's solving the problem of data governance, where I think posting policies and holding people that doesn't even sound like fun to me so I don't. I don't think it sounds fun to anyone. I don't think I'm your girl in that case but. But within that, but within that consistency and solving and confidence you've got a team of people that are that are efficiently and expeditiously delivering quality data assets that you can count on and they're proud of themselves they're doing the work they're producing their customers are happy with what they're looking at it's just, you know, it's like transformative. And it sounds based on your previous example that that saves the company money. It absolutely does and that's one of the conversations that I continue to hone getting pretty good at it. I think it's going to grow, because there is a large portion of the audience that thinks that data governance is an expense and so I think it was Laura Madison that told me when you set a rocket off to the moon. The first, the first payload is the largest amount of fuel. It's that first girl. So you've got to be able to get that first payload.  Make sense. So, Theresa if somebody wanted to reach out to you and solicit your services how do they get in touch with you. And that can be found on LinkedIn.  Indeed. Go to your local day diversity event. See if I'm talking. Well, Theresa, this has been a fantastic as always. I love your passion around this topic. It always comes. And passion is so important for these things so. So, again, thank you for taking the time to chat with us today. And for all of our listeners out there if you'd like to keep up on the latest podcasts and in the latest in data management education me go to dataversity.net forward slash subscribe. Thank you for listening to Dataversity Talks brought to you by Dataversity. Subscribe to our newsletter for podcast updates and information about our free educational articles, blogs and webinars at dataversity.net forward slash subscribe.


The Australian Open not too far away, about six weeks or so until we actually go to the Australian Open which is crazy because the season just ended. We have the entry list for the Australian Open and it's out now and we've got some really interesting names that are seeded but it's more important to see who's not seeded. So taking a look at the top 32 seeds, the star and of course Djokovic, he will be the number one seed going into the Australian Open with Elkhir as the number two, Mehvedev at three and Sinner at four, the four best players of 2023. Other players that will be seeded at the Australian Open, Ben Shelton who bit her catch who have been very good over the last couple of months. Sebastian Korda also going to be seeded, he's been pretty good the last few months as well and Bublik is actually the cutoff at number 32 in the world. He is the cutoff for the seeds but let's go over and look at who's not seeded at the event. Sodom and Chris Eubanks, he is one of the most dangerous unseeded players, the most high ranked as well at 34 in the world so he will be very dangerous for a first round opponent potentially for a seed. Stamford Rinker of course always dangerous in a first round of a slam, of course Andy Murray as well, very dangerous in the first round of any slam. You can see there Baratini, he's also very very dangerous, unseeded plate 92 in the world, that's kind of crazy. Marin Chilich also very dangerous but Rafa Nadal, unseeded at a slam for the first time in forever. He's got a number nine protected ranking but that doesn't get him a seed in the top 30 so that's the thing with protected rankings, they get you into tournaments but they don't get your seeds so he will be unseeded going into this round open and could potentially play one of those big four guys in the first round. There is Rafa Nadal, the most dangerous unseeded player by a long shot and we just get in for free of course, doesn't need a wild card to play this event. I think he gets like about nine events or nine or twelve, something like that over the next few months to get into tournaments without having to get wild cards and then if he needs them he'll get them but look, everyone's going to give Rafa a wild card if he needs one anyway so it won't really matter but man, the draw is going to be crazy with Rafa back in the tournament of course Jocovic versus Nadal first round. That would be insane but there are other dangerous players as well like I said Baratini's coming back from injury, he'll be a very dangerous first round opponent for anybody. Murray, Vavrinca, always dangerous even Marin Chilich coming back for the first time in a long time but man, where do you think Rafa's going to be put, just take a guess down in the comments below. Do you think we're going to get Jocovic first in Nadal? I reckon we might get something like a Nadal versus Root or something early in the tournament, that's my prediction. I reckon we'll get it, we won't get the Nadal Jocovic epic but we might get a Nadal versus Root or maybe even a Nadal versus Rooblev, something like that. One of the big boys in the first couple of rounds but man, Rafa Nadal unseeded a slam for the first time in a long time and he could play anybody in that first round.


Our next caller is Jackie from Virginia. Hey, Jackie, how can we help you? Hey, first of all, this is super cool. So I listen to you guys pretty much every day. And if there isn't a new episode out, I go to the archive and listen to something there. So I'm a coach myself. I find a ton of value in the content you're putting out. So thanks for all you guys do. Thank you, Brad. Yeah, so a little background on me. I currently compete in Olympic weightlifting at a pretty high level. I've been competing for six years. And in that time, I've won two national championships, an American Open championship, 20 national medals. I've competed on Team USA. And I'm just getting to a point where I'm in my mid-30s. I've accomplished all of my goals and more in the sport, but I also have a full-time job, completely outside of fitness, and I coach on the side. So I'm just kind of ready to retire. I've also been an athlete my whole life. So I started out as a gymnast. I did that for over 15 years. And then I just went into normal strength training in college. I did some CrossFit. And that's what introduced me to Olympic weightlifting. But I've always been strong pretty much my whole life, especially from gymnastics and just having good genetics. I tend to keep on muscle and have really strong legs. So I can squat over 350 pounds. My deadlift is about the same because I'm super quad dominant. So yeah, I've been strong my whole life, been an athlete my whole life. And now I'm looking at the next chapter of being in my mid-30s and wanting to maintain a strong physique. But I also don't need to be as strong as I currently am, because if I'm not competing, I don't need to be able to squat over 350 pounds. I'm not looking to, but I also want to be strong and strength train. So for one, I'm pretty lost on which program I should do because I've been training really hard for so long. But I'm afraid that if I don't train enough, I'll gain body fat and there's a ton of muscle. So I'm trying to figure out what the best program is for me to start with. So you came to us from a program that will get you not as strong. Is that what you're saying? I mean, no. But I'm 5'3 ish. Between 5'3 and 5'4, I weigh 145 pounds. But I cut down to the 64 kilo class for competition. So I feel like I could lose 10 pounds to get to a physique that makes me happy and still be strong, because I'm not trying to be. I have giant quads, but I'm pretty lean. But I just want to change my body composition. And get to a point where I can also eat at maintenance, because right now I've cut for competition back and forth. So I haven't been able to actually reverse diet, because I don't have enough time in between competitions to do so. So I'm trying to also get to a place where I can eat like a normal person and all that as well. You'd be a blast to train. I would love to train. I can't wait to hear what everyone. I bet you were all going to have different opinions. Maybe you could go a lot of different directions. Well, I mean, I have some good news and some bad news. So here's the good news.  OK, that's the truth. And I can't say that to everybody. But someone like you with your obvious great genetics and how responsive you are to resistance training, you can do whatever you want. And you'd probably get great results, no matter what. Here's the bad news. It's going to be hard to lose muscle. So because your body's so responsive, the only way you could lose muscle in a relatively healthy way would be to focus on endurance training.  Not to mention she wrote that she hates cardio. Exactly. I mean, that's the good news and bad news. Now, what I would go, if I were you, is more of a MAPS aesthetic route. See, I was going to push your performance than aesthetic. Well, performance would be good, too. But here's why I said aesthetic is because with the focus sessions, you could go to the gym and be more like a bodybuilder and sculpt your body and not train your quads as much. Maybe focus more on your hamstrings and just focus on the parts of your body you really want to develop and neglect the parts you don't want to develop as much. You can really have fun with MAPS aesthetic because it allows so much of that modifiability in there. Right. Yeah, I was going to say that for that specific reason of the focus sessions and just to get you outside of the compound lifts a bit and really just kind of take your body as individual muscle groups that we're really like hyper-focused on. But then also, too, you mentioned you hate cardio. To me, that speaks like something that maybe your body needs to venture into that a bit, lean into the cardiovascular aspect of it. And just challenge yourself through that, which then you can maybe see the benefit of that going forward and your body responsive in that direction. OK, well, it sounds like we all are a little bit closer than I thought we were going to be because you're right. To your points, I 100% think that you could go a bunch of different directions and we could have success a lot of different ways. I did ultimately want you in MAPS aesthetic. I was going to say performance first, just because I know that Olympic lifting is obviously more dynamic than powerlifting. But sometimes we tend to do a lot of sagittal plane exercises. Primarily, there's not a lot of multi-directional exercises that you're probably doing. So I think you could benefit from that. And because I think there's a lot of unique exercise in there, so I think your body would respond with that. But I do think that a kind of bodybuilder-esque type of routine would do you really, really well. So MAPS aesthetic, I agree. The one add to that I would add to that is my prescription on that. If we were to go to MAPS aesthetic, I would love to see you, even though I know you don't like it or want it, I would try and push you towards 30 minutes of cardio with your focus days. So the way the program's structured is there's three foundational days, and then you have two to three focus days. On those two to three focus days, when you are focusing on the, which is basically like a 20-minute workout, 20 to 30 minutes, I would spend the other 20 to 30 minutes doing some cardio. And it doesn't need to be crazy intense.  You could have some fun. But I would encourage us to do some cardiovascular training like that for about 30 to 40 minutes on the same days that we do focus training with MAPS aesthetic. I think the combination of that, I think your body will respond really well. Now, here's another route you can go, Jackie. And I would almost never recommend this to most people, OK? Because you did mention you have a full-time job, and obviously you're not going to be competing at that same level. So maybe you want to work out less. Maybe you don't want to work out five or six days a week. You're one of the few people that could get away with this. You could go to the gym three or four days a week, literally do focus on whatever you want. Like, literally, you could go to the gym.  Or you know what? My shoulders, I want to develop a little more. My quads are really big. I think I'll avoid quad training for the next three weeks or whatever. You could totally get away with going to the gym and kind of doing what you want and having a little bit of fun with watching your body shape and sculpt based on what you do. Most people's bodies are not responsive enough to do that. They just wouldn't see their body change quick enough for them to be able to make those judgments. But in your case, you're literally one of the 1% or probably less. I would say you could go to the gym, literally three, four days a week, and kind of do whatever you want and look at your body and say, I want to do a little this, a little that. And like I said, when you first answered your question, any direction you go, so long as you don't hurt yourself and overdo it, you're going to do fine.  She probably has created a high demand of calories for her body. So if all of a sudden you dramatically reduced the volume of training, I would imagine she's going to have to change the calories. Whereas if she does something like MAPS Aesthetic, which is one of our higher volume programs, in addition to 30 minutes of cardio, two to three times a week, I think that's enough calorie burn that she won't have to reduce her. I agree, but you know, it's funny. So Jackie, I've only really trained a few people that I would say are probably in your, like the kind of genetics that you have that really competed at super high levels. And so what Adam's saying is you cut your volume down. Oh no, I'm getting some body fat. What I noticed with these few people that I trained is they literally like, oh no, I gained a little bit of body fat. I'm going to work out a little more. Body fat's gone. It's like, it just responds very quickly. Whereas most people are like, oh my gosh, I'm stuck. What do I do? And I'm sure, is what I'm saying resonating, do you feel like you could just kind of pick it up a little bit and watch your body change? Yeah, I mean, I, like I love training, like obviously, because I've been doing it for so long at such a high level. So I don't necessarily want to like stop going to the gym on a regular basis. But I'm just trying to change up like what I'm doing, not put so much stress on my body because I've been putting it through the ringer quite a number of years. And also doing like those extreme cuts for competition. Like I end up water cutting most of the weight that I need to, like right before the meat, but like kind of like a fighter would, but I'm still restricting calories so that I don't gain weight. So, you know, it's hard to, I guess, figure out which route is the right one. But I feel like when you say like aesthetic, adding some cardio and like maybe that's, yeah, I love that. I think I'm standing by what I said. I think maps aesthetic, 30 minutes of cardio, two to three times a week on your focus days. It's still allowed. You're going to the gym, six, five, six days a week minimum, what you probably like to do anyways, you're just changing the focus. If you're not stressful on your joints. Yeah, not stressful on the joints. No, it's bodybuilder style. So it's really. I think you'd be phenomenal for your body. Awesome. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense because it's way different than how I train now. And I think my body would probably respond well to that. Well, Jack, if you don't have it, we'll send it over to you. Okay? Yeah. Oh, awesome. Thank you guys so much. I'd like to add two or two because you would be a fun client to listen to and talk. Could you add her to the forum too, Doug? And I would love to hear your process through. I don't know how often you use Facebook. Hopefully you get on there. I don't know if you do. I would love to see you in the forum. So I'm going to give you access to the private forum because you are somebody like back to Sal's point. This would be fun to try. Yeah, you would be fun.   You see changes. Drop this exercise and that exercise that are in that program. Let's switch it, put this in instead. And like you'd be a fun person and I can easily help without having to feel like I'm having to coach you full time. You'd be real easy to tweak some things.  Awesome. That sounds great. Thank you so much. Thanks for calling in. Hold on, Jackie. Cool, yeah. Thank you guys. Yeah, cool to have someone of that caliber. Oh, it would be a fun client. Those are the best. But I tell you, well, they're the best. People need to know. Here's why they're the best. It's like anything you do, something happens. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's like a champion, right? That's why it's fun. Well, a couple of things too, right? So you know if she's that talented. You know that I, like this is what I love about clients too. When you teach like a new movement, I could say things like, oh, tuck your tailbone. Oh, pull the shoulders back. Oh, head up, Joe, chin in, like. And it happens. Yeah, it happens. And they cue them like that. And they just, their body will snap right into it, which is fun to teach. Of all the strength athlete-based sports, Olympic lifters are among the most athletic. I've seen Olympic lifters who play no sports watch them do stuff and they're, it's not like a bodybuilder or a power lifter. Like they can move, then they can move dynamically. So it's the highest like technical lifting sport. Dude, 335 squad at 145. 355. At 143. She competes at 62 kilograms. So that's 130 something pounds that she competes at. I mean, that's insane. Yeah, tremendous strength and power, but you know, I guess the challenge at that level is how do I scale down, right? Cause you competed at a national level. That's more of a mental challenge, I think than anything. How do I bring it down because I'm no longer competing at this, this ridiculous level.


Hello, good afternoon everyone. My name is Kisung Kim. I'm the CTO of Vietnam Global. I present a graph database project based on Postgres SQL called Agents Graph. Before we start, let me introduce ourselves, Vietnam Global. Vietnam Global is headquartered at Seoul in Korea and was founded in 2014. There is an R&D center in Santa Clara, California too. We provide technical services for Postgres SQL and big data systems in Korea. We have partnerships with IBM and cloud data. We had core technologies for data processing and currently we are developing a graph database system called Agents Graph. This is the outline of my talk. I'll introduce the graph database and our motivations to develop a graph database based on Postgres SQL. And then I'll introduce our product Agents Graph and explain how we implemented using Postgres SQL. And then I present Agents Graph's performance results and conclude with our future roadmap. Graph database is a change in data representation. GATNA says it has a radical change in how data is organized and processed. Let's compare the graph and relational data model.  Data is managed as a row over table regardless of whether it is entity or relationships. And if we want to retrieve some data, usually we would join the related tables by ourselves. The database does not provide any facilities to handle relationships. But in graph database, the data model uses nodes and relationships rather than the row and tables. The relationship is the first class citizen in database system. This is the biggest difference in graph database. Relationships are explicitly managed and handled directly by the database engine. In graph database, you can create nodes and relationships explicitly and you can query in terms of relationships. So we can make our data more connected and the management of the connected data becomes much easier in graph database. Let's see how graph modeling is simple by an example. In this example, sellers have their products and customers order these products and list them. If we represent this as a relational model, we can make these entities and relationships as a table. For example, the order table has the information about which products. So the order table stores the relationship information. But in the viewpoint of the database, it is just a table. In the graph database, this real-world model is reflected directly to the graph model. The relationship between entities are stored as relationships in the graph database. So you can see that the data model of graph database is much simpler than the relational database. To show the conciseness of the graph query, I want to introduce cyber query language, which is created by Neotechnology. Cyber is a declarative query language for the property graph model. It is inspired by SQL and Sparkle, which is the standard query language for RDF. Cypher borrows many clauses from SQL like where and order by, and the graph pattern matching features from Sparkle. Neotechnology opens the Cypher language as a public project open Cypher. To see how the query can be conciseness using Cypher, let's see an example. This is an example of Cypher query for finding an ancestor-descendant pairs in the graph. In SQL, we use the recursive common table expression to express these kind of queries. And we have to specify in the query how to retrieve the relationships using joins with CTE. So as you can see in this example, it is not so simple. But in Cypher, this kind of relationship can be expressed in an intuitive form like this. The pattern is described using ASCII code diagrams. So it is easy to read and understand the meaning of the query than the SQL query. Essentially, the graph database is getting more popularities. There are many graph database vendors already and existing database vendors like IBM, Oracle, and SAP also provides graph features in their product. And recently, NoSQL vendors like MongoDB and Elastic Search also provides graph features in their product. So I think that it is time to provide the graph features in PostgreSQL 2. There are broad spectrum in graph database area. So what we want to implement is a graph database which provides the property graph model and Cypher query language, ACID transaction, and graph analysis functionalities. We chose to implement a graph database based on PostgreSQL because it has already great features we need, like a storage engine, transaction layer, and cost-based query optimizer. Of course, each module should be extended and optimized for the graph workload, but PostgreSQL gives a good starting point. Recently, we released Agents Graph version 1.1, and it is a Poked project of PostgreSQL for the graph data. First time, we considered to develop it as an extension, but we cannot develop it as an extension because we have to modify query parser and add plan nodes for graph processing. You can visit our homepage, but it is currently under developing, and Agents Graph is an open source project, so you can clone the source code from our GitHub. From now on, I'll explain some features of Agents Graph and how we implement it based on PostgreSQL. Let's start with Agents Graph's data model. Agents Graph's data model is the property graph model. The property graph model is a graph model in which vortexes and edges can have their properties. And the vortexes and edges can be grouped into labels. For example, you can make vortex labels like person, student, or teacher to distinguish them. We extend this model in two ways. First, we extend it for vortexes and edges to have JSON documents as their properties, rather than key value pairs. These properties can be indexed using any kind of indexes PostgreSQL provides. This is one of the great benefits from developing based on PostgreSQL. And we introduced a label hierarchy for the property graph model so that you can organize these labels as a hierarchy. Agents Graph supports multiple graphs, so you can make several graphs in a database. Before I show you an example, I introduced more details about Cypher. Cypher has many clauses. Some of them are borrowed from SQL and their meanings are familiar with you. For graph pattern matching, they use match clause. And for updating the graph, you can use create merge or set. This is the railroad diagram for Cypher syntax. You can make a query by chaining these clauses as you want. I'll show you an example about this later. This is an example of Agents Graph. We provide several details to create graph objects, vortex, and edge labels. The first sentence, create graph social network is a detail to make a graph object called social network. And then you can make vortex and edge labels. In this example, I made a vortex label person, conference, and community. And then I create two edge labels, attend, and related. So using these details, you can create graph objects and vortex labels. And if you want a label hierarchy, you can create a label using Inheris keyword, the first class SQL provides. And then you can make vortex and edge using Cypher query like this. The first query makes a vortex whose label is person and its properties are described using JSON formats. And then you made two more vortexes, one conference and one community. After that, to check out this vortex, we use match queries. In this match query, there is a single node pattern. So this query returns all vortexes in the graph. And we can see there are three vortexes whose label person, conference, and community. And then we can create property indexes for some interesting properties like this. You just need to assign specify property names to be indexed with its data type. And you can create relationships using Cypher match and create clauses like this. To make a relationship, we first have to find vortexes to be connected. And so we use match and create clauses together in a single query. This example, first find vortexes to make a relationship among them. In the match query, it finds person vortex and it assigns to a variable and finds conference and assigns to variable b and community. And then the next clause create will create a relationship between the vortexes. And after the creating relationships, I learn of match queries again. And in this time, I use the pass pattern. So this match query is to find who attend a conference and the conference is related to some community. And we can find this information. Agents graph is not layered architecture. Rather, it is developed in the level of core of post-classical engine. We implemented the graph objects and designed storage layouts to store graph data. We extend post-classical query engine to process Cypher query. For that, we modify post-classical query engine including passor, optimizer, and executors. But we maintain the storage and transaction layer. So most post-classical external modules and extensions can be used with Agents Graph 2. This is the storage layout. We use heap tables to store graph data and use v3 to index edge and vortex information. The heap table for vortex has two columns, vortex ID and properties. And edge table has four columns. Edge ID and start and end vortex ID and properties. And there are two composite indexes for edge tables, start and end start. We build two indexes to find the fast incoming edge and outgoing edges for specific vortex. And we use composite indexes to exploit index of these scans for graph traversal if possible. We haven't implemented a storage for graph data none yet. This storage layout works well for medium-sized graph data. But we have a plan to implement it for handling large-scale graph data. Cypher query is processed in the same query engine with SQL. We integrated Cypher query processing with SQL engine from the passor. So you can use post-classical expression or functions in Cypher queries where it is allowed. The result of Cypher query is a relation. So we treat Cypher query as a sub-query so that the existing query optimization techniques can be applied to Cypher queries too. As I already mentioned in Cypher, several clauses can be used in a single query. Basically, each clause makes results and the following clause leads the result and process them. When processing a Cypher query, first the query is transformed into a query tree structure. To make a query tree, first each clause is transformed into a query structure in post-classical engine. For match clause, it will be a query with join tables and the chain queries are combined as a sub-query. Let's look at this example. This query is composed of three clauses, two match clause and one return clause. When we process this query, the first match is transformed into a query with three tables as inputs. In the upper picture and inside the query, there is the query structure for the first match and there inputs actor table and acting and movie table. To process the second match, we create another query structure which includes the first query structure. The first query structure for the first match becomes an input to the second match query. After we create a query structure like this, the post-classical query optimizer engines optimize these queries further. In this case, the sub-query load-ups can be applied. After applying the sub-query load-up, the query structure will merge into one. We implemented some new plan nodes to improve the query performance. As an example, I present a VLE plan node. VLE means variable length at Gs. VLE pattern is a concise way to express a range of the matching paths. We already seen in the previous example for VLE patterns. In this example, in the match, there is a pattern whose length is variable. We use the star characters to express the variable length at Gs. This kind of query can be implemented using recursive common table expression as we saw previously. But we found that the CT approach has some performance issues. The CT approach is a breadth-first-search approach which needs to buffer all its intermediate results in memory. To improve the performance, we implemented a new node for VLE patterns which perform depth-first-style processing and need-no-buffering. Using this VLE plan node, we can improve the VLE patterns by orders of two or three. This is the explain output for this cyber query. This query uses variable length at G patterns so you can see that there is a new plan node whose name is nested loop VLE. This node conducts the graph traversers using depth-first-search patterns. There are many considerations about graph query processing. Among them, I want to explain three points here. First, graph pattern matching is usually more efficient to use random page release rather than the sequential release. So, it is recommended to decrease random page cost parameter value. Graph processing uses random IO extensively so it is more efficient to cache the data in memory or use SSD to store the graph data. We designed the HG indexes to use index omniscans when it is possible. When traversing the graph, HG indexes are used so it is more efficient to use index omniscans for HG indexes. And finally, the query optimization is crucial for graph processing. But usually, it is harder than SQL queries because graph queries involve more joins than normal SQL queries. We found that PostgreSQL Optimizer works well usually even for graph queries but it needs to be improved and it needs more research for that. We conducted performance comparison using LDBIS benchmark tool. LDBIS is a consortium for making a benchmark tool for graph workloads. There are big companies to participate in this project like Oracle, IBM, Huawei and SAP. There are three benchmarks for three benchmark workloads. The first one is social network benchmark. LDBIS benchmark simulates the social network services in which user creates friendship and write posts and comments and they can express they like the post work comments. It is some kind of OLTP workload similar to TPCC. And there are also graph analytics benchmark which conduct large-scale graph analytics. In this experiment, we used SMB interactive workloads. And this is the result. We compared Agents Graph version 1.0 with Neo4j's 3.1, the newest one. I want to emphasize that even though we had optimized tool database as much as we can, the result can be changed in any time according to the server configurations. For now, the result so that Agents Graph is much faster than Neo4j for updates and complex queries too. left side is the performance for the updated queries and right side is the complex queries. Update queries is relatively simple. Some people, if some people becomes friends with someone, then it creates relationships between the two person. Or some people can write posts or comments. So it is very simple update queries. And for the complex queries, it is usually read most queries and the query pattern is very complex. So it takes more times than simple update queries. But for both workloads, our Agents Graph is much better than Neo4j. Neo4j is the most popular graph database systems. They argue that they are most optimized for the graph database, graph data. And they have native storage and native graph processing engines. But although we use PostgreSQL or relational databases back-end systems, but we prove that our system is better than Neo4j. There are many reasons for Agents Graph is better than Neo4j. For the updated workloads, this is because of the efficient concurrency control of PostgreSQL. Neo4j, I think it is not matured for the high concurrency workloads. And for the complex queries, as I already said, the query optimizer is very important to improve the query performance. So when the query pattern becomes complex, it becomes harder to optimize the query. Because there are many joins and so the PostgreSQL query optimizer, we found that it is very good for optimizing the complex queries. And further, we can optimize the performance by using PostgreSQL advanced queries and advanced features. Yes, I conclude my presentation with our future roadmap. First, we plan to extend Agents Graph for distributed and parallel systems. Currently, we are considering applying PostgreSQL to Agents Graph. And we're implementing Graph Analysis Framework like BotX-centric programming model. The BotX-centric programming model is a new programming framework for the Graph Analysis algorithm. It is a very simple form of API. So users can easily implement their algorithms using the BotX-centric programming model. And finally, we are also considering integration with Big Data System for large-scale graph processing. Currently, we are considering to make Hadoop file system fdw using native C++ library. And we are also considering external fdw modules for pocket data format. Pocket is a data format which is developed by cloud data. And it is a columnar data format. So I think if we can use this kind of integration, we can extend our Agents Graph for the large-scale graph processing. Yes, that's it. Thank you for your attention. Any questions? Yes? You mean the self-relationship? Yeah, it is possible. Yeah, yeah, it is possible. Sorry, I'll repeat your questions, please. What? DH has directions. So when you design the graph modeling, you have to decide which one is the major and junior using the direction. Yes? Yes. The first thing is that Cypher is very popular. And we found that Cypher is easier to understand than other languages. I saw the OrantDB's language. Yeah, it is good. But we found that Cypher is more intuitive because they use ASCII code like diagrams. And it is very similar to Spark code language. And the Neo4j currently they want to Cypher as standard code language. And they make open Cypher community. And they promote large companies like Oracle to participate in the standardization. So I think Cypher can be developed more in the future. So I choose it. Yes? Yeah, GraphQL becomes very popular today. But I think that it is not for Graph database. Rather it is general. I don't know how can I say, but in GraphQL we cannot express curly patterns for variable length edges. But it looks like more curly language for JSON documents, I think. So the name is very confusing. Yes? So your question is comparison between Graph model and relational model? Yeah. It is good questions. Actually, in LDBs consortium, there are many relational database vendors like Botuoso, OpenLink, SOP2. They use relational model to conduct the LDBs benchmark. And the result is the relational database wins. Because I think that because the Graph database is add more abstraction to relational systems. And I think that one of the reason the LDBs performance better than Graph database is that LDBs database is more matured and more optimized. Actually Botuoso provides columnar storage. So they extensively compress the data. So I think Botuoso can win the other Graph database. But Graph database provides another benefits for managing the Graph data. Because we can curate, give me any BotX and give me any relationships. But you cannot curate this kind of curate in relational database. Because there is no concept of BotX and relationships. So I think the performance will be more improved in the future. And the Graph database is a benefit for data modeling. The conciseness can be help clients. I think it depends on the machine's resource. It depends on the, especially for size of memory. If you can load all of the Graph data into memory, then you can get best performance. So I think medium size Graph, we can say that two or three times than the memory. But if the data exceeds the main memory size much, 10 times or 20 times, then it can be classified as large scale. Yes, we provide our packages as entirety. Including Post-Classical and Agents Graph modules. Thank you very much.


for those who cook, we present a drawer. Not just any drawer. A drawer with... Good morning, Lisa. Hey. I had trouble getting on live this morning. That was weird. I kept getting a strange error message. I'm not sure what was up with that. How are you this morning? So we're going to do a... We're going to go back to working in the watercolor journal and I'm going to do a two-part painting, I think of a... I think we're going to do a little bird, like a little sparrow type bird. I'm going to use a couple of different brands of paint this morning, side by side. We're going to use the Daylor Rowney little pocket kit. Oops. That we have the aquafine student. I think they're the student watercolors and then we're going to use the Prima, which should be comparable types of paint to each other. Yeah, we're having trouble focusing. Like this morning is just not... Okay, it's just because there's nothing here for it to focus on. There we go. We'll put this here. I don't know about you guys, but that's annoying me going in and out like that. We'll leave this here. Maybe that'll help. There's a delay in the video footage compared to what I'm seeing, so I am just waiting to see if that helped moving the watercolor box over. Yeah, so there's just too much white space for the camera. All right, so I have my two Utrecht brushes, which I'm really enjoying using. These are the Utrecht brand 6150 round brushes, a number six and a number eight. These are the Utrecht as part of Dick Blick, and these are their generic store brand watercolor brushes. I'm really enjoying using them. Recently, when I was out running Aaron's, I stopped by Aaron Brothers Art and Framing, which is owned by Michaels. It's not only not worldwide, but I don't think it's nationwide, but anyway, they do have fine art supplies there. Hey, and they had their buy one brush, get one for a penny sale. Aaron Brothers, like Michaels, has coupons all the time. They're owned by Michaels, so they run a similar type of ads, but also unlike Michaels, Aaron Brothers frequently has paint brushes and stuff like that on sale, like they have penny sales. So they have, of course, penny sales on their frames, and that's what they're known for. But I love it when they have penny sales on their paint brushes. They have either buy one, get one for a penny, or buy one, get two for a penny. Sometimes they have that. So if you need new paint brushes, that's the way to stock up. And these are by Princeton, these are called Snap, and these are not an expensive paint brush. I have a Philbert number four here, and I have a little round number, what is it, two. So I thought we would try these this morning. These were inexpensive, they were $3.99 each regular price, and I got one for a penny.  All right, we're gonna need a pen. Let's see, at least one. Let's draw some bird this morning. I do have my book off camera, my bird book open to a black throated sparrow. So we'll see, we'll draw our image first. I hope everybody's having a great day. I'm a little off this morning. I spent lots of time last night, I'll talk while I'm drawing, editing video for journaling Crazy Island Style because I wanted to get the editing done and get it all. The three lessons I filmed this week so far edited and loaded today.  So yeah, there's that.  So whenever I'm doing any drawing, I just think of the shapes, the basic shapes, drawing what I see, not what I think I see. And it's good to have a reference photo. You can find, find reference photos for birds on like Pinterest. I like to get like Audubon Society books or those kind of field watching type books. They're great for just keeping around your art space for reference. Okay, that's pretty good for the basic shapes I think for our bird. Now I'm going to start putting in some details. I hope you've all had a great week so far. And Poet Spice, aren't you a teacher? How come you're home today? Is it spring break or something? Not that I'm not happy you're here, because you know I am, but I thought you worked at school, out of school. Just curious. Not that it's any of my business. So I'm just drawing in the different things I see on the bird from the bird book. And I don't actually, it's funny. I like to paint birds. I liked, I mean everywhere, a lot of places I go, I end up finding feathers. I'm not sure what's up with that. But in reality, I'm not a huge bird fan. I like watching them, but from a distance, because I always, you know, birds are messy. I don't know. I'm just odd. I know, I know that. So I'm just, now I'm just drawing in the different sketching in features, sketching in what I see. So here's the, here's the picture that I'm looking at. I'm sorry, you're having a lousy week, Lisa. That's too bad. So yes, we want to paint in some of our features, but okay. But we want a good drawing too. Now, we're going to draw a line. I'm going to avoid drawing it actually on the bird. But remember, this is kind of a study. We're doing these multi-part paintings to test out some of these paints, like I did here. This was four different brands to see which ones perform. I won't say better than others, but in a way, hey, Mary, in a way that we, I'm happier with than others. So, so far, I really like the brighter brands like Quar, Daniel Smith, Maymary Blue, Schmincke, Mission Gold. I like the brighter brands more than others. I mean, I really haven't met a watercolor paint I hate, but to be honest. But like the Holvine paints, this was done after the paint dried in the palette. I like them fresh out of the tube. I'm not so happy with the way they rewet. So, there's that. So, we're going to do the bird today. We're going to do, I think we're going to use the, like I said, the Daylar Rowney and the Prima. So, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take some of my lines for my bird. I think, Dina, if you subscribe to my channel, then it should show up in your news, in your news feed, in your subscription feed, when I always try to post something that I'm going to be going live at least an hour before. If I remember, I try to do it a couple of days before, and we'll talk about why I didn't do that lately. And then, yeah, make sure you turn notifications on. And thank you, Mary. So, I'm going to outline some of the features in Sharpie Pen. A pen that I know is going to dry and stay permanent. Not a lot of features, because I wanted to find my drawing with paint and not necessarily with pen. But I think you can add some notifications, Dina. Also, if you're in one of my Facebook groups, my group, or Crazy Island Family, or Kelly Donovan's group, or artsy endeavors, why can't I not think of Kelly Donovan's group name? I can't think of it right now. Maybe one of you all knows. I post something in those groups usually an hour or so before I go live. Okay, and then I'm going to write at the bottom here what the brand, which brand is where. Okay, the name of my group is called A Life of Art and Self-Expression, and I always post something there. I almost wrote that at the bottom here.  So, how about Daler, Rowney, and then Prima. And we're going to do Daler, Rowney, and this is the Aquafine, which I believe is their student grade watercolor. I know, right? So, I've been frantically trying to get all of Dirtling Crazy Island Style done and filmed in the can, so to speak, for all of 2016. And I'm at a crunch time this week to get it all filmed, and then I'll spend the next few days editing, hence why I was doing some editing, and then had to re-edit. That way I can catch up on other things. Like, you know, I don't know, Start Lifebook, which I still haven't started yet. Hello, Ampex! Hey, how are you? Now, I'm adding a few lines in this pen. This is a Pilot Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen. I really like this pen. Yes, it will bleed. Yes, it's going to blend and smear even a bit with the watercolor paint, but it's going to add something interesting, I think. So, I'm going to add some of it to our bird here. Okay. Oh, thanks! I barely got started. So, this is my new favorite art supply, the Pilot Varsity Pen. It does come in colors. I like the black. I do have the colors somewhere. Wait. Here you go. So, they do have these at JetPens. I haven't tried any of the colors yet, but I love the black. And I love that they're disposable and you don't have to, like, mess with ink cartridges or anything. They're not permanent. It does bleed, but I like the fact that it bleeds. All right. Let's get some paint wet, shall we? Hey, Cheryl! Good afternoon! I hope you're having a better day than you've been having, honey. I'm going to spray all my paints. I'm doing it off camera. I do have all of the Prima watercolors, the ones that Prima did not send me. I bought. I am loving them, especially if you're just doing quick journal pages or greeting cards, things like that. I think they're a really great watercolor paint. They do claim to have some light fastness. How much? We don't know. We haven't gotten a straight answer out of anybody. My office, I don't know where to put stuff. My office is a mess. Let's see. All right. Let's put that there. That, I guess, will work. I don't know. I guess it'll work. Now, in this Daylar Roundy kit, we don't have a black, so we're going to have to, like, make a gray black color. I'm going to start with this small filbert brush, and I'm going to take some of the, this is Prussian blue.  We don't have white either, so we're going to have to just make it work. Yeah, because I'm in the midst of all the filming for Journaling Crazy Island style and editing, I've got little piles of art supplies out everywhere on my desks, so that I remember what I used on what page, because I have to create PDF documents. It's my office is a giant mess. Okay, so that was red and blue, and now I'm going to add a yellow, and that should give me a neutral e-color. I chose the yellow ochre, which was okay. I'm going to add some of this other blue. You just kind of start mixing your primary colors together, and at some point you'll get a mixture that is a neutral tone that'll work for what you want, and there's no other way to do it except trial and error. There's no quick way. That's actually not a bad color. It's a little bit on the green side. Let's put a little more orange in it. See the only problem with some of these kits is I really miss having Payne's gray, because I know how to mix colors, but I'm not a huge fan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's better. Let's get a piece of paper and try that. Let's see. It's a piece of just scrap paper. Yeah, that'll work. All right, so start light, work your way darker. Yeah, see, I'm just not a huge fan of mixing paint. The nice thing about the Daylor Rowney side is that we have that pen on here, and we don't have a black in the paint palette, but that ink is going to mix with our paint, and it's going to give us a dark color, the ink from the Pilot Pen. See like right there. There we go. Nice gray tones from the ink. No, you're not.  I do not.  That's why I prefer a larger palette even when I travel. My palette usually has at least like 15 colors in it, because I don't want to mix violet. I don't want to mix teal, and I don't want to mix dark, panes gray or black. Yeah, exactly, Mary. You get the color right, and then you run out. A nice way to add more colors to your palette, especially if you're traveling, but also if you have a limited budget, is to use your other water soluble materials in conjunction with your watercolor paints.  Use them together. Why can't you? I have to remember not to do the whole bird and to just do the half of the bird, because see I'm chatting while I'm doing this. You notice I didn't get rid of the pencil lines or anything. I never do that. I let them help me define the shape that I want. Yeah, use it all, whatever you have. One thing, too, when you're painting anything with watercolor paint, you either you have two choices for your highlights. Leave white paper or go back later and add white, and you can do that with gouache, but you could also do that with a gel pen or a paint marker. I'm going to see if I can get something that's a little darker. Also, don't feel like when you go out and, you know, buy art supplies, don't do what I did. This is another reason for me doing this, you know, series and, you know, hopefully helping some of it, somebody out. Don't do like what I did when I first got into Mixmedia. I felt like I had to go out and have neocolor crayons, because that's what the teacher used, but then I also felt like I had to go out and have all the neocolor crayons. There are, there are subtleties. Some of them are, yeah, why won't they, Cheryl? So you should always test your pens, and the micron pens may work if they don't, if they're waterproof, they would work for the outlines you don't want to have move, and then the elegant writer would work for the ones that will move. Why won't they? So I have a slightly darker here color here. I'm going to go in and add some shadows. It's kind of a green, but again, we're going to have trouble getting our sparrow to be black because I don't have that color in the kit. And since I'm lazy, I'm having trouble not wanting to mix it. So test all your pens. You should test all your pens and see which ones will, what they'll, what each one will do. I would recommend doing something like we did with the product review swatch book and doing it with pens and pencils, whatever you have in your stash, and testing each one with water and without, with Gesso, over Gesso and without, and see what they will and won't do. And that way, when you are working on a painting and you want to add something to it, you know, by looking at your reference book, what product to pick. And thank you. I don't know. I'm just, I'm doing a chickadee. I'm, it's coming out a different color than the one in the picture, but that's fine because I, you know, like I said, I don't have the right colors. Thank you. So the other thing too is I'm a big fan of Jean Haynes and she does lots of animal paintings and she does not do them in their natural colors. She does them in, you know, purples and blues and, and there's no reason why you can't do that. And I love the idea of urban sketching, Mary. I have some books on, on that that I'm going to be studying up on. I'm grabbing just some Prussian blue FYI. We're going to Alaska and I want to be able to take some of my, I am taking some of my stuff with me and I want to be able to do some urban thing, urban sketching type things while we're there.  We're painting an impression of the bird. So we're, you know, we're not trying to copy the bird. And yeah, urban sketching in Alaska, I mean, you know, I don't know that there's too much better than that. So I'm looking forward to it. So a little bit of pigment and then some water. I'm not blending out all my marks, but I am blending some of them. I like these little study paintings and I like leaving all the pencil lines because it just it adds something that's interesting to the painting. That's pretty good, I think. That's the Daylor Rowney. I'm just catching up on the comments. Okay. So that's a Daylor Rowney. I'm going to set that aside for a minute. I'm not going to go too far with it because we might want to add more, but let's do this side. You notice I started to paint over here. Oops. All right. Here's the, this is the Prima. Now in the Prima, I have a lot more colors to choose from. My husband and I are going on a cruise to Alaska. We have to book our excursions. I'll be taking a lot of photographs for sure. We may be shooting some video because I'll be bringing the video camera, although I won't make any promises in that regard. And I will definitely be bringing a watercolor kit with me, the one I usually bring with me. When my husband and I got married, we wanted to go there for our honeymoon and we couldn't afford it. So it's our 25th wedding anniversary. So now we're going. Now with the Primas, I'm going to try to get, you know, a close color because the paint brands are different. I have different colors. They're not going to be an exact match. So we already know that. Also, I have this sneaking suspicion from working with the Primas and I do like them. Don't get me wrong. But they're, I think they're a little bit more opaque than what I'm used to as a watercolorist. Yeah. I can't wait. It's going to be so much fun. And yeah, the pen, I just finished a bunch of illustrations for a book when it is time to have it be published. I'll let you all know, but, and I did them mostly with the Pilot Varsity Pen and a wash from the ink from that pen. So I'm going to take this color in its darkest, purest form and put some of it on there. And then I'm going to come in with some water before it gets soaks into the paper too much and blend it out a bit. Now again, it's going to mix with the Pilot Pen. I'll be letting you all know, and it's going to be sort of a charity fundraiser, kind of a thing. It's for a special project. The author requested I do the drawings in black and white. So I did that mostly. So thankfully she liked them. And yeah, Mary, I'm sure you had a fun time with that scrapbook. I'll be posting a lot of pictures that you guys will be more than welcome to use for inspiration. I'll be taking as much photos as I can. Now up here, I already messed up because I went over, but I'm going to try to leave a line here so we can see the differentiation between the two paint brands. I am adding kind of a lot more water to the Prima than I seem to have to do with the De La Rowney and be a lot more careful about how much pigment I put where. I haven't done a proper scrapbook in years. I don't know about the rest of you, but I got into mixed media and then, you know, promptly forgot all about scrapbooking. Okay, so you can see right here where that ink from the pen is mixing with the paint and I'm getting this secondary color. That's great. I love it for our bird. I'm also able to pull some of that pigment out and moving around and it just adds another level of interesting things. Yeah, I got rid of a lot of scrapbooking things, but, you know, I still have some of the paper. Some of the ones I just can't seem to get make myself get rid of. So because this is a bird, you know, if you get some lines like right here, you know, if you get some brush marks that seem to like hint at feathers, you don't leave them. You don't have to blend them all out. I think they make a better dark color, a darker gray color than the De La Rowney, but I think that is more because of the color selection I have than it is because of the paint. I do think they're more opaque than other paints. I think that and I think that's pretty true with lots of the student grade crafters grade watercolors. Generally speaking, I think if you are a water colorist and you really like the transparency of watercolor, then you're going to probably want to stick with more of an artist grade paint. I use gouache. I have gouache, but I'm not a huge gouache fan. I like the layers of puddley watercolor transparent paint. Like I said, these are okay. And if I was just doing a journal page, I would probably use these instead of Schmincke. I mean, you know, I don't think I'd use Schmincke on our journal page. Okay, so I'm going to switch to a littler brush because I want to do the eye and for the eye, I'm going to grab some of this paint, but I also put some of that pilot varsity ink in there. There we go. I do have a black in this palette, but because we don't have it in the other one, I'm going to try to avoid using it. I am going to grab what is like the equivalent over here of the Prussian blue, color number 35. Thank you, Mary. It seems like lots of the student grade paints are a lot more opaque than the artist grade. And I think that's probably just the nature of the paint because it's, you know, less expensive. You know, it's not really made to be the same. I'm sorry, I was looking at my drawing. So this is, so this is that small brush I just bought. It's a very small, this Princeton Snap round number two. I really like this brush. It has a nice point on it. I'm really hard on my brushes, so I tend to buy brushes that are inexpensive. Let me see if I can move into the bird's face just a little bit. Hang on.  It's my acrylic brushes I'm really hard on. I do have to replace them every now and then because I'm so hard on them. And you'll find like right now, I'm doing pretty well with these Prima paints. They are, like I said, kind of more of an artist, I'm sorry, more of a crafter or student grade paint. You just, you can get similar results with, as with the artist paints.  So it just depends on, you know, what you want to do and how much you want to work at it. Right there, his tip of his beak is a little dark, so let's see. Aha! Lifts pretty well. Like, I like that. So if you get too much on there, that's pretty good. All right, looking at my picture. Thank you.  I'd rather draw them than have to deal with them in real life, but you know, but I like, no, this is just plain paper. This is Fabriano Cold Press, 140-pound watercolor paper. I made this journal last, let's see, I was going to say last year, but I think I actually made it in 2014. There should be a video somewhere. I think actually, now that I think about it, I think this is part of one of my paid for classes on Udemy. Okay, so I love that. I love the way that part of the bird is looking. Well, except for his foot. We forgot about his foot. Let's see. So remember when you're doing any painting, you know, stopping so hard on yourself if it doesn't look like a photograph. If you want a perfect representation of something, take a picture. If you want to do an artistic interpretation of it, then paint a picture. We're shooting for painting our interpretation of the bird and not a perfect representation of said bird. Aw, thanks. Okay, so let's go back to the bird over here with the De La Rowney paints.  That would be my biggest piece of advice for you. Just enjoy the process. So I'm going to see what kind of color we can get if we just mix the brown and the blue, the same color that we have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. We'll go with it anyways. All right. So now we're going to, I want to add more of these like light strokes that we have kind of over here, just barely touching the brush to the paper. So this is two completely different brands of paint, two complete different colors, color ways, really. Enjoy the process. Exactly, Mary. Enjoy the process. It should be about having fun and being creative. If you're not having fun, what's the point? He's pretty good. I kind of like him. I'm going to take one of my larger round brushes and we're going to get splattery. Yeah, stop comparing yourself to everybody else.  If I wanted a painting by Van Gogh, I'd buy a Van Gogh.  I'm not Van Gogh. I love, I love splattering my watercolor paints. It's a fun thing. So I like both of these brands of paint, I have to say. They both work really well. Now the mixing palette, the palette was easier to work with in the Prima because I've got a lot more colors. The Dayla Rowney's Fine, there's nothing wrong with it. In my opinion, and I said this before when we had it out, it needs a black, a white and a paint's gray and a violet in my opinion. And if I'm going to continue to use this and I'm not going to pass it on in half email or something like that, which may happen at some point, then I would probably, and even if I do pass it on, I would probably add those four colors to it before I did because in my opinion that it's easier to get the look that you want. Yeah, I love the gray grayish tones that you get here from the Prima paints and also from the pen. Hey Teresa, that Pilot Varsity Pen, this one. I love the look of this more than the look of this. And this is just from, this is the book that I have, Birds of North America. Actually I have a few books on birds. I think I've got this one in Amazon, but I usually buy them used for like a penny. And then I'm just paying for shipping or I, if I have time, I go down to the used bookstore in my town and go buy, I go to the coffee table and bird watching, you know, or a nature section. And those are not sections they sell a lot of books in, so they're usually pretty cheap. And one book like this has a lot of, a lot of different kind of birds in it. Like look at this purple finch. Yeah, if you have a library that has them for free, do that, go get them for free. These, even if they're missing a couple of pages or they're not in the best condition, these make the best reference books for your art library or, you know, collage books because you could cut these photos out and use them in your journal pages. Yeah, I prefer the DK books have the best photographs and detailed illustrations. So they are, I have a few of their, their sort of natural history type books and they, they're one of my best brands that I have. And then I also have my book weight to hold it open while I'm painting. So there are just a quick painting. Does anybody have any questions? Or would you like to see something else? DK is the publishing house, Mary. Discover more at www.dk.com. DK is a brand that you hear about a lot if you had kids in school when they had their, you know, Scholastic Book Drive. DK is a big school, kids' schoolbook brand. Oh, there we go. Oh, there we go. Dorling Kindersley. It just says DK all over this book. Does it say Dorling Kindersley anywhere? See, look at this photograph. That's right in the front of the book. But I have them on birds, fish, eggs and nests. Like there's, I don't even think it says here in the book anymore. It just says DK. Oh yeah, it does down here. Dorling Kindersley in little teeny tiny print that I can barely read because I don't know how my glass is on. I'm supposed to do a bald eagle for my husband one of these days for him to hang in his office.  But I'm loving these, none of these brushes were expensive. I think the Utrecht ones were like $5.99 and the Princeton Snap were $3.99. Buy one, get one for a penny. So these are all, in my opinion, great brushes. The bristles are staying together. They're not displaying. They're not, no bristles are falling out. They are stiff enough to not only do your traditional light stroke painting with, but to scrub a little bit. I'm loving this small filbert brush. Number four, Snap. I'm loving this brush. It's a great size for doing some watercolor painting. McGraw Hill still is a schoolbook brand, Mary. Alrighty. And then, of course, our pilot varsity pen. And you know what? While we're here and we're just chatting, let's try these. So these are all, see, I just put all my brushes away. Let's get one out. All right. So these are the rest of the Prima. The Filbert is my great, my favorite, most favorite flat brush shape. Okay. So these are the pilot, this is the pilot varsity set. You can just buy the pens individually.  But I did get the set so that I could try some of these other colors. So let's do that. This is the blue, red. Now we found these or heard about these when we were in Las Vegas. The girls and I were in Las Vegas. The art supply store there had them selling them individually. They, I only bought black. When I got home, I tried it and I loved it so much that I bought, I had to go to Jetpens and Audemars. These are disposable fountain pens, Mary. So they have a fountain pen nib on them, but they're disposable. They're not expensive, and they have a lot of ink in them. Can you see in the barrel there how much ink is in there? There's a lot of ink in them. And I love a good fountain pen, but I get tired of dealing with the ink cartridges and clogged nibs and all of that other crazy nonsense. So those are all the colors. Now we're going to get some clean water and look. And there's no reason why you can't take these and mix them with your watercolor paint. Turquoise is one of my favorite colors, but black has always been a most favorite color of mine. When I was in school, we didn't know what goth was, but I probably would have been one of them because I wore a lot of black. There is no brown, Mary. There are only these colors. I wish they had a brown because I really do like these paints. Look how great they blend. I love them. They're fabulous. And then, of course, we have the black. I really love them. I want to encourage all of you. Yeah, you could probably mix some of the inks together, like the red, the black, and maybe the green to get sort of a brownish color or the red and the black. We could try that. So you can also use something like these alone or in conjunction with your watercolors. Do a quick little sketch over here. No, that red is really strong. I think you would have to add some of the green. And honestly, I think that would be pain in the neck. Oh, yeah, if you do the red, green, and black, you get something that's closer to brown, Mary. But it would be easier to just add a brown distress marker. So then, you know, you can use something like this. So knowing that it will smear, that it's gonna, it's water reactive, right? And you don't have to react to all of it. You can be careful about where you put your water. Yeah, and get something interesting. Yeah, with just a water reactive pen and a brush. And I would, I would say these kind of pens like this that are water reactive, this is a great way to take a few coloring implements with you. That you can, you know, add, add some colored pens with you to just do journaling with. But you also, if you bring colors, colors that aren't in your travel watercolor palette, then you can add, use them as additional colors for your watercolor. Once it's reactivated, is it permanent? I don't think so. Let's dry it. Um, they do seem to hang on. So these pens are not waterproof. First question, Teresa, these are not waterproof pens. The Marrior question, these are by Pilot. And these are the Pilot Varsity. Here it is on camera, the pen brand. I've heat set these. Now I will say from working with the illustrations for the book that, yeah, Pilot Varsity. Varsity is the model of pen. That once it's dry, especially if it's heat set, it still will move, but it moves less. So see, it will still, it still moves. It's always water reactive. So if you were using this on something that you were going to add more layers on top of, you would probably want to spray this with something like workable fixative before you did that. They should be. I've got mine from JetPens, but I bet if you go to the Pilot website, Mary, you probably could find out Pilot Corporation of America. They're made in Japan. They may have them at your office supply store too. I know I never heard of them before I went to Las Vegas, and they had them at Desert Art Supply. They do have them on Amazon. If you have Amazon primed, if somebody is on the internet right now that is looking for the pens, maybe you can go to Pilot and see if they have them available. Oh, see, look, I have watercolor paint all over my arm. That's just fabulous. You can tell I'm a true artist. I've colored myself. Staples. Does Staples have them in the store? I would guess, I would think Staples would have them, Mary, or if you have Office Depot or Office Max, I would think that I would think that you would be able to find them there. I know you're on a spending freeze. I do watch your videos, and I do save these, by the way, FYI. I either put these in Happy Mail, or I put them in my journal that I'm using to document my year, just so you know, these little sample scraps. Okay, cool. Check Staples. If you only can afford one pen because you're on a budget, I would recommend adding the black one to your stash.  And if you don't have black or purple in your kit, like that one doesn't, this whole set, if you could get the set, this set is a good complement to a small watercolor set like this one, or this Windsor Newton one, because neither one of these have black in them. So if you have a set like these that you're working out of, and you really don't want to add more, you don't want to increase your palette size, because that's not the ideas to have a small one, add some pens to it, because not only can you do some journaling in your book, but you can use these as additional colors, water soluble colors with your paint. It's pro, you know, I have no idea. That's the short answer for that question, Teresa. It may not be light fast is what you're asking, but this is the 21st century. So if you're going to be selling your art, and I don't sell originals in my journals like ever. So I keep all my journals, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be willing to sell this say little bird, but I sell a reproduction. So if you create a painting that you might want to sell, reproduce it, scan it, photograph it, and reproduce it, and then sell the reproduction, that one's going to be good forever. If you're really worried about light fastness, then I would contact Pilot and ask them. I would say that there's probably some things you can do to increase the lifespan of the pen by spraying it with sealers and fixatives and keeping it out of direct sunlight. There probably is, Mary. We probably just don't know about it. But if somebody knows, please, let the rest of us know because we would sure love to do that. But my best advice, if you're doing any kind of mixed media piece, and you are not positive about the light fastness of anything that you've used in that piece, I would recommend scanning it or photographing it and making a digital copy. This is the 21st century after all. You can get really fine art quality reprints these days, probably from a local photo lab, sometimes on canvas and sell those. But if you seal it, if you spray it with a good, you know, spray it with some workable fixative first, then put a couple coats of sealer on it. There are watercolour sealers, and then you put it under glass and you keep it out of direct sunlight. It should be okay. I agree with you, Mary. There's got to be something that we can spray on the page like a spray wax. Wouldn't a spray, a matte spray waxy thing that would dry and yeah, we need one of those spray wax. But if you think about it, this is a pilot pen, a pilot ink. A lot of their inks are fairly light fast. I have, you know, pilot pens have been around forever. And I have notes like written by my grandmother, you know, back in the 1920s, and the ink is still fine. So it's probably going to be fine, but I, you know, it wouldn't hurt to write pilot and ask them, is your pilot varsity ink light fast. Of all of the colors of ink, my guess would be you're more likely to have no issue with the black than you are probably the colors. Because the lighter the color, they're probably the less light fast it is. Glossy and not sticky. Yeah, wow, Mary, you're not asking for much. Yeah, I have some of those too. My grandparents used to keep, you know, budget books. And that was all done in pencil. You can still read some of it, but it's fading. And the paper's yellow. Alrighty, I think that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. We will have to do some investigation on the pilot varsity pen. And I will be posting to my Facebook group any conclusions we come to about light fastness. But yeah, scan, scan, scan any of your artworks that you've done that you love, whether you know for sure that the piece is made with light fast materials or not, I recommend you scan them or photograph them. Always. You never know in life what could happen. And so I recommend having a digital copy. You're welcome, Mary. I'm sorry I broke your spending freeze. I'm sorry. But I think you're going to like this. And especially if you happen to have this in conjunction with, and I love a good fountain pen, but if you have this in conjunction with this one, which is waterproof or the Sharpie marker pen. So these two are waterproof. And being able to use them together, and when I did the illustrations, I use these two. You have lines that you can put on here that you know aren't going to go where they're going to stay with the waterproof pen, then you can add a little bit of the varsity pen that you know is going to blend and add it to the shadows. And if you use them together, right, you're going to get something really unique and really beautiful. And I, my goal always with these live broadcasts is to be instructive not only for you guys, but for me, I learned something new all the time from you guys too. So, and this is another fountain pen. This is the carbon ink pen. I don't have any idea where they have these online. I got mine from Amazon, and it's the only proper ink cartridge filled like fountain pen I have because it's the only one that doesn't get clogged. So I've kept it. All the other ones I returned because they get clogged and they drive me crazy. I have no patience for that. You're welcome. All right, I'm going to go to the gym because they still haven't done that yet. And then get the mail and hope the rest of my stuff is in for journaling. Crazy Analyst I can finish getting my stuff filmed today. That would be fabulous. I got to film October and November. Everybody have a great day.  Don't be afraid to mix your watercolors with your acrylic with your pens and your crayons. Just have fun with it. And the most important thing, go out and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. All right, I'll see you all later. Bye.


Display web links. With Moodle it's very easy to display for all learners links to websites or links to files uploaded online. This saves them having to go and find them themselves. They get a direct link which you the teacher have chosen. One way to do this is by adding a link in the editor by typing, selecting and then linking to our chosen website. We look at that in another video. In this video we explore the URL resource. We enable edit mode top right and either click anywhere on the course page between activities or click add an activity or resource at the bottom of section. This brings up the activity chooser. URL is a resource and we click to go straight to the setup screen or we can click the I to get more information and then press add bottom right. Here we put the name that we wish to give our URL. This is a descriptive term that the students will see on the course page and in external URL we type the actual web address. We can add a description and if we want to display the description on the course page we check the box. There are several other settings that you might like to explore in your own time for instance appearance. How exactly would you like this URL to be displayed? The options you see here are controlled by your admin. In activity completion if we want to track that students have accessed the URL do we want them to manually click to confirm they've seen it or do we want it automatically marked complete when they view the URL? To alert course participants that our URL resource has been added or updated we click send content change notification and then when we click save and return to course we can see that we very quickly added a link to a website for our learners to access.