Up next, I want to invite some folks up that they have a very interesting story about developer experience. And it's not going to be your normal Cloud Foundry developer experience, but they are going to talk about how to use some of the Cloud Foundry technologies in a really unique and novel way. So I'd like to invite Andy Rosequist and Holly Moody from Zipcar to come on on stage. Come on up. All right. Please, please. After you. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Holly. Absolutely. So they walked here from their office. They walked here from their office. So I kind of teased it a little bit and said, you know, you're using something that's perhaps a little bit different than what most folks in the audience are using. We love experimentation and different ideas. And so I want to hear about that. Okay. I want to hear about that. So the gist of it is that we essentially really liked the Lattice project. We said, you know what, let's see if we can take that and actually run it at scale. And so it came in at the right moment in our platform journey that it was what we needed in order to scale. And we were really focused on how can we enable developers to work with a large constellation of microservices at the same time. And so Holly will get to some of that in a little bit, but first I want to give a picture of sort of what our tech stack looks like. So I have this. This is beautiful, by the way. Yeah. Probably the best slide of the day. I'm pretty excited about this. And every time I show this to my team, they're like, no, no, put another X on there because we don't have that one either. So we really love concourse. We really love Bosch and we love Diego and Garden, but we don't like the cloud controller. We don't like that stuff and we rewrote our own. You have a different opinion. Exactly. Yeah. So some of the folks yesterday were talking about, you know, Kubernetes versus Cloud Foundry in terms of Cloud Foundry has more opinions than Kubernetes. We're hyper-opinionated in that sense. And so our sort of deployment orchestrator is all around Docker and it's all around taking all of our services at the same time and letting engineers work on a few of them, but then orchestrating across multiple different deployments. So the facts that I like is we're running 12 Bosch directors and 6,000 container instances in multiple different clouds running three different, completely different products using about half of the same services in the middle. Very cool. I mean, you mentioned hyper-opinion. So let's talk more about that. Sure. So we, in addition to all of the pieces that we love about Cloud Foundry, we also did a bunch of work to build our own SDK that exposes some of the Diego primitives and some of these other bits directly into the application. So if you use our internal SDK, you can get up and running and integrated into this microservice mesh within minutes of starting to write something and it is already able to run in production and deliver value. But that only works if you use RSDK exactly the right way. And so we had to build a lot of work and concourse to make sure that all the things are fitting together in the way that we want them to. And so we, I would say we abandoned a few of the factors of the 12 factor model in order to. I like to think of them as inspirational or aspirational. I mean, the aspirational stuff, like Holly can talk more about some of our continuous delivery maturity stuff. Yeah. So it's wonderful to have the ability to deploy stuff when you want to. But you've got to actually transform a team. And one of the things that we used is a tool called a CD maturity model. And you can find this out on the internet. We just took and lifted that and modified it based on reviewing with the team and having them accept what they want the maturity model to look like. And it's basically a matrix that's a checklist. And it's got things across the horizontal axis of the different stages with the target stage. And then on the vertical axis, there are things like testing, data management, culture. Disaster recovery, all these things. Yep, service management. And so there's different items there that you just sort of check off as you go. And if you get to the target area, then you're in pretty good shape. And it has helped us to be able to have the 100 plus developers deploy apps when they're ready to deploy. So we develop it, we test it. There isn't a separate team. The whole team works together. And we push, you know, an app out to production when it's ready to go. What was the process of kind of rolling that out through the development team? Is it easy? No, change is never easy. We just started it. You build a few champions that believe in it. We as a team, a Zipcar team have still a legacy architecture that is very painful. And so there was motivation to try and transform into something better. And so I think that that's been the biggest thing is being able to have that motivation and to transform into something better. That makes a lot of sense. So one of the things that both of you talked about is how Zipcar is kind of like a, well, you're part of a larger corporation. It's true. Tell us a little bit about that. And this whole multi-cloud buzzword thing has something to do with it. Yeah, so we wanted to be able to operate, to continue to operate like a startup. So Zipcar has been around since 2000, 2001. And we were acquired by Avis budget group in 2013. But we've still maintained a lot of independence in how Zipcar the business works. And so we've always been an agile organization. We've always been doing that type of software development. And then colliding a bit in different ways with parts of Avis budget, we've been able to help demonstrate like opportunities for future for our larger parent organization and as well as take on projects that really fit well with the kind of culture and tech that we've built. And so by using Bosch at our underlayer, we're able to portably move our workloads depending on what kinds of, whether it's regions of the world that we need to support or whether it's contracts that we found, oh, it's really cheap if you can run in this cloud. Okay, well, let's figure out how to do that. So the story that I like to tell is that there was a point when we were running in three different VMware environments and one of them was really bad. And I won't shame why, but it took us two weeks from the point that we said, you know, this is so bad, we need to get out of it. We moved an entire production stack into AWS and we're up and running things to Bosch and then building everything right up. Yeah. So last night, you were talking a little bit about one of your troubleshooting techniques. Yeah. Sometimes when easily like the second or third option that we do is just burn the whole thing down and rebuild it. Give it half an hour and then everything's better. And redeploy all, you know, 50, 60 services, redeploy all of the cells, just everything. It's sort of like when you call up a help desk and, you know, they say, well, have you tried turning it off and back on again? Exactly. We're just reboot the whole div environment. It'll be fine. That's really interesting. It's really interesting. So I actually kind of wanted to dig in just a little bit more into the idea of this, you know, this hyper opinion. Because, you know, I brought you up, I was talking about how developer productivity is sort of the general theme of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. We're very focused on developers. And the fact that you're hyper opinionated is interesting. Now, it's going to be specific to Zipcar. Exactly. How does that play out? I mean, what's the process of a new developer coming in and learning what opinions they're supposed to have play out? Yeah. So I think that as a team, we pull people onto a team and collaborate. There's a lot of pairing that goes on. But as far as, you know, sort of developer productivity and ease within our environment, we have a couple of tools that were built up. One primarily is the ability for a developer to work locally on an app and be able to debug it. But because it's a microservice architecture, you have to connect to a bunch of different microservices. And so this part of our, we call it a Savannah architecture, is able to, you are able to start up your app locally, debug it locally against services that are deployed in a Savannah instance somewhere else. Very neat. And just to work clear, Savannah is the aggregate kind of platform. Yeah. So Savannah is essentially our replacement for the Cloud Controller and the CFCLI. So we have a Savannah CLI called SAV and we have a Savannah API that basically fulfills the role of the Cloud Controller. And one of the opinions we have is that all of our RPC between microservices goes over messaging queues. And so because we have this messaging queue that allows all of the RPC to happen in a developer environment, you can tear down the sort of data center hosted instance of the app that you're working on and connect your own laptop into the message queue that that instance was running in so that your teammates can then go and browse to the thing that's running on your laptop via the data center and get all of the other 50 services running there. So you don't need 50 services running on your laptop and you don't need to build the smaller mocks there. You can say, you know what, I'm just going to connect into all of them and get a full suite of everything that's running exactly as it is in production. But just my thing is different. I think that's the reality of microservices architecture. It's both really powerful, but also kind of make things a little bit more complicated. You think about more moving parts and we need the right tooling in place. It's fascinating to hear about that. And that's actually part of what the CD maturity model was about was, what kinds of things you have to put in place. And testing is a very large piece of that in order to deploy something reliably out to production. You've got to have multiple layers of testing and the CD maturity model talks to a lot of that also to the infrastructure as software, which allows Andy to do what he's talking about. Burn it down, start it up again. But testing and I wanted to talk about, I talked about the developer testing, but there's one other kind of testing that we do to validate that our apps are viable out in production. And that's called journey testing. And we actually run these tests out in production. And the idea of these particular tests are to validate your primary money making paths. So you don't test everything. You're actually doing business as Zipcar, right? Right. And so you want to be able to validate that your production architecture is running for your users. And you want to find a problem before your users find it. So we have these things called journey tests that run every 10 minutes. And, you know, let us know if there's a problem out in production. That's really neat. And they're orchestrated by Concourse because we love Concourse. Yes. Very cool. Very cool. So this is really has been a fascinating story to hear about, in particular for me, because it's been inspiring about how you're using components of the architecture. You're achieving very similar goals to most of the organizations here. You just happen to have a hyper-opinion, you know, hyper-opinionated approach. But we're really happy as a community that Zipcar is getting some value out of the Cloud Foundry software. So I want to thank you both very much for coming. Well, so if you want to hear more about what we're doing. Yeah. So 1205, I think it is Concourse all of the things at all of the times. Is our quality engineering manager talking about how the way that I put it is that how we achieve a CF push like experience, but using Concourse to build containers that we then run in Diego. Very neat. Yeah. Very neat. Well, thanks again. I really appreciate you both coming. Thank you. So about a round of applause. Holly, Andy, thank you so much for coming. Thank you very much. Cheers.


Right so yeah this is the native GTK UE which limited to the dialogues so first we'll do the usual demo that the OpenGL transitions are still working which they are so what was native in 6.0 was the the file dialogue which has always been native the tooltips became native in 6.0 popovers which are used in impress and they're used in calc as well and then the menu bar menus became fully native menu bar and menu in 6.0 coming on then the 6.1 we are I made all of the message dialogues native as well and then a handful of the simpler dialogues such as insert break there so they all became native dialogues as well now moving on to 6.2 sorry and 6.1 also more complicated warning dialogues are also native as well such as this PDF expert dialogue all right so 6.2 then what we have is 180 or so generic dialogues they're the simple ones that just have one page in the dialogue and then there's about 41 dialogues that contain multiple tabs and then there's about a hundred plus actual tabs and they're all combined together in multiple ways different dialogues will use different tabs and the same tab will reappear in different dialogues so the background tabs the background tab will reappear in about paragraph dialogue character dialogue and so on so in 6.2 which is released I think what is it soon enough anyway pretty much from my perspective all of the major dialogues are converted over to native GTK dialogues so that's the page dialogue in writer character dialogue format page etc etc there's a few ones that are still large dialogues that are not converted that I get to at the end but you'll definitely get the overall feel hopefully of fully native GTK dialogues until you start exploring some of the edge cases and some of the character dialogues in particular so here's an example of what the format character looks like when it's a GTK dialogue so what has changed here especially is that obviously in the GTK one where you have up there it says a liberation Sarif in the GTK entry and underneath it you have a GTK tree view there are two separate widgets that are now working together previously in the VCL land there was a single exploded GTK exploded VCL combo box where the drop-down list and the combo box entry were part of the same widget they're now two separate widgets which means that in practice that when you tab between them you're tapping twice there's two different elements there people seem to be reasonably happy with that they haven't noticed and haven't complained about it versus a lot of other things that have been complained about that we get to in a bit right it's a quick summary of how we got here which isn't that interesting at this point but we converted the file format that the widgets are described in from a legacy file format to GTK builder file format as the first step and that was described in terms of GTK widgets but actually implemented with the VCL widgets we added some extra layout widgets so we could get all that dynamic layout support and we could reuse then the Glade Guru Editor which gives us whatever that large number of individual files described in the second step then is the translation file format again we migrated from that legacy transition file format to the same file format that everybody else's uses for their translations the PO-AMO combination that's another large piece of work which went relatively smoothly considering the size of it that has given us as a side effect the ability to handle plurals in our translations which we hadn't before so that's a kind of a little cherry that we finally got working that we finally implemented for 6.2 as a kind of a payback to translators for the pain of getting this far but it now can get their plurals working properly which is a side effect of what I was doing right so given now that everything is in the GTK builder file format and that the translations are in the expected MO file format you can then in theory at least load up those converted files that are in the GDIs with the native GTK support for doing that and you get the native GTK dialogues out the end and a little bit of a transitional API between the VCL stuff and the GTK stuff and it all works beautifully which all VCL stuff as the fallback for the platforms that aren't using GTK windows and Mac as well as the not interested in GTK things like KD and so on so the fallback is there and salutes case a couple of problems with all that of course is that because we had used the GTK builder file format but written our own parser for that a few areas are kind of fuzzy as to what they mean obviously if you do implementations they went two different ways so for example we're using GTK adjustments just to set the initial values for spin buttons whereas in the case of GTK once you actually map a button to that adjustment if you to map the same adjustments they're locked together so you had to go back over all those spin buttons that were sharing GTK adjustments and just duplicate them again as to when you have a bunch of radio buttons together as to which one is the leader of the group is a little bit of kind of a fuzziness over how that works so we had done a different way than the way GTK does it's up you just go back and redo those that UIs to do it the way GTK expects and the thought to do a custom widget so custom widgets needed to be manipulated a little bit so we can have a bridge between GTK there and we ended up with the same API we have for our existing VCL window you can inherit from a new thing a custom widget controller if you have a custom widget typically previews a couple of small interactive things and you can keep the same you can inherit from a new thing and everything should work the way it worked when you inherited from our old VCL window accessibility was difficult a long story but it works for those custom widgets for the native widget to use the native GTK stuff I don't know if there's anybody here from GTK but if there is these were the three issues that I had a problem with at Fuzzdom not Fuzzdom but at the Brafus conference that have been solved in a fragile way that works for now but may not be long term great first one is a straight forward bug if there is enough if under wayland if there's enough entries in the GTK combo box at some point the GTK combo box will not GT combo boxes menu will not appear when you click on the button the bug URL is there is a couple of bit of complexity over the set of circumstances in which it arises but it will arise once the menu gets long enough and the selected entry is far enough down the menu but it just so happens that if you just manipulate the combo box in the right way you can get it to that to not happen so we can use this little hack at about 30 entries in and it affects slightly the GTK combo box menu placement so it's not as beautiful when you get to over those 30 entries as it would be if the bug didn't exist but at that point it's better to have a menu than a perfect placement. So that one is resolved in that sense though it would be nice to get fixed upstream. The other obvious one is type ahead in a GTK combo box both when it is just a combo box with no menu appeared you want to be able to we want to be able to type into it so we can select the next entry in the list automatically that's straight forward enough you can just listen to the key precedent and then you can run it through our existing quick selection engine the same mechanism we used for the VCL one so if we were happy how the old one works then we have to be equally happy how the new one works. The problem there then is that when the menu is active in the old VCL situation you could type into the menu and you could automatically select the entry there couldn't do that with the GTK one but people wanted to do that but you don't actually have direct access to GTK menu from the GTK combo box we're not supposed to care about that but there is an accessibility API there and GTK combo box get pop up accessibility and once you have that you can cheat and you can get the accessibility get widget from that and that gives you the GTK menu that you're not supposed to have access to but you can get access to it and then you can install all the stuff you want so that works perfectly fine but it's potentially fragile in the future. Yeah notebooks this was the big one yes I got five pages on I got five pages on GTK notebooks and the hardest there's nothing really wrong with the GTK notebook the GTK is notebook there's nothing wrong with it but we have used and in our tab control we have kind of abused it a lot and we have multiple multiple tabs in these things so what works against us in the GTK one is that the default default theme that I use and most of Fedora uses and a lot of people the other way the team has got really large font and padding so each tab takes up a lot of spaces that's that's so it's big on our side we have a load of tabs and dialogues we have 16 tabs in the impressed style dialogue so no matter what there's a there's a lot of tabs there and that so first thing I tried was just the built-in stuff in the GTK notebook first just say that we put scrolling tabs at the top so when the tabs don't fit in the notebook you get these two scrolling things on each side but when you do that you can't see all of your tabs at the same time so you know we used to be able to see them now everybody's unhappy you can't see them okay then in some themes let's say like the default your bunter teams and tabs are quite small you say well there's all the space going to waste at the top so let's keep putting tabs into the top until it no longer fits and at that point if they no longer fit switch to putting them down horizontally down the left hand side again the the GNOME HHI the human interface guide suggests that when you get to over eight tabs you put them down the left side right across the top but again you come up with like that impressed dialogue where you have 16 tabs and they're not going to fit all the way down the left side either so again there's significant push back there all right so let's try the double-decker tabs the same double-decker tabs that you have in the VCL version and see can we do something there we use two notebooks one at top of the other no content here in the top one content here in the bottom one and see how you go with that but you're definitely there then the notebook always have to have one active tab and that active tab is out of place if you have you know one active tab in the bottom supposed to be no active tab in the top and I see then you try to look at ways of maybe getting rid of that active tab you can block signals to the notebook to let it know you can select the active tab and you can then block signals to the notebook remove the active tab so that that notebook can be tricked into not picking a new active tab success you think that's great but then the draw callback of notebook will refuse to draw anything if there's no active tab except of course if you're actually dragging your active tab to another window so you're wondering maybe you know can you can you position the GTK notebook in some way that you know it thinks it's in a drag and drop state and refuses to draw the draws the rest of the tabs not the active tab that doesn't work anyway because that just pressures and all sorts of horrible ways so it was a bad idea in the first place you know so let's see if that active tab you know and maybe just pretend it's there for some sort of reason if you can't get rid of it so there's this active tab at the top right there with a kind of a down arrow on it or something that's indicating that the the next row is active yeah okay yeah so that wasn't very popular either but the good bit is that all the tabs are now visible at the same time all the tabs are back to the top but this extra one is is of no use to anybody yeah so let's try and seek to be themed into oblivion so yeah let's just team it into invisibility in zero by zero size and now we're back to double-decker tabs like you had traditionally with the VCL ones except now rather than being themed to look like the GTK ones they are the GTK ones and you can keystroke between them all when you get to the end of the bottom row it restarts at the next row and it all works fairly seamlessly so yeah that's finally in for six to two so notebooks were a major struggle all right so let's like to I think I've done this a few times before but just in case anybody hasn't seen what the progress is this here is an example of a popover wherever you use calcunos popover appears as you type along and give it a tints yeah I think native they've been around since 6.1 so we see them all now as well the native message dialogues obviously at this point it's actually now this year now that we're there's a native tooltip as well this year if the quality good enough to actually see animations in the presentation I think it is you can see that they're animated checkboxes and things like that let's see if we do form a table yeah we've got an overlay scroll bar here as well now so you get all the the good stuff a side effect of all this as well as that preview widgets like this on high dpi on GTK high dpi cases come automatically high dpi so fuzziness disappears from a lot of these widgets once they get converted over like this yeah I think I've shown the screenshot of the tab dialogues and just key stroking between them shows that they do like the older ones did and at all keystroke accessible okay that's a tabbed one yes so also as well small little bits and pieces should be able to show that we have the icons for spell checking or available in the native GTK combo menu just like the preview silver and small little thing that you now have if you export as pdf for example or anything that has a password control that if you accidentally hit the cap locks you get the built-in GTK cap stock indicator on thing so you're getting the smaller benefits as well as the obvious ones and yeah and one of the most recent things and kind of fits in with this morning's talk is very most recent thing we have here is that now the firefox persona team integration thing will work with the native GTK menu as well so up here in the menu bar the native GTK menu is drawing the top portion of that background team in picture and then the vcl classic stuff from the controls down is drawing the bottom half of it so that integration now finally works as well so that works so that's the walkthrough the list of the walkthrough yeah so what's left to do as i said earlier is if most of the major dialogues are done what's left now is that um that insert table context dialogue and the insert section dialogue and writer are the two dialogues left that are causing a little bit of difficulty the difficulty in the writer one is the preview widget i have a version for the preview widget renders but the size of the preview widget is very odd and you're ruining a kind of a captive version of full version a captive instance of writer to render that preview and it's not interacting well with things but we'll get there in the end and the other one is the insert section dialogue where there's a condition entry and the condition entry itself is the only custom it's the only custom widget have come across so far that have made an effort at at least that has a dragon a custom dragon drop handler so and that's not something that i've implemented yet so i need to implement support for custom dragon drop to do that dialogue that's straight forward enough the insert table of contents is just a buggy at the moment i can get there in the end the a lot of the calc dialogues have a kind of a shrink to specific entry and button feature that's not particularly difficult to do it's just i haven't done it yet which means that a lot of the smaller calc dialogues are are blocked on implementing that and then the last other one is the calcs insert head or footer is using an edit engine in a unique way that that nothing else is using so those are like the four blockers so apart from that thing that's why what isn't converted yet remains as it is once they're out of the way i expect that things will be completed pretty rapidly i think that is yes that is pretty much all i have to tell you okay have anybody got any what does anybody have any questions on that is it great background is it the issue or the is it your here uh visible here someplace yes where down here something is it the only the only the top menu bar here is in your style in a in is it on screen here yeah yeah yes only the in this screen only the menu bar is native ggk the other two rows are the vcl stuff pretending to be ggk and the problem with teeming there is one of the reasons why this teeming never works so yeah yeah eventually getting these all native is doable as well but you have to work kind of from the outside in like we get native toolbars and then be able to get native bits and pieces end up with a native score bar that this score bar here is not a native score bar but i think it is possible to eventually end up with all these as native bits and then these is like like the custom widget thing we put together for those dialogues you'd have this uh writer would be a custom widget with a native toolbar on the right hand side and so on so it's all it's all doable but that is another step for another day once the dialogues are all under control if ever anything else sorry yes yeah i don't know um i think that's not out yet i mean i mean but oh i think anything at the widget level will be mostly okay unless for instance that accessibility one that i mentioned the if that's removed for example that make things a bit more awkward but i think anything at that widget level will be fine and our difficulties will be more likely at the pre-existing stuff we have for our existing kind of fake stuff i think that'll be where it'll be more difficult where for instance we had this big kaira canvas that we draw everything to and then we blit that in the draw how that's going to work in in gdk4 i mean i've asked some people to say that'll keep working but it'll no longer be the preferred way of doing things so i think this work would be okay and i think our prior work from before this uh which is still necessary will be may require rework okay thank you


What is the first thing you notice when you meet a person? Just everything. Everything. Past, present and future. Is it more important to do what you love or love what you're doing? See, if you're an intelligent person, you will try to do what you love most.  If you could be invisible for a day, what would you do? You wouldn't know.


Hey there, my name is Allison. Welcome to The Tiny Herd, where we talk about everyday pet care for guinea pigs, rabbits, and other small pets. Some of the most popular videos on my channel are my cleaning videos, whether I'm cleaning my entire pet room or just my cages. But on those videos, I get a lot of questions about the different cleaning supplies that I use. So in today's video, I'm going to be taking you through my top five cleaning products that I use with my pets. All right, so I do want to say really quickly that nothing in this video is sponsored. These are just the things that I really like to use and have made my life so much easier when it comes to pet cleaning and just cleaning in general. So let's just go ahead and jump into the products, and I'll tell you what they all are and why I prefer them.  A lot of people ask me why I use a litter scoop instead of a brush in a dustpan, and really it's just personal preference. A handheld brush and a dustpan will work just fine. You can get them at the dollar store, but I like to use a litter scoop that's meant for like a cat litter box, because it tends to get the hay off of the fleece a little bit better in my opinion. You just use it sideways to scoop the poops up into the dustpan, just like you would a brush. But I think that scooping motion, it kind of scrapes the hay off of the fleece. It doesn't affect my fleece at all, but it works really well for getting the hay up. So I just prefer that method over using a brush. I just think it takes a little bit less time, and it's a little bit faster and easier to get all that hay cleaned up. So that is why I use a litter scoop instead of a brush, but that is for sure my number one cleaning product since I use it every single day to spot clean my cages. The second thing I want to mention is probably a little bit weird if you've never heard about this before, but it is actually white vinegar. So I buy the big gallon jugs of white vinegar from the grocery store. It's really cheap and it works as a really, really effective and safe cleaning product for your pets. So I use it for wiping down my cages, cleaning the bunny litter box. I can even throw it in the washing machine with my liners if they're getting kind of smelly or I want to get them extra clean. So this works really well. You just mix it 50% water, 50% vinegar and put it in a spray bottle and that will work perfect to wipe down your cages or any litter boxes or anything like that. Pretty much any pet surface, you can wipe down with that and it gets it pretty clean. The only downside of using vinegar is it doesn't smell great because it smells like vinegar. So a lot of times when I'm done wiping down cages, I will take a damp paper towel and just go back over it to kind of like rinse it off and get rid of that smell because your pets probably don't really like that smell either. So that's the only thing that's kind of a con with that. But other than that, it is a great cleaning solution. I use it to clean my cages and my litter box, like I said, it works really well. So highly recommend that and it's very cheap. The next thing I want to mention is definitely my shop vac. So this is a little bit more expensive, but it's something that I highly, highly recommend. It has made my life so much easier, especially with all of the hay. So I will link the shop vac that I have down below, as well as one that is a little bit smaller. If you live in an apartment, the smaller one can be a really good option. Or if you just don't have as many pets. I used to use this one when I lived in an apartment and it worked really well to get the hay out of my carpet.  So they can handle a little bit bigger of pieces instead of clogging up your normal vacuum. So this has made my life so much easier. I highly recommend them. They're so worth the money. It's going to save you money in the long run because you're not constantly breaking a nicer vacuum. So again, highly recommend. I could not live without this thing with the number of pets that I have now. So shop vac is definitely on the list. The next thing I want to mention is this pet hairbrush. I don't really know what to call it. Basically it is this metal brush type thing that you can use on furniture or carpet or really anything that is going to be okay to brush on it. But it works really well to get pet hair out of things. So with having a long haired bunny and just having two white rabbits in general, their hair is pretty obvious when it starts to stick to things. So this brush has worked really, really well for us to get hair out of the carpet and off of bedding and off the bottom of furniture and things like that. So I don't even know how I found this thing. I think my boyfriend found it on Amazon or like in an Instagram ad. But it works really well. It came in a pack of two and it's worked great. We mostly use it for getting hair out of carpet or in the places where the bunnies lay the most, we'll use it there so that we're not constantly just having like a film of hair, bunny hair on things. So if you have bunnies, I highly recommend this, especially if they're free roam and they get hair all over your stuff. And then the last thing I want to mention is my carpet cleaner. So I actually have a like handheld carpet cleaner. It's more of a spot cleaner. It's not like a big vacuum size one that can do a whole room. But it works really, really well if you have bunnies or if you just need like a more specific like spot cleaner type carpet cleaner. And it has worked really well for me. I honestly don't know what I did before it. It's made my life so much easier, especially having free roam rabbits. Sometimes they just randomly decide that there's a new place that they want to be their bathroom. And they'll just do that. And I have to clean it up before I can move a litter box into that spot. So this carpet cleaner has worked super well for that. It cleans really well. It really, really does. And it's worked on so many different messes. We use it when our dog makes messes in the basement as well. And it's just worked great. So I highly recommend this as well, especially if you have free roam rabbits or really if you just have dogs or cats or even if you just have kids that makes messes in your house. It works super well and it's super easy to just pick up and carry around. So highly recommend that as well. So thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you enjoyed and got some ideas on cleaning products you can use with your pets. Everything that I mentioned in this video will be linked down below as well as any other relevant links. Let me know what your favorite cleaning products are down below in the comments and I will see you guys in my next video. Bye.


Yeah, they create an advantage for us because they create dilemmas for our adversaries. They expand our weapons capabilities, they expand our reach for us, and they allow us to provide a defense in depth, either an offensive strike capability or a defensive capability. Man to unmanned teaming is where we're going to align with the CNO's unmanned campaign plan. We're excited to go in that direction.


Start your new year off right with this brand new 60 minute all levels flow and stretch class by me Bryce Elizabeth Watson. This class is guaranteed to get you sweaty and to get your blood pumping. In this class I will be combining fundamental yoga postures along with physical therapy and basic movement to help you detox the best way possible. Because this is an all-levels class I will be giving modifications for postures that are more intermediate. You will also be queued when to observe and integrate the study of spirituality within the physical body in the form of exercise. I invite you to join me on the esoteric health and wellness series exclusively on Gnostic TV as we together use our own bodies to rediscover the magic and the truth that lies within our bones. This is the second of many many different workout videos to come again exclusively on Gnostic TV in the esoteric health and wellness series. It is my hope that all these videos and the information that they contain help your life and change your life like it has helped and changed mine. See you over on Gnostic. To watch this show and get access to all shows on the Gnostic TV Network just click the link in the description below.


Hello friends! How are we doing? It is time for the final episode of Wrapped Up Retro in December. That is not correct. Don't worry, we'll be having one episode every month in the first half next year. I think we've had mixed luck with the books that we've had so far so I'm intrigued to see what our final book is going to be. I don't know, I don't know no predictions. I don't know what it's going to be. Yeah, shall we just choose a book? Shall we just choose a book? Shall we just choose a book? Shall we just choose a book? I haven't really been drawn to this one that was just sitting on top but I don't know if that's too easy. This one? Oh don't fall. It's gonna fall. Okay well we're just living with it. Maybe this? Oh my god guys this is hard. No I'm gonna go for this. I'm gonna go for this. I'm gonna go for whatever this is. Pinky's just so horrible. Okay all right let's see. Can you see what it is? Okay interesting. Interesting. So this is uprooted by Naomi Novik. I haven't actually read anything from Naomi Novik ever. I think this is gonna be a good wintery one. Enchanted forest, villages. Okay this is gonna be a good wintery pick but I've earned this for a long time and I think people, I think on Goodreads this is marked as a series but everyone tells me it's not a series this in Spinning Silver and that Spinning Silver's better and you should just, I don't understand how it works. I don't get it because I originally thought they were a series that's why I got uprooted first but everyone says oh it's not a series. You can just read Spinning Silver so I don't know what's going on but I'm excited to read this. This is one that a lot of people recommended me based on my taste in thrillers so I'm excited. I'm excited to see what I think of this and I think it will be a good wintery read. So let's get into it. Let's start uprooted and see what we think. Third to six weeks later. Okay hi. This is somewhere I've never been before. I honestly don't know how much I've spoken about this on the channel. Like I know I've spoken a lot about it to my Patreon and I think I've mentioned it once or twice on the channel but Tom and I have moved across the country. I'll tell you another country. We're in Wales. We've moved to Wales for about two months for Tom's job and I've come with him because I just reached. So I've accompanied him and yeah we're going to be living in this flat for the next two months. We got here a couple days ago and we love it. It's very nice. It's a lovely little flat. We've got a little kitchen back here. It's a little sitting area, a TV, a bedroom upstairs. You'll see it throughout. I don't want to do like a tour because we've lived in it for two days but you'll see it throughout the vlog. It's coming. We're going to be here for two months. So we got here Friday afternoon. We spent Saturday and Sunday kind of just unpacking, living our lives, you know, getting situated. And it's Monday. So I have tried to read. I think I started this on Friday. I've read it which you just saw me unwrap. If I speak I am in big trouble. In big trouble. And I've been trying to read it over the weekend. I have not wanted to. I'm so bored guys. I'm on page 117. I did want to get like in these vlogs I like to just check and do like every third of the book. I don't know what it is about my personality. I really like to check and do like an equal point. So like every 140. I Google what is a third of the book? You know, I work it out. Not Google. I calculate. And then I check with you like all that time but I can't even make it there. I need to just talk to you because I'm so bored. I have not wanted to read this. There's my YouTube watch later. It's overflowing. I've got like 200 videos on there. There's so much I want to watch. I'd much rather watch a video than read this. I thought I would love this. I thought I would love this. Basically this book is about a girl who lives in this little village and there's this dragon. He's called the dragon, but he's a wizard. He's a man, I think, who every 10 years takes a young woman from the village to go live in his house. She has to go live there, right? And she's chosen. She's not supposed to be chosen.  And he's like teaching her magic. Maybe she's good at magic. I don't this book doesn't need to exist. I don't understand why it exists. Here's the thing. So often I reach fantasy that I love, right? Where people like, the criticism people give of it when they don't like those books, nothing happens. Nothing happens, right? People say that about Aaron Morgensen. I love Aaron Morgensen's books, the style I see in the night circles. People like nothing happens in those books. Valid. But I love the writing. The writing, this is doing absolutely nothing for me. I've never read anything by Naomi Naomi Noeva before. But so many people recommended this and Spinning Silver to me when I loved the Bear and the Nightingale. People think they're quite similar, you know, like kind of with a village, perhaps Russian influence, grim fairy tales, magic, whatever. This is not on Catherine Arden's level. The Bear and the Nightingale when it meets uprooted. You know, you really jumped out the window when you compared yourself to me. Girl, we don't even look alike. Smell alike. We don't know none of the same people. We don't go to none of the same places. We don't even do brunch together. I've taken to calling, I've just dropped the book.  But I'm so bored. If I, if this wasn't like a one book vlog, like these wrapped up retro vlogs are, I would DNF this. I would DNF it. I can't believe I have believed for so long that this was going to be like a five-star for me. I was going to love it. Absolutely not. Why does this book exist? Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening and the writing isn't great. Girlie, the main girlie's annoying me. The dragon's annoying me. Everyone's annoying me. I don't like any of you people. Why does this exist? That's my question. Anyways, I am going to try and continue this. I want to get like two thirds of the way through today. I want to check in with you again this evening. So I'm going to get through as much as I can. I'm actually just about to go and try and prep some Minestrone soup the rest of the week for lunches because I love Minestrone soup. It's really like cozy. So I'm going to go and try and prep that and I will continue listening to your book. I'll force myself and I would much rather watch YouTube. Well, actually I've, I've just been watching Kayla's latest video. So I might finish that. That's a little treat. And then I'll read more of this, but I'm really not enjoying it, guys. I'm really not enjoying it. But we must read it because I need to get this vlog to you. And that's the whole point of Wrapped Up Retro, right? These books really exist on my TBR for so long. They've languished on my TBR for so long. And the point of these vlogs is to see, was I missing out on something or was I not missing out? And I don't think I was missing out. But who knows? I'm only 100 whatever pages in, but it already just feels so long and so meandering. I'm not enjoying it. I'm going to go and make Minestrone soup. So come with me. I think I've got this last little bit less. I have so many thoughts. I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to say to you. Like I don't know, where do we start with this? Also, I realized I haven't clarified that this was supposed to be the last book of Wrapped Up Retro in December. But then I got ill in December. So this got pushed to being January's book. I feel that in the intro. I hope you haven't managed to cut most of the intro. I'm like, this is the last book of December. But in case I didn't, it didn't make sense. That's what happened. I'm still really not liking it. Zero character development. Wooden cardboard cutouts. Yep, yep. Wooden cardboard cutouts of characters. I have no attachment to any of them. Our main girlie, I couldn't even tell you her name. She is like the chosen one. This might be mild spoilers. Mild spoilers. The stuff I'm referring to is more what happened in the first 100 pages, still that I have more thoughts on where the book has carried on and it's made me think about that earlier stuff. So not really, but like, if you really care, everything is easy for her. Everything is easy for her. She, the dragon, who is the dragon? Why name a character the dragon if he's not going to be a dragon? That should be our first question. The dragon is like the most powerful wizard of all the ages. And like in the week, it's like, oh yeah, I can cast spells as well as him. Yeah, get out of here. Get out. It's so annoying. Everything comes easy. There's never any struggle. There's never any tension of like, is she going to get through this? Because I know she will. It's the kind of book that is like, it really thinks it's it. It really thinks it's it.  And like stuff is happening, but I could not care less. Like it's got the plot beats. It's got here's the character arc, but there's no flesh to it. There's no heart to it. I'm just reading. I'm reading like the first draft and it's too long. It's also it's way too long. It's way too long for nothing to be happening. Nothing to be happening. I'm really not enjoying it. I can't believe I was going to love this. I thought I was going to absolutely love this. You know, it sounds crazy. And indeed it was. Please, if you have read this and spinning silver, should I still give spinning silver a chance because I know so many people love that? Or should I just not? Because this is so boring. And it's blurred by like Robin Hobb and Ursula Le Guin. Like what is going on? What is going on?  The writing's boring. I'm so sorry. Guys, my reading has not got off to a good start this year. This is only going to be the third book I finish this year also. And it is the 20, what, 23rd of January? I've stopped reading apparently. I've stopped reading. I've just stopped reading. Okay, I'm going to finish it. Will we convene with my final thoughts?  Like this is, it's really bad for me out here. I'll see you in a bit. Okay, I finished it. But at what cost? I didn't need to finish it. I did nothing to my life. In fact, it's subtracted from my life. Finishing this book. I am so confused. Thank God it's off my tee beyond I finished it. That is the pro of wrapped up retro.  They put me through purgatory.  There is like 50 pages of battle scenes that are just so tedious to get through. Like, I don't care. Maybe it's one of its because I don't care, right? But also I think it just wasn't written well. Like there was no, it was just plodding onwards and all this happens and this blows up and then this person stabbed and then this and the characters I didn't care about that no one cares about no one cares about not just me.  I'm giving it two stars. I'm giving it two stars. The reason it's not one star is because I kind of reserve my one stars now for things that I think are like, is it a one? No. Am I about to give this a one star? I think can I give this a one star? Do you know what? Yeah, I'm giving this a one star. Am I giving it, no, come on, let's be, did I have any enjoyment from it? No, I'm gonna give it a one star. Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. I just want us to still take a moment beyond this. Is it a one? I don't want to accept it. I'm gonna give this a one star. That is my level of enjoyment, right? I do not necessarily think maybe it's a two in terms of like quality, but in terms of enjoyment, I did not enjoy a single part of this. I just want us all to take a moment to realize the fact I've read three books this year. I read Emily Wilds, which I gave three stars. I read Godkiller, which was for my book club, my Patreon book club, which I've given two stars. I've given this a one star.  I can't get any worse. But that means my average rating for you so far is two stars. Two stars. Two stars. I've been set up to fail. What is going on? Why am I hating everything? I really did not enjoy this at all. At all. I thought it was incredibly boring. Her sidekick friend is so much more interesting than she is, and should have been the main character. And the fact that I've cut out a part in the last check-in, I was like, this isn't a romance. There's no romance here. I was like comparing it to the dynamic in The Burning Lighting Girl, if you know that with the Winter King and the dragon. You know, I think that's why people make the comparison. I was like, this ain't a romance. Is there this ain't a romance in the room with us anymore? Mild spoilers again. I can't contain it.   And this thing, I love a good grump sunshine romance. As you guys know, that's my favorite kind of trope. This ain't grump. This is just mean and not getting along. You know in grump sunshine is that there's chemistry. There's moments of like, you know, joviality and getting along compliments behind the grumpy facade. That ain't that. It's nowhere to be seen. I don't think he's necessarily a bad guy, but there's nothing there. There's no, stop trying to, same thing happened in God killer. Stop trying to make romances happen when romances don't need to happen in fantasy. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. What a terrible start to my reading year guys. Then the video I'm doing next, I am hoping, the whole premise of the video I'm doing next is to get me some better ratings. I'm really hoping it will, but I'm feeling nervous and it won't.  One star. Anyways, that is the end of another episode of Wrap Top Bright Show. This is episode four. We will do 10 episodes in total throughout the year, so I can't work out what month it will lead up to, but you can do the math. July will be our last episode maybe. I don't know. So we'll keep going. We'll keep unwrapping the oldest books on my TBR. If you enjoyed this video, please make sure to like and comment. It helps boost it in the algorithm. If you enjoyed this book, please tell me why, because I don't get it. I'm having problems with my reading guys. So please also help me out. I'm gonna actually do a community post tomorrow, the day after this video goes live, asking for your guys' help. So keep your eyes out for that because I need it, but I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye!


Hi stampers! Welcome to Watch It Weekly Wednesday. I'm Jill. I'm here to show you a fun technique using the 3D embossing folders on your cardstock. So I'm going to show you how to custom color this. So I've already ran the layered florals 3D embossing folder through the basic white cardstock. And I'm going to use these little sponge stoppers to custom color it. So I've got Fresh Frisia, Granny Apple Green, and I also have Lemon Lolli. So they're kind of those spring colors, really pretty. So I'm going to go ahead and start with my lightest color first, which is the Lemon Lolli. And I'm going to get that ink on there. And I'm going to go ahead and do all these little flowers. And I'm just going to do like a circle around them. It's okay if you get some of the other colors on the other parts of the other flowers. It's not going to, it's actually going to look really kind of pretty and more like a chalk look. Because it's got the, you know, you've got some other colors there that it's getting on the residual area. And I will get the greenery later. So I'm just going to do all the flowers. And you'll notice some of them are light and dark. Okay, so I've got those flowers done. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the greenery next. And this is Granny Apple Green. And there's only, I'm, I, these could be green right here, but I'm going to actually treat them as part of the flowers. So we just have a little bit of greenery. And that's these little itty bitty leaf areas right here by the little flowers. I'm just doing this softly. You can do it as if you want a deeper color. I'm just kind of making it like really airy looking I think. And you can go over the color that you already did as far as like if you want to make sure you want it darker. It's always better to start lighter. So we've got that. I just love those colors right there. Okay, now the fresh frieze. I'm going to move these stamp pads so I don't get in them. I like how you can put these on your finger. And it's just super simple. Okay, now I'm going to go ahead and start. And I'm going to just do this in a circular motion. So let's say you want a really light color, fresh frieze. Then you could just do that. But I wanted a little darker. So I'm going to put it a little more into it, a little more muscle into it to get that color that I want. And I'm going to do all those flowers the same way. And I think it would be fun to go ahead and take your Winkistella and go on these little spots right there to make them give them an extra bit of sparkle. I do love sparkles. So it's okay if it gets off like this. It just gives it pretty soft look. Isn't it neat that you can see the detail as you're going out in the light and dark? I mean, there's no right or wrong way with this. That's why I think it's such a pretty technique to do with those 3D embossing folders. Because you can use any, I mean, basically custom coloring it. You can do it on the same color by doing the same technique. And if I want this a little darker, I can come in here and just add a little bit more color in the center on these. Okay, we've got a few more here. Oh, so pretty. This layered florals 3D embossing folder. I just love it. It's in our new mini catalog. So pretty. But there are many floral embossing folders too. You can do the same thing with. Done all the fresh Frisia color. Now I want to do the center of my flowers. So there's two different ways you can do that. You can either take one of these and use an embellishment to do it. Or you could take alcohol marker, which I'm going to do is an alcohol marker. And I'm just going to kind of touch this right here in the center to just get it. It's a little bit darker, but it's okay. And then that way the center stands out because it's such a small spot that it's kind of hard to go ahead and use your sponge daubers for that. So to give it a little bit more pop, I'm just going ahead and just touching the center of these. And it goes right over the lemon lolly. So, oh, that looks so cool. Okay, let me show you. Now you can actually make two cards out of this. So if I was to cut this at five and a quarter, just straight across. And then at four inches from here down, I've got two pieces. So that's how I did these two cards, okay, with the two pieces. I put a little Winkestella on the center of the flowers and on these two. So it gives it like a little shimmer. Then here's a different color combination with the real red and the Granny Apple Green and Pool Party. So that's kind of fun. The same look with the four inches and five and a quarter and then the rest of the piece over here. And then I showed you that idea where I went ahead and used some embellishments for the center of the florals. I hope you've enjoyed learning this technique with custom coloring your embossed image. The neat thing about this technique is you can create great colorful cards with any 3D embossing folder. If you like any of these products, you can click the link below. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of our videos that come out once a week. And we'll see you next time on Watch It Weekly Wednesday.


Welcome back everyone. We saw how Paul is being interrogated. But before we go further, there will be more interrogation, more people coming into the picture. I want to ask you, is there any fulfilment of prophecy in what is going on right now? Do you recall any word over Paul's life that is being fulfilled right now? You can turn your pages and check. Ma'am, Agrabah's prophesied about Paul being found. Correct, okay. So Agrabah's prophesied. He said that the man whose belt this is rebounded showed that he will be bounded Jerusalem. Yes, that is one prophecy. Any other prophecy, prophetic word? Just think carefully, you can even turn your pages and look up some portions. Anyone, I just want to check whether we are in sync. I know a lot of things are unfolding but with the incidents, God's work, the leading of the Holy Spirit, the fulfilment of the prophetic word, many such things are also taking place, which we shouldn't miss. Yes, go ahead. Agrabah's prophesied. Yeah, Agrabah's, correct. That is there. In chapter 21, he was at Philip's place. Yeah, so that's true. So the daughters also, I mean he was at Philip's place, they were prophesied and there only Agrabah's came and he prophesied this matter regarding it being bound and you're right, this one matter was prophesied several times. First, he only had that impression, like chains await you, then the brothers entire, the brethren entire when he was journeying through, they also emotionally they told him don't go Paul. You know, so a lot of people told him about the same matter that he will be bound, but I'm asking you, apart from that, that he will be imprisoned if he goes to Jerusalem. So apart from this word, is there any other prophetic word which is being fulfilled right now? Okay, let me, all of you, you know, there will be too many names and places and also it's confusing sometimes. If you could recall, when we talked about Ananias, the person who came and prayed for Paul in Acts chapter 9, when Paul had the encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, we don't see the Lord Jesus say a lot of things to him about what he must do. When you know Paul, he asks Jesus, Lord, what do you want me to do? He has given one instruction, you go to the city and there you will be told what you must do. But to Ananias, it is revealed, so this is in verse 15, the God says about Paul to Ananias, Go, for he is a chosen vessel of mind to bear my name before Gentiles, kings and the children of Israel. Okay, and verse 16, for I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake. So can we reconcile with this word and see that it's being fulfilled now? Because Paul is that chosen vessel who is bearing the name of Jesus, he's standing before Gentiles, who is Felix, he's a Gentile and kings, kings, well, we could put the whole category of authorities. He has stood before the Sanhedrin, he's standing before the governor, he will stand before many others, you know, going forward. So he's being fulfilled, he also spoke about Jesus to the children of Israel, to so many Jews he's testifying, so prophecies are being fulfilled and he's undergoing a lot of sufferings for the name of Jesus. So the fulfillment of God's word is actually happening as you see Paul standing before these authorities. And he's not ashamed to proclaim the name of Jesus, even to these governors, so bold, isn't it? When he was being accused in Jerusalem, like the temple, when he got caught, he still preached about Jesus. He is under the governor Felix, he's still talking to him about Jesus so that even Felix and Brucella would accept Jesus Christ. Now there are questions, did these people accept Christ? We don't know, Luke doesn't mention anything about it and you know, I don't think there's any comment in the epistles of Paul later on. So did these people become Christians? We have to look at other comments only to see what exactly happened. But the point is he took every opportunity to proclaim Jesus Christ. So where were we now in chapter 24 under governor Felix, the whole argument of the case. You had Ananayas the High Priest coming with his gang and his speaker, Turtle is making the case, Paul defending himself, Felix noticing that there's actually nothing here to solve, but still dragging the case, maybe with an expectation of money. So two years fall is here and the governor finally changed. So there is a new governor by the name of Festus. So chapter 25 is about Festus. While he's interrogating the case of Paul, he will have a visitor, who is that visitor? There will be King Herod who will be visiting him, King Agrippa. He is part of that Herod family and Bernice, Bernice is his partner. But then we'll see that even this relationship is an incest relationship. Whereas, you know, it's not right in the sight of God that Bernice is his wife. So anyway, Paul will address, Paul will speak about Jesus Christ to even these people in authority. So that's what we are going to see. Now let's come to chapter 25. Excuse me. And here Festus, he has to take up Paul's matter, but then there's a little bit of traveling that he's involved in. So the chapter begins with now when Festus had come to the province after three days, he went up from Caesarea to Jerusalem. So this person, his office is in Caesarea, but he goes up to Jerusalem. There the high priest and the chief men of the Jews informed him against Paul. So look at these people. It's been two years, but they are still trying their best to get Paul caught back in Jerusalem. So their plan is, if we put a word against Paul to Festus, Felix did not work for us. How about Festus? Maybe he will close the case in our favor. So they petition him.  But Festus answered that Paul should be kept in Caesarea. He's not allowing for Paul to be murdered. Now, obviously they also hinted that if Paul can be brought to Jerusalem, you know, he can be easily killed. But Festus says no, we will not move him out of Caesarea and that he would go back to Caesarea and deal with the case. So then finally Festus comes back to Caesarea and he wants to inquire with Paul what exactly is going on. So he checks with Paul and hears Paul's answer. We can look at it in verse 8 of chapter 25 where Paul says that neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar, have I offended in anything at all. So he is again going by the earlier statements that he made, that he has done his best to live right. He's not giving offence to either, you know, like the religious authorities, which is the Jews, the religious authorities or the religious people. He's not giving any offence to the temple and neither is he giving any offence to the land or the law of the land. So he's quite clear about these matters. But then, no Paul is clarifying this matter somewhere Festus, right? What has happened to Festus? He was in Jerusalem where people tried to talk to him, the Jews over there tried to talk to him against Paul. So we understand regarding Festus that somewhere in his heart he wanted to do the Jews a favor. So he was trying to find a way to convict Paul and close off this case. So Paul is presenting a defense but Festus slowly he is trying to kind of check whether there is any opportunity. Of sending him back to Jerusalem so that once he goes there let the Jews do whatever they want to do. If they want to kill him, if they want to convict him up to them, at least he has done something in the favor of the Jews. And you know, he will be out of this situation. So that's where he is at. But by this point Paul is quite upset. He's like neither did Felix solve my problem for two years. Now Festus, he's playing the double king, listening a little bit to the Jews and though he has inputs from Paul not solving the case. So when Paul realizes that like this my situation is not going to get better. He plays that card of the Roman citizen once again. So he tells Festus, I stand at Caesar's judgment seat at verse 10. I stand at Caesar's judgment seat where I ought to be judged. So the Jews I have done no wrong as you very well know for I am an offender. If I am an offender or have committed anything deserving of death, I do not object to dying. But if there is nothing in these things of which these men accuse me, no one can deliver me to them. I appeal to Caesar. So this is something that a Roman citizen could do in, you know, it's like in our country in India, we have the lower courts and you know, then you have the state court, the high court that we could appeal to. But ultimately we have the central court, which is a supreme court. So when we take matters to the supreme court, it's like the ultimate authority that has to solve the problem. So Paul realizes that his life is at risk and these men are not doing anything to protect him or even resolve the matter. So he appeals to the highest court. So he says, I appeal to Caesar. Caesar is the ruler of the Roman Empire. And he says, because I'm a Roman citizen, I'm eligible. I can go straight away to the supreme court. That's, you know, in our understanding, that's what it means. So he wants to go up to Caesar and have his matter solved. So when he makes this statement to Festus, Festus is stuck. Now Festus thought that he will slowly do a favor to the Jews in Jerusalem by sending Paul back over there and dragging the case. But the moment Paul says, I appeal to Caesar, Festus has no other option. He has to take it up. So in verse 12, Festus says, you have appeal to Caesar, to Caesar you shall go. Ultimately, when this appeal is made, they're supposed to send them to Caesar. So now one decision is made. What is that decision? Paul has to go to Rome. That is the place where his problem, you know, this whole issue, the case will be resolved. So Festus also is no longer in charge of Paul's case. He has to go back, fall up now and send him to Rome. That is the conclusion, finally in chapter 25. Before sending him to Rome, there is a visitor who comes to Festus' sort of, what do you say? He was in the Pretorium, right? Eretz Pretorium. So over there, you have Agrippa visiting at that point. So we'll see what exactly happens when Agrippa comes back. Okay. So all this you just have to imagine. I don't know if you're able to imagine. Always imagine, you know, he went from Jerusalem, he's in Caesarea. It must have been, you know, something like a court or a place where he was kept and all these interrogations are taking place. And now you have Agrippa also coming to that particular place and visiting Festus. So it's like a movie. It should run in your mind about the events that are unfolding. In God's calendar, in God's sight, the prophetic words are being fulfilled. So the kings are coming, right? So Agrippa comes. Who is Agrippa? He is Herod Agrippa actually. So though over here it only says Agrippa, we would, his name is Herod Agrippa II. And he ruled one of the, you know, he, the client kingdom of the Roman Empire. And this Festus and his province came under Agrippa, which is why he could actually visit. So Agrippa was known for his Jewish customs and, you know, he had a, he had a love for Jewish customs and religions, traditions. So that is what he was known for. And he just came by to visit. And I'm sure, you know, he would be interested to hear directly from Paul because Paul was quite famous. So he may have wanted to hear from Paul, you know, about what this new faith of his is all about. But another interesting fact about this person, Agrippa Herod Agrippa II is, he was the great grandson of Herod, who was in the time when, you remember Jesus, when Jesus was born, the babies were being killed and so many things, you know. So his great grandfather was that wicked person who was killing the babies. So he comes from the tradition of very aggressive rulers who went against the purposes of God. So, yeah, we don't really, we're not really expecting for Herod to come in and solve this problem at all. Fine, let's see what happens when this Herod comes to visit. Okay, so I told you, he came, Agrippa, he came with Bernice. Bernice, she's actually meant to be his sister, but you know, he married her, which is actually not the way he was supposed to get married. But yeah, that's what happened. So they came to Caesarea to greet Festus. And there was something like, what do you say, visit is not the word, but like a day that is fixed and a ceremony actually, a ceremony where they are welcoming Agrippa in a very grand way. So they are hosting him over there. So let's probably just read through itself experimentally. I won't really need to explain it for us. So we could read from the place where he arrives. Okay, fine. I think we'll have to read from verse 13. Could somebody pick it up from verse 13 and you'll have to read it till 27. Act 75 verse 13. And after some days, King Agrippa and Bernice came to Caesarea to visit Festus. When they had been there many days, Festus laid off the case before they came saying, there's a certain man left a prisoner by Felix. But about whom the chief priest and elder of the duke told me when I was in Jerusalem, asking for a judgment against him. To them, I answered, it is not the custom of the Romans to deliver any man to destruction before the accused, neither accusers to face as opportunity to answer for himself concerning the charge instead. Therefore, when they had come together without any delay, the next day I sat on the judgment seat and commanded the man to be brought in. Until 25. When, okay, the accusers stood up and they brought no accusations against him of such thing as I supposed, but had some questions against him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus who had died, whom all of them to be alive. And because I was uncertain of such questions, I asked whether he was willing to go to Jerusalem and may be judged concerning these matters. But when Paul appealed to be reserved for the decision of Augustus, commanded him to be kept until I could send him to Caesar. Then Agriba said to Festus, I also would like to hear the man myself. Tomorrow, he said, you shall hear him. So the next day, then Agriba and Bernice had come, great pomp and had entered the auditorium with the commanders and the men of the city at Festus. Paul was brought in and Festus said, King Agriba and all the men who are present with us, you see this man for whom the whole assembly of the Jesus petitioned me, both the gentleman and he are crying out that he was not fit to live any longer. When I found that he had committed nothing, this thing of death and that he himself had appealed to Augustus, I decided to send him. I have not certain to write to my Lord concerning him. Therefore, I have sent him out especially before you King Agriba, so that after the examination as he can place, I may have something to write. For it seems to me unreasonable to send a prisoner and not to specify the charges against him. So as I stated, it's quite self-explanatory. Festus shares about this matter to Agriba and then Agriba himself comes with great pomp in the presence of all the other leaders and he wants to hear Paul out. So now Paul is going to talk to Agriba and make his defense. Now why all this audio of trying to listen to Paul because you see Paul has appealed to Caesar and before sending to Caesar, they need to explain why they are sending to Caesar. They don't have an accusation against him. So funny, isn't it? That you have a prisoner for over two years and you are not able to specify what is the accusation against this man that you kept him over here. So this issue, Festus shares with Agriba and says like can you help me now? Because something I have to write down before I send him to Caesar. So Agriba says ok, come on, let's listen to this man and let's figure out what is that one point we can mention in the letter. So now we come to chapter 26 where Paul has the opportunity to go ahead and speak. So Paul speaks and he narrates regarding his own life. Again he talks about how he is part of the Jews and his upbringing. He was brought up under the strict sect of the religion and he lived as a Pharisee. So he is giving an explanation of his upbringing and later on he also talks regarding the hope that he has in Christ. He talks about the faith that he has. That is how he is not opposing the faith of the Jews. So then he puts a question to Agriba that look I am believing in these matters and just because I am believing in these matters what is it that I have done wrong? And Paul's faith is so strong that he says people are accusing those who believe for the miracles that take place and the healings that take place the resurrection from the dead that takes place. Why is it such a great thing for us that God even raises the dead? This is a wonderful statement that Paul makes in verse 8 if you notice he says that why should it be taught incredible to you that God raises the dead again coming back to that matter of resurrection which he told the council and he also told Felix and even now he says I am a Pharisee I believe in the resurrection of the dead why is it such a great matter for us? Can God not raise the dead? These are the things that I believe in. He also states how he was actually a persecutor of Jesus and his people but how God actually encountered him and his life changed so he gives a clarification and he recounts his experience of how he encountered Jesus so that whole narration is there it's like a repetition of Acts 9 where he saw that bright light and Jesus spoke to him it's really nice to listen to it all over again actually because you might find an insight or two again in the narration so just for that sake I am going to read it out what he is telling to Agrippa about that encounter on the road to Damascus so I will read from verse 12 where he says while thus occupied as a journey to Damascus with authority and commission from the chief priests at midday, okay along the road I saw a light from heaven brighter than the sun shining around me and those who journeyed with me very interesting because we are talking about the Middle East so the Middle East sun we know that those places are so hot in around noon time the sun must be so bright but he is saying brighter than the sun midday so what kind of a light did he encounter something amazing isn't it so he saw very very bright light was 14 and when we all had fallen to the ground I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew language Saul, Saul why have you why are you persecuting me it is hard for you to take against the gods so I said who are you Lord and he said I am Jesus whom you are persecuting but rise and stand on your feet for I have appeared to you for this purpose to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of the things which I will yet reveal to you I will deliver you from as well as from the Gentiles to whom I now send you to open their eyes in order to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in me so this is not a good incident and the most one of the scriptures that I want us to focus on is verse 18 very powerful very powerful scripture there what does it say it says here is the the function or the assignment of Paul but you know something it is not just his assignment it is all our assignment to bring people to Christ that is the great commotion actually but Jesus said go into all the world preach the gospel teach them everything that I have taught you baptizing them the King of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit you know I am with you to the end of the age so to proclaim the gospel what does the gospel do there are other aspects here it says open their eyes so they are able to see who God is how God loves them what is the great purpose for which God has called them now we know Paul also talks about this in other episodes where he says that those who don't know Christ those who are not born again they are spiritually dead and also in verse 14 he says that the God of this world he is blind in their eyes so the spiritual eyes are blind of those who are not born again but what does our mandate the great commission open the eyes open the eyes of the people so that they get no Christ so that is the responsibility which was given to Paul it's also given to us and see how beautiful it continues in order to turn them from darkness to light why did Jesus come that's why he came to lead people in that path of life he came to give us abundant life help us to walk in that abundant life same thing Paul is saying what is the gospel it is going to turn people from darkness to light that's what is going to happen when we preach the gospel and then he says from the power of Satan to God remember how to the Romans Paul writes he says that we are no longer slaves of sin that the power of sin over our lives is broken right now we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus so he teaches us here that what is salvation we are no longer slaves of Satan but we come under the power of God from the power of Satan to God that is what salvation is all about that they may receive forgiveness of sins ok that we understand salvation a part of salvation is forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are satisfied by faith in right so he is actually stating about the great commission and how God called him to that but we can see for ourselves that this is what we are also called to do so he talks about this to Agrippa that he talks a little bit about what happened to him after he gave his life to Christ so from verse 16 therefore King Agrippa I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision one thing is the calling second thing is responding to the calling so he says look I responded I responded I was not disobedient when God told me to do these things I did it and verse 20 but declared first to those in Damascus and in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea and then to the Gentiles that they should repent turn to God and do works to fitting repentance but these reasons the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me therefore having obtained help from God to this day I stand witnessing both to small and great saying no other things than those which the prophets and Moses said would come that the Christ would suffer that he would be the first to rise from the dead and would proclaim life to the Jewish people and to the Gentiles so he is just saying that I have been doing the same work I have been talking about Jesus I have been talking about what he has done proclaiming it to everyone now let's see what would be the response of Agrippa what was Felix's response come at a communion time that is Felix's response Festus so far no response regarding the matter of salvation now Agrippa has heard the gospel that is going to be his response let's see verse 24 now as he does make his defense Festus said with a loud voice Paul you have beside yourself much learning is driving you mad so Festus is not able to receive this message and of course you know Paul gives a defense he says I am not mad I am convinced about whatever I say that he directly asks Agrippa verse 27 Agrippa do you believe the prophets I know that you do believe what did I share earlier Agrippa Herod Agrippa too he was interested in Jewish customs ok so Paul knew this and he is directly asking Agrippa do you believe the prophets do you believe I know that you believe in them so if Agrippa believes in the prophets he should believe that the prophets were the ones who prophesied about Jesus isn't it so now what is Agrippa going to say the ball is in Agrippa's coat Agrippa is saying you almost persuade me to become a Christian so what Agrippa is saying is Paul I am not finding anything wrong in what you are saying I am almost at the door now tell me for salvation being almost at salvation but not entering is it good enough when people come in it's like Felix only come at a convenient time but Agrippa is saying I am not his answer is not I believe he doesn't say that he says Paul you almost convince me to be a Christian but that's not going to help one experience salvation it's a definite decision that one looks to me whether we are born again or we are not born again even Agrippa sitting on the fence is not making the decision so Paul responds to him he says in verse 29 I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me today might become both almost and all together such as I am except for these slaves meaning you should become a believer Agrippa and everyone should so that's what he is telling Agrippa now so very boldly and verse 13 when he had said these things the king stood up as well as the governor and Bernice and those who sat with them and when they had gone aside they talked among themselves saying this man is doing nothing deserving of death or chains then Agrippa said to Festus this man might have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar so according to Agrippa he has evaluated the case and he feels that he should actually be set free but unfortunately what has already happened Paul has appealed to Caesar so he has to go to Rome that matter is fixed okay but now let's come to the more important question about the salvation of Festus and Agrippa they don't accept Christ at that point now did they accept Christ later on for that we don't have a clear cut answer at least from the Bible we don't have so it's really sad that these great men they heard the gospel but they did not respond right and yeah it's just so sad that even when Paul himself preached to them they didn't say I believe or I dependent okay so what we'll do is we'll stop right here because the last two chapters are more about the voyage there will be a journey that Paul makes and it's again like a movie only like the ship will go and there'll be like a wreckage and all and then he will safely land on an island and eventually he'll go on to Rome he'll do some ministry in Rome so all that is going to happen so we can talk about it together and then talk a little bit about the timelines right because we need to know what the years are all about and what are some of the the epistles that Paul wrote even through his journey so all that we look into in the next class so hopefully the next Friday class is our last class and yeah so we could stop at this point here after looking at the defense that Paul makes for himself both in Jerusalem and in Sicily okay so before we close with the word of prayer any thoughts or any comments about what your words are about okay so I suppose okay basically I'd like to know that the information is helping you think about these things think about what Paul might have gone through really gives us a deeper understanding about what and all people have suffered to kind of pass on this mandate to us so let's pray and we get close for today okay let me just pray Heavenly Father thank you Lord for the records of the lives of your people especially Lord Apostle Paul and Lord the way today we read he says I was not obedient, disobedient to the heavenly vision came up with Agrippa Father God thank you Lord for men and women of God who have been obedient to what God has called them to do Lord today we stand Lord on their shoulders Father we thank you for their lives, their examples Lord that strengthen us Father help us Lord to also be obedient to the call of God on our lives Lord strengthen us Father God give us the grace anoint us Father and Lord we just pray that in our generation Father God that we too will be bold Lord and how beautiful to see that even though kings and Lord many authorities are examining him they are not finding any fault Lord with Paul not such a man of integrity and commitment Father God enable us Lord to pattern our lives Lord in these good ways Father that we are learning we commit ourselves into your hands Father God and we just pray God that will continue to speak to us from the book of Acts in Jesus make me pray Amen Amen thank you everyone God bless you you can look forward to your final assignment ok so all the best God bless and bye for now thank you thank you