All right I'm going to get started. This session is called pivot points recognizing opportunities and turning challenges into strengths and before I get started I need to call out two family members whose permission was essential for me to be able to do this presentation. The first was my mother. She died of pulmonary fibrosis this spring. In the last few weeks of her life I visited my parents and in that time she helped me sort out details in my childhood that that I needed to have sorted out for this presentation. The second is my daughter. She doesn't realize it yet but she's kind of a superhero. So the journey that begins with two young parents being told that their youngest child was really bright but despite that brightness I've never overcome my learning disabilities. It's too far a stretch and I would never learn to read or write. My parents were told that they should prepare that I might never be independent and so through a series of pivots I learned to read and write. I became an accomplished child vocalist and completed a Bachelor of Arts earned a certification in in non-profit management and went on to complete a master of fine arts in theater and eventually became a technology professional. At many points in my life I was in the right place at the right time grabbing opportunities where they could be found whether whether it was learning to read because I wanted to sing and acquire or happening to be part of a crazy online project with a dance company when the worldwide web was in its nascent form or pushing the boundaries of what an MFA in arts administration really ought to be. Understanding those moments where your life pivots and taking advantage of them can make the difference between success and failure. When I was a small child, that to me is a small child, when I was a small child my parents discovered that I was developmentally delayed in reading and writing. I was having a hard time learning my ADCs. I was ridiculously hyper. I was engaged in obsessive and repetitive behaviors. I had trouble understanding what others were feeling although when it was explained to me I was deeply empathetic. Yet my vocabulary had developed to a degree which you wouldn't expect from a child that age. In today's terms I likely would have been labeled in three ways dyslexia attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Asperger's syndrome. Back in the 1970s doctors weren't well equipped to make these kinds of diagnoses. In fact Asperger's wasn't recognized in Canada until the mid 1990s. So I was pinned down as being a defiant child with what they called a reversal problem short-term memory problem and an extremely short attention span. My siblings and father were part of a church choir and I desperately wanted to be part of that experience. The choir master had me read from a hymn book and I couldn't do it. He told me that until I could read I couldn't join the choir and I was inconsolable.  But my father was an English teacher and he sat down with me every night writing letters sentences longer sentences and eventually short stories on the back of used dot matrix paper that he got from work. We spent several months every night after supper drilling and I went back to Mr. Renert and asked him to test me again and he was incredulous because I had done so badly 10 weeks earlier and after the test he invited me to join the choir. If my parents had taken it at face value that I'd never learned to read or write perhaps I never would have managed it however my choice to learn to read set me on a path where once I had my eyes on a goal I could achieve it. In 1977 I was identified as a high risk child due to delays in eye hand coordination spacer relations motor skills and visual memory. I had a massive vocabulary and excellent word discrimination however traditional learning was very difficult for me. It was recommended that you should treat Matthew as if you were hard of hearing and maintain eye contact while giving oral instructions and his attention span is so short and he's so easily distracted that it is possible for him to not hear or retain oral lessons. My mind was quick to sort out a problem though but I could only focus on one thing at a time and often it was obsessive. My handwriting was patrocious I would scramble letters up and I had a hard time writing letters in the correct direction. I had behavioral issues which included some pretty angry outbreaks and in retrospect I realized that I was having significant challenges with transitions. Crowds freaked me out and they actually still do there's just too much stimulus. I also didn't understand consequences I didn't get that if I did action A that there would be consequence B and it didn't matter whether it was a good or bad consequence I just simply couldn't understand that correlation and to this day I have to think through scenarios so I understand the consequences of my actions. This happens incredibly quickly but I have to think about it and I never realized until adulthood that most people just naturally extrapolate consequences so learning to do this has been critical to my success. My parents and educators at the time were seeking ways of supporting my needs and this was challenging because I believe there was a misunderstanding of what my symptoms actually meant and how to intervene. My dad the teacher and my mother the nurse worked with my teachers to start sorting out ways to isolate me from distractions and concentrate better. As a result I ended up being enrolled in both the gifted and talented program and also remedial classes in junior high. This meant I didn't fit in anywhere as I transitioned from high to high school. I didn't fit in with the gifted kids because I was in the remedial program and I didn't fit in with the remedial kids because I was in the gifted program and the the kids that were sort of in normal normal classes I didn't have anything in common as well. It was an extremely lonely time for me. This had social impacts of its own that I didn't that really didn't resolve until until university either but it did save me from being relegated to being solely in the remedial program which is what the school wanted to do. I didn't understand this pivot point until much later in my life but it quite likely saved me from being dependent on others for for the rest of my life. So parents of people with learning differences need to demand educational opportunities outside the mainstream. Parents need to be willing to look outside the box and find opportunities for their children even when things seem hopeless and never give up. This was impactful in two ways later in my life. The first was in my transformation in university and the second saved my daughter's life but in a real way also helped me understand my own. When I finished high school I recognized that I wasn't really ready to go to university. I wasn't mature enough. High school had been difficult and while I'd never failed any classes I had a hard time concentrating and was socially extremely awkward. I didn't understand people well and they didn't understand me. I misread intentions and was often bullied. For example I was taped to the football posts, goalposts, two feet off the ground in ninth grade. My locker was broken into and a snake, a couple of crayfish and a fetal pig from the biology lab were left in their stinking formaldehyde. The stigma from junior high had followed me and I was alone, bullied and largely without a tribe. Every success since then has been colored with somebody's going to figure out that I'm worthless and this is where for me imposter syndrome began. I felt happiest when I was able to do things on my own, things that required repetitive actions. This made I was excelled in art classes where repetition with techniques like crosshatching were valued. I was able to express myself in some pretty bizarre ways and rather than being frowned on for it I received praise. I decided with the help of my parents to take a vocational art program for high school graduates and I worked in a coffee shop at the same time but I was really adrift. My parents nor I had any idea really what was going to happen next. I half-heartedly engaged in that program and left it before it was done.  But I was about to pivot and it was a moment of ridiculously good luck. My father had seen an advertisement in local newspaper for a tiny liberal arts university in the eastern townships of Quebec. The school is nestled on the convergence of two rivers and was established in 1843 with much of the architecture reflecting its affiliation with Oxford and Cambridge universities. When we toured the school it was immediately clear that the school's size only about 1700 students at the time would be perfect. I applied in fine arts and theater was accepted and received several scholarships which seemed crazy to me at the time. My largest class was about 40 people smallest about seven and I started school at the starting school feeling a bit like a fraud. I was just waiting for teachers to figure out that I really didn't belong there for it all to fall apart but it didn't and I flourished. Remember when I said the social impacts of being an experiment in mixing remedial and gifted programs didn't resolve until university? Well when I arrived nobody knew who I was. I realized that I could completely reimagine myself without any of those stigmas. At bishops I learned that you can define your own identity. I learned that when you're redefining yourself you might need to fake it until you make it but all of these things are in your control. After finishing my bachelor's degree I moved back to Ottawa and moved as a lighting tech for a local theater. I realized while doing that lighting work that I really didn't want to be a theater technician my whole life so I enrolled in a non-profit management program at the University of Ottawa which led to a job in an experimental dance company. I'd also applied to go to grad school in Virginia to complete a master of fine arts focused on arts marketing. That job ended up being an enormous pivot and one that I realized at the time and leveraged when I went to grad school. It was 1995 and I was hired to work on the website. I glibly said sure I can figure that out but in 1995 you didn't have Google to Google what is a website.  I asked somebody on Lambda Moo what this web thing was and suddenly I was a webmaster. One of the absolutely insane things that that company did over the summer, remember this was 1995, was to collaborate in real time with multiple dance companies in different cities across Canada. They were working with the Canadian Broadcasting Company to do live feeds between the different sites and nobody had ever tried anything like that. Collaboration at distance with performers and it blew me away. When I arrived at Virginia Tech I explained to my committee what I had seen and my committee was incredible and allowed me to gather together a coalition of different departments to experiment with bleeding-edge technologies for my thesis work. So rather than researching the business of the arts doing doing marketing I was allowed to produce three works each layering on the previous experimenting with live action, stream live feeds and pre-recorded video and that work was the next pivot because I had to learn to code to manage people to string together networks to learn video codecs. So the boy that wasn't supposed to learn to read or write transformed into a technologist. All of this led to my working with the university after graduating teaching copyright law, videography, developing what I think was the first database driven tourism website with the Virginia Tourism Board and this was back in 1998. There are two parts to this lesson. First of all never be frightened to ask for what you need and want. The worst thing that can happen is that somebody could say no to you.  Do something that takes you completely out of your comfort zone and assume that if you keep applying pressure to it you will make it work. Be fearless and don't let the perceived consequence fail your cripple you because the consequence of success can be life-changing. Shortly after I moved to Colorado to start my first full-time professional job I discovered a lump in my left left testicle. That lump tripled in size over the space of 15 days. I was off to surgery and then chemotherapy. I listened to calculated and sorted out what to do in a dispassionate way not dwelling on consequences. The chemo was pretty dreadful at times and to this day my hearing is affected. I have neuropathy in my fingertips and permanent tinnitus in both years. It was intense. I was in the doctor's office taking chemo through a port installed in my chest pretty much every day for two months. I brought a work lap talk to the clinic and spent my days coding. When I got home at night I would spend my evening sweating curled up in a miserable little ball. Remember when I talked about my childhood though? How I was impulsive short tempered at times often inflexible obsessed by single things and bad transitions? This caused me to be impatient with people. I would often quibble about small details and found it extremely difficult to let those small details go often to the detriment of my personal and professional relationships. This experience forced me to confront the fact that small stuff doesn't matter. I learned that holding on to those kinds of trifles and letting them stress you out was counterproductive. When I completed my treatments and came out on the other side that part of my personality had changed for the better. In 1999 I joined a company called the Western States Arts Federation. It built software for other non-profits and as the senior director of technology I was the architect for a job board. I led development on online registers for artists, writers and performing artists. I was the lead on the software that is used by nearly every street art festival in the United States to adjudicate artists to this day. I designed what I believe was the first online grant making system and all of this was written in custom G-H-B in my S-G-L. In 2006 I attended a technology symposium in Vancouver that included participants from two of the first Drupal shops in Canada. At the time I recognized in this pivot I knew that I knew that Drupal at least for a time could become a career. In fact 13 years later it's still central to my life. Later I attended a training session in Vancouver with Bright and Rain City Studios. I started building my first site in Drupal 4.5 and came to the conclusion shortly thereafter that I wanted to dive into Drupal completely and I joined PingVision, a young Drupal agency in Boulder, Colorado. A few weeks later I was at my very first Drupal con in Barcelona. Barcelona was a small Drupal con, only about 600 people but I became friends with core members of the community during that trip. Making those connections became critical about two and a half years later. Near the end of my time with PingVision I did a presentation at Drupal con Paris and it was approached by chicks after it was done. He was pretty cryptic but said that I should talk to Mike Myers. He was one of the co-founders and now public. After that conversation with Myers I was invited to come on board with the examiner.com team that was being formed. I was to shepherd the largest Drupal migration in history with people like chicks, moosh, cyberswatt, and Jeremy Andrews. Our team actually built 18% of Drupal 7 and we did this while migrating this site from cold fusion. We were using MongoDB before it was out of beta. The project had no real right to succeed but it did. I needed to be able to manage our giant remote team. I needed to communicate and work with an executive team sourced from Disney, Access, and AOL who had no experience in Drupal. I separated the consequences good and bad within the working relationship of the executive team and the dev team. I didn't focus on what could go wrong. The entire time I was working on examiner I was convinced that somebody was going to figure out I didn't have the education or the experience to have that job. I think that all of us though on that project realized how successful it could become a launching point for many careers and indeed that is what happened. But the real pivot occurred near the end of the project when Myers suggested that I offhandedly that I should run for the Drupal Association Board of Directors. That pivot wouldn't actually affect my career until about three years later. After a few years clear of the cancer my wife and I decided that we wanted to adopt a child. We'd always known that we wanted to be parents and we decided that we adopt through the foster care system because so many terribly abused children in the United States need parents. We adopted a five year old girl she had had had very difficult first few years of her life and had a lot of emotional problems in many ways that mirrored my own issues. Mine hadn't been born from a childhood of trauma but I kind of understood this kid and I'm not going to go into her stories but parenting this child has been the largest pivot of my life because I wouldn't understand my own challenges if I hadn't been confronted with hers and had to learn everything I could about reactive attachment disorder, ADHD, post-traumatic stress disorder and most recently bipolar disorder. If it hadn't been for my daughter I would have just continued coping and I wouldn't have understood my own ADHD and dyslexia and I certainly wouldn't have had the explosive realization that I was on the spectrum. When I left the examiner I cycled through a few jobs. I did a short period of time with Trellen. I worked with a small company called Fiverings Web. I joined Atten Design Group and it was at Atten that I ran for the Drupal Board of Association Board of Directors and I was elected and served for two and a half years. I sat on the board with Mike Lamb. He was from Pfizer and had a large Drupal team. Micra represents the next pivot in my story. There are three convergences that made this moment work. I knew that my time with Atten was wrapping up. I was at the second Drupal Con hosted in Barcelona and there was a Drupal Association Board meeting which meant Mike was there. I asked Mike if I could balance my ideas off of him. I wanted to talk to him about where my career might go next and he and I met over a couple of drinks, talked for several hours and at the end of it he said something like Matthew I have some ideas of what you could do for me. I'll be in touch in a few weeks. That pivot had occurred exactly four years ago. I was brought on to the team as an engineering lead for the healthcare professional portal system in Drupal 7 utilized worldwide impacting people everywhere. So you should build friendships and bridges at every point in your life because those friendships become vehicles to your success. Never be afraid to talk to those friends about what you need. Every job I've had for nearly 22 years has come to me because I asked through my network. Now you know how a kid that was never supposed to learn to read or write went from his first goal of being a chorister to being a senior manager at one of the largest companies in the world. So I have some takeaways for you. When working with your children do not set expectations through the lens of what others tell you.  Let them be fearless and when they seem adrift be present but don't dictate. When you perceive your weaknesses what you perceive your weaknesses to be might well be hidden strengths. For example being on the spectrum drives me to be a nerd and everything that I set myself to figure out. Having ADHD has allowed me to focus on many things at a time and my dyslexia has given me insight into how to teach and learn differently.  Look for the good not for the bad. And finally imposter syndrome is real no matter how successful you are and lots of us have it. So have empathy for others. I hope my stories have resonated for you. I thank you for listening and if you like my presentation my presentation number is 346 and I'd love you to rate it on the site. Thank you very much. And I think I might have a minute for questions if anybody has questions. If not I'm happy to meet people over coffee or beers or whatever. No. Well thank you very much for coming to my session. I appreciate it. Thanks for sharing.


Mark, good to see you from Oxaco. You've had two pieces of significant news that I'm very interested in an update starting with Bolivia. On September 12th of this year, we announced that we had signed a memorandum of understanding with a group in Bolivia called El Benton. This is a very interesting property for a number of reasons. This is a past producing property. They had exported niobium concentrates to Germany in 2013. It's fully permitted. They have environmental permits. They have mining operating permits. And so we believe this is a project that can deliver a near term cash flow as we can do direct shipping more quite quickly and easily from that property. We've taken and looked at a number of samples from this property and this is primarily a niobium and tantalum bearing property. Some of the concentrates we're getting from the El Benton property are in the range of about 50% niobium, 22% tantalum, and those are exceptional grades, and that's direct shipping concentrate that we can do from the property. In addition to the tantalum and niobium, we are discovering a slew of rare earth elements too, including neodymium, gadolinium, and others. Neodymium is probably the most interesting one and we're getting in the concentrates grades of close to 11%. And neodymium together with prasodymium, terbium, and dysprosium, they're the four key elements that are needed in the magnets that go into the electric vehicle motors that go into the EVs that are powering the green revolution. So if you don't have access to those four, you're going to have a problem creating the magnets and creating the motors. So our goal as oxycos to be a leader in providing these kind of materials to the industry and helping that green revolution along. So it's my understanding based on your investor talk, Mark, you were talking about how you've picked up a past producing mind. How was Oxico able to find this? Can you tell us a little bit more about how you brought the deal together? Yes, we have a geologist that is from Bolivia. I knew this property quite well and he worked with us on our Colombian property. So he introduced us to this property to the owners. And again, we looked at some of the data. This is a past producing mind in Bolivia. It exported niobium to Germany about 10 years ago. It's fully permanent. It has environmental permits, mining, operating permits, and it's rich in a number of elements. So they have produced concentrates with significant amounts of niobium, tantalum. There's a number of rare earth elements, including niobium, which is a key element in the magnets. And we've also identified a lithium anomaly on the property that, again, it merits more work. But again, it seems to be it's polymetallic and it's a number of the strategic and critical minerals that we hope to feed to the market. So we talked to the owners. They require some capital to renew the permits. And we have an arrangement whereby we will provide the necessary capital to begin direct shipping of concentrates. And we'll have an 85% interest for $140,000 US dollars, which to us seemed like a good deal. So specifically, you know, first of all, your news releases are better written than most in the market. You said that your objective is to relaunch the mine for production. And you really focus on the niobium and tantalum. Can you give us a little bit more of the timeline on when you plan on relaunching it? Yeah. So right now, we just announced this in September, it's fairly recent. We need to renew the environmental and operating permits, which is the owners, current owners are in the process of doing that. That shouldn't take too long, maybe a couple of months. And then we'll look at how we can begin to produce those concentrates and ship them. So it's probably definitely going to go into the new year 2024. But the good thing about this property, Tracy, is that it's, as I said, it's fully permitted. It's about 200 kilometers from Santa Cruz, which is the business capital of Bolivia, easy access. And the fact that it has produced in the past is good. And it did have customers in Germany and so forth. So we hope to relaunch this as quickly as possible once we get the permits. So speaking of that, you know, really Oxyco has been a front runner at actually getting deals and actually producing and selling as you've done in the Congo already. But let's, let's flip to Columbia now. You've had some news recently. Can you give us an update? Yes. So we've worked in Columbia for a number of years. And in order to begin small scale production, we need a couple of permits. One is from the National Mining Agency, which we received some time ago. The other is an environmental permit, which we received recently. And so the mining agency has given us a registration certificate, which now says you can go and operate the property. One of the things that we did in Columbia was we had an option to buy the property. So we would be the property owner as well as the miner in that region. So just just make it easier to begin production. So we're in the process of transferring that title to Oxyco, which could take a bit of time. But in the meantime, we have an agreement where we have basically 100% economic interest in the property. So while we're doing that whole process of transferring title, we hope to begin small scale production. So according to the permits we have, we can produce an export up to 300 metric tons of material a month. And so what we've identified on the property is significant amounts of tin. And these come in the form of pebbles. So it's very easy to create those concentrates. You don't need a lot of equipment, a lot of capex. You need basically a lot of pans and screens. And so when we were working on the property about a year and a half ago, we had about 22 employees on the property panning and screening. And we're able to get those high concentrates just by doing that. So our near-term goal is to begin production there of up to 300 metric tons a month. Any critical mineral follower, anyone interested in critical minerals will see that you're true and true. A real critical mineral company. You seem to really focus on tantalum tin, niobium, but also nickel. Can you just give us a background on the involvement of Central American Nickel, which some of us in the private markets are also following? Thank you. Yeah. So Central American Nickel or CAN is a related company. We have common directors and common shareholders, common management. I'm one of those parties. I'm in both companies. We kept CAN private because it had nickel concessions in Guatemala, which previous governments were not too friendly to the mining industry, which has since changed. And so CAN has acquired a number of properties in Guatemala, also in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is looking at other jurisdictions for significant amounts of critical minerals. And CAN is in the process of doing a significant fundraising, working on that. And in June of this year, CAN acquired a significant amount of securities of oxyco, convertible debentures, shares, warrants, and all in. CAN has about a 31% interest on a diluted basis of oxyco. And so we did that so that those shares and those securities wouldn't hit the markets and we're in a bad market, as you all know. So by having those securities in friendly hands, it helps oxyco. And also if CAN succeeds, oxyco will succeed. So the interests of both companies are aligned. And both companies work together, as you mentioned, Tracy, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The companies are the first ones to export concentrates of rare earth elements since 1983. We've exported about 1,000 metric tons to date. And we hope to increase those amounts. We have another shipment that we're ready to do right now. So CAN is focused more on nickel and other materials and in other jurisdictions. But the companies work together in the Congo. And now the CAN is a significant shareholder. It has a vested interest in seeing oxyco succeed. And as I said, we're trying to capitalize CAN. And if that happens, then with all the securities, debentures, warrants, and so on that CAN owns of oxyco, that will help oxyco succeed. Okay. Well, that's very exciting. We've got past producing project in Bolivia. And that's obviously your priority. Is that correct? Absolutely. It's a key priority as it's fully permanent. We don't have to go through that whole permitting process. It has produced in the past. It's a successfully sold product to customers in Germany. And I think all we have to do is to restart that whole process, renew the permits, which have already been granted. It's an administrative process. And then we look at how we can export concentrates from Bolivia, Tansalum niobium, and hopefully rare earths. And these, as you know, Trisha, these are the building blocks of the new green economy. And oxyco wants to be a leader of that. On that note, if you would like more information on oxyco, and if you're following critical minerals, I'm certain you do, please go to the following website. Thank you, Mark, for joining us today. Thanks, Tracey. Thanks, everyone, for your interest.


Hello, everybody Andrea here so i've had my own teeth waning business for years now, and I teach all of you how to get started and do the exact same thing, so you can become a teeth waning technician depending on if you are adding this on to your current. Beauty business, or if you are a dental professional there are different packages, but let me talk to you guys about the cost and the expense of developing your own teeth waning business. And the profit that you can make the amazing thing is the truly amazing thing is is there's not a lot of expenses involved, what if I told you, you can spend about $500 and sorry not $500 $1500 $1500. And have your own teeth waning business, and you can make a profit of about $200 per patient. See how that can add up very, very fast and the nice thing is for you to have your wholesale account to purchase your teeth whitening products after you get the full package. You will need refills, you will have a wholesale account and you're still making profit, which is truly amazing as an example. For those at home teeth whitening kits that if you are adding something on to your. Beauty business and with the pandemic right now, what if you want to tell your clients I can't apply teeth whitening to your teeth in this pandemic because I can't see anybody. But you can pick up your very own teeth waning kit from me, or if you want to take it to their house, you can make $200 right there. And the cost of that kit wholesale is about $50 to $60 depending on if you purchase them on sale because the website has sales, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The more you buy the better deal you get so let's just say you spent $50 on this take home kit to purchase a wholesale. And you're selling it to your clients for let's say $150 $200, however, you want to do it, that is a profit for doing absolutely nothing.  On the micro brushes the led light, you have the cheek retractors the shake guide the whole works. I charge $200 for teeth whitening some people charge $300 that is truly up to you, but I charge $200 my cost is about let's say $20 for those syringes depending on how big I decide to get them that is about eight patients. The cheek retractors I can sterilize so that's not an additional cost, since I did have them already the light that I did purchase a while ago was about $300 the Vaseline that I applied to protect the lips protect the gums Well, that was what $5 for the entire jar and that lasts forever, so you get the idea.   Maybe cheek retractors a couple times a year if you sterilize them too much and then they're just not up to quality anymore, you know throw them out get some new ones. But the costs are so minimal those teeth whitening pens to give to the patients to use at home they're about $10 whole sale. I charge my clients about $20 to $25 depending if there's a sale and that whitening pen is good for about two uses, maybe three.  To give a good base foundation for the teeth whitening it takes away the natural you know oils plaque anything in the mouth and that's about $10 I charge my clients about $20 for that it kind of depends on the sizes to. But do you guys get the idea, I do explain more inside the course of course, but if you're making $200 there's really minimal expenses so you're always making a profit. Even signing up for my teeth teeth whitening a technician training course a fully certified course it's about $1500 for all of your supplies that you need for 10 patients. Not including the light, but the light is about $200 that I do decide I can send you the link to purchase that on your own. But with shipping these days with over the border it's just easier for you to pick the link that's the best for you but that's about $200 so just add that. You can make the money back so fast, because you are charging let's say $200 $150 even per client right away you're making that money back in a one hour appointment isn't that fantastic. And the nice thing too about a teeth whitening technician is you can also sell other things with your teeth whitening packages, you can sell lip glosses to make the teeth look wider inside your own wholesale account you have full access to all of that. What if you want to sell certain toothpaste for teeth whitening you can do that as well you have full access to wholesale prices, it is really fun and you will be. Your own business owner, so let me know you guys if you have any questions, as you guys can see there's always a profit it's not that type of business where oh I don't know if i'm going to make anything in the first two years. You start making money right away, it doesn't matter if you have your own location somewhere because you do have a current beauty business. Or if you want to do teeth whitening in a room in your own home or go mobile to other people's homes, you will make money right away, so good luck, let me know if you have any questions, I will leave the link for you guys on the bottom for further information and thank you guys so much for watching.


So good afternoon. Thank you for joining. This session is going to be common networking operations across Kubernetes and open stack with Calico It's a really good echo in here. It's like Imagine being an announcer at a stadium. So As my name is Mark Baker, I'm part of product strategy at canonical with I'm joined with Karthik Who's a Calico expert says director of solutions architecture at Tagira and we have Larry who's a Working on open stack helm and various other container initiatives at AT&T and finally Steve Who's also doing the same? So we're gonna talk about a number of different topics first off if I kick off I talk about a bunch of open stacks So a bunch of producers and open stack distribution as I'm sure you know And that's been successful out there in the market with lots of people using it But increasingly we've seen people wanting to be able to connect that with containers and so whether that's running Containers inside open stack alongside open stack underneath open stack the interaction of open stack with containers Is a challenge that many people are looking to try and address today And in fact, I have a nice build that emphasizes this containers throughout Canonical or Ubuntu open stack today. We have them at the control plane So we've been running Ubuntu open stack in LXC containers for many many years several years. I should say In fact, many of the production deployments we have at telcos around the world are in LXC containers So we have a containerized control plane But now we're looking at how can we bring that into sort of immutable containers with with technologies like Docker? Or Kohler, I should say but we also have them at other layers throughout the stack too And we see customers deploying them in the same way So whether it's using LXC containers on top of KVM whether it's using Lexi containers are you machine containers with a hypervisor called Nova Lexi? It's all talk about in a second or whether it's running Kubernetes on top of open stack containers are a Sprinkled liberally throughout our open stack deployment Now anybody that's been using open stack for a little while knows That successful open stack requires successful networking and I'm sure the same is true of Kubernetes too So figuring out how these things work together has been very important For those of you not familiar the different types of containers that actually we saw in that previous diagram We see virtual machines, of course based with KVM. They have networking implications machine containers She's essentially VM, but using container primitives, but looks and behaves just like a VM With technologies like Lexi or or perhaps open VZ if you know that Process containers things like Docker and rocket, which I'm sure you know love already And then different styles of application containers in the IoT space or Embedded space things like snappy and flat pack in there We're going to be primarily talking about the process containers. So Docker containers here how we can network Kubernetes environments and open stack environments together I'll skip through that. We do use Lexi with open stack So machine containers with open stack if you want to be able to run for machine containers in conjunction with open stack We can do that using this Lexi technology So this is slightly separate from running Kubernetes, but it's networked in the same way So all everything you'll hear will apply in a very similar way And finally With Kubernetes so as I said, we see a lot of the customers are engaging with open stack today looking at Kubernetes Deploying that on top of or alongside And so if that's something that you're interested in doing the solutions the things that we're talking about over the next half hour The integrations between these technologies are both with canonical Kubernetes with a bunch of open stack and of course their upstream fathers So let's look at the three types and Karthik who's going to deal with these in more detail as I pass when I pass over in a second There's those three scenarios. So In fact, let's ask the audience Put your hand up if you're running Kubernetes alongside an existing open stack say that again alongside an existing open stack On bare metal if you is anybody doing that today Okay, good opportunity for Kubernetes distributions there. Thank you. Is anybody running Kubernetes inside of open stack today? Okay, that's good. And anybody running Kubernetes Open stack in Kubernetes so using things like Kohler and on whatever okay, so a good good mix and somebody doing all three over there good brave man, so At this point as I say you'll know that Whatever way you're doing it getting the networking right is going to drive success or rather getting it wrong is going to cause you lots of headaches and sleepless nights With that I'm going to hand across to Karthik from Tigera. We're going to introduce Calico and how they've been addressing some of these problems Absolutely, so first of all to introduce Tigera Tiger is a company behind project Calico, which is a pure layer 3 approach to networking It's a very simple and scalable approach But we also co-maintenance a flannel we're co-maintenance of CNI, which is the networking abstraction used in Kubernetes and Before we sort of dive into Calico a little bit I want to give you a little bit of context for how Calico came about or rather What is what are some of the approaches that have been taken previously in that from the early days of virtual machine networking and Specifically in the early days of VM networking and this is by the way a standard Neutron with open v-switch slide and you can see the amount of complexity there in terms of bridges V-switches overlays security enforcement points and so on and the reason you have this complexity in the early days of VM networking if you needed to Applications to talk to each other you put them in an overlay you expose the virtual network concept to users and then you sort of conflate Isolation with network topology and so as a result as your applications grew the number of overlays grew and then you started adding layers of complexity and Then you start looking at things like east to west flows and not thought flows and then you had things like virtual routing to be able to get between overlays and The thing soon becomes a total mess as I'm sure many of you guys know if you if like me You've spent nights and weekends troubleshooting open v-switch and why packets going in a virtual wire don't come out the other end You know what I'm talking about right so that fundamentally is an artifact of the fact that people have sort of conflated Isolation with network topology and doing that by creating overlays and complex overlay networking And as we move to microservices that overlay approach starts to break down because if you look at the more The larger microservices deployments and this is a picture from Netflix from a few years ago this concept of creating overlays for individual application instances of groups of application instances that need to communicate and That does not scale from a networking perspective Right and so what you'll find is that the container orchestrators like Kubernetes have taken a fundamentally different approach Towards networking and it started with Kubernetes But all of the other container platforms are moving in the same direction which is to assume things like an An IP per pod or an IP per container depending on which orchestrator you're talking about in Kubernetes It's an IP per pod you assume that the communication between pods within the cluster is over IP and those IP addresses are unique within the cluster We assume the world is IP right? That's the fundamental assumption and the second Major difference is that all of the container orchestrators are moving in this direction Kubernetes has chosen to start in this sort of a model which is To have a separate set of policy constructs that applications can declare Typically in a YAML syntax in terms of what sort of isolation they want So Kubernetes has these concept of labels and selectors and then you can create network policy That defines what should talk to what so if you have an LDAP server or a bunch of LDAP servers objects labeled LDAP servers and you have a bunch of objects labeled LDAP clients and you have a label production or QE Then network policy you can define things like I want all LDAP servers to talk to all LDAP clients as long as they are in Production and they are all labeled project A right? So you start a decouple isolation from networking and What that allows you to do is it allows you to move to a much more simple network fabric With scales and an example of that is Calico So what is Calico Calico is a pure layer 3 networking abstraction built for cloud native platforms We work across multiple cloud native platforms Certainly Kubernetes tends to have Calico as one of the most popular network plugins So today and most Kubernetes deployment you'll see typically Calico being the network plugin of choice But Calico also works with OpenStack. It works with Docker. It works with Mesos. It works It works across multiple orchestrators and so the way it works is typically we use the plugin mechanism defined by the orchestrator in Kubernetes it is CNI in OpenStack it is Neutron and and other orchestrators Mesos also has adopted CNI So depending on the orchestrator we use the plugin mechanism and we create virtual Ethernet that connect In fact, I have a slide coming up on this we use we basically connect the workload a Virtual machine in OpenStack a pod in Kubernetes Directly to the host namespace using virtual Ethernet's and we treat every compute node or every Worker node in Kubernetes as a router Basically had routes in the host routing table pointing to the workload and We advertise those routes within the cluster using standard internet routing protocol specifically BGP And this is within the Kubernetes or within the OpenStack cluster Super simple. We don't use OpenV switches. We don't use bridges no complex overlays keep things Extremely simple and so if you think back to the picture I showed earlier about Neutron with OpenV switch And you look at a similar picture for Kubernetes networking. This is it Every node is a router. We use the standard Linux routing table What Calico does is it creates routes in the routing table pointing to the local pods on that host and Then we have a daemon called bird which is a BGP daemon which creates a BGP peering amongst the Calico nodes That's exchanges routes with each other. So all nodes in the cluster know how to reach a given pod using its IP address Extremely simple and surprise surprise when you look at Calico for Neutron. It's exactly the same architecture No V switches no bridges no complex overlays no tunnels So that's from a networking perspective. We've radically simplified networking and now for isolation the way we do isolation is using policy in The case of Kubernetes We actually use Kubernetes network policy and the reason for that is because the team that the team behind project Calico help developed Help develop the network policy implementation for Kubernetes and the design for it So you'll find that Kubernetes network policy mirrors Calico's policy infrastructure almost identically right and In the case of Neutron because Neutron has more core-screen artifacts like security groups It's not nearly as dynamic as something like Kubernetes's network policy and labels and selectors We have a concept called profiles, which is mapping security groups into profiles From an overall operations perspective Calico like I said the focus is both on simplicity and scalability The way you deploy Calico on Kubernetes if you go back and look at the recording of the session I did yesterday, which is introduction of Kubernetes networking for open stackers I did a live demo of deploying a Kubernetes cluster across multiple nodes with networking with Calico networking And that took two minutes. It's three commands right the networking portion of that is one command CubeCut will apply Calico.yaml If you take more than two minutes to deploy a simple Kubernetes cluster chances You're doing something wrong right that focus is simplicity and the way you operate Calico and production is You use the tools that you've used for network planning and engineering and operations and monitoring for the last 30 40 years There is a lot of thought that's gone into building out network tooling. We are not creating complex overlays We're not creating overlays and overlays We're doing simple IP routing and so what that means is all the tooling that people have Built up over the years can be directly leveraged with Calico Okay, huge huge win in terms of operational scalability and from a troubleshooting perspective Troubleshooting container networking with something like Calico or even networking an open stack with Calico is No different than troubleshooting when your laptop is unable to connect to the internet. Can I ping my destination? If I cannot ping let's do a trace right and see where packets are being dropped and At that point you're looking if it's being dropped on the host you look at is there routing table entry for the destination? If there is is there a policy rule that's preventing that traffic from being received at a destination that policy rule is simply IP tables Actually IP sets for scalability views IP sets not IP tables So it's a really simple a really simple approach from a water deployment Operations and troubleshooting perspective and for those of you have deployed neutrons with OBS and all of the complex layer three Approaches on top of that This is something you will really appreciate so coming started the scenarios of deploying open stacks side-by-side with Kubernetes or one on top of the other so just going into some of these scenarios with Calico There's two sorts of things you have to think about one is how do you network the workloads? So how do you network sort of workloads happening in Kubernetes and connect them with workloads in open stack and? That's one aspect and the second aspect is how do you provide isolation between them when you have different flows different projects How do you provide isolation especially when those applications are running in both domains? Okay? From a Calico perspective because the networking is really simple Every workload whether it's an open stack on Kubernetes has an IP address we use standard IP routing All it is is IP routing if you'd like you can you can peer across them or you can use your infrastructure If you're running in a public cloud, it's perfectly fine. It's IP routing It doesn't matter whether your clusters are in the same data center or in data centers at the other end of the planet It's simple IP right we know how to do IP routing at scale It's a solid problem. This should be no different right, so that's one part of it from a policy and isolation part of it the way Calico does it is we like I said we use network policy in Kubernetes in open stack we actually map open stack security groups to profiles in Calico's Key value store so in our data model we have the concept of workloads which could be in Kubernetes Which could be in open stack, but we have a common data store and that common data store for us typically is Xcd So as long as you have a common data store Xcd across both open stack and Kubernetes that is managed as part of Calico you can define through the use of labels and Profiles in terms of what needs to talk to what so if you have an LDAP server on open stack talking to an LDAP set of LDAP clients and Kubernetes which are being spun up and down and these are changing dynamically as your microservices require them Calico dynamically adjusts to keeping that Policy control and enforcing that through IP sets across the infrastructure. So it's a really simple way to scale your your isolation and Do that at the very end point dynamically based on how your workloads are spinning up across multiple orchestrators So to give you a sort of a pictorial illustration networking is really simple. That's IP routing Nothing to it and we use policy defined typically in yaml syntax for Kubernetes or mapping open stack security groups with things like tags into a common policy model and By the way, the same approach will also work when parts of your application are also running on host Linux instances So if you have an Ubuntu Linux instance running in the cloud somewhere You can have the policy part of Calico also applied there and apply the same IP sex rules there so as you have say a database running in the in the Host Linux instance maybe database clients running on Kubernetes and on open stack all of them the policies enforce dynamically at the very end point as Instances come up and down and it's enforced at both sides of that of that connection all sides of that connection So it's a very Distributed dynamic. There are no centralized sdn controllers. It's truly distributed. It's truly dynamic So that keeps up with your with your cloud as you have instances coming up and down With Kubernetes running Kubernetes nodes running inside virtual machines and open stack again There's different approaches you can take if you have an existing open stack Installation with an existing sdn you could absolutely keep right keep using that run Calico for the Kubernetes Which most? Calico is one of the more popular deploy network implementations for Kubernetes and essentially you would run Calico inside as part of a Kubernetes installation Keep it really simple But if you want to get even more sophisticated and you're looking for a simpler networking solution for open stack as well Guess what you can run Calico for open stack and at this point the way you connect the two is you simply do BGP peering between Calico running on Kubernetes to Calico running on open stack as Far as Calico and the BGP instance inside the Kubernetes node Things it's just talking to a top of rack switch. It's that same concept. So it's simple IP routing its routes in the Linux routing table and normal packet forwarding the data path is totally it's a Calico is not in a data path Calico just sets up the routes and it's simple IP routing right so super simple And then you use the common at CD data store to enforce policy between applications running in Kubernetes and those running in in open stack and Then sort of the interesting to one of the use case Which I think is emerging much more rapidly these days and something that it is going to talk about is when you run Open stack as a containerized application on top of Kubernetes and again It's sort of from a Calico perspective It's the same sort of models simple network peering with BGP and Policy with something like the Calico policy model applied across both Kubernetes and open stack But I'll hand over to the AT&T folks to give more Detail around this By the way, I see a few faces in absolute shock. It's not possible to make new trying this simple. Is it? Yeah, so we're gonna be doing a little bit of a demo today for you guys But before that we should talk about the environment so we're right right now We're running a three node cluster running Ubuntu 16.04 on bare metal Our CNI we're leveraging is Calico so Calico is providing the BGP mesh that our nodes are communicating on As well as the network policy that Karthik talked about Additionally, it's worth noting that Calico supports or our cluster was created using kube admin and Calico has a hosted kube admin manifest that it's one command and it'll apply the The nodes it'll configure the nodes with the ACLs Also, it'll set up an xcd instance for you as well as the policy controller. So we already have a Misclick, so we already have a version of open stack installed running mataka And We have an instance created The instance has a floating IP associated with it and at the end of the day all this is a web server that's running We have a video that's loaded onto it so we can show During the upgrade there is no service disruption Yeah, and we're also going to start a script that will It's that good by the way and the back they're able to see So this script is just going to keep calling Keystone asking for a token We're going to kick off our upgrade to Newton Real estate is at a premium here, and we're going to start a ping on that VM that's running So now the upgrade is happening So now you can see that some of the pods are being de-scheduled as the lively this probes and the writing this probes are being kicked off So you also see some new pods coming up in the init state So of course our init container is going to run and it's basically going to make sure the dependencies for these new pods that are Going to be scheduled to met So we're going to check for the keystone jobs are complete. We're going to check that Well, of course the database is going to come back up before the pods are rescheduled and If I remember right this does happen pretty Quick once the pods get terminated This entire process usually takes about three to five minutes. So yeah, but the big takeaway like larry mentioned is The video is still running We're going to be able to keep getting a token from Keystone and that's because we're leveraging rolling updates here So with rolling updates, it's going to make sure that it gradually moves a service or deployment down one replica at a time And replaces it so there's no interruption to the service at all So if you're looking at this in terms of Keeping your availability high for your your open stack deployments. It's it's pretty Important and it's also a pretty pretty awesome thing to watch, especially as you're doing upgrades I think there was a quick question here. Oh, would you want to take questions now later? Sure Got time Yeah, it's um Yeah, repeat the question So the question was can you can you sort of explain what's happening in behind the scenes to make this sort of magic happen? Sure, you want to take this? I mean at the end of the day, it's what steve just touched on with the rolling upgrades. It's slowly tearing down Pods one by one making sure that at least one version or one replica of that pod is always able to serve requests No, it's uh, the question was is uh, am I corrected? It's happening because it's replacing them faster than they're being torn down Uh, it's it's how it's a built-in mechanism with rolling updates with kubernetes So if you have a deployment that is Using a rolling update it will never schedule fewer than one So as it's tearing them down it will leave at least one replica up So that service always maintains an entry in the load balancer so it can serve requests So it's it's not a matter of speed. It's just a built-in feature for kubernetes with the api So it can make sure that there's something there always to serve the request So I think it's done running look here the tokens likely expired, but Yeah, so you can see that Okay, yeah, so you can see that the formerly gray Side menu bar over here is now the Newton bootstrap blue theme Our vm is still running Still serving The video stream hasn't been interrupted. We can check There was no packet loss on the ping to the vm. So there was no service disruption disruption on our vm workload All right, that's it So At the few minutes we should probably take a few questions as well But I also want to leave you with some sort of parting thoughts mark I'm sure you can add some as well So this is obviously a pretty in my opinion a hugely impressive demo to have a containerized open stack Deployed very quickly with simple networking and do sort of a live upgrade while an application is running And to be able to pull off a demo like this on stage I think is super impressive All right, that's sort of your moment of truth. Can you do this live on stage and have it work? All right, I kind of had my heart in my hands, but you guys seem pretty comfortable Um, so this is sort of like where the future is going Join the community open stack home. There's a lot of activity going on Calico as well strong and thriving open source community Join us obviously canonical is a good supportive of this whole whole initiative, so Thanks for the presentation. I was just wondering is this out of the box open stack home Or is there any did you guys make any edits to make it work like this? Well, this should be out of the box So a question about using um calico as a controller for open stack So you mentioned you don't have you don't use virtual bridges So I was just wondering the sorry don't use what sir you mentioned you're not using virtual bridges correct all switches Right or switches. So, um, I was just wondering so the the virtual machine is running on the compute nodes. So Where do you get the networking ports from? Yeah, so what we do is we essentially create virtual ethernet connecting to the workloads network namespace the vm's network namespace Down to the host namespace and essentially what we do is we we have routes in the linux routing table That says to reach that workloads ip address send traffic into that virtual ethernet So it's really simple No complex bridges or v switches or combinations of bridges and v switches And we essentially do the do our ip 6 rules ip tables or ip 6 actually at that Uh entry point into the workload. So we actually do it at the very edge So using linux name spaces correct. We absolutely use linux namespaces And when you when you have Vm some different hypervisors connected to you know the same virtual network that is How's that traffic isolated from out of virtual networks the so first of all in terms of different hypervisors Every workload essentially has an ip address and the way the networking works a simple ip routing The isolation is with policy which in the case of open stack is artifacts like security groups When you have a security group that says you are allowed this traffic in We have the concept also tags and calico where you can do a little bit more labeling The same thing in kubernetes is with a more sophisticated set of labels But open stack doesn't have the concept of labels to that same degree So it's basically mapping security groups to say hey, this Workload should be has this security group which gets mapped into a profile Which is something applied to a workload in Calico and that profile can be applied across multiple Virtual machines and multiple nodes and essentially that same profile is enforced at the endpoints At the watch late and that's what which connect to the workload and last question. I promise and so but you can still have a Same layer to broadcast across multiple hypervisors. So calico is a pure layer three solution It doesn't it's not focused on layer two. It doesn't use bridges So essentially every node in the calico domain you can consider the router Right, so it's a pure layer three solution a question right here Does your upgrade involve any database Schema changes and if yes, how is that done? Yeah, so every time you run an upgrade or even an install for that matter We have a set of jobs that run for every service. So we have a db and it which is going to start It's going to create the user grant them permissions And then we have a db sync which is going to prep the schema for the version of that container for whatever service it has So these are What kind of jobs are these kubernetes jobs? Yes kubernetes jobs that we use in it containers to check dependencies Okay, and does cola provide that out of the box? Is is it a feature of cola? Or uh, sorry the open stack uh helm Those scripts or those um Init jobs the what project is that part of yeah the dependency checking uh in the past We had used staconetti's entry point. I think right now in master for open stack helm. We're leveraging cola toolbox. It has a dependency checking application in it So calico being a layer three solution Can you talk to how that may or may not impact? Technologies acceleration technologies like dpdk. That's our iov. Sure. Uh, that's actually uh Answer in two parts the really simple answer is that calico what the way calico does networking is that Programs routes into a linux kernel essentially normal linux routing So the data path for a flows application flows Is the normal linux data path calico does not Unless you're free calico can also work if you have things like uh ip ip tunnels or ip sec tunnels And there's other ways you can have as a transport But it's not required. So calico policy can still apply on that But in the in the default case where you're using simple ip routing and simple packet forwarding in linux Calico is not in the data path And so what that means is uh Very depending on the technology you're using If you're using accelerated data paths those generally just work Right and even if you're not using even if you're not using acceleration The thing to keep in mind is because calico is not in the data path Unlike something like an overlay network plugged into open re-switch where every packet gets encapsulated into an overlay Calico is not doing any of that stuff, right? It's so even in the default case Generally you get much better performance with calico Because typically it's it's whatever your linux router can do which is normal packet forwarding Does it help? Yeah I had a question regarding Service function chaining or service insertion and that kind of stuff So how would it work in open stack because calico has a neutron plug in red So probably has to do something for that and also just on a pure kubernetes environment How does service insertion service chaining? Yeah, there's different ways you can do that That's actually a more complex question And I think there's different sorts of use cases to get into there So let's start by talking a bit on the kubernetes side kubernetes You have the concept of services in kubernetes, which is Depending on whether you're using cluster virtual ips and node ports or load balances There's sort of different ways you can do services so Typically those services get you work with something like qproxy which does the translation and sort of and qproxy just works with calico They work at different layers the calico works on the Workload ips and qproxy basically works also works using ip tables But they work with each other calico is fully compatible You'll find some network plugins and kubernetes have to replace qproxy. That's not the case with calico. It just works Now that said there's more advanced things you can do And as an example, an example i'll call out in the case of kubernetes Is you find that some load balances for example fi being Call fi out They have the ability to do things like bgp peering So they actually have written up a document and how you Do bgp peering between fi load balancers And calico so that fi can do more intelligent things with how they get traffic into and out of the cluster So there's different approaches that you can take to optimize sort of your different elements of your network Same thing again in open stack calico does certain things and does it well There's other things you can do sort of outside of calico Which are again, it's it's it's a function of how you architect your overall network Depending on what sort of specific Service functions you're looking to get chained happy to talk to you offline I might have some recipes for you Reach out to us on we have a calico user's public slack channel as well And reach out to us there. We'd be happy to give you some more detail on some of the possibilities Yep, actually, that's that's good. It's good to see that calico can handle the Neutron security group. Can it handle the neutron firewall service? Uh, so so the way you would do this in calico is essentially calico is providing a policy Implementation so you use calico policy typically. So for example Neutron firewall as a service I haven't looked at that recently But generally users would use calico policy to provide that same function up to up to users Two quick questions if I may depending on how much time we have one is Do you use how do you solve overlapping IPs across tenants? Do you use something like multi protocol bgp or whatever? Yeah And the second one is related to l2 for vlan aware vms Do you handle that? Is there any implication? Yeah, let me answer Let me take the second one first and like come to the second first one as well So, uh, you can do your layer to sort of abstractions on the need from a physical network fabric Uh, essentially think of every calico node as a router. So it's a super clean architecture If you want to clear your routers over an l2 fabric with Beef spine l2 architecture great More people these days the general approach in the industry Even outside of cloud infrastructure when you look at the web scale providers Most of them are moving towards l3 all the way to the edge Not just the top of rack when you look at the large web scale providers They're moving to l3 up into the servers as well, right? And so the calico really Fits that model now if you want to use vlands on the physical infrastructure and do other things It's not required. It's uh, it's typically making your network more complex But there's different reasons why people tend to do that and that's fine Coming to your other question overlapping IPs There are approaches that calico can use for overlapping IP address spaces Calico does not support overlapping IPs today. That's not in our current product set There are ways we can do that But surprisingly we have calico deployed on some very large service provider scale infrastructures And we have yet to Get some get requests from service providers saying oh, you need to do overlapping IPs and the reason is this The world we are moving to is a cloud native world The kinds of workloads being moved out into the cloud and into cloud like infrastructures Are workloads where you have instances coming up and down and in a clean IP Layer 3 model like calico When you can keep the networking really simple and do policy Independent the networking you can essentially get get that same effect using policy and a simple networking fabric So don't see a question calico does not do overlapping IP support today. It's something that we actually have Something scoped out, but we haven't had to implement that yet I think um, I think no, no, no, I think we're uh, we're over time now. So Um, uh, we'll obviously hang around here if you want any follow-up questions But just like to say thank you very much to car thick for presenting calico pieces and uh, But steve and larry for giving us a great demo if you have any questions, please please follow up with us here Great. Thank you very much


Hey guys!  We don't want to make noise today. I don't need a background music. Thank you. So for this video, we are going to be talking about how to start your own princess wardrobe. This is going to be a complete guide very similar to how I created the how to start a vintage wardrobe video. So it's going to be very similar to that. But this time we're going to be talking about how to develop the princess aesthetic, wear a shop, how to put things together, and just overall cover the basics on how to begin your journey as a princess. So let's jump right in with top tip number one. And that is pick your color palette. Now you don't have to stick to a color palette, but come into this journey with colors in mind that you really like. Now the royals have seen so many trends ranging from dark green to light baby blue. So there's honestly a color palette that works for whatever your current style is. It doesn't need to be bubblegum pink and Barbie and frilly and bows. That is not what the princess look is all about. In fact, the princess look is honestly in its own right a vintage style as well. But instead of it being an everyday look, it is looks sported by royal people. That leads me to tip number two to keep in mind. And that is you do not have to be air appropriate. In fact, I really recommend that you don't unless you're into shaving your hairline back, plucking out your eyebrows and wearing white base paint. Princess look is all about creating the essence of a princess. And that's often through types of cuts like my shirt today. I've got the puffy sleeve and this kind of sweetheart neckline with pearl detailings. So something as simple as a top like this can really emit the princess energy that you're looking for. So don't go too hard on yourself about being decade accurate. If you do choose the awarding era or Victorian era or the now, worry more so about just creating an essence and creating an essence that you can wear every day. Now once you figured out your color palette and the kind of range of time you want to go for, the next is to really form your own fantastical storyline as a princess. What kind of princess would you be?  For example, if you're into cottages and homemade pies and nature and just that peasant lifestyle, which is kind of contradictory to the whole royal thing, but if you're into that lost princess vibe, then using Snow White or Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty as an example or as inspiration would really be helpful. If you're into more of that like seaside tropical royal energy, then Princess Ariel would be perfect. If you are into more of a Gothic era, if you like more of the Gothic princess storyline, then you can look at other works of art like Timber and Sleepy Hollow. Cassandra Montussell is a great example of a Gothic princess, though she's not necessarily a royal, her outfit is very princess-esque. So just using inspirations from movies, from cartoons, real life historical examples like Maria and Toonette, those examples can really help you narrow down and kind of figure out what your style is all about. And having those inspirations while I've been forming my wardrobe all these years have made it so much easier. So create your own princess story or use a princess story that really inspires you, and you're going to have an easier time looking for wardrobe pieces that remind you of that story. So I know if your style is modern royalty such as Kate Middleton or Princess Diana, I really recommend checking out my other video in the past, I'll link it down below. I cover exactly the basics on how royals are expected to dress now, and that could really help you in forming your wardrobe, so check that out. But if you guys are looking more for that fairy tale princess energy, then definitely keep watching because we're going to talk about stores that you can shop at that I really recommend. So let's get started. So the stores I'm going to be mentioning range in a lot of different eras and styles of the princess look. Some of the stories that I'm mentioning do have more of a Victorian dark vibe. Some of them are super light and powdery and girly. So definitely check through the stores I'm recommending and see which store suits you the best. I'm also going to be breaking it down through price range. So we're going to go from the cheapest to the most expensive. I'm going to be talking about where you can get corsets, where you can get hair bows, where you can get stuff like that, and just overall stores where you can find everyday wearable princess attires. So let's go ahead and break this down. So starting with shop number one, I'm going to do a little bit of a shameless plug here and plug in my merch. So I have been creating a princess lounge attire for a few months now. I'll show you one of my most popular ones. It's this one. This is just a princess sweater. It comes in a lot of Disney princess colors like yellow, white, black, more of a powder blue. This is the Tiffany blue I have in pink. I'm going to be coming out with a lot of other colors as well like lavender, which I'm super excited about. A lot of them are sold out, but I still have the Tiffany blue in stock. And I have a few other designs as well that are very princessy. So if you're looking for like very casual lounge wear and you want to support my channel, buying my merch really, really helps. So I figured I would let you know that there are some new designs up. And yeah, so let's go ahead and jump into shop number two. So the next shop I'm recommending is called Chic Wish. I actually came across them a few months ago. They have really girly, frilly princess style attire for a very affordable price compared to a lot of other shops. That's the one I really recommend. They primarily have more on the girly end. So if you like the dark Victorian stuff, keep watching for the other shops. But Chic Wish is a really good place for your everyday princess attire. The next shop that I recommend is actually a small shop and her shop is called Antique. She's on Instagram. She has on her shop a lot of cottage-y style stuff and a lot of Victorian style stuff. So if you're into that snow white vibe, Antique is a great, great spot to shop at. She has a lot of cute corsets and puff sleeves, ranging in a lot of different neutral tones and colors. And yeah, it's really, really cute. So I really recommend Antique, again, a small shop. So you'd be supporting a small shop and their prices are really, really reasonable. The next shop that I recommend is also a small shop and they're called Jasmine's Vintage Closet. I actually own a piece from their shop and it's the most comfortable thing in the world. They also carry that snow white cottage core princess aesthetic with the Victorian twist. So Jasmine's Vintage Closet is on Instagram and pretty affordable as well. There is also a shop called Needle and Thread. Needle and Thread, I've actually purchased a dress from there and I'll show you what that looks like. They have more of a cottage vibe as well. If you're looking for like that cottage look that can be worn in a very formal setting, Needle and Thread is a great spot to be looking for dresses like that. Now, this next one I can't really pronounce and it's Shop Trinay. Shop Trinette, Shop Trinay. Shop Trinay is a pricey shop but again, they do have a lot of great quality evening wear. I personally don't own anything from them but again, I know a lot of people who do and they really recommended it so I figured I'd put it in this video. Now, we're really getting into the high dollar science here and the next one is Tutsumoto Shiodoriki. Now, I have two dresses from there that I've worn. The princess blue dress which you've seen in the past video and my Mulan Khmer dress. They have amazing, amazing dresses. Honestly, for the craftsmanship that they provide, the prices are more than fair but they are high. So, I really recommend if you're looking for your ball gown, you know, every princess should have the ball gown in their closet. Especially if you're looking for a dress for your sweet 16 or for your wedding, Tutsumoto Shiodoriki makes amazing, amazing stuff and it is custom made for your body so there is that factor as well. But they are, when I think of the princess ball gown shop, I think of them. So, really recommend it. Now, if you're looking for corsets, I really recommend Amazon. I really recommend French Meadows. French Meadows makes custom made corsets and they're very period accurate. You can also check out a shop called Subculture. Subculture, if you like especially the more dark, grungy corset style or clothing in general, Subculture actually makes really awesome dark Victorian corsets and they're really good quality too. So, French Meadows, Amazon or Subculture are great spots to buy corsets. If you're looking for specific things like robes, I think robes are a great way to channel your inner princess. I actually wore a robe in my princess video and a lot of you guys were asking where I got it and the person that I bought that from is named Catherine D. Liz. She's an independent designer. Catherine D. Liz makes boudoir, classy vintage feathery robes that are just absolutely gorgeous made out of satin and chartreuse and all those great expensive things that I cannot pronounce. But her stuff is really great quality. It is a little bit pricey but it is well worth the money. It's going to last you a lifetime. So, I really recommend Catherine D. Liz. Now, if you want those kind of robes on a budget, there actually is a seller on Amazon. I actually just bought one. I bought a pink one after it went viral on Amazon. It's on Amazon. But after it went viral on TikTok, somebody bought it and they're like, oh my god, it's such good quality. So, I bought one. It's going to be here right before Valentine's Day. The next shop on the list is Etsy. Etsy is my go-to for pretty much any fashion style to be honest because there's a lot of creators who make handmade stuff. For example, every hair bow that you see in every video is actually from an Etsy shop called Very Shine. Very Shine. Super affordable bows. Really good quality. They're handmade. So, Etsy is a great place if you're looking for more unique pieces, handmade pieces. And lastly, if you're looking for shoes, honestly, any of the shops that I've mentioned are great because I think a lot of them, if not all of them do sell shoes. But you can also check out this place called Harriet Wilde. Harriet Wilde makes really nice, classy heels and just shoes that just give off the ultimate princess vibe. So, I really recommend checking them out or again, checking any of the shops for shoes as well. Now, that's really all the advice I have. I feel like just being aware of where to shop already is enough advice because there's not enough advice I could provide because the princess aesthetic is such a broad style. There are so many tiny little styles within this style that there's no way I could technically give advice on how to dress like a princess because that is defined in many, many different ways. But like I said, if you use the Top 15 three tips that I gave you, you should be fine. So, yeah, that concludes the end of this video. I hope this video was helpful for you. If you guys have any more specific questions about the princess style, make sure you comment them down below and I'll get back to you. Depending on how many questions I get, I might make another video. So, if you guys want more princess and vintage content like this, make sure you subscribe and turn on the notification bell so I can see you in my next one.


Hello everybody, welcome back to another AI video. In this one, we're in Adobe Firefly, in particular, Firefly Image 2, it's in beta at the moment, it's coming out. And this video, basically, I'm going to pronounce the death of stock photography. Literally, nobody will ever have to pay for another stock photo, where you get like three photos for $3,000 or whatever the heck, those people over there at the stock sites were charging, it's over officially, here we go, let me show you what I'm talking about. So here we go. I'm in a firefly.adobe.com. So I'm in the Firefly Image 2. And let me just show you a few examples. Here is a stock of a female working late at her desk in a corporate office. It gave us four cracks at it. This one is pretty good. This one is great, especially the look they've got the right number of fingers. That one's pretty good. This one's fantastic, of course, is from behind. But there you go, there's just a few examples, I've got tons more here. Here's a stock photo of a male professor teaching at a university class. And I mean, look at this, this is just fantastic. How good these are. This guy looks like a real person, other than maybe that one little index finger might need a little shortening. Not sure there we had, well, it's not so bad. Standing at a blackboard teaching. I mean, if we go in, look at the just the detail and the wrinkles in this suit. This is crazy. And I'm just showing you multiple examples, but we can go ahead and this one here is an old couple celebrating a birthday with champagne and cake. And you'll also notice here that I've uploaded my own image for generative match. So if you have your own photo and you want to, you know, make a stock style to in comparison or you want to make something similar to something you've already got. Another example, this one is also a Labrador leading an ice cream cone. I mean, this is really, really good stuff. That tongue might be as smidgen too long, but you know, you can work on it. And this one here is pretty much perfect. Look at the look at just a detail in the fur. I mean, just lovely. And then here I'll just give you one or two more examples. I'm going to show you how to do it. Okay, well, there you go. We got a puppy in a heart shaped box. Anyways, how do you do it? Let's just go firefly.adobe.com is all you need to do. And let's just move this over here. And then when you're on this page, you will need to sign in now it is currently free to use with a limit as to the number of credits. I'm not sure what the current limit is. But if you have an Adobe account, an active account, like, for example, you're a creative cloud subscriber, you have unlimited generations, all that may change in November. Anyways, the next step here is click on text to image. And when you do that, you're going to get some default stuff here. Hey, that's not so bad, but it's a little bit highly stylized. Here we go, type in a in down here under the prompt, I'm going to go, I don't know what's a good stock image. Let's go with teenager playing video games late at night, something like that.  You click generate. Your first generation is not going to be correct. And this is where it gets a little weird. I got to show you the techniques. I'm just going to quickly generate this and it's not as quick as I'd like. Come on, Adobe. Here we go. All right. Not well, actually, this is actually a little bit better than I expected. Let's see what we got here. Not bad. Not bad. Pretty good. Got the right number. Look at the fingers. They've got fingers. Correct. And pretty good, but not perfect. What we want is we want visual. We want it to be photo realistic. So here we go. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to take the visual intensity down to zero. Basically, I'm removing it. When you do this, now I'm going to click generate and watch this. This is basically getting rid of any stylization. And in its current format, this is pretty cool. So this is the right way to do it. This may change in the future. But we've removed the stylization. And now if we take a quick look, this is pretty good. Her facial expressions are pretty good. This is another shot from the back. Okay, not bad. Okay, I could use that. It's got a little bit of depth of field in there. And of course, we can continue to refresh it. Now keep in mind, if you have a photo that you want to use as a reference, this is called generative match. And you can click on reference image gallery right here. And then you can either upload your own photo or you can scroll through it and use other people's photos or pre-generated photos that they've got already. So you'll see some under dramatic lighting, photo studio, photo manipulation, textures, etc, etc. I'm not going to use any of those, but I did want you to be aware of it. Okay, good. Now let's just go back. I'm going to go ahead and close that up here. And actually, let me show you how to do it. If you wanted to drag and drop in a photo, just click on reference image gallery. Click on upload your new image and just grab an image. So I've got a picture of my dog here. Let's go with that. Okay, whatever, who cares? And then it will go ahead and it'll check it. And of course, this has nothing to do with the type of photo I'm trying to make. But this is the technique. Okay, let's go back here. So if we go down a little more here, again, we want to eliminate stock photos and stock images. We don't want to pay for them anymore. Look at this, we get some effects here. So here are some of the default effects, bouquet effect. These are a little bit too much. I would actually go down a little further here and then take a look at these ones here. Color and tone.  And there are many, many different types here. Tone, image, vibrant colors, etc. Warm tone. You want that golden type look. It's all there too. The same thing goes for lighting. So if I wanted this to be dramatically lit, for example, I just click on it. I'm going to click on generate, and then we'll create a whole new set. And we're going to have it with this big, amazing, beautiful puppy dog as the style reference. How good is that, right? So this could get a little weird, not going to lie. But hey, let's have some fun. So let's see what we get here. Okay, we got some weird stuff. But hey, I'll take it. You know what? I guess the colors of the dog got into the colors of the shirts here. And let's see what we got. That's a very believable picture. Not bad. Not bad. The hair is a little bit messy up at the top there. Very believable. Nice look, nice colors. I like it. There you go. So there's just some more examples. And then finally, you can change the composition. So if you want it to be a close up shot, or shallow depth field shot from above below surface detail, all of these are available to make stock photos. And last but not least, look at this. Not only that, I'm on Twitter here, but one of the Twitter users even mentions that they thought that, look, they can even do perfect ethnicity. So this lady is Indian, and she made some Indian shots. And look at this. This is AI generated. This one's not so good. But look at this. This is pretty much a perfectly lit stock photo if this is what you were going for. And it's got the ethnicities down pat. This is amazing stuff. Those are the tools. That's how you do it.


Hi students, in this topic we are going to discuss about Black and Mendel Hall's model of cross-cultural training. You would remember that in the previous topic we had talked about Tongue's model in which she identified two dimensions on which the training method which should be used for international assignments was discussed. Now Tongue's model has been modified and upgraded by Black and Mendel Hall and we are going to discuss that particular model in this topic. So let's take a look at the key dimensions of this model. Alright, so there are three key dimensions of this model. Number one is the training method. Number two is the levels of training rigor. And number three is the duration of training which is relative to number one expected degree of interaction. And secondly, culture novelty which is the amount of difference between the culture of the parent country national and the host country national. So the duration of training is going to depend the duration and rigor of training is going to depend on both these things. If the cultural novelty is high and level of interaction is high, then the level of rigor and duration of training that is also going to be high and that is also going to be longer. And if the cultural novelty is low and the level of interaction between parent country nationals and host country nationals is low, then the level of rigor as well as the duration of training will also be low. So that is going to basically demonstrate what kind of training method is going to be employed or should be employed in these particular circumstances. So in the next slide, we are going to look at the illustration of this model and how different training methods should be used for each type of situation. Alright, so let's take a look. This model is again a little bit more modified by other authors. So this is this particular diagram is defined by Mendelhall, Dubburn and Odo and you can see that there are three dimensions on which the kind of training and the dimensions are mentioned in this diagram. So you can see that on the x-axis is the length of stay. So your y-axis is less than a week on the lower side, then there are 1 to 4 weeks in the center and on top of it 1 to 2 months. So you can see that as the level of rigor and length of training is 12 and the length of stay is 12, then our approach of training is changing. So to decipher this, we go further towards the training methods. So if our length of stay is less than one month and along with that, the level of rigor or length of training is less than one month, then the level of rigor will be lower and the length of training will also be less than a week. And what kind of training will be provided in this? That is information giving approach, i.e. you will not keep the training very rigorous. Since you have to do it in a few days, less than a week, then basically you will provide information. So in the information giving approach, what strategies can be there? You can see that in the model you are told that this area can be briefings that what is the area of different briefings about the area and what is the culture there and how is the terrain there or what are the requirements there. Apart from that, there can be cultural briefings. Apart from that, films or books or videos can be provided. Use of interpreters, if you have to stay for a little while in an international assignment, then you do not know the language there, so you will not have time to teach the language there. In fact, if you are going to stay for a week or a month, then you will be provided with interpreters and that is why you will need to provide training that how to use interpreters will be done. And apart from that, survival level language training, i.e. you can do basic survival there, i.e. you can ask someone for a way or you can ask someone for time or you can talk to someone yes or no, then the survival level language training will be provided to you in this situation. So if your length of stay is less than a month and if your level of interaction is low and if cultural novelty is also low, then in this situation, the level of rigor training will be low and the length of training will also be less than a week and the information based approach should be used by you. Now moving to the next level, if your length of stay is up to a year, you have to stay for a year, cultural novelty is also there and your level of interaction so in this situation, the level of rigor training will be moderate and the length of training can be of 1 to 4 weeks i.e. you can be given training for a month. So this approach is called an effective approach. What strategies can you have in an effective approach? One is culture assimilator training i.e. you assimilate the culture, like not just knowing the culture but also assimilating and absorbing the values and attitudes of that culture, this can be provided to you in training. Apart from that, role-playing can be done. Apart from that, critical incidents, what kind of critical incidents can happen in a particular different type of a culture. For example, if you are going to a culture where let's say driving safety culture is not conscious, then critical incidents can happen regarding safety on the roadside. So the training required from a person who is coming from a developed country, for example, if a person is coming from the UK, then the situation of road safety is very high and people are very much particular. But if you are going to a less developed country like for example India or Pakistan, road safety conditions are not that good. So those kind of critical incidents may be incorporated in this effective approach. Then another strategy which could be used is cases, stress reduction training because if a person is going for about a year, then the person could be having kind of a stress because of the cultural shock. So that could be also incorporated and then moderate language training. Finally, if you are being sent on an expatriate international assignment for one to three years which is a significant amount of time and that means that you are going to live in that new culture for a long period of time, then the level of rigor of training is also going to be high and the amount of training, the length of training that is also going to be longer. So training could take place for one to two months. This approach would be called then immersion approach. Immersion means that you are in the training period you will be immersed in the culture of the host country. Different exercises will be done, will be provided to you so that you are able to absorb and get immersed in the culture of the host country and therefore absorb it into your subconscious. So this could include assessment centers, it could include field experiments, it could include simulations, you know very well about simulations that simulations are replicas of real life situations, then sensitivity training that you are sensitized to different values and cultures of the host country and then in this kind of a approach, extensive language training will be provided because you are going to stay in the country for more than a year and therefore you must know the language of the country, you must know the language of the people who are living there so that you can interact with them because you are going over there for some kind of a business and that is something which must be taken into account that you must know the language of the business. So these are the three types of approaches which are employed according to the length of training, length of stay and the level of rigor which is required for a particular situation and three types of methods can be employed, one is the information giving approach, then the effective approach, then the immersion approach and this is going to be determined according to the basis of these three dimensions. So this is Black-Elmander Hall's model of cross-cultural training and how training should be done for ex-patriot assignments.