This talk is about the seven righteous fights that you should be having already. And it's about your inevitable failures, because I know about these things. I'm sorry to tell you you're going to fail on these things, but I'm here to tell you how to make it better. 20 years since I learned HTML in an English class, we did some HTML coding on a project on Arthurian legends. So that's where I'm coming from technology-wise. In the intervening time, I've been the lead tech writer on at least 10 new products. And I am a person who has been trained to see and analyze patterns and nuances in how projects work. And I'm going to tell you there are some common points of failure. We get stuck in a rut. This is a picture of a Central African highway. That's what it looks like when it's going well, because you get stuck in a rut.  We all have ruts in our programming. We all have places that we get comfortable in how we work. Like, I am an early-stage person. I really like the start of a software project. I really like being in there. But that means that if you're only an early-stage person or only a mid-stage person, you don't understand the pain points of other stages of software development.  You don't know what happens at year six when everything goes to hell. So who here has gotten the retirement lecture on compound interest? Yeah, right? Like, start saving now, or your retirement is going to suck. Compound interest is magic. Compound interest is also horrible, because it applies to technical debt. The more you make mistakes in the beginning, the more horrible it is to fix them later. So this is a story about a product that I was working on with a startup. We were doing this really cool thing, and we were scrambling to make it ready for a trade show.  And so we were stripping out everything that was unnecessary as fast as possible. And then we went to the trade show, and we got the proof-of-concept contract, and we were so excited. And then we realized it was for a company in Brazil, and one of the things we had stripped out was localization. So what we had to do was take all of the labels that we had hand-coded in English, and port them back into something that could be translated. It cost five days to fix it the wrong way, which is just to say, put Portuguese hard-coded labels in. It cost two weeks to fix it the right way, which is to say, put references to a list that you could translate in. I bet you have all, at some point in your career, hand-coded a label. Don't do it, because it's gonna cost you five days to fix it wrong, and two weeks to fix it right, and that's in the early stage of a product. As you get later and later into a product, it's gonna cost you months.  It's not that expensive if you do it at the beginning. You say to yourself, well, I don't need to do that right now. I'm just gonna get a minimum viable product out.  It's bad for the chocolate chips, and it's bad for the cookie. You don't want to be doing this. You want to have your cookies baked, or your chips baked in. So that's localization. Here are the things that I know you can do for localization. You can make all of your labels refer to lists, so it doesn't matter how you're doing this. You can avoid ever putting words in your images. Don't put them in your logo except for the company name, and don't rely on screen captures to be doing your work for you. Don't say, read this screen capture so that you know how to do our product, because it's gonna look different in another language. Build in support for extended characters. It is dehumanizing and extremely rude to tell people they cannot enter their name in the way that their name is. And I'm not saying their real name, I'm saying their actual name. Their actual name is really important to someone, even if it's something that you think is frivolous and full of emojis. The late Noreen Plunkett used to keep a list of all the ways that people would nangle her name, because she had some Celtic diacriticals in there, and nobody could handle it, like conference registrations, like webpages. There was just this huge list of ways that people had disrespected her core identity. It doesn't take that long to build in full character support. Security, okay, brace yourselves because you all know this could be a book, right? But let's talk about some easy wins. The internet is not actually a series of tubes connected by guys at ski masks, despite what we have been told in the television. It is complex and beautiful.  But eventually there will come a day when you have to write a super embarrassing email because your Waffle Buddies app has been compromised and someone has put everyone's syrup preferences up in a paste bin for the world to see. Do you want to write that super embarrassing thing? No, you do not. Security is neither cheap nor easy, but it beats the alternative, which is fixing things in a hurry and expensively because it's gone wrong. You should hire somebody who knows about security so that you can make sure you've covered your basis. You don't have to hire them forever. You don't have to have an onboard security person, although it's probably a good idea, but you have to be thinking about how you can do this better. If there was one thing I could convince everyone to know in their heart, deep in their heart, if there was one thing I could convince everyone to know, it is that authentication is not authorization. Authorization is not security. Just because you can prove you know who somebody is doesn't mean that you're letting them in the right places. Just because you're letting them in the right places doesn't actually mean your data is secure. I wish that there was like a children's book on this, I'm serious, because we're just not teaching it. We're confounding these things all the time and it's horrifying. Leave room for encryption. You can use SSL internally already. There's no reason you can't be using that in your internal things and when you go to expand, that's gonna be easier. You should be using HTTPS for all of your pages, not just the front one.  Why is it suddenly insecure? I don't feel happy about that. If you bake that in from the beginning, if that's just the default for how you code something, you're gonna have a much easier time when you have 300 pages and you have to do a security audit, which is what I'm doing this week at work. Know what kind of data you are redacting and what kind of metadata is actually super revealing. We think that if you strip off the names and the social security numbers and the zip codes of something, that's fine. Did you know that HIPAA restricts you from doing birth dates of anyone who is older than 89 because it's so identifying what their exact age is? We're saying there is a lot of things that you can correlate and confound with each other and then people know more than they should know. So only collect the data that you actually need. How many of you are building something that actually needs to know somebody's gender? And yet how many of you are building something that has a gender box by default because that's what we're used to? I want you to stop and think about the data you're collecting and why does you actually need that? I want you, and this is my radical call to action, I want you to delete users. I want users to have a way to say, not just delete the access to my account, which is what we usually mean when we say delete, I want them to be able to wipe themselves out of the system because everywhere that we have left ourselves, we are vulnerable. There are some exceptions to this, there's some financial stuff, but I think that in seven years, your data should just sunset. It should just go away unless you have actively preserved it. We're building these chains around ourselves like the ghost of Barley in a Christmas Carol. We're dragging them through life. I am now almost 40 years old and there is evidence of me from the start of the internet from like 21 years ago being a college student and using Usenet, right? I don't necessarily want that dragging behind me forever. So I'm saying seven years, delete the data, tell everybody that's what you're gonna do. Say like Flickr, hey, we're gonna take this away unless you wanna keep it, you don't need to have that. And this part makes people really uncomfortable because they're like, well, we could store it forever. I don't want you to store it forever or else you're gonna end up like OPM.  This is Santa Claus. He has a naughty list and a nice list, right? So this is, you should be whitelisting the scripts that run on your web pages including the web ads. This is security by whitelisting because I'm really tired of injection attacks and ads that have nothing to do with the site but because they're just passing through the scripts that come with the ads, I'm getting hammered and this is why I wanna put on ad blockers. If you can say to somebody, hey, we've already verified the people who are providing the scripts here, we know that they're good guys. You can be a lot more aggressive about saying don't use an ad blocker on me. Don't recreate the wheel. There are people who believe that they can improve on something that already exists just because they're doing it new. If you are selling to enterprise or social networks, don't recreate Active Directory. Don't recreate OpenID. Don't recreate SAML. A whole bunch of really smart people have already solved this problem and the IT managers and flunkies that the company you are selling to would like to not have to put your funky weird homebrewed solution for authentication and authorization into their AD directory because it's not gonna work well. So don't recreate the wheel, just use something that already works. Stop saying that word. Do you know what word it is? Might be Humberning. It's not Humberning. It's secure because every time you say we're building a secure, rabid lawyers sit up and look around for their next victim. Nobody is secure secure. You're more secure. You're better secured. You're considered about security.  So fight number three, extensibility. This is the ability of your software to play nice with others. You say to yourself, it's only internal APIs. I was just on a project where we did a whole bunch of internal APIs and they had the ugliest names ever. They were named after a dead product that never ended up getting released and they were like this long and they had typos in them. But it didn't matter because they were internal and we could all look this up anyway, right? Well, it turns out that some people don't want our pretty interface.  If we had done this right in the first place, we would not have had that scramble. I really like Legos as a metaphor for APIs. Legos have a universal interface that you can just plug things in too reliably and you know what's going to happen every time.  I want you to just be able to say, I'm going to be able to attach things to it and not worry about it. So documentation, I'm a technical writer. You knew I'd get here, right?  Nobody buys software because they saw an awesome PowerPoint about it. Like that's just not how it works. They get excited about software if there's an awesome PowerPoint. But then somebody says, hey, I need to know how that's going to go in installing in our environment, right? Your software is not a state secret.  I have this fight all the time and I lose it and I do not understand. Nobody is really going to go to the effort of reverse engineering your product because of your user documentation. It's like this bugaboo. They're like, but what if people saw our secrets and I'm like, they're not secrets, they're our business model. So how many of you bounce out when you try and go read documentation and there's a login page?  But if I could read a little bit of description about what it is that I'm going to be getting, there's something that motivates me, I might log in to read white papers, maybe. I don't like logging in. Like why should I sign up for spam from your company if I don't even know I want to buy that? Documentation is not state secrets. Documentation is subtle self-promotion. You're like, hey, here's everything you can do with our product, isn't that awesome? I'm going to give this information to you for free. I'm so super. So user documentation is actually pretty easy to retrofit. That's what I do, that's my job, I go in and I take companies that have neglected to do user documentation for the first two years of their product and I fix it in six months. It's easy. These are the things that are not easy. Do you have a tax on your senior developer that costs 10 hours a week and goes on for a month? Do you think you do? Because you do if you are onboarding new developers. If you are onboarding new developers, they must understand how your environment works and the only person who can explain it to them is the old developer. So you're saying, hey, I know we're trying to go really fast here but I need you to slow down and explain it to this other person and it gets really slow. So document your developer onboarding. Document your build process and procedure because it's really hard to do agile development and publishing if nobody but this one person knows how to do it and if they get sick or distracted or cranky, you can't build because nobody knows how to change the procedure at all. They're like, well, I click a button. Jenkins, hello. It's not there. So when you hire a build engineer, make them show you some writing samples. Secretive build engineers are bad build engineers. They are hoarding knowledge and they are putting you at risk for not being able to push your product out. Release notes. Nobody likes reading documentation but if there is one kind of documentation that actually gets read, it is the release notes because people who are installing really need to know if you're about to screw up their whole system or if you have actually fixed the bug that they filed six months ago and they would really like you to fix. So you have to do release notes. They don't have to be super charming or cheerful but they have to be effective, timely and complete. You want to document your coding intent. As a writer, I really like going to sprint planning meetings because it's pretty much the only time that somebody actually spends time explaining the business reason for the coding goal. Otherwise, we just have all of these little stories that I don't know why we're doing them and I personally work a lot better if I understand why it is we're doing something and what's going to make it more effective. Also, those are really ephemeral meetings and you may not all agree on what happened. So if you document your coding intent and what you're trying to accomplish, it's gonna work out a lot better for your organization. Affordance. Affordance is what your software makes obvious or easy, what your software is trying to get people to do. This is the crosswalk where I go to work. You may notice a little problem here. The crosswalk button and the crosswalk are not in the same place as the sidewalk. This is troubling right now in the fall because I have to go stand on the grass, it's not great for the grass, and it's pretty bad for wheelchair users or anybody who is on crutches. But imagine, I'm from Minneapolis, what it's going to be like when we plow the sidewalks and all the snow piles up against the post and we can't get to the crosswalk button. This is bad affordance, we don't want to do this with our software. Affordance is the big green okay button and the small gray more information button. It's how we're shaping people's reaction to our software. One of the things that we never think to do and it's an affordance thing is, when we run our software, we run it with all the privileges turned on. So you perform a task and it goes great, woo, it's good. Have you tried performing it without all of your elevated privileges? Have you logged out and logged in as an unprivileged user? How long does it take you to do that task? Do you want to live like that?  I don't think you do and I don't think your users do either. Affordance is also used in some really interesting sort of nudge ways to improve our behavior. This one is about how sometimes banks will let you just take the change, the extra change to round up to a dollar and deposit it in a savings account. That's an affordance that allows people to do more saving without any particular effort on their end. We want to make software that creates good behavior with no particular effort on our user's part. This figure is called a homunculus and it's really distorted because it's about how the nerves map to the brain, how much sensation we get from different parts of our body as opposed to our visual perception of our body. I think that as developers, we sort of end up in this visual perception part of our body where we're like, this is how I believe the body works, this is how the software works, but we're not actually replicating the daily tasks of our users. So if it's like a minor irritation to us, it might be something that they have to do 14 times a day and it's more irritating every time. Here is the secret.   There's a sprint dedicated to resolving technical debt, right? Used to have these, it was really cute. That never happened. Here is the secret. You are never going to fix it later because by the time you get to later, even if you had time, your users have adapted to the broken way it works and they are angry that you want to change it. You're like, but it'll be better. And they're like, my whole workflow is centered around how it's broken. I do not want you to move my cheese. I am angry at the mere thought of you moving my cheese and making this any different than it used to be. You cannot fix it later and you cannot step in the same river twice. You only get one chance to be right the first time. Fight number six is acceptance. Find some people who use your software. I do not mean people who buy your software and I do not mean people who show up at trade conferences. I mean people who sit in a fire truck and use your navigation software to get to the right place. Actual users, find one of them, find five of them. It doesn't have to be statistically significant at this point. You just need to talk to them. You need to break out of your echo chamber because it is so easy for us to assume that people are living like us and it is so wrong that they are. I really believe that five users and a WebEx session is gonna change your world. Microsoft, they have this beautiful testing suite with the two-way mirrors and the recording devices and it's all very exciting and I was super excited to get to use it but it didn't teach me any more than just sitting in a room with the user and here's the important part, shut up. Don't tell the user how you expected it to work. Don't tell the user how to make it work.  Your physics is all broken. Really often, we hire user interface designers before we hire user experience designers because you have to build a piece of software and it has to have a front end of some kind. But if you don't get to hiring a UX designer eventually, you're gonna be in trouble. So if you can't win this fight, if you cannot talk someone into hiring you an expert and how people are, give up and become a student of UX. This is always going to make you a better developer. Nobody's going to say, oh, it's so terrible that you have sympathy for our users. That's not how it works.  I think that's gonna be a great selling point for all of you. So you wanna say I'm a student of user experience even if you're not an expert. The place you should start by the way is Kathy Sierra's book, Badass, Making Users Awesome, which is stunning and wonderful and I literally carry a paper copy of it around because it's just so clear about how it could be better UX designers. Fight number seven, accessibility. Have you ever looked at your software with your glasses off? Can you still see all the elements? I turned 39 this year. I started needing reading glasses because suddenly the conference badges were too close to my face. I'm like, oh, I can't see that. I'm like, what is this? So I've never worn glasses. If I wanted to look at a user interface element, I would borrow my spouse's glasses. I would say, hey, load me your glasses so I can see what the screen looks like when your vision is a little weird. Have you ever looked at it on a non-retina screen? This is a real usability problem because we all get these beautiful MacBooks and they are gorgeous and then that's like the bad one and the big monitors that we're using to code. They're gorgeous, they're clear, they're glorious. That's really not how it works out there in the world. There are people using some really terrible monitors and you're not making your stuff accessible if you have to have really fine color gradations to see what's going on. Have you looked at it on an actual phone? Not a phone emulator on your retina screen but an actual phone and not your newest iPhone but like your dad's phone. Like the one he has all cranked up so he can see anything because he's blind as a bat. Have you looked at your stuff on that? Because even though the CSS claims it's gonna reflow, it doesn't always and even though the colors look great on your monitor, they don't always and if you're going to be accessible, you have to look at it in a different way. Did you know that 8% of men are color blind? Red, green color blind. Makes it really hard to tell what your interface elements are if you're doing stop lights for your logging. Like which one's gone wrong? I don't know, the brown one? Like for some reason, the 8% of men who are color blind pretty much never become user interface designers. I'm puzzled by this but it's true. The people who can see well are the people who end up in the arts who end up in user interface design. Don't do this to people who have screen readers. It's really easy to say, click here, click here for the link. If you spend an extra 30 seconds crafting your link, giving it a target and a name and a destination, you're not only making it possible for people using screen readers to see what's going on, you're making it more trustworthy for every user to be able to say, hey, I know where that link's going to go. I'm not about to get hijacked somehow. You know what? Not everybody has broadband and not everybody has their employer subsidizing their phone data plan. Some people are living in the dark ages. Some people in America are still using modems. Do you want to leave those people out?  Also, there are other reasons that people don't have internet. This is a fight I lost at Microsoft and I am still embarrassed about it because what happened was I was working on the 2008 Windows Server. And we had come up with this amazing new plan where you don't get all your help in the build. You download it and that allows us to keep it fresher and more current and reactive and make sure that we're solving all the problems, right? Do you know where servers live? They live in server rooms with ferocious firewall rules and if you're doing it right, no browser because you do not want your servers in your server room exposed to the internet.  So there's no way that you're going to open up a hole in your firewall so that Microsoft can download some unseen packets to solve your server problems.  Do you think the admins had server installed on the computer at their desk? They didn't and they couldn't look up the server help from the desktop that they had. So they had this real problem and I said, we can't do this with server documentation. We have to provide the whole thing and I was insufficiently persuasive and if you've used Windows Server 2008 it has tried to download documentation updates for you. Sorry. So there are a lot of people in the world using old devices and I'd like to say that it's easy to forget how far we've come in phones and tablets and everything. When angry birds switched over to tablet default, I noticed, I'm like, I can't see the birds past the ads. I'm not okay. So I think it's really important to keep a stash of old phones if you're doing any kind of mobile development so that you can see what the load actually looks like. You may also be talking to people who have big fat fingers or can't find their stylus or are, I don't know, just not good at the touchingness. Sometimes I get really cold fingers and the phone doesn't respond to me. So a problem more common in women than men and it's just really frustrating to not be able to use somebody's app because it requires really fine finger control. We are all only temporarily able-bodied. Age is coming for us all. Disability, infirmity, sickness, accident, it's gonna happen to us and we need to be building for ourselves in the future. If I'm not saying be compassionate to other people, that's not sufficiently compelling, be compassionate to your future self. Say, hey, future self, how's that gonna work out? I don't understand. Like, if I can't use my left and right hand, how am I gonna hold my phone and type on it? So remember that we're all only temporarily able to do these things, to type, to touch, to speak. It's gonna change.  And what I'm trying to get you to do is do work upfront and you're all kind of like, yeah, but I have this deadline. I have this thing. There's a reason I can't do these best practices. Let me ask you this. How much do you really enjoy performing mission-critical tasks on a tight deadline with no particular reward? Because that is not my favorite thing to do and that's what you're going to end up doing if you continue to make these mistakes. So now what? I've made you all sad.  Write a coding style guide and follow it. That solves a ton of the accessibility problems that you can get. Apple has a nice one. There's some really good stuff out there for write a style guide and follow it. Do some brown bag lunches on how you, as an organization, could do this. You could, for instance, show the talk. They're gonna record it and send it out. You could just have a lunch about this. I'd be famous in your company. Or you can talk about how your particular product could be improved, how you can pay down some of your technical data ahead of time. When you're pair programming, encourage each other to best practices. You can say, hey, I think it would be more accessible if we did this. Hey, I think it would be more secure if we put in SSL. Hey, I think we could improve on this. Add test for accessibility and usability. Even if you don't have a test group, write that into your test plan. Like, how is this usable? How is this secure? How is it accessible? Cultivate diversity and representation on your team. Make sure you have one of those 8% of colorblind guys, right? Or there are other types of diversity that you might wanna throw in that other people think about. Ask questions. Ask users questions. Ask your installers questions. Ask your tech support questions.  Because the users are calling in going, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. And they know where the problem is. This is why I always like sitting next to tech support. They know where the problems are. They know where the bodies are buried. So, here are your seven righteous fights in handy slide format. Localization, build it in early so you don't have to build it in at 300 pages. Security, put the encryption in now so you don't have to do it later. Extensibility, make it so that other people can use not just your front end but your back end. Documentation, because it really sucks when you have to try and drag a build engineer out of bed in the middle of night. Affordance, making your product shape behavior that you want. Acceptance, making sure that you are serving your users' needs and accessibility, making sure that everybody can use your product. I'm gonna go back to accessibility for a minute because I forgot something really important. Did you know that software has to meet section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act in order to get federal money? If you are not ADA compliant, the feds cannot spend money on you. And you're like, that's okay. I'm not selling to the government. Do you know who that includes? Any higher education or college that includes federal grants, prisons, hospitals, like the world is touched by federal money and federal money is driving this accessibility need. So go look up section 508. It has some really clear outlines on what it is you need to be doing and make sure you are not leaving money on the table by not complying with it. It's like a no-brainer. Like, hey, we're 508 compliant. How about you? No? Guess we can't buy you. Okay, so this talk was too long. I read Twitter. Be productively lazy. When I was a kid, I read the original, not the movie of Cheaper by the Dozen. And it's actually a really interesting story about people who were productivity experts who studied motions in factories. And the thing I got out of it was they would go to a factory and say, who is your laziest worker? Who is the worker who works least hard? And they would film that person because that person had optimized as much as possible to do as little work as possible. I want you to optimize as much as possible in the front end of your products to do as little work as possible in the back end.  I'm in favor of it. So I can take a few questions and then you can go have lunch or you can go have lunch now. Do I have any advice for winning these fights? I do. The advice is make it about money because it turns out that business owners are reluctant to give you time to work on this until you say, yeah, but it's gonna save us this much money. Like, if we do it now when we only have six pages, it's gonna cost us a day. If we do it later when we have 20 pages, it's gonna cost us three days. So if you make it about money, people listen better.  Like, I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. I care about moral force, but they care about money. Is my point that all of these things are part of the minimum set of features? My point is that you should try to make them part of the minimum set of features. I am enough of a realist to know that you're not going to win all of these fights, but every little hook that you leave in for later, every time you take 30 seconds instead of two seconds to build a link, every time you say, hey, I don't have to hand code that, I could put that in a file, that is your personal rebellion against speed kills because your product, while it may be viable, is not going to be optimal. And so it's always gonna be a balance. Like, I can't tell you, you have to do all of these things to make a viable product. That's not true, but I can tell you, you will pay and pay and pay if you don't do these things super early. Yes, okay, so the question is, there's a lot of problems selling this to your peers and especially junior peers because it doesn't feel productive to them to do this. They're like, we can do that later because they haven't, like me, had this problem happen over and over again. And this is part of why you're going to have to do the socializing in a peer programming way. And I think one of the things you could do is make an hour a week, like accessibility hour, and say, okay, we're all gonna use screen readers for the next hour. Oh, wait, you don't like doing that because it's really terrible with our product? Like, eat your own dog food in more than just generating code.  And how many of you actually use your product every day? Like, I don't, I open it to document things, but I don't actually use it to do anything. I think it's a really important part of being developers that we don't just make the product that we understand how to use it because otherwise we're failing to make a product, we're making some code. Does that, okay, time for lunch.


All right. If you have only partial information about your neighbors, that will do for the moment. But before coming out to you, requesting you to speak for 30 seconds, obviously we'll do it on a sample basis. People like the idea of knowing each other more than doing something useful in the class. So I hope you have made at least small notes on a piece of paper, whenever if you are picked up in the random sampling and you have to come here and introduce a member of the group, you should be able to do that. You can carry a piece of paper with you if you want to. But right now we'll stop this discussion and go over to the next matter. So I'll come back to the introductions later. Okay. As I mentioned, each one will have to give a talk for five minutes. All talks will be completed on Saturday in two classrooms, 201 and 202. There will be a three and a half hour morning session and three and a half hour afternoon session. However, every person will have to be present only during the presentation of all members of the group. So the number of students in a group, they vary between 9 and 17, for example.  The schedule will be followed absolutely in a military style. That means if the session has to begin, let us say at 10.20, then it will not begin at 10.21. It will begin at 10.20. Obviously, we will provide some buffer time for people to move out of the classroom and the new set of people to come in. Please note that the five minute talk is an upper limit. You can finish your talk in three minutes or four minutes if you so wish. However, you will not take a single second beyond five minutes, not a single second. So five minutes at the end of five minutes, if you are midway through a sentence, you dead stop there at the half-centers, period. We appreciate this. You may never have done that. You are always permitted to at least complete the sentence. I will tell you an anecdote that happened in the conference in Zurich, the VLDB conference, an invited paper and the presenter was a great known researcher. He had several slides. A German professor was in the chair. At the appointed time, the person started presenting. As the chairman had announced, five minutes, ten minutes before the talk, he gave a bell. The person was supposed to speak at most for five more minutes, remaining five minutes were for question and answer. He continued to speak beyond five minutes. At the end of ten minutes, which was the end of the entire session, the chairman simply said, thank you professor, the next speaker is so and so. Now this professor, well-renowned researcher presenting an invited paper was obviously offended. He said, chairman sir, I have just a few more slides left. And this German chairman smile says, you did not hear me professor. He said, thank you very much. And the next speaker is so and so. Now that is the respect that one has to give for should you. For others, not for yourself, but for others. Is that okay? Five minutes, by the way, is a lot of time. If you think about it, you can actually speak on a topic in three minutes or four minutes. There is an additional requirement. So no slides. Because slides means transition time is costly. You can use whiteboard. There will be whiteboard and black markers, etc. There will be a transition time of exactly one minute provided in which the person walking out will have to clean the board. So you get 60 seconds to clean whatever you have written on the board and then you go to your next seat. Somebody else comes up. We're organizing such that there will be enough microphones that the next person is actually ready with the technology where a person can simply walk in and start talking. I won't be there. Unfortunately, I'm in a far away place called Agartala. But our TAs and other colleagues will be there. You have to submit a text file containing the name of the topic. So it should not be a PDF file. It should be a .txt file prepared using a notepad or any equivalent. A .txt file with a .txt file can be automatically analyzed. I will be showing a sample of such a .txt file now. But the exact format in which you have to write your .txt file and the naming convention for the file will be informed on the boodle today. This has to be submitted by tomorrow midnight. None of us are going to read that. But if the .txt file does not exist on the boodle you miss the chance to speak. Simple. And it must exist before midnight. So please don't try to upload it at 11.55 and then say, oh, some problem happened with boodle. Preferable to leave about 2-3 hours. Best bet is you mull over it. It won't take more than 10 minutes to write that page. But upload it as early as possible. In addition to making this presentation, you also have to assess others in the group who make the presentation. It's a very useful practice to assess oneself. How do you assess oneself? This is an opportunity. Your five minutes presentation will be video recorded. It's a short presentation. But you will be able to see that presentation. You will be able to observe yourself. You will be able to listen to yourself. You will be able to see your own body language. You will be able to see how your coverage impacts the audience when you hear it yourself later. So all these recordings will be rendered and will be made available in the Moodle for all of you to see. So that you can learn not only from yourself but from others. And as I mentioned, at the end of the course we shall have a more formal presentation recorded. And if you do not find improvement in your own speaking abilities then as I said, I should deserve a fail grade for not running the course stop. All right, here is a sample. So you have to write your roll number. Obviously this is a fictitious roll number. This actually is not completely fictitious. I mean this was the year when I joined the master's program here. So 69 is real. The rest of it is concocted because those days we had only six digit roll numbers. So I've created a roll number to in tune with our groups and so on. So this Mr. Brijlal Chesumal Karamchandani wants to speak on learner autonomy. So he gives the points. IIT Bombay offers complete freedom to a student. These are the points that he has listed. All amenities are provided.  Always someone in the lounge. So let me tell you a bit of a history about this student. His real name was one Mr. Pandey. But throughout the first semester he spent time mostly playing either bridge or chess or karam. He was never seen in the academic area. He was seen in the lounge perpetually. And he was thrilled to find that there is always somebody in the lounge. So that is why he was actually named Brijlal Chesumal Karamchandani. But this is the modified name that I have given. His only problem was the academics was too strict. Some teachers insisted on attendance, which he did not like. And the intake program, SINET insisted on throwing out students if they do not have adequate, in modern terms, if you do not have adequate CPI, you get thrown out. So just to tell you the reality of those days, there were no grades then. There were absolute marks. Each paper was 100 marks. 20 marks, 20 marks were for two tests. And 60 marks were for the exam. In the internal two tests, if you scored less than 30% in any subject, you would be thrown out. You would not be able to appear for the final exam. If you score 30% somehow or more, 33% whatever, then you are permitted to take the exam. But if you fail to get 50 marks out of total 100 in two subjects out of six that you are studying, you are thrown out again. If you fail in one subject, you are permitted a special re-exam of 100 marks. If you fail in that, you are again thrown out. The general rule was you are thrown out, occasionally you are retake. Now that was the problem of my friend. So that is why you will notice that while he starts with learner's autonomy, this is the kind of autonomy he has in mind. What I have created this example is to illustrate that the name of the topic does not necessarily indicate completely the intention of what material the speaker wishes to cover. The actual points to be covered will be completely dependent upon that person's own context. It will not necessarily be relevant to the context that you might create in your mind from what the title explained. In this particular case you have complete freedom. You decide on a topic. You decide on the points but you have to submit such a text file in some appropriate format. With a file name convention strictly followed, the purpose is obviously that all these files can be automatically categorized as the content of the file can be automatically assessed or further categorized using a simple thing like AUK for example. So if your text lines are appropriately formatted. Is that okay? Now there was one student who had a problem on the schedule on Saturday. Is that person here? Yeah. So he had come to me and I had said that we will schedule his recording on either Friday evening or Monday sometime. Are there any other students who also have an emergency outage on Saturday? One, two, three. My God, more and more people are coming up. Okay, can you share the emergency that did not have emergency at the beginning of this dialogue? There is a hackathon on Saturday. 12 p.m. It starts at 12 p.m. Here it's an IIT Bombay. How many people? What is your group? Six A. If your recording is over before that, much before that it is okay, right? You see, you're not required to be present throughout Saturday. You're required to be present for one and a half hours. So I suppose that is okay then except for him who has to go out. So as I suggested, please send a mail to me. He has already sent. We'll excuse you and we'll have to decide on a specific time where we can conduct your recording. It cannot be done 10 days later. It should preferably be done on Friday evening itself or it can be done on Monday morning. But such people who want to be excused from this engagement still have to make submission of their topic and the points that you want to make. And in case for such people the recording session is going to be organized on Friday evening, then your time slot for uploading the text file will not be Friday midnight. It will be Friday noon. Is that okay? Fine. As of now there are two people who are not free on the entire Saturday. One or two people who have some engagements. If your slot, because the timetable at the time when we formulate the time slots we may not remember exactly this. In case your group comes at that time slot then you can see, you can actually speak at the beginning and you will have freedom to go away without assessing others or you may be permitted to join some other group. My TA's will take a call on that for exception. All right? Now we come back to the brief introduction. 30 second introduction. I'll randomly pick up someone who should stand up at the place and introduce the neighbor. His name is Siddharth. He is from Lucknow. He has just joined the PhD program. I haven't had much time talking to him but I assume he likes playing cricket. I'm going to introduce Jayesh. He's my classmate and he's from Maharashtra. He did his BTEC in Mumbai. His interests. He likes music. And then he's a good programmer. You wish to get all your programming assignments done by him or what? As long as you're not caught, everything is allowed. They're heavily discussing amongst themselves. So already you know everything so I will ask. His name is Guru Kanwal Singh and he's from Chandigarh. His areas are wireless networks, cryptography and current programming. He does not have any girlfriends. He plays badminton. Because you don't have any girlfriends is that the main motivation to register for this course? No, not necessary. One of the motivation. I'll be introducing Ajita Shikharth. She's my classmate as well as my floormate. She has done her engineering from Government Engineering College, Bharatpur and she hails from Bharatpur Rajasthan. She's done her primary education from Dosa and then she did her class 5 onwards from Bharatpur. That's when she's shifted to Bharatpur. Her hobbies are sleeping, listening to music and travelling. I like people who have a hobby of sleeping. I love sleeping too but unfortunately I don't get time to sleep. Let's go behind. The backbenchers are sitting quietly. So let me capture some backbenchers here. I'm going to introduce Dipesh. He's a first year PhD student here. He just joined our institute in the SEM. He is originally from UP. He did his masters from UP Technological University and I hope to connect with him very well. I would like to just mention that as you go ahead and mingle with your group members, I try to find out some more specifics. For example, he introduced the friend as coming from UP. We can picturize the map of India and the map of UP. It's rather a large place, isn't it? With how many crore people? Nobody knows the population of Uttar Pradesh. You come from UP, what is the population of UP? Close to 20 crores. So our friend while introducing him has generalized him to be a part of 20 crore people. Had he said for example that the person is from Allahabad or from Banaras or from Meerut, it would have been pointed to a location more closely. The second thing he mentioned is he studied his B.Tech in Uttar Pradesh at the Technical University. It had more than 800 colleges under it. So it again does not tell you anything more specific about the person. I'm pointing this out that we often are satisfied with the generalities whereas when it comes to people, knowing people, it is useful to know as many particular details as possible so that both of you can relate to each other in a better fashion. I already consumed much of the time for today's session. Just to conclude, all of you have to make a 5 minute presentation and record it and then assess others who make that presentation. The assessment format, you don't have to write essays by the way. I mean if the person is speaking for 5 minutes you would like to listen to that person for 5 minutes. So the assessment cannot take more than 30 seconds after the person has finished talking. And there will be specific parameters listed. They will be put up on the moodle so that you can see what those parameters are. And you will have to actually just take, you don't have to write anything. But that means everybody has to have a working fountain pen or a ink pen or a ball pen or a pencil at least. You should have your own, alright. So with this, let me ask you whether you have been able to see the video that was uploaded yesterday. All of you, anybody who did not have time to see, can you raise your hands? This is an amazing class. The whole class comes in time. The whole class watches videos. Is there something wrong with you? Very good. I am very proud of you. I told all my colleagues in a faculty meeting yesterday and I'll be informing the dean and the director of this extraordinary coherence in this class. Keep it that way. If you can sustain it throughout the semester, we'll have a treat for all of you. On second thoughts, I will seek my wife's permission to spend that kind of money. But in the past, she has been permitting me so that's not a problem. Alright. So if you have seen that, proofed editing is an absolutely important step. In the days when you construct your documents online, you'll be using some word processing software or the other. Now, how many of you routinely look back at a document to check errors? Can you raise your hands? One, two, three, four, five, many. Okay. But online, you cannot mark the errors. You can at most correct those errors as you notice them or you have to note down those errors somewhere else and then correct. Right? You cannot mark those errors normally.  How many of you routinely keep the tracking on while editing a document? That's the harder question. Most of us don't do that. Even if we are using a word processor, we depend upon the word processors in-built dictionary to suggest grammatical errors and spelling errors and wherever there is a red underline somewhere, we quickly go and correct that. So in effect, we are dependent completely on the word processor software to point out our errors and the word processor itself to correct our errors because it indicates what is the correct spelling and so on. English is a bit of a funny language. Any language in fact has its own idiosyncrasies but English, for example, is spelt differently in England and in the United States. Indian English follows the British English rather than the American English and if you don't have the right dictionary, you will get a whole lot of horrible errors which appear okay to you or do. So you have to decide on what standard thing that you'll follow. English is also funny because there are several similar sounding words which have completely different meaning and sadly a wrong word might be right as far as grammar is concerned and spelling is concerned. So the word processor will never be able to point out that way. You agree? I had the occasion of doing this in one of my own promotion interviews. I had prepared a two-page write-up and gave it to the selection committee members and I was sitting in front and the great Professor Mabra of IIT Madras who was a member, he was looking at it and at a certain point he suddenly said, kick and showed it to his neighbor who is Professor Hari Sastrabude from Pune and I suddenly realized what was the mistake. I had said in one sentence, in my career, something, something, except the career was spelt as carrier, you know, bicycle carrier and the word processor had said it's perfectly correct English. So notice the importance of identifying, locating the error and marking the error. Traditionally, when people had handwritten manuscripts and which the printer set on a printing machine sort of, the first rushes they would be given to you and then you will have to proof-edit them or proof-read them. So the small discussion that I presented on behalf of Professor Prakash Vidya is related to that. We have decided that we will now work on pieces of software which will permit you to do such marking even on the screen. We already have a software which permits us to do that on PDF files. Professor Supratik introduced it to me many years ago. There is a free version and there is a costly version which I actually purchased. So all my students who submit PDF files as their reports, I can actually use a stylus and do exactly this. I don't do proof-editing but I write my comments. You can use that for proof-editing but you require a device with a stylus because you have to mark something by hand. There are utilities which are available where you can put your own comments on a PDF file. But those comments are usually written in the margins and there is no clear way of indicating where exactly that comment relates to. If it is about proof-editing it is not easy. All of you are computer science professionals. I would request you to start thinking about it. What kind of tools could be used to help you proof-editing? I am not talking about correct. I am not talking about word processing. I am talking about proof-editing. That means you should be able to mark online the mistakes that you are looking at. Obviously the whole process is an iterative process. You have been introduced to some symbols which Mr. Prakashwati will start discussing today and he will have several sessions following this. But what is important is that these symbols have become standardized over more than 100 years. Chicago manual of style which probably is the first glossary of all these symbols is almost 100 years old. Now some of the symbols have lost last term because they may not be any more valid since you don't do printing press kind of thing. But many are still valid. And some simple ones are absolutely mandatory for each one of us to know. So that is what this whole session is about. Use of proof-editing and then subsequently we will also discuss use of punctuation marks and other things. Since we are going to follow the flip classroom concept, henceforth most of the assignments that you will have to submit will have to be done here and submitted here. There won't be any home assignment. The whole purpose is you discuss among yourselves, work out, repair something and then make a submit. Many of these will be group submissions. So we will follow a methodology which is called a think-pair-share methodology. Are you aware of this? You have heard of this? No. In a think-pair-share methodology, the class obviously has no lectures. There are discussion sessions. Just like I went around asking somebody to talk etc. We'll have such occasions. But more importantly, if a point is discussed and a problem is posed, all members of a group attempt to solve that problem individually on their own. But after every individual has done it, we ask them to share their paper with their neighbor. So I have done this. What have you done? Believe me, there is a lot of learning to find out from what my neighbor has done. Even if that neighbor has made many mistakes, when you explain those mistakes to your neighbor and convince the neighbor that these are wrong and when your neighbor does the same thing, obviously there is more activity of the mind and learning is better. In simple terms, it's called think-pair-share. So we are saying think, not pair, but group-pair-share. The idea is that we do not want to lose focus on every individual because at the end of the day, each one of us has to become a better communicator. But we will take advantage of the fact that we have so many neighbors and friends and their collective wisdom can be made available to me individually when I do this. We will follow this mechanism in most of our activities. All right? Thank you, Professor Patak. One was the theoretical part about proofreading. The second was the actual symbols used. Then we had one page giving you a para in three formats. That is the uncorrected form, the corrected form. Corrected means proofread form with markings. And third was including those corrections. If you see on top, this was actually from last year's batch. In last year's batch, we had assignments that everybody had to listen to one-take talk of their choice. And then, so it is listening skills. Then they had to write a short report on that. So this was one of the reports. We wanted to select something which had sufficient errors. And we didn't have a problem. In fact, there were many contenders. We had to choose among them. Even the best report, which was only one para, had at least five errors. And this one has many more, you can see. The fourth paragraph. So if you see here, you can see the proofread version in which half the errors are those of commands. That is, you have this with comma underneath. And this is the general pattern that in any document, you will find that half the errors are those of commands. Almost nobody knows how to use commands correctly. So we are going to have a special session for punctuation marks, mainly commands. Other punctuation marks are not very important. For that also, we have a chart made which we'll be uploading, which you can study beforehand, which gives examples. And then in the class, we'll be doing only an exercise. So this shows you what happens. Now, for example, Professor Hawking's words. So in that, P has to be capitalized because he is a specific professor. If it is general professor, you need not capitalize. And Hawking is a proper noun. So H has to be capitalized. All these things we have actually learned in school. Capitalization rules. But while typing, we tend to forget them. Then big bang. Big bang is the big bang. It's not any big bang in the second-last line. So both B's are capitalized, which you must have read. The word universe previously used to be capitalized. But the present convention is that it need not be capitalized. Previously, English had a lot of capital. But they are slowly vanishing. And if you have read Times of India, they tried to make even the I, that is first personal pronoun, also small, which is not permitted in English. So the third part, this is also, this is the second part of the same submission. We had just blanked out the corrections because we had a PDF file and given you as an exercise. So how many errors could you find in the exercise? Anybody remembers? No, no. How many? Number of errors. Not the individual errors. Ten. Anybody remembers how many errors you found? Anyway, we are close to the actual, because there were 13 errors in that. Now our next assignment, which we will be taking up next time, will be a one-full page, class assignment. And that page you will get 15 or 20 minutes to correct that page. Then we will just take a poll of how many errors you have found. Then we will display the model solution, explaining each error. And since you have the sheet in front of you, you can check that how the error is marked and why the error is there, etc. So that will give an idea of where we stand and how much we have to improve. That is the invention. If this small tree is a business, it will actually cut it, but it has to be replaced by something. The replacement is written in the margin. It is written in the margin. That is the convention. Yeah. Now if you have read the theory part, the draft also always has to be double-spaced. So if it is double-spaced, you mark it there itself and you also mark it in the margin so that you can count and check it. There are more. There are no more conventions, the same convention. But the application of the convention, as he said, is that ideally if you have a double-spaced printout, then you can mark the correction either above or below. Yes. But you are expected to also mark it in the margin. The margin. The nearest point of that error. Yes. The purpose is you can count. See this counting error is something that is considered a silly thing. It is not a silly thing. The number 10 and the number 13, you have to reach as many errors as you can find. And this number then reminds you whether you have corrected all 13 or not. Because usually the correction appears in the modified document. And online it is more difficult. Because once you modify, the original version is gone unless you are versioning the document. Please understand that writing edited English correctly is actually mandatory in all professional communication. And the developed world always coughs at us Indians that we are not careful about how we write. So Asian people generally have this problem, people who have great verbal traditions of knowledge. But the Chinese, Asians, Koreans, when they write in English, there is a problem of this. As I said many people claim that English is not their mother tongue. Therefore they make the mistake. I am 100% sure that if you are writing bad English, they are also writing bad mother tongue. Yeah. Which one? The second last line. We have a great capital. Right. The last line. If there is repeating again two more times. The second and the third letter is the last letter. Yeah. So the last line, the big bang. He has made capital for the big bang for the first line. Second line. Yeah. The last line. There was no before what it says. There was nothing before that first before has been is in inverted commas. And second before means before the big bang. No. The second one will not be capital. See? Before big bang. Yeah. No, he is right. It should be capital. It should be capital. Yeah. All of them should be capital. Why should big bang be capital? Because it is the big bang. The big bang. It is a proper noun. It is a proper noun. It used to be I also learnt something. Big bang is a proper noun. I thought, I mean, he introduced the subject with a big bang. No, that is not the universe big bang. That is not the big bang. That is a different big bang. Yeah. This is the big bang. So when I use big bang in my general writing, I should not capitalise. No. Thank you. Yes. Okay. So about these symbols, we will see some important things. Actually, we have edited this list. This is for longer because some of the symbols are not relevant. In operational science, there is move right, move left, flush left, flush right, etc. Now these things are done by word processor nowadays. So if you do the settings properly or even after composing the document, you can give these as commands or centering also you can give a command. But still you have to mark this. If it has not been done, you still need the markings. Then the right and typographical signs in that many of them refer to the font. For example, italics and roman and capitals and small and small capitals. In Indian languages, there is no capital and small. So we are not really accustomed to this. And we have to learn this by convention. And we have to correct where ever it is applicable. And proof editors, these punctuation marks will be studying separately. Now I will tell you what are the references which we should use. So there is a low end reference. Has anybody heard of this book? You have used it in school, etc. So this, if you have a copy, it's fine. Otherwise you get a copy. It costs about 200 rupees. This is an old classic. It was originally written in British times, around 1936. Ren and Martin were principals of some colleges. They have written this book. I have used it in my school days. Firuja's mother has used it in her school days. Firuja has used it in her school days. It's an old classic. My grandson is using it in his school days. Yeah, you see. So Ren and Martin, you should acquire and go through. It's an entertaining book of those who have read it. Because it has many things. It has about poetry, about quotations, the Latin roots, Greek roots. There is a lot of entertaining material. So if in doubt about anything, about grammar, you can refer to this. And at the high end, Chicago Manual of Style, this is a publication of Chicago University Press. So they started it at about the start of last century. It's almost 100 years old. They did it for, since they were themselves having a press, they needed a guidebook about how to proofed it and how to publish. So when that was circulated, it became so popular that all others asked them to publish it as a book. So they started publishing and then depending on language change and technology change, they keep on upgrading it. So when I got it, it was the 12th edition. When we got it here, this is the 16th edition. This is the current edition. So whatever we are telling you over here. Why did that book cost so much? It cost about 2000 rupees. 2000 rupees? You have to be strong hearted to spend 2000 rupees of your scholarship. Not scholarship, e-ship, sorry. Now luckily we have extracted important things out of that. So whatever handouts we are giving you contain enough material for you to get along. But all of it is traceable to Chicago Manual of Style. This is written like a law book and each paragraph has a number like act number this, clause number this. You can always refer by that clause and everybody will understand. Last thing just before I close because we have finished our time is how we have written the date. Does anybody write date like this? You do? Good. What is different from normal writing of date? Normally we write 07012016. Now from mathematics, more significant digit should come first. So that order is scrambled because date is the least significant. Then is month, then is this. Here if you read then from most significant to least significant digits. This is the ISO standard. There is international standard. It is also the Indian standard. So on closing I will suggest that you might want to use this as a prefix to every file name because then whenever you sort files on just name you will automatically get them chronologically sorted. Yeah. Now in computer programs are designed to recognize this with hyphens as date. They will automatically treat it as date. Chicago Manual of Style follows American English and Renan Martin follows British English. So is there a confusion? Yeah, but there are very little difference. As far as grammar is concerned, maybe some spellings are different. Anything as long as you are consistent it's fine. Don't mix the styles. I have closed this session with a similar question that was asked in one of my exams about three decades ago. A student was from Chemical Engineering. I had said that in case of difficulty make reasonable assumptions and state them with justification. There shall be no dialogue between the individual and the student. And yet one student raises that. So I said read this. He says I have a question about that. And the question was, sir your definition of reasonableness may be different from my definition of reasonableness. So how do I make reasonable assumptions? And my answer was you make assumptions as per your definition of reasonableness. I will assess them from my definition of reasonableness. Very unreasonable, right? That's how life is. Carry on. Thank you so much.


Quarantine hair. I don't care. Anybody want to come out and play? Oh I should get my phone in case. I have my glasses. I didn't do my Friday check-in like I said I was going to. And I think I spilled check-in wrong on my video. Hold on. Great big beautiful tomorrow. Who here knows that song? Somebody here has to Oh my god. I got chocolate all over my shirt. Does anybody know that song? If Molly Bill was here she would know it. Any Disney fans want to sing along with me? There's a great big beautiful tomorrow. Shining at the end of every day. Angela you get the high five sister. I miss it. We don't have it out here. I don't know if you go hi Linda. Hi kids. Oh Tracy it couldn't have been better. It could have been better if we stayed a few more weeks, months, maybe even years. Lou I was hoping you'd be here. I was hoping all of you guys would be here. I was watching Steve Knapp your Florida girl so you get you still get to go see it. You know if I ever do go back there because I don't have a great big yearning to go to Walt Disney World but if I do it'll be for two reasons in that carousel progress and the people mover. I'm just a little hometown Disney land girl myself. Happy Father's Day to anybody who's celebrating. We're not really celebrating. Well actually we're not not really celebrating. We're really not celebrating. Oliver is with his dad. Steve's not my dad and excuse that. You know what I would I just here's the stories Steve laid down. I was like hmm what should I do and then I remembered. I didn't come back on Friday like I said I was going to and I thought well why not hop on and see who isn't doing Father's Day with you Nita. Does anybody else look as pretty as me? It's because I've been laying like this reading all day. It's been so let me check in and see who's here and say hello. There's Anna, Angela, Linda, Tracy, Lou, Lou, Lou, Angela, Judith. Hi Judith. Looking for me? Nobody looks for me unless they want to give me a hard time. Hi Susan. I'm glad you're here. It's your main I love that name. Cheryl, Susan. Hi Susan. I don't know what to say but I realized that I told you guys thank you actually you know what I I rarely say anything good about myself but I'd like two things. I don't remember what the other one was. I like my silver hair. I wish it was styled but I just didn't have time for that. I wanted to come on and see you swells right this minute and do you have your water and I know it's late in the day for a lot of you so if you've already had your fair share and you're not going to drink anymore before bedtime you're off the hook but I've got mine. I'm on the patio. It's beautiful. It was an uglier day earlier. Steve and I were out in a boot and it says we're doing Father's Day but taking a baking break right now trying another batch of sourdough. You're strong to have that in your house my friend. Oh Jermaine are you kidding me? I think it's beautiful but I I get it because my name is it's like it's a weird name.  What's her name? Anita? What? And I wish I could see a picture of it. What color is it? Is it your favorite color? Is it like do you get excited when you hold it? Like I totally get excited when I hold this one and my two pink ones. My friend Susan arc here. Susan K 57 arc. 7 arc. 6 7 arc. Sorry Susan. She just got a new pink cup and uh well I I can't say. I'll say it later. Well wait what time is it in Australia? Let's look at the world clock and see what time it is in Australia where my friend Devina is. It's a oh she might come on so we'll just just made the Dalgona iced coffee.  Man that stuff is strong in the morning.   How good. Well put your red bull in your pink cup silly. Um get back to doing it but I'm just like I don't know. I don't have an excuse but I am back on plan. I am excited as soon as I got back. I did a weigh in on Friday only I didn't do a weigh in video like you guys. I promised I lied. I downright lied but here's the good news. I was down two pounds. Now that is really good news because I finally you know how you know something's there but you don't want to turn in and look at it like a scary movie. It's like you know it's there and you want to know what's going on but you're just afraid to look. Well that's how I was feeling about my tracker. So I went in and looked and since March the 5th actually we went on quarantine Friday the 13th March Friday the 13th. Steve and I looked at all up last night. He was kind enough to help me. Hi Liz. No doubt no coffee at night unless you're going to stay up all night. Thank you Susan and I have been and I'm I'm back to normal. I'm back to uh things I have discovered that affect me a certain way. Um what was I going to say?  Oh anyways since March even though I kept saying oh you guys I'm maintaining. I'm maintaining. Remember I said that I'm maintaining? Well in my head I was maintaining but when I go back all the way to March and I look at my graph I'm like at point one. All the little teeny tiny maintenance that I was maintaining. They just shot me up. Lou is going to be kind enough in a channel who comes on the chats with us. Lou always puts their link here and we love her for it and we thank her for it. And it's just my I just it was a very slow uh what's the opposite of a decline? What's the opposite of decline? A sin? Thanks Lynn. I feel like my old self. I think the vacation really helped. I really do it. I think it had a lot to do with it. I just needed a break for you. So yeah just slow and you know I still can't believe we're in June. I don't know about you guys but in client things. I really do know these things but it's a funny thing when you get on camera and you get to talk in words just escape use the easiest words in the world sometime. Anyways it's slowly all added up and looking at it was like oh holy cow okay this has to come to an end. I mean in my head oh June I keep I keep I keep forgetting where in June every day I ask Steve what day it is. I in my head we're still in like March April and what's today's the first day of summer yesterday. Hi Patricia. So that's my story um and I'm thrilled with the two pounds if I can just you know have if I can just have a loss every week I'm not going to go for the grand slam. Excuse me. Hi Carrie. Where have you been lady? I don't know I haven't been on myself. I haven't been watching any YouTube except for well here's my story. Since we got Netflix since I got the Netflix Steve and I have sat and have just been watching all the shows that's so out of character for us but that's what I've been doing so I haven't been watching any YouTube. I will jump on weighing days of my pals like I know Sandy's gonna weigh in on Saturday. I'll jump on and see what cat is up to but I just haven't been I haven't been watching any weight loss channels at all and has nothing to do with the people. I just haven't it it's not a subject that I have been feeling like watching I feel like been there done that you know what I mean and there's a lot of really creative people out there who find different foods and they find different things and and I'm not I'm not there right now maybe when when I start declining in my weight again maybe I will be back there and I'm hoping I will be and I I'm going to make this a positive note and say I definitely will be but right now I'm just not so and I lay in a worry and I think oh my gosh I'm not I haven't been on my channel I want to talk to my peeps but I don't have anything good for them because I'm not going to just get on here and okay you know do this okay what can I do to get on my channel so I don't lose all my peeps I'm not going to do that to you guys uh hello I will tell Steve happy Father's Day from you guys Carrie you've been hiding how to hi hi Claire hi Christine um Liz when I was dictating on your thing last night and who asked who asked I think it was Susan said what I was indeed my dictaphone was not working and I did not obviously read back overhead so when you guys see stuff like that that's what's going on oh and also I'll have the tv on in the backward so it picks up the television and my voice and combines them and then you guys get to try to decipher the gobbledygook that's what we're here doing Susan but I do want to keep you know the weight loss because it is important if anybody needs any help um I'm here to help because I can help even though I may not be I knew it would make you laugh Liz I knew that you'd look at it and go oh lord why doesn't she just go over this before she gets sent because then I am stuck with it right for some reason you know Steve and I again when I come to all these conclusions I do talk about this stuff with him and when we went in on lockdown nothing seemed important anymore you know it's just nothing it's like okay I have to sit in my house and be a good citizen and not get ill and uh that's what I'm gonna do and just there's nothing was important or exciting and that included my weight loss now I will go down with the ship saying that I track every single thing that I eat if I go up lately I haven't been eating enough I don't know why when I get anxious um or something's bothering me I don't eat enough especially in the morning but I'm I'm good I'm back and I'm happy look at there's 30 of you guys here you guys need to hop in and say hello if anybody's sitting in the background watching and has never commented or or if you're new here please say hi I am Anita I am on the green program I am a um what's the word my dad militant when it comes to the green program don't care for the blue program I've never done the purple program uh I use purple shampoo 30 swells haha 30 swells yeah um I have not done the purple I did simply filling when it was simply filling but purple and simply filling are not the same um I think it's the same idea but it's not the same and I did love simply filling exactly Susan it all it all does one does affect the other so we can talk about all sorts of things and still talk about our weight and our exercise in fact I was going to go walking right now I steve lay down and I thought oh I'm going to go say hi to the girls and jimmy if you should show up first I thought well maybe I'll do a live while I walk and then I thought no because then I'll trip over something do face plant and the whole world will see it on the internet is anybody still doing their zoom programs is anybody not doing their zoom programs has anybody left completely is anybody still going strong what how are you guys doing also Liz I started to say um there was something specific to your video that I wanted to address but of course now that I'm here with the lights and the cameras on me I forgot what it was I have a whole bunch of um messages coming through nobody messaged me when I'm sitting around with my thumb up my bum Christine says zoom zoom occasionally I went on zoom um oh you did how was that Liz I've tried to figure out how to do that and I just can't figure it out it isn't Lynn it isn't the same and and I say that every um visit with you guys I haven't been on a zoom in four weeks and our leader is gone okay Kerry give somebody else a chance maybe it'll be like somebody but I know how we feel about our leaders I totally totally get it don't throw in the towel my friend um I go to my zooms not going strong Judith that's okay everything's okay any feeling that anybody's having is totally okay so Liz you like it better than your regular meetings oh you see I love it when I get all these different answers I'm just doing I tried fights I do the green plan and I was down in woo one point eight everybody cheers to her right on hi Kim um I tune into my zoom meetings and then I plan my phone because I there are I do have friends there and my leader is a friend and one of the way and ladies like I I don't know what they're called anymore receptionist those ladies are my friends and so I go in early and I get to see them and then we chit chat had to act a little bit and uh good Kerry I'm happy to hear that hold on I hope I didn't wake the old boy out after all it's father's day he's never been a father but he's a grandfather so yeah I do go to the zoom um I'm not gonna say anything negative about it because like if anybody watched my last video hi bonita um and that is a great loss am you know that there's so many of us right that somebody is getting something out of something that I'm not I'm getting something out of something that you're not and we just have to wait and see what happens you know I oh this is also why I go to my zoom meeting this is important in case you guys haven't heard this this is a fact jack this isn't just a rumor floating around by youtubers who are trying to get views by giving you a bunch of godly good bull um our my coach said on she has said in the last three zoom meetings that any zoom meetings that get below 10 viewers on at a time they're wiping out their workshops when they do come back so that's the other reason I go to my zoom meetings so that I can support and in case I'm that 10th to the nine that are already there because when my meetings come back I want my later my meeting my peeps my time my day hi ester hi silvi hi guys so happy to see you I hope you all had a good sunday and a good saturday even though for some of us they're all kind of the same well what Lou did I miss something or just to what I just said about the 10 people you guys if that gets allowed and you can hear it let me know and I'll go in the house but yeah she said um they have to stay at 10 on the zoom or they're goners so I am there to support my people they have been there to support me since the day I walked into that workshop and I will do anything hello you got a hundred subscribers yay Lou can you put up um um bow bouquets uh link for us you guys go see my friends play like bouquet she's on the other side of the pond with ester she has a channel she's delightful she's fun uh you know she's light nothing heavy and gloomy and do me over there that's why I love her founder one day I was scrolling around the youtube founder and I was like I like her I'm gonna be friends with her so I want you guys to be friends with her too let's get her sub count above a hundred Lou says I noticed on the ww site that the workshop I used to go to is listed anymore oh man so crazy about the 10 people I know I did Sylvie I did get my hair cut oh Steve and I went together and it was just like and when it's styled and shampooed and all the good stuff it looks really nice I will say that but right now it's not we've just been uh slugs totally slugs hello melody my meeting starts live workshops this week oh I don't want to be I don't want to go Florida are you in Florida if you're in Florida then I won't blame you yeah thank you Sylvie thank you so much it next time I come on my promise I'll do some coughing first um um whatever we wanted to melody so they're gonna have um zoom and well I guess they have to write we have to appreciate the fact thank you so much Lou we have to appreciate the fact that we all have different feelings on the subject and while we may not agree with hers or hers or mine we have to respect them to me it's all a matter of respecting what people feel comfortable doing and not doing even though if my studio were to open up tomorrow I would put on all the gear I would cover everything and 10 pairs of gloves and you know walk in like this I respect melody it's melody right yeah for not wanting to run into her meeting we all have to respect everybody's decisions but still try to support if you really enjoy your meetings still try to support it like I said go to the zoom meeting to be that person and then like I said I put mine on mute because sometimes I'm talking to the dog or a follower's home talking to him I just hit the mute button and I'm there and uh and then I play on my phone because I've been doing this so long that you know the subjects are pretty much repetitive but I go half an hour early I see my friends we chat we talk it's really nice I don't do any of the kind of zooms I know some folks are doing other zooms yeah I think do you miss the little things I go back to work with persons with disabilities I just want to limit exposure absolutely um and you know every continent every state every city has different numbers so when it the Oliver is good he's with his dad they are doing Father's Day he's getting really big that wasn't in the handbook when they dropped him off on my doorstep he's just like so big um so get this I need to do a grandmother bragging hi barbie yay that's what I was going to do and then I thought I'd come in here and bug everybody instead so he when Steve and I were on our trip he went on a camping trip with his dad and he said a couple nights goes uh Nana I made an our itinerary itinerary for a camping trip do you want to see it and I'm like yeah but I don't want to see it so we went over to my we went over to my um Mac book and he opened it up right then he went into his google account and over here and over there and he had this full-on formed or itinerary I couldn't have done it and I'm not just saying that it blew blew my mind what this little boy had done he had gone in and looked up all the surrounding museums and lakes and restaurants and places that he wanted to see and put it all on this list for his dad so thank you Lou and presented it to him and said hey dad this is what we're gonna do this is where we're gonna go and I was just like floored thank you for the 10 thumbs up you guys I sure do appreciate that oh Barbara I was blown away when I say that I wouldn't have to do that you guys I'm not exaggerating I've never worked in an office the only computer ever worked on was in pharmacy it did not involve documents or word or any of that stuff I was so proud of him because he's he's not in schools who he doesn't have to be practicing these type of things yet he is doing so anyways and then I think I told you guys was it here or on Instagram so when I dictate like when I'm dictating to Liz's channel or to my friends I always say have a great day exclamation point hey Liz how's the weather up there in Northern California question mark so I was doing that in the kitchen and he was sitting at the kitchen table so he started talking to me like that hey Nana can I have some cereal question mark thank you so much exclamation point and we went on for like 10 minutes having a conversation like that and I thought that's a good mind twister for his little 10 year old head right I thought it was funny and then he's oh it was Instagram anybody sat and he says wait Nana and I said what you have something more you want to say he goes yeah period never mind period and then he was done silly goose so yeah he's with his dad um he went on a play date and I was extremely anxious the whole time I was like did I make the right choice did I not make the right choice and I think I did but I worried about it the whole time but he's everything was fine they've been quarantined they live very close I know them it's not like any yahoo off the streets and hey can we have a kid over for a play date and I said why sure who's this and where do you live and he had a great time they the mother said that they were they were up to like five in the morning laughing and scratching hi Charlene Charlene I read something from you today somewhere that I had missed on a video oh is Anna leading for her sourdough mmm enjoy well if it's not good it's not the end of the world do the best you can and enjoy it if not round two right enjoy it bread let's talk about bread for a minute so I know that my mantra besides drink your water and know where your bathrooms are is keeping it simple if you're new here and you're sitting around in the background welcome welcome I keep my program super simple this is what I do okay drink my water I do it wait watchers tells me then I do it wait watchers tells me and I bring it in the rear by doing what wait watchers tells me now not everybody does that and that's okay everybody has to do it's a bio individual program hi shoes hi honey pie um but I do exactly when I'm doing my wait watchers the way I want to do it and I'm cutting out the alcohol which is my nemesis some people like food I like drink um so I keep it simple I count my blended fruits um everything my watchers says to do because that's how I lost my 50 pounds right shoot what did I start to tell you guys this oh I have noticed since from our vacation because I tracked on vacation too even though I wasn't eating my normal stuff I did track it and bread has become an issue for me I have noticed that when I eat regular bread other than my olay wraps or my serrally 45 bread uh it sticks around so that is one thing that I have noticed so I have to cut back about once a week I have a burger on a regular bun and I'm going to go back to putting it on my olay wrap and and see if that has any help bread is loose kryptonite chocolate beer and pizza pizza I think pizza's everybody's kryptonite isn't it it's like what the heck sylvie likes food and drink you know I have a daughter a friend she named her whoops named her daughter sylvie and I had never heard that name before it's a beautiful name no Susan I dictate when I'm not talking I dictate so anybody who I talk to on a regular basis they know that I'm you know I'm not stuck in a have a good night Kim enjoy your meal thanks for coming by hi Rachel how do you track your fruits and veggies if you make a smoothie okay Rachel well first of all um thank you for making me have to admit this in front of the world I'm not a big veggie person that is my downfall uh so I don't put veggies in my smoothies but I count my fruit I use what I do is I my my smoothies are super simple I put one premier protein in for two smart points and I put a cup of mixed berries in there often they're different kind of berries right now have a tropical grouping which has mango pineapple coconut which are all high pointed fruits so I just rounded off to three and I am comfortable with that but it's kind of something you've got to figure out you know what you're happy with there's so most people don't even count their blended fruits I'm the cheese that stands alone and I do wishful counting sometimes don't we all um I just have to do it that way because it worked for me and I have to do what works for me and I figured they put that in there for a reason right they made it a rule that whatever um I count my avocado and because I have to have my healthy fats now let me tell you a little story without getting into too much TMI when I was on vacation I wasn't having my avocado uh I was in my my guacamole my nuts I was not having my healthy fats and we all know what happens when we don't have our healthy fats you guys have to have your healthy fats whether you choose to count them or not is your own decision only you and your tracker are going to know whether you're counting them or not but you must eat them and I encourage you to track them because then you lose the weight but you have to have your healthy fats hi Cindy have you had your healthy fats but I have to be careful with nuts I have to take nuts and I have to put them in baggies or else I just take my hand like the shovels in those games where you're trying to pick something up oh man nuts they're hard aren't they because so many of them are so many points Susan doesn't track veggies or fruit in her smoothies and never affected her weight loss okay so there you go see and she's at goal and on lifetime so yeah again bio individual whatever works and I feel when I'm not counting something that I was told to count when I started it nags at me if I count it and I track it then I'm that kind of thing you know something's sticking in your noodle hey Jermaine eight points is it was the burger itself eight points are the whole thing we get these burgers at Costco that I've shown you guys before the burger is eight points Steve makes them in the air fryer I put it at the burger is eight points I put on a lay wrap for one point another point I put a laughing cow on there for one point that's a 10 smart point burger that's totally delish if I track ahead and I want a real bun and I mean a real bun with sesame seeds and something I can hold on to not those little starchy white bread pieces of I'm gonna have the real deal I'll I'll track ahead Rachel smoothie is a cup of kale a cup of spinach half a lemon one app a whole apple and one banana and I counted it as five points should it have been more oh gosh I don't think so no because the kale alone you should get negative points friends don't let friends eat kale I'm just kidding if you're new here I'm just kidding so let's see you guys give us give me your thoughts kale no no kale nothing for the spinach nothing for the lemon nothing for the apple oh you know what I think five points is too much personal opinion Rachel I would count that as three no more than three 12 points is still good for a burger germane because we got to get those cravings we need to take care of them kale is bad kale is bad it was only meant for buffets for the food to sit on in the buffets on the ice not to be eaten so yeah I mean just make it work and I don't mind eating my burgers on my olay wrap I don't mind it all now and then I'll go for the burger and enjoy it but that's it love kale but some people say step away from the kale I have to agree with that sentiment and the apple the apple is a low sugar fruit I mean compared to pineapple cherries and the others I would say three you like spinach Lou you know what I would try to because I cannot stand cooked spinach but I do like spinach salad the one that my mom used to make um I should try it I should because I know that if I ate more veggies but we have asparagus and zucchini right now we went to sprouts and I told Steve if I buy this will you cook it and he said yes I will you know Lou maybe you could talk me into doing that maybe I'll try that out I need to try some new recipes and that's another thing I just keep thinking about I do too Barbara I can eat them all day long love them that Steve is a keeper he just he's now he's just he doesn't even ask who's cooking anymore he just goes in there and does it and he's kind of silly enough to ask me what do you want to eat tonight it's like dude you're doing the cooking I have no right to tell you what I want to have and then he does silly wonderful things like I come to the table and there's fish and broccoli hey do you guys have sharkies where you live sharkies would grill Mexican food really germane even when it's cooked in different ways like if you roast it man roast it with some salt and pepper and any of your favorite seasonings you know I did a lot of cook with me is that we're a lot of different recipes and then when a quarantine hit I just lost my piles to do it anymore and I need to get back in there no Mexican across this pond yeah three points max I agree three point English muffin you know what I tried that once I think Betty um or you know what I did it on a bagel thing I think but spinach and your smoothies with chocolate protein powder or chocolate premier protein right almond milk bananas strawberries plus one tablespoon yummy sounds good I'm just kind of comfortable eating the same thing every day because when I eat something different I worry about the points do I have it right um I have been eating a lot of egg salad sandwiches lately for some reason they've just been tasting really good and I have to switch my um lunch meat like also I haven't been feeling like going into sprouts I'm starting to get hot out here Fran's brand that's the other you know thing like I hear people talk about the 647 Schmidt bread or whatever the heck it's called hi Hope how are you she brought us flowers you guys um and not we can't all get the same stuff around the country so we have to remember that and deal with what we have I know Melody I know I I know all the stuff but that doesn't mean I do it Lou uses water spinach mango strawberries and pineapple seed and and medule medule I can never say that right dates and how many do you count that for Lou so nothing for the spinach um mangoes a little high strawberries I wouldn't count pineapple I don't know I don't how do you count for that one Lou that's because the dates I would I would count for the dates definitely the other ones I don't know do you count the dates or no hi Diana you don't count it at all whatever works right yeah I don't Susan I don't use mayonnaise in mine either that's a lie I use about this much because if anybody else who's eating it sees me not put any in um I gotta take this off then it's like uh what you're just using all mustard but I'm happy just using all mustard right Lou I at right but you know in the um when Divina was here and where she was making her bliss balls in the tracker they come up as four smart points and then we asked my coach at the time too and she said four smart points and she says she doesn't count her blended fruit but the medules she does I don't eat them normally so I don't know thank you hope so did I oh my gosh so did I I don't Charlene but I'm sure there's people out there who do and I I encourage doing it but you know counting blended fruits is such a device subject that I just kind of let everybody do what they want to do and try not to say you should oh I'd never say you should or shouldn't do anything at least I hope not if I do then you guys need to call me out on it because all these ladies up above you don't count and they're doing just fine I just do because I'm weird I'm OCD it's just like I have to do it but what can I say I managed to lose 36 pounds to get to go having a smoothie almost every day but yes that's just me you know what when I lost my 50 pounds I had a smoothie every day too and I haven't had a smoothie for a long time now just out of the blue I had one a couple weeks ago to mix things up melody I was like yeah I need to mix things up a little bit and I think I was out of my way or have something like that I know Barbara but you know what it's that's how it does it make sense though but that's how I lost my weight oh Charlene doesn't have it often so she doesn't count it I don't count my fruit it doesn't affect effect weight loss right right right if it doesn't affect your weight loss then do you do you you know that's the whole thing everybody's got to do it's good for them and I'm just you know I got to go by the rules it when it comes to ww when it comes to anything else in life or the world then forget about it it's just one of those funny things this is true this is very true I do too germane I do too and and even and you know I eat my Sumos that are out of season now so I'm so bummed hi sues I mean I meant to answer your question sorry I'm getting heated up out here it's getting warm I believe Steve bought himself a steak for Father's Day how many points do I have left for today let's find out oh I brought up sharkies if anybody has a sharkies and you've never been you guys should go they have some excellent excellent meals for low points and they're really super tasty so yeah he bought himself a steak oh I looked at my points and then what's wrong with doing I have eight points left so I could have a little bit I am sues I am getting his warm out here the sun's like right there and I'm wearing my hair down usually I have it up but I can see if I missed anything okay I think I got all of you guys so that's that I'm doing my thing I know he likes his steak but you know what if he shows up behind me I need you guys to start yelling okay I like my anything my steak my chicken whatever it is when it's on the barbecue I need that stuff cooked all the way through I'm really neurotic about my meat on the barbecue for a reason there's a reason for that it doesn't always happen steak is good steak is protein right just count it and we did pizza and stuff for ice cream at the hubby for Father's Day I can say thank god for weeklies I did choose a sugar free fat free soft serve with few gummy bears soft serve is my favorite my favorite you too Suzy about the barbecue it's a thing man it's real it's like he'll bring me a piece of chicken and I'm pulling out that thermometer and then stick it in the microwave I'm like I'm not so okay so I'm gonna wrap it up because I am getting warm and I think Barbara talked to me into taking that walk I think I need to take that walk um so I am back full force WW especially germane yes um I'm trying to find something to motivate me to make some regular videos I am not going anywhere uh quite the opposite good night my friend and all you guys please go over to slay like bouquet's channel and you will enjoy her I promise she's just lovely I'm gonna walk it off hope but I am here I just need to find something to talk about on my channel that I haven't or you know what I was actually having an opposite thought who was I talking to about oh a group of ladies that I talk to regularly um maybe almost doing like a start over like start my channel over as if I'm starting for the first time since I'm I'm clicked back into my boots into my binders if you will you know that feeling when we click your boots in your binders you know you're ready to go that's how I feel so I just might do that yeah Barbara and bouquet unite friends honey pie I'm sorry it's nothing personal I can assure you we've been talking I've been talking for 40 minutes I'm sorry um but it's warm out here I'm gonna go throw my hair up go for a walk thanks kids and uh I think I'll do that anybody who wants to give me a thumbs up I'll take it if anybody's not subscribed and you want to subscribe I always feel fun but it helps I know the time differences it does help so but you don't have to if you don't want to all right guys love you and I will talk to you soon Sue's warm warm I say