Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age viewer discretion is advised Hey, what's going on guys? Patriot Prime here once again with another Transformers review, but before I get started I need you guys to do me a favor if you're watching this video right here and are not a subscriber of Patriot Prime Reviews Please hit that subscribe button right now. It won't cost you a thing Will help me and my channel out tremendously. Also, make sure and visit my sponsor toyhacks.com Toyhacks provides reproduction and upgrade decal sets for transformer toys from generation one to the latest modern figures Make sure and stop by the toyhacks armory where they can equip your figures with new weaponry in multiple colors and toy stages provides backdrops for figure displays and photography Each purchase with toyhacks earns you RoboSense that can be used for future purchases. You can check your balance anytime in your cart Toyhacks is a company run by collectors for collectors So check out toyhacks.com and make your collection stand out from the rest and tell them Patriot Prime sent you now onto the review The featured button this video is Transformers War for Cybertron Kingdom Air razor now air razor comes to me. Thanks to the generosity of a subscriber Brad Baluta. Thank you so much, buddy. This was the last Kingdom figure I needed to complete wave 2 and I am so Grateful for you. Thank you so much. So now let's take a quick look at air razor here in the packaging We've got air razor here in bot mode Transformers War for Cybertron Kingdom some fantastic artwork of air razor in Falcon mode and robot mode Back of the package. We got robot mode and Falcon mode once again this side of the box that Fantastic Kingdom artwork. So now without further ado, let's get air razor opened up out of this packaging and Check her out and welcome to Patriot Prime reviews Now once you get air razor all opened up and out of her packaging you'll see she does come with a sheet of instructions that as Usual are very well illustrated and very easy to follow. She also comes with a trading card I got another arc. I think this is my third arc card. You've got the arc right here flying through space And then you peel it back. Oh That's different. It's the arc hurtling through. I guess that's the dead universe So that's cool. The second wave cards the stickers the same as the first wave But the card underneath is different. So that's pretty cool Air razor also comes with her two little wrist mounted missiles So those are kind of neat and now let's take a closer look at air razor herself Now the first thing I noticed with air razor when I opened her up out of the packaging was the amount of sculpted Details she has I mean look at this. You can see all the feathers They're on her shoulders here on her chest, which is also the Falcon head and not to mention her wings Those look great. I love the detail that Hasbro is putting on these Beast War figures I mean they look spectacular and the paint applications are really good as well You got the gold crests the orange here on her head the feathers kind of flaring out from her helmet Not to mention the eyes the eyes look great black with the green dots She's got the purple face a little goatee if you will right there. I mean, it's just Amazing what they've done with this figure. She looks really really good. Got a little maximal logo right there on her wrist Great detailing down here on the crotch all the way down to the legs I mean this is a fantastic looking figure Not much of a backpack at all considering the wings she has of course you can flare these wings out and we'll get to that more With articulation and well, let's just go ahead and go into that right now Air razor's head is on a ball joint so it can do a complete 360 and look up it can look down slightly So a lot of range of motion there with the arms the arms could do a complete 360 if not for the wings There's also these little shoulder pylons. They can move up and down. There is a elbow bend There is a elbow rotation and no wrist rotation though. She does have a little bit of a Joint there, but that's mainly for transformation. There is a waist rotation the legs can go forward Really tight hips legs can go forward they can go back they can go out they can go in there is a knee rotation A knee bend and the ankles are a ball joint and there is one problem I do have with the figure these are a little loose so getting her to stand is kind of tricky with these loose joints But that's nothing a little floor polished woman fix Going on to the wings as you saw earlier. They can flare out like so Or you can untap them from the back and flare them out Even more so she has quite an impressive Wing span now I've been seeing on Facebook some people Pointing out I'm trying to find exactly where it is, but they're getting stress marks on their wings I haven't noticed any with my figure in particular But just be aware of that that that is kind of thin plastic there So watch the stress marks now another issue with Air razor forgot her name. I can't tell me how many times I started this video over because I kept calling her air raid But anyway, these tabs right here which secure the wings to the back. They do not peg in great I mean they pop Right out really really easy and I wish that stuck in a little bit better, but it's no biggie now with her weapons her little missiles There are ports right there on her her wrists can't talk tonight Just slot those in like so Now the wrists is where she had the weapons in the show You can also put them in her hand so she can wield them like so, but I Don't like it that way air razor needs to have them on her wrists So there you go guys there you have air razor see if I can get her stand up all armed and ready for battle Now let's get her transformed into Falcon mode and of course the first thing we're going to do is take off these Missiles that I just put on we're going to untab the wings and fold these out and separate this back section Like so and we're just going to rotate the head around Bringing the Falcon head up. I gotta make room to get that in there. Just right There we go Okay, now also if you wanted to now you have air razor looking like a Roman got not a Roman an Egyptian God Horus I believe was the name so there's an option if you're into Egyptian mythology so once you've got that going on you're going to take air razor's arms and fold the wrists up like so and Actually these fit in To these slots right there. She's got angle those fists accordingly Get those back air in the back. It's kind of a fiddly transformation. I feel like I'm missing something But I am not Maybe I need to get the wings All the way back. There is something Something amiss here. Oh There we go. I'm missing this see the hinge right there I got to get that flared up and over like so now The back section is going to be way more flush Like so so yes, don't forget those hinges right there I've had this figure for about a week and I've only transformed her once and that was the very first day I got her so now once you get this going on you tuck in her fists like so bring these shoulder pylons down And now you've got the legs and you want to bring the legs around Let me see here I'll get the legs flipped so you got this little port right there.  That's a guarantee when you're doing YouTube videos. You're gonna screw up on camera So get this flipped around get the legs down out of the way Another step I missed you got to rotate the waist around now you have clear shot to get those thighs pegged in To those little pegs right there. So there we go. Get those locked in bring the bird feet around Like so you're gonna bend these down here these little leg pieces Now make sure everything is tabbed in and There we have air razor in Falcon mode and this beast mode actually looks pretty good Unless you look underneath and you got a lot of robot junk hanging off, but still not bad Let's see if we got to tab that in get that feather Tail feathers in there and there we go. I dig it. I like this hawk mode a Really really good beast mode with a very impressive wing span Head sculpt looks great for the hawk Articulation the beak can move up and down, but it's really hard to get to especially when you have no fingernails Underneath you got the legs have a little bit of movement especially there at the feet The wings, of course, you can make them flap.  You've got air razor in Falcon mode all harmed and ready for battle all in all I really like this beast mode. It's very impressive From the top meaning right here. That's a lot of robot right there But hey beggars can't be choosers and it's a much better beast mode than poor old Dinobot And now for some quick-sized comparisons here is Transformers war for Cybertron Kingdom air razor with Kingdom Optimus Primal Kingdom Cheetor and Kingdom Rat Trap Transformers war for Cybertron Kingdom air razor is another Kingdom figure that really surprised me I really had no interest in getting this figure whatsoever because I really didn't have a connection to the character But thankfully Brad hooked me up and I really really like her now granted She's not 100% cartoon accurate, but still this is an amazing figure and comes highly recommended So there you go guys Transformers war for Cybertron Kingdom air razor So does the Transformers war for Cybertron Kingdom air razor belong in your collection? Absolutely, especially if you're a Beast Wars fan You are going to love this toy and even if you're not this is a very unique Transformer to add your collection and I think you're really going to like her just a couple minor complaints her loose ankles But that's an easy fix with some floor polish just a little drop there on the ball joint Let it set overnight. You're good to go Also, I wish the wings would tab in a little bit better for a backpack, but as you can see I'm going to display her like that So I really don't need those tabbed in anyway So yeah, you see this figure on this shelf don't hesitate pick her up You are not going to be disappointed and guys if you liked the video Don't forget to like don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to click that bell icon to get notified when I upload new reviews Do what? Oh That I'll be taking a look at that very soon. Once again guys. This is Patriot Prime signing out


Hello, everybody. This is the second session of this room of the DevCon 2022. So welcome, everybody. And the next talk is Orohan by Issues. Let's have a party. It will be presented by Pep Tromari and Trosten Svesic. So welcome and the stage is yours. Thank you so much. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining Orohan by Issues. So let's first go with who we are. So it's Pep and me. We both work at Redhead. And we both started in this team we are in, which is the topic with Pep and operate first. It's on my side. If you're interested in this, join the session with Marcel Hildes this afternoon at 2pm. Some little announcement from our side. Sorry, less advertising for today. So we are both software engineers. And because we started last year, we had this problem looking into GitHub and being over-bent by Issues. Good morning, Pep. How are you? Good morning, everyone. Yes, we're here to try to have a party after the situation of Orohan by Issues. But that's what we will present in the next slide. Maybe we can get into what we are trying to convey today by having a party Orohan by Issues. Well, first let's define, you know, what's the problem? What does it mean to be overwhelmed by Issues? Here we would like to ask you, everyone, what do you understand by being overwhelmed by Issues? We have some ideas, but we also have a poll that you can see here where you have potential things that can feel overwhelmed when talking about Issues. And by Issues, we mean GitHub Issues, for example, whatever items that you use on your, whatever tracking system, in our case, GitHub, to track the work to be done. So, Thor, what is for you, what does it mean for you to be overwhelmed by Issues? I mean, for sure it's the amount of issues. If you open GitHub and you look on your issues you have, then maybe you have to scroll a few times and that's a lot. And the other thing is, how do I know what the issue is about, especially if you're starting a new team and maybe the technical issues are different or what you take care of is different, then you have no idea sometimes what the headline means. And if you look into the issue, then you sometimes don't know exactly where to start. Yeah, that's an aspect in my case, in my particular case. A key thing that I found when starting to look at the issues in the team was, you know, there are dozens and dozens of repos and it was hard for me to get the context and connect the dots between the different issues across the whole project. So the poll is ongoing. We proposed a few ideas, but if you have others, we would like to hear as well in the chat. And I'm seeing it. No, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, and I'm seeing that most votes so far are about missing information and this is a thing that we will focus a little later on the slide. Let's call it kind of a quality thing. Yeah. What our goals are, sorry, go ahead. So the goals for us here is for this presentation and hopefully you have something when you go out of it is number one, bring the fun back into handling issues. And fun means make it easy, get the team involved, let it be satisfying when you solve things and when you organize them. The non goals are for sure. Besides 42, which is the answer to everything, we will not be an out of the box answer for every team and for every project or for every development situation. So we will tell you what you should focus on and maybe find your own grid and clusters to organize your issues and optimize them for the problem and the project you have going on. What we expect you to take away from today's talk is we will share our experience so far this past few months since we joined the team and try well started to tackle this topic of, you know, making issue handling fun. And we will share the ideas that we had and how we started to implement them. So let's go then. We want this to be a party. Let's move to the next slide. And we will have this analogy of a real party. Just to keep in mind that in our context, having a party would be fixing everything like solving all the issues in a real world. The idea you have of a party is let's, let's get together and have a lot of fun by, you know, dancing, listening to music, having food and talking. But in order to have a proper party and have real fun, there are a few things that you need to take into account in the real world. Right.  But if you don't know how to dance, for example, or if you don't know where to get the drinks, then there's a problem and maybe the music is not playing. So starting with a party means also planning the party. And this means as far planning ahead, like the invitation list, because it's important when you look at your issues, what actually is the audience you're talking with to the issues. Like if you have a team and this team is just for cleaning up some hot problems from the last days, then maybe you need a different look on the issues than if you're planning for the next three months. Or what we're going to have an epic running for the next year or something like this. And so you have to also figure out who does what who brings the music who brings the food, who does these things, which means organizing ahead. And then there's a party by themselves by itself and the party. This could be the fun part solving issues and bring them on the right track and making them better which would be the dancing thing. So what comes after the party, Pep?  You can see here in the picture the results of the party where you have food and drinks and all in the bed table. You need to organize like, well, clean up in the context of issue handling. You want to make sure that after issues have been solved, they reflect the real status that everything is understood, properly understood, properly documented. For example, if there is a need to follow up with something that there is another issue for this follow up, make sure that the priorities are clear for the next steps. The end goal here is that you, this is an ongoing thing. We want to have a party every day, right? So we want to be able to have fun fixing issues or working on issues day to day. So this requires, well, a few things that we will introduce like some ideas that we will introduce in this presentation. In particular, we have two main kind of topics or proposals to share during this presentation. The first one is in the next slide. Let me certainly make a stop here if I may. Sorry, because I see the words are still going on and missing information in detail. This exactly fits to the cleanup after the party because just solving the issues is maybe sometimes not enough for the people coming afterwards or for the next party. So putting details in your issues, that's one thing. Okay, so we go ahead and here we go with the quality. Yes. So yeah, two proposals. That's the first one. We are going to affirm that if all your issues have a good quality and by quality we mean a definition of how you want them to look good. What is quality? Well, good looking issues. If all your issues look good and have good quality, then this list of issues will not be overwhelming anymore. That's kind of a bold statement. But we will explain what makes that quality and hopefully with the rest of the context. It will become clear how this helps you have fun with the issues. What makes good quality for the issues? Well, there are a few ingredients. This is the list. Well, obviously starting from the bottom. An obvious thing is that they are properly written, an issue that qualifies the problem statement properly, etc. But there's more. You want to make sure that there are some labels that help you classify the issues. That's a bit of a spoiler of the next statement that we have. The idea, the list, you know, this list is a set of the tools that will help you achieve that goal. The main idea is that you look at the issues and you are happy looking at them. Look what a nice issue I have here. It's clear what needs to be done, when this can happen, what tools do I need to solve it, etc. One aspect. And you don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. So we leaned our ideas to the Kubernetes contributors community. And the link is in the presentation. It's public presentations. You can look there. And so labels is a thing. So what labels mean, for example, here's from the MiniCube project. So a label could be what kind of issue you have. Like if it's a bug, it's a feature, if it's a cleanup thing or just a documentation. Or if you go into the next slide, then if you're developing for different operating systems, a label could be for what operating system you are coding this thing right now. And one thing which is mostly in all projects important, the priority of an issue. So here in this case, important long-term backlog, something like this. And some people use the priority as a life cycle that depends on the project you have. We just mentioned it here. Yeah, couple of final points about quality. One of them is that it depends on what moment in time you are and what you are wanting. So I'll give you a complete example. If you are going to fix, you know, right now want to see what box you need to fix. You might have some standards for quality at this point in time, but maybe you launch a service and those standards change. So things like the time to result might be bound to an SLO that you said. What I want to say is this quality or this set of standards is bound to, it's not fixed. It's bound to change over time. The other thing, the other aspect is also the audience of who is looking at the issues, you know, looking at an issue might make you happy, but some difference they call them might not be so happy. So it's important to define the quality that makes everyone happy. Right. And so we talked about overhead and sometimes the feeling producing stuff ahead or overhead makes things complicated or taking too long. But at the end, you can control what you can't measure. Me coming from the my last jobs were like in building dashboards for financial things. So control means not controlling of money necessarily, but control means being prepared. So here bolting with bears, one of my favorite authors from Tom DiMarco. If you know that the bear is heavy and steps on your foot, maybe you're wearing the right shoes. If coming back to the party, if you know that there could be a fire, you have a fire, the thing was prepared, which makes you enjoy the party and solving the problems more because if you have everything prepared and you measure things right. And you know what's coming up, then you can just focus on the issue because no, you know that everything else is taking care of because you organize ahead or afterwards.  It's more about being able to relax and have fun. Right. Okay, with this we go to our second main proposal of the topic. So you are overwhelmed. You have an elephant here, a big elephant that you have to eat.  Well, one bite at a time. And translating this into the world of solving issues. The idea is that you should apply proper filters to show you and clusters of issues. So filtering them in groups will help you eat that whole elephant one bite at a time. One point here is that we mentioned in the previous point about quality. How do you define quality? This will, you know, having quality issues will actually enable is a kind of a prerequisite for achieving this, being able to tailor the cluster of issues that you look at at any time. A classical example of this is how to distinguish, you know, urgent versus important issues. What is urgent? What is important? Let's not the urgent prevent you from doing the important stuff. Right. But how do you define what's urgent? It depends. That's what you define when you define your criteria and the quality of the issues. Right. And so these two statements we have here, the one about the quality earlier and this one about the cluster is taking care of number one, the quality that you know what's going on in the issues. And the second one, if you don't have too much of the pure amount and by clustering issues, you can kind of reduce the amount of issues that you're taking care of at this particular time or place that you are in your project. Cool. Well, one thing that we have found when implementing this is that preparation is key. In the end, the last point here is you need a clean starting point and basically you cannot start to have the party back to the steps about how to have a fun party you need to prepare. Right. And that's very key in the in the world of issues as well. You need to know who the audience who is going to look at the issues, for example, and in which context, this is the audience and goal thing. Are we now going to look at which what work should be done over the next screen over the next quarter, or are we looking at what do I have to do today. Right. Different requirements like those imply different views and different. So it's important to know what what you're trying to to see. And, well, there are tools to to to help you achieve each of those goals. In particular here we are going to talk about to one. Again, we we are taking inspiration off the Kubernetes ecosystem and how they do things. One of the tools is triage party that actually inspired the name of this talk. And it helps with the well as the name says triaging more on the day to day or what we call the bottom up approach we will clarify in a bit. And the other tool that we use as well we we have all the issues we in in GitHub issues and we use GitHub projects to help the top down approach here. So and if you got no some other tools because we're always looking and improving our ideas. Feel free to put them in the chat and we would love to share them with the community afterwards. Let's go a little bit more into details now how a party I mean the tool triage party would look like. Why did we choose triage party I mean GitHub comes to the law of nice features and get love does to and get project that everything going on. But one of the main things we figured out is creating filters for maybe specific problems to find the right issues was not helping. So triage party has like an amazing set of filters you can use regular expressions and even more. And so that's why we at some point decided to try triage party. You can easily fork it from the GitHub triage party Google area. We started locally and then deployed it on on our operate first system. We use the powerful filters to create a different cluster. I mean we talked about audience and time in your project. So you create filters and you can create collection of filters to design different kind of dashboards in your browser because it's a web tool in this case. And it gets also the fun part we talked about because there's a party mode you can invite like an amount of people from your team. And this tool automatically splits the open issues up to these to all of your team members and you can solve them together. And at the end you come together and find things that are not solved yet or maybe not labeled or not the right qualities in them. Some things you can't do it's no direct edit mode for issues. So you have to always go into the YAML file to do this. And there's no bulk edit. Always if you click on an issue it goes directly to GitHub yet. You want to add something? No just to summarize it's a very nice front end to help you show not edit as you said but it will help you achieve that clustering of issues and showing you views that help you, you know, eat the elephant one bite at the time. We have examples here but we're running a bit late. I don't know if we want to. No, no, no, I think we can skip that we had the example of configurations but yeah kind of emphasize that it's just to summarize it's trash party allows you to filter on more sophisticated ways than GitHub. That's that's the message and that will let you achieve that classification. But yeah, let's move on. And the shared principle. We thought first of doing a live demo but realized takes too much time so in the presentation presentation which is shared at the end you see some screenshots from the definitions and different rules. Yeah, and again, sorry we can run a live demo here but we have this screen a couple of screenshots of our we have two deployments of of trash party for each of our teams. This is towards initial view of trash party highlight here. I don't know if you want to talk that's your. Yeah, I mean it's you see this is an example you see if you this is not really clustered and really label because we have the top down approach on our team. And this is an a bad example how you see because it says check daily and they are 341 issues on this cluster view. So the generic template from triage party is here not working for our team. So there needs to be some customization. And then we go again in the other hand that's that's that's our trash party which no no yeah you were showing that looks more manageable. This is again the initial view what what the tool showed us initially. It's a fewer number of cases resulting of our team have been using more labels but on the other hand, that doesn't mean it's not overwhelming as we mentioned at the beginning there are multiple criteria that can result on overwhelming issues and in this case it was quite hard, even if the number was slow, quite hard to actually through ice them because missing context, let's say this case. Okay, so our experience so far. We didn't come to a final solution yet because we want to have make it fun and until it's not fun for us. It's a work in progress we will not present it or force it onto the team. So we are still in sharpening the song, which means we need some fine tuning as you saw. So different approaches of the team top down and bottom up pepper mentioned this in the next two panels here. And I said is not we're not having fun we don't push it to the team. So, you would like to go to top down and bottom up. Bottom up meaning the triage refining approach where basically triage party the tool shines looking at individual issues and then, you know, looking at them individually that helps you do the things right. So it helps you with making sure that each issue has good quality for example, but it doesn't help you connect the dots and get that context this is kind of where the top down approach comes handy. Which is looking at the things at a global level like look at those start from those issues that I mentioned that are tracking work for the next few months. And then dive dive under. So I think we can move to the next and final slide because this this correlates. Well, we believe one of the recommendations we we have for you is we believe we you need both approaches both top down and bottom up. And they are quite different, but they complement each other you cannot do just triaging like individual issues you need that high level view, but the high level view by itself is not alone you need good quality individual issues right that's one of the recommendations for more you want to cover the others. No, I think it's kind of a summary. Sorry. Yeah, so in the general, define your quality know ahead what you want to go what is your audience. Use the filters from triage party to, yeah, sort to think a little better and cluster them which makes it easier. And think about the purpose for all the tabs you're creating on triage party and then do both things top down and bottom up plan ahead and work and have fun with the issues. Yeah, and we hope that this will allow you to have fun working on those issues. The two things. The questions are pretty short because we are running out of time we know this we are in this adventure work adventure area later on if you want to talk to us here's our contact details feel free. And the slides, there's some attachment at the slides where you find links to all our things we talked about to our triage party deployments, and also a little checklist how you can maybe make more fun of your triaging your issues. Thank you. Have fun. Great. Thank you very much for your great presentation. So everybody feel free to go to the organization here and see you in the next talk. Thank you very much again. Thank you. Thank you.


From Hollywood, it's time now for... Johnny Deller. This is Jim Perez at Worldwide Mutual. Don't tell me, Jim, let me guess. What are you talking about?  Also, I heard something about the fire on a news broadcast a few minutes ago. Somewhere out on Albany Avenue, he said. Yes, it's the cash and save market over the other side of town. And since your company insured it, you want me to go over and take a look? A good look, Johnny. You thinking of possible arson? I am. Okay, why? That store is just one of a chain. Hartford, Boston, Providence, Springfield, Lowell. Yeah, yeah, I see. But how does that make it arson? This is the fourth one to go up in as many weeks. Oh. The outfit that owns them having financial troubles? The outfit that owns them is one man. Oh. John Wakefield Carson. Then I repeat my question. Johnny, if he is burning up his own markets, if you can prove it, you can save our company a lot of money. That might cost you a lot of money, Jim. What do you mean? An expense account. In the exciting adventures of a man with the action-packed expense account, America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator... That's truly Johnny Dollar. Expense accounts submitted by Special Investigator Johnny Dollar to the Worldwide Mutual Insurance Company Home Office Hartford, Connecticut, following as an account of expenses incurred during my investigation of the Carson arson matter. Expense account item one a dollar and a quarter for a taxi to the Department of the Offices of Worldwide, where I hope Jim Parris could give me a little more to go on. He did. Very little. First loss four and a half weeks ago was the market up in Thompsonville. How much? Loss in Thompsonville, $41,204. That was the smallest one in the chain. The following week, the one over in Fall River burned to the ground. And the claim on that? Uh, some $58,000 odd dollars. Nothing odd about that much, Joe. Loss in Lowell was a bit over $64,000. How much the claim will be on this one here in Hartford remains to be seen. How much coverage does he have on that? Around $100,000, I believe. Yes, $106,000. Oh, and that's probably what he's going to claim. Look, you can still see the smoke out there. Yes, and the telephone report I just got says it looks like a total loss. Will you go over and take a look at it? Of course. That's right. His office is up in Boston. That's where his newest, biggest market is. Oh, how much insurance on that one? Nearly half a million. It's one of the largest, most modern supermarkets. And I'd better get over and see him in a hurry. You want me to get there before that one goes up, don't you? Expense account item two, four fifty for a cab to the scene of the fire way out on Albany Road. Three or four fire companies were hard at it. But it was easy to see there wasn't a chance of saving much. It struck me that this location, part of a brand new residential area, was about as far from an established fire company as it could be. I wondered for a moment if this was deliberate. I finally ran down Hal Gibbons, an old pal. One of the best men in arson squad ever had. Stick your nose up in the air and take a deep one, Johnny. You smell it? Well, it's not kerosene, Hal. I don't think it's gasoline, either. Something highly inflammable. The boys in that chemical truck could get it out and might learn something. First, these stores always stock a lot of cleaning fluid, stuff like that. Most of them are not inflammable. Well, how about... Johnny, look out! Now, hey. Hey, maybe we'd better move back a ways. Yeah. Must have got a pretty big start on the fireman, Hal. Sure, because it's so far out. It's like the markets in Thompsonville and Fall River. In Lowell, too. Oh. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it? At this point, I'm more than just wondering, Johnny. Have you come up with anything? Those other towns are out of my bailiwick, but I know all the boys in the departments. Have they come up with anything? No. And that's why I feel I've got to get the first lead, if there is one, right here. Has old man Carson showed up? No. Not doing any of the fires. He just sits calmly in his office in Boston, mutters something philosophical about the vagaries of fortune and lets you go at that. And files of big fan insurance claim. I think I want to see that guy, Carson. I don't think it'll do you any good, but go to it. Know anything about his financial situation? He's loaded. Multi-millionaire. And boy, what a quill one. What's that mean? A regular nut. Always quoting Shakespeare, the Bible, poetry, but a good businessman. You sure he hasn't got some big investments, something like that, that went bad on him recently? I'm sure. There has to be some reason. I can't tell you. You've got to stay back alive. You want to keep your job? You tell your chief I'm here and I want to know why this fire got out of hand. Well, who's that? Now look, miss, I got orders. Don't choke on them. It's all right, Jerry. I'll take care of it. Whatever you say, Mr. Gibbons, but I got orders. Okay. Well, Miss Carson, it looks like you're losing another market. This is the fourth one. The fourth one in a little over a... Hey, don't I know you? I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure. Miss Margaret Carson, this is Johnny Dollar. The insurance investigator. Good. Now maybe we'll get somewhere. Oh, this is... Walter. Walter! Oh! Yes, Margaret? I can say, Mr. Dollar. Walter Smithen. Smithen? Hello, Walter. Mr. Gibbons? Walter handles the legal end of things for Dad. Oh, I see. The next president of the company, Walter? I? In the grocery business? Oh, no. No, sir, thank you. The legal end is enough for me. What do you think about these fires? Four in a row? Well, if I were you, Mr. Dollar, I'd suspect Austin. Oh, Walter, for heaven's sake. Why, Walter? Someone trying to put Mr. Carson out of business, something like that. The father out of business with a couple of fires? Miss Carson... Come on, Walter, we've seen all we need to make the final report to Dad. Goodbye, Mr. Dollar. Yeah. See ya. Like a motive, Johnny? That Walter character? If he marries Margaret Carson, then he doesn't seem to like the grocery business. Yeah. But if he could get the money from it? Yeah. I see what you mean. Two of yours truly, Johnny Dollar, in a moment. Our flag now numbers 50 stars, and behind each star there stands yet another flag representing one of the 50 states. South Dakota state flag was inspired by a song, South Dakota is the Sunshine State. A stenographer named Ida Anding designed the flag with a sky blue background and a blazing sun in the center, and the words South Dakota of the Sunshine State in gold around the sun. Later, the state seal was inserted over the sun, a seal representing mining and agriculture, the prime pursuits of the state. The state's banner also carries the motto under God, the people rule. South Dakota state flag, the flag of the 40th state to enter the Union, was adopted on March 8th, 1909.  Expense account item 320 cents phone call from a booth near the scene of the fire. I wanted more information from Jim Parris at World Wide Mutual, information about the policies covering the 13 cash and save markets, four of which had recently gone up in flames. I waited in the phone booth until Jim called me back. Johnny Dollar, Jim here. Oh, good. All right, here's the list of markets, Johnny, and the order of insurance coverage, starting with the smallest amount. Go ahead. Thompsonville, Fall River, Lowell, Hartford. That's the same order in which they burned. Exactly. Okay. Which remaining store has the next biggest coverage? Salem. Okay, I'll start with Salem. What are you thinking of, Johnny? It's just a hunch, Jim, but, well, I'll call you later. Item four or five dollars and a quarter for a cab back to my apartment. Five, twenty-one dollars even. Monage in my own car, Hartford to Salem mass. Despite burning up the highway, it was almost dark when I pulled into Salem. It was well after dark when I finally located the cash and save market. Again, the store was far outside of town, and it was a long way from the nearest firehouse. I don't know exactly why I went there instead of the main office in Boston. After all, it was the same day as the Hartford fire, and the others had all been about a week apart. As I said before, call it a hunch. But as I pulled up in front of the place, I saw the shadow of a man dart fritably around the back of the building. As I reached the far corner of the building, I stopped. But with only the sliver of a crescent moon, I could see no one. Somewhere ahead of me, I heard a door open. Then silence again. But somebody had entered that building. Slowly, cautiously, I felt my way along the wall. And then I came to it, an open door. A storeroom. But inside, it was pitch black. I drew my gun and carefully, quietly fell around for a light switch. After stumbling gently against a big packing case, I found it. I hunched down behind the case and flicked it on. All right, where are you? I heard you. I saw you come in here. Now, look, I got a gun, so don't try anything funny. You hear me? Where are you? Right over your head! I must have been out a long time. I came too lying on a cot in the back room of Salem police headquarters. A couple of gallon jars here. And you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah. Well, it was a couple of big gallon jars of kosher pickles that he dropped on top of your head. He, officer? I don't like to split your head open.  Now, easy now. Oh, yes. Doc says no permanent harm done. He'll give you a shot to make you sleep and rest. Now, how about this cup of hot coffee? Yeah, sure. And about a dozen aspirins my head feels like. There you are. Nice. But you, you said he. Well, according to him, you left yourself wide open when you sneaked in there after him. And then to turn on the lights. Son, you got a lot to learn. OK, so I pulled a booboo. But do you know who it was that slugged me? Of course, son. He brought you here. Who? Owners of the market. What? Mr. John Wakefield Carson. Item $6, $2, more mileage on my car. This time down to Boston and the main office of cash and save markets. To the private office of John Wakefield Carson. Please be calm of mind. All passions spent, Mr. Dollar. What? That's from Milton. Please sit down. Now look, Mr. Carson, about last night. They docked place tricks upon us all. They did so in bringing us together last night. How did you know I was going to investigate the market of yours up in Salem? Well, I didn't know. But look, you young man. Yeah. The fires which destroyed those four markets did so in order of their value to me. So I found out. Possibly then the next to go would be the store in Salem. For that indeed is next in order of value. Get figures. Or perhaps it was mere coincidence those accidents occurred in that order. Accidents. Remember, coincidence breeds further coincidence. That's a quotation from Braskoff. Now listen to me, Mr. Carson. The reason I decided to inspect the Salem store myself. Inspect it, huh? To make sure there'd be no possibility of spontaneous combustion there. Let's get one thing straight right now, Mr. Carson. Yeah. I think those fires were set. And if you'll come down to Earth. Possible, I suppose. It was Shakespeare who said fire answers fire. Through their pale flames he sees the other zumbug face. Listen to me, will you? Oh, of course. I think you set those fires or had them set. I think you were going to burn down the store in Salem until I came along. When I saw you there, I thought that was sure-intent. Oh, sure, sure. All right, tell me this. What are you planning to do with the insurance money if you get it? Rebuild? Bigger and better stores where the old one stood? No. Or did you find out you hadn't made them big and modern enough for those real estate developments where they were located and decided the cheapest way for you to do? No. No. To build again with tragic delta fates? Forget the fancy quotes and answer my question. Shakespeare said you tread upon my patience, sir. Look, it's most enough to make a deacon swear. That's by James Russell. Mr. Kyson. What disposition of the funds I choose to make is mine alone to settle. And from my heart. Kyson, enough. I've had enough of this. Now, be on your way. Now, wait a minute. You've gone, dollar. And, Dirk, me now, no more. Now, you wait. From your heart, you said. Now, I have said enough. Henceforth, my lips are sealed. Okay, okay. But you know something? I think you've told me who might have set those fires. And if you'll answer me just one more question. No. Okay, we'll see. Of course, truly, Johnny Dollar, in a moment. Sometimes we may wonder why a football team doesn't quit playing and walk off the field when it finds itself 50 points behind with only a few minutes of play to go. What is that indomitable spirit that fills men with hope and keeps them going in spite of terrific odds, keeps them going just to play the game according to the rules, just to get the job done as well as they know how? This kind of spirit pervaded the feelings of heavy bomber crews of the night Air Force on that day of glory, August 1st, 1943, the day of one of the most secretly planned surprise bombing missions of World War II, the day of the low-level attack on the Romanian oil refineries at Proesti. More than 170 B-24 heavily loaded bombers took off in a swirl of red dust from Benghazi Libya to bomb a highly defended priority target. The element of surprise in the low-level attack was to be one of their greatest weapons. But things went wrong from the start. Three planes exploded during takeoff operations. Eleven more aborted due to engine trouble. Of those that reached the target area, less than one-third returned to home base. The leaders of the mission encountered navigation difficulties and difficulty in identifying the specific targets. And due to the loss of that elemental hope, surprise, they also encountered devastating enemy firepower from flak and fighters. The mission was partially successful, but a horrifying experience. Five medals of honor were awarded to the heroes of the ployish to raid for valorous action above and beyond the call of duty. At any time, the men would have been justified in turning back. But they had a code of conduct that made them want to see the unequal game through to the end. It was a job that had to be done, a charge of the light brigade in the air as they flew down the valley of death to glory.  Expense account item 780 cents, phone call to Hal Gibbons and the Arson Squad back in Hartford. Yeah, Johnny, I finally found plenty in the remains of that fire. Then it was Arson. By some rank amateur. That's where it was hard to spot. What do you mean? When a pro sets a blaze, we know what to look for. I see. And what about the other three fires? I called the boys in those cities immediately, heard back from them this morning. Same story. All right, have you checked on Walter, what's his name, the fiance of Carson's daughter? You mean stepdaughter. Stepdaughter? I have, and that's what stops me. Alibis, huh? Perfect. Walter Smithen couldn't possibly have started those fires. I didn't think so. Now that boy may call himself a lawyer, Hal, but he just hasn't the nerve to gumption. But who else? He stands to benefit if he marries Margaret Carson. And surely you don't think Carson himself? Johnny? Call the Boston police, will you? Have them meet me at Carson's office. What for? Maybe to make an arrest. Do that for me, will you? Maybe it was more than a hunch now. Sure, I know there was no real clues in the case, but maybe for once I could get along without them. I went back to Carson's office, and I must confess, tried a little bluff. Court? You'd hail me into court? That's right. Unless you open up and tell me what I want to know. Very well. Speak to me as to thy thinking, as thou dost speak. And you can forget the quotations. Walter Smithen is your lawyer, isn't he? A timid but an eager lad who saved me many a fall. You like him? Like a son? Why would he were my son? Or as the Bible says, a wise son makeeth a happy... All right, all right. Oh, yes, yes. You have a stepdaughter, Margaret. Alas, I have. Okay. Now, who is to get the insurance money you may collect? Well, that sir is none of your concern. You're going to talk now, Mr. Carson, or in support. What a family matter. Who gets it? I... I pledged to my wife before she died that Margaret would have all monies from any profit, any monetary gain of any kind of any of my ventures. That would include the insurance money. I see. That, Mr. Dollar, was my pledge and oh, how I have rude it. Why do you say that? She's not of my blood, Mr. Dollar. She has no soul for art or poetry. And since she's come of age, she's made so many demands upon me. Money, money, money, that's all she thinks of. And like Walter, she's so bold, aggressive, headstrong. Were it not for Walter, I'd mistrust her every move. But if he's in love with her? Because she demands he be, and why? So she can use his legal guidance in her fight to take this business away from me. All right, Mr. Carson. I haven't notified the authorities yet, but I found proof that Margaret is the one who started those fires. You what? And you just told me why? Because the money would go to her. Oh, Mr. Dollar, I'm glad. I've suspected yes, but because of family honor. No, no, no, I'm glad you have proof. Long last it will take her. Take this millstone from above my neck. Proof. Oh. Margaret. Well, Dollar, you'll never live to tell the authorities. Margaret, that gun? Unless you'd like to make a deal, Johnny. It could be with a lot of money to you. I'd even promise not to set any more fires. Oh, you were right, Mr. Dollar. Unless I'm mistaken, Margaret, the man who just came in... What man? Who heard your little confession is from the police department. You're trying to make me look around so you can grab for this gun. Oh, no. Fact remains, he's standing right in back of you. That's right, Margaret. What? No! No! Oh, my hand! Margaret! A sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child. The company will have to pay on those four markets. And the courts will have to take care of market. I'm sure they will. And next time, well, give me something clean to work on. Well, yeah, I hate this kind of stuff. Expense account total including the trip home, $56.90. Yours truly, Johnny Dollar. Our star will return in just a moment. Our flag now numbers 50 stars. And behind each star there stands yet another flag representing one of the 50 states. The Tacoma state flag depicts an Osage warrior's circular buckskin shield from which hang seven eagle feathers. Across the shield is the Indian's calumet or pipe of peace, crossed with a white man's peace symbol, the olive branch. On the shield are small crosses, the Indian's graphic sign for stars, indicating lofty ideals or a purpose for high endeavor. The background of the flag is a field of blue, the blue of the Oklahoma sky signifying loyalty and devotion. The important symbols, however, are the calumet and the olive branch. These override the shield, the symbol of war, and bespeak a predominant love of peace by a united people. Oklahoma state flag, the flag of the 46th state to enter the Union, was adopted on April 2, 1925. Now, here's our star to tell you about next week's story. Next week, the Rolling Stone matter. Remember that old saying about a Rolling Stone? Well, that applies here with a vengeance. Join us, won't you? Yours truly, Johnny Dollar. A star in Bob Bailey originates in Hollywood and is produced and directed by Jack Johnstone, who also wrote today's story. Heard in our cast were Virginia Greg, Byron Cain, Harry Bartell, Jack Edwards, Joe Kearns, and Boris Lewis. Be sure to join us next week Same time and station for another exciting story of yours truly, Johnny Dollar. This is the United States Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.


So what did we see here? We easily get a factor 3 between different trivial ways of implementing the very same function. And this is quite typical. And it is another example of how deep learning works so well because we have lots of places where we gain ourselves a factor 3 or maybe a factor of 10 by doing certain things right. We are a really big community now. We have awesome developers that work on everything from the hardware side to algorithms to good ways of implementing activation functions. And by being this community that all collaborates, we're incredibly effective. And that is why if you look at all the players in the deep learning space, they're generally really enthusiastic about this collaborative, open, co-chairing way of running deep learning. Deep learning works so well because lots of tricks came together. So let's dive right into classification. What is classification? We have input and labels, xi and yi. And in the case of classification, the yi happened to be integers. Now what do we need? We need the right transfer function and we need the right loss function. And let's see what we can do about them. So the output. I want to know for a given input xi, which of the possible outputs could be the right one? Ultimately that means that at best I can hope to have a probability distribution over these integers. Of course, I hope to be right. I hope that I have an algorithm that is usually right, but no algorithm is perfect. And as we discussed before, going into a domain where we can approximate how good our algorithm is, is a very good idea. So how can we convert the output of the neural network that is going to be continuous between minus infinity and infinity into a vector of possible probabilities? Now just to be clear, we want to in the end have a vector that has the number of classes as its length and the probability that this item is of that class, an estimate, as the end turns to that. So for that, we use the softmax function. What do we have there? We have e to the xi. Now what will that do? It will take large values and make this be very large. Small values up to negative infinity. Now negative infinity will reach zero. So e to the xi will produce a value between zero and infinity. And now we divide that by all of, by that same value for all the possible classes, zj. What will that mean? We have all these values, small or large. We divide it by the sum of all of them, which means that at the end, every value will be between zero and one, because one would be the largest value if the sum is entirely dominated by one of the e to the zj. It will be between zero and one and it will adapt to one. So this is the properties of probabilities. Now, given that we now have a way of formulating a distribution of probabilities, what is the right cost function here? Well in a way, we want the predicted probabilities to be close to reality. Now in reality, one of them is true and the others are not. Now there's some realities where reality might be, I am not given ground truth, number three was the right answer. But there can be cases where even ground truth or like the kind of labels that we get have uncertainty, but like now that for the moment. So the target vector y can now be a one hot encoded vector where yij is one, if and only if xi belongs to class j and otherwise it's zero. Now, what that means is that if I have lots of inputs with index i, the output or like the target vector is encoded as a matrix where for each input i, I have a probability of output j that is zero everywhere apart from one where truth is. Now what we want to do is we want to have a cost function that measures how similar the two of them are. And this is cross entropy here. So let's see what we have there. We will have on the inner side of that equation, we have sum over j yij of log n of xij where n is the output of the neural network. So what that means is we effectively, not like keep in mind that all the yij that are wrong are zero and only the one that's right is one. So this sum boils down to the log probability that the network this way assigns to item i being of class j. So only that estimate matters of the outcome that actually happened in that case. And then of course we will have a sum of all over all the data points that we'll have here. Not like we will sum from i is one to s which is the number of samples that we have. Now there's a warning that is really important which is PyTorch combines softmax and cross entropy into one function. I've seen a good number of people run softmax and then put it into the cross entropy function in such a way that softmax was run twice, which of course won't work well very well. Okay so this is now how we can take the pram of classification and formulate it as a lost function that really makes sense to us. Now I want to give a bit of an aside here because it's very important in real world applications. I told you before that what we often do when we do modeling is we try and use a lost function that says how good is our model and we want to have a model that is ultimately working well. So we use log p as how good our model is in a way as a starting point. Now if I optimize on the wrong cost function I will always do worse than if I optimize on the right function. So for example the payoff function for me might be I take my deep learning system I build it into a production system and whenever I get it right I make money for my company. So the payoff function in that case is how often do I get it right? So now we are in a conundrum like I like log probability because it's smooth and it will optimize really well but my ultimate payoff function is how often do I get it right which isn't even differentiable. So what could I do in this case? So one standard procedure and you will generally get a lot of mileage out of that is you want to in the end optimize for what matters but what you can then do is you can optimize for the log probability first and then you do a second optimization where you then fine tune the model so that it's as good as possible and at getting as many of the items right as possible. You will generally get some advantage of that. Now we're ready you know like what we have is we have a function which is the neural network up to the softmax and we have a loss function which is cross entropy here and we just choose an optimizer we will learn a lot more about optimizers next week and now it's time to take some data and train it on the data and what we will do is we will use a simple 2D case because we can meaningfully visualize it and learn from it. So now train classification on the spiral dataset.


What kind of discipline and patience does it require to kind of dink and dunk your way through a game? Yeah, I mean, it definitely comes up periodically throughout a season.  So, just kind of depends on the game plan. Is there temptation in those situations to look, to want to do more? I mean, there's always temptation.  So, there's definitely always temptation. We're gonna check the very complimentary of your play. He mentioned how you've done well against him. What is it about being able to go in there and just overcome that aura and everything that comes with playing it to that stake? Well, it's definitely a tough place to play. Look at it historically, they've been really good there. They're playing really good football right now. They're loud on third down. They got the foghorn going, get into a lot of weather games there. So, definitely a tough place to play and then we're gonna have to be at our best, communicating. They did a great job of mixing up personnel, mixing up looks. They give you every look in the book. And it's gonna be up to us to be able to communicate, ID, and be on the right people. You've got some of the guys in and out, not sure who's playing until late the week and how do you kind of manage it? It makes it tougher, not about it. But at the end of the day, you have to get ready to go each and every week, no matter what kind of hand you're dealt, and go play good football. I appreciate a management team that tries with an Adrian Peterson, goes and gets golden tated. And it's not just like, well guys are hurt, good luck everybody this weekend. Everyone's trying to do their best, right? They're trying to do their best to get guys in here that fit what we do and can fill in for guys when they go down. Players are doing our best to get ready to go each and every week. So it's from top to bottom of this organization. I think everyone tries to do the best they can to get ready and prepare the team each and every week. And what about Des Fitzpatrick's growth since maybe the summer gives you confidence that he could maybe step up for you guys, which is kind of the revolving door you guys have had at receiver? Yeah, he's definitely grown. A guy that came in maybe didn't have the start he wanted to. But as the season's gone on, started making a ton of plays on a weekly basis on scout team. And then you've seen his opportunities grow on Sunday. So it definitely kind of fits what this program is about is take advantage of your opportunity, take advantage of each day, grow in practice and then you'll get your opportunity on game day. Brian, what have you seen out of a guy like Golden Tate in his career? And is it easier maybe to have a veteran presence come in here? Is it easier to maybe get on the same page with a guy who's been in a different systems and a couple of different places? I hope so, haven't been on the field with him yet. But a ton of respect for his career, things he's done. He's been a guy who's consistently got open and plays a lot in the slot. And enjoyed watching him play over the years. So hopefully we can get on the same page quickly and he can contribute for us. I said that he came up to him and said, hey, anything I can do for you? Just let me know, man. He's still got to work his way onto the game day roster. But had any kind of conversation with him? What was your early interaction with him been like? Yeah, early interaction has been great. A guy I knew a little bit before he signed him. Like I mentioned, just had a great career and good football player, good dude. And so excited to have him. How about the way a guy like that can get you those three yards? How critical is that for you in a situation where you want to be precise with the football but still want to get those chunks? What are you talking about? Three yards for goal to take, yards after the catch. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean yards after the catch are huge. I think it kind of fits what we like to do is get the ball on our playmakers' hands and let them make plays. You know, whether it's AJ or you mentioned Golden. Guys that are good with the football in their hands are going to be good for us. Brian, you haven't had a lot of games since you've been here that you probably wanted back after the game or maybe in the way that Sunday played out. How do you turn the page and let it fuel you or forget about it? Or what's your process to just move on and get ready for this one? Yeah, obviously, probably one of the worst games I've been a part of. So not something I'm proud of, but can definitely grow from it, have to turn the page and move on. You know, I don't think that's indicative of the player that I am and believe that I am. Just got to play smart football.  And at the end of the day, have to turn the page and get ready and prepare for a new week. And as you get ready for this week, there's going to be a lot of new faces out there. You guys had a walkthrough yesterday. It's not clear how much you'll be able to do over the next couple of days. How do you get ready for a game with some new faces of wide receiver without having a full week of practice or as much time as you might like? It makes it hard, no doubt about it. Have to communicate really, really well. Be on the same page in the film room, in the installs, making sure we're communicating everything clearly, communicating exactly what I'm expecting. And then if we do get some full speed reps, taking advantage of every rep we get. You said a few times on Sunday, it falls on me, I need to be better. What specifically does need to be better this week than it was this past week? Name it? I mean, you guys watched the game. There was some good things in that game and then some things that hurt us. So just got to clean it up. So what's it like when new guys join the locker room? I mean, does it bravely introduce them during a team meeting? How do you meet the guys? And has it kind of been crazy? Just so many new guys coming in and out and are you constantly finding yourself and introducing yourself to new players? Yeah, it's been wild. I feel like we always have a little bit of turnover, but this year it's been heavy. I think yesterday in the team meeting when he introduced the new guys, I don't remember how many, I was probably like six or seven guys. And so you're trying to look around and match a name with a face and remember it and then go up to these guys and introduce yourself and welcome them to the team. But like I said, everyone's trying to try to fight and get this team ready to go. If we can add some guys that can help us, then I'm off for it.


Let's talk about how to manipulate the vertices, edges, and faces of our mesh while in edit mode. By default, we can already select a vertex with left click and move it around with the move tool. We can also select multiple vertices with shift left click. This allows us to rotate and scale our vertices with their respective tools as well.  For example, if you select two vertices, the edge between them will be considered selected. And if you select all four corners of our cube, you'll see that the face within these vertices is also considered selected. You can technically manipulate faces and edges simply by selecting the vertices that form them, but you can also change your selection mode. In the top left hand corner of the viewport, you will see three icons that represent what selection mode you're in. By default, we're already in vertex select, but you can also change it to edge select or face select mode. These will allow you to select the edges or faces directly. For a more intuitive experience, you may enjoy holding shift and left clicking these icons to activate more than one selection mode at a time. For example, if we were to turn on every one of these modes at once, you could click anywhere on the mesh to select either a face and edge or a vertex at any time. Box select, circle select, shift select, and most basic selection tools are available in edit mode as well. For hotkey users, simply use the 1, 2, and 3 keys on your number row to change your mesh selection mode. You can also hold shift and then press 1, 2, or 3 to activate multiple selection modes. Another very important tool while in edit mode is loop selection. Depending on your mesh selection mode, you can select a loop of edges or faces by holding alt and left clicking. In vertex and edge select mode, you will select edges when alt clicking, and in face select mode, you will select faces. Quick tip, in vertex and edge select mode, the edge loop that gets selected is the one that runs along the edge you alt click. However, when in face select mode, the face loop that gets selected runs perpendicular to the edge you alt left click.


Zinc metal is a promising anode material for aqueous secondary batteries. However, the unfavorable morphologies formed on the electrode surface during cycling limit its application. Here, the authors report the tailoring of the surface morphology using a lanthanum nitrate aqueous electrolyte additive. This article was authored by Rui Rui Zhao, Hai Feng Wang, Hao Ren Du, and others.


Welcome to Toffey TV, it is the Everton News Daily. Young striker Manassi Mampala has signed his first professional contract with Everton. The 17-year-old scored 11 times in 18 games last season for the 123s and also had six assists, he's a real prospect and Everton tying another youngster down, obviously Shane Lavery, signed his deal yesterday, so well done Manassi. A player linked with leaving Everton today is Martin Stechlenberg. He's been linked with a move to Leal. I'm not sure whether Everton will want him to go. Obviously Joel Robles has left the club, signed for Real Betis and it always seemed like Stechlenberg was quite happy to just be the number two at Everton but you know he might want, he might think he can go and get 13 football with Leal and that might be enough to see him up the door which would then obviously increase Everton's need for another goalkeeper. Middlesbrat are apparently trying to convince Mohammed Bessage to join them. Bessage went on loan in January and had a very successful loan period at Borre, Tony Pulas wants Bessage back. I'm off to see what happens there. He's out currently in Austria with the first team training and he'll be trying to impress Marco Silver and convince him that he still has a future at Everton Football Club. Everton again have been linked today with Wilfrid Zahar in a £70m move. Ronaldo's just gone to Juventus for the deal with £105, they believe or what the fee was rumoured to be between £80 and £105 so Wilfrid Zahar at £70m. Let's be honest, Everton aren't paying £70m for Wilfrid Zahar are they? Let's be honest. Whether they could do Balasi plus £35m or £40m, I don't know but I couldn't see Everton paying £70m for Zahar albeit he is a fantastic footballer and he's getting better as the years go by. Manchester United apparently are leading the race to sign Celtic left back here in Tainey. It looked as though Tainey was ready to move to Everton. He still may well do. Reports that the deal stalled and Everton have walked away are probably by the remark slightly. He's a talented player. Do Celtic valuing too highly? Who knows, it just depends what happens and this of course could all be part of the fun and games that surround transfers but it appears on point of view. I would love Everton to just go and tie the deal up. Get him in and let's start the next, the new era shall we stay with an area that we've needed to put pressure on Leighton Bains for the couple of years now so again it's a watch this space that I suppose. Everton today have also been linked with Quincy Thromes again for about the 84th time and rumours that were in talk with Gerry Mina, us and Tottenham but that just seems to be a daily link at the minute with no real substance to it. Finally, Van Arama have commissioned a artist who specialises in date work, is that right PID? They've done it, they're doing a campaign, launching a campaign ahead of England's Whale Cup semi-final tomorrow called No More Years of Date. The reason I'm referencing this is because the artist has done Jordan Pickford on the side of the van and it looks absolutely brilliant. How good is that to be fair? Out of date, that is quality. Even Harry Kane looks like him as well. All good. Obviously we wish Jordan Pickford all the best tomorrow ahead of that Whale Cup semi-final against Croatia. And let's hope he has another stormy and let's hope the Van Arama date artwork is seen everywhere because it's all good publicity for Everton after all, isn't it? If you haven't subscribed please do so, it only takes a minute. Click the bell notification so you are notified every time a new video is out and if you want more videos get over to Patreon. What are you waiting for? See you later on Softly TV.


So, hello, my name is Jeffrey Sykes. Today I've come to talk to you about an issue of serious gravity. Thanks. There's going to be some more of those. I'm the director of technical operations at VML. We deliver connected experiences for folks. So a few qualifications. First, I'm not an astrophysicist, so this metaphor may collapse in on itself. And second, I'm trying to distill for us what's been a five-year journey. So let me talk about some of the problems that we faced. We were spending about 65% of my team's time on release management. We were building and deploying code across .NET, Java, front-end, PHP, and other Ruby and other platforms. We were doing this with 10 different web content management systems and eight different database systems.  So I was looking for a great quote about release management, and I couldn't find one, so I made this up. Manual release management is super fun. I love it, and it gives you great joy and a real sense of fulfillment. I love scouring config files to make sure I update them correctly. I especially enjoy having my weekends and evenings destroyed. So the first thing is to admit that you have a problem, right? Like if you think that you're good with your manual release management process, you may have already been sucked over the event horizon. Okay, so once you've admitted that you have a problem, then the next step is that you have to begin to realize that how you deliver is not nearly as important as what you deliver, right? Unless you are delivering release management software, the process itself has no inherent value. When you realize that, you begin to realize that what you need to do is standardize on how you deliver not what you deliver, especially at a marketing company, we don't always get to pick text stacks, so you have to be able to standardize the process, not the what. And as you do that, you begin to realize that automating release management is a team sport. So you cannot do this with just ops, you cannot do it with just devs. It is a team sport that involves everybody, including QA and InfoSec. So there's some common pitfalls that you can run into as you're doing this. So control, configuration, and culture are three that I want to talk about today. So when we're looking at those, we want to make sure that in terms of control that we have the right people have skin in the game, right? Gatekeepers only keep what they have to keep. And when you're doing this, that you make sure you have time for QA and demos and that you don't just go through things too quickly. Sorry. And don't forget about configuration. Now, as an ops person, managing configuration files is not exciting, but you should treat configuration as code because configuration needs to be treated inside of source control. And if you don't account for how to move configuration and databases through, you'll never make it. But there's also cultural blockers. So one of the things that you have sometimes is a distrust of automation. So when you're dealing with that, you have to be able to figure out how do you build that confidence in? You also have to deal with it, not my job. Part of what we do is that you don't have enough time for automation. So the automation snowball is you take one task every week that you have to do. You automate it and use the time that you buy back from that to automate the next task. And this is a great tactic, especially when you're coaching people. But automation always leads to new discoveries, right? So you're going along. Everything looks great with your swordsmen. And then all of a sudden you start running into tanks and you suddenly realize that you're not doing as well as you thought you were. What's going to happen is automation is going to find new bottlenecks, right? So in our case, we totally destroyed our QA team. They had no time to do anything and they became the new bottleneck. What I can say with last year is we've been doing awesome stuff on automating QA and that has made a big difference. For us, the culture is more important than the tools, right? You're not even going to ever...  Now, I still fight the, how do I want to use this particular tool? But the culture itself is the bigger blocker that you have to deal with. And finally, one of the other lessons that we learned is sometimes that you're staring at that little blue dot and you have to take a step back so you can see the entire picture. That's major importance for us. Sorry. And finally, manual release management is like a six-fingered man that killed your father. Like some things in life just cannot be tolerated. So my advice for you is just never give up and you got to keep going. Thanks.