can we make that will improve things and minimize confusion in the short term. So we're probably not gonna radically rename routes. I mean, unless for some reason there's a reason to make it clear that a route is different from what was there before. When we're looking at alternatives for the future, though, we're certainly not gonna start from, we're probably not gonna start from the basis of the route names that are there now. And so something that happens in these processes is while we're doing that planning work and that consulting work, we just come up with entirely new names and usually they're like one, two, three, or A, B, C because we don't want confusion with what's there now and we wanted to make it as easy to understand as possible. And especially if the shape of the network changes a whole lot as a result of that plan. So maybe one of the alternatives is less different and we retain a few of the existing route names and one is very different and they're all new names. It's a little hard to tell right now. In terms of the route names as they come out at the end of the process, I think there is, there's a part of that that comes down to your own marketing and communications and how you think that's gonna go down best, but certainly what we typically advise is if you can make the more important routes have the lower numbers or have letters, that helps. People know route one is important, that's easy to remember. I don't know if Hop Skip and Jump is what works in this community, that's great. I'm not sure, personally I have mixed feelings about that one specifically, but yeah. And what about the, and there's probably more for John, the app that we've been working on for writers. I'm wondering, it seems that would be a way to help the confusion if they can go to an app, not only know they're on time, but maybe be able to negotiate the right, the different routes or the different routes. Yeah, thank you, Director Lin. So on March 16th, for the first time in Metro history, you can actually open up Google Maps or Transit app and see real-time information. We only have about a third of our fleet that's equipped, but that'll just continue to grow as we roll out that program. So customers can currently see on a portion of our buses where it is in space and time, whether it's delayed or on time. And again, that'll, I think by April, we're targeting full deployment of that system. So it's really exciting. And that will also let someone look at the right connecting route if they're, such as a confusion and what's what they may simplify them. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes. I'm trying to understand the time long-term and I'm thinking about development for things. I don't know how you're working with the different cities and the county government to find out what's coming down the pipe like the Aguilo lanes, the bus on shoulder. Is any of this that information that have been incorporated in this study? I'll let Daniel add more if he needs to, but the cost-neutral short-term again is this year, we're looking with current resources. The future growth scenarios, we will be taken into consideration future planned land use changes, although it is mostly based on current use because we're looking about two to four years out for the first blueprint phase, the first growth scenario potentially, and then maybe five to 10 for the second, but the second one would definitely look at future land use, is there anything? Can I add a couple of points to that? So just to add, we have been in communication with the cities and with their planning departments. We've had initial meetings with all four, I believe, cities and county planning staff as well as UCSC to understand what the big projects are coming down the line. And in addition to that, we're also engaging them directly in that alternatives development process and in the planning development process. So at the moment when we are trying to figure out with the bus should turn left or right here, there will be, if the cities are willing to provide that a staff person from the city to participate in those conversations. And so that is happening actively. The other thing that I wanna point out though is that for those longer range needs, and yeah, we are mostly looking at the next two to four years, but the fact is that you're in an extremely constrained situation in terms of land in this community because all of your valleys are like this wide. And so ultimately, I think that there was gonna be continued value in strengthening the land use pattern you have now. And by that I mean, in designing the transit network, I think there's a back and forth between that transit network and where land use should probably intensify in future if you're anticipating future growth. And so we're gonna be looking at that in tandem with the cities as we go along. Director Karis Carter. Thank you, Chair. Daniel, I just wanna say thank you for highlighting some of the issues in Watsonville, particularly the walkability and the infrequency of the routes. I also just wanted to add there's a lack of bus shelters in Watsonville, that's a big issue because people also don't wanna be sitting out in the sun for an hour, so I just wanted to highlight that. And I do have a couple of questions. So my first question is about the frequency from Watsonville to Monterey County. I know you skipped over the slide just in the interest of time, but I was just kind of interested in where that ranked among the popularity of the routes. And then the second question, I was hard to see back here, but I wanted to see the circulator bus. I don't know if that was up there, but that has been a huge improvement in Watsonville and just getting around. I noticed that downtown was a frequent area, but that's because that's where the bus stop is, the bus station. But I was just curious about the patterns of the circulator because I think that was a much needed service in Watsonville. Thank you. Let's see, there's two questions. I'm gonna, can you remind me your first question again? Absolutely. Oh, Monterey, Monterey, you said Salinas, yeah. So there is currently hourly service between Watsonville and Salinas for most of the day, seven days a week that's provided on MST routes 28 and 29. Each of those routes operates every two hours, but they alternate and one of them goes through Castrowville and the other one goes through Perndale. It is the same amount of service that was there before December, but it's been coordinated now so that is happening once an hour. Historically, that service has been provided by MST. I think I'm sure they'd be delighted if Metro wanted to contribute to strengthen that, but that's the decision that's certainly beyond my ability to make. And there are in fact a certain number of, there's a certain amount of travel between Watsonville and Salinas that certainly could get better served, but it is nice that you have that line and it is at Watsonville Transit Center. As regards shelters and bus stop conditions, I think I have to defer to John. I'll plug a second parallel study we're doing right now, which is a, it's called the Silk Hill Rapids Project, but it's looking at line 71, 69 and 91X as it formerly was and we plan to bring it back. And it's looking at bus stop conditions as part of it and they've analyzed the shelter locations, conditions. On those corridors we found that only 39% of stops do have shelters. And so what that study is doing is teeing up our ability to go out for future investments in bus stop improvements in that area. So it's definitely top of mind. We haven't seen the sun in a while, but rain for sure. Shelters were on top of customers minds as Emma and Jared Walker have been doing outreach. It's been coming up in every discussion. So yeah. Thank you both very much. Thank you. I know Director Dutra just made an online had some comments and questions. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Chair for Madam Chairwoman. I wanted to say first of all, thanks Daniel and Director Ergo for your presentation. It was extremely honest and I really, I appreciate that honesty and what it does say is that we do have a lot of work to do in order to increase our ridership again, which has definitely has fallen over the years. Just to kind of repeat a couple of the things. Oh, I also want to say thank you for reiterating that the 91X will come back. This plays into kind of the conversations that I hear in South County is the convenience, right? I mean, the 91X offered convenience from Watsonville to Santa Cruz and also with all the transferring as well. I know that that has also become an issue and that was brought up this today as well. I know I worked with you guys and when we had the elimination of a route in Watsonville and we brought Lincoln Street back into the phase through conversation. So I know people are really, this deters people from riding the bus when they have to have all these transfers. So I guess my question is with ridership decreasing, it has not, I don't think since I've been on the board since 2014, have I seen ridership increase? I've seen it decrease, I've seen routes decrease and I've seen transfers become more happening more often than direct routes from one shot to another. How are we going to fix this with, I guess, the budget that we have already the loss of community buy-in when people have to get from Watsonville to go to Santa Cruz to work and we just took away their 91X, which gets them there on time and now they're having to go back into a car. What do you, how do you think we're gonna be able to turn this around? I'm trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel here. Thanks, Director Dutra. So the fundamental point of this exercise is to answer that question of how we can make Metro more useful for more people. We think a lot of that comes through frequency and some of the things that Daniel has talked about. It's also gonna come through future investment. I mean, there's a direct connection between the amount of service that we can provide on the street, which is completely related to how many, how much operational resources we have to provide that service and how much ridership there is. And we saw a decline in 2016 with the last comprehensive operations analysis that we did because that led to a reduction in service of 10% and pretty much an equal reduction in ridership coming out of that. It was successful in the sense that we didn't lose more ridership than that. But the first, the cost-neutral will just be frank. It's gonna be really hard to grow ridership with our existing resources. But that being said, we think there is a way with all the maps and the way that Daniel portrayed in the slides, their services, it's confusing for a lot of people. And we think there, this early win scenario, which is, we hope to be there by May, late summer and implementation in winter will improve things for a lot of people. And frankly, during the first round of outreach, we've been hearing a lot of positive things about Metro, not that people are giving up, but that people want more. So Dan, if you wanna add anything to that. Thank you, yeah, I'll add a couple of things. First of all, because I anticipate you'll hold me accountable for what I've said in the past and the future. I wanna clarify that I did not explicitly say 91X was coming back. I think we recognize the- Rekha Ergo did. Oh, okay, oh, I'm sorry. Okay, great, great. Then I'll, all right. I will hold you accountable. Although I totally recognize, we've heard about the 91X Pliny, and so that's not to say that I don't recognize that need and the value of that service. In terms of growing ridership with your existing budget, I think I'm just gonna be more brutal than John and tell you that they're not gonna grow ridership a whole lot with your current budget. That's not, you've cut service over the years. You've lost ridership as a result. And that's, those things are correlated. And when we look at the research and when we look at the data from many cities and many places, the single biggest determinant of whether there is high ridership for transit in a community is if there is a high amount of service relative to the population. And so while increasing service on its own is not a sufficient condition to increase ridership, the service has to be useful, as long as you remain at your quite handicapped current level of service, we can make it more efficient, we can help a little bit at the margins if we do things that are smart and that reflect the community's needs, but you're not gonna see a step change in transit's place in the community with the existing level of resources that are allocated to the service. So I just wanna say that, I understand that UCSC has a huge ridership and they're a big portion of this ridership. The problem that I'm kind of noticing down here is that our residents that work up in Santa Cruz, if you're now, you don't have that 91X to get up there, it's adding an hour or so onto your trip to get to work. And so because we may not have the numbers, it's still important to have those routes available to the community, especially to South County. So I don't know if we're gonna be basing our decisions on these future routes off of the finances. How is that gonna, are we gonna be able to add those routes back if we're not, if the ridership down in South County is not producing the numbers or that like something like UCSC is producing, can we still make sure that our people are having those routes? Because this seems kind of grim overall. I'll say two things. One reason I'm a little rosier on my outlook on the current level of service versus Daniel is that within our current budget, we know that we're still down about 20 operators. So we can add service, we're still trying to get back to pre-COVID, but we can maybe even increase beyond pre-COVID, assuming we can hire and train operators in a timely fashion. So that's one reason I'm rosy. In terms of responding to your question, Director Dutra, so we're gonna look at existing ridership. We're also gonna look at ridership potential. And a lot of the analysis that Jared Walker and Associates has done so far within Santa Cruz County and within Watsonville in particular is looking at that ridership potential. He showed a lot of information on where density is, no car households, youth. And so there are things that we're doing today that aren't serving those areas as well as we could. And that's within current resources. In terms of the 91X, I did say it was temporarily suspended. I'm not sure it's gonna come back exactly as the 91X, maybe it'll be called the Route 1, who knows. But we do understand that there is an important need for a faster connection between Watsonville and Santa Cruz that takes advantage of the auxiliary lane project on how we won. MST took surf line from us. I think that's copyright infringement, but we'll call it something that makes sense to people in Santa Cruz. And as soon as we have the operator resources, we'll bring it back. The changes that we put in place currently with the 69A, W, and 71, it's only, I don't wanna say only. It's 20 to 25 minutes longer commute. It's not an hour. And we've actually increased the frequency between Watsonville and Cabrillo College all day to every 30 minutes, every 15 minutes between the four routes, between the three routes. So it's not quite as bad as we're making it seem, but we understand the need. And the 91X has always topped in mind for us, that connection between Watsonville and Santa Cruz. Thank you. Director McPherson had a... Yeah. And then I'll go to you, Dr. Yeah, thank you, Daniel, and John for your candid presentations. A couple, I have a question, and then I have even an opinion at the end, but in general, when we're talking about reduced, time factor stops, it's 30 minutes minimum now. Are we usually talking about 15 minutes as a good target? Or is that a good one? Secondly, you factor in the cost factor. Do you have a cost factor? If we wanna go from 30 to 15, what that's gonna cost, whatever the routes are. And secondly, or thirdly, and this is kind of an opinion of mine, we talked earlier about a valid measure, possibly in November. My thought is, seeing that this is gonna be coming to us a year from now in March, I don't know that it'd be a good idea to put a valid measure on November. If we put something there, and then we see in March, we have to do a lot more to get where we wanna do, where we wanna really be. Maybe we should just put off that thought until March, because I don't wanna be asking people, having been through a lot of campaigns, you wanna ask for somebody, something in November, and then the next June, say, hey, we just really wanted more. What's my opinion? I think we gotta ask once for whatever we wanna do big time. So in March, to answer the last question first, in March, we'll have the fully baked plan that has been vetted by the public and the board for where we see ourselves in 2024 and two to four years beyond that. It's gonna present that future, what we would do if we had more resources. What we're gonna finish this year by May, June with implementation in November, December is what we can do with our current resources. So we'll be done. We'll be done by March, and we'll have already talked to the public through various rounds of outreach on what the future of Metro could look like if we have additional resources. Our target to go back to the first question is certainly 15 minutes as a baseline. It's kind of a minimum level of convenience for people. It's also important for state funding now. A lot of the cities are interested in where we're gonna put these 15 minute corridors because it means it's gonna be easier to develop along those corridors given recent changes in state legislation. So 15 minutes is our target. We're not gonna be able to get there in a lot of places until we have additional resources operationally to do that. Budget-wise, we're gonna be balancing the whole system. So obviously if we have 30 and 60 minute routes currently and we wanna do a 15 minute corridor, it's gonna mean reducing somewhere else given our existing resources. And that's why the future scenarios are much more exciting to talk about because it's adding resources where we can kind of maintain the existing level, make sure that it's the best it can be and then adding on top of it to build these 15 minute corridors in the future that we've heard overwhelmingly from the public that people want to be able to use and rely on Metro within Santa Cruz County. Thank you, Director Rodkin. Yeah, Dan, how to... Yeah, I wanna second everything John just said and I wanna add two things to that. One is just about the cost factor. Just the cost of running a bus on a day to day is basically the cost of having a driver out there and the driver and the bus itself. And when you double the frequency, you double the number of buses you need and so you double the cost. That's just how that works. Sometimes there's some rounding in that but that's basically how that works out. The other one thing I wanna talk about is you asked about the adequate frequency and I think that John's absolutely right, 15 minutes is the general target and it's the state, it's certainly the target that the state of California is encouraging everyone to think about right now. I wanna add another point of context which is that the frequency that becomes useful where you get that kind of next level depends on the distance of the trip. So I think, so if you have very long trips like you could get a lot by increasing, service to Salinas being every 30 minutes versus every 60 minutes I think actually has a fair amount of potential but that obviously wouldn't be a huge improvement for someone trying to get between Live Oak and the city of Santa Cruz is still a long amount of time to wait compared to the amount of time you're on the bus. For your shorter services with very high demand like between downtown Santa Cruz and the university, you could consider, you get that benefit, you get some of it at 15 but you'll get more of it at every 10 if you can afford that. We wanna make sure that we, 12% of the service that's a real hit. And it's a little early to start the camp. Let's face it, we don't pass some kind of a, it's still worth doing some of it and be marginally helpful but it's not gonna be what the public are asking for. It's gonna cost money and we have to go out there and fight for the public to support that and then be able to provide the service that they wanna have. And that was a situation we found ourselves in 1978 and we passed Measure G for the half cent sales tax and it's gonna be our situation again. So again, we shouldn't be fooling ourselves early on the reason really shouldn't be fooling ourselves that we're gonna somehow like improve the system tremendously through a organized planning effort without more funding. It's about more funding. And yeah, if a 15 minute route costs twice what a 30 minute route costs, that's money, and it's simple. And so I think the reason we're doing the, what can we get for our current money? It's part of the, frankly, the political effort to show people, you know, okay, we're not trying to just throw money itself. We wanna study it and it goes on. So this is what you get if we don't raise the funds and people can look at that and realize it's not what they're looking for. And that might be another incentive to get people to come out and actually support a better transit system, both for the people that are gonna ride it, but also the people that don't wanna be stuck in traffic and hope that a lot of other people get hit at their cars. I mean, whatever it is that motivates people to vote for these things, but we do need more money. And I think that's realistic and we're not just asking for money because that's just what government does or something or what agencies do. It's because we really need it. And that 25% cut, that hurt us badly. When we passed that half-send sales tax in 78, one of the first districts in the country to do something like that, but certainly in a small community, big cities were doing that, but it's communities of our size, not so much. And particularly in a community that's got the environmental awareness that ours, we wanna cut back on greenhouse gases. There's fights about this, is it 40% or 60% of the greenhouse gases come from transportation? But it's somewhere in that range and that is not insignificant. So people wanna be more than talk about climate change. They need to think seriously about some money to make this thing work. Just attack what comment on, our surveys in the last fall showed strong support among non-riders for maintaining Metro. And that's kind of your first point there is how do we maintain the system into the future and stop some of the things that we've heard during this initial round of outreach that the system has really started to atrophy over recent years directly related to funding. So that's the first goal, maintain the system in the best state possible. Just a couple of points I think are positives for us. As Director Peckler mentioned, we do have the articulated buses coming in that will certainly help UCSC. We have that extra 20 feet. And the other is the driver recruitment and that's part of the issue is the shortage of drivers. And I know there's been some success in this approach too, looking forward to those new drivers coming in and going into I think it was Academy as a police officer but whatever that term is. There are some positives with these buses coming in from San Diego and the recruitment efforts that at least should help the public see some of these improvements and be more supportive of funding asked too. Thank you. Let's see if there's any members of the public that would like to comment on this for sound of all. Well, first I just want to thank you for the great presentation, Daniel. I just want to share my quick experience of whenever I travel, I try to rely on transportation or at least when I'm there just to see what the experience is like in other places in the US. And specifically in San Francisco, I was relying on the buses and I missed a bus and knowing how our system is designed, I didn't think another one's going to show up for a couple of hours, you know, or how reliable it is. And within 15 minutes another route came by. And that is exactly where we need to be is where you could go to a bus stop or even miss a bus stop or bus and know that you're going to be picked up in 15 minutes to go where you're going to need to go. That's what I'm really hoping we're going to be able to go to. I will emphasize that I'm glad Donald Lynn brought it up. We do have a driver shortage, an extreme driver shortage. We're not even providing a reliable service right now because we are dropping routes. And I encourage everybody in this room are online to sign up for our GOV deliveries. So you could see when we drop routes. And I just really hoping that we could get to a place where we could provide reliable frequent transportation and just emphasize again, too, the pattern for a while now has been that we're losing people. Fasten them, we're bringing them in. And we have a great opportunity coming up with our contract negotiations to reach a deal where we could attract new drivers and retain the ones that we currently have. So thank you. Any other members of the public? See anyone online? Okay, thank you so much for the work and the presentation. We'll move on to item 18, which is CEO Oral Report. I appreciate the opportunity just to chat for just a few minutes before we go into closed session about some of the current undergoings at the agency. But I would have to stop for just a second to regress and talk just a bit about reimagined metro from your CEO perspective. I think director Koenig made a really good point. Transit works in Boulder because it's a hop, skip, and a jump. It is easy to understand. It is frequent, it is fast, and it is real. If you were to ask me looking at what we looked at down in Watsonville, I would call those routes, estimate, study, yes, good luck.  I think it's problematic. It's not that hard. I think you have a fiscal cliff coming up that we'll be talking more about, which means you're gonna be cutting more service before you get to a ballot if you aren't seriously considering a ballot opportunity in 24. And I think it's gonna be easy to see that the public, the majority of the public that goes into a voting booth doesn't ride your bus system and never will, but they recognize the value of the service that you provide and they recognize that you need an easy to understand, frequent, useful bus system that's improved over what you have today to be able to give people equity and opportunity in Santa Cruz County. So those are my thoughts going out of that conversation. So they are what they're worth. And I'm looking forward to the conversation moving forward. I do wanna say there are some pretty amazing things going on and you've made mention to them and alluded to them throughout the meeting, but your ridership continues to grow. But I thought I'd point out two things. I asked our planning department, is there any service we're providing that is 2019 level in pre-COVID? Interestingly enough, you provide pre-COVID-like service on the weekends. So I asked, what's our ridership on the weekends compared to 2019, knowing that we're providing that level of service? It's up 15.5%. So people are returning to transit. They have a willingness and appetite to and it's growing. Second, the other bullet point I asked was, what's going on with your youth crews for you? We've now been running it for a while. So youth crews free is up 96% in student ridership K through 12. So that's the impact of creating something that's easy to use. And in the reciprocal ridership that comes from it, I think it's a great note and comment and story for Sacramento. And it's a great comment and story for the community and for the school districts. It's a pilot and the whole purpose was to gauge how the students will react. And I think you've seen how they're reacting and we haven't even gone on campus yet to set up booths and to really get them engaged. And so I'm excited to see where that ridership goes with that. I do want to, I know we've been in here for hours but I got like two or three other things. That flood event where in the levee broken Watsonville, I just want you to know I was really proud to be from Metro when that happened. We got a call from the mayor Saturday night. Hey, I've got all kinds of people coming to the fairgrounds. I need some help. And so I called James, oh geez, James Sandoval, sorry about that, James. You know, he's your general chair for the local 23. He called Ignacio Mata, which is your president for SMART with your local 23. Within a couple of hours, our teams were delivering blankets, towels, toiletries that included toothpaste, toothbrushes, diapers for infants, coloring books, crayons for children. I mean, man, did you have that happen on a weekend with just a couple of hours of notice? I just felt like, I was just over the moon with saying I work for Metro and I'm part of that family. So there's lots of other things that happen there. I just want to mention that immediately, or within days, Rina, your manager of customer service, to remember her last name, Solario. She made the fantastic suggestion. Let's get 200 passes over there. Basically a 15 day custom pass made for the people at the fairground so they can actually get out and have some mobility. And so in the end we provided 272 passes that have a value of 15 days of all you can ride on them. And then Margo went to action and customized Route 79 so that it had regular service during the day so that they could actually have access to the bus system from the fairgrounds. So I mean, when you say that Metro does far more than just run in circles with the routes, that even our drivers were at loss in regard to their homes and you saw in the newspaper how our employees reacted to that to get them the resources they needed. I do want to say perhaps just one or two other things. You have five drivers that are just being released and other that are just starting the revenue service that are in the classroom. Eduardo Montesino, you know him as the mayor of Watsonville. I know him as supervisor Montesino with our organization that he and a fellow supervisor, R.S.L.E. Campos put together a game plan to take our classroom training and our behind the wheel training from four classroom cycles to nine. And then we've got ongoing recruitment that's coming up soon. Margo's working day and night trying to figure out how to make good on doing nine classes a year. So the big goal and the one that I'm losing sleep over the most because it's just important and I don't want anything to fall through the cracks is by the end of 23, you're running with full staff. The 20 drivers being short 20 drivers is a thing of the past at the end of the year. I think you're gonna get there perhaps earlier than that.  So there's just a lot of focus and it's happening. CHP came to town, did their annual inspection. I think it's important for the board to know what the CHP thought of Metro. They come in and do a random inspection meaning they just tell you they're gonna show up on Tuesday and have the buses ready to be looked at. So yesterday they finished up that annual inspection. They gave you the highest rating they could. Sounds kind of lame, but it's a satisfactory. But I want you to know you've had some of the best mechanics at the CHP. Obviously you were concerned about safety.  And then finally, in April, we're gonna start a community logistics. Now we're the mailing list substantial. Senator Laird said the best advice I could ever give you because this is a great agency. You've got to tell them once a month, community newsletter and then us staffs gonna do a once a week kind of internal correspondence to make sure the employees are completely up to speed on what's going on and that we're having a mechanism with your back. With that, you know, I'll be happy to answer any questions. Director McPherson, we met with the CEO with Community Coast Energy, our community, Central Coast Community Energy. And so we're working on a template that they would like to use that will go out to other agencies of how, I'm so right around the corner we should be talking about. With that I'd be happy to. Thank you so much for that report. Comments from directors? I just got a few things. Okay, Director Ducha. Thank you. I just wanna say thank you, Michael, for all your hard work. You definitely have come in and really brought some really positive changes to our organization. And I think that it's gonna really change how we look in the long run for in the positive. So I just wanna say thank you for all your hard work. I also wanna say thank you to all the bus drivers who stepped up during the flooding down here in South County. We really appreciate it. I mean, our shelter is full at the fairgrounds. We have people that have been just lost everything and it's heartbreaking to see these families in the situation that they are. And I was just reading an article today where kids are afraid to even go back to school. And they don't even know if the numbers of kids will return. So I do wanna say, our bus drivers have always stepped up for our community whenever we asked of them. So I wanna say a big thank you to them as well. And I guess my question to you, Michael, and you touched on this a bit is, and I know we've been working on it, is how do we become more appealing to people to apply to be one of our drivers, to join our family? I mean, I feel like we've been having this conversation. We brought some, the starting rate up. And why do you think that we are people just, they don't wanna be a driver and be accosted by other people on the buses. So they choose a different profession or what do you think we could do to get our numbers up so that we can get our routes back so that we can get our frequencies up? You know, you have a good starting industry leading benefits. And interestingly enough, I think the way you make the difference in getting your new operators your recruitment, it's not about blasting out TV ads. It's not about blasting out radio ads. It's about people talking to people. And most of the people that we talked to, for instance, last Sunday in the rain, got this driver's name, last name's Johnny Lopez. The people we talked to said, oh my gosh, there must be a waiting list. It must take you a year to get on board at Metro. And I'm like, are you kidding me, right? Believe it or not, I heard that multiple times during the day. So we got this stuff all over the radio. We got it on social media ads. But when you just go out and you talk to people, what we're really finding is that at the end of the day, people are underemployed. And that's the target market. It's your underemployed. It's the people making 21 bucks an hour with minimal benefits. We would love to make 24 bucks an hour with industry-leading benefits. And we'll continue to mass market that. I'm not saying that we're gonna stop mass marketing it, but I think the most productive way we get operators in is when everybody starts talking about with their friends and with the people that they meet in the grocery store, at the fast food restaurant, wherever you may be, it's just talking to them about how great Metro is and that there's a need right now if they apply and just helping them get the recruitment. And that's the best tool ever is these business cards that have the information because you can have a simple conversation and hand someone a card. And it's an easy application to make. That's been the most productive. That's the target market. It's not necessarily the unemployed. It's the underemployed. Those are the folks that would love to have what our operators have and be a part of an organization that's as tight and family-oriented as Metro. Have you thought of maybe like a refer a friend? You know, if you, when you think of, you know, sometimes you see, I don't know, gyms or banks, you know, and maybe that would give it, and it would incentivize our employees to, you know, go out to their friends and their families and, you know, if the person comes on as full-time then that employee gets that stipend or whatever we give out. I mean, that might be helpful. If that's where we're heading with, with this is to, you know, word of mouth, I think, you know, maybe we do some sort of incentive incentivizing them. I think it all works. Even the mass media works to an extent, but I've really just found that if you really want a transit center to my office during the week, I'm passing a guy in the street I've never seen before. I stop him and I say, where do you work? And he looks at me like I'm an alien. And he said, I work at the library. And I said, well, how come you're not working for Metro? Cause you're obviously walking in the neighborhood where Metro lives, as far as where we keep the buses and where the operators are. And he's like, well, again, I thought there was a long waiting list and I've seen your flyer at the library, by the way, but I just have never really connected the dots. And I, we had a five minute conversation and I would bet that guy's got an application in. Paying more than the library's paying him. I have better benefits and the transit system is right where he lives. So, you know, unless you stop somebody and you say hi to them, you're gonna never gonna make that connection. Thank you. I think the public also needs to know more of nature of the job. I was shocked for them on a discovery that the reason people don't make it through our training program. The vast majority of cases, it's not cause they can't train how to drive a bus. And that's probably most people's fear. Boy, that's a big thing. I don't know if I could drive that. I don't think of myself as a physical person or whatever. But the reason people don't make it through our training program is mainly cause we can't train. It's hard to train people in customer service. And in fact, this is a much safer place to be drive a bus than in large cities. It's not a scary a job, I think that some people think it might be. We also, we don't, of our bus drivers, they do have to interact with the public, but it's not at a level that sort of like, I think is threatening the people. So just making people understand that people, almost anybody, not everybody, almost anybody can be trained to drive a bus. You just need to have a positive attitude towards working with the public. And like you said, there's a short waiting list for it and it pays pretty well and the benefits are fantastic. So that message is not out there yet to a level that it needs to be in the general public. So I do think along with the 101 Contact, just setting stuff out there about what does it mean to be a bus driver? Just saying we're hiring bus drivers, probably intimidating as a job to a lot of people that it shouldn't be in the community. Thank you. I just wanted to, I'm Dawn Kermane, HR director. I wanted to address Jimmy's comment about, refer a friend. We are currently running a referral bonus for the bus operator position. So if anybody, any of our current employees refer somebody, it's a $2,000 or up to $2,000 referral bonus paid out over two years. So it pays out just like the sign on bonus of $4,000 that we're offering right now. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Just curious, do you do an exit interview with anybody who starts the process and then stops the stream to get feedback as to, okay, you started this now, why is it no longer appealing? And getting that sort of, because maybe you're doing it, but you get any sort of feedback from those folks that start and just don't complete it. We do, and you know, Dawn can elaborate, but we're very interested when someone's walking out the door. Do an exit interview each time if the exiting employee will allow us to. Sometimes they don't want to do that. We do gather that information. And if it's something that we can pass on, we do pass on to whichever manager it pertains to, yeah. Just real quick, I know we want to get out of here, but I just wanted to give Michael credit for that call that he made on that weekend to activate Ignacio Amato pretty much. He connected me. And we just wanted to make sure to take care of as many people as we could. And we were able to do that as a team. I also wanted to give Dawn and Michael also credit because we're attacking this recruitment and retention problem. We're meeting twice a week, coming up with a lot of different ideas and strategies on how to address this. And we're working extremely well as a team. And just trying to remember the last point that I was gonna make. Oh, I apologize in advance because I did not send my invitation to you guys. I normally do, but we normally have that quarterly bid change party that you're probably aware of where we provide food for Metro employees. And we just recently had one and we usually ask for donations to kind of make up for the food that we bought. But this time we provided the donations to our Metro employees that were currently affected.  So I will be happy to report that we raised almost $3,000 and we were able to distribute it evenly amongst them. And the amount of gratitude from each and every person was awesome. And it's just validating, improving that Metro is a family. And I just wanted to make sure you guys knew about that, thank you. And thank you and congratulations. That's a lot of milestones and accomplishments in the last month. So thank you for that report. We'll move on to item 19 and that's review of items to be discussed in closed session. Thank you. The board will meet in closed session conference with legal counsel existing litigation as described in the agenda. Now is the time for any public comment if not the board will meet in closed session and then reconvene an open session at it's committee. Thank you. We take public comment now.


Welcome to the 2021 KSC annual award ceremony. KSC units for maintenance excellence as well as individual meritorious awards to KSC professionals. But these awards are different as they celebrate excellence within a truly excellent organization. Today we presented 23 awards. Awarding the excellence for the battalion really ensures that we have the not only the capable personnel, but also motivated personnel. The KSC battalion all the way dating back to its inception in 1951 has been the backbone of the Army. It was the backbone of the Alliance really. We supported units. We support many organizations across USFK from Busan all the way up to the JSA. So we're really proud of what they've done in 2021, what they've done since the inception and what they continue to do.


Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world.  In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Written by John Perry Barlow, Davos Switzerland, February 8th, 1996. A big change of CDNs at the NHL as well as celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. How are you doing, Eck? I'm doing great, Tom. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be back. It's good to have you. It's been too long. And we had one of our analysts in our Slack actually send us one of many complaints about some problems with the NHL. So this is a good cross-section of sports and technology and especially bearing, even if you're not into sports, on the idea of getting things streamed to you over the Internet versus broadcast over the air, don't you think? Oh, yeah. I know. There's a lot to this. And I was at the press conference, luckily enough, last weekend when they were in Nashville for the All-Star game and they gave the press conference. So I got to talk face-to-face with a lot of the guys who did it before it actually hit the wall. So I've got a lot of good stuff to talk about. Awesome, man. Can't wait to talk about it. Let's start off, though, with the headlines. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued prohibiting discriminatory tariffs for data service regulations. That means no free basics, no zero rating. The regulation reads, no service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content. In other words, Facebook's free basis can't provide some parts of the Internet for free while leaving the other parts to be charged by the ISP. Thanks to StarFuryZeta for posting this in the subreddit. Mark Zuckerberg says they're going to continue to do internet.org plans in India. Things like trying to roll out airborne Internet connectivity and things like that. But it sounds like India, the government, has said no. You can't give people portions of the Internet for free, thus creating portions of the Internet that are given an advantage over the portions that aren't free. Boy, there's a lot of angles to this, Tom. This is an intense story. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of angles to that. That's something that there's a lot to take in there. I'm not so sure what I think about that. It seems like there's good intentions and there could be not so good intentions. Well, free basics by Facebook is very popular in parts of Africa because people can get Internet when they couldn't get Internet at all. I think the difference with India is people, even if they can't afford a carrier, feel like they will be able to soon and they don't like the idea of certain parts of the Internet getting a boost. I don't trust Facebook in keeping data personal and private. That's legit. I could see why they wouldn't. Reuters reports, France's data protection authority has given Facebook three months to stop tracking non-users web activity without their consent. In other words, cookies. The company was also ordered to stop transferring data to the US on the basis of the Safe Harbor Agreement declared invalid in October. This is one of those things that Facebook says, again, look, all we're doing is what lots of ads do and the difference is they're Facebook and they collect a lot more data than those other advertisers do. The difference is they're in a different country. If there was a French country like Facebook, would we be feeling the same way? With Americans, we tend to maybe trust American companies and even we really should, but we trust them for sure. You can see how France, especially having lived in France for a while, I know what it's like there. You can't get Hellman's mayonnaise because they don't let you get Hellman's mayonnaise because it has to be French mayonnaise. This is a place that doesn't trust Americans off the bat. This completely stands with their character, in my opinion. It is something where I don't know how much of it has to do with the United States, which I think you're simplifying the case, but I think you're right. There's very much a pro-France first sentiment, as Patrick I think would agree, but there's also a real distrust of Facebook these days in particular. Yeah, and Facebook is an American company, but at the same time is a worldwide company too, but I can see in France where they would say it's an American company first, just from my experience at least. On Sunday, a data dump was posted on Twitter containing the names, titles, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers of more than 9,000 US Department of Homeland Security employees. The Twitter account said it would post data from 20,000 US FBI employees next. The data was also sent to Motherboard, which confirmed the data was legitimate. Source compromised an e-mail account and then used the details they learned from that e-mail account to socially engineer access to US Department of Justice staff portal. I think that last part is getting swept into the rug a lot here. This isn't a hacker who broke encryption. This is somebody who was able to get into an e-mail account, which granted, that is a security vulnerability that should have been corrected, but then socially engineered their way into the rest of it. Yeah, this is another, this is a scary sounding thing for sure. And you can see where people, three kind of scary stories to start off time. Yeah, yeah. How about this? This one's more fun. The Financial Times reports sources tell it that Google plans to release a more substantial virtual reality product than its current cardboard. The new headset would have plastic casing, better sensors and lenses, and support a wider range of phones. The report also mentioned more about bringing VR to the core of the Android operating system. I love this. And as you know, you can currently buy better versions of cardboard on Amazon and such. And I have a couple versions of them. And recently just used one when my son had to get a blood test. My son's terrified of needles. This is a tip for those parents out there.  And it rarely worked well. I like the fact that Google is doing this. I think it's already exists, but since Google is doing it officially, we get some more hype from that. Yeah, it sounds like from the article at the Financial Times and the Verge here that the idea would be to create a Nexus-like device to give you a reference piece of hardware and still encourage other companies to make these headsets. That's great, I think. Yeah. The Pirate Bay has added beta compatibility with the Torrents Time software. If you have Torrents Time installed on your desktop, you can click on a Streamit option from any listing on the Pirate Bay and you're watching the video in your browser. The video can also be sent to Chromecast or AirPlay. Popcorn Time online, obviously, which is very similar to this. Torrent Project, VideoMax, and OnlinePornTime have also added support for Torrents Time. The majority of content found on these search engines, I'm not going to lie, is probably copyright protected and downloading it and viewing it is probably going to violate laws in your area, but that doesn't make the actual software illegal and it doesn't matter to Netherlands Anti-Piracy Group, Brian, B-R-E-I-N, which VentureBeat reports sent Torrents Time a cease and desist and Torrents Time is fighting back. They responded, denying allegations that their product is illegal and refusing to comply with the cease and desist thanks to user Buzz Out Loud for posting this on the subreddit. Nice username, by the way there, Buzz Out Loud. Very good username, I like that. Throwback. Yeah.  Now, what does Torrents Time do? Because I think I might not be the only person who doesn't really... So, Popcorn Time blazed the trail with a piece of software that did this all in. What this does is say, you don't need to actually have anything in the software other than Torrents Time to use a website that is integrated. So, I go to the Pirate Bay, I see Public Domain, His Girl Friday Carry Grant video Torrent. I can press stream it and it just starts playing after it gets enough trackers. So, it may take, you know, a minute or two, but it actually just starts playing the movie, which is a great way to create infinite streaming suddenly without having to have a central server. Yeah, that is a wonderful service and not having to risk downloading, of course, malicious hard, malicious software in the process, I imagine it saves that as well. So, it's a good service. It is always going to be one of those things that could be used for good or evil, which is the internet, right? Well, and if I had to guess, I would guess that Torrents Time definitely had in mind the idea of streaming things that are probably protected by copyright. For sure. But that doesn't mean just because they lusted in their hearts to break copyright law, doesn't make their software illegal if they're not inciting people or they're not actually providing the copyright infringing content, and it doesn't sound like they are. This is what I love about the internet, you know, and this is the way, I mean, because when I deal with the, I was finding tying a little into the NHL and a lot of companies, there's an appearance of evil clause within contracts, which is something that doesn't exist on the internet really, because if it did, there would be problems. But companies, you can get fired for something that appears evil. I know somebody ran into that. You know, this is not, you know, I'm not calling Torrenting evil, but I'm just saying that there is an appearance here, like you said, that there's an appearance. This is probably something wrong, but because you can't prove it, that's a wonderful thing about the internet that it has to be absolutely proven to be wrong. Yeah. And that's a good thing. Motang on our subreddit noted that venture be confirmed with Google that Google Hangouts will now route audio and video over a period of peer connection when possible in order to improve quality and speed. Again, pretty much the same technology behind Torrents time, but used by Google for Hangouts. Feature has been spotted on Android and is apparently coming to iOS and the web as well. We really live in a fascinating time.  They'll be there. CBS reports the number of people who watched the NFL Super Bowl 50 and streamed online set a new record for streaming online. It did not set a record for viewers. It was less viewers, at least the early estimate is, than last year, but streamers watched 315 million minutes of game coverage with an average of 1.4 million people streaming the game per minute. Ricode notes the last year Super Bowl on NBC claimed 800,000 average viewers per minute with a total of 213 million minutes watched. CBS offered the game free over devices like the Xbox One, the Tokyo Chromecast and Apple TV using its CBS Sports app thanks to Scott Pantall for the subreddit post on this. I used it on the Apple TV and was lucky enough not to be hit with problems which a few people were using. And the reason I was streaming it on the Apple TV is my over the air was just kind of being janky. It wasn't bad. I could have watched it, but it was getting interference every once in a while. And I figured, well, let me try the stream and see if that's better. And it was in my case. Yeah, we had it in three different places actually in three different ways. We had it over the air and on cable. And we had it streaming in the other room too. So the thing I think about this year versus last year was it was a lot better. The streaming was better. The technology was better. Last year was, and last year was further behind too, which is a really big deal when you're actually watching, when you're trying to play along with Twitter or what have you. The game last year was a good five minutes behind. This year it was close enough that you could play along with your second screen. But yeah, bearing on our discussion topic today, we'll show that streaming video still isn't perfect. Like it's not a dead, simple replacement for over the year. It is interesting to me though that the most valuable broadcast on television, certainly in the United States, people are willing to just give away for free on the internet. It's an odd juxtaposition to the fact that I actually had a really hard time finding the puppy bull. Hey man, I got invited this year to the pre puppy bull journalism thing, which I'm going to do next year. And guys, the puppy bull is usually popular in our home. Last week, Twitter, well Buzzfeed actually, got everybody all excited because they were threatening to change the way the chronological, reverse chronological Twitter feed works. On Saturday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted, we never planned to reorder timelines next week. Buzzfeed had reported Friday that Twitter would introduce a more Facebook style, algorithmically driven feed. The Verge received screenshots of a test of this new timeline. The screenshots show the salt mobile carrier, which is in Switzerland. So it might be a tester out there. It will add older tweets based on how long since you last checked in and a pull down to refresh that will give you chronological views. You can then choose to opt out of the feature as well. Patrick Bezier posted this Verge article about this yesterday and several people said, okay, that's not so bad. Other people said, nope, still should be opt in. Don't make me opt out of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I think I wouldn't opt. I wouldn't opt in too. I don't want to opt out. Although I do like the idea of screwing with the timeline and like for the same reason I just said before, of screwing with Twitter timelines, I would love to be able to start a Twitter timeline if I'm watching a show, like, you know, Breaking Bad or something like that. I would do a little delay. Yeah, I would love to be able to do that. You know, a program that you couldn't actually enter anything because nothing you enter would make sense but actually watching it on watching it and watching the tweets as they have it online would be a really good, I think that would be something that they should look into and it seems like this is sort of that but not quite. Yeah, it looks like this is for people who aren't power users. So they check in maybe once a day, maybe once a week and it's a way to give them kind of like the while you were out feature now on steroids. Here's a bunch of really good posts that have happened since the last time you checked and the idea that I can kind of makes this fine for me. The while you were out things have turned out to be kind of useful to me. I thought I would hate them when they first brought it out but I think what happened here is that Buzzfeed got ahold of the information before Twitter had a chance to acclimate people to the idea and of course when you shock people with without soft peddling a new feature and telling them how they have control over it and how they're listening you will tend to get internet outrage. Especially Twitter, you know, especially Twitter for whatever reason it's like someone compared to the other day that Twitter is your home is your new home phone like everybody has a cell phone and Twitter is your home phone I thought that was pretty interesting if you mess with your home it's like someone messing with your home phone if they mess with your Twitter feed people take it that that's seriously I kind of like that analogy I do think it is it is true to a degree and I like the while you're out as long as as long as they're being put together in a in a way that interests me and I think that's very difficult to do, you know I don't think that it's algorithmic right now and I think this is where Twitter should use some of its thousands to figure out what's there, you know that really legitimate stuff finally Samsung's UBD K8500 the first consumer 4k Blu-ray player is now ahead of its announced March release out apparently it's kind of sold out and Gadget reports video and audio center in Santa Monica sold out of the machine Friday after announcing it was on sale Best Buy started emailing pre-order customers saying that the release would be February 10 and members of the AVS forum reported seeing the machine at fries in the San Francisco area and San Diego 399 player works with Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray DVDs, CDs in addition to Ultra HD UHD 4K Blu-ray and can stream 4K content from services like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube among a few others I think M-Go is even on there I don't know if it streams in 4K but it's listed on the box Wow yeah this just means that actual Blu-ray players will go from like $69 to $29 everything in the back in history you know this will now make everything less expensive it's exciting that I'm a real big 4K fan so I'm looking forward to this $400 a little much for streaming box which is what this is right now there are no 4K DVDs for you to buy yet right no 4K Blu-rays for you to purchase as of yet there's only going to be two out within the next couple months but you can get some 4K service from the streaming providers it's an early adopter thing if you're willing to spend more money than you should just to be able to watch it now well then you can get this you know what's funny about 4K and all the better like color TV and then HDTV and now 4K you've had to wait for technology to catch up as usual but in 4K since you can actually make your own 4K videos before videos are available it's the first time you couldn't make your own HDTV before HDTV was available that's a really good point but it is kind of strange how we've actually moved faster than they've allowed and then obviously that's because it's really expensive to go to 4K I've talked to people in Hollywood and Canada was in 4K two weeks ago it was the first hockey game I think done in 4K people got to watch the Canadians lose again but um yeah that was you know it is interesting how we've actually passed that time threshold for some I see a new version of Be Kind Rewind in the making there where you actually make 4K versions of movies ahead of time of the release right I like that anyway that is our look at the headlines thank you to everyone who supported the show by posting things on subreddit or just voting on things on subreddit you should at reddit.com that's the headlines alright so last Tuesday after the all star break the NHL decided to relaunch GameCenter it's no longer no longer called GameCenter it's NHL TV it's being taken over by BAM formerly MLBAM Major League Baseball Advanced Media they are the host of MLB TV they are also the host of HBO Now they host a lot of video HBO doing HBO Now on BAM was seen as a really smart move because when Game of Thrones premiered it didn't just bring down the servers however it does look like that is not the case with NHL TV people have been saying all kinds of things what's going on here yeah they went I mean for anyone who's ever launched a website after you know we've done a couple relaunches of our website I've been terrified to not do one for four years you just know that you're going to get killed no matter what you do right so it better be darn good because people hate change so much that you know the first part of the people people just hating the design in general but along with and saying there's too much white space too minimalistic too much like a you know a stock website type website but the actual lag time has been pretty bad unless you have super good internet you know and I haven't had super good internet because we do these kind of shows but for most people there you know we did a test today and people were loading and loading and loading just to get the scores and you kind of feel like you're going back to 1997 you know like this is not really what we need and yeah I think the biggest the biggest complaint and I think their biggest problem so far and I talked to the guys about it at the time a little bit is that they are so into this working everywhere on mobile and all that that they kind of made a mobile website for the internet itself and I think that that is really upsetting people people are saying you know what I want my internet website to be you know my website and my mobile website to be my mobile website we don't need it just because some people have touch screen on their computers and they have a NHL.com website I want that to have all the details like and they've taken out some things that they really take people off they took out something that really bothered me which is the condensed games which is something that I liked because you know I could watch all the games the next day without having to you know and see more than just the highlights I could get a feel for the game and they took that out and some of those things that they've taken out they could eventually put them back in I've been told I've talked to people up there but right now yeah there's a lot of people up a new tab whenever you do anything which is one of the things people are like you know you end up with like five or six tabs across the top of your screen that's scary but yeah there's there are some good parts to it though I mean the 60 frames per second really looks a lot better I mean it just it really just does so that part I like and that's that's true 60 frames per second on any device you could find like your your PlayStation or your anywhere so that looks a lot better because of the speed right because of the speed of the game and because of the black on white the very it's very difficult to do you know the black puck on the white on the white ice is you have to have that's why HDTV really boomed hockey in a big way but yeah this was one of the first things I saw on an HDTV that just blew me away was hockey on HD net so yeah because for years I think hockey fans who knew the game could watch a game on TV because they knew the game but they weren't really seeing the puck which is why we got glow pucks and things like that which just celebrated history a couple of days ago too happy birthday glow puck oh the glow puck I know you can buy them on eBay for like $500 piece glow pucks but yeah but they won't glow of course because you don't have that technology unless you own that technology but they were the pucks that they were used proprietary glow puck yes but they were used so yeah so why is it that I'm looking at ahl.com and I'm not I'm here on a 300 megabit per second connection granted I'm streaming with you right now right I don't get the image that goes along with the jets that's been signing with Winnipeg that's not oh we should have a second CDN that's not a design issue that's just a failure like that shouldn't happen I think that there's a limited amount of resources at the NHL.com right now and so many have actually focused on fixing the thing to make sure it runs better than I think some of the some of the basic things like that are falling through the cracks right now which they didn't before and you're right I mean Dustin Bufflin signing today is a big deal for those people in Winnipeg and for those people who are hoping to get them at the trade deadline but he um yeah I mean that fact that that's not it's been slow in general and that there's not on the main website just a headlines thing that used to be there it used to be like four or five six headlines now you have to go through when you click on the headlines you go through a little condensed version of every story so you're scrolling a ton yeah unless it doesn't load like it did for me and then you only get the one story you only get the one story yeah and people you know Bob Bowman who's the president of BAM formerly and major league baseball advanced media said that the problem on launch day was a failure in the archiving on the CDN and he said well maybe we should have had two CDNs but we wanted to keep it simple so we could track down problems faster we're only having one CDN that doesn't I mean that could have explained a Tuesday outage it seems like the complaints are still going on oh yeah the complaints are still going on and this is and the NHL gets great traffic at angel.com I mean this is a this is a fan base that doesn't have as much coverage in your basic cable TV and stuff like that so they go to angel.com for their news so I guess the question I'm left with is I have looked at BAM aka MLBAM as somebody who knew what they were doing they've done a great job with MLB.com over the years and MLB.tv they did a great job with HBO now is it telling that it's the NHL that they're having problems with is the NHL keeping hold of some things or not cooperating or causing problems Bowman sort of danced around that issue in one of the interviews that I read but of course he doesn't want to throw him under the bus I did ask that to him too who's at the press conference um yeah I said you know why the rush because this I was told was going to come out next year and to launch in the middle of the season as well you know that I think that was a little that was very you know very opportunistic sort of and just a little too much to try to pull off um yeah I don't I don't know I don't think the NHL is withholding anything at all and I think that what's happening is they really do trust BAM like they have they they when they went out they went all in with them you know for sure and for good reason because of like you said they success with HBO and streaming but there's a lot more to it than that you know there's there's a lot too just a basic website right and especially what people are used to and people are people who grow accustomed to it as part of their daily lives so if you mess the mess with that you got to mess with something better or at least and leave some of those similar elements I think they went too far you know they just you want to you don't want to just change the iPhone over night to a to a different kind of phone all together you do keep parts of it you know that's what they did here they didn't keep parts of it and that's really baffling to people and it comes on the it's funny TSN which is the ESPN of Canada TSN.ca it's a very another big hockey website that every hockey fan will go to just did a revamp as well a couple months ago and made the same mistakes in the same way um so people who are complaining about this are complaining about NHL.com and TSN and here we are we're actually a pretty big website in the US and then we're resigning our site and I'm like we're going to take our time here we I don't care if it launches next year I want to see how what people really want you know what people are okay with in the long term because this is tough I mean it's tough to pull this off. Yeah and I don't mean to minimize what Bam is trying to do here. There's always a big difference between having your dozen or more testers in-house trying out the new system and having hundreds of thousands or more people with all different kinds of devices trying out your new system that's when you find the bugs so it's never easy. I think it's just surprising because Bam seems to have figured out how to avoid most of those pitfalls in the past and this time it's not only not working well it's spectacularly failing at least on launch day. It is and I know and it's not just there too because NHL the NHL show that comes on the NHL network is produced out of MLB's studios too and that has had issues as well. I really feel as if trying to do this on the fly with the NHL granted off season is very short but trying to do this on the fly has been a problem and they were really excited about this partnership but why not take your time a little bit more in the process and it feels like Bam we do everything great so we can just do this and I know people who work there and there will be the flat out tell me that they're doing twice as much work and that they didn't hire enough people when you join a partnership like this you need to bring in more people so I think there's a lot to be learned here they're interesting how they're trying to cover it and fix it on the fly now they're definitely putting resources down but then something like the Dustin Bufflin picture which everyone is noticing people will notice that on Twitter it will be all over the place so the NHL has to I think real this in and they need to hire some extra people to get this up and running quicker it was too crazy they really wanted to put it out at the same time as the All-Star game I think was their thinking. They probably agreed to too small of a budget for what they wanted to do and then we're too aggressive in the launch date. Yeah because you know these I've been in these meetings oh we'll just make this change here it's not going to be anything all those things that aren't anything are everything at the end of the day. Can we get by with two QA people instead of five? Sure, yeah why not? Well that's no problem we'll just do that and then all these compromises that end up becoming a mountain out of a molehill type situation I think that's what's happened here and I do know that they're working very hard at it I've talked to them a lot about it and they know what's going on and they're aware of it and they really are very the NHL particularly is very into public perception but they also did hand this over very much to MLB so when you talk to NHL now I used to talk to NHL about things like this I'm being referred to MLB people right away you know like talk to this person. They're in charge, they're the ones doing it. Alright well let's get to our pick of the day it comes from Nate Langson of X Message as well as a top tier tech reporter in his own right. He's sending in a pick for VPN called AirVPN he signed up for the product about a year ago he's been paying it for it every month happily he wanted a VPN service that allowed him to use port 80 which may or may not have been so he could access something online over Wired's corporate network. This worked well at the time and since then I've taken advantage of the fact that configuration options are extremely numerous offering multiple simultaneous connections from multiple devices multiple servers in many countries no bandwidth limits and support for open VPN as well as SSL SSH and multiple other features well I've been a very happy customer and the service does exactly what it says in the box I would really love to know how all the service stacks up in the eyes of security experts maybe listeners with experience with that could shed some light on whether AirVPN is seen as a secure and trustable service for more serious security users rather than just people who want to game over corporate networks or not so there you go AirVPN might be worth checking out but take a look around see how it works and Nate is wondering if he can use it as a security device as well so if you have any insight on that let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com Mike had just listened to the discussion with Scott on Friday about Amazon stores on Wednesday and it reminded him of an email imagine this you go into an Amazon store ask for a specific book the assistant tells you they have it in the closest distribution center and if you'd like to have a free coffee while you wait the drone will bring it to the store shortly Wow having worked at Borders Bookstore for a long time in college sure maybe I mean if we I can just imagine though as an employee as the drone arrived yet now the drone is not here yet tell them the drone will be here soon yeah yeah yeah where's the drone I don't know says it's here I don't see it the tracker says it's right here but I don't know where it is yeah I don't see the drone is that it way up there? no that's Ebay's drone Daniel Hoffman recently relocated from Cincinnati to St. Louis was thinking about the discussion from Friday about virtual reality and says is the VR Unreal Engine editor basically a whizzywig editor for game creation virtual environments could it bring 3D environment creation to a more general audience depending on the execution in the hardwork house I see a demarcation of game creation happening much like web development in the early days you had to know HTML and how to manage servers now it's as simple as Squarespace or even just a Facebook page I'm interested in what Scott was saying about the object oriented databases what if instead of writing code you just stack blocks and ran lines together kind of Minecraft like the way he describes it there make your own VR world that would be awesome yeah I mean I've been waiting for that for a long time even with mobile apps you know would be one if I'd have a really good mobile app whizzywig some I know they're out there but this that would be interesting in this environment Dan in San Antonio, Texas and several other people he was the first one I saw actually I think it was the second one I saw wrote in to say hey when you were mentioning that the catalog companies had stores first and then catalogs you're wrong about Sears Sears started as a catalog company and opened their catalog locations to serve small towns that weren't served by big department store retail like Macy's the reason this piqued my curiosity said Dan to go out and check it out was because of the many references by my elders of the dual use of Sears catalog pages in the current catalog you could browse them to order other products but the expired catalog pages were often used in the little brown shack out back for another purpose. Do you remember this year's catalog? I do remember this year's catalog. I mean that was especially around Christmas that was a huge deal the back Sears catalog, the Montgomery Ward catalog, the JC Penney Wishbook Kitty City. I didn't have Kitty City, we had Dillards though. Yeah, Dillards, okay, yeah. I would just stay with that Sears catalog circling everything I wanted for Christmas forever. Yeah, yeah. And then Friday we implied that Apple issued a free replacement for a defective iPhone brought in by a Guardian Freelance Journalist according to the Guardian article the journalist had to pay 270 pounds to replace his iPhone sorry for the misimpression we gave there a couple of you wrote in correcting that as well thank you for that and that is it for the show thanks to everybody for watching thank you Ek. If people want to follow you on Twitter go to hockeybuzz.com I guess you just go to hockeybuzz.com where can they find all the things you do? Yeah, hockeybuzz.com we do a podcast like the Daily Tech News Show but like basically the Daily Hockey News Show everyone every one o'clock every eastern time one every eastern whatever I'm trying to say there you understand we do that and I'm at Ekland on Twitter and at Ekland on Instagram so yeah definitely definitely check that we have a lot of fun we do we really are I love doing a daily podcast it really structures your day so it's something I've enjoyed doing quite a bit. Tell me about it. No, thank you thank you to everybody who's supporting the show if you have I don't know 33 bucks that's how far we are from being halfway to our next Patreon milestone and Peter Wells has promised to do two example episodes of day 6 of DTS this month if we get halfway that would also get you access to the treasure chest folder with full pre and post show recordings and the best of pre and post show by Rich from Lovely Cleveland it just give 5 bucks if six of you gave 5 bucks we'd be at that point and you'll get your February 15th episode day 6 do it do it do it yeah I think we're I don't think we're gonna have a problem getting there but thanks to everyone who supports the show it means the world to us dailytechnewshow.com slash support our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can give us a call 51259 daily it's<PHONE_NUMBER> catch the show live Monday through Friday at 30 p.m. eastern at alphacigradio.com and diamondclub.tv and visit our website dailytechnewshow.com back tomorrow with Patrick Beja we're gonna talk to him about bandwidth talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hope you have enjoyed this program excellent no pun intended pun intended pun intended so that was fun there's your title for the show excellent excellent no that was not intended but it was perfect I'm gonna stop the audio stream for a moment because I had a little difficulty on my end and then I'm gonna start it back up again so do not panic. everything is going to be just fine basically for some reason the recording didn't happen one of those days because I started this show in an office and now I'm in a car what's impressive you know most doggy mommy hashtag doggy mommy's wow apparently my dog is having a panic attack at the groomers so you look very fashionable Jenny so what I picture there Jenny is like he's got everyone hauled up in a closet you're not grooming me no chance they called and they were like well he's sort of like pacing around his cage he's totally freaking out do you think you could come sooner than 230 I was like okay because apparently he just had his seven teeth out so maybe it's like a little too soon to take him to the groomer he's probably not a happy dog after having seven teeth out he's probably not a happy dog so um anyway wait till you get that Roger wait till you get tooth fairy time tooth fairy's been killing me this past month oh yeah my son's teeth are falling out all at the same time so I remember I vaguely remember what it feels like is it painful for your tooth to fall out like for for for your son because she's no yeah it depends like my son my son just pulls him out of his mouth because he wants gifts my daughter just cried like crazy if they were hanging on by a thread so it's like it really depends on the personality but my son tends to pull him out at like 10 30 at night like you know and if you're like if you're the tooth fairy like I am in this home it's not fun to suddenly like he can't be I can't wait to see what I get tomorrow and like it'll be something from the supermarket right I finally went out and bought like three tooth fairy gifts the other day just like three like Disney infinity characters I'm like I'm gonna keep these aside keep them there and he hasn't lost a tooth since so of course that'll happen so no it's yeah but with my daughter was horrifying she was terrified of it yeah I had her I had to like um hold a hold an ice cube to her tooth and wait for it to numb and then try to pull it little bits of the time sing a song put ice cube on it just like you know it would be it would be an hour long hour and a half long process my parents used to give me creamed a myth on my gums after oh there you go you see that's good yeah sure whiskey would work too you know it's not legal to give your kids benedra when they're not having allergic reactions I think that's that's something I've noticed do you like put it in a little box oh yeah yeah we do and yeah I mean it's kind of strange you know I would wonder if like if aliens discovered our civilization in the future like why were they saving their teeth but yeah I was thinking making a necklace out of her baby teeth oh that's kind of cool I like that pretend that was like a surfer and like fought off like shark's teeth I love that well those are the things you'll do you know like it's I um I hid shark's teeth one time our kids were looking for that we were at the beach and our the kids next to us were all finding shark's teeth and my kids were like looking for shark's teeth and couldn't find them like I can't find them like I'm getting really frustrated so I went out and I bought me some sharks teeth and hid them in the sand and the kids next to me found them oh no I'm like holy cow what is that about yeah that's bad news you gotta watch that kind of stuff that's really not good that and um and also like the uh metal detectors at the beach are another fun thing to like go go pre-hide things like wow there I can't believe this would be just hidden under the sand go out with a metal detector I've seen less and less of those guys yeah no the new jersey I think they still exist quite a bit um where I go to the beach but but yeah it's really like there's nothing cooler than hiding like some really cool metal things and then coming back out with a metal detector your kids thinking they found them it's the greatest thing ever they get so fired up it's true but I mean is it is it a white lie or is it just uh just not if you tell them about it later if you charge them for the toys you're okay um that's great you found that yeah but one thing I found I found one of those infinite portals that has the the mirror that looks like a mirror with with lights that goes on forever I hid that under the sand and when they're digging through it and they look down they're like wow there's a portal that goes on forever through this under the sand that's pretty cool there you go that's a geek dad moment for sure so every time a whole show Tom I was thinking how's the NHL gonna be pissed at me um and they won't be because everything I've talked about all this stuff so I was like there's nothing that you know I mean they really you know that they just they did too fast they did yeah well and I think you did a good job of saying hey this is this is what they've said this is what happened you know I don't think they're trying to deny it no they're not I mean they they're they're very much aware of it it is definitely a case of MLB thinking they could do everything without bringing more people on that's what the by the end of our conversation that's what what I felt was probably rung closest to the truth was just uh underestimated resource needs yep exactly and we did HBO fine that was no problem so yeah but HBO only needs serving you know a little bit of publishing it doesn't have all of the things that a live sports league has right right including anything they've been hiring writers too and they've been hiring new writers and that's been a big controversial issue as well because they're bringing on people who used to work in baseball that they know but now we're hockey and they're like talking about home runs it's embarrassing they're not canadian enough right yeah there's a whole bunch of things definitely get that right right that's for darn sure that's funny well yeah I think it's I think it was a really interesting conversation just from the the aspect of wow just because a company has been amazing about things doesn't mean it can't have trouble no yeah and and and like you said the fact that they didn't beta test this really in any way she before me would have been they didn't even put the they should have put it like they dual launched as a beta tag or something like that or something they could have done but there's tech they're not they're not a tech company you know they don't think that way that's like a tech company would have done that they would not have well that sounds like an NHL issue not a bam issue right there which is like what do you guys want to do and they're like well this is what we want to do this is how we want to launch it so I think what I would have done is you launch it after the Stanley Cup in a free preview with classic games and last season's games and then slowly build up till there's you know a small charge to get started for the pre-season and then you do the official launch like right it's perfect and that and then you could have done it I mean the offseason still looks like there's still a lot of news going on in hockey but it's not you know it's not like you're in this spot the other thing they introduced is really weird was this 299 thing which we didn't talk about which is that you get like the last five minutes of a game you see that yeah and the overtime is in the shootouts only yeah and that's not how hockey works no that's basketball perhaps maybe maybe you know basketball is more along the alliance see the last five minutes yeah no I want to have the blues on in the in the background right right you're not keeping an eye on it and I still I went up to them and just like in my cord killer stuff I went up to the guy I'm like does this mean we're gonna be able to watch in market games now come on right what's holding us back no way he's like no not quite not yet like why why in Canada can they why can't I really just I really just went hard for that I almost asked Gary Batman during his press conference I'm like I don't know because that's really I mean it's MLB this is MLB's fault for in implementing it the way they have it's NHL's fault for trusting MLB completely to do it that's my thinking right but they because they really just handed over like okay you got it now we're good all right well happy redundancy the audio will be a little bit less full than it usually is unfortunately for this one but at least I have a copy of it but fortunately the dog is back adorable too how is Jax I'll show you he is he's working it's working it pretty hard Jax well cute dog I gotta text you that we did a cartoon I'll text you Jenny we my my I have a big dog and a little dog so we did one of these fun cartoons of just I filmed them one time just twink just screwing with each other and our big dog is just and I and I and I stopped into pictures and then I put little captions on and it's just because you know we have a little smart shitsu and a really dumb big corgi and so the shitsu is just constantly toying with him and it's it's fun to watch so it's it's just really right up I know you're your detective dogs you like it too it's all it's all right there they're they're just the hilarious oh my gosh and then we got a giant blizzard too and home that was like watching a shitsu was one years old take take take on 21 inches of snow was was fine that's awesome well that was a great show I listened the whole way except on side streets where I would lose the call oh weird anytime I was on a major avenue I was fine but if I was on the side street it just erred the call out it was interesting mobile internet um okay I'm gonna go so that I'm not driving while talking on the yeah yeah good idea I'm gonna end the broadcast thanks everybody for watching thanks again act it was great having you thank you so much thanks jenny thanks roger all right we'll talk soon see you guys soon bye bye now


Gubar a good result against Hekaru with the black pieces you drew in the night off Now that's one line that has been under fire especially since the London chess classic. Tell us a little bit about your opening Well, he went for the I mean he went for six Bishop g5 Which is as far the most aggressive system and by far the most problematic variation for black. I mean There were two top-level games in this variation. I mean, which was played last month First was Karwana's victory against Nakamura himself and second was Nakamura's crushing victory over MVL. So Well, I was expecting him to go for Bishop g5 and I had some ideas up my sleeve, but After I mean Bishop g5 I went for six Knight bd7 and Here he played Queen e2 h6 Bishop f6 nf6 and followed by I mean then he followed it with g3 I I think this has not been played so far and Well, he was looking confident and he was blitzing so I mean he was well prepared, but then I went for e5 and After Knight f5 Bishop e6. I couldn't actually I mean I was actually quite comfortable. I mean I couldn't find any clear ways for white to you know get a Better position or I mean to play for initiative. So actually the crucial point was When he went b4, I mean I had an option to play rook takes d5 or to play rook c6 Rook takes d5 is basically just giving an exchange sacrifice I mean giving a rook for Bishop and rook for Knight and then Then it's a positional game where I have my trumps as well, but well, I'll be down in exchange for the remaining game and Rook c6 was another alternative where I mean, which was also quite decent, but After rook c6, I thought that white had some advantage. So after rook d5 e5 Bishop d7 like I Mean I had like he was up in exchange, but his king was quite weak and but the main problem was that I couldn't find a clear cut plan, you know just to post more problems for white what I chose was pretty straightforward and it didn't actually yield anything and It was quite easy for him to find the best defensive setup and then the game just fizzled out So well the fact that you put Hikaru in trouble to find the best defensive setup was already an achievement with black Now when he played b4, it's quite a provocative move And like you said the rook d5 was not the most obvious Reply to that and you're giving an exchange without an obvious compensation. So how is your thought process? Why did you choose Rook d5 instead of just retreating with the rook? Well, first of all The move before is highly was highly provocative, but actually he didn't have any other move I guess because I was already threatening Bishop takes d5 and then I mean after Bishop takes d5 it would have been quite easy for me to play because white doesn't have any sort of counter play so and After b4, I mean I had two options and rook takes d5 which I chose Was I think the strongest because after rook takes d5. It's much easier for black to play. I mean black is I mean a very clear follow-up and after rook c6 I mean Hikaru's play would have been much easier. So I think I played rook d5 just by I mean I mean I just felt that after rook c6 I would have to defend for the entire game Rook d5 was a practical approach Right in fact after Rook d5 the position you got it almost seemed like the position that Hikaru would love to play with the black pieces because Despite being an exchange down. There was a lot of initiative for you. Yeah, that's what he was quite unhappy and he was quite Disturbed actually because Yeah, he had to defend. I mean this is not what what Hikaru wants. I mean he's a Very strong and I think one of the best Dynamic plays in the world. I mean of course, I mean he's one of the best plays in the world, but Dynamics or tactics. I think is by far his strongest point and This has resulted him in winning many games. I can stop place like Ramnik and even Abhishek Anand. So Right now against Hikaru. This was the first time you were up against him Whatever said and done you you're happy with this result, right? I cannot say that I'm happy because I I mean actually I Mean I had a very nice position and if I would have found the best continuation and then I mean if I would have post more problems then that would have you know Been a That would have been an achievement actually rather than just playing a normal stuff and then drawing so well But anyways, it's a it's not a bad result. Yeah, so not a bad result at all And now you're somebody who keeps coming back to Gibraltar. What brings you back again and again? First of all, the weather is nice. That is the main thing. I mean, it's not as cold as other parts of Europe. I mean and I mean, it's one of the best organized tournaments in the world and I mean, of course, it's I mean not only me. I think most of the players who are here feel some sort of I Mean they feel that they want to come again and again. So I mean you just feel like You know, January 2017 or January 2018. I mean any year Any chess player I would I think would like to, you know, love to start with Gibraltar. So I think Thanks to Stuart Conquist. So Thank you very much and good luck for remaining games. Thanks a lot