Mae'r cyfnod wedi cymryd yw'r maesedd Dei Llor, mae'r cyfnodau sydd wedi'i'r cyfrannu yn bwysigol yma. Mae'n bryd i'r cyrraedd o'r adeiladau llyfr yng Nghymru sy'n ddifudio'n cyfrannu. Mae'n grwyffyd o'r cyfnod o'r adeiladau llyfr yng nghymru o'r adeiladau llyfr ynghraeg o'r Google. Mae'n ddifudio'n ddifudio'n ddifudio. Thank you. Thank you, sir. I would like to welcome everybody here. I have to say, it's great to be asked to chair this, because otherwise I would have to pay it to attend. It's the sort of event that I certainly would have played to attend I'm very looking forward to hearing what Julian's got to say. We are, we find ourselves, we find ourselves I believe on the cusp of the next major generation of computing. We had mainframes, we had minis, we had PCs, we have laptops, and anybody who's been transition over the last 12 months I can't have failed to notice the impact that both the iPhone and the Android phone have made. Do we really think that in five years' time there will be more of that? What impact does it have on learning and teaching? What impact is that going to have on inclusion? I think there are two big companies lining up to fight for that new ground. One of them is Clearly Apple. I spent, yes, the afternoon in the Apple shop. And the other one is Google. I think we have a speaker today. When I went out on the internet, what did you hear earlier today? He said, just make up five things about me. See if they spot the mistakes. So he was a founder member of the Lewis Institute. In a previous life he's done adionics. And he describes himself as a test juggler. I'm looking forward to hearing about him. And if you want to ask questions, you're happy to take questions next week. Yes. I really am happy to take questions anyway through this talk. The purpose of me being here is to try and help you, solve whatever interests you in terms of technology, in terms of questions, ideas. I'm fairly unstructured, as you'll see, which may be a good thing or a bad thing. And I'll probably go off the point, so please bring me back if I'm going too far off the point. So the first thing is, what am I doing here at all? Basically I'm passionate about having things work for people, technology work for people. And it bugs me when technology doesn't. It really bugs me when people have to adapt to technology rather than go the way around. And that's how I fell into software testing about 10 years ago when I realised that wasn't a very good developer. And I thought, well, how can I help and show the quality of software well by testing it? And so I set up my own company 10 years ago, a long time ago, and fell into software testing, in that respect. I've been at Google just under four years. I speak at a lot of conferences, which is high until I hear that Sal Cooke picked on me after speaking at the R&B conference where someone else picked on me to come. So that seems to be the way I do this. And I'm doing this on my own without formal sponsorship from Google, but they tolerate me, which is a good thing. So I promise I'm going to talk about some Google technologies, and I'll try and mention these. To give you an idea of what might be possible, I'll also try and give you an insight into the company. A little bit about how the company operates and works, but it's quite a big company now.  But that isn't the company in many ways. And by trying to explain a little bit more about how the company operates, hope that I encourage you to try some things out that you might think, well, hang on, I'm not Google, I'm just this small person with too much work to do. What happens now? I can't do any of these things. Well, most of Google's successful technologies have come from two or three people. So not 20 or 30, not 50 or 100, but two or three. So one of the reasons I'm here is because I strongly believe that by talking to various people, both with income with Google and outside Google, I can encourage change. Now, maybe that some of you end up doing the real change and my job was to encourage it. It may be that I have some part to play in that, and that's fine here. So I may be just the messenger, I may actually actually do some work. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is Google Wave. Now, I have Arthur Ortega in the front row here. He works for Yahoo, he's blind. I mailed him about a month ago and said Arthur, I'd like to really use Google Wave just for a trial with all the people around the conference. What do you think? Because I know that it doesn't work for blind people. So he gave me a bit of a hard time and promised he'd give me a batch in through the sessions, which is fine. But so we can look at that as a problem. We can say, Google's got this brilliant new technology. They've had n developers working on it for several years. Google's a multi-billion dollar company. How is it that they haven't solved this problem? Surely they've at least done the basics for blind people. So I can hang my head in shame and say, well, yes, I agree, I'm not very happy with either. And it's one of the things that I try to work on at the address of Google. But let's do it from a different perspective. I went to Sydney in the summer of their winter last year. And when I arrived there, I said, oh, I'm interested in accessibility. I said, Arthur, you must talk to the deaf association. I said, okay, fine. So I was asked to talk to the Australian Deaf Association. And for them, wave was revolutionary. For the first time, deaf people didn't need a human with a computer to interact between them and who they wanted to talk to. Is there no deaf here? It doesn't sound like a silly question to ask. But deaf people typically will have someone who does text to type in translation one way or the other as they type a human speaks for them. The RID provides a service or vice versa. So all waves are real-time technology. It means that as I type each character, I'm listening to Guy here typing on his fan's little keyboard, each character is transmitted and can be edited by someone else in real time. So this is not sending an email and someone replies to an email. This is not I am. How do you use I am here? Okay, about half of you. So I am going to type some stuff. By the time you've typed your 20 characters, whatever it is, normally someone else will type something else or you can just type as a waste of time because you're no longer on the same question anymore. So Google Wave actually brings that together so it happens within the same sub-second. You type, they type. Now, it's a bit of a weird technology in that it's sort of looking for a home. It's been invented and it's invented based on the premise of let's imagine that we didn't have to live with 30 years of history. So email's been around for 30 years now and I've certainly used it for 20. Let's imagine we don't need to worry about that anymore. Let's imagine we don't need to worry about modems anymore. Let's just look at what technology could do in terms of communication and that's where it came from, brand new from the ground up. One of the challenges we have is to marry it with the old world which is email and chat and the rest of it. So a conference, a Google testing, an automation conference, a deeper technical and we had about 100 people in the room so slightly more than here and we gave them all accounts to Google Wave. And what would happen is someone would take notes. So a guy's taking notes now, I'm picking on him slightly. I assume that a guy's only going to get a subset of what I said. Is that fair guy? Do you want to fix this problem? You've got a subset of everything I said. No, look at the second. So I looked at the Microsoft event a couple of months ago, the end of last year and they had two people and the first one typed in most of the workers but there were lots of typos and mistakes and the second one corrected it. About a minute later and this was a very well run event by Microsoft. So Google Wave were out to do that in real time and it means that, I'll pick on you because there's a gentleman that's being shared over there and the woman is sitting next to you and you can be typing past this down and then you get tired and you're sort of daydreaming. Someone else has just picked up and continues typing the same document in real time. Someone else over there noticed that I said this weird word that everyone else has missed out. So they correct it. Ten seconds later at the end and it means it worked and otherwise it worked. So going back to inclusion then one of the things that is helping is the devastation we're really keen to use this because it gave them advantage. It meant that they could compete at the same level as people who were there. And what I hope and what Arthur and I are talking about separately is how can we do something similar to blind people? How can we do something similar for other impairments? And to me it's not really about impairments but about getting technology to adjust to the needs of the person. And when we can get that solved and it's an imperfect science then we've done something useful and I'm pleased with it. Are there any questions that don't go away? And I'll move on to the next thing. So the next thing then is Chrome OS. Now are you happy to be the test engineer on Chrome OS in Europe? Sounds great, doesn't it? It means I'm the only one. But then it might. This one I bought from Amazon and it cost just over £200. And it's cheap, it's cheerful. It's a little computer, it's got a battery in. It's got a crappy keyboard. Sorry, it's a cost-effective keyboard and a cost-effective mousepad. And these devices you can now buy for £200. If I run a traditional operating system I'll just be general and say Windows but Ubuntu is the same sort of thing and I'd count this on. It takes about five minutes to start the computer up and get everything up and running. So that's the first problem this time. Now let's imagine I want to use this to take notes. Well, the guy, thankfully, can type immediately. But with this thing, I know already five minutes before it comes online and then type on it. And that's too long. The second thing is how many of you have got home computers? Has anyone not got home computers? OK, so does it start to be the home computers? You've got home computers. How many have got antivirus software? How many have got antispam software? OK. How many of you like having antivirus software and antispam software? And how many of you like the security problems?  Yes, no, cancel. How many of you are confident with the answer? Any of you? Seriously? OK, so we've got one or two people who are halfway confident. So the way that Google has tried to approach this is to solve two problems.  And the idea is a few seconds. This one currently takes 13 seconds from current. And it's an off-the-shelf computer running the off-the-shelf hacky alpha of our software. So it's better to get better. The second thing is there's no antivirus software on it. There's no antispam software on it. Oh, and how do you have to do your lightningers update? You know, your computer is downloading stuff and you're using it in the middle of the night to give up here. You did save your work last night, didn't you? And I'm not complaining about Microsoft. I think what they've done is great. I'm really impressed by them as a company in terms of security on the rest of it. But from a user's perspective, they haven't solved the problem yet. So they've halfway solved it. They've addressed a lot of the problems, but they've used the software to make two decisions. One is that the standard is secure. I'm responsible for testing security, by the way. So we can come back to boredom in a year or two. Anyway, the antivirus has to get rid of all these problems. You may say, well, what's this going to do with this conference and inclusion and the rest of it? Well, imagine giving this to someone with very difficulties, with Windows on, horrible to on, and it keeps dropping them to you on to update your computer. What are we going to answer that? Yes? No? Don't know? Leave it? Close in the hope to probably go away? Well, if we've got a secure operating system, we hope that they don't have to worry about it anymore. The operating system won't be perfect for security. It never has been to date in the history of computing. It's unlikely that Google's going to write the first time. I'll be very surprised. However, one of the things that companies have done a lot more of recently is we open-sourced our software very, very early. The Chrome OS is the browser on a minimalist operating system. We've opened-sourced all of it. All the source code is out there. Now, what that means is that you could, I say you not personally, because I doubt most of you don't want to do this perverse stuff, but you can actually download our source code, build your own operating system and use it. There's nothing to stop you doing that, the wear-with-all, the technical wear-with-all, and the patience. Most of your better things to do than write a programming code. So, we're actually putting it out there for the people to try. We're giving away, in many ways, the assets of a company. Again, it sounds sort of paradoxically, why the heck do you do that? Other companies make their billions out of selling operating systems. Now, I think one of the reasons we do this is because we're disrupting technologies. We're disrupting patterns. I'll talk about that as well with the Android phone. So, we're changing the mindset of people. So, the first thing is, if you look at fastboot, then newer notebooks now come with a second operating system on them. HPs do, for instance. And what you can do is boot into that to use the web. It takes, let's say, 20 seconds. So, by Google Chrome saying, Chrome OS, that we're going to do it in a few seconds, other people say, hang on, we can solve that problem too. So, what it means is it isn't just Google doing it now, but it's many people doing it yet. So, we're changing the mindset of people.  And I suspect three days later you'll be doing two. But unless you talk to that person, you wouldn't know it does. You just don't believe in, well, I can't do that because it's too difficult. And they say, ah, actually, just go and try this website and download this piece of software. And just do what you want. Then you can try what you want, but you'll get money a few hours later. So, that's the sort of thing where we're trying to encourage that sort of behaviour. I'm going to go back to the ones and twos and how it applies to you. So, Google is several tens of thousands of people, I think roughly 20,000 people in total, probably 10,000 engineers roughly, give it 80,000. So, quite a technology centric company. But, as I say, the typical teams are rather small. And also, if we look at things like accessibility for the mobile phones, and I'll talk about that in a moment, the work was done by two engineers. One of them blind, and the other one was an intern, a student. So, I'll move on to the mobile phone software and talk about Android and our platform for mobile phones. So, how many of you are blind here? I know these two are three people are. So, three people perhaps are blind? Okay. So, there's a track called TVRAM at Google. It's quite well known as a TVRAM today, and he's blind. He's Indian who's blind from the age of about 14 and is now in his mid-40s, although he would probably tell you this 37th year. Anyway. So, he went to the Android team. Oh, sorry, let me go back a little bit. How many of you use Nokia and Nokia, the Nuance Talk software? I assume that, yes, quite a few of you. So, 405 is a fairly special piece of software. And it's a wonderful piece of software because it enables your phone to talk to you. And over the years that software has been developed and for the other people who use Jaws and screen readers, again, this software has been developed to solve the need. So, when TVRAM came over to the UK about three years ago, I met him and I gave him an Nokia phone, because my job was of our phone testing. And I bought a copy of the Nuance software, maybe about £150, I forget. And he then took the phone back to the US and used his main phone. This was the first time he had a normal main-machine phone rather than a special one designed for the blind. And it was all well and good until he bought another phone because people are perverse and buy new technology and know where one works. And he had to transfer the license over. And the license was very cost £50 transfer. I remember that I had to pay for it on my credit card. Now, how many of you say that people would pay £50 because you got a new phone? How many of you wouldn't pay £50, that's a third question. Okay, a few of you, why not? What are you doing instead? Sorry, I'm going since you're in the front row. People want me. I don't know about that on the phone. I just see it as a tax on it. Okay, so you wouldn't buy the phone. So that's one good counter, but the brand has only bought the phone. It's too late for that. He's a technologist, he works at Google. He's probably got 50 phones now. Anyway, so his solution wasn't to pay £50, but he didn't pay it. He spent nine months writing the software to replace that with the Android platform. Now, let's imagine you're the Android software development team. The product isn't launched yet. It's the Google operating system platform. And you imagine that you're under immense pressures to ship. I see that most of you are under immense pressures to do good things at work. So what do you do if someone comes up to you with a madcap idea saying, and why, I want to use a touchscreen phone. So they laugh at it. I said, Paul, you know what, let's be serious about this. And so they sort of ignored it, but he's a very stubborn individual. And so he went back and we have this thing called TJF, which is a Friday where we have the founders speak, and they have beer and pizza typically. It's a wonderful event. And you have an open mic session. Anyone can walk up and ask questions. So Rowan walked up and said, hey, why can't I have one of these phones? So eventually Android team gave him a couple of them so then what happened is he wrote the whole talking software for the phone and open sources. One blind engineer doing part-time with another intern who helped him write all the code. Put it all up on the web. And of course it isn't perfect. It doesn't do everything. It doesn't speak when the browser's used. But that software is going to be integrated into the core platform. And that's two people part-time. And Google is one of the very unusual companies I think it still allows that to happen even though we're at a large company. So what I'm trying to encourage you to do is to say, hang on, not that I'm part of a big organisation or that I've got, I don't know any of your circumstances, but I assume that you're all part of relatively big things like schools or further education or charities. But what can I do that's different? How can I solve this problem and make something useful happen? When you start to look at problems in that perspective, I expect that you'll find some solutions. So I'll move on to the Google Android platform now. So let's go back five years in mobile phones. Most of you have Nokia phones. Certainly 60% of the market have Nokia phones in Europe. The phones cost, well, they tend to subsidise a lot. In the UK, most of our phones are subsidised. They're paid for by our contracts. So you pay over 18 months 30 pounds a month, which is about 500 pounds. A part of that is probably 150 to 200 pounds at the base of the phone. The phone is closed source software. Do you remember the new and speaker software? The new and talk software, 150 pounds. And applications are typically sold for the phone and are relatively expensive. And there are millions of phones, about billions of the Nokia phones out there. But the Android platform is open source and it's free. So companies don't pay to use it. You don't pay to use it. You don't pay to use your own phone and run Android software, you can do that. Again, barring all the technical challenges of making all the work. There's no financial burden beyond that. So by taking the software and making it free, we actually built on the work of Apple in that Apple changed the marketplace of phones with the iPhone. How many of you have iPhones here? Yeah, so about a quarter of you perhaps even as many as a third of you. And why do you have the iPhone? Well, this is the Android phone, but there are people on this thing. Surely it's got a keyboard. But because the user interface and the user experience was so wonderful and innovative, people loved them and people bought them in drugs. They queued outside the store. So the Google of us, when the iPhone was launched in the UK, I think they queued for eight hours outside the store in London to go and buy one. And that for technology is something. When they ignore the buy on the internet and click a couple of buttons, it just arrives at the box tomorrow morning. But they actually queued to get these devices. And so they changed the ground. If you look at all the manufacturers, they all used touchscreen devices within six to nine months. So Apple changed that game and I really pleased they did. The Android phone again has changed the game. If you look at what happened to the Nokia software, which is from a company called Symbion, how many of you have ever heard of Symbion? Okay, quite a few of you. So the game changed with lots of funding. And shortly after Android launched, then Symbion was open sourced. It was put into effect of the Charitable Foundation. There's no longer a business. And it's supported by, I think, Nokia and Saudi Arabia. You can check on the internet for the details. But the game changed at that point. And it changed because of disruptive technologies. So Android software is now available on something like 50 different phones. I personally own more than 10 of them. I've had that. I fiddle with technology far too much. But it's becoming commonplace. And it's changing the way people think about software. Because now it's going to be easy to do the software. There's no wisest fee to pay to write and run software for it. There are tool cases. I'll move on to children. None of you's asking questions. I'm just going to be yattering until eventually something stops them. Excuse me. What does Android software do? Android software, by analogy, what phone have you got? I've just got my iPhone. OK. So the iPhone is a lump of hardware, like this, and inside there's some software. And the software is written by Apple. And it's called the iPhone software, the iPhone operating system. And you're running probably version 3. You just bought a new phone. So all that software is written by Apple and they maintain all the source code and they keep it in Apple. So if you wanted to know how the software works, you'd have to work for Apple and get conditions to work on that application to know how it works. So Android is the equivalent for this. This is a phone from a company called HTC but there are also a bunch of other companies like Samsung and Motorola who all take, they design a wonderful piece of hardware and this one has a little kick shape and that sort of trackball and a fancy camera. This one's another one with a different funny shape on it and a different camera. There's a keyboard somewhere else. All of them though are running the Android software inside them which is the thing that keeps the phone on it and it does everything from setting up the phone and enabling you to make phone calls to using the internet, to being the web browser to your calendar, your email and everything else. Does that answer your question? I just want to make sure I've answered your question. Yes, it's basically a phone that's a software platform for clients. Yes, and there are two parts to it to be strictly accurate. There's a part that is open source which is all the underlying fundamentals in the phone in the web browser and there are parts that belong to Google and those are things like the email client and the calendar client and those we don't open source because they're part of the Google software that we need to manage. So there's two sides to it. I'll come back to you in a second. Let's talk about how many of you haven't got an iPhone or an Android phone? So how often have you updated the software on your phone? That's very typical. So let's imagine that your phone is more than the year old. How many of you have a phone more than the year old? Let's just give you an example. So your phone is more than the year old and the software is out of date but the software can't be updated in practice so if you're plugging into your computer you have to download the Nokia software which is 100 megabytes then you have to connect to their update server and then update your phone. None of you are going to do that. You haven't yet. You've got better things to do with life. If you look at the iPhone your phone is running the latest software with rare exceptions. If you bought one last year it's still running the updated software now. So if you're plugging into iTunes and test a new version is available, do you want to update it? You click. I don't know. Okay. So Android is the same thing. The phone gets updated automatically which means that new features are available and security fixes are there and performance improvements are there just because you use them up. So it changes the model side. That's your question. How many applications are available to Android and why? Not so many. So I don't know the real numbers. I'm going to guess 50%. But ask me again in a year's time and I suspect you'll find that the gap is closing. So I've got a number of phones and although you can see there's lots of great gaps and things out there it appears that they're all hidden and they're trying to search and then you can just find something. Now a friend of mine has shown me something for screen reading basically. On my phone we can take a photo of some text and read that to your book or write something like that if they enjoy it and just know where to be in. Yes, it's paradoxical for a company that's involved in search. Yeah. So it is one of the areas to improve I think in terms of finding applications. What more can I say? So a friend of mine at Google happens to have written an application that scans in text from a page to Google documents, runs the OCR engine on a server and downloads a text in a couple of seconds and reads out a text aloud. He wrote it in half a day, the first version of it and of course it buggy in and it crashes. But he wrote it in half a day. So he did it himself with no special inside Google knowledge he just used the standard open tools available. So that's the sort of thing that says you don't have to have an advanced degree in doing this development. You can actually get away with doing something with a little skills. I mean, there's still programming skills, computer science skills, but we still have a few students doing computer science in this country, don't we? There's a range of you, people like this and me who did that in the past. So let's hope for the industry again. So let me move back to education and Android then. So Google Research ended up developing a little tool kit. A tool kit aimed at children and I'll say that children in their teens is actually much broader than that. But the idea was, how can we take technology and make it part of the classroom? Now, are there any good teachers? Okay, a few of you teachers. What do you think about mobile phones in the classroom? Okay, good, I've got one positive. So you're paid to write out a text and email and use it on Facebook all the way through the classes regardless of whether it's history, French, PE, it could be video on each other. I don't want that. So it's basically looking at how can we change the mindset of saying rather than phones being a pest and if a child is seen to be using in the classroom and we get confiscated what could we do with this device if we make it part of the classroom experience? And so it's part of that. It will end up developing another little project which is again free to use that enables children to develop a software application. This is another drag and drop jigsaw type of building block application If you decide you want to use it we haven't got it as a full open product yet so you'd have to request a sign up but then just meet me later if you want to do that. The main reason being that it's a little bit rough around the edges and you'll need a little hand holding I expect. But a university in the States has written the tutorials for it I found them on the web so I didn't even know they were doing it they were written pages and pages and tutorials so the material is starting to be there so one of the other important messages I want to encourage you to do is to open source your software If you end up writing software or paying someone to write software how would we do this stuff than open sources? So Google I can't give you exact numbers but we are open sourcing I'm guessing let's say half of our software now and again you sort of think we're throwing away the crown jewels here but the thing is that the software is out there and out there itself it isn't just for us to use and it could be that the world ignores it most of you are ignoring our software you don't care about what we open source you never need to know hopefully but if in five years time you decided you didn't want to know you'd go back and get the software and you could build our browser you could build our phone operating system you could build the hacky little screen reader stuff I wrote and you could use that I may have lost interest in this I may have been killed by a car accident but you can get my source code and choose to do what you want with it even if you just want to delete it and make it look really agamashating from printing it out I don't mind but it's there for you so too often we have pieces of software that someone starts and for whatever reason it doesn't get funded next year so you have to stop on it and either it attributes at that point or you put it out on the internet for open sourcing software I suggest it isn't quite as simple as just copying all my source directories and putting on a server and declaring victory so it's good to provide some sort of guidelines and introduction and explain the rationale behind this so that someone else following after you but like an archaeologist can read the clues they don't have to rely just on the fossils which is the source code so I would encourage you to open source it and put a few words around it and write some sort of tutorial get a friend with the relevant skills to try it out and get their comments and incorporate that into the documentation Let's see if there's anything else I said I wasn't talking about Yes, what other thing? So I have a friend he lives in Copenhagen or in that area actually in Arthur's which is just outside and he's a very bright man, my age he's 40, perhaps even 50 years old and he has children OK, quite a few of you So Denmark's got one of the best national health services in the world so if you want to fall ill somewhere forward in Denmark, you'll be wanted to treat it so his youngest boy was like those daughters of aged eight I don't think we have to deal with special needs and kids with autism so what happens in Denmark where a child who's got autism gets a 16, what do you think happens? He gets it so he was deemed at the time as not able to work so simply out of the old age pensions is a good pension so that's fine no, what? Well actually, if you look at it some of the people in our industry in my industry, they're probably autistic they're certainly on the Asperger's syndrome some of them, they've got attention to detail brilliant minds, but they're different yes they don't always talk to you but if you've ever tried to talk to a programme you'll probably know that problem so you can't get used to that so you can either say, these are autistic he can't work at all he's different from me, but how do I interact with this person and help them so all the chapters, he resigned in his job he was some IT consultant probably quite senior and he said of a company employing people who have registered with autism these are the things what matters is this but if we look at the skills of autistic people I'm looking at the Asperger's syndrome I'm not looking at the most extreme end of the spectrum they have incredible attention to detail they remember things they can spot patterns in data and my brother has two autistic boards and the one who's more communicative is great until something goes wrong and he asks you a thousand questions and that can either be really really annoying or it actually becomes really useful if you need someone to do that it's built around that it's built around people with those skills and finding a way to enable them to work in a commercial environment so for instance Microsoft have worked with this company because they've got skills that their average employees who are sane and have got a life and want to go home don't want to live please can you test this software again for the 37th time of testing it I'm bored I'm really bored so I'm not a good person to do regression testing of the same piece of software I'm talking about software testing tomorrow if you're interested so a bad example but for someone who's willing to go back through this time and time again what are the problems I've missed the other area they're very good is security testing because security testing is mostly about coping with rejection and failure can I break into this software I spend hours or days trying to break in and the best result is I don't break in it's good that you're a salesperson cold calling you try, you try, you give up now if you're someone who's easy to discourage you stop at that point and you go and do something else where you get praise and money and girls or whatever there's a people wanting life but something else but for people with autism sometimes they're willing to keep going and keep going and of course they can keep going in the wrong direction so absolutely a bit of help to find the right direction because it's a bit of a commercial business out of this and they've now set up a company in Glasgow in the UK to do something similar and there's a company in Japan who's following them on and the company's called Specialist and he's called Thor Kill Solar because it's been videoed at least the video remembers it's the rest of you forgotten by tomorrow morning but come and ask me later on and I'm happy to tell you more about this work I'm just so impressed about the way they work and I happen to go for their summer company outing they're unusual for a company of autistic people to go out and went down into the fields and they're a barbecue and they're chasic to me but what I like best about a company is that probably 80% of the people are autistic on the autism spectrum and they actually talk about the normals because they're the specials and they're the majority and the normals are the poor misguided people who aren't as good as they are that happens to me by play so they've changed the whole mindset around from oh that's the special needs person to actually they're the experts and I'm the weird one in this relationship OK I think we're getting close to our time so they've just thought it might be useful to open the floor to any particular questions Can I just ask about Google way with the autism whether you're happy with the autism aren't I a lot of people I know sort of immediately signed up for the account and then since then we've sort of sat in those a bit on what to do I think that the challenge of the way is to find a useful way of using it it's something that's so avian and unusual that until you see it demonstrated then it's hard to think of what am I going to do with this thing so you give me a nice toy but now what when you see someone who's using it like the deaf for instance you say now I get it so the example I gave you was a conference where we didn't know what would happen when we were doing 100 people but we were very pleasant and surprised because people contributed and wrote up the notes in real time so the rest of you are sitting around you weren't typing we actually had to read the transcription in pretty much real time maybe a minute or two behind we didn't have to use it at the beginning but a day and a half later they've update now wave isn't very good for a solo person you sit and you can type in real time you interact with yourself in real time it doesn't really exist if two of you is unlikely to be particularly useful but perhaps 100 people it starts to get the sort of the catalytic effect that means it comes to life so I don't know what the numbers are for wave I'm not close enough to the team but I would suspect that it's going to go through a change I know it's changing in terms of how it operates and user interface isn't the rest of it and who knows where it will be in a couple of years time well I would think it may just take off I mean the weirdest things take off like Twitter I've been up to SMS for 15-20 years what's the big deal like an SMS on a website it doesn't make any sense to me but you might sign up for Twitter now first to all these other networking things but it finally makes sense to me and it's relatively simple 140 characters or less type in a little web interface on my mobile phone and I think so share information for people that don't really want to communicate with individually and so we probably will have an epiphany of it like that but maybe it won't go away and maybe it will be Yahoo! Why were you or why not were you or why not were you and maybe someone else who comes up is something similar so I don't know I'm not sure I answered the question but I'll try my best now Christian you? Sorry, what are we next to ask that so healthy for me? You've saved on Google Wave and you've talked a lot about making a lot of your applications on the source One of the things I've taught yourself with Google Wave and I've cut a lot of people off is that you've got to sign up for any count it's the same with a lot of them Are you going to take any steps towards making it more open as in you don't have to register for an account I don't know so that's the safety data I have no idea about I mean typically we have people sign up for accounts but it's much of a privacy of anything else because it's ultimately your data and one thing that I'd like to mention about Google and this is perhaps a bit of fear but never mind is that we actually have declared in the user and their data and given that we've lived in the IT internship for 20 years and been stuck with incompatible file formats or the fact that you used to have a computer account now that's long gone but if I didn't save the data out at the right time, the right format I'd never see it again so Google's actually said you can see how we use your data across all our systems and if you want to take your data out you can and again it sounds paradoxical that we would make it so open to people to move because one of the things that the infrastructure does is lock people in it's greatly locked people in and you get them to pay maintenance and upgrade fees and it doesn't matter if 25% to 32% any of you who have been involved in IT purchasing know that you just keep paying their money until something else happens so if you can take your data out of Google's stuff and it's free or virtually free to you how does it benefit us well it benefits us because you're more like a trust us with your data no one can get it back out again so it's a bit like going to a station and they have to be able to do the left bloody things and it says it's only open between the hours of 2am and 4am in the morning on Thursdays chances of me putting anything in that locker is slim or not but it says it's always open and the security guard standing there is going to check the hand of the right person check myself, I'll throw every damn thing on in the locker because I haven't walked around the streets of Paris or wherever I am and enjoy myself so that's the idea and the mindset of this but for everyone to do this to share the data and make it easily available and so the account is part of the protection of that and I think if we had it and this is me speaking individually but I think I'm totally anonymous might cause much more spam behaviour spam is a bigger problem in our industry anyway even when people do credit accounts so it's an unsolved problem personally I don't mind having volume so my problem is running old passwords I've got when you all have different rules of passwords this one you can't put dashes and this one must put a number and this one's going to be 8 letters long and this one can't be more than 6 long that's something you spell out the one I can't anyway that's my problem old age I think we've got time for a couple more questions fully welcome then I'm sorry yes after it was next fully welcome then for the how the deaf community is probably embraced for the communication it's not completely new for the deaf community cause in the 60s Andrew Sachs was one of the first connected two teletech writers through the phone system two deaf persons can communicate instantly to each other and see the letters directly on the other screen so it's the direct communication not even Lama line like in the message but directly and I'm doing the same when I'm communicating with my deaf friends I take my laptop with my screen ring on it turning it around so they can type in a regular text editor and I use an external keyboard and my headphones and type it on the same computer it works quite well so I can listen to what he's typing and what I'm typing on so it's probably a similar experience I think yes and I'm glad you gave an old example it says if you don't need all this fast technology people did it even with simple technology 30 years ago and again sometimes a solution to dissect it with simple and one thing with Arthur is that we can look at Google Wave from a couple of different perspectives so one is saying we've got to make the user interface work as dreamier and we've got to make it interact beautifully as dreamier and Arthur and I have a difference of opinion on this so I'll say that openly the other is saying what is it that you want to do with this piece of software how's it going to help you and if you can write a functionality that works well with you and he gave an example here of two people and their headphones that were communicating how many other people here who are slightly bothered to do that probably none of you but for him and his friend that's how technology helps and so what I'm trying to encourage within Google with you is to find ways to do this in your world to be your friends so I met someone behind an Android event on Friday evening when lots of developers from the London area and one of them came up to say that he's working on something similar for a woman with cerebral palsy and he met her at the supermarket and apparently she asked him to pass a tin of beans now or something and he happened to notice a few years later that she was in another aisle and asked for someone else to help and they didn't help, they'd ignored her or whatever so he went and helped her so I'm kind of a long story short I probably shouldn't go into too many details but I'm going to point into this is that he's actually worked on software that helps someone who's got physical impairments to use technology to communicate and he's just about him for a friend and it happens to be that software is written and maybe other people can use and so he'll share with other people but it's changing the mindset around and solving a particular problem with two people and then hopefully the big companies like Google and Yahoo can find ways to raise up another level and solve not just the point-to-point communications of you with you with you with you with you with you but across all of you OK, one last question Have you thought about it tonight? No sir, the woman in the back with green and red, do you still want to talk? You've had them a bit for a couple of years together Yes, I am You've talked a lot about solutions for particular groups like deaf people or people who are blind but how about people who's in needs which is a wide range of people who's needs change all the time? My mum My mum is 17 hours I went to see her yesterday at Whitby and she was a school teacher an English school teacher She's polygots, speaks I don't know how many languages used to teaching with foreign language people and so I learnt Gujarati and Hindi and all sorts of other languages and she used to empty vibrates She's scary when she's around with live cards because she was said to take up 10, 20 books at a time but she's 70 now and it turns out that she's got a problem with her sight the eyes work but the brain doesn't the brain's no longer interpreting the information correctly and she reads books, I mean the Wagon's House it's full of books so she's now got this horrible problem knowing that her sight's going and knowing that when she gets tired she can now have a focus on the words at the moment there are a bunch of different solutions she can go to her local library and get talking books and talking books if you're registered with visual impairments I think you're free from the library if not you pay a pound or two a week for them but I suspect she'll go through them in a month and then what she's got another 12 months or 11 months to want to read so we're now looking at another problem well it could be that she registered with the RMIB and she gets what's called Daisy books Daisy books have been around for tens of years and typically they have a special hardware that you basically buy or someone pays for whether it's a government or a charity and probably cost let's say a thousand pounds and then you get talking books and you visit the talking books and you send it back and they have millions of titles there of the talking books so I was at the TechShare Barnaby conference in October which is why I'm here now through Sal Cymru ahead and a couple of people came up to me saying it would be really nice if you had a book reader for the mobile phone for these things and even nicer if it was free intent your group will pay you for free oh and you might have open source it so that's what I've done I've basically in my spare time I'm not a very good programmer but I've been writing Java programme for the Android phone to read the first of all talking books which is the main one, the RMIB supports in the US they happen to use a newer version of the standard which is called DATY3 and I've now been one of other software to do that and I say I actually I've got a blind developer at the RMIB who's collaborating with me I have a couple of other blind developers who are working for other major technology companies I won't name here but they're helping out on this because they see there's a useful need here so I think to come back to answer your question because I've got another little sidewalk there is we should find ways to help use technology that means that my mum doesn't have to hold her hand up and say actually I think I'm going blind now but hey I can still read the books but I just use this little phony computer thing that does it for me now and we have done that then there's no shame of using it in fact it's pretty cool and I can listen to books on it so I'm sorry to but I like it does that answer your question nail me if you want come on tell me what that answers well what about I'm thinking more of perhaps the person with MS who might be able to use the touchpad one day and then the next day then try and listen to that they can't or their eyesight is ok one day and the next day it's not so the first thing is I don't think this is a solved problem from anyone if you think it's been solved by someone else then please tell me if you solved it so I expect that the solution will be piecemeal at least at first for let's say five years and we'll end up with a half-solving problem so this chap is telling me about from Friday he happens to be working with MS and he had MS sorry with it wasn't MS sorry I think MS was beginning so anyway she's got physical impairments and he's finding a way to enable her to use the movements and gestures to control the phone but then let's imagine that woman's also got epilepsy and so she's got seizure and now when she holds the phone of course the gestures are so large that they dwarf the normal gestures we're expecting but is there a way that we can still help her communicate I have a friend who's daughter has a certain policy and she's probably 12 now and she communicates either with her eyes or with two head switches that are here and she lives in a wheelchair and she's on a drip and all the rest of it and they've solved the problem by doing several things having the head switch by looking high-trapping software and trying different ones out because some of them don't work very well because their head moves so much and some software works well with that and some doesn't and ultimately and I'll say you can just pick her out of you but you could let the software this phone or for the iPhone or for the Nokia phone and it probably won't be perfect but it wouldn't be better than the alternative of not having anything I suspect it will be and then someone perhaps else in this room will take your software and say hey it's really good work here but I've noticed it doesn't work in this situation because there's no seizures I think I've got a solution for that do you mind if I have a go? and I'm hoping that you'll build on each other's work and since I'm way over time I'll come back to the Google way of working one of the reasons I stay in this company is that we're encouraged to build on each other's work our source code is shared within the engineers so I can pick up someone else's source code and modify it so we have checks and balances to make sure it's in reasonable quality but that's what we're encouraged to do you see a problem you fix it so I encourage you all by closing boxes tonight is that you see a problem or someone who's helped to fix it and ask the opinion held on that


A little bit difficult. Welcome back to Art of Awakening. My name is Ona and I'm just coming in to do a quick energy update and spirit of and reading This is the week of January 10th going into I guess that what is it the second week of January? And so I've got a little message here that I was given from spirit that I want to start with because I think I just felt feels right and they're talking about truth Okay, they're talking about really staying in your truth So they say the highest the highest guru is within you, right? So that trusting that we each have our own inner guru, right? That we can really count on to give us that advice tell us exactly what to do to help us through whatever it is that we're going through and They say trust in the voice that brings you sustaining peace So one of the the the questions that I think all of us go through is this is this really the voice? This is this is this really the voice my guidance Or is it something else and that's something that we all have to work through because there's all sorts of things that come At us that want us to you know kind of take us off into their agenda and Sometimes these key things could be really really subtle So the advice that was given here is like trying you know helping to discern what is you know What's your truth and what isn't so the same trust the voice that brings you sustaining at peace That means you have to be very very discerning of you know when you listen to this advice How does that feel with you right? It's just to sit with it for a while They say when you feel your spirits lift when you feel that sense of freedom not escape But freedom and that's true guidance. Okay, and so these are really really subtle distinctions And sometimes we have to kind of go along with some advice for a while first before we figure out Is this really feel good or not? They say that true guidance is measured by a bliss and an inner peace Depending on circumstance. This may feel like joy or it may feel like an absolute knowingness Knowing that you're feeling it's more of a feeling feeling like that you're exactly in that right place at that right time If you just feel like you're kind of in that groove You know when you feel like you just know what to do, right? That's your true guidance kicking in You know no matter how hard or challenging, you know The your situation may seem when you feel that kind of grounded inner peace that that's generally good your true guidance Um Motivation by fear is not true guidance and neither is motivation by winning Right, it's motivation to win without the presence of that joy that bliss that that grounded inner peace It is simply a fear of loss and it's not true guidance So they're saying that winning is a natural Byproduct of being in your truth doesn't mean you don't want to win Of course we do but when he's a natural byproduct of being in your truth, not the goal, okay, so there's a real shift there When you're really following your heart song, right? It's that's that true guidance and you start to lift you up and it feels good even if you're going through something really challenging so right now, of course we're all going into this kind of very challenging period of time and Um, you know, I don't know how people are you know, wherever you are at right now and for like For some it may feel really exhilarating like things are finally moving and this is why I'm here on earth and for others It may be like, oh no, I'm not ready for this. I think for a lot of us it may be both So, you know, just if you're feeling really overwhelmed Um, just kind of keep in mind that, you know, that light cast shadows like I've got this candle here and I don't know if it's dark enough really to show but if you if you should that light on it, you know it's gonna start to cast some funky shadows and That's when you know when we're all going through Typically, there's this ascension process, right? We start to waken up and that's where light starts to shine and Then once that light starts to shine the funky shadows start to happen, right? That's what wants to take us, you know, kind of off-path because we're just only around the dark You only have a little candle, you know They can it can get confusing. So But this is always what happens is this is, you know, part of this whole ascension process We've got this whole collectiveness planted ascending right now So we've got this happening at a major major scale, right? Lights starting to shine more lights coming in we just had a huge amount of light energy coming in and It's starting to throw even more shadows, right? The shadows are coming out and they're coming at us pretty hard for a lot of, you know Whether it's individually or collectively So the shadows gonna come forward in a number of ways and it does it in order to take you off-path. Oh Ultimately one needs to realize that the shadow is our ally, right? And in the very very very big picture what the shadow does is it kind of We bump up against the shadow and we start getting a strain and we realize this isn't the right way And so it forces us back onto the path So it's got a number of techniques that it uses and it's really good to be aware of these so that you can start to You know as you go through see them a lot quicker one is confusion like the gaslighting the lies the projection Okay, confusion is a huge huge huge tool that the shadow uses to get you off-track and so One way out of confusion is To start really taking the bigger picture and also to be aware of what's going on around you because the more you can be aware of You know rather than looking at one perspective if you can see multiple perspectives of what's going on You can get a much bigger picture and a better idea. So if you You know if you are feeling drawn to following current events and seeing what's going on Encouragement is to maybe start listening instead of maybe to one side of the issue Start listening to different sides and see if you can't get a bigger picture of kind of how to Put two and two together things aren't always as they seem There's a lot of disinformation out there and that may be impossible to know exactly what's disinformation and what's not But I think the more that you can feel into it and whether you're watching the news or just kind of feeling into things or watching How people observe if you can stay Disinterested, okay, that's another thing that it does is it tries to Get you emotionally hooked. Okay, so that emotional hooking is Like a huge huge tool, right? So the more you can stay grounded stay centered stay like, you know Be aware of the emotions And then choose those emotions that like the joy, right and the bliss start following those Separation and isolation another huge tool that's used by the shadow side, right? So just being aware of that And you know, we'll see what happens in the coming months Suppression is another one right a lot of lightworkers have issues with the throat chakra and that's often from you know kind of past life just kind of really being stuffed out or Bound and gagged right? Censorship is another one of suppression. It's another tool of the dark. So just that you're aware of those things And remember also that we have multiple aspects of ourselves. So when these things come forward It's going to come forward on the spiritual level and on the mental level but also at the physical level, right? Manifesting the physical world and so one of the things that it's easy to do is to think okay Well, this is a spiritual process and it is But to neglect that physical whether it's our health or or our physical surroundings or whatever these things are all important to all right, so anybody ready for a Little bit of a little reading. I'm going to pull a couple cards for this week and See what wants to come forward January 10th and If you haven't yet subscribed, I encourage you to do that And I always appreciate your likes in your comments Hi steamer embrace the shadows says they do not survive in the presence of light absolutely, right? And that's the thing is that the more we Start really focusing on our inner bliss our inner joy that inner guidance It makes that light shine brighter and brighter and brighter until finally it becomes like a sun and there's no holding Shadow to the sun right so absolutely steamer. Thank you maintain the caphash and observer state You love them to death absolutely right even if they're doing things that are abhorrent. The core is love Yeah, so Alright, let's see. I'm gonna put an animal card here. This is bear Coming up as a bit of a challenger. Okay So I always think of bear when it comes up in this position here as kind of coming up out of the You know the the den in the spring time. They've been in there for months there, you know, they You know where their store fat, right? They're hungry. They're crabby I didn't imagine kind of waking up in the morning so One one thing is to kind of you know, there's a lot of intense emotions going on around here You know just in general on the planet right now And it's easy to again be brought into that those emotional kind of eddies and currents and so And a don't to that right is first of all as steve says kind of the compassion of observer states if you can consciously stand that compassion observing states it can help you to kind of Just breathe and Keep those emotions from raging right because it's so easy to be triggered It's so easy to be triggered when everybody around you is in this emotional turmoil, right? Because we have this what's called limbic resonance. It's it's in our brain stem It's like we resonate with other people and if you're an empath It's even easier to do that, right? And if other people and it may you know, even if they're angry You may resonate as anxiety, right? So it's compassion observer just recognizing that all this is happening ultimately for the highest good and That's the best thing that we can do as awakened beings on this earth is to stay as grounded as centered as we can okay as centered as we can because that is really it's gonna have a Calming effect over the whole planet the more we can do that I'm gonna pull another one here This one is cooker Again that calm cool collected had I think of the most of the big cats especially Cooper It just strikes me as a strategist And one that can kind of stay in in that it's it's very much itself, right? Staying in your truth having your boundaries, right? Your boundaries are so so so important, right? and if you have a practice of You know Putting that shielding up before you go out before you know You might want to do it before you hit the social media anything like that It can be very very very helpful as well. I'm gonna pull an angel card here to around this off Here this one is oh soulmate relationship. Okay, that that reminds me because that's something that I was going to touch on is that This connecting with the inner truth It's something that we're all Of course being called to do more and more isn't as individuals and I don't think there's ever an end to that It's not like you get to where oh, yeah, I'm in my truth right, it's always a progression, but We can also and especially the more and further we get along in on that journey I think there's gonna be more and more of a call to Start connecting with others right who are also resonating with that kind of truth that blue ray kind of truth feel to it as We start advancing On the earth as the ascension starts, you know, the earth itself ascends as the collective continues this ascension We're gonna start to see more of these soul groups coming forward and you may have been experiencing I've started to experience this already connecting with people sometimes out of the blue sometimes from across the world whatever it is, but people who Have a certain resonance and it's like these relationships are gonna be feel very easy and very just flowing right and you may have been through relationships, you know That helps you in your suggestion process that were it may be difficult or challenging These relationships coming in when you get to a certain point I think at this time on the earth that we're going to start to see more of these these kind of Soulmate and this doesn't always mean romantic. It can be Anybody right but these soulmate relationships of people who really are resonating and vibrating and a very high level together and We when we start coming together with these people in whatever way it raises the vibration and it becomes Another entity. It's just like the two coming together with the and creates a third, right? This is the tri-wave Pattern that starts to happen. That's very expansive and that really assists in this ascension process We're gonna see this more more. We're gonna see more and more telepathic things happening and this is going to be super important, right and what by telepathy it It sometimes is like we may not even be aware of it But I'm seeing this starting to happen more and more more of the synchronicities between people, right? I have Somebody that I follow that that puts out meditations on YouTube and it seems like every time I start thinking I really need Some kind of a meditation of this topic this person posts one It's uncanny. We're gonna start to see more and more of that and this is To me it's really really exciting. It's a watch for that and you know, just start being aware of these Person-to-person or person-to-group synchronicities because I feel like that's This is something that is a very powerful force on the world right now in the world That's that's really beginning to rise and it's going to be very very instrumental in assisting with this whole getting all this all of us this collective through This period of darkness that we're kind of in right now So again, don't be afraid of this darkness. It is just something that you know, that happens as we go through this collective ascension All right, so thank you guys so much for watching me and I Just wish you all The best the you know tons of love and light to you Thanks for joining me.


Sometimes when you draw a daily ink monster, you see something so clearly, and then you mess up, and then you see something else, and you mess up again, and then you mess up again, and again, and who knows what it becomes, but at least it's a daily ink monster.


The ultimate GPS is a breadboard friendly breakout with built-in data logging, a ceramic patch antenna, as well as a UFL connector for connecting an external antenna. This one is thick so it'll probably be hard to desolder. But I've got my hot air station and a positive attitude. And if those don't work, there's always the mini hot plate. You can see some of the components sloshed around in the molten solder, including the prominent MTK339 GPS chip. It's supported by a 32 kHz crystal, as well as a 16 MHz temperature-controlled crystal oscillator. That center post, of course, is the antenna path. It feeds through an amplifier, then a filter, before entering the GPS chip.


Usually, if we're gonna have a tough time finding something in Daily Fantasy Baseball, it'll be pitchers because I tend to be a lot pickier at pitchers because there are just fewer guys who I think are viable for DFS who can have that upside that we need. For today, pitching's actually okay. It's more so the stacks where we run into issues trying to identify players who we want to use in Daily Fantasy Baseball. What we're gonna do today is break down the pitchers first, but then dive in the stacks, make some consolations and go places we wouldn't normally go and try to figure out how to play this slate from a DFS perspective. Welcome on into the solo shot that's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network in Numberfire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for Numberfire.com here to break down Monday's seven game main MLE DFS slate with locks set for 705, four to night, and luckily for us, there is no weather for today because I could not handle having any of the good stacks we do have available to us taken away by weather. Thankfully, that is not a concern for today. We are good to just play things pretty much straight up. Again, it's also a bit cooler on the East Coast now than it was previously, which means it's less of a detriment to stack out West than it was before. That's a positive here. All positives, they're trying to give some consolations on a rough slate. I will thank them for that for sure. Before we dive into the pitching section for today, quick reminder, we are back on air on the FanDuel YouTube page later on today, 9am Eastern on the FanDuel YouTube page talking about our takeaways from week one of NFL DFS. That is myself and Brandon Gondula breaking down the big headlines, breaking down role changes, injuries, and what you need to know heading into week number two of NFL DFS. So make sure you're subscribed to the FanDuel YouTube page. Also check out the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast because we got the NFL podcast now twice a week on Monday and Thursdays. PGA is back this week with Brandon. We'll be doing that one solo. And then I have NASCAR coming up later this week. And I think UFC back this week as well. So a lot of good stuff. Make sure you go to the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. Hit subscribe. And while you're there, leave us a rating and review as well. Also, the 4pm show still on. I'll be doing a Monday football preview with Ryan Williams at 4pm. I'll stick around talk MLB DFS at 4.30. So if you are a regular listen to the MLB DFS Q&As, those are still live just at 4.30 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and four o'clock on Wednesday to account for this new NFL schedule. Hey, football fans, the NFL is finally back and FanDuel is giving you a free way to get in on the action. The FanDuel High Low is a free to play fantasy football contest. All you have to do is build your scorecard with the teams you think will score highest or lowest in four stack categories. The closer you are to being spot on, the more points you'll get. Players with the most points each week, split the prize pool and a perfect scorecard will win you the jackpot. Head over to FanDuel.com today and play the High Low for free, FanDuel High Low for free, eligible districts to apply. Go to FanDuel.com or download the FanDuel app for more details. Pitching preview for this Monday main slate, Clayton Kershaw is back. He is $10,900. He's not fully back. We'll talk about that and thanks to watch. Sandiel Contra is 10-9. We have Adam Wainwright at $9,800. Hugh Darvish is 92. Alec Minoa is 9,000. We have Eduardo Rodriguez, Jake Oderizzi, Zach Gallin as the other guys that being $8,000 are higher. And again, pitching easier for today than stacks. That does not mean it is a perfect slate for pitching, but I do think that there are some pretty logical options for this week beginning at the top with Sandiel Contra. And I am broadly a fan of Alcantra, but that's especially true recently. I like his mattress in I-2, so I think that he deserves to be number one despite a high salary at $10,600. Alcantra is facing the Nationals who have been playing pretty well offensively, but on paper, this shouldn't be a good offense. They have an 88 WRC plus against righties to the full year. Their active roster does. They have a 141 ISO. Alcantra can take advantage of those numbers. We assume that they haven't magically become the world's best offense. Alcantra really doesn't have a lot to play for right now, and that can be a negative. But with him specifically, you can't tell. There is no way you'd be able to tell this dude has nothing to play for right now because he went 114 pitches last time out. He went 111 a couple starts before that, and he's doing really well in those extended pitch counts too. He's been using more sliders over his past seven starts, and Alcantra was interesting because he had been featuring his change up more earlier on this year to try to neutralize. Lefties would have given him fits in the past. That was successful. He adds in the slider now, and that kills righties. And it makes sense. We've seen Alcantra really kick things up a notch in this time. He has a 30% strikeout rate over the seven starts with a 3.05 skill interactive ERA. He is still letting up just a 29% fly ball rate. So Alcantra, with this slider usage being up and having pitches that can obliterate all hitters, he's pitching like a legit stud. And I think that we should treat him like one in DFS. Yes, 10-6 is a high salary, but I'm down to pay it personally. I think he's worth that. And I think that on a slate where we're lacking certainty, I will take the one ounce of certainty we do get, and that is putting Sandy Alcantra at the top of my list. Number two for me is going to be a risky option. Alcantra, I think is pretty safe. I like him for cash games and stuff. But it's a risky option that has upside and has paid off for us in the past. That's Eduardo Rodriguez. His ERA is over five this year. And that's not great, obviously. But I still think he has a path to a big game because he's shown us he has a path to a big game. A big part of this is the matchup. Eduardo Rodriguez is facing the Mariners. They are a big strikeout team against lefties with a 26% strikeout rate. That's the highest mark on the slate. And they also don't walk too much. And that should help Rodriguez be efficient with his pitches and not get in. He gets in issues. He gets in a mess a lot of times. And it is a concern, for sure. But he can't get strikeouts. He has a 27% strikeout rate over his past eight stars with fewer sinkers. His hard hit rate is 32%. It hasn't always worked out because the ERA in this time, even in the stretch we're talking about here is 4.95. So very similar to his full season mark. But he's had pop games. He had 46 fan dual points against the Reys two starts ago. 46 against Baltimore. 51 against Detroit. And Seattle is a plus matchup for a lefty. I think that Rodriguez can do it again. So I will run it back here and see if we can have another upside night. It could go poorly. But that's why we're going to use Rodriguez in the formats in which we care more about upside than floor, which is all of them, frankly. We don't really care about floor anywhere. But I do think that for tournaments night, Rodriguez is one of those guys who has a path to a big game. And I will use him as a result of that. Number three for me is you, Darvish. Rodriguez is the value play here, but also just a guide rank second. Darvish is higher salary at $9,200. But again, it's about the upside here. He's facing the Giants, which is why Darvish is not safe. And that's why he's not higher. It's a super tough matchup. It does help that it's at a generally good park. And you is still getting strikeouts. He's been throwing more foreseamers over his past 10 starts, which is pretty strange for him. It's typically a low usage pitch. He's been throwing it more recently, though. And I don't think that fastball usage is why he's struggling because the peripherals are still good. He has a 27% strikeout rate with a 5% walk rate. His hard hit rate is 34%. So the struggles have been there. He's let us learn runs for sure. But it also could be bad luck. It could be just because of the fly balls. I'm not really sure. But the overall takeaway from looking at Darvish's peripherals, I don't think he's broken. And he showed that last time out because he held the Angels to one run over six innings. He had seven strikeouts. He also had 12 against Arizona earlier on this month. He hasn't faced the Giants in a long time. That means that they shouldn't be too familiar with his stuff and Darvish is now a different pitcher than he was back then due to the other pitch mix. So there's a path to a good game here. I don't feel great about it. It's not a safe stack or a safe pitching option by any means. But there aren't a lot of pitchers in the same at the ceiling. I think that it's a fine pitching slate. But not a lot of dudes can put up 50 to 60. Darvish is one of them. So I will take some swipes here exclusively in tournaments and see what he can do for tonight. But to me, it's Alcantra number one for sure. I have Rodriguez two slightly ahead of Darvish and then Darvish number three. So that's a pitching. The pitching is the better part. The the shining pinnacle of how things look from a pitching perspective for tonight. Stacking is tougher. Stacking is a lot tougher. And there aren't really any spots I truly, truly want to go at. So keep that in mind and we'll see how things play out. But to me, I do think that the Cardinals are interesting. The face of Rich Hill, who has gotten good results recently, he's led up two runs or less than three straight stars. But he's benefited from some plus matchups. The tougher spot for Rich Hill is going to be tonight against the Cardinals. And I want to stack them and see what happens when he does face that tougher offense. The primary motivator for stacking against Hill is that the peripherals for him are not great. Hill has been getting less vertical break on his curveball over his past nine starts. And the strikeout rate has gone way down in that time. He has a 20% strikeout rate.  And he's also got a low walk rate, which is good for him. But it also means we get more balls and play, which is what we want for DFS. One thing that Hill is doing really well right now is keeping the hard contact low. That's part of why a ZRA is good. But it's hard to tell how much of that is from the matchups facing teams that don't make a lot of hard contact. Hill has done pretty well in that department against better teams as well. So that's why it's not a perfect spot. And again, that's why the stacking landscape tonight is pretty tough. But I still think the Cardinals are pretty solid here. I am fine putting them first, given the wonkiness at stacks for this slate. It does help too that the Cardinals very easy to stack with Alcantara. Nobody here has a salary higher than $3,600. Tommy Edmond is $2,900. Yadir Molina is $2,500. Both those guys have good power numbers against lefties. Edmond doesn't really against righties, but against lefties, he's at 240. Molina is at 246 from an isolated power perspective. So those are guys we can turn to in our Alcantara lineups. And you can use them with Nolan Aronato and Paul Goldschmidt. Again, nobody here above $3,600. So they're an easy team to stack when you are going with Alcantara pitcher. And I think that that is the way I want to start off my lineups here tonight. Alcantara pitcher Cardinals as the first stack. The second stack is going against a pitcher I like. I like Logan Gilbert a lot. I think he's a very good pitcher and I will use him in DFS next year. I can almost guarantee that. I just think we might want to stack against him in this specific matchup tonight. So it's the Red Sox. It's a very tough spot. They have a 111 WRC plus against righties with a 207 ISO, which is the highest number on the slate. And they also don't strike out too much. That's the key thing. The low strikeout rate that worries me with Gilbert, because Gilbert is doing that well. He's getting strikeouts right now. He's had his current pitch mix for his past 11 starts. And in that time, his strikeout rate is 26%, which is solid. And I would take it if I were him happily for sure. 26% will work. But things go poorly for Gilbert when he doesn't get strikeouts. And if he's facing a low strikeout team, that's a concern. He's letting up a 45% hard hit rate and a 45% fly ball rate. That's why ZRA is 4.87 in this time, even though he is getting those strikeouts. If the Red Sox make contact, they should be able to do some damage. And I would expect them to make contact here. So the Red Sox are a good stacking option. Again, the reason this is not like a, oh yeah, I love this one is because I like Gilbert, don't want to stack against him. But I think in this spot, it does make a lot of sense. As far as the individual Red Sox go, I have typically targeted Bobby Dahlbeck just against lefties because the strikeout rate was way too high against righties. But he's been otherworldly recently. We've seen Dahlbeck just against righties, has 63 play-out appearances since the start of August. He has home runs in nine of those 63 play-out appearances. And more importantly, at least for me, not for everyone else, but for me, his strikeout rate is 22%. Again, specifically against righties since the start of August. His ISO is 589. It's unreal. He's still $2,900. And sure, I'll probably hit lower in the order, but Austin Swain called him Big Fly Bobby on Twitter. I kind of like it.  I kind of like the flow of it. Bobby Big Fly as via Austin Swain, that nickname there. Bobby Big Fly, gonna be in my lineups for tonight. That may be more common. I just heard it from Austin first, but either way, Bobby Big Fly, a staple for DFS for tonight. The final stack isn't as solid as I'd like. But again, it's a good offense facing what will effectively be a bullpen game. That's the Astros. And I don't mind stacking them here. They're facing Spencer Howard to start. And Howard probably not going to stick in this game super long. He has gone 52 or fewer pitches in every start with the Rangers. And then he gives way to the bullpen. Howard is not a shutdown guy, though he's not bad. Oh, he's bad. Just not a shutdown guy. He's more middling, which is tough against an offense like Houston's. It's a similar thing for the bullpen where they're not terrible. Their ERA is 4.02 based on their current active roster. The problem comes when he stretched that bullpen out and make them last a full game. That means you're getting middle relievers going longer than they're used to, and that can lead to a lot of issues. For the most part, they've been okay. And Howard starts to have one pretty big blow up in there. But I think that the repeat blow up potential is within the range of outcomes. So I will stack the Astros today and see how things play out. One thing I'd try to do is use guys who can be good against both lefties and righties because Han Jung-young is one of the more likely relievers to pitch tonight for the Rangers. He's a lefty. Howard's a righty. And so is Dane Dunning. So I will skew towards guys who can hit both righties and lefties. That means I'd love to get Chas McCormack in there. He's $2,200. He is kind of in and out of the lineup, switching around Jake Myers. So he might not play, but if he's in there, I will be McCormack for sure. He's known for hitting lefties, but I think he hit righties too. Kyle Tucker can hit both righties and lefties. He's $3,400. I think that's under salary. And so McCormack, Tucker, two guys, I think great out pretty well based on the way I expect things to go for tonight for this Houston or this Rangers pitching staff. Let's finish up here. Thanks to watch and talk about Clayton Kershaw. Pretty big pitch count concern for tonight because he's coming out the IL. He's been out since July. He didn't have any rehab starts. It sounds like they expect Kershaw to go around 60 or so pitches tonight. And even against Arizona, that's not enough. So I'm not going to have any Kershaw tonight. I likely won't be there for his next start either, or he'll probably be closer to like 75 or so. So wait and see on Kershaw and wait until the pitch count gets up before we dive back in. Not opposed to one-offs on the Rangers. They're facing Jake Oderizzi and he's still having big issues with fly balls. He does a 21% strikeout rate, which is pretty low as well. And it's the worst skill interactive he ran this slate. Problem is they're just not a good team. So DJ Peters works, Nate Lowe works, Adelisa Garcia works. Those are guys are all options, but they're more so like one-offs or mini stacks than I want to build around this offense stacks. Finally, I can see either using Paolo Espino as a pitcher or using bats against him because his 24% strikeout rate is not bad. And he's facing the Marlins who really struggle offensively. That's why you consider him as a pitcher because, you know, it's a good matchup, stuff like that. But he also lets up a 43% hard hit rate and a 42% fly ball rate. The Marlins get a big park factor upgrade here. I am more inclined to stack against Espino and use the value plays and Jazz Chisholm, Hayza Sanchez, Luen Diaz, stuff like that. But I can't see both sides here. He could do well, but I think that I'm more inclined to get the value via those young power hitters than use Espino as a pitcher. Let's finish up here with the home run calls for today, the boring one going against Logan Gilbert again. It's a bummer. I know, but hey, this is a good hitter. It's Rafael Devers. Devers gets out of Fenway. I know it's not a great park overall, but Fenway pretty tough on lefties. So I think going to Seattle, probably a good thing for Devers. I like him here. Obviously, I'm an unshwarber, despite the fact that it's not been the best run for him. But Rafael Devers, the boring home run call for today, the fun one is in that Espino matchup. That is Hayza Sanchez. I like the powers in from so far this year. Obviously, some prospect type there as well. And it's a park factor upgrade for him. So home run calls for this Monday slate, Rafael Devers and Hayza Sanchez. That is all that we have here for today on these solo shot. But again, don't go anywhere coming up at 9am today. We're going to be breaking down our week one NFL DFS takeaways on the Fandil YouTube page posted up on the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. After that, search for the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed, check out that podcast, hit subscribe, rate and review it. We appreciate those of you who have done so already. If you've got questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S. You can also follow the Fandil Podcast Network at Fandil Podcast. Big thank you to everyone for tuning in for today. Good luck to you tonight. We'll talk to you once again tomorrow. This has been the solo shot right here on the Fandil Podcast Network.