Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, helping to extract the signal from the noise here at OpenStack Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, Atmail, which is an email as a service company. We have Jay Cill, who's the European Sales Director, and we have Jason Brown, we'll call JB for the rest of the interview, is Solutions Architect. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks very much for having us here. All right, so Jay, email as a service. Tell us a little bit about the company, and you know the state of email. Have Office 365 just taken everybody over? Well, so most people don't want to talk about email, but it's still essential. So Atmail is a 20-year-old company. We are probably one of the largest pure-play, white-label email providers in the world. We have about 170 million mailboxes out there in the wild. But we provide not-to-end-user businesses. We service the service provider and telco market. So a lot of our customers you would have heard of, we're more the brand behind the brand. So we provide the email to their end-user subscribers, but he's very much the telco ISP that's up front that you would hear about. Yeah, excellent, and that's been a discussion we've been having at this show a lot is, OpenStack itself is kind of something that gets in there, the telcos and the service providers, you know, a big place. So, Jay V, tell us a little bit about your role and bring us into the involvement with OpenStack. Sure, so I'm the solutions architect for Atmail. I kind of helped bridge the gap between the technical and the non-technical. I helped Jay out with explaining the technical details to the sales team, and then bring back the, you know, like the non-technical details of feedback that Jay gets and we get from our customers into development and operations so they can actually improve the product in a way that's fitting. And so we started with OpenStack a few years ago through a partnership with Dreamhost here in North America to move from, we kind of had a traditional email, like a hosted email solution, or an on-premise email solution, but it wasn't a true cloud solution. And so, took a big step back, looked at our architecture, what it actually looked like, what it needed, and it just turned out that OpenStack was the best direction for us to go to make that move. Jay, can you clarify, when you say a true cloud solution, what did you mean by that? What were kind of the requirements and what did that? So, we had for years, we would just take our on-premise solution, and we would run it in a data center that we had a rack in, we had four to use were the servers, and I was the guy at the time that was responsible if something went wrong. I got a call at three o'clock in the morning to drive to Spokane to go to our data center to fix something, replace a hard drive, or do something like that. And that just was, it didn't scale horizontally or vertically, to be honest. That was just limited to what we could do with it, and so we really wanted something where we could save the cost by distributing in the load as we needed it. And I think that's really the difference, is you can spin up instances for front end or spin up an instance for a back end, whatever resource you actually need, you can spin that up as a service in a cloud infrastructure, whereas you can't really do that as easily or as cost effectively on bare metal. Jason, I want to bring it back to the business. Your customers, what does OpenStack mean from them and the ultimate end user? I don't think I've seen emails that say, sent to me via an email service powered by OpenStack, but walk us through what that means for the business and your constituents. Well, so they are both commercial and technical benefits. If I look at the commercial benefits first and foremost, what OpenStack allows us to do is to provide a solution quickly and efficiently. The first thing that people want from email is they want a stable, robust service. It's a bit like turning a tap on at home and then getting clean drinking water. You really don't give it a second thought. It's only when that tap stops working and it's not coming out properly, then you think about it. So first and foremost, our customers want a stable, mature, reliable service. They also want to make sure that it's secure. And that allows us, you know, the OpenStack initiative that we've undertaken allows us to achieve that. The commercial other benefits that we obtain from that is being able to reduce our cost base or controlling our cost base. And as a result, that's passed on to our customers so they can then not only mitigate their risk but they can control their costs as well. From a technical point of view, I mean, J.B. can touch upon some of the technical benefits, but one of the things that we found because we are a small vendor in terms of the DevOps team that we have, what OpenStack allowed us to do was to gain from the knowledge that the community had and really benefit and accelerate our solution to market. And when you talk to some of our DevOps guys, the first and prime word, foremost thing that they say is that we couldn't have achieved this without the help and support of the engineers and the OpenStack community. So the depth of knowledge out there really helped us accelerate those services. Awesome. That's great. Is the fact that it's OpenStack, it seems like at this point, one of the themes we've been talking about is OpenStack ubiquitous, mature, a lot of talk here about containers and other things, but the stack itself is well known and mature and that seems like that that would also have an impact on things, something that Telco understands, right? It's a well-known stack, yeah. JB, so this is your first time, you said that this was your first time at a summit. Kind of curious, before we dig in to kind of maybe what your stack looks like, OpenStack looks like, what did you think of the summit, the level of kind of conversation here as the sessions and that sort of thing? So far it's been fantastic. I've had a complete, not a 180, but there's so much here that I'll be able to take back to our DevOps guys and our QA guys, and we're looking at the Zool stuff, really heavily the CI-CD stuff, just a huge benefit that'll streamline all of our development and testing and pushing that to market. It'll be huge. Yeah, anything specific, because one of the things we look, there's a number of CI-CD offerings in the market today. What specifically about Zool is, because you're using OpenStack, that it makes sense and fits a lot. Yeah, I like that it fits with OpenStack really well. I like its level of maturity, and I like the gated looking at the future as opposed to looking at the past or looking at the present for your testing specifically. Gotcha, that's interesting, yeah. Can you talk a little bit maybe about your, so your stack, is it, so it sounds like, well, yeah, talk a little bit about the OpenStack, your OpenStack deployment in terms of, there's a lot of components, are you using kind of the core components then, and the other thing else that it interacts with, the other theme here, right, is OpenStack has to talk to a lot of other systems. So we use pretty, we use the OpenStack storage module and the networking module, and I don't know all of the little names to all of the little pieces, but we do use the storage and the networking. The networking was a really big help for us, because we were actually able to offload some of the system load into the network layer, moving into OpenStack. Whereas before, we would have, with an email system, you have all of your actual email traffic or your IMAP traffic, it can create a significant load by being able to move some of that load into the networking layer, we're able to provide a better customer experience because all of those edge services aren't as taxed. And so when the user goes to check their email or send an email, they're not waiting because of a high load. And you see this, especially if when something goes wrong in a system, because they're systems and things do happen. And so when that happens, the time to recover is faster on our backend and the overall, the way that's presented to our end users is much better for us. A lot of business benefits, yeah. Jay, I have to think in the regions that you play, kind of the governance and compliance, something you need to worry about. It's also, it's May 2018, so I have to ask you about GDPR and how that fits into your business these days, so. Absolutely, Stu. So GDPR comes into effect this Friday. We've had a team dedicated on working on that to make sure that we are compliant. Obviously, our telco users, service providers, rely on us implicitly to make sure that we are fully compliant. And I can assure you that we are. We have seen a number of high profile breaches of other vendors. It's not something that we want to have an experience of. So we have worked diligently in order to make sure that we are fully compliant. Any commentary you want to share on security these days, too, is people always, you know, governments asking for things, hackers, it's a complicated issue. It is, and it's interesting, because email, I think, represents the largest surface area of attack in any organization. You know, you can get from a CEO to anyone in the organization via email. That's how powerful it is. And again, as we were talking off record earlier, it's not something you give an awful lot of thought to. Email is like turning on a tap at home and clean drinking water comes out. You don't give it a second thought. But when it stops working or there's an issue, that when it becomes a problem. And you know, you could regress back into the dark ages because you can't do business, you can't send that message, you can't communicate or connect to the audience that you want to. So yes, we have a lot of issues around that that we need to make sure that we are fully on top of. Our aim is to provide a stable, mature, reliable and secure service to our customers and their end users. And security is something that we take seriously, as do a lot of other vendors. But it's something that is always constantly changing and evolving, you know. By the time the latest attack comes out and you've checked that you are covered, the next one has come out. You know, and we've seen a lot of attacks over the last few months. They come in waves. You know, we had WannaCry last year that really hit UK and Europe hard as with other regions. And I'm sure there'll be more coming out soon. JB, containers and, well, secure containers, one of the topics of conversation here. Containers in general have been a big topic. Kubernetes, how are you all looking at that application at orchestration layer? Containers with an email system are kind of tough. Security is a big reason for that. And it's not that we can't use containers, but by the time you take a container and wrap all of the security around it and everything that you need for something you would use with an email system, it almost negates the benefit of using the container to start with. Gotcha. So we're constantly looking at other ways that we can take advantage of that. And, you know, Kata, I think today just released their version one of their solution which secures it down into the actual core of the system. And so that changes the game a little bit on what might be possible now, not having to worry about some of the security issues that we are concerned. Right, right, so even now, your cloud portability strategy, per se, is your app runs inside an OpenStack context with OpenStack configuration. You run, I think, at least two, on two different instances of OpenStack.  We are, yes. That's great. And that actually made it really, the move into our EU data center was so much smoother because of our experience with OpenStack on our initial deployment. We were just able to just launch it and go. All right, well, I want to give you both just the final word as to, you know, your takeaways here at the show so far is being first time attendees. So from a commercial point of view, I mean, the networking has been tremendous. You know, I've had conversations with people over email, over phone, that I've actually met face to face here and made that connection. So for me, as a salesperson, those networking events, et cetera, have been invaluable. What I also like about the show itself and the community as a whole is that there is this openness and there's this willing to share ideas which you don't always find in other arenas. It's much more of a closed, well, I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing because it's a trade secret or it's going to give me an advantage, whereas here it is very open. It is, we want to collaborate, we want to share. And that's been very refreshing from my point of view. Yeah, the community is a big part of it for me. All of my work in development or operations has been from the open source community. So to come back and see that thriving and pushing this forward the way that it is, it's just so reassuring. Well, JNJB, we really appreciate you being open with sharing your story with the practitioners. So thank you and congratulations at mail for all that you've done here in the community. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.


No, the graphics of it. Okay. Hey, this is Dana Stephanie Burke. You're watching behind the scenes divine Intimacy radio. We're back talking about a fantastic book republished by Sophia Institute press Visions and revelations. Oh perfect. Just put it right on the screen. It blocks No, it's fine. I don't mind being blocked out. I'll you know the books right in front of my face on the screen That's great. Father Gabriel, St. Mary Magdalene and our guest father Matthew McDonald was the wrote the forward and helped us to get that thing Republished so check that out. That's that'll help you a ton in this time of a lot of weird stuff going on Yeah, and we're ready to start the show. You ready? Yes, and you mark sicko This is Dan Stephanie Burke. Welcome to divine intimacy radio your radio haven of rest your hermitage of the heart Your monastery of the mind where we lift our hearts and minds to heaven to draw upon the wisdom of the saints to help us navigate This challenging life and it's weird and challenging right now With us again as Father Matthew McDonald You want to get his bio check out the first show out on spiritualdirection.com? This is a series On helping us understand how to discern whether visions and revelations are valid because they're popping up everywhere Which is normal in dark times in dark and difficult times the Lord raises up saints And the devil tries to copy the Lord And so he raises up other than saint or devils to influence people work to confuse Yeah, yeah, and so how do you discern and because there's a there are a bunch of folks that I wouldn't give a moment a minute of the day now I won't mention any of them During this show because the reason is is because and people want me to because they said it last time Why don't you say the names? Well? Because of the church hasn't formally condemned them For instance like they church has formally written warnings against Oh a tear danger dan and others Then we want to leave room for grace and for repentance and that sort of thing And we're not it's not our job Necessarily to do that. So I'm not real fond of that though. We do it occasionally on spiritualdirection.com warn people But in this case We won't mention any names, but we will give you the tools to discern if Some things of the the enemy or some things of god and stephanie's got a little Interesting story related to our next topic about the demonic and visions and revelations Yeah, this this is very fascinating and you know, so we're we're trying to figure out so if we're Spiritual directors or whatever. How do we help those that we're serving? You know muddle through sometimes what happens in prayer and what might be affecting them and especially if they're You know, I think most people that go seeking direction are People of good will they desire the lord they desire Uh to grow near to him, but sometimes they can be carried away If they're not measured or grounded Properly or if they or if they have some open doors somewhere, right?  Oh, that's a that's a god, you know That's amazing. It's the lord's face.  But I had I had had some formation in what st John of the cross said about these things and he said if you have a vision You should immediately set it aside Because whatever effect was intended if it's of god, whatever effect Was intended to happen Will happen prior before you even realize it before you're even your senses and your faculties can even Uh, perceive that the vision is happening and whatever god desires will have happened It'll move right it'll have its effect And then everything after that is subject to interference disturbance Derailing as it were by the enemy So I shared this with the person And I said well if it's of god praise be to god Whatever he desired for you has happened, right? So we're going to set it aside and we're going to continue on your path of seeking holiness of growing in the lord And just let it be right we're just going to let it be because whatever the lord wants he's going to bring it And if it's not of him Then you know we just set it aside right Well the response was indignation pride absolutely not Telling the world about it telling everybody that would listen and you know If you're not grounded And you're going out and saying jesus came to me to everybody that'll listen They're going to dismiss you outright as crazy especially if they're not people of faith And we talked about it, but there was this intense pride and refusal To even consider that they were not to go do something with it, right? And they went away You know they discontinued with spiritual direction and disappeared off the radar Years and years later three four years later. I receive a text from the person who says Stephanie you may not remember me. My name is ex And I want to share with you that you were right And I'm very sorry for the way I responded to you In time and in reflection. I've realized That it was prideful and which was very very problematic. It led to a number of really disturbing Conflicts and difficulties in my marriage with my friends with my children with everybody And I should have listened so Just a beautiful humility On the other side and the person's going to continue their walk and they're not my directee but I think that is you know, so so that leads us into I think what are some of This number one, right, right, right the number one sign So the number one demonic sign is pride in the soul that leads to trouble discouragement and even despair, right? It created immediate disruption to the family to relationships where The person was probably honestly going towards god and if they had responded In humility Maybe the lord would have started to work me. Of course. He would have started to work in that humility to bring about you know, holiness But the temptation to pride took them a whole different direction and really created a lot of havoc So, I don't know father. Can you speak to that and then all these other signs that help us to denote when Something that we see here experience Maybe of a demonic origin. Let's walk through them slowly because I think it's important But let's just start with that one. Is that a good example that's definitely I think that's a great story and it really shows the danger of pride of you know It's all about me. I'm the chosen one And there's not a detachment A healthy detachment from the reality that is experienced in prayer Something related to Different example One of the earlier followers followers of st. Dominic whose feast day we celebrated yesterday st. Peter Verona He was preaching against the albogensians in italy And one day he came To a albogensian base and he had a vision Of our lady holding the baby jesus and that vision said My son, you're wrong. The albogensians are right. You have to you have to join the albogensians It's like oh really and he they didn't know this He had a pics with a host on him And he said if you are really our lady and our lord you will bow before Jesus and the Eucharist the mid the vision immediately Disappated and there was a foul stench so You know, it's not pride Is the root of all sin And when we make it about ourselves and not about god and not and not about Loving others the way that the lord desires us to love them Then we're under the influence of evil you know a contrary example is I had a woman who was Having revelations who was publishing them on the internet and had some connection with me at spiritualdirection.com And I I reached out to her and I said this is very dangerous what you're doing And I'm not saying you're wrong because there was nothing doctrinally wrong with what she was saying But it just I if I recall right.  Oh, you're right. I'm going to take these down and I'll I'll get a spiritual director Uh another example Uh, which by the way, I believe she's legitimate, you know, she's never popped up again But the point being her humility was very compelling to me another example In a book, um, what what's that book? Uh eight days in virtue. I think it's called definitely promoted There's a guy the guy who wrote the book Had some revelations that he published in the book and he wanted us to promote it I spent probably two or three hours with him on the phone just talking through the the issues And about the danger of of doing this without a director. Well, what did he do? He gets a director, right? And and he was super humble In in our conversation. And so though it is not normal for us to do this We ended up promoting his book and I believe it's it's legitimate So humility is and the reason this is number one on the demonic science list Is because it's probably, you know, the most telling Uh regarding the character of the person is whether or not they're humble or prideful Does that make sense father? Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you know And again, our faith isn't just about us. Our faith draws us to the life of god and and the love of the holy trinity and We have to be healed in order to receive that and when we get visions that could be part of the healing process That we cling on too tightly to what we're receiving like look at me. I'm so holy Red alert Yeah, you know back to an example I gave earlier in a way to deal with it in a little bit healthier way because I didn't really I just said This tends to make me uncomfortable is god told me, you know And if if you think god's put something on your heart one of the powerful ways that you can orient yourself to humility And be prudent and cautious because it's not a bad thing to Be oriented to that kind of reality is to say to someone, you know, I think I'm hearing this How does it resonate with you? Especially if it involves another person? And if they that is very humble and it allows the other person to assess it rather than to go Oh, now, what am I supposed to do? You're telling me what god said or what god is doing. That's a way that we can be Practice this kind same kind of humility. Yeah, and before we go to you know, we're about up on a break But I think what's important too about what you just said Is when people because this happens to us it happens all kinds of people when you're you know in the in the catholic circles Is that someone will say god told me or you know, whatever and as people tell us that But we need to leave room for that, you know to say it doesn't speak to me Um and and to also allow god to work in that however he sees fit, right? So it's okay to say no that doesn't resonate with me, but thank you for your love Thank you for wanting to speak something to me And and I'll I'll let that rest with the lord or just thank you. I'll take it to prayer Yeah, you know and and just always to receive in humility and prayer. So We will be right back and we'll continue about the demonic signs that we can be on a lookout for Regarding visions and revelations Any markets that go this is danis ebony Burke. Welcome back to divine intimacy radio your radio haven of rest We're talking with father matthew mcdonald who wrote the forward to a newly republished book that is very important Uh, it's visions and revelations published by sophia institute press as always If you want to support ebtn You can get it from the religious catalog. You can go to spiritualdirection.com As well and on the shop button and it's an important book. Which is why we brought it back into print Father matthew did his uh, what was it your was it your master's dissertation or what was it? Yes, my ma thesis at st. Joseph's seminary in dunwoody on the discernment of visions and revelations according to scripture Teachings of the magisterium the teachings of the carmelite school spirituality And i'll be teaching a course on this for the avalanche institute school spiritual formation Sometime in spring of 2023 a six-week course that goes more into depth about how do we do that? awesome awesome, so now we're going to move into um into uh Another one of the demonic signs. Stephanie. You want to tell folks what we're going to check out? Sure So father, can you lead us through some of these signs? Maybe give us some examples and and we've got a little bit of time so Um, one of them is an exaggerated mortification. Can you give us an example of what that would be? So an exatter exaggerated mortification would be i'm not eating food for a number of days Um out of love of god without the guidance of a spiritual director Um right fasting penance is good Um and sometimes when we get to a certain level you want to take on more But it should always be checked in Um with our spiritual director that we're seeing To make sure that we're not biting off more than we can chew or tiring ourselves out or just look at me I'm just morally white knuckling this and one of those would be An inordinate use of of discipline. We don't even hear about that anymore Can you tell us, you know, what that is why somebody might be inspired to use the discipline and and what Would be an exaggerate, you know, why it's so important to have a spiritual director to discern those things if they're inspired to do so And in inordinate use of discipline could be done because I want to save souls You know, so i'm going to take on 50 billion things at once and then all of a sudden i'm not getting any sleep My emotions are all out of whack Um i'm being short with people So a good discipline of penance will normally take maybe one to three things at a time Under the guidance of a director where i'm abstaining from a particular kind of food or i'm just having one meal a day or i'm I'm shutting myself off for technology or reducing it to like an hour a day So it it's teaching me right engagement Um into the things of this world rather than just this constant repression This the next one is false humility spurred on by spiritual pride. I won't say the name of the person but uh There is one person who goes around supposedly walked across immense distances In the united states in prayer, which has been debunked by someone who who checked all the timelines out And then I saw them on a video and what I caught immediately was this Self satisfaction in their own humility. So it's this weird thing of i'm showing humility and i'm but what slipped out was the person was sort of Impressed by how humble they were so it's uh, it's You know, some people can feign humility, but You know, you got to look closely When they're when they're claiming humility because Those who wanted to see and by the way this person threatened to sue the national catholic register because There was an article written about the bishops treatment of the person Uh in uh denver colorado and so that certainly is a dramatic Reflection of a total lack of humility. I I just read in scripture this morning You know, why are you taking other christians? You know carinthians were at monistice that you shouldn't be suing other christians similarly another Uh mystical phenomenon in atlanta where there's a handful of books have been published and One of our bloggers in the register You know criticize the guy or something and he went crazy as well and it's just It's such an easy test This either pride or false humility. You have any other examples father? There's a famous saying that I once heard in a seminary about humility That humility is a strange bird and once you think you have it you lost it And Humility we can always think that it's a negative virtue But it's both a negative and a positive virtue. So yeah, I'm I'm realizing my complete dependence on god for everything Without him. I'm lost. I can't be saved. I'm nothing But the positive side of humility is this despite my nothingness despite my sin God loves me and calls me to a relationship with him Which will allow me to fully flower in his grace and his love Right It's it can be an over exaggerated Focus on our sinfulness as well. Can it not to where we're withdrawing from god? We're withdrawing from Stepping fully into who he's called us to be is that not correct? It's another way to Understand false humility.  I'm never going to do this or that, you know Except darkness or sadness. Yeah. Yeah, great Okay, so another one is a focus upon what is mostly Extraordinary and marvelous to make the faithful feel esteemed or to bring about what is foreign to our vocation You know, this this was one Example that was fascinating Very very pious beautiful mother of many Believe she hears in prayer You made a mistake You were supposed to be a nun. Oh, yeah and before you know, then you know, so this sense of confusion Like I think I made a mistake. I think I was supposed to be a nun and you know, they're married They have all these children which immediately creates division, right between the husband and wife And god be praised she was humble And I said that's not of god And she also, you know, she said, okay, I'm I'm gonna relook at this Also went to confession and the priest outright said not of god That needs to be dismissed outright.  You know, it just needs to be dismissed and gone I think what was truly happening is she was being She was being called to a deep piety a deep holiness which has played itself out In time and it was a it was a roadblock that the enemy brought up And because she was humble she listened to her director She listened to the priest got rid of it and kept moving and I've seen extraordinary fruits from proper discernment in that area Um, what about presumption which undermines the theological virtue of hope? Tell us about what that's what does that mean? so presumption would be Either a fixation on something that is good Like oh, this is always going to be here You know kind kind of like the gospel from two Sundays ago of the rich man. Oh, I have this plenty You know, I'm gonna sit down and enjoy it um Where you can lose that at any time or a fixation on um the negative that God's just gonna come and punish us for our sins no matter what we do Yeah, so it's uh, it's it's When the punishment you do see It is not something that God does. It's something that we choose for ourselves. Right in an example would just be It's all bad. The sky is falling. There's no hope everything's, you know, it's just a an overly negative Because there's always hope even in the worst storm And if there's no sense of hope then that's uh, that that really breaks that That it really reveals that it's demonic, right or the presumption that I've got this under control Everything's fine. Right. I live like I go to church I I practice the sacraments. I don't have to worry about anything versus this constant diligence of Keeping an eye out that the enemy's lurking and so that I must be watchful ever watchful with my eyes on the horizon looking for christ Seeking him in prayer and wanting to live a holy life never presuming That my salvation is one and done right not in fear, but rather just prudent diligence. Is that right? Absolutely and again God always gives us sufficient grace in every scenario whether good or bad for our salvation But that doesn't mean It will always be smooth sailing And the important thing is that we do not take anything for granted and that we be vigilant Great. Okay. So the the next one is creation of self-love and the faithful It's an interesting An interesting one in light of so these these this list was compiled quite a quite a while ago by Or it's it's derived from Father reginal gargoyle grange a famous dominican theologian but this Idea that you can actually do this would be Denied in our time that you can create too much self-love. What is a proper understanding of what legrange was getting out here? So self-love would be i'm the center of the universe I'm I you know, I have a key place in salvation history Um and elevating oneself to something that one is not so self-love is a love without humility a love without that you know dependence trust and surrender with God that Exaggerates one's own self worth And it leads to you know as father rippinger would say Um, I am special an excessive fixation on that when If we are unique, but God is the only person got God the fathers and holy spirit Or the three persons of one true God are the only things special in the universe. Okay Great. So we have about a minute left. So let's go quickly through seven and eight. Well, yeah Um, can you explain those to us very quickly and we have one minute just what we can get done, right? So in dead during dissensions and hatreds as opposed to peace So a spirit of excessive divisions that goes against charity and faith And an evidence in which cannot be concealed and creates confusion the vexation and discouragement in the soul Okay, so when sin Is predominant and the person tries to hide it or Or make excuses for himself that could be a sign of demonic demonic Influence great. All right. So we got to wrap things up father. Matthew mcdonald we've been talking about the world this whole conversations inspired by a new Republication of visions and revelations by father gabriel st. Mary magdalene father Matthew mcdonald wrote the forward and helped us get this back out so that people could be Aided in this very difficult time of discerning what's going on in the church in the world Okay, so until next time may the god of peace make you perfect in holiness May he preserve you whole and entire spirits whole and body Irreprutable at the coming of our lord jesus christ. Amen. Now before we jump off the air perfect I wanted to remind you Go out to spiritualdirection.com book study if you want to join our study on st. Francis to sales saturday mornings 8 a.m to 9 a.m Second four saturdays that's spiritualdirection.com forward slash book study. Yes. Thank you for that Correction So if you want to join us there and get a regular formation on this amazing text of introduction to the devout life spiritualdirection.com forward slash book study also don't forget about the the The Pilgrimage Yes next year. Yes, we It'll fill up. It's going to be a carmelite pilgrimage to spain. I'll be teaching through devil in the castle Uh, spirit st. Teresa of Avalos spiritual warfare in the progress of the soul And you will be deeply blessed you can get that out at spiritualdirection.com forward slash events You'll see all of our events there and don't forget the courses. We have at the avalan institute avalan dash institute.org really what we do at Abla foundation is a one-stop shop for any spiritual formation that you need priests religious or lay Yeah, and keep an eye on that because as spiritualdirection.com events because Uh, we're about to load up on 2023 So all of those that haven't been laid out are going to start being uploaded So keep track of that. So and they'll get um, they'll get they'll become full pretty quickly The spiritual wisdom of st. Thomas Aquinas if you have an interest in Aquinas And the spiritual life will be a new course beginning september 6 of 2022 So check that out. Dr. Kevin boast avalan dash institute.org. Got to see you guys. Thanks father. Take care


When I was about six six eight months after I took my course I started getting What like my interactions when I was going out and doing day game. They started to become less good I started to get more reactions where I The girl was like a little bit weirded out or she was like oh is this like Am I on camera or like is this a setup like did your friends send you over here? And that happened sometimes, but it you know quite rarely and started to happen more and I realized why is because I was I Had hit upon like kind of a the same kind of thing. I'd say when I was beginning conversations and I was so confident in doing it that it stopped becoming authentic It stopped feeling genuine to the girl and so they started reacting like this can't be real so What I always encourage students to do is like a great a great thing I think that really really works when you're starting out and you you've only just done it, you know a few weeks or whatever is To actually express the fact that you have no idea what you're doing and you're nervous right Because a much better interaction for me At that point when I was starting to get bad reactions was to do even the most bumbling ridiculous opener But where it was coming from a genuine place. I've just been like hey listen. Oh my god I just I haven't really like planned this and I don't really know what I'm doing But I just I just saw you and I just had to come over and now I'm here And I don't know where this is going, but wow and hi. I'm Ryan Like that something like that really genuine jump in stumbling over your words is gonna is Gonna have to create much stronger emotional reaction in her Then if you have like the perfect day game opener that you just say a hundred times the same way So absolutely if you're really feeling something you're like, I'm really nervous And I'm not sure what I'm doing and that's really true for you express it always


Present perfect versus past perfect from espressoenglish.net Both the present perfect and the past perfect talk about something that happened before a point in time, called the reference point. In the present perfect, our reference point is the present, and in the past perfect, our reference point is in the past. Let's look at some examples. Present perfect. I have been to Japan twice. You can see that our reference point is the present, and the two trips to Japan are in the past. We don't know exactly when, but they happened before the reference point, before the present. Past perfect. I had been to Japan twice by the time I was ten years old. In this case, our reference point is in the past. I am twenty-eight years old in the present, and in the past I was ten years old. The two trips to Japan happened before I was ten years old, before the reference point in the past. Here's another example. My husband has already eaten breakfast. It means that he has eaten breakfast sometime in the past, before the present moment, which is our reference point. Now look at an example in the past perfect. When I woke up, I saw that my husband had already eaten breakfast. The reference point is now the moment in the past when I woke up, and my husband had eaten breakfast before this reference point in the past. You can form the present perfect with have or has plus the past participle. I have been. He has eaten. Form the past perfect with had plus the past participle. I had been. He had eaten. In spoken English it's very common to use the short form. In the present perfect, I've been, and he's eaten. And in the past perfect, I'd been, and he'd eaten. For a fast way to improve your English grammar and vocabulary, get the e-book 100 Common Errors in English, available at espressoenglish.net. Thanks for watching English Tips from Espresso English. If you liked this video, please share it.


there's good part of community and there's bad part of community but at the end of the day you can't have good without the bad that's how i feel um with that being said i think the main thing to focus on in the question is you saying with people being so spread out and yeah i do think that people are going to be spread out on different servers i we've talked about like what server we want to play on and we've said from the beginning our plan was for us to you know classic cast crew to play on the same server i think people have kind of okay well we'll play we'll play we'll play here and we'll play here and then it just kind of has naturally turned into a lot of people probably playing on the same server um whether you want to play on that server or not uh that's entirely your decision i think the the whole concept of like streamer servers and stuff like this that people worry about i think that's a whole another discussion i think a lot of people are going to be in for a rude awakening uh from from that respect i think the things that i think the things that people worry about aren't or most of the things that people worry about aren't necessarily a thing and two i think that just because you're not on a big streamer server doesn't mean that you're not going to experience some of the things that people are worried about so moving on i think the hope is getting the tournament realms for dueling tournaments and stuff so we could have people who are who are not on the server get to play together right i think i think that's that's the hope um that we get some kind of access to tournament realms and uh something like that and that's specific to like dueling tournaments or trying to host like pre-made versus pre-made tournaments stuff like that um i think as far as everything else goes i mean hey that's it's on the server right if you want to host a community event you got to host it on your server right i don't see how you could be on another server and do that so so lots of warlocks lots of warlocks yeah i guess i could expand on that like um you know as far as streamer servers are concerned i was one of the people who was going to avoid streamer servers at first because you know i wanted i felt like i wanted the full authentic experience and i felt okay well streamers didn't exist back then so i want to maybe avoid like the big streamer server but like really through the beta again i answered this earlier with what really surprised me is the community events and it really turned me on to it because um it's just again you said it earlier and it sounds maybe a bit cliche but the game really is about the community and i feel like all of the events that get put on like the dueling tournaments and even going outside and stuff like that you know on a smooth mcroove server he's going to do the um the fishing stuff as well right again i think you know for me personally not everyone's going to like it but i think just it kind of strength and it strengthens that community aspect a bit so you know it's it's not going to be for everyone though certainly so yeah for sure i think that um i mean and this is what's going to happen like every server and this happened before streaming was a thing too every server is going to have players that are popular and every server is going to have players that kind of like uh naturally will will accumulate people that you know like being around them or they think they're funny or they're interesting these are players that are going to kind of rise up a lot of these players might start streaming or something and they're going to have their own kind of uh viewership and people who want to watch them on their server because they're good players or this or that or whatever um i mean like for me like even in burning crusade like i like somebody else paid for my epic mount in burning crusade or my not my epic mount my flying mount in burning crusade you know and it's like i was uh i had a pretty i was pretty well received in burning crusade i think i had a lot of people who liked me and they thought i was good and stuff like that yeah hashtag sponsored yeah yeah sponsored uh sponsored flying mount so um yeah so i mean there's stuff like that's just gonna happen right you look back on like Swiftie and stuff like that right it's like oh legendary player Swiftie like because of the videos and stuff that he did um i don't think it's necessarily going to be specific to streamers and for me like i didn't stream before i was playing private servers i started streaming uh a few months in a couple months in and my stream just kind of naturally grew to be the most watched stream in in like for private servers right over the course of the next like seven months or whatever uh i every server is gonna have somebody like that where it's just somebody either becomes a meme or or they're they're gonna be really good and they're gonna be interesting to want i mean that's what happened i mean stay safe can can attest to it like i basically like i was like a big meme right i was literally like a private server meme and and that's what made people want to watch like what like what the hell why is this guy playing ret like what's wrong with this guy it's got like brain issues but like but yeah that's just kind of how it goes so i think every server is going to have somebody like that uh yeah i mean just to add on to that i like you're right okay so every every server in classic wow will have a streamer that steps up and you know all these servers are so insular and they're so community driven that there will be a streamer inevitably that will gain attention and traction on each server um you definitely can't compare that i'm saying this what you're doing but i'm just saying in general you can't compare like that one guy that's going to rise up or two guys that arise up on each server you can't compare that to like the streamer server with asman and so yeah no doubt no you definitely can't do that but every server will have their one or two famous guys like that's that's just the fact yeah but i and also what else i think is i think that well i think some of the issues that people bring up are very valid i think that it's other issues that people are just like people are being kind of paranoid about other stuff too and that's like a whole other thing um but yeah do you guys have anything else you want to you want to add to that as far as community events goes i was told there would be a face reveal and i'm still salty well guys you saw it this is exactly what mad season looks like he looks just like his character believe it or not he looks just like his character yeah so he's very very angry everything but head yeah so guys thank you so much for joining us today please please please if you haven't already follow tips follow stay safe follow mad season follow these guys check out their youtube channels twitter all that stuff all that stuff is on the screen down below right under the facecams i'm going to continue streaming for a little bit there is going to be a cooking stream tonight as well uh there will be a cooking stream at my house tonight as well so we'll talk about that a little bit and uh we'll see you guys next time 20 days baby take care boys mad season thank you for coming on dude thanks for having me guys


Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Chris, Chile, London, it's like a February day in Boston here, Paul Gillin, my co-host. And I am really pleased to welcome Richard Phillips, who's a global technology leader at GE Digital and Trippartane, who's the HP CTO looking after GE within Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, Bill Rue had a split. We've had him on theCUBE many, many times, and we know the GE story. We covered the announcement of the initial industrial internet, Beth Comstock on. We were just doing mines and machines. Very exciting times. So, and you spent some time in Silicon Valley. I did, yeah, I spent two great years out there. And so, tell us what it's like to be this industrial giant, trying to build a software company, a multi-thousand-person software company in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's exciting, it's complicated. It's breathing a new breath of fresh air into an industrial company and reinvigorating the way we do business. It's completely changing mindsets and perceptions as GE, a 125-plus-year-old company into something, a digital, relevant organization. It's great to be part of that spearhead. So, Tripp Partain, you get the award for best name on theCUBE this week. You won out over Antonio Neary, sorry, Antonio. So, tell us about your titles, really interesting. You got GE in your title. So, obviously, that shows a commitment to the partnership. Tell us more about the partnership in your role. Yeah, absolutely. So, my main role is to work on key technology innovation projects between the two companies, which sounds really cool because it is really cool, right? And we've had a history of doing these types of projects with GE even before GE Digital. A lot of folks may not realize when in hospitals, when you've got a GE CT machine or the mobile X-ray machines, there's a lot of HPE technology embedded inside of those that takes care of handling, you know, in the case of the CT machines, all the different images that are being collected and digitized and then processed very quickly there on the spot. And so, we've been doing those types of projects with GE for a number of years. And so, extending that into GE Digital, being there at Mobile World Congress when they had the official announcement of GE Predix going live, and then really developing the partnership further from there has been very exciting. Great, Richard, where are you seeing bottom-line benefits right now from your industrial IoT initiatives? What are some examples? So, for us personally, we're actually laying out a lot of our brilliant manufacturing technologies into our own manufacturing shops. So, GE operates some 400 manufacturing lines globally. And by the end of this year, we'll have about 75 of those introduced with Predix and the digital technology that we're bringing to bear. That's going to save us not only production time, it'll improve our quality of manufacturing, but it's going to reduce costs enormously for the whole of GE, which is going to keep accelerating that expansion throughout our production lines. All of our business units are seeing huge productivity increases through using our digital technology, being able to monitor the assets that we actually manage on behalf of our customers. We're able to do so more effectively. We're able to predict when failures are going to occur and proactively take care of them before failures occur. And that's really important, especially in things like the airline industry. Unscheduled ground time is a huge problem. And if we can do anything to help reduce or remove that entirely, that can only benefit our customer base. Well, I hear this figure, $6 billion in revenues and digital revenues for GE this year or last year. Where are those revenues coming from? So from the combination of different pieces we have, when we actually formed GE Digital itself and we moved our IT portion of our group under the GE Digital organization, we were a top 25 software company just by doing that. And we had around about a $4 billion order book just from doing that now. Now once we start introducing predicts and start making the software sales and subscriptions to those kind of models, we're looking around about $6, $6.2 billion this year. So that is truly selling predicts and our IRT solutions to our customers who are subscribing to them and making them use in their own enterprises. Now we also have enterprise customers building capabilities in our predicts solution and reselling to their own customers. And you've said, I think, both Jeffrey and Mel and Beth Kompstock have said on theCUBE that you plan on being a top 10 software company by the end of the decade. Yep. What's, tell us about how we should be thinking about the difference between the consumer internet and the internet of things or the industrial internet of things. So where we differentiate is, you know, for the consumer internet or kind of the IOT sphere, we're not the difference between the industrial internet of things is the type and nature of the data that we're dealing with. We're not trying to connect toasters and fridge freezers to the internet. I'm connecting jet engines, steam turbines, nuclear power plants and collecting the data and dealing with that. The type of data and the nature which we have to deal with it is so entirely different. The scale of the data is different. And the way in which you have to manipulate the data and manage it to be able to surface the right information out of that to be able to make use of it in a timely manner is so different to that was, you know, when I need a switch on and off the toaster. It's just the scale is so different. There's been a debate and I think both of you can speak to this over sort of where does the processing happen? I know HPE is very big on processing at the edge. What are you learning about? What's the optimal balance of centralized versus edge? We're seeing now that we're kind of been rethinking about this over the past couple of years or so. You know, everybody focuses around the cloud platform and they think that's going to solve world hunger. And realistically it isn't. You need to spread the processing out to the right places at the right locations to make sense of the type of data that you have. And so if you have very high frequency kind of vibration data coming from a steam turbine that's coming in so thick and fast you cannot have that data being sent to a cloud system and process. It has to be done at the edge. And so we're absolutely looking at edge solutions to be able to do some initial analysis where it makes sense to be able to deal with the control systems to make changes live as things occur and then to send the right type of data back to the cloud to do the bigger value propositions and type things. The integration with bigger data sets like your weather data, like seismic data, because you really need big horsepower. The historical analytics. Exactly. We size at Wikibon. We size the industrial internet of things. Just around the time you guys launched, you know, the company, it's enormous. The numbers are just mind boggling. We don't even have to review that. But the other piece that we just released and this really relates to HP strategy of the intelligent edges, the cost of doing industrial internet with edge plus cloud versus just cloud is it's astronomically lower. So the economics of leaving the data there, doing the analysis and maybe moving 5% of the data back in most use cases versus 95% or 100% of the cloud, the economics is so much more compelling. Can you talk to that, Tripp? Yeah, and so we've been having a lot of joint customer conversations. So historically, GE and HPE are in a lot of the same customers. We've traditionally been working with, say the CIO side of the house in the data center and they've been out on the OT side or the operational technology side of the house in the operations and as IoT use cases are coming up, these groups are coming together a lot of times for the first time. Right. Not always even happily so. Indeed. So what happens is depending on the use case, there's an oil producer that's got a rig in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. So if you think about the cost of trying to have connectivity to support a cloud infrastructure, that's not going to work, but we can leverage the compute power that HPE brings to the table, have rig IT literally running the Predix platform on site and then synchronize back to the cloud how and when it's necessary or it may not even be a cloud synchronization. It may be a true up synchronization that takes place depending on when people travel back and forth to the rig, to your point on the cost, thinking about a live satellite cost, which would be the only aura running a cable all the way across the ocean floor versus being able to use local IT as needed and then synchronize as necessary. Huge difference and it helps actually with the use case that's required to get the data processing done timely enough. Working with GE, which clearly is the leader in evangelizing industrial IoT right now, how is that informing HPE strategy? What have you learned from working with GE that it's going back into your product strategy? Yeah, and really looking, and we're even getting to the levels of working with the infrastructure designers at GE to actually do some customizations or create either chip level or board level capabilities to match up with the way the platform works. So we're getting a lot of insight into, as Richard was talking about, sort of the fidelity of the data, the type of processing that's necessary. You know, usually when you launch a product, we try to make a generic product that can serve a lot of different needs. But when you start to look at a use case where maybe I'm outfitting half a million elevators, every dollar that goes into that box means something.  I want one that does exactly what I need it to do, but no more, no less because every dollar I add to that is an instant burden to the bottom line. So, you start to understand the use cases that are involved in how to support these different industries, and in taking that feedback back to our teams and making sure that we really co-innovate together and have the right products in the right place makes a big difference for the customer success. So my business partner, John Furrier, often co-host of theCUBE with me, hosted a panel with Jeffrey Immelt, and he loves to quote Jeffrey Immelt saying, I went to bed one night as the head of an industrial giant, and I woke up the head of a software company. And then I got Bill Rue, obviously couldn't be here. He has another great quote that I want to share with our audience. He said, we've already learned some powerful lessons. The first is that we must commit to changing GE's business model, to be driven to the business outcomes we aim to achieve. Second speed is everything, including the speed at which we learn, the speed at which we execute, and the speed at which we pivot. Sounds like a startup. For you guys to succeed in some of your ambitions of being a software company, do you not have to extend the Predix Cloud beyond just GE's products? Can you talk to that? Yeah, you absolutely do. So the way we've been building our product line has been very much based around the assets, the people, and the processes, regardless of who makes the equipment in the first place. So all of the analytics, all of the capabilities to ingest the data, are absolutely OEM agnostic. We'll take whatever device is out there, we'll connect to it, and we'll make sense out of it, we'll provide insights to it, to make sure that we are addressing the market needs, which is people don't want 10 different systems to interact with, they want one system that gives them the holistic picture for their entire enterprise. That's what Predix is about, that's what we're delivering. What are the tough, you're dealing with so many variables, harsh conditions, just so many things that you have to work with. What are the toughest problems you're working on right now? Some of the biggest problems we have is connectivity. So one of my potential customers is looking at how do we get connectivity to power plants in Siberia? These guys, they have a maintenance engineer go visit their site once a year. The connectivity solution to that, much the same as the oil fields, is satellite and maybe you lay a landline, but I mean the economics of doing that are so massive. How does that compare to the benefits of applying the solution in the first place? And so you've got to make some really good decisions about how much data you want to send back, coming back around to the edge processing. How much information and how much processing do I put at the edge to be able to solve those problems real time at the site, versus actually get it back to somewhere else and not deal with the economics of communication? Interesting business case, right? Is a once a year truck roll good enough or is the advantage of actually having the analytics in place offset that cost of connectivity? Rubik can help in a lot of cases, but maybe SpaceX can help in this case. There we go, we're just going to have a Tesla. But if you look at some of the strategy we've taken around our edge line products, actually having them harden to the point that they don't require to sit in a data center, you're able to have them out in the environment, you've got the multiple connectivity, communication capabilities available on the device, and the way they've been set up from a power and a heating standpoint, you can actually put them up on the wall in the factory because a lot of times these locations aren't going to have a data center, and if they do, it's probably a closet, right? So it's not, exactly. So it's not going to have the capabilities that you would want in a data center anyway. So having the ability to have the right level of compute at the edge, but also hardened for these environments is pretty critical. Yeah, exactly. Big DDoS attack in October, a lot of people freaked out, worried that their thermostats are going to be compromised. An even bigger issue I would imagine in an industrial corporation. How worried should we be? I think we need to be cognizant. I would steer away from worried because worried infers that we don't necessarily have a plan. We need to be cognizant of the realities of the world that we live in today and to take appropriate measures to be able to protect ourselves. So we invested in a company called WorldTech, their ace, an industrial cybersecurity leader. We've got cybersecurity products from our partners and our strategic technology partners that we're going to be integrating into our technology base to ensure we make sure that the infrastructure we have in place is protected, that the OT assets on site are protected, not just from the data transfer that's happening, but from intrusion into those sites. There are not many people in the market that can really offer those kind of capabilities because you have the combination of the domain experience and the IT know-how from the way that the intrusions are happening these days. I mean, potentially your physical security becomes more important because you have more at stake with that data on site.  You know, on an oil rig, we had one example where the use of USB keys is very prevalent that the systems, the computer systems are very disparate around the setup itself. And so the guys, they would take data off of one system and transfer it to another, but they were finding they were getting viruses, malware, all these kind of things. So what we actually put in place was a sanitizing box which allowed the guys to introduce a new process. Next time you go to a PC, put the USB key in, hit the go button, it's sanitize the USB key and then you can do your data transfer. And the next time you want to do it, you repeat the process.  It's huge business to make sure that you get that right the first time. Let's talk about the organizational implications. We've got IT and we've got OT. What's, give us the update on those two worlds we really don't speak within organizations that much. How is that changing or is it changing? I see it is definitely changing when we know we're seeing the two worlds or they're kind of colliding together. We're starting to understand each other's language a little better and we're finding they're having kind of domain experts from either side kind of swap sides for a while to learn the different patches, helps that alliance, helps the communication paths. So we need to actually, you know, work out what that common language pattern is for the integration between those two worlds and we're making great strides towards that and we're absolutely relying on our technology partners to help us get there and, you know, we've been in this space a long while anyway so we're really trying to help that. One of the interesting things in the area, again, I like to get into the cool co-innovation area. So you mentioned WorldTech which really focuses on OT security. Can't say too much because it's still in the works but we've got some really cool stuff with the WorldTech team and our Aruba teams working together. If you think about WorldTech understanding the OT connectivity, those protocols and security, obviously with Aruba being a leader in wireless and the IT security that goes on top of that, if you had all of that working together with Predix at the same time, you create a converged device that allows the IT and the OT to come together much more easily. So again, bringing these together and then helping leverage our best capabilities to go ahead and solve these problems for the customers ahead of time also helps with that transition because we've already worked on bringing those worlds together. Is OT parlance harder for the IT guys to learn or is IT parlance harder for the OT guys to learn? You know, when you've been sort of armed deep in like Greece and something to try and change out, I don't know, a HPT turbine blade and understanding the problems that come with the fatigue and the sort of the metal and downstream distress, trying to explain that to somebody who understands servers and computers can be tricky. But it's just as hard the other way around. I've seen the struggle in both directions. So it is not easy either way. Any advice to companies who, I mean, every industrial company is going to have to wrestle with this with integrating these cultures, 30-year veteran engineers and software, upstarts, any advice on how to make that happen? The biggest advice I think is be open, be collaborative. You know, learn from your peers, understand how they're changing their game and don't try to be in that closed environment. The traditional industrial clothes, it's in my shop, not in my backyard, those kind of philosophies, that their day is done. We need to be in this open collaboration space working with partners to ensure that we are delivering the best technical solutions and understanding each other's domain. Only then are we going to succeed. Top takeaways. Let's see, you guys are three years in now since the launch? We're, yeah, three years in here. I mean, we've been working on it for about five years all up. It's amazing how fast things have progressed. Takeaways from the show and the context of this discussion. I think it's been sort of an eye-opener for some of the guys who've come around. They haven't necessarily realized quite what GE were doing and how we've been changing ourselves. So being able to impart some of that on the passers-by and the guys who've been learning a little bit about what we're about, that's been great. And also to hear in reverse the kind of problem spaces that maybe some of the traditional IT teams or the IT customers have been on site. The use cases they have are so similar to some of the use cases we're solving in an industrial space. The technology can only be a similar solution to some of that stuff. Tripp, final word. Yeah, I think we got a lot of good feedback on both sides. A little surprising for some folks to have an OT company here at HPE Discover. So I think that was a big eye-opener in a lot of ways. And then really talking to them about the fact that in this space there's really no one company that's going to be able to do it. So kind of going back to your other question about how do we make this happen? How do we keep it moving forward? I think companies looking at partners of leaders. So you've got leaders in the IT space, you've got leaders in the OT space who recognize neither one of us are going to be able to do this all together. So looking to those partnerships with folks in a leadership position to be able to help these companies traverse the challenges. And I think that's the feedback we've seen at the booth and when people have been coming back. I agree, absolutely. Excellent gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Love to bring this topic to our audience. It's an exciting one, huge market opportunities, a lot of innovations. I really appreciate the insights. All right, keep it right there everybody. This theCUBE will be backed from Excel London Discover 2016, right after this pre-port.


I'm absolutely delighted to be sleeping here today, and I'm even more delighted to have some of these new faces over on home terms in Ireland, so I'm glad that you can drag me all over and hope it's the first of many. Anyway, I'm Rachel, until very recently I was ddars at Sontrain Institute, just around the corner. Now I'm director and lecturer at the NA TESOL at UCD on the universities we have here. I mean, I had a lot to say about meetings when I went to a language school, having more to say about meetings now that we're at the university. And that's what I'm going to focus on today, because I'm going to look at how meetings fit into the broader perspective of communication. And I'm going to try and keep it quick because I precede the lunch break and I'll be very unpopular if I'm doing it to the left. Okay, so it's about communicating the right time at the right time, and I'm just looking at worst-case scenarios. I'll go there myself as well, and tell you one of mine was meetings. I'm addressing questions such as how many meetings are too many and how long it's too long. Why is it so difficult? I'm going to contextualise it in the language school context. And then I'm not going to say this is how to have effective meetings. I have no idea yet. But I'm going to propose some interesting paradigms that I can lend us through which to look at the more effective meetings. And then just look at it in the broader context so that we can have knowledge. Okay, so what's so wrong with meetings anyway? Because it's kind of like this, oh God, meetings are awful, aren't they? I have to go to so many. I've got a few little kind of memes about a general consensus like meetings are just a little job. But it's essential to get together, isn't it? You can't not have meetings. It's important to be informed. I'll see what happens when you don't have meetings and it's not a pretty picture. How many meetings actually get informed when you can't think, oh God, I'm so glad I'm saying it. It's really useful, rich use of my time. I'm just surprised at laughter at not.  I've done some research into this. I put a link up there. I put you on mismanaged. Lots of things are wrong with it. Meaning some managers waste over two months of their work on my meeting. I've attended one meeting and felt I could just waste two months of my life in it. I've never managed to go that over a year. So let's just have a look at the laughter moments. What goes wrong, loads and loads of things go wrong. The one thing that can go wrong is the agenda's not clear. I'm not fit to have it all. Time scale's not specified. So you're like, well, is this going to be a five minute meeting more? Or two hours and how do I fit in with everything else? Inviting everyone whether relevant or not? Or not inviting right people? In effective chair, I just think that's kind of good manners. Whether the time is up, it's up. Or let one person taking every chair should facilitate that. But sometimes they don't. Too many meetings as well. Or not enough meetings so that it's kind of almost pointless because it's out of context. I can't remember what happened last time. So much has happened since we had the last meeting. We can't really effectively discuss it. So that's kind of a tip of the iceberg. Really. So look at this.  Mally didn't come alone in the meeting. I'm finding this. I'm going to treat him. I'm going to have another look. But one of mine was a meeting. I'd like to put this forward and everybody addressed it. But I just don't want to go over the time. I'd rather be on this today than over. So my worst meeting I think was. I had this big meeting. I hadn't been in the school long. They just didn't like having a new manager anyway. It's part of Change Management. I was making a lot of changes. The bigger context was that it was a difficult situation to walk into. It was part of my needs analysis. I noticed that you had these two breaks in a four-hour lesson. It was complete disruptive. The students took up a lot of time to leave and come back. It was to find us as a let's have a long break. Obviously and obviously unpopular with the teacher. You can imagine. I had my house in the right place. It wasn't a good decision in the long run. I thought it was going to be tricky. I did everything right. I was going to really walk with them. I was going to tell them I know it's difficult. I was going to sell the advantages. I was like, this is one of the hour meetings. I tried to keep meeting short to the lunch break. Less in the lunch break. I said no, I'm going to take the hour. So people come then to get it off their chest. I was so good. Before I went in, one of the students rushed up to me, Rachel. It's two years at the two-year anniversary of the Libyan Revolution. So we got a whole big meeting. Completely the old teacher event. It starts in 15 minutes. All of the students have made food. It's such a high rate. Of course, I had to go in. By the time everybody sat down, I had like five and a half minutes to say, sorry guys, I know you kind of love your two rates. It's going to be one. I mean it was awful. I didn't give it any chance. Okay, that's starting tomorrow. Let's go ahead. It's awful. It's like, just, I mean I did everything right, but things happen. I mean like when I've had angry staff, I won't even go into that because this has been filmed.  Again, why is it so difficult? Well in a language school, I mean wouldn't it be a great job if it weren't for the teachers? Teachers have their own timetables. Some have other jobs to go to. Some have other commitments. I'll go into this, but there's lots of factors why it's difficult to try to get teachers all in the same place at the same time. Content, again, it's making the content relevant to the teachers. Sometimes something's really relevant to you, but not to the teachers. It's like the timetable. Organising the timetable is hard enough without trying to find a space when you can get everybody together. Students. What we've had is like, say a Monday and it's every Monday, but the students don't let teachers leave the classroom. They don't care that a meeting is actually really important. It has a good impact on their experience as a student. I just want to ask the teacher a question on my small talk or whatever it is. So students don't understand how important the meeting is. They just go, hey, I don't know, I won't ask, but some teachers have paid for meetings, some aren't, some schools do this, some don't. That's tricky. The most popular meetings I ever had were because we provided sandwiches. Then that budget was cut. The meetings were the same again. So I just found this, which I thought was quite interesting, because we've all got so much to say about meetings. I wanted to find some kind of parallel that might be useful, a useful kind of lens to which to attack the content of the meetings. So autonomy, when I looked at this idea, I thought it was quite interesting because autonomy, when I looked at this, I kind of like what went on because I can see where I've gone wrong sometimes. Autonomy, does teachers feel like they can actually, or is it just you barking things? Do they feel like what they say will actually be listened to and have an impact? Meaning is what you're saying. Or will they be able to immediately relate it? This is meaningful to me. Challenge. Does this have an impact on them? Are you giving them maybe a problem to help solve? Learning. Are they going to feel like, oh I've got any feedback, because I know that I can use. And feedback. Do you refer to previous meetings and give them like, I've actually taken part of what you said and I've taken action on it. You can now see that action. Or even within the meeting, giving each other feedback and scheduling and supporting. Scheduling, it's as simple as picking a regular time so I've found it really helped. Still, if it says the same thing every Monday, still won't work, people feel forgot because it's backed up a lot of things, but it's just something regular. I also thought if I could take a note while I was at the previous talks, so I'll go to these and discuss that. So how often, as often as makes sense every school is different. You know your context. Pick a frequency and stick to it. I also thought, I've mentioned provide food, but a selective agenda, try and put yourself in the teacher's shoes or even ask a senior teacher to say, listen, what's relevant and what isn't. I also thought of making some meetings voluntary. Now this worked. I did this once with the admin team. We needed to have meetings. Everybody is too busy to attend it but anyway, but not too often. But I said, okay, so let's say we'll have an admin meeting once a month, but let's do it for weeks anyway and whoever wants to turn up can, and that works really well, and it goes into autonomy. I also thought 10 people three times, whatever it is, tell them three times. The meeting is going to be next week. First time is the fact that we know that. The second time is put in my mouth. The third time is maybe when you're doing the role so it's beautiful to get people very busy. Supporting meetings. Most Irish language schools are rolling enrolments. I don't know if it's as common in the UK as it is here but loads happen. That is really relevant. Memos would be a good way to back it up but again, somebody said this earlier don't think that we should put a memo that people have read it and know it. But again, it's a good way to back it up without being too intrusive. So look, if you want, if you think it's relevant to you and the teachers who want to look at what they do, what they don't, don't or maybe just a reminder, like we said in the meeting that we've got to do this, this is a good thing to do then. A teacher FAQ page, it's kind of similar to somebody raised the issue of their handbook. Things like don't really change very often and I kind of pull all the things out of the handbook and put them on FAQ pages and see if funky web designer create a really cool FAQ page for us that work quite well because it's kind of quite interactive so that was nice. And of course for coven teachers, last minute teachers, teachers who are new actually don't tend to induct them properly. This is a good resource for them and I also put minutes to the meeting on the link in the bottom of that so people can access the minutes. A useful information that doesn't change. The minutes as well, I've just found nobody read that. I hate it. Of course very useful, but I had the meeting and then I didn't have time to write the minutes and it was weeks later. I was like, okay, there's a minute, do you all read it? No, because I'm really going to get you on time. So I actually asked a teacher to take the minutes and they took turns. Small change but actually really effective means at least one teacher is listening anyway. And notice boards again, kind of similar to the memo thing, just a useful backup. And if you're referring to the syllabus all the time then that's where the syllabus is kept, guys, so you don't have to troll through minutes of meetings. Everything has a place. And then, of course, I think what's really important is backing up what happens in meetings. Informal communication. Walking into it until people are on the corridor and I think it was Josh who said it to talk and manage by walking around. You've got one there? Everybody's saying it now after joining. So if you manage by walking around, it's a great phrase. Just telling people as you're going along backed up with other things as well because you're not going to bump into everybody. And also letting the teachers have space to communicate informally. I was just having a discussion with Mike over there about attending the coffee break with the teachers. My teachers wouldn't have liked that because it's the one chance they're all staying usually about me and that's okay, they needed that. They needed that chance to informally communicate with each other so that then they were kind of on a level playing field when they came into a meeting even if it was formed a consensus against something I was proposing. At least I had the chance to discuss that. It's all communication very important as well. Thank you very much. I've done it. Any questions? Thank you very much. Hi, I just wondered if you do provide space in the meeting for them to make that suggestion for the years and how did that work? It worked really well when we had sandwiches. It worked really well. I made a conscious decision when we stopped providing lunch because I know we were going to have short meetings and I did feel like I was just barking so much. So I kind of tried to have one meeting and I thought I was just barking so the next day I was very, very scared so that was the space and the whole thing like that. But I didn't quite get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't get it. I didn't like that but I didn't quite get it right in a way that I wouldn't like to. I've come across schools where the idea of the freelance doesn't go very well for meetings. In some schools where they say that when we really want the teachers to go we do provide freelance. It seems to work really well. You turned it to one thing I didn't mention on this but I found the location helps. If it was in a classroom they felt like they'd never left the classroom all morning. Or if it was a one-to-one meeting that's holding an important appraisal. I'd go off site so that I wasn't interrupted. Maybe just having your boss at some of the meetings just the director of the schools I can meet with is it a direct initiative to turn this around to this kind of location where it ends? OK, thank you very much.


Well, there's a lot of talented artists in Clearwater County and right now their workers being featured in a very unique exhibit. Lakeland News reporter Cheryl Moore has a look at some of their pieces for this week's in focus. If you ever feel the need to treat yourself to some extraordinary pieces of art, take a trip over to Shevlin to check out their creative Clearwater exhibit. Well there isn't any art center in Clearwater County and so we actually would be the appropriate place for this kind of exhibit. The Clearwater County Historical Society started the exhibit in November. We changed the exhibits annually and so we just recently closed an exhibit and we had a few months that we wanted to fill with something different and unique and so we decided to invite local artists to come and bring their items in and we'll display them for about three months. There's a couple hundred items on display that use a wide variety of mediums. I was surprised when we put the word out I assumed we would get quilters and painters and that sort of thing but I was really surprised some of the other things we got and we said at least five items or more we'll kind of see how much space we have. More than 40 different artists from Clearwater County lent their work to this exhibit so you can imagine every single nook and cranny is covered. Art can be found like this down below or up high like this and nearly touching the ceiling. Artists brought in baskets. We have a lot of Scandinavian crafts like Hardanger and some crochet and it's really such a wide variety of items. One of the surprising ones is the seed art that was not anything that was on my radar and this young girl who's ten years old brought in two items and her friend Patricia brought in a few items. They lived down by Itasca Park and that was really a nice surprise. Each artist's story can be found on display with their work. There's even a few pieces from legendary artists that have never been displayed before. The exhibit has been a hit for the museum. It will end in March but there's a big chance it will make a comeback. I expect we'll do this again. It's been so well received and we've had a lot more visitors than we would normally have. Reporting in Shevlin with this week's end focus, Shawamor Lakeland News. Clearwater County Historical Society Museums open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to four by appointment and admission is free. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Apologies if you can't hear me, my microphone is out of batteries. Nana is on her way with coffee. Dark roast coffee, it could not arrive quick enough, even though I've been drinking espresso all morning. Now we're just reading books on the couch, mama's in her nest, aka the dark, quiet fan-based noise machine bed situation with baby Michael. They are doing their thing, and we are once again waiting for coffee. Talking about thank you Ryan and Avery, you're amazing. We're getting remembered somehow, so for every child shot within the first week and today is one week since Michael arrived, so with a little one laying on my chest. So here we go, this is Seth and Joseph is beneath me.