Thank you. So yes, I am here to talk about the rise of layer seven in DevOps. And particularly, I wanted to talk about an interesting trend over the last few years where, on the one hand, we've been moving more towards independence in the way we write services, but at the same time, we've been moving towards standardizing the way the services actually talk to each other, which is a little counterintuitive in some ways and kind of interesting to look at why we did it and how it affects things. A long time ago, we tended to write applications that were centralized and all ran on a single local machine. We originally did things that way because we didn't actually have a choice. That was the tech that we had available. That was the way we did things. It did have a couple of nice things, which was that applications written that way are relatively simple to reason about and relatively simple to debug, because fundamentally, they can only do one thing at a time, both in the sense that you can only be executing one block of code at the time, but also in the sense that you're only doing one release at a time. You don't have to worry a lot about synchronization in different parts. So simple, but certain things become really hard when you do things that way. And the nature of those things that were difficult led us towards multi-processing and then into multi-threading and then distributed computing. The first time we tried this one, it was all custom stuff in the communications world. We tended to be doing very application-specific protocols, either at layer 4 or built directly on layer 4. And one of the things that we found was that distributed computing is actually really hard. And one of the things we found in particular is that if everything is custom protocols when you're doing your communications, then as you solve problems for one application, you have to go back and solve them again and again and again for every other application, which is problematic. The typical approach we've taken in the industry to problems like this is to try to push things down into a layer below so that all of your developers can go through and take advantage of them. And we did that for a while back in the Dark Ages. We ended up with some really crazy stuff in old IP switches and things like that. But overall, it's really hard. And that didn't work very well. If you track forward from there, there was a span where we went back toward centralization as various hardware resources became cheaper, and that introduced some other stuff was organizations got larger, software teams got larger. And all of that ends up landing us into the current microservices world, sort of our second push into decentralization and distributed computing, where we have independent services and we have each independent service being managed by an independent team with its own lifecycle. But one big difference this time around is that this time we actually have effective layer seven protocols that we can standardize on for the communication between these things. We have HTTP, we have GRPC, we have WebSockets, and we tend to be building applications on top of these rather than building applications on their very own custom protocols that we've built just for that application. The holdouts are kind of things like PubSub, Redis, various databases, but even those, they've been around for long enough that those protocols have effectively become standards in their own right. That makes life a lot easier, but underneath it's still a distributed system, and you still have to deal with it as a distributed system. You may have heard of the eight fallacies of distributed computing. People tend to design as if the network is reliable when it's not. People tend to design as if, or start out designing anyway, as if latency is always zero, even though it's not. Likewise, bandwidth is always finite. The network is always hostile. The topology will change underneath you. When it does, you're not gonna know which admin to go talk to. Shuffling things around costs you time and money. Various things will be different when you would really rather have them be the same. All of these are things where if you do not manage them, your application as a whole is not going to work, and that gets into the question of how do you manage them? So, for example, one thing you need to be doing is worrying about resilience. A simple example of that is if you send a request and don't get an answer, after a little while you should probably send it again. A whole retry concept. Observability is another important one. One of the things that's nice about the centralized world is that you actually have pretty good visibility into a centralized monolithic application. You can attach a debugger to it. You can go poke around at its state. This is not easy, but it's easier than doing it across 100 different systems simultaneously. And so one of the tricks with the distributed computing is managing that and giving yourself a way to look in across the application as a whole. Simple example of that one would be for one of your services, you would like to know the latency within which 99% of your requests complete. Finally, we can talk about routability. If a request comes into your service, that request needs to go to a service that can actually handle that request. Seems obvious. It should not go to an instance of your service which is crashed. Again, fairly obvious, but something that you have to deal with if you want everything to actually work. The stuff that I cited earlier is also kind of the bare minimum. Resilience doesn't just cover retries, but we also have timeouts and circuit breakers and outlier detection and all that good stuff. Observability may actually take you beyond metrics monitoring into fully distributed tracing so that you can actually watch a request come in from the edge and then flow all the way through your services and back out again to find out where a given problem actually is. Routability isn't just about finding an instance of a service that's up, but it's also about things like as you change versions, you probably want to start routing some small percentage of the traffic over to a new version of your service while letting the older version that you trust handle almost all of it, things like that. One of the interesting things about the Shift to L7 is that having standardized layer seven communications actually make it a lot easier to manage all of these fallacies. We'll pick on HTTP for a minute just because it's pretty well known. The URL and the headers in an HTTP request give you a fairly application-independent way of capturing information that you can use for routing. That job is a lot harder if everything is specific to a single application. HTTP formalizes the concept of the status to a request. And again, that lets you do things in an application-independent way about figuring out how many of your requests are succeeding or how many of your requests are failing. One of the more interesting ones is that HTTP actually formalizes the semantic of a thing called a request. So you have, again, an application-independent way of watching the latency for requests or watching the number of requests you can do per second. That actually turns out to be a relatively difficult thing to do in an application-independent way if you don't formalize your communications up at a much higher level than we used to 20 years ago. You get similar benefits of this with GRPC, similar, slightly less with WebSockets. But again, the fact that the protocols have moved up the stack to a place where we can formalize some of these things and rely on them across applications makes life a lot easier. Of course, it does introduce the need to manage all the layer seven stuff. And that gets us into the question of how exactly do we do that? The first cut of this happened 2010, 2012. Those sorts of time frames with various smart RPC libraries that people worked with. Historic came up around this time in Java and Netflix. Twitter working in Scala did their clinical products. Google did GRPC and Stubby and whatever crazy secret googly things they were working on back then. All of these things were used in the same way, which is that you'd take your application and then you would bake the library into your application and use the library to provide resilience, use the library to provide observability. This worked out a lot better than asking every developer to reinvent all these wheels simultaneously over and over and over again. It does have some problems though. The biggest one is that the library by definition can only help you if you're working in the runtime that that library was designed for. If you want to use Historic's and you're not working in Java, then you have two choices. One of them is you port your application to Java and the other one is you port Historic's to whatever you're working in. Both of those are expensive and likely to go wrong. That made it difficult to keep using these as the world started shifting to become more polyglot. Another somewhat more subtle problem to borrow Ben Christensen's phrase is that after a little while we realized that people were basically building distributed monoliths. They would use the libraries in ways where the library itself sort of created a tightly coupled protocol at a high level for the application with the end result that every time you wanted to change a piece of it, every time you wanted to upgrade one piece to a different version of the library, you actually had to do all the other ones in lockstep, which turned out to be problematic and created a lovely sort of crazy dependency hell and versioning hell and things like that. So that was better than not using these things but it still wasn't ideal. That brings us up to 2013 where Airbnb introduced SmartStack as a way of trying to deal with the problems that the smart RPC libraries had. SmartStack introduced the idea of a proxy running in a sidecar. They took HA proxy as a proxy, they took ZooKeeper to deal with service discovery, Crandall bus together and ran them in a sidecar, next to the services. This had the advantage that for one thing, it was application independent, it was language independent. It worked really, really nicely in the polyglot world because instead of your service code calling a library to do something, it would just do its normal thing making an HTTP request but it would hand that request into a proxy running in a sidecar right next to the application. The proxy would go and do all the smart stuff around finding an instance that was working, finding something that wasn't already crashed and then it would hand it off. There was another proxy over with the other services handling the other end of this sort of thing. Again, much, much better than what we had before. Still not perfect, nothing is perfect. One of the problems with SmartStack in the beginning was that HA proxies kind of old. It dates back to 2006. There are a number of things that it didn't have in 2013. Observability was there but it wasn't really designed to cope with a large number of services and things like zero downtime reloads or a runtime API so you could interact with it programmatically. Those things didn't actually come along until 2017 even though people were kind of clamoring for them. Another issue was that ZooKeeper, if you've ever actually tried to run ZooKeeper then keeping up with its care and feeding is challenging. Consulinet CD actually came along partially in response to that aspect of things. So that brings us up to 2015 with InginX coming along. InginX we got to use in pretty much the same way with the sidecar idea because the sidecar concept ends up working out again pretty well in a polyglot world. InginX also had zero downtime reloads which is great. Observability, in 2017 it got a runtime API as well but one of the interesting things about InginX is that a lot of the stuff that you would really like to have is actually walled off in InginX Plus which is commercial as opposed to open source. It had the observability, it had the zero downtime reloads. It didn't have something like ZooKeeper to go and beat on but the runtime API advanced load balancing algorithms, things like that were again locked up in this commercial algorithm, this commercial product rather. That leads us to 2016 with Envoy which had a bunch of stuff that we like. Data wire's been very fond of it. Zero downtime reloads, observability all the way down to distributed tracing. It has a runtime API, it can do shadowing. It's native HTTP2 and GRPC.  All of this is stuff that we liked, stuff that we thought was good. One of the other interesting things about Envoy is this year it became a CNCF product so you also have neutral governance going for you and you also have an extremely active community building up around Envoy. You can probably guess the next slide that's coming. No really, nothing is perfect, right? There's a bunch of stuff about Envoy we really like. Aside from all the technical stuff, we really like the fact that being a CNCF project tends to keep it a little bit more neutral. We really like the fact that the ecosystem is really active and is tending towards keeping it in sort of an open source vein. We really like the fact that it's very powerful and very flexible but the cost of all of that is that it's also very complex. Kind of like the difference between assembler and higher level languages. Assembler tends to be extremely powerful, extremely flexible, very performant and just a royal pain to work with. So this is actually exacerbated by the way where as you start to look more at Envoy's programmatic API, you realize that it's really designed for a computer to interact with, not for a human and that goes double when you start dealing with things like it's advanced discovery services and all that. This makes it hard to work with Envoy as a human and the end result there is that a response of the ecosystem has been to introduce this concept of a control plane which is sort of like a safety net if you will for interacting with Envoy. The idea with the control plane is that the control plane sits in between the human and the Envoy. The control plane gets to mediate all the configuration junk both in the sense that the control plane has to worry about taking a higher level description and generating the lower level configuration from it but also in the sense that if you get Envoy's configuration wrong it will crash. And so one of the jobs, one of the very important jobs of the control plane is preventing that sort of madness and making sure that you're doing things that will allow your Envoy to actually function. Quick sampling, here are three control planes that are currently active in the Envoy ecosystem. Istio is primarily focused on service to service communications. Ambassadors primarily focused on edge communications. Those two sort of complement each other. There's also the go control plane which is actually from the Envoy people and it's really more of a control plane kit written in go. So a lot of flexibility, a lot of cool things you can do just be prepared to write a bunch of code is all. To pick on Ambassador for a minute to get a sense of kind of how this stuff works. Ambassador has a configuration that lives in Kubernetes resources. Specifically it lives in annotations on Kubernetes service objects. Whenever you change one of those then Ambassador gets notified of those configuration changes. It regenerates the Envoy configuration, feeds it to the Envoy that's running in the same pod as the Ambassador. And the thing that's kind of interesting about this is that on the one hand, since Ambassador is writing the configuration for Envoy rather than the human, we both get to make Ambassador's configuration much higher level than the Envoy configuration and we get to make sure that the Envoy configuration is actually functional. But the other thing that's nice is that Ambassador does not have to do the heavy lifting of actually routing requests and responses around. All of that happens on the Envoy that's being configured.  Most of that's a bog standard Kubernetes service. The annotation in the middle is the part that's Ambassador specific. That's saying that whenever a REST request for the resource HTTP bin comes in it should be handed off to the actual httpbin.org servers which are not running in the cluster in this particular case. This is the Envoy configuration, well no, this is a small piece of the Envoy configuration that represents the Ambassador configuration we were just showing. The thing on top is an Envoy route which describes taking a request to the HTTP bin resource and then handing it off to the thing named by cluster underscore HTTP bin underscore org underscore 80. And then the thing on the bottom is the cluster definition which tells Envoy where to actually, the actual upstream service that is going to respond to that request. The split between the two is because you can have multiple routes that are all going to the same cluster. And a lot of the logic in Ambassador deals with the fact that you would like the human who's interacting with all of this to not think very much about that. You'd like them to just say this goes here and then let something else worry about defining the clusters. One of the other things that's worth pointing out is that if you misspell the cluster name and the route, then things won't work. If you miss any of the syntax, then Envoy will crash. So it's a little tricky sometimes. So all of that kind of wraps up with a couple of things that are interesting I think to call some attention to. One of them is that although those smart RPC libraries like Phinical and Histrix over there on the left have not gone away, old software never dies. It just gradually loses its user base over time. Since SmartStack showed up in 2013, it's been a pretty dramatic shift over towards the proxy inside card idea. The world has been becoming more polyglot and having tools that can work with that seems to have really resonated with a bunch of people. Another thing that's interesting is remember that HAProxy's original release would be way off the left side of this graph in 2006. Ingenix's initial release is actually a little bit to the left of Envoy. What we're showing here with Ingenix and HAProxy in 2017 is that after Envoy showed up, both Ingenix and HAProxy have started to undergo a pretty significant amount of development seemingly getting pushed by some of the stuff that's shown up in Envoy, which is kind of interesting. And in fact, as an example of some of the changes that have shown up there, one of the last things on this graph at the far right, SmartStack has actually switched to Envoy at this point. It's still out there, but it's no longer HAProxy. So wrapping it all up, as the world is moving more towards microservices, this whole concept of your communication happens over layer seven protocols that are well understood and well standardized seems to be very important. And being able to manage those layer seven communications is definitely important in that world. We're seeing multiple different proxies showing up evolving to give you tools for managing these things. They are of course evolving in different ways and at different paces. And we at DataWire tends to like Envoy a lot given the neutral governments, given its ecosystem. But we think it's very important to point out that most people are not using Envoy directly. Most people are using control planes to make their lives easier, which we also think is a good thing. And I believe that that is it. Any questions? Thank you. Can you please say a few words about performance differences if there are any between the three top proxies you mentioned? Mostly what I can say is that, okay, so probably the simplest answer to that question is that all of the proxies take performance very seriously. If you have a proxy that constantly slows down everything you're doing, then it's not terribly useful. People tend not to use it very much. Envoy is the one that I know the most about the internals of. And Envoy has put a ridiculous amount of effort into performance to the extent that every time I look at it, then it just constantly trips my alarm bells for premature optimizations. And I have to remind myself that they're not premature. They actually tested it and profiled it and then made the optimization. So Envoy is extremely fast. I don't really want to talk much about HA proxy or Ingenix in that respect, other than to say that the stuff that I've heard about with those two mostly has to do with the HA proxy, not really liking lots and lots of services rather than either of them introducing a lot of performance delay on individual requests. Does that make sense? As a minor question, are the Ingenix new developments just going into the commercial version or some of those in the open source? I think some of it is going into the open source but I think it's mostly going into the commercial version. So would it be fair to say that Ambassador is basically an Ingress controller for Envoy or is it not completely compatible with the definition of Ingress controller? Are you talking about Ingress as a Kubernetes resource or are you talking about, okay. Could I slot it in basically as a replacement for the Ingenix Ingress? Yeah, so functionally, yes. It is not a Kubernetes Ingress controller because when we started working on Ambassador and full disclosure, Ambassador is a data wire project. I work on it a lot. As we started working on it, we realized that the Kubernetes Ingress definition simply was not expressive enough for the sorts of things we wanted Ambassador to do. So it is used instead of an Ingress controller to do similar things but it is not actually a Kubernetes Ingress controller. Got it, thanks. Hi. So you just hinted about some premature optimizations. Can you talk about some of those? Let me first explain my bias there. I've been doing software for a long time and when I first started off doing software, I was writing in C, Envoy's written in C++. Those of us who have worked for a long time in C, particularly those of us who have worked for a long time in C on underpowered systems a long time ago where optimization was a thing. Usually got our fingers burned a lot by people trying to optimize before they understood what was an effective optimization and the end result of that sort of code is that you end up with code that's much, much more complex than it needs to be for arguably not much gain. There is code in Envoy that is surprisingly complex and is surprisingly complex in ways where when I first saw it, I looked at it and went, oh my God, they optimized prematurely, this is awful. And then I did a little bit more research and found that no, actually, they had written it the simple way first and then they measured its performance and then they found out that that bit of code actually was slow enough to matter so they went through and optimized it at that point. But it's so rare to find a product where the optimization has actually been driven by metrics that my knee-jerk reaction is still that feeling of premature optimization and it makes me nervous. I was wondering if you could expand on Ambassador versus Istio, both in what they do today and whether their goals are different? So again, full disclosure, I work on Ambassador so I'm biased. Istio's design, and I have talked to the Istio people but I am not one of them, so again, biased, right? Istio is designed primarily to tackle the problem of services talking to other services, the so-called East-West direction. So Istio worries a lot about things like MTLS and policy enforcement around security and a lot of things like that, which Ambassador kind of doesn't worry about right now. Ambassador is, the way we've sometimes described it is that Ambassador is meant to be an envoy for generalists. It's a way to put an envoy at the edge of your product so that you can make your services accessible without having to go off and learn to be a domain expert in envoy. So at present, Ambassador is almost entirely focused on the North-South direction dealing with requests coming into your microservices application and responses going back. Istio has of course been sort of moving in the direction of handling North-South as well. To me, that's still pretty young in their product. Ambassador has not so far really begun moving in the direction of doing much in the East-West direction. It's very much on our radar, but we're still at the point of looking over and trying to decide, how do we wanna cope with this? One of the challenges that Ambassador has always had is that if you take something that's very complex and powerful and try to present a higher level simpler way of dealing with it, then there's a real challenge in figuring out how to allow your simpler configuration language to not constrain people who wanna do complex things. And so we have to think a lot about how to do new concepts in Ambassador in such a way that they work and they give you a lot of room to do what you need to do, but they still fit in with the rest of Ambassador's model. And I guess we are done. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Flynn.


Have you ever heard of animal communication? It's a method of using intuition and energy healing to connect with your pets. And there are certain mentors and experts that are great at this. And today I get to interview one of them.  Rachel Embry is an intuitive spiritual mentor, intuitive animal communicator, energy healer and astrologer. She offers a unique down-to-earth approach to connecting with animals, spirituality and energy healing. Her business is called Radiant Vibes and the business offers you an opportunity to bring optimal connection and deep bonding for your animals and for you as well. She works with human beings. She's really started working with animals of different kinds and then the owners of the animals wanted to work with her directly too. Rachel believes that when both people and animals achieve alignment from within, they can radiate outward to all with confidence, unconditional love and vibrancy. Welcome Rachel to this interview. Hi George, thanks for having me, it's good to be here. So I'd love for you to start with just describing what you think animal communication is for those, there are lots of us who have heard of it, but that's about it, we've heard of it. Yeah. So what is it from your point of view? And I know you don't just communicate with the animals, but you also provide some healing elements. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So to me it's a little different than what you might typically hear or read online or on the internet, but what I've learned is that all of my life I've had this innate ability to really connect with animals and be able to get them to do things that they wouldn't normally do or where there is resistance or if they're being difficult or challenging about things, then I've been able to somehow hone that in and it's easy for them. And then I realized over time that this was not just something that everybody could do, it was actually a unique gift that I possess. So and after working with my own animal communicator for many years, she helped me really hone this gift in and be able to finally tune it, you know, so that I could put it in a way that was tangible that I understood. So in that I have found that for me it's not so much like dialogue, it's not this back and forth. Sometimes it is, sometimes I can hear words very easily from the animals. Mostly those are animals that don't have as many issues, traumas, stresses, but it's really a way that I connect with them and I can empathically and intuitively sense what they're feeling, they're thinking and kind of know where the blacks are. They're often very misunderstood. We as people think we're doing the right things or that we're asking the right ways of what our animals need, but they're much more instinctual and so we complicate it. And in the animal mind it's actually really simple. So sometimes it can come over in the form of images and when animals have experienced a lot of traumas or when they're in high states of stress that is to me the most effective way because I can use the images and they understand that. So yeah.  Oh, I would actually love for you to share what kinds of animals you've been working with.  Help me out here. They compete in dog shows and they compete in national dog shows and very successful. And so when I wanted to bring that in because sometimes people think, well, I don't know how do you know it's really working and how do you know it's right. But it's like, wow, okay, even national dog show champions are coming to you and they keep coming back to you because somehow what you do is helping them compete better. And that's, I think it's fascinating. Yeah. Talk about that. Like how did you, yeah, I mean, anything you want to say about that? Sure. Well, I myself compete in agility and obedience and I've finished several champions in the dog showing world. So I do have a good understanding of that. I've also ridden horses competitively and I've been around horses all my life. So I work with all different animals. There's no limit. I've worked with birds, I've lizards, chickens, turkeys, you know, you name it. They've come to me and it's all the same, you know, there's no difference in the way that they communicate. But what you're speaking of is there's, I work with a lot of animals that compete regularly with their people and or they're out on the road in dog shows. And some of those are the ones that are televised on TV, which is kind of interesting and neat for me because I see them on the television, but it can be a stressful road sometimes for both the human and the animal understanding what each other needs. And it can be a lot of pressure on the animal when it's not understood by them what is expected of them and that this is a job and it's a partnership and we're trying to come together and form a team. So that's really what I do with that. And a lot of these people and their animals work with me anywhere from like weekly to once a month and they do a lot of energy clearing on these animals because they need their meridians, their chakras, everything to be really balanced. And what happens is when the stress gets high, it gets stuck in the body and it can come out and stress, overwhelm, physical issues. So whatever comes up, they contact me and I work with it directly. Wow. And so for those of us who don't have, you know, competitive animals, and by the way, maybe a few people watching this do have some, you know, that situation and that they love to hear this. But just for those of us with everyday pets, I guess, how do we, yeah, what would we work with you on? Sure. I honestly love working with all animals. It doesn't end people of the like. But I have a lot of people that come to me when their animals aren't feeling well. I've worked with a lot of dogs that are undergoing chemotherapy because cancer is basically, you know, it's on the rise, not just with people, but animals too. So I have a large number, unfortunately, of animals that are undergoing chemotherapy or their prognosis is really poor. They've given maybe a couple months and I'm weak with them on energy clearing and I will work to basically alleviate or eliminate whatever physical symptoms that they're experiencing at that time. And through that process, I've actually been able to get animals to go well beyond their prognosis timeline, also really help alleviate the effects of chemotherapy on the body so that the body can actually receive it in a proper immune response way. And the other, I mean, there's just so much, like that's one thing with the health, but there's also a lot of animals that are experiencing anxiety. I get that all the time. My dog is biting now, my dog is this or my horse is is is acting weird every time I get on on him, you know, when it so there's those things are true like science to me that there's anxiety and a disconnect happening. And so I connect with the animal to figure out, OK, well, why are you biting or why are you constantly itching or why are you going at the other dog in the house or, you know, why are you throwing me off your back every time I get on there and relay the messages to the person so that they understand why. And then what is unique for me is that I always always use energy clearing because it clears the pathway so that the animal can then receive messages in a way that it understands. And also the person can understand where the animals coming from. And then I can provide tips and techniques from my back, like my knowledge of how to work with each of these different facets of of, you know, that the animals display like the negative patterns, basically, that are being displayed and give the the person, you know, techniques to work with that. So yeah, so I find initially when there's really traumatic situations or aggression or any type of health stress or situation that it's best to do the work weekly for at least a month. And then after that, we can reassess, you know, but usually there's a lot of release that happens within that first two sessions. And then we can typically go to twice a month. And then ultimately, the goal is just to do a check in, you know, every other month. So, you know, that's great. And just to be clear with people, you don't have to be there in person to work with. Yeah. Yes, that's a good point. I am, in fact, never present with an animal when I work with them. I find that and or and people, I might be on the phone with people and I might be like in that way. But I'm never connected physically with them in their physical presence because I found that there's too much happening in that exchange. It's really hard for me. My work is done primarily from connecting from the higher self, from the spirit or the soul of the animal or the person that I'm working with. So that's where I can see, like, OK, who this animal really is outside of the stress that it's displaying and experiencing or the health issues or whatever is happening. And so if I'm in present presently with them, it muddies, like, kind of like makes everything muddy, you know? So this way I can keep those energetic boundaries clear and keep the connection with the higher self. So talk to us a bit about what you what you mean by that higher self. And I know you also talk about universal life energies and even spirit guides. Yeah. What is your understanding of of these things and how it works with animals? Yeah. Yeah. So we each have all of us. Any living being here has a higher self aspect of us. I mean, you can hear it called the spirit. A lot of the times I feel like it's a little separate from the soul because the soul is sort of never it's always out there in the astral plane, sort of for lack of better words. But and then the higher self is just like the self that we are really born here to evolve into when we come into this earth. So, you know, of course, there's different things that we are born into. Environmental stress, there's environments, parents, you know, how we're raised and same with animals, what environments they were put into, whether it's like a puppy mill situation or, you know, as sometimes breeders have puppies till they're five months and they've never even seen the light of the day outside. You know, so all of these things can affect, you know, who we are in our physical self, you know, but that's what the connecting with the higher self, which is really in that that's sort of like what's really unique is that I can see that I can see that version of every person or every animal that I'm with. So it's like, OK, here's where I can see that you want to be spiritually and in this physical body on this earth. And then bring an alignment to that. That's great. And so you work with people as well. So talk about that. I mean, a lot of times people start with working with their animals and they realize, wow, it's helping. How can you help me as well? What kinds of issues have you been working with people on? Yeah, well, I mean, or human people. Yeah, it's just like with the animals. It's just whatever comes up, you know, I had a lot of resistance to working with people because I felt and I really got animals, you know, I've just lived and breathed the connection with animals all my life. But I honestly started when I learned energy clearing back in my 20s, I started working with people in persons. So very like three, like one D, you know, in person. So that's really how I learned and I've always been good with people, but I wasn't sure how to incorporate this knowledge into something that felt really good for me. And I started out trying to be like the traditional coach thing and doing all that, but it just wasn't working for me. So I found that the best way for me and and the people that were coming to me was to combine the intuition that I have into guidance and mentoring, connecting with spirit guides because it's extremely important in my life and it's helped me so much, you know.  So it's kind of a mouthful, but it just flows and it works and it seems to be really, I mean, anything from physical, deep physical pains like headaches, sciatica, people that have chronic, I mean, they're having compression, you can't obviously get rid of that compression, but the pain that's stored in the body around that from the emotional holdings is where I can come into play so I can help alleviate the pain, make it less, sometimes make it go away altogether, which is really the goal. There's also a lot of overwhelm that people experience and there's a lot of gripping, a lot of trying to control our day-to-day lives and often people, we just don't realize that we're doing that and so we're not in flow and alignment with the day because we're just gripping, grasping, trying to control to keep our fears and our ego in mind, you know, and it makes us feel safe, but working to release holdings around those energies and it seems to really help. And I'm sorry, my dogs are howling in the background. I hope you can't hear that. Can't, yeah, it's not coming through. I hope they're okay. They're fine, I think, because Siren's going by. Oh, okay, okay. So when you work with people, so you're working with their spiritual life, their emotional life at a distance and that affects their physical. Yeah. Of course. So hopefully that connection, I mean, I think a lot of us understand or at least believe in that connection. One thing I want to bring in here is your astrology. You mentioned intuitive astrology. You've been studying astrology for a while. Yeah, I've been studying about 10. 10 years, yeah. Yeah, since I was 10. Oh, since you were 10, okay. Yeah, since I was just a little pike. That's great. And so tell us about that journey. Yeah, your journey of learning astrology and then what do you mean by intuitive astrology? Yeah, sure. Well, for me, astrology was just, it was innate. It's just something that I, as soon as I saw it, read my first book, I read it from cover to cover and probably a week at even that age and it just stuck, it really stuck. And I feel that that was the gateway for me to really getting into all these other aspects of healing, crystal, I mean, chakras, meridians in the body, connecting with guides, spirit guides, power animals, all of that. So I feel like it was a really big gateway for that. But I love it in particular because it gives a lot of insight to how we process and deal with our emotions as individuals. It explains polarities in our energies that we're experiencing on a day-to-day in our dialogue that's happening. It also can explain maybe why people are really opinionated and how to work with that energy or why people, one person might say, everybody takes me the wrong way and it's like, I can look at that and say, well, you have this dynamic and that dynamic and then we can work with it together to figure out what's the best way of working with that energy. So I feel that astrology gives us a really good baseline for all of our best attributes that are here for our purpose to help us bring alignment to that, how to cope and handle our inner emotions, what we need to be emotionally fed as individuals, as well as learning to work with the sort of shadow side of ourselves that, you know, they're here, there are teachers, not our enemies, so. That's great, wonderful. And the astrology you work with is Western astrology, yeah? Yes, yes. That's great, yeah, cool, cool. I know there's different systems of astrology. And so the intuitive part that you bring to astrology, I think is really important because it's not just about reading the charts or whatever, but say a bit more about that. Yeah, so I mean, obviously I have a really strong baseline in astrology, but the intuitive part is somehow I can look at a chart and get a really good feeling of the map of a person, you know, of their emotional, spiritual, their aspirations. And so what I do is I take all of that and I combine it with my intuition and the spiritual guidance that I hear around that and can relay more messages.   That's great. That's really, I think that's really special because otherwise, yeah, like you said, software programs exist or websites exist that we could just read it and then oftentimes it doesn't connect with us or sometimes, you know, we don't get it. So are you moving more into working with people or are you kind of splitting your time between working with animals and people? Yeah, I am. I love working with people. I love working with animals. They both have, you know, to me really rewarding aspects in each. I try really hard to split my time between both because I feel that, you know, as a whole, you know, I'm being called to really work with all beings, you know, all animals and people to bring more interconnectivity and to help people really understand how misunderstood animals are, but to also help people understand how misunderstood they are, how they're misunderstanding themselves and, you know, just to bring more of a connection, you know, in that sense, so. That's great. So if people wanted to connect with you and work with you, what do you recommend? What's the next step? Well, I have my website, which I think you have posted here. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram, but, you know, really I just, I always tell people, I offer complimentary Q&As for anybody that wants more information. I love connecting with people, answering their questions. And even if it goes nowhere, just the simple fact that of maybe putting that light bulb that there is another way of healing out there, another way of connecting with animals. And even if it's not me, it's got that light bulb going and they might find somebody else that they feel works with them. But I always tell people, have a one-on-one, you know, see where it goes. My energy clearings with people are done all email reports because I'm in a deep state of meditation and that they're quite lengthy and long. And so that's one way. And then I do one-on-one with the spiritual mentoring, but before anybody commits to working with me in a lengthy amount of time, I always say, do that initial session, see if it works, you know, same with the animals and see if the animal's responding. If they're responding, then keep going. Wonderful. So yeah, be sure to those watching if you're interested, the links are in the notes of the video, the website, the Facebook page, Instagram, et cetera. And Rachelle, thank you so much for doing your work. Any other words of encouragement or advice as we finish the call? Yeah, I don't know. I just say, you know, if you're feeling compelled to make a change within yourself or, you know, if you're sensing that something's just not quite right with your animal, get in touch with somebody that can help you because nobody's at a loss and we're at a time right now that there are so many healers and energy workers and light workers out there that are ready and want to help, you know? So just, it doesn't mean any type of failure or that you're not good enough.  Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you, Rachelle. And yeah, I hope folks will reach out to you if they feel connected to this and thanks for your work. Yeah, thank you, George. Yeah.


It sounds a little bit like poetry, also. They say, is it an art, a science, or a bunch of, you know, immense energy that we have on the screen, and what does that mean? That's the topic. But we'll just extend it to another level, a little bit more on the issue, about a new sector on the basis of the channel. They create the impression what we have of bigger icons, all they have here, because what we see, we'll get an industrial view, so as to say. So let me first take your brief and ask you that first question. Is new art starting new over there? Is new actually art, new things are new, science, or just a bunch of energy that you need to go there and show and read out? How do you define it in your way, if you have to tell me? Because there can be different opinions on this. And before I come to my opinion, which has been anchored in the world, in my opinion, the science in this regard is that the anchor is so visible, because if the television is running at home and the husband is watching the event, the visible level of the anchor is that the wife, the kitchen, the kitchen floor, is so heavily filled that you can't even see. Or even the husband, the kitchen floor, is not heard. So science is from that point. Art is from the point that nowadays where is this weight needed for any sort of project, and where does it move? It's on the anchor. The same thing can be seen here and there, in that sense. So these are the things that are present in today's anchoring. But if you have a bigger talk than me, then according to me, anchoring is not done from T to C. The content should be there. Because when the viewers are watching, they don't have the content to tell you. If you are playing, they don't like it, they don't know it. But after a while, they will come and listen to you. If there is content, they will tell you. But if you don't have the content, if you don't have the content, then you don't have the content to tell you. Sometimes you will say, I have asked you this question. Have you ever asked this question? If you don't have the content, then you don't have the content to tell you. That's why it is very important. And these are the most important things in the anchoring. They are connected. There is a connection between the viewers and the anchors. We don't have the content to tell you. But our content, if it is connected, then it doesn't matter. The viewers, if you are watching the world from your perspective, if you don't have the content, then you know that you can't have content like this. It's about social media. So these three things are very important. Please see this in the picture. That the length, the length and the content are connected to the anchoring. Please read through the screen. I will say one thing. Anchoring is either art or science. But definitely not too much energy. You can trade what you are saying like the hyperactive anchors jumping in the chairs, shouting and screaming and I just say, you know, it's not a question of principle. It's not about how small the anchors are. Unfortunately, that's what is now important. I would also say that I very prefer the age of the faceless anchors. Because we are not the news. We are just someone who is the media for you to get to the news. I would invite the experts. Let's listen to what they say about the anchors. That's not news. That's just the drama. That's a joke. People like it. We like it. We like wrestling. So this is verbal wrestling. So watch that. Don't prevent news and entertainment. So I hope you listen to the kind of news that is fascinating today. Secondly, we are the most victim of a person's house.  Don't betray that trust. And also don't drag that over you. I would say that. Subjects are also one of the most off-site also. What is the subject? One, two, three, four. That's what we see today. I'm sorry, what is it that you were going to do? You were that big. You were that big. You're that big. You're that big. I'm sorry. I'll take a few more. There are three different scenes. I think the scenes that we're going to watch today are a series of different scenes and a different campaign. I think we should think So you are thinking about it. Because you are also thinking about it, which we are doing with our thoughts. And more than that, I think it is very complicated. As Bia said, you are thinking about a 30-minute show, where you have 12 people. And the actor in it, has a 5-minute long question. That 5-minute long question. She is the right thing to do. She has invited people to know about her opinion. I have invited them to do an insight into her work. These days, they are 5-6 people.  What kind of a person is she? I have invited her to do some research. I have invited her to do some facts. She is the opinion. She is also the opinion. In my work, I have to listen to both of their opinions. Where I feel that I should do a fact check, I will do a fact check. Where I feel that there is a point, that I am not doing my opinion. I have to discuss it with her. She has invited people to know about her. She has invited people to know about her. She has invited people to answer her. She has invited people to give her 5 seconds. I feel that too much energy, I feel that she is doing it professionally. She is doing it negatively. She is doing it positively. You have given us 8 out of 5. I liked it very much. I felt that we are going to do an idea. I had thought that it would be good to give you our idea in the topic of life. We have given 8 out of 5. But 8 is something that I feel that you can say in the next life that 8 is the idea in journalism. But every person doing journalism cannot become an actor. This means that there is a skill in becoming an actor. And every actor has to be an actor. So the idea is that there is a particular art. I feel that it is not that much. There is no scientific knowledge. There is no rocket science. There is no science. It is just being what you see. What you record. Be neutral. Listen to both of them. My opinion is possible. But when I sit on the chair as an actor, then my opinion will be on me. I was thinking that you have conscious of the world. How many seconds do you have? I am not sure. How do you see this? This is the big, big art science issue. What is there to tell you about that? As you said, there is no science. Somewhere, what do you think? Interesting. I first want to know what we do think about this question. This is a lot I have to say. PPM is in art, science or beauty. What do you think about this? I see the high energy levels that are there. Honestly, I want to know what makes it big. They actually rely on it. But honestly, I want to understand where does that stand on? That polarize your energy, that high core energy. Where does that stand on? Is there an act? Is there a skill that is as much needed to live your life? Just bring it up. I am running out of it. So there are two part of the question. Basically, one, what exactly is this? Is it not science or beauty? But the second part is as to why you see what you see now and how it has not been lost. That is exactly the answer. So I will answer these two questions. I was doing some homework before I came to this place. How do you find art in television? It is basically art of being the voice of the people. I mean, it is an art that you become the voice because you don't have the opportunity to be a medium from point A to point B. And you have to be the voice. TV is often called the voice of the audience, but that is the anger of the audience. People very easily relate to anchors who ask right questions. And what are the right questions? They are very simple basic questions they want to ask. So I guess art is basically it's love. You have to be voice of the people. Very nice to science. Science is the form of knowing what can sell and what can get in the PR. Wherever or wherever you are, somewhere. And when it comes to energy, then I'm sure that most of the people here would appreciate the non-bias behavior and non-bias sense of use in the world in the days of New Testament. But I'm sure they appreciate the energy which the anchors now have.  It's on this analova.com and there was a robot who used to read news, right? It's no more over there. Because the moment an angel is there you want to feel that connect. You want to see that passion. Now I'll see your question. Which is why you asked all that. I guess when it comes to shouting or being the foundation of being used around us what we all need to understand is just raise your hand if I ask you one question. Do you see the crowd? Please hold your hand. Please. One more time please. Why do you become reckless? Do you see the crowd? And what? Don't you see everyone? Okay fine. But how many of you carry bad things from that fight? How many of you carry bad things from that fight? Maybe you should not fight. That's what you think, right? I'm talking about the public fight. You stop and cease, right? So what we do on television is a public fight. Isn't it or not? What we need to understand is how many of our viewers have something to understand. Higher than you think. So what we need to understand in absolute consciousness is whatever we are talking on screen how many of our viewers are carrying bad something, bad things. Now that's a big question when we when we are there at night and we need to ask. This is exactly what is happening on social media. It's like you need to understand that you want to give it back to your viewers because what the rule of an animal is is not just being an animal.  Trust me.  That's all I've done. So, when did this anchor, who was like, I'll let you take this name, Governor Nandu, when he spoke spoke and Saptu took his time to express his views, he became the like a WQF fighter, right? When did this change begin? Was it also a reflection of what the viewer was to say, was it this huge business model that makes this, what you are saying, anchor community? When did that shift happen? If you do, that's fine. Hi, energy world, I'm just talking about coffee world. Actually, we were, everyone asked how many people stop and see a fight. We do pay the loan and see it, we may not pay anything back for it, but we do stop and see it and that's what we are paying. So, that is what was working, the fact that my energy, the fighting, the fact that it compares a verbal jousting that is not self-unfortunately, so it's not just the anchors, it's also the priorities that come with the words. But I think now, maybe I'll speak, because it was only one channel, two channel, and many more that are saying the way to express your challenge, real world. Now, what is happening is, every channel wants to give an offer of a thing and you try to create the high level jousting and have, you know, people in windows who live from verbal dioxide, people have got fed up of that, which is what I am saying more and more now. People are saying, where is the conversation? Let's bring conversation back to the table. Let's get them back on the table. So, maybe, there was a cycle, I was there, they called on that team. Now, I am hoping and I am seeing the change also, that people are coming back to their conversations of the kind of police. Well, Sushant, is there a pressure of performance on anchors a big day that we have to leave the journalist part of the site? It's a dual perspective.  Is that the good crash that we are in a moment of time for all the time? It's because the pressure on the channel is not on the anchors, it's because you have to keep it on both sides. But from what I am aware of, there is a graph that I have worked with Dr. Boyd. So, from there, Sushant was there, he was there, he was there, he was there, he was there, he was there. And I am telling you, many of the people in the audience were like this, but the rest of the audience were like this. But the editors forget and tell you that there was a very strange debate going on. They were like, how did it happen? It was just a joke. Now, there is no way of giving a joke. There is no way of giving a joke. We are sitting there, and the people in the audience who are in the audience and the people in the audience who are in the audience are getting connected. Sometimes the audience will think that this is the same question I want to ask. And that can be asked again, the question you are asking me, you want me to ask you the same question, how did it happen? Tell me, how did it happen? So, they have their own thoughts, and they have their own thoughts. That it was a little more fun. Now, along with our performance, we have to decide this time whether you are in the audience and say that you are going to the right place. Or you come into the audience and say that you can't do this much. You can't do this much. I want to ask you this question, I want to ask you this question. So, that is a challenge.  So, along with the performance, this is more interesting. What are your thoughts? Do you think there is a meaning between the film and the audience? Do you think there is a meaning between the film and the audience? So what does that mean? When you see the pressure of the performance do you think there's a little bit of a hole in the head or not? If you think that there is a sense of This is a deliberate attempt, which is a sensation in my eyes and here in all of them, what you call, a journalist, you know. Is there a, without any pressure, existence of these actions? Have you, have you heard about that? I have heard about it. Now I am going to try to do it. Because every day, I think, I am going to try to do it myself. I have never seen a competition like this. My style, the style of Rishabh, is the style of Rishabh, which you have seen. I try to do it in a way that I speak to you. My real attempt is to do it myself. I do it like this. I do it like this. I think I am going to try to do it with you. I am going to do the same tactic. Today, most of the time, I see people, women, girls, boys, girls, all of them are acting.  I think there is a lot of activity in this. That is why people are not connecting with people. Second thing is to try not to make yourself more afraid of your channel. I know that when I made a report that I called you. We called you but you didn't. You called us, it was us. I didn't know whether it was in this or that. I don't know whether it's in this or that, A lady, the lady, who is wearing a ring, Life is like a career. What I try to do is to connect more with the news. What I try to do is to disconnect others from me. I don't want to be treated like that. If you are doing ground reporting, then you should be under her guidance. I am saying, if someone is doing a very good job today, then I feel that as soon as a mother becomes a very small example, then you should be somewhere, okay? You should be somewhere. And that is the only thing that matters. No one should do anything about it. If I have someone who is following me, what can I do? Today, I don't know who is doing so well. I have reached such a high level of guidance. How can I send it? Where can I send it? She is teaching me how to do it. She is teaching me how to do it. I don't know anything. That is the most difficult question I get. If I don't have a reporter, I don't have good information. I don't know what to do. But if I have done ground reporting at that time, then I have to know that the first thing that I can do from my point of view is to do your work. I can never do that. When I don't know what to do, when I don't know what to do, I can't do anything. If I am an actor, if I become an actor, if I don't have a journalist, then I will try to do that. Because the first thing that comes to mind is that if a reporter is this late, then I can control him. So, you know, you have to have that knowledge. You have to have that experience. If you have the right question, and if you have the right question, then you have to work with the right people. I don't know what to do. If I become an actor, I can read them. I don't know what to do. If you don't know, then try to have that knowledge. That's what I am trying to do. You have to have that knowledge. You have to have that knowledge. You have to have that knowledge. You have to have that knowledge. So, do people actually watch news if they can suffer? If there is more information, less performance? Do people actually watch it? Oh, we are stuck in that branch. So, I mean, I don't think we will classify the time values of a huge channel. We don't mean the ratings we are getting and what is their interest. I'm going to think the right way. I'll just come back to it myself. So, in that way, at this time, debate is important. And maybe at this time, of asking for something else for itself. And if you put, because again, it's like the ratings. So, if a news we suffer, any news, well, news is all about acting. That's what I am trying to do. This has been old school news. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. It's very lively about you. So, so any way you walk into any news and you walk into any conflict, you try to address it. News is full of adrenaline. It has to happen. You remember that you will go through the fish and it only talks about how you can make up what plays as a fish market. It is a very interactive, very one on one kind of thing. So it has to have energy But whether it will say or not, you might not, if you're talking about ankles, the ankles starting to move, it will start to move and it will start to move. I somehow feel, and very much so. Yes, there are points where you have to raise your voice to ask someone, which is what I'm going to examine. But I'm going to examine it for you. Tomorrow evening, I'm going to examine it for you. This is a question from Mr. Jamun. Mr. Jamun, please give me a question. This is a question from Mr. Jamun. Mr. Jamun is very keen to shout out. And he is very famous for that. So he is going to answer it tomorrow. Now, let's sit in Pakistan for a while. It's like a trap. The moment you shout, then shout back. But the moment you ask questions, you have no answer. So if you're ready to do your fights, say, for instance, you don't know what to do. You don't know what to do. And you know your fights. If you assume this as a doubt about Pakistan, then Pakistan answers all the questions. He'll run for Congress. Which actually, that guest was going to. But he is a journalist after all. He is very famous for shouting out. So he didn't know what to do. And he was very happy that Pakistan's guest was a Pakistan's reporter and very beautiful. They gave him a lot of information. About the show. I am a bit over the moon. I have never seen a person like him. And my words were directly pointing towards my own journalist, Mr. Pakistan. Because I am not allowed to use any of the witnesses I am talking to. This is what I am talking about. Maybe he didn't say anything wrong.  Then I said, it's enough.   So in the social media, I don't even want that. But when you look at Pakistan, they have a very good partner. They are still on the moon. And if you look at them, you start laughing at them. They are not saying anything. They are laughing at them. It's like, my journalist is right. Indian forces are so right. He is made to make what he has done, is to make a speech. I don't know what to say. I was wrong about it. I was talking to him. I don't know if it was a debate about Pakistan or something. I don't know. I don't know. I was talking to him. I didn't know. I had to tell him, I didn't want to talk to him. I said, you are talking about war, war, war, and this kind of war is the final look. And no longer we are in the conventional war type of situation with any country whatsoever, whatever part of the world. Unless it is America or somebody is like as now calling us in our country. So when it is the end of the world, then I can tell you as a son, I am just asking you a question. I am not an advocate of Pakistan, I am asking you a basic question. And we are not just talking about that. So your question can be used, it can be done, it can be not. It can be done. But, use may be passion to a certain extent. A little elaborate is a little bit. Passion is important, happiness is important. So I will, this is my, this is my final round of applause. This is my final question and I like to use it as a second round of applause. Just a second round. Do you see, when you see news anchoring going in the next few to three years, there is digital news, reading is coming back, you know, we have got a lot of saturation, same, same, you know, every news channel that a crime guy looks to the world, 20 people in the world. I mean, when you see this world in the next few, quickly, then it's as it is. I don't know where it is going in the next ten years, I don't know, I don't know whether my answer is true because it is the people who debate, or something like that. How is this going, and where it is going, I will be back when the thoughts are gone. I will be a little more subtle and I will be more gentle. Social media can impact me. Okay. So we just had one actually. But I'm hoping that it is coming back and I will say back to basics, back to the way it comes into conversation. Yes. The question of your answer is very small.  The decline of brain impact. Box moves can be a very good idea. In 30 years it will be 6 or 12. In 12 years it will be very good. Exactly know what I'm talking about. Thank you. Thank you so much. I will be back in just over one more time. Thank you so much. Thank you once again. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.


For this What's Neat This Week, it's December 2015. We're going now into our fourth year of doing this show and we've got lots of good material coming up in the future. This month, we've got a segment on 3D printing where we explore and look at the new Dremel 3D printer and we experiment a little bit with that. And then later on in the show, we discuss layout construction. We do part two of a series that we started last month where we're gonna explore soldering, track laying, scenery, and everything else to finish off a really cool warf scene that I'm working on on my layout. But first, Joe Fugate asked that I do a story that correlates with this December's cover for Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine. And that's just a little bit of story about the photography and the photos and my career in the model railroad industry in the last 35 years. We're gonna talk about some of the photos that I've had published in the Model Press and this is gonna correlate with the introduction of two new calendars that are gonna come out that Joe is introducing. I sent him 60-something photographs and he picked 24 photographs and we've got a nice narrow gauge calendar coming out and a standard gauge calendar coming out, all model photography. Now, I was born in a home with a father that was a model railroader. I found some of the photos of his old layout in a shoebox, photos from the late 60s. He was an old school modeler and I watched him build bridges and wire screen hardshell scenery and plaster and the like. But during that time in the late 60s and early 70s, I was exposed to railfanning and I absorbed a lot of information from watching the prototype. Fast forward to 1975 and I found myself adopted by my grandparents and as a homecoming gift, I received a Tyco train set. I quickly grew from my four by eight layout to an around the room layout, using scrap wood or anything that I could just get my hands on that was in the garage to work on models. Later on, about 1981, I built this layout that was just wrapping around the whole basement. I had gotten a jigsaw and I took that saw and started cutting up plywood and you should have seen my grandfather's face when I wanted to load all this wood on top of his Ford LTD. About this time, I became interested in photography and I started using my grandfather's Pentax and me in shooting layout photos indoor on my layout, different scenarios. I used nighttime photography, I experimented with that a little bit and I also tried taking old Arizona magazines and using them for backgrounds to create some photographs. I also tried taking simple cotton and my blue jacket and putting that as a background for a sky. You know, it was about this time that I ran into the 1979 Walthers catalog photograph that Vic Roseman had done and this taught me something really, really instilled into me was depth of field and outdoors. Do your photos outdoors. So it was about this time that I started doing outdoor photography. I actually took apart parts of my layout and I also built dioramas and I knew that outdoor sunlight was the way to go. It didn't work out that great but also about this time I got in my car and I got a job at a hardware store and it wasn't just the fact that I was at a hardware store, it was a fact that I could now order my own homosote, my own lumber, my own woodwork and now we're off to the races to finish the basement and start working on a layout that really would run well and incubate and kind of teach me the skills of model railroading to improve my talents. I did finally score a realistic model railroad photo around 1986 of this creek scene with a guy fly fishing in the middle of a resin creek. I entered this in my local NMRA photo contest. A year later I moved out of my childhood home and found myself living in a small house in Webster Groves with college students as tenants. My home layout was now a six foot long shelf diorama with hand laid track, scratch built wood buildings that I would eventually photograph outdoors. I tried a few different shots here and there in a field just to see how the buildings and everything would look together. It was also at this time that I met the girl of my dreams, Michelle who was very supportive of the hobby and even participated a little bit and helped me with projects. Living on my own now, I started my own real estate company and found myself in the streets every day flipping foreclosures just to support my hobby. It was also at this time I started the Midwest Valley modelers layout, a modular club in St. Louis. This was a stackable layout with modules six feet by 28 inches wide and for the first time I used foam as scenery along with one by fours. The layout was 36 feet long with 12 modules making for a circle 51 and a half inches from the floor with head lighting all the way around, track lights which lit the scenery and added color to everything. This layout also became a platform for shooting photos outdoors in real sunlight. I found myself in the middle of cornfields many days out of each month photographing unweathered brass models on the layout like this shot of a Rock Island steam locomotive running up the main line with cotton as smoke or this SP consist running through the interchange module or this Amtrak California Zephyr running across the creek module. The yard shot was a great place to shoot colorful locomotives and rolling stock all in groups. The engine service facility made for some great shots like this NNS photograph of one of Jim Napoli's models. This canary Missouri Pacific locomotive is getting fuel at the fuel and service facility on the layout. Realistic scenery made the stage for this stunning Rock Island photo with hikers in the bush or this sunset brass Santa Fe consolidation pulling a freight through acres of fake fur with a lone passenger riding in the boxcar. I always wondered where this guy was going and I can tell you he's still here running around on my layout. Now we're about 1997 and this is when I really changed my life because I met Michael Buddy. Now what Mike did for me is he taught me about oil paint weathering and I was no longer shooting unfinished clean brass models. Now I was shooting models that were weathered on the layout like this Bachman photograph, an ad for a manufacturer where all the models are completely weathered realistic. It's the way I also did when Lifelike was purchased by Walthers and we had a submission of many diesel shots for publication and ads and those models were all weathered as well. So it was Mike that really changed things for me and allowed me to learn how to make my models that much better. It was also in 1997 that I closed my real estate company. Not that I was going broke but I wanted to pursue my passion. So I put on a suit and I went to trade shows and I started soliciting the manufacturers at these trade shows to show them my work to see if I could actually turn this into a business and fast forward 18 years and wearing that suit and going to these trade shows did support and create a business of sorts to the point where I've been shooting photographs now for many manufacturers for Walthers, for Atlas, I've been doing Bachman photos. I can't even remember all the people that I've worked with. The most recent ones that you've seen are Athens, just some stunning photography I've done for them. But as you look around the room here, you'll see I've got a lot of the covers hanging up and I use them more or less as a menu to help me know what kind of shots work quick when I'm trying to create something fast and also it's a good way for me just to reminisce on a lot of good memories. Let's look at this one shot, the 2002 Walthers cover and let's talk just a little bit about that shot for a minute. My assignment was to take the cover of the Hunman publication, Alleghenies, Lima's Finest and mirror it so that the engine is running towards the opening of the book. Phil Walthers personally flew his private plane to St. Louis to deliver the pre-production models fresh from Italy. He spent a few hours in the bluff giving me instructions for the photo and pretty much just giving us a break from the normal routine. I laid the scene nine feet long on a few sheets of foam with supporting scenery to match the book's cover. I soaked bags of lichen to form the Allegheny Mountains onto foam. I then set all the props up outside and shot photos over a period of a month in between stormy days until I captured the essence on film of this mighty model working the grade in all of its glory. Another cool shot that is one of my favorites is the shot I did for Atlas. I use both HO scale and N scale models to create the effect of the train's rear cars curving back into the scene at a distance. I've always had good luck at painting backdrops like this Bachman N scale photograph with the train pulling itself through snow. Another interesting photo is this derailment photograph where the crane was the product to sell so I put one of Bachman's best K4s in the dirt just to be rescued by the train crew. Everyone remembers the Bachman Easy Track ad. It has been running in the model press for 15 years shot in 2000. I always thought the title for this ad should have been From the Carpet to Your Imagination. Easy Track will take you there. It's when I came up with the idea of making large bodies of water on foam that I landed the Walther's Ordoch project and then the Lift Bridge project which led to the Swing Bridge photographs and more recently a BLMA Bridge photograph which has been featured in previous What's Neat videos. There have been so many cool projects that I could go on for hours. Let me end this short overview of my work by saying pick up one of my new calendars. In it, I will share with you inspiring photographs each month, both in narrow gauge and standard gauge available at the Model Railroad Hobbius Magazine store online. Since it's December, let me end with one of my favorite Christmas shots that I did for mainline modeler in 2004. It captures the feel of a cold Christmas Eve night and will forever be one of my most favorite shots. For this segment of What's Neat, we're gonna take a peek at the new technology that is 3D printing with this new Dremel 3D printer. The Dremel 3D printer came in a nice box. Well packed, the box was a presentation by itself only adding to the excitement of working with this new tool. It was wrapped in plastic and everything you needed to make the unit work was packed in the foam. The power cord, the USB cable, a nozzle clean out tool and a spatula. I installed the spool of printing filament in the unit with the spool feeding from the bottom towards the back. After threading the line through the filament guide, it was ready to be fed into the printer's extruder head when the machine is turned on. Upon powering up the unit, the first procedure is to level the printing table. This is done by pressing the level key on the touch screen. The table then moves into position. The touch screen walks you through the procedure of leveling the table to the printhead in three locations. You use the supplied gap tool, which is about three millimeters thick, similar to gapping a spark plug. You want this to fit just between the table's head as you slide it between the space. There are adjustment knobs under the printer's platform that raise or lower those table, aiding in this process. First, let's build something from the machine's internal memory, the Rhino head. Press build and you see the head's temperature rise for the one hour, six minute print time. When the head's temperature reaches 218 degrees, the 3D print process begins with the table moving into position and the printhead finding its location to start laying filament, which is about the thickness of a human hair, layer over layer over layer. Let's watch as the printer makes the Rhino head in about an hour condensed down to less than 30 seconds. Peace from the printer's table. The part came out clean with smooth lines. Along with the Rhino head, I also printed a toy school bus. The parts felt solid as the printer made an internal webbing that added strength to the semi-hollow toys. Now it was time to connect the USB cable to the printer and power up the laptop computer to download Dremel 3D software from Dremel3D.com. We will use this software to size a model downloaded from the internet to any scale that we want. The Dremel 3D ID Builder website has many items that you can download and print. Clicking on the entertainment, page four, I found a highway construction barrel to print. I downloaded this barrel to the laptop and scaled it from one inch tall down to about one half inch tall for HO scale using the Dremel software. Now I was ready to print. Move the pointer to the build icon, click and you will get a screen giving resolution options. I chose standard. Click okay and the file is loaded to the printer as you will see the head's temperature heating up and the two minute print time for this barrel displayed. When the printer's head reached 218 degrees, the two minute printing process began. The barrel is almost complete as we view the head printing the top detail. When finished, the head and the platform move into position giving us access to remove the newly printed part. Here you see two printed highway construction barrels next to an HO scale figure. Pretty cool. I'd like to design a small storefront in HO scale for my layout and a future show we will explore the process of creating this storefront building using the design program SketchUp which is available online. So the new Dremel 3D20 Idea Builder print machine is really an impressive simple to use versatile machine and in reality it only took about 20 minutes from unboxing the unit to setting it up to printing my first item on the internal memory. So it was very intuitive, very easy to use and I know just in time for Christmas, this would be a great gift to buy yourself so that you could build models for your model train layout, any scale that you want by simply designing them in a CAD software program or downloading them from the internet. So check it out, something to think about this Christmas, the Dremel 3D Idea Builder. Motion tips. This is gonna be part two from where we left off last month and that was where I was working on a warp scene on my layout where I'm replacing a lot of areas here that I've worked on in the past. So we're gonna test starting to put out the gray, getting the gradient, carving it and sealing all the foam with latex paint. Well now I'm to the point now of cutting a hole in the side panel here to put in the electrical and run block switches to each one of the tracks so I can turn off the power. I've also got the tracks sort of laid out in an area where I'm pretty sure it's gonna go now. I have not glued it down yet. I'm still test fitting everything and I'm adapting everything to fit where the building is gonna be on the scene. So what we're gonna do next is we're gonna go over and we're gonna put the plywood on the scene, cut the plywood and give a really nice edge to the whole diorama and then we can glue down the track, wire everything up and then start ballasting and fake furring and finishing the area so that it's ready for structures and buildings and details like that. So we're gonna go over all of those steps real quick in this part two series of layout construction. The key to cutting out control panel mounts is that when I do that, I use a spiral drill bit so that I'm able to when I go around the piece of material, the bits got teeth all the way around it on all sides and therefore it's easy to cut out the circles that I need, plus the blade itself has got just enough thickness of teeth on it where I don't get melted plastic. Everything doesn't melt together. So it's just one way that I like to do this for cutting out the plexiglass circles for the rocker switches to fit into. And as you can see, I can go all the way around. I don't have to move the workpiece. I don't have to turn the workpiece. All I've got to simply do is allow the saw blade to follow the pencil line I've got drawn and then I'll go in and I'll file out the hole just to be the right perfect size to fit the rocker switch. And that's how I cut my holes for my panels. After filing the holes to a perfect size for the switches to fit, I applied tape in the track pattern of the area to the backside of the panel and I did this backwards. Then I painted the backside of the panel black. Upon removing the tape, the unpainted areas were clear to see. I then sprayed gold paint over the back of the panel creating a gold track pattern as would be viewed from the front of the panel. These things look really nice to dress up the room and the sides of the layout. I then figured a spot to place the panel on the side of the layout in relation to where each of the four tracks were. And then I started carving this area to fit the wires and the panel flush into the foam. I'm using a hot foam cutter to cut out a space that's exactly the same size as the plexiglass panel we just made so that I can fit all the electronics inside this cavern that we're making with the hot foam cutter. Then the panel's gonna rest right in here with all the switches on it. And of course all the wires are gonna run from here to one, two, three, four tracks all the way across. So that's the plan at this point is to finish carving this out, get the panel rocker switches in here and run a wire lead to each one of the tracks for the blocks. I like to use these radio shack rocker switches. They're flush mount three quarter inch holes. And the reason I like these is when they go into the panels and the panels are mounted on the layout, these switches fit flush. I've seen far too many situations where modelers or friends have come by and they'll hit, they'll rub their coats or their jackets up against the edge of the layout and I've had other switches that stick out, just toggle switches and I've had the tops of them broken off or I've actually had complete control panels literally just pulled out. But what'll happen here is this will be flush with the plywood that's gonna laminate the diorama so there'll be no chance of anybody catching or rubbing anything, but at the same time they work perfect for what we want to use them for. Okay, I've got my rocker switches in the panel and I'm gonna run a common wire to the bottom of each one of these connectors here, just a brass wire so you have electricity and that wire's gonna run off to the hot wire, the positive lead of the layout. And then what I'm gonna do is the top brackets here, the top to solder on that, the wires are gonna run from the rocker switches to each one of the tracks and that's the track that will be able to be shut off when we kill the switch. I'm soldering my common wire on with just a little bit of rosin solder here and a pencil tip iron. So this will be the wire that give me the power for the entire block and it runs all the way through like I said before. Now what I need to do is come off of the layout and attach the wires to each one of the switches and let me show you how we're gonna do that. You've gotta ask yourself, well how is it that I drill a hole in foam to run my wires to each rail that we're gonna use for blocks because you can't really take a drill bit and drill through foam because the foam collapses again. Well what I like to do and what I'm gonna show you how to do here right now is you take a brass tube, they're stiff for the spot where your electrics are gonna be and on my layout it's always the inside rail that I gap and I use for my block wires. So I'm gonna come from the inside rail and I'm gonna simply aim and I've had great results with this up to eight or 12 inches. Sometimes I like to put a block of wood on the end to help facilitate your hand pressure if you don't stab yourself. But if you aim for the location, it'll pop right out the bottom just like we want it to. Watching it real time here for me. Now I've got the tube all the way through which provides a conduit through the foam so the foam does not collapse in on the hole and then I can take my wire and run it right here all the way through the tube and it doesn't have to go all the way through just far enough to reach this area where we want the wire to be. I think that's right there. Then you pull the tube out and here's my wire ready to be soldered onto this track right here and then the other wire here will be soldered onto this block, the bottom one right here. So I'll simply strip the wire and solder that onto here and I just need to do that ditto one, two, three, four to finish the rest of the switches here for the electrical. Here's another one I just sank in. I'm gonna cut the wire, pull out my tube and take this under the wire and simply solder it onto this terminal just a little bit of heat. I've only got one more to go now.  This gets continuous power from the main line of the layout so I don't have to worry about continuity or ever having that off. So this is gonna be my hot lead to run into the panel area and I'm fishing my wire through right now and that should end up coming through right down here in the hole just like that. Cut the wire on top up here and then I need to pull out the tube. Still have the wires stay in place. So I'm ready now to strip off my lead here and go ahead and solder this wire onto the turnout right here. And the other wire, the other end here is the one that's gonna be soldered to the main heavy wire I've got running to all the switches. So I'll be able to just intertwine that inside of here like this, like that, just a little bit of this solder, just like that. And now our panel will be hot. It's got main power coming in, all the little block wires, all four of them going out. And at this point, I can go ahead and glue this into place now because we are completely, completely finished with the wiring on that, just like that. That's completely upside down. Okay, how about just like that? I always like to use a pair of tweezers to hold my electrical contact wire when I solder it. So I put the gorilla glue around the outside edge of the control panel where it's gonna mount and touch the foam and wet the surface. And now I'm wetting the surface one more time. This will all dry. The key to keeping this in place while the gorilla glue expands is using these long push pins which will keep it into position, want it to stay as the foam sets up over the next 25 minutes. Now that I've got all the track lead into position, I'm simply soldering together all of it. This ensures that nothing's gonna move when I glue everything down. Everything's gonna stay right where I want it to.  When you solder it all together, you get great continuity for electricity. Plus you've got a sturdy structure. So I'm just gonna go through all of this track work. There's nine joints on each turnout to solder. Plus the wire leads, I'm gonna solder those. Curves in the position. Everything's gonna be rigid. I'm using a knife point soldering tip for this. It's giving me a flat, even heat so I don't have to touch the part very long at all. I've got a lot of rarotized root place where my joints are to put underneath to fill in. Because all the foam is sealed with latex paint, this allows me to use liquid nails to glue the track down. Which makes the track very, very permanent. It's very difficult to reuse track after you've put it down with liquid nails. Another thing you can try to do is silicone. That works, but silicone, nothing really sticks to silicone. It's difficult to get ballast to stick to silicone. So I've been using liquid nails and it's tried and true and it doesn't take very much to hold very tight. I don't put any liquid nails around the switch points or any of the moving parts of the turnouts. It's not necessary. If you can get the liquid nails about every six inches of trackage, you're fine with that. It'll still hold it down a lot. And I'm not gonna put liquid nails down and glue the final section coming into where the building's gonna set because I don't know exactly the distance of the trackage yet. And I wanna leave that option open. Turning my attention to the sides of the layout, I routered a three-quarter inch groove to accept blocks of wood that I could use to attach the plywood to the sides of diorama with. I'll use staples and I'll staple this right into those blocks of wood. I sealed this groove with latex paint just to make sure I wouldn't have any problem with foam shrinkage. I cut a strip of one-quarter inch plywood for the side of the layout, matching the contours. I used the jigsaw and I started cutting the edge on top of the plywood and matched the contours that I traced onto the plywood. And then I also had to cut the opening for the switch panel to be able to show through. I sanded the wood sides very smooth with 120 grit sandpaper. I then stained the sides of the plywood with, I used red oak stain on this. It matches the color of my interior of my studio. And then I put three coats of polyurethane over this sanding in between coats so I'd get a glass smooth finish. I then fit and attach the wood to the sides of the scene. I'm putting on the plywood side of the diorama. This is Gorilla Glue to help me attach it so I spray a little water on everything. I'm just a little Gorilla Glue here to staple this also onto the sides. With the wood it's already in the woodwork. I also cut off about a foot of the layout on the other end of the bridge module and covered this with a new piece of stained plywood giving the layout an even curvature that flowed really well when viewed overall. Turning my attention to finishing the visual scenery I cut the fake fur in sections to fit in the spaces where wild grass would grow between the tracks. I glued the fake fur in place using Great Stuff Foam Pro and pressing this in with my hands. This set up very quick and glued the fake fur permanently. I trim the fake fur into random tall grass looking patterns with a barber shear. The random part here is very important. I painted the fake fur grass with a can of spray paint actually alternating between forest green and hunter green giving the whole area a very good green look. I applied backyard dirt sifted through a screen onto the fake fur in the surrounding areas around the track. And then I worked this dirt in with a hair brush kind of just brushing back and forth so the fake fur tuffs would stand up and the dirt would settle down between the grass tuffs giving a good area later where we'll put ground foam. I applied dirt, ballast and rip wrap onto the scene using a fan brush to spread the ballast over the track area clean smooth along with the dirt and the rip wrap the same way. I also applied woodland scenic ground foam around the track areas, the fake fur areas husing two different colors, medium green and light green. This helped blend the fake fur scenery around in the track areas. Once all the dirt, rock, ballast and ground foam was in place I sprayed the entire scene with two bottles of woodland scenic scenic cement permanently gluing everything into place solid but leaving the ground foam feeling soft. I used sill floor grass tuffs to further detail the track areas gluing each tuft one at a time with Elmer's white glue. Using a spray bottle full of scenic cement and a knock static gun, I added random areas of green static grass around the track. All of this various vegetation works good together to make the scene visually believable and further helps to blend the scenery where the fake fur edges and the dirt come together. I still needed to add bushes and trees as time permits but this pretty much finishes this section of the layout with the BTS Hyde Pult Mill 95% complete along with the Wood Dock Warf. All of the scenery elements come together making this a new signature scene on my layout for photography and video as well as adding additional switching operations for the trains in both standard gauge and narrow gauge.