Thanks for coming. Congratulations. You left the house. You're here. This is great. Thank you for being here. Oh, sorry. Can everyone hear me? Yes! All the way on the other side there. Can you hear? We're good? All right. Thanks everyone for coming. We're so excited that you're here. We've not done an in-person event in quite a long time.  I had my laptop propped up on a wobbly side table on a bed. And I was drinking tap water out of a mason jar. So this is an upgrade. We're really, really excited that you're all here. This is Local Lives. We are partnered with our friends at Back Pocket Media. And this is a storytelling event about journalism. My name is Mike Docherty. I'm the digital editor at VT Digger. Tonight you're going to hear from a couple VT Digger folks, a couple storytellers from the community. And for us, this is a lot about telling the story behind the story. You know, we, as journalists so often, are trying to remove ourselves from the story and be objective and unbiased. And those things are important, but we also think it's important to share a little bit about, you know, behind the scenes of what we do, why we do it and how we do it. And so that's a lot of what tonight is about. Our theme tonight is headfirst. And you'll understand why by the time we get to the end of the night. It's a very human thing to go into something without all of the information. Sometimes it works out really well. Sometimes it's a disaster. And so we've asked everyone to fill out a little card that tells us some stories of times that you jumped in headfirst. And so we're going to be reading some of those throughout the show. We have a couple here. And I will just start by reading one. Here's an example of a time that one of you jumped in headfirst. And these are all anonymous. We're not going to ask you to identify yourself unless it's really juicy. I'm kidding. We're not going to do that. I left a party in Ecuador with an armed shrimp farmer to get beer. All right. Okay. So to kick things off tonight, our first storyteller tonight is Marlon Fisher. We're really, really excited that Marlon's here. Let's give him a round of applause. Marlon is a combat veteran. He's a comedian. He's a storyteller.  He, most importantly, is the father of two amazing boys. And so let's give a round of applause to Marlon Fisher. I'm not sure if riding an e-bike counts as cycling. We had crossed the herd path at least 20 times, missed it. See, on this particular day, I got to take the back seat to watch a group of 15-year-old boys navigate their way through the wilderness. And as we walked back and forth, I stood and I stopped so they could notice the herd path. And finally, we made it. They figured it out. We walked up. It was late in the day. We walked up the mountains through the trails, hit two peaks, and we finally got to our campsite. At our campsite, we set up real quick, a bunch of solo tents, one-man tents, and on the left side was a stream and on the right side was a stream. And we set up in the middle of those streams. They came together to make a fork. On the trip were six 15-year-old boys and two 18-year-olds named John. And John had just graduated from high school from New York City. He was super late back. And Sterling was a kid who was going to college to study quantum physics. And he was not prepared for the trip at all. He had no hiking boots. We had to borrow a sleeping bag for him. And he actually bought a quantum physics book on the trip. The kids loved him for it. I can remember, though, as we were finishing dinner and setting up our bear bag, it started to rain. I told everyone, everyone got into their tents because it had been a long day. And it rained, and I fell asleep to the pitter-patter of rain. Now, when you're inside of a tent, rain masks all the sounds around you. It had rained all night. When I woke up, I felt like I was in a puddle. My sleeping bag had gathered, the feathers had gathered like, you ever wash a comforter?  It was that thick and heavy. And when I got outside my tent, I had noticed puddles all over our campsite and those two streams that were just trickling, where the night before we had filled our water bottles barely, became raging rivers. Immediately, I thought to myself, oh man, what am I going to do? These boys have to cross this river. I have to cross this river with them. I was so afraid. I was so nervous. What was I going to do? So all the boys got up. They complained about how wet their sleeping bags were, how all the puddles in their tents, no food, no dry wood. I had the leaders of the day set up a tarp so that boys can stand under and I had them singing songs. And for hours, we just sang songs, all types of tunes and making up songs and people were freestyling and all this other stuff. And while they were doing that, I kept going back to check the path to see if it was safe enough for us to cross. And it wasn't safe at all. I remember pulling John and Sterling to the side. I said, John and Sterling, we have to move on. We can't go back. We only have to go forward. So I decided to go forward. The decision didn't come easy.  We would lose a soldier and we would go to the airfield and watch the body roll onto a helicopter, hold a salute for three minutes at least, and go right back to work. And this, and go right back to work, log back into my computer and forget that even happened. And that prepared me for this day because I knew that I had to drive on. I knew that I had to not show my fear, not show my anxiety around the potential of losing, of not moving forward.  And I used my trekking poles and I went into the stream and one by one they passed. One by one. And as they passed, my heart grew more with fear. But as they touched the land, their confidence grew going from becoming young men. Every single time. And the last person to cross was Sterling. And when Sterling took a step, he was just about to arms reach. He fell. And I reached for him immediately and I grabbed Sterling and we made it and the boys were super excited. They were so excited they created a chair for Sterling and it went something like this. Sterling and quantum sitting in the tree. F-U-C-K-I-N-G.  They were happy. I almost just lost a kid. I would not be standing here in front of you if that happened. So with that confidence we moved on. We continued on. And we came to a second river, a little wider, not moving as fast. And they were like, let's do it mom, let's go for it. Let's go for it. So this time by myself I tied a rope, walked through the water, weight chest deep to the other side, tied a rope on it to a tree and had them cross one by one. One by one. And guess what? Somebody fell again. Owen's foot got stuck in a rock and he fell. He went under. I jumped in again and grabbed him. We made it across and again they filled with excitement. So filled and I was so afraid but I knew that I had to drive on, that they had to drive on. When we came to the third river, I was done. I couldn't do it emotionally. I could not take another chance. And I decided that we would camp where we were. And this kid came to me and said, Marlon, we got to do it. We did two, three. We got to do it. We got to do it. And I said no. And he was disappointed. And they were disappointed that they didn't do it. But we got to dry out. No food for an entire day. The next morning we woke up and what they didn't know, they were going to spend, part of the trip was they had to spend 24 hours alone, solo. And they thought that because they had crossed these rivers, that they didn't have to do the solo. But I said they had to do the solo. And so as we crossed the third river, which was lower, I set them on a trail about a mile and a half.  All by themselves, 24 hours. And when they were all set, I pulled Sterling and John aside. And I said, hopefully they'll spend this time reflecting on what just happened. The other day I called Owen. Owen had fallen. Owen was a kid who fell in the second river. I called him. I said, this is eight years ago. I said, Owen, what do you remember from that trip? He said, Marlon, that trip meant so much to me. First, I almost lost my life. Second, I remember that no matter how bad things get, we were wet and miserable. No matter how bad things get, we just have to drive on, embrace the suck. He said, did I teach you that? Because that's a military saying. He said, no. But I was like, I know I said that. But he said to drive on. That day, we went head first into two different rivers. Two kids literally went head first into the river. But no matter what, those kids will always remember to drive on, no matter how bad things get. Thank you. Let's give another round of applause for Marlon Fisher. I want to hear some more times that you all dove in head first. So I'm going to go back to the bucket here. Cleaning up a deceased person and rescued their cat before the coroner arrived. That one was all crossed out. I don't know how to interpret that. Let's see. Getting married after two months. This one just says birch. I think that means something to someone. Oh, this one says birth. Okay. Well, this one's blank. Let's do one more here. This one's folded up for privacy. When I decided to stay at the bar with those mutual acquaintances and suddenly was in the bar without my friends. All right. Our next storyteller tonight is Fred Tice. Fred is a colleague of mine. We've been working together since June. Fred and I did the math. He's been a journalist for about 38 years. Fred has worked all over the place. He's worked in New York, Atlanta, and Latin America. Most recently, before he came to VT Digger, Fred was at WBUR, the public radio station in Boston. Fred is in the process of moving to Vermont.  But let's give a round of applause to Fred Tice. So, this is a story about how... I had a conflict about how I was going to tell a story about a young man. This was 2007. It was several years into the war in Iraq, I guess four years into the war in Iraq. And it was the day after Mother's Day. I was in the newsroom at WBUR in Boston. And we find out that the son of one of the most prominent critics of the war has been killed in the war in Iraq. This critic was a political science professor, Andrew Bacevich at Boston University. And he had himself served in Vietnam. He had stayed in the Army. He had become a colonel. But he was very much opposed to the United States being involved in the war in Iraq. And I realized that the way I should be telling the story is calling the dad. And so I did. I got in touch with the father. And he was just way too upset to talk. And so he suggested that I talk to his three daughters, the three sisters of the young man, also named Andrew Bacevich. And the sisters tell me, you know, my parents are so upset. They're way too upset. We can't talk to you at the house. But we're going to meet you on Route 1 at a Starbucks. There's a little outdoor area there, a busy, busy highway. And we sit down and we have this interview. And they're wonderful. They're super generous. They talk to me about, you know, their brother from the time he was a little boy to the time that he got to college. And he decided he wanted to go into ROTC. And he had asthma. And so they wouldn't let him into ROTC. But then after college, he decided to join the army anyway as a private. And then he eventually went to Officer Candidate School and he went to Iraq. And they have something, they have a message, though, for me. And here it is. I think a lot of people think that this is a story just about a professor that was against the war that had a son. And it's not, you know, more than anything I think we, I think our brother was just a, he was a fantastic human being. And I really am just a little missing. So I do the story with the sisters. True to what they want. But also note that, I mean, this is obviously the son of a famous anti-war critic. And we include this cut in the story. And the father hears the story. And he gets in touch with me and says, I really liked what you did with my daughters. And I will talk to you. So I go over to the house and we sit there in the screen porch. And the father goes through the kinds of things that so many parents that I have interviewed because I did a lot of these stories. You know, he's trying to process the loss of his child. And he, so we talk about that. But then we get to a point where he says something that really takes me back in the way that he's trying to process the loss of his son. One of the things that I've been really struggling with over the last several days is to try to understand my own responsibility for my son's death. That really took me back to, you know, took me back. And he also said something to me that really stayed with me and that also talked about in the story that I would do. And that is that we all are responsible for his son's death because, you know, this is several years into the war. Basically the whole, the country's turned against the war. And he says, what kind of a democracy is this when the people have spoken but nothing changes? And so I do a story with the perspective of the father. Days pass. Andrew Basovic Jr.'s body is brought home to Dover, Delaware. Then up to Hanscomair Force Base outside Boston. Eventually to the suburbs where the family lives for the funeral. And in the meantime all week I've been trying to get in touch with the friends to try to get a different perspective on this young man. So these are the people who went to Boston University with him. They're now kind of all over the country. And they, you know, they do have a very different perspective. And I'm excited that, I mean excited, again perhaps the wrong word, but, you know, I'm really, I really want to bring this perspective into the next story. A story that's going to run the evening after the funeral and then the next morning. And, you know, the friends tell me all kinds of things, goofy things, serious things. But then we get to this particular thing that one of the friends, James Carney, tells me. Well, I know his father is a military man, a career military man. I actually tried to discourage him from joining the military because when he was not allowed to continue in ROTC, I was like, it was a sign. You know, I'm like, it's a sign you're not supposed to do it because although I know he could conform to the military and that lifestyle, I just didn't see him. It wasn't a fit for him. I don't think, I think he didn't think it was a fit for him either, but I think he thought it was, like his father, it was good to serve your country, and you know, I'll serve my country and then that chapter of my life will be over. And as far as the political round goes, which is what he was interested in, you know, I think that he felt that that would make him more appealing in the long run to people having served this country. You know, it was a good resume builder, I think. A good resume builder. Andrew had wanted to go into politics. I think this is a really interesting thing to put in the story. We get into the edit booth.   And I'm there with the editor and usually she's very good about telling me, okay, you need to do this, you need to do that. I'm telling her, you know, I'm really conflicted about whether I should use this in the story because on the one hand, I feel it gives the audience a fuller picture of this young man. On the other hand, you know, the audience doesn't have a big stake here, but that's who I serve, right? That's who I work for. That's my vocation. That's my avocation. It's everything.  It's presenting him as a normal guy who's thinking about things like, hey, maybe if I join the military, you know, that'll look good on my resume when I run for office. And I decide that we should run it and that the audience should hear this. And I have felt guilty about this ever since. I mean, it's been, you know, 13 years, not 13 years, but 2007 to now. And so, you know, and it's weird that I've never talked to the family about it. I've never, again, had an occasion to cross paths with them. I think I did the right thing, but I still feel super guilty about it. And I think this is the sort of thing that journalists go through all the time. I mean, we have these questions about how are we true to the audience? How do we serve the audience? How do we give them the fullest story? And at the same time, how are we true to the people who have led us into their lives to tell their stories? Fred Tice, everyone. All right, there's a couple longer entries in here that I wanted to wait until we were all friends, until a little bit further into the night to read these. So I'm going to dig into some of the longer ones here. We'll do a couple and then we're going to take a quick break. So when I was eight years old, I was helping my dad bring the cows in the barn. A heifer came charging down and my dad yelled, Stop her. I jumped out in front of the heifer with my hand in a stop signal and yelled, Stop. The heifer slid and ended two inches in front of my nose. And then this is in parentheses, I weighed about 50 pounds, the heifer of 1500. It worked. All right, let's do one more here. Okay. After many weeks of very negative behavior from my, quote, true love, I decided it was time to split. Hector, my dog, some food and clothes packed in my car, I sped off landing in a huge mud puddle. Oh, then part two. I had to go ask my, quote, true love to push me out. Goodbye, as I left him in a six foot sea of mud with no idea where to go. From Colorado, I headed east. Three places I tried and then, oh, here we go, here's part three. Glad that, I'm glad these haven't been shuffled. So where a no go and many days later, I landed here in Burlington, Vermont. Within months, I had an apartment and I started my, oh no, I'm having trouble reading this. Well, now I feel like I can't stick the landing here. I started my something, which 50 years later I still have, biz. I think I started my business. I hope I got that right. I'm sorry about the handwriting. So, my reading of it is what I meant there. That is what I meant. So I'm gonna get off the stage right now. So we are gonna take a quick break, but first we're gonna hear from Danny from Foam. We are so thankful to Foam for having us tonight and for giving us these delicious drinks. So we're just gonna have here a quick toast from Danny and then we're gonna take a quick break and come back and hear our last two storytellers.  Yeah, I just want to say thanks to everyone for coming out. Okay, he said get closer. Is this close enough? Yeah, we want to say thanks. I mean, it's been a long time since we've had events like this at Foam and we built Foam to bring in the community and have these types of community-based events. So it's just such a joy to kind of welcome you all back and be here just enjoying each other's stories and each other's company here with one another. So I just wanted to toast to everyone and thank you all for coming. So cheers to that. Okay, so we are gonna take 15 minutes and then we'll come back and we're gonna hear our last two storytellers. So we'll see you back here in 15. Storytellers in just a moment. I hope everybody had a chance to take a breather, get some refreshments. While we're kind of getting back into our seats, I'm gonna read a few more stories of your times jumping head first and let's see what we find here. Okay, here we go. This starts with a quote, Fly like a spider monkey Is something never to shout when rocking a boat, a nine ton boat, my wife dutifully obeyed, flew through the air to wrestle the beast to the dock and missed the dock, broke her arm and then in parentheses, she has not yet insisted I sell the boat. Open to interpretation. All right, it was March 2020. Off to a great start. I was living in NYC, my girlfriend in Dubai. She decided at the last minute to fly back to see her parents. She invited me for a weekend with them, the four of us. She, her parents, I have been living together in Burlington ever since. So I am going to bring up our next storyteller tonight. Our next storyteller is Suzanne Schmidt. Suzanne Schmidt is a... I want to make sure I get this right. First generation Italian Brooklynite living in Burlington. She is the drummer for the brevity thing and a producer for the Moth Radio Hour.  So the first sentence I ever learned in Italian was si prega di portale liberta, which translated means please bring to me liberty. Or in the case of my great-grandmother, bail money. My great-grandmother was an Italian immigrant and she came to this country with nothing. Speaking no English, knowing no one. And she landed in Brooklyn and she immediately became a garment worker. And she had been arrested so many times as a suffragette fighting for women's rights to vote that this was the sentence that my grandmother, her daughter remembers most from her childhood. I didn't know my great-grandmother. She died the year after I was born. But the stories that my family would tell about her were incredible. One of my favorite stories, which went along with a picture that was sitting on my grandparents' mantelpiece, was a story of her standing in the waters in the beach off of Coney Island. And she had a long black dress on that she had pulled up between her legs and tied off at the waist. And as the story goes, she was arrested for indecent exposure a couple of minutes later because she had dared to show her legs on a beach where only men were allowed to swim. And so when my great-grandmother died, she passed this fierceness onto my grandmother and my mother and my aunt who raised me. And so from a very early age, I was clear that the power in my family lied with this mighty matriarch. And so the thing you need to know about Italian families, and I don't need to offend any of the men in the room, but the power lies with the people that can win the most arguments. And if arguing were an Olympic sport, the women in my family would be gold medalists. And the reason for that is because men argue as if it's an individual sprint. They come out with a lot of facts, but they don't have the stamina. Women know that arguing is a long-distance relay. There are arguments that started in the 1800s in fishing villages in Sicily that are happening right now tonight at my family's home in Brooklyn. And so the year that I turned eight, I decided that I wanted to play the drums. I had seen Karen Carpenter on television, and I thought, that's what I want to do. And so I knew in order to make that happen that I would have to convince the matriarchy that this was okay. And so I strategically waited until our Sunday family dinner when everyone was gathered around the table at my grandparents' house. And I announced I'm going to play the drums in the elementary school band. My brother was the first one to say, girls, don't play the drums, you can't play the drums.  And then my aunt said, she can play whatever she wants, and so I just sat back and thought, let the games begin. And so then my grandmother jumped in and she said, you know what? Of course girls can play the drums. We saw Karen Carpenter on stage the other night and she was playing all kinds of drums. And my grandfather said, well, I don't think she's a very good role model. She was wearing pants on stage. And there was this long pause and then my grandmother looked at him and said, you wear pants, you're not a good role model, and yet you're still here. And I thought to myself, and the gold medal goes to the women's team. And so next week I joined the drum line and it was me and eight boy drummers and they were not happy to have me there. They were actually kind of horrible. They would rip up my sheet music. They would break my drumsticks. They had horrible things that they would say to me. And I thought about quitting a couple of times. But there was something that happened when I played the drums. I felt powerful in a way that I had never felt before as a girl. And so I stuck with it. And so a few months went by and the band director announced that I was going to play the drum set solo in the winter concert. And so I came home and I announced this to my family. And the first thing my grandfather said is, you're going to wear a dress on stage. And I was like, no problem. And so my grandmother made me this beautiful, long velvet gown. And even as a girl that did not wear a lot of dresses, this thing was beautiful. And so the night of the concert comes and I put this dress on and I get to the stage and I'm standing in the back with all the other drummers. And I'm looking at this red sparkle drum set sitting at the corner of the stage waiting for the drum set solo. And things were going really well. And then somewhere in the middle of the Hanukkah medley, I realized that a long dress is not the best outfit to play the drum set. Right? And so I think to myself, oh my god, what am I going to do? I could go side-saddle, but I wasn't really prepared to give up my kick drum or my hi-hat. And then I thought, what would Karen Carton do? Shit, she would wear pants. Of course, that's why she's wearing pants on stage. And Raymond Klugelein looks over at me and he whispers nice dress, because of course he knows that I can't play the drum set in this dress. And he says, I'll take your solo. And I think about it for a second and I look out into the crowd at my family, my whole family aunts, uncles, cousins are taking up like three rows.  And in that moment, I know what I need to do. And I stroll up to the corner of the stage and I reach down and I grab that long dress and there in front of 500 people at the RJO elementary school, I pull that dress up, I tie it off at the waist, I sit down at that drum set and I rock that frickin' thing. I was like Karen Carpenter and John Bonham's love child. And the concert finishes and I come off stage and I meet my family out in the hallway and my grandmother was like, your great-grandmother is here with you tonight. And my grandfather says, I knew you could play the drums. And I go home that night and I'm lying in bed and the cymbals are still ringing in my ears. And I think to myself, I think my family was wrong. I don't think my great-grandmother meant bail money at all. I think she meant liberty. I think she meant the right for women to vote. I think she meant the freedom to show off your legs on a hot day on the beach at Coney Island. And I think she meant the hope that comes when you really work hard for something, knowing that you may not ever achieve that. But someday, your daughter or your granddaughter or your great-granddaughter just might. And when they do, you will forever be a part of their story. Thanks. Let's get another round of applause for Suzanne Schmidt. All right. We're getting closer to the end of the night and there's a lot more index cards in here. So I want to hear a lot more of these stories. So I'm just going to run through a few more while we still have time. The time was pre-Katelyn Jenner. The sibling I then thought was my brother called me and said they were in fact my sister. And she would start, quote, presenting as a woman. I had no idea what it meant, but I answered reflexively, I love you and I support you no matter what. And I will never regret that moment when I dove in head first. My stomach wasn't feeling right. And I decided to fart. It was a terrible decision and it wasn't a fart. The real range of interpretations of the theme here will give us one more. Moved from NYC at 26 an orchestra program in rural central Vermont from the ground up. All right. Let's do one more.  Our last storyteller tonight is Audie Guha. Audie is one of my colleagues. She's a senior editor at VT Digger. When Audie was a teenager she started a special page in a local newspaper in Calcutta called The Statesman that was run entirely by high school students. That now is a weekly supplement that involves thousands of young writers from across the city. Audie has been a journalist ever since. She's reported from Bombay to Boston and now she's here in Burlington. So let's give a big round of applause for Audie. Of course I'm the last speaker. I want to shoot you for that. That's okay. So it was August 2017 and it was the first year of the Trump presidency. I was a reporter for a D.C. nonprofit called Rewire and I was covering race in America. I was in Charlottesville and I was in a huge crowd so packed that I had nowhere to move and then word reached us that a car had plowed into the crowd not too far away from us and snippets of information kept dribbling down to where I was and it said that it was intentional and that people of color were being targeted. I had been a reporter in America for 15 years and like a slap on my face I suddenly became the other and I looked around I was surrounded mostly by white people and I wondered for the first time in my entire reporting life if I was safe and I flashed back to a different time in a very different place where I should have been scared for my life but I wasn't because I was in my 20s and I didn't think death was real I was in Mumbai one of India's largest cities in my first real reporting job as a cub reporter for the Indian Express a very large national newspaper in India and I wasn't even part of the main newsroom I was like a side beginning reporter at a big startup that covered the internet because that was a new thing in the 90s I was in Churchgate Station which was a local train station in Bombay where I went to many times but this particular time I was there for a different reason I was going to interview a very notorious man who rarely granted interviews to the media I was standing at a particular gate at this station and I had no idea what would happen when two men came up to me dressed in white wearing Gandhi caps which was the name given to these white triangular caps that Gandhi used to wear and they kind of ushered me they kind of hit me on my elbows they pulled me down the street to a generic white ambassador which is the equivalent of a Toyota Camry in India and I got into it and they barely spoke any words to me but they took out a black cloth and they said that no harm would come to me if I complied and they blindfolded me and there I was in my 20s not an investigative journalist barely a journalist at all blindfolded in a car with two strange men and I thought it was the most exciting thing I'll ever do I'm like I'm an investigative journalist I'm going to win the Pulitzer this is awesome and so we went on this crazy ride and all this time I was wondering how I ended up in this situation the Indian Express was an entire high rise building and I worked in this obscure business publication department fresh out of college but I was always barging into the main newsroom to see what was going on a very male newsroom most of the women who worked at Indian Express worked in preachers or in entertainment there were very few women in the political newsroom at that time in Bombay there was a huge scandal going on about buildings that were falling down very similar to what happened in Miami only it was multiple buildings they were less than 5 years old and they were built with substandard materials that was suspected to be supplied by the underground mafia controlling building materials in Bombay at that time Indian Express had broken multiple news stories about the people connected to this but as underworld everywhere we did not have any major connections to them I had covered a mill a protest of mill workers at a mill in Bombay where I heard about a notorious thug called Arun Gowli who started at these mills and was expected to be behind the supply of building materials for these buildings that were falling down and I had kind of ingratiated myself into the newsroom and managed to write a story about this guy's particular connection now he was a guy people hardly saw or heard from no one knew where he lived I would describe him as the Al Capone of Chicago everyone knew he existed he had a great following he was a huge thug but also a hero among certain people and he had a lot of power and was not answerable to anybody he was the man I was going to interview because he had asked for me and in my naivete because I'm a fabulous investigative journalist he asked for me because I was new, clueless and the youngest reporter in the Indian Express family so there I was in this car, blindfolded thinking I'm like in a James Bond movie and amazing things are going to happen to me and I finally ended up at like no one knows where I ended up but we went down steps and they kind of guided me into a room and when they unfolded me I was in front of a very little man with a big turban and a giant moustache and the weird thing in reporting about in India is that because of the cultural because of the culture there whenever you went into a person's house they expected you to eat and drink with them so there was a gigantic Gujarati platter in front of me which involved maybe 20 bowls and rice and rotis and he basically the first thing he said to me was cow which is eat in Hindi and so I'm like this is not a good time to argue with anybody so I just sat down 85 pounds really small I look like a not even high school maybe like a middle school student I wouldn't have taken myself seriously so I'm like okay I have to sit down and eat this giant meal that weighs more than me and clearly he's not going to talk to me until I do this so somehow I think I sat down I'm a very slow eater it did not help so I think an hour passed in small talk and both of us eating this gigantic meal at the end of it I asked him all the questions I had and he completely played me because this is a guy whom the internet described as hoodlum jailed thug corrupt politician and these eventually daddy which if you go to Netflix is a new movie that Bollywood has made about his life in the last two years this is like a new discovery I made when I googled him so there I was and I asked him all my questions about substandard building materials and how he's behind it and he denied everything and he said it's all lies he believes in the people and he like straightened his Gandhi cap which is very funny because all these underworld thugs and criminals in India always compare themselves to Gandhi while not having any of the Gandhian ideals and he was like I'm for the people I want everybody to have a good life and the government is corrupt and just completely played me never answered any of my questions and you know was really condescending the whole time and so we went back the two men blindfolded me again dropped me back at church gate station and I remember standing there in the afternoon light and wondering if this whole thing happened at all or if I imagined it and I remember having to call my aunt in Bombay back who was far more afraid than I was about what would happen to me that day and made me swear that I would call her back if I came back alive so I went back to the office and the editors were amazing they knew that I was completely inexperienced not equipped to write a political story about an underworld thug like Arun Gowli but also made me sign several non-disclosures about how they would not be responsible if anything happened to me but also told me that I'm under no obligation to go for this interview but I thought I was going to win a book Pulitzer so what the hell I was like I'm going to do it no matter what so my story was a complete fluff piece that I would never want anyone to see today but the one good thing that came out of it is that in a very rare move the editors of the Indian Express wrote a front page editorial about how the press in India is treated and how they are completely unable to do real journalism when people like this control the narrative and do not respond to our calls and completely manipulate how the story is framed so there I am in Charlottesville thinking about a time when my life was probably really a threat and I didn't care to 20 years ahead when I was suddenly worried about how I would get out of there and whether I would get out of there alive and I've spent my whole life in journalism and there's nothing I can't imagine anything else that I would ever do and I've been in a lot of strange situations either unexpected or surprising or not planned for but no matter what the situations is and I'm sure this is true of journalists all over the world we go into it and we write the story thank you Adi Guha everyone thank you so much for coming thank you so much to Back Pocket Media for putting on local lives thanks to all my colleagues at BT Digger who are here who helped make this happen thank you to Foam Brewers and Deep City we are so so happy to be here and thank you DJ Local Dork also for keeping things moving tonight so and thank you all so much for coming we're so happy to be here we're so happy you're all here have a great night thank you


From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston Area Studio, our actually brand new studio, and I'm really excited to have, I believe it's a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long-time listener, first-time caller. Good buddy of mine, Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of Emerging Technologies Messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company, some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, you know, after Dell had bought EMC. So, Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? It is the first time on theCUBE, Stu, so.  Yeah, nice to be here. All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC, or now, you know, Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give your audience a little bit about your background, your passions. Oh, so background-wise, yep, so it started my career in technology, if you will, but EMC worked starting inside sales of all places, and worked my way into a consulting engineer-type position within ECS, which is, you know, obviously a pretty hardcore product inside of EMC, now, or Dell Technologies, now. Left, went to a startup, saying, you know, everybody's gotta do a startup at some point in their life, right, take the risk, make the leap. That was awesome, was actually one of those cloud brokers that's out there, like Nassuni, a company called Certis, had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. Yeah, the company did, not you. The company did, I was fine, you know, but yeah, the company had some problems, but it ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so it worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently, this hit the new- Broadcom. Broadcom, Broadcom, part of the grand hold of Avago. Dave, you know we're getting up there in years in our tech, when we keep talking about something, because I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which of course, Avago brought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name, because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces, I mean, you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together, but yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us, especially with some storage and networking background and know those brands well. Absolutely, yeah, PLX is being the PCI switch, well, it's actually Broadcom, yeah, those things. So, yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran, part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team. Only non-networking guy in a networking company felt like, I can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies, you know, kind of everything all becoming new again, right, and go in and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with about 10 years ago. David's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom and Avago and things like that.  So tell us a little bit about, you know, what you're working on these days because some of the high level things definitely don't bring to mind, you know, the low level, you know, board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? There's still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space, you know, or Horizon 2, Horizon 3, I guess, or... It sounds like something some analyst firm came up with. Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff.  Stuff from the 50s and 60s is now starting to permeate everything that we do.  And you bring up a great point. So, you know, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI but help connect for our audience that, you know, when you talk AI, we're talking about, you know, we're talking about data at the center of everything and it's those applications. Are you working on some of those solutions or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that and, you know, what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? I think it's all of the above, you know, the beauty of kind of Dell technologies is that you sit across both infrastructure and software, right, you look at the efforts and energies, you know, stuff like VMware buying Bitfusion, right, as a mechanism of trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Now, let's start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. You know, when you bring that kind of capability up the stack, you know, now you can start to develop within the software mindset how we're, you know, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it. You got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point. Am I allowed to say that? Well, you can say that. I might disagree with you because absolutely there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101. Article that I had, I actually had Ashley Guaparala who's the general manager of Dell servers holding the t-shirt that there is no serverless. It's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need it and everything. But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely there is still infrastructure that plays there. Just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff. And I mean, Dave, this stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler. I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades. It's just, you know, for me, it was interesting to look at. It is very much a, you know, developer application-driven piece top down as opposed to so many of the, you know, virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom up. Let me try to change this construct. So that we can then provide what you need above it. It's just a slightly different way of looking at things. Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push forward that stuff. So, you know, you can bundle together hardware that makes a development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, you know, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within industry, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, GraphCore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. You know, it's, you write to a library, like Kudo or, you know, PyTorch or using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? And so we want to be in that both-and-space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility and capability, you know, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You know, again, becoming a platform company really when it comes down to it. Yeah, you know, I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but you know, what are you hearing from customers and what's kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's kind of the reality of AI as opposed to kind of, you know, some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? Well, I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, you know? So what, you know, people that come and ask us, or, well, you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence and I want to do X, Y, and Z, and these particular workloads could be better handled by simple, not to distill down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, right? Like something that's, you know, like go back into history and look at the things that matter that you could do very, very simply that don't require, you know, a large amount of libraries or an understanding of, you know, more advanced type algorithms or developments that way.  You know, some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize this is a better way that I can serve my customers. And really it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers where they may not have the knowledge that here, but they're coming to us and saying it's more than just, you know, an IVR system, you know, like an electronic IVR system where I gotta come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context. I need to be able to do this and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. Yeah, no, it's such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times is, you know, my entire career, we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation. You know, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right, I was scripting things or I would have some batch processes or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today is, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days and it's not as, you know, to set all of those up. There is more intelligence built into it. So, right, whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath them. That spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there and it definitely is, you know, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about, say back when we were both at EMC and you know, the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it is night and day and how could we ever use those terms before compared to where we are today?  Like things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years both in computing horsepower and GPU, GPGPU horsepower, the, you know, the innovation around, you know, FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? Like all that brain power that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of those systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there.  I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, what was your software defined moments?  So, you know, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days.  I yell a lot of this stuff. I mean, you know, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining challenge. Well, you know, so depending on which cryptocurrency you did, you know, AMD kind of snuck in there with, you know, their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, composition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore or, you know, the chip that was just launched out of China this past week, that's configurable to any type of network, neural network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution and capability now where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements. So, you know, I'll have FPGAs or some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, you know, I'm giving my background in psychology is always interesting to me.  It's amazing. I just, you know, the workloads that are coming along the way, you know, I think are starting to demand different types of more effectiveness within that hardware now. So you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs.  So you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not gonna be one ring to rule them all, the, you know, to cop-token there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're gonna start to see the desperation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software. It's gonna start to drive the application for how you see these things going. And it's gonna be the people that can service the most amount of platforms or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people that are gonna come out ahead and whether it'll be us or, you know, any of our August competitors remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space. We want to be playing hard in that space as well. All right, Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just careers. So it's interesting at VMworld, I kind of look at it and like, wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting on a panel for opening acts, which is done by the VM underground people, the Sunday, you know, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs. And there's actually three panels, you know, careers and financial and some of those things. I'm gonna be there on Sunday, maybe I should join you. So come on by starting at one o'clock Monday evening. I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that. So, you know, all that stuff's online if you want to check it out.   Yeah, I mean I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs back in the 80s, right, when that was a thing, you know, like I built my AMD 386 DX. Have you watched the AMC show, Halt and Catch Fire, when that was on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was that kind of, you know, always interesting to me and I, you know, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, right? That's my brother's gift, not mine, but being able to kind of assemble things in my head was, you know, kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I, you know, worked as a lab resident as well, you know, working with computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education was very, you know, it was my family, it was very hard on the education stuff, you're gonna do this. But being able to follow that passion, you know, a lot of things kind of fell into place with that and I mean, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my master's in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling harder. And a lot of what I've done is just, I read and ask a ton of questions, you know, I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, you know, like, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that I think has gotten me a lot to where I am as well. But yeah, being kind of able to come out on this side, you know, marketing is like you're saying it's, it's kind of anathema to the technical guys. Oh, those are the guys that kind of shine the, you know, shine the turn, so to speak, right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the hotter stuff, the more, you know, hardcore engineering terms and the layman's terms, because not everybody's gonna approach that. A CIO with the, you know, with the double E or, you know, an MS in electrical engineering or going on down that road is very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of be going and translating through that, it's been, it's been a huge blessing and it's nice, but always following the areas where, you know, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in going, hey, I'm gonna, I'm here to learn. And being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, because, you know, nobody's gonna be an expert on everything and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry and even they realize, you know, nobody can keep up with all of it. So that being able to ask questions, participate. And Dave, thank you so much for helping me, you know, come have this conversation. Greatest always to have a chat. Great to be here too, thanks. All right, so be sure to check out thecube.net, which is where all of our content always is what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. The studio is actually in Marlboro, Massachusetts. So not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop. We're gonna be doing lots more videos here. Myself and Dave Vellante are located here. We have a good team here, so look for more content out of here and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching thecube.


Hello everyone, welcome to the Jenkins Infrastructure Weekly Team Meeting, we are the 7th of November 2023, today we have around the virtual table, Damien Duporta and myself, Hervé Le Meur, Stéphane Merle and Kevin Mortins. Let's start his announcement, so the release 2.431 is out, at least packages, war, packages and Docker image. I'm not sure for the changelog, Kevin, do you have news on that part or? Yep, it's merged and on the site now, so live. Cool, I don't have other announcement. Eventually we will upgrade Kubernetes on the public cluster later today, most probably, or tomorrow if we see a last minute blocker. I wanted to do it earlier today but I didn't have the proper time to ensure if it will be working as expected. Public upgrade later today, packed on, get Jenkins, I go, etc. I don't have other announcements, upcoming calendar, so next week 2.432 of November, as usual. Please note that we will also have LTS.1, new release line, the Wednesday, November 15, so in 8 days. Marquise is the release lead, which means a bit of pressure for Hervé, if you want to have windows images for container published. I'm confident in my change. Absolutely, I am too, so I'm sure that will be very nicely done. The release candidate was done six days ago, the 1st of November. Haven't heard about major issue, something else to say about the new LTS folks? Yeah, for windows, not that it's GDK17 and not GDK11 like before. For the weekly windows, container image only, be careful. Yeah, sure. GDK17 by default, so that might require a changelog message though. Yeah, I'll add it in the documentation in the changelog on Jenkins. Okay. The same warning notes that I put in the previous. Perfect, I haven't checked, but just wanted to be sure that we had the proper glue between the bricks. So perfect, good job folks. Do we have an advisory announce? No, the last one was 25 of October, so no advisory. Yes. And what about the next major events? They've absorbed London 5 of 5 December. Tim Iacombe will be there for sure. And we will have Jenkins contributors submit on Brussels for the first time beginning of February 2024. Any question on the calendar? Okay. So let's get started with the work that we were able to finish during the past milestone. So congratulations for Bruno is now part of the GSOC team and he has the permission to do things. Yeah, congrats. I'm sure that will benefit us, especially putting the GSOC project on production. I trust Bruno's skills to learn the things in Jenkins soon. I think we will have really good surprises and we will have a nice outcome from this. Bellnets, the Bellnets is a mirror that we have disabled 2 or 3 weeks ago after one of our users complained that they were blocked when trying to reach the mirror. So they weren't able to download Jenkins releases. After careful checks and communicating with the mirror administrator, we had confirmation that an IP range was blocked on their servers because of DDoS abuse. But that blocker was years ago, 5 or 6 years ago. So they have removed the blocker. They will let us know if they have a new one. And of course, we have enabled the mirror again and confirmed with the user. So everything is back to normal. So thanks Bellnets for sponsoring the Jenkins project. Any question? Okay. Next one. So that has been a team effort to track and upgrade the Chideka 21 on the wall platform everywhere for every cases. The main challenge was that some architectures such as S390EX are still on the early available, aka preview, aka nightly builds versions, while some are already on GA, such as Intel or IRM. So we had to track properly because they have different life cycles. Sometimes you have an upgrade on the EA version, but not on the GA and the other case. So we have the latest Chideka 21 everywhere when it's available, whether it's GA by default or EA, if we don't. Nice work on this one. That has been a lot of tiny areas. So yeah. And don't know if you have any question on this one. Okay. Hervé, I'm sure remove Jenkins. Your page is not accessible and indexed anymore. So I believe this is closed. Yes. When I activated the delete option of BlobExpair, we've got many, almost every outdated link. I think we're returning 100 and 3 euros because the directory where these outdated page were contained only this page. So when they were removed, the web server was attempting to list the empty directory and return it zero. So by removing this empty directory, the web server now attracts to the not found page, which is better than pure error, not pure error, but server error. And for a good part of the documentation and documentation page, I've put in place some redirection. So users are getting a pure error page when searching for Jenkins documentation on Google, for example. Users are from old Google results. Nice work. Anything else to add on this one? No. Okay. Last issue we were able to finish is the planning for supported JDK version in Jenkins infrastructure. So that was removing JDK 19, which is not supported since March or April, if I'm not mistaken. Updating CI Jenkins IU online documentation to point to the GEP from Mark. So that has been done. Nothing else to add here, unless you have questions. Nope. Okay. We had an issue, like every week, someone tried to reset their password on account Jenkins IU, while they think about the Jenkins controller account. Looks like. They never answer, so I guess. Now, walk in progress. I'm going to update the priority order. So step one is update center. Just a minute. Okay. Bing. Il is not fun. Award on update center. Reminder. The goal is to finish the POC for an update center using mirror bits, which will delegate most of the bandwidth to a set of cloud flare buckets. We have one right now. That could also allow us in the future to have other other location for downloads. So we were able to finish and validate the script, the update center script for the parallel copy and mirror bits scan. So at the end of the parallel copy on all the location, then we trigger mirror bits scan. Timing is one minute 20 to one minute 50 with a lot of change. So that looks like it should be okay with the three minutes once we will integrate the generation. We were able to fix the HTTP 500 Apache erros. So now if you go to azure.update.genkins.io, you have a walking update center, which is not updated regularly yet, but it's working. So now the main, the two main tasks now, the idea is to hand over to Stefan on that part. And I will take some of the minor issue and Stefan will take the major, because I'm a lazy person, of course. First step is the Jenkins infra slash crawler. So we need to update that script so that it copies the files it generates to the update center mirrors. Because this is also served under update.genkins.io. This repository generate the Jenkins tool installer definitions and they are signed and integrated with the update center index. Two copy files to see mirrors. Then after this one, we will have to do a full end to end test to update mirrors regularly. So that mean merging the work we did on a pull request of the update center tool to the real life world or at least validate with Daniel that it work on a test case. The goal is to ensure that generation and copy takes less than three minutes for the UC. For crawler, we don't really care because it's run once a week. And once both of them will have been done, then we will be able to run Jenkins to new UC tests. So the goal will be to spin up a Jenkins controller in a container instance and set its update center to the new URL and see if it work. If we can download plugins, then we will have to test the Jenkins plugins CLI and other scenarios. The goal is to see if we have a functional update center. If it works as expected with the redirect, etc. Then we will be able to start writing a GEP to describe the changes. The changes with the POC as a proof. These are the top level major elements. On my side, I will have a few minor changes around credentials and variables. But these are not worth mentioning today. It's technical implementation details and nitpicking mostly. Any question or need for clarification on that topic? No, okay. Stefan, are you okay to work on this until Tuesday? Of course, yes, yes. Perfect. And Hervé, if it's okay for you, we will hand over for next milestone. So one milestone, Stefan and I, and then the next milestone will be either both of you or you and I. Is that okay? Cool. So move to next milestone. Next topic, RM64 agent. Terri, can you give us a status on this one? Yes, at all. The last development update is that the third manager on Datadog is running in ARM64 now. Yes. I had to do it to review my first request as third manager. I have three services and I moved only one, migrated only one at first. And for Datadog agent, Datadog cluster agent, I've added a node selector by mistake to the agent, while it should have been only for the cluster agent. So it prevented Datadog agent pod to be spawned on every node of the cluster. And we noticed that because Seldap was in, had triggered an alert on PagerDuty. At first, I was wondering why only Seldap and not every other service on X86 node. And it was because Seldap is using more advanced monitoring, like process monitoring, which the other services don't. Nice job. So what are the next candidates for RM64 migration? The plugin site backend API. I have to take a look at the issue, but next time in the last one, I think it will be weekly.ci.io or demo controller. Do you think that plugin site front-end? I don't think it's front-end. It's not a problem because it's served by web server. That's why I thought. There is one I don't know, plugin site issues. I don't know what technology is used and if it's RM64. Let me just take a look at the issue. Not now. The goal is just to mention that we don't know. There might be risk on this one.  Does it look good for you? Yes. Cool. Okay, that should be good for the next milestone. Is that okay? Yes, and it's the last one. The plugin site issue, we have already this image available and just as a note for later, but as Mirabits development repository has new activities. I intend to propose a request to build Mirabits to cross compile Mirabits. We will be able to have an official image deploying Mirabits in ARM. It looks like the author said before end of year a new release. So honestly, I don't think we should plan for Mirabits on RM64. If that's okay. I will put it post-bonit in the issue. By airway to upstream to have RM64 binary. Okay, cool. If you have, yep, sorry. Kelly Contributor mentioned that Tébian is providing an official Mirabits package in ARM64, but we won't use it. It was just a mention. Here we have for planning for the infra right now. It doesn't exist and is not supported, so we don't use it and we stick to Intel. Do you think it should be doable? And you can say no. It's an open question to start building images such as docker lm file or docker ashacop tools to both Intel and ARM64 and start scheduling infrasci agent on RM64 not pull. Do you think you will be able to start this work this week or should we just delay later? We can add it as a bonus step. Okay, let's say that RM64 agent has bonus step. Nice, not pull and then docker. Okay, cool. I also have something to report here. Falco to RM64, because we have demon set on Falco, not the main application, and it's failing and rebooting on public case due to issue. Still need Falco version bump. I plan to run that operation as part of the Kubernetes 1.26 upgrade. So if we have an issue on the cluster that will be due to the upgrade, maybe you can. Then be able to blame this new version. Exactly, Kubernetes is so hard to upgrade. Anything else to add on the RM64 migration? Okay, any question, clarification, Stéphane, Kevin? Okay, next step. I'm reporting about Kubernetes 1.26. So EKS done. Earlier today, the private cluster was upgraded. So for EKS, sorry, first I need to move RM64 to the new milestone. For Kubernetes, we still have the public cluster to migrate. That's the last step. Stéphane and I paired on this one. We wrote the issue we had, mainly on Amazon clusters. The system was refusing to upgrade the VPC-CNI. So that's the plugin in charge of maintaining the network inside the Kubernetes cluster. Because it said, hey, you cannot bump two minor versions at once. You need to do minor by minor version. So we had to bump manually from 1.13 to 1.14. And then Terraform took care of upgrading to 1.15. So the good news is that the work we did during the past upgrade are working. We can upgrade both Kubernetes and the add-ons at the same time on the same pull request. So this is an improvement since last time. But now we have this new one. That means we will need to set up update CLI. There is an old issue where we will use the AWS EKS command to retrieve the latest available version for the currently used Kubernetes version. Once we will have done that, we will have regular pull requests between the Kubernetes upgrades that will try to bump the add-ons version. Because for a given Kubernetes line, the add-ons has its own life. In that case, the add-ons would already have been upgraded to the proper version before the cube upgrade. So that's why we should have this. But it's written, and if we don't have time for that, we will have to know for the person in charge of the upgrade on 1.27 before end of share, ideally. That person will have to take care at least to upgrade manually the add-ons before... End of share? Yes, I'm a challenged person. I'm a challenging person. Yep. That's all for EKS. The rest was quite easy. 1.26 is minor. It doesn't have a lot of changes. We also upgraded EKS, the private cluster that went very well. Oh, I forgot to tick this one. We had two issues. One is due to me, I forgot double-codes. And the Magica of the Jenkins mChart, there is no validation of the syntax of the YAML files passed to the config maps. Unless you do your custom mChart like we do for job.dsl. I upgraded the GDK tool yesterday for the issues we mentioned earlier today. And I forgot double-codes on GDK 17. Thanks, Stéphane, for helping me on outfixing this one. Because once we upgraded the cluster infrasier, I restarted and was in error constantly due to that syntax error. That's an improvement on the Jenkins official and chart. And we should have our own mechanism to check that. So that one was a human error. Second one. We had issues and we accidentally deleted and recreated the public IP during the past upgrade on the public cluster. So we did a short-term solution by adding an Azure lock on the public IP so nothing, neither Terraform or Kubernetes can delete these public IPs. For instance, the public IP used for get Jenkins.io. You don't want to update this one every day. But we discovered that Kubernetes refuse to upgrade because the lock was present on the whole MC system and it was blocking the upgrade. It's a bit too much from Azure, but that's how it works. So that mean, in order to fix this, either we do like we did this morning with Stéphane, we remove the lock, upgraded the private cluster and then Terraform did back the lock afterwards. We didn't see any public IP change so that should work for public. However, last time, Tim Iacom showed a solution for us. We should be able to create a custom resource group with the public IP so we should be able to move this public IP here and by adding the proper annotation on the load balancer object on Kubernetes we should be able to continue working as it. That will put and move the lock on that resource group to see whatever automatically managed resource group to avoid blocking upgrade in the future. I would want to do this before public, so Falco checking the public IP by migrating the private case one because if we lose the public IP of private cluster, we lose a few web books to infrascii, that's not a problem. So I propose to test on a dummy public IP and then test on the private cluster. If it works, then we should be able to migrate the public IP of the public cluster prior to the upgrade. Does it make sense? Do you agree with this? We can even use the one that we saw which is not used as a dummy IP because it's already done. Yes, absolutely. We need to move the public IP to another and move the lock to avoid blocking project to be tested on the private case cluster. Any question here? Then later today or tomorrow depends on the time. Ok, looks good. So that means that Stefan should be volunteered for the next Kubernetes upgrade, right? Moldon, are you talking about the same Stefan than the one I think? Yes. What are you doing the 23 of December? I thought that would be on the 18 or 19 of December, let me think. I have something that day. Is it remembered just before your holidays? The day before.  Have fun! So that's all for Kubernetes. Any objection, question, clarification, remark on that topic? Ok, so that one move to the next milestone automatically. A new issue cannot spawn Linux RM64 agents on CIG and Kinsayo. I was trying to check the GDK tools on Linux RM64 and I saw where there was on the logs and after waiting one hour for my agent. I retried earlier today with the reproduction step here on replay and I was able to go in real time on the Azure console and see the following message which say that kind of instance standard d4 whatever that we use for RM64 cannot use a disk greater than 100. Of course we use 150 GB by default on CIG and Kinsayo. I'm not sure of the solution yet but just what I saw. Decreasing the disk can have side impacts. Maybe we need a persistent disk instead of fmural disk. I believe we should check what is the setting on infrascii because infrascii still can spin up Linux RM64 agents. So I don't know if it's because it has different instance size, different disk size I don't know. Is there any information about the size that we're using most of the time if we never cross the 100 there's a good point. Yeah, everything is on Datadog and you did the work for the ephemeral agent to send their metrics. So I'm not bad point. So this one move to the next milestone. I'm removing myself by default Si quelqu'un est intéressé, il peut commencer à checker sur celui-là. J'ai écrit un note. Le disc fmr n'est pas élevé avec celui-là à l'instant. Pour trouver une solution, bien sûr, comparez-vous à l'infra-ci, où ça marche. Check datadog. Discusage pour agents fmr. J'ai besoin d'incrédits instantiaires. C'est bon pour vous ? Pas de question. Pour la prochaine question, j'aurais voulu avoir un morceau. Ok, on a juste une réponse de Alex. Je ne suis pas vraiment sûr de ce qui s'est passé. Quand les murs sont en place, ils auraient voulu être arrêtés immédiatement. Tout est bien installé, même si c'est manualement installé. Mais ça ressemble à ce que le S3, le système d'artifacte archivant, a tendance à faire un délicieux synchronisation. Ce serait peut-être un bug sur la plug-in, ou un comportement expectant, je ne suis pas sûr. Mais parfois, il faut attendre 1 ou 2 heures avant que les murs sont nettés, même si, comme vous pouvez le voir sur le screenshot, c'est plus comme un écart immédiatement. J'ai vu le timestamp, où les webbooks étaient en temps, mais ensuite, le temps pour l'artifacte archivant finit par être copié et netté. 1 ou 2 heures peut être élapsé. Ce serait possible parce que c'est un procès synchronisé. J'ai demandé à Alex pour vérifier si il y a un autre cas. Peut-être qu'on va avoir plus de détails. Je pense que ce serait bien expliquer que ce serait relative au plugin S3. Est-ce qu'il y a une question sur celui-là ? Je vais le mettre à la prochaine milestone. Je propose que l'on s'occupe la prochaine semaine, si on ne peut reproduire le problème. Le statut de mirrors. Ce n'est pas de travail sur ça. C'est un bon catch-folks 3 semaines auparavant. On a 4 erreurs. L'une des meilleures solutions serait de changer de OSUSL pour l'archivation d'Archive. C'est le default fallback. On devrait toujours avoir un statut HTML. On peut vérifier nos scripts synchronisés. Je pense que ce serait relative parce que l'âge de l'archive pourrait être plus ou moins que ce soit le système de rétention que l'on a sur OSUSL. Si c'est le cas, peut-être qu'on pourrait régénérer l'archivation d'Archive chaque week-end. C'est un week-end. C'est l'autre angle. Je pense qu'on va changer l'archivation d'Archive par ajouter un command t-dash-tml ou le toucher et voir si c'est synced pour l'OSUSL. Nous devons travailler sur ça. On va passer à la prochaine milestone. Stéphane. Le ton. Statues. J'ai commencé à changer beaucoup de tests pour les tests et les tests. J'ai préparé une nouvelle version de Linux pour pouvoir avoir les Windows et le commun. Pour maintenant, j'ai besoin de couper mes requêtes et de retirer le t-dash-tml que j'ai fait pour que le t-dash-tml soit bloqué parce que le processus de l'OSUSL a besoin de l'air avant d'évaluer ça. C'est ça, je pense. OK. Wip on migrating the Linux test the Linux test toGhost pool then update CLI Is there any question? OK. Let's have a look on the recently incoming issues. So we have an issue opened by Bazil Implement artifact caching proxy for MavenHPI plugin. I've disabled it. I don't know if you remember. We had an issue when using ACP for that particular use case. I've created an issue in the repository and Bazil wanted to have mirror issue on our repository so we don't lose track of it. So I'm removing Criage because it's a valid issue and we are looking on it. I don't think we have time for this now unless someone challenged this. I wouldn't... I would let it for now. So we let it in the repository. Is that OK for everyone? Yeah. Erwe, you open an issue about cyber bits. Can you let us know a bit more about this? While looking at mirror bits contributors I noticed one of them was running cyberbits.ui It's providing mirrors for open source software. So it would be nice to ask them if they are willing to mirror Jenkins 2. I haven't done anything yet on this issue. It's not on the milestone so no expectation for having worked on this. Do you think we should add it to the next milestone or do you want to delay for later? I propose I think we can delay for another week. OK. So I'm moving it to the sync next, OK? I wouldn't... Yeah. I wouldn't have used that milestone but we'll see later. Start a new repo under Jenkins for Jenkins contributors spotlight. OK, that one was opened by Chris. I I'd prefer to start working on this one. Yes. Moving for Chris. OK, let me add new issues. No, let's add it to the next milestone. OK. I believe we had a discussion last week I don't remember exactly are there any blocker? It's just a matter of starting to work on it. It's just a matter of starting working on it. Cool. So I did. Then I think that's all. We have this one still try edge. We can remove try edge. We had this one but it wasn't good first issue. No more try edge to add here. Let's have a look at the infrasync next. See if we have topics. Here. Cyber bit just moved here. We still have the pod restart on public gates. Not sure why. AWS decrease cost for summer. I need to close this one and move on the winter port. Not this week. Now. The status from sun grid. And the rest are classical. So if you are annoyed you have plenty of task to pick here folks. Just in case you are asleep. You'll sleep when you'll be dead. Oh no. Jokes aside I don't have other subjects. Do you have other topics you want to add to the next milestone to mention here? No. We can also finish early for this time. Cool. Ok. See you next week folks. Thanks for the work. Bye bye. Bye bye.


Yes, that's how I was spotted and I was awarded HSE in terms of corona because we were the first people who were, because after participating in Embola, we were the first frontliners to start the Magadi hospital for corona. Yes. Alright, so let's talk about these two things here. First, you were awarded the head of state's commendation because of involvement in corona and Ebola. Yes. Corona and Ebola. Yes. Let's first of all talk about Ebola because you were there when they started the first site, the first institute where we had actually the first ward in Kenya for Ebola. Yes. How did that come to be? We were working in the Kenyatta Nation Hospital. We were selected to go for Ebola training. I was among the first people who went and after going for that training is when the Ebola was very serious in West Africa. We started an admission center in Kenyatta Nation Hospital. So after training that, then I was selected to go to West Africa when Ebola was really hot and that's when I went and we fought Ebola till it was no longer there. I remember during that time it was such an outbreak that many lives are lost at that time and of course people were even skeptical about even traveling was a problem. Yes, especially the health profession. Yes. It was very devastating because most of them died because once you come in contact with Ebola patient, if you have not protected yourself you get Ebola and you can... That's the end of it. Yes, that's the end of it. Wasn't it psychologically traumatizing for someone like you? You've traveled to a place where only if it was the first time to go to West Africa. I never been there and we went through the long road in North America, Central America and then West Africa because most of the routes were closed. So it was not easy but we just put God first and say if my death is meant to be in West Africa and then let it be there.   So it's just like an army person going to fight the enemy. You don't know whether you will survive or you will come back. So you just got there praying God that let me can't help those people.  And then you planted the first Ebola ward here in Kenya? Yes, when I came back, I thank the Kenyatta Nation Hospital very much. They came the responsibility of starting the first Ebola ward that is IDU, infectious disease units in Kenya, which is still there. Still there? Yes. How is it functioning? It has been a hand even especially for corona patients who are already getting help from there. So is that the same ward that has also been used when it comes to COVID patients? Yes, yes, yes. It is the same ward including Bagati. Now that one was the intensive one where you get now those people put on any ventilators. Yes. So how was it and of course your participation when it comes to the fight against COVID. From the time we had the outbreak and of course it was announced and then we are seeing a curfews being put there. We are seeing restrictions, masks, sanitizing and social distancing. How is it for you working at KNH and of course as a health practitioner, medical practitioner during the time of COVID? Because now you came, Ebola was there. Now corona is there but you are still the same person handling all these pandemics. Okay, when the corona came and I was appointed to go to Bagati Hospital, it didn't shock me because after going through Ebola, because in West Africa we were seeing dead people all over the streets everywhere. So I was not afraid because since I know to protect myself and protect others, I was not afraid to go and work in a corona ward of which I went. I worked there but there I got corona that is in March. Yes. And I was given the treatment and I was well. You had to? Yes, I got infected with COVID. Yes, that is in March 21. That is 2021? Yes. How long did it take for you to recover? It took about two weeks. But since we had to keep ourselves away from others, I was just in the house for more than one month. Yes. Because you were not doing that time, people lost their jobs? Yes. Yours was secured? Yes. Mine was secured since I was now the health provider. So they were just waiting for me to exit to die or come back on duty. So God help me, I came back on duty. Very healthy and I continued nursing the COVID patients. When the vaccine came I was the first one to get the vaccine. And I didn't worry about getting it again because I knew I was protected. Yes. I love your passion. You don't give up? No, I don't give up. I don't even fear death. You don't? No. If it would come, it would come. There is no reverse. But since God is still loving me, I have not died. I will continue giving the health to other people. Yes. Now I am seeing now those medals that you have. So tell me about this. This is the hero one. The one I got the hero, I was awarded at the Kishi National Stadium by his Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta. Yeah. For being brave to go to West Africa now, corona, I got this through the national hero scans of Kenya. So I was awarded this in Kishi. That was the Machuja Day. Machuja Day. I was awarded this. And then the same, that's 2020. The same year during celebrations, national celebration that is 12th December, I was also awarded the Honorable. Also this is another one. Yeah. I don't know if you can get that done. So this is another award? Yeah, this is for HSC. This for? HSC, state commendation. And this for hero. For being a hero. I thought they are one. They are different. They are two different. This for HSC and this for hero. All right. So you can see the one on the left side of your screen that is the HSC. Yes. Of we that is called the head of state commendation. Yes. I was awarded because of what? Because of participating in corona after Ebola. Yes. And this one is for being a hero. A hero to go to West Africa and come back because of Ebola. And of course today even on our Facebook page that's at Y254, we even ask a question how big are your dreams? Una plan kuwacha legacy gani? Someone like Lydia, you've already left a legacy. Something that people can remember. Yes.  Let's talk about the things you plan to do now. Okay. After being awarded and we get a lot of talks from our leaders through the heroes camps of Kenya. We should help other people just from the crossroads to recognize you that you have been recognized by the president and help them in any way you will. Maybe now I am in health to help those people who cannot help themselves in terms of health. So you want to go out and give back to the community? Yes. I go out and give back to the community and identify those challenges, problems special for hearing now that I'm an audiologist. Identify those challenges and help those people to obtain their full potential of life. Like now children they are born not hearing. By the time the parents realize they are not hearing already they are past school age. So if they are identified at early age so interventions and technologies are there help them just here like any other normal person. So how do you plan to go through this for lack of a better term do I say outreach program? How do you plan to go about it? Is there any particular areas that you want to focus on? How do you plan to go about it? Okay. Now the last five years back I've been planning how well I can do that and that's why I went to specialize in audiology beside my nursing provision under the small courses critical care, emergence courses, HIV all round. I thought of it how I can put in one umbrella or one packet so that when I go out I'm able to give any health care as it comes. So I started the process of starting a foundation, a health foundation. I was inspired by those people who have started before a health foundation and you find they really go on the cross route to help those people who cannot help themselves in terms of health challenges like hearing, maybe they are sick and they don't know where to start they can't even come to Nairobi for better treatment so that is my focus. So you're saying you won't focus on just hearing only? Not hearing just heard as a whole Ya, that is inclusive inclusive of hearing. So initially you were thinking of just hearing and then it only changed your mind? I changed, I said I should include everything because when someone comes to a health institution you have a headache but when you reach after an investigator you have a bigger problem you have a hearing problem you have other big disease like hypertension but diabetes which you don't know but after investigation you get that is what is disturbing you so you are just channeled in the right you are referred in the right place or you are helped from there to go in the right place and get help and you have good health. But now you have to start from a particular area? Ya, the foundation is called Outer in Health Services and your diologe that say hearing center so I am planning to start but if I get assistance I am also looking for assistance if anyone can assist me so that I can start that hearing center plus day care so that I can make it back to the community where I can identify a place and start it so that I can help those people who are in the ground So you are looking for a place and of course some sponsorship or support in terms of support in terms of anything because I need to procure the machines it helps the institution just the basic to test if the patient has come maybe it doesn't know what is suffering from or it doesn't know the problem you should have all the services there counseling, audiology a doctor to see them and also speech maybe the children need where they have reached they need speech therapy they need to be assisted so that they can talk and then they continue to go to school so all those services combined together I want them to be in one center and that's all give back to the community the bottom line is just giving back to the community I love that let's talk about the community itself what I thought is regards to the state of healthcare in the country but picking it up from COVID we've come from a time when we were restricted and now you can see good town masks are no longer there even me I don't have a mask so I have a mask in Liyanguka and people no longer have that what I thought is regards to that now the mood is changed actually the mood has changed it has changed because they are following our leaders to say that now the infection rate has gone down but the protocols still remain you are supposed to keep a distance and if you are in a crowded place you wear a mask and you put it on that crowd who has corona and you can pick the corona from there so just be careful if you avoid crowded area and if you have to be there you have to have a mask just in case people to get the vaccination and then their life continues your thoughts about healthcare in the country so far the steps you've taken as a country how far are we and do you think based on your experience from where you see it that we are where we ought to be in terms of healthcare in terms of health people have responded well especially on the vaccination side because the way corona attacked us no one wants to be sick in a short time and go twice so most people have been given vaccination and if there are people who have not been vaccinated there is a very small percentage I can't really quote the percentage but based on what we see in the hospital side and how people react outside there people have responded well and of course as you bring this conversation to a close I would like you to just have a final word and of course give a general comment in regards to this what message would you like to pass to those Kenyans that are watching you this particular Tuesday morning for those Kenyans who are watching me just briefly yes I would just urge them to just take care of their health if there is somebody who has not been vaccinated can you say corona to take the initiative because it is good for that person to keep health so that we don't continue losing our loved ones through avoiding simple vaccination and it is good for our health just to be protected by just a simple job and you stay healthy and you eat well yes people kukula kukula is a balanced diet yes this is a balanced diet you are what you eat what I eat we are what we eat is what we eat but these days people are trying to balance the food and take for good health yes and take plenty of water yes and those people who are watching me I would like to get any assistance so that I get this dream going and it will you've done a great job a fantastic job and I know it will catch up how can people get in touch with you if they want to get a hold of you how can they reach you okay they can reach me through my email that is Lydia mohaiatiaw.com or my website for the foundation that's www.outeringhealthservices.org and audiologyassessmentcenter.co.ke okay so get in touch with her and you guys to that and of course you shall be able to get all the information and the details you need because we are giving back to the society Lydia thank you so much for coming you do the good job and we wish you the best thank you very much resante sana yes all right now down to the end of this particular conversation right here on why in the morning but remember we still have more coming up your way my name is Ramama keep engaging with us keep talking to us the Ashina Ghazules is why in the morning we still have a lot in store for you coming up your way we are taking a short break we'll be back in a bit