I think we should start off with the commissioner and he can start us and as we get into more specifics, we can have questions and we have the entire morning devoted to this. Good morning, everyone. For the record, Michael Harrington, Commissioner Vermont Department of Labor. We also have Cameron Wood, our UI director, as well as Matthew Barowitz, who's our economic and labor market information director or chief economist. So each of them can speak to the respective areas. Appreciate seeing you all in 2022. Although I think we've stayed in pretty regular contact even after the session ended last year. So we can certainly give an overview of the department. If, if you'd like, but maybe to the point you just ended with, Mr chair, in terms of looking at coven, which seems to be the most prominent or area that we face right now, I think we would also agree that workforce is one of, if not our top priority going forward given the workforce shortage that we and every other state are experiencing. At this point, we don't believe there's necessarily directed or specific legislation that's needed for the department or the state to, you know, further combat the COVID crisis from maybe the Department of Labor's perspective that said, I think we're all familiar with the OSHA emergency temporary standard that's currently moving through the court system. So we are keenly aware of that. That's the requirement from the federal government that employers larger than 100 that must have either a vaccination policy in place or require their employees to be tested on a weekly basis and report and maintain those test results. We have some, some varying opinions on on that from our perspective, where what's known as a state plan state. So, some states OSHA actually overseas enforcement in their states. There's roughly about 23 states that are state plan states. We're one of them. So, really, what that does is shift the responsibility on to us and the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA. And we will need to, if this moves forward and doesn't get stalled out again in the court system, look to implement some type of an emergency rule that is as effective as the emergency temporary standard. So, I think we have some thoughts on how to go about doing that without overburdening Vermont's small employers. I think we would, we would say to Senator Clarkson's comment earlier, you know, small employers in different than small employers in other other states. So, figuring out how to be mindful of that. From the unemployment insurance perspective, we are at, I guess what we would call pre pandemic levels for people collecting unemployment. I think what makes this time now different from when we enacted provisions early on to expand eligibility and either additional benefits or additional supports for employers is that now we have a vaccine and we also have boosters and those vaccines cover a wide age range from from a toddler and young adult to adult. So, from that perspective, there are many more opportunities for protection with our worker community. I think also what we're finding is that more employers have now adjusted their, their work habits. So that there's more flexibility. There's more ability for people to work remote or have, you know, changes in shift coverage. So again, I think there's a lot more opportunity there or if someone finds that their current employment is not conducive to their, you know, there are other responsibilities in their personal life. And we also have a lot of options as well in terms of moving around the employment system so they could find easily another employer that may offer more flexibilities, you know, if they needed to manage childcare, or things of that nature. So that is here as well and Matt can certainly talk about the employment landscape in terms of what it looks like in terms of how Vermont's labor force has decreased over the past two years, but also what what hiring looks like in our work workforce landscape. So happy to go in whatever direction, the committee would like, or I can just keep talking. Very much for that. That's a good starting point. I'd like to stay on the COVID thing and let's get through that issue first and then we can go more into the other issues. And maybe one of the things I'd be curious is to hear from Cameron, what, tell us what the, if somebody comes in with saying, I came down with COVID and we can talk about whether it makes a difference whether they're vaccinated or not. And the doctor says you got, you got to take three weeks off and isolate yourself or something like that. And the person says well, I got laid off, either temporarily or permanently as a result of that. And he goes to, to you and says I'd like to draw an employment. What is, what happens to that person. Good morning for the record Cameron would unemployment insurance and wages division director for the Department of Labor. Happy to try to address the question, Mr. Chair. You know, as a general matter. The first thing we'll look at is whether or not someone has separated from employment. And in the event we actually did a webinar just yesterday for a lot of employers regarding vaccine mandates and unemployment insurance and the impacts of a vaccine mandate on a potential separation and whether those individuals would be eligible. And I spoke a little bit about this topic. If an individual has been asked to quarantine, or is out sick due to contracting COVID-19. And they have an anticipation of going back to work. So, you know, they have a job available they will be going back to that job after that period of quarantine or illness. We would likely not consider that to be a separation from employment in that instance, and the individual would not be eligible for unemployment. If there has been a separation because somebody is out due to, you know, being sick. The individual if it's COVID related would likely not be eligible for unemployment at this point during that period, because a requirement to receive unemployment is that you'd be able to work available to work and actively seeking work and somebody who has separated because they're not able to work because of COVID, whether they're sick, or they are being asked to quarantine would not be eligible for unemployment at that time because they would not be able to work because of that reason. If there is a separation because of COVID. So let's say, you know, somebody contracts COVID, they're being asked to quarantine their employer says, No, you need to come to work.  In that instance, we would look at that and say, after the period of illness, we would look at the separation and determine that person most likely to be eligible. You can't, you know, if somebody has to quit a job or somebody refuses to go into work, because it would be contrary to guidance provided to them by a health care provider, the CDC. So, you know, health departments telling somebody to quarantine for five days, the employers telling them you're asymptomatic, you need to come to work and the person refuses and quits. You know, we would probably consider that good cause to quit and we would likely find that person eligible for benefits after the period in which they would, you know, need to quarantine. Once they become able to work again, we would likely deem that person eligible and able to receive benefits. It's really going to depend on whether or not there has been a separation. If it's just somebody having to stay home with the intention of going back to work and they're out of sick leave, for example, to cover that time period, we would likely not allow them benefits in that instance, because they wouldn't meet the eligibility requirements for unemployment. I hope that answers your question, Mr. Chair. Well, it's a complicated area. Yes, is that different than what our law provided when we did the temporary fix last year as far as temporary separations where they where they they're not they're able to eventually go back to work do we make any provision for people who were not given their job or promised their job back. Yes, sir, there were some expanded eligibility provisions that went into place during the height of the pandemic, primarily to allow people who needed to separate from employment for an extensive period due to a quarantine or taking care of a health care member. You know, who is out of work or needing to take care of children who, you know, because of a school closure or remote work or something to that event. We also had the Pua program at that time, which was designed to assist those individuals as well if they were not eligible for unemployment. There was flexibilities across the country at the federal level and also the expanded provisions that were put in place in Vermont have have since expired so at this point, we are back to traditional unemployment insurance program, which would not allow for for similar exemptions. And yet, are you getting some inquiries from people who have come down with coven and saying, you know, I can't afford to live I need some help financially. And I don't you know I either. Maybe I'll have my job back maybe or not I don't know how long I'm going to have to be out but common sense, and even CDC guidelines may dictate that they stay away from work or they have childcare school closes down and they have to stay at home. I'm having. I mean the Commissioner gave us a bunch of examples and I think they're all accurate but I'm not sure I come to the same conclusion that it's, it's much different this time around than last time around, and whether we should be helping these people. You know I would say you know I've received some questions mainly from employers, not necessarily from claimants, like yesterday on the webinar that we did there were a few questions about this issue that we answered for employers that were on the call. I would say we haven't seen a significant increase in claims being filed I mean you know typically claimants don't proactively reach out to us and ask whether they would be eligible in our typical response even when they do is you know you have the right to file. It's hard for us to gauge your eligibility without having all of the information available to us so we try to be very cautious about not being firm on whether somebody would be eligible for their circumstance because you know there could be a different party to the dispute the employer. We don't have that information so we try to be careful of not advising people that they will be eligible but I'm not aware of a lot of claimants reaching out to us about this issue and I also know we have not seen any spike in UI claims related to this topic we haven't seen adjudications going up related to this topic in particular no sir. So is this. I mean if I got sick. I had to go out of work for a month or something and my employer laid me off. I thought there was a disqualification period but then that could you could still get benefits and I think in this case you said you didn't mention a disqualification period you said that in that case we probably award benefits. So your your disqualification is going to be it's very similar to what you just described Mr chair so for for everyone's benefit who may be listening you know if somebody separates for employment due to some medical circumstance that prohibits them from continuing to work. They would not be eligible for unemployment based on that medical separation because at that point in time again you would not be you know available to work which is a requirement of UI. But once that period once your medical disqualification is lifted, then we would look at that separation and determine whether or not you would be eligible at that time. So let's say you know you you know you broke your leg and you can't work and your employer discharges you know at the point in time when you can go back to work. And it's not a great example to be honest people may be able to work with a broken leg but the point being you know at the point in time when you're clear to go back to work and you're now able to work again at that point in time. You would become eligible for unemployment based on the separation and that's where I was describing Mr chair and a COVID situation. If you are discharged you know if your employer, you know terminates you because of a COVID related separation, you may not be eligible for unemployment during that period when you have COVID if you are ill, or during the period of quarantine. But once that period is lifted or once you have recovered at that point in time we would look at the separation. And if it was an eligible separation and you were able to go back to work we would allow benefits in that instance. I guess, I guess maybe I misunderstood the way the laws I thought that if you quit for health reasons presently. It's as you said but there's also some period of disqualification even when you're able to go back to work like a week or or something like that. Up to six weeks or something. Yes, sir, let me double check I believe you are correct but you know the point being once you're. Let me confirm while we're sitting here talking with the committee but you know once the big question is your, your availability of work and once that has been resolved you could then potentially be eligible for benefits. I'll confirm on the medical disqualification. Okay, so no collection. This is sort of, it's frustrating, obviously, because here we are in a surge. Again, we had one obviously this fall and we managed to get through Delta without UI clearly being impacted as we're now again at record lows of unemployment claims. But I guess my concern is what are people doing, you know, even if they're out and their employers okay with it. What are they doing about income. And that I guess that concerns me if they're out for two or three weeks that's a huge economic burden on them and what, what's our remedy for that is their one and be with no paid family lead with nothing safe with no safety net for people what are we doing about that. So I'll jump in here. If you don't mind I think the question really becomes is the unemployment insurance program or the unemployment insurance trust fund the appropriate place for that. And I don't think it is personally it because it is a health separation and a health reason for not being able to work. And so what ends up happening is we start having workarounds for regular eligibility requirements that typically would mean someone isn't eligible so if someone to Cameron's point if someone has to leave work due to a medical condition, they would not be eligible for unemployment insurance in normal times. So then Michael is it a workers comp issue that we should be looking at I mean, you know what we certainly looked at health concerns at the beginning of COVID and we in state we in stated, you know, we, we put into play, and into place measures to support workers who had to leave because of COVID so we've dealt with health issues already with you I and set a precedent for that. I guess my question is, does this belong in the workers comp should we be make then making these workers eligible to access workers comp more readily or. Yeah, I think those are great questions. First of all, I think the hard part will be trying to compare today to 2020. And we had things like an emergency order where there were certain federal exemptions and exceptions and federal programs that many of these people would have been eligible for. So many of these people became eligible and moved into the PUA program, based on their eligibility. And to your point, you are talking more about a, you know, a family or medical leave program which does not currently exist and I think that's the challenge when we talk about workers compensation. The only way an individual becomes eligible for workers compensation is if you can directly tie back the injury or the reason for separation to the workplace. And unfortunately, as we know, it may well be it may well be but again you have to the employee. The burden is on the employee to prove that the exposure and subsequent, you know, consequence of that that put them out of work was through working. I'm just astonished, you aren't getting that pressure right now from restaurant, particularly the lodging and hospitality sector, where there, you know, our workers in particularly in restaurants are exposed all the time by the tourists by who are bringing it in or by our own unvaccinated or by people who've gotten it. I mean, you know, and I think the difference though is that with the change in the CDC guidance, right, so there's no, you know, but even if you're vaccinated and you are exposed, you don't need to quarantine or isolate anymore. And so part of that too is with 80 plus percent of our population fully vaccinated. If they are a close contact or fall into the exposure category they no longer unless they're, you know, exuding symptoms, they don't need to quarantine anymore. So the level of the number of people needing to quarantine is much less. I also think, go ahead. You know, I get it, but I also get that a thoughtful person. You know, it's still unclear to me how contagious you are in that circumstance. I mean, I know there is CDC, CDC guidelines on this now. I'm concerned about people who are, you know, without paid family leave and without UI, are we left with workers come to pick up the week or so that people may have to not be working. And so for every dollar counts and every week of work counts, what are we going to do to help these people. To Cameron's point, I think what we aren't seeing right now is a massive number of people filing for unemployment. So I think it's also hard to know exactly who is impacted and and how are they impacted. Right, because we aren't seeing a significant number of, you know, what we saw right now is even a much smaller uptick than we normally see during our winter session. So even those construction employers or granite shed workers that typically lay off hundreds of Romaners actually are there's such a demand right now that they're actually keeping them on through the winter to do other projects. So again, even the seasonal unemployment isn't as steep as it used to be, at least this year. Let me let me interrupt because we'd like to take a break at 10 o'clock. I'm just going to, we're going to continue with this conversation because I think it's, I think it's really important. I'm not surprised that there's not that many people applying. I mean, we're in a different environment.  If my business closed, but here the businesses are operating, and they lose income for a couple of weeks, and they probably don't even think necessarily of unemployment but they need some income so we need to talk about that. I don't want to commission or come back to workers comp because I had on a much smaller scale. I had the same question in terms of the presumption law we passed last year and continued. It's very hard to prove with airborne diseases that it was coded that that it was caught at work, but a lot of these things are going to be caught at work so let's take a 10 minute break. To remind me about that because I could go on and on, you know, so we'll come back at 11.


This is George Gao. So imagine that you had a group of people who got to know your services really well and were out there selling your services for you for free. Now you have that group of people they're called your clients. Okay. Really think about this.  Now this only happens if you have made your services or if your services are effective and delightful. Okay. And so I think that there's not enough conversation in the marketing conversation and when people talk about marketing and getting more clients there's not enough talk about making one's services more effective and more delightful because again if you don't if you aren't doing this on a regular basis if you aren't looking at your services and your interactions with your clients on a regular basis and seeing how can I make this more effective how can I make this more delightful for them how can I make every single touch point with my client more delightful for them if you're not doing this on a regular basis you are basically wasting a whole group of ambassadors who took the time to really get to know your services from the inside so they can out there are actually more qualified to sell your services than anybody else on the planet so if you're not taking the time to actually improve your services in that kind of way with that kind of foresight and insight then you are you are wasting a big part of your marketing opportunity so that's what I want to encourage you today is to is to take take some time at least every month you know if not every day after a client call or after a client meeting to say how can I what's one little thing I can do to tweak my the experience my client has with me to be more effective or to be more delightful if we all do this our services will start to sell themselves we don't we don't have to do as much marketing as not as much selling so I hope that this video is encouraging for you and until the next video I wish you joyful diligence in improving your services take care


How do you build a UX culture in a company that doesn't value UX? What if you're the only designer? What about if you want to get promoted in the same company? How would you do it? Okay, what's up? I didn't press record on this video, but I did record Zoom, so bear with me. Hi, I'm Chris. Previously, the head of design and now founder of UX Playbook. Today, I'll be speaking to one of my mentees about her two struggles. UX is not valued in her company and how to get promoted. I'll share tactics that I've used and a step-by-step process. Now let's jump on the call. So your title is a senior product designer, but you're just doing a lot more, right? You think you deserve the lead role as you also are the only designer. So you're doing things like designing, user research, design ops, road mapping, okay, our presentations, just everything that you should be doing and more. And that's the argument. Also, because your company is dev or engineering focused, they don't really have a clear career path for a designer like yourself. And also the excuse of, because we're quite flat, authority doesn't matter and title doesn't matter, but we know that in career it kind of matters if you're playing this game. If you have a lead role, it'll be much easier to jump into another lead role versus if you have a senior role today and you're trying to apply for a lead role tomorrow, it's going to be much harder for you to kind of get your foot in the door anywhere else, right? So it does matter in this sense. And of course, a lead holds much more weight in meetings with customers, with clients and with juniors as well, right? Like that's kind of how they think of it. The first thing is if I was to reframe what you said, which is how do I pitch that I'm lead role material? I think that's the first thing we need to tackle. And I would encourage you to build a brag sheet of accomplishments at work. And what does this mean and how do you do it? A brag sheet of accomplishments is basically all the things that you accomplished throughout the last six months. Really simple. It could be over a year, over two years, depends how long you stay in the company. So how do you do this? You record this on a living document, so like Google Docs or whatever. And you basically document the accomplishment and wins that are super important to you throughout the year, but also super important to the team, the impact that you made. And you would actually use this as the baseline of presenting your case during performance reviews or whenever that happens, right? Why do you do this? Because you want to be sure that when you have these conversations about salary, about title, about what you're worth to the company, that you're really sure that you can provide some quick examples that actually make sense. Because a lot of people don't do this in their career. And this is bad because we all suffer from recency bias, which means if you did something one month ago, I might remember. But if you did something six months ago, I've almost completely forgotten about. But maybe the thing six months ago was way more important and really helped the team. So this is why we record it for ourselves, but also we then formulate that into something that we can present. Also, I'm not a big fan of waiting for performance reviews. Some companies have it every six months, some have it one year, some have it every two years. I think that is BS. So for me, I would say I like to at least do it every six months, given if my brag sheet is good enough, and I can actually fight for the case of renegotiating salary. So you should be the one asking for performance reviews. You should be the one ready to pitch why you deserve this role. Not anybody else because you should be the one valuing yourself over everybody else. If your manager values you more, then I would argue that you need some more self-love. But anyway, previously I did it in a one or two-slide format and I put things like cultural contribution, design ops contribution, project work contribution and other achievements. Those are like four main categories. You can have your own categories. These are really up to you.  Basically it's just to help them digest the information a lot easier. And also you can see like, oh, clearly I love this cultural aspect of building companies and building teams and I've done a lot for that. So there's different pros and cons that you can come up with while affinity diagramming. So that's one way of doing it. And then the other way, which I forgot to mention, before you come into this, let's just say pitch meeting of I deserve more, here's the evidence. You can also do something that's really well used in the industry of products, like digital products or any products really you buy online, which is reviews, right? People look at reviews all the time about everything. Why are you not asking people to review yourself? We call this at work, 360 feedback, right? And it could be the main three people you work with or five people. And it's really just to be like, hey, I've worked with you for six months now. I would love if you could just write a few things about what you enjoyed working with me. So basically you should make it really simple for people. So here are the three questions I would ask. What do I do well? What could be improved? And what's your ideal scenario with working with me? Right? And those three questions could just be one line each, right? It could be a survey and it could be these people that... And then you take that and you really just give up a quote and be like, look, I've worked with this square master, he said this, I worked with the PO, he said this, and I've worked with another dev and he said this. And this is the backup for all the contributions, right? So you can kind of align them with the contributions you made or the biggest one or the biggest theme that you come up with. And then that feedback could either relate to that or relate to different sections of your brag sheet, if you will. So yeah, 360 feedback is super important. I have this on my portfolio as well. So then you can like add that to your portfolio. You can use LinkedIn recommendations that you've previously gone, whatever, that will help you kind of move the ball forward. But if you're pitching it to your specific company, then it will be the people in that company that's worked with you, okay? And then the last thing is about goals. So I've wrote a lot about things on goals, I even have a six step process, but really the goals, whether it's your career or in the job environment, really needs to reflect what you want to do. So it always comes back to the point of introspection. First is like, what values do I have? Like what do I care about? Whether it's mastery, like I want to be the best designer ever, or whether it's like helping others, right? And whatever the value you think is most rewarding and why you do what you do, then from the values you break it down into motivations, right? So maybe if you want to be the best designer, why do you want to be the best designer, right? That's one of the values of mastery. Maybe you love learning complex items and teaching others. Maybe you just really have this knack for understanding things. Maybe you really like the tools that you use, whatever the value is. So you can really break down the value into motivations. It takes a bit of work if you haven't done it before, but you can kind of dream up of these ideas. And then from there, you have a really good baseline of like, okay, well, if this is what I value and this is what motivates me, the goals could stem from there quite easily. And these are not just arbitrary goals that your company sets you, improve revenue by X percent. These would actually be the goals that you care about, right? And then from then on, of course, if you know OKRs, you say, all right, so the objective is to do this goal. Let's just say you've picked a goal of like getting to lead position within the next three months, then you're going to have to have key results to measure that, right? Like how are you going to do it? You're going to have multiple reviews with your manager.  You are going to chop up these things in different ways. If you were to pitch your manager about getting a raise, here's what you do first, right? From senior to lead. Okay, so the first thing you'll do is build a bracket sheet. You want to list out all your accomplishments, what you did, not why you did it, but like why it's important. Why does it move the needle? Then after you have that, you want to kind of do this infinity diagram. And really, this is just for your personal benefit, but also it makes it easier to read. Like the major themes that you've contributed to, whether it's culture, design ops, project work, other achievements, whatever these things are, right? Then you have this, then it's time to kind of put this into a presentable format, right? And this will be just a slide format, something you can send someone and they can understand really well. Remember, you want to cut down these sort of bracket sheet accomplishments into like super easy to understand, half a sentence type bullet points, basically. And then you want to gather some 360 feedback, three questions you ask. When you work with me, what did I do well? What can be improved? What is your ideal scenario when working with me? So you grab that, you then concise that down and put that into the slide, right? So maybe you have one, two or three slides, right? So the first slide could be your contributions, aggregated in themes. The second slide and the third slide could be just feedback you got from your team. So that is your pitch, but from what you've said, there's also a bunch of things that you want to do to improve the UX organization within your company, right? So you say, hey, this is what I've done, okay? And then now you say, this is my ask. You say, you know, this is what I would do. I want to bring people in the process. I want to train people, right? I think design is super important and I'm going to move the needle forward, right? Because you don't just want to say, here's what I've done, give me a raise. You want to say, no, I can do way more than what I've done and this is what I want to do.  Actually, it should be this. Brecksheet, step one and 360 feedback. Step two is what you want to do, like what your ideal sort of recommendations are for the organization, where you want to take it, right? And then the third, the last is your ask.  She was two more people and she wants to spend 50% of the time on projects, 50% on other. Maybe that's not a reality for you, but it could be a conversation that you have to kind of negotiate what that ask is, right? But you should have a clear ask. So those are really the three steps. That's how I would formulate it. And where you start the conversation about your workload and the impact it has, you know, long term on your health at the company, that's really up to you. I think it could go at the end in terms of before you ask, you give him the reality of today, right? You say, hey, man, I'm so burnt out. This is crazy, but I want to do all this stuff that I just mentioned. Here's my presentation to you. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what you need to do for me. So I don't feel like this, plus I can help the organization do that, all that stuff that we just mentioned. So that would be kind of a four-step process or three-ish step, a 3.5-step process. Yeah. So let's recap it in three simple steps. The first one is rag sheet, what I've done and what have people said about my good work, right? That's the first one. Then the second step is recommendations, what I'm going to do for you, right, and the company. Then the third one is my ask, the reality of today and what I need from you as the manager. And then with those three steps, I think that is your strategy to kind of one, get a raise, two, get more resources, three, actually tell him you're not happy and that he can help if he wants to. And then four is kind of just to be like, you know, I'm doing a lot of work, right? You better kind of give me some recognition for this work. Maybe five would be, here's the vision I have for this team. So you're showing a more strategic and leadership side of yourself, right? It's not just about you. It's about what's good for the company, what's good for the team, what's good for the product. So there's actually quite a few beneficial things that are just made up on the spot. Pretty good, right? And that's it. If you're interested in UX mentorship, let's jump on a call. Link in the description. Or, or, or, hit the big red button. Here, I think. Anyway. Okay, bye.


Hey guys real estate gaming here today. We are back to the original story of suit heart apparently The other one we joined was in the original one and this is the original one So let's see how this whole thing began and the story behind suit heart Okay, so suit heart. Oh, he's sleeping lick the door That's funny. All right, so let's see what's going on over here to start that to start are you awake? You're almost late for school. Huh? I gotta hurry. Oh no suit heart running late for school, man Okay, so it seems like his parents are on him about school.  Wait, those aren't bacon flakes are Cheerios.   Well, he said he loves bacon flakes. So he definitely is Okay, so let's see up. I don't know why they go to school dad. Oh, so this is where the bully is Well, he hasn't told his dad yet. Why son why he's about son like an actual son whatever man Okay, uh, because everybody will be mean to me because we are bankers. Oh man, that is so sad poor suit heart Don't listen to what people have to say now. Let's get a move on. That is right dad You better tell him but i mean poor suit heart, man. He doesn't want to go to school Okay, so fee and her mother Whoever so fee is okay. Uh, okay. Bye dad Okay, now son if people be mean just time to talk to the hand talk to the hand Oh god, I don't think that's gonna be enough though. Okay. Uh, oh What's going on here? They're in class. Look at the freak over there next to jenna. Stop being mean to him Oh suit heart. It's sad. It leaves suit heart alone. You bully.  That is right jenna. I think like jenna's sticking up for suit heart But kate on the other hand. She's like a whole different story. She does not give up Okay, does this look good? I don't know wait boy. That's empty. Oh my god. Talk to the hand There you go suit heart. You better tell her he's telling her to talk to the head. Oh my god.  Are you okay suit heart? Oh, she just threw the giant boss suit heart and knocked him over That is not cool, man. Okay. Uh, hey jenna. Thanks for standing up for me. No problem It's just what I do. Well jenna seems like a nice friend. Okay. What's going on? Hello, I'm looking at a piece of bacon. Okay. It's so mean. Oh look that guy's dressed as sands. That's pretty cool Man, it's a cool outfit. Oh god. Okay. Let's see what's going on over here Read the note go die bacon. Oh god. It must have been katey, man Okay, I'm going to tell the principal. They should have done that since the beginning Hello, I gotta see his reaction katey is so evil like she like she lives off of being evil, man That is not cool at all Goodbye epic depressed gamers Okay, um, okay, so they're at the office now. I did not write this note I promise. Yes, you did. That's your name on it. Okay, so she left her name on it Why would she leave her name on it? Like You just gave yourself away. She's not so smart as you can see here Oh fine. I did it just to punch me already. Don't think that I did not hear what you said.  Where did they send them? Don't tell on me again.  Okay, so she's threatening him because he He snitched while he didn't technically snitch on her was it was what was his name jane I forgot her name It was the other girl that told the principal and then that's when sutard came in and confirmed that she he's actually getting bullied Which is a good thing punches sutard in the face. That's what you get. Oh, wow Dude, she just punched them straight in the face Katie is a savage man. She's a straight up savage. Uh-oh Okay, so here's the ambulance where the guy is is he still in here He's in the ambulance boy. He's legit sitting in here playing with the siren. I told you to still look at his shirt You guys see a shirt It says still chill and this boy is not still chill at all man. That boy needs some milk for sure All right, so let's see what's going over here. All right for sure. Don't want to go to school now You're going to be just fine, son. Uh-oh, so he's telling his dad. He doesn't want to go back to that school Okay, um like I'm sorry for what I did and I will never do it again I got filmed so ha ha wait, what so she's apologizing to sutard, but I don't know where sutard's going with this Oh, he means the camera. Oh my god Oh my god smash his film Also, he destroyed the evidence I guess But I guess I kind of worked out at the end still chill Kind of worked out at the end because she apologized him, but I'm not so sure Okay, so is that it? So that's all it ends I mean that's a happy ending I suppose because she said sorry and she was a bully. Okay, so what's going on over here? Where are we going? Oh my god, I think we just found like a secret passageway. Let's go in here. Ow Okay. Oh, there you go. What's going on? There's the tv. It's free. What's free? You can click on the ad once Builder man is your not your dad mad missing lasting poking lasting poking bomb Blam What what is going on in this world blocks news man? Why is there a mini dodge? Oh god, okay, so let's go. Oh, I want a chest burger Who wants waffles and chest burgers? Nobody. Okay. Oh wait. What is that? I think that's a suit heart mpc Oh god, let's go over here your text here. What does he mean? I don't know what he means by that. Wait. What is that?  He's just walking in circles.  So I'll see you guys there. All right So we're joining up on suit heart animated by beam productions So let's see what this is about. I think it's like a little animated movie about suit heart Which I want to see because it would be pretty cool Oh Like that Okay, uh play nuke mode 25 roll bucks. I want to nuke something Let's just buy it man 25 roll bucks to nuke something. That sounds awesome Okay, you have purchase uh nuke succeeded. All right play Oh suit heart's dad. Oh god. Why is he doing that? Suit heart on your way. We're almost late for school Oh my god, he's doing that. Oh just uh, I got two hurries.   Are you okay? Why maddie mode your face because everyone's meaning to make fun because we're banking Oh lord.  You know we're banking Dude, this is big chaos see What All the bacon flakes flew off the table Are you trying to make it so that you're tired of school? Let's just go to school now Oh my god, look at the whole town. It's getting milked They're dancing over here Oh, I think we broke the game you guys because it's so laggy Oh my lord Oh, okay, so it's off to go towards the school Dude, this is just madness I gotta go now.  Look at that. Oh god.  Oh my god.  Oh Why is to talk mom? Uh-oh That's who types on the ground doing prank dance. Oh my god. You're so casey tart. Thanks for sticking with me Uh-oh, why they break dancing on the floor? What in the world Uh-oh, who is that the doctor? Dude, that's on the ground Oh my lord This is madness you guys. I don't know what he's saying The whole town is getting destroyed the next day Okay, can we continue? Thank you.  So I guess that's it subscribe to temperate Block us subscribe to temperate man, right you guys Well, I suppose that was the end of the suit right animated It was pretty insane with uh, but the whole loop going on. It was destroying the whole map I think it was caught in the game to lag a lot Like drastically all right you guys well, thank you guys for watching. Thank you guys for the amazing support If you guys enjoyed the video make sure to slap the like button if you need a channel Make sure to subscribe and turn that notification bell and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye


theCUBE alumni, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, I'm John Troyer, co-founder of Tech Reckoning, and our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President and General Manager of the Management and Business Unit of Red Hat, home of Ansible, among other great capabilities. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for stopping by. Red Hat Summit 2018's happening, all the buzz is all about Kubernetes, containers, obviously Linux, and all the action, really transforming the digital journey of customers. It means cloud scale, check data, check new applications, check a lot of interesting things. Now Kubernetes, workload, multicloud, all kind of coming together. What's going on for you guys in this show? Because obviously management, operations, automation, these are all things that are data driven, your thoughts. Yeah, so I'm responsible for management and automation, and so all these technologies that you're hearing about, Red Hat is helping people digitally transform, so a lot of the technologies you mentioned, it turns out that these environments really require automation to move fast, and management's essential to keep these really complex environments up and running and secure, which is a big issue for people. IT operations has been around for a while, but it's always been like, okay, managing the data center, but now you've got a lot of things going on. Management, operations, and data is changing the world because now you can apply automation to it. What's a customer to do here? Because a lot of people are recasting, and I won't say re-platformizing, but they're definitely looking at a global cloud native with containers, legacy taken care of. How do I instrument this? What is the approach that you guys see customers taking from Red Hat's perspective? Well, there's a couple of principles. Automation is huge, and it's interesting because automation on the front edge, getting the containers and cloud services, automation's huge, but we also see automation for people to reduce the burden of their legacy environments by using automation to free up resources and people and money that they can put into their front end digital transformation activities. The other thing besides automation that we're driving is analytics based operations because these environments, once you build them and start operating them, get very complex, very fast. So it's beyond somebody sitting in front of a network console waiting for red lights to come up on the dashboard and reacting. It really has to be automated and they have to get a lot of insights into what's going on. It's an interesting challenge. I want to get into the hybrid cloud for a second because before we get into hybrid cloud challenges, automation is a double-edged sword. You can automate something, and then all of a sudden it could have a memory leak and you don't even know about it because it's self-healing. There's a lot of automation going on. So the analytics have to be smarter. This is why we've been hearing this come up a lot which is, okay, I need visibility not just into what's happening, what's breaking, but what's going on beyond the automation. These are new dynamics. What's the approach there? How are you guys looking at that trend? Is there any products out there? Solve this challenge? So we've had a product in a portfolio. It's Red Hat Insights which is a predictive analytics based offering that we've had and basically what it does is it analyzes our customer systems and it looks across sort of a broad set of settings and processes and configurations and things and basically can actually tell them, hey, these systems are at risk. They're likely to either have performance issues or crash or they have security vulnerabilities and actually tell them what's going to happen and what they need to do. So that's called Red Hat Insights as the name implies gives you a very deep insight into your systems. We've recently tied that to automation to say this is what's wrong with your systems. Would you like us to automate and correct them or remediate them? Now I can tell you, haven't been around automation for a while, most people don't trust automation. Think about the first time you're going to get in your self-driving car and you're going to go, wait a minute, I'm going to not have a steering wheel or brake pedal or something. That's like terrifying, right? Automation in IT is the same way. It's like, wait, I'm going to have this system do what to my production systems. So there's usually this cycle where it's like show me what you're going to do with the automation, let me sort of get comfortable and verify it and then let me push the button and then automate it. That's a natural cycle. Well, let's go down one level from that and talk about hybrid cloud. So we see a lot of examples of that hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, on-prem with open stack, you know, out in the public cloud with open shift, you know, multiple clouds at once. So you've got your self-driving cloud now, one layer down, what do enterprises and IT operators need to look at from a governance and an operations perspective? What are the things they need to be worried about if they're running a multi-cloud scale operation like that? So let me use the self-driving car analogy. Let's say you bought a self-driving car from three different car manufacturers. Okay, the instrumentation, the hardware, the software's all going to be vastly different. But you're supposed to operate those things at a consistent level. So think about a hybrid cloud. All of these clouds have different instrumentation, how they get monitored and managed and the kind of events they generate, the cost models, all those things.  It's you have to actually instrument into each of the cloud particular instrumentation, right? And then try to automate that. So one of the things we do is we provide sort of a consistent way for people to manage what's otherwise a pretty complex, heterogeneous hybrid cloud environment. And how's that going? Can you give some anecdotal insight into how that's going? Well, it's going very well. We have a number of customers here at Summit who are talking about, you know, sort of their production journeys with Red Hat, right, transforming whether it's an open stack for private cloud or OpenShift for containers or using our middleware services or integration services and then using our management and automation to actually deploy those things, keep them secure, keep them operational and run them at scale.  Joe, Ansible's been a very successful acquisition for Red Hat. What's the status of the future plans? Any updates on Ansible, its role, its relevance, and so forth. So Ansible's a great story. So Ansible was an open source, you know, company, you know, very smart people, very innovative technology, right, strong community. Red Hat acquired the company about two and a half years ago. And one of the things that we did was we didn't screw it up, right?  What, in this case, what we've done is because Red Hat's so good at open source so we've actually nurtured that community. We've actually helped that community grow virally, right? So the amount of contributors to the community has grown significantly. The amount of integration, you know, activities, interest in that community has grown wildly over the past two and a half years. So I think our biggest thing is we let it do what it's really good at and we've nurtured it, right? So we've taken a really smart team with some great technology and we've amplified that with the Red Hat, you know, sort of capabilities. What was that secret sauce on that? Because this is a really kind of hard thing to do. Acquisitions can get, you know, mangled a bit and founders leave and what did you guys do specifically to not screw it up?  What specifically did you guys do looking back at that? That was the secret to that success. So I, having them personally acquired three times, right, I joined Red Hat through acquisition a little over five years ago. So I've been here a while, but when I did the Ansible acquisition, I wanted to make sure that, you know, what we didn't do was break anything. So a lot of times in acquisitions, they tend to take the new company apart and they say, okay, marketing moves over to corporate marketing, engineering moves over here, product management moves over there, and they sort of take the transmission apart and then they wonder why the, you know, the engine's not running anymore, right? The car's not running anymore. And so the first thing was don't break anything. Let's understand it, let's understand how it fits in. I also think there was a good culture match, there was a good impedance match for the fact that they were smart open source guys, right, so the Red Hat way was like. They got Red Hat. Yeah, they got Red Hat. And a number of them were ex-Red Hatters. I mean, we have a lot of Red Hatters that go off and start up very interesting projects because of their background and sometimes they come home, right? And this was that kind of case. That's good, that's a great best practice, gotta say I've seen many acquisitions mangled, you know, same exactly, just go to the playbook, you know, to hear them apart. Yeah, it doesn't usually end well, you know, in large company parts, small company. So I'm curious how you all are looking at the role of the IT admin operator in this new world, this new cloud-native world we're going to. You know, the people formerly known as sysadmins, you know, I think they thought about automation a lot with maybe day zero, like setting things up, but now we've got, you know, day one and beyond. We've got to run these clouds. Does IT become full of SREs and operators or how are you dealing with your community and training them and teaching them how to work with the new environment? Yeah, so the world has gotten, you know, significantly more complicated for those folks. Right, in the good old days, you know, they were sort of segmented maybe into compute network and storage teams, and now you've got like the public cloud team and the private cloud team and the container team and the different teams, right? So the complexity's been amplified, right? What we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce that complexity by things like Ansible that basically can automate across those domains. So we introduced Ansible network automation. You can automate storage, you can automate compute, you can do stuff in private cloud, physical servers, you know, different layers with the same set of tools. That means that a person, instead of being a generalist or a specialist, can be what Gartner calls a versatile list. They can actually be good at a number of domains, right? And in this case, with a single tool set without having to learn five different, you know, tools. Joe, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for the insights. Great to hear your perspective. Final question for you. AI, machine learning, always a big part of analytics. What are you guys doing anything there? What's the update on what's coming? Because automation, you got to love machine learning and I love some of these software. You guys doing anything in particular notable you want to share that's worth highlighting. Yeah, we showed some stuff in our keynote here, you know, in terms of demos, but we're really driving towards algorithmic IT operations, right? We're going to keep applying analytics, building towards machine learning and AI for these complex environments. We have some really smart people internally, data scientists and experts. We have a lot of expertise because we're building some of these platforms and the new technologies. We have a lot of customers, they trust us, they share data with us. So we're really looking forward to advancing, you know, sort of this AI ops discipline. And the trend is your friend, the winds at your back, whatever you want to call it, you're seeing Kubernetes, you're seeing the kind of decomposition of services down to the very low granular level, throw some instrumentation on it. You now have data, data is good, right? So, you know. Speed of transformation is getting faster. Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President General Manager of the Management Business Unit here at Red Hat on theCUBE, sharing his insights here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.


Okay, so everybody last slot of the day lightning talks We got actually four people signed up here. First one would be um, oh rules are six minutes. Um, and I will do would be hard and forced So ten minutes ten seconds to the end of the talk. We're just we're gonna stand up and applaud So it's very nice and run some way to catch you off Okay, first off it's one two What is this? Okay, I call it distributed ODF applications Where is it? Is it going this way? Okay, so from a birdbuilder perspective, right? ODF applications are just and can we Toss and toss and I've got a screen problem. Can we switch it that it's fit? Should should it's should switch the screen. It's a it's over here. So I'm Yeah, I'm just a pedantic. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I'm waiting six minutes for a brilliant thing I just leave it this way that's it's good enough for me full screen that's much better, but it's it's should be wait a minute No, then it's Why is it looking okay I But but you know the page you know of page feel it Fit page fit page is better fit page is good. Let me switch. That's much better. Okay. Sorry. So I've got one minute left Okay from a bird perspective, okay So every every every we have all of the ODF applications Microsoft Office or they have toolkit or so on It's always starting with your load the audio file into yourself And then you there the state machine the user macros they adding deleting or modifying Document right and at any given time you flush it out. You save it export it to another valid ODF So this is from a bird with that perspective everything that Libraff is doing right, okay Very abstract right because this is this very important Okay, and the next thing is when we have multiple of these state machines working together like here Then and we want to collaborate in a perfect sense like we do with software then we need to You can think of even as not even as three Libraff's versions or Microsoft Libraff So but it might be git repositories and look this about this guy here is adding something is inserting your second paragraph and The others are pulling these changes and this one is just modifying the third paragraph And this one is just doing nothing just receive the changes, right? This is our goal. We want to go that direction so currently we are not able to Receive any of these changes these high-level changes. We cannot receive some XML snipples because in the internal model We don't and know anything about parts. We can only load everything and Drop everything so this is very very important if we want to do collaboration that Libraff is learns to Accept changes so these changes are just some high-level Fused changes. So what I'm going to do is I'm currently working on I did it tomorrow that this morning that this FXML grammar is in nightmare. It's a very huge text file with a lot of XML nodes So what I do to answer questions like What is the late? What is the? What is the minimal document? I loaded in a graph database because this is exactly what they can do What is the lowest smallest ODT possible our paragraphs nested at all and all these things you have to look into this long text file And this is horrible. So what I did is you see a lot of using a graph database and Making visualize it. This is only the table table element with all the child elements and the red things are the attributes, right? You can even see it from here. So I I'm going now to improve this graph because this is just an internal model and There are a few things that we have to to to I skip this To to to view better, but we have to extend this grammar. We have to have a better tooling Otherwise, I mean one otherwise. We cannot cope this complexity, right? And this is I think this is the brilliant way to go using graph databases annotate more annotate these changes because we think XML all this now we specified everything but in our lines in all the users minds the user changes of all the same you can Every ODF application you can add a paragraph at the lead a table and so on or like I said Modified format a paragraph count and we have to define these things and we have to define it in an automatic way and specify this way So we have something like ODF get repositories like we have real coloration where they come Oh, here's my pull request, right? You have your ODF book outside and as I read it and said, oh, there's a typo I've got a pull request to you and you don't have any ideas. You can internally have ideas But you we should be able to have a coloration as powerful or even more powerful than the kid. That's it. Thank you So I'm having a quick talk about the state of liver office at the city of Munich first of all who am I I work for the Linux team since 2016 and My head of development for Libre office of the city of Munich and Presenting the city of Munich in the ob ospa and also in the advisory board of the TDF And I'm also working on gimp dark table and a lot of other stuff, but mainly doing packaging but You may ask wait, didn't you decide to switch to Microsoft Office? not really the government only decided to switch to Windows and The city council will decide in November if they are going to switch or if they want to switch or not so, but even if we switch to to Microsoft Office, we need liver office for the next four or five years and at least two or three or maybe four releases and so we are going to continue the development as usual and Also continue our community efforts and the advisory board membership What have we done in 2017? We started development of a new relief or office release based on Libre office 5.2 We finally got a new build server, which improved building time a lot building for releases at the same time We also started development for walmox 18 which will be released on walmox.net and And Jmux did a lot of work upstream on scheduling and bug fixes and We also sponsored a lot of work at CIB and KDAB mostly CIB pre-rotating images and Also the border frames you talked about signature lines as I talked about today and improvements in hyperlink sandaling KDE5 plasma back ends which is based on gtk3 a lot of work by KDAB in cooperation with CIB and More than 40 improvements in OO XML and also many many more bug fixes and performance improvements and What is to be done in 2018? We want to improve web-duff support Polish with KDE5 support For our next buzzestline 6.0 release, which is based on or which does use KDE5 We also want to roll out LibreOffice 5.2.8 All patches for this version are stream and back ports are also available on our private branch We are getting rid of more than 100 internal bugs fulfilling a lot of feature requests by by our users and finally getting rid of LibreOffice 4.1 plus 300 or something like that back ports and patches Which is diverging from 4.1, which is upstream And we also are going to start development for the next release which is based on LibreOffice 6.1 We want to make change tracking rate again, but it doesn't crash and But we are going to pay for it ourselves so More improvements of OO XML support and also at bug fixing and some user requests And hopefully we can host a bug-scratching party Munich last year. We didn't have a chance, but maybe next year. Oh, we'll see you Okay, that's all thanks Okay, while Tosten is preparing the Website hopefully Website I sent you a link to a site stops in clock Yeah, okay We're talking about GSOC as a pro organization we applied for being accepted and Application has been submitted. I have the dates here announcement if we are accepted will be on the 12th of February and Student application follows between March 12 and 27 so we are Hopefully looking for a lot of mentors and of course students, but since here are more mentors and students I am happy to Be able to announce. Yeah, we have some Success stories from last year that could be you the next year Yeah That's the the successful projects from from the last GSOC Season and Yeah, so um, so we've been doing GSOC in one way or the other since I think 2008 back in the day with with overbuilt and before that I was doing that I think two years with Sun at open office. So roughly, I don't know let's make it 10 years of GSOC Between I think between always between four and twelve students So it's a great opportunity both for For mentoring for getting into mentoring for students. So if you know students in your community or Friends and family encourage them to try GSOC. It's a great thing. You get paid for open source work It looks great on your resume And you get a t-shirt And That's yours Is it really no the left side is for you? Left side is mine. Hey, cool. I got the left side and have two minutes left I'm really happy to have chance to advertise some ideas from the design team We just We have a really large list of topics that Could be improved for instance change tracking. No question Something what I would like to highlight is the addition thing addition means to integrate Our extensions more closely into the program integrating means at the place where you use function you get the chance to add things from a third place our extension site or if you are in a Company you could restrict it to the company extension for instance if you are in the Templates manager. You can click on the link to add a template. You don't need to go over the site Should be a quite an easy thing just a framework. It downloads A file from a link kind of configuration should be behind it and the dialogue Sounds quite easy to me Blurry shadows. That's something we really desperately need. We have a really hard shadow Shape has a shape behind and that looks really terrible blurry shadows makes the draw even better if it's possible at all in this sense, we could also improve the lines if we have some kind of brushes so that lines get Looks like scribbled lines. It makes tool a really great mock-up creation tool Font handling I talked this afternoon about font handling. We have some topics around font handling where Mentors are welcome. I think students should be really smart if they do work of that Next one. Welcome scream is two minutes left It's not really a welcome scream. We have a problem with user configuration we are still placing things in the user directory under slash four and everything what the user Configures himself in the past is not overwritten So if you update you don't get the updated information and that's not that good The idea here behind us that you can Show a screen for the updated when the new releases What of the previous Configuration should be overwritten so that user can say yes, I accept it and this dialogue could be used as well for Welcome and tip of the day, right? So this was all the user experience High-level great ideas that you can really make an impact with and a big splash and the right side is a few Sometimes a bit more low-level project ideas just a random Subset of the ideas page page maker this document liberation project for import Domain specific language for UI testing. This is to make it easier and quicker And nicer to write UI tests Smart art that got recently the last year had the import finally done So now it will be great if you could also edit that and Charts and or course or because I say Special calc filter import filter Python support for into a liberal officer clips and VML import for writer VML is a part of the oxml standard Okay, and we're running out of time so Yeah, just a summary and two links to the resources Please do go out and advertise encourage people encourage mentors or mentor yourself or you student yourself Thanks, everyone Okay, and we have I think Olivia, okay. Yes, let's see if we can see so Here we are. I wanted to show you a very little. Oh my god. Yes I would like to show you Everybody knows in the in the work office that the help files are quite Hard to to write so we had in the past a small extension that allows you to use a writer file and generate a xhp file, but We had some issues with this extension. We have some problems. So I decided to And one of the issues that you have to review the XML that is generated and sometimes fix each of the points of the tags so I Decided to look into Kate Kate is the kitty editor and Kate has a very nice feature which is some widgets that you can have here and When you click on the widget you you can generate all the XML and just Insert the contents that you want. So I'm gonna just show you how it works. It's very simple. For example, I have this Content which is purely text and if I want to start generating a specific Help file for example, I come here with this. Oh there is a Wait, there is here new xhp file. So double click here and then he it generates It generates The the XML I can let me So I can hear in page topic Write anything I want. Okay the page title also I can type anything I want And the file name is automatically generated. So I want now this hitting what heading one I want to generate the XML for this heading one and I get here a specific widget Okay, so H1 and It generates. Oh, I'm sorry. So I select I Select and I Double click on each one and then it generates Paragraph role equals hitting ID This this ID is the most cumbersome Activity that we have to do because each idea has to be unique level X equal one XML in US and your contents here. So if you have For example here, I want Emphasize This put emphasize into this String I just double click here and it inserts the tags Okay, so and then I want to trust on that into a paragraph and Double-click and you have all the XML things that you need to do so Quite a fast way to quickly get some contents and generate an HP file and most of the very boring Things that you need to do With the ideas is automatically generated It's a set of JavaScript that runs in the text and You can have most of the X HP Tags implemented here. So this is what I wanted to show and You can There is a page in the wiki where I describe how it works. So no more excuse for Like missing help pages. Okay. Thank you. That was quick Okay, thank you very much. That concludes the very last session of the day Thank you all of you for being here. Thank you all the speakers for For great information for great talks. Thank you for them for hosting us and Yeah, I have a good evening and a great Sunday. I don't know. I think


Trump, time to make peace in Ukraine. The time is ripe for making peace in Ukraine, and the United States should contribute to the peace process right now, acting as a mediator. Former US President Donald Trump said in a telephone interview with Reuters, I think the biggest thing that the US should be doing right now is making peace, getting Russia and Ukraine together and making peace, he said. This is the time to do it, he added. The ex-US leader also believes Ukraine may be allowed to keep what it has earned. I think they would be entitled to keep much of what they've earned, and I think that Russia likewise would agree to that. You need the right mediator or negotiator, and we don't have that right now, he lamented. Without either elaborating on what Trump meant under earned, or citing the former US president directly, Reuters said that he did not rule out that Kiev might have to concede some territory to Russia. Everything would be subject to negotiation, though. Trump added, the former US leader has repeatedly said publicly that he would broke a peace in Ukraine in 24 hours if he were to win the 2024 presidential election. However, he never explained exactly how he was ending this conflict.


Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the arrival of His Excellency Mr. Cyril Errol-Charles, acting Governor-General of St. Lucia. We remain standing for the National Anthem of St. Lucia. We will now be led to recite the National Pledge by members of the SALCC Interact Club. I would like to please invite everyone to place their right hand on their chest as we get ready to recite the National Pledge. With God as my guide, I pledge allegiance to my country St. Lucia. I proclaim that I will serve my country with pride and dignity and will defend it with vigor and valor in the pursuit of excellence, justice and equality for all. Thank you so much, students, and let us now raise to the skies our ceremony this morning. Ms. Deborah De Law, Administrative Assistant at South Lewis, will lead us in praise. Good morning. Sign yourself, those in need too, please.  As we gather here today in celebration of the legacy of our two Nobel Laureates, Sir William Arthur Lewis and Sir Derek Walcott, we lift up their family, friends and loved ones, and by extension, all solutions to you. We also pray for the family and loved ones of our beloved past principal, Sir Lytton F. Thomas, who was a stalwart of a leader, a generous and kind man, who has now joined the rounds of the greats who've gone to the beyond. We ask, Lord, for your continued guidance and direction for our lives and that of the leadership of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College. We may plan, but it is you who disposes that will. Merciful Savior, while there is a lot about our little island to lament, there is also much that we can celebrate and boast about. We thank you for this. We are indeed honoured that we can continue to share in the legacy of our Laureates and Sir Thomas. May we emulate the good characteristics and habits that served as an impetus for their exploits. We pray that excellence will be our way of life as fellow Saint Lucians. But Lord, we cannot do it without you, for you are the giver of life, the giver of gifts and talents, the giver of wisdom and of blessings. You are provider, sustainer and the greatest inspirer. Please inspire us to do great things. But in our greatness, Lord, teach us to be humble, to have positive attitudes and if we should boast, may it be in you. Help us to be mindful always of your existence and that with you all things are possible. This and other mercies we ask in the name of your only Son Jesus. Amen. And the congregation says, amen. Thank you and be seated. I think that prayer really deserved a big amen. It put us in the spirit of what we are here to do. Before I get into my welcome remarks, I would like to recognise the presence of His Excellency, Mr. Cyril Erol Charles, Acting Governor-General of Saint Lucia, Her Excellency, Dame Prolette-Louise, Governor-General Emerita and the Chairperson of the Nobel Laureate Festival Committee, Members of Parliament may be present, Honourable Dr. Pauline Antoine Prosper, Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Education, Sustainable Development, Innovation, Science, Technology and Vocational Training. Members of the Diplomatic Corps and please allow me to recognise two of our strongest supporters, Ambassador Life Escalona from Venezuela and Ambassador Peter Chen from Taiwan, who are really good friends of the South Lewis Community College. Monsignor, Honourable Dr. Patrick Anthony, our featured speaker today. Mr. Cletus Springer, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the South Lewis Community College and other members of the Board. Dr. Marjorie Jameson-Charles, Principal of the South Lewis Community College, Vice-Principals, Dr. Meryl Sinclair-Odevis and Dr. Winston Folgens, Managers, Staff and Students of the College. Sir Vaughan Lewis and Lady Shirley, who represent the Lewis family every year. Ms. Sigrid Namo, widow of Sir Derek, representing the Walcott family and other friends and family of Sir Derek Walcott. Ms. Beverly Josie, former Registrar of the South Lewis Community College, representing the St. Lucian community and she oversaw the ceremony for I think the number of years that it was held here so we are so happy to have her in that capacity, please. Members of the National Nobel Laureate Committee who are present, other specially invited guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is so great to see you here. We will begin our ceremony with a melodious rendition from our choir led by Ms. Alra Omi and you can join in singing you are my all-in-all found in your booklets. The treasure that I see, precious jewel, Lord to give up, I'd be your cross, my shame, rising again, I bless your... Another amen for this rendition. The showers of blessing have us here for this partly solemn occasion but partly celebration of the lives of our two Nobel Laureates. On behalf of the South Lewis Community College and the National Nobel Laureate Committee, it is my pleasure to welcome you here to this wreath-laying ceremony which for the first time this year, we are not the only ones who can participate but we are live streaming to a wider audience and we want to take the opportunity to welcome them to this ceremony as well where we honour and celebrate the lives of our two Nobel Laureates who have placed us on the map, who have brought global recognition to St. Lucia but who have also set a legacy for us to follow, one of excellence. And as we work to deal with the showers of blessing and the bipolar weather that we have been having, partly maybe due to climate change which Dr. Fletcher chose not to address last night and maybe he should have to give an explanation of this phenomenon that we are going through right now. I want to remind you of the theme for this year, 2024 Nobel Laureate Festival, celebrating excellence, inspiring our collective imagination, fostering national pride. And I'm sure our speaker today will dissect the theme but I really hope this resonates with us that the core of the theme always is celebrating excellence and we celebrated by our actions as well. I think that came out last night as well. And we see our imagination, our collective imagination coming through in so many different ways and I hope you can join us this afternoon to see our young people portray that and the national pride takes a leap and we see the result. So officially welcome to this ceremony. It is a short ceremony. Let me just tell you that after our featured speaker presents on our laureates we will be laying wreaths at the gravesites of both Sir Arthur Lewis and Sir Derek Walcott and that will be done by members of his family, accompanied by members of the college community and our wider community as well. So with these words I now invite Ms Monique Anthony, Deputy Chair of or coordinator of our ITS unit to introduce our featured speaker. Please welcome Ms Anthony. Good day everyone. Adopting the protocol as already established. Monsignor the Honorable Doctor Patrick Parber Anthony ordained in 1972 as a renowned St. Lucian cultural figure. He founded the Folk Research Center now carrying his name in 1973 advocating for the inclusion of the Creole language and Caribbean elements in church services. His efforts led to the creation of Juner Creole in 1984. Now a national celebration. Elevated to Monsignor in 1984 he has actively addressed social issues. With a master's in theology from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in English literature from the University of the West Indies he received the St. Lucia Cross in the year 2000. The Queens Diamond Jubilee Medal in the year 2012 and was named a national cultural hero in 2013. In November 2023 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of the West Indies. I should say an honorary doctorate degree. Described by the extinguished orator Mrs Leslie Crane Mitchell as a distinguished servant leader leaving an indelible mark on the Catholic Church and the entire Caribbean diaspora we welcome our featured speaker Monsignor the Honourable Dr Patrick Parber Antony. You know she is. The protocol established recognising its excellence here and all others you know it's I was just saying to Sigrid when I was thinking of this address today I thought of the day that Derek died and I've been working on a piece the day Derek died and it begins like this the day Derek died it rained and there it is it's raining not the kind of rain of which he rode to here waking at night the rain driving its nails into the ground into his hands no not that kind of rain not a kind of rain that brings dreaded premonitions like when Harry died on such say such days he says when the postman's bicycle was dryly like a locus that brings rain I dread my premonitions today we are guarded at a time when as McDonnell Dixon reminds us a new kind of rain is falling from our skies boring from metal devouring flesh banana leaves proud heraldic emblems wave contradicting fury tumbling from the skies nothing is this hopeless cause we fight with tooth and nails our hopes and futures consciously suspended it's a different kind of rain you see for today there are monsters cloved in human flesh with a hole in the space meant for a heart who slaughtered so viciously that even walls complain of too much blood as Palestinian poet Nasser Ab who should know explains in those days we didn't pay attention to the complaints of the walls so much blood was on them who cares about the walls that complain one morning we didn't find homes just heaps of red words spied like dirty clothes on sidewalk no one cares about them today we gather less we forget today we gather to remember because we care you see we are here on a mountain where rivulets of blood have flowed and murderers of yesterday have left us monuments of atrocity like in the Skilling Monument in memory of a vicious battle fought but those who savagely fought for fair helen that was so valuable up to this day Britain's black debt remains unpaid and how Britain and Europe underdeveloped Caribbean is still not officially acknowledged I'm sounding serious yes you see because the walls of Khmer barracks barrack A technical school barrack B barrack C the college still remember the blood even if those walls no longer complain however we do remember for the French and English cemeteries and not too far from here since 1782 the buried major generals David Stewart 1829 major general George Mackey 1831 major general Ferguson 1834 Sir Harry Thompson 1902 not too far from here what am I saying I'm saying that here this mountain has been a mountain of battles blood and there it reminds us that those wars and battles were real wars but we now must change this mountain into a mountain of excellence where we celebrate woundless wars as Lowes and Magritte with wooden swords it says what would our scarred earth could contain so sweet of violence flowers fighting to remain not enemies but friends that's the battle and as we gather here we hope that those walls will no longer remember and complain about blood from those walls to radiate the excellence of our students our theme is inspiring our collective imagination fostering national pride here lies the remains of Sir Arthur Lewis on this mountain we said when Derek died this should be the place where all our heroes our national heroes are buried and when we suggested that Derek should be buried in what is now called the square we thought no Sir Arthur Lewis is already here Sir Ira Simmons do you know where he is? he's here, yes he's here Sir Ira Simmons, yes so we already have a son here and now we have Sir Arthur here and we felt it appropriate that we should have Sir Derek there but not only Sir Derek but all those icons Sir Leaton should really be here should be here and we have been pushing to make this place transform the history of this mount of violence into the mount of excellence and achievement Sigi has a little project which we've been pushing Jali Mudevik has prepared a headstone a headstone of Derek Walcott it's a headstone in which we can see the image of Derek but there are sheets of paper on which we can put all his beautiful poems I carry a small cemetery in my head which you can see from here all of those, we can see it whom there's battles we can put them here it costs only $150,000 to do you know how much one of the missiles that is part of the defense of some of our countries one missile cost it can buy us several headstones but yet still those countries that have exploited the Caribbean including this nation will not even acknowledge the debt and so publicly today I challenge Europe all those who are representing Europe help us as we try to lift up elevate this place and transform the memory of this place from a memory of violence into a memory of excellence and let us put Derek's headstone there you can write a check and send it to us and Jali Mudevik will put it there first tomorrow you see, here every day tourists come and they come to see what? monuments or battles that's a nice way of putting it Israeli monuments or atrocities I read the account of the Innist killing battle well, Winston can tell you the writer himself who was in the battle talks about the barbarity the number of the head this is what this place has been however through the imagination talk about collective imagination through the creativity and imagination of Rwanda Francois and others like that this place has been transformed into what we are only beginning to see this place is like a flower beginning to blossom the petals are only now unfolding hey, hello, wait this place can radiate into such an ecstasy of excellence for Saint Lucia and this is why we want to lord all those who have dreamt of transforming the history of this place into a history of excellence for Saint Lucia and we say to those who are reluctant come and dream with us because our young people are coming here they are coming here and we want to inspire them when they come here because what you are offering does not inspire them we have a battle in which the minds of our young people are being challenged by such false values and attitudes and ideas but here we have the opportunity to truly elevate them so that they can join that legacy of achievement of Saint Lucia and so while the rain falls we pray that it will no longer be what Dixon says a different kind of rain but it will be the rain that we are accustomed to the blessings of God that have soaked this land that despite the savagery and the butchery human beings of compassion understanding love people of our hearts have emerged from this land as we see a world today that is increasingly becoming less human may the students of this complex have to promote a new humanity may we teach the world what it is to be a people of heart a people of joy a people of love a people of togetherness let us celebrate as our flower festivals continue to celebrate let us celebrate what we are Lucia's friends we thank God for the legacy of Seaffa and Cedric and we look forward to many Aleutians who will one day grace those beautiful lones our heroes back thank you thank you so much Paver as your legacy to lives on and as our laureates battle with and theories we pledge to keep here a mountain of excellence where we celebrate woundless wars thank you so much Paver let me invite the chair of the board to make a presentation in thanks to Paver a round of applause again for I was very inspired I must say so Paver has done so much work and I really hope that someone continues to build on the work that Paver has done I don't think we should expect much more from Paver but we need to build on his legacy so as we celebrate excellence we do have a theme song and we are so proud that it was spent by our own lecturer here at Sartre de Wis community college Mrs. Elra Ome Glasgow and we invite her now to perform you can be next please welcome her pleasant good morning to everyone let's celebrate excellence yeah oh yes we come from smallness yet still we achieve greatness just look at Sir Arthur Lewis just look at Sir Derek Wolcott oh yes they set the example and showed showed us it is possible for us in ocean's work to be deserving of the highest highest recognition Lewis made us proud a pioneer was he developing our small economy give us the cure for poverty I know it's not money it's knowledge that will elevate this country oh yes we come from smallness yet still we achieve greatness just look at Sir Arthur Lewis just look at Sir Derek Wolcott oh yes they set the example and showed showed us it is possible for us in ocean's work to be deserving of the highest highest recognition doesn't a field of literature Sir Derek Wolcott made his mark he's a great creator lover of the arts rich history and doubtful our people and our culture inspire the works of oh yes we come from smallness just look at Sir Derek Wolcott oh yes they set the example and showed showed us it is possible for us in ocean's work to be deserving you can be next try for excellence in all you do you can be next try for excellence in all you do yeah so we're celebrating excellence and this is also a portrait of excellence in her own way and with our parliamentary secretary in education here I want to challenge that every primary school child knows that song because it tells the story of the Nobel laureates in song something that they can relate to let us do those things the simple things Mrs. Elra Ome Glasgow we appreciate you, we love you the Sir Arthur Lewis community college would like to present a small token needs to be something you know more symbolic but every yes since she has written the song she performs it at every event you don't have to ask her twice before you ask her she's there her music there, her words there, the lyrics there I know the whole song by heart now it's the small things I really appreciate you, a soloist since she was what age Elra my mother's bell wow mentored by our late great Joyce O'Gee's somebody else that we need to recognize thank you for continuing that legacy that's how we do it at Sir Arthur Lewis community college with a chair like Tracy Bill George you know what I mean, if you know you know so we come from this high and like I say it's a mix of celebration and calamity we come from this high to remember another great one who was again located right here ladies and gentlemen we lost Soliton Thomas in the middle of last week and we want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him and to remember him today and also before his burial we will do something here at the college but at this time I would like to invite the chair of the Board of Governors of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College Mr. Cletus Springer to pay tribute to Soliton Thomas thank you and good morning everybody Governor General what a call already established Soliton Felix Thomas I knew him all those years and I never knew him as Felix 1926 to 2024 the Board of Governors Principal Management Faculty and Staff and students of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College received a deep sorrow news of the passing of Soliton Thomas on Wednesday the 17th of January 2024 Soliton served as the first principal of our college from 1987 to 1995 he assumed the Principalship to nearly 50 years of Distinguished Public Service including 14 years as a teacher and as a teacher trainer 4 years as an Inspector of Schools 11 years as Chief Education Officer and 7 years as an International Civil Servant working exclusively in the education sector Soliton drew on this rich and varied experience to set the foundational policies, strategies, procedures and regulations that continue to support our college support its organizational structure as well as the expansion of teaching and learning programs Soliton's vast and imposing legacy as principal included the establishment of the college's Viewford campus a substantial increase in scholarships to enable more teachers to pursue higher education overseas attractive salaries and compensation packages to support the recruitment and retention of talented faculty and staff and the delivery of adult education programs that help to give our college its community character in addition to his immense contribution to the growth and development of our college we acknowledge with sincere appreciation Soliton's transformational leadership of our country's educational sector he presided over the steady expansion of the school system particularly in the increase in the number of secondary schools in addition he pioneered the adoption of many innovative approaches to teaching and learning in tandem with his career wife Lady Madri Thomas who served as the first female principal for the Centusia Teacher's College from 1975 to 1982 we consider Soliton to have been a model citizen and a devout patriot whose love for beloved Centusia served as a beacon to many generations of our people we pray that the good Lord grant his soul peaceful and eternal rest and that perpetual light will shine upon him thank you I ask that we stand and just offer a moment of silence for Soliton Thomas after which we will have a musical rendition may he rest in peace thank you very much ladies and gentlemen you may be seated I believe the choir now has a rendition that is in honour of Soliton Thomas so this took me back to my days in my little uniform with my flag waving I knew that song so well and we didn't even think about who wrote or composed it so thank you Mrs. Omeglasgo for taking us back to that time of national pride of national pride of national pride of national pride of national pride and we have quite a few independent songs that are a joy they sustained through generations so we need to go back and teach them to our young ones so ladies and gentlemen at this time we move to the wreath laying and this is where we place wreaths on the graves of both Sir Arthur Lewis and Sir Derek Walcott and we invite first the wreath bearer that is students and members of staff who will bear the wreaths for the wreath layers so we have representing the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College Ms. Theodora Sylvester who's a lecturer and the president of our staff association Mr. Jacob Filomen a student of the SA of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College Ms. Genet La Force also a student of the college and Ms. Naima Epifan who is a member of our operations unit at the college and they will bear the wreaths for our wreath layers and I will call them one by one unfortunately we have a challenge with the so we first invite his excellency Mr. Cyril Errol Charles to lay the first wreath can we please have some soft music accompanied wreath bears the second wreath will be laid by Dr. Marjorie Jameson Charles and she will be accompanied by Mr. Jacob Filomen representing the St. Lucian Community we invite Ms. Beverly Josie former registrar of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College accompanied by Ms. Genet La Force a student of the college representing the Lewis family will be Sir Vaughan Lewis and he will be accompanied by Ms. Naima Epifan of the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College so we will invite you all to move to the grave of Sir Derek Walcott but that will be led by the wreath bearers and let me invite Mr. Matthias Francis of our finance department Ms. Althea Lake of our institutional remind me internationalization office Ms. Shadeh Gustave a student of the college and Mr. Darren Leslie a student of the college Mr. Matthias Francis will accompany her excellency Dame Proleta Louise Ms. Althea Lake will accompany our honorable parliamentary secretary Ms. Shadeh Gustave will accompany Mr. Cletus Springer chairman of the board of governors and Mr. Darren Leslie will accompany Ms. Sigrid Naima representing the Walcott family please allow his excellency to follow and the rest of you can it's optional but you it's a short walk and we have some sunshine now


Well, with the population in the greater Bemidji area continuing to grow, the demand for quick and efficient emergency response time has grown as well. Our Josh Peterson shows us how the implementation of a fourth fire station hopes to improve response time and keep everyone safe. After years of planning, the Bemidji Fire Department has expanded north. Leasing an 1,800 square foot garage, the department has spread out its resources to provide more effective coverage for their 522 square mile coverage area. That's after a lengthy process of not only identifying a need, but actually identifying a good location to serve our northern service area. When it came to adding station 4, the demographics of the area helped pick the ideal location for the facility. Fire station 4 has been strategically placed here at the intersection of Highway 71 North East and Winter Sumac Road, targeting an area that has seen significant growth. We have a large population that we serve in our northern area along with a good amount of building value up here and thus we know that we're going to have responses up here. For city officials, expanding to the north was the right thing to do by continuing a strong partnership with local townships. I think it's an example of a strong partnership that the city of Bemidji has with its rural fire partners. Over the years we've worked well and evaluated our service needs. If successful, the lease space after two years could lead to the construction of a permanent fire station 4. Since August 28th, the facility has already been used to respond to multiple calls. We have a two-year lease on the building that we're at right now. We're going to try that for a while and see if we can make an impact up here. In Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. The fire station currently has seven on-call firefighters who report to station 4. The new station includes a pickup truck for tools, a water tender truck and a structural fire engine. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.