Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this lecture we are going to look at determining masses and sizes of stars, and look at general at the overall properties of stars. So, let's take a census of the stars and see what kind of stars are the typical ones. Well, the typical stars are not the stars that we see in the night sky. The stars that we see in the night sky are large and bright stars that can be seen over very large distances. A typical star is smaller and cooler than our sun. So, let's take a look here at stars within 21 light years of the sun. These are stars in our solar neighborhood. Our sun is a G-type star. There are seven of those. And there are three stars then that are hotter than our sun of higher classes, class A and F. And there are 111 stars of class K and M. So, we see that there are far more stars on the cooler side of the sun than on the hotter side. Now, we also see a few white dwarf stars and brown dwarf stars. To be honest, the brown dwarf stars may be underestimated still. We are still detecting more. These are hard to see. In fact, most of these stars that we see are not visible. Most of these M-type stars are very cool, and we really can't see them with the naked eye. Now, we have some here things with selection effects here. Since the stars that we see in the night sky are not typical stars, this is an example of what we call a selection effect. The bright stars can be seen for hundreds or even thousands of light years. Faint stars are hard to see even if they are close to us. So, what we are seeing in the sky are the more unusual stars. We see O and B stars. Remember, there were none of those in close to us. Red giants and super giants, which are also far away. Our nearest red giant is more than 100 light years away. The nearest O-type star is 500 light years away or so. So, we are looking at very large distances. However, we can see these brightly even over those distances because they are so tremendously bright. So, the stars you see when you go out at night are not the typical types of stars that exist. So, how do we determine masses of stars? Well, mass is a hard thing to determine, and that's because we need something orbiting a star so that we can figure out its mass. In order to get this, we look at things like binary stars. If we have a binary star, then we can determine the mass from the orbit. And we have three types of binaries we want to discuss. There is the visual binary, which is shown here where you can actually see two stars in an image. And if you watch over long periods of time, you could see that they are slowly orbiting around each other. We also have spectroscopic binaries where we cannot see two individual stars, but we can see them in the spectrum. So, when we look at the spectrum here, we can see that there are lines from star A and B when one star is moving toward us and one star is moving away, then we will get shifts in the opposite direction and those lines will separate. When they are going tangentially as we see in the image here, then we will see no shift, so that would be similar to the top and the bottom sections here. So, this was an example of what we call a spectroscopic binary. We cannot see the two stars individually, but we can see evidence from the spectrum that there are two stars orbiting. We also have eclipsing binary stars, such as shown here. In this case, a star will dim when an unseen companion passes in front of it and we can see that in the light curve. And we can use those properties to help us determine the mass of a star. Now, how do we determine that mass? Well, we go back and remember Kepler's third law from an earlier lecture. Kepler's third law stated that the cube of the semi-major axis was equal to the square of the period of revolution. If we use d for the semi-major axis, which is what the textbook is using here, and p for the period of revolution, Newton tells us that d cubed equals the sum of the masses times p squared. Now, actually, there's a constant out here that we are not going to worry about. In our case, we can simplify this and look at just this portion of it, because if we measure these in specific units, then we don't need a constant. We can make that constant equal to one. So we measure d in astronomical units. We measure the period in years, and in that case, the mass will be in solar masses. So if we determine the semi-major axis and period of a star, we can determine the sum of the two masses of those stars. We can determine the mass of that system. Now, what kind of range do we get in these? Well, the largest stars are limited to a little over 100 solar masses. Why? Because radiation pressure becomes so intense that if star is producing so much energy that the radiation pressure will overwhelm gravity and will keep the star from adding more material there. So radiation pressure exceeds the gravitational force. Now, if we want to look at this theoretically, there is actually an upper limit of about 300 solar masses. These are for stars with no metals. And remember, a metal is anything other than hydrogen or helium. So stars like this would have existed only very early after the Big Bang. Any current star forming will have at least some amount of metals. So those are the most massive stars that we see. The lowest mass stars are about one-twelfth of a solar mass. This is where they never get hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium, and that becomes, then, a brown dwarf star. Now, we also find what we call the mass-luminosity relationship as shown here, that there is a relationship between the mass as you get larger and larger masses, we get larger and larger luminosities, and it actually goes up as a relatively high power. So a star that is twice as massive will not be twice as luminous, but will be many times more luminous. For example, we look at a star like our Sun, which would have one solar luminosity and one solar mass. If we went to something that was 10 times more massive, we might originally expect that, oh, that would be about 10 times as luminous. But if we move up the diagram here, we find that it is closer to 100,000 times more luminous. So the mass and luminosity increases very rapidly with the mass. That's one of the reasons these stars can be seen over such tremendous distances. So that's a little bit about masses. How do we determine the diameter of a star? Well, a vast majority of stars look only like points of light, even through very large telescopes. However, we do have some methods to determine the diameter. If the moon passes in front of a star, we can use that to measure by the amount of time it takes for it to dim as the moon passes in front of that. Eclipsing binary stars can also be used to do that when one star passes in front of another. If the star were infinitely small, it would just immediately drop down and go like that. The amount of time it takes to dim tells us something about the size of that star. And we can use the radiation law. The radiation law has a bunch of constants here. 4 pi and sigma are just constants. So it relates the luminosity, the radius, and the temperature. Now, if we can determine two of those, then we can calculate the third. So if we can figure out the temperature and the luminosity, we could then solve the equation and find what the radius would be. So that's another way that we can do it if we are able to determine the other two numbers. Now, what do we see when we look at the diameters of stars? The smallest stars are about the size of Jupiter. These are the most common stars that we see. Now, they are the size of Jupiter. Remember, that is diameter. That is not mass. They are many times more massive than Jupiter. The largest stars are much larger than our Sun. We have giant stars that are 10 to 100 times larger than the Sun. Supergiant stars 100 times larger. The largest known star, Vy Canis Majoris, 1,400 times larger than our Sun, which would extend out beyond Jupiter if we placed it where the Sun was in our solar system. Another star known as Stevenson 2-18, possibly over 2,000 times the diameter of our Sun, and would extend out beyond Saturn in our solar system. So, while there's a big range in mass, there is an even bigger range in sizes, and, as we'll see, luminosities within the types, different types of stars. So, let's go ahead and finish up with our summary, and what we've looked at today is that the stars have a wide variety of both masses and diameters. We've talked about various methods to use to determine how big a star is and the mass of the star. Large stars are more commonly seen in the sky, but the small stars are the more common ones in the universe. So, that concludes this lecture on determining masses and sizes of stars. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So, until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.


You might need another Marine in the front. You gotta move more. Got it. And that first pull is in. Lift it up more. Push it. Lift it up more. There you go. Hold the wheel tail. You got a wheel stick? Yep. Pull it off. Alright, is it on there? It's on there. Tighten the collars down. Put it on there. So make sure this hole is lined up with this hole. So disconnect your metal army wire. What does this army wire do? When the force of the rocket... Alright, stop talking. Billings, what does it do?


Perfect. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone, and welcome to my session on the Kubernetes risk assessment. I appreciate it. I know you come after lunch, so I definitely appreciate it. And just a quick poll before we start. How many of you are assessing risk in Kubernetes? Great. How many of you heard about the CIS benchmark? Nice. Okay, perfect. So we're in the right place. I'm not going to talk a little bit about it, but that's not the main scope of the talk. Great. So my name is Ariel. I'm today part of CISCO, part of the responsible for the security application, cloud security application in CISCO in a business called ETNI, which is a new business unit on emerging technologies. I was in Portshift, which was acquired by CISCO. I was in Aqua Security. Some of the people know this company even in Checkpoint before that, working on some open source contributions, whether it's QB. It's a nice open source for creating S-Bone probability scanning, part of the CNCF in a few initiatives, and also MitraEtec. Anybody familiar with the MitraEtec? Great. Okay. So we're going to talk a lot about it. Great. So for this risk assessment, why do we need it? Where does it come to play in our life? And how many times are you doing it in a year? So just for those of you who are involved with it, how many are you doing it periodically, those risk assessment for clusters? CIS benchmark compliance, anything? Okay.  You're doing it because you're trying to assess. Now, the challenges that at least force us to go deeper into this risk assessment is, ideally, understanding where we are, what are the risks we have, what do you think we need to mitigate. The primary suspect is, of course, the application, pause, the worker knows, because that's where the attack usually happens. But the master node and the control objects are not less important, maybe even more, because a small change in the master node or a small change in the worker is going to create a much bigger impact. So small changes on any of those elements can create big impact. And this is why you always want to monitor them more. Even more than that, the Kubernetes clusters have dynamic parts. We keep changing. We're changing objects. We're changing roles. We're adding policies. We don't have policies. All those changes make a small change in role-based access control without understanding who has this role-binding. And you open up yourself to many potential attacks. Same thing, apply for policies. You enable something. You change AP. And then all of a sudden, all your cluster is exposed. And there's objects like ingress and egress that make it even harder. Now, usually, I love this picture because I always find myself in a constant chase that usually we have compliance, usually done once a year. A lot of times, it's required that we're threat-modeling because we want to come to developers and tell them how they need to design and plan their services. So we want to better understand what is the threat. And most commonly, usually, we want to avoid the abuse of the cluster. A lot of crypto mining. You probably read a lot about it. It happens. And we want to make sure that we cover it and we're not exposed. So I ask you about the CIS benchmark. So the CIS benchmark is definitely a great start. Those who are familiar and working with it, it's very impressive. There's a really very comprehensive set of security checks focusing on securing the configuration of Kubernetes elements. So it starts... I think the CIS benchmark was the first that was there. It was the first framework that people start using. It was in the very beginning of Kubernetes. And the good thing is that they keep updating it as things are moving by and they keep changing for every version. There is a new CIS benchmark. And indeed, it's a very compressive check. We're going to see it in a minute. It really touches everything on Kubernetes. Everything on the master node, even a lot of comprehensive checks on the worker nodes and admission controllers. And warning, this is tough pictures. But it's really, really, really a detailed list of many, many, many tests that you need to check. Now, again, as I said, they keep updating it, updating it, which is very good because they keep doing a great job in that. Again, I think most of the attacks are usually because of those misconfigurations. Now, they're also going to network policy, ensuring that you are setting up some policies, covering even the role-based access controls, secrets, making sure that any sense of information using secrets, and even so that in the recent editions, they added stuff about port security standards, which is fairly new recommendation for isolation using Seccom, which is very new. And again, they're doing a great job in making sure you configure a cluster carefully. So this is really great. Now, I think this is the primary topic of my talk, is that CIS benchmark is a really great start, but it's definitely not where you need to stop. Or it is definitely not enough. Why it's not enough? Because those benchmark provide, you know, looking at all the security misconfiguration. Now, security misconfiguration are indeed the primary cause for cyber attacks. There's no doubt about that. But security misconfigurations are not the only risk factor in clusters, right? When you look at all the attacks, which are published, or all the nodes which are made, most of them coming from different vectors. A lot of them coming from backdoors in like open source images, like you read a lot about, you know, new images which were discovered and new vectors which were added into it. A lot of them coming from compromise on insecure, but very popular tools. And those who remember last year was a big campaign on Kubeflow. People using Kubeflow for machine learning in Kubernetes clusters. And there was a very nice campaign in Azure that really exploited some misconfiguration. I'm not even like deliberately, but some, you know, mistakes that were made on the configuration of Kubeflow. Network manipulation. There was a recent CVE which was showing how you can leverage the ingress fusing and genics in order to expose secrets for the clusters. So the idea is that misconfigurations are important. Definitely, it's a good place where to start. But definitely not where you need to end if you want to make sure that you are secure. Interaction is abusing you. You need to take advantage into the actual, I would say, dynamic content. You know, images, networking, things which usually are being exploited when you want to launch an attack. Now, if you ask yourself, okay, so we understand that misconfigurations is a good start.  But the question is, where we want to go? Or how do we make it, you know, even better? And here, I think there are three factors that we need to consider when we plan our ideal risk assessment plan. I think the first one is the attack context. One of the challenges that I personally find the CIS benchmark is the fact that not all misconfigurations or not all vulnerabilities are born equal, right? Not all of them are equal. Some are more important, some are less important, okay? Some has bigger success or bigger impact, some are smaller. What a smaller impact. And we need to factor in what is the real risk.  There's no details on what is the impact of this misconfiguration. This is like some untouched element that you never reach to it, and it's good it's going to be configured properly, but it's not such a big thing if it's not.  It's very powerful and there is no login requirement to do it. You really need to add some more risk context into those tests. This is, I think, an important aspect to consider. Another thing is the security context. So ideally, you know, or sometimes you can find yourself that with changing one setting or changing one security layer, you can eliminate many risks. So there is also, you know, balance between how much effort do you need or what you required versus what the gain that you gained. So again, one of the challenges that I've seen in the CIS, there is just plain list of tests. You can see where you're complying where you're not, and watching it to complain. But you don't see like if you can do one change, then maybe it eliminates all the other changes. So there is it to be like more holistic view, something that give you, you know, the full context of the security. So it'd be much easier for you to plan and to configure your security tools in the right way. And the last item, which I think is critical, is the remediation context. So good risk assessment tool should lead to good remediation plan, right? And if you can do everything with automation, it's the key. So for one side, run an automated process to assess all the risks, and then run an automated process to mitigate those risks and mitigate them. And I think those, in my opinion, of course, would be great tools to take our risk assessment one step further. Okay. So let's try to examine what other options are there on the table if, you know, we want to indeed to go one step further in our assessment. So this is the Mitre attack. I don't know if people are familiar with it. And the Mitre attack publish and the Mitre org, to be more precise, publish and attack metrics for different environments. When they see that there is an environment that is becoming popular for attacks, they publish an attack metrics, which is actually, you know, a very detailed list, that list all the techniques and the tactics and the techniques that were used in the wild. So they not doing just theoretical tests or theoretical explanation of what can be done wrong, but what I think that's what you're really being used. So sometimes, you know, there are great theoretical risk, but the exploitation is so hard that it's almost impossible to use them. So the beauty of all these metrics is you're taking a list and they're doing a lot of work to validate them. Those are where actually in use and the specific environment that the metrics is trying to cover. And what I like very much on those metrics is that they're organized according to the cyber attack kill chain. So you really get the security counter. So you see the all the stages of the attack. You can see where are the, you know, the exposure or where are the items based on the attack. And then you can understand, you know, to yourself, you know, where you are and what do you need to do maybe better or, you know, could be that there is a risk, but it like maybe down on the chain that if you cover everything before, maybe it's not relevant for you. So I think that this cyber context and cyber kill chain is very important. So happily, the Mitra attack published a metrics on containers. It started in 2021, after almost a year of research and validation. And it really documented all the real life attacks on containerized environment. It was a very good cross country collaboration and I'm happy to say that, you know, we in Cisco collaborated a lot into this work. And the beauty about it that, you know, until then, when you look about, you know, research on containers attacks and stuff like it, you can find a lot of theoretical things on every KubeCon. You can see many talks about how you can break out and what you can do. But in the real life, most of them didn't happen. Now, most of them maybe because they're too complex that they because, I would say, attackers are lazy. Probably you don't want to assume that. But one of the things that the the mic could put, you know, as a starting point, which was very, very important, is we really want to know real things, real things that happened, real attacks, not just theoretical ones. And I think this was, for me, at least the first time was a very interesting initiative that looking at, you know, things that are real and give you something that more better validation to what you think. And the end reached like plus 40 attack techniques, which each of them is really documented. So for every technique, there is detailed information on what is the method, how it was actually really used, you know, when and where it was discovered, how you can mitigate it, you know, how you can detect it. So sometimes, you know, you want to detect before you mitigate it. You have like very good references. So if you really want to read and get, you know, more information about it. So overall, I think it was a very interesting initiative. We can look at it in this table.  And the beauty about it is that it's really set according to the attack kill chain. So you can see on the left, this is the initial access, you know, how do you access a cluster? How do you access a container? So you can see like, for example, you know, exploit public facing application, there's references to all those dashboards which were exposed, whether the Kubernetes or Kubeflow dashboards, which were exposed. How do you do external remote services? How can you abuse them in order to get access to your clusters?  Persistency, how do you maintain persistency, privilege escalation. And again, a lot of detailed detailed techniques, good information, a lot of things which you can do. At least if you want to assess the risk of your cluster, those are items that you definitely want to check to make sure that you're not exposed. And as I said, when you can see the context of what part of the attack, what stage of the attack, it's happening. You know, for example, that if you are covered and there is no way to do initial access or execution or persistency, and you really covered your privilege escalation in a way that no one can make out, then if maybe if you have, you know, wrong things in discovery, you can understand that your risk is not so big. Because until an attacker need to reach the discovery phase, you need to pass so many things which you covered and you protect, then you understand that it might be an issue, but not, you know, a big one. On the other side, if you see that, for example, you have holes here, you know, in that public facing in what, you know, documented initial access so it can lead to an execution, then maybe a bigger impact because all the rest will follow. So I think overall this context is really important when you want to assess what is the actual risk of your cluster. Let's take, you know, a deep dive into just like examine and examples. So one example is, you know, execution, you can see like, you know, for example, malicious image, this is just one of the sales. So you can read the old information about how this can be abused. You can see who is using it, for example, team TNT. It's a known attack group that is using it in order to get, you know, usage. I think in this case was mainly for crypto mining, you can get the details on how you mitigate it, how you detect it, and overall it's a good way for you to test, you know, how to avoid it in your clusters, you can even see who are the contributors of it, which is again, very nice information. Same thing about container API, how can you abuse them? And, you know, I choose those examples because not just to show that it's really working, but mainly because those are items which you cannot cover by CIS benchmark. So CIS benchmark, which is very good start on how you configure things properly, but if you don't look inside, you know, the active components, you will not be able to discover it. Those are items which you're not going to define. And I think that this is, you know, an area where the Mitre attack can really provide, provide, you know, a good benefit and a good usage for the user. So what are the benefits of the attack metrics? So obviously, you know, it enlarges the coverage of techniques which goes beyond security misconfiguration, you know, you get to see the real attack context, so users can understand the impact and the risk and plan their mitigation in accordance, and provide a good remediation context, how to mitigate it, how to, you know, minimize the exposure, what do you need to do? But there are also some challenges. Okay, nothing is perfect. There are some challenges. And here one of the challenges, for example, in the Mitre attack is there is lack of automation.  And here, you really need to do it, a lot of things you need to do manually. You need to manually go and check, you need to manually, you know, do it. And the lack of automation, you know, this is something that, of course, make it much more error-prune, take it a much longer process, and put some burden on the user. Now, another challenge that I think I see in the attack metrics is it's a reactive approach. So it's only document and listing attacks which took place. But unfortunately, you know, in the cyberspace, also in Kubernetes, we talk about very creative, you know, attackers. And usually, you know, it's good to know what happened, but you also need to predict what will happen, right? And, you know, if you only look at what took place, you know, it doesn't mean that we're going to prevent new things that will change or something new that can happen to our cluster. So I think that the micro tech is providing really in-depth approach, a very good looking, but still is not perfect. Okay, so that leaves us to the question of what's needed, right? If you really, you know, want to create our ideal work, is what do we need? So here, I have more, I would say, wishes than just really concrete work that I can share, but I'm saying we definitely want to add an element which is, I think, missing in all the different framework, which is the security context. Today, every item is being looked independently. There's no overall security context, so the desired security context can allow users to check the impact of each mitigation. So if I do one mitigation and I cover many, many risks, of course, the cost benefits for me is much bigger than if I do a lot of work and just cover one risk. So assessing what is the protection context versus the risk can help me to prioritize on where I can get the bigger value, of course, right? So having this overall context, because sometimes, for example, let's assume that I see many risks coming from potential network exposure. This will put just create policies on my ingress or my egress, right? Or if I put maybe more, I will protect my network, create maybe more restrictive network policies on whatever is coming into my cluster, I can really save many of those risks, right? So this is like an idea where if I have a broader context and a mitigation plan which take this context into consideration, I can optimize my steps and I can get, you know, better value to my efforts. Another thing that is really missing is the proactive approach, right? The most challenging barrier is assessing the unknown. And I think, you know, it's always hard to predict the unknown, right? It's one in security, it's one of the big things. You never know what you never know. But here, this is an area where the CIS is doing a good job because, yes, you don't know everything that you can do, but if you know that you can minimize the attack surface by covering all the different elements and, you know, adding this security layer. And as I said, automation is definitely key, especially in cooperatives environments. And this is a call to the open source community, here in the room, is to create automation tool for the Mitre attack, Mitre is something that can assess the test and can also help you to automate the remediation of it. So if I ask myself, you know, what would an ideal Kubernetes risk assessment framework would look like? So I think, and again, I'm saying it's ideal because there's a lot of work around it, but something that starts with leveraging all the CIS benchmark, which prevent, you know, the common and maybe the unknown risk by setting up, you know, good security posture to the environment, something that leveraged the Mitre attack metrics because the check were in the cluster, you have exposure to exploitation that took place in the wild. So you can really know that this is something that can really happen to you. We did it, you know, in CIS code, this is something that we also contributed to the back, you know, to the Mitre attack and again, hope to create some more automation around it. And of course, something which is fully automated and not just in the inspection, but also in the remediation plan. And hopefully it's not done annually once a year when the security team comments ask you to do compliance, but something which you do constantly to making sure that your clusters are always protected and not in the risk. So if I want to summarize everything, Kubernetes clusters really require, you know, content risk assessment picture, but it's not something to do once in a life and go to, you know, to do other things. It's a constant work. You always need to check yourself because unfortunately, the good things which happen, but also sometimes bad things happen. The common framework is the CIS benchmark. I think it's a very good and comprehensive work, really comprehensive set of configuring tools can be automated. Really, really great start. But again, it's not enough because it's only focusing on misconfiguration.  But again, even together, we still need more steps to get to the ideal framework because we also need to look at not just showing me risk and show me what's going to go wrong, but also showing you how to fix it. And where is my bigger value in fixing and what steps I can do, for example, in fixing like an infrastructure layer, and then automatically eliminate risks that coming from the application called the infrastructure itself is secure or the cluster is protected, or there's no way to do exploitation by, you know, providing a more basic layer. That's it. Thank you very much. I hope it was interesting. And hope you find it useful and you're going to protect your clusters. Thank you. If no more questions, and I give you back a few minutes.


Up until now you've been asking the wrong question. You've been asking people what they think of your photographs. Is it good or is it bad? The question you really should be asking is who are you photographing for? How's it? How's it? In professional circles there is a phrase that says either you shoot for the sale or you shoot for the soul. Now most people, both in a professional and an amateur sense, tend to end up shooting for the sale. They're looking to please other people. Now obviously as a professional you have briefs and guidelines that you need to follow but as an amateur or as a hobbyist or somebody just does it for the love of it, are you photographing to make other people like you? Oh are you doing this because you want to just simply enjoy taking photos? I'm going to hazard a guess that it is the latter and that you just want to enjoy taking photographs and if other people like them then that's a bonus. Stop caring what people think. The easiest way to stop worrying of course about what people think of your images is simply to well to stop asking them. That doesn't mean not posting on social media or wherever you choose to display your images. It simply means not being those people and we've all seen them from time to time who go which is better for my photograph? Color or black and white? I can't decide, help me choose. That right there is the worst thing that you can do for your creativity. You are asking an aggregate of people's opinions about what you should do with your image in an effort to please everybody else. This just leads to photographs after photograph that all look similar. So say me. You need to stand out from the crowd. You need to stick your head above the parapet and start to speak with your own voice. Social media is not a place to get your ability as a photographer validated and we'll get on to that in a second. It is simply a place for you to share images. As you do share images that go a little bit beyond what is considered to be say the norm wherever you choose to show your photographs, you may run into people who give you unsolicited let's call it feedback loosely and say your photograph is rubbish or that it's got empty tumpy million things wrong with it and when you run into this I want you to take this quote to heart. Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something even if it is clumsy that doesn't look like somebody else's work. That's William Klein there. As people learn photography we get taught that there are rules that we should follow and obey like these are some sort of sacrosanct things that must never be you know confronted and some of these rules are legitimate. If you change an f-stop it will change your exposure that is a hard and fast rule. Same things like your horizons must always be straight and level is a suggestion rather than a rule. I ran into this a lot you know that I would do lots of Dutch tilt and I still do so that's when the horizon was all wonky things now some people hate it and some people like it I like it but if I were to go with the common idea that horizons should always be level then I would be creating photographs that weren't necessarily mine and this is what you need to be mindful of is that there may be suggestions that are being put in place that are holding you back from creating photographs that feel comfortable for you that feels natural and this is what we want to get is you photographing in a way that feels comfortable and natural for your own voice now that may run contrary to some of these ideas you may get pushed back from judges and people at camera clubs and stuff like that and this is when you need to recycle back to this idea of who are you photographing for are you photographing for the sale or for the soul in many respects it's good when people are questioning your choices about how you are moving forward because at least you are doing something out of the ordinary that you are challenging some expectations some you know pushing some boundaries within your photographs so don't look at it as a negative criticism look at it as a positive thing that you are heading in the right direction recently I watched a Ted talk given by Ethan Hawke where he talks about the Beat Poe Allen Ginsberg and when he went off to do a national TV spot and sang a song about Harry Krishna you know and he got back to New York to all his intelligentsia friends and they all told him that she knew that everybody thinks you're an idiot and the whole country is making fun of you and he said that's my job you know I'm a poet and so I find that very liberating because I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality something that the world will consider good or important and that's really the enemy because it's not up to us whether what we do is any good and if history has taught us anything the world is an extremely unreliable critic I love that idea it was so liberating when I heard it because you know it's here it's like all of a sudden yeah actually it doesn't matter if I think my work is good enough so long as I'm putting in the effort that I think it deserves because it's not for me to judge it seems counterintuitive but wow I was like I'm now free I'm free of worrying about what other people think I don't have to ask people do you like it because I'm just making work for myself that's my job as a photographer is to make images that please me first and foremost no longer did I have to worry about you know following the latest fad or fashions or you know processing techniques or you know the the subject of the of the century or you know all these kind of things that cycle around and everybody jumps on the bandwagon looking for for likes and you know shares and followers I was free to just make my own images and that all of a sudden actually paid benefits because I was speaking visually with my own voice again this is what you're going to start doing you're going to start creating images that have your soul inside them and your soul your unique vision is so much more important than trying to make a technically perfect copy of something that once upon a time was original so how do you find what motivates you what what drives you visually there's a misconception I think that you know a lot of famous artists and people who are visual visionaries are born with it then it just springs like you know like divine intervention and then that's not true at all it comes from hoarding like a magpie all the bits of visual stimuli that speak to you personally this is why it's kind of it's silly to sort of say who shall I look at to be inspired on the channel here I can give you suggestions about places to explore but your inspiration is going to be different from mine so think about the things that inspire you visually films tv I love the work of Wes Anderson that symmetrical feel that his image his films often have but my photographs are not symmetrical but they have an oddliness that comes from that symmetrical feeling that was Anderson and injects into his films asking other people if they like your photograph is putting the ball into their gut that you are saying tell me what influences you and then I will make something to fit that you're going about it the wrong way you need to have it in your own voice make a collection of things that inspire you see how wide ranging those inspirations can can actually be see if you can incorporate the feel and the mood of those things into your photography and when you start doing this you have a far richer pool of inspiration to draw from than those people who are just simply asking everybody else what they should do with their photos there is a quote by the very famous marketer Seth Godden that goes people like us do things like this and in short that means that we want to be part of a crowd we want to feel like we are accepted and this is why so many photographers I feel create just bland homogenous work because they want to feel accepted they want to feel part of this crowd they want to feel part of the cool club and that leads to conforming to making images that are like everybody else's instead take the other quote from Seth Godden to heart is that I didn't make this for you now what he means there is not saying I didn't make this so you can't have it is saying rather that if somebody says I don't like this you say it's okay it's not for you it's for me and that is such an important lesson to take too hard that you know a photographer like Ralph Eugene meatyard I find his work challenging interesting and slightly disturbing but that's fine because I kind of connect with it if you don't like it and I'm sure some of you watching this absolutely will not Ralph would probably just go okay I didn't make it for you that's part and parcel of creating something you must be willing and brave to get to grips with this idea that you can't make something to please everybody make images to please yourself first and foremost be brave enough to stand up and say I didn't make this for you now this is not to say that you need to create disturbingly weird photographs right okay it just means create images like we said earlier that are natural to you that they they feel like there's something that you want to do they don't have to be crazy they just have to be yours having this confidence having this unique expression is an ongoing process it is going to be part of your journey as a photographer from now until you finally put down a camera once and for all embrace this progression when I look at my own photographs when I was younger they were all over the place stylistic because I was finding things I was finding ideas and what having it then I fell into this idea of oh I need to start pleasing people and and I lost some of that vitality in those early images because I was trying to please other people then I discovered that you know I don't need to please other people I could just photograph for myself and that made everything about it far more enjoyable your style of photography the way that you express yourself is going to change over time and that is perfectly normal embrace it it is time for you to push the boundaries to come like the butterfly from the chrysalis of trying to please everybody asked with your photographs to be brave to to create clumsy images that William Klein would love you will be tempted to invest in new gear and all that sort of stuff over the years in your photography and the thing that you should invest in first and foremost is education to feed your mind to to seek out visual inspiration and and hoard it so that you can have a richer and far more eloquent way of expressing the way that you see the world to see more of William Klein's fantastic photography check out this video here I know you're going to love it thanks for watching


recorded to the lab. This meeting is being recorded. So let me give everybody a quick update before Dave shows up.  The grassy area has been sprayed with the grass seed composites. Ted says it's starting to grow already. So everything inside the fence is there. The shade structures are there. The benches are in place. The water fountains are in place. There's not yet, I can't remember if I saw a trash can or not. I went yesterday so I saw everything. So we know the kiosk has been ordered and the kiosk company is actually going to be installing it. That goes outside the gate. I don't know the timing of that. That's a question I have for Dave once he shows up. Dave and Ted and I took a walk there just last week maybe and talked about what we hope to see happen in the near future. And working backwards, we hope to have a grand opening for the piece stone area with the grassy area blocked off. So we don't know exactly. We're going to talk tonight. Today, it's not tonight. It's really morning still. We're going to talk today about timeline. But the concept was the town is going to be ordering hopefully already did, but that's another question for Dave. They're going to be ordering hurricane fencing, storm fencing, whatever you call it, and the metal posts to put it up to block off the grass area. So we can have an opening this summer, maybe even late spring. Hang on. Dave shows up here. Hi, Dave. Good morning, everybody. I'm just giving everybody a rough background of what we talked about at our meeting, new me and Ted when we walked the site. So again, talking about having a grand opening that we're going to try and schedule. And before that, we're going to have a workday where we're going to invite people to come. And we're going to try and publicize this in lots of different ways of anybody who's interested in the dog park, particularly people who might be interested in being on the friends group to have a workday where we all meet at the dog park and install the fencing. And Dave is going to be coordinating with DPW or somebody to order the supplies we need and figure out what tools we need. And everybody's going to work together to put this fencing in place. So this will be a kind of a work party and introduction to the dog park where people can't bring their dogs because there won't be any fencing yet. And the whole point is to not have dogs prancing around on the seeded area. So that's got to happen before the grand opening, but it can happen very close to the grand opening because the main thing the grand opening will need is this fencing in place. And there's a bunch of other little things we'll need, like at least some of the signage up because the point of the grand opening is we'll leave it open after that. So we need to have the rules up and some of the signage up. I think I'll stop talking now and we'll go into our agenda in order and we'll get back to all this stuff as we go. So Dave, I already officially started the meeting. We actually still we don't have a quorum because although with Ellen here we have four and if Nina's no longer a voting member, so we four out of the eight voting members might mean that we do have a quorum. So we can vote on things if we want to vote on things, but I don't know that we'll need to vote on anything so it might not be an issue anyway. So any rate the meeting is being recorded to the cloud and we officially called the meeting to order and hang on eight participants. Who's the eighth participant? It might just be Angela who's gone now. Okay, you know if anybody else shows up we'll invite them in to join the meeting. Okay, so getting back to our agenda. I already gave a brief construction status. Dave, one question I had is, do you know the timeline for the kiosk delivery and installation? Yeah, I missed the construction update. I just cut off the phone with Jason Skeels. Do you want me to talk a little bit in more depth about that? Yes, please. Yeah, so and I'll end remind me on the kiosk. By the way, just interrupt a second. I'll take notes and send out minutes for this. I don't know if people have been Nina, Jack, Ellen, I know Ted and Jim and I have been out there and Ted lives nearby, but I don't know if you've been by, but things are looking really pretty good. Fencing is all done. Hydro seating went in I think last week. Parking has been striped. Things are looking pretty good. The park is locked now because we did have people kind of exploring on their own and now that the hydro seating is in and some of the other elements are and the park is not officially open, we really didn't want people kind of nosing around in there. We're at the point where we're working with the contractor on kind of punch list items. Things like the wetland buffer area to the south needs reseeding. We had some erosion there in these last couple of storms. We're getting them to trim and weed whack around the trees to the north closest to Route 9. Bike loops have yet to go in, but benches are in, the shade structures are in. Let's see. We still have things to do. So the plans that went before the planning board had to be changed in the field. So that was an on-the-fly change that the town engineer Jason Skeels made. So we have to go back before the planning board on June 29th. This is part of our site plan review and it's a requirement basically because we changed the parking. We changed some of the ADA access ways, if you will, and a few other things. We need the building commissioner to sign off on the project, particularly things like the clasps on the fencing. I believe have to be ADA. So we're getting down to these kind of punch list items and then the planning board. I don't expect any major issues with the planning board, but I think they will want to know what changed in the plan because it did go through site plan review. So that's why in a recent email to Jim and Ted, I was suggesting this soft opening after June 29th. What are the punch list items? So then getting on to kiosks. I'm in touch with Vermont Timber Framing. I can't remember the name of the company. It's Vermont Timber something. And they're ready to deliver the main kiosk at any point. We paid for them to install it out on the concrete walkways. So DPW will coordinate with them and we'll try to get that in next week or the week after, depending on this company's schedule from Vermont. What else? Kiosk. We're working on finalizing all the signs. I think those went out to Jim and Ted via Angela last week. And I think in general, we're ready to send those off to be produced. Those are the, we can, I don't know if Jim, you have them, but we could review them briefly here today or you could send them out. Those are rules and regulations, etiquette, all those signs we did up before. Yeah. I'm just interrupting. I, as a separate agenda item, when we get to the signage review, I'll share my screen so people can see. Okay. I'm also working to make sure I don't have the final budget numbers, but I'm confident that we will have some breathing room on the budget. So we are going to cost out and order a sign that is probably not quite as nice, but in a similar style to the sign at the Kendrick Park playground. If you've seen that one or, you know, when your travels go by that one, it won't be granite there. It's on granite posts. We're going to not use granite, but the sign will be similar. It's, you know, it'll be a couple of thousand bucks. We're also going to order a lawnmower and weed whackers and things like that. Alan Snow from DPW will handle that. The outbuilding, the shed, if you will, is going to be delivered next week. That'll be on the south end outside of the fence. That's where we'll keep equipment that the Friends Group and DPW can use to maintain the park. I'm sure there's other things and you may have questions, but those are the kind of issues we're working on right now in the next two weeks. So a couple of comments. Before you got here, Angela was here and I asked her what the status is of the rules and etiquette signs and she says she hasn't actually ordered them yet and she needs some sort of budget line item code or something from you to do that. So she's waiting on that. Yeah, I think if you all are good with the signs, we'll hit send and produce them. So maybe by the end of this meeting, we should say, yeah, etiquette and rules and regs done. Let's get them produced. She did say it might be two and a half weeks for some reason to get the signs made and so we need to be mindful of that in terms of the end of the month as far as an opening because we may not have the signs by then. Although if we ordered, she can get the order in today. Yeah, I think we're still fine on that. And I visited yesterday the day before and I asked Dave and Angela, I think I copied Ted and this also, if we could just have a little temporary sign saying coming soon with an email address that people can send to if they want more information or if they want to be involved in the Friends Group and Angela was going to send a prototype of that today and we'll stick that up on the front gate. So when people go there, before the real signs are in place, they can say, hey, I want to know more, send something to this email and get more. And I did also figure out, I managed to find the password to our Amherst Dog Park Gmail account which Anna had set up and I found the password and I made that forward to me for now. So instead of to Anna, because she's officially off the committee now that she's a counselor. So that email address does work now. So that's just kind of a smattering of the kind of things we're trying to wrap up. The contractor is actually on the hook and has site control until I believe they do one mowing of the grass. So we have to kind of dance around that a little bit and I'll talk to Jason's skills about that. I did not talk to him about it moments ago when I was on the phone because I frankly forgot but the one question I'll put to Jason is if they do their mowing, let's say they do their mowing in the third week of June or the last week of June, are they then done done? And we pay them and they're gone. The one thing, yeah, it's a fine line between our soft opening and them being, they're going to want to be paid and off the site before our soft opening because they don't want to have to come back if, let's say the, I don't know, some big dog gets out there and ruins the grass or whatever. They don't want to be on the hook for that. Contractually they want to be done. And so they have site control. So when do we release them from site control? And I'll talk to Jason about that. Okay, by the way, as Dave was talking, I got a text message with a picture from my brother-in-law who lives in Amherst Woods saying grass is growing with pictures of the grass. How long will the grass need to be fenced off until we can allow dogs onto that?  It's not, it's not the way we would typically do it because, you know, I'm hopeful that people will be respectful of the fencing, but I have a feeling dogs will get under over through the fencing. And so there likely will be some damage. Ideally, you would wait until even October 1st to open the park and really let the grass grow. So we're going to have to oversee. We're going to have to, you know, this is typically what happens is, you know, and we had this at Kendrick Park. It's a great example. We opened Kendrick Park because there was a lot of pressure to open it. And what's happened is in some areas where there was seed, but it really didn't take, we have bare ground. So it's going to be a little bit challenging, but we'll be hopeful that people will be respectful of the fencing and not try to explore further. So they'll have access to all the piece stone areas. Dave, does the town have to keep off the grass signs that we could put on the hurricane fencing just to emphasize? Yeah, we'll have to order some. We don't have them, but we'll order some. Yeah. And what about the hurricane fencing and the posts themselves? We'll get that, Jim. No problem. I think we have some already. Dave, does the hurricane fencing come in different heights? Is there a possibility of a three foot four? Is there a four foot height, you know, which would be certainly a bigger barrier than a three foot height? Yeah, we're definitely not going three. It'll be four plus four or four plus. Yeah. I think if it's put in properly, I don't think too many dogs are going to go through there. And if it's obvious, even if they go through, if the owner goes and retrieves them, I don't know how much damage they're going to do as long as it doesn't become a play area, because the ground is pretty firm. I was walking out there today and it's not mushy ground where you're going to have footprints. You know, it's pretty firm, the surface. So I'm hoping. Yeah, we'll be hopeful. So again, we were, we haven't locked in on a date, but I had put out to Jim and Ted, I believe I had put out Friday, July one as a potential soft opening day right before the fourth of July holiday. I put that out there for two reasons. One, we need to get through the planning board hearing on the 29th, make sure everything's cool. Two, we want to grow some grass and give a couple of weeks here to get prepared. And three, I'm out for two weeks. My son is getting married on the 9th of July. And so I'm out the week of the fourth and the week of the 11th. So I'd really liked, you know, if we don't do it on the first or Saturday the second, which is a little weird because it's the holiday weekend, then yeah, I just want to do it. I'd want to do it either before I go away or after I go away. So I have to take off. I'm not going to be here the last week of June or the first week of July either. But I have an appointment. So I got to skip out and we'll talk. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. I hope you're in good health. It's good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. I actually had my six month post op scan and it's good. No recurrence. So thank you for asking. Yeah. Thank you. Good to see you. Alrighty. Hi, everyone. So I wonder, aside from the things that need to take place at the park in terms of publicizing the friends group, the workday and all of that, will we have time between now and July 1st to get the word out sufficiently when we kind of have to wait for all the pieces and parts to be answered before we publicize the date? You know what I mean? So we might not be able to get publicity going for another week or two until we have what we know when the signs are coming. We know when the kiosk is coming. I'm just wondering if we'd be better off delaying it to the middle of July or when you're back. It's just the thought the grass is more mature at that point as well. Less chance of damage. Well, the other piece is we haven't even talked about the populating the kiosk, which in and of itself is some work for all of us because we want that acknowledgement for that soft opening. You want all that kiosk to be looking super sharp. I mean, I'm fine. I'm fine with a middle of July, frankly. I'd feel more comfortable doing that, but I wanted to put out an earlier date to see how you all felt. But I've got my punch list, but a lot of that donor stuff is going to fall to you all. Right. The thing is that we haven't discussed making those signs for the board yet. We had some titles. We had some sketches and what was going to go on each plaque, but we didn't really talk about what size, what font. I'm guessing we wanted to mimic the other signs. Yeah, thematically and style wise. We also haven't until the benches and shade structures and doggie pots got put in. We haven't talked about making the little brass clacks to go on those structures or how they're going to get there. Yeah. I think that stuff really should, if people paid significant money, yeah, I think that needs to be there for the opening. I agree. So Dave, tell me again, Dave, your timeframe of when you'll be back. So I will be back. I will be back in the office on July 18th. So I'm gone the week of the fourth and the week of the 11th. And I'm actually gone that week of the 18th. Do we go for early August? It's going to be September. Yes. It will end up in October and we won't even need the fencing. I forget there's no fencing. I'm away the first week in August. Nina, when are you away? The second week in August? I'm moving away August 1st. So one possibility is the last week in July and I haven't totally given up on the earlier timeframe. I mean, we'd want to get the signage in place and that's sort of the big next category to talk about is signage review. And we have a pretty decent list of the signs that we need and we have a pretty decent outline of what's going in the kiosk and which panel it's going on. We did all that stuff in the fall and actually have and can share those documents as well. So it's a question of putting in the time and the effort to order the signs we need and figure out how they get mounted on things. And it's a lot to do in a four-week period or a three-week period. I'm happy to help with getting some of the plaques made or the signs for the kiosk. I have a few weeks. I'm going away at the end of June, but I'm around for the next few weeks. And now that the structures are there, we can actually go out there with a ruler and say, okay, where do we want to put this and how big is it going to be? And if you send what we have for the, we've already designed for the kiosk, then maybe Angela, when she's putting in the sign order, can just order, if we know exactly the measurements and what we wanted to say, she can just order that all at the same time so that when the kiosk gets here, we can have it mounted right away. It might be two different orders. I think we want to try and get in the two big metal signs ordered like today. Those are the ones with the button turned around. So I mean, I'm insanely busy for two more weeks. And then I'll have a little gap that last week in June where I'd be available to do a bunch of stuff also. Well, it seems real realistically with vacations and with all the work we have to do. Why don't we target, let's say, right now our tentative week is the week of July 25th. I think we need to put that in our heads to say, that's what we're shooting for. Let's see how we can move these sign, the suite of signs I call it for the dog park forward as much as we can during June, get everything ordered. Things will come in, piecemeal a little bit, sign one, we'll have one, the etiquette and the rule signs will get out the door, get those back. We'll order the big sign, the welcome sign that goes out there somewhere. And then we'll work on the panels during June, get all of that ordered, all the plaques ordered. And as these things come back in, we'll hone our week. Is it the week of the 25th? But let's shoot for that week. Okay. Yeah, that's fine with me. I think we gotta have a goal. We gotta have a goal. You know? Yeah. So we're gonna say July, week of July 25th is our goal. Goal opening, you know, soft opening, whatever. Probably still assuming fencing, that's fine. Yeah. A workday would be best on the weekend, obviously, before that, I think.  Yeah. Yeah. On Sunday, the 24th, say? Is that sound reasonable? That sounds good. I'm coming back for my vacation that Saturday, so I'm around that Sunday. I'll be around the 24th. And we'd have a workday on the 24th. And again, we're gonna pick whatever day of the week during the week of the 25th. Okay. Right. We might be able to open up the 25th if everything's in place, you know, of all the signs that are there and everything's done and the fencing goes up, then we might be able to open up whatever is good for the town. And the thing I'll have to do is, as we go through the month of June and get signed, you know, orders out, we do need to lock in, we've got plenty of time now, but I need to give all the people, the CPA committee and particularly the town council, a couple of weeks advanced notice to say, we selected July 25th, 6th, 7th, 8th, whatever date it is that week, because, you know, people are on vacation, we want to get as many people from the council and the CPA committee and the community as possible to come to this. So can we, which day would be like of that Monday through Friday? Anybody have any, you know, there's no reason to not pick a day now. Is there? Um, no, I mean, we could, I'm not a big fan of that Monday, just in case we need, we've discovered things on the 24th, we need DPW's help. It's hard for me to mobilize Monday morning for a grand opening at 10 a.m. So I'm more inclined to do Wednesday the 27th, something like that. Would it be a morning thing or would it be an after work? You know, I don't know what's best in terms of getting the public or do we want the public or you know what I mean? I have a two o'clock Dennis appointment that day. It should be a morning thing. It could be the morning of the 27th. Okay. 10 a.m. Yeah, I think this might be more of like all the official government people ribbon cutting type thing. And then maybe that Saturday the 30th, the friends group, if we pull it together and time does like a big public welcome and we have, I don't know, lemonade and iced tea or something. Let's say our date right now is July 27th, 10 a.m. I'll look at the town calendar and see if there's any conflicts, anything like that. And if it has to move a day or two, fine, but let's, we need a target. Good. And the work day, the 24th, Sunday, the 24th. Yeah. And that'll be, I'd say, you know, 9 a.m. Okay. And so, Dave, we'd probably need at least Jason or somebody from DPW there kind of helping to direct traffic and explain what needs to be done and. Yeah. If I'm just going to put this out there, I'm not making a promise, but would feelings be hurt if I'm able to get the snow fence in before the 24th? Is that going to hurt anybody's feelings? It probably be done better. It probably be done, you know, professional. Yeah. So let me, let me play around with that with Jason. Okay. I think the more we can get done before the better. Yeah. We can still have a organizational meeting at the park without, you know, to show like a preview or early access or whatever you want to call it for people who are interested. Yeah. So let me, let me, let me just work on that. Yeah. And if, if it would be helpful to have a couple volunteers to help with that, we could still get some volunteer labor to help them if they feel that would be useful.  If you get volunteer labor, who knows what they're doing, it can really make things go well. If you get volunteer labor who's clueless, it could make it take longer. So. Okay. All right. Good. So should we switch topics over to signage? Yes. And I'm going to share my screen and show you the two signs that Angela has already got sort of mock-ups up that are ready to go if I know how to share screen. Well, he's doing that Dave. Is the sprinkler running, you know, function, functional mass of grass? Okay. What's the, what's, what's the schedule? Do you know? I do not. I pride myself on not getting into that level of detail. Ted, if I did my head, my head would explode. So I leave that up to Jason Skeels and he's trying to grow grass out there. The contractor actually is trying to grow grass. So it's, you know, they're on the hook. They're on the hook for that first mowing. So they want to go grass. So they set the irrigation. So can everybody see the dog park rule sign? Yes. That's exciting. You say no or yes. Yes. So this is it. And Ted and Dave and I have already reviewed it and it's based on stuff that was agreed upon and voted on it. One of our fall meetings, but everyone should take a close look to see if there's anything there. Now, does this one, I have to see the other one. Is this one on for the inner fence and the other ones for the outer fence? I can't remember. What we said is both of them at main entrance, dog park rules at main entrance and dog park etiquette also at main entrance. So we can interpret that to be, you know, my feeling is outside the gate is where this is read in the little vestibule area, whatever you call it. People are too busy with their dogs to read signs that we don't want people lingering there reading things. Sure. So I would think, you know, one on each side of the gate, probably. Right. And I think there was going to be a smaller version of the same thing to put in the kiosk. Yes. Both of them. Yep. Can I ask one small thing? And I don't know if this is really that important, but does it make sense to move the kind of no glass food or breakable containers up a little bit? I don't know. It just seems like I remember there was quite a bit of discussion about you're not supposed to have food at a dog park, right? Because I think the chances of somebody having alcohol there are pretty low. I don't know. It's not a big deal. Yeah, I don't know. We'd have to also talk about, you know, which, you know, possibly something way at the bottom list catches people's eyes more than something in the middle of the list. Because it's the last bullet, maybe it catches people's eyes. That's fine. Yeah.  I'm sure you know Dave from other places. My percentage is a little different. I have the 80-20 rule. I don't have 98. 80-20 is maybe 90-10. At Puffer's Bond, it's 80% of the people will stay off the cliffs, but 20% of the people want to jump off the cliffs. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to switch this and show the etiquette rules now. Yeah, I think that all looks good. I wish it weren't so negative, but I don't know that there's ways to change that. You know, there's so many no's, no's, no's. I wish there was like a more positive. Well, rules are negative by nature, aren't they? Don't do this, don't do that, you know. Yeah. It's interesting. Let's look at the etiquette and see if that's as negative or not. So I'm going to stop, share, and now I'm going to go share again this one. Hang on a second. I took a picture at the dog park of the rules. These PDFs are killing my computer. Okay, can you guys, oh, here we go. Yeah. Now can you see it? Yeah. Good. Yeah, still a lot of no's. Yeah, well, I hear what you're saying, Ellen. We struggle with the same thing on conservation signs and we're going through that, you know, I already had two or three discussions this week about new kiosk signs for our conservation areas. And I think what we're trying to do is, you know, the rules and regs may be a little kind of negative, but the rest of the signage is welcoming and, you know, I don't know. No, it is what it is. We deal with this at the museum, too. You know, it's just trying to always be welcoming and positive and it's hard when you have. The good news is dogs can't read. I don't think. Only dogs and humans in the park. That's a funny one. I like that.  Yeah, or your cat. Or your goat. I've seen a goat. I've seen a goat at the beach before, a goat. I have, too. I've seen a lamb, I think, at the beach, too. A pet lamb or something like that. Well, we have neighbors with a donkey and they take him on a walk in the woods. So I'll be in the woods behind my house and bump into a donkey now. That's my dream. The lamb could have been a Kerry blue terrier. So these are the two signs that, hopefully, Dave will get in touch with Angela and she can order right away. And I'm going to unshare my screen. You have the kiosk signs easily. Yeah, maybe I'll share this document from, that's the kiosk content sign. Let's see if I can find that. These two PDFs that Angela sent me are humongous. So opening, closing, moving them around is painful. There we go.  Let's find this other document. By the way, I continue, I just wrote a note to myself, I continue to update the Stanton Foundation monthly. I send them a once a month email with some photos. The grants administrator there who was so terrific who we started with left. And it's been a little spotty, I have to admit, that the previous grant administrator was just fantastic and always checking in with me and the person who replaced them is just, you send emails, you don't get, I don't know if they're going to cyberspace or not. So I'm just trying to keep adhering to their rules and regs because I think we're going to want to go back to them for more money because I can't remember the sequence, but I think in year two, four, or something like that, you can go back for more money if we need to upgrade the park or want to add something or fix something. So for what it's worth, I send in these monthly, you know, it's a quick email with some photos. So I'll send this one for kind of a June 1 update to them with some nice photos of the park. Great. Okay, I'm going to share my screen again. Hey, there's Carol. Carol has joined us. She's been lurking the whole time, I think. I don't have, if you can hear me, I don't have video on my computer at work. We do hear you. Hi, Carol. It's nice to have you lurking, Carol. I was working with you the other day at the dog park. That's right. Okay, so here's this document from October 27th, and the first two pages are the signs that we just looked at, the actual rendering of the signs. So here's kiosk content, panels one and two, community notices, and then the small versions of the dog park worlds and dog park etiquette. Panels three and four, founders of Amherst Dog Park, recognition heading, permanent name plaques, and we, I'll actually have another document that I'll show you who we currently have as founders and as donors who are going to get different recognition. Then annual dog park supporters with recognition heading and one-year signs. Panels five and six, friends of Amherst Dog Park info and sponsorship info. Not exactly sure what that means, but hopefully Ted can remind us if he or he can make something up. I don't know. Panel seven and eight, about the Amherst landfills, the big picture, grasshopper sparrow perimeter trail, and then about the dog park funding sources and the history of the project. So name plates will be attaching name plates to sponsored items. And the only, we have, I believe, four bench donations that are, so we have four name plates that we need for benches. And I think there's a total of eight benches. Is that right, Dave? Two in each shape, is there one or two in each shade structure? Two in each shade structure. And then two more on each loop. Yes. So there's eight in all, and we currently have four recognition plates we need. I don't think we have anything for fountains or waste stations, and we have one of the shade structures that needs recognition. Then we're going to do the temporary fencing, you're going to take care of that. We talked about a wayfaring sign out on a loop nine. So how does that, how do we make that happen? That's something I've got to make happen. And can you send this to all of us at the end just so it's on the top of our inboxes? Because this is a great reminder I had not looked at this in a while. But yeah, Angel and I will make some sort of wayfinding sign. It'll be thematic with the maroon and white, Amherst dog park arrow or something like that from route nine. And let me show you another thing that I put together. Can I just, on panel seven and eight, we can pull some of that together. I think we already have that information. The other panels, I would look to all of you on, because I don't have all the names, well, I guess I do have all the names of the donors, but I would need help on the other panels from you all. Just so you know, the perimeter fence that meets the dog park fence is going up as we speak. I would say it's one sixth or one eighth done. We are wrapping the old landfill, what I call the South landfill in a perimeter fence to protect the cap as well as the grass upper sparrow. We definitely ran into a little bit of buzz saw less so on the fence and more so on the perimeter trail. Not all of the people who abut the landfill to the West were aware of or thrilled with the idea of a perimeter trail through their big backyard. It's actually on our property. It's on the town's property, which is the landfill, the cap landfill. We're working through that. Stephanie Ciccarello and I have been out there multiple, multiple days meeting with the abutters to the landfill. That perimeter trail, the fence is going in. The fence will be in by the end of June. The perimeter trail will likely be a longer conversation and would not, if we're able to achieve it, would go in in 23, not 22. As you can imagine, some people's yards are bigger and more private than others. Having a perimeter trail there was a little bit of a surprise to some of those abutters. What you have in front of you now is everything that I know of for acknowledgement signs. We've got four different bench acknowledgement signs. People specifically donated what we are required amount minimum for benches. We've got Barry Roberts as a kiosk acknowledgement. We've got two founders, Ellen and Ted. We've got Ted also in the small dog shade structure. Then we have three other people who just gave donations, but not with a specified acknowledgement. I don't know where we want to put those. It depends on the amount. They were very different amounts. Stephanie and Jonathan gave $1,000. I think we need to see the amounts at some point because otherwise, if they give $25, they're not going to go in the kiosk. I think the minimum was $500 to be listed as an annual sponsor. I believe, I don't have that in front of me. Kate Atkinson and the Spencer's were small amounts, but Stephanie and Jonathan was $1,000. They should go somewhere special. We could put them on an object. I don't remember if there were $1,000 objects. We could look. I could get in touch with them and ask them if they want to be on an object. I think we're going to have to have another meeting to actually talk more in depth about all these labels. I think so. With Angela, who's going to be involved in producing some of the signs. Maybe Ted, I'll send this to you also. Ted, if you want to do the research and come up with a recommendation of what all these signs should look like and stuff. Remember, Angela has all the records of all the totals of what people gave. Right. I do too. I can send it to everybody. I guess maybe I should talk to Angela about where she would like to have these made. She has all the fonts and stuff. I don't want to spend time designing the actual signs when she has the format already in place. It's more or less just what's it going to say and where is it going to go? Dave, are there other town parks that have benches and things like that with plaques for donations? There are. Sorry, I have a little coughing problem here. There are, Jim, but there's no consistency. I wish there was. We're with the Kendrick Park and with the dog park. We're trying to really establish this brand with the maroon and white and the town seal. I think we're breaking new ground here. As far as I know, there's not another park that has so many private donations. I think we can break a little new ground here. Ted's right. I think as long as Angela knows what categories people should be in, she's very good and creative about coming up with a draft of these. I will say that Barry Roberts ended up not contributing as much as I had hoped he would for the kiosk. We could acknowledge his gift toward the kiosk, but it did not cover the entire cost of the kiosk. Was it over $5,000? It was not in the end. What happened? He decided that he... He doesn't want to be in the kiosk. I don't think Barry cares. I don't think Barry cares whether he's acknowledged or not, but it was $2,500 instead of $10,000. I think we just need a couple categories like founders, sponsors, friends, and then we can divide it. We don't have to say what the amount is, but do it in a descending order, so you understand that. Right. What we had from two years ago or three years ago, we had set up all those different categories and maybe those need to be revised into something different. I think it might be nice too when we work on this to reach out to especially the people who gave money for the benches. They might have specific dedications to a dog or something or in memory of, and we can also let them know about the opening date and it's just a good stewardship thing. I'm fine taking charge of the communication with people and checking if they just want their name on the bench plaque or if they want something else. The bench threshold was $1,000, so I'll ask Stephanie and Jonathan if they want the bench. Sure. Right. Will people who gave money for the bench also go in the kiosk? Yeah. We probably have to figure that out. What is the threshold to be a quote-unquote founding donor or whatever they're called versus just people or we have different categories of founders or we just lump anybody over $1,000 in one category. It was up there. I think we had said founders were $5,000. I think it was, but since this is where we're at, we have all these people who gave $1,000 or $1,500. Where are we going to put them? They go underneath. When you see an annual report, founders and then sponsors, friends, associates. We didn't do that. We only made the one category and then we were going to have an annual board for people who just business at $500 to be up there for a year. But we need another category like sponsors might be in. There's something under founders for people in that $1,000 to $5,000. Yeah, let's set up a separate meeting for this. I think we need to really think this through carefully and make sure we're acknowledging everyone correctly. Send these documents around, Jim, and then we'll all give it some thought before the next meeting. Okay, and I'll also do a doodle poll and baiting a meeting really focused on signage and acknowledge. Yeah, right. Sorry. Let's also remember, Ellen mentioned kind of, I don't know if it was descending order or whatever, but we want to acknowledge the Stanton Foundation, but also the town, CPA, committee, the town council. We've got to figure all of that out too. Yeah, right. And I've got them, they're listed here. Beautiful. Right. But I think we need their full, yeah. Right. I've got the numbers. Should be in a separate category than Stanton, you know what I mean? We'll be in a separate spot. Yeah. But I'll send out my spreadsheet, which I believe matches Angela's of the numbers. Yeah. But is it like Amherst Rotary Club or Rotary Club of Amherst? Like we need to be very specific that we're not, that we're acknowledging everybody correctly. Stanton Foundation, LLC, whatever it is, not just Stanton. And we would list the original committee member names as well. Oh, right, right. Yeah. That's a good thing to remember too. Yeah. Maybe add that on their gym too. Yeah. Good. I just wanted to go back to the two first signs that we looked at, dog park rules and dog park etiquette. One said Amherst, dog park etiquette, and the other one just said dog park rules. I think we should be consistent and have the town. Well, the one that said dog park rules above it, it had town of Amherst, Massachusetts with the logo. Oh, and the other one did not. And the other one didn't. Okay. The other one has the logo, but kind of down in the corner. You're right. Yeah. So I'm going to add to this just the, I won't add it here, but I'll add dog park task force. So the other, so there's actually two big topics to discuss at our next meeting. And the second one is publicity around and, you know, all the different things we do need to do. And I have, actually, if we scroll down here, I had just made an outline here of, you know, direct email. I actually have a list of 75 names of people who at some point in the process over the last five years have expressed an interest in the happenings at the dog park, including the, you know, a scattering of people who sent something to the Gmail address and stuff like that. So there's this direct email. And then, you know, we're going to want a good Gazette article sometime middle of July. Amherst Indy, the Amherst Bulletin and Phyllis Lair is a great person to talk to to get things in there. I assume the town would do a posting on its newsflash site. But we can go into details of this, you know, I envision our next meeting, you know, the end of hanging on my calendar here still says may that's, that's all wrong. So maybe sometime the week of June 20th, try and have our next meeting where we can finalize all the signage that we're going to need and placement of it. That sound reasonable? Yeah. So I'll do a doodle poll for that week. Okay. And I'm gonna unshare my screen. I think that covers what we needed to talk about today. It's exciting. It's really exciting. I mean, it looks great. It looks really great. You know, tell Jason that I said nice job because it really, really looks very, everything's well done. That's huge day.  That's what municipalities have to do.  So that's great. Nina, are you going far or would you still be around for any of these events or? I'm moving to Pittsburgh. Oh, Pittsburgh. Going to Duquesne Law School. It's wonderful. Congratulations. That's awesome. Thanks. I'll be like around. I'll probably be visiting during breaks and stuff, but yeah, for the next three years, I'll be over there. Wow, that is super exciting. Do you have a sense, any sense of like what kind of law you want to focus on? Yeah, I want to go into children's advocacy. I want to start out like doing like abuse and neglect cases because that's kind of what I was doing in my previous social work job in that sphere of things. But it's like my absolute dream to do education policy one day. So we'll see where law school kind of point me and I'll decide where I want to go from there. But you're here till the end of July? Yeah. Good. So you can be there at the grand opening? Yeah, I'm really excited. I was kind of doubtful that I'd be able to get to it. Well, that's awesome. Congratulations. That is super exciting. Thanks. Okay. So I actually just added a third agenda item for the next meeting. So we've got working on all the signage and acknowledgments. We've got publicity and who's going to do what and how are we going to do it. And then an outline plan for the grand opening event and what we're going to do with that. So those three items. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Should we add something about the friends group? Like is it time to get that going? Now that this group is going to disband, I assume, as soon as we open? That's the plan. I thought the organizational meeting is where the friends group would kind of kick off and all the advertising. We would say we need people to help take care of this beautiful park. Please come and take a list. And like that would be the beginning. Yeah, that was part of the other piece of the workday before the grand opening was to have it be a vehicle for luring people in to form the friends group. And it might be only that if Dave does the fence, the whole meeting might be to just come and show your interest and take the name. Well, maybe one of us or a couple of us should be there on that Saturday and Sunday asking people who come, you know, if they want to join the friends group and taking their information. Yeah, I think we should have a little bit more formulation of what it's to talk about, you know, talking points, what will be involved, what their time commitment is. Good. So that's that's a fourth item on the agenda. Okay, great. And we actually, we do also have a nice document that I don't know who put it together. But we have a document talking about the friends group with a pointing authority mission statement, responsibilities, membership governing body. Awesome. I think I'll send that out as well. I'm pretty sure Brenda did that. You know, it's timeline says, you know, finalized working mission in July of 2020 officially turned over governance in September 2021. So who knew pandemic was coming our way. But there has been thought put into that. So I'll send that out to everybody as well. So they have the latest of that document at the next meeting. If Angela could be there, at least for the sign part, that would be very helpful. Yeah, maybe just make note of that if you could in your doodle poll or whatever we're going to do for that meeting. I like the word you use there lure people into the French group. Yeah, lurking and luring. So our concept is kind of that weekend before the grand opening, even if we don't have a workday, invite people to come without their dogs for a tour of the park and early and early look. Although if the storm fencing is in, we could invite people with their dogs for a tour of the park and unlock it just while we're there and let people bring their dogs. Yeah. Yeah, let's see. We'll see where we're at. Certainly all the donors, all the donors should be invited, of course, for like a sneak peek or preview. Sneak peek for donors. That could be very cool. Yeah, I like this. Yeah, I know for all of us it's been a long road, but it's something I said to somebody the other day about the spray park at Groff Park. People waited a while for that. People, not as many people like you were involved in kind of the behind the scenes and in the trenches, if you will. But when I go to Groff Park and I interact with people, I've never heard anybody say, this took so long to build. Everyone is like, wow, we love this. What a great design. So that's what we're going to hear. We all know the behind the scenes story, how much work, how much effort, how many meetings, but the average person who's going to go to this dog park, they are just going to go, this is great. Hopefully, how can I get more involved and be a friend? So these projects do take a long time, but in the end, this is going to be here for the next 50 years or more. Okay. So I think we'll adjourn this meeting and thank you so much, everybody, for coming and for everything. And you'll be hearing from me with notes and documents and a doodle call for the next meeting. Thank you. I'm really excited. Me too. Thank you. Okay. Have a good weekend. Have a nice weekend. Bye. Bye, everybody.


Chicho dingbobber. How are you doing? I was talking to my uncle yesterday about Julian Assange Talking about how he is such an important person in current times, etc My uncle claimed that Assange is likely a Russian spy Informant, I don't know. He referenced the Trump election scandal. How would you go about disputing this? Be respectful dingbot. Okay Really because your uncle is going to be older. He's he's consuming certain types of information There's certain things that cannot enter his psyche right now, right? But anybody that comes up to me and says Julian Assange is a Russian asset spy informant and he interfered in the elections in 2009.  I personally don't hold back But I'm a lot older than you right most of the people that I talked to I talked to older people than me as well Right, but most of the people I talked to they are a little bit younger So that gives me a little bit of more lean way to be brutal with them. You are not be kind I'm saying what you need to say but say in the gentle fashion and do some research and Find the key points that people are using to demonize Crucify a whistleblower a journalist that revealed war crimes, right? and Find the key points that the Propagandist and it's easy to dispute the garbage that corporate propaganda Machine spews right because they're having like two three four talking points, right? So all you have to find is the facts behind those two three four Talking points that you have they have right because that's what people who've been brainwashed will Regurgitate, right? They'll go all this and then you say no Here it is and they go. Oh, no, no this and you go.


Hey everybody, this is Brian. Today we'll be talking about casting variables, narrowing and widening. Okay, what is casting a variable? No, it's not like Dungeons and Dragons casting a magic spell or something. What it is is you convert a value from one thing to another. So we'll say we have our integer of zero and we will make a floating value float. And we will say this is 4.125. Now, if you're wondering what that little f at the end, that just means we're denoting that as a float. So if we take that out, it doesn't like it. It says drumroll cannot convert that. So we have to change either to a double or we have to add a cast of float. That's also legal, but it's just easier to use the shorthand and just put a lowercase f behind it. So we have two primitive types. Now how do we know they're primitive? Remember we talked about wrapper classes with boxing and unboxing. How do we know these are primitives? Well, they're lowercase. If you wanted to do a wrapper class, you would do the uppercase. That's a wrapper class. That's a primitive. So let's just stick with primitives to keep this simple. Now let's say we want to convert this floating point into an integer. Now, what's the difference between a floating point and an integer first off? Well, an integer doesn't have a decimal point. A floating does. So anything past this decimal point is not an integer. That is an integer. That is not. So to convert this value, what we're going to need to do is call it a cast. And the syntax for this is really simple. We're going to say m int equals and then in parentheses type the type that you want to cast to, in this case an integer, and then the value you're casting from. And let's review. You have two primitive types, an integer and a float. This part of the float is an integer. This part is not. So when we cast, we're saying take m int is going to equal the value of, and we're casting to an int. m float. So basically let's read this in reverse. So it's easier to understand. m float is being converted to an int and assigned to the value m integer. I should say the reference m integer. Now let's do a system.out.printline. I still can't type today. This is the third video and I still can't type. So bear with me. m int. Now when we run this, what do you think is going to happen? We're spitting out m int, this guy. And you see we've assigned it the value of m float, but we cast it to an integer. Let's find out. There's the four. Where'd the rest of it go? It should be 4.125. No, you shouldn't. Because remember, an integer does not have a decimal point. That's called narrowing. The problem with casting from one type to another is you have narrowing and widening. What you've just seen is narrowing, meaning we are taking this float, casting it to an integer, meaning we're stripping off this extra information. Now widening is the exact opposite. Widening would be when we say m float equal and we're going to cast this. That's called a widening conversion. So let's actually just narrowing, widening. Space these out a little bit so they're not so confusing. So this is a narrowing conversion. We're going from a bigger number to a smaller number. And this is a widening conversion. We're going from a smaller number to a bigger number. So let's just spit out m float and see what's going to happen. Now if you start at the top here you see we've got two variables, m int, m float. One's an integer, one's a floating. We're going to take our floating value, convert it to an integer, assign it to the integer reference. That's a narrowing conversion, meaning it's getting smaller. And then as a cruel twist of fate, we're going to turn right around and widen it. So we're going to say our integer. So at this point it's 4. It's going to be widened to a floating point and assigned to the float reference. When we spit this out, it's probably still going to say 4. Do you believe me? Let's find out. 4.0. You see how it added that extra zero in there because the floating point always has a decimal place. That in a nutshell is casting. Another handy little trick I can show you real quick here is the two string method. And for that what you really need to do is create a wrapper class. So we're just going to say int, integer, m test, we'll just call test equal 2-3-4. Now let's say we want the string representation of this. Well with wrapper classes you can do dot two string and as you can see it converts it to string. You can also do two binary, two hex, two octal. You can do two string with a certain formatting. There's many many things you can do. So let's just kind of test this. Do our handy copy and paste. And when we run it you see there's 234. We have our 4.0 and our 234. So if none of that was apparently clear to you you should probably rewind the video and rewatch it. This is not an easy topic so don't beat yourself up. What you just need to know is that we are converting. You're converting from a float to an integer, from an integer to the float, and then you have narrowing and widening. You really need to understand the difference between those. Well this is Brian. I'm running out of time so I thank you for watching and I hope you found this educational and entertaining.