Why 254, imagine? One of them is being fought and I'm speaking in regards to what happens to Kirinaga Governor. And some of the people are saying she's being fought because she's a woman. And now we have hosting plans by members, all the MCs of Kituidia planning to host Osta Cheritingilu. What do you make of all these events politically? Okay, thank you for having me. I'd like to say that the Waiguru impeachment that was done recently by the MCs is not really because she's a woman. I don't think it's about the gender that really matters here. Honorable Waiguru was elected by Kirinaga people and the MCs in Kirinaga are the voices that represent the voices of the people. So if the MCs felt that there's a gap somewhere in her leadership, there's some questions to be answered, that's why they did the process of impeachment. And what we need to now understand is we hope that the Senate coming, as we wait for the report from the Senate, we hope that it will be purely objective and nothing political attached. Because if you look at how the Senate was going about with the, whether to go this plenary or the committee way, it just shows that there's a way, there's lack of independence in the Senate. Because if you look at the ones, the people wanted plenary in Waiguru's case, they wanted different things for Waiguru's case. So it just shows that everything changes according to the politics of the time, the political temperature at the moment. And we just hope that going forward that Waiguru is given a chance to defend herself. We have the structures like ESC, GCI. They need to maybe probe into the matter so that the Kirinaga people and Kenyans are able to know if really there was an abuse of office and gross misconduct. But for now as I speak, I just want to say that we need to wait to see if the Senate is going to do the right thing. But talking about being targeted as a woman, I don't think that's true because right now she holds the office of the governor. She is a leader. She's not looked at as a woman. So she's a leader and if you saw why it went through impeachment and like any other governor, she's capable of going through the same. So I don't think it's about the gender that should be played right now. And if you look at now Honorable Ngelu almost being hosted, we just hope, I just hope as a young person that all these are not political, are not tied to settling political and personal scores. Because in the house recently when the senior senator James Sorango he just said and declared on the floor that there's someone that is behind Waiguru, Waiguru's impeachment. So if an experienced leader, someone we trust and has been there in the Senate for some time now, if he's able to speak that then you know as Kenyans we also have questions. We also have to question is there what political games are being played. So that's the worry of Kenyans. Is it a genuine impeachment or is it just settling political scores? Speaking of settling political scores, in the recent days we have been seeing the cleanup of the Jubilee House and maybe if we could be having that particular image of the persons who are holding now the higher office or the bigger offices in the country, they are all male. We do not have women if we could look from the speakers of the National Assembly and the Senate, we have both male. Coming down we do not have any women. Would you say the woman has been undermined and for a long time the Kenyan parliament or the Kenyan House has been calling for that role and the women would not stand up and now they are not into picture. What do you make of the recent events? Now when I look at this picture it's just an illustration of the fact that we still do not fact agenda when making decisions and that's so unfortunate because in this era in time we expect because we have women leaders of proven to have a track record of good leadership. It's just unfortunate that we can't have great positions for them also in the party. You see now it's about we still have existing particular structures in our politics. That's why as much as the women were doing well and we are getting more of them into their politics there's still gaps, we still have blocks. We still have blocks especially in leadership positions and party levels and as you know in Kenya political parties is central in politics. So if you can't have women having leadership roles, this one is for Jubilee and it's the major party right now in Kenya. If it does not, it cannot factor women into leadership yet we have very powerful women. Those are very vocal and working hard in the parties. I think it's just about the patriarchy that still exists within the systems and it's not, it's the patriarchy, what we need to do is just we need to also create our safe spaces for women leaders to create those systems to be able to combat the patriarchal systems. That's the only way. Otherwise if you continue maybe just tolerating the whole system then I don't think it will favor us and you know in politics women leaders have to stand for themselves. They have to prove themselves always and right now if we see this what's happening it just means that we still have not taken it seriously. The ability, the capability, the strength of women leaders in this country. This just an example. In the recent cases I've seen webinars where we have just men in the panel. We call them money list. And we were discussing this recently with some friends and they were like a whole ministry. Can't they find women who are in the ministry? Those who are in the sector. They can't miss to find a woman in the sector. So it just means that the society still does not embrace women leadership to its core, the way it should. And this will take some time because patriarchy is something that exists in all levels from the grassroots to the top levels. So I think it's not something that it's going to be fought tomorrow or in the near future but consistently when as women leaders they have to stand up for themselves they have to keep on fighting so that their voices may be heard. But it's just an unfortunate thing that at this era we still can't, we are still closing our eyes to the reality of women leadership. You spoke of learning yourself and putting yourself available for leadership and here brings me to the point of young women connect. You are the chair, how did the dream come about and maybe you could tell us about the journey? Okay, it was co-founded by a also friend, Cleongati. She was the former education minister for MKU. I was in the women students body UN and when we finished campers last year we realized there's a gap for young women especially those who are formerly campers leaders because most of them we envision to join national leadership because leadership does not stop at campers. So while we want to do that, there's normally a gap between the campers leadership and also the national leadership. So we thought that we have the strength, we have the capabilities, we have the skills. So what if we just come together and be able to nurture each other and be able to find mentors because in leadership it's all about mentorship and in current world you can't thrive if you work alone. They say if you work alone you can go far but if we work together we can go farthest. So we thought that it will be ideal to be able to come together and bring the skills and knowledge we have and then be able to nurture the young women in leadership. That's why one of our major programs is women lead forum and what we do is we bring those who are experienced in leadership we have many women leaders who are doing great so we bring them to the young people themselves and they are able to share the experiences they are able to share the skills and in that way when we have the right mentorship then we are nurturing the next generation of women leaders because if you look at the current women leaders we have most of them are, let me say, the age, they are a bit old and we can't expect them to be represented as for long so we need to start nurturing the crop of new leaders right now so that's why we came up with Young Women Leaders Connect and maybe the name we have, we also have men it's just not limited to women I think because of the name people confuse it with women we have men who believe in our vision but our main vision is to see young people who participate in decision making tables Now you mentioned leadership in the national level and I'm sure in this country if you have been keen we have so many women being in the leadership position in the corporate world are your programs tailored towards national leadership like politics or even in the corporate sector Now leadership is all rounded leadership is not just about politics in our programs we also take up teen pregnancy as one of our issue because we realized that if you want to empower women the young girls one of the major issues that affect their education is teen pregnancy and you've seen the recent statistics in the country so we took it as the major social issue that we want to handle and when we do that when you call ourselves leaders it's an all rounded thing we respond to society's pressing issues like the teen pregnancy we also talk about peace and security we've been involved in conversations around that and also leadership the women leadership now you find that we can't limit ourselves to politics only because some members you'll find someone is good in sexual productive health someone is very good in entrepreneurship someone is good in corporate someone is good in politics so what we do normally in our programs we try to blend in different topics but all of them under leadership because at the end of the day whatever field you are good at we still want to see you being a leader in that field we have very able women in our group and most of them will be vying for the 2022 elections and we want to work with them we want to bring more members on boards mentors to work with them because we believe if we do it together all young women who believe themselves as leaders then we'll be able to come out as a next generation of very powerful young women if I could have the question who is your biggest mentor is it not that you have spoken of you have all the programs that you will cater for every kind of leadership who do you believe or who do you have seen for that time you have been in operation who is your biggest mentor are they the politicians yeah it's a mixture yeah we have our first forum we had Honorable Miliu Diambu she was the guest speaker and she was able to have two hostas a half a day and within that time we were able to get the sense of the feeling of politics from the start because she started as a nominated MP so we wanted to get the feeling how did she start because normally the problem is starting and when you get there I think it's so easy to get you to maneuver your ways but when we got her as a mentor she was able to maybe lead us into how to start how to position yourself in leadership in political leadership then the next forum we had Miss Betia Deira the Miss President she was also there and for her she talked about general leadership including corporate we didn't limit ourselves to politics because as I said it's not just about politics and we also have many young women that maybe we look up to they may not be in politics but we look up to them we have Nafulaki Siangani we have Ruth Bolo so many of them they normally come and they're able to share the wisdom they have because they have the experience than ourselves What would you say are some of the challenges that you're facing in your quest to learn about leadership and becoming better leaders than we have? Okay I want to acknowledge that so far so good we are thriving because we have women leaders who are ready to support the others, the upcoming ones and maybe the challenge I would say is being able to being able to to increase the scope because our main goal is not just to limit ourselves in the town, in the city we wish that someday maybe we will take the discussion to the grassroots to our villages and have also young people be able to be talked to at that level so the main challenge right now is getting the resources to be able to expand the program but on part of support we are glad that we have a very good support from women leaders Are men supporting you as well? Ya, we have men in our group we have men who have worked with us in fact we normally don't limit men to activities most of them maybe you won't see them on these forums but behind the scenes let me say behind the scenes we have men who support us we have someone who took who takes care of our let me say the general communication he does for us maybe designs the communication part of it we have another one who also helps in advocacy maybe I want to mention all of them but just to be sure that we have very able men who are supporting us because they believe in the mission and vision of our group and to this end do you believe the woman in this country is being given a chance to be what they can? Okay, about get opportunities for me I believe whether you are a man or a woman it's about creating the opportunities for yourself I think even as much as we have women in leadership we won't just sit down and say we are now okay we are waiting for them to come looking for us so it's about just stepping out out of the comfort zone going for it so there is chance for everyone so long as you try to position yourself try to find the opportunity and we always have enough opportunities for everyone whether you are a man or a woman there was a narrative going on during the reggae shows I'm speaking about the BBI we had narratives where some of the women would say if the governor is a male deputy should be a female and there was a question why can't you go for the female being the governor you be elected don't just write do you think what the allegations or the assumption of if this is this way then the other way we could be having this what do you think should be happening I think what was said it wasn't really about if a male it was about a male if a male is a governor then the deputy is a female and vice versa there is that part of vice versa because right now we can't we have female governors and if you look at the progression of women leadership in Kenya you will see that the more years go by the more we get more and more opportunities and more slots so it's just something it's not, it won't be a shock to see more women in governorship in the governor position so you find that that's why they made it so clear if the female would be the governor then the deputy would be the male so it's not one way it's a two way thing because in the near future we will be having in fact the two third general the man will be the ones fighting for it but the women have not been voting for it it has been in parliament for the longest time and the male MPs were there to vote for eight years but the women would not come so you say you are your own enemy no no no I don't think we had women they really did a good work when we were championing for the two third gender bill I can't say that women leaders did not come or were not supporting I didn't see that in fact during the fight for two third gender rule it just demonstrated how women leaders can really work together beyond political parties and if you look at the way they were to maybe advocate for it yeah it's not I don't think there was a group that opposed it a woman leader who opposed it two third gender rule and it's a good thing that men were also in tools in fact it was introduced to the house by Honore Buldwale so it is just a demonstration that it's not about gender is not about women gender is about both men and women so about support of course that's just a false notion that is being created by let me call them stereotypes or whatever but it's not to we have women leaders they normally come together when it comes to championing for what's right for women leaders because one thing for sure in leadership women always have to to stand up for themselves if they never do that our equality will be a forgotten word in our vocabulary alright thank you Wendy for coming do you like share your final thoughts in regards to women in power and of course leadership your final words oh my final words is if you look at the history of this country from the time we got independence to right now you will see there's a progression in women in leadership just shows that there's always there's a bright future in women leadership but now the main challenge is the society still has a problem is the society that still brings us back the patriarch is still exist and it's the systems are still patriarchal and once till the day maybe the society will be able to open their eyes to be able to realize that there is potential in women leadership then I think that's the day we'll be able to now talk about equality making equal share in decision making tables but as we speak the fight is still on and women leaders have a major responsibilities to the country and to themselves alright thank you so much for coming and shedding light and of course bringing your whole opinion in regards to women and power back home thank you so much for keeping us company she's been my guest Wendy Aura chair of the young women leadership connect I'll be seeing you again next week on a Monday until then be safe wash your hands sanitize and stay home come out here if you must I'll be leaving you in the safe hands of Ken Relbis and DJ Cheska on why Mashuriki my name is Dareva Hilawee this has been the day brief goodbye


Hello friends, welcome back to module five lesson number two hiring your all-star team in this lesson You're gonna learn how to hire your all-star team so then that way they can run the dream restaurant of yours Now before we talk about how to even hire an all-star team We need to define what are the positions that make up for your all-star team? First of all, there is front of the house Managers servers bus person hosts and hostess when we're thinking back of the house There are cooks dishwashers and when there are bigger operations. There are head chef shoe chef line cooks so on and so forth Supporting staff. What are some of the supporting staff bartenders baristas casheers depending on the operations that you run You may have these you may not have these Overall this becomes the all the positions you need to account for for your all-star team I'm not saying that you need every Every up precision there is on this list But having and knowing the fact that where these people and where these roles play in Makes you and allows you to actually choose your team properly and build your team properly So duties will cross over between groups so for smaller operations specifically groups may overlap and what does that mean it means that managers may double as a host and Servers may also bus tables casheers might act as baristas Smaller operations make sure that you train them and actually actually hire them So then that way they know they're going to be responsible for multiple different job descriptions as your company grows And as your restaurant scales bigger and bigger we see that jobs are a lot more specific So if you're busing a table, you're going to be just busing tables all day long That's much more for a bigger operation But for the sake of the smaller operation I highly recommend you to hire and build your team based on overlapping or Responsibilities and make sure that people know about that because it just makes for a much more agile Team that you have because for example if your manager or let's say for example your host is sick What's gonna happen your manager can come in and fill in that spot same thing if your server is taking a Week off to go home then at least your busboy can actually go and level up and become a server as well So making sure that your staff and people that you hire know that there will be Double and crossover between groups is essential when you're hiring an all-star team especially for a smaller operation Now I get asked this question so much and which is the reason why I'm including it in this slide as reference How many staff members do you need it all depends on your food and beverage business type and size? And this is only for reference purpose only okay, so don't quote me on this And this is what I see a lot of people do depending on your operation This can be more or it could be less if we're talking about front of the house You have five to twelve tables you need one staff per shift on a typical day Let's say if you have like two shifts, then you need two staffs Back of the house if you're servicing up to 50 customers per hour That's a lot of customers per hour Then you need probably four staff per shift cooks line cooks shoe chef dishwashers to help you guys out Support staff one to two staff as needed and once again This is for reference purpose only you might need more or you might need less depending on your operation But this gives you a general gist and a framework of what you can follow to start off your operations Now what to look for in your all-star team members? Okay, people who are committed aligned with your vision that believes in the mission that you have and what you're trying to Achieve and the goals that you guys have in mind values over skillset guys These are all much more of a priority over the skillset that they have they might be Front of the house manager for a really five-star hotel But they might not fit in your culture It might not fit in your values and might not fit for what you're trying to create So it doesn't matter how much of a great skillset they have if the values don't align then please don't hire them because It's just not the right fit most important thing is The values because at the end of the day Innate values cannot be taught where a skillset can be taught So make sure that you hire for the innate values that make sure that you guys are aligned and gelled with because at the end Of the day you just don't want to work with people that you don't enjoy seeing every day on a regular basis, right? Also the four all-star characteristics that I look for whenever I'm hiring and this also comes as part of a Collective of surveys that I've interviewed a really successful restauranteers and this is what they say collaborative professional Communicative and also being authentic. These are the four core all-star characteristics to look for when hiring an all-star team more Notable supporting characteristics punctual humble positive attitude So these are all a big list of characteristics that you should look for and that you could look for when you're trying to hire someone I'm not saying that person needs all of these characteristics or that there are no go It really comes back down to what you believe in as a restaurateur and as the owner and I'm just providing this as a Kind of go-to guide for you as a reference when you're hiring and when you don't know What skill set or what values to hire for this becomes a really great list Now we understand what makes for a great staff. How do we even hire them? Well, first off referrals are your best bet because people who are good to hang out with each other Their values tend to align much more with each other and those don't won't stay together for too long Just like how you and your friends group you tend to have the same types of values And that's the reason why you guys are friends and the people that don't share the same type of values Already start to fade away from your crowd and your inner circle same thing with your friends Which is the reason why having referrals is a really really great way to hire for staff It's free and it also at the end of day you can provide incentive for referrals So for example, if you have an all-star team member in your in your whole team You're like, wow, I really enjoy working with this person. Maybe you can incentivize them Hey, you know what if you have any friends who are in the industry or who wants to start in this industry If you refer them over, I'll give you an extra hundred bucks for every successful referrals or something along the lines of that They'll be much more inclined to actually even just refer their friends because who doesn't like to work with their friends In addition to that they also make an extra side hundred bucks. Why not? Another way to hire for all-star team is on your own website and on your social media Usually this is a great place because people who buy into your values and vision follow you Religiously and when you open up an opportunity to work with you, they would be all over it It's free to post so which is another reason why I would highly recommend posting on these platforms Next up is jobs job sites like Craigslist such that people are constantly looking for jobs It's low and free or free. However, with job sites Do know for one thing that the quality might be very different. The values are really It's it's a wild mix of people on Craigslist Which is the reason why you need to vet these people even more carefully Same thing with newspapers. Good to find good talent low and fee consultants If and when you grow to a certain point where you're looking for a more higher level skill set You can consider how having consultants to help you find these people Mainly head chefs and front-of-the-house managers if you have that scale, but they do take a hefty fee So it's not something I recommend for a first-time restaurateur. I would much rather you Create your own team from your own other resources rather than going for consultants because it just allows you to save some money Job listing templates that work So you might be asking hey Wilson like what do I post all my jobs job postings? Well in the link below we already included a template of what I use to hire So make sure that you guys download in the link below so then that way you can utilize this template Interview questions to ask when hiring once again, you know for a fact that hey You know what these are the values I'm looking for but what kind of questions are asked during an interview Do I just Google them? No, you invested in this course and which is the reason why once again It's in the link below download it and use these questions to interview staff Okay, and also make it your own these are all reference and templates that I'm sharing with you As a starting point, but make it your own given and inject your own character into these types of questions and postings Now it is your turn to assemble your all-star team Determine the personnel that you would need to hire for and ask for referrals in the link below all the resources Are there for you use it to your advantage? Hopefully you have learned how to hire your all-star team in this lesson who will run your dream restaurant for you in the next lesson What we're gonna be talking about now that you have them hired how do you train them? So then that way you can create an employee handbook and it just becomes super easy for you to onboard Anyone else in the future? This is it for this lesson. I'll see you guys in the next lesson


Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Jay. Hey Happy new year happy What is it? Are we allowed to still say that 21 days into the year still January still January? So that's my rule of thumb is while we're still in jail while we're still in January and you meet somebody for like Almost like the first time in the year. You were allowed to say happy new year Wonderful. Well, happy new year to you, too. It's been a while since we did this and it's amazing like, you know Calendar turns, you know, we we get into 2022 and Not a ton has changed between then and today, you know, we've got some updates to share But the world is still what the world is, you know, we just got to keep moving forward and hope that We can stay, you know, at the same speed as the rest of the world now, you know, yeah, well, it's the the speed at which Things are developing is glacial like the temperature outside right now but also They fatigue is definitely there for online viewing but so we would try to make it interesting Keep it fresh have a good vacation You know, I did I took a little bit of time off. I had a birthday, you know birthday Thank you turn 43 years old Got a lot of work done, you know around personal stuff enjoyed some time with my wife just Took it easy. I Didn't go anywhere. I didn't really do anything and we had obviously a big surge of Corona virus here in New York City so it meant kind of like locking it all down for a little while and You know, luckily we're in a good place here that compared to where we were about a month ago And I'm very very thankful for that. Well, that's I had a good vacation to accept for The the week of Christmas where I did catch the the rona the human malware So I was out of commission for about a week. I don't wish that on anyone Wasn't as severe as some other folks that I know who I've also caught it, but the difference is I'm fully vaccinated. So I did get it and it was Not pleasant, but it wasn't As severe as it could have been so yeah, my wife got it And somehow another I did not I don't know how I you know same house You know same air same bed the whole nine yards somehow another I didn't get it, you know knock on wood I must have some really really tough antibodies or something going on there, but hey I I heard there's some big news that just came out this week I was just gonna say considering we all have to kind of isolate and stuff like that to the the gaming industry has gone Gone way up because what else are you gonna do when you don't you can't go anywhere It's turn on the Xbox or your PC and load up your favorite game and this week we have We can't go around that we have to talk about that news That's Xbox a or Microsoft is buying Activision Yeah Big big deal because like there's so many Super popular games that are part of that acquisition Overwatch Diablo Call of Duty, of course roll the croat Warcraft, which I feel like it's just been around forever Candy Crush for you like you know who want to sit there and do it on your phone And then Starcraft, which is another one that I feel like people have been playing that since like 92. Yeah It's unbelievable. But yeah, big deal something like 68 billion dollars with a B folks billion dollars. Yeah Crazy, I know Phil Spencer who's the CEO of Gaming Said, you know, we're gonna build a future build the games you want I know the head of Xbox said that also any commitments with Sony are gonna be You know still respected and honored because they need to You know help the gaming industry thrive regardless of platform That was a very cool thing to see. Yeah, it was it was great and you mentioned COD. I'm I'm a part of a group online Called BNG. So no was it? Bad gamers unite BG BGU bad gamers united where we kind of go online every once in a while and do like Game parties where we trash talk each other more than we trash talk our other teams and have a beverage of some kind and So that has helped me go through the pandemic But How about we get to the news? Sure. Sure We've had a quite sorry we've got quite a few weeks off and there's been a lot of Announcements since like the week after Christmas So we had to kind of pick and choose what we want would and you went with I think pose grass Can you tell us more about that? Yeah? Anyone that knows me personally knows that open-source databases are near and dear to my heart. I really kind of Spends a lot of time around another open-source database and postgres is is still, you know, when you're talking about important Big big technologies that people really rely on Postgres is there and so a couple years ago. We bought a company named Cytus that make hyper scale Version of postgres. It's a software as a service or a platform as a service, whichever way you want to Describe it. So, you know, what's the it? Pro kind of fit here Well anybody that knows that they have to have some data governance or compliance When it comes to your application has been through the process of certification Especially of the data centers the data platform at rest data things like that. And so Microsoft announced that Azure can now Say that it's been certified to be compliant with APRA the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority The DPP digital production partnership out of the UK the Prudential Regulation Authority All the way down to the motion picture association So, you know that there are a lot of big groups that have now essentially said this is a platform that you can run on that meets our standards and If you don't know much about it, there's some great documentation around the the Cytus service It's built for Azure this particular version It allows a horizontal scale across multiple machines sharding so you can partition out your data It paralyzes incoming SQL queries Across the service for faster responses on large data sets. So, you know, let's say you have a huge data set relating to your customer Relations software or a customer relationship software You'll be able to quickly access it index it get all the scaling that you need Excellent support for multi-tenant apps real-time operational for those of you who might have something like signal R And you need to have a data source and they're doing real-time applications So you're using standard connection libraries So it's not like you have to create your databases and access them with a special one No, you're using what you are already using you just go ahead You're migrating your data into a platform that you don't have to manage anymore So for those of you who are interested and you know, you have some governance and Other issues that need to be, you know met in order to be compliant Here is a service for you someone made a service just for you. Yep and I'm always Concerned because in some of my previous roles I had to deal with a lot of like the Bank of Canada for example was one of my accounts that I dealt with and Every time they're taking a they're looking at a project and they're making Decisions and that's just an example. There's just I'm not saying that that's what they're actually doing right now In case they're listening You're looking at the technology and you say ooh, I this is this is the best scenario for us in terms of technology if you're looking at stuff like the compliance in that particular industry if you don't have the SEC and the ops fee and All of the other compliance you can't use that technology for in that industry for banking or for financial services So the fact that we all of a sudden Provided I think is what so one two three four about ten new certifications on top of the ones we already had Speaks volume as to the how secure and how well managed that that offering is so Yeah, so many doors and anybody who's been through the process of getting something certified like, you know I've done PCI a number of times in the past for you know credit card transactions personally Like information it takes forever It's a lot of work the audit process is really really intense So to know that we had all these different types of certificates that are now adding you know compliance to this particular product That's that's big news it is So what do we got next Pierre next we have? Azure monitor Azure monitor Actually there this month For Azure monitor. There are probably like six or seven different Announcements, but we had that we only have half an hour. So I had to kind of pick a couple that I thought were really good and Number one is a what's generally available is a new improved rule a creation experience. So if anybody's ever had to create rules and alerts for Log analytics or as it's known now because we love switching names of our products for no particular reason Azure monitor logs The process was not the most friendly You have to go create your query here You got that like link at the here and then create your action group here and then what you're gonna do with it Like it wasn't like the most straightforward process And a lot of people kind of complained about that we we've heard the feedback So they they went back and they revisited how it is and now it's actually Been pulled out from a form that you fill out and you have to know exactly what you're putting into the form to now It's a wizard. So a wizard will now allow you to create your alerts and your rules and your alerts much much more straightforward and simplified So that's they the number one Notive not notification, but the announcements coming out of Azure manager Monitor sorry and of course if you're not really that familiar with Azure monitor This is another Platform as a service for monitoring so that you don't have to go ahead and configure monitoring on your own You can monitor applications based on whatever runtime you're using So if you want to get the information about that Java no JS performance, you name it There's SDKs. It'll allow you to slurp data in make a take a look You can monitor monitor your infrastructure, which is always super important So you can keep monitoring data on your VMs your kubernetes clusters your storage your database And then of course, you know, we don't talk a lot about it nowadays It's because we just assume that things are gonna work and that's network So you can do network monitoring so you can diagnose issues that may happen with your VMs You can get packet capture Sometimes that's super super needed when you're having say an application being DDoS You can analyze security group log flow logs to see what's being permitted and what's being denied And just gain some visibility over your entire Network that you have deployed for Azure and so, you know The big keys for Azure monitor are insights so you can find out how your applications containers VMs Monitoring solutions are running. You can visualize everything with dashboards views. You can import it into power BI or workbooks You can set up responding services for alerts and to trigger autoscale Function and then you can integrate this service into say event hubs You can use logic apps so that you can actually kick off say run books or something like that and you can ingest and export APIs so if you need to gain Insight to your from your data on how your applications your servers networks are performing better to use a service that Is tried and true and trusted and put through the ringer to make sure that it's always working always available to you and able to Integrate with all your like favorite tools, so you're using Grafana in flux TV Datadog or Splunk. Let's say you you're doing multi cloud. You need to be able to aggregate into all these different services You can just set it up. Yeah, but even with the multi cloud With Azure Arc, so Azure Arc for server Azure Arc for databases and for containers and stuff like that you Through Azure Arc, you can centralize all of your logs and monitoring into Azure monitor So it is really a perfect hybrid Monitoring platform and it's also a platform. That's used by other Microsoft Azure services like Sentinel users Log analytics, but in the background so it underpins a lot of other services, so it's really really important the other piece of news about Azure monitor is that they regularly release updates to the Azure monitor umbrella service so in this case particular Azure log alerts the version for logs You can now know also I have a lot more resource centric alerting The rules management at scale so you can have thousands of rules. I Know that if you have a large corporation, you probably have thousands of rules It gets a little harder to manage when you've got that many so they've been Improved that experience and of course as I mentioned the wizard based alert creation experience so lots and lots of new functionality in Azure monitor to benefit everybody and anyone using it Yeah, absolutely and for those who need another service that will help keep your websites online highly available and Doesn't need a ton of infrastructure configuration. There's a new announcement for enterprise grade Static web app service. So Azure static web apps. It's in a public preview To give you enterprise grade edge capability. So If you want to increase your websites page load speed Enhanced security optimize reliability for your global apps. This is the service for you It combines capabilities of Azure static web apps as your front door and as your content delivery network that the CDN service To a single secure cloud CDN platform There's some new key features and so I think one of the biggest ones is that global presence 118 plus edge Locations we want to be able to have our static apps because the whole point is they should load quickly They should access API's past So having that 118 plus edge locations because the Azure network is so well distributed across the planet Just only adds to your reliability of your application protective Proactive protection against DDoS. So, you know, I mentioned before, you know DDoS is happen they could happen to you and When a DDoS does happen the mitigation process can be quite difficult. I remember Having to set up like a reverse kind of proxy to be able to capture certain Packets so that we didn't get DDoS is on our applications. This was years and years ago We had to do everything manually nowadays, you know, we've got these services that can just oh Yeah, I noticed a ton of incoming since sin floods on on your your application or or someone's You know trying to do what you know, like a ping of death, which is whatever you want to call it People have that proactive protection nowadays without having to do it themselves It's it's a turnkey process and then for those of you who have reached into the IPv6 world or the HTTP to protocol world And I know you're out there There is native support for end-to-end connectivity for both Which is big because you know, it's it's what like 2022 We've been told for like the last 15 years that IPv6 is the next big thing so whether you're you're really Paying attention to IPv6 or not. It's it's really important for you to know as far as a business That you can make sure that this is ready for your IPv6 connections. Like I know that personally my router Had goes IPv6 first For my home computer internally. Yeah. Yeah, okay Yeah, well any external like if I try to do like what is my IP address like it'll always default to IPv6 first for that external Finding out what my IPv4 can be like alright a couple of things that I have to do but Let's compare it the way things were a lot of times back in the day as we used to say if you needed to remote into your home Computer you needed to know the IPv6 all that wasn't really a big problem But anyway, I'm getting off topic There's a lot of new great things that you can use with Azure static web apps It's a service that automatically builds and deploys full stack web apps to Azure from code repos so, you know, you basically can use almost like a get off to workflow of Making a change having it trigger a new build And then having it run through either actions or get help pipelines to build your app Supports a lot of static site generators That will help you kind of put some scaffolding You can build apps with angular reacts felt view blazer All these things that you know, you typically would have to spin up a server that Have load and then have to configure a CDN that have to configure any sort of Liability services like a load balancer not anymore front door turnkey CDN turnkey Authentication services they're right built-in So if you need to have some sort of off before people go into the site you can use it there Yeah, I'm really exciting mostly about the the front door part of it I find that it makes the managing the end user experience or the Stakeholder experience connecting to your app where they connect to the closest endpoint to them the fact that you can Manage where your application can get accessed from so if you've got any kind of Regulations where it can't be accessed outside of your country for example You can deal with that all of that good stuff in in front door Is I wanted to just show this really quickly you can see this is kind of what it looks like In a traditional front door Configuration where you've got you know your website your edge location and all these different regions With in the network that front door manages so adding that into your it solution just makes it a little bit stronger makes it capable of Having additional reliability, and I always like to say the liability Is your reputation so making sure that you're you're available you're reliable people that that's what they want Yep, and speaking of reliability We know that and everybody on the because I'm looking like Andrew Jared Paul and digs BTW from on twitch If you're an IT you know that nothing is 100% guaranteed so you got to make sure that you're covered you got to make sure that you've got your your data replicated that you have a good business continuity plan that you have also a good backup and Over the holidays I flattened my machine and I thought I had a good backup of all my drives turned out. I missed one so I Failed and now I'm gonna learn from that and I've adjusted my backup routine but Azure backup is one that regularly also provides updates and This month what Azure backup as provided is A way an updated way to automate the backup procedures on your if I on your in your environment So they've released a whole bunch of command commandlets and CLI Updates that you can Run your backup schedule your backup Restore your backup like all of the management of the backup of each machines can now be much more Straightforward when you're looking at scripting that environment. So if you're if you have an environment where you you're gonna be scripting or you're doing and I know some people that What they do when they have so they're they're critical systems They as part of their back their patching routine, for example before right before a patch They do a backup or an image backup of That machine So doing that, but now I can be scripted a lot more easily. So it's not a huge News, but it's something if you're if you've had to script the management of your Backup and restore for all of your environments. It's going to be significant in terms of impact on your life. So oh and Andrew says also that Oh, oops. Yeah ransomware as well. So when you have to like bypass If you bypass some backup procedures, you'd set them up for them And it's gonna help a lot I have seen some really nasty ransom situations with open-source databases where you know, they didn't Close up their their network connectivity. They didn't add authentication and because of that, you know It said hey if you want your data, you got to send us like X amount of Bitcoin and Certain companies that this happened to they simply didn't have backups of their entire database and that Maybe it's because they didn't know how to get it done. Maybe they thought oh, this is gonna degrade performance or you know This is cheaper. We don't want to pay for the backup Well, you paid for not having the backup you always pay the bill always comes due Yeah, and and a lot of times that can kill a business You can lose all your customer information You can lose all anything that's all you need to do when you get something deployed and You know, you're taking traffic. You've got to consider what happens if this goes away if this fails If this has a bad insert If your database becomes unusable, what do you do? Yep And so having backup services, especially native backup services within Azure really really tremendously important So we wanted to give some shout out to some really cool things that are going on in the community and one of them that I thought was really interesting is Open Source day that Microsoft's gonna be doing it's Tuesday, February 15th It's it's all virtual and it's a digital event that's committed to open source It's going to celebrate one of the 30th anniversary of Linux because Microsoft loves Linux So you're gonna find out how to optimize your Linux performance good But for our Windows friends out there Microsoft still loves Windows as well. Oh, yeah, those licenses certainly make it so There's developer tools open source database talks The latest on AKS like I know Brendan Burns. He's gonna be one of the speakers Sarah Novati Novotny is the director of open source strategy and ecosystem. She's got to talk and then the the actual Keynote is by our own wonderful Satya Nadella who's gonna share some of that information about that 30th anniversary of Linux Very very cool. I'm actually quite interested. I'm actually I've actually blocked that time off in my calendar Of course that can change but of course, you'll all probably be able to watch it in in replay But that time has been I've registered in so if you were interested go register yourselves Well, no, we're also another shout out want to do it real quick is to Johnny chips himself Check out. He's got these little great interviews that he does. He does news updates about Azure and dev ops and all these different subjects.  I hope to be talking with you soon. Yes, and John we've had actually Johnny on our show not this particular show the show that's later this afternoon Testing in production, which is today at noon with Jared Jared is in the chat at the moment so Jared and I will be discussing some stream content and All kinds of shenanigans so if you want to join us it's today at noon Eastern time nine Pacific I'm not quite sure what time that is in the Europe's but I'm sure you can figure it out check it out everybody then of course we always do our Our module of the week for Microsoft learn place to get free education on different Microsoft products services And this week we're showing the introduction Azure front door. I thought it was timely Check out how to actually know when to use front door how to use front door why you would use front door So take a look at this module. I think you'll really get a lot out of it you'll Figure out how you can use WAF web application firewall things like that to just help reliability and security of your your website No, the way I look at it if you have anything any workload that is exposed to the internet Azure front door can be of benefit to you In terms of controlling the access to it making sure that the experience is great You mentioned DDOS mitigation and all that stuff Azure front door is is something that We should as operations in terms of making sure that our systems are Operational and accessible at all time is a great thing So I really really Recommend that you go and try that one out if you have not already, but if you haven't go check it out anyway Alright, so hey, we're right at the end of it, huh? That's right. And I'd like to Say thank you to the chat for joining us again this morning. So Andrew Jared Paul. Oh and our boss mr. Claus is now in the chat room as well and Thank you Jay for joining me again this week and we will see you Next week have a great weekend everybody. See ya


Welcome digital asset news to get top stories and cryptocurrency and digital assets and break up down to bite-sized pieces. So today, we're going to do a little something different. We already talked about the news about what's going on and the Coinbase IPO and hopefully it'll be great and maybe a potential ETF. But what I want to talk to you today about is about goals. And it's all about everybody's different, especially what is going on with every individual person. And your goals are probably different from my goals. And I want to talk to you about when we talk about these, you know, you got to have strong hands, you got to have diamond hands. But do you really have to have diamond hands and hold on forever? And I'm going to tell you why I think that is the most overused statement and why because everybody is different and all the different things that they have to do, that that is actually a wrong statement to say for all time. So here's what I'm talking about. So if you've been following the channel for a length of time, you know that me and my wife are into properties, we like to buy you know, in different houses and do short-term rentals and Airbnb. Works out real well. We love it, right? And of course, there's tax benefits. And we talk about depreciation values over 20 years and we can put in our taxes and do do do. And that's pretty great. But I came across this tweet and it made a lot of sense to me. And again, it's the same adage I always talk about. I always have a problem with believing that everybody's kind of like me and they're not. There's so many different people out there. So this was from Bitcoin Maxi. Bitcoin Maxi Hodel. And he says, I sold my last property last year. After all the fees and loan, I settled I had $55,000. So all the properties, 55 grand. All right. All that went into Bitcoin. And this was last year. So maybe this was probably around when it was 5k. So, oh, no, all my Bitcoin just under 10k, right? So you've got at least, you know, let's say 5 Bitcoin. I have friends staying saying you sold the wrong time. Property is up 6%. Mate, that 55k is now 330k. No maintenance, rental stress, insurance. And I could go on. No people breaking your stuff. No different discrepancies in the time frame of the actual, when they're actually going to check in and check out going for all the different cleaning services, making sure that everything they did destroy that you fixed and all the different criteria that goes on that. Oh, and also just, you know, doing all those taxes and things like that, because that's what you got to do. So when I saw this, like, you know what, for this guy or Gal, I don't know, this makes total sense. You know, why not do that? Why not get rid of everything? And just, you know, just ride it all on Bitcoin. And that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? I mean, it does. But for me, those are not my goals. Those could be your goals. And I can totally agree with you. Or maybe you're somewhere in the middle. But for me, like right now, probably not something I want to do, because you never know, right? Because I always, in the back of my mind, this is how my mind operates. I always think that something's going to fail or not work out and I have to make sure that I have a contingency plan and just go, you know, if you think it's going to be an A, you got to do BCD and E, maybe an F. Because if not, things could just go down sideways and then where are you going to be robbed? So these are the things I always think about. But again, this is this person's goal, right? So here's an example. If you're like 20 years old and you're thinking to yourself, man, I got to do all these things. I got to, I got to get rid of this cycle. I got to get rich this bull run. I got to put everything into. No, you don't. I mean, this is not financial advice, but I'm just saying, if it's me talking to 20 year old Rob, I would like, listen, man, you've got a lot of time to do a lot of different things. On top of that, it's not like the price of cryptos are going to be just go to the moon. And then at a certain point, it just flat lines and you'll never be able to catch any other ones. So you got to do it this bull run.  So when I see something like this, I'm like, for this guy and this goal, this makes total sense, right? And then when I hear about these statements, like, you got to have diamond hands, you got to have rock hands, you got to have strong hands. I always look at this and I'm thinking myself, I remember this in 2017. I remember this in 2017. I'm in this 2018 and 2019 and 2020. And I got to tell you, I would be better served if someone would have said to me, Rob, you know what? I was just saying, it's called cycles. And, you know, you can hold on to it and just kind of set it and forget it and you'll be okay. Or if you're really into the market, you might want to think about at some point selling some of your assets because they will go down. They will not go up forever. And if you don't sell, that's fine. You can just write them all out. You don't lose any money unless you sell. So just do it that way. Or you can just sell a little bit and get back in. You can sell 80%, 90%, 100%. It's all what you want to do. So when I hear all these statements about you got to have diamond hands, you got to have strong hands. In the back of my mind, I think to myself, again, 2017, 2018, I'm thinking myself, you know what? Does that help you? Or does that help me? Because sometimes a lot of, I think sometimes a lot of times folks, there's two reasons.  And second reason is they want you to hold because they can dump on you. And that's what happens. Now, it's still solid advice. I'm an investor. I'm going to be here for the long haul, but I do have an exit strategy. And once I hit a certain price point, I am going to be 80% out of alts and 50% out of Bitcoin because I expect at some point a crash, not a dip, a crash. Because right now, think about what your coin does. What does it do right now that has a real world application and not like what they tell you it's going to do as far as speculation, what it actually does today. If you can't answer that, you now realize that your whatever coin it is is overvalued. It doesn't do squat. So if you're looking at things that actually do things, Bitcoin just throw a value. I think we can all agree on that. And a lot of people are behind that. There's a lot of old money, a lot of new money, a lot of smart money that's going to be building on that. So Bitcoin, gotcha, right? Ethereum, everybody's building on Ethereum. So I can see that. Will it be the greatest of all time forever? That's why I bet, that's why I put money in Ethereum and other smart contract type platforms. Can Cardano do a lot of things? Not right now? Sure can't. Can you, do you have a lot of people building on a Cardano? No, you do not. But these are one of those things that you take a look at and go, well, maybe at some point, that is a speculative asset. Binance coin is one of those coins that actually does something right now. We just did a story where you can actually purchase, I guess for with Binance coin, you can actually have a reduction and to certain types of stocks right now, they're going to start with Tesla. On top of that, you can stake it, it'll reduce your fees, they're going to have another debit card, I think a credit card too, not for sure. So that actually does something. Okay, StormX actually does something, right? You can actually go to a store online, they have over 750 partnerships, and you can buy something and get cash back. The more that you actually stake it, the more cash or sorry, crypto back that you get. And then Voyager, same type of thing.  So it's not a rant, but all these different things about people saying, you've got to have diamond hands, you should never ever sell. Sometimes you got to look at and go, yeah, I believe in the long term of this project, but on the other one, maybe it's not a good idea to actually dump things or to actually dump things at some point.  And this is what I always think about. It was a story about, actually, I'll get to that in a second. Amazing stories was a show back in like the mid-80s. And it was Steven Spielberg who was the director. It's crazy. And you tell these different stories, and one of them was, starts out with a kid, this will make sense in a second. Starts out with a kid, and he's just sitting there under a tree and all of a sudden this gnome or something like that. Again, first of all, you're not going to see a great picture because it was in the 80s. Some elf gnome thing. It's like, hey, don't sell. This was a weird thing to tell a kid. Hey, don't sell all your different trinkets and stuff because they're going to be treasures someday. And the kid's like, okay, I'll do that. And he follows this elf's advice forever, right? Which is kind of like the internet. If you think about it, you don't know who's on the other side. It's just some person who could be schizophrenic and be like, you should do this. You're like, what? Okay. So fast forward like 10, 15 years, that's Mark Hamill from Star Wars. And his parents are kicking him out of the house. Like, why kick him out of the house?  You don't want to go to college. You don't want to do anything.  So why do you have this? He's like, oh, okay.   And before you know it's like 40 years later. And he's right around the same piece of junk car. And he's got all the things that he ever owns in this car, right? And then it goes on and then you see him, his house gets demolished because he was squatting, he didn't even own it. And then when he's like super old, he goes to Vegas and he had all this stuff in there. And some lady pops out and is like, Hey, I was looking for this cup. And you know how this, how valuable it is? It's like $10,000. He's like, Oh, okay, I'll sell it to you. And he gets an idea is like, maybe it's time to sell. So the moral of the story is, and then of course, he's old as dirt. All right. But he's loaded. And in reality, this guy, this gnome thing was right. This elf was like, if you just hold on to it, it'd be, you know, worth a ton of stuff, ton of money. This is how it is in all investments, right? We know that whatever it is that you're into is probably worth some money. Maybe, right? But at some point, you have to think to yourself, and this is where it all comes down to do your own research. This is not financial advice. This is something that I go through on a weekly, actually daily basis code. Is this really going to go anywhere? Do I need to get rid of this and cut my losses and put in something that actually works? And this is just the example of like, sometimes when they talk about diamond hands, strong hands, got to hold on, they telling you that because they really want you to hold on, they want to dump on you. That's the real question. So again, at the very end, you know, our camels all like, Hey, thanks so much. Now a millionaire, but I'm like a thousand years old. And then here's the elf like I told you. So that's what it really comes down to, right? And I will just tell you this, my portfolio, this is what I think is going to do well. I was listening to actually, Alex Becker had a really great video, he talks about, you know, what's like low risk, medium risk and high risk. He talks about different things that he's into. And it makes a lot of sense, right? So if this poor SOB, if he just would have like, you know, maybe in the 40s and 50s and 60s, maybe if he invested into some other type of like, a stock or maybe real estate or maybe something else, he could have kept all that stuff. And he could have made a killing later on. But guess what? He just hung on to one thing and that was his only hope. And it just didn't work out like that. Me personally, I like to diversify.  I hold Tesla. I hold Airbnb. I think it's going to be huge this year, actually. And I hold Mara. I should have gotten a riot like CJ from Rocket Rebellion told me, but I was like, yeah, sure. Serious CJ. And I just forgot to do it. So this is my portfolio right now. It's very safe. I'm long Bitcoin. I think it's going to do really well. But there I'm in Cardano. You can see that I don't know which one's going really break out. But I mean, honestly, Cardano is pretty good so far. And so did Ethereum. So I'm pretty happy. It's at $2,000. It's Cardano is like $1.30. Who knows how well this video is going to age, but that's what's up. They did things to do with Voyager.  Because even though these down here aren't worth a lot right now, I think, well, it's kind of like fireworks, right? Well, this one's going to pop off first. And then maybe a little Ethereum is going to pop off second, right down the chain, then a Cardano, then a Theta, then a Voyager. And then these down here, like Engine, for example, I don't think it's going to pop off anytime soon. So I'm diversifying across crypto, I'm diversifying across real estate, I'm diversifying across stocks. And why not? Because I don't have time to wait on one damn thing to where I'm old as dirt. Now I'm like, Oh, now I'm a billionaire, a millionaire. And now I can do stuff. My foot's in the grave. So that's a very, like I said, a very elongated story. And it takes things to the extreme. But I just wanted to share it with everybody because sometimes these diamond hands and strong hands, you've got to understand what's your real function behind it. It's only up to you to make sure it's the best decision for you and your family. And that's all I got. So anyhow, thanks for watching the video. If you found value in that, give it a thumbs up. Also consider subscribing. It helps a ton. And that's it for today. So thanks so much. See you on the next one.


Well good morning and welcome to the post-flight press conference for the STS-60 mission. The crew of the mission is joining us today. The commander will introduce the rest of the crew, Charlie Bolden. And again, this was the 60th shuttle mission, the 18th flight for Discovery. And with that, I'll turn it over to the crew commander, Charlie Bolden. Thanks very much, Kyle, and welcome to everybody, wherever you are. Please quickly let me reintroduce the crew, since we've been through this before. All the way down on my far right, Ron Sega, who was our mission specialist number two. To his left, Jan Davis, who was mission specialist number one. To my immediate right, my pilot, Ken Reitler. To my immediate left, Sergei Krickloff, who was mission specialist number four. And to Sergei's left, our payload commander and mission specialist number three, Franklin Chang Diaz. So what we're going to do from here on out, we're going to show you about a 16-minute video that will give us an opportunity to explain what we thought we did. And then you can ask us questions in case we did something that you didn't think we did or we didn't do something that you thought we did. And then we'll show you some slides that are primarily geared toward Earth observations. And after that, we'll take questions and answers. So with that, why don't we go ahead and roll the video and we'll make an attempt to describe it to you as best we can. The first thing you're going to see is an advertisement from the sponsor. This is the NASA logo, the meatball that we've all come to know and love. And these are the two patches that we have come to know and love. They're both the English and Cyrillic versions of our crew patch.  And you'll see each of us in succession here as we go through the suit up and check out in the launch and entry suits. Everybody trying to act like we're very relaxed and it's just another day at the office, but I think all of you know better by now. We were very excited about this flight. Everything had gone very, very well in the flow so far in the countdown. And everybody but me was very confident that we were going to get off on day one. I still had it to be proved to me since I had never done it before. So it was a new and exciting experience. Everything was just about like the simulator until somebody said three, two, one, and everything started rumbling around and the engines lit off.  This is the real thing. On time launch, beautiful morning at KSC. The feeling of those main engines and the solid rocket boosters is just incredible. Feeling of being pressed back in your seat and accelerating upwards, followed immediately by that big roll to get us aligned with our high inclination right up the east coast of the US. Not a whole lot to see out the windows because of the attitude of the vehicle. But really trying to pay attention to what you're doing inside at this point. The first stage is pretty rough. It's like riding down a country road. But once the solid rocket boosters are finished up about two minutes, they come off in a nice clean burst of energy. And then the main engines take you the rest of the way. One of the first things we do once we get on orbit is open up the payload bay doors. And this view of the payload bay, you can see the space have module and the foreground and the wake shield there. And also after the wake shield, we had a gas bridge, which included a capple bridge and the bremsat deployable and the odorax deployable. And then we get right away to space have activation. Basically, this is the first order of business for us on orbit. And Jen and I got to do that. And we found a few traces of debris common in a new type of spacecraft. But we took care of that and got down to the business of getting all the systems activated in the lab, something fairly, fairly simple to get down to work. The space have module worked very well. All of the systems worked very well. And it turned out to be a really nice environment to work in. And here we are checking out the initial systems and doing the setup of the module before we start doing the experiments in the space have. Even on the end of flight day one, we were busy doing DSO 201, which is sensory motor investigations. You see Jan in the foreground as the subject here with electrodes placed on her head.  He's undergoing sinusoidal head oscillations. We performed these exercises on day one, two, five, six, seven, and eight with Jan, Sergei, myself, and Ken. This was another one of the Joint Science Detail Supplemental Objectives, DSO 202, which was metabolic studies. And believe it or not, I've just inserted a catheter in Franklin's arm and if you look very closely right down there by my left hand, you saw the blood just start flowing into the tube. I was pretty excited about that. Once Charlie and Franklin were finished drawing blood from each other, then they handed it to me and I was going to work up the blood in this centrifuge. You can see that we ran that centrifuge pretty much free floating. Worked just like a gyroscope. Once the samples were taken, both urine and blood samples, we then had to freeze them to make sure that they stayed preserved until we could get back and harvest the science. We used two freezers, GN2 freezers like this, to put the samples in. This was always a pretty interesting time when you go down in the mid-deck and you see this fog and haze down there. And you wondered what these guys were doing with a GN2 freezer there. Another part of the metabolic experiment, I'm not drawing blood here, it may look like I am, but I'm actually measuring the venous pressure of the blood that we have already obtained the catheter for. It's called peripheral venous pressure, a non-invasive way to get the pressure of the veins. We also did hermetic tests on the blood as well with another little centrifuge. And that's what I'm doing here, filling up capillary tubes from the blood and then inserting them into a small hermetic centrifuge. And I'd run those for a couple minutes and then record the readings. This is the rack there in the back is called eclipse. It's one of our material processing experiments in the space ab, having to do with liquid phase sintering. It's from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. We had another rack, kind of like this one that you see here. And it was on the other side of the space ab and it was called the SEF, Space Experiment Facility. And it was probably the most interactive experiment we flew on the space ab. You see a crystal there at the bottom of the picture. The beginnings of a crystal that we grew for several couple days actually. Highly interactive with keyboard entries through a small computer. And the picture that you see there is the end when the crystal was completely formed and we get the feeling that it's a pretty good one. This was another experiment in Space Ab called OrSEP or the Organic Separation Experiment. It was actually two parts. One was a phase partitioning experiment and the other actually a live cell growth, both canisters inside. And what I was doing here was actually conducting one of the many status checks that we did. This is in what we call a CRIM. It's a commercial refrigeration incubation module. And it actually was able to keep the samples at desired temperature. This is an experiment. We expose several materials in space and grow some bio crystals. And this kind of experiment could be very important in future to understand how we could use weightlessness. And to understand what kind of weightlessness we have in space. We had several other experiments and this experiment named SEMS, record data from Space Hub, all vibration, acceleration. And we return this data back to Earth for development in future. Another experiment we had was protein crystal growth. And this is a graph on a power book that we had that shows when nucleation occurred. You can see the peak at the end. We had a laser scattering detector which detected when a crystal was actually growing and we were real excited when we saw these two peaks and the two different CRIMs that we had indicating that we had a really good crystal and hopefully we have some good results from this protein crystal growth experiment from University of Alabama, Birmingham. This is another biological experiment, life science experiment actually. We flew two cages with rats and we took care of them. This part of the experiment we show as we feed water in these cages. We had over 50 of these canisters that had different tubes in them filled with different biological experiments. We had crystal growth, we had seeds, actually seeds that were flown from LDF. We had actually miniature wasps and all kinds of different biological experiments. And we activated them by mixing two fluids together. And in some cases we used these incubators where we would take out the individual tubes and place them in the front of the incubator and monitor the temperatures and other data from those experiments. A very late addition to our experiment list was this Sterling Orbiter Refrigerator Freezer which we filled up with drink containers to check out how it worked. We also had some ice cream on board. The first time the history of space program that astronauts enjoyed truly real ice cream and we really had a good time with that. We get an opportunity to see us in our inaction here on the mid-deck as we all. The ice cream was packed in small containers like the old food containers that I think most of you became accustomed to before we started using the much more flexible ones. It was quite delicious. We had an opportunity to perform a couple of in-flight maintenance activities. This one got I think a little bit more visibility than the others. It was this collapsed rubber duct that provided a means of transporting air from the orbiter into the spacehab module. Eventually what we ended up doing was just taking the cover from our atlas, plastic cover and inserting it kind of as a stiffener on the inside of this rubber duct here and then reinstalling it and it worked very well. This is another experiment to understand what kind of environment we have on board. It's very simple but it's allowed to visually see what kind of acceleration we have on board the space shuttle. These are some of the scenes of preparing food in the mid-deck, which you probably have seen in the past. But it's a matter of just simply rehydrating containers, plastic containers with dried-out food. On Flight 8, this was a special night. We call it international night. We not only had chopsticks and Japanese food, curry chicken and so forth. We had the small Russian bread loaves as well as cheese dip that Sergei arranged to have on the flight. So we ate everything from American jerky to Japanese and Russian food on Flight Day 8. This is a more challenging way to have dessert here as Sergei I think has a cashew bounced off the flight deck lockers. So each one was more challenging than you'd expect. And here's Charlie on your agometer. Each of us had an opportunity to exercise on this basically a fixed bicycle, and we thought that was very important. We were so busy in flight, we probably would have liked to exercise a bit more than we got a chance to. Let me try to look nice. And here's a scene of just brushing teeth and basically how to maintain yourself in the environment of the space shuttle. In my case, I slept in the space hab. So not only did I transport myself down, back and forth, during the normal days, but also in the evening. We had the opportunity to send a couple of messages to the Russian people. In this case, we were singing a lullaby, spyatustali i grushki, which means tired toys are sleeping. It's a traditional lullaby right before the evening news to put all the children in the right frame of mind to go to sleep. This is during some of our RMS activities. I think actually Ron was operating the arm in that case, and I was backing him up. This is during one of the unbirthing of the wake shield. We had really good luck with the arm. It was very smooth. And our training prepared us well for these activities. We had four unbirths, actually three unbirths, I guess. And this is one of the times when we rotated the arm so that the wake shield hardware could look at different atmospheres. The horizon sensor was looking at different things and checking out the hardware on the wake shield. We noticed on flight day four that the attitude control system had a problem. And one of the attempts of diagnosis was to bring the wake shield over the overhead windows of the orbiter and look at it with a camcorder and looked at the mechanical motion. We did a growth on the port side arm in a very successful respect to vacuuming films. And we also could control it from laptop computers there, as you see on board. Very interesting experiment, plasma physics, used the wake shield as a source of voltage. And we would observe the actual changes in the luminescence of the wake shield at night with image-intensifier optical train on board. This was the deploy of Otarex. And as you can see, the balls start coming out. There were a grand total of six spheres, metallic spheres. And they were used for subsequent tracking by radar sites on the ground. Our primary site was Eglin, the Air Force Base. And there's also a backup site in Kwajalein. But this was pretty interesting to watch.  And then kind of coming together again out there. And they'll probably be there for a couple of years, orbiting until they finally burn up in reentry. The next deploy that we had, and both of these occurred on Flight Day 7, was the deploy of the Bremsat satellite from the University of Bremen in Germany. Very small, lightweight satellite. And its primary objective is to do some observations of Earth's atmosphere while on orbit. And then during its subsequent reentry, which will come in a few months, to actually collect data about the makeup of the atmosphere as it comes back through. We had a very busy flight. And on Flight Day 8, we actually closed up the hab, closed the hatch out, as you can see here, and deactivated the space hab. We were really busy the night before trying to stow things. And the morning of entry, we also were very busy trying to clean up everything on the mid-deck and stow away all of our equipment and get ready to come back home after busy. And we felt a very successful flight. This was hilarious, because remember the bicycle or gometer that we were on? This is it, or pieces of it. And I remember hearing Ron and the guys down on the mid-deck going, wow! Pieces were just going everywhere as they're trying to gather them all in and put them back in their place. Time to get back into the launch and entry suits and get ready to come back. This reentry came in right across Alaska and Canada and down across the heartland of America and right in across Atlanta. It was mostly daytime, and so we didn't see a lot of the real spectacular fire that you see sometimes. But it was a very, very clean entry. We did have to go around one time because of some concern with weather. That was not a problem at all. Very comfortable just sitting there in your suits. All the work was done. There's just a matter of letting time pass and letting the weather work itself out. Weather was great. Charlie made a real nice approach over the Cape and brought discovery in for just an absolutely perfect landing. It was a great ending to a really fantastic flight as far as I'm concerned. Everybody had a lot of concerns about the weather. I think on board, we just kind of roll with the punches and roll with the flow. We were very confident when they finally told us that we had to go for deorbit. And we had had an opportunity to see the weather on our previous pass. And knowing the folk that worked the weather and knowing that Hoot was in the shuttle training aircraft making the evaluations, I was very comfortable. And like Ken said, it was a gorgeous low level. It's what it seemed like coming down across Alaska and Canada right through the heart of the US. We did deploy the drag shoot. We did a little bit different procedure than has been done before. This was the first time that we actually deployed the drag shoot prior to initiating the derotation. It was unbelievably smooth, very, very stable when the nose came down. All of your speeds end up being a lot slower than you're generally accustomed to, but it makes the orbiter very, very nice to handle. And I was very pleased with the handling characteristics of the orbiter there. This is, again, one last word from the sponsor. And that finishes our video.


So, let's talk about some benefits of astral travel. First-hand experience gives us the unique opportunity to experience and explore beyond the limits of our physical senses. It gives us the ability to obtain first-hand knowledge of our existence. Recalling past lives, we learn more about ourselves by understanding our past lives. Most people on earth have been reincarnating over and over for the past 13,000 years since the to be discussed fall I mentioned in lesson 7. As we project more and more, we begin to have healthy recollections of past Identify reasons for existence. You may even recall the purpose that you came to this lifetime on earth for. This information can help us get to know ourselves better, overcome traumas, self-cure certain illnesses and expand our sons of fraternity and universalism. Remember, you don't have a purpose except the one you give yourself. Do you remember what that purpose was?


As the country heads to the polls, which will be keenly contested, momentum is continually momentum is rising and expectations at that free, fair and credible elections would be conducted. Cano, being one of the states with the highest number of registered voters, would be a major decider in election results and residents are optimistic. Cano, being one of the states with the highest number of registered voters, will be a major decider in the election results and residents are optimistic. It's a unique election and for the first time there's a massive awareness about electoral participation and I just hope that INE could be neutral and personally, of course, I'm going to vote. I have my candidate because we just can't continue like this. We keep doing the same thing, we always get the same result. So we hope that this time around we're going to cast our vote to make it first. I'm going to vote because I have my PBC. I will vote by the grace of God and I will vote whom I have in mind to vote for. Elections worry about high-tint security challenges, inflation, fuel scarcity, as well as falling standard of living. Believing that changing the trajectory will only happen when right leaders are elected. I will vote so to change the situation of the country. At least to feel better. Nigeria has done something else, the way people are really suffering in the country. We are hungry. We are seriously hungry. Who do you expect us to vote? Is it the APC? I'll be PDP? I'll be the other parties that are not even remember their names. Of course, I'm ready to vote for this election. We are already with our PBCs. We are waiting. We are waiting for that day to come. We are going to vote and vote the change that we want. The change that we have always asked for is what we are going to vote. And come that day, we will not be scared. We will wait for who we know is capable of doing the job. Even me, I'm scared. But with that, I will still go out and vote for the love of my heart. The person that I love to vote for, best known to me, I will go. By the grace of God, I will go. I'll go out there to vote. The Independence National Electoral Commission, INEC, has continually assured that the elections will be free and fair. All eyes are on the election empire to do the needful and put its name in the book of posterity. Steven Enoch, Mustave News, Kano.