How do you ensure you're making progress in all the aspects of your life? You know, we talk about goal-setting here all the time, but when it comes to, like, life is made up of a lot of pieces. It's finances, it's love, it's relationships, it's free time, it's leisure and sleep. But how do you actually track like where are you going? Am I moving in the right direction in this quadrant, the wrong direction in that quadrant? Well, in this video, I want to share the process I use on a monthly basis to evaluate where am I going in all the directions of my life and how to actually help you course correct if you're going the wrong way. What's up guys? Alex Hein, author of the book Master the Day. Now the first link in the description is to a free journaling worksheet and email course. Now journaling is the primary method I use to assess my progress in life, to assess the mistakes I'm making and what is holding me back. So you can check out that first link in the description for the free worksheet, the free email course on how to get started today. So the first step that I do each month is that I come up with the six main quadrants of my life as I think of it and I rate them from one to three. So the six primary quadrants are happiness, finances, fun and leisure or rest, relationships and love, health and fitness and contribution. Now when I say rate them from one to three the reason why I don't use a ten point scale is that I find it's just really difficult to understand where I am one to ten and one to three is much more simple. A one indicates something is obviously wrong and I'm not getting good results. Two is it's okay it could keep going that way and everything would be fine and a three is it's doing amazing I'm killing it in that part of life. Now the second step for me to evaluate my progress report so far for the month is that I write down the top three habits that I've been engaging in on a daily basis in that quadrant of my life. So again remember the whole point of my book master of the day you look at the daily rituals you're doing and you can predict where you will go in life and what I do is I've obviously some parts of your life are ten habits for fitness or for happiness but I try to find the three most important and then I just write them down on a piece of paper and it tends to look like this so happiness may be do I do what I love for work do I spend enough time with people every day do I get enough rest and relaxation finances might be do I track expenses do I save 10% of my income and do I increase my salary each year to fund and leisure or rest may be do I limit my hours I work do I actually take vacations and do I not work on the weekend relationships and love might be do I have a date night twice a week with my girlfriend do I call my parents on the weekend and do I hang out with friends at least twice per week health and fitness may be do I cook daily do I go to the gym four to five days a week and do I do meditation or Qigong five times a week for at least 20 minutes and then contribution may be do I give 10% of my income to my family or charity do I do one random act of kindness per week and am I working on being more present for my friends and not being in a rush on a daily basis so right now we have the ratings of each of these quadrants I have the habits I've been doing in each of these quadrants and then the third step is I evaluate so if I said I give myself a one in finances was I actually doing those habits and if so maybe those habits needs changing so maybe you know I wrote down do I track my expenses on a daily basis well actually to get the best financial results it turns out I just need to be earning a lot more money to be able to save the way I want and that tracking my expenses that habit wasn't good enough or that maybe with contribution my goal was to contribute 10% of my income to charity or to my family and I just wasn't doing it and I had to decrease it maybe I just do 5% because that's what I can consistently do every single month and the last step finally is if you know first of all this is a good habit I know this works to help me be fit be happy be fulfilled be well rested do good in school or at work to do well if you know that's the right habit then you keep it for the next month forward and you just do a better job tracking it on a daily basis but if you did the habits and you weren't really sure if it did anything then you need to reevaluate and figure out okay now going into the fifth month of the year may what specific habits do I need to change from this quadrant so you see what I'm saying you evaluate it one two three you look at the habits in the quadrants so that you're very specific about what you're doing and then you evaluate if it worked keep doing it if it didn't then maybe change it or maybe you try it again for another month to see your results and that is the way that I primarily assess my progress and just get a snapshot I want to be able to sneak take a sneak peek at that pie every month and no okay I was struggling in contribution last month I need to really work on that this month and then that informs my weekly habits and my weekly goals so I hope that helps again don't forget the first link in the description is how I use journaling to figure out what to do in my life find my passion reach my goals and do all that really cool stuff so if you click the first link in the description you'll get a free journaling worksheet and you'll also get an email series on how I use journaling to radically change my life and you can get my last two videos right there end right there


Hi, Alex Levier here from SerbOS. Today, we're going to look at a truly cloud-native way and approach to authorizing your application, your business logic, using kind of the modern technology stack, making use of the vast ecosystem of CNCF projects. So quickly, SerbOS is an open-source decoupled access control for your software.  And this is going to be kind of a run-through of how you can use best-of-breed tools and projects to build a scalable application with fine-grained authorization, as well as it being monitorable, scalable, and observable. And we're going to kind of run through what that looks like and what a typical workflow would be if you were to go and implement something like SerbOS for authorization across your application. So a quick run-through of the app. This is a finance, it's kind of an expense tracking system. I'm sure many of you are familiar with, you know, traveling for work and having to file your expenses, those sort of things. So this is a demo app. Node back-end, route front-end, very simple API. And kind of what it exposes is we have our different users. So simplicity is a very simple kind of user switcher here. We have users, they have different roles. So from our identity system, we know what role this person, Sally, is in. We have some attributes about them. So she's in the sales department, she's at Amiga. And this is what the application kind of allows. So I can go into my expenses. I can see all the expenses that I've submitted as Sally and they've got dates, vendors, amounts, these sort of things. If I go into it, there's the different actions. So I can go and edit this expense, but I can't approve or reject because it's my own expense. If I were to go back and look at maybe when it's already approved, I can't edit it because it's not approved. So there's already some business logic in here that defines who's allowed to do what. And if I go and look over to be this other person. So now I'm Ian, I'm in the IT department. I am an admin, so I can actually see a lot more here. So suddenly I can access to this admin section. I've got a report section. If I go into expenses, I can now see expenses from Sally, but there's one from Frank. If I go and look at the actions, I can do all actions because I'm kind of the super user, some other sections that we pretend will be implemented. Now if we go and look at something a bit more interesting. So we have Frank here. So Frank is in the finance team as a user in the immediate department. If I can go into my expenses, so now I can see all the ones that have been submitted. So Sally, Frank, et cetera. If I go and look at my Frank one, I can't approve it because there's some sort of business rule that says you can't approve your own expenses. And now if I go and look at this particular one from Global Airlines, $12,000. Even though I'm in the finance department, I can't approve it. If I actually go and flip over to go and be Derek, he's actually a finance manager because he's in the finance team who's also got the manager role, he can approve it. So again, there's kind of some intrinsic logic in here. If we go and look at kind of how the rest of the applications are architected, it's all on our GitHub. So it's running a Kubernetes cluster. We have our application layer. It's talking to an API that's running. And then the data is being stored inside of Postgres and using Prisma as an ORM if you're in the TypeScript ecosystem. All our authorization checks are going through our Serbos instance and we'll go into kind of what that looks like. The Serbos instance itself is getting its policies from a Git repo. So it's pulling policies and the logic is held outside. We're using our workflow to actually test and validate those policies before pulling into the Serbos instance. And then on our monitoring stack, we have traces coming both from our app and also from Serbos. So we get kind of open telemetry, tracing so we can see what's going on. Prometheus metrics, so our app and our Serbos instance are exposing Prometheus metrics, which are being scraped and also our logs are being collected by Loki. So doing log capture from our different containers that are running here and exposing all that through a Grafana interface. So if I can flip over to our Grafana, we got various kind of interesting metrics, your typical sort of request rate by path, request latency. We have some metrics coming from our Serbos instance so we can see the different checks being done. So there's like a check resource and a plan resource. You can see number of policies that are currently in our cluster and we can actually see our decisions. So how many allows, how many denies, how many resource plans that have been committed to have been run and we'll go into what that means in a second. And then we also get all the logs. So this is all being captured by Loki. So we're actually getting audit log. So every action you are seeing me doing and clicking around is generating a log which is being outputted by Serbos in a standardized format and being in this case picked up by Loki and demonstrated here. So we can see we have some inputs or an expense. We have Derek trying to look at this particular expense ID three of these attributes, trying to see whether we can view, view approval, delete allow and we can see the different responses here. So the allow for a view approver, allow for delete, deny for an update, allow for approve, allow for a view. So we actually get a nice audit log and audit trail and we can even see what my effective roles are based on those policies, what's going on. The flow into yoga. So we can go and see traces, application traces. So here's like those API calls to go and get a particular resource. We can see the request coming in. Here we've got some middleware to do authentication. We're going to fetch the data from the database and then we actually go and do a check resource call out to the server's instance and that brings back our results as we saw kind of from the other end. So we fall from the logs, server's making decision. This is the telemetry tracing showing us of the actual request pipeline. We very quickly go and look at the actual code and see how this is all wired up. So in our server backend, as I said, is very simple kind of an express server in node. We have different routes like to render the root page to go and get a particular expense. And the way this logic is done, so we've authenticated the request already. So we know from a request header authorization header who the user is and that's being passed in this request object. So when we want to go and get a particular expense, we first go and fetch that from the database. So using Prisma, go and look up by ID and send some attributes, can't find it, return a sort of an error. We set up some spans so we can get a nice tracing around exactly what's going on. And then our business logic has different rules around who's allowed to do what. And you can imagine you might end up having to card code if this, then that, or a case switch style logic to work out, can this user, in this case, view a particular expense or not? And that logic will be kind of repeated across different API handlers. How Serbus works is you just now replace that with this SDK and we have the service SDK, which actually runs a check resource call. So we now simply package up the information about the principal. So this is our user, at the particular resource they're trying to access. So we have the resource type expense. We have various different attributes about it and then different actions that we want to check permissions for. Can this person view, can this approve, can this delete, can this update, can this approve? That goes off and then Serbus goes and checks those and you get a response back for each of those either an allow or deny. So it's a Boolean and here we're just returning a map of all the different permissions whether it's allowed or not. So these are just Booleans. Some further logic to hide certain fields based on further permissions, but ultimately we'll return back an object to the browser with the information about the particular expense if they're allowed to view it and then what permissions that user has upon it and that's actually what's being used to render these buttons. So firstly, to view the page you must have the view permission and then for each of these actions edit, approve, reject, delete, et cetera. That's being driven by Serbus and that's coming back from the response and then it's a similar setup for the other actions. So to approve, we look it up, we go and find it, we then go and check Serbus whether this user is allowed to do the approve action on this particular resource. If it is, then we actually trigger it in this case it's a database update to set the status to approve and set the idea of who approved it to the person making the request and goes off in similar logic for those. So let's go and actually look at our policy. So our Serbus policies, we have a set of common roles. So these are roles that we'll call derive roles that will get kind of added to the request or to the user base request time. So for example, the owner, you are given the owner role in the request if the owner ID attribute of the resource is equal to the ID of the person making the request. Similar, we give you the finance attribute if you have finances, your department and you're a user and we give you the finance manager role if your department is finance and you have the parent role of manager, you become a finance manager and similar sort of thing for regions. Now if we go and look at natural resource policies, this is the Serbus expense resource. We have different actions, so view, approve, create, update, delete, et cetera, kind of talking about and through these YAML definitions we define our business logic. So to view it, we're saying you must be the owner of it, you must be in the finance team or you must be regional manager. To see who approved it, we only wanna show this to people who are either the owner of the resource and it's approved. So here we say to the view, approver, action is allowed if you are the owner. So the owner ID is equal to the principal ID and the condition of status is set to approved. So you can't see who approved a particular expense unless you're the owner and it's approved. Or there's another rule here that says the view, approve, action is allowed if you're in the finance or the finance manager roles. So if you're in the finance team you can always see who approved it. Something a bit more interesting is the actual approve action. So our business logic says a principal that belongs to the finance role is allowed to perform the approve action if the amount is less than $10,000 and they did not create it. So here our logic says the approve is allowed if your derived role is finance and all these conditions meet. So here we're looking at actually the attributes about the resource and the principle to make a decision. So all of these must match. The amount field must be less than $10,000 so that's that less than $10,000 rule. The owner ID must not equal to the principal ID so you can't approve your own expense and the status must be opened. Now additionally we have our finance manager role. It's just the same logic but there's no cap, there's no limit. And what that looks like back in the UI so if I swap myself over to Frank who's just our regular finance person I'm looking at this expense which is $12,000. It's not allowed if I go and look at it as Derek the action is allowed. So Serbos is actually based on the request giving you a dynamic result for each of these actions. And that's being reflected in the traces when you see these traces go through. Here we got the request of Derek and the response is coming back for each of those particular actions. So now let's say our business logic changes and we've got a ticket and we wanna kind of evolve this logic. Normally you'd have to go back to your code, update your if-else style statements to go and change things to reflect the new logic. But because our application code and our authorization logic is decoupled through Serbos these policies and the API application is actually doing a check against the service instance we don't need to touch your application code again because all the context about who's making the request and the resource they're trying to access is already being sent to Serbos. And so in our policy here let's say we wanted to change it from $10,000 to $50,000 because you want your team's growing you wanna be able to decenimate every responsibility to different parts of the organization. So now anyone who's got a finance role should be allowed to prove it up to $50,000. So what this ultimately means is our existing finance user should now actually be allowed to do it. So I've made this change. Let's go and commit it to our Git repo. So we wanna make sure we have a nice sort of, can't type at the same time. We wanna have a nice sort of Git object style workflow. So I've now committed that change. I'm gonna go at it. I'm gonna go and commit it. Really can't type. And I'm gonna say allow a finance team members to approve up to $50,000. And of course it's not gonna like my dollar sign. There we go. So I've made that change. And the logic is going on. I'm gonna go and push that out to my Kana Co repo and it's up there. Now at this point you could set up kind of a CI pipeline in say GitHub Actions or GitLab and have this server since it's pulled down. But we're actually gonna use Argo for this. So we have our Argo instance running inside of our cluster. So again, it's all kind of locally controlled. And we're gonna submit a job to it. I'm gonna go and just go into our infra, show you how I make file. So we have this Argo job submit and we're gonna submit a workflow that we have available from Serbos. And we're saying go and grab the policies from this particular repo, this demo app expenses repo and run that workflow. And I'm gonna do this and then I'll talk through what it does to take a little time. But that's now gonna go and submit a job and we can see the jobs running and we can go in our Argo UI again, running inside of our cluster and see what's happening. So what's happening behind the scenes? We keep top of job is case manually, imagine it being triggered by a commit to the Git repo. It's gonna go and clone down the repo into it. So this is now gonna go and fetch the latest commit. It's gonna go and fetch the latest policy change that one we made in that YAML file. And this takes a little while to run, but behind the scenes is pulling down those policies and this workflow does a few different things. So with Serbos, we provide a full sort of CI CD style experience so there's tooling in there and to actually write tests and evolve things over time and run in your CI workflow, first you validate that your YAML files are in the correct format against the schema and then actually run tests. So for Serbos, for this expensive resource we've actually have our test defined here. So we have some example test data of different principles with different roles. This actually matches what you're seeing in UI. We have this example of different resources and we have some tests. So here we're testing every combination of user and resource and action to go and establish whether our policies are doing as we expect and catching on those edge cases which undoubtedly will occur and may not have thought of and here we're saying that for Saray, if this particular expense, these actions should be allowed, denied, et cetera. And we're doing it for kind of different ones so we can be certain what's going on. Here we're looking at different roles. So we have these principles of Mark and Simon, they now are sales managers, different results, different actions and what the expected results comes from and if we go and actually look at the approve we have tests that are checking this approve action. And that's what our goal is now running through is actually going to pull down as policies, firstly validate that the policies are behaving as they should and then actually run the tests against them. And if we go and jump back in here we can actually see what's going on. So we've cloned the repo already. We're running the tests, we're validating it, so this is good, so this step hasn't failed so all our policy files are valid against the specification of service policies and then we have the test phase. So this is where we're actually running that change through the tests. So this is now executing, so it's using servers itself to actually run the tests and this has surprise, surprise, failed. If we go and look at the output, we can actually see, oh yeah, this particular expenses test for Frank, for expenses three has failed. We got a deny but it was actually allowed and this is because our test data for Frank in this particular expense now breaks the rule. We expected a expense of over $10,000 and not to be allowed by Frank who isn't the finance manager, but he is now, we've changed that rule where the limit is $50,000. So that test has caught the change. So that's gonna actually just gonna fix that test because we've changed our business logic and we want to allow it. So it was approvals for Frank, for expenses three. Let's check this right, yeah, expense three approve for Frank, Frank, expense three. So this actually should be allowed now because the limit has changed. So we're gonna go commit that again, we've got the change, classic fix test commit, commit that in, synchronize the changes up and we're gonna go and just rerun that test. So now we're gonna go and give the same process, kick off that job inside of Argo, again, kind of inside our cluster.  The only thing I've changed now is our application policy. Our logs, our application, you can confirm it, our containers are still running, it's still serving requests, our service instance is still making decisions, our index hasn't changed, everything is behaving kind of as it should. And we know our logs as we kind of click around, let it again, Frank, I'm still denied and our tracing here is kind of confirming that, we can see the request going off, we can see it going off to a service instance and coming back. So you get that full visibility into when exactly what's going on. So now the CI workflow is validated, it's cloned, the tests are now passed and now what the workflow is doing is actually saying to the service instance that's running inside the cluster, saying, yep, there's new policies, they're valid, they're tested, go and pull them down and that service instance is now gonna go and fetch the new policies. If you actually go and look at the here, inside of here, the requests are kind of being handled and we'll actually see an audit event occurring telling us it's gone and downloaded those new policies which it has, so it's reloaded. So the policies are now being updated, the reload store method has been called, so again, because of the observability and tracing we have, we can see exactly what's going on and now if I just go and refresh my data here, so if I go back it out and then, this is Frank, remember we changed the logic, this one, these buttons are now enabled, so this action is now being validated. So kind of summarize what's going on here and recap what we've just seen. Through this architecture, we have an application, it's business logic for authorization, has been extracted out into a standalone service using Serbos, CACF project and that Serbos instance is pulling down as policies from a repo. We can see exactly what's going on thanks to OpenTelemetry, Yeager, Prometheus, Loki, we have all the logs, we have the metrics, we can see how things are performing, we can see the traces of a request coming out through into the database out into a Serbos instance before actually returning back thanks to the Yeager traces and then we're using Argo for end-to-end workflows for compiling, testing, validating the authorization changes and then once it's done telling the service, the Serbos service inside of our cluster to reload the policies and then that is immediately reflected inside our application because all those checks are not hard coded, they're now being dynamically resolved based on that Serbos instance. So this is just touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can do using this architecture but the cool thing is you're able to fully, very much cloud native open source as well, authorization application architecture, plugging into all your existing tools around observability, monitoring metrics in a very cloud native-y fashion and allowing you to iterate on your business requirements and authorization without having to go back to a dev team to go and change the code base. You can just do it through the Serbos policies. If you want to find out more about this, the application is up on the Serbos GitHub org so github.com.com.serbos.demo.app and expenses and you can find out more about Serbos, how these policies are defined, the different tools and everything are available at service.dev. A particular shout out, we have a playground where you can actually experiment and test policy themselves and this example application, this expenses app is actually preloaded in here as an example so you can experiment directly in the browser without having to write all this infrastructure but just know that things are ready to go as and when you need them and want to deploy to production. Thanks for your time. Always have to chat more. You can come join us on our Slack community if you go to server.dev and follow the links there. You can find me at AlexLivier on Twitter and I look forward to speaking to many of you in the future. Thanks.


Welcome everybody to the first installment of the Visual Studio remote office hours where we will explore the new world where a lot of us have to work from home for the first time and I'm sitting in my kitchen right now because I don't have. I don't have an office and I had to like wire in your ethernet cable that I had to go and buy because I actually didn't have one at home that was long enough and so I'm sitting in the kitchen because that's where the router is and so I have all these sort of difficulties or challenges if you will working from home sort of for the first time for an extended period and I you know and we were talking about this on the Visual Studio team and we kind of thought that probably a lot of you out there are in the same boat and so let's see if we can if we can help each other out a little bit and talk about some good tips and tricks and who's better to help us with that than the one and only Mr. Scott Hanselman. Hello Scott. Hey, hello, hello. We'll get this figured out in the future where we can have a side-by-side right now we're learning how to use teams live events. There's a teams meeting you can join but that has a limit to the number of people you can have in it and this is called a teams live event which is kind of cool so we've got our friend Rajen who is switching us back and forth. I'm here in my home office in Portland and trying to basically have a time each week where you could talk to the team we'll have guests on and we'll figure all this technical stuff out and make it so you can ask questions about how to be a more effective remote person and it's also worth pointing out as we mentioned a little bit before when we're getting our technical difficulties is that remote work and quarantine work are a little bit different so if you don't quite feel like you've got your feet underneath you and you're doing remote work right it's probably a reasonable thing because the stress of being stuck at home is different than just becoming a remote worker. Yeah right that's a really good point and yeah so it's something we want to do every week and so the first topic is sort of just tips and tricks to get off the ground working from home in a successful way so we can maintain some level of productivity and then we'll talk about more maybe some Visual Studio features about how we can handle like remote collaboration in a smarter way with stuff like live sharing all that but that might be next week and actually there's some new features coming in Visual Studio soon new experiences for working with Git and whatnot that might be interesting for especially when we're working from home and doing code reviews and whatnot so that will be for maybe another time in the near future but right now I want to talk about how to stay sane maybe or stay productive when you're home I'm faced with two little kids I have a two year old and a four year old and they don't understand that when I'm sitting with my headphones in here in front of my laptop I'm at work they don't understand that and so they distort me a lot and I'm not very productive like I'm probably in the first couple of weeks I was probably at 50% capacity like I was really not productive and it's gone up a little bit but I'm nowhere near what I used to be so Scott how can you help me what can I do what are some tips so my children are a little bit older but I did I was working when they were babies one of the things first is to recognize that you're not going to be 100% productive so I push back gently on your original statement where you're comparing how it was before the the deal is that with remote work we can't try to pretend that it's not remote work we can't pretend that we're trying to be as productive in the exact same way and by the exact same way I mean time boxing our life from nine to five or eight to six or whatever our hours are babies families are families they need that time so you might find as a remote worker that to get your will just say your eight hours or your nine ten hours you're going to need to do it in chunks right you know when you have a new baby you don't get eight hours of sleep you get a couple of threes right if you're lucky and you try to combine them like Tetris pieces into an eight hour sleep moment a sleep segment as a remote worker I tend to go and do like eight to eleven or nine to eleven and then hang out with the kids for an hour or so just before this I was helping them put their scooters together and pumping up the tires after this I might hang out with them for half an hour so your daily life has to be structured but it also has to be a recognition of the Tetris pieces that you're trying to fit to assemble a productive day the second thing I would offer to you is and I can hear you moving around in there what are you doing man are the babies coming? I don't know where they are you should probably find out where they are that's important don't lose your kids they could just run away you have no idea another fun thing that I've been working on is really simple is just the idea of maybe lights that can change color outside you can just get some light effects or any kind of wifi lights or any lights and just have a light near mommy or daddy's office that lets them know that you're either not available or you are available to say hey if the light screen you can come in and bother daddy and make it a game oh yeah that's actually a really good idea so but how do you make it a game? you make it a game say hey if it's green see if you can sneak into daddy's office and my my younger son would do the navy seal crawl and he'd try to sneak in here only when I'm green to like attack me or whatever oh but when it's red you know you're red you know like red is important and you have to be you can't just set it red for six hours right you have to switch it on and off and let let them know that there is a time when they can come in here the other thing that's really important is that as a leader as a person on a team that people look up to you we the folks that are listening set the tone you set the tone for what's okay to to the credit of our vice president Amanda I have been in meetings and her daughter will come in and just sit on her lap in the middle of a meeting if she were kind of pushing the baby away or being implying in any way that it was not okay that sends a silent message to me that that's not okay but by her normalizing it that makes it okay for me and I don't feel bad so the acknowledgement that kids exist we are humans why not be reasonable about that get set from the top down that example is set from the top down yeah that's a really good point I've you know I've had my kids in a lot of meetings and they just come in and I see other people's kids all the time and or dogs and you know what not it's definitely sort of a new world in that way and people seem to embrace it in at Microsoft that's kind of cool and I think we've also been we've actually been working from home a little bit longer than I think is the average around here anyway I think we were actually sent home maybe two weeks before the state of Washington where we are went into a lockdown so I think we're on like week 5 or week 6 and one thing I have noticed actually is that I am more productive when it comes to to work like creative work that I can do on my own that is sort of an isolated task like doing a Power BI dashboard or writing a visual studio extension or something like that that I am at the office because I get maybe an hour a full hour maybe even two hours without any distraction at all and then the only distraction at that point becomes like all the notifications right emails pop-ups from like teams and Skype and you know Slack and whatnot and so that has actually increased and so what I've figured out is that I can if I just kind of mute those apps sometimes I just close them down if I really need to focus and that that seems to be helpful but it usually it has to get bad before I close them down and so I'm not so good at doing it as early as I probably should to be more effective but how do you handle that yeah that's a tough one I mean the thing is and you can see there's actually a question here from Tomas who's talking about the notification flood that you're referring to right where everyone is interrupting you we are enabling people to interrupt us with these little devices and the challenge here is I don't think that we are intentional and deliberate about what we choose to allow into our lives you can delete outlook from your phone you can slack from your phone if you want to compartmentalize your life if you're in the kitchen right now and that's your workspace decide that that's your workspace and when you leave it then make sure that they can't get you when you've left that space you have a studio apartment in your corner is your office how do you make sure that your work doesn't bother you outside your office well if you've got your phone you got your work email and you got your all your notifications turn them off airplane mode remove the apps delete outlook if you've got outlook on your phone mad you know you can put it into quiet hours teams has quiet hours I've put in specific hours that I will accept that time and other times that I will not accept any notifications you should I'm saying and what when I say deliberate I'm saying if you accept the defaults the defaults in your life the defaults on your phone then you've just had the defaults then it wasn't your decision now here's the thing mad if it feeds your spirit makes you happy and you don't mind sitting on the toilet at 2am doing work email we have the technology to enable you to do that but if you feel that that technology is an intrusion into your life and 2am on a Sunday is not the time for email you accepted the defaults reject the defaults and decide what works for you if if the phone should not be bugging you at 7 turn it off figure out a way with the settings with the notifications with privacy with do not disturb mode to prevent it from injecting into your life and again I want to get back to that except that you are not going to be eight hours of work productive during this time if you get six good hours and you don't get fired and you survived this thing then I think you're doing an awesome job yeah well that makes sense and you know I actually do I've never had notifications enabled for any of my apps except for text messages pretty much so like on my phone so for emails or I do have teams now but only because I don't have notifications and so that's super important but you know that's that's really important for me to not feel like I'm at work when it's the evening Wednesday or the weekend but when I'm at work when I'm at work you know in my kitchen here during the day and I'm you know trying to concentrate on something and because everyone is remote now and everyone is like there's no you don't just go to someone's office right because you do that now through teams or Skype or something and so I feel like the notifications that come in during the work day has increased so is it the same thing is true there do you also just disable your notifications on your computer well I mean the computer is off right like that's the other thing like I joke about how airplane mode works on the ground computers can be turned off it's a shocking shocking concept you know well not while you work right I mean well there's focus mode right you know how you have a piece of toast that pops up surprises you that happens with your computer right you're focusing you're doing some work and then some toast pops up and it says hey Mads is online or the worst one where someone's like got a sec pause for effect got a sec what do you want like what do you you enable interruptions by not by allowing those notifications by not using focus mode which is built into built into windows you can actually right click if you go right now imagine the lower right hand corner next to your clock on windows there's a little right click on that nobody right clicks on it click focus to click focus there's priority only or alarms only you can turn all those chats off well that's fantastic I'm looking at that right now and never I never noticed that and then here's a trick though teams is an electron app so teams does its notifications differently you have to decide whether or not you want teams to run its notifications through its notification center or the windows one if you run it through the windows one it will accept that that focus assist okay I need to do that because I think I turned them off in windows and then I turned them back on in teams and now they're only in teams and I it's kind of weird and so that I can't like swipe them away like I can with the windows toasts and so it's kind of annoying teams toasts are different unless you choose to run them through the regular notification system you know not to derail but speaking of toasters right you were talking about toaster popping so I was in Hawaii this is this winter before the all the working from home app and all that and we were staying in this house that rented and you know they had a toaster they had a coffee machine they had an oven they had like you know it was a kitchen and all that and all the appliances all beeped when they were done as if you couldn't hear toast popping violently up and make it a loud noise then it did like three beeps and you know with little kids sleeping and thoroughly in the morning right or coffee the coffee maker is done and it like why do you beep just why do you notify me about these things that you don't have to this is what I get into that idea of the defaults it's very easy to accept the defaults because it's very tiring to go and assert the defaults right and being able to say well hang on a second this isn't working for me and I rejected takes a little bit of time so I would encourage the folks that are listening to set up a half an hour okay afternoon here and just look at all the things that bother you things all the things that pop up can I mute that can I snooze that can I tell keep this from happening and then just reassert make an appointment with yourself to assert the defaults yeah that's a good one now I have a if you don't mind can I go to some of the questions because some of these are yeah I was just about to so please go ahead I appreciate you sir thank you the one I was really excited about here was the one where John W says what percentage are you using video versus audio staring at my coworkers for an hour is a bit weird I've been doing a lot of both research ad hoc and otherwise in this in this space right now and we have to accept that everyone is different and everyone works differently so some things work for people and some things don't I'm a big fan of the Brady bunch view I want to see everybody I want all the context if you could put 50 by 50 grid of everyone in the meeting on the screen I need that information but another person said well they were a visual artist and they couldn't stop looking at backgrounds they were distracted it was like squirrel and they were looking at stuff and I reminded them that well you know you can right click and pin on the individual you can hide incoming video so if you don't want to see your coworkers even if they have video on or not you can consciously click click and hide incoming video you can pin the people that you want to see you can see the active speaker or you can just see nobody but the other thing and I know that you and I have talked about this before we're looking kind of at each other which is kind of weird we don't have to we could shift our bodies and put the webcam on a different screen or a different location and it could be more like this and that sounds silly but Phil Hack and I used to work remotely with roommates so I would turn to my left and he would turn to his right because of the way we oriented ourselves and we would work quietly and listen to our music and I go hey do you have a second and he would turn to his right and we added that little bit of physicality and I wasn't then staring at him I was there we were together in our space but we were not visually bothering each other and that helped as well we did some research and the teams team put a blog post about it right now in Norway about 63 to 70% if I recall teams calls our video in the US it's between 30 and 40% of the calls to have video turned on so I think it's a largely cultural thing and I think it's also an inclusion issue not everyone's camera ready not everyone wants to be camera ready not everyone wants you to invade their personal space and that's why we have the ability to blur backgrounds and things like that and it's important to be able to you know be in your private space you don't have to let your coworkers into your house if you don't want to yeah that's I really think it's the teams feature where you can blur your background is pretty phenomenal because it kind of removes that barrier but I also know that like some people that I work with they just say hey I'm not going to turn on my camera because you know I didn't do my hair this morning or something like that right and that's their right and we shouldn't we shouldn't just spring it on someone like we started a meeting hey it's a camera on meeting right what you do is you give them a heads up you say hey we're going to be presenting to the VP and we'd love it if this was camera on I think it's another great example a nice parallel is remember when we used to go to meetings and people would sit there and delete email and you're like would you close your laptop well now you sprung it on them right so let them know ahead of time this is a no laptops meeting this is a camera on's meeting yeah here's a related one from Danila she asks do you have some non-official meeting with colleagues during the working from home so we do on a couple of the teams I'm in so every morning all of Amanda's program manager so Amanda is our vice president and we meet for 15 minutes every morning at 8am the ones who can the ones who are you know want to very casually just talking about like anything and everything and so that's really nice just to kind of keep that sort of casual thing going the water cooler talk basically or you know around the in the morning at work in building 18 you know very often we meet at the coffee machine waiting for our coffee and so that's the equivalent of that we have at 8am which is very nice and then I got like from with two other teams I have like a 10am and I think I have 11am or something like that again completely optional and just a good way to kind of casually say hi to your team and so I really really appreciate that I can highly recommend it it's a it's a nice helps keep me sane I'd say you know because it's a lot of alone time and I'm used to when I really cherish to be around other people which is kind of weird because I'm an introvert but I really do enjoy it and this type of casual meetings give me that I think it's worth pointing out that the way my opinion is to say that these are not required meetings right this is a drop in drop out if you're trying to simulate work you have a kitchen space you have a water cooler you have a hallway and people can be there at a certain time or not be there a certain time I've shown up to four or five of those meetings with Amanda and sometimes people are there sometimes people are talking about what TV shows they watch right if no one wants you're saying that you think your team doesn't want it I would hold it anyway every day for a week or two and I bet you people would slowly start to come in once they realize that that it's there that it's an option you know what's really nice about the team that notifies you that someone started a meeting is that you don't have to be the first one to go on one of those casual team meetings you'll just wait till someone signs on and if it's someone that you're comfortable talking with you know one-on-one until someone else signs on you just join that meeting right then and there or you decide not to and it's totally fine and so that I see that happening so it's just just really nice and low key so Scott I have another problem is working from home that I hope you can help me with because you've said you've worked from home for 13 years is that right yes sir okay so I find it kind of boring you know it's what the sitting part you know I'm in my home every day and whether I'm at work or it's the weekend or during dinner I'm sitting at the same table in the same chair you know looking at the same pictures on the wall and whatnot so it's like very it maybe it's it's not as inspiring as going to work it's let's say put it that way but it does feel like a little bit born so is that something you feel or have felt and dealt with yeah I think that that's fair statement I think that again I want to make that comment that we talked about at the very beginning that remote work and quarantine work are different things right we have to accept that this isn't remote work because if it was I could go to the mall and I could sit at the mall and let the mall you know the noise of the din of the mall give me a little bit of energy you know that go to Starbucks you know if you get bored and you're working from home you can you can leave this is what sucks is the inability to be able to go anywhere and derive energy from anything that is not inside your your own house so the only thing that I've been able to do in the time that I've been doing this is to is to try to mix it up and not everyone has that privilege right I don't want everyone has a house with multiple rooms but do you have the space to literally change the direction that you're sitting opening a window moving to a different desk going into the kitchen sitting on your porch which you're looking for in my opinion is just some visual change something to let you know let your brain know to fool your brain that things have changed a little bit so that you can get that inspiration that moment of something's going on something's different so I have another desktop here and I've got a stand and I can sit over here and I can stand and work for a little while or I can go sit in the back yard you know we are allowed to go out of the house in the sense that we can sit on our porch you know what I mean where have you worked that isn't just your kitchen oh man like I sit in the sun room I've started to sit outside when the weather like in the last week or so the weather has been really nice around here if I need privacy I go into the bedroom which is horrible I have like a like an arm chair or whatever and it's not that comfortable but you know it works for shorter periods of time when I need you know if I'm a meeting with a senior leadership or something like that and it needs quiet but yeah no I'm pretty much everywhere but it's I have one place that I prefer to be but I kind of have to follow the flow of the family and people around this house and so I kind of just go with the flow oh Scott your voice oh sorry one thing that I found I muted that makes me happy is a thing called I miss the office dot EU okay and what this is is a website that makes office noises okay listen whose office is that I wonder it's just sound it's people moving it's it's white noise but it's the specific sound of I don't know if you can hear it but it's like phones ringing and copy machines going and the ping pong machine you know it's it's random sounds of the office so that you just don't go completely bonkers and you can click on the sounds you want to hear coworkers copy machines and listen to them that's pretty awesome try that let me see if you can they won't let me include system audio but you get the idea it's a fun project yeah so just any trick you can do you've got white noise there's also a thing called pink noise there are introverts there are extroverts there are ambiverts that go multiple ways but knowing these things all comes back to that original statement that I made about asserting the defaults yes it is absolutely boring and it sucks meds and if you don't try something else then yeah you're gonna it's gonna suck all right yeah I have a question here for from Jerome how do you deal with the with mentally starting and ending a work day like being inside all day ooh that's a good one so I commute to my house I go out of the house to the mailbox do a loop around the neighborhood I live in rural area not everyone can do this but you are allowed to go outside for you know essential things so do something some that makes it different and the other thing that I've done is I've tried to make my office look as different from the rest of my house as possible it's a visual trick I'm just nesting now some people look at my office and they're like oh my god it's all bling down I don't have the money or this is a really cheap office it's just full of a lot of crap I don't want you to think this is a money thing those are Ikea billy shelves those are LED lights this couch this is actually a slip cover you know what I'm saying this is not this is a $20 slip cover to change the color of the couch why is that important because it doesn't look like any other part of my house I fooled myself into thinking this is an office and then when I'm done with the day I shut everything down I leave the office the spare bedroom and I close the door and I go to another part of the house it's totally visually different nothing in the house is painted this way and the furniture looks this way and the lighting is this way so try to and then go outside and sit on your porch like you need that light to like simulate a commute if that makes sense what about lunch do you go out or do you stay home well I mean we can't go out so right now it's been well like tonight we're going to have movie night and we're going to rent a movie we're going to have intensive ones they have a whole thing where the movies that were in the theater are available now we've got candy we're going to make a little pretend you know welcome to the movie theater thing for the kids and they'll come in and give us their tickets and you know you try to simulate reality as best you can but so for the lunch hour you yeah of course you stay home I know you used to go out for tacos I assume you still eat tacos but at home but do you like yeah I just make them here and you don't eat them in the office do you set a timer like I have to do a full hour the lunch thing is an interesting one two things that two things that I think are interesting first when you are doing lunch do you want to eat by yourself is that what you need is that what you would makes you happy or do you want to have lunch with someone else so if you want to have some lunch with somebody else invite them to lunch then do that thing I was talking about the positioning because it's weird to eat close like this but if we decide to sit next to each other and we can eat together there's kind of a peacefulness in that you know what I'm saying so do you have a lunch buddy you have multiple lunch buddies can you eat somewhere else take your laptop to a different place like the cafeteria and eat there and then come back it's about those ways you can fool yourself that something has changed or something is different alright that's a good one so we got another question here from Tomas who asked Scott you so now with the quarantine and everything has that changed your daily schedule and how so has it changed my daily schedule it has changed everyone I said that at the very beginning that working from home is not quarantine work yes I miss going to Starbucks I miss going to the I like to sit in the food court at the mall and I need like the electricity of other humans in the room like the energy I find that I'm not moving enough like you really have to stand up it is not normal for a human to sit in one place how to be moving yourself around you got to be changing your posture you got to change your situation so all of those have been a challenge yeah alright so you talked a little bit on sort of you got some hardware there you got some some lights that change green or red whether or not the kids are allowed to come into your room or not your office room what other type of tech or hardware do you have that kind of helps out with working from home well I do like I do like my my cameras and such I enjoy those but I don't think that you need to have a fancy camera or spend money to do these things so right here I've got a nice camera I can turn the light off quite dramatic I would say the difference I can change to a different camera which is a more regular just a regular webcam so let me bring that up here's just a regular webcam but I can open the window you know and change the light so we can we can decide how we want things to look based on how we position ourselves in our space a laptop webcam can look like a million bucks if it's got enough light that's the trick light light light if you have a natural sunlight place or anywhere you can sit in front of a window with the camera in front of you you don't need to go and buy a fancy setup with a bunch of lighting you really can just find natural light and webcam just suck up the light I was talking with Damien Edwards on the team and he was reminding me that one of the reasons that webcams look the way that they do is that if they don't have enough light what happens is they stay open longer and the frame rate goes down so the less light the lower the frame rate the more natural and the clearer the frame rate and I think that if you are a person who wants your camera on your audience your team members will appreciate that natural light you don't need to buy anything for that I mean you can buy cameras and crap but I'm doing this because it's fun and I do video training but I don't think it's necessary I don't want anyone to feel like they have to rush out and buy a bunch of camera crap and again this is all cheap this is a $30 this is a $30 what do you call this microphone thing I paid $15 for the light on Amazon you don't need to go and invest if you don't want to you can if it makes you happy but I don't think that you do so that light you got there I assume it's LED so it's not hot on your face but is it it's not blinding either I haven't found it to be because you can also change the color temperature pasting on how you want to look and how you want to feel the daylight version and I've got another little cheapo I've actually got a piece of tape on it right now because it's broken light so you can set sunlight color and stuff like that and this was I think $20 on Amazon and it's just a big LED light and I try to do that in the winter time so I don't go insane from not enough sun that makes sense my wife got one of those too like she needs her daylight and the winter is here pretty dark 100% let's see there were a couple of other questions that I wanted to make sure Alan had a very nice thing that they were saying that they've been working remotely for the majority of the last 30 years and had some suggestions for us they set up recess for the kids so having plan fun things this is a nice one for you Mads a planned session which is something fun as a reward for giving mom or dad their privacy so this idea that the two-year-old or however old your kids are is bothering you he said hey if you give me an hour of privacy then we'll do something fun afterwards so a little bit of a structured trade there which I think is a really good idea that is a fantastic idea so basically I'll schedule like half an hour or somewhere an hour in my calendar for playing with my kids let's say and so that is a really good idea I never thought of that here's another interesting one from an anonymous person saying now that everyone is working remotely people are working they have their own private time what do you do about team members that just stop delivering it is a challenge to figure out what the right number of work hours is if you're teaching your kids from home if you are the single parent and you or you have two parents that work and you're struggling schools are closed and the kids are there you are going to have more of a challenge than other folks and I think it's important to note that it's unreasonable to expect someone to be available nine to five to do video calls if they're in the middle of teaching their kids I'm dropping out to go and work with the kids and having them Skype and teams into their schools on the regular but we also have to recognize that our team members are adults like it's not my job it's really not in this time to be bothering them checking on them too much the fact is you've been given a task you time box the task and you say try to accomplish this in this time and here's your clear deliverable setting people up for success by saying here's a clear deliverable get it done however you you work right how are you partitioning your deliverables mad because you don't certainly need me or anyone else micro managing you you got to you have stuff that you have to deal with yeah it's like in the beginning when my productivity was way down like when I first started working from home I was very upfront about it I told my entire team and my manager saying I'm going to you know I'm going to be very unproductive and things are going to be late and no one said anything no one there was no you know heart feelings or anything at all and some of my team members came and said the same thing as well afterwards so it seems like if you realize that you are the one that might be on reduced productivity and might delay your deliverables just be upfront about it share it make sure they all know and they have you know a clear understanding and that's going to happen and these are these are unprecedented times right so no one said a thing it worked out great it didn't feel good it didn't feel good to be the one that didn't deliver the feeling of being unproductive maybe for the first time in my career it was not a good feeling but you know when you then get the support from your team and your managers then it's all good again so speaking of hardware there's been several questions about the setup so Scott you asked me when you're doing this video thing you need make sure you have your external monitors and then you need to be hard wired into your docking station with wired ethernet and power and all this sort of stuff and use your secondary workstation to host the video stream because that requires a lot of processing power so you don't want to do that from your let's say your demo laptop and then I told you but Scott all I have is a laptop I don't have monitors I don't have a docking station I don't have a secondary thing I don't remote it to a workstation somewhere else or a VM hosted on Azure or anything like that you're limited right now with one laptop at home and that's it you don't have a space and that's a very common thing it's unusual to have a home office in multiple computers but yeah probably but I don't at work have multiple I just have a laptop that's all I have and it's all I've had for like around 10 years such a minimalist it works great and you know it was a period of two years when I worked on the web team on the Visual Studio that I didn't even have a desk I had a comfy chair and a footstool instead of a desk and that was where I came up for two years just with a laptop in my lap it was horrible for my back and neck and all this sort of stuff but it was very comfortable was it an intentional decision it was but we were like cramped for space and I kind of said I'd rather do this than feel a little bit cramped and besides I'm kind of a person that walks around all the time I don't do meetings I just go straight to the person I need to talk to and talk to them if they're there and if they're not I'm coming back in an hour and see if they've showed up and that works very well for me and that's maybe also why it's a little bit hard for me to be home now I'm used to really use the having other people around in an active way but it's just to the questions about the hardware I've had no complaints about just using my laptop camera and these are some old iPhone headphones no one's complained about it so I don't know if you actually need anything really just to kind of follow up on what you were saying Scott you bought a lot of things I didn't I have my surface laptop too and before that I had a little Novo yoga and that was the same story no one ever complained about the quality of the camera or anything like that so as I said before we don't need to buy a bunch of stuff this isn't about the acquisition of things you said I bought a bunch of stuff and I acquired stuff a lot of this stuff came from Goodwill which is a local thrift shop I've got a TV right here I got for 20 bucks so the minimum that you can do on on the cheap I do think though as a remote worker and I'm also a kind of tech support for the family I'm sure that you are as well I have you know multiple laptops that I'm managing of family members and cousins and aunts and uncles and stuff I do think that as a remote worker of some amount of essentialness it's good to have a backup laptop even if it's a crappy one so if your laptop died the hard drive died today what's your backup plan Oh order an iPad or a phone but you know how productive could you be I know I'm not productive I'll have to I'll drive down to Best Buy or order an Amazon that would be or like you have to order an Amazon because their best buy is closed so in like over my 20 year career whatever I've never had a laptop breakdown you realize by saying that now you've set yourself up yeah maybe to have that happen right now and have your computer live but I don't with all due respect that's not a hope is not a strategy I'm not hoping I'm just using this is just statistical observation right this does not happen it is on there's a difference between being something that's possible and something that's probable and I'm not a hard drive is six years right but I'm not optimizing for you know possible I'm optimizing for probable with a plan for what's possible and my plan is that I don't have anything local on my hard drive that I need so I have everything is in the cloud I can literally throw this out and I can get a new laptop and within like an hour or two I'm completely back and up and running and have everything I need mm-hmm well why don't we start wrapping up as we get towards lunchtime here if you have found this to be a useful thing let us know we will try it in the future to have a split screen we did try that at the beginning it didn't work 100% but we are kind of update our production value and mad you had talked about figuring out how to do this and having guests come come on and whether or not we do it as a live event this is a teams live event or whether we do it as an actual teams meeting might be another option to have folks come on yeah that's right so we're planning on shipping this or publishing this to channel line or YouTube or something like that so people can watch after the fact and yeah the hope is that we can do this on a weekly basis and exactly how we're going to do it we don't know yet we're just kind of experimenting at the moment and so if you have any feedback anything like I think everyone on the call right now are got the link from Twitter so please just tweet us and tweet to the studio Twitter account so it's literally just called visual studio so and that's also where we will publish the new dates and times for when the future shows will be with links and all that so if you don't already follow that Twitter account make sure you do that is the official team Twitter account and the idea is that we're going to talk about working from home and different aspects of that but this is also visual studio so we will get more visual studio stuff in as well and who knows maybe we are going to talk about like some really interesting never talked about before visual studio deep dive features or whatnot and or maybe even get some early previews of some stuff in the future who knows as I said this is an experiment we're trying to get it off the ground here so yeah your feedback is much appreciated and I think we went through all the questions too Scott I think so and we'll we'll try to come here on the regular and answer more I think next time we should try it as a as a regular teams event we can try different things it doesn't always have to be this way absolutely all right well thank you everybody for tuning in and until next time stay safe


How to remember your dreams better? Dreams are sort of a complicated subject and your dream memory however complicated dreams are, your dream memory is actually fairly similar to your normal memory. So to use your dream memory better, to remember more dreams, all you really need to do is focus on how your brain works when it records and recalled memories. So your brain records memories in kinesthetic, auditory and visual modes. So what that obviously means, kinesthetic means things you can feel and touch, feelings, right? Auditory sounds and visuals is what you can see, what you're aware of. Your brain records memories or you know retains information better when you use all three, when you use all three different consolidation methods or you know recall methods. When you use all three of those things, you remember things better and longer. The trouble with dreams is that most of us when we write our dreams down or when we think about them, we only focus on what we could see, you know, what was there and it's important to realize that you need to engage all three of those senses or you know ideas to remember your dreams better. So, next time you try and remember a dream, next time you think about dreaming and you know when you go to write your dreams down in your journal, try and focus on three different things, try and focus on what you were feeling, what you could hear, right? And what you could see and when you combine all those three things, you'll remember things better. So start by just thinking about one particular detail of the dream, start thinking about who was there, you know, what was the scene like, what was the situation like and then from there you can ask yourself things like what was the weather, how cold was it, right? When you ask yourself these questions, you start uncovering more of the memory that was already there. You start being able to remember in more detail, not only that but then in the future if you keep doing this, right, if you keep interrogating yourself about your own dreams, you'll be able to remember them better without even trying. So the next time you start trying to remember a dream, don't start by thinking about what the dream was, just ask yourself detailed questions, like ask us, make a list of questions to interrogate yourself with. Who was there? How cold was it? What was the temperature? What was around? What was I feeling? Was I in pain? Right? Was I happy, sad? Stressed? Whatever it is, just ask yourself loads and loads of questions about the dream itself. And you'll find that the memory sort of uncovers itself for you. This is a really simple way of remembering more dreams and by having more detail in the memories as well. Another thing you can do is you can actually take a supplement, I think, vitamin B6 is a very good one for memory and recall, but you could also take things like Claridream, you know, Lucidesk. These things will all be good for helping your overall dream memory, but more than anything I would recommend just taking a basic multivitamin, okay? I think the one I use here is, let me go and show you here, A-Z multivitamins from Boots. Obviously you can use whichever multivitamin you want. I'm not saying you have to use a particular one. I'm just saying that one's quite good because you know, it's got a coated capsule and it's quite nice and easy to swallow. So, yeah, focus on the details, interrogate yourself and ask questions and take a multivitamin, vitamin B6. And if you want to take some supplements, take Lucidesk or Claridream. Done.


Do we need to remind you what happened to July of last year, man?  She's in the desert of Gongolac it's different from jacu and You didn't really pass on all you knew you kind of just told You did it exactly you did like two days.  I don't have problem with what you just said So I guess she fixed that lightsaber Nido Number one that exploded Fucking rogue tie fighters in the wild so annoying, you know Every generation has a legend only this generation wasn't it the same legend in this generation as though previous This is Lucas of the guy's the legend still continued until the early 2000s with the break and arguably never even happened Luke was a legend in the prequel Lasted quite a long time. We went back in time. All right, let's speculate So each of those pieces of grass on the desert could represent the force Because of forces coming together. Yeah, those hills. They could be the remains of a statue of a Jedi this chat like Anything could be that could be the emperor right back there Yeah, anything could be anything with these fucking Star Wars And I bet every blade of grass represents a ghost Jedi that's gonna come and do Oh, that was a tie for I think that was a time. Do you guys think that was a tie? Interceptor.   Yeah, that was right. That's clearly that's Darth Vader. I think I'm sorry. What is she doing? Why is she facing the wrong way?  Okay, I don't think you're gonna outrun that thing Ray, it's not worth it. Ray, just walk to the left or right Why would she do it like that? Why would she go away? She's just great. I love that she does it and it just it fades it fades into this Christmas What is that? What? Why would you push someone over with a lightsaber instead of just slashing them with it? Because. No, because he stabbed him with it. Oh, he stabbed him with it. Oh So, uh, totally worth breaking that helmet just rip Rip Ryan Johnson's dream I like this is a metaphor for JJ repairing the No, you will be able to It's still funny just to think that JJ's like giving a giant middle finger to Ryan right now.  They're gonna ruin you Finally comes to an end This could be the scene where C-3PO dons the famous bowcaster, I don't know that it is for sure though It looks what's that like right by his waist that looks like a bowcaster Why do you two like each other? We'll find out finally why she likes in this movie They make each other for like five seconds. They've known each other like four minutes It's funny because you'd be like they'd be in hyperbolic. No, literally less than that Why have these movies ignored R2-D2? I don't know. It's weird Yeah, yeah, I want you guys to absorb that hold on. Is that the death star? Yes, it is death star my friend Why are they looking at the death? Cuz they're no no God if they do what I think Wait a second So is this Yavin 4?   I don't know it does. It's not gonna make sense Stop trying. It's not right right. I forgot the whole thing vaporized.  That's your opinion Oh He's look he's next he's next everyone's getting systematically murdered he's on the plate next Imagine we have been going for months asking which character is gonna be the most inconsistent turns out it's gonna be Palpatine Dude, it's you know it because I when I just I woke up and I watched I watched this trailer when I first So I was like zombie through the whole thing because I'm just like I don't care anymore. You've ruined this for me I don't care anymore, and then when I heard that I was like, oh There are things no things left to ruin this still stuff. They could We could bring anyone back and ruin them. You don't know the extent That power that we have they are literally going to make the entire Original trilogy pointless now. Yeah, they're rendering the whole thing pointless. Aren't they just they didn't even win They didn't win anything. Let's assume Safely that it's gonna be an evil force ghost. That's probably what it's gonna be, right?  We got it. We got it. We got it. We got a show that show the name. Oh The name yeah The rise of Skywalker doesn't even make any sense. He's dead No, because there's loads of Skywalker's the whole entire family is dead Yeah, maybe yeah, you're right. They're all dead except for Kylo Maybe put this name before this particular episode like any episode before this one would it be more suitable? Not this one. I feel bad. I Want to go home. I am home, but We got we got like seven months guys we can survive Seven months to wait in agony over this awful film How are they gonna ruin everything? Are you guys just hated force even come out?  You know, it can't be worse than the last Jedi. I don't think it's I don't think so You say that but Palpatine's back Yeah, I know that's what I mean like at first. I thought it was inarguable that it could Palpatine it's just like I like for a lot of fans that Clip of him laughing is like an immediate like yes before us. It's like As soon as I realized it was the Death Star I was like they can't yeah When I first watched the trailer, I was like, what is that wreckage and I was like, wait, no Oh Like I referred to it before this film will be the funeral for Star Wars because the death was the last Jedi for sure Someone breaks the headstone digs up the grave Takes the takes the corpse to Ludlow main puts it in the pet cemetery and then they get to watch his corpse Kill people and go crazy just goes It's like a parasite is puppeteering all the things that were good and it's not I mean it wears the skin of Star Wars But on the inside, it's just not Moment of silence with Star Wars, please Yeah, like this entity this this film wears the skin of Star Wars, but The flesh is rotted away the bones at least I finally get to see Rey's story concluded because honestly, man I've been so invested in right where is that going? You know, there's so many possible She never close her mouth Will find how powerful could she become I don't know. Is she a Skywalker? Could she be the Skywalker that rises? Oh my god. You know what? I just realized She might kill Palpatine And that might just actually Like give me a heart attack. It's like hey guys remember all the original trilogy. Yeah, they didn't even kill Papa to Palpatine Yeah, remember remember that time when Luke actually couldn't kill him and Darth Vader had to do it because he was that powerful The immediate reaction people are having is like is this undoing what Vader did it's like we don't know It's not a force ghost.


A Bemidji man is in custody today after triggering a cold red alert in the city last night. After a 20 minute standoff with police, Jordan Nubby was arrested. According to the criminal complaint, officers responded to a call on the 1000 block of East Avenue, Northeast. After Nubby's mother called authorities and said that her son was standing outside of her house with a handgun. When officers arrived at the house, they found that Nubby had left the property, During a cold red alert, officers located a set of footprints which led them to a gazebo at a nearby residence. The criminal complaint states that officers asked Nubby to show them his hands, but he would not comply. In a press release from the Bemidji police department, Nubby told officers that he could get off a few shots before they could shoot him. When SWAT members arrived on the scene, they shot Nubby with less than lethal shotgun rounds. Bemidji police chief Mike Mastin says the cold red alert issue worked well for the dangerous situation. This was a very dangerous situation and we didn't want the general public to not know that this was occurring potentially in their neighborhood and increase the risk that maybe them walking to their car, they encounter this person or walking into the garage not knowing what that noise was. We wanted them to call us first before they went and investigated themselves. Nubby was taken by ambulance to Samford Hospital for evaluation before being taken to the Beltrami County Jail. In a statement given to officers, Nubby admitted to having a gun and firing around outside his mom's home. Nubby is charged with one count of felon in possession of a firearm, one charge of reckless discharge of a firearm within a municipality, and one count of obstructing the legal process. Nubby is being held without bail on charges of a probation violation. His bail for the new charges is set at $50,000 without conditions and $30,000 with conditions. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Our hyper-connected world is more complex than ever before.  These kinds of challenges share one critical feature – they're all interconnected. We can find the solutions, but we need to think beyond any single area or interest. In 2008, the World Economic Forum created the Network of Global Agenda Councils. The Councils are a unique community of more than 1,500 leaders from government, business, civil society and academia who dedicate their time to the world's foremost intellectual network. Its members provide potential solutions and new insights about the most pressing challenges and opportunities of our time. These insights from the Councils form the basis of the outlook on the global agenda – the flagship publication of the network, which gives a view into the most important global trends, regional challenges and emerging issues that leaders should be watching for. This report is intended to be an indispensable resource for decision-makers. Council members meet annually at the Summit on the Global Agenda – the world's largest brainstorming, which is hosted in partnership with the government of the United Arab Emirates.  Over 1,000 members of the network engage in interactive workshops and sessions to provide comprehensive insight into the global, industry and regional agendas. Come join our efforts to improve the state of the world.


Player I'm low on this week and really most weeks is Derek Henry. I just don't know how you can trust his situation right now. He has one target through two games, he's played only 36% of Tennessee's snaps, and Tennessee is a big underdog at Jacksonville this week. When you're afraid of whether or not Tennessee is going to win, then you know it's more than likely going to be a Deon Lewis week and not a Derek Henry one. GameScript can always go in the other direction like we saw with Chris Thompson and Adrian Peterson last week. But the problem is that even when GameScript has favored Derek Henry so far this year, like last week, he's still not guaranteed to perform. He still saw just four more rushes than Deon Lewis did in week two. You can confidently bench him this week.