Live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. It's theCUBE at the Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Oracle. Hello everyone, we are here live in Silicon Valley at Oracle's headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. My co-host Dave Vellante, we are here covering Oracle's special announcement. It's our pre-event pre-game. We're pre-gaming the announcement here. Obviously huge, big discussion around exit data, the future of engineered systems, really the future of the data center. And this all touches the cloud, mobile, social, big data world we're living in. It's exciting to be here. And we're going to hear from Larry Ellison at one o'clock for his keynote. That should be entertaining as always. But really more importantly, this is the three year journey after really the vision of this engineered system. So you start to see the fruit on the tree coming off the Oracle, Oracle product lines. And we're excited to have that. Our next guest is Mike Almett, our senior director of product engineering. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. Thanks, happy to be here. So engineered systems is all the rage now. You see everyone going into the higher end stuff where people want purpose built was kind of the word back in the day. But you go back a few years ago at Oracle Open World, even in the industry, it was seen as kind of a radical thing. And with the Sun Microsystems assets, you guys are doing that. So give us the latest update. What's happening? And what are you guys, the key announcements? And where are we today with that vision? It's interesting, you know. I think the vision was built around a fairly basic observation that we made, which is that when you start looking at all the work that you can do in understanding your customer data better, you start looking at all the different kinds of applications that you can build on top of a modern internet-based platform. As an enterprise, I think it raises a question, which is, you know, given all the new stuff that you can do to move the ball forward to advance your business, you know, to differentiate yourself, what are you going to stop doing? Right? And I think many of our customers have kind of come to the conclusion that there's not as much opportunity to kind of differentiate by focusing on applying expertise in the implementation of platforms at the low level, right? Putting disks and chips and memory in a box and putting a box in a rack and connecting switches and all that stuff, that's hard work. There's no question. It takes very specialized skills and it costs a lot of money to do it right. But here's the thing, if you're in healthcare or if you're in financial services, is that what you do for a living? Is that your business? Well, now it's supporting the business. Well, so then, do you need to keep doing it? Would you be better off spending your resources, developing applications, talking to your customers, you know, using the social tools, using the mobile devices to provide a better user experience, maybe that's where you want to concentrate. And I think we saw that coming a long time ago. I think Oracle saw, Larry saw, it's not just Larry, but you know, he's an important guy. Larry saw that there were some pretty big changes happening in the marketplace in general and it wasn't visible to a lot of people working on the ground day to day, but I think it was pretty clear long term that, you know, the rise of pervasive networks, new technologies that allow applications to be co-located on shared infrastructure in a very secure way, all that stuff was going to change the way customers thought about building platforms. That's why, you know, Oracle looked at database as a way of building up its application portfolio in middleware as part of that stack. You know, customers want to go up. Yeah, and the other thing we're seeing too, that narrative is interesting, you mentioned that, the customer view and that is that, you know, this idea of integration or integration's integrated systems really is about functionality. So the old thing was, whoa, I don't want to worry about that but there's so much demand with transformation going on with the technologies. There's none of resources around. So what is that key integration point? I mean, it used to be, hey, I got all these clusters everywhere, you know, I got a little sprawl on the server side, I got sprawl on VMWare now, VMs everywhere. So, you know, horizontally scalable systems are great in theory with open source and it's done a lot of great things but you have sprawl. There's a lot of hidden costs there. So, what is this new notion that you guys are talking about this today around super clusters? What is that about and how is that different from what you guys have done in the past? How is it different? Well, I don't know that it's fundamentally different. I think it's, we've made a lot of strong moves in the direction that we've been going for a long time. So I don't know that it's different. I think that it's kind of new and every year we do something new. We spend a lot of our resources on solving some pretty hard engineering challenges that frankly most enterprises aren't able or willing to take on, right? Designing microprocessors is not something that any bank's gonna do, right? But we've spent a lot of time focusing on database and middleware and ultimately building applications portfolio because that's where we think the technology meets the business. Like I was saying, if you're in financial services, you care about your data model.  You care about your ability to analyze your business to understand what users are doing and to understand where your assets are deployed and that kind of stuff. Do you necessarily care about the details of how to build a cluster under your app tier or do you necessarily care about how to implement a relational database or build a large scale data management infrastructure? No, you did in the past because you had to. But now that you don't have to, why do you? And we're finding a lot of customers are saying, yeah, I don't want to anymore. That's where the cloud is coming from, you know? So, I want to talk about the cloud, that's super cluster, spark based system. I was at an analyst meeting about four years ago, Steve Mills, IBM, smart guy, well respected. He made a statement, he said, mark my words, spark is dead. What did he miss? Well. Is spark dead? Well, yeah, it's most certainly not dead. Okay, so what led him to underestimate spark? Well, it turns out that you can do a lot of really interesting things with software to make software systems reliable independent of the underlying hardware. And you know, you go back 10 years ago, there was a realization, you know, kind of across the industry that we didn't have to rely on really expensive what we call big iron servers anymore to get reliable applications. You could use technologies like Oracle Rack to get a highly scalable, highly reliable database. You could cluster the middle tier and do things like that. And that allowed a large ecosystem to develop around what we would have considered commodity technologies that resulted in some pretty significant gains. I mean, a lot of us have benefited from that. But I think what folks saw back then was that trend happening. What they didn't see is that eventually it was gonna run its course, that we were gonna realize all the gains that could be realized from that approach. And as is the nature of progress, you must always go forward. So we came up to this point where things are working really well and suddenly we have massive scale applications everywhere, life cycles getting shorter, the demands for agility going up. And we discovered that that strategy while it took cost out through standardization, in fact, it left a whole bunch of important value unrealized and we saw customers moving up the stack to the applications to the middle where wanting to care less about the infrastructure and what's happened to us is that the whole notion that at the end of this era, there shall only be one underlying platform architecture, that notion was undercut by the fact that folks in fact wanted to focus on the layers above the infrastructure. And so now you have companies like IBM with open power. You have Intel with its foundry. You know, this whole notion and the success of ARM and all the different platforms built on the ARM, designs, I think it's no longer given that there has to be a single platform under everything. And a lot of folks are leaning back now a little bit and saying that maybe I want to use the right tool for the job. I mean, if I'm going to run an enormous infrastructure at large scale and I want my users to concentrate on the platform, they want to talk about implementing business logic as Java and deploying the Java to a reliable platform. They want to talk about their data model. They don't want to talk about the implementation of the database. Now all of a sudden the question is, well, do I need to care which chip is underneath? Do I need to care even about the traditional operating system? Am I going to be touching it all the time? And that's changed the economics. Okay, but you care, obviously the Oracle cares. Right tool for the job. And so to carry that through, I mean Linux and X86 obviously are very popular, dominant, dominant platforms. So where are customers using things like Supercluster and Spark based systems specifically? Well, so at first I want to say that I think X86 is correct. We're a big partner with Intel. Of course Intel. Intel says the Exa stands for Xeon and that's their little joke. Well, yeah, but look, so we think X86 is great. Great architecture, Intel's a great company, done great things, Linux is a great technology, we've invested a lot in Linux. Oh my gosh, we've invested a lot. We're pushing it as far as we can push it. But like I said, the truth of the matter is that we have the option now of focusing on using the right tool for the job. So we don't have to force fit what we're doing into any particular platform architecture. We get to bring in the platform components that make sense for that particular workload. And we're doing a lot of work in engineering our own chips too. I mean Supercluster is a good example of a hybrid, right? We have a fairly complex system that has a number of subsystems that we have all optimized for their particular bit of the work of the platform as a whole. And we're using the right technologies in there, right? If you look at something like the Supercluster, we have networking, we have general purpose storage, we have exadata storage technology, we have Spark processors to run the database, we have Solaris, we have Linux. All of these technologies are brought together in this system. They make the system better, the storage functions better, the compute runs better for database workloads, the storage grid runs as well as it can run. We've built the platform using the right tools for the job and all that complexity, we've absorbed that into our own R&D spending. So as a customer, you don't see it all. What you see is essentially a turnkey system that provides a really, really reliable, really secure, really scalable platform for your business applications or your cloud. Okay, so you mentioned cloud before. So is essentially this notion of, let's talk about it. This notion of engineered systems becoming sort of the de facto infrastructure for whether it's a private cloud or public clouds or running my SaaS based applications. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, so if you think about the original premises that most businesses, even though they spend a pretty significant portion of revenue on technology, don't consider themselves to be technology companies. So they've acknowledged this and they've looked for opportunities to divest themselves of responsibilities that they don't need to have, that don't offer an opportunity for differentiation, some advantage in the marketplace. Now, we're seeing a lot of companies looking at public cloud because there are some advantages, agility that comes from having someone else own and operate the infrastructure and sell it to you by the drink. A lot of companies are looking for ways to control their infrastructure better than they would in a public cloud or even a third party hosted private cloud. And they're thinking that there's a bit of a compromise they can make. They can get away from the peace parts. They can still have the agility and flexibility of a cloud and in many cases they can save a lot of money doing it by buying essentially ready-made building blocks, converged infrastructure, engineered systems like Supercluster. They can buy those. They're really quick to deploy. We do all the hardcore engineering up front to improve performance reliability and all of that stuff. We single patch stacks and better support at no additional cost. And so that's the relationship, I think, between engineered systems and cloud. And we use engineered systems under your cloud too. Single patch stacks with four times. You're talking about the whole stack, right? The whole stack. The whole stack. That's unique, I think. Compute virtualization storage, driver's firmware, the whole thing, the whole system. And of course with X, up to the database and the middle tier and even the applications, absolutely. I mean, that's the joy of being a company like Oracle. We have a complete, I know people say that a lot, but it's really true. We have a very complete portfolio, right? All those core business applications, like ERPs, CRM and HCM for the utilities. We have the storage technology, you know, database and exadata technology. We have the hardware, the switching that. We really have it all. I love the comments. So I'm going to get some questions. So we have some veterans on CrowdChat, ex son veterans. And I talked to a lot of son folks who live in Palo Alto and the heritage of son was about engineering and performance. Obviously, this spark is dead to comment here. Spark is dead like the mainframe is dead. Come on, right? But what the comment here is many people don't understand Oracle's strategy making Spark number one, a five year road map twice should prove R&D is there. So comment on that passion that you have in this group of people who have that heritage from son and now integrates into Oracle. What is that road map? What kind of R&D? This is not a one trick pony kind of deal. What is the R&D? Summarize kind of like what happened? What's going on? How much R&D? Share the folks out there. Yeah, so I can't give you a number spending money. But I can tell you that we have the largest engineering team working on the Solaris operating system that we've had in almost a decade. We have hundreds of engineers working full time on Spark chip development and server development. The engineering team behind the Spark and Solaris part of our platform portfolio is huge. It's a huge organization full of some of the best people that we've ever had. Some of the best brains that worked on this technology back 10 years ago when it was just starting out, those people have been retained and some of them have come back to us. A lot of new college hires bringing fresh thinking about technologies like OpenStack. They've joined the team now. We're doing really good business with this technology. We're seeing super cluster growth take off. I mean, it's growing incredibly rapidly. Triple digit growth. Customers love this product. Because of performance? What is the aha moment for the customers? They just need to make the stuff go faster. Well, see, a lot of it is about performance. And the technology, say in the excavated, the reliability and the performance optimizations that come from that part of the portfolio are inherited. There are a number of really interesting capabilities of the Solaris operating system. And I think more importantly, there's an opportunity for us because we have control over the intellectual property behind the microprocessor. There's an opportunity for us to do things in the chip that will optimize it for certain workloads that are really highly, highly high value and it doesn't matter a lot to us. So I'm not going to. Talk about the OS, because one of the things, first of all, I love the old comparison of the iPhone for the data centers, Oracle, Larry's, Caprivatto there. You know, putting that aside, it is interesting, right? What the OS did for Mac, if you could look at the history of Apple, you know, they were struggling and they took the awesome OS and they bolted it in while Microsoft had the old virus craze and dominant market share. What the power of the OS, talk about the power of the OS in this new normal of, hey, integrated systems, I got large scale performance, scale up, scale out, lowering costs, what is the OS role? Well, you know, so what an operating system used to be isn't what an operating system is today. So when we think about operating systems, you know, we don't just think about, you know, whether it's Windows versus Solaris versus Linux or anything like that. We think more in terms of the infrastructure software that ties the system together and makes the database and makes them aware and makes the applications run. And so when you talk about something like a super cluster, you know, what's the operating system? Well, the truth is it's got, depending on how you look at it, four or five operating systems together. And they do work together. You could think of them as kind of a new hybrid operating system. And in the future, we're going to be getting away from the kind of view of the operating system as something that runs on a server and thinking about the operating system as something that runs the data center. And so again, technologies like OpenStack are really important to us because it offers an opportunity to kind of unify and expose the infrastructure in a way that matters to the application users and application developers but shields people from the complexity of the underlying implementation of the infrastructure.  Okay, so what's the enablement opportunity? So in data center, I get that, it's certainly changing. But now the stuff happening outside the data certainly in cloud and big data, internet of things. Right now it's probably maximizing. It's on its way to the apex of the hype scale. I mean, but it's very relevant. I mean, it's just connected to the edge of the network. You know, which is not a new concept in computing edge of the network. So it's just now a lot of edges. How does that impact this system? Does it help it? Does it highlight the benefits? So there's one really important way that it matters.  But what we've seen really rise to the surface are concerns about performance. You know, with the data center kind of getting turned inside out. That's what cloud sort of does, right? For many companies now suddenly the data center is a thing out there and all your branch offices talk to is not inside your walls anymore. There's a real focus on security. Like a lot of efficiency in implementing systems that way and architecting applications so that they can be used in a kind of cloudy way. But that exposes a lot of surfaces for exploit. And so when we look at technologies like Spark and Solaris that have the, you know, a long tradition of being really, really secure, really reliable, really hard to compromise enterprise class systems. We think that plays a big role in the success of Supercluster. We've seen a lot of customers implementing e-commerce, implementing their core ERP, their core HCM database as a service, Java platform as a service, right? These are the things that are driving Supercluster forward because it gives them all the operational benefits, the performance and so on and that security. You know, we have tools in the product for end-to-end compliance validation. We have Solaris which has something called Zones and the notion of an immutable zone. We have some great technology in the database itself to prevent, you know, SQL injection attacks. So we're really concentrating on security and we think that frankly everybody, who doesn't care about security? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's tried and true, you know, it's a standard computing paradigm. I want more speeds and fees, but the real trend that you highlighted there is this inside-out data center. This is absolutely the number one issue most people are dealing with right now is because of the transformation, which is the combination of the shift and the inflection point with mobile, social, native things, the highlights, that inside-out. It absolutely does, you know, and we talked at Open World, I don't know if you've caught it at Open World, we talked about something, the next generation spark chip, which we call M7. We've been working hard to extend the instruction set of that chip and I'm going to say this just to give people a sense of kind of where we're going with our own microprocessor technology. We've been taking core functions into the chip, things that are extraordinarily hard to do in software, pulling them into the chip and one area is security. We talked about something called application data integrity and the idea is that there's a lot of software out there, C++ C software written in languages that require the programmer to manage memory themselves. That's a notoriously common source of defects in software. Really, really hard to find, happens all the time. But it's also, I believe it's the third most common vector of attack on enterprise systems is what we call buffer overflow. Now, we're engineering into the chip a solution for buffer overflow that will effectively make it impossible for that vector of attack. It's simply, you won't be able to do it.  Irrespective of how well written the software is, it simply can't happen. We think that those kinds of advances are what are really going to differentiate our whole portfolio in the long term. The perimeter is not secure, it's a whole new world inside up. Mike, thanks for coming on the queue. We are here live in Silicon Valley at the Oracle Headquarters Conference Center for the big announcement waiting to hear from Larry Ellison. But we're doing the pre-game. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.


Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. Today, we're gonna dive into the five steps that you need to take in order to be more self-discipline. Now, when we look at self-discipline, the phrase discipline makes us automatically think that discipline is a bad thing, right?   And so there tends to be a bad connotation around discipline. But when you really think about self-discipline, if you've been listening to me long enough, I always say that self-discipline is the highest form of self-love because you never have to have discipline to do things that aren't good for you. You only have to have discipline to do the things that are good for you, right? Like you don't need discipline to eat an entire thing of ice cream. No, you just do it because that's easier. You need discipline to go to the gym though, don't you? That's self-love. You don't need discipline to sleep in. You need discipline to wake up so that you can have your morning routine. That's self-love. And so when we talk about self-discipline, first thing I wanna cover is that becoming more self-discipline is one of the highest forms of loving yourself more. And so I'm gonna talk about how to be more disciplined. The way I think of discipline is I think of it like a muscle. Like with me, I think that I'm quite a disciplined person. I'm not the most disciplined person in the world. But when I was younger, there was no discipline in this body of mine. I was just a lazy tub of ice cream and food and alcohol. That's what I used to be, right? Discipline is a muscle. The more that you work out a muscle, your biceps, and the more weight that you give that workout, the bigger those muscles will get. Same thing works with your discipline. If you're not a disciplined person today, you're not born with discipline. It is something that you become better at. So discipline is a muscle, discipline is a habit. How can you become more disciplined? Because nobody is born disciplined. For me, like I said, I used to be extremely undisciplined and I developed it over years. So you don't need to be disciplined at the easy things in life. You need to be disciplined on the hard things, the things that should be done. And discipline is not about being perfect. When you think about discipline, it's not about being the most perfect version of yourself. It's like James Clear always says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you want to become. So if you start thinking that way, you realize that in order to win an election, you don't need 100% of the votes, you just need the majority of them. So as long as the majority of your actions are heading in the right direction, you're gonna be much better than if they're heading in the wrong direction. And a really good question to ask yourself before I give you these five tips, whenever you're doing something, you've got to ask yourself this question, is what I'm doing right now, getting myself closer or further away from my goals? Is what I'm doing right now, getting myself the actions that I'm taking in this very moment, is it getting me closer to or further away from my goals? Is getting you closer to your goals continue on that action? If it's getting you further away from your goals, stop and start moving towards the things that will help you get closer to your goals. So it's about winning more than it's about losing, not about being perfect. Because one thing that I know is when somebody that wants to be perfect messes up in some sort of way, a lot of times they end up just crashing the plane because then they start guilty and they start creating shame around it and you should have done this.  But when you do use that as a lesson to improve. So let's dive into it. The first tip, the five tips to be more self-discipline is try to challenge yourself to finish everything that you can. Like everything, every little tiny thing that you can, when you start something, finish it. Because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And that goes for the big things in your life, but also goes for the small things in your life. Because what you realize as you get older, as I've been in this self-development game for 17 years, is I've come to realize that it's not really the big things in life that changed my life, it's the little tiny things done consistently, every single day. And so if I can tell myself, the way I do one thing is the way I do everything and to try to get those little things done, usually I'm gonna end up being better. So like an example would be, let's say that you cook some dinner. Well, screw it, let's say you cook down, say you go for something real easy. Say you wake up in the morning and you make yourself some oatmeal. You put the oatmeal inside of a bowl, you put some water in it, you throw it inside the microwave, it's on for, I don't know, 90 seconds. You eat that and you could immediately go and you could take that bowl of oatmeal and you go, man, that bowl, these oats, they're sticking on the inside of that bowl. Now you know what I'll do, I'll put it inside of the sink and I'll put the water in because I've gotta soak it.  You could do that. Or if you want to try to finish every single thing that you do and ingrain that into being the type of person that follows through, what's the best thing to do? Take an extra 15 seconds. Get the scrubber, scrub off the oats and put that thing, dry it off and put it back where you found it. That's the way to finish everything. It might take an extra 15 seconds but you're starting to develop the discipline of finishing everything that you start. You know, let's say that you're sleeping. You wake up and maybe your spouse is already out of bed or maybe you sleep alone. You could wake up and you could just immediately go on about your day but you want to finish the act of sleeping. So what do you do? You make your bed.  When you finish the act of sleeping, you make the bed. It's these little teeny tiny things. When you can start to train yourself to do the little teeny tiny things every single time it makes it easier to start to finish all of the big things that you do. So develop this mindset of whatever I start, I'm going to finish. Don't allow yourself to stop early because stopping early is also a habit too. You want to develop the habit of following through on everything that you do. So that's the first thing. First thing is to challenge yourself to finish everything. The second thing is something that I find a lot of people are really, really bad at. Planning ahead. Some form of time management. Thinking ahead of what's going on. So let's say that you're on this fitness journey, right? You want to lose some weight or you want to gain some muscle or you want to get healthier, whatever it is. You could walk into the gym and go, well, what's my workout going to be today? Well, I'm going to go from this thing to this thing and I'm going to go from this. And you just kind of flow with it. You can flow with it if you want or you can know when you walk into the gym exactly what your workout's going to be for the day. Oh, it's buys and tries today. Oh, it's back in chess today. And you could say to yourself, these are the exact movements that I'm going to be doing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'm taking Thursday off, Friday, Saturday. These are my movements that I'm doing. This is exactly what I'm going to do. I'm just taking Sunday off as well. It makes it easier to go in and execute when you've planned ahead. Now let's say you're trying to build muscle. You're trying to get some muscle on that scrawny little body of yours, right? Okay, I'm going to need extra calories. I'm going to need extra protein. You could walk into the kitchen and just try to figure out what you're going to be eating or you could plan ahead and say, I need this amount of protein. I need this amount of calories over this many meals. This is what I'm going to eat in the morning.  And you can, if you want to, just wing it. But if you really want to get disciplined and help yourself in execution, plan ahead. And so that's the next tip, is to make sure that you plan ahead in as many things as you can. Tip number three is to design your environment. One of the best ways to get really good at executing and to be more self-disciplined is to design your environment to make execution of whatever it is you need to do easier. So let's say, for instance, that you are trying to build muscle like we're talking about. Why don't you design your environment to remove any temptation that you might have around something?  Or if you're trying to get off of alcohol and to not drink for 30 days, why don't you hide every alcohol bottle so that you don't see it? You don't have to throw it all away. I don't care if you throw it all away, but if you hide it out of sight, out of mind, you're usually not going to think about it as well. And so you start to think, if I'm gonna be more disciplined as a person, how can I make it easier on myself? Like I could make it harder on myself, or I could just make it easier. Okay, I'm not gonna drink alcohol for 30 days because I've never done that before and that's something I wanna do. Remove all the alcohol from sight. And you're just not gonna think about as much. If you have friends that like to go out and party, tell them the next 30 days you can't go out and party. Whatever you can do to start to be more intentional in design your external environment to do so. Let's say you wanna get more disciplined and you don't wanna read, or you wanna read more and not watch as much TV. Really simple way to design your environment. Take your TV off the wall for 30 days, put it inside of a different room or put it inside of a closet and on your coffee table, put out books. That alone is designing an environment that used to be made to watch TV inside of your living room to now you have an environment that is designed to reading. And so it just makes it easier to get into the habit to take the right actions when you design your environment correctly. So when you look at how you wanna be more self-discipline ask yourself this question. How can I design my environment to make taking that action easier on myself? Simple, that's number three. Number four, this is a tip that one of my bosses a few years ago, eight, nine years ago gave me and she used to have it on her wall and it said progress, not perfection and done is better than perfect. When you mess up, make adjustments, don't shame yourself, don't make yourself feel guilty. When you mess up and something didn't go exactly the way that you wanted it to, maybe you tried not to drink alcohol and somehow alcohol slipped into your face, right? Like that's just happened. Oops, I just opened my mouth and alcohol fell in, okay?  You could do all of those things or maybe you wanted to not eat sugar and you had a moment of weakness and you ate sugar. Instead of when you mess up, just beating yourself up, make small adjustments. Okay, let me take a step back.  What can I do to make sure that doesn't happen again? Because what most people do is they just, we shame ourselves, we guilt ourselves, I should have done better, what did I do wrong?  Man, I'm never gonna be able to create the life that I wanted, the body I wanted, the mindset I wanted, the business that I want and we start to beat ourselves up. Instead of beating ourselves up, what we do, take a step back and make adjustments. Just take a step back, dude, chill out.  And we go, okay, I messed up. I have been doing really good. It's about progress, not perfection. Let's say that your goal is to work out every day for the next 30 days. And on day 13, you didn't plan accordingly. You got 12 days in, you get all 12 days.  What happens only?  And they focus on the one time they screwed up versus the 12 days in a row where they actually had progress. It's about progress, not perfection. Remind yourself of how well you've been doing. You see your moment of weakness.  Make adjustments so that you can make sure that you try to get around that again. So you take a step back. You see what happened.  So that's number four. Focus on progress, not perfection. And number five, reward yourself, right? If your goal is to try to do incredible with your health over the next 30 days, give yourself a cheat meal every once in a while. It's a lot easier to go. If you're like, I'm gonna eat really healthy for 30 days. If at one day you have, if you know at day 15, okay, I'm gonna go on this 30 day journey. On day 15, I'm gonna get one cheat meal.  Then what happens is day one through 14, I'm like, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined, I gotta be disciplined because I'm gonna have a reward at day 15.  I need another two weeks off. And then over those 30 days, I had one crazy meal where I had a whole bunch of fun and I got everything that I wanted, but I got my fill. Now I can go for another 14 days. And so how can you develop a system of actually rewarding yourself? You know, when I used to do another example completely different, when I used to do 100 sales phone calls, right? We would do 100 sales phone calls. One of my managers taught me how to do this and he would say, he was like, hey, what's your favorite candy? I was like, Skittles.  I'm like, okay, cool.  And every single time that you get 10 phone calls done, give yourself three Skittles. And you get another 10 phone calls done, give yourself three Skittles. And I started doing this over and over and over again and it drove me to take the action that I needed to take because I wanted the Skittles. And I got the 10 phone calls done and I ate three Skittles. Oh my God, that was so good. Okay, I can't skip ahead. Let me go ahead and get another 10 done. And it was like breadcrumbs that kind of made me keep going on my way to success. And so can you develop a system of actually starting to reward yourself for taking the action that you need to in order to create the life that you want to? Whatever it might be, whether it's the Skittles, every 10 phone calls, or whether it's the cheat meal once a week, or whatever it is that kind of is the rewarding so that you can go, dammit, you know what I'm doing really good? Okay, let me keep on this path. And you use this. It's actually called the dopamine reward system. Your brain actually works better when you have a dopamine reward system. They've actually found that people will actually be more motivated to work out tomorrow.  It seems counterproductive to be able to have chocolate right after a workout, but that little bit of chocolate is a dopamine reward system for your brain, which makes your brain more likely to want to work out tomorrow. So how can you develop a reward system around everything that you do? So those are the five things that I got for you to be more self-disciplined. Number one, challenge yourself to finish everything. Number two, plan ahead. Number three, design your environment. Number four, focus on progress, not perfection. Number five, make sure to reward yourself. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories and tag me at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Once again, if you love this podcast, you'll also love my YouTube. Go to YouTube and type in Rob Dial, R-O-B-D-I-A-L to check out some of the videos that we've been putting up there to help you improve yourself.  Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.


Good morning. It's 11 o'clock in Eastern State of Time, so it's time to start the functional group update for the front-end team. My name is Jacob Schatz and I will be representing the AC and the DC team, so Tim as well as myself. So I'm going to share this.  Great. See if I can. There we go. Okay. So some accomplishments, some things we've achieved. And I will show screenshots of these after the slide. The issue discussions was completely rewritten in VUJS, so the issue discussions is all the comments on an individual issue page and it was completely rewritten and it's already in and you probably didn't even know that we rewrote it. It has made the issue discussion pages very, very fast. So now when you go to an issue discussion page, it loads the page and then it loads the discussions asynchronously after the page is loaded and that has made the issue page faster initially but it's just the beginning of performance improvements that we will be making to that page. The group level issue boards went in and we fixed the merge request, widget compatibility with external services and integrations like Team City and Jenkins. The move issue button has moved to the sidebar and we now have really great consistent drop downs everywhere. Also we gave the service desk a new UI. So when you first go to the issue page, you'll see now this loading spinner which is going to change into what we call a skeleton loader and a skeleton loader you've probably seen on other sites which is where it looks like if it's an individual comment, it looks like the comment but there's these bars and it looks like it's like faded typing or something like that. So that's called a skeleton loader. We're going to be putting those in shortly and once it loads, it loads the rest of the comments and this is all done in VUJS and it has made it much, much faster already. Here's a picture of the consistent drop downs. You can see that also they got a slightly new look. They look really nice and the move button is now in the sidebar so this is on an individual issue page. You can see that nice move drop down and the group level issue boards is just really fantastic and here's the service desk UI. We gave prominence to this user interface. We have some concerns. There's still a lot of regressions on the front end but the number is going down a lot. We've done some research into regressions and how they happen and how they're created and if some are preventable and this is yielded tons of information which we will share soon. While working on deliverables is still an unsolved problem. It's a time management thing because there's still regressions to and there's still deliverables to deliver. Right now the only solution is to do less deliverables so it's something that we're currently trying to solve and then the other question is can we fix all the performance issues while still shipping new features? This is also another time management thing that it's something that we've been working on. So hiring. We are hiring two front end developers, one for Tim's team and one for my team, one for the AC team and one for the DC team. We're looking for mid to senior developers hopefully on the higher end of mid. So if you know anybody then tell them to apply and then you can put them down as a reference. Some cool stuff that we are working on on the side. The repo editor is happening. It will be going in. There's a link to a list of bugs. You should have a PDF of this presentation in the event. The CI CD jobs page proof of concept which is something that's really cool that Philippe is working on. So you now have these tabs on the jobs page that allows you to see multiple things and switch between them. We're going to be putting together a Selenium viewer. So this is something that where Selenium allows you to test on multiple browsers. And so from a front end perspective, it's really important to test things on different browsers, test things on Firefox on Chrome and especially IE, which if you aren't aware has the most problems classically. So it's going to be really fantastic in the future when people are saying I want to test this not just on, you know, I don't want to just test this test going through the command line. I want this to also run specifically on Firefox and take screenshots and show me the screenshots and let's see what it actually looks like because some tests are purely visual. And we're currently testing with Selenium. There's a proof of concept that Bryce has created where we're running all of, all of GitLab and we're just taking screenshots and just taking a look at them. And then we're running a diff, a visual diff, to see what's changed since the last version. And then we can alert people when something's changed. And then we'll see if it was an intended UI change so that we don't have as many regressions in our user interface. We're creating sheets for SVGs. So classically what happens is an SVG is loaded individually on the page. Now, all the SVGs are on one SVG. And we can just move to a specific area of that spreadsheet. And then we can just pull in that sprite and then improves performance a lot. And that turns into a huge optimization. And also what that does is that we created a separate repo for the user, for the UX people. They can upload their SVGs to that repository. And then it's going to get automatically compiled and included in GitLab. So then the work of the SVG creation and all that can go happen in a different repository. So it's a really cool idea that Tim put together. We're working very hard on performance. This is just a highlight of some of the things. We've done tons of stuff, but this is just a highlight of some of the cool stuff that we've done. Like I said, the issue discussion refactor, you can see that graph down there, that stand head included in his talk, was 2600 milliseconds went down to 1.9 and just the beginning, this from purely refactoring it in Vue.js. So the stuff we can do from now on is going to be huge.  They only get loaded afterwards. Some stuff that we're working on right now. There's a huge meta issue to check out the front end performance with network stuff. So we make tons of requests to the network. And can we make that faster? I'll have a screenshot to show you what some of the performance problems are there. When we load the issue page, there shouldn't be that much of a difference between 20 and 100 issues. But what about 1000 issues? We can't really support that very well right now. So we're talking about loading the issue page in chunks. And it actually works really well. And the chunks can be any size. That means that you load all the all the issues, but maybe 50 at a time, 100 at a time, 200 at a time, three at a time, it doesn't matter. The point is to not load all of them at once. And they're not going to get to the bottom that quickly. And if we improve the performance of loading the discussions, then we can improve the performance of loading them in chunks. So the thing is, why shouldn't we be able to load tons and tons of issues? Our competition currently has issues that have, you know, 500 comments in them. And what they do to solve that is they just cut out the middle comments. And it looks like a little page tear, and then you can load the middle comments. So there's different ways to handle this in the UX. And we're going to try and experiment with all of those. Eventually, we are also going to do the same thing we did with the issue discussion. We're going to rewrite that merge request discussion in view as well. And that will make a huge, huge improvement on the diffs. And on just the discussions on merge request, because the merge requests are classically slower than the issue discussions, but they're also harder to rewrite. They're more complex. So that's going to be something. Now this graph is crazy looking. But it also highlights something really important, which is just that you can see the yellow on the left hand side is all of the JavaScript libraries. They're all combined. You can see one called common. You can see one called main. And those are already combined. And we're still loading a lot of them. And you can see all the way on the right hand side, that gray bar that says discussions.json. So by the time we finish loading the JavaScript to when we actually load the comments, there's that big gap in the middle. And you can see on the bottom, all that is just evaluating tons of JavaScript. And so this is where we're at right now. And what we want to do is basically remove all that stuff in the middle. Because if we can remove all that stuff in the middle, then we can load the comments faster. So in one hand, this graph is really confusing. On the other hand, it's like, look at that big white space in the middle, we want to lessen the white space. And that's going to be that's going to improve the performance a tremendous amount. And I annotated what all the different things that are happening here. So this I'm going to take a look at the questions. Let me see if I can see my mouse. And if anybody has any questions, feel free to shout them out. Right, the, the, exactly an example of a skeleton loader is like what Slack does, or if you've looked at Quora, I think that's how you pronounce it, Quora does that too. Yes, comments. I meant comments. Thank you, Victor. Does anybody have any questions at all? I'll wait like another 10 seconds. What am I most excited about? Thanks, Job. I'm really excited about. So as an example, when I wrote the new repo editor that we're going to put in the merger quest for that repo editor is like almost unopenable at this point. It's something that we can't even like barely open because there's just so many, there's like 800 comments in it. And I'm sure that other organizations have the same exact situation. So I'm really excited to make these things just load really, really fast. I'm really excited about improving the performance of these things. And I'm also really excited about getting the repo editor in when it's ready. Because we really shouldn't have any issues or merger quests that are just unopenable. That's silly. Yes, the repo editor will be lit. I knew what that meant. Okay, thank you so much, everyone. Does anybody else have any questions? I heard somebody make a peep. Okay. All right, have a great rest of your day. Bye.


Hey friends tonight We are gonna be dining at Victoria and Albert's here at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort And I am so excited. This is the fanciest restaurant here at Walt Disney World It has five diamonds and five stars in all the major categories from travel networks And it's very expensive and pricey and I've always wanted to eat here and tonight's gonna be my very first time So I want to a little make a little video to show you guys We're gonna eat some food drink some wine and have a fancy Victoria and Albert's kind of night Any hoes Let's go do this Here it is Disney's Grand Floridian Resort And this is where the restaurant is Victoria and Albert's a part of getting a reservation here Valet parking is included with it So you get free valet parking if you plan on coming to this restaurant kind of fancy This is such a bucket list item for me And it's not something like a lot of people get the chance or opportunity to do So I'm very thankful that I'm even here in this predicament where I can experience this and make a video for you And it's a very hard to get reservation. In fact, it's probably the hardest to get reservation in Walt Disney World Dates come available every 60 days And I had to wake up at exactly like 5 a.m. And I was there at 6 a.m To get the reservation and it was gone within minutes So I was lucky enough and there's only like under 20 tables allowed per day like per day You know what I mean in each dining room and we'll get to all the details about everything a little bit later in the video But it's safe to say for two people. It's gonna cost you around a thousand dollars to eat at Victoria and Albert's Disney's Grand Floridian Resort would have the most luxurious Restaurant in Walt Disney World. It's so beautiful in here the piano when they're playing down here It's so nice and I think we're gonna make our way up to the second floor. That's where the restaurant is I just love being here though. It's so elegant and really transforms us to a different time fancier time Like I mentioned, I've always wanted to come and dine at this restaurant But I've kind of been afraid to come and I get anxiety Being in environments that I really don't know anything about, you know, I mean, I'm not a very adventurous eater I eat foods very plain But at least I'm coming with some friends that you know They have a little bit or maybe an expanded palette and I'm always eager to learn things like that You know, I mean, I've never experienced something like this before so I can't tell you what it's gonna Be like until I do it, you know, I mean and that's also a reason why I want to come and experience this because I think After this I can officially say I've eaten at every single restaurant in Walt Disney World, you know, I mean So I hope you guys enjoy it and also please forgive me if I don't know what I'm talking about Because like I like I said, I it's hard for me to pronounce words I don't know what fork to use and I'm just a just a regular guy here with a steamboat Millie Mickey hat on At least I got some good friends some friends to help me Here are my friends for this evening Kristen right down Main Street Sean Mr. Planters, Mr. Peanut Or you're Mr. Monopoly He's out doing all of us. I know This man, I mean when we found out we were coming to Victorian Alberts There was it was no question what Sean was gonna be wearing the top hat the cane the soup with the tail I mean it of course it had to be done Like I mentioned there's a dress code that is strictly enforced no, you know ball caps I'm gonna probably check that when I get in there, but if you have any questions I'll put a link in the description and it'll take you to the know before you go by Walt Disney World They'll have the exact specs price and policies just so you can reference them because like I said Maybe a lot of people might want to watch this video to see what it's like to actually come dine at a restaurant like this Or Victorian Alberts, you know, I mean the the the the top tier restaurant here at Walt Disney World Maria and Chris from Lake Buena Visitors is also gonna be joining us to First time your first time right Yeah Well, that's because of the 60 is a 60 days. Yeah, because so once the the day opened Yeah, I was up by like 5 a.m. So we just happened to get up at the same time at the same day Hey, let's go to yeah There are three different dining rooms here at Victorian Alberts They have the regular dining room and then they have Queen Victoria's room and then they had the chef's table Which is a private table in the kitchen and they all vary on menu and prices the the regular dining room Where we're gonna be eating tonight is just around 295 dollars per person and then it goes to like 375 for the Queen Victoria's room and there's only four couples in there a night So it's a very quiet quiet setting and then it's about five hundred dollars a person for the chef's table And that's all you I mean for you and your party. You're just in the kitchen talking one-on-one with the chef And I think it's really cool And I know some people might think it could be expensive But this is like a five to six hour event like you're in there for a long time and it's an experience more than just a meal I know people that spend more money on Taylor Swift concerts and not saying that's not a bad thing either But you know, it's depends on what you can do and how much it costs to entertain you for a night And tonight I'm kind of excited to experience it do something. I've never done before Inside Disney's Grand Floridian, you have the main lobby with the piano player and it's very fancy And on the second floor you have Victorian Elberts right up here Very very fancy walking through here. I like the rug and the carpet little foyer Yeah Very very fancy. And as you can see right up there Forbes a travel guy Victorian Elberts verified as one of the finest properties in the world 2023 five diamond Very fancy We are gonna be using very small cameras and microphones while we are in the restaurant So it may sound loud But we're probably just gonna be talking in our normal voices and you're gonna be able to hear, you know Everyone at the table even The cast members are gonna be taking care of us because of these little mics and the cameras that we have are no bigger than a Cell phone. They don't have a big lens It's very very discreet And I think it's perfect for this setting because I didn't know how to approach that You know I mean because it's a very intimate setting and I don't want to be a disruption to anybody else So for the most part we're gonna be very quiet low-key with some fancy equipment and Hopefully you guys enjoy Thank you Welcome drink from our zero-proof pairing this evening This is gonna be a warm apple cider It's made with two different kinds of apples Sub-shining these dates a little bit of clove and cinnamon, but it's made purposes Now open up your outfit Cheers, please enjoy Tastes like Christmas honestly It's so delicious The service so far has been exceptional They escort you to the table if you have to get up to use the restroom They escort you to the restroom They tuck you into the table like a little blanky. They tuck you in they put napkins on your lap it's very very fancy and Like I said, this is gonna be several hours So I'll be in and out kind of highlighting some of the things but I don't want to talk too much You know, I mean you'll hear us talking, but mostly it's because the mics We're gonna have actually on the table, so it's gonna pick up a lot But for the most part, you know, just gonna kind of show and let you guys see it all for yourselves Wow, thank you This is very cool So please feel free at your convenience open your invitations to dying Inside the envelope tonight, you'll find your choice of two minutes First menu you'll see is listed as our dining room menu, which is historically served to the 12 tables here in our main dining The second menu is our chef's degustation or chef's tasting menu Historically served in the Queen Victoria room and also the chef's table tonight Chef Matthews extending the invitation to enhance to the entire dining room So you'll have your option of either menu to choose tonight The chef's menu will include two additional courses, which is the main difference between the menus The first additional course flown in fresh from off the coast of North Fork Long Island It's a beautiful filet of wild striped bass Butter poached and served with a brioche carabinero prawn toast in a beautiful aromatic Eastern Asian lobster sauce Then the second additional course on the chef's menu is the Miyazaki A5 This is the imported Japanese wagyu beef coming from the Miyazaki prefecture on the southernmost island of Manila in Japan A region known for farming cattle for over 400 years Going back to meet the chef. Oh wow. It's so pretty This is amazing Thank you. You want to take a picture with chef. Yes. I don't know if we slip to Sarah So far everything has been exceptional and I can't believe we got our own custom menus And we're also going to be able to eat or dine off of the chef's menu from the chef's table But it is three hundred and I think ninety five dollars. The price is on the bottom there But I'm doing it. I think most of us are doing it. Some of us are doing the wine pairing But I'm just honored and we got to go to the back of the kitchen like this is beyond like I've never experienced anything like this and when I said it's probably gonna be the most fanciest menu or fanciest dining experience It definitely is like already Cocktails For the whole fashion Which is meant to give And then add the seltzer to the cocktail Starting our chef has designed these bites to be enjoyed using your natural utensils So we're actually going to bring some warm towels so that you can try to your fingers after words So if we start to the left, we are going to have a new zealomangosteen tartlet Inside of a crispy-flavored tartlet shells. We're going to find some grilled legosteen along with an avocado wheelie Along the top you're going to have a carrot and mandarin veil If we move into the center, everyone is going to have a Danish pastry called an evil skewer This one has been produced using some sweet potato Everyone is going to find some Preserved persimmon puree and then four of you are going to have a low-movi barricade on the top For four of you. We will have a venison carpaccio sandwich This reminds me of like the three-shell method from demolition man. Do you ever see that movie? The demolition method. You know what I mean? It's like you don't know how to use the three shells. I don't know Oh I'm I'm pretty shocked that the first two things I've eaten I had no idea what they were and I was so nervous Ended up being amazing. Yeah, I don't know what that was, but it was good I'm worried that this is going to ruin the streak for me Mini ice cream looking sandwich And this is coming from an area called the montanide de rems Which is a very hilly infertile region just to the south and west of the capital city This is a region that's famous for growing the pinot noir used in some of the most exceptional wines in the world Sorry, I love that one. So they actually uh grow pinot noir Chardonnay and pinot mounier all in champagne and those are the three building blocks of uh of champagne I found a nice little corner over here So whenever I step out, you know, I'm just going to give you guys a quick recap If not, I'm just letting the camera roll and catching just you know our discussion with the servers and stuff like that I really don't want to dive into pacifics or anything like that. So mostly when I'm talking I'm either talking to other people sitting at the table and not talking to the camera Just kind of listening. I've been taking it all in a lot. The music is kind of beautiful And I love the sparkling water like I love how you got fancy water I wish it had the really cool water the uh the uh cell bar they I think it is It's like glacier water, but they don't have any. They're out of stock. It's okay. I got some at home though There it is the vichy canta cut alone Fancy sparkling water here. I've never seen anything like that. So me and they got a pairing. Thank you Yes, fancy water for spain from spain for our Wow I love it bubbly blessed The caviar has arrived We have for you the royal belgian oestetra caviar You're finding it laid over top of the parsnip puree Four of you are going to find some smoked bone marrow along with that parsnip puree Now the majority of our produce comes to us from here in ohio from farmer lee jones's garden Look at this I've never had caviar like this before No, I'm dipping it like chips and guac or salsa and they got bone marrow underneath there with a parsnip A guac over none, but it tastes really good Brutal green tea is essential our green tea called fucajica chant We then infuse it with the juice of strawberries top it with the foam of marcha And then this is a dehydrated shiso leaf in here unfamiliar. Shiso is a japanese herb with the flavors of mint and basil Wow The menu itself has everything laid out and honestly, I can't understand like I some of the You know wards that they use to describe the food. I really don't understand So I'm just like going at it and the first two things that I bet I was like I have no idea what this is It was just presented to me and I took a bite and I loved it first one I was like wow and I'll put a list like the menu.  I want to try the quail. I like quail. I think So the appetizer course this evening is you want the ginger taste compressed Along the top you're going to find some penguins with some thin and shaved compressed kohlrabi then in the light dish at the base you have grilled kohlrabi that was rubbed in a sweet wire lemon oil from california The crab meat is along the top of the grilled kohlrabi then we're finishing with the crab-induced kohlrabi sauce with a black lime and honey milk Oh How is it you need to be the one? Crab's good. Crab's good You see you got the crab in there. I first I thought it was like a corn soup But this is a hollandaise sauce and it's um, what's that word they use? Ambitious? Fumcious Something more on the fatty Okay Along with the lemongrass and ginger aioli Then I'm adding a caramonero base sauce with white soy Yuzu and caloria chili I've never had sea bass before so I'm a little nervous But like I said, it's about adventure and learning Wow they are pretty easy to eat Is that the sea bass? They're buttery almost like a lobsters Like a lobster Of course this evening we have put it down with pasta It was produced using something that looks like a dowel rod with a wooden block Similar to the process of making meal here, Steph is making the pasta and rolling it across the wooden block Allowing the grooves to form in the gargoyle It has been dressed in a cauliflower purée You're going to find some romanesco and cauliflower along with it. And then we have santa barbara kuni So you have the raw piece along the top along with the sea butter finishing the pasta We'll still get carrot in the style of a botargo with some yuzu and chili Claw ranjilli And then we have a green purée in the middle that has a base of castle botana olives Along with raw pieces of leaf pistachios with parmesan, parotta, and green gargoyle Thank you so much It's a char d'lis with some lamb belly bacon and crushed pistachios Personally, I don't think anything is gonna live up to that a5 wagyu at the end And it's kind of sad because we have to wait till the very end to actually get to it I've had a5 before in Epcot and so far, I mean, I really loved The pasta was really cool. And it's cool that, you know, we heard a little backstory about how it's from Hoboken And that's where the Roosevelt's team is the chef, you know, got some inspiration there And then also the lamb chop. I've never liked lamb before I've never been like I've never been a fan of lamb and that was one of the best things I've ever eaten Like if you you realize how amazing that is like that's like someone saying they don't like a certain Like item and then liking it because of how it was prepared Like there's I don't think there's any place on the earth I'm gonna be able to like lamb like I did tonight and that kind of boggles my mind Thank you Or at the same time The salmon has been pan seared While the quail was dry aged with something called shio koji So shio koji is a fermented rice product that is used in the preparation of making sauté So it gives a little extra Goumame to the dish before being dry aged and grilled over Japanese beef chocan taro Now on the side from every morning, we have some sunflower seeds So chef Gabriella wanted to produce something that gave you the feeling of texture of risotto But didn't leave you feeling full and heavy afterwards So she's taken these sunflowers in front of the cookbook With the sunflowers for I'm sorry, the Sanchoed and mascarpone cheese puree Finishing with crispy sanchoed chips with mustard greens and parigord large truffles First time Coming to us from the Miyazaki prefecture It was grilled over Japanese beef chocan charcoals And laid over top of the bed of caramelized bite-length onions At the base, we have a vinaigrette with black vinegar, salt, and chili On the side, you're finding a short braised dairy rice called koshi goba Browned in the style of a yaki and dairy using french butter and wagyu renderings Underneath the rice patty, you're going to find some sauteed hedgehog mushrooms along with braised oxtail We're then finishing the rice patty with onion jam Crispy onions and a house prepared for a coffee Hedgehog Yes an A5 81 point score Oh my lord I accept the sticker I Hate me This looks like a beautiful Faustalavan is the celebration very similar to a mardi gras but in the in the nordic countries So this uh the holiday happens on the sunday before ash wednesday And as opposed to wandering around a french quarter drinking tons of hurricanes The people of specifically denmark will actually travel to all of the bakeries in their town Each bakery will have created a different kind of ball for the Faustalavan festival And so this is technically a Faustalavan bowler And so our Faustalavan bowler is based on the idea of pretzels and beer So we take a pate de choux a pastry We then cut it in half and fill it with a caramel sauce that's made with milkstout beer pretzel ice cream And malted corn flakes with a little bit of 23 karat gold leaf powder So it's meant almost as a little ice cream sandwich and uh, let me tell you I hope you enjoy it because I know you will Oh boy And once we lined it up with candy-toned spiel Now the sphere is sitting at the top of the gingerbread foie gras cookie With some chantilly cream at the base With some coconut sponge cake and sugared almonds And you're going to find cardamom and brown buttered twill in the shape of a snowflake Some bites to welcome you We will conclude this evening With some bites to say goodnight Say thank you for joining us and just enjoy some last thank you Beautiful flavors here Courtesy of our pastry team. Oh, they look amazing All those little mandalines So we'll start there if you like on top of the high pedestal This you know these are technically what our pastry team will do is they go more by it like our true season So our winter We had our holiday desserts, but then we had our winter desserts premiere on the winter solstice around december 21st 22nd And so that was of course the first day of our Snowflake in a citrus wonderland which was our dessert that you just enjoyed and now we move of course into our winter Friandese now as I said on the elevated plate Uh, I'm sure you're all familiar of how important gingerbread is to us here at the Grand Floridian during the holidays and during our winter So this is our gingerbread madeline to uh For you to enjoy as we move to the small plate in front of you. Uh, this is our take on a raspberry bake well if you're Dinner was amazing and now I think we're gonna head home And i'm gonna give you a little recap and let you guys know everything my thoughts And kind of break it down a little bit more detailed. Well, I don't even know how detailed I can get but I liked it a lot I Was gonna bring you back some of that a5 wagyu, but they only gave me enough for uh one or two bites So here's a nice little cookie for you. Whoop And she also has a pizza pad You can't grab it. What are you doing here? You want to break it?  You got a little little Pads right there. Bada boom Yeah, good stuff And with that we are done here tonight Uh, I'm all dressed down now back at home I wanted to close out the video give you like my final thoughts on everything because really can't go into it Much while you're in there. I thought it was everything and more than everything I expected Like I thought it was such fun and amazing atmosphere. I thought it was going to be stiff, you know uncomfortable, but uh, I mean most of the weight staff and uh the chefs and like everyone was just kind of warm and welcoming and uh like I enjoyed my overall experience I thought it was so fun Uh being adventurous and trying foods that I've you know never even had an interest in trying before But getting a great opportunity Where you can see a team of people putting together a very small portion of food And it makes you you know kind of respect it a little bit more So, you know what I mean, uh, and you kind of feel like okay Well, if I'm not you know that big into this type of thing if I'm gonna try it I'm gonna try it at a very good moment and you can't ask for a better moment than that And some of the things I absolutely loved like the sea bass was great And uh the a5 I loved it was so good I mean, they only give you a little bit though. They can't give you a lot. Obviously. It's very very expensive Uh the uh the lamb I thought I never would like like lamb like I talked about it Uh, a lot of the things were very cool And I know I didn't show much of it in the video because like I said It's not like I could just break it down into like a little like small food review I knew I wanted to kind of just show you and have uh, it was great because uh, The wait staff that was taking care of us They were kind of talking about each of the items and I was like oh Well, they can probably describe it a lot better than I would ever be able to So I kind of left that in and just went with the flow of like the evening and it ended up being amazing We were there for holy moly. I'd say We got there around five ish and we left around 11 p.m. Yeah And uh, I uh when I first got there, uh the original dining room menu It was like 295 and then they gave us the option to upgrade to the chef's table menu After we went in the kitchen, we got to meet the chef and uh, I was so pumped after that. I was like, I'm doing it Uh, so it ended up being a 395 almost 400 Uh, and uh, of course I bought some drinks, you know, I bought an old fashion stuff So uh, just around 500 a person like I said if you end up going as a couple It's safe to say you'll spend around a thousand dollars per person Just because if you plan on having drinks or any pairings or anything like that But if you're really tight and you're just going to go straight like still water You could probably get it for about 300, you know 350 a person Like uh, then you also have the gratuity and tax that you have to add into and uh, you know The staff there is beyond exceptional We, uh, you know left great, you know gratuity for them because honestly, it's an art form And they only have one table most of the night like that whole entire restaurant revolves around you The whole entire restaurant there's only like 12 12 other tables in the restaurant And they're not like getting up and leaving and like going like other tables are coming in Like we're here and we're there for like several hours So you got to make sure you take care of them because it was like I felt so amazing And like I said, even if you know a lot of people now, that's like probably the most expensive dinner I've ever bought and like I said, I Definitely will remember this as a night of memorable moments I had a great time and it was amazing, you know trying something unique I would definitely do it again. I could tell you I've had you know fun times some You know nights, you know at concerts or sporting events or even that bars where you spend a lot of money that you know You can't even remember, you know what I mean? So like a lot of people like oh, it's very expensive if you're into Creating a great moment like some great, you know memories of food and cuisine This is definitely worth it. And you know what it's just hard to get a reservation And the police, uh, you know exceeded all expectations for me on a level of experience Uh, and uh, just like I said being able to create a great memory like that. I'll never forget it So I hope you enjoyed the video. I enjoyed making it and uh, we'll see you next time Bye


Hey guys, welcome back to another week of What's For Dinner. My name is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food. If you're new to our channel, our channel is all about the food. We do taste test recipes, grocery hauls and What's For Dinner. And we are kicking off another week of What's For Dinner with some salad. Now, salad as a meal is not something I normally make a lot. You know, normally for us, salad is a side dish, but with this coronavirus outbreak, I'm trying even harder to use what we have on hand. So I was able to go to the grocery store before things got really crazy. And I got salad and some other fresh produce and I'll be using that later on this week for What's For Dinners. But let me show you what we're having tonight, which is this huge dinner salad. And we used this Caesar salad kit from Aldi. So I got two of those kits when I did my grocery haul last week. Like I said before, everything got super crazy. So I have the salad kit, which comes with Caesar salad dressing, the lettuce, of course. And then it comes with croutons and salad dressing. To that, I added these chicken bites. So if you aren't aware, I have been working on our freezer fridge and pantry for a while, doing a little challenge, trying to use what we have. And so this is something that we had in the freezer. It's from Sam's. And initially when I got it, I thought it was going to taste like Chick-fil-A and it doesn't. How did I aren't crazy about these? I won't be buying these again. They have kind of, to me, like a pickle-ish taste to it. And I'm not crazy about it. But since we're having salad, I decided to bake some up in the oven. And then as you can see, I shredded it and added it to the salad. We're also having some bacon as well. I had some frozen pre-cooked bacon in the freezer. So I took out a few slices and cooked it up and chopped it up and added it to our salad, along with some boiled eggs that I sliced up. And then I added some extra Parmesan cheese, grated Parmesan cheese that I had in my freezer as well. So again, just trying to use up stuff that we already have since groceries are so scarce. So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight. And I'll see you guys next time. Hey guys, so let me show you what we're having for dinner tonight. We are having some spaghetti. I don't know if I can call it spaghetti because we're not using spaghetti noodles, but it's a meat sauce with some pasta. So let me show you what I use to make the meat sauce. So I had some ground beef in my freezer. So I used that. I also had this pepperoni in my freezer as well. So I threw that in. I use this marinara sauce from HED, which is a local grocery store here in Texas. And I like my spaghetti sauce chunky. So I had this in the pantry, these tomatoes, two different cans of tomatoes right there.  This lighthouse freeze dried red onions. So I threw that into the sauce as well as well as some other seasoning. As far as the pasta, like I said, I'm not using spaghetti noodles as you can see. I had this pasta in my pantry that I needed to use. It is fusoloni. I think I'm pronouncing that right. So I used half of the bag for our dinner tonight. We'll probably have leftovers tomorrow so I use the other half then. And then we are having a Caesar salad on the side. And so this is a salad kit that I picked up from Aldi. And here it is in the bowl. So I'll portion that out for us. But it comes with the lettuce of course, Caesar dressing, shredded cheese and croutons. And then for dessert, I made another thing from our pantry. Again, trying to use up what we have. So I had this in my pantry. All you add to it is softened butter and a tablespoon of water.  So I just added this in too, just to get rid of something else.  As you can see, we've already taken a bite out of them and they're really good. I love these little bars. So I guess you guys can probably hear some crying in the background. But anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight. And we'll see you guys next time. Hey guys, so for dinner tonight, we are having something from our pantry. This is Goya dirty rice mix right here. And it says to just add meat. And so there's a recipe on the back right here. And it calls for a half a pound of chicken breast, which I did have in the freezer. And then it also calls for green pepper and red onion did not have green pepper. So I didn't use that. And I did not have a red onion. I instead had green onion in the fridge. So that's what I use to make this. Here it is. It's a quick skillet meal. And then I made some fresh broccoli to go with it as well. So this is, and it tastes okay. I don't know that I would buy this again. It's not as flavorful as Zadarans. I think there's another brand out there. But it's not as flavorful as the New Orleans brand. So I don't know that I would buy this Goya brand again. I mean, it's okay. It was in the pantry and I needed to use it. So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight. And we'll see you guys next time. Hey guys, so for dinner tonight, we are having a frozen pizza. I picked this up at Tom Thumb a while back ago and it was in our freezer. Signature select brand. And it has, it's a supreme pizza and it has spicy Italian sausage, pepperoni, black olives and roasted vegetables. And so you cook it on the oven rack directly. And then that's what I did. And then I took it out of the oven and put it on a cookie sheet so that we could cut it. And I always forget whenever I take a frozen pizza out of the packaging, I forget to redistribute the ingredients so that it looks a little better than it does now. But anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight. And we'll see you guys next time. Hey guys, so we are having a quick and simple pantry meal tonight. We are having some beans and rice and Howard is having avocado with his. So we are using these black beans from Aldi. And then we are using this jasmine rice that I picked up from the Dollar Tree. And then of course, avocado. I'm sure we're gonna be having a lot more meals like this with everything that is going on. It's really hard to find groceries, you know, around here. So we'll be having more meals like this, good old beans and rice. See you guys next time.


The thing about the Agile People Conference is people's ability to question what we actually are doing today, because of the greater will to change things for the better for tomorrow. This conference gathers leaders, HR people and coaches who are the ones working with this thing. So this is the conference to be for us. We of course would like to be very enlightened with all these fabulous speakers that will be here today and to get some energy and some waking up calls. I think the more people come to actual conferences and network people, both theoreticians, consultants, practitioners, the more likely we are to advance agility as a weapon to actually change society and change organisations. I'm here to talk about employee engagement and why it's so important to create great experiences for people because we want to tap into the passion of people and we cannot do that if we stick them into boxes or just script what they're supposed to be doing. So we have to tap into their passion and unleash that passion to make great things happen. I think Agile is really important because the world is moving much more quickly and so the idea of waterfall processes and long lead times and people working in silos needs to just go away. I think what's really important about conferences like this one is the mix of different disciplines and getting a variety of ideas and just the diversity of perspectives into a room and to learn together, especially when it's Agile and HR and not just Agile or just HR. I think it's in the mix and in the diversity that the value lies. I'm here to get inspired and I'm here to get a next level to my own Agile coaching so I can build on whatever I do in my daily work. Agile is important because traditional management causes a lot of suffering in organizations and which is spilling out over in society as well. I think the most important thing about Agile right now is to get back to principles. Methodologies and frameworks have become too strict and I think principles are the key thing that allows organizations to become performant. The Agile people conference is really important because any transformation is about people so we should start from people. It's great to be here today especially to mingle with other people who like Agile and together with my colleagues and bring this back home. The energy level is sky high and there are a lot of people here that are trying to make better companies and a better society right here in Scandinavia so it's really exciting to be here. I think a conference like the Agile people is very important to get Agile to the next level by bringing in the HR and the leadership on Agile rather than just the processes and the methods. Working as an Agile coach can be very lonely even though it's a very social interactive job and it's very important to meet other people to brief your problems and meet people who have maybe come up with good solutions. This is the space to be to tap into future and say how can we change how can we collectively do things better. It's been really cool to be here this is my first living example of an Agile conference and it's I think a living illustration about how it is that you can turn an Agile alive in the company so it's been a real inspiration I really enjoy it.


The Bitcoin system is so perfect that I think it's going to be the future. For me it looks bulletproof. I'm pretty sure this is going to work, not only for us, but for humanity. The legislative assembly of El Salvador approved a law that will give Bitcoin the status of national currency. The country's president and main proponent of the bill, Naid Bukeli, is convinced the adoption of Bitcoin will bring financial prosperity to the country. In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy. The thing is that since we don't understand it right now, we don't know how we can overcome it. We can go down. Well, it's going to be something new for everyone and I think it's going to be a little difficult. I don't think it's going to be good because to start people don't know it and it's The Bitcoin law has sparked widespread concerns. Critics say that at best the bill won't improve Salvadorans' lives. At worst, it could wreak havoc on the country's fragile economy. We tried to figure out what the Bitcoin law actually means for El Salvador and its people. Since 2001, the United States dollar has been used as the official currency in El Salvador. But starting from September 7th, 2021, Bitcoin will join the dollar as legal tender. That means citizens will be able to use dollars or Bitcoin to purchase goods and services and pay taxes and debts. Traditional cash and digital currency functioning side by side. A monetary experiment the first of its kind. So why does President Bukeli want another currency for El Salvador? Seventy percent of Salvadorans don't have access to a bank account and fully rely on cash. Bitcoin could provide these people with a fast and cheap way to transfer money with no third parties involved. This is particularly important in El Salvador, where one-fifth of the country's GDP depends on remittances from expatriates working abroad. When you send remittances from the U.S. or any other country to El Salvador, you pay a commission which can go as high as 20-25 percent. And we expect this to be lower when sending money through some Bitcoin exchange. Given its new status as a currency, Bitcoin won't be subjected to capital gain taxes in El Salvador. Additionally, the government will grant residency to crypto entrepreneurs investing in the country. Bitcoin proponent and podcaster Peter McCormick visited El Salvador after the law was implemented and is optimistic that the bill will transform the country into a Bitcoin haven. I would expect to see an increase in investment in the country from Bitcoin companies. So that's going to increase the GDP in the country and that's going to increase the job supply. The adoption of the Bitcoin law is highly controversial. Critics say Bitcoin's high volatility makes it unsuitable as a form of money. The cryptocurrency has been known to lose 40 or even 50 percent of its value in just a matter of days. The former head of El Salvador's central bank warned that if Bitcoin becomes an integral part of the local economy, a sudden price crash would pose a huge risk to the country's financial stability. The political opposition in El Salvador sees the Bitcoin law as part of an authoritarian trend that has marked Bukele's presidency. They say the Bitcoin law was approved too quickly and without the necessary consultations. Most of the criticism of the law is focused on Article 7, which requires all economic agents to accept Bitcoin if it is offered as payment. The compulsory nature of this article sparked concerns among members of the crypto community. Professor of Economics and early Bitcoin supporter George Selgen thinks Article 7 should be repealed for this reason. If governments compel people to use something as currency, they can make them use anything as currency. They've been doing it for a long, long time. That's how we got fear. If Bitcoin only wins a victory of being widely adopted by taking advantage of coercive measures like Article 7 of the present Salvadoran law, that's going to be a very hollow victory. But supporters of the law have brushed off these concerns. As President Bukele pointed out, while merchants will need to accept Bitcoin, they are not forced to hold it. He also said a dedicated government fund will be created to allow the instant exchange of Bitcoin into dollars. Other analysts even say that Article 7 is necessary to make the law effective. From an economic point of view, if you don't guarantee that some sort of money will be accepted, then probably it won't be demanded. It won't be accepted. So you have this chicken and egg problem, is whether people start accepting this and then it becomes popular or where you force them, and then of course it will become popular. The idea of making Bitcoin a means of exchange is not totally new in El Salvador. In the small coastal town of Elzonte, Bitcoin has already been used as a currency for a couple of years. Here, locals use Bitcoin apps to buy goods and services and even pay salaries. Rosalina Franco, the owner of a local grocery store, was among the first merchants to embrace the new currency. I asked him when he came to tell me if that currency was accepted and he asked me to change it later. How will my phone fall? The experiment of Elzonte started in 2019, when an anonymous donor from the US started sending Bitcoin to local nonprofits. The donor's goal was to create a sustainable Bitcoin economy in Elzonte. Since then, local merchants have largely profited from the Bitcoin price surge in late 2020. Extending the experiment of Elzonte to a country of 6.5 million people won't be an easy task. That penetration in El Salvador is among the lowest in Latin America. Most people lack education about crypto and blockchain technology. A recent survey shows the majority of local entrepreneurs are highly skeptical of President Bukeli's Bitcoin law. To encourage the adoption of Bitcoin, 1,500 Bitcoin accounts will be installed all over El Salvador. President Bukeli also announced $30 worth of BTC will be airdropped to all adult citizens. For this purpose, $120 million of state funds will be transferred to 4 million new Bitcoin accounts. To receive this money, people will have to download a government wallet, which, according to Bukeli, will enable instant conversions of Bitcoin into dollars without any fees. President Bukeli's plan is ambitious. Can he put in place the necessary infrastructure to generate meaningful Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador? Despite the challenges ahead, the Bitcoin community remains optimistic about the opportunities this law could create. I wouldn't even call these things barriers, because they're things in the way. I would just call them speed bumps, challenges, things I have to be dealt with. People have been willing to cry and experiment with this, and the experience seems to have been at least partly successful. In the following months, El Salvador will be a crucial testing ground for Bitcoin. In the eyes of the people, the cryptocurrency's usefulness has yet to be proven. And if mishandled, its introduction into the economy could cause significant financial stress. But if Bukeli's plan succeeds, millions of people may benefit from a decentralized censorship-resistant monetary system. And who knows? Other countries could follow its example. Will El Salvador be the spark that ignites the Bitcoin revolution across the globe? Here at Cointelegraph, we'll be following these events very closely. So stay tuned.