He slept with my sibling, degraded me, smashed myself confidence to pieces and cheated on me regularly. If you like true revenge stories, you found the best place for your vengeful needs. In this episode, we start off with a husband who finds out his wife cheats, but he went through great lengths of suffering to accomplish the happy life, without her, while she literally pays for it.  Lastly, in an ongoing story involving private investigators, a cheater's lover gets the first bite of revenge, instead of the cheating partner. Before we start, tell the like button to hold your dignity, because you're up to some sketchy revenge acts. Let's dive in. Naturally, viewer discretion is advised. These revenge acts might be disturbing to snowflakes. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, because this is a long story, but it's surely worth your time. My revenge began with discovering my wife's infidelity, let's call her Carrie. After 14 years of marriage and three kids, I saw a text appear on her work phone for just a few seconds that would forever change my life. It was a message that was sexually graphic and had no business being on anyone's work phone. It was on the lock screen and the sender's name was visible, let's call him Perry. Some background, I married Carrie when I was 25 and she was 22. I was teaching high school at the time and she was a nurse. After having our first child, Carrie became a stay-at-home mom. Money was tight, so I took on an admin role in my department and coached two sports for the stipends. We made it and after a few annual pay raises, I stopping coaching and took advantage of a program to earn an administrative credential. Once I made the jump to administration, our last child was ready for preschool and Carrie decided she wanted to go back to work. Nursing jobs are always available, but they're not always the best positions. Carrie pretty much had to start back at the bottom, working alongside nurses that were a lot younger than she was. They could work back-to-back double shifts that took a toll on Carrie. When she asked her supervisor about other positions, she was told that without a BSN, she wasn't going to move up. At the time, Carrie had only the two-year ADN. I told her that I'd support her getting her BSN. So I would focus in the kids preschool and afterschool. My retired mother, who was always willing to pick up the kids from school and watch them, helped us out too. It took her three years, but eventually she had her BSN and was promoted to a better position at the hospital. Things were good for a while. We had plenty of money, so finally moved into our own McMansion, bought new cars, etc. I'd moved from school admin to the district admin, so I had more time to spend with Carrie and the kids. She was working a more predictable schedule and even with my often long hours at work, this change allowed us to finally take vacations to all the places we'd put on a list during our honeymoon. She kept that list in our wedding album. At some point years later, I noticed she's carrying two phones with her. When I asked her about it, she said that it was a phone provided by the hospital. I didn't question her explanation, because my district had also given me the option of a phone or a phone stipend, which I took instead. Again, months went by and I thought we were a happy perfect family. I charged my phone in our den, while she charged her phones in our guest bedroom that doubled as a computer room, so we could keep tabs on the kids while they surf the web. I was updating software on the computer when I saw a light around her work phone. She had a habit of always turning her phones face down when charging them. Out of curiosity, I reached over to the phone and flipped it over. A message had popped up on the lock screen, asking her when she'd like to be orally pleased again, but in much more graphic language. I also saw that Perry sent it. The world stopped around me. I just froze.  It's her work phone. That kind of message gets people fired. Then it hit me. Was Carrie having an affair? It's amazing how the brain works. I suddenly started remembering a lot of things Carrie had done that seemed odd, but I'd either dismissed them myself or immediately accepted her explanation. She was always walking out of the room to answer a call or return a text and claimed that it would violate HIPAA if I overheard her talking about a patient. I accepted this, because education has similar privacy laws regarding students. She would sometimes come home with the faint smell of cologne on her clothes and claimed it was from helping to move male patients. Again I accepted this at face value, but it always struck me as odd how it seemed to be the same scent of cologne. Once the proverbial barn door was open, I started seeing a lot of things that I'd missed before. Our love life in the bedroom had cooled off considerably, which wasn't helped by her having to leave the house at odd hours to fill in for other nurses that called in sick. I also recalled where I'd seen the name Perry before and a call to the hospital confirmed he was a doctor there. For the next week or so, I was walking around in days trying to put all of the pieces together. One of our kids had left a book in Carrie's car, so it was an excuse to visit the hospital, Carrie had told me personal visits were frowned upon. My kid went up to get Carrie's car key, I'd forgotten my key to her car at home. I talked to a nurse in the lobby and joked about how work phones seem like a blessing, but all they do is put you on call 24 hours a day. This led to her eventually telling me that the hospital was too cheap to give cell phone to nurses, so only high level executives got them, which didn't include Carrie. With pretty much everything confirmed, I took some personal time off the next day to talk to a divorce lawyer. The news she gave me was horrible. We lived in a community property state with no fault divorce. I made more money than Carrie, she'd been the primary caretake of the kids, and we'd been married for more than 10 years. Basically, if I filed for divorce, I'd be screwed. Lose the house, pay alimony, she'd get a huge chunk of my retirement, and I'd pay child support for the next decade unless I was lucky enough to be awarded joint custody. The worst thing she told me was, that it didn't matter that she cheated. It, didn't, matter. I was crushed. There was only one person I could trust with this kind of information. She was a fellow teacher that had also made the jump to administration, but was stuck at a school site. Let's call her Anne. Anne had been married at 19, but her marriage was annulled when he got some other woman pregnant. Since then, she'd focused on her career and we'd found we were kindred spirits in a lot of ways regarding K-12 education. I talked to Anne. She said something to me that changed my whole mindset. If you don't like the hand you're dealt, change the deck. I realized I had two problems. I made more money than Carrie and she had more time than me to be the primary caretaker of the kids. The second issue was actually kind of easy. At every district office, there are jobs that are fast tracks to higher positions and there are jobs that administrators suffer through, like mess or KP duty in the military. One of these dead-end regulatory positions was open again. Ambitious administrators leave after a couple of years when a better position opens up. I sat down with our district superintendent and asked about being transferred to that position. At first he was shocked, but I told him that it was my time to take one for the team and it would fill a hole in my admin experience. He agreed. It was really just crunching numbers with no personnel or student interaction so I could set my schedule, even take a laptop home and work there. With my new free time, I began taking the kids to school, picking them up from school, not leaving them in after school or having my mother watch them, and taking them home. I'd help them with their homework, make dinner, etc. While the end goal was to become their primary caretaker, I can't explain how much I really, really enjoyed taking a more active role in their day-to-day lives. My salary hadn't been reduced, so I needed to find a way for Carrie to make a lot more money than she was in current nursing position. I remembered Carrie being mad after she'd earned her BSN and a supervisor told her in the future, bachelor degrees will be worthless and everyone will need at least a master's degree.  I talked her into starting a MSN program. I told her that since I had a much more flexible work schedule, I would keep taking care of the kids. She was reluctant at first, then I said, you could have every evening free to study or go to class, whatever you want to do. I saw her eyes immediately light up, probably thinking that she could spend more time with Perry. To make sure she was actually completing her MSN courses, I paid her tuition and fees directly to her university. It was going to take her between two and three years to finish. Those years were rough at times. I could tell every time she was rushing off or coming back from seeing Perry. There was an excitement or a sense of satisfaction in her eyes that just wasn't there when she was doing her coursework. I had to either smile or pretend I didn't notice. My temper got short at times and I found myself in arguments over petty nonsense. A couple of times I almost blew the whole charade having to bite my tongue and apologize, rather than scream insults at her that she deserved. Anne remained my confidant through all of this. I'd recommended her for my previous fast-track position and she joined me at the district office. Anne was qualified, hardworking, ambitious and only needed her foot in the door to impress the higher ups. I even got a few pats on the back for recommending her after she impressed everyone. Anne and I started our own affair. It wasn't some hot-blooded, passionate romance, but two friends giving each other what they need. Without Anne, I wouldn't have been able to maintain the charade of being the oblivious cuckold. But when Carrie would come home smiling after spending time with Perry, I was able to bear it, smiling back because I had my own lover. After three and a half years, Carrie completed her MSN and was promoted at her hospital. Her salary went up substantially and was now higher than mine. When the kids and I made her a congratulations dinner, I made a joke about her being the breadwinner for the family and she laughed, joking back I should be a stay-at-home dad now. A month later, I went back to the lawyer, who didn't remember me at first, and told her the financial situation had drastically changed. With these new facts, she drafted the petition and filed it. When the kids were with my mother, I had Carrie served. The deputy knocked on our front door and I let him in, pointing at my wife. He asked her name and then handed her a copy of the divorce petition. With the deputy standing there, I told Carrie I knew all about her affair with Perry, but I didn't tell her how long I'd known. I told her to go be happy with her doctor lover. She screamed at me, tried to lie, and then made the mistake of rushing toward me. The deputy stopped her and warned her that women go to jail for domestic violence too, now. He suggested she pack a bag to stay somewhere else. Carrie left after I promised not to tell the kids about her affair. I didn't tell the kids.  It took a few days, but eventually the kids knew that dad was divorcing mom because she had a boyfriend. In the end, the court granted the divorce, giving me primary custody of our kids, because I was already their primary caretaker. I kept the house with the promise I'd refinance to buy out Carrie's half. She was ordered to pay child support, and I used that fact to negotiate with her to give up any rights to my retirement if I bought her out. I was able to refinance my home, it was the era when banks threw money at everyone to buy or refinance a mortgage, and with a little money borrowed from my parents, I bought out Carrie's community property interest in the home and in my retirement. The day she signed all the paperwork with my lawyer finally ending any possible financial obligations to her, was the happiest I'd been. I felt like I could finally breathe. I celebrated with Anne who'd been my rock through all of it. I'm not ashamed to say that through the years I'd cried many times in her arms. Anne and I would eventually marry. She got promoted to a higher position and I was convinced to take back my previous position at the district when my youngest child reached high school. Carrie and I got along well after the divorce. We took the kids to family therapy and worked out this co-parenting thing. For the few months, she took a beating from the kids about, why you need a boyfriend when daddy was there all along? Between the kids and the therapist raking her over the coals, I didn't have to say anything at all. Carrie missed a lot of time with the kids, because of her now legitimately busy work schedule and I actually felt bad that my kids were missing time with their mother, so encouraged them to talk to her on the phone instead. When Carrie found out that I'd proposed to Anne, she congratulated me. I told her it's okay for her to marry Perry, too. She got sad. She told me that Perry had started seeing another woman, a younger nurse at the hospital, because with her new position, she didn't have time for him and when they did get together, she wasn't fun anymore. My ex-wife, the woman who'd cheated on me and destroyed our marriage, was looking to me for sympathy. I had none to give. What I had was years of anger and frustration. Years of knowing some other man was sleeping with my wife. I'd lost weight from not being able to eat, I'd suffered hypertension and had to confide in my doctor why it wasn't the stress of my job. I had to listen to my dentist complain about how I was grinding and listening to him tell me I'd need dental implants if it kept up. There were times when I had to be intimate with Carrie to keep up the charade, fortunately and frequently, only to lie that I wanted to use condoms to remind us how we used to have sexy time when we were dating or, because I might have a bladder infection. Then go take a STD test anyway and wait for the results before seeing Ann again. But in the end, it was all worth it. Sure, Carrie got a big payout when I bought her out of the house and my retirement, which she was trickling back to me through child support, but she lost everything else. Her kids only saw her every other weekend and spent a couple of holidays with her. Carrie dumped her and he was no great catch anyway, since he was twice divorced with five kids and paying alimony and child support through the nose. I kept my kids, my house, my income, my retirement, I got Ann, and I am genuinely happy. All in a community property state with no fault divorce. If that's not pro-revenge, then I don't know what is. I've been wanting to share my story for ages, but I just never got around to doing it. So, then I figured, since I have a Reddit account now, I might as well post it. When I was around 17, I started dating a guy who was 19, I'll call him Jake. Also age of consent where I live is 16, so nothing illegal happening here. Jake was a bisexual male. We got on well, spent a lot of time together and cared for each other a lot. We even started talking about living together once we both moved out. We were a perfectly happy couple. Or so I thought. You see, after we'd been dating for a few months, something in Jake changed. He was getting a lot more distant. Whenever he was with me, he'd be checking his phone constantly. We stopped spending as much time together and he started to get really funny about public affection, regarding things like hand holding and stuff. He also seemed to start caring less and less about my feelings. I used to have a bit of a thing for humiliation in the bedroom, nothing too far and we'd spoken about what Jake should and shouldn't say, but he started to get more and more degrading. He'd tell me how no one would ever love me and would pick on my insecurities, I actually broke down crying a few times when this happened. To give him a bit of credit, the first few times he did stop everything he was doing and apologized to me until I felt better, but eventually that stopped too and he just began rolling his eyes and telling me to grow up. He was like a completely different person. The insults started to seep into our everyday life. He'd pick on my appearance a lot, bring up my family, I was dealing with a lot of family issues at the time. He'd bring up the fact that I slept around before we started dating, a sort of rebellion caused by family issues, etc. If I got upset by it, he'd just leave the room and let me cry by myself. I started to feel like it was my fault our relationship was falling apart, maybe I just wasn't good enough for him. I knew deep down that he was cheating on me and that was confirmed when I got a message from a guy named David. He messaged me on Facebook, telling me that he'd been sleeping with Jake. He apologized profusely and told me that he broke things off with Jake as soon as he found out he was in a relationship. I couldn't be mad at David, it wasn't his fault. We spoke for hours and I reassured David that it wasn't his fault and that he'd done nothing wrong. David also helped me to stop making excuses for Jake's attitude and the way he'd been acting. He was a godsend. The thing that truly broke me, happened not too long after the cheating was discovered. We'd been arguing a hell of a lot more. Then he decided to do something absolutely unforgivable. You see, I had a stained relationship with my father for years. He'd cheat on my mother constantly and eventually, he settled down and had kids with a girl he'd been seeing behind her back. He did try to have some sort of relationship with me till I was about 14, and then decided that he didn't love me as much as his other kids and we stopped all contact. It broke me and it still hurts to think about to this day. Anyway, Jake went out of his way to find on of my step-siblings online and slept with them. He bragged about it the next day, my step-sibling actually posted online about what had happened and I received a bunch of messages from their friends telling me how I had deserved it. This was probably the lowest point in my life and I hated myself, partly for allowing it to happen and partly because I had started to believe what they were saying. My only solace during this time was David, I didn't want to burden my friends with my problems and David was one of the only people who knew, first hand what Jake was like. We spoke for a few weeks and eventually talk blossomed to revenge. I had tried calling things off a couple of months prior due to Jake's awful behavior, but he started with the apologies and telling me he didn't mean it, he'd never do it again. He even spoke to some of my family members who, unknowingly, pressured me to get back together with him as we were such a sweet couple. I hadn't wanted to tell them the real reason that we'd broken up, so I kept the details pretty vague, though I'm pretty sure some of them had seen my step-siblings post and knew why I didn't want to be with him. After weeks of talking and planning, I had finally had enough and decided to do something about it. My father wasn't exactly a rich man, but he worked a pretty well-paying job and earned enough money to live fairly comfortably. He had begun spreading rumors around when I was younger, during a custody battle with my mother, that he had set up a trust fund for me and that there was enough money there to get me set up in my own place when I was 18, plus a bit extra. I knew that this was absolute horse due to, he tried to get out of paying child support all the time, of course he'd never set up a trust fund for me. However, Jake didn't. We'd never spoken about it, but he'd heard the rumors and I'd just always say what I told you folks, my father was an appalling parent who grudged paying my mother's child support, so why would he set up a trust fund? But Jake wouldn't listen, he even did his own research into the type of job my father worked and came up with an estimate of how much he thought my father was earning. Though, to his credit, he did drop the subject whenever I asked him to, for a while anyways. I decided to use this to my advantage. Jake and I were still dating though I avoided him at any chance I got. Until one night where I sat him down and told him that since I'd be turning 18 in a couple of weeks, I'd started thinking about us getting our own place. With the trust fund my father had set up for me. He immediately cheered up at this. I think that night, was the first time in months that he'd set anything nice to me when we weren't in public or with friends or family. This very nearly made me wanna call the whole thing off, but I spoke with David later that night and he reminded me that Jake would go back to his usual degrading attitude in no time. We started looking at flats, though Jake was kind enough to let me have the final say and handle the paperwork, because how could he possibly go out and cheat on me, if he had to sort out the paperwork for a flat? I was a little surprised by this to be very honest, as I'd always thought that he'd won his name on the paperwork and everything so I couldn't kick him out. But by this point he'd slept with my step-sibling, degraded me, smashed myself confidence to pieces and cheated on me regularly, I think by now he thought that I wouldn't kick him out no matter what he did. Anyways, I started taking up extra shifts at work to try and save enough money to actually move out. Not with Jake though, oh no. I was moving in with my friend, Emma. We had both been thinking about moving out for a while anyways and thought, why not just be roommates? We found a cute little one-bedroom flat that was close to our college and work and started getting stuff sorted to move in. I also didn't want to bring any trouble to my mother's door, if Jake started kicking up a fuss, Emma had no issues with clawing the face off him if need be, and told me not to worry about him coming to our front door. Then came the next part of the plan. I waited till a week or so before Jake and I were supposedly moving into our own flat and stole his phone for a few minutes. He'd stopped caring about leaving his phone unattended, and would sometimes flat out brag about how lucky he was to be able to sleep with whoever he wanted and come home to, a little witch who'd make him dinner. So that day when he went for a shower, he wasn't all too bothered about taking his phone with him. Perfect. I went onto his phone, deleted my number from his contacts and changed the name of his mom's contact as mine. Pleased, I went to the kitchen, smashed one of the plates. I left for work once everything was done, my mother had left for work a couple hours prior so she was safe.   His first reaction was to text me, calling me all the disgusting names under the sun. Except it wasn't me he'd texted, it was his mom. I'd texted her in advance and told her that I hoped she'd forgive me, but she had to see what her son was really like. She'd never tried to defend him as much as she just hadn't known quite how bad his behavior was. She'd actually called him out a couple of times where he'd slipped up and been harsh with me when she was there.  I never found out exactly how their argument went, as she phoned him to scream at him and call him out for his awful behavior, finally seeing how horrible her son was. It didn't help that she'd been sent screenshots of some of the times where he'd admitted to cheating. She was absolutely disgusted by her son's behavior and phoned me to apologize on Jake's behalf. It wasn't her fault though, he's old enough to know how to act like an adult. He wound up telling his mom essentially that her opinion didn't matter as he'd be moving in with me anyways. Needless to say, when he called me on Facebook after I'd deleted my number from his phone, I took some satisfaction in telling him that we weren't moving in together, that the trust fund wasn't real, which I already told him in the past, he just refused to listen, and that I'd moved in with Emma. I was called all the skanks and whores under the sun, his voice sort of turned into white noise after a while. I told him we were over and hung up. Blocked him on everything.  Though after a bit, the fights and arguments became too much and his parents kicked him out. He stayed with a couple of friends for a few months, before he managed to get his own place. His parents, especially his mother, has not been the same with him since. I still talk to his mom on occasion. Lastly, David and I took the liberty of sending screenshots of Jake's abuse to as many of the people he'd been hooking up with as possible. A couple of sleepless nights were spent trying to track people down on Facebook. Part of it was to get back at Jake, but most of it was just to make sure that none of them got roped into a full-on relationship with him and had to deal with all the crap I'd gone through. Due to my story that is still developing, I can only share how far I got till now. My partner George and I were monogamous for 10 years. We had an occasional threesome before that, but nothing long term. I know I'm potentially going to get a few people who will say that's where the trouble started. The understanding was, that we would not do anything behind the others back. And whomever we brought into the relationship, would be an equal in the relationship. We wanted to have our couple evolve into a thruple. Needless to say, it didn't work out. We tried, but with the last person we tried with, we ended up in court. Admittedly, I wasn't bringing my best self to the relationship. Two people who basically raised me died and I was in mourning. And I was focused on the rest of my family whom I loved dearly. During this time, George cheated on me and lied about it, he used my disease, lupus, and wanting to spend time with his family as his justification for cheating. Spread over a few days before the COVID lockdowns. In March, my partner had told me he wanted some time apart. I initially agreed, but then things just didn't seem right. I thought we were fine relationship wise. But something seemed to miss. I have my own place and I give him some space. We would only have dinner sometime since it was what we were used to doing together, this is important for later. One Sunday, he tells me he has a spa massage session that evening and that he would be busy and wouldn't be able to meet till late for dinner. I didn't think anything was going on behind my back, he said he would call when he was done and not to wait for him for dinner. I needed a notebook I had left at his place and thinking he was having his spa session, I let myself into his place. Low and behold, he's having dinner with a guy named John. I leave and he assures me that he's just having dinner with a friend and that his spa session got rescheduled. I asked, point blank if anything was going on between them and he said no. Next Wednesday, I'm just a complete wreck. I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's true and what's real anymore and I get the gut feel that there's more to George and John than he's letting me in on. I do some sleuthing and find out that they're friends on Facebook, but not on Instagram. This makes me curious. Yet they've been liking each other's posts on Instagram. I remember George logging into my iPad, so I go on and check for any message history. And wouldn't you know, I see exchanges between them going on for months. Once again, I ask George who this person is, with whom he's friends with on Facebook, but not on Instagram and why their interactions are so bizarre. George tells me he's just a friend nothing more and that I'm crazy. My blood must have been boiling at this point. I then remind him that he still logged into my iPad and his face just changes. He tells me that I betrayed his trust and that I really shouldn't have done that. He must have been in full blown panic mode. In their messages, I find out that they've been seeing each other since September 2019. I had an emergency appendectomy in October 2019. The very next day while I was recovering in the hospital, George and John went out for dinner and John stayed over after. No prizes for guessing what happened that night. They're talking about me in their conversations, and they even arranged to meet that day I saw them. John asked if I would show up again and George said that I wouldn't.  I'm having plenty of sleepless nights, thinking about how on the chump they were fooling for five months. I was none the wiser. Furious, I engaged revenge for higher service. I hired private investigators a friend recommended to me. Shout out to my Asian friend. LA Asians are pretty crazy, no hate. She's been a great ally in this. I wasn't thinking clearly in caveat emptor, I lucked out with a service that did a good job. I gave them all the information about John the first had, not much, just his social media accounts. They proceeded their investigative work, they dug up quite a bit of dirt on him. Turns out, John was in a relationship as well. Inform the partner? Check. George wasn't the only person John was cheating with. They managed to find some chat history of his hookups all the way to 2017. What's most interesting, is that John enjoyed using illicit drugs while having these trists, complete with contact information of parties involved and locations where it happened. They dug deeper and found conversations where he would advise friends to commit insurance fraud. Nothing major mind you, but while fraud is still fraud. And from the conversations, it seems that the insurers did pay out for bogus travel delays. The revenge agency then asks me how I would like to proceed with the information. I told them, I just want his life ruined. My life and relationship have been ruined, why not share a little of the pain I was feeling? The agency said that they had informed all parties involved. Last I heard, his insurance agencies dropped him, on the basis of encouraging insurance fraud, and he has a criminal record for drug use. Now that he has a criminal record, it means he can no longer travel to Canada or Japan, countries he loves to visit. His family knows that he's been cheating and using drugs.  For George, I'm not finished with him just yet, there's more revenge in store. He's not getting away. Thank you for enjoying this episode, which was made with artificial love. Subscribe or give royal AI some sugar by avenging the like button. Could you imagine doing one of these acts yourself? Share your experience below. I'll join the conversation.


All right, Lady. What's this? Okay. I'm doing bring up on a new feather. As you can see, it's ESP32C6. This is a new chip in the family for Espressif. It's a Tensilica processor. Sorry, it's a RISC 5, not a Tensilica processor. And it has matter Zigbee support. So I think it has Wi-Fi and I don't think it has BLE, but it has Zigbee instead. So I made a feather for this module. It doesn't have a ton of pins. So like one or two of these pins are shared, but I did have a second LDO for low power on the Stemic UT port, battery monitoring, battery and recharging, boot and reset button, and you know, plenty of analog pins, SPI, I squared C, UART, and all that good stuff. So I'm going to keep testing it. But luckily, you know, because Espressif has like one board support package for all of their boards, you know, Neopix will just work out of the box. So I'm going to test all the pens, all the peripherals, and then do some low power tests. And we will do another video.


Hi, this is your host Martin and welcome to a special edition of tear for let's talk here at QCon you in Amsterdam And today we have with us once again, Chris Clark program manager at Cloud for new foundation Chris is great to have you on the show Great to be here swap. Oh, it's a pleasure. It's yeah, it is always pleasure to talk to you Let's talk about because I think this this time or last time also at QCon you folks talked a lot about griffin And if I'm not wrong the latest release came out, you know a few days or weeks ago So first. Yeah, so let's give a kind of no recap on let's start with the basics What is griffin and then what's new in this release? Well? Karifi is is latest platform out of the cloud foundation and it's a it's a lighter weight implementation of Cloud Foundry, which has traditionally been a very opinionated heavy footprint cloud application platform and Karifi is a simpler implementation of that. So it's the Cloud Foundry API and CLI but Deployed with an entirely Kubernetes CRD based back-end So it should be the idea is that it'll be much more extensible and and composable so that as new CNCF projects and other other cloud technologies become mature they can be incorporated into Karifi Whereas with Cloud Foundry traditionally Cloud Foundry on VMs we sometimes call it That was challenging to swap out one part for another part. It was kind of a take it or take it or leave it We have a situation so that's the the gist of what Karifi is trying to accomplish basically giving Kubernetes users that that that you know best-in-class Cloud Foundry developer experience and solving a lot of the day day one day two problems that people have with Kubernetes And Karifi just hit 0.7. I'm a couple of weeks ago This release had some some notable improvements in logging in metrics and some other some other features Earlier in the year there's increased support for AWS and So the features are coming out. We're still not quite at a GA point There's a couple of key features that we still need to to work out But it's they've made a tremendous amount of progress in the last I think it's been 10 or 11 months since 0.1 was caught. So, you know, we're hoping later this year that we get a Maybe a 1.0 release. Let me look at Karifi because from from Cloud Foundry Foundation project a lot of effort have been going on for a very early days, you know to release no projects You know to kind of balance between Kubernetes and so is Karifi kind of Evolution of those projects or it's like, you know, totally new projects from, you know ground up To solve some of these problems. Well, both I mean, there's there were a few initiatives over the last few years to incorporate Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes and We've learned a lot from those we ran into some some roadblocks there and it's just not a technically trivial job to undertake so Karifi is what we think is the best architectural approach to solving this problem and So far we've we've been quite happy with how it's developed and since you are you're still, I mean 0.7 so Do you have any of course a go puzzle structure really hard to say but when you do feel that you will hit the Either point release and you're like, hey, this is when we'll hit or you're still like no This is still work in progress and we'll move forward Once again, it's open source project where the community takes it or you do have a set deadline that hey This is there's no deadline and and we don't even have a you know We're not totally sure about what features we need to have in that But there are a few key features that they're still being worked on that we'd like to have Squared away before we you know make our larger push for for this so right now We're just you know kind of spreading the word about Karifi I mean and it's it's working right now you can you know it deploys apps and it does a lot of a lot of the The CF push experience at least for from Cloud Foundry is there And you can deploy it on your laptop quickly, which is something you could never do before with a traditional Cloud Foundry So there's already some nice advantages Even though it's not a one-to-one parody with Cloud Foundry features There's some nice advantages to Karifi over traditional Cloud Foundry already This question may be a bit uncomfortable, which is more or less like there have been couple of projects You know over years, you know once again as you also mentioned and I've been covering them So and every time a product came out if we're all like hey, we have learned some lessons, you know And this is what a so when we look at Karifi, how much confidence do you have in this project? How much involvement is also from the Kubernetes community as well then where you can say hey, though This is the kind of final destination of bringing the CF experience to Kubernetes This this is the first time we've really taken it from a Kubernetes native Approach as opposed to taking parts of Cloud Foundry and swapping it out like there was a rainy where we just tried to you know Swap out Diego the container orchestration layer in Cloud Foundry for For Kubernetes and that that was successful. I mean that worked, but that still left a you know monolithic Cloud Foundry platform that wasn't quite extensible with other technologies And CF for kates then was was a more robust version that was essentially swapping out Bosch for for Kubernetes The Karifi approach this lighter-weight approach. I think is going to be much more future-proof than some of those others As it integrates with Kubernetes You know, that's the goal in this short term and we've already I mean it's already integrated with Kubernetes, but the real goal is to have a more Composable extensible Cloud Foundry so that when another technology comes along that can be incorporated a lot easier than you know the Then Kubernetes has been but Ultimately, we're really happy with with how creepy Karifi shaping up since you know, it's very early days for the project What kind of involvement is there because when we look at Cloud Foundry you have you know A lot of big players from all days of you know VMV and all those players and we are very also heavily interested in Kubernetes So if you can talk about what kind of community is there at this stage Where you can say hey, this is all the players from the Kubernetes space is also involved These are the player in the whole veteran from the Cloud Foundry space also involved so that we can also understand You know who is building right so VMware and SAP Are still you know Platinum members of the Cloud Foundry foundation and they're the driving force behind most of the development behind Cloud Foundry And both of them have been involved with Karifi mainly VMware But the foundation in the general Cloud Foundry community I mean IBM is still is still around To a slightly lesser extent And we still have a you know robust open-source community of people using deploying Cloud Foundry on their own Karifi at this point, you know, we're we're still kind of building that community and it's yeah It's a very early stage so you know, it's pretty yeah, it's so pretty early for Karifi So we're talking about it because we're very excited about it, right You know and that's why I wanted to add the question was because when your project is a very early stage Then the way you plan a lot of things are different, you know a lot of things goes in education and awareness talk to people about that So so the next question about that would be so of course you are working in a project You know the code base at the same time when you're also trying to engage the community There are a lot of efforts going on each about telling them what a project is about telling them how they can use it So what are the efforts going on there? We just launched earlier just one month ago. We launched a new tutorials page So tutorials dot cloud foundry dot org. There's a career fee tutorial now. So that's that's brand new We just launched that and that was developed by the CFF In conjunction with it with the dev team behind career fee. So that that should be a big help We're gonna be having a cloud foundry day event in Heidelberg, Germany on June 21st And that'll be our first European event that we've had since before the pandemic So really looking forward to that and we can you know, what we talking about career fee a lot more there as well We are here to go on tell us, you know, what is cloud funding doing at Q4? Well We're largely we're promoting career fee which we've already discussed a bit and Peketo bill packs Which is our collection of cloud native bill packs from the cloud funded community That's getting quite a lot of traction with Kubernetes end users and other folks in the CNCF wider ecosystem it's also Peketo bill packs is consumed by By career fee so they're kind of linked technologies, but a lot of people are using Peketo bill packs on their own as well. Knative is consuming it There's there's a lot. There's quite a few larger end user companies right now that are just using Peketo bill packs So we're trying to promote both of those projects kind of simultaneously right now Chris Thank you so much for taking time out today and of course give an update on career fee and you know We're a cloud foundry community and the project is heading thanks for all those updates and as usual I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. It's a pleasure swap. No, and yeah, we'll be in touch like I said, we've got that cloud foundry day event in Heidelberg in June and then If we don't talk to you before then I'll certainly see you in Chicago at XCubeCon


Transfer of control from the fire ground incident controller to the incident controller and incident management team is critical for the ongoing management of a large and developing fire incident. As the regional controller, it's my responsibility to ensure that this transfer of control occurs effectively. For fire danger ratings very high and above, level 3 control centres across the state will remain on these days. At fire danger ratings very high and above, fires often develop very quickly and are likely not to be contained by the initial attack. It's important as fire ground commanders and duty officers that we recognise the potential of fire to develop quickly and recognise the need to transfer control early. The decisions we make in the early stage of a fire can be determined whether fire stays small or becomes a large damaging fire. It's really important as fire ground commanders to actually have some trigger points marked on our map. If a fire is burning up in this area up here, we need some trigger points and that may well be this main road down to the south. So when that fire crosses that road, that can be our trigger point that we sectorise the fire. But also it's a good trigger point to hand over control to an incident control centre and an incident management team. That allows us to concentrate on fire ground activities with things we do best. There are so many things we're expected to do this day and age, it's really impossible to do them from the field. The community expects much greater warnings and advice from what we've done in the past. Again, this is difficult to do from the field, much better done on the incident control centre. Pre-positioned incident control centres can provide timely, relevant and tailored community advice and warning messages to the community. Assist with fire prediction and estimation of fire behaviour development and potential. Arrange and manage aircraft, provide additional resources for the fire ground and most importantly liaise with police and other emergency services at an emergency management team. Those decisions are much better made back at the incident control centre where it's much quieter and we haven't got the pressure that we actually have in the field. It allows us to concentrate on fire ground activities which is what we should be doing as operations officers and fire ground commanders on the fire ground. The role of the duty officer and the initial incident controller is to manage the transfer of control process. They need to ensure that they've got an effective fire ground structure in place and also are using the default communications plan for the incident. Remember that any local team is part of a much wider statewide team. It's incumbent upon us all to make it work on the day.


So, welcome back. In the last class, we had looked at some other experiments to understand the reaction mechanism. So, one experiment is checking for a common intermediate and here what you do is you take two different reactants and essentially if both the reactants give the same intermediate i which will essentially lead to the same product, you can say that i is the intermediate formed in that particular reaction. So, this is a nice trick that is used to determine the nature of the intermediate where you choose slightly different reactants by working out the mechanism. If you assume that both form the same intermediate, you can based on the product formed, you can say that this is the intermediate that is formed and we had looked at two examples as to how this method is used to determine the mechanism. The other experiment we had seen is a crossover experiment. This is usually used for rearrangement reactions and in this what is taken is again you take two reactants but these are taken together. So, in the earlier case you are doing two parallel experiments, here you are doing the same experiments where you are taking two reactants and this is used when you need to figure out if the reaction involves fragmentation or it goes via an intramolecular reaction. So, if the reaction is intramolecular then the products you get would be CD and C star D star. So, there is no crossover. The other situation is where it involves ionization or fragmentation. In that case the products you get would be CD plus C star D star as before but you also see what is called as crossover. So, you will see CD star and C star D. So, you see crossover. So, we also looked at examples as to how this can be used to determine whether the reaction is going by an intramolecular rearrangement or fragmentation. Then towards the end of the class we started the topic of catalysis. Now we started with the definition of a catalyst. So, a catalyst is a molecule which takes part in the reaction but is not consumed in the overall reaction. So, whatever the catalyst does during the reaction by the end of the reaction you get back the catalyst and the main role of the catalyst is that it lowers the activation energy. So, what that means is the reaction goes faster. So, this is a term used in English also when you think of something catalyzing a process you talk about it making the process faster. So, it is the same thing with reactions. A catalyst increases the rate and is regenerated at the end of the reaction and we had started looking at reaction coordinate diagrams to understand catalysis. So, typically when you think of catalysis you think of the catalyst lowering the activation energy and we had done this towards the end of the last class and this is the highly simplistic reaction coordinate diagram that a lot of books will show or you will be tempted to write. But in reality what is observed is the catalyst forms a complex with the reactant A to give you a lower energy complex with a lower activation energy. This then reacts to form the product which is again complex with the catalyst and finally you form the product. So, this whole pathway is lower in energy compared to the activation energy for uncatalyzed reaction. Another way by which catalyst work is sometimes a completely different reaction coordinate is followed. So, the pathway is completely different. So, we will look at what is most commonly observed and try to understand this process a little bit more. So, let us see the scenario shown in purple which I call the realistic picture here. So, here essentially what we had shown was that you have A going to A catalyst complex. This will go to B which will still be attached to the catalyst and finally you have B plus catalyst. So, as you can see the catalyst is regenerated in this entire pathway and then the cycle can repeat again. Now, there are certain parameters that you have to think of when you think of this representation of catalysis in terms of energetics. So, as we said the overall goal that or the overall role played by the catalyst is to lower the activation energy. So, let us look at different scenarios. So, let us say that you have a situation where the catalyst binds quite tightly to the reactant. So, when it binds tightly to the reactant, what you have is you have a lowering in energy. So, this would be A catalyst complex. Now, say it does not have a great affinity to the transition state, it just stabilizes the reactant. Now, what happens? The activation energy for formation of B will still be very high, let us call this B and then you have since B is bound you have the product that is formed. So, this is one scenario. Another scenario is say the catalyst binds very weakly to the reactant. So, again you get the A catalyst complex. Then again it does not bind to the transition state.  So, this is the second scenario. Now, what I want you to think about is look at both of these scenarios shown in purple and tell me will that be a case of catalysis where the activation energy is lowered.  So, again you have to look at activation energy for formation of B from A. So, you can press the pause button on your screen and try to work this out in your notebook and when you come back we will see if you are able to understand this. So, let us see if you were able to understand this reaction coordinate diagram. So, now what is happening is you have the activation energy for the process given by E act. So, this is the activation energy in the presence of catalyst. I will show it in both the cases. Now, your original activation energy I will show it in a different color. Let us choose green here. So, your original activation energy is given by this energy difference. So, this is your original activation energy. Similarly, in this case this is your. So, if you compare now the green line with the red line, if the red line is smaller than the green line that means it has a lower activation energy. If the red line is almost same as the green line that means there is no improvement in the reaction rate. So, what do you see in the first case? You see that the red line is actually slightly larger than the green line. So, what that indicates is that you have no increase in the reaction rate. You would also see a slight decrease because you see that the red line is slightly more than the green line. Here again when you compare in the second case the red line and the green line what you see is the red line is slightly lower than the green line but you see no major difference. So, you would say no significant increase. So, will these two be good catalysts for a reaction? The answer is no. If the rate is not being increased then these are not very good catalysts. Now let us look at two different scenarios. So, in this case again I will write the generic equation below to help you. So, the generic equation is A getting complex with the catalyst. So, you are adding the catalyst and then you have A going to B. Again B is bound to the catalyst and then you have dissociation of B and the catalyst. So, this is the process what we are interested in. A catalyst going to B catalyst.  So, in the previous slide I had drawn it for you. In this slide now you try to draw it yourself. So, here the scenario is that you have let us say case A. In this case I will write the conditions here. You have tight binding of catalyst, second condition weak interaction in transition state going from A cat to B cat. So, again I repeat scenario one is you have a tight binding of catalyst to A, but then a weak interaction in the transition state. So, tight binding means high stabilization, weak interaction means less stabilization.  You can press the pause button on your screens and try to draw the reaction coordinate diagram. So, let us see if you have the reaction coordinate diagram. So, in this case a tight binding means a lower energy for the A cat complex. So, it will be weak interaction in the transition state means a slight lowering in energy of the transition state. Not as high as the reactant, but you have just a slight lowering of the energy of the transition state.  So, now tell me in this case will the catalyst enhance the rate? So, this is one scenario where we have shown that you have a weak interaction at the transition state and a strong interaction with the reactant. If you remember all the experiments we had studied so far the kinetic isotope effect, the linear free energy relationships in all these cases what was important was the relative stabilization even solvent effects. So, now what do you see? Again you can go ahead and try drawing the green line and the red line and see what is happening. So, let us go ahead and do that. So, the red line is the catalyzed activation energy. So, this is E act and the green line is for the uncatalyzed. So, now what do you observe when you compare the green line and the red line? Do you see an increase in rate? No, because what is happening is the catalyst is actually stabilizing the reactant a lot more than the transition state. Again the same thing we had spoken about earlier, think of a mountain if you are at 2 positions, if you are at a much lower position there is a greater height you need to climb. So, it is the same case here you do not see rate enhancement. So, this is again not a great catalyst. So, you see no rate increase. So, now I want you to draw the reaction coordinate diagram for this scenario where you have a tight binding. You can even choose the scenario where you have a moderate binding to A and a very strong interaction the transition state. So, now go ahead and draw the reaction coordinate diagram for this and you can again press the pause button and also do one more thing try to figure out if this will be a good catalyst with the green line red line that we were doing so far alright. So, let us see. So, in this case you have a tight binding. So, you have this as the A catalyst complex and you have a very strong binding with the transition state. So, it indicates a large stabilization of the transition state. So, now when I draw this process it will look something like this and this finally goes to the product B. So, now if you draw the red line and the green line what do you see? If you draw the red line this is the energy of activation and if you draw the green line this is for the uncatalyzed reaction. So, now you see the red line is much much smaller than the green line it is very visible. So, that means this is a great catalyst. So, this is a very very good catalyst because what it does is it lowers the activation energy or in other words increases the rate of the reaction. So, the lesson that you learn looking at all of this is that a good catalyst should be designed such that it has a greater affinity for the transition state as compared to the reactant. Alright. So, a lot of times when people also try to inhibit enzymes. So, in our body a lot of problems or diseases that we get is due to some enzyme catalyzed reaction. So, if you want to make a drug that blocks the activity of the enzyme it is better to design a drug which is similar to the transition state of the molecule that is actually interacting with the enzyme because if you have the drug which resembles the transition state more than the reactant that means the enzyme will bind stronger to it and it would help in blocking the enzyme because nature is so good that a lot of these reactions catalyzed by nature naturally does what we are talking about in a good catalyst. The transition state is bound very tightly to the enzyme. So, when you have a drug which competes for the transition state of the regular substrate of the enzyme that would be an excellent drug. So, this gives you an idea of what are the characteristics you need for a catalyst and doing the systematic process of drawing it actually made you see it visibly that the case where you had the smallest red line was the case where you had the greatest stabilization for the transition state. So, now we will move on and we will look at the different types of catalysts. So, there are several types of catalysis some of these could be put within one category or the other. I start with acid-base catalysis. Now acid-base catalysis is what is most common you have some acid or base catalyzing a reaction. Even so far we looked at several examples of writing reaction mechanism and we came across acids catalyzing the reaction or bases catalyzing the reaction. The other important form is binding which we saw earlier where you have the catalyst binding with the reactant and this leading to lowering of the activation energy. This is seen a lot in biology and enzyme catalysis. Then you have electrophilic catalysis where you have an electrophilic species catalyzing the reaction you have nucleophilic catalysis. Then you have strain catalyzing reaction sometimes strain is a great catalyst because when the molecule has strain it wants to release that strain and that is a driving force for the reaction. Then you have covalent catalysis and phase transfer catalysis. So, we will start with acid-base catalysis because that is seen very very often. But before we even go to acid base catalysis I had told you earlier that we will look at understanding pH, pKa and that is what we will be doing first. So, first we need to have a good understanding of what exactly is this acid base equilibria. So, shown here is a generic equation. So, when you have HA plus B giving A minus plus BH plus a better arrow for this would be the equilibrium arrow. So, when you have an equilibria like this, so this is your acid, this is your base, this is your conjugate base and this is your conjugate acid. So, you get the conjugate base by the dissociation of the acid. Now, if you look at the right you have now another acid and another base. If the conjugate acid gives its proton you get the base. If the conjugate base grabs a proton you get the acid. So, now you have to understand that this process is in equilibrium. Now, a lot of times we consider reactions in water. So, here what is happening is your water acts as a base. So, the water acts as the base and the conjugate acid that you have is H3O plus. Again, better way to represent this would be by the equilibrium sign. Similarly, water in the presence of a base, in this case water now acts as an acid and then you have your conjugate base of water which is OH minus. Alright, so this is your acid, in this case this is your base and this is your conjugate base and this is your conjugate acid and as I told you earlier this process is also in equilibria. So, this is a better arrow to represent this. Now, whenever you have multiple acids or bases in a media the relative acidity or basicity is very important because as you see if you look at this equation on the left side you have an acid on the right side you have an acid.  So, you need to have an understanding of acid strength. So, let us look at the case where we are looking at the dissociation in water. Again, the arrow that you have to use is the equilibrium arrow and the equilibrium constant for this is given by KEQ. So, now KEQ, KEQ would be given by A minus times H3O plus which is your product divided by HA times concentration of water. Now, water is the solvent. So, typically water is in large excess. So, water is in large excess here. So, a lot of times people do not consider it or in other words if you consider a very dilute solution of the acid you can consider the concentration of water to be 55.5 molar. So, then this equation reduces to the one shown on your screen and further if you take the water concentration to the left, this is what the equation becomes. So, it is A minus times H3O plus divided by HA and this is called as KA where KA is called your acid dissociation constant. So, KA is called the acid dissociation constant. So, you have varied acids of different strengths. Can you even guess how different these strengths are? So, just to give you a feel the KA values can range anywhere from 10 to the power 12 to 10 to the power minus 50. So, that is a big range. So, when you are trying to compare acidities it becomes very difficult when you are looking at such large differences. So, to make it easier for you to compare another scale is used very often which is the PKA. So, when you compare PKA of two acids it gives you an indication of the acid strength. So, PKA is defined as minus log to the base 10 of KA. So, now PKA is defined as minus log to the base 10 KA. So, what does that tell you? If you were to compare two acids and one is much stronger than the other what that indicates is that the PKA of that acid is much lower. So, what you need to remember is a low PKA indicates a strong acid. So, especially when you are trying to compare two acids you can compare their PKA's and the one with the lower PKA would be the stronger acid and that makes sense because PKA is nothing but minus log to the base 10 KA. So, that is quite straight forward and easy to understand. Now, let us see what that actually means in terms of an organic reaction. So, let us consider the simple reaction if I have acetone and I am treating that with a base. So, let us say I will first put it as base. So, then what do you generate? You generate the enolate plus BH plus. Now, let us consider a specific example. So, let us consider the base as OH minus and then so if the base is OH minus what would be the conjugate acid? It will be water. Let us say another example the base as OMe minus mythoxide. What will be the conjugate acid? Now, how do you decide whether this is actually a good base for this reaction? So, I want you to carefully look at this reaction and if I were to ask you which of these would be a good base or are any of these a good base to ensure deprotonation, how will you go about thinking about it? You can spend some time press the pause button and think carefully. So, what would be important is as I said you have now two acids here. Acetone I will call it as acid I and what is your second acid? These are acid II. Now, if acid I is a strong acid that means there is a greater tendency for it to give away the proton. So, what will that indicate? That will indicate that the reaction will go forward in this direction right because it likes to give proton. Now, let us imagine that acid II is the stronger acid. If acid II is the stronger acid then there is a greater chance for it to give a proton. So, that means the reaction will go in the opposite direction. So, if you were to compare both of these what do you need to compare? You need to compare the pKa of acid I. So, let us call it pKa I. You need to compare that with pKa II. So, reaction will go forward in which scenario when pKa I is less than pKa II. Remember lower pKa means stronger acid. So, if pKa I is less than pKa II you will have the reaction go in the red direction because now red is the stronger acid. But if pKa II is lower than pKa I then it will go in the green direction because green is the stronger acid. So, now understanding relative acidities is very very important for you to understand a reaction. And there are two guiding principles that you can use to predict relative acidities for neutral acids such as this case where you are looking at acetone. We called it HA in the previous slide. You usually compare the stability of the conjugate base. So, you can compare the stability of the enolate versus the OH- or OME-. And the second case is for cationic acids like HA+, you compare the relative stability of the acids themselves. So, what you would compare is that the more stable acid so the one HA+, which is more stable obviously if it is stable it will not like to lose its proton right because it is highly stable. As I said molecules are just like us if they are very comfortable they would not like to react. So, if it is a very stable molecule it will not want to react. So, if HA+, is more stable it will be the weaker acid. So, now that you have understood this what I want you to do is here now I am comparing the pKa's of acetone, water and methanol. So, what you see is acetone has a pKa of 20 whereas water and methanol both have lower pKa's of 15.7 and 15.5. So, now if you look at the previous slide that we were looking at you have the pKa of acetone now we have values for this. So, I will put it pKa of acetone is 20 and this is around would say around 16. So, now when I compare this what it tells you is that it will have a greater tendency to go in the reverse direction. So, water and methanol are stronger acids than acetone because the methoxide and the OH- that you generate is highly solvated. So, you have a highly polarized OH bond here as well as compared to the OC bond although this is resonance stabilized but what you have here is this is highly solvated. So, you have water to be a better acid as compared to. So, then these two will not be great basis for you to deprotonate. So, what would be great basis? In order to understand you would have to get an idea about the pKa of all these conjugate acids shown. So, these are some compounds shown here on the top which have acidic hydrogens similar to acetone and here these are some compounds which are conjugate acids of bases. So, what I want you to do before the next class is I want you to look at this table and try to predict what would be the relative acidity for each of these. So, I leave you with this problem and we come back in the next lecture. We will look at all of these and also look at factors that affect acidity. So, thank you and see you in the next class.


Net Scheme for Teaching English in Hong Kong, How It Works and How to Apply So, you're interested in teaching English in Hong Kong? Although there are many avenues in which to do this, one particular program that is unique to Hong Kong is the native English teacher, Net Scheme. I've just started my fourth consecutive year teaching in a local school in the new territories in Hong Kong, and this scheme has definitely provided me with plenty of opportunities. The role of a net is to enhance the English learning environment in public sector schools. The Education Bureau, EDB, of Hong Kong recruits native speakers from English-speaking countries around the world to give students a chance to interact and learn English from a foreigner. Hong Kong is an attractive city for teachers as the salary is higher than that in many other countries and it's a great travel gateway to other countries in Asia for teachers who usually get long holidays. The city is known as a hub for experts and it's a top food and culture destination. Whether you enjoy the bustle of the city, the tranquility of nature or the relaxation of the beach, you can get them all in Hong Kong. History of the Net Scheme After the handover of Hong Kong back to China in 1997, there was much discussion about Chinese being the medium of instruction in schools and what that would mean for English language learning. Thus, in 1998, the Net Scheme in secondary schools was born, followed by the primary section a few years later. This year, the Net Scheme celebrates its 20th anniversary. The Net Section is a division of the EDB that was established in 2002 which provides support and guidance for teachers under the Net Scheme. The Net Section is comprised of the advisory teaching team, primary section and regional net coordinating team, secondary section. Duties of a Net The Net's role is to enhance the English atmosphere which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. You may be asked to run after school lessons such as debating a drama club, decorate and hold activities in your school's English corner, or develop English language lessons and other curriculum materials. Although you are technically employed by the EDB, you have to report to your school and fulfill the duties your school requires of you. This could be speech festival training, teaching Saturday enhancement classes, taking students on outings, teaching summer classes, running your school's English week, or organizing lunchtime activities. As far as teaching load goes, this can vary depending on your school. Many Net's often teach solely oral classes or drama lessons. For me, I teach a full general English class with a few oral lessons.  How to apply for the Net Scheme in Hong Kong? The competition to be an EDB Net is fierce. You should expect to at least have a bachelor's degree in several years as teaching experience, with top priority given to education degree holders. An English degree and experience teaching English as a foreign language are also advantageous. Although you may be considered for the scheme without these specific qualifications, you may not ultimately be chosen. Each year, applications are accepted for the upcoming school year. The deadline for applications is usually the end of January. If you are selected for an interview and you do not live in Hong Kong, you will have to travel to a specific location for the interview, which is usually held by a panel from the EDB. For me, the North American location was New York City. You also have to do a written test. I had to write an essay in a short amount of time about how I would introduce myself to students on my first day of teaching. If you pass the interview, it doesn't guarantee you a job. There's a ton of paperwork to do, including a qualifications assessment. If approved, you will then be put into a candidate pool where the EDB will send your CV out to certain schools that are looking for a new net. Some schools will advertise for a new net without going through the EDB directly, which means you are welcome to job hunt on your own. If you choose this option, note that the EDB will not send your TEFL resume CV to any schools. Hopefully, some schools will contact you for a TEFL interview. I've heard from other nets that it's advantageous to actually be in Hong Kong while applying to schools, although this means that the EDB will not provide a passage allowance to flight reimbursement if you've come to Hong Kong before securing a job. For me, however, I had a Skype interview from Canada with my current school and was hired shortly after. Lock of the draw, I guess. Finding a job may not happen instantaneously, however. Most schools will not know if their current net is staying or leaving until the month of May and many may not recruit for new teachers until June or July. You also have to factor in at least a month's processing time for your working visa and other documents before arriving in Hong Kong. I didn't get a job offer until the end of July, so while you're in the candidate pool, it's definitely a waiting game. After securing a job, you have the option to attend the net induction days. You're super important, especially if you're new to Hong Kong, as members of the net section will help ease your worries and impart some valuable teaching tips.  This was extremely helpful for me. In order to draw qualified foreign teachers to Hong Kong, the EDB offers an attractive relocation package to speak with an ITTT advisor whose normal place of residence is outside of Hong Kong. They cover a return flight from your country of origin to Hong Kong for each completed contract. A housing allowance and medical allowance is also provided. Currently, the housing allowance is approximately $21,000 and this amount gets assessed and usually increased every year. You can thank the soaring high rent prices for this. As far as salary goes, your pay is determined based on your qualifications and experience and you will be paid according to the government's master pay scale, MPS. Each year, if your school deems your performance satisfactory, you will gradually move up the point on the pay scale. Upon completion of your first contract, you can apply for the retention incentive, which is a 5% raise for continuing into a third and fourth year of teaching. If you stay five years and onwards, the rate is boosted to a 10% raise. The most alluring bonus is the contract gratuity, however. If you apply for this, you will receive 15% of your basic salary upon completion of each contract. As you can see, if you stay on the scheme long term, you can quickly rise to the top of the pay scale and live a very comfortable life in Hong Kong. Attractive rewards Although working in an international school is a top goal for many serious English teachers, the net scheme offers many things that an international school can't always provide. Being in net allows you to get an authentic cultural experience in Hong Kong by working with local students and teachers. You will likely be the only foreigner in your school, which means that students and staff will really value the knowledge and culture that you can bring to the learning environment. For many students in local schools, you may be the only foreigner they have ever met and probably ever will meet. This means that you will impact on their lives a great deal and bring something completely different to their lessons that they may never have experienced before. In my experience, English departments often give the net a lot of creative control. My school encourages me to switch things up in my lessons, so my students have studied topics such as Disney, Taylor Swift, veganism, etc. We've had Halloween parties, movie nights, photo scavenger hunts and charity walks. On Saturdays, I've taught them culture classes where they learn how to have a proper British afternoon tea and taste different American foods. The students love these interactive lessons and my department appreciates the creative ideas that I provide. One of the things I absolutely love about working in a local school is that I don't have to deal with parents. Many parents in local schools do not speak English confidently, so it's unlikely that they'll want to meet with you. I consider this a bonus because I've had to deal with not so pleasant parents while teaching in English-speaking countries.  Depending on your school's banding, academic ranking, you may have some parents who are more than willing to meet with you. The most important thing is the students. Although not all are perfect angels, in Hong Kong, youngsters are taught to respect people in positions of authority and are generally kind. Compared to their counterparts in many other countries, Hong Kong students' overall work ethic is admirable and in most families, schoolwork is stressed as the number one priority. They are expected to devote most of their time to academics and the majority of them genuinely work hard. Common challenges in net faces. Being the only foreigner in the school does have its challenges. The lack of English among colleagues is probably the most difficult aspect for me. Emails, notices and meetings are all in Chinese. Communicating with janitors, teachers from non-English departments, security or office staff can often be a huge hassle. Sometimes I feel unmotivated to do large-scale activities because asking for assistance or communicating what I need from the school is impossible. Depending on your school's banding, you may have students who speak no English whatsoever. How do you teach a lesson to somebody who has no idea what you're saying? It's definitely challenging. A large number of students may come from mainland China and some have newly emigrated from other Asian countries, which means your way of teaching English might be something completely strange to them. Another big challenge is Hong Kong's education system. You'll be lucky if you're in a school that doesn't enforce constant dictations, drilling and textbook learning for its standardized tests. Although the net is usually granted a lot of creative freedom, this can be difficult to balance in a classroom full of students who are used to rote learning and very old-fashioned teaching methods. For this reason, students are often shy, passive and unwilling to participate in activities that are too different than what they're used to. Moreover, the class sizes are a lot bigger in Hong Kong than they are in Western countries. In Canada, I would have a maximum of 22 students in a class. In Hong Kong, I've had over 40 students in a single class. Both students are often overloaded with tutorial classes and extracurricular activities in addition to their regular classes and long hours of homework in the evenings. Combined with immense pressure from their parents and the competitiveness of entering post-secondary programs, many suffer from extreme stress and other mental health issues. In Hong Kong culture, it's shameful to lose face in front of others or ask for help. Therefore, many students are suffering and cannot access the support and counseling that they need. For these reasons, Hong Kong has a relatively high suicide rate among youngsters. It can be difficult working in such an environment. The net community. Although you may be the only net in your school, you're not alone. There are many communities for teachers such as Facebook groups, WhatsApp chats, and online forums where nets can communicate with each other. Nesta, native English-speaking teacher of association, holds social events every month and advocates on behalf of nets when issues arise. The net section also provides many professional development opportunities such as cluster meetings and workshops. You can meet other teachers and learn useful skills to bring back to your school. In addition, the EBD offers various competitions for students to enter, such as speak out, act up, drama competition, film it, film competition, and hands-on stage puppetry competition. What are you waiting for? I had never taught ESL until I joined the net scheme and came to Hong Kong. If it's your first time teaching abroad, it's a great path to take. Since you're employed directly through the Hong Kong government, you can rest assured that you'll be placed in legitimate schools and be treated with respect and IT professionalism. If you're yearning for a change of pace, wanting to broaden your teaching experiences, or simply looking for an adventure, you should definitely check out the net scheme in Hong Kong. For more information about the net scheme in Hong Kong, visit the EBD website. Apply now for your TEFL CHESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll-free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. Speak with an ITTT advisor today. Speak with an ITTT advisor today. Speak with an ITTT advisor today. Speak with an ITTT advisor today. Speak with an ITTT advisor today.


SARS-CoV-2D614G spike protein mutation is one of the predominant circulating vital mutants. Demonstrate that D614G mutation increases in vitro cell entry by acquiring higher affinity to ACE2. This article was authored by Seyozono, Yangjao-John, Hirotoko-Ode, and others.


Somebody give me a guess of what that means. Yes, number 17. I can give you a clue. The clue is W. Yes, the clue is W, blood press. Can you tell me what 17 means in the blood press? 17, number 17, yes? No, weekly. OK, someone else? Yeah, updates? OK, so this is the thing. Every second, 17 posts by wordpress go up worldwide. Every second, 17 posts by wordpress go up, all right? Then we have another one. I'm skipping 14. Then we have that. The number of running on wordpress CMS, yeah? Great. So let's go to myself. When I gave out my presentation, the guy said it's like a biography. Yes, it is. So my name is Uduar Jagero. Uduar is my witch name. It's my witch name. In Lua, you are named according to when, the time that you were born. Uduar is midnight. Midnight is for witches. OK. So but that is not the only thing about the Lua word, Uduar. Every Lua, the Lua believe that the name that you're given, the first name, is the soul. What drives you? What puts your path that makes you unique? Like there is no, what's your name, sir? Mwanza. So like you will never find Mwanza anywhere. So the Lua believe that that name is the force that drives you. So that is the force that drives me. I have the colonizer's names that were given to me by my father, Ken and Anthony, which I don't use, unfortunately, for obvious reasons, OK? So now what we will discuss is my life, my writing, and how it all goes back to the topic. And the topic is WordPress and business, all right? WordPress and business. And I want to, so this is about me. I'm the lead CMS Africa summit. And then I run this organization called Core Media. And then I am a writer.  I am not lying. So don't stook at these things a lot. No, 4.7% of my. So this is CMS Africa. CMS Africa is an event that was started about six years ago. It hopes from one city to the other in Africa. So the last CMS Africa summit we had was in Kigali, March this year. Before that, we were in Abuja, Nigeria. Before that, we were in Kampala. And then before that, we were in Nairobi. And next year, we are going to Cape Town, all right? So those are some of the pictures, the Kigali. That's Abuja. Next year, we're going to Cape Town. That's my company. And I am also a writer. Now, I have written four books. One is called Why the Hospital Corridor is White. It's a novel fiction. The other one is called The Ghost of 1894, this one. All right. And then the other one is True Citizen. I wish I could talk about them, but I can. So True Citizen is an urban fiction about the story of a conductor, a mud driver who falls in love with the wife of a traffic police officer. You know how that ends. Don't you? All right. And then that's True Citizen. And then we have these two books are a bit sad. So this one follows the story of there was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, right? Where about 100,000 people were being killed per day. So that was in 1994. But my book is called The Ghost of 1894. I went to Rwanda and stayed there for about eight months, recite the book 100 years before the genocide to 1894 in Germany. So that's one of the reasons why I don't have Ken as my name. And then we have Why the Hospital Corridor is White is a book about a young woman who is a what? What's the word? Neurosurgeon in Nairobi. And then she's diagnosed with cancer. So the story follows her going to treat other patients while she's suffering from cancer. Then we have the last story. Say my colon is about a lady who wants to kill herself, but first she has to travel the world. So she travels from Kenya to Zanzibar to go and kill herself in Zanzibar. I have a family. So this is the woman that I think loves me. And then I think this one loves me unconditionally. Then we were laughing somewhere there. So now we are going to talk about what brought me here. That is WordPress and business. And standing here, I owe a lot of my life to open source. Everything that you see that I've talked about, I got married because of open source. I had a child because of open source. I wrote books because of open source. All right? I am serious. It's that serious. And that's why I really love open source. Because open source is, well, the thing is open source is not always free. But open source is mostly free. And the good thing about open source is that if you are just, did I tell you about my story? Now, I was born in the village. And I'm the only member of my family who was not born in the hospital. My mother gave back to me when she was going to the hospital. And she told me that she actually gave back to me by the roadside, by the euphobia, by the ISO. And she tells me, but that's probably why your head is a bit bigger. And you know, it's somehow not where it's supposed to be. But it's something else I want to tell you. Because my mother, my father died when I just finished my fourth form. All right? So I wanted to be a journalist, a writer. But then my father left me 30,000 in the account for my college education. And my mother ate most of it. So basically, there was nothing to go to college. I traveled to Nairobi on faith, said that I want Nairobi to start my life. And then as you guys live in Nairobi, Nairobi can be a very tough place. So I knew my uncle, only one uncle that I could live with. And I knew stories were being told in the village that you can't just live with someone in Nairobi. So I didn't tell him that I'm coming to Nairobi. I just showed up. It was drizzling. And I remember that evening it was drizzling. And his brother was in a school in town. And so I showed up and said, bro, I'm here. He suspected that I talked with his brother, who was my uncle. No, I hadn't. So I just showed up and hoped that he wouldn't chase me away. He didn't. Thank God. I stayed there for the rest of my college life. Then I went to college. And then when I went to college, my mother died five months into my college. And then I was just in this city, this last building alone. We will come back to WordPress and business. Don't worry. I'm still backgrounding the topic to bring you to what happened. So then by the way, this story is for the people in this room that just from college or in college or in a place where they think that they cannot make it in life. And because my life and WordPress and Joomla and everything else and Open Source is about telling people that whatever you are going, that's going through in your mind or in your pocket or in your house right now, it's not going to be there forever. Thanks to people who can make this change. So my college was in Shambles. I tried dodging the teachers for a year and did my certificate. Then went for internship. But then after that, I said, well, I have to drop out. But I was bright in school. Ma'am, I was bright. I think I'm still bright. So I told my teacher that, you know what? I'm dropping out. And she said, why? I can't afford the fees. And then she told me to write a letter. And guess what? I was given scholarship for three years. So I finished. I finished and started writing. I have never been employed. I was employed for 30 minutes, actually. 30 good minutes, 30 long minutes. Right? So OK, let me not tell that story today. So after leaving college, I started writing. Using WordPress.org to write. So I was really writing scripts and posting them online. I was writing short studios. I was writing poetry. Then I started something called Poetry Spot, something, an event like this that was bringing about 600 people in a month here in the city, you know? And I was all writing it on WordPress.org, you know? And then Facebook came and I started sharing and all those things, all right? So after doing all these things and I was earning money from it, and then at some point, money dried. And I was totally broke. Then somebody came and offered me a job for 30,000 per month and said, I'm taking this thing. And then I remember it was one of the tall building next to Allions, Allions in town. I don't know the tall building is called what. Hey, hey, that one. So this guy gives me a job, gives me a desk. And I say, fine, let me start the job. It was a writing job, writing online. And then I realized that I had four meetings that day to attend. So I said to this guy, look, I have four meetings, but I'm going to attend only one and come back for the job.  I said, these things are in my computer. So I went back, we had a meeting. That guy offered me a gig and I never went back to work. Anyway, so WordPress and business, you cannot take them apart. They're like this, because it is through writing on WordPress.org that I earned my money for at least three years. I started writing my scripts and all those things they were all on WordPress. So now I want to ask, how many people do business in the house? That's a lot of people. How many people blog? That's a lot of people. How many people are web designers? That's a lot of people, right. So let's talk about WordPress and business. And when you talk about WordPress and business, it's a bit broad. It's really broad. And so that's why I crystallize it into two, into three actually. So I ask the question, are you a blogger? Are you a designer? Or are you in business? The funny thing about these is that they're all related. Because if you're in business, then you could be blogging as a business. All right? And if you're a web designer, you could still be blogging, all right? So all these things are tied together. So there are people who blog, like us, a way of life, that's their business. So somebody might ask themselves how is blogging related to business? And when I'm talking about blogging, I'm actually talking about WordPress blogging. There is blogging in Drupal. There is blogging in Jumla. By the way, CMS Africa is an event that brings all these guys together in one room to talk about, we have workshops for WordPress, we have workshops for Drupal, we have workshops for Magento, and all these other CMSs. So there are a lot of people, like I was talking to someone during lunch break about what she does, and she told me that she's blogging. And so the question is, how do I make, how do I do business with my blog? How do I earn money as a blogger through my business? Well, I don't think it's easy to start earning money from your blog as to earn money as a blogger on WordPress, but you can. I think one of the things you have to do is to have to be consistent. You have to write like every day. You have to post. And the things that you post have to be interesting. You know? So I majorly blog on Facebook, micro blogging on Facebook. And sometimes I think that if I put them in a blog, it would earn me money, because I have a lot of followers on Facebook. Everywhere I go, I always blog about that thing. So I think that if you're blogging on WordPress, there is, there are things that you can use. If you're on WordPress.com, you can use a lot of these things. Like I said, I'm not going to be talking about the practicality of these things or going into details about these things because they are radial Google.  You can check out Chitika. You can check out Infolinks. And you can check out media.net. But what is so beautiful about blogging on WordPress.org or on.com is this one, which is a dedicated advertisement by WordPress. So if you have a blog, they will have their adverts spread on your pages, right? And they share the revenue with you. The beautiful thing about that, they will share the revenues with you. I don't know about the percentage.  You'll know everything about that one. Okay? And then the other beautiful thing about OneAdds is that all the big guys are actually scrambling to have to bid for the ad spaces on WordPress sites. So there is App Nexus, there is Amazon, and then there is Google Adsense still coming there. You know? And you don't need to do anything. OnePress actually takes care of everything. You just need to write interesting materials and they will all be there. Okay? The other thing is that you are a web designer, and you are asking yourself how is WordPress connected to business? And I think this is no brainer because then all the web designers are making money. Who isn't? Who is a web designer who is not making money? None, right? WordPress is becoming a force to reckon with online, actually. And that's why it's very important to get to WordPress and start using WordPress because the future, I think, is WordPress. And I want to say that WordPress actually is working in a very human way in the sense that WordPress, if you don't have the money to spend, they have something to give you. If you are that person who wants to spend money, they have something to give you. And that's why they have got WordPress.org and then they have got WordPress.com, you know? And I think it's amazing. Web designers that do not earn money, I think you need to earn money because it is easy. Everybody wants a website nowadays. Everyone wants a website. And making websites has become very easy, you know? The idea of writing everything nowadays is, actually there is a secret in web design that a lot of people who are not into web design don't know. And if you know those things, then it becomes very easy, you know? And there is this gentleman called George. George Agak. So he's a content creator. He's a content creator, and he appointed me the other day that he wants to work together with me so that when I have a job for web design, he can be creating the content. And I think it's a great thing because most of the time when clients come to me to build their websites, they don't have branding, they only have a logo and it is only one file, which is like this tiny. They are no longer having a relationship with the graphics designer. He's lost. He, they fought. Did not send the AI, you know? And they don't know their colors. They don't know what to put on about us. They don't know anything. They just want a website.  Because you have to sit down with those clients and give them one, two, three, four, five, and you can go to 10. And if they are good clients, they will pay for all that. And everybody walks away happy. So web design is not just web design. I think as a web designer, you have to know a graphic designer. You have to know a content creator and you need to know good ones. So that as a web designer, you're not just charging web design. I mean, your quotation should belong. Yeah?  Okay, let's go on. Okay, then we have business. Then we have people who are now doing business. And I think that the people who are doing business are not using WordPress properly because let me say something else. When you, there's a friend of mine who's having a web design company and he gets interns that he pays. Every three months, he has three interns that he pays to teach, to learn, and do things for him. So these guys actually write articles. If you are coming to work for him, you have to know how to write articles. And I think if you're a businessman, you have to seem to be writing things about your profession. If you're a web design company, then people have to know the person designing. I was very impressed by this gentleman who came in front here and explained something deeply about such engine optimization and how Google ranks pages and not the entire website. So what happens with business is that when this guy writes that as an article, then this lady who owns a brewery would say that when people type something to do with the brewery is not the word. Let's not forget about brewery. Let's say what? What can we say? An item that is sold every other day. Shoes, yeah? Yeah, flowers, yes. Let's talk about flowers. She sells flowers. And then when somebody types flowers in Nairobi, she needs to come number one, right? And then this gentleman has written a detailed article on such optimization. You know, this lady, when she reads that article, she wants this guy to optimize the website. He's not gonna get this guy, trust me. She's not gonna get this guy.  Why? Because this guy talks about it. So if you're a business dealing with sugar cane, write about what's good about sugar.  So that is why it's very important for professionals to be writing about their profession. One, it builds your such engine optimization as a company when you write, because all those pages are ranked by Google. Every article is ranked by Google as a website. So if you write 30 articles in a month or in a year, all those are seen by Google. And then when somebody types about that business in Nairobi, you automatically pop up, you know? So that gets you people on Google when people search for you, okay? And then branding. I don't know why I chose that photo by the way. I have no idea, okay? Okay, so branding. So this guy is talking about doing some ropes. The ropes or something, right? Yeah, he's doing some, you know, how to build your muscle, how to do all that. And when you talk about that, people are always seeing it, okay, and going. And something happens that when people know you personally, for example, if you are a web designer and then you appear on YouTube talking about web design, then people develop a trust. There's an automatic trust that people develop with you when they see you, when they see you write. Of course, when you write an article, there is a picture of yours down there. Then people that then marry your business with your face and then they start developing that trust, okay? So that happens a lot. And then the biggest thing that happens when you do that is that when you're a business and you blog, is that it's now there is a lead generation. Now you start getting business, you know? So now you get so much web design work that you tell people that you know what we can take your job. All right? So that is my presentation.