This is a recycled version of a talk I gave about three or four weeks ago at the sharks camp in the Netherlands. If any of you were there, then you may well have seen it already. You can perform a merge on it. because there'll be bits that i forgotten, bits which I'm doing differently or whatever. You'll get the full story. tacticsetty from project Kit is detailing my experiences running a small electronic kit business. Y rai ei ddigwad â 110, rai ei penochel anghilodau y gallwn argronwch gyfer gweld, a wneud i chi arweithio eich cyfrifiadau cyllid yn eu cyfrifiadau eich cyfrifiadau, eu gymwylo yn L-ROM,uestion Media, Computer Games, Web, Google, yng Nghymru Cymru, a'r eich hun yn ysbytyn ymdeg yw Oxford Dictionrys, ac ar gyfer wnaeth ym生, rwyf er mlynedd ar y dictionary. Y cwm ydw i'n gwybod i'r perthodol, nid wnaeth eich gweithio'r PNP, I was producing language technology software for manipulating language to do cool things and I thought I could make a living out of this and it didn't really work out because I couldn't find the customers. I was casting around for other things to do for a living and along the way I turned the kind of stuff I did for fun into some products. If any of you were here for this event about a couple of years ago you probably saw me giving a talk about Whisper, an amateur radio protocol and as part of that talk I brought in some of the I guess the development boards that turned into some of my first products as I launched them as playable kits. So that's the background to this talk. This is where this is coming from. I feel a bit bad about this kit business because I'm still running it but I haven't given it to the attention it deserves because along the way I also found Hackaday and you've got to follow the money and the fact is I write for Hackaday. I make more money writing for Hackaday therefore it makes more sense that I spend more of my time writing for Hackaday rather than developing further kits so I have to make a slight apology on that one but it doesn't take away from the experiences that I'm about to relate. So you want to sell electronic kits. I mean everybody has a kit on this. It's like there's an old thing about everybody has a novel waiting within them and in most cases particularly on dark and stormy nights that novel is probably best left unwritten but every electronic engineer thinks hey I can make a neat little kit and those people would buy that and build it but a few things you've got to think about it before you do it. The first is don't quit your day job. There are people who launch kits. It does really well and they make decent living out of it and live happily ever after. I mean I know one or two. I've got one or two friends who've had just hit the right kit, the right piece of electronics at the right time and have made a real contribution to the community. Lots of people have bought it and have made living out of it. If that happens to you that's wonderful. It really is good but I would suggest that you don't expect that to happen. It's a bonus if it does happen. But assuming you've got past that you are going to do a kit. You have to think okay this is the thing I want to make. I think it's really cool and I think lots of people would buy it but you have to have a look at the market in which you're about to work. I'm going to use as an example the Raspberry Pi business. There are a lot of boards or kinds of boards for the Raspberry Pi but among them are little educational boards that make an LED flash or conceivable little boards with LEDs on that you can plug into the Raspberry Pi. There are ones just matrices of LEDs. There are novelty ones shaped as Christmas trees or bananas or whatever it is. And people keep launching new Raspberry Pi LED boards for some reason. I don't know. All I can imagine is that there is a huge untapped market that is still unfulfilled by the vast number already on the market or they simply aren't going through this step and looking to see what other people are doing.  Therefore you've got to look at is this kit a viable proposition? Am I going to be able to sell enough? Is it going to make sense to put this on the market? Finally you've got to look at what makes a good kit. Think of the kits that you've made that you thought were good kits. You probably have an idea of some bad kits.  They are quite beautifully designed often and what you'll get is a little bag of components and a PCB and if you're lucky you'll get some instructions and they'll probably be in Chinese.  She's called Alice and she translates it and it still makes no sense because it's not being well written by somebody who really understands how kits are built. Even in translation it's pretty useless instructions and so you need to think what makes a good kit and so think about the good best kits that you've encountered. I always think the gold standard are the heat kit kits from the 50s, maybe 60s, 70s. They are legendary for having amazing instructions and everything just worked. You followed the instructions and you got a beautiful professional product. I'm not talking about the current heat kit kits which I'm sure are very good but I just somehow can't see it. I don't know quite where they're coming from on those products. I think they bought the name and are trading on the name but that's only a personal view. More recently there was an amateur radio kit company in the 70s, 80s, 90s CM House. I built quite a lot of CM House kits when I was a teenager. I thought they were fantastic kits. They had nice printed circuit boards, components that fit. The printed circuit boards had good writing on to tell you where the components went and the instructions were well written. Back in the day I think they were done with one of those turn the handboard duplicators that used to get exam papers at school with. But you can't blame them for not having 2017's repro graphics in 1987. So you've decided that the kind of kit that you want to make. In my case, I should say the kind of kits that I've produced, some small amateur radio kits for the Raspberry Pi. It's a niche that nobody else seemed to have jumped into and it's what I was making for fun anyway so I just thought hey I'll make these into kits. You've made it on your bench and it works. It's on a redboard or something like that. It's made from kit bits and pieces, components that you've dug out, your junk box or whatever and you're very proud of it. It works really well. What you have to do is turn that into something that works repeatably. You can make it again and again and again with exactly the components that the punters are going to get. None of the, oh I've got one of those in my junk box and you pick out some part from the 1950's or none of those, well I can do that because I have elite coil winding skills and it works for me so it must work for you. It has to be pull it out of the box, solder it to the board, it works. When I was here two years ago I had one of the early prototypes which I showed to a few people of my little Raspberry Pi HF shortwave radio receiver. The first version of that had a little toroidal transformer. Didn't perform very well. As part of this process of iteratively making sure it worked repeatedly I discovered that Ethernet cards have a little transformer on which is actually a fantastic little low power wide band RF transformer and the minute I changed it to one of those I had a repeatable HF radio receiver. That's the kind of thing you need to do. You need to work with exactly the parts that you are going to sell to the punters. Then you have to think about how you're going to package it. The packaging has to protect it to send it to the other side of the world and it has to be attractive when they look at it. It has to present the stuff well so that you've got to imagine that you're actually having it on a stall and people are coming up and looking at it. You want people to look at it and say hey yeah that looks like a really nice kit. Now yet again your little Chinese kit will arrive and it will just be a mess of bits in a bag with a sort of scrunched up photocopy leaflet in Chinese. You've got to avoid that. You've got to make it look wow when you see it. Pricing. There's no point selling a kit if you're not going to make money. It's a place a lot of people get wrong when they for instance do a Kickstarter project. They think oh I can make that for a tenner. I'll sell it for a tenner. Of course you can make it for a tenner because you just spend a tenner on bits but you forget all the other work you put into it. You forget not just your time but taking it to the post office. You forget postage. You forget customs on ordering a whole load of stuff from China. You forget the cost of the staple that sticks together the instructions. Nothing on one of them but when you're doing a thousand of them, hell it's expensive. Almost everything the puffy envelope you send it off in the integrated sticker stationery, the little sticker on the front of the kit, the printing costs of those. You think when you hit print on a laser printer it pops out a few sheets that's nothing but it can be 20p, 30p, 40p that's a lot on a kit. What I do with mine is I produce a spreadsheet which has the bill of materials and then every other conceivable thing associated with the kit underneath it. I price that up for I think 25, 50 and 100 kits and I come up with a figure of what it costs me and then I stick a mark up on it. I would suggest you don't do less than double it. In some cases if it's a low amount, more than double it. Now that sounds like yeah, I'm ripping off my customers. But no, when you are putting in everything that you are doing with the kit you have to make it a sensible and sustainable price for your business otherwise there's no point in doing it. I should be speaking from the same side of the PC shouldn't I? Now I'm a writer, I'm... Oxydictionary is trained literacy so I would say that writing the instructions are the most important part of the kit but genuinely they are. It doesn't really matter what the kit is, it can be the nicest kit in the world. If the instructions are awful then the kit is going to be awful. The punter isn't going to remember the design, they just can remember that they couldn't build it and that comes down to the instructions. I always say keep it simple, pitch it at somebody who to me knows a bit of electronics but hasn't built something like this before. If I pitched it at me some of my customers wouldn't be able to do it because my customers are radio amateurs and they are experts in what they do. They have incredible experience that goes back decades of radio but for instance my kits all use surface mount components. They may not have done much surface mount work so you have to pitch it at somebody who hasn't built anything like this before because though you know most of your customers will have done it gives them all the opportunity to get something from it. This is a lower level than them at all points therefore they don't feel it's above their level. I split my very carefully up into sections. First sections isn't really much use but I consider it very important it's the cheery introduction. Nice picture of the completed kit and hello and congratulations for buying a kit from me.  Isn't the radio wonderful? Just a paragraph and a half, a little bit of blurb. Then I go into a you will need, you will need a soldering iron, you will need side cutters, you will need a lamp, you will need a magnifying glass etc. That kind of stuff, very clearly laid out. Then I have a section on surface mount soldering. I probably wouldn't have a big section on soldering if it was just through a hole because I think most people who buy a soldering kit know how to solder. But because all my kits are surface mounts there are a lot of people who I think are unnecessarily scared of surface mount soldering. It's perfectly within their skill set but they've never done it before so they're scared of it. So I try to lead them in gently, yes you can do this. So I put quite a lot of effort into my surface mount soldering section. Then I have a step by step go through every section of the build. I have a little screenshot with first you do R1, then R2, then R3, then the next section will be IC1, IC2 etc. And I take them through every step of the build. You cannot overdo this, you cannot make the instructions for a kit too clear. Going back to one of those 50s Heath kits. Have a look online, download, you can find all sorts of places that have the 1950s Heath kit instructions. And just look how wonderfully detailed they are. If you can make them more detailed than the 50s Heath kits you're on the right lines. Then I'll probably have a little section on, you've built the kit now just before you plug it into the Raspberry Pi. Let's just check it works. In the case of these what I do is I say connect up a 5V supply with your multimeter measuring current. And I can't remember what the current is but let's say if it's measuring about 20mA it's probably not going to fry your Pi. And an instructions here are the places to look for solder bridges, that kind of stuff. And then I have a little section. Congratulations you appear to have produced a working kit. Plug it into your Raspberry Pi. Here are the instructions for downloading the software and running it. And here are the instructions for use. Then I'm into a little section of appendices. Here are the frequency bands to look at for the radio. Here are a few technical specs. And then right at the end I have the really, really boring bit which is a statement of CE compliance. I consider CE compliance to be an important thing to go for. But I'm very lucky I have a get out clause on the worst bit that for EMC compliant compatibility there is a loophole for kits of parts for radio amateurs. If it wasn't a kit of parts for radio amateurs if I wanted to smack a CE logo on it I'd have to take it to an EMC test lab and I don't have the money for that. So if I make anything else I'll find a tenuous and weak amateur radio angle just so that I can sell it without an EMC test. And then you've produced your instructions. Assemble, I'll put together a working kit of all your instructions and components just as you would want to sell it to the customer and then farm it out to want to see your friends. If they can build it you've probably made a kit that will work and you can proceed to the next step. If they haven't, go back, iterate, find out what they had problems with, fix it, take it back to them. It's an important step, it's a bit tedious and you waste a few kits doing it but you'll thank yourself later when your customers don't give you grief. Then you're ready to put together something for the customer. Come back to what I was saying earlier about presentation, your packaging. You want them to look at it and think wow this is wonderful, I want to buy it. My kits, I looked at different packaging options, there were little cardboard boxes, whatever. In the end I went for plastic click and seal bags because if it neatly in the smaller type of, is it large letter I believe it is, postal puffy envelope. I have a nice colourful sticker on the front with my company logo saying what the kit is. I have to have a tiny little bit underneath saying not for children it's got small parts in but nice cheerful label. Inside the plastic bag I have the instructions carefully folded so the nice colour picture is visible. I tuck the loose components behind the instructions so they don't get a mess of components. I very carefully tuck the printed circuit board, deck all side upwards in front of the instructions. So when you look at the kit you see a nice cheery label, a picture of the kit and a printed circuit board. The printed circuit board says yes this is a professional kit and the effect is of quite a colourful thing. I am kicking myself metaphorically at the moment for not having brought one with me to show you. I should have done my apologies. And then you've got a finished product. Great. You're almost ready to sell it. I'd always say I can't remember if I put this on the next slide. I'll see in a minute. That at that point you need a final set of testing. Give one to another friend, somebody who hasn't seen it before and just check that they can build it from that. That's your final set before sale. Let me come to you've got a kit. How are you going to sell it? Probably the most easy, the easiest and the most difficult simultaneously is to sell it direct. So hawk kits, take them out on the road.  And go to radio alleys, go to events like this. Actually we don't have any traders here. But go to hacker camps, go to make affairs, go to hack spaces, everything. In one way it's probably the easiest way to sell kits because you just stand in front of the punters. They give you money, you give them kits. It's the most difficult way because it is incredibly hard work. You spend a lot of time on the road. There are some people who thrive on that. I know one or two of them and they've done very well. I'm thinking one in particular who sells a little retro computer board who sells quite a lot of kits. Face to face in that way. Personally I didn't because I think it would have given me too much stress and tiredness and I don't think I would have been able to take it. But if that's what works for you, if you think you can do that, it's a very good way to start. Then online. Now I have to give a bit of a disclosure here. I write for Hackaday in other work I do. Hackaday is owned by a company called Supply Frame. One of Hackaday's sister companies under Supply Frame ownership is a company called Tindie. Tindie is described as Etsy for Makers. Effectively it's a very easy online store for people who sell electronic assemblies, kits, that kind of thing. Have a look at Tindie. I'm not so just saying this because I wrote for Hackaday. I'm saying this because I know quite a few people who sell the kits by Tindie and say it's quite good. Is it just tindie.com? I think if you Google Tindie you'll find it. I didn't go for Tindie in the end because at the time I set this up I wasn't sure about some of the implications with respect to tax. At the time I believed they only would pay me via PayPal which I preferred not to go down. It's a decision for yourselves if that's the kind of thing you're looking at. But it's an option and the people I know who use it seem to rate it. I've certainly bought quite a lot of things from Tindie and it seems to work from the seller's side too. Then you've got online shops. That's the route I went down. Now as somebody has done web development in the past I've built online shops of all varieties. Like J-Shop and Magento and all those kinds of things. This is a living hell of payment gateways and other nasties. If you are an online shop guru for whom that is easy then go for it. Knock yourselves out. Personally I wanted to be a maker of electronic kits rather than a maintainer and builder of online stores. I've been there and done that and I really didn't like it. Therefore I went for a turnkey online shop. I went with Shopify. There are other online shops turnkey operations that will do you something similar. It's cloud hosted, real shop experts, real financial experts, real gateway experts, real security experts handle all that side of it. So you just give on with your shop.  That's my experience, your experience may vary. Finally is crowdfunding. I actually the first thing I tried was a Kickstarter campaign. Now Kickstarter is great. Obviously you bung something up and say I'll make 200 of these back me and then the money rolls in and you send them out. There are pitfalls. There are some wonderful online nightmare stories of Kickstarter campaigns where they woefully underestimated the amount of money they went and had 100,000 people wanting to buy whatever it was they were making and only had about half the money and practically went bankrupt doing it or else just folded. I launched my first little board which is a little RF prototyping board for the Raspberry Pi on Kickstarter. I like to think I got the estimation part completely right. It actually failed in the end because I got a bit greedy. I said I can make 200 of these and I only think I got about 170 backers. I will say this. There's a lot to be said for Kickstarter project that fails because you don't actually have to ship anything. You don't get any money but it's an interesting experience. You get quite a lot of publicity. You get in touch with quite a lot of potential customers but you don't have the inconvenience of actually having to ship anything. In the end, when I put the same product on my store and the other products on the Shopify store, quite a lot of my Kickstarter backers bought it anyway. For some people Kickstarter is an amazing thing. It works really well. It didn't work for me but it wasn't quite a failure. If you fill up to a Kickstarter, I think do it. It's an interesting process to go through. Anyway, however you've flogged it, you've flogged a kit. You now have to get it to the customer. You have to get the customers in and you have to keep them happy. When you're sending it out to the customer, you can have the best operation in the world. As far as the customer is concerned, your operation is whoever delivers it to them. You see very large billion dollar online organisations falling foul at this. They think the cheapest bidder always wins so we will hire the cheapest white fan men we can find.  And it's not them that are at fault, it's the white fan man that are at fault but of course it's them that are at fault hiring the white fan man in the first place. Go for the best delivery service that you can. In my case I send everything out, signed for or international tract and signed and I do it with Royal Mail because in my view the posties are best at delivering stuff because they know where everybody lives. That sounds very sinister doesn't it? They know where everybody lives, they know how to find people, they know where to deliver things so if you send something with the posties it will arrive and if you send it signed and tracked people will know that it arrived. My customers probably pay a tad more on the postage than they might do if I use some of the cheaper options but I'm unrepentant about that because I know that they will get it and they will get it in one piece. And when you send it out it also has to withstand the worst that the international postage system can throw at it. I didn't quite test my packaging by packaging up some kits and jumping up and down on it but I should have done but I did do a bit of loading kits in envelopes and sending them through the mail to people. In the end I went for the mail light, I think they are puffy envelopes. The ones I use are a post office large letter. They cost about £2.50 to £3 to send within the UK first class signed for and I've had one or two returns. I had one I sent to Florida I think it was and the US post office cocked up the delivery and I got it back about six weeks later and it had been to Florida and back. The envelope was battered as anything but the kits were perfect inside it. In that case the guy very slightly complained and I sent him another copy of the same order which he received in about a week so it was obviously just the post office cocked up that time. So think very carefully about how you are going to send it out and who you are going to send it with because that's what your customers sees. Next you have to get in the customers, become a marketing genius. At this point you get all sorts of characters in suits popping up and say I can help you on Kickstarter, Facebook, Twitter or whatever it is. You have to do that yourself unless you've got lots of money and to be honest a lot of them are very questionable businesses anyway. I went for this by trying to be a helpful and knowledgeable person on social media, forums, whatever, QRZ, all this kind of amateur radio stuff. Not going buy my kits, buy my kits, buy my kits but if somebody came up talking about stuff to do with the Raspberry Pi with radio with my particular niche I would pop up and talk about it and there in my signature was buy my kits. But I wasn't saying to them, pushing out them, buy my kits. I was being a helpful and friendly expert, at least I like to think I was anyway. And then finally afterwards support your community, you sold the product, help them if they've got a problem. To be honest 99% of my customers never hear from them again. It's possible they buy the kit thinking yes I'm going to build that one day and put it on one side and never build it. I hope they build it, it works for them and they think wow that's a cool kit and just get on with their lives. Very occasionally I'll have one who comes on to me and says I've got a problem. I've had people who've damaged surface mounts components and sent them another little tape of components in the post or whatever or people who haven't got a component or something.  Even when somebody is very irate, you just have to send them another product. Eventually if it doesn't really doesn't work for them just refund them the whole lot, chalk it up to experience. Occasionally you're going to get annoying customers, move on, refund, move on. And mostly you'll help them, they'll get their kit working. Even if you have to refund them often they'll be happy that you tried and you refunded without a question.  So that's what I've tried to do. I've probably lost a bit of money on a few orders but overall I think I've gained. Ah, that's it, sorry. Okay, that's my experience selling or starting in a small kit business.


This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey Aloha and welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. This is Andrew, the security guy. We're here with another episode of Security Matters and today we've got a very special guest, Terry Parks with Sight. Stop Sight. Terry is an inventor, an owner of Stop Sight and we're going to have an interesting topic today about sort of a hostile intruder response and this is not something that I think everyone really pays attention to but response times to these types of incidents vary. Inevitably the intruders there, the adversaries there cause in trouble for a while before we have a chance to intervene and we're going to get into the broader discussion of that and then in the ideas that Terry's created to deal with that. So Terry Aloha, thank you so much for joining us. I do want to apologize to my viewers. We had an issue with our live stream so we've got Terry's wonderful mug shot there. Sorry it's not a mug shot. It's his head shot. And Terry, we're going to keep you on just on the head shot today. I'm so sorry about that. We'll get you hopefully another episode where we can get you live or get you in the studio at some point in the future. So anyway, go ahead and give us a little bit of your history. I know you're the inventor owner of Stop Sight and tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, it's a pleasure to be with you Andrew and your guest or your audience I should say. I'm the guest. Yeah, I'm a 70 year old who has from the earliest time I can ever remember just always thought there was a better mousetrap or a more exciting way to do something. And so when I was even a little kid, I was trying to make a perpetual motion machine. I remember that was kind of my first big venture. By the way, I haven't succeeded in accomplishing that. Yeah, no one else in there. But when I do, I'll be sure to let you know. Thank you. But but my life has been just very eclectic. I I've been in business in many, many different realms, including development of properties, building, built log homes for a while. I was a pastor for many years and was in energy conservation and all of the realms that I've been in, and those are just some of them, I always look for maybe a cutting edge way to do things or a more efficient way to accomplish something. A lot of the things that I'm mostly involved in in terms of invention innovation had to do with something in my life experience, not all of them, but many of them.  So this is not something that's just a theoretical or scientific issue to me. And I my heart goes out like most people, most people's hearts do when when they see people mowed down innocent men, women and children. And I'm the same way. And so I started thinking many years ago, there's got to be a better and more efficient and quicker way to to mitigate attacks. And so that got me thinking and it resulted in stop site. That's a good story. And we're definitely going to get into stop site a bit. I am. I like to ask my guests. And I think I can probably guess at maybe what keeps you up at night. But given the security environment that we live in in the United States, which is a very, you know, secure country by and large. When when you're when you're laying there at night and you you're probably iterating on your latest ideas. But if you think of it from a security perspective, what what are the things that do keep you awake at night? Well, I guess I can't say things keep me necessarily awake, but they're awake. I'm awake longer. Let's put it that way. Okay. And I'm thinking I'm thinking a lot about situations with loved ones, but also people that I don't even know thinking about how that so often they're just sitting ducks when it comes to people's evil intense deadly intense. And that bothers me greatly. I I'm a very protective person. And I don't like to see innocent people in any way, messed up, disturbed or injured or certainly not killed. And that bothers me. And I know that with the societal breakdown in some ways and and other issues, we have mental illness in my own immediate family. I know that that's a factor. But regardless of what the factors are, when you get in that situation, I think about that, even when I'm sitting in a restaurant or in a public place, I've often mentioned to people, you know, if someone came in right now, and started blasting away, there isn't a lot we could do. And so, fortunately, it's it's it's rare when statistically to be in that situation. But when it happens to someone, I believe we have the resources to address that particularly in large venues and in public places. And I'll just say one other thing, Andrew, the thing that bothers me the most, I think in overall in life, is not ignorance so much or impotence or incapacity or that type of thing. It's that we know more than we do. We have resources, we have technologies that we could apply to many things, but we're so slow to do it, so reluctant to do it. And by now, stop site, that somebody should have beat me to this a long time ago, but they just didn't. So I decided I was going to take it on. But that's what bothered me as we know more than we do. Yeah, I am interestingly, I had an author of what's your plan on last week, James DeMeo. And he's authored a book really at for parents to talk to their children about what you mentioned that, you know, when you're going to go to a venue, when you're going to go to a place, what sort of responsibility you have with your family to those others, you know, in your life, as you mentioned before, you know, to help them at least be prepared to at least have their head on a swivel to know where the exits are, to know where the fire extinguisher is, to know what means of egress or what means of hiding or perhaps possible, you know, in their media environment should something occur. And it's interesting that we don't talk about this in such you mentioned that, you know, we've got technology that we're very slow to bring to bear on some of these kind of problems. And in the same way, we don't tend to want to even talk about the problems that can occur themselves. And so I like to get your take on, do you think that fear of these topics is a problem for our culture? Or is it just easier to hope that it won't happen to me or to those others that we love or the others others that we're responsible for? You know, in the security industry, I feel like that's our, it's a privilege for us to bear that responsibility and to share that message and to protect others. But others don't always seem to want to protect themselves or leverage those things they can do for themselves. What are your, what are your sort of thoughts on on that as you've had these discussions with folks? Yes, well, even when I was a pastor, I mean, the last subject people wanted to talk about was death. Yeah, of course, no one like to talk about things which are fatal or or dangerous. And I shouldn't say no one does that's that's not accurate. But so the bulk of the population prefers to avoid talking about difficult issues rather than talking about them. And I've listened a lot to experts who are training people in active shooter attacks and so forth. And they all kind of say a very similar thing. And that is that even though people would like to think that they could be more prepared, it bothers them, especially children, of course, but but also very sensitive adults to even bring the subject up. It's just a subject to avoid. And I understand the reaction. And I'm not blaming anyone for that because it's not pleasant. And many people feel like, well, what could I do?  But what am I going to do in a situation that's desperate like that? And so there's the sense of helplessness, even with the training and with it, also a fair amount of confusion. NPR had an interesting program recently about that, that that even when you train, when the actual events occur, a lot of that training isn't immediately applicable, because you have to adjust and also it gets to be confusing as well. So when I looked at this issue, Andrew, I thought, well, you know, training, I'm not against training by any means, I think we ought to be as prepared as we can be in every respect. But I don't think we can train our way out of this problem, because we can't train everybody and everybody cannot be trained effectively and for every situation. But some training just doesn't stop a bullet. It just doesn't. And there's only one thing that'll stop a bullet and that's something powerful enough to do it. So yeah, it's a good point. You know, I've, you know, in my military career and military law enforcement. So we had, we had several scenarios that we trained for, you know, and you do in classroom training, then you're doing instruction.  So your point that training, we can't train our way out of this, I think it's really well made. I, I'm a big fan of awareness.   And that's that is to your adversary's advantage, obviously. So, but, but there is a point at which I, let me ask you another question. In talking with other folks, do you feel that people think that like society's just going to take care of it? Like when I go to the venue, the venues got it handled like those, those $12, $15 an hour guards and we need them. I'm not not deriding them. But, you know, do I wonder if people feel that the venue or the place that they're going to actually has all that covered and they don't have to worry about it?  Yes, I think there's the whole psychological realm that no one wants to feel hopeless in a situation. And so what we all tend to do is to for our own sense of sanity and security, we want to think that everything's taking care of, like you said, and OK. And I've had people say, we don't need something like stop, so we got police to do that. And that's what we pay them for. And, you know, it doesn't take very long to just say, well, you want to look at a few examples where those paid police find men and women for the most part, some cowards, but some, most of them, yes, pretty good and dedicated. I have them in my family and appreciate them very much, but they're not well suited to this kind of situation because in most cases, they get there after the actions over with or shortly thereafter. And if they do get there when the action is going on, many of them put themselves in severe danger themselves and they spend their time just trying to trying to take cover while they're while they're doing something. And it. We can talk about a couple of the recent cases in that regard. OK, but let's I tell you what, let's I tell you what, Terry, let's we'll let's take a quick break. We'll go pay some bills for about a minute and we come back, we'll get on response times. And that, I think, is goes right to the heart of what stop site can do. So we'll be right back in about one minute. Thank you. This is Think Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggle with hunger. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more.  If you're not in control of how you see yourself, then who is live above the influence? Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech, Hawaii's Hawaii food and farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurant tours and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. And we hope we'll see you next time. Hey, Aloha. We are back to this episode of Security Matters Away. We're on with Terry Parks of Stop Sight. And I understand, Terry, you said that there's a you have an audio feed, some Hawaiian music in the background that you're from our broadcast. I don't myself, but someone who was watching it was saying it's been on the whole time. OK, we'll get production to look into that, make sure we're there. If nothing else, we're recording this, so we'll have this recording and we'll go from there. So we were talking about response times when we left. And I think this is a critical thing. I do not. I think that the public relies on that response force, which is going to do its job. It's going to show up and it's going to go to work to mitigate the threat. But most of these events occur very rapidly within a few minutes. We have a potentially large loss of life casualties and many, many more minutes before we probably get local law enforcement response on site. So you have some examples of that, obviously. And I think this is right where an idea like Stop Sight plays in. So do you have, just off the top of your head, any of those metrics from some recent events of how long it took for the response to arrive? I think it was 20 minutes at Parkland. There are 20 plus minutes. Yeah, it's interesting to watch the events unfold on these. And I was looking at an FBI report as well on kind of collectively to average out and to draw a pattern with these type of events. And even though police many times get there amazingly quickly after receiving an alarm and alert, it's usually at least four minutes before they can get there at the very minimum. And the average time is eight minutes. It goes between four and 11 minutes in most events. Wow. However, most events are over within five minutes. Sure. Most of that time the attacker has freewheeling and virtually no resistance. So as in Las Vegas, that shooter, of course, that was an unusual situation and he was up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, but he was shooting for 10 minutes. Sure. And he had, I think some of this is the ability just to how much ammo can someone physically carry without being noticed. Whereas he had access, he had all that ammo in the room, whereas the guy who walks on your site, if he's got cases of ammo, he's a lot more obvious. So I think maybe some of that, these guys can shoot up hundreds of rounds of ammo, which they carried very rapidly and then they're done and they're headed out the door. Yes. Well, and one of the things about StopSight, since it's designed to be a comprehensive technology, it has detection of capabilities with heat signature. So that man, had there been StopSight, for instance, in the hallway of Mandalay Bay, there's a good chance, as well as magnetic imaging, which can go with it. There's a good chance that those weapons would have been detected, actually, but we can't say for absolute sure and I wouldn't say that as an absolute, but that's what the design is about. But the point being is that Parkland's an excellent example. I don't know, Andrew, if you've seen or any of your audiences seen the 14 plus minutes, they just released that with the commission on security and kind of chastised some of the police officers because no one went into that building or even really came close to it for the seven minutes that the shooter was in that building and then he left and completely left the property with no one interdicting him in any respect. Even though there were officers all around the region and they were just hundreds of feet away and then when Carl Ridge got there, they started to move toward the buildings. Robert did not and neither did the on-site security person but no one has hindered that shooter for the seven minutes he was shooting and no one even got to the bleeding athletic director who died on the way to the hospital for 10 minutes. All of that could have been seen and interdicted and communication with the shooter all of that time and also up to lethal, I say up to lethal mitigation. It doesn't have to be lethal because there's also disabling mitigation too, but all of that just points out the fact you have all the police you want in the area and there were a ton of them at Birkeland before this was all over, but they just listened to the shots and you have the human factors going on all the time. Sure. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about, so when we get into active intervention, so you took a look and said, hey, we've got a lot of technology. I mean, I think of a drone, for example, a lot of technology in a package that flies, unmanned and delivers a strike against an adversary. So that's controlled, of course, by an operator. So same idea of deploying some technology into a site that can take advantage of technology, censoring technology, locating technology, targeting technology, and then perhaps delivering some type of a lethal or less than lethal type of a mitigating technique. So what initially, and let me ask, how long were you thinking about this and what initially got you to say, look, I'm going to sit down and design this now. I'm tired of tiptoeing around the idea. Well, I thought about it before, but when 9-11 occurred and they had these planes in the air and they were talking about the hijackers and so forth, I thought to myself, now, there's no reason why there couldn't be a compact interdiction and, well, up to lethal response that could either disable or take out someone who's hijacking an airplane. It could be dismounted and it could be operated even by the pilot if it needed to be, but it could be operated even from the ground if you have the right kind of data throughput. And so that got me thinking, there's no reason to leave it up to passengers to try to have to deal with this situation if you have the ability to open up a device which can not only see, but can laser accurately, I mean, pinpoint accurately, take someone out or disable them. And it has to, of course, be above the action to some degree, but there's even room in an airplane for that. And so stop site was, first of all, I thought about it, first of all, not just in regard to the Columbine and other incidents like that. I was thinking about it at that time, but I was thinking also about the transportation and aircraft in particular. And as I thought about all the applications, including neighborhoods and everything else, I thought, well, okay, it's time to start looking at the technologies available, start putting them together and seeing how comprehensive can a technology be that does not operate on its own? It is not dependent upon something programmed properly as to when makes decisions. These are real operated by real people, real law enforcement people in real time, but just like video games, this is no game, but just like video games, the idea is to safely from a safe position to accurately and be able to thoroughly and completely as completely as possible, take care of the problem as soon as you can detect it. And so that's the idea behind stop site to have the mounted stop site units, which aren't really big. They're mounted up high on walls and in corners and so forth. They're up above the action so they can look down on to some angle on what's going on. And these have detection devices in them and then that alerts real time law enforcement and centralized facilities that are, this is all they're doing is to monitor and stop site. So these are not officers that are on duty or something like that. They are people who are highly trained for this specific purpose, but they have to be credentialed as law enforcement because they're going to be hurting people or potentially killing attackers.  Yeah, understood. Yeah, so as I started looking at all those possibilities and it's just the way I think I don't have a hard time thinking about multifaceted responses and solutions to things. That's something that comes fairly natural to me not because I'm so smart it just because I think so shallow that I don't think of all the problems first. I think of the solutions first, but check the problems out. That's probably a gift out of thinking. It's a good thing. So it wasn't too hard to think about all the possibilities that a technology could have if it were remotely operated. Sure. And if the technologies could be compactly designed and deployed. And so has this, so have you done some beta development? Is this a thing that I saw that there's not, I think you have maybe some room left for some investment but by and large you're kind of ready to go to production or what's your sort of status there with the build? Well, you know, my favorite, my own definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has multi mega million dollar ideas but not enough money to buy a cup of coffee to tell somebody about it. Sure. I just said. So the stop side as well as some of my other innovations, the biggest obstacle is that early funding. I, at one time I was going to self fund this. The Great Recession took care of that. And so it's very difficult to get large complex technologies of this sort started. So I've made contact and I'm still making contact with some pretty good sized companies that have been in the business a long time and they have a heart for what I'm doing. It's just a question of whether they can business wise incorporate that. I'm willing to do a joint venture and that type of thing. But otherwise I've been contacting many people who are in the realm, some who are money people and so forth to see if they have a heart for doing a first round funding the development, the design, all the technological issues as well as the implementation is very expensive for something like this. The first round though to make sure we have international patents in place. It's patent pending, but we have a lot of patent work to do on it. And that required a little more design work. So we've got about a minute or so, Terry.  Well, I would encourage anyone listening or watching is it where I guess? Watching my mugshot to take six minutes to look at the stop site video if they would. That's on ParkSystems.com. It's spelled with two S's in the middle, ParksSystems.com. And it's the first video. There are others there of other innovations of mine, but that's the one that's featured. That will help them see a little more of what this is about and the why isn't workforce. The other aspect of the appeal is that if someone has, they don't have that great resources, but if they have some resources they would like to see put to something like this, there's opportunity for founding shares. I'm forming a new company brand new. I'm not planning to be an officer in it. I don't want to mix the invention with the administration, but I would be their heart and soul and of course very heavily vested to do the first round. Then once we get the first round, I believe the second round funding and third, which will complete all the marketing and so forth. I think those will come much more easily if the first round is there, but without the patenting global patenting all in place, you can't even get the second stage. All right. Terry, thank you so much for my audience out there. ParkSystems.com, take a look at stop site. Get involved with this hostile intruder intervention. We need to minimize this response time because security matters. Thank you so much, aloha.


haven't done one of these videos for you in such a long time. I don't think I did one in November, December, January, or February, but we're gonna do favorites. And so I gathered together the ones that I thought were my favorites for January and February and I'm gonna get into that with you right now. Hello, girlfriends. I am so glad to be back with you. I've spent a long time. I've been on a hiatus, I guess, with my health. And as most of you know, I did have surgery and it was a success completely. But as the month wore on, I was finding that I was having a lot of nerve pain because when they cut you, they cut the nerves completely.   Some of them come back to life with no problems. Some of them come back to life very angry. And so you have to deal with that too. And I did have kind of one side, one part of my incision that was just, I'll talk about angry, it was beyond anger, it was furious. And so I've been kind of dealing with that for February. That's why I haven't filmed that much. But here I am and I'm hoping that March will be so much better for us. Now we will go over what I'm wearing in a minute because it will be part of the favorites. We'll do that in a second. But we're gonna go through the things that I have found recently that I am really liking. So let's start out with these eye patches. These come in a huge amount of eye patches. Now I have not been one that has really gotten into the eye patch masks or the facial masks. I felt like it was kind of a kind of a gimmicky thing and kind of a waste of money because you could actually, you know, make this kind of yourself and just put it on super thick and then wait, you know, 20, 30 minutes and take it off. But with these, I found that I can reuse these like three times. I can put my own serums on here if I want to. You don't have to because it's full of really yummy kind of brightening and really hydrating serums that are in there. And so you can use these without anything else. But after I'll use or two of them, what I will do is I'll put my own on. And by the way, I stick this whole package, I put it back in the package, back in the sleeve, and then I put the whole package into a baggie. And then I take as much air as a block and I take as much air out of it as I can to be able to reuse it. And that's how I just make them last a lot longer. I'm cheap, so I don't want to keep buying them that much. But I really do love these. And I put my own serum on there. Like on the third day, I'll put either an eye serum or even just one of my regular serums, whatever I like.  Wearing concealer or makeup under there can look terrible because it's not plumped up enough. And this really does help with that. I forgot to tell you about my numbering system. So as I hold up the product, there's going to be a number it should be to right now. And as we go through, they'll be all numbered. Don't worry about remembering what the product is. Just go down the description box and find that number. And the product will be next to it. If there's any color or any sizes that will be there as well, you can shop that way with the links. This is Vaseline and this is the balm or, you know, put into a balm like this. You basically put this on your pulse points like you would your perfume and make sure that it's on there and then spray your perfume on there. And the oil helps grab the perfume and make it last longer for all day.  But I do put it behind my ears, on my wrists, in my elbows and behind my knees. And then I spray all over the place with the perfume and it makes it last so much longer, especially if you just have a body splash perfume or a body spritz for perfume. I don't know why I can't talk today, but it works really good for that. So keep that one in mind. I think you'll really like that in the end. I also just barely got these new sketches in the mail a couple of days ago. I ordered them off of QVC and these are the kind of sketches that I wear all the time. It has the no string or, you know, you don't have to tie it. So it's just got the bungees on it. And I love these that are the lightweight, especially going into spring and summer. They're just so nice. These have such a cute print on them, pale yellow with pink and kind of coral in there, purple in there. I loved the print on it. It was so cute. I love sketches. It's my very, very favorite brand of sneakers to wear. I love them because you can just slip them on. I love them because they never, ever hurt my feet. True to size all the way through every time I wear a nine. I can buy a nine and it absolutely will fit every time. I love this brand. I will forever continue to support them. These are super memory foam inside of them. I think these are adorable going into spring and summer. They're going to be so nice to wear. And then off of Amazon, I found these and I had to show you these in favorites. Number one, I have still like eight inches, 10 inches of snow outside, but I wore these in the house all day long the other day. And they didn't hurt my feet, nothing rubbed. And that is a huge thing for me when I'm wearing sandals. I can't wear the flip-flop sandal or the thong sandal where it splits right here with your toe because it always rubs on my toe long toes. And so it always just hurts right there. But these were regular sandals so I could wear them. I thought they were so cute because they have enough of the design on them to be just a little bit of an elevated sandal. But at the same time, you're still getting the pretty much your flat sandal. I do like that they do have quite a bit of memory foam in there. And they didn't hurt my feet at all when I wore them. So I love these. They have like a zipper in the back right here. You can zip them up and get in and out of them a little bit easier. So I love these. I thought they were so cute. They come in quite a few different colors and I'll make sure that I link those for you as well. I wanted to show you a brand new product from Denessa Myricks. Now, this isn't her latest product. This has been out a while, but I really have been enjoying this. This is the Dew Wet Balm Highlighter Highlighting Face and Body Balm and the shade is Morning Dew. Now, this is kind of almost just like a clear one, but I'll tell you why this is different. And it kind of surprised me. I was like, normally when you get these that are coming a balm and they're talked about as being a highlighter, you normally get them like this one's just clear. You get them and they are kind of tacky and they stay tacky no matter how long you have them on.  But what's different about the Denessa Myricks one is it will dry down and you won't have that sticky feeling to it. Now, you can see right there that it is giving kind of a wet look to my hand. Let me put more on so you can see a little bit better, but it gives that wet look to your cheeks and it stays there all day, even though it's not tacky and I don't know how it does it. I've got it on today. I don't know how it does it, but it's really cool. It's a very innovative product. This does come in several different colors. I chose this one because I thought that it was going to have a little bit of color in it, but it's just a clear one. And I think it's something very special, but you kind of almost have to get used to it. It's not like other highlighters that you put on and you get that super color or, you know, sometimes you put on a light highlighter and it's super white or you put on a golden highlighter to see the golden. This is so subtle and that's what I love about it. You know, if you have texture and you just stay away from highlighter, you might really love this one. So I thought it was a good one and wanted to pass that on to you. Elf also came out recently with their color correctors and they have these in all different colors. Now my shade is peach and this one is called Camo Color Corrector and I've been really enjoying this. I've been enjoying it because what happens with it is it's super opaque. So you get that color payoff of canceling out your dark circles or any darkness you might have with age spots or whatever. You can just touch those, but I will put this on and then I'll let it dry down and it doesn't dry out, which is so nice. And what I mean by that is if you're putting it underneath your eyes, if something dries out, you're going to look even, you know, older because it's going to kind of be crinkly and this doesn't do that. Plus it plays really well with other concealers and that's what I like about it. I have it on today and I was trying out the new Flower Beauty concealer. I'm not really sold on that one. So even though I look okay with it, I really had to work with it in order for it to look good, but I do really love this new color corrector. They have all different kinds of colors. They also have a light peach one if you're lighter and they have a darker one. So definitely like an orange colored one. Definitely something that I would look at if you needed a color corrector. I think that's a really good. Also, this is cool. Okay, I was on TikTok and I saw this gal. So this is not my idea, but I have to share it with you because I think it's one of the coolest things that I have found in a very long time. It could be the greatest trick on the planet for lips and being able to keep your lip color on for all day now. It's not the lip color. It's more like the liner. Scott Barnes started the craze with Toddie about really contouring your lips, leaving that darkness underneath your lips and kind of outlining them in kind of more of a contour color or a deeper color so that you had that kind of shadow and then you could overline and then you could put your color on and it just made your lips look a lot bigger. Okay, this little gal on TikTok and I wish I remembered her name. I looked for her video, could not find it. I apologize if you're watching this and you know who she is. Please tag her so that she gets the credit, but this is Maybelline's Tattoo Studio and this is their gel and this one is so cool. Okay, Tattoo Brow and this is the Easy Peel Off Tint. Take this and the little brush isn't the greatest, but it still works.  You outline them. You do the pout. I have a whole video on what the technique is on doing this, so I'll make sure that I'll list that below. Hopefully I'll remember that so you can kind of understand how to do that, how to outline. But here's what happens with this particular product. Okay, you put it on and you just put it on in a line. You can put it on thick or you can put it on thin. It really doesn't matter because it's going to do the same thing. So what happens? I'm going to let that dry. It's going to take a couple of minutes to dry while I'm talking and I do have it on underneath my lipstick today or it looks like there's darkness there. Maybe I've outlined my lips with a dark brown. Well, I haven't, but what the cool thing is is this product, this Maybelline product, is what you can use in order to get that effect. Now you put it on. You line your lips carefully.  I almost would think that you might want to go in with something a little bit more precision if you feel like you have another brush that would work. Maybe an eyeliner brush or something. You could do that, but you put it on, you let it set, peel it off and it is budgeproof. I've been wearing this that looks like it's lip liner right now. I've been wearing this since really early this morning. Right now it's almost four o'clock in the afternoon and wow, it's incredible that it's still there. But I had put this on my hand for a demo on TikTok that I did and I had it on my hand all day long and by the end of the day, I'm like, I guess I better try and script that up. But it is so cool because you'll be able to have that contour on there. Now you can go on and over line your lips with a different color if you want to, then put your color on and your lip gloss on, which is actually what I did today, or you can just use that and put a lip gloss on and it would be gorgeous. I wish that I could get a hold of maybe Maybelline or somebody else and talk to them about possibly doing this in different colors because it would be a fantastic idea for a lip liner that you could put on and have it stain for all day long. By the way, I will list another one that is kind of like a knockoff from the Maybelline tattoo because I think this is almost $20. I'm like, why in the world is that so expensive? But the one that is the knockoff was about $10 and they're identical. They work the same. So I'm assuming that they're probably got the same ingredients and the same kind of technology in them. It lasts just as long as far as it being staining on your lips. Okay, this is dry.   Now that is that probably doesn't seem very dark to you, but it's going to be there and it's going to be there all day and you're not going to be able to get it off. And I am here to tell you that is there to stay. So this is genius. I think this looks a little bit gray, but that's what you want. You want it to kind of create that shadow. So that's really what you want. I just think this is such a good idea. Genius. Absolutely genius. I also found this month and I was so excited about it. These are holders for your sponges. Okay, so here's the beauty sponge, right? And what I normally was having was a two piece deal where half of the piece would be gone and my granddaughter would be playing with it. And then the other half I'd be left with. And then I didn't have anything to put my wet sponge in so that it doesn't get your other makeup dirty with the foundation or the concealer that you have on there. And the other thing is, is that this helps it dry. So it's got the ventilation in there. As you can see, you just put it in there and it's not going anywhere in your suitcase or in your makeup case. And I liked it because it also protects the sponge from getting, you know, dents in it or whatever if it gets crushed. So I think this is a great idea. And I really like it because it's a one piece thing that you can just get your sponge in and out of and it can dry. And yeah, oh, by the way, it comes in a two pack. So if you want to give one away or you want to keep one at home and keep one in your makeup case in your car, whatever, it just, it just is a great invention or a great idea. They're silicone. You can throw them in the dishwasher if they get super dirty in the top shelf. I just washed mine with a little bit of makeup shampoo or makeup brush shampoo and they come sparkling clean. So love these, think they're great. Now Ulta came out with their new stick blushes and I'm a little bit in love. These are the two cheeky for lips and cheeks. So if you wanted to use this on your lips, you could. Okay, so the colors are close up. That's what this one is. You know what I like about this? So creamy. So even though you can use it on your cheeks and it stays on your cheeks, by the way, oh, this is the one I have on today. I was trying to figure out which one I had on. But I do have on for my blush today close up that I just said so creamy. And the creaminess I love because you could use it on your lips as well and it not draw your lips out. So that one is kind of just a true pink, a true rose. This one is kind of more mauvey. And what is this one called? This one's called Mood. Really pretty. Just a really pretty more of a, just like I said, like a mauvey rosy tone to it. And then the last one is kind of a true pink. And this one is called Social. And they have corals. They have peachy pinks. They have so many colors. I just thought they were so pretty and they have lighter. They have darker. There's the lightest one that I have. I really like these. And I love that it's a cream product.  Everything matches. Just so pretty. Wonderful texture. Really have loved it. Now, I also want to share with you guys what I've been doing with my hair. I have fallen in love with these huge rollers. I used to use these in high school and like probably five years after I was married, every time I did my hair, I did not do my hair without rollers. Of course, they didn't have the nice little velvet flocking on that they do now. And they didn't have the guides that they do that helps heat it up way inside. These are great. And I love these because they're an inch and a half which is great for just like a bend or body in your hair. And that flocking helps grab onto your hair so they're not going to fall out like the old ones used to. This one does come with clips too. I don't have them over here, but it does come with the old-fashioned clips that I use every time. Anyway, super duper wonderful body on this inch and a half. That's what you're getting. Now, they do have other sizes. Another one has an inch and a quarter in there, an inch and some smaller ones. That one is great for actual curls if you want that. But I've been using this one non-stop partly because I'm so tired of using a curling iron and curling my hair and it taking so long. And this just, it works so good. So yeah, I put them in my hair when they're hot and, you know, completely, you know, do my whole head and then I will wait until they're completely cool. So I'm doing my makeup after I have them in waiting and you will not believe the kind of body that you get at this. Even the body that you're seeing on the top of my head today, that is all about those curlers because I used them two days ago. Oh man, did you all see that my friend Jan Phelps actually came out with a set of brushes from Dalton? I just got this today. But I wanted to make sure that I talked about it because I want to support my girl. I have not had a chance, like I said, to use them, but they feel very, very soft. So you get a paddle brush or a flat concealer brush or flat shading brush. You get a blender brush that isn't really domed. It's just kind of your basic straight-up blender brush with a little bit of a dome on there. You get kind of a pencil brush. It seems to be a little bit thicker at the point than a regular pencil brush, but it's got that stiffness to it that's so good for smudging out the bottom lash line. So nice. And you also get this really nice foundation brush in there that's angled. And then you get this brush right here, which is just you can use it for powder. You can use it for highlight. Whatever you decide to use it for, it's just a really nice powder brush. So happy for Jan. And if you get the chance to show her some love and some support and congratulations, Jan. It couldn't happen to a better gal. I'm so excited for you. And yeah, she did a great job on it. The last product that I'm going to show you is from Dermalect. And I discovered this line after my good friend Sherry from Graceful Beauty talked about it. And I love this product right here. This is the Outcrease Retinol Trifectus Serum. This is Retinol Retinil Acetate and Retinil Palmitate. And did I say that right? Yes, I said it right. Palmitate. Now, this does not replace my heavy duty Trentinoin or my heavy duty Retinay. But I want something that I can use in between those treatments that can help boost that collagen production even more than my Trentinoins doing. So I set out to find something like this. And I'm so glad I did. I absolutely love this. And it goes on and it feels like a dry oil. So you're going to use it and I let it sit on there. And then it just kind of dissipates and sinks into the skin. It feels really good. And then I'll put my heavy duty moisturizer on before I go to bed. And they have tons of different skincare products at a fairly reasonable price point. It's not the cheapest that I've seen, but it's reasonable. I feel like I'm noticing brighter skin, a little bit, you know, totter skin. And I just, I've been loving it. Absolutely loving that I have something in between days. So I want to share with you the top that I have on today. It's a rib knit sweater short sleeve mulberry color. Really pretty. And then it just kind of hits right at mid hip, right there mid butt, right there. Really do like it. The jeans that I have on are really nice jeans. They're kind of an acid wash. I didn't even know they had acid wash anymore. I used to wear them in high school. So that's kind of crazy. They're not a button up though. They actually have a zipper on the side right there. So you don't have any buttons or anything. And they're pretty darn stretchy. So they're really nice. This is a large and I'm really glad that I got them in a large. And I will show you a long video or a long picture of them too. Because I love the little split that they have in the front. They just are so cute. And then you can wear tennis shoes or whatever you want with them. Just thought that they were really cute. Also want to share with you two really cute purses. I am so into this quilted bag thing. And this one has a, it's a crossbody bag by the way, has the gold chain on it. It's so cute. And it can be made longer or you can use it as a double. And it's just really a cute purse. Has all the gold accents all over it. Has the flap that goes over the top. And then it doesn't have a bunch of compartments. It just has the one which I actually like when you have a smaller purse. I think the compartments kind of cut out from the size of the purse when you do have these little tiny crossbody purses. But I love having the smaller purses especially since I had my surgery because what happened was I was just not able to carry anything. But I could carry something that was this size. Very light and very well made too. So I loved that one. And then I also loved this one. Not just for the quilted detailing on it. I loved the color of this because it's almost like, it's almost like a rosy beigie color. And I just thought it was so cute. I loved the little accents. By the way, this is my own little accent. I will list this little key chain for you down below if you're interested. But I did come with the little purse that just looks like a little kitten on there, which I thought was so cute. Gold accents. And I love that they did the black piping on this purse.  But you do have the option of having the longer chain, which I really liked too. And then again, like I said, it's just the one pocket.  But it's just the one pocket. This one does have two or three pockets on this side that you can use as well. And then the back of it, it does have an ID pocket. I don't think I would feel very safe putting my ID in there. But you could, you know, stick something in there if you needed a special paper or something. I thought this was a great purse and a great size. This is the perfect size for me now. My bigger purses, I have been using occasionally. But the smaller purses are what I'm gravitating towards because I need this small purse so that it doesn't absolutely weigh me down and kill me. So love this one as well. That's it for today's video. I hope that you did enjoy seeing my roundup of December, January, February and what I'm loving and what has really caught my attention. I am more interested in finding out what you have been using while I have been on my hiatus and been away so much. I'm losing my voice. I'm so not used to doing this. So I'm interested in knowing what you have found that you are fallen, that you've fallen in love with. That's always of interest to me because I love to try out your suggestions. They're so good. So leave all those suggestions down in the comment section and I hope you're doing really well. I love you so much and please come back, back around really soon in my next video. Take care of yourselves friends. Goodbye.


Hi, this is George Cao and this is a video about how to keep up with the updates of the people who are most important to you on Facebook. So the first thing you need to do is go to the Facebook homepage, which is facebook.com and then instead of just clicking on news or instead of staying here on the news feed and looking at, you know, somewhat random postings that Facebook serves up for you, scroll down and find where it says interests. Now you might not have these yet, but just click on the word interests, okay? Oops, okay. Once you've clicked on the word interests, again, you scroll down, you click on the word interests and now you're here, the interest section. You might just have the following one. You might not have these yet. Don't worry about it. I'm going to show you by giving you an example of adding a couple. I'm going to start an interest list of some of the clients in my current coaching program just to give you an example. So I'm going to click add interests, okay, and then instead of adding what other people have created, I'm going to create my own. So click on create list, okay, and then I'm going to actually, so instead of clicking on any of these pages or anything like that, what I recommend doing is scrolling down and clicking next, okay, and this is, I'm going to put current clients, okay? These are clients. And who can see this list? I'm going to put only me and that's what I recommend because then who you put on the list is all private to you. So current clients only me. I'm going to put a couple of clients on the list. I don't think they'll mind having people know they're in my coaching program because, yeah, they're building great businesses. Current clients and click only me. Only I can see it and then click down and click done. Okay, so now no one's on this list yet and the way you add people to the list, the easiest way I would say is to start, well, the easiest way actually is to go to their profiles and fan pages and add them from there. So first person I'm going to add is Allison McKenzie. So I'm going to type her name in the Facebook search, Allison McKenzie. I'm going to click on her here. That's that's what I'm trying to add. So once I get to Allison's page, I'm going to click, I'm going to scroll to the right-hand side and I'm going to click on the gear icon and I'm going to click add to interest lists and I'm going to click current clients. Okay, besides adding her personal profile, I'm also going to add her fan pages to the interest list because since she's one of my current clients, I want to make sure I see the updates that she posts to her fan pages too. So the way to get to someone's fan page typically is to look at the about section and where it says, you know, their job title and then the company or the fan page. So job title and then the fan page is hard center network. So I hover over this one. I scroll down a bit. I click like. I hadn't liked it yet, but now I will. And then once I clicked like, I can hover over this, click on add to interest lists, click on current clients. You see? And another one, Allison McKenzie. All right. Because these are these are job, you know, sort of generic job titles, job title, and then this is the fan page. So I'm going to go here, hover over like, click on add to interest lists, click on current clients. And I'll add one more just to show you see Brenda. Okay, so her and so I want to show you this example because Brenda is also someone I want to add to my current clients list, but she's not yet a friend. So I can't add her to the interest list. So I have to click add friend first and once she approves my friend request, then I can come back to her profile, click on the gear icon and there will now, there will at that point be an add to interest list here, but it's not, she's not a friend on Facebook yet. So so I hope that's very helpful. So let me just kind of go back to and show you where that shows up. Click to back to the Facebook home page and where I find that new list, I scroll down and it should be in my interest section. And what I recommend doing is clicking on the pencil icon next to the list that you've just created and click add to favorites. And this is, this only affects your Facebook sort of home page. So next time I come to Facebook, it's in my favorite section. So I can easily click actually Alona is also one of my current clients. So I'm just going to hover over here, click on actually so this is called a friend list. This is not interest list. A friend list is is where you cannot add someone's fan page. So to add an interest list, you have to click on the profile, go to the right-hand side, click on the gear and click on add to interest list current clients. Okay, so now in the future, I click on the Facebook, I go back to home and then I click on current clients and now I'm just seeing the updates of the people I put on the current clients list. Okay, and it's always nice when whomever you are trying to keep your your most important people in your life, it's always nice for you to just visit Facebook every now and then be focused and click on the list and just like read and like their their postings and whenever you have a chance, just type something, type a type of appreciative comment about whatever they posted. And that really makes people feel good and it's a great way to kind of keep keep a good relationship with your VIPs on on Facebook. The other last thing I want to say is besides adding your most important people, it could be your current clients, it could be your family members, your closest friends, your business partners. I also recommend adding friend lists, not friend lists, sorry, interest lists, again, scrolling down, clicking interest, creating interest lists on the people and the and the and the and the celebrities and the books and the and the brands whom you want to influence you. Because if you if you if you believe in living more consciously living in a way that you're continually upgrading who you are to become more and more of the person you want to be, one of them is what you consume in terms of information. And so I'll give you a quick example. I'm going to add an interest list called I'm going to add an interest list click on next. I'm going to make it public this time because I don't mind inspire spirit. So the I'm going to add a couple of folks who inspire my spiritual path. Okay, so just to give you an example. So here I'm going to the way I do it is I I'm going to click I'm going to find the Dalai Lama, for example, okay, Dalai Lama. So as I search, that's probably the official page because that has the most number of likes. Click on it. Come over here. Click on the gear. Click on add to interest list. Inspire spirit. Okay. Another one I'm going to search. Let's see. Cardic radio. I like cardiac radio. Scroll to the right. Click gear. Add to interest list. Inspire spirit. So next time I'm on Facebook. Oh, and I also want to add them to my favorites list so it's easier to access. So scroll down. Click on this pencil icon. Click add to favorites. So next time I come to Facebook, instead of just reading random things that Facebook decides to serve serve up for me, I can be inspired, you know, in my spiritual path by clicking here and you know, reading and being inspired by the Dalai Lama's postings and I guess cardiac radio hasn't posted anything recently and also follow up and you know, I call it social media caring. So provide social media caring for the people who are most important in my life. So I hope this video helps and I hope this video will help you to do some good social media caring for the people and help you to continue growing and solidifying the relationships that are most important to you. And if you find this helpful, please do share this video forward so that more and more people can use Facebook more consciously and create relationships that really matter to them. With that, I wish you well and thank you for watching this video.