What's everybody Jason here for Jasper's case race calm twenty to twenty three Panini flawless collegiate basketball just sold out This is a one box random hit break number two and again guys ten total spots There's ten cards in the box usually six autographs two relics and two gem cards or a gem autograph And of course the way this works guys is first we open up the box We showcase the ten hits then we'll randomize the customer names and the hits and whatever you match up with is what you get so Here's a dice roller we'll do that later. There's a customer list there There's something in my eye And then of course like I said, well manually input the hits that pop out of here And then we'll randomize names and hits for you guys All right, so here we go guys Round of the two So of course guys, this is the most recent draft class right twenty two twenty three with Paolo chat Jane and Ivy Smith jr. Etc. So that goes telling people you know We're not going to see a higher-end product like this for a little bit especially flawless NBA It's me a little wild. So honestly, you know some of these hits that pop out of here Sometimes you can retain a little bit of good value for a little bit And it looks like see we get a third extra hit if we do end up getting an extra hit guys I'm not sure those supposed to be three of them in here, but We end up getting a third extra hit. We usually combo up like the relic With something else or etc. So says Six two relics two gems Alright guys, so here we go first one is a patch here Cade Cunningham, of course. That is a one two three color patch eight of ten We have a Dyson Daniels five out of ten and look at this Christian Coloco That's a one-on-one pack 12 patch right there for Arizona. It's pretty nice I'm sure our co-worker Evan knows this guy. He's an Arizona alum That's a one-on-one RPA right there guys Very solid. We have Trey man Ten out of 25. Nice two-color patch out of Florida. He's a Rookie there for the Thunder. I think actually that's an update too And this is an update from last year. My god, dude, you're is is just blowing this game from Mexico already in the first inning We have David Thompson 21 out of 25. We have a RPA there to 25 Ash OSHA at Baji They pronounce it three out of 25 out of Kansas And the last one in here is a Johnny Davis for Wisconsin three out of 25 All right, so one two three four five six seven. So yeah, actually, you know what there's ten cards in here, actually So let's go right here Got Dwayne Wade five out of ten Marquette little gold gold diamond Scotty Barnes eight out of 25 Little diamond gem for Florida State. This should be an autograph or patch auto Rookie autographs nice Chet Holmgren 21 out of 25. I wish he was playing for my Thunder this year But had that little little injury in in a pro-am league, which I don't think I'll ever be playing again before the season started in summer league, so Had to miss the whole entire Thunder year, but that's a very nice Chet Holmgren right there 21 out of 25 nice All right guys, and there you go. So I'm gonna quickly pause the video and we'll input these hits as they came out and That uh, we'll randomize the customer names and the hits and see what you guys get so BRB guys All right, you guys so welcome back. I just input the hits in there. So there's a customer names There's the hits and whatever you match up with is what you get at the randomizer here So let's roll it and it's just snake eyes just two times. Good luck one two So two times James at the top last one. I'm older down to Ryan at the bottom and here we go guys two times one two Boom Scotty Barnes diamond down to Johnny Davis to 25 so boom right there See how you guys matched up so James You have the Scotty Barnes diamond to 25 Brian Frank with a colloquial one-on-one RPA. That was pretty nice Adam with the Dyson Daniels pads brine with the Kate Cunningham pads Jay with the Trey man RPA to 25 as well as the Dwayne Wade gold diamond David Thompson autographed to 25 Obagi to 25 RPA and the Chet Holmgren autographed to 25 pretty nice Jay and of course Ryan you can end out there with a Johnny Davis autograph. So appreciate it guys. Like I said, that was the break Jasper's caspins calm guys you guys want to get more break since and I appreciate it guys


So this is live. I haven't seen this block. I see the picture of my boy spaceman who you might remember sent me this I don't I watched the highlight In same block yesterday, I've ever seen Balancy Where he caught the friggin ball of two hands. I Need to see a Steven Selly reaction video. Okay Okay, so he sent me the link I haven't watched it, but I did see John Moran's John Moran I said Giannis on the two coupons of Giannis is not name wrong and I got roasted for it So I don't know how to say his name. Yeah, he said it like Ja. Anyway, Moran's I saw his dunk head at the rim. That was nasty. He almost literally nailed it. He's Amazing to watch. I'm ready to watch this thing now ready. Here we go Internet Wait, I need to see the replay. It's a little blurry. He's gonna be so high. Oh My god, how do you do that?  Oh That's like two hands above the square. Oh my god He does it so hard to he could that's what's funny. Wow, okay So first of all, it's funny when you like smack it with two hands You could just like touch it right some people do that once in a while They just like touch it out of the air. They're so high, but it's just exciting to see what he's gonna do next It's exciting to see what he does and other people keep doing cuz he's just one of the few I don't know anything. Okay, don't I mean this is like when comedian podcasts say that about politics or something I don't know anything It's gonna be fun to see more people with insane friggin hops in the NBA doing insane things Cuz hops are becoming more trained and everything. It's not just one freaky jumper like it was That was nasty. I'm gonna pause it one more time. I'm gonna pause it like how tall at the top. Oh my god, right there. Oh My god, so he's forward leaning so it's already a little far the balls above the square like line wise His hands are probably above the square and he's he's timing that block. How do you score? You can't score That is insane. His head is like rim.  So What's we have the same vertical you get the point? So that's my reaction send me more clips I should do this more often. I'll have a good day Nothing matters and nothing really exists you can create your own reality.  Have a good time


US Marines with Maritime Special Purpose Force. 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, conduct a parachute insertion during the Intelligence Interoperability Exercise 2 on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, November 16, 2023. Intelligence Interoperability Exercise 2 tests the integration of multiple intelligence disciplines in order to enable the Marine Expeditionary Unit to respond effectively to diverse and evolving threats while underway.


Welcome. This talk is about the Mega 65 project and it is a new talk. I just created three weeks ago as I had a funny idea to go to such conventions and see if this is a great thing and I can tell you I had lots of fun. Who am I? My name is Oliver Graf. I am someone who started with a Wig 20 then moved over to a C128. I had slight contacts with Apple IIs in my school doing UCSD Pascal and other funny things like manual presets on four-color needle printers or something like that. As I moved on to a PC I quickly discovered that Windows is not my thing so Linux it was and in my work life I'm a network architect and a software developer at the local little ISP in Rhineland Palatinate. With the Mega 65 project I'm associated since 2021 and I started looking back into retro computing and stumbled over projects like Commander X16 and Mega 65 and also I started with a manual board set and somehow I got sucked into the project because I discovered a problem and the reaction of the developers was hey try to fix it. Yeah so I fixed it and then I was suddenly part of the team and since 2022 I like to call myself the GitHub janitor. I look after the repositories I prepare for releases and I also actively develop on the core and on infrastructure for the PC and for the Mega 65 itself. Yeah what's the Mega 65? For that we first take a little look back into history so 1980 we had the Wig 20 as we all know 1982 the Commodore 64 followed and 1985 so short time periods we had the Commodore 128. Then around 1986-87 you all know what Commodore did they bought Amiga and brought out the first Amiga and a bit later 1991 they suddenly decided hey let's do another 8-bit platform and the names that were in fluctuation were C65 or also C64DX so the not classic design with a front loading floppy drive and a three and a half inch floppy drive which you did not see in the old Commodore computers they always had the 1541 or 1571 the 51 quarter inch disks. Yeah they developed the system they developed new ships it had a glitter like ship DMA magic ship they called it it had a new Wig ship it had the same old sit chip and it had a new CPU the 4510 and this one don't had any undefined opcodes as the 65 or 2 had. Yeah so then features got tested ROM got developed and people were set up on the task to determine how compatible the C65 which had a C64 mode is to the C64 because the C64 there is this huge software library so you want to have this software library for your new 8-bit machine and yeah the testers were not happy with the system it was not very compatible you didn't have the five and a quarter inch floppy drive directly there you had to buy another drive and those drives were very expensive because they had a whole CPU inside as we all know on and that was one of the reasons it did not both well for the testers and also those pesky not pesky pesky opcodes the undocumented or yeah the undocumented opcodes they did not work so most of the very old software that made use of them did not work and other features also did not quite sync up with the C64 software library so because of that and perhaps also of because of financial reasons they yeah terminated the project and to that time we don't know exactly around 200 systems we think we're in fluctuation with different hardware revisions and they got sold off or thrown away for little money and the development was completely halted and more Amigas were made obviously you can buy those systems I think I talked today with a few people who actually have one with one who has one and I also know people who have one if you look for eBay auctions or look on the wiki page of the C65 you can find that it is sold for prizes up to 20 30 30 000 euros because it's so rare if it is worth it I don't know but in the end this was the reason why different people decided hey the C65 would be interesting perhaps we can recreate it and one of those people was Paul Steven Gardner from Australia and the other folks were mega the non-profit club so in German Fein which I'm a member of decided yeah let's proceed look at this and let's develop a C64 in some way and the first designs in VHDL and very lock certain parts are very lock we're made on the Nexus for DDR development board which has a Arctic 7 100 t FPGA so it's a pure FPGA FPGA development board no modern CPU on it and you can see there are lots of cables connected there and the board is actually in a C65 case with the cables the original keyboard was connected yeah and then the work began to implement all those ships that were documented there were technical documentations there were diagrams of the system and from that we recreated those electronics in the FPGA after the designs looked good the first real or the first custom PCB was made with this we now had the interfaces the system should have so on the Nexus board you only have modern interfaces USB and such things and here we then added the expansion board the joystick ports VGA HGMI is not very old but we decided we need one for better yeah so that more people can use it not everyone has an old monitor we have an IEC interface and this one on the side is the floppy interface because the the drive in the C65 had its own ship for controlling the floppy drive and this was not compatible with the way Commodore did its other drives so yeah it had to be done in an extra way so this is why it's not some internal IEC bus after the first revision of the board which had about I think it was three or four PCBs were made in total a better design was made more parts were added that we found out we needed for a full system we have some connect extra connectors crew connectors we have extra breakouts for the FPGA this board had around 25 produce units and they are still in use for desk hits we lend out to developers who are interested in developing for the mega 65 so to push the software development of yeah real mega 65 software and not have to yeah use C65 software because there was not really C65 software in the past the system was not released so we needed to create some software we can use the third revision of the board this is the one that actually got produced in big numbers we had development kit with this board and also the produced units that are now in the field are also with this board the board has a much better digital audio output it has very many small corrections we found out the R2 R2 board was yeah bad in some way and we opted for raising the size of the flash ship that is on the board so as this is a pure FPGA board we need some place where the bit stream so so to say the configuration of the FPGA where the logic that is put into the ship is described this needs to be in some flash ship the FPGA will scan automatically and this we made bigger because we thought it would be nice to have more place for putting in more cores because we thought hey perhaps people might make other cores than the mega 65 in some time yeah we did not have the case yet because the case you can see at the booth is injection molded case and such an injection molded case is very pricey to produce because you need to build a tooling to make this injection mold and it's it was around 70 000 euros and for being able to create this as a non-profit organization we did searching for English words spend donations yeah thank you we made a donation drive for the tooling and it went faster than we thought actually because yeah people donated crazy amounts so but we had not we did not have the case yet we only had test cases so the first 100 death kits we called them had a plexiglass acrylic case with the real keyboard and all the real electronics and a floppy drive in this case the floppy drive goes out to the side some people ask for that very much yeah but the real case is the real thing so it goes out to the front we had produced 100 of those and they had a very high high price point of 999 euros and they were also meant to get in developers yeah perhaps we should not have written limited edition on it so a lot of them are in yeah displays and not used at all we know that for the future yeah but as I said the donation drive went well it's gathered around 30 000 euros in the first two months and got slower and slower and slower and people got worried oh it will take till 2030 but then one guy donated 40 000 euros and we were over the limit so many thanks to him he really wanted the case yeah but we were we also wanted the case and it's a very beautiful you have to look at it and touch it in reality it also has a very nice keyboard which is a sherry mx mechanical keyboard made by gmk of the case is made by hirschsteiner in österreich sorry and electronics inside are made by trans electronics which is also german company so all the parts are made in germany okay ships are imported for sure but that's also a bit of yeah we didn't want to make it in china we wanted to make it in european countries and we didn't want to use kickstarter we wanted a normal ordering process and no confusion about do i get what i pay for or don't i get it yeah um what can i point out yeah the whole platform i like to call it consists of many parts one part we see which is the case the keyboard and the fpga mainboard then we have the fpga core of the mega 65 with which it implements the the chips the electronics inside the fpga and then we have another part which is the rom the rom is also based on the original rom komodoro developed for the c65 we based it on the original sources and developed it so that it got to production level um and the the thing is you can exchange parts so you you can it's an fpga you can run other different cores on the system you can also use different roms you don't need to use the original rom there's an open rom the open rom also runs on the mega 65 open rom also runs i think on c64 i'm not sure um um the the problem with the sources of the original rom is chloranto has the rights for the rom at least they told us so and um because of this we can't give uh put out the roms for anyone we only can put out patches for the rom um and only users that have a mega 65 get the key so that they can download the full roms and that they can access our github repositories of the rom which brings me to the next point um which is github because the whole mega 65 project is open source all parts of it are on github with the exception of the closed rom because we need to do so chloranto told us um the diffs of the rom are based on a rom chloranto provides for free with the c64 forever package so in the c64 forever package look in the roms folder you will find some c65 roms there and yeah with that we are in the clear with the patches um there are many parts of the project um all those i explained we have the core which is the fpga configuration recreating the electronics we have the mega 65 tools which are tools for your pc we um support all major three platforms um to um communicate with your mega 65 and we have the user guide which is um a manual for the mega 65 and it is uh in the package you get when you buy a mega 65 240 pages ring bound manual as in the old days you can lay it flat on your table you have all the basic commands explained okay one so about the manual is from 2021 and uh it is uh yeah it it's changed in the past but we need to print new manual so the next batch part of it will get new manuals um but the whole manual is uh not 240 pages the whole manual is around 1300 1400 pages you have the whole documentation you have the the cpu modes documented the all the registers of the ships and there's a lot and it's not done yet so we still are working on this we have volunteers that do spell checking or replacing all occurrences with of kernel with kernel or kernel with kernel it shifts sometimes what's the right word and um yeah there are many parts we also welcome contribution so if you are happy to help and there's also an emulator of the mega 65 you don't need actually hardware then um there is a lot to do um yeah and everything is community-based so the hardware is done by real companies that do this for living but the software that runs on the system is done by the open source project and another part that the project attracted somehow is this um uh two developers began exploring the platform they also had the development system and um they started porting mr course mr is a different uh fpga-based platform it's a bit different than the mega 65 because the mr not only has a fpga it also has an arm dual core cpu on it so the mega 65 don't have any cpu uh except if you put a cpu in the fpga um and it uses the the the arm cpu for stuff like on-screen display and and sd card access and usb devices so it's not so easy to take the cpu implementations of some system that is made for the mr and plug it into the mr the mega 65 so over the course of three different cores which was a gameboy colore uh satyx you know which is a satyx spectrum core and the c64 core of the mr project they developed a mr to mega 65 framework which i call a hell for a hardware abstraction layer and this framework provides um uh abstraction of the hardware of the mega 65 so all the ports you have and it provides a 16 bit q nice cpu which is a yeah cpu that somebody developed i can't remember the name and this uh does the menus and on screen displays you normally have on the mr and with this it was possible to um accelerate the development of course you can use um the framework to develop more new cores to have all the um peripherals um already done in vhdl and can concentrate on the cpus and graphic ships you need and you can rapidly rapidly port mr cores to the mega 65 so currently um this happens uh mostly with arcada cores it's not so the thing i really like to see but it's nice to have um as a proof of concept essentially um so a galaga core was essentially ported in a few weeks and then you could play galaga on the mega 65 and for me that was a indicator that the framework is well designed and can be easily used by someone who's knowledge of vhdl and electronic design yeah about software there are already software releases for the mega 65 okay and not the big library of the c64 um but we have a arcada shooter like game and um uh infocom adventure hibernated which are um released as real boxed games by polyplay and there's a new game in development you can play it at my booth um it's not quite done but it displays some of the graphical features we put in the week for graphics chip and yeah there are development tools you can use to communicate with the mega 65 um you have ways to um directly put software from your pc if you cross develop on the mega 65 and you can also develop software directly on the mega 65 there's for example one project that is called 11 it is a eda ide for the um mega 65 a basic ide a basic but the mega 65 from already has basic yeah but it is a basic that don't have line numbers but labels and it can use long variable names and it has some preprocessing stuff going on and um the the way it works is if you compile the program it does not create some pcode or assembly it creates a basic 65 program from the source and while you're doing that and testing your program you can always jump back into the development environment on your mega 65 you can do the whole development there so there are both ways available on the pc side um llvm moss uh was recently um expanded with um support for the mega 65 cpu opcodes so now you can use rust to develop for the mega 65 natively which is interesting i'm not sort of a rust fan um yeah and we don't uh stop where we wear them we develop on and uh this is the future this is the next board this is an r4 board there's the small four but it's all already old um i hope in a few weeks we have the r5 board so why do we have a new board revision um i could say commodore also put out new board revisions every year so why shouldn't we um that's uh in the style of commodore now the the board had some problems we found out and users found out for example the hdmi port of the r3 board had a hdmi back power problem we are in good company there i think the spectrum next first revision also had hdmi back power problems so essentially more power from the monitor flows into the fpga and does weird stuff with it with it sometimes um so on the new board there's protection for that then we have new um hardware for the digital audio again um there are some nice est cages on some ships but we only need one of them um we have huge we had huge problems with our rtc or real-time clock in the r3 boards there we got uh during the ship crisis we got a bad batch of rtcs and there was no way of finding this out before creating the board making the boards and uh yeah about 20 percent of them just don't click tick um there's a workaround with external clock through and um there's also a program where you can request external clock from us if you have a broken rtc so on this new board we decided to go full way and put on a swiss rtc so this should really tick i think and there's a supercap which holds power for the rtc if you decide to change the battery and uh we are not associated with edeka i just bought the power cell there um what is also changed on the r5 board the r5 board has on the expansion port and on the joystick ports we have pins that are not bi-directional and they were bi-directional on orange cell c64 so um this is a thing we also fixed in this revision and the last big thing is the old boards all had eight megabytes of hyper-rum which is serially connected sounds a lot but yeah the the system has memory in the fpga this memory is very fast because it's directly in the fpga the hyper-rum is with one serial line or two lines essentially connected or are it four very not not many lines and it is slow and it has lots of latency and the developers of the mr2 mega 65 framework told us they can't do the big cause with that setup they made experiments they worked with buffering and all of it did not really had the results they hoped for so we couldn't know that before and we didn't plan for we may we need 64 megabytes of ram for what we only want to make a c65 yeah but they um um wanted more memories so we heard that call and we um added 64 megabytes of sd-rum which is parallely connected to the fpga and which is really fast uh so we already could test this on the r4 board um the r5 board has a few minor revisions to that and every unit will which will chip out from now will have this new board as soon as we have finalized it so first we need to get it we need to make a core for it and then we tell trends which does the boards you know now you can do the huge numbers we hope the next batch is also around 500 units we will see yeah that's it already questions what's the price okay um so the price is 666 euro 66 without that uh texas it's texas right yeah so um if you buy it in germany it's 740 or something like that yeah and it's as i said it's no kickstarter trends is a company which works business to business uh so they produce fpga pcbs for uh industrial stuff and normally they don't do uh stuff for consumers uh this is a special relationship we have with them they are also commodore fans and they like the project so that is why we are working with them and yeah they are really a great help they provide lots of knowledge about pcb design they also did a great work connecting all those lines from the sd ram yeah more questions when will the next batch actually be delivered everybody wants to know i voted waited for that one so currently as i said i have five port is i i i looked at the males last evening they are finalizing the last changes something about buffers and i don't know i don't know all this electronic stuff so then if that is finished and it should be next week then next week new boards test boards 10 10 pieces will be ordered it will take about five weeks until we get them then we need to test them they should this should um go be finished quite fast because we already have to our forecore and our five port is only fixes and slight changes so we should be able to test its functionality directly and then we can give the go to trends to order the full batch of boards i think it's 500 and then you need to add another five weeks and then they have the pcb stand they need to put on the parts so it's next year definitely it's it won't be christmas i don't think so so christmas was somehow a wish of many people and some people wanted to step the extra step of checking the r5 board but i think that would have been a bad decision we need to make sure that the new board works as it should and yeah we can't afford to just order 500 pieces and then throw them into the garbage that's yeah does not work there's not enough money to do that there are not big margins we can work with yeah more questions so it's the first time i heard about this project and this computer and um do you have any idea why komodora tried to make successor for the c64 in 1991 so it looks really weird for me yeah i had also had discussions today with a few people about this there could be many ideas also one idea is the huge software library of the c64 then there was also the um what was this apple 2 gs which came out around the same time someone mentioned to me and this was also expanded apple 2 so perhaps this was a driver at komodora someone saw it and thought oh they bring out another 8 bit perhaps we should too i don't know it's also all uh yeah wild guessing for me um yeah i don't know the software library i guess that's the huge thing but because it's at the start of the amiga time there were not well was not much stuff to software for it i think and perhaps someone thought yeah let's do it and make another machine that can use it but they failed in that more questions okay um then um if you want to take a look um touch the keys type in some basic come over to um booth 21 it's uh way through at the desk at the entrance desk uh behind the entrance test that that was what i wanted to say and yeah thank you very much for listening


Hello everyone. I'm Prudhvi. I work for Intel. My co-presenter, Suzanne, who's leading Watcher's efforts from Intel. Fortunately, she couldn't make it. So our talk here is about automating noisy neighbor detection using OpenStackWatcher. So this is the agenda of the talk. First, I'm going to talk about what motivated us to come up with this strategy. What is a noisy neighbor? What is shared resource contention? What is Intel's resource director technology? Why do we need to automate noisy neighbor detection? What OpenStackWatcher is? How can it help us achieve noisy neighbor detection? What our algorithm is? How it fits into a Watcher strategy?  And some final remarks. Okay. So what motivated us to work on this strategy? The very simple answer is resource utilization enhancement. Now that a lot of OpenStack code projects like Nova, Neutron, Cinder, they're very close to maturity, now you have an OpenStack cloud which runs fine. Everything works great. But the next question is everything works fine. But how do I enhance my resource utilization? How do I get the most out of my cloud resources which are already there? And that's the reason why a workload placement is very important. It's like a game of Tetris. You need to look at all the aspects while placing your workloads on various servers to get the most out of it. We already know a few ways to enhance resource utilization like job packing or cluster over subscription. But a lot of these methods are not very easy to implement. It completely depends on the data center, its use cases, and it has its own set of cons. So what is a noisy neighbor? So when we have more than one VM or an application on a server, a lot of VMs, they fight for resources. There is a lot of resource contention that's happening below the table. And so when you have two VMs and each VM is fighting for its own set of resources like cache, L3 cache, CPU cycles, each resource, each VM is going to affect the other VM's performance in a negative way, of course. It leads to performance degradation completely depends on the scenario. And let me just explain this with a very simple example. Say you have a server with just two VMs on it. You have a web application which uses some web services and each VM has a web service. Say one web service is very important like a payment web service for your web application. And the other web service on the other VM is just some add-on to your site like, say, image morphing. So which is not really important, but it needs a lot of computational power. And when your image morphing thing runs, it's going to try to draw all the resources towards itself, which is going to affect your very important service, which is your payment service. So this is something which we want to avoid. And this is a very simple example of a noisy neighbor. So to put in formal terms, when application performance is greatly in a negative way affected by a co-locating application, you have a situation called noisy neighbor. And noisy neighbor is the application which is overutilizing the resource and which is leading to performance degradation of a very important or a high priority VM. Let me put noisy neighbor aside for a few minutes and let me talk about what Intel Resource Director technology is. So as I've just told you, you have a lot of resource contention going on. And one of those resources is LLC, last-level cache or L3 cache. And this L3 cache has a direct, it has, it is directly proportional to the performance of your VM. So Intel RDD is a technology where you can monitor or allocate L3 cache on the go, on the fly, right on spot. And you can also monitor memory bandwidth on a per VM or a per core basis. Let's just focus on CMT, which is cache monitoring technology, because that's very relevant to our strategy over here. So using Intel's CMT technology, what you can do is you can know the amount of L3 cache utilized by a VM or by a single core or by a single app right on spot at that point of time. So using this, you can come up with some strategies when your high-priority application is getting very little of this. You can try to kill other applications. I'll just come to that in the next few slides. But yeah, CMT is what we're using. So telemetry is a very important aspect to understand how well your resources are utilized in your cloud. And a lot of times this telemetry is limited to compute or network or storage. But actually if you can get telemetry all from the silicon level, that's going to help you in understanding your cloud better. And it can help in intelligent work load placements. You can come up with strategies where you can minimize resource contention. And you can come up with strategies where there's continuous resource optimization. Okay. So by now, you know the problem here is noisy neighbors. That is something which we are trying to solve. And you know, you must have guessed by now Intel RDT is the tool which we are using to solve this. But we need some other component to fit into this jigsaw and to help us use RDT to automate noisy neighbor detection. And that is OpenStack Watcher. So for the next few minutes and in the next few slides, I'm going to explain you what OpenStack Watcher is because it's very important to understand how Watcher works, to understand the strategy. And I'm quite sure a lot of people in this room do not very well know what OpenStack Watcher is or what it does. So OpenStack Watcher is a flexible resource optimization service for your OpenStack-based crowds. It's a service used to optimize your resources in an automatic fashion. So what Watcher does is it audits your cloud against a set of predefined optimization algorithms. And based on that, it comes up with some strategies which it presents to a cloud admin which he has the power to apply directly using Watcher CLI. So, yeah. So Watcher has a set of goals and a set of strategies. So all you need, if you're an OpenStack admin, right, all you need to do is set a goal and map that goal to a strategy and just leave it and Watcher does behind-the-scenes jobs to achieve that goal using the rules defined in those strategies. So OpenStack Watcher is a part of OpenStack BigTent right now. So, yeah. So let me explain how Watcher fits into the OpenStack ecosystem. So these are your core set of OpenStack services. Hope you guys can see. OpenStack services and these are your monitoring services. You have Salameter. You can use Nukey or you can use Manaskar. And then these services, they feed off all the metrics to Watcher and Watcher based on the goal and based on the strategy you have used. It does something to optimize your cloud to reach that goal using that strategy. And the really cool thing here is we also have a pluggable analysis tool. What you can do is you can feed off all these metrics from Nukey to a third-party big data analysis tool or whatever tool it is. You can, I mean, data scientists can work on, they can do their own big data analysis. They can come up with their own stuff and using those numbers, they can again feed the information to Watcher and Watcher can pick up everything from that third-party data analysis tool and it uses that data to optimize your cloud. So if you're using CollectD, which has a RDT plugin to get these silicon-level telemetry directly from your processor and that's passed to a CollectD daemon, which again passes it to Salameter. And once it is in Salameter, Watcher just takes it from there. So this is the workflow of Watcher first that monitors your cloud, I mean via Salameter and other monitoring services. And then it analyzes, it takes aggregate flows of events and does some kind of analysis and it profiles your VMs. And based on a set of cost model, objective, and your constraints of your cloud, it comes up with some optimization schemes and those schemes are presented in the form of action plans. So action plans has a set of actions which Watcher is saying these are the actions you need to do to achieve these goals. And I mean, you can automate it or you can, a cloud admin can run it manually. I mean, I'll come to that later. And I mean, if you want whatever way it is, when you're trying to apply it, you can use Watcher's Applier component to apply those set of actions. Okay. So before I actually talk about our noisy neighbor algorithm, let me, I just want to tell you that there are a few algorithms already in place to detect noisy neighbors. Like, simple threshold algorithms where a VM crosses a threshold and you radiate as a noisy neighbor. But there are a lot of disadvantages to that. Let me just explain that. So say you have the same example which I was explaining previously. Say you have your payment web service running in a VM and say that VM is hogging a lot of L3 cash, LLC. So if you use any typical algorithm which is already in place, it's going to identify that as a noisy neighbor because it's taking too much of resources and other VMs do not have enough resources. So it's going to identify that as a noisy neighbor and it's going to try to move that or kill that or stuff like that. But that is not something which you would want if that is a very important application. So we have come up with something called job priority since, I mean, not all jobs in data centers are equal anyway. So you can pass a job priority to an instance as a part of instance metadata and watch it pick it up from there. So there are a few silicon level metrics which I was talking about which you can use to detect a noisy neighbor like L3 cash, IPC. And if you want to split IPC, you can just see number of instructions executed by a VM or the number of CPU cycles VM is taking. But as a scope of this strategy, we're going to focus on L3 cash. We already are working on algorithms. In fact, we have few algorithms ready, which are using other set of parameters, but we've still not upstreamed it. A lot of testing is being done because testing this is a real pain. It's not easy to understand all those silicon stuff. So this is our algorithm. So I'm going to talk about the algorithm which we have upstreamed. It's already an OpenStack Watcher's repo and you can look at it there. But so this is a very straightforward algorithm. What we are doing is we're going through, we're looking through all nodes in your OpenStack Cloud. And we're going through all VMs per each node.  So a victim VM is a VM, typically a high priority VM that is being affected by a noisy neighbor. And an aggressor VM is a noisy neighbor, which is typically a low priority VM, which is trying to mess up your other VMs, other high priority VMs. So once we identify a noisy neighbor, we look at all the remaining nodes in your cloud and we come up with, we look at nodes which do not have any priority VMs or any priority applications. And if the node has enough resources to accommodate this noisy neighbor, we migrate them to that node. And the whole thing is again automated by Watcher. I'm going to explain how this is done in the next few slides. So to identify a VM which is being affected by a noisy neighbor, which is also your victim VM. So to do this, what we do is we go to every node and every node, we try to see all VMs in the decreasing order of their priority so that we can, we first go through all high priority VMs in the beginning. And if we see any dip in L3 cache, LLC of any VM, which, if the dip is beyond the threshold, and this threshold can be passed as a command line parameter when you're setting the strategy. So when there is any dip in your LLC, which is beyond this threshold, we mark it as a potential victim VM. We're still not sure if it is actually a victim VM because we're not sure what caused the dip. We're not sure if the dip is because other VMs are trying to take up LLC at that point of time. So we just mark it as a potential victim VM. And then what we do is we start identifying a noisy neighbor in that specific node. So we go through all the VMs in reverse order of their priority, from lower priority to higher priority. And we try to look if there is any VM which tried to take too much of L3 cache in the same period of time where our potential victim VM has lost L3 cache. So if we identify a spike which is beyond the threshold and if it falls in the same time period as your priority VMs dip in LLC usage, then we know for sure that there is something wrong with this. And this is somehow affecting your priority VM. So we mark this as a noisy neighbor. And once we mark this as a noisy neighbor, we're going to go through all nodes in your cloud, see for any nodes where there are no priority VMs and see for nodes which have enough resources to accommodate your noisy neighbor. And we migrate this VM to that node. So all this sounds complicated and a little tiresome, but an admin has to do nothing. All he needs to do is run a watcher goal and strategy. And all of this is done behind the scenes. So let me talk about two modes of watcher, which is a one-shot mode and a continuous mode. So I mean, sometimes an admin can have no confidence in what watcher does.  It's a new thing.  So what a one-shot mode in watcher does is an admin can request this audit to be run. And once the audit is completed, once watcher comes up with your optimization schemes based on the strategy which we have set, an action plan is created. And this action plan is presented to the admin. And this action plan might have a simple action like a VM or migrate a VM, or it might have a set of complicated actions like, move this VM here, move this VM here, move this VM there. And this is how you're going to optimize your cloud. So I mean, an action plan has a set of actions. And an admin can see what each action is. I'm going to show you in the next few slides how to do that. And so this is the one-shot mode. And once an admin is fine with all the actions, he can just apply the action plan with a single command. So this is the one-shot mode I'm talking about. And this is not always viable because an admin can't always keep running this for every 1,000 seconds or one hour or whatever the time period is. So we have a continuous mode in Watcher where all you need to do is set a goal and strategy and just leave it. So what happens is after every x amount of period of time, and this x can be set by the admin, your Watcher runs an audit on your entire cloud, and it comes up with an action plan with a bunch of actions. And it's going to automatically apply this action plan.  And then after again x amount of seconds, x amount of time, this thing is again done. So identifying a noisy neighbor is not a one audit cycle task. It takes a bunch of audits, and it takes time to understand how each application or each VM is using LLC. And based on that, over a period of time, over a period of audit cycles, your node can move from a noisy state to a noisiest state. And once it is in a noisiest state, that's what we want because your priority VM gets whatever it needs. It's not going to be choked for resources. And things run fine. So this is a plot of L3 cache with time of four VMs on a node, and this was taken before running Watcher. So if you can see instance one is actually the red one, which is a high priority VM. And you can see this is the L3 cache consumption of that, which is not really good. I mean, you have instances 2, 3, and 4, which are hogging more cache. I mean, it might be completely up to the, there is a chance that all this is happening is because instance one just needs that. But since I've done these tests, I know I've run the same amount of load and all. So this is not something that's good. And the most important aspect over here is the whole noise over here. I mean, it's all noisy. Every VM is fighting for the cache it wants. And the whole graph you can see is not clear, and it's a bit noisy. So I have some screenshots of how Watcher is run in the next few slides. So that you guys have an idea how easy it is to run Watcher and how Watcher works. So you have a goal list and a strategy list. So these are some predefined set of goals, work-out balancing. If you have too many VMs, I mean, you can balance all the VMs using this strategy. You have server consolidation, thermal optimization. And these are these strategies where you can map each node, each goal. So have a thermal optimization goal, and I can map it to a thermal optimization strategy, which is this. I thought there was something wrong. But anyway, coming back to noisy neighbor. So this is the goal we need to use, and this is the strategy that we need to use. So all you need to do is create an audit template and run an audit with a goal as noisy neighbor and strategy as noisy neighbor, and an action plan is created like this. So I've run this in a one-shot mode so that I can show you how Watcher shows the action plans in a set of actions. So if you see this, 7C53, this is the UUID of the action plan that was created. And it says this is recommended by Watcher. So now the admin has an option to go through what this is. So if you see the action list, so this is the action that was created, and you can see it is mapped to this action plan, which is 7C53, which I just showed you that was created, which was the recommended one. And now if you want to see what this action is, what's the goal of running this noisy neighbor strategy? And this is how you see what Watcher has suggested. And you see over here, the destination node is 38. Migration type is live. You have a source node, which is 39, I guess. And resource ID, which is the UUID of your instance. So Watcher is saying, move this instance from this node to that node in order to reduce your noisiness in your node. So just to run the action plan, all you need to do is watch your action plan, start with the ID, and boom. Everything's done behind the scenes. And you have your host where live migration has started. And once this live migration has been completed, this was the, I mean, one of the instances out right now. And you can see this is what the ATCache graph looks like right now. And I'm not saying this is noises. There is still a lot of noise. You still do not know if these VMs are affecting this. So this is right after one cycle, because I wanted to show you how it looks after the cycle. And over a period of time, right over a bunch of cycles, it's supposed to move towards a noises state. So this is the summary side. So I've showed you how to automate noisy neighbor detection and mitigation using OpenStack Watcher. And it's all automated. And you have Intel's RDT, which is being used for this, which can directly introduce hardware hooks to monitor and allocate per thread or, I mean, allocate resources on a per thread or a per VM basis. So this is something which we are working on right now, which is going to be released soon. So right now, this strategy, all the strategy does is look at cache and then try to change your cloud map based on that. But Intel RDT also gives you a feature called cache allocation technology. So all these things are, I think, available in the latest line of Xeon family. I think that's what's used in almost all the data centers right now. So what this cache allocation tool does is, so when you can actually allocate or restrict or reduce the amount of last several cache right on spot. So say if your high priority VM is not getting enough LSE or enough of any other silicon level resources. So I mean, using Watcher, using the strategies which we are coming up with, you can on spot allocate more LSE to that VM.  So that we haven't upstreamed yet. We are working on it. A lot of testing is being done on this. And so one more thing which we want to investigate is how to bring in other silicon level metrics into pictures. I mean, I have LSE. That's fine. But I want to bring in IPC. I want to bring in CPU cycles. I want to bring in other stuff and put all of them into one algorithm or a bunch of algorithms based on a set of very common scenarios in Datacenter and use all of them to automate your noisy neighbor detection and, ultimately, enhance resource utilization of your cloud. So that's it. This was automating noisy neighbor detection. So if you have any questions, I know, I see someone already standing there. I've got two questions. The first question is, what version of OpenStack are you doing this with? What's the requirement? Is there a micro version specific requirement for any of this, et cetera? So for Watcher, there is no OpenStack requirement. I mean, it's there in Ocarta. I think it's there from Newton actually a while before that. So as long as you're having your latest version of OpenStack, I think this should work. But you need to have some specific libraries to get specific versions of libraries to get these silicon metrics. And if you're using LeBert, you need LeBert 3.0.0. OK, that's cool. Yeah, and here we have used Kalecd. So that's an alternative to LeBert. And Kalecd directly pushes metrics to Cilometer. I mean, yeah. OK, second question. I did more of an observation. So in my experience, I'm an operator at Charter Communications. We've almost always found it much easier to leave the noisy neighbor where it is and move its other neighbors, the nice neighbors away. It's almost impossible to migrate a noisy neighbor successfully. So bear that in mind, people in the audience. Yeah, I mean, as I've told you, this is something which we are experimenting. And this is something which actually worked for us. I mean, at least the scenarios where we've tested it. Moving a noisy neighbor away to a node is actually that worked out better for us. We are still coming up with more strategies. We're going to upstream them soon. And I mean, obviously, feedback like this is valued. So we can come up with better strategies. And in fact, Watcher has written in a way that anyone can write a new goal and a new strategy. So if you think for your data center, that's the strategy that works. Just define a goal, define a strategy. You can use it. And if you upstream it, I mean, anyone else can use that. So that's great. So I see that Watcher has the ability to either automatically take actions or to just advise what actions to take. Are there any sort of hooks that you know of, or maybe an automated way to say, I don't want it to actually do this automated action, but I want it to advise and maybe send something out to Page Your Duty to wake somebody up to look at that advise action plan? So are there like hooks to external or any way for external things to kind of hook in to be triggered off of that? Yeah, we are actually working on that right now that something which came into our discussion yesterday. So some people said they wanted to link this with Congress or a bunch of other OpenStack projects. So one drawback of that is not everyone uses every service. So if we completely move towards making Congress APIs or something, you need to have Congress in your OpenStack and not just the basic services and Watcher. So that is one drawback, but we are still working on that. And in fact, we are trying to work on how to optimize containers and how to make external calls.  Is that kind of like a plug-in for architecture? Yeah, so again, this is something which we discussed yesterday. And I mean, since a lot of, I mean, it's not just you. We've got a bunch of feedback about this. So pretty soon, we are going to come up with a blueprint and then implement that. Yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? OK, sure? OK.


How does a vegan or vegetarian diet affect bone density? And what other factors contribute? Watch the video to find out. Osteoporosis is estimated to affect 200 million people worldwide. Literally meaning porous bone, osteoporosis, is a disease characterized by reduced bone formation, excessive bone loss, or combination of both, leading to bone fragility and increased risk of fractures. And bone mineral density is the most robust and consistent predictor of osteoporotic fracture. What can we eat to boost our bone density? Well, we know that increased consumption of plant foods is associated with increased bone mineral density. There's an extensive range of micronutrients and phytochemicals packaged within plants that can be powerful promoters of bone health. So healthcare professionals should be encouraged to advise the increased consumption of plant-based foods, particularly in mid-life, irrespective of the client's underlying dietary pattern, meaning no matter how much meat or junk they eat, adding more healthy plant foods may help prevent the development of osteoporosis. On the other hand, a more animal-sourced nutrient pattern has been associated with a higher risk of fractures, suggesting that a more animal-based diet is related to bone fragility. So we would expect less osteoporosis in those eating plant-based diets, but you don't know until you put it to the test. The incidence of osteoporosis in vegetarians and omnivores is the first study published nearly 50 years ago, and the density of the bones that were measured was significantly greater in the vegetarians than the omnivores. In fact, the average bone density, so the vegetarians in their 70s, was greater than the densities of the meat-eaters in their 50s. Bottom line, these results suggest there's less likelihood of vegetarians developing osteoporosis in the old age.  Dexascanning, which is what we use now, didn't come online until the 1980s, so the researchers were just using just regular x-rays, and they confused the readings such that darker bones on the x-ray got a higher score, but that actually means less bones, so their conclusion should have been the opposite of what they claimed, so vegetarians had worse bone mineral density. Fast forward about 40 years, by which time nine studies have been done on thousands of individuals, and all in all, the results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, are associated with lower bone mineral density, but the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant, meaning the difference was so small as to not really matter out in the real world, reinforcing the fact that vegetarian diets have no clinically detrimental effect on bone health. And it's important to note that the findings of lower bone mineral density didn't fully control for key confounding factors, such as for differences in body weight. We know that people who are obese have stronger bones, why? Because their weight left them 50 pounds all day every day, and maybe 100 pounds.  That's how you build strong bones, weight-bearing exercise, so people who weigh more have denser bones. And vegetarians, and especially vegans, have such low rates of obesity that no wonder, on average, they would have lower bone density. The researchers didn't take weight into account, but if the difference they found isn't even clinically significant, who cares? As of 2009, the answer to the question, is vegetarianism a serious risk factor for osteoporotic fracture? The answer was, no, vegetarianism is not a serious risk factor. By 2018, the latest meta-analysis on veganism, vegetarianism, and bone mineral density were up to 20 studies involving tens of thousands of participants, and, again, lower bone mineral density was found in studies of vegetarians and vegans compared to meat-eaters. The researchers conclude that vegetarian and vegan diets need to be appropriately planned to preserve their bones. But wait, did they account for the obesity thing? No, they did not. They just used what are called crude risk ratios, meaning no adjustments for confounding factors like weight. So they didn't control for things like age, smoking, obesity, exercise, and so the results are really uninterpretable. But no one had gone through the trouble of going back through all those studies and making the proper adjustments until now. The title gives it away. Differences in bone mineral density between vegetarians and non-vegetarians become marginal when accounting for differences in body size factors. Yes, bone mineral density values were significantly lower among vegetarians than among non-vegetarians, just like is the case with nearly every study on bone mineral density and excess body weight. But forget clinical significance, these differences even lost statistical significance upon adjustment for body size factors, suggesting that lower bone mass among vegetarians is in larger parts explained by their lower BMI and waist circumference. Thus, it's not so much the composition of the diets of vegetarians and vegans as much as it is the fact that they become so much slimmer. Now, a small but statistically significant difference remained for total lower spine density, a difference of 0.03. This was dismissed as having little clinical relevance, but is that true? If you look at the reproducibility of bone mineral density measurements in daily medical practice, you can see how if you repeat test back to back, there's some scatter in the measurements. And so a significant difference really has to be more than the inherent variation, and indeed, expressed as the smallest detected difference, you really need a bone mineral density disparity of at least 0.05 at the spine before it can be considered a significant change. And so indeed, there does appear to be little clinical relevance. However, even if vegetarians and vegans basically have the same bone density at the same weight, everyone who is skinny is at risk. Low BMI is a risk factor for fracture, so all persons in a low body weight category consuming any kind of diet should be monitored for osteoporosis.


The most important thing we need to do as leaders is develop the future leaders coming up behind us. Because someday, we're going to want to move on to a new challenge. We're going to see something out there, whether it's getting a promotion, whether it's changing jobs, whether it's leaving and starting our own company, we're going to want to move on to a new challenge. And to do that successfully, to leave our organization better than we found it, no matter what our organization is, for-profit, non-profit, government, we need to build those leaders up behind us so that when we leave, they're ready to step in and take our place and make the organization even better.


CHAPTER XII. THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY Eastridge, June 3, 1907. To Garrett Wendell, the Universe Club, New York. Do you remember Promise? Come now, if possible, much needed. Cyrus Talbert. This was the telegram that Peter handed me as I came out of the coat-room at the Universe and stood under the lofty gilded ceiling of the Great Hall, trying to find myself at home again in the democratic simplicity of the United States. For two years I had been travelling in the effete, luxurious orient as a peace correspondent for a famous newspaper, sleeping under canvas in Syria, in mud houses in Persia, in paper cottages in Japan, riding on camel hump through Arabia, on horseback through Afghanistan, in Palenkeen through China, and faring on such food as it pleased Providence to send. The necessity of putting my next book through the press, The Setting Splinters of the East, had recalled me to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Two hours after I had landed from the steamship, thirty seconds after I had entered the club, there was Peter, in his green coat and brass buttons, standing in the vast cool hall among the immense columns of Verde Antique, with my telegram on a silver tray, which he presented to me with a discreet expression of welcome in his well-trained face, as if he hesitated to inquire where I had been, but ventured to hope that I had enjoyed my holiday, and that there was no bad news in my dispatch. The perfection of the whole thing brought me back with a mild surprise to my inheritance as an American, and made me dimly conscious of the point to which New York has carried republicanism and the simple life. But the telegram, read hastily in the hall, and considered at leisure while I took a late breakfast at my favourite table in the long, stately oak-paneled dining-room high above the diminished roar of Fifth Avenue, the telegram carried me out to Eastridge, that self-complacent overgrown village among the New York Hills, where people still lived in villas with rubber plants in the front windows, and had dinner in the middle of the day, and attended church sociables, and listened to Fourth of July orations. It was there that I had gone, green from college, to take the assistant-editorship of that flapping-sheet the Eastridge banner, and there I had found Cyrus Talbert beginning his work in the plated ware factory, the cleanest, warmest, biggest heart of a man that I have known yet, with a good nature that covered the bedrock of his conscience, like an apple orchard on a limestone ridge. In the give-and-take of every day he was easygoing, kindly, a lover of laughter, but when you struck down to a question of right and wrong, or rather when he conceived that he heard the divine voice of duty, he became absolutely immovable, firm, you would call it if you agreed with him, obstinate if you differed. After all, a conscience like that is a good thing to have at the bottom of a friendship. I could be friends with a man of almost any religion, but hardly with a man of none. Certainly the intimacy that sprang up between Talbert and me was fruitful in all the good things that cheer life's journey from day to day, and deep enough to stand the strain of life's earthquakes and tornadoes. There was a love affair that might have split us apart, but it only put the rivets into our friendship. For both of us in that affair, yes all three of us, thank God, played a straight game. There was a time of loss and sorrow for me when he proved himself more true and helpful than any brother I ever knew. I was best man at his wedding, and because he married a girl that understood his house became more like a home to me than any other place that my wandering life has found. I saw its amazing architectural proportions erupt into the pride of Eastridge. I saw Cyrus himself, with all his scroll-saw tastes and mansard-roof opinions, by virtue of sheer honesty and thoroughgoing human decency, develop into the unassuming first citizen of the town, trusted even by those who laughed at him, and honoured most by his opponents. I saw his aggravating family of charming children grow around him, masterful Maria, aesthetic Charles Edward, pretty Peggy, fairy tale Alice, and boisterous Billy, each at heart lovable and fairly good, but taken in combination bewildering and perplexing to the last degree. Cyrus had a late Victorian theory in regard to the education of children that individuality should not be crushed, give them what they want, follow the line of juvenile insistence, all the opportunities, and no fetters. This late Victorian theory had resulted in the production of a collection of early Rooseveltian personalities around him, whose simultaneous interaction sometimes made his good old head swim. As a matter of fact, the whole family, including Talbert's preposterous old-made sister Elizabeth, the biggest child of the lot, absolutely depended on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife and would have been helpless without them. But as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. Independence was a sacred tradition in the Talbert family, but interference was a fixed nervous habit, and complication was a chronic social state. The blessed mother understood them all because she loved them all, Cyrus loved them all, but the only one he thought he understood was Peggy, and her he usually misunderstood because she was so much like him. But he was fair to them all, dangerously fair, except when his subcutaneous conscience reproached him with not doing his duty, then he would cut the knot of family interference with some tremendous stroke of paternal decision unalterable as a law of the Medes and Persians. All this was rolling through my memory as I breakfasted at the universe and considered the telegram from Eastridge. Do you remember Promise? Of course I remembered. Was it likely that either of us would forget a thing like that? We were in the dingy little room that he called his den. It was just after the birth of his third child. I had told my plan of letting the staff of the banner fall into other hands and going out into the world to study the nations when they were not excited by war and write about people who were not disguised in soldier clothes. That's a big plan, he said, and you'll go far and be long away at times. I admitted that it was likely. Well, he continued laying down his pipe. If you ever are in trouble and can't get back here, send word and I'll come. I told him that there was little I could do for him or his, except to give superfluous advice, but if they ever needed me a word would bring me to them.  That was all the promise there was, but it brought him down to Panama to get me, five years later, when I was knocked out with the fever, and it would take me back to Eastridge now by the first train. But what wasteful brevity in that phrase much needed. What did that mean? Why will a man try to put a forty-word meaning into a ten-word telegram? Sickness? Business troubles? One of those independent interfering children in a scrape? One thing I was blessedly sure of. It did not mean any difficulty between Cyrus and his wife. They were of the tribe who marry for love and love for life. But the need must be something serious and urgent else he never would have sent for me. With a family like his almost anything might happen, perhaps Aunt Elizabeth, I never could feel any confidence in a red-haired female who habitually dressed in pink, or perhaps Charles Edward, if that young man's artistic ability had been equal to his sense of it, there would have been less danger in taking him into the factory, or probably Maria, with her great head for business. Oh, Maria, I grant you is like what the French critic said of the prophet Habakkuk, capable de tu. But why puzzle any longer over that preposterous telegram? If my friend Talbert was in any kind of trouble under the sun, there was just one thing that I wanted, to get to him as quickly as possible. Find when the first train started and arrived, send a lucid dispatch, no expensive parsimony in telegraphing, to Cyrus Talbert, East Ridge, Massachusetts. I arrived this morning on the Dillatoria and found your telegram here. Expect me on the noon train due at East Ridge 5.43 this afternoon. I hope all will go well. Count on me always, Garrett Wendell. It was a relief to find him on the railway platform when the train rolled in, his broad shoulders as square as ever, his big head showing only a shade more of gray, a shade less of red, in its strawberry ron, his face shining with the welcome which he expressed as usual in humorous disguise. Here you are, he cried, browner and thinner than ever. Give me that bag. How did you leave my friend the Shaw of Persia? Better, I said, stepping into the open carriage, since he got on the water-wagon, uses nothing but East Ridge silver-plated ice-pitchers now. And my dear friend the Empress of China, he asked as he got in beside me, she has recovered her digestion, I answered, due entirely to the abandonment of chopsticks and the adoption of East Ridge knives and forks. But now it's my turn to ask a question. How are you? Well, said he, and the whole family is well, and we've all grown tremendously, but we haven't changed a bit, and the best thing that has happened to us for three years is seeing you again. And the factory, I asked, how does the business of metallic humbug thrive? All right, he answered, there's a little slackening in chafing dishes just now, but ice cream knives aren't going off like hot cakes. The factory is on a solid basis. Hard times won't hurt us. Well, then, said I, a little perplexed. What in heaven's name did you mean by sending that? Hold on, said Talbert, gripping my knee and looking gray for a moment. Just you wait.  I'll tell you about it after supper. Till then, never mind, or rather no matter, for it's nothing material, after all, but there's a lot in it for the mind. I knew, then, that he was in one of his fundamental moods, imperviously jolly on the surface, inflexibly puritan underneath, and that the only thing to do was to let the subject rest until he chose to take it up in earnest. So we drove along, chafing and laughing, until we came to the dear old ugly house. The whole family were waiting on the veranda to bid me welcome home. Mrs. Talbert took my hands with a look that said it all. Her face had not grown a shade older to me, since I first knew her, and her eyes. The moment you look into them, you feel that she understands. Alice seemed to think that she had become too grown up to be kissed, even by the friend of the family, and I thought so too. But pretty Peggy was of a different mind. There is something about the way that girl kisses an old gentleman that almost makes him wish himself young again. At supper we had the usual tokens of festivity, broiled chickens and popovers, and cool sliced tomatoes and ice cream with real strawberries in it, how good and clean it tasted after he's behind and Baghdad, and the usual family arguing and joking, how natural and wholesome it sounded after Vienna and Paris. I thought Maria looked rather strenuous and severe, as if something important were on her mind, and Billy and Alice, at moments, had a conscious air. But Charles, Edward, and Lorraine were distinctly radiant, and Peggy was demurely jolly.  After supper, Talbert took me to the summer house at the foot of the garden to smoke. Our first cigars were about half burned out when he began to unbuzz him himself.  As for example, I asked, Well, it is Peggy, he broke out, you know, I like her best of them all next to Ada, can't help it, she is nearer to me somehow, the finest most unselfish little girl. But I've been just selfish enough to let her get into trouble and be talked about and have her heart broken. And now they've put her into a position where she's absolutely helpless, a pawn in their full game, and the Lord only knows what's to come of it unless he makes me man enough to do my duty. From this, of course, I had to have the whole story. And I must say it seemed to me most extraordinary, a flagrant case of idiotic interference. Peggy had been sent away to one of those curious institutions they call a coeducational college, chiefly because Maria had said that she ought to understand the duties of modern womanhood. She had gone without the slightest craving for the higher education, but naturally with the idea of having a good time. And apparently she had it, for she came home engaged to a handsome, amatory boy, one of her fellow students named Goward. At this point, Aunt Elizabeth, with her red hair and pink frock, had interfered and lured off the Goward, who behaved in a manner which appeared to me to reduce him to a negligible quantity. But the family evidently did not think so, for they all promptly began to interfere. Maria and Charles Edward and Alice and even Billy, each one with an independent plan, either to lure the Goward back or to eliminate him. Alice had the most original idea, which was to marry Peggy to Dr. Denby, but this clashed with Maria's idea, which was to entangle the doctor with Aunt Elizabeth in order that the Goward might be recaptured. It was all extremely complicated and unnecessary, from my point of view, and of course it transpired and circulated through the gossip of the town, and poor Peggy was much afflicted and ashamed. Now the engagement was off, Aunt Elizabeth had gone into business with a clairvoyant woman in New York, Goward was in the hospital with a broken arm, and Peggy was booked to go to Europe on Saturday with Charles Edward and Lorraine. Quite right, I exclaimed at this point in the story, everything has turned out just as it should, like a romance in an old fashioned ladies magazine. Not at all, broke out Talbert, you don't know the whole of it. Maria has told me. Oh, my prophetic soul, Maria, the Charlie and his wife have asked a friend of theirs, a man named Dane, ten years older than Peggy, a professor in that blank coeducational college to go with them, and that she is sure they mean to make her marry him. What Dane is that, I interrupted, is his first name Stillman, nephew of my old friend Harvey Dane, the publisher, because if that's so, I know him, about 28 years old, good family, good head, good manners, good principles, just the right age and the right kind for Peggy, a very fine fellow indeed.  My point is that Peggy positively shall not be pushed, or invagled, or dragooned, or personally conducted into marrying anybody at all. Billy and Alice were wandering around Charlie's garden last Friday night, and they report that Professor Dane was there with Peggy. Alice says that she looked pale and drooping, like the bride of Lammermore. There has been enough of this meddling with my little Peggy, I say, and I'm to blame for it. I don't know whether her heart is broken or not. I don't know whether she still cares for that fellow Goward or not. I don't know what she wants to do, but whatever it is she shall do it, I swear. She shan't be cajoled off to Europe with Charles Edward and Lorraine to be flung at the head of the first Professor who turns up. I'll do my duty by my little girl. She shall stay at home and be free. There has been too much interference in this family, and I'm damned if I stand any more. I'll interfere myself now. It was not the unusual violence of the language in the last sentence that convinced me. I had often seen religious men affected in that way after an overindulgence in patience and mild behavior. It was that ominous word, my duty, which made me sure that Talbert had settled down on the bedrock of his conscience and was not to be moved. Why then had he sent for me, I asked, since he had made up his mind? Well, said he, in the first place, I hadn't quite made it up when I sent the telegram, and in the second place, now that you have helped me to see absolutely what is right to do, I want you to speak to my wife about it. She doesn't agree with me. Once Peggy to go to Europe thinks there cannot be any risk in it. You know how she has always adored Charles Edward. Will you talk to her? I will, said I, after a moment of reflection, on one condition. You may forbid Peggy's journey tomorrow morning if you like. Break it off peremptorily if you think it's your duty, but don't give up her stateroom on the ship, and if you can be convinced between now and Saturday that the danger of interference with her young affections is removed, and that she really needs and wants to go, you let her go, will you? I will, said he, and with that we threw away the remainder of our second cigars, and I went up to the side porch to talk with Mrs. Talbert. What we said I leave you to imagine. I have always thought her the truest and tenderest woman in the world, but I never knew till that night just how clear-headed and brave she was. She agreed with me that Peggy's affair, up to now more or less foolish, though distressing, had now reached a dangerous stage, a breaking point. The child was overwrought, a wrong touch now might wreck her altogether. But the right touch, or rather no touch at all, but just an open door before her? Ah, that was another matter. My plan was a daring one. It made her tremble a little, but perhaps it was the best one. At all events she could see no other. Then she stood up and gave me both hands again. I will trust you, my friend, said she. I know that you love us and our children. You shall do what you think best, and I will be satisfied. Good night! The difficulty with the situation, as I looked it over carefully while indulging in a third cigar in my bedroom, was that the time was desperately short. It was now one o'clock on Tuesday morning. About nine Cyrus would perform his sacred duty of crushing his darling Peggy by telling her that she must stay in Eastridge. At ten o'clock on Saturday the chromatic would sail with Charles Edward and Lorraine and Stillman Dane. Yet there were two things that I was sure of. One was that Peggy ought to go with them, and the other was that it would be good for her too. But on second thought I'd prefer to keep the other thing for the end of my story. My mind was fixed, positively and finally, that the habit of interference in the Talbert family must be broken up. I never could understand what it is that makes people so crazy to interfere, especially in matchmaking. It is a lunacy. It is presuming irreverent, immoral, intolerable. So I worked out my little plan and went to sleep. Peggy took her father's decree, which was administered to her privately after breakfast on Tuesday, most loyally. Of course he could not give her his real reasons, and so she could not answer them. But when she appeared at dinner it was clear, in spite of a slight rosy hue about her eyes, that she had decided to accept the sudden change in the situation like a well-bred angel, which in fact she is. I had run down to Whitman in the morning train to make a call on young Goward, and found him rather an amiable boy, under the guard of an adoring mother who thought him a genius and was convinced that he had been entrapped by designing young women. I agreed with her so heartily that she left me alone with him for a half-hour. His broken arm was doing well. His amatoriness was evidently much reduced by hospital diet.  Synonyms, dear boy. And that he was now going west to do some honest work in the world before he thought any more about girls. I commended his manly decision. He was rather rueful over the notion that he might have hurt Miss Talbert by his bad conduct. I begged him not to distress himself. His first duty now was to get well. I asked him if he would do me the favor, with the doctor's permission, of taking the fresh air with his mother on the terrace of the hospital about half past five that afternoon. He looked puzzled, but promised that he would do it, and so we parted. After dinner I requested Peggy to make me happy by going for a little drive in the runabout with me. She came down looking as fresh as a wild rose, in a soft white dress with some kind of light greenery about it, and a pale green sash around her waist, and her pretty sunset hair uncovered. If there is any pleasanter avocation for an old fellow than driving in an open buggy with a girl like that, I don't know it. She talked charmingly about my travels, about her college friends, about Eastridge, and at last about her disappointment in not going to Europe. By this time we were nearing the Whitman Hospital. I suppose you have heard, said she, looking down at her bare hands and blushing. Perhaps they have told you why I wanted especially to go away. Yes, my dear child, I answered they have told me a lot of nonsense, and I am heartily glad that it is all over. Are you? More glad than I can tell you, she answered frankly, looking into my face. See, said I, there is the hospital. I believe there is a boy in there that knows you, name of Goward. Yes, she said, rather faintly, looking down again but not changing color. Peggy, I asked, do you still think now and answer truly? Do you still hate him? She waited a moment, and then lifted her clear blue eyes to mine.  Really, I don't hate him at all. I'm sorry for him. So am I, my dear, said I, stretching my interest in the negligible youth a little. But he is getting well, and he is going west as soon as possible.  Do you feel that you could bow to him just to oblige me? She flashed a look at me. I'll do it for that reason and for another, too, she said, and then she nodded her red head in the prettiest way, and threw in an honest smile and a wave of her hand for good measure. I was proud of her. The boy stood up and took off his hat. I could see him blush a hundred feet away. Then his mother evidently asked him a question, and he turned to answer her, and so exit Mr. Goward. The end of our drive was even pleasenter than the beginning. Peggy was much interested in a casual remark expressing my pleasure in hearing that she had recently met the nephew of one of my very old friends, Stillman Dane. Oh, she cried, do you know him? Isn't that lovely? I admitted that he was a very good person to know, though I had only seen a little of him about six years ago. But his uncle, the one who lately died and left a snug fortune to his favorite nephew, was one of my old bachelor cronies, in fact a member of the firm that published my books. If the young man resembled his uncle, he was all right. Did Peggy like him? Why, yes, she answered, he was a professor at our college, and all the girls taught him a perfect dandy. Dandy, I exclaimed, there was no sign of an excessive devotion to dress when I knew him. It's a great pity. Oh, she cried, laughing, I don't mean that. It is only a word we girls use. It means the same as when you say a very fine fellow indeed. From that point we played the Stillman Dane tune with variations until we reached home very late indeed for supper. The domestic convulsion caused by the formal announcement of Talbert's sudden decision had passed, leaving visible traces. Maria was flushed but triumphant. Alice and Billy had an air of conscience stricken importance. Charles Edward and Lorraine were sarcastically submissive. Cyrus was resolutely jovial. The only really tranquil one was Mrs. Talbert. Everything had been arranged. The whole family were to go down to New York on Thursday to stop at a hotel, and see the travelers off on Saturday morning, all except Peggy, who was to remain at home and keep house. That suits me exactly, said I, for business calls me to town tomorrow, but I would like to come back here on Thursday and keep house with Peggy if she will let me. She thanked me with a little smile, and so it was settled. Cyrus wanted to know, when we were sitting in the Arbor that night, if I did not think he had done right, wonderfully, I said. He also wanted to know if he might not give up that extra stateroom and save a couple of hundred dollars. I told him that he must stick to his bargain, I was still in the game, and then I narrated the afternoon incident at the hospital. Good little Peggy, he cried, that clears up one of my troubles, but the great objection to this European business still holds. She shall not be driven, I agreed with him, not a single step. The business that called me to New York was Stillman Dane, a most intelligent and quick-minded young gentleman, not at all a beauty man, not even noticeably academic. He was about the middle height, but very well set up, and evidently in good health of body and mind, a clean-cut and energetic fellow, who had been matured by doing his work and had himself well in hand. There was a look in his warm brown eyes, that spoke of a heart unsullied and capable of the strongest and purest affection, and at the same time certain lines about his chin and his mouth, mobile but not loose-lipped, promised that he would be able to take care of himself and of the girl that he loved. His appearance and his manner were all that I had hoped, even more, for they were not only pleasant, but thoroughly satisfactory. He was courteous enough to conceal his slight surprise at my visit, but not skillful enough to disguise his interest in hearing that I had just come from the Talberts. I told him of the agreement with Cyrus Talbert, the subsequent conversation with Mrs. Talbert, Dandy's drive with me to Whitman, and her views upon Dandy's and other cognate subjects. Then I explained to him quite clearly what I should conceive my duty to be if I were in his place. He assented warmly to my view. I added that if there were any difficulties in his mind I should advise him to lay the case before my dear friend, the Reverend George Alexandersohn, of the Irving Place Church, who was an extraordinarily sensible and human clergyman, and to whom I would give him a personal letter stating the facts. Upon this we shook hands heartily, and I went back to Peggy on Thursday morning. The house was delightfully quiet, and she was perfection as a hostess. I never passed a pleasanter afternoon. But the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Stilman Dane, who said that he had run up to say good-bye. That seemed quite polite and proper, so I begged them to excuse me, while I went into the den to write some letters. They were long letters. The next morning Peggy was evidently flustered but divinely radiant. She said that Mr. Dane had asked her to go driving with him. Would that be all right? I told her that I was sure it was perfectly right, but if they went far they would find me gone when they returned, for I had changed my mind and was going down to New York to see the voyagers off. At this Peggy looked at me with tears sparkling in the edge of her smile. Then she put her arms around my neck. Good-bye, she whispered.  Give mother my love, and that, and that, and that. Well, my dear, I answered I rather prefer to keep those for myself, but I'll give her your message, and mind this, don't you do anything unless you really want to do it with all your heart.  I promise with all my heart, said she, and then her soft arms were unloosed from my neck, and she ran upstairs. That was the last word I heard from Peggy Talbert. On Saturday morning all the rest of us were on the deck of the chromatic by half past nine. The usual farewell performance was in progress. Charles Edward was expressing some irritation and anxiety over the lateness of Stillman Dane when that young man quietly emerged from the music room, with Peggy beside him in the demurist little traveling suit, with an immense breastplate of white violets. Tom Price was the first to recover his voice. Peggy! he cried, Peggy, by all that's holy! Excuse me, I said, Mr. and Mrs. Stillman Dane, and I must firmly request everyone except Mr. and Mrs. Talbert Sr. to come with me at once to see the second steward about the seats in the dining saloon. We got a good place at the end of the pier to watch the big boat swing out into the river. She went very slowly at first, then with astonishing quickness. Charles Edward and Lorraine were standing on the hurricane deck, Peggy close beside them. Dane had given her his walking stick, and she had tied her handkerchief to the handle. She was standing up on a chair with one of his hands to steady her. Her hat had slipped back on her head. The last thing that we could distinguish on the ship was that brave little girl, her red hair like an oriole, waving her flag of victory and peace. And now, said Maria, as we turned away, I have a lovely plan. We are all going together to our hotel to have lunch, and after that to the matinee, I knew it was rude to interrupt, but I could not help it. Pardon me, dear Maria, I said, but you have not got it quite right. You and Tom are going to escort Alice and Billy to Eastridge, with such diversions by the way as seem to you appropriate. Your father and mother are going to lunch with me at Del Monaco's, but we don't want the whole family.


called the documentary on Netflix is called Skinwalker Ranch. Have you seen that or know about that? So it's a docu-series about six or seven, no, it's eight episodes about this place that has been around for a long, long time that had odd things taking place there. Highly recommend watching it. It's on Netflix, just search Skinwalker Ranch. But based on the trailers for Nope, it won't surprise me if there's a lot of similar things in Nope that actually have taken place at Skinwalker Ranch. Cool.  I haven't seen Nope and I haven't seen Skinwalker. I don't have a lot to comment there. Subscribe. It involves extra terrestrial and or interdimensional beings. I'll enter your mom. Too late. Today we got a, this is actually behind the scenes of Fafa's new film. Oh, yay! It's called the film, obviously. Yeah, Malian Kunjo, I believe. Which obviously is Fafa starring, and it's A.R. Rahman's script. Yes. So this is like, obviously, I've been told that we're not giving anything away that wasn't already in the trailer. Right. But like they're gonna show like a little, kind of almost, it's not like somebody actually talking. That's what I was expecting. It's more of a montage. More montage, but they're gonna show like the sets being built, what they kind of had to do. So we're not gonna get a legitimate like birds-eye view. No, I want to yet. Because obviously we haven't seen the film. I prefer seeing the film. I prefer those kinds of things like after you've seen the film. Let's see how it was made. Because beforehand, you don't really want to see that. No, but I'm very excited about this film. I'm so hoping we actually- It's kind of like kids. You really, you want to see everything about them afterwards, but you don't want to see the making of them before you see the kid because that should be private between the parents. Oh, I want to see it. Speaking of babies. Yes. Shout out to the camera work right there. Nice miniatures. Nice. I love that they built this actual set. Yeah. Lovely. The people that make the movies look like the movies. Would you do something like that? 100%. I would adore running on something like that. I know there's some like people like the claustrophobic and stuff. Oh no, I would, what a wonderful, fully immersive experience for you as the actor. Makes it easy as an actor. And the sense of safety doing it this way versus like Revenant when everything was outdoors. Oh, love it. Lovely. Nice. That is so cool. That's a great promotional piece. That is so cool. Yep. I love that they built that entire practical set. That is so, that is movie making right there. That is the magic of movie making. And it makes the, I don't want to say it makes the actor shop easy because obviously in, especially for something like this where you're literally supposed to be, makes your job much easier than it would have been if it's like green screen. Yes. You have running water going, right? That's going to be splashing in your face. You have the dark, you have the mud, you have literally all this stuff that is so helpful to, you don't have to act at that point. Right. You're in the moment. Being given to you. Yeah. It's wonderful that they were able to one have, that costs a lot of money. Yeah, that is, I mean, I know this film doesn't have like a Brahmastra budget. I'm not saying that, but that's, that's probably a good chunk of their budget. That's a big chunk of the investment. Building that. The time and the man hours and the materials to create that. And then the other things needed to be in place to protect equipment when you're filming in those conditions and to protect the actors is monumental as well as, I mean, I doubt, cause it would cost so much money. I doubt they did anything to the temperature of the water. So I bet they were dealing with, you know, just standard temperature water, which was probably not as cold as in the outdoors, but it was still probably quite cold. I was thinking, that's a question. When we get the opportunity to talk to him, that's a question I want to ask him and see if this is the answer as to what's been one of the most challenging, if not the most challenging roles you've ever had to do physically. One day, hopefully. Yeah. But like, also shout out to not only obviously Fafa, but the people that have to be there with a massive camera, that is difficult. Like, I mean, there's a lot of unsung heroes in filmmaking, obviously the actors directing, writers and score people. Those are the people that get the most praise. Those are the ones with the names, right? But the other people like the DOPs and the camera operators and the lighting people and the set designers, these are the ones that don't get the praise that they deserve, except for if they win an award. Yeah, exactly. For it and then even then, most people don't watch those. And I can tell there's gonna be a lot of things in this that are going to be screaming about an incredible achievement in cinematography already. I love that one thing they did where they had the rail and he was underneath it. So rather than have him wear a camera or have the camera operator above him, it's on a railing and he's kind of sliding with it. It's gonna be so fun to watch. There's gonna be so many times, even though we saw that, I know there's gonna be times in the movie you're watching and you're gonna think to yourself, how'd they get that shot? Yeah, and it's looking like it's gonna be, from the trailer as well, when you're in an intimate space like that, but the coloring and the shadows and the doing it in dark to not just make it look like a black screen. And sound, because so much of the sound is gonna have to be post-production. They'll capture a lot of it, but to get the realism of the sound, there's gonna be a lot of sound engineering in this that is gonna be as well. How'd you get that to work? Very excited. They must have been so excited when this went from concept to storyboard and they were really getting the feel for what this was gonna be. This must have been just an exciting project to work on. Yeah, and it's our first FaFa film since the, oh wait, no. We've had quite a few and it's been amazing. They've all been good. At them, yeah. All the new ones, especially. We've liked some more than others, but the only one that we didn't like that he's been in is obviously Pushpa. Oh yeah, he wasn't that. Although he was nice in that. Yeah, we didn't have a problem with FaFa. But he was only a pinch of FaFa. Yeah, that was one of the problems we had with it. We only got a pinch of FaFa and we wanted a full snort. I always wanna snort a FaFa. He's never going on the channel now. Come on the channel, we'll snort FaFa. Anyways, let us know if you're excited which we are next time on the album. And a FaFa film, Trance is one that a lot of people say. Yeah, I've heard that one over and over. I think his wife said her favorite of his is the artist, I think. It's an older one of his that, well, I highly recommend we watch if it's his wife's favorite. But anyways, let us know down below.