I find it hard even to read or listen to the news because it's so bloody ridiculous and a lot of these contradictions and exclusions and mistreatment of Dunnegal people and those in other counties are just routinely ignored. It's as if it doesn't matter. It's crazy, like it's unreal. You would, if you explain this to aliens, they'd get back in their mothership and start off back to wherever they came from. Absolutely, I mean, and that's another one of the issues that I would have thought, you know, would have been an easy one for a deputy in the queue to, you know, come out publicly and say that he would be pushing for also. But he hasn't, you know, and I really would urge him to maybe rethink, you know, when he's next on your show or in other media statements to kind of be a bit clearer with homeowners about what his red line issues are beyond penalty free downsizing. And I presume as well that he, you know, was in support, as all of us were, with the 2.5 billion euro 100% redress for defective apartment owners, which seemingly has no caps involved in that. And to, you know, again, the points that you just made, and they're not restricted to, you know, pre-2008 building standards, just the inequity is just astounding. Yeah, and unfortunately, the way news cycles works, it was a big deal for a little while and it's on to the next thing. Yet, there are people that are not sleeping at night or have to live the rest of their lives with this dark cloud, this inequality hanging over them. And yet it was three or four days in the newspapers, which is actually not bad for an issue. And then it's gone, but the reality is left. We're living, we are left with the reality. Thousands of people, and I'll tell you, when it becomes cheaper to access the scheme if that ever happens, I think we're going to see a tsunami of houses, additional houses in Donegal and elsewhere that are going to be found to have defective concrete. Absolutely, yeah. And I just think that, you know, like Joe McHugh, as a government party TD, his voice does have more weight, particularly with national media, when he speaks out, maybe more so than our opposition TDs who have been tirelessly campaigning and trying to raise all these issues. So I really thank you. In terms of the opposition, and I can't wait, those chickens are going to come home to roost soon and words are going to have to be backed up soon. Absolutely, we'll have to see the colour of their money, you know, if indeed they do leave, you know, the next government. But I mean, I'm just dealing with the reality of where we are today. I get you, I'm not pulling you up on the right here. I'm just saying, you know, I've logged so much on this, I've logged so many commitments to so many different things, big item things, this defective box scandal, the state of the hospital, you know, stuff that's, I've asked questions directly as will this be resolved? The answer being in the affirmative. And I just, I await to ask those questions in a different political environment with the hope that obviously for people, things improve, that's what we want. I'm not looking for any gotchas or anything to try and catch people out. And Mary T, we were, former minister, I keep going to call him minister, Joe McHugh said in an event today, we didn't invite him before this call, right, in fairness to him, and he said he'll come on with us. And I'll tease out some of the stuff that you've been talking about, Mary T, and see what other, because he does say the wording's quite, he says he would consider rejoining the party on that particular issue, the low-hanging fruits as you described it. We'll see what else it would be required for him to re-enter. Okay, is that all right, Mary T? Anything you want to add? Yeah, thank you very much. Listen, stay strong. Thanks, Mary T, for joining us. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Greg. All right, take care of yourself. Oh, wait, 60, 25,000 WhatsApps and texts to that number. And it's been a really busy week on the phone lines. I can't overemphasise how important that is to us. Now, just a statement here from Letter Kenney University Hospital, by the way, they are extremely busy today with long wait times at the ED. The emergency department at the hospital has under significant pressure with high attendance and long waiting times. A record number of 194 patients attended the emergency department in the last 24 hours, that's huge, 194 people. The high number of people attending who need to be admitted for ongoing treatment means that there is pressure on beds availability. This is resulting in significant delays being experienced by patients in the ED who are waiting for a bed to become available on the ward. So that means we're going to see very high trolley watch figures tomorrow, okay? The hospital is also treating 10 patients with COVID-19, four patients with influenza A. They say that all beds available in the hospital at the moment are in use. Every effort they say is being made to discharge patients who are ready to go home so the beds will become available for patients who need to be admitted at the earliest opportunity. The hospital says it acknowledges that these delays are very difficult for patients and their families and apologize for the inconvenience and distress these delays cause. It says the hospital is committed to treating everyone who presents at the ED. People who are seriously injured or ill are assessed and treated as a priority and those who do not require urgent care may be waiting longer. And they re-emphasize that people should only attend the emergency department at the hospital if it is an emergency situation. They ask people to attend their GP or an out-of-virus service in the first instance if at all possible is the phraseology they use. So the hospital, very busy. All beds currently occupied. They're trying to discharge those who can be discharged. That in and of itself when we covered it extensively on this show is a challenge. Getting home care packages, beds in the community family who are able to look after someone who doesn't require acute care any longer requires ongoing care. And the delays and the problems and the shortage there, it then has a knock-on effect and people can't get into the hospital because sometimes there's a struggle to get people out. Stop Highland Radio are going to Scotland from Monday the 1st of May to Thursday the 4th of May with the very best of music and we would love for you to join us. Staying at the four-star Crown Plaza Hotel in Glasgow, we are bringing with us some of the biggest country stars including myself, David James, Declan Ernie and Robert Mazzel to name a few. You will enjoy luxury travel to Glasgow, three nights dinner bed and breakfast with music and entertainment each evening. Join us on the Highland Fling to Glasgow this May for only €575 per person. To book, call Highland Radio today on<PHONE_NUMBER>. Early booking is advisable, single supplement applies. Some sports demand resilience, great power, Cheltenham demands it all and this is William Hill Racing at Cheltenham. Get our top price guarantee against selected bookmakers on all championship races. It's who you play with, William Hill. Top prices from 9am 27th February 23 until the start of each of the four championship races compared to selected competitors. Standard win market odds only, exclusive competitor offers, further terms apply, 18 plus for advice and information visit gamblingcare.ie Call a hands gala and go Burt, your one stop family shop. Drive into our newly renovated spacious forecourt, fill up at our upgraded modern fuel pumps and save with our keen go fuel prices. Located on the main Letter Kenny to Derry Road were the ideal pit stop on your Dunningall journey. Fast flow fuel, self service or attended with a smile. Shirts all go with Calla Hands. Join me, Marty Frayl, this and every Friday night from eight for rocking hits on Highland Radio in association with Arena 7 Letter Kenny, the best family entertainment complex around with bowling, laser quest, soft play center and more, visit arena 7.ie This week's Nine Till Noon Show was brought to you by St Mary's GA Convoy Club Development Draw. Win 50,000 for 50 Euro. Draw takes place 17th of March. Get your ticket now at stmary'sgadraw.ie Okay, now it just so happens there are these types of stories going around at the moment. Let me put it like that. But we read that the head of a childcare representative group has said one of the world's largest nursery school groups, which instructed parents to stop telling their daughters they look pretty or claiming calling them princess or a tomboy was overstepping a boundary. The woke handbook sent to parents whose children attend bright horizons nurseries in the US and the UK also cautions moms and dads against praising good behavior and takes pains to define girls as children who identify as a female. Elaine Don is chair of Ireland's Federation of Early Childhood Providers and joins us now. Good morning, Elaine. Can you hear me? Elaine, I wonder. Okay, we are struggling to pick up Elaine there. We'll come back to her in a moment. Stay right where you are. Don't know what went on there. Caroline, you might have an investigation for us. I call it says it is really time to get a pedestrian bridge near the dry arch if people are getting injured. There should be no people crossing a dual carriage waits on safer pedestrians and motorists says a caller. My children go to secondary school and every day they have at least three free classes with teachers away training. Should teachers not be qualified enough going into a job to prevent this from happening as it's the children that are suffering? Another caller says why do you have to travel to letter Kenny NCT centre to get an NCT on your van? It can't be done in other centres around Donegal. I'm not really quite sure about the reason for that. Anyone with any insights please let us know. Right, I have a quick break to catch up on and that will give us an opportunity to reconnect with our last guest. Stay right where you are. Watch the show live now on YouTube, Facebook and at HighlandRadio.com. We have Davey Russell and Andy Maxx exclusive views plus all the top tipsters ready to get your first pass the post all week. The Irish Daily Star number one for racing number one for you.  Located on the main letter Kenny to Dairy Road were the ideal pit stop on your Donegal journey. Fast flow fuel, self service or attended with a smile. Shirts all go at Calla Hans. Dylan's Hotel letter Kenny is the perfect place to celebrate special occasions. Dylan's exclusive function rooms cater for up to 120 guests for any occasion from corporate celebrations presentations and networking events to milestone birthdays anniversaries and retirement parties. There's audio visual equipment integrated PA systems and even a private bar. Dylan's Hotel perfectly located letter Kenny town center with a award winning food and five star service call 911 229 double seven. Toyota Relax our new service activated warranty is now available at Kelly's Toyota letter Kenny in Mount Charles. Whether you bought your Toyota from us a classified ad or your auntie once it's less than 10 years old with under 185,000 kilometers you will get a 12 month warranty when you get your service at Kelly's Toyota letter Kenny or Mount Charles. For more search Toyota relax. Toyota built for a better world. Okay, let's go to the plight. Hopefully Elaine Don chair of Orleans Federation of Early Childhood providers can hear us now. Can you hear me? Okay, Elaine. Yeah, okay. Can you hear me? I can just the signal is not fantastic but we can work with it. Right. Don't discuss a girl's looks. That's the advice of one of the world's biggest childcare businesses. Parents whose children attend a bright horizon nursery in the UK and US have been given handbooks which include how to speak to young girls. It advises people not to use gender-based words like princess or words like bossy as it reinforces gender stereotype. I don't know. I'm finding it hard to get my head around some of this stuff. As a chair of Orleans Federation of Early Childhood providers what say you? What's your feelings on where we're going the direction here? Well, I suppose for me in my service everything is parental driven. And if we were still having parents coming to us asking us not to use the term princess or superhero whatever then what we would do is we would survey all of the parents and we would take guidance from them. So I was quite shocked when I heard what was in the handbook. It certainly wouldn't be in my handbook in my service in any way. In terms of endearment are always used to empower the children and it's all the children within your service. It's not just the girls we would empower all children in the same light. It seems to be the what they're against is affirming gender stereotypes you know that maybe girls play with these toys boy plays with them girls wear skirts boys wear trousers you know but I mean where's the evidence for this? You work with children does that cause harm if you speak and treat children like that? Can I come in? Yeah, look one thing I will say to you here when children come into a service the girls play with the cars the boys play with the dolls they wash the dolls no everybody does the same thing it's totally child led so a child wants to go and take a doll in the book and push it around the room or wash the doll down or whatever that's up to each individual child they're not treated any differently because of their gender they're all treated exactly equally do you know what I mean? So that's empowering a child Yeah so but would you avoid using words like avoiding using words like princess or gender specific words like girls or boys? No not at all Yeah that being said we can't ignore this either because this isn't this isn't necessary In the morning time when we open the door that's oh come on in princess and Yeah my apologies Elaine we won't keep you very much longer the line is just very is very up and down but the point I was trying to make here this isn't just some person one individual that's tweeted something that's open for discussion this is quite a significant organization that's distributing this handbook do you think there'll be a push back from parents? Do you talk to parents much about these types of issues and what do you think they might say? I actually do it's going to be 25 of my parents so we're absolutely shot a child needs to be a child and if a parent wants to make a decision to change how we address their child well then they will come to us individually and then we will do them case by case you know you look into the future who knows what the future is going to hold here you know what is going to go on in the next couple of years because you see a lot of changes as you said about gender so we don't know what's going to happen in the near future all right listen thanks for working through us that with us on that Paul connection we appreciate your time no it's okay it's perfectly fine Elaine Donner chair of Ireland's federation of early childhood providers now as I say this is these issues on the hobby halls for us here by the way I just want to make that clear it just so happens that there are two quite high profile stories going around at the moment both which deal with children and conversations around gender so just to give you a recap there the head of a child care representative group has said one of the world's largest nursery school groups which instructed parents to stop telling their daughters they look pretty or calling them princesses or a tomboy was overstepping boundary the walk handbook sent to parents whose children attend Bright Horizons nurseries in the US and the UK also cautions moms and dads against praising good behaviour and takes plans to define girls as children who identify as female you just heard from Elaine Donner she has her concerns but what say you 08 660 25000 and also I do want to hear from people who might believe that this is the right way to go I just think it's there's more and more that sort of it's in it's it's it's notional amongst adults and it's being imposed on children it's just I don't know it feels a wee bit feels a bit worrying good morning Greg so the guards have no problem seizing learner driver cars from Donegal yet Ukrainians can go where they want as she said if they find out they are a permanent resident the next time they're caught they'll be dealt with if you know they're a resident then they know the address it's how long the intent to stay here the situation is somewhat complicated the majority will go home when it's safe for them to do so I don't know what the definition of a permanent resident is but I am a permanent resident a Ukrainian staying in a hotel in one of our towns and villages I don't think they'd be classed as permanent they don't have a permanent address and what have you just listening there all about the money Greg get money in not learn your drivers or anything else please that caller let me see keep going here congratulations to George and his album tour from his old piano teacher is impressive George he really is I just want to mention one other thing as well Stremort National School do you remember we had the students in with their robot that fired little disks out they had won the national competition they're doing a fundraising to go over and compete at the World Vex Robotics Championship in Dallas it's the biggest robotics event in the world and why shouldn't we have a group from Stremort National School over at it well there's a big breakfast for Stremort National School it's on Sunday March 26th so that's a week Sunday it runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. it's in Wilkins Bar in Churchill all donations greatly appreciated so if you want to back them you can do that right we were talking yesterday on the show about littering how in God's name are we going to stop it maybe Joe can help us Joe good morning to you thanks for taking the time to speak to us today how are you keeping right okay you were talking to us about people throwing rubbish out the windows what particularly do you want to talk about right right well I just said the lady talking about it just then just wanted to make a comment on it no I'll give you an example anybody that throws a bottle over a hedge if I'm going to now know how more I know the bottle breaking is kind of a sudden noise the flames pick it up from the village and then the harvester lefts it and goes on to the city stop now if you have a clue where appropriate the stomach or if not doing well you realize that the trees are eating these butts of grass and people are saying but they don't realize the pain and the suffering the animals have sheep can cause both yeah it's an interesting point you make because we often view this as environmental or how pretty the countryside might look or our towns and villages might look but this is a problem for farmers as well because as you say you bring them all over it you hear that crack it's in bits and it could end up do we know does it happen I'm sure it does though but does it happen where animals that have fed this product end up getting injured because of the plastic contained within well you know it's kind of freezing sort of a silent killer if you don't know what's what's just doing to the downside but I had it a few years ago with a perfect stomach and actually we could do on that another example of it a tin can now if you look at the trough or the seeding process where the cellage is and they have it cleaned up you'll get bits of can bigger than the cow would eat the supply to the can so that's a big bit more to the wee bits go but how they go on to them and through them you know that you don't realize the damage is doing to the environment and the animals especially it's really quite an interesting point that I hadn't really thought of or heard before Joe and it makes perfectly perfect sense because this stuff has to end up somewhere there's no way to filter these shards of plastic or metal and the idea then that a cow or a sheep could be eating them and and digest them and any grazing animal presumably a horse or whatever it might be the same could apply Joe the seeding does apply especially when they're grazing plastic now a wee plastic bag or ever for the cow the cow and sheep knows it and they'll pick that up and start to chew it and a few times a full plastic out of the cow's mouth you know it's a job of catching I don't know if I can do that you running around looking to try and give an oral examination to a cow that's not interested in having a look at you Joe but listen yeah okay I see exactly where you're coming from never crossed my mind before but I will remember this conversation Joe another good reason as to why we don't or shouldn't be chucking our rubbish away illegally all right Joe good man how is it farming at the moment of you is it tough good exactly good to have the health to do it Joe come here keep on it take care of yourself Joe lovely to chat to you thank you all right bye bye all right that's Joe there he's out and about and now looking out the window here at the mountain top in letter canning but the weather is beautiful I would say it's chilly but it's beautiful okay morning this is the second year I've contacted the chamber the letter canning chamber I presume this is about having a quiet part of the parade for children with autism and other issues last year they told me it was too late to organize but thought it was a good idea I contacted them in January and they assured me they would discuss a disappointed to hear the ads for the parade and no mention of it it doesn't affect me or my family thankfully but I'm sure plenty of families don't go to the parade for this reason it works in other towns Sligo has been doing it for a few years now so presumably in part my ignorance is this a case whereby there's a section of the streets maybe the lower main street or wherever it might be in a town and everything goes silent the music goes silent the bands go silent is this the norm elsewhere is this listener rightly says they say it is so I've no reason to doubt that and is there a big appetite forward in our towns around this region let me know 08, 60, 25,000 so it would be a a section of the parade where things fall silent I presume that's the the suggestion they're making so that parents and guardians of children with autism and other issues can attend would there be is there a huge appetite forward that out there let me know 08, 60, 24,000 08, 24,000 we've lost 1,000 08, 60, 25,000 the last few weeks there have been a lot of long wheelbase vans parked along letterkenny main street and at the bottom of church lane on double yellows making it impossible for a fire brigade or ambulance to get passed on the road down the side of some businesses there blocking emergency vehicles too there's no problem until something needed until something needing an emergency response happens that's a concerned listener there Hi Greg being as our sister Kathleen's a dedicated listener of your program please wish her a very happy birthday from our fan and brother and sisters her fan and brothers and sisters Gormeha Mahigat Kathleen a dedicated listener thank you very much indeed a very happy birthday to you from your brothers and sisters but also from us all here at Highland radio we hope you have a lovely day and you're very well treated what does Ireland's future look like at ESB we invest over 1 billion euro every year to ensure it's a future powered by clean affordable energy that's 1 billion euro to fund projects that will move Ireland towards energy independence harnessing our natural resources to bring clean renewable electricity into more areas of our lives so that we can enjoy a reliable supply of home-grown energy long into the future ESB invested in Ireland find out more at ESB Darahi house to home bridge end Donegal our modest front door opens onto two floors of Irish made furniture suites beds mattresses dining and occasional furniture step into our showroom and see how we can transform your house into a home house to home furniture flooring slide robes and interiors bridge end Donegal do you suffer from high cholesterol menopause symptoms digestive issues anxiety aches and pains or a lack of energy the highly trained team at the natural way letter candy can provide advice on natural remedies for a number of individual health issues the natural way also has its own brand of herbal treatments to help fight fatigue relieve digestive discomfort maintain a healthy immune system and alleviate common menopause symptoms the natural way letter candy shopping center your one stop health shop get ready for the all new polls venue with state of the art sound and light and all new decor reopening Saturday 18th of March with the whistling donkeys Tickets on sale now see polls letter Kenny on Facebook for updates this week's nine till noon show was brought to you by St Mary's GA convoy club development draw win 50,000 for 50 euro draw takes place 17th of March get your ticket now at St Mary's GA draw.ie Highland radio weather updates with Ireland west airport fly dilly to london Haidtzer with their lingus and connect to 80 plus destinations worldwide including Boston and New York Ireland west airport don't just take off take it easy OK let's have a look at that weather then further showers of rain hail and snow through the morning in the afternoon highs of just four to seven degrees with an added wind chill moderate to fresh and gusty northwest winds frost and ice will setting quickly after dark under clear sky and easing winds cold temperatures minus three to plus zero degrees but temperatures begin I believe to pick up later on tomorrow now I read the article on the front of the Irish Daily Mail this morning more than 1200 people under the age of 65 are living in nursing homes and can't leave with advocacy groups saying they are being held in custody due to the housing crisis and Griffin is regional advocate with sage advocacy for the northwest and it's shocking language it's a motive language and I would imagine that's by accident rather than design so people sit up and take note of what's being said and yes I suppose twelve four hundred people nationally living in nursing home care and nursing homes really should be the last resort but sometimes it's the only option for a person and then they have no choice as to where they live they lose all access to family life they're living with older people not in a suitable environment in terms of activities and engagements and the diseases like motor neuron Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis these are lifelong illnesses and the planning should take place much earlier in terms of accommodation and facilities to support those individuals in a community setting in an ordinary neighbourhood nursing home care is excellent in terms of the physical well-being but for a person a younger person under the age of 65 they need more interventions they need physio they need engagements to stimulate they need access to family and this is denied in terms of the nursing home care because the nursing home environment is set up to support an older person a younger person requires ongoing assessment in terms of what they require to be supported to live an independent life and we need funding to match the care needs of the individual but I suppose the requirement comes in in terms of suit of access to suitable accommodation in community settings and we only have the national rehab unit in Dunleary so if a person under the age of 65 is maybe following a farm accident or a road traffic accident or a quite brain injury of course we also have the early onset dementia from the Kostikov syndrome and those that individual if they require support from the national rehab they then they're invariably discharged back into nursing home care and carers in nursing homes are trained to care for older people but the care care needs of a younger person are quite different and they need to be simulated for sure and this is about their personal development as well and what is lost in that and this is and you quite rightly point out this is not a criticism of nursing homes they provide a wonderful service for a certain group of people but that service is not tailored for the this other group of people groups of people that we're talking of and this is not a 2023 problem or a 2022 problem I've been speaking to and particularly when you mentioned people who have suffered a brain injury I've been speaking to advocates on this issue and this problem for years and years and years so there are people that are living and have been living very long term in a nursing home when they'd be far better off in the types of environments you've described absolutely and it really is about forward thinking and planning and planning should be in place at a much earlier stage where you have the ongoing life illnesses but then once you have an acquired injury that then can prevent an individual returning home to their own area neighborhood it can present a person moving back to their own home that then has an impact on family life and particularly on children and where that parent is missing out on parenting their child so the the planning needs to come in at a much earlier stage and we need to consider more than the physical well-being of the individual there are and what we are what we are doing here is we're choosing the path of least resistance here it's handy you know what I mean it is a space for someone that but it's not the right thing to do this is not focused on the person it's not person focused it's not it's not what can we do for Greg in his situation it's what will what will do rightly for Greg you know what I mean without consideration for you know my development my life my rehabilitation as well because some of what we're talking about you know there are you know rehabilitation options you know and what have you give people the best level of independence or whatever it might be that's obviously not happening how it should in a nursing home environment I presume absolutely and there will be people listening to us this morning Greg who may be in those circumstances and but the ability to self-determine and the fact that your independence is taken away because you technically have to accept what is on offer and that then impacts on your social inclusion it impacts on the family life it impacts on relationships and everything is I suppose in in terms of support we need to consider what happens if you leave the rehab unit where do you go next what are the supports in the community like physio and ongoing therapies that are required to support those individuals and then we want to talk about quality of life talk about engagement with their peers relationships social inclusion all of that is lost in many ways because of the lack of choice Yeah and it puts me in mind of a case we covered on this program some time ago of a person who effectively ended up being a long-term resident of the acute hospital because there was nowhere for them to go and I believe they were moved then out of the hospital to a nursing home it would make you wonder you know is that person still there is that the right thing for them I'm not talking about any individual cases but this is probably happening really quite regularly and we know the number at the moment is is 1200 which is not a mountain we shouldn't be able to climb in providing proper services for these people in the right places if there is a will Anne it shouldn't be beyond us No it should not be beyond us and you know you can see where in care settings where they have recently decongregated and some of those residents are now living independently in communities for the first time so it can be done but there is a requirement for funding to support the care needs and the ongoing assessment of these individuals because they're missing out in terms of where they're at in terms of their own development they're missing out on education they're missing out on an opportunity to live a normal life they're missing out on an opportunity to have a job to be independent and you can talk about independence in terms of support for their disability but you're also talking about travel how they get from A to B then you're talking about access to accommodation in the community what types of accommodation what type of accommodation is built to support the individual's care needs and you cannot say that any one service fits the bill for everybody every person has should have the right to be assessed in relation to their care needs and to be supported to live as an individual and an independent life as much as you can possibly be yeah and I don't think I don't think there's anyone I don't think there's anyone listening to this program that would like to think they're fellow people or some of them feel like they're being held in custody because the props facilities aren't available for them so we just need really I suppose the powers to be to exercise the will of the people that would be the right thing to do well we we certainly need more support for those individuals who find themselves in those circumstances because we find that for the older people in nursing home care we have the manager for the services for older people in the various CHO areas and then you have I suppose if you look at the national picture the funding is not matched county to county but we are saying that the funding needs to match the individual's care needs we need to accommodation needs to match their care needs and while nursing homes provide excellent services for older people the staff there are not trained to provide a service to a person with an acquired brain injury say for example and then you find that there is a lot of frustration and of course the other side is that it may not be fair on the older person to have individuals under the age of 65 living in their nursing home because of their care needs do not match the care needs of the older person and you could be talking about you know music or noise or activities all of those things that are set up for the older person they technically don't meet the needs of a younger person yeah for sure and listen thank you so much for explaining that so clearly to us we really do appreciate your time this morning and Griffin Regional Advocate with Sage Advocacy for the Northwest okay we're heading towards the end of the program let me tell you that our show sponsors of course are St Mary's GEA convoy and their development draw they are raising funds for the ongoing development of their facilities there's 50k to win on St Patrick's Day 50k for St Patrick's Day it's their draw and you can get tickets by going to St Mary's GEA convoy development draw their social media website etc we asked you today to be in with a chance of winning two tickets into that draw the question was in the famous All Ireland song in 2012 Jimmy's winning what? Is it Jimmy's winning matches? Or is it Jimmy's winning footballs? We insulted you with that in question but the answer was of course matches and the winner of two tickets into that draw and fingers crossed you are successful I had the winner and now I've lost the winner have it again quite correctly Kathleen Gallagher from from Letcher Kenny correctly answered matches and wins two tickets I hope you win the 50k for St Patrick's Day and we'll have another two tickets to give away tomorrow and in the meantime if you want to support that club and be in with a chance of winning as I say search out their social media and elsewhere for your chance to buy those tickets alright that is where we have to leave it on the show today thank you to all of you who listened to the program took part in the program watched it however you engaged with us it's really appreciated we're back with you tomorrow morning Wednesday we'll announce the winner of our Irish Music Month search for a local musical talent hero competition we've got businesses with Kieran and so much more besides so rejoin us at nine but don't go anywhere today because John Breslin is coming up after the news around the Northwest


I also have with me Jeff Squires of Cisco Systems and one of the authors of OpenMPI Jeff. Thanks again for your time Hey Brock love doing these kinds of things. You always get to hear something new You can find us online at www.rce-cast.com You can find all the old shows on there see a list of people we're looking at talking to and if you have contact for any of Them blood is please let us know you can also follow me on Twitter at atfrockpalon and you can find that off of the website Me too, I think I'm at Chase Squires and Well a little note to anybody who's listening out there if there are things about MPI that you would love to see explained Let me know and I'll do a little bit about it on my blog because just off the cuff I did something about eager limits a week or two ago and Brock sent me back afterwards. Hey, that was really useful. I can show that to all my users And so you know if you gentle reader out there have anything you want to hear about on the MPI sphere Just let me know be happy to talk about it Yes, that that was very useful Also, I'm gonna be at the terror grid conference, which is in Salt Lake City this year That is coming up in July it is July 16th through 21st of any you guys are gonna be there for sure to track me down I'll be walking around as a campus champion there representing the University of Michigan So I'll be there if anyone else is gonna be there All right, so let's get on to our topic today I think you have a special affiliation with our guests. So why don't you give the the introduction honors here? Yeah, yeah, so our guest today is Rodney Maka of Hyperlogic He's actually gonna be speaking to us about a lot of the questions we have about Windows HPC server I've personally never ran an HPC server setup Rod's unique in that he actually got me into this business Rod hired me back in 2004 2005 as a student employee at U of M Running a bunch of Mac and Linux clusters there. So this is how I got started in this business So I owe Rod a lot for getting me on track in a great industry Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Brock. I said I knew you would be excellent employee And I'm glad to see that you know run the podcast of a small small world And I also work with Jeff in the past on lamb and then open MPI so it's got to great to see you guys Yeah, we go way back and before we were recording I was saying that people need to stop using lamb Yeah, please upgrade to open MPI and stop asking us questions about lamb. Yeah, you can do like the Microsoft IE 6 web page, you know stop using I6 Using lamb and you're like you can point point where in the world people are still using lamb Well, but kind of a segue here We're talking to Rodney here because he his company does a lot of consulting around Windows HPC and Windows HPC is not something that a lot of us know about so it'd be interesting to hear about it because At least my particular bias is mostly focused on Linux and other POS XE kinds of OS is And the HPC in those arenas now Windows HPC is getting more popular. So we figured Let's hear something about it. So Rodney, I wonder if you could give us a little the background here about why you can Talk to us about this stuff. Sure. Yeah, we have a consulting company hyperlogic So we do a lot of Linux consulting. We also do Microsoft HPC consulting mostly for Manufacturing and automotive because we're out of Michigan. So we do a lot of CACFD a lot of commercial office shelves shelf apps We're an HP HPC elite partner. So we put together clusters support them manage them And for Microsoft, you know, definitely like you said Linux has been you know Kind of de facto standard for a long time and as Microsoft's came out with their stack, they're now in the third version It's gotten to the point where it's actually Very interesting and we've seen a lot of customers in the manufacturing space adopting it for different types of Point solutions and even in larger companies in tier one automotive. We starting to see a Microsoft HPC server So we've been doing we have tools and solutions in that space. We do development and consulting So thought we could come today, you know, having a kind of a mixed background We see both sides of the fence of done operations development. We could maybe hopefully, you know Talk about talk to the H Microsoft HPC space Currently listeners that might be interested in kind of what's different or what is what is Microsoft doing in in this arena? Just stress that a rods a good candidate for this because as I mentioned at Michigan He was running in all Linux and Mac clusters. So and he still does Linux quite a bit of Linux still actually right, right? Yeah, yep. Yep. We still do a lot of Linux. So, you know, it's We can talk about like what you know, what is a decision point when you go to when you're trying to decide Linux or Windows, you know often You know, there's a there's some criteria that may make one more preferable over the other depending on your situation Well, yeah, actually, let's dive into that. I mean what what why would a customer choose Microsoft HPC? And I don't mean that nearly as confrontational as that sounds But you know a big chunk of the HPC industry is Linux. So what would lead somebody to the to the Windows solution instead? Well often what happens we go to a customer side the engineers, maybe they're using a Linux cluster They don't have necessarily Linux expertise or they face problems like they'll have they'll create an input file on Windows And they have to deal with like Unix to Windows line conversion all those like little things having to FTP files back and forth And so the the Linux for the end user the engineer, they almost don't care it They're just trying to get their job done. Whatever is the easiest way to get the job done. So often that barrier is That Windows reduces that barrier a little bit if the engineers are Windows focused now other shops there the engineers I'll want to use Linux. So it just depends on the environment the same thing goes on the flip side the for the IT administrator Often they if they don't have Linux skills and Linux comes in we often bring Linux into a Windows only shop in the past and You know IT, you know corporate IT is has maybe a more difficult time handling Linux than they do Then they do a Microsoft solution now I should say that just because you have a Microsoft solution in place doesn't mean that having Windows skills makes you an HPC person You definitely need to learn, you know the all of the part of HPC But that does lower the barrier of entry for folks who if they if they aren't familiar with HPC and they aren't familiar With Linux it's at least one of those two you knock out. You knock out if you want to consider HPC And kind of the third realm that's new is that if you want to like utilize a lot of companies now are going to Windows 7 So you see a lot of Windows 7 workstations out there and especially in engineering these things are almost like mini supercomputers I mean they got 8 cores a whole bunch of RAM, you know what they were they were more powerful than the clusters We used to run a U of m back in the day and they're sitting under someone's desk HPC server let you basically schedule on those boxes seamlessly So you can use it even if you have a Linux cluster You could use it as a point solution to do cycle scavenging on Windows boxes and you could do this in the past with third-party solutions But it's it's way way easier now with HPC server than it other ever was before with like having to buy off a third-party app to do it So a lot of people are used to seeing Windows machines, you know a desktop that kind of interface Is there anything about running an HPC a Windows HPC server set up that is going to feel very desktopy if you've been running Linux things before Well kind of the dream of HPC server is that the that you actually submit from your native application and you should never really even realize that you're submitting to a cluster necessarily So applications like Ansys there's some good apps out there that do have that you know dream realize they've using Microsoft API They submit to the cluster. It's it's basically transparent if you want to go back to where your application doesn't have that level of integration Then it's not that different than using a Linux. There's a command line API. You can do like job submit You know the the big difference between how you submit maybe to an HPC cluster versus a Linux cluster is what are you using instead of writing bash Maybe using bash files or PowerShell So so it's definitely a little bit different skill set, but it's not vastly different There's a command line you can you don't have to use the GUI to use the GUI tools though They have all GUI interfaces web portals standalone thick client, you know command line so whatever you prefer they don't you can choose choose any of the above Okay, so that sounds like they've actually reproduced a lot of stuff that we figured out in other batch environments for a long time What about actually moving code over that was originally developed in a Unix Linux environment? Do they have POSIX compatibility? How hard is it? Well, they do have a there's this thing called SUA, which is basically a full POSIX compliant Implementation on top of the Microsoft kernel so you can install that it has like AUX said grep You can basically compile any application with very little change But that's not really the way if you're gonna do that. You're almost I think you might as well stick with a stick with Linux But if there's a lot of toolkits like PGI make some nice tools that allow you to easily, you know, take a pure Linux Unix heritage code and make it work on Windows You know a lot of the changes are just like on Windows you have dot OBJ instead of dot oh you have to change your make file slightly for that PGI actually has a pretty good tutorial on on migrating over some classical HPC codes over to Microsoft just to kind of show you What the steps were that you had to do, you know, what did they have to you know change? So it's a it's but you know, it's it can be non-trivial or it can be You know, it could be an effort just depending on how many assumptions or code makes about the fact that it's running on Linux Like how do you do your directories?  All right, so along that line, you know, my particular bias is MPI, you know and hypothetically the MPI API is exactly the same between Linux and and Windows and a lot of people have experience porting between different versions of MPI simply because you know There are fundamental differences for example between open MPI and MPH to two big popular open source ones So I would imagine that the MPI portability is not so much the issue. It's really all the other little things Is that kind of an accurate statement? Yes, that's correct. The MPH to layers the portability issue is not there The the Microsoft MPI is based on MPH to so if it's compatible All right, and what version is the HPC server based on are there different versions, you know What what do people use out there? There's basically one version. There's the eight there. They've had three versions of the product But the version that you get is HPC server 2008 R2 so that's like a whole huge mouthful But that that's the main version and it's broken down into a couple subsets based on what functionality you need Okay, so what things are included in there? I mean, you know, typically and again I can only speak for my experience on the on the Linux side You know, there's a scheduler and a resource manager and a Cuing system and things like that, you know, are these kinds of things involved on the Windows HPC stack as well? Yep, that's correct. Actually, they have let's call the a Pack express pack and it has all those things basically for free if you already have a Windows server that you've played for us paid for a server 2008 R2 It has message passing job scheduling Reporting sys admin deployment all that stuff is included for free Now they also have like an enterprise pack that gives you some additional functionality like being able to run on Windows 7 workstations Or using Excel on a cluster and some other functionality like that So I've heard some stories and speaking with Microsoft reps when they come by about infrastructure needs and So that's been some confusion for people like I need an active directory setup Or I need a quite a large Windows infrastructure to even support this is that true and what is really needed? You do need active directory But there's very few businesses that I have encountered that don't have active directory installed But it is true active directory is the main requirement You could always install active directory separately if you needed it for some reason your company didn't support active directory But but that is a requirement Okay, so I because I had heard things like SQL server was required to be able to collect statistics because I stored it in a SQL database So none of that's is that just an optional requirement and it's not needed to actually run the server It includes SQL server express which is free But if you want to run let's say a top 500 style cluster Then you would want to put full-blown SQL server on there if you want to collect a full Full debugging etc. That that would be true Speaking of top 500. What is the largest Windows HPC cluster you've seen slash been involved with? They have they just did a pediscale cluster the one over the subami over in Japan So that was I think 1.1 Petaflops and over like 1300 nodes. I think it was number four on the top 500 last time I had checked though To be honest the majority of the installations we're doing them You know top 500 are like few and far between but the majority of the clusters we see in the Manufacturing etc. You know under 256 nodes, you know I've seen as large as 512 nodes that we've done with H with Microsoft HPC server So it just depends on the implementation for Windows workstation nodes We've done up to a thousand Windows workstation nodes with being scheduled under Microsoft HPC But but yeah, it's it's it's it's it's certainly they can do top 500 obviously top 500 dominated by Linux right now All right, so they're not really targeting it though It'd be fair to say they're targeting more the the commoditization market at the bottom 50,000 Kind of market is that accurate? I can't speak for Microsoft I'd say if the people wanted to buy in the top 500 we're buying Microsoft they they they can scale to that level They certainly designed to that level and they've shown through you know doing top 500 runs that they they don't have Scalability problems in any part of their stack whether it be MPI or or just loading the reporting tools All are go scale up to the up to the top 500 level. It's just that There's not like I said the top 500 customer base. That's 500 customers in the world There's a they're trying to grow the market I think where I see where we see personally us deploying Microsoft Microsoft HPC server our customers that would not have done a Linux cluster Certainly would have done a you know top 500 type cluster and but we need a manufacturing needs to reduce the time to To engineering they need to reduce solving time They need some kind of cluster technology and so I see it enabling a market that maybe wasn't there It wouldn't have been there if we would have stuck to just traditional you know putting xcat or you know some type of Linux solution out for customer where that that would have been a difficult sell to that that user base or that IT department So I want to back up a little bit you mentioned a tsunami cluster at Tokyo Tech The first version of that just ran some links derivative But I had also seen some numbers of that running Linux. Is that like a dual boot environment or something? They're doing there. Do you see that kind of environment often? I? Personally don't like the dual boot solution though. You can certainly a lot of customers do that I know BMW and there's a bunch of universities that are using like stuff from adaptive computing and platform That'll allow you to dual boot based on what you need, but I personally like Linux or Windows I don't actually come into a scenario with customers that they're that they want both Now why do they want both what kind of requirements would that be? What's the benefit of that? Well, one would be if you have an application that has a very nice native integration with Microsoft HPC server that would be one one one area where I could see that beneficial or you're developing on.net Microsoft is investing in different types of languages and technologies to improve Writing parallel code. I mean you guys develop code, you know, it's hard to write Parallel code and so if you have an application like that that would require basically Microsoft platform I could see that be another requirement, but Normally when when we're going into customers, they want one or the other We don't have we're not trying to decide for them which one that that they need both So for the cluster administrator if they hook a console up to Compute node in the Windows HPC world will have like a full desktop on it Or is this like a lean stripped down version of Windows that goes on to compute nodes? You can strip it down if you want to but it's basically server 2008 R2 What they do is they you're not allowed via licensing if you want to run the cheaper version of HPC You can't put them like your active directory mail server and everything on it That's just they give you a reduced price purpose built basically to run computational Loads, but but yeah, it'll look and feel like what regular windows you don't have to But like just like on Linux if you install red hat it comes with the Bluetooth enabled and all those types of things So you still want to tune it down if you want to get maximum performance, but it's certainly not required There all right. Here's a random question out of the blue. I am on the mp3 Fortran committee for Really obscure reasons because I don't really know a lot about Fortran, but somehow I'm in this group is Fortran supported on Windows Yes, they support Fortran now It's either with PGI or Intel or a third-party compiler vendor But yeah, they do they have Fortran bindings in their MPI library and you can use PGI or or Intel all right, there is nice because there's a you know a huge boatload of existing Fortran MPI codes out there They might not very well be the target since you know portability is not necessarily the main issue here, but Certainly particularly with modern versions of Fortran. It's actually pretty kind of kind of analogous to C++. It's a fairly Modern language, but a couple people have asked me about that whether it's supported on Windows or not So I figured I'd give an ask here. Here's another obvious question. What networks are supported by Microsoft MPI? They support the standard fare Infinite band, you know gigabit ethernet 10 gigabit ethernet mirror net, you know all the major interconnects They have a network to direct providers. So now while what Microsoft doesn't actually produce like the OFED stack Obviously, that's you know a consortium of people developing that so you would obtain your infinite band layer You could go download that but they they have a committer on that that helps and I'm sure you're you're involved with that as well So but yeah all the major interconnects. Yeah, I actually do I'm asking a few questions that I know the answer Microsoft MPI guy The MPI forum together and he and I get along pretty well, but Yeah, so still give a little explanation of what's network direct because I assume most Linux people won't know what that is Yeah, when they when it's basically a direct to hardware when they first came out with the very first version of this product They actually had a like abstraction layer between that and the hardware and it made it so that their performance numbers weren't good So when you saw benchmarks, you know It reinforced people's preconception that windows must be slower So they fixed that in the next release with this network direct that basically gives them us just a small shin that That lets them have direct access to the hardware And then you get the latencies down and the things that you need when you obviously you want using a low latency Interconnect and and now you see the numbers when you see Linux Windows benchmarks You know, they're they're almost identical within a few percentage either way and that's because of that change they made and 2008 So what kind of latencies are you seeing? I mean we've had a lot of focus on our DMA type networks and stuff on The Linux platform and there's this big existing infrastructure of Linux HPC systems out there their latency focus What kind of numbers are the Microsoft guys getting the same? I mean, that's not they're not limiting They're not being limited by the fact that it's windows. Let's say with the network direct you get the same Latency kind of numbers when you look at the application performance You almost can't tell the difference in fact some sometimes they went sometimes they lose but it's it's not a deciding factor anymore I have never gone into a customer and they said we need Linux because it performs better at least for us That's not the that doesn't need that conversation doesn't happen anymore in the old Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna go off on a little rant here too saying that you know it is real application performance that matters micro benchmarks have their place and There is certainly some chest dumping going around saying I have the lowest latency around and things like that But you know, I've said this actually many times on my blog as well like, you know, low latency is great High bandwidth is great, but it really matters.  And so I would say I would assume that rod is right, right if They've got to infinite man latency down in the one to three microsecond range or even maybe even four Probably doesn't matter particularly for the target audience that we've talked about a little bit here on on the podcast Yeah, a lot of times customers. They don't they don't come to us and say we need one microsecond second latency between nodes They say I need this application to get this model ran in this amount of time Whatever technology meets it. That's that makes them happy. So we often, you know, don't talk about Talk about the those micro benchmarks with customers. We're talking about at the application level So what about file systems with small linch clusters people have people start with this NFS But sometimes they move into things like PVFS luster Gluster a few of the other like a more exotic parallel file systems a lot of those I don't remember seeing Windows support for does Microsoft have their own solution for high performance IO operations Nope, they don't they still rely on third parties for high performance I mean you could certainly put in something like a fusion IO card, which is you know if you need really really fast bandwidth to one particular node, but Yeah, they don't have a parallel file system of their own They definitely depend on third parties to provide that kind of support So something I probably should have touched on earlier in the conversation is how is it licensed and what are the costs of this? Because one of the deciding factors in HPC is cost now We're kind of moving away from that as HPC is getting commoditized, you know It's exactly what you said that the engineers, you know, they don't care about whether the job finishes at midnight or 3 a.m Just as long as it's done before they get in in the morning and in you know a traditional enterprise kind of world Cost isn't the major factor anymore where it used to be in the you know the academics and the researchers They have the the least amount of funds and they're trying to get the most bang for their buck So how did Microsoft approach their licensing and their cost structure? How does that work? It's basically licensed per server So you have a they don't need Cal or with the access licenses But yeah per server if you're using Windows 7 workstations per workstation in terms of the cost in a corporate environment You know like you can say okay, we can use central assets free But a lot of times in a corporate environment, they want to have red hat they want to have that hey I want to have support and then you layer on the other pieces well We need this commercial scheduler that has support and then we layer on another layer We need or some kind of reporting mechanism that comes from your scheduler vendor by the time you assemble those pieces I don't really think cost basically becomes an becomes an issue Because you end up having really on the on the way it is today The most expensive person or the most expensive part of the solution is the software and then the person running it At least in our space Let's cost us like the OS and they even the hardware nowadays has gotten to be you know, not the most expensive piece of the puzzle Okay, so taking all that I mean and you coming from a Linux e maxi kind of background I mean what is is your take? I mean is this a good product is this something that people can get worked on and have confidence in How's the support on it? You know all these all these kinds of things Yeah, I really like 2008 R2 I think deploying and standing up a cluster if you have Windows skills is definitely way easier But of course if you come from a Linux background, you know, you have the same, you know ex-cat There's lots of toolkits to choose from you know some there's disadvantages advantages of both with Windows HPC It is nice. You have you know one stack. You don't have to wonder does this version of MPI work with this version of Linux I mean Intel's trying with Intel cluster ready to basically kind of make a Monopolized stack there to create the same kind of consistent ecosystem But I think it reduces the amount of testing you have to do in that sense The one thing I really love I like command line So I do like they have PowerShell and and I like you know But being able to use being able to use the break open a command window and and but there's different skills So one will sometimes people know when they're trying to especially an app that was ported, you know They say while there's it's not just point-and-click not every application on HPC servers point-and-click. So Just realize it at That you still you know for Linux people are trying out Windows. You're still you're gonna use your skills It'll be just a different technology you're using So very early on you mentioned something about Cycle scavenging picking up excess cycles from machines at night I'm guessing just like you know your your desktop at work. Can you tell us a little more about that? Yeah, basically if you have a win it has to be Windows 7 But if you have a Windows 7 workstation you in and you basically install this little cluster Compute pack on it that and it joins to the cluster and then that's available basically for scheduling jobs So you can set up things to say if the load is too high or during certain times Don't schedule on those nodes, but they basically become a resource and Actually a lot of Linux only shops that have Linux clusters We've been deploying the solution because you just basically put a head node down at their site They already have all these Windows 7 workstations that they've paid the capital expense for and now they're able to actually utilize them off hours Why before all they were doing is costing money right sucking up energy not being utilized And so that has been a quite a popular use of HPC server Especially in the last six months where we've seen a lot of Windows XP to Windows 7 rollouts We've been doing quite a bit there So do you see these even being used during business hours like you know the the secretary or even the engineer who really all they're running is you know Outlook and you know, they're they're barely using their machine Are those types of environments being used during business hours to say like take over half the cores on their machines I mean machines are coming with two and four and eight cores standard these days. Anyway, yep We have a lot of we have so several projects Currently going on where the customers are trying to avoid actually buying any kind of cluster because they're like We already have the equivalent of a 512 node cluster here just in our engineering department Why don't we just reuse those resources and so that that is a is an area that people are interested in They're trying to avoid even buying a cluster just reuse the resources. They already have No, that's fascinating. Are they trying this with desktops or with laptops? I mean, does it work with laptops since they they come and go and you know, how does that? impact a running job for example if someone it's running on a laptop and then I close the lid and walk away the majority of the ones We've been doing are actually workstations like HP workstations But you could do it with a laptop But that is true if they unplugged it, you know, the job would crash you could schedule it to re queue but But I haven't done one with the laptops It's probably not they're not as good a use case not as power powerful as a workstation still today So when people are running this cycle scavenging version, are they generally running serial codes or single node parallel jobs? Or you know, what's kind of the more common way of using this? Often they they use SMP if you have eight cores the limiting factor often is the price of the software licenses to be honest like Some of these third-party ISV applications are extremely expensive They don't actually have enough cores to run a large job many big clusters are just running lots of little jobs And so for them, yeah, they can run an eight CPU job on one box. Great. They don't need to run across I do have some folks that are running across to gigabit ethernet though and doing a distributed parallel to get the memory down So farming out all these jobs isn't you know in the input data in the output data and everything else Isn't starting to put extra stress on the corporate network Often in places we go the because I'm in manufacturing. I should Say that in manufacturing the engineers often have their own dedicated network They're usually gigabit because they are large transferring large files around to each other So no, it's not it's not like it's going out on the corporate backbone and back You know, it's on it is still on a dedicated network So are people running mostly ISV codes or is there any homegrown stuff? Or is it mostly focus on you know your abacus is an influence and things like that Well from I know and and this is this is where from from our perspective We live in manufacturing and also an oil and gas so between those two a lot of that is Is ISV application some of those have like Fortran We because they're Fortran based codes that where you are putting in like user-defined libraries But certainly some customers are running their own codes. It's just our customer base is mostly ISV ISV apps financial services though They're all basically custom and HPC servers is becoming pretty popular and In that space because they also support SOA and some other types of models that are popular and financials Now I know that Microsoft is testing heavily in trying to and you mentioned this even earlier in the call in the call here that you know They're trying to make it easier to write parallel code Do you have any of your customers doing that or is that something that you can talk about it? I'll give some examples because we all know that it's it's difficult to write parallel code I mean, I guess I'd be interested in hearing. How are they trying to make it easier? Yeah in a previous life, you know, I worked at a compiler company where we you're developing tools to help people write parallel code That isn't the market. I haven't been in anymore. So to be honest, none of my customers are trying to write parallel code Though I do follow the space that I still interested in and developer in the developer community We definitely develop a lot of our own code, but it's not, you know HPC So yeah, I couldn't speak to that. I think it's very interesting what they're doing in the space But I still think the majority of applications are MPI base today Open MP So I'm gonna go off into the weeds into a really weird spot here. This is a relatively small market Really really large SMP machines. We saw SGI take the altix from the itanium platform Which windows did support back to you know, your regular nihilum chip that we get on a you know Two-socket server from Dell Or do you see anybody using windows HPC on a 128 core SMP machine or anything like that?  You're not out anything. So I don't see big SMP boxes too often in our space. So Rodney, I know you're not Microsoft yourself, but you know anything about the you know upcoming releases What are some new cool neat features that are coming and when are they coming and things like that? Sure. Yep, they're having another release called sp2, which is gonna be out Maybe by the time this podcast is available. You can download the beta currently and try it out Some of the new features that they're gonna have one of the big ones is they're gonna have support for Azure So you're gonna be able to actually just put a head node, you know at your site and run your MPI jobs basically on Azure Which is like a cloud slash hosted Solution so that that's kind of the big functionality They're gonna support VM roles and you'll be able to actually see your on-site file shares remotely on Azure and be able to access those That sounds cool with all the standard cloud HPcish questions. How do I get my data there? How do I keep it secure and there's all kinds of things like that that we talked about when we had Nicole Hamstoth on here with HPC in the cloud Yes on a while ago, but those solutions don't you know the cloud that you know There's that whole cloud talk though I can't say in terms of cloud security you'd be surprised I you know how insecure a lot of customer sites are the cloud may not be any less secure than their site already is or you know, but But I could say it's a it's a nice solution for people that maybe only once in a blue moon need to run a larger job You can spin up and like you had mentioned earlier. They just care about getting the job done Does it run slower? Yep, sure does but they get the answer by the time they need it, which is the important part. I Can't say I've heard that argument about cloud security before but it's probably I wouldn't doubt you Hey, Rod, thanks a lot for your time and clarifying a lot of these questions We've had we've had Microsoft reps come through here and you know, they're not necessary They're the same Microsoft reps are selling desktop So we've we've had some HPC specific people But it's it's great talking to someone who's actually stood it up and used it and actually got stuff running on it So Rod, where can people find you and how can they get ahold of you? Yeah, you can reach us at hyper logic comm It's hi for high performance comm and we do like you said if you have any questions We also have a website just dedicated to our tools for HPC server called total CAE dot com So either either place you can reach us in Okay, well, thanks again for your time, Rod All right, thanks for your time, Rod Yeah, thanks for having me guys. It was a lot of fun


Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. A million things are happening all at once first, and most importantly, you are sick. You have shingles, which is extremely painful, and it sucks, and I'm sorry. But I do feel, Hank, that very little attention has been paid to how your shingles affects the literal center of the observable universe. At least when I'm observing it. Me.  But also, when you are sick, I feel sad and worried because you're so great. Alright, that's enough sentiment. On to the million things. First, I'm gonna see a movie this week. Specifically, I'm gonna see the first cut of Turtles All the Way Down. Obviously, there's a long way to go before it comes out in theaters or streaming or however movies come out these days, but I'm very excited to see it and I'm a little nervous. I'll try to make some John's Channel's videos about it. Oh, that reminds me. There has long been a Hank's Channel where Hank makes Hank stuff, but for the last several months, there has been a semi-secret John's Channel where John makes John stuff. I started the channel as kind of an experiment. Like, over some months, could I build an organic audience for my shorter videos? And the answer is no. Like, I made a video about Tuberculosis and Toulouse La Trek that got 17 views in two months. So yeah, I'm a really good YouTuber whose success is not at all dependent upon the fact that I started in 2007. There is a link in the dupe we do to follow John's Channel if you want. Also, if you're wondering why I look like an off-brand Rhett McLaughlin, it's because Pizzamas is coming. What is Pizzamas? It's two weeks every year where we make week-daily videos to sell stuff with my mustache on it for charity. I can't really explain what Pizzamas is. Only that Pizzamas is. Another thing, you know the actor Ryan Reynolds? He and his friend Rob have this amazing show right now about buying and running Wrexham AFC, a football club in Wales. And this is weird, but I'm in the next episode teaching a crash course about the history of Wales. The show is great. You don't even need to like football to enjoy the show because it's not really about football. It's about how football of all the unimportant things is the most important. So yeah, the show is called Welcome to Wrexham. It stars Ryan Reynolds, Rob McElhaney, and a guy whose personal YouTube channel has 167 subscribers. Two other things that are happening. One, I'm quite busy writing at the moment, which is really nice. One of the many things I learned from Evan Pushek's great book Escape Into Meaning is that writing is sort of the way I have thoughts. Also, I'm just having a lot of fun writing. I'd sort of forgotten that writing can be enjoyable, but it's super fun. Finally, as many of you know, our community is currently on track to raise over $30 million over the first five years this decade to support a stronger healthcare system in Sierra Leone's Kono district, where one in 20 women will die in childbirth and where one in 10 kids won't survive to the age of five. Most of that money is going to the building, staffing, maintenance, and supplying of the maternal center of excellence, a teaching hospital in the region's capital city of Coidu, but some of it is going to support a stronger primary healthcare system, especially in the town of Cayema. This clinic is the main source of medical care for over 90,000 people and it does not have reliable running water or electricity. But thanks to your increased support, the Cayema Clinic is undergoing renovations now and increasing hiring and training to become a safe space to deliver babies and effectively refer more complicated cases to the hospital. And even more excitingly, all this progress has helped attract new grants from big foundations so that the other primary healthcare clinics in Kono can also see similar improvements. That has always been our hope that the big funders in global health would come on board as they started to see progress in Kono and that's starting to happen. So thank you, thank you to all of our donors at pih.org slash Hank and John. Thank you to everybody who subscribes to the awesome clubs and also to everyone who gives their attention to this crisis and in doing so supports those working to address it. Hank, feel better. I'll see you on Friday.


All right, welcome back cyber traders. Happy Friday everybody. Everybody all excited for a new weekend First first weekend in December. Good to see you Raymond. Good to see you Michael.  Hopefully everybody Everybody enjoying the new platform. Hopefully everybody's joining the new alert service Hope you watch that little demonstration we had on a video regarding about how to use it the new features on it I know Greg did a really good job doing it It's a very very big overtaking. I don't if you guys notice but in the past year We've made some huge huge changes here at Cybertrain University to make your life easier. We had a new A a new portal page on our website. You saw how nice and designed it is made things easier You see the videos coming up I know we got a lot of new testimonials that came up from onsite So hopefully you guys taking the time remember the big thing is you have to learn before you could earn And that's what trading is all about but but let's talk about what happened yesterday and what's going on for today You see the job reports did come in Market reacted a little bit nothing crazy. I mean it was up, you know about 90 points right now We got a little bit of a little bit of a bounce yesterday After having that huge catastrophe on Wednesday Mark went from 35 35,000 all the way down to 34 Almost like a thousand points made a little bit of a comeback not huge But like I told you this was a very big big support level if you look over there since April It was been it's a really big support, but um You know it has to hold here and it looks like it held it a little bit It came back a little bit, but I'm telling very very skeptical to do any big swing trades You know yesterday I did an event about how to trade inflation and just want to do a recap on it and tell you guys a Little bit about it, but the way you treat I mean listen You know everybody has their political beliefs everybody has their thoughts on you know salaries inflation China virus all this The big thing you have to remember as a trader if you want to succeed and you want to do this for a long time You can't take things personally. You have to learn how to capitalize on it.    I think it was like five or ten times more money than they actually keep in the bank If everybody went out there and took their money out of the bank. They don't have it. They don't have it Crippled the banks. I mean literally For every dollar that you put in the bank. They lend out 10 So and everyone's ought to freak it out like I'm gonna get my money out listen They and then with the SIPC, you know, some people have a million dollars in the bank or whatever You only insured for a hundred thousand. So like where's my other nine hundred? Let me go take it out So you could see how it happened and yet it's had no choice But at the end of the day Like them or not. It was a great opportunity to make a lot of money I remember trading Citibank at a dollar and a penny. It was the worst trade I ever made because I got I got so scared They got greedy. I sold out a dollar fifty. I made fifty percent of my money, but you see where it is today So the bad thing about day trading is it makes you too conservative But I don't think that is a really a terrible thing But but it helped you become a very good long-term trader and you could see it's happening right now with this whole new virus that came out and some of the you know some of the Vaccine stocks are doing pretty decent.  I have students out there to tell me I don't watch TV. I don't like it. You know what? But then when something happens like well listen, you better watch because you got to be prepared and when you're in this business You got to know how to capitalize on it because that's why we added the alert service if something's going on You're not but I know if you're not in the trading room at least you can be aware of something goes up so anyway, I just want to cover that really quick and And and let's just talk about what's happening for today. So we got a couple of stocks Why do I keep on spelling this wrong? AR DX, okay so we had a couple of stocks that did move pretty decent yesterday and We had we had this one right here the AR DX was a really nice move from the all day You can see this stock was right around a dollar. It basically ran to two dollars about up about a hundred percent It went up really nice all day. It was you know, when you look at the spread And the movement it was you know, it looks a lot nicer if you held it over the course of the day But it was a it was like pulling teeth though Was it really moving as quickly as some of us will like as a day trader? Sometimes we get a little impatient, but you know, it was if it was it was a buying hold for the day It was a good swing day trade on that aspect those stock that took a got a huge got crushed You could see CF VI the stock got gapped up and came right back down That stock obviously was another one that we watched a PP si that was pretty good too right around 1030 The things started running from 670 to 870 the stock We've been trading extremely volatile stock in the past month of November went to 6 month at 13 12 went back Down the six went back up to 13. I mean this thing was just all over the place fun stock We did we know that that stock obviously did pretty well with that and then the BFRI that also quick pop righty open You could see how it just ran from four dollars and you could see right here It just ran literally up to about 650 nice little mover not as super crazy day, but it was okay now today Honestly, I said this yesterday, but today is not as good as yesterday. It means Friday I don't like to get crazy. There's literally only one stock that I found that I really liked out of remole And you know, I mentioned this earlier, but it's the CYAD Where was my my chat I put a chat in and I first I said you could see it right here. I posted this in the chat room oops and I put it in the cyber in YouTube, so I posted this in the room that was right around 8.52 and I said, you know, you could see it right there at 8.52 I said that the stock had a little bit of a pop nothing great and I also mentioned that Would I say what time was it? Okay here, right so right around here just post this link right here and right around this time I said Earlier at 8.43 you could see here. I said the stock Basically started build a falstow flag. So when I when I saw that right around here, that was right around here So let me blow this up so you guys can see what's going on. So right around here That's where I saw a little falstow flag going on and you can see it right now It's really starting to pick up momentum I'm gonna bring up level four right here and you can see also what's going on here But this stock started building a ladder effect right around here So when I found it and I saw looking at it says, you know what falstow flag ladder effect Iceberg order. There was a big iceberg order right here about $5 Looks like you got execute.  Okay, you know Remember you don't you didn't trade 13,000 shares someone else's so you got to see if those orders get filled So the stock is pretty much doing pretty decent, you know Only issue I have right now is that it's probably not going to go higher Up until I mean the most we could squeak out is probably maybe 525 you got you got major support levels back in May, June You got some resistance levels here in October and when I looked over here long term I mean the only thing is I don't see any big sellers out there on level four and level three, but you know right around that resistance but 5 525 I think you maxed out. So I knew that was pretty good for you know, how much of a move right there in pre-market You know 50 cents 40 cents. That's not bad thousand shares You know less than a little bit more than $4,000 investment, you know, not bad for a day's pay So there were a couple of stocks also that I did find Tomz is one of them. I thought the stock was gonna look pretty good It's been a bit on a little bit of a nice little trend, but she started backing off stock was at a dollar broke up Over to 250 she's starting to trend down right now. I'm seeing a lot of orders coming out So this stock is probably gonna go on the B list and I mean, I'm really stretching it The doc you saw ain't got hammered hammered stock was at 300. It's at a buck 50 down 50 percent It's down seventy seven dollars. Okay, so why would a stock go down so much? Very simple Look what happened yesterday. Okay, what time was this right around here?  That's about four o'clock earnings came out could tell you right away Earnings always come out after hours stock didn't do too well not looking too good for doc you sign. Okay So great company we use it but obviously not doing too well anyway, that's stocks game There's a lot of them getting crushed This one right here ASAN another stock 140 down to 73 another one that's down 50 50% Oh Li another one getting crushed 70 dollar stock down to 50, you know I don't know if these stocks gonna make some nice little bounces But when you look at these things they really really getting hammered, but it's Friday It's Friday and when when Friday comes around, we know Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to trade Unfortunately this week. It was the first day the last day in the first day to pay period So we're probably I'm not gonna get some good momentum till tomorrow next week So don't get too crazy today, and then you know what that's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing Now on there was all the stocks. I know we did some swing trades, you know, just keep an eye on this CHGG You know, it's a very difficult stock to day trade. Okay, but the stock has been on a big big up trend The stock took a big hit. There's a we're gonna we're testing some resistance levels right here This is like a stock. You have to set it and forget it But if it does break this stock, it could make a nice little push a little bit higher But it's been on a you know every day. It's been going up I lost money on the stock day trading and But because it's got these nasty shakes and I'll show you what I'm talking about But if it was done on a swing trade, which you know, which I'm looking at you could see it right here The thing just literally right a gate ran from like 27 up to 29 and boom It just came right back down to 27 not really the nicest thing to trade and you can see it very very volatile Look at these candlesticks in one minute this thing went from 28 35 literally dropped about 40 cents. That's a lot That's a lot.  All right, so very difficult stock to day trade So, but if it does break this it could be maybe be a nice little nice little swing trade Ron says Ford near 52 we Kai Ford's doing great, you know Ford up. We're gonna throw Ford on that watch list. Absolutely. Good call.  Definitely come up to that 52 a Kai. I Know Bill Ireland's loving that loving that loving that Ford aren't you? All right So guys, let's get ready for the market to open up If you see something say something if you're watching you to Facebook live We'll be back here at 230 if you want to join our trading room Just like us and friend us. You can only do a trial for $9 try styles for a week. You're not happy We'll just give you money back. All right, but it's always nice to see what would it's like to be in a real professional trading room Good luck everyone. Happy trading and we'll start commentary once the market opens up


In this presentation, we will take a look at fonts and numbers options within reports. We will be considering these options with the balance sheet report, although they can apply to most reports within QuickBooks Pro 2019. For more accounting information and accounting courses, visit our website at accountinginstruction.info. Here we are on the home page. We currently have the open windows open. You can open the open windows by going to the view dropdown and selecting the open windows list. We are going to be considering the balance sheet to look at the fonts and numbers settings that can be used. These settings can be applicable to most reports, not just the balance sheet reports, but the balance sheet report is where we will start. So we're going to go to the reports dropdown up top. We're going to go to the company and financials and back on down to that balance sheet standard balance sheet standard. We're going to change the date that date being 123119. That's going to be didn't put it in there correctly. Let's try it one more time 123119 tab. So that's December 31 2019. We're going to refresh it or just click down here or select refresh. We're going to take a look at the different types of fonts and display options we have meaning can we change the font of say the title or the different headers within the report and other types of numbering options we can have what about this little negative I don't like the negative maybe maybe we prefer brackets or red numbers there. So what kind of options do we have that there in terms of fonts? We'll go up top we'll go to the customized reports customized reports. We're going to be taking a look at the fonts and numbers. So here are the fonts and numbers now we have the column labels the row labels the report data and you can take a look at some of this different information to determine exactly you know the items that you'll be changing within the reports clearly some of them are pretty common you know the column labels the row labels and consider what you want to do to those distinct labels you can customize these items by selecting them. So if we want to the report data for example and change the font in the report data this could be useful a lot of times and it could be useful in times when the report maybe is too large that could be one area just from a practical logistical standpoint where we might say okay I want to try to fit this on one page wide and I've done everything else I can maybe I want to try to make the the size of the font larger or smaller or maybe if I chose a different type of font it wouldn't take up so much room and that might be easier to do or just for presentation purposes you can get quite creative with the fonts some some people are very good at that others are less imaginatory about that but changing things like the headers and whatnot and giving your own kind of custom look to the reports can be useful and if you do that then you can memorize those reports and your your reports can be a little bit more distinct people will know then they'll stand out a bit you might want to not to go too far in the in that direction to make sure that you have some standardization within the reports and not make them look too too out of the norm but a little bit out of the norm could give you a you know a bit of an edge in terms of the types of reports you have so if you're going to choose some of these different fonts especially for things like the headers you can change the font style the effects you can have and if there's some items that you want to strike out or unstrike you know put a line through it you can do that you can have the colors that would be adjusted here so if we want to change the colors of it we can have the options there and then the font styles and then of course the font size that we can have so if you take a look at the combinations between these types of options you have a lot of combinations we say okay and change all related fonts we're going to say yes and then okay and then you can see of course big change to the fonts here so if you're if you have skills in those type of areas a lot of different options a lot of different combinations you can have in order to customize your reports in different kind of ways if you want to customize reports in color coded ways and for demonstration purposes that can be a useful tool for setting up your reports if we go back to the customized reports we go back to the fonts and numbers over here also note when i went to the column if you go to columns up top and you change one of these items and you change the font and if we chose something like a color just to make it dramatic and we said okay here notice it's saying change all related fonts if we if we don't do that say no and then select okay it'll change only the fonts that we had selected in that case being the column headers here so then we're going to go back to customize reports we're going to go back to fonts and numbers and then the other options we have over here is show negative numbers oftentimes people like to see negative numbers not just with the little negative because that could be difficult to see sometimes sometimes parentheses are going to be common and you may want to match this with whatever types of reports you're you're receiving whenever you're dealing with clients i tend to like the the brackets here when i use excel for example i use brackets we we also have with a with a trailing minus and this could be useful i don't typically use that format but it could be a useful format you may see that format elsewhere i don't use it because i like to see that everything lining up with the decimal so then we got the parentheses here and that would be one other option that's not normally the default then we have the items down here or this item show in red a lot of people like to see the distinction very distinct by having it both in brackets and red so if we were to say okay if we had any negative numbers like the depreciation here it's going to be very distinct hey this is a negative number you need to subtract on this one and that could give some kind of pop to the reports or give some kind of distinction in terms of how are we going to calculate add or subtract these items and then if we go back to the customized reports up top and we go to fonts and numbers we also have the divide by thousand that's going to take the reports and make them more simplified so if we had a larger numbers if we're talking about thousands or if we're talking about millions then having a lot of zeros even if they're not zeros they're not going to be helping us for decision making meaning if we're talking about millions everything in the thousands range is not really helpful for our decision it's not useful to have that information we could then divide by a thousand which would be the standard here and then say okay and in our case now you see kind of more simplified numbers that aren't going to boggle the mind so much so this is one way that we could standardize the report and say hey this report is in thousands as you can see up here it's a green so you can't see it as well but it's in thousands meaning each line you have here you have to multiply by a thousand to get the true number of what's there most small companies probably don't need that because if the numbers are within thousands or even hundreds of thousands probably not too bad to go through but if you start talking millions then it can be useful to divide by thousands and get the report down to numbers that are easier to look at and just realize that they are in thousands going back to customized reports up top we're going to go to fonts and numbers once again i'm going to take away the thousands and then we can we can export zero amounts so uh accept zero amounts so note that the reports typically will remove the zeros so if there's any zeros they're going to remove them if we check this item we're going to say put those zeros back in the place so this could add items to our report that have zero balances in them i don't typically use that item there because if i want to look at balances with zero then it's probably not something i want to use for reporting purposes but in order to use the zoom feature to zoom in on it which in this case i would use a different report like a trial balance or possibly just go to the chart of accounts and take a look at the detail for a particular report going to go back to the customized reports up top going to go to fonts and numbers last thing we have without sense and that doesn't mean that the report makes no sense but it's not in its sense here in that we're going to get rid of the pennies so we're going to remove the pennies and notice that these two if you're going to divide by a thousand you almost have to check this one off i mean it should almost be a default meaning if you're going to divide by a thousand you're not going to leave the pennies on there typically but you can also use just taking the pennies off of there without dividing by a thousand we want to get rid of the sense so then the last two decimals will remove and we'll have just a rounded number and that could be a lot cleaner to look at because once again the pennies the sense is not something usually relevant to decision making and therefore it might be just cleaner and easier to see reports without them we don't need that clouding things up so these are some types of things they can one they can really customize the report they can really just something like putting the negatives in a red sign could be something that some people really appreciate and it also could be very off-putting obviously if i made the whole report green like this but even if i made it relevant colors that match each other some people especially within the accounting field might say that's not that's just more gaudy i guess not professional i i've come to appreciate colors more and more as time goes by i can really if used well they could really help to distinguish the data and make your data stand out so a little bit of formatting can go a long way removing the decimals some people will just feel like your reports are a lot cleaner not even know really exact why if you just do a little bit of formatting people will notice your reports as compared to other reports just with some distinct nothing too too out of the way something just like having brackets around possibly some of your numbers if that's something to preference or making them red which is again going a little beyond you know maybe the norm but having different kind of fonts that aren't the standard font but maybe isn't too out of out of the norm and if you are dealing with people who are very visual and not financial at all then it's probably okay to go way outside the norm and those locations and possibly make your make your report stand out with colors that make sense you know trying to make the reports stand out in certain certain types of ways that you're trying to emphasize for more accounting information and accounting courses visit our website at accounting instruction dot info