Think Tech Hawaii studios. We've got another exciting episode of Security Matters for you today. My guest today is amazing. I think you're gonna love her story. Liz Bakas is with us. She's an engineer with Integrated Security Technologies in Honolulu. Liz, welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you on today. Thank you for having me, Andrew. Hello. No worries. Well, I saw your story in the Women in Security Form Spotlight. Paul Ragusa had you in there as an interview. So I thought we'd get a little deeper. You know, you can do a little bit in print, but live we can get a little more of your story. So let's introduce you to the industry and maybe give us your history, you know, as much as you care to share. We don't all put everything out there on social media these days, but give us what you can and then we'll roll from there. Sure. Let's see, how far back do I want to go? So I was originally born in the Philippines and my family and I moved to New York City at age eight. And so, you know, growing up in New York City, but still growing up in like Filipino values on Filipino. Anyway, with that type of diversity, that's always been, you know, a center point in my upbringing, basically, right? So traditional Filipino values and the melting pot of New York City.  They come back for college. During college, 9-11 happened and I was kind of inspired, you know, about four or five years later, I was like, you know what, I really want to do something, you know, besides my formal education, I wanted to get more knowledge and I just want to be out there and help the community. I just want, it was like a call to action. So I joined the Navy and I was in the Navy as an electrician's mate. And I was, my contract was for eight years, but I did for active duty, for inactive. After that, I went to school, continued my education, but this time instead of in New York, I continued it in San Diego, where I was last station. Basically never left. Went to school with University of Phoenix, which by the way, shout out to University of Phoenix for giving me some swag for this interview. Got my bachelor's and my master's and during that time I was working in the defense industry with BAE systems, ship repair. And then I got married and my wife's active duty Navy. She's a lieutenant commander select now, weapons officer for a destroyer. She got stationed here. So that's when I started looking around for jobs here in Hawaii and here I am. She's on deployment right now. So that's a quick rundown of my life story, I guess. Wow, it's amazing. So how was it to go back to the Philippines for high school after going, I guess you went to great school in New York, right? Yeah. So it was a little bit of a shock, a culture shock in the sense that I was trying to, starting to relearn the language. I mean, we still spoke it at home, but just like slang, it's teenage years. So it's like slang words in the native tongue, if you will. And like just the culture too is so completely different, very conservative Catholic.  So like, it was still a shock. Cause my mom in Filipino, you know, traditional conservative Catholic standards is still very progressive. So it was trying to relearn, you know, navigate as a teenager, who by the way, is LGBT going back to something like that. Which my family knew, you know, I was LGBT and stuff, but like, yeah, it was interesting, but not in a bad way. It was good. It was good growth for me, for sure. Wow. Yeah, that's it. Was it a big school? Yeah, it's actually one of like the prestigious schools in Sibu City. Yeah, it's, they have like, like an all-encompassing education level. So it was like kindergarten to all the way to college. Wow. So that campus was huge. Wow. Yeah, I was fortunate to visit. We did some volunteer work when I was in the Navy out there and went to some of the schools and they, I don't think it was in Sibu. It was, I'm gonna have to remember the city, but it was so interesting cause the kids put on like shows for us. And they were so professional. And I was like, oh my gosh, these kids are amazing. That's a thing, yeah. Yeah, it was really good. So we didn't expect that, right? They were just very, I think grateful. We were like delivering supplies. And so it was interesting. That's so cool. I love that you ended up in the Navy. So tell me about, so was now 11, was your family impacted by that? Or was it, did you have, did somebody that you worked that you knew? I mean, that was a major event if you lived in New York. It was a major event for the country. Yes, definitely. My mother, she is a registered nurse and my stepdad is a doctor. So when 9-11 happened, anyway, so it's really intense because like we lost communication, could not contact any of them because all the major towers, comms towers were on those towers. So like there was no communication. Like people were, you know, this was at a time where cell phone use was not like prevalent.  So for like hours on end, we didn't know what happened to everybody.  So it was just very crazy. So yeah, we were impacted in a, like in a not like personal sense where, you know, somebody, you know, passed due to it, but it was definitely a, you know, what is this? It sears in your memory. How you felt. Like traumatic, sure. Almost. Like traumatic event for you guys, for your family. Wow. Yeah. I think most New Yorkers can attest to that too, I think. Even if they're not, you know, they don't have family in the medical field because just all of the calm showers just went down. So you couldn't contact your family. And it was crazy. It was a crazy time. We didn't know what was going on initially. All right, so. Super scary. And so that got, you got to thinking about a little bit of national pride and ended up in the Navy. So did you get, did you meet a recruiter at school? How did you get, how did you pick on the Navy? How did that come about? Honestly, Andrew, I took like my own initiative to like look it up. So I was like, I want to join the military. Okay, which is the best branch obviously Navy after my research, right? I was like, obviously, like let me contact a recruiter. And you know, they're quick. Like once you show interest, boom, recruiter calls me up. He just so happens to be a native New Yorker too. So he's like, hey, come up to Harlem.  You know how they are. They're like, they super cater to you. They're like, do you want me to pick you up? I was like, no, I'll take the train at my school. Like, I went to, you know, straight up, like went to the recruiting office, like ask more questions. You know, me, I'm like, I talk a lot and I ask a lot of questions. I ask so many questions. And then I was like, hey, I'm satisfied. Like I really do want to sign up. And at this point, I was already 21. So it wasn't like I needed a waiver to join or anything. I was already an adult going to college, part-time job, all that. But I was like, listen, can you please put a little nice little presentation for my mother? Oh, okay. Because I was the person to convince, not that I needed her, again, not that I needed her, you know, approval or anything, but it just, it would make me feel so much better that she didn't worry about me while I was away. So yeah, and that rest is history. I signed up once my mom was convinced, of course that took a while, but. Nice. And you said for eight years, so did you, how did you pick your rate? And what rate were you? So I was an electrician's mate. So basically an electrician, motor rewinder specifically. So yeah, so they, you know, they have you take the ASVAB all that stuff and they gave you like all of these things that are available to you. And again, if nobody knows what ASVAB is, it's standardized tests to basically assess like, where do you belong? So they gave me a whole list of like rates, which is jobs in the Navy to pick from and what is actually available to get shipped out within the next two, three weeks. Cause I said, please, I need to get shipped out now before I change my mind and my mom changes her mind, right? So they're like, okay, okay. So this is what's available. That's right now that needs to be filled, billets, right? And I was looking at it and I was like, electrician, huh? That's so far removed to, you know, from what I'm currently studying. And at the time I was studying journalism. Okay. Because, you know, idealistic me at the time, I was really inspired by embedded journalists during the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan war. So I was like, I really would like to, I don't know, convey that type of news to civilians or just electorate, you know, the population. So we know where our money's going. Like, what are we funding? You know, are we good? Whatever, but I'll get you to political there. But that was my, you know, that's what I was into at the time. So I was like, huh, well, let me learn to be an electrician in the Navy. And cause that's so different. There's something new to learn and I love learning. So I was like, let me do that instead. Cause it was like, what was available? Andrew was like firefighting in ownership, which was like, all right, cool. What was the other ones?  ICMEN, which is internal communications again, deals with this industry. So a lot of it was like electronics, electrician type works. I was like, let me do electrician. And again, the rest is history. That's how it was. And so you went to, did you go to BEE? Did they still have that then? I had to go to basically BEE school for like 12 weeks. Oh, that's called back now. Basic Engineering Common Core. And that's actually stretched out to, yes, it's still 12. Yeah, you're right. About two months, three months. Okay. And then you got to pick an A school of some type. Yes, sir.  Which A school was that? Yeah, motor rewind. No, that's a C school. What was my A school? No, you don't get to pick it.  So you have to learn like basic instrumentation, calibration, reading, stuff like that. So you learn how to use like a oscilloscope, a multimeter, stuff like that. So that was the A school. And then did you go, we went about like the choice of orders. So if you finished like first in the class and there were 20 students, you got your first choice of the 20 sets of orders and that's how it worked. Okay. That's awesome. It was still like that during the time. And I did get to pick my first orders in my dream sheet. You know how they make you fill it out? Yeah.  So my wish list was Italy to be stationed in Italy. So I got it. That was my first time. Oh, wow. Yeah. Nice. And was it chipboard?  So it was a, so my first ship was the USS Emery S-Land, AS-39 that is a subtender. So you have a repair side and a ship's four side. I was part of ship's fours. So the repair side is what supplies and repairs submarines and whatever ships are alongside us. So we were like the supply repair ship. Nice. For all the other ships.  So we pulled up the, you know, a destroyer tender, right? Similar ship. Those things were huge. Destroyer tenders. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Never knew those existed. That's cool. I guess they tend, maybe tend to all ships.  Great stuff. So about that, I got my, I was second in my class. So I, but the first guy wanted to stay in Virginia. So I wanted to go to Hawaii. I really did, you know, like I grew up in Kentucky and people there saved their whole life to come out here for two weeks. I was like, I'm going to be going to Hawaii. And I didn't know how I would get here, but, but I did. So that was kind of, that was my, that was my lucky story to end up in Hawaii.  It was supposed to be a five year tour, but since the ship was going to get turned over to MSC, which is your civilian counterparts of the US Navy, military Navy. They said, hey, you have the option. You can stay here or you can go to another ship. And I was like, heck yeah, I want to go to another ship. I want to learn more. I want to see more. I want to see something different. Cause this was a steam ship. So I wanted like a more up to date ship, like gas turbine or, or diesel, right? So I was like, yes, sign me up for the next ship. I want San Diego. Oh, you got a choice. Did you get a choice when they decombed it? That's awesome. Good for you. So then San Diego, huh? Well, let's, I tell you what we'll do. We're going to take a break. We'll stop with, we'll pause with San Diego and then we'll come back with Liz Bakas. Liz, thanks so much for joining us today. We'll be right back folks. Stick around and welcome back to security matters. We're talking with Liz Bakas and we've been through her history, which is I think amazing and inspiring.  I want to learn what, what were all these skills that you were picking up along the way? So along the way, obviously as an electrician, you know, onboard shipboard electrician, I was able to learn, you know, major mechanical systems like main propulsion, auxiliary stuff, so pumps, motor controllers, you know, taking apart the engine and the ancillary stuff, generators and ancillary stuff of that. So going from a steam ship, which was the old ship, right? That was talking about my first ship.  So now you have a smart system where things are communicating to each other. You have a console now that actually says, hey, these sensors are indicating that this cylinder or whatever in your generator is messing up, go check it out, whatever, right? So now that's where the electronics part, the knowledge about electronics really got a foothold in my brain. I was like, this is so interesting because usually the ETs and the IC men would be handling that. But in my second ship, they gave me free reign just because, you know, in the Navy, when they see somebody that wants to learn, you know how it is, right? I like, oh, this person, they're motivated. Let's give them all the jobs while the others are, you know, kind of slack it off. It's okay, she's here sometimes, unfortunately. So it was cool though that they allowed me to do that because I learned so much working with the ETs and the IC men and that's when I learned about, you know, logic boards, PLCs, reading sensors. So that the electronics side right there was where I learned it from. Then when I became a civilian, going to like the software portion of my job as a systems engineer, where you use, you know, computer aided design, AutoCAD for example. When I started, when I worked for BAE Systems and ship repair industry, I had to, I was a tech writer. So I had to kind of be an SME of sorts for systems that I was writing procedures for, right? Got you. And from cradle to grave, I was kind of involved in a sense. So part of that was putting together work packages and creating these 3D drawings or floor plans or layouts to help out the technicians in doing their job. So hey, if you're gonna put together a pump or take it apart or clean it, you know, here are the things that you need to do. And this is what it'll look like, you know what I mean? Because sometimes as comprehensive as Navy tech manuals are, they're old. Like some of them are dated from like 70s, you know, 80s. Some of them are no longer like relevant or they are still as far as the procedure goes, but the drawings in them are no longer relevant to the new stuff that's already on our ships today. So I would put together these CAD drawings. Most of them would be 3D so that, you know, the text would know how to, you know, put it together, put it, take it apart, what measurements to take, you know, where to take the measurements, you know, what are your parameters that it's passing or failing and criterion. So that was, the AutoCAD I learned, I got certified through that job with BAE systems. Wow. So that's both with inventor, which is 3D and AutoCAD, which is 2D, so. Yeah, interesting. So that, there's so much sort of precision and detail in the Navy. You know, we had all of our maintenance processes, everything's down. You never had to really think about what to do. You were told what to do all the time and it was laid out for you exactly how to do it, except maybe troubleshooting when something broke. But I remember the depth of the manuals, but also the lack, there'd be things that were wrong with them, you know, definitely. And so I do remember, especially when we started troubleshooting and we'd find, hey, this isn't actually like this. So that's amazing. I'm glad the Navy continues to do that stuff for the sailors out there. So you got to our industry coming, which is a little, we're on the applied side of the industry, right? I mean, so we're taking someone's desire, someone's what they think they want. Sometimes they actually know what they want as well. And we've got to turn that into a solution set that sort of addresses their concerns from a security perspective. How did you find drawing sort of a dream versus something that was hard and, you know, a actual pump, like a pump, a known thing versus turning, you know, from someone's ideas into a set of security system drawings. How's that been for you? Or what's your opinion of sort of that process? Well, again, I credit Richard Arguellis, which is my mentor in this industry. When I first joined the company, I bothered him and bugged him.  You know, I already have the fundamentals of electrical and electronic theory, of course, from my previous experiences. And knowledge base, right? So I just needed to learn what this was about. This particular access control, ideas, CCTV, all that stuff, which I had like, you know, bare minimum knowledge of and applied all the other knowledge and put them all together and learn, right? So essentially he made it very easy for me to understand. And I did tell Christine, I told her, if you're gonna hire me, please put me in with a really, really great like instructor or someone that can teach me the ropes because I won't disappoint. I'll learn that really quick. So she didn't fail me, Richard didn't fail me. So that's how it worked was just watching him. And you know, he gave me the steps on how to, like you said, like somebody telling you verbally, like this is how I want it to look, you know, this is how I want it to work. And then us coming in and going, huh, how is that gonna be like cost effective? And also like exactly how they want it, right? Within budget, whatever. So I couldn't tell you detail like the steps it took, but it's essentially, yeah, it's essentially like drawing something and putting it into a 3D plane. There's so many aspects you have to think about. And as far as training to understand how to get to that point, like giving the customer what he or she wants, you know, I took a lot of certification classes and in those classes, they actually tell you like basic steps, you know, hey, if they want forensic, you know, like at this height, it should be this, or if there's motion, lots of traffic, you know what I mean? Like those things are considered. There's so many in-betweens that you have to consider, you know what I mean? To get to that point where here customer, here's the thing you ask for and they're like, yes, that is exactly what I asked for. Yeah, I could spend like 30 minutes just breaking that down, but I'm not gonna. But yeah, definitely certifications help and these manufacturers and their certification classes and they're just classes in general, amazing. Like they were great, yeah. That's awesome that somebody, you know, with as long as you have that basic background in electronics, right? The door sort of opened for our industry to bring you in and train you. And you, how long have you been working in the security industry? Oh my, it hasn't even been, let's see. It was a year for me back in August last year. So about a year and a half. So a year and a half and you're like a lead engineer already. I think all that experience that you had must have played well and into your point of being able to learn quickly and then being hungry to learn, right? So that's just a good lesson, I think, for folks that are interested in that level of work because not everyone has the sort of adaptability to pick up the detail that's necessary on the engineering side but it's a very rewarding part of our business. Absolutely. And keeps the salespeople straight too, right? A lot of them don't aspire to that level of detail. I'll just leave it there to be as gentle as possible. And so they need that guidance right along the way, you know what I'm saying, from an engineering team. So how do you find the industry collaborating? Like when you've been, had to go visit with a customer, is it, do you go with the salespeople or is it with a project manager? How does, sort of the way that you work, how do you get to communicate, I guess? Let's just ask that question. Sure. So before I got into this hybrid role of systems engineer and project manager which what we call Fedgov project engineer now, I was still just a systems engineer. So I would go and do sidewalks with the salespeople for a salesperson and actually have face to face time with a customer. So I'm there, there's nothing lost in translation from the account manager, you know, relaying that information to me. I'm actually there listening and understanding the needs of the customer. So yes, I would be at these sidewalks. I mean, if they were, if these sidewalks weren't as like big or whatever, I mean, the salesperson, I gave full, you know, confidence because, you know, at the point, you know, when I started in the industry, they knew more than me. So I was more confident in their knowledge at the time. If anything, I was shadowing Richard, you know, this was in the beginning, but now as a systems engineer when they had confidence in me at my certs, I knew a little bit of the industry, I understood my job, blah, blah, blah. Yes, I would go with the account manager, do the sidewalk, take all the notes, keep in all of the ceilings or what have you if needed, all that stuff. And then same thing with being a project engineer now for the Fed side, same thing. Again, cradle to grave with a project pre-sale all the way down to close out, involved in every step of the way. So I don't know if that explains it. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that the folks in our industry can appreciate that, you know, that type of vision. I mean, a lot of your projects are complex. And so they really require, I think that visibility from cradle to grave, like you said, to make sure that the final deliverable, the final as-built packages accurately reflects what was done in the field and you know, there's field changes and all that stuff as we know about. Did the initial sort of, I guess I'll answer it another way. When, now that you have, you know, done all the work that you've done, how do you think that that compares in sort of complexity to the work that you did, say, you know, the shipboard drawings and all that type of work? Honestly, and not to like undermine like the complexity of our industry. I mean, I was dealing with electromechanical systems on board a ship and it wasn't even just that. It was in conjunction with welding, machining, like ancillary stuff like flushing, you know, systems. So you had to, you know, consider all these other things working at the same time and know about them and know the regs, you know, per federal, whatever's, state, federal regulations and then also know the system itself. So compared to my previous job to now, I would say that this job was a lot more, you know, for anybody to pick up, like it'd be a lot more easier for someone new to pick up and it was easier for me to learn, I would think because at my previous job, you know, coming in as an engineering background as an electrician and a Navy, I had to still learn what welding was. I still had to learn machining. You know, there was a lot of other like jobs that were happening in conjunction with mine that I had to learn their requirements and their start, stop and dates and whatnot, all that stuff to consider. Meanwhile, in this industry, because it is electronics, electronics makes things so much easier. It's just electricity, right? That's, you know, to me, just a little bit heavier on the complexities of my previous industry than this one, for sure. Awesome, awesome. Well, we've got a minute or so left, Liz. What would you tell somebody that's looking at our industry, thinking about engineering, maybe they're already in our industry and interested in what you do? What kind of advice would you give to them? Definitely go for it. I, you know, we've talked about this before the show started, but I definitely was not aware of how great this industry was and how like, as far as mobility goes in career, how like, wow, like, there's so many opportunities, not even just systems engineering or project management or sales, but there's so many things you can do, IT. Definitely, if you're looking into it, you know, talk to someone who has been in the industry a while, I was fortunate enough that I'm with a group of people, you know, with IST that just are so knowledgeable, have an extensive, you know, experience and just everything, like everything I needed to learn, I learned from them, right? So it's like, they answered all my questions, you know, it wasn't just Richard, it was a whole bunch of the team that like basically, I bugged them and just asked questions and they were so open to answer. I also found, this is on a personal note, I also found that in this industry or at least the company that IST, there was not a lot of like, I don't know, what is this? There's competitiveness, healthy competition, but it wasn't like cutthroat to the sense where people are keeping knowledge to themselves. People were always so available to impart that knowledge, you know, at least with this company and I'm assuming just in the security industry in general, I guess, in my previous industry and it wasn't just with BAE, I felt like in general, people were very cutthroat, like unless you were in their little clique or whatever, they were not very free in sharing information. So that's why when I'm talking about mobility with access to information and just career, you know, going up, trying different hats, wearing different hats, I feel like the security industry has a lot of opportunity for whatever you're looking for or whatever your passion is. So do the search, do formal education, talk to someone about it, get into it. Perfect, I love it. Yeah, we're a caring industry. We're a sharing industry. Join us. Liz, thanks so much. It was a great interview. Glad I finally got you on the show and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care of yourself. Take care, everybody. Aloha.


Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar show where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and it will be available for you to watch from our archives later at your convenience. I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think may be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, similar to your state library in your states potentially. And so we provide services to all types of libraries. So you will find public K-12 academic archives, museums, corrections, et cetera, et cetera. Anything and everything, really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We do a variety of types of sessions, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and do presentations for us about services and programs and things through the commission, but we also bring guest speakers sometimes. And today we have a mixture of that. Today is the last Wednesday of the month, so it is pretty sweet tech day. Yay. This is the monthly episode, always the last Wednesday of the month when Amanda Sweet, who's our technology innovation librarian here at the Library Commission, she comes on and talks to us about techy related things. We do other shows during the month, potentially depending what our topics are about tech stuff, but you can always count on the last Wednesday of the month to be Amanda doing something for us. And today she's brought in a guest, so I'm just going to hand it over to you, Amanda, to introduce who you've got with us here today and how you all got connected up doing this and what we're going to be learning about today. Cool. And this is one of those days that I decided to throw a curveball at y'all. And that is because today's session is not 100% tech related. But if you squint one eye, it could be. So this is all about kind of ways that you can improve your library improve yourself, build a better team and kind of make your community in your library run more smoothly and more effectively. It's all research backed but don't worry Brian is not one of those dry academics. You actually like talks like a human and stuff it's awesome. I mean sometimes a robot but you know, whatever. And he is from the evolved project. So the evolved project is pretty awesome. So first, if I could get you to talk a little bit about evolved project and then you could dive into the main meat of the presentation. So yeah, happy to thanks man and thanks for having me on your pretty sweet tech day. So yeah the the evolved project was a thing that I built together we I call it a collaborative platform. And actually fun fact, the first time I announced anything about the evolved project was that and come this live. I looked it up was like 10 years ago right. I forgot to mention that yes that Brian has been on the show a few times with us. I was just looking up here. April 25. Wow, almost exactly 2012 was when you were 10 year anniversary. We need a cake or something. I think so. But yeah so so I unveiled the vision of the evolved project, literally 10 years ago almost to this date, where I plan to partner with startup companies around the world and bring their technology into libraries, and which which I've been able to do and I made a ton of friends along with AI. And so what the evolved project does is we try to find like the latest and greatest technology by going to places where librarians don't go. So we go to tech shows we go to start up boot camps, and we find people that have beautiful brilliant ideas but never thought of marketing to libraries. And we bring those those technologies into the library space for creation maker space that kind of things anything about building robots AI programming. And when we come out there that does it we try to find them and see if they'll be willing to do partnerships, where we do pilot programs of their tech into a library space you know will this fit, will this work out, and go from there. Outside of that, I will then present about these technologies tech trends. Sometimes they get forced to do it security because apparently that's a, that's a big worry in the world these days. I do that whole gambit. And so, through some of these conversations of making tech. There's always the challenge of some resistance of oh I'm not sure if I want to do this new piece of technology. I don't know if our libraries ready for it. Through these conversations I slowly been thinking what if we, what if there was a, what if we created a challenge and I've dubbed this the 40 day challenge, or each day is a different challenge that stacks upon themselves. So you can get more comfortable with leadership technology meeting people, breaking out of your comfort zone. And I do have some fun fact filled things packed in in today's presentation. The goal though is today is to give you a teaser of 25 challenges and talk briefly about them so then you can come up with some of your own challenges for your own library space that will help accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. On top of that we're also developing a platform that will be available for free that people can play on and share their challenges and their experiences. So yeah that's that's essentially what today's topics are going to be about Amanda and I've connected over a year ago now right. Roundabouts yeah. And meaningful impact hubs, and a whole bunch of really cool amazing things I'm sure Amanda's talked to you about before. So, so this is this will help dovetail into some of those conversations. But our big goal for today's topic is what are these challenges like, and how to implement them and obviously the wise because that's always know why should we do this why does, why does Brian have a 10 year anniversary episode and taking up a man this time. And so. So here it is. So the idea and the vision is over the course of 40 days. So we will explore different challenges and the goals of each of these challenges are all unique.  And if you'd like it, you have to do it more. But these small incremental changes overall can make things better. And it's these challenges aren't necessarily designed only for a director or a leader in the library. And they're not also designed only for a page or circulation clerk. It's designed where anyone at any level at any skill set, whether they're senior librarian that's been around for decades, or some that just signed up for library school, the goal of these challenges is to be simple and easy. How do I pick 40, because that's my favorite number. No, there there's some there's some there's some facts around it. So there's a 2009 study from a European Journal of what I say social psychology that stated it takes on average 18 to 254 days so almost a full year for a person to form a new habit. And again the goals of these challenges as small little pieces to overall improve right. So that study concluded that on average it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic and you're like well Brian why did you call this a 66 day challenge. I have other reasons and also 40 was easier to come up with. But overall in another slide 40 is a very magic number and it goes back from generations and decades of culture and theology. But anyway, but in that other case certain habits do take longer to form. So in this study, some participants for instance found that it was easier to adopt the habit of drinking of glass of water at breakfast, then do 50 sips of water after having willing coffee. So, in other words, some people are also more suited to accomplish habits reform habits and others. But the key thing of any type of habit psychology is a consistent routine. Some of these challenges aren't going to be for you might be like I don't want to do that that does not sound fun. And that's okay. Now there was also a 2012 study that was in the British Journal of General Practice, and they stated habits are actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with the performance. When you sit down in a car, you most likely instinctively buckle your seat belt. You don't really think about it you don't really go alright I'm in my car next step is oh I have to buckle. Typically because you form this habit over time that when you're in a car you instinctively grab plugging the seat belt.  When you automate these very simple common tasks you free up mental resources. So there's a few wins of trying to do these these types of habits. So 40 is a magic number. So there's a I'm not going to try to pronounce that word cundalini yoga, but it's also called the yoga of awareness. And the way you master this yoga move or yoga practice rather is you do it over 40 consecutive days so in 40 days. They say if you follow these this yoga tradition, which includes physical movement, listening to very specific sounds. You can improve your consciousness, you can have better intuition. You can have better self knowledge and unlock your creative potential. And so it's supposed to be this really amazing yoga process. Do you have to do it over the course of 40 days. Have you done this. No, I'm not I'm not a person.  I did it with Pilates, it works. They also say that 40 days it has a lot of like relevant religious or cultural backing. Judaism, for instance, someone wants to have an answer to their prayers they have to pray that same prayer 40 times in Christianity that's why you have 40 days of fasting after lunch. There's other religions and cultures like Hinduism Islam, and in China as a culture that state that after a mother has a baby she has to stay home for 40 days after she's given birth on it's like this whole cleansing thing. And I worked really hard to find this contextual clue so please give me some some applause because I didn't realize what it was that important after I picked it. So there's a science of 40 that says a personality can be changed by handwriting exercises over a period of 40 days. So by writing differently or writing a different mindset your personality can be tweaked. And then also apparently our skin cells on average take 40 days to renew. And then red blood cells start dying from 40 days onward. So 40 is magic 40s everywhere. And that's why we're going to do a 40 day challenge. Sweet. I thought so. 40 works. And so the goal of all this is again making small incremental changes over 40 days. We can strengthen our community our connection to ourselves our community and our team. And the gentleman that I have a picture of his name is David Brails Ford. You might not know this, but the Olympic he was an Olympic coach for Great Britain. And for a very long period of time almost like 100 years. They were known as the worst performers of the Olympics. They had not won an Olympic medal since like 1908 when before he was instituted as a coach. He was a staffing staff of the Olympic cycling team like no one everyone knew that Britain was never going to win. So they hired this gentleman, and he had a philosophy called marginal gains. And so he breaks it down that if you break everything down that you want to try to accomplish into small buckets and improve them just by 1% the sum of all these small buckets will be a dramatic increase in improvement. 1% here 1% there 1% there. And so some of the things that he found out was the way people slept. If you sleep a little bit differently, you're going to perform better the next day. And so we had all his the entire team do a giant sleep study and then bought specific mattresses for each of those people that matched the way they slept. And then on the bike circle and he fine tuned certain things like different different pedal sizes for different different players would help improve their ability to be fast. And so he made all these small little changes and in 2004, they won two cycling gold medals which was their best performance since 1908. Because all he did was find small things to tweak. And since he made enough small changes over time, a dramatic improvement appeared. So I'm putting in a link I found on the Harvard Business Review about how 1% performance improvements led to Olympic gold. Wonderful, thank you. You open up the chat too so I can see. So what are these 40 challenges. So I broke up these 40 challenges into five pillars and I'll walk you through these five pillars in a moment. So when you do a challenge my philosophy is that it should take about 30 minutes or less on average. Some challenges are like you do this for a whole week. Other challenges are you know it's a five minute phone call. But on average most of these challenges, you can finish in 30 minutes or less just like a gym. So if you wanted to exercise and work out, people usually typically work out for 30 minutes to an hour. And so that's why the challenges are geared as much and for those that are gym buffs, you know that every day you have to go work out in the gym you don't do an entire body workout you don't do your abs core your legs, you do 1% of your body. More than that, let's just say it's 1%.  So same same logic same thought process there as well. So, the first pillar is being centered on community. And so some of us will go well, I'm a library I'm connected to my community everyone knows who I am on the world's most famous librarian. But the goal of these challenges are more so to strengthen the connection to your community. And you're going to have to do things that are outside of your comfort zone. For instance, let's do the play. There we go. There's a calling challenge. So you're going to ask for help from local businesses. And they should yield some pretty amazing and surprising results. I've taken this story from a small library in Illinois, and then we called it like the 4440 challenge where they were supposed to call 4040 local businesses and just after $40. Do they wanted to buy some new furniture for the team section. Like the eighth or ninth call of these local businesses, the person that they reached out to was so excited that they were being asked to give a donate for a couch for the teens. They asked how much was this couch in total and can they just pay it all and be the ones that that pay for the entire couch. They didn't care about sponsorship they didn't care about anything else, but they were like when I was a team. I loved my library and I loved hanging out and one of the things I wish was there was a couch. Simply by calling, they were at this library was able to have furniture for their team section. So some other challenges that are centered on community are some of the obvious ones like, you know, volunteer with a local organization like a homeless shelter or nursing home. They say that if you do that once a month, you'll have a very emotional outlook on life. And so I'm asking you to just do it one time. But again, in this 40 day challenge you make small little improvements so you volunteer local organization. To get connected to your community is fairly simplistic, and it's go go explore nature by going to a park or park or forest preserve, and just observing what you notice and discover so just be the idea is being in the moment. Some other things that will help you get connected to your community is simply going to a coffee shop and buying the person behind you coffee. You can also do this. This is some people call it paying it forward. And then it is, you know when you're buying someone coffee this is it's like an intimate gesture. And then you can open up a dialogue and ask hey what do you do for work. I'm a librarian. What is that you do. And you've created this interesting dialogue that would never have happened anywhere else. Coffee is cheap we're talking like two to $5 unless if they were super fancy and they had like 18 different shots of espresso and 12 different pumps of syrup. But in general, you're just giving out $2 to $5. And the last one, the last activity I want to share today for this pillar of Center that community is one that I've taken from Amanda. And this one is invite your local nonprofits to your library to give a presentation on what they do for the public. So there's a lot of nonprofits out there in your in your community, or even local communities for that matter.  I want to know more. You know nonprofit, you know, dance off and all these different nonprofits in the day will pitch for 1520 minutes and share what they're doing. But now our goal still is getting connected to communities now we know what kinds of nonprofits exist in our community, our patrons know, and you start building these connections. The next one is teaching with technology. Part of this challenge is also disconnecting from technology which is kind of like an axiomoron. I'm telling you we're going to learn more about tech and at the same time also going to tell you we need to take a tech break. And so some of these challenges are are kind of harder because we're going to talk about disconnect from technology so we can focus more on ourselves, or team or our family even because families important. And forget, you know, our family friends and teammates are for always tethered to our phone. So some of these challenges include disconnecting from social media for a week. I was trying to find a study that proves that less social media improves people's social outlook, but there was only one study I found that said there was no direct correlation. And people I've talked to that have done this challenge already felt better after disconnecting from social media and granted this the study that I found was like from 2010. I assume that now that social media is a little bit more argumentative I suppose no less less puppies and babies and more about politics. Disconnecting social media could probably yield some some beneficial results. It depends on who and what who you are connected to in social on social media to it depends on how you're using it are you only friends and sharing with with your friends and family. It's probably more babies and puppies, if it's just a real social thing, but for people using it for informational purposes, a lot more that serious political doom and gloom doom scrolling, as they say, is what you're dealing with and it's certainly a mental drag. So my tick tock is very healthy the algorithm has worked out perfectly it's food and puppies. There you go. I'm feeling bad I just go to tick tock and it's like an instant. What is that dopamine. It may just be you know unfollow the ones that keeps, you know, every time you look at something from someone is just too depressing yeah I know the bad things happening the world but I want to be in this space for a good reason for fun or just you know, easy loose. Nothing I don't want to think too hard about it, you know curate your who you're following yeah. So other than social media disconnect for a full week. We're all going to talk about a technology disconnect for a full 24 hours.  There's ways to do it they say that in a survey in February 2021, nearly half the respondents on this survey so they spent five to six hours on their phone on a daily basis, not including like your work related usage. So, six hours of scrolling on to talk Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever it may be. That's what people do. And so if you want for a fun challenge for yourselves, and everyone can post in the chat. If you have an Apple phone. You can find your screen time by going to settings, going to screen time and seeing all activity and it'll list out how frequently you use specific apps, and how much time you spend on your phone on a daily average or go to click on a week. You can see your daily average at the top. Go ahead and if you have an iPhone. Throw your daily average of timings, don't worry what mock you embarrass you. Mine sometimes like, like 10 hours which will like shoot my phone a lot. She doesn't think I've never timed myself and now I'm afraid to know that you're in a safe place. I'm looking for the digital wellness app. So now I get email alerts to me that say like you use your phone three hours less than you did last week. And I'm like, good God. Exactly right. So if you have an Android digital you have an Android for us to Amanda, right. Yeah, the digital wellness here's how the how to user here. I'm an iPhone guy. I don't believe in Android no thanks. This week tech, Amanda you should switch. I'm Android too. Oh man. The new challenges to get an iPhone everybody. The rest of the challenge. Okay, everyone can have whatever device they like. I'm going to throw it in the chat of what your daily average usage is just for for Googles and grins. And as you looked up your time I will share a couple other challenges for tech. Another fun challenge that I've done occasionally is leave your cell phone at home while you're at work. So anyone that needs to reach you knows where you're at so they can call call work if need be. I'm doing a full disconnect I've done technology purges for an entire weekend now and like I feel so recharged and regenerated afterwards, or I also found that I'm way too addicted to my phone and I require my phone for everything. Like I went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to do like a little spirit journey without using technology. And I don't know where to go or what where to eat without like looking at Yelp or Google to find out what's near me. So it forced me, which is odd to talk to people. And so I went to the desk and I was the reception desk at the hotel.  But it was a cool conversation. We do have some people like one person put in and I've got mine here. Mine says one hour 37 minutes is what she's getting of using hers. Mine says, I guess, 52 minutes, one hour 36 minutes less than yesterday of course it's only like 1030 in the morning though so. They still young. Yes, and I usually do look more on my phone actually after I'm home in the evenings. When I'm at work I have it because well I mean you said leave your phone at home people nodding in touch with you. If I do this is we don't, you know we've gone. No landline at home so if anyone from my family or friends needs to contact me this is, this is it. But it just sits here waiting for if someone does need to contact me generally when I'm at work so. It's the worst day to ask me this question because yesterday I set up a bunch of robots. So mine was about six hours. But you know what you're doing at least that was a you know, I mean, it was just doing its thing from Facebook and Twitter or my three that it had me doing today so far. Yes, it's early in the day. Well you can boost those numbers right. Someone else it's okay Amanda someone else just typed into the questions that there's a six hours 53 minutes for yesterday too. Oh thank God. Seven hours for yesterday. And the last fun challenge I want to share though to is, or no I have two more teacher co worker, or patron, some site of that you love and that you're passionate about. So grab a fellow co worker or patron and show them a piece of technology that that you're interested in that they might be interested in. And the last fun challenge that I think some of us might not like doing that Amanda is take a random programming course or learn a new software. Have I got the websites for you. And so ask Amanda and then she has a plethora of sites you can go to, to learn. Now I found where I can get the daily average screen time of what I do so it looks like I'm about three hours or so a day. That's pretty good. Two hours 58 minutes specifically. On my phone so it's like games that I play is the biggest one. I wonder though like there's there's a whole like psychology behind of, of overuse of cell phones. Like what did we do prior to our smart devices like I don't think I was on my flip phone for that long. So it was way too hard to text out a message like it was like eight, you know four times and three one time to spell different words so I don't miss those days. I'm not teaching with technology challenges. I try to be cute so if you notice the T's and teaching with technology both are T's center that communities overseas. It's memory so you remember it. Yeah. And we will learn learning to lead. And this is good for if you're a leader or not. We're a team of like 25 different employees. And we always try to make sure that each employee can have some sort of skill for for being a leader, even if that's not down their track. Being a leader is important because it also helps you have self discipline, because you got to lead yourself. And so, so leading values as I as I say is a universal skill, don't have to be a leader to have the ability to lead. And so the challenges in this in this pillar are specifically geared to kind of push you outside your comfort level. And then hopefully through it. You get fresh respective about you and the new insight of how you do things. And so there's some fun ways to do this. One is to mentor another person, it could be a coworker it could be a friend it could be a colleague in another department. But mentor them say hey, let's start up a mentoring relationship and I want to kind of show you what I've not what I've learned what I've accomplished so you can benefit from it.  And that way you can have like a roadmap to be successful. Another example is taking a co worker you don't talk to frequently or even get along with and take them to lunch. So this one's a little expensive you know $5 $10 meal. If you go to subway and take them to lunch and have a conversation just check in with them. And this is a really great way to learn leadership. And it sounds odd but what you're doing is you're asking someone to meet with you and have a conversation and you're typically if you're doing that you're the one leading the conversation. Another thing that I've that I love doing. I've done this thousands of times is I'll go to a local business or typically a restaurant. Preferably fast food and figure out who the manager is and watch how they interact with their team like do they step up do they are they behind the scenes. And then know like what you see and how well or does it well it works. What's really neat when you do this exercise frequently is you'll be able to start to make trends and identify like what makes a good leader, like is it the manager that shouting in the back is the manager that's at the counter helping and then running food to a table. And at the same time then look at the rest of the employees. How happy are the staff. Are they attentive or they timid, and then try to make those connections of why certain things occur. And that's the best way I believe you can go to as many business classes as you like to find out how to be a good like business manager, but watching it in a lot in live and then trying to understand what works and what doesn't work on your own is very beneficial. If you go to Burger King, then you can just walk them all watch out automatically. Exactly. And then you can also, and this one, this one's going to be a conversation that that some libraries are starting to have in terms of like mental health and healthness. I'm a big proponent of joining different support groups. And so join a support group with something that you struggle with. So that's something like complex like codependency or something like workaholics or shopaholics. Or even something like I spent too much time on Facebook there's support groups for people that, oddly, it's on Facebook to make you probably find a different platform. But there's all sorts of different support groups out there that as this challenge, pick one and go to like there's tons of meetings that are open to the public that are free to use. And the last challenge I want to share, it's called a 360 degree survey. And it's where you, there we go. It's where you ask employees or coworkers, five things that you do really well, and five things you need to work on. And sometimes people can't come up with the latter column. But it's good to know your strength and weaknesses. And so if you, if you search for like 360 survey or 360 degree manager survey, you'll get some pretty good templates out of that. The next pillar of fun is exploring with excitement. And so the idea of this challenge is we just had a really rough challenge just, you know, the prior pillar the prior week and a half. This challenge is more fun. And these are things that help you focus on stuff that you may not have found time to do. So this is making you time. And they're geared to open up like new opportunities new excitement for you and or your library. So what's how do we explore with excitement. The easiest and as librarians might like this challenge, read 10 minutes, 10 minutes each day on a book that you've been dying to read but just don't find time.  And I'm tired. I'm asking you for 10 minutes. 10 minutes a day. Turn off the TV put your phone down. Tell your kids are significant other that it's reading time for you and you're going to spend 10 minutes reading. And this is an easy one you can do this every day doing that that that challenge week. Another challenge is try working out or just starting that habit of working out. But do it for 30 minutes and that and working out includes going outside for a walk. And that's very simple it gets you into routine. Another really neat way to explore excitement is going to a crowdfunding website like Kickstarter in indiegogo and scrolling through people's ideas and things that they're asking to raise money for. And here's the part that we tie it back into a library and this is how I run my business. Reach out to those companies that have and I'm asking you to reach out to one. So reach out to one and we've already practiced calling people in the first pillar of calling community members. So now we're going to talk to someone that's not local and reach out and say, Hey, I think your product would work really great in our library. Is there a chance that we can pilot your product in our library space. Like, can we borrow it or do we have it. And quite frankly, this is how I've gotten almost all my tech gadgets at no cost. Because I will find these companies and say, Hey, would you like to work with me.  And then you have this fun little conversation that note libraries doing a lot of things. Pay attention to Amanda's sweet, sweet, perfect sweet tech talks. You know, learn some things around Wednesdays. I recommend the mini pepper and Kickstarter.  It's open source and adorable. It's just started with that. It's true. Yeah. Who knew that AI could be so cute. Which then leads into the next challenge is finding one new technology gadget and write a proposal and why it should be good to include in your library. So take Amanda's awesome puppy she found.  And the last fun challenge I want to give to you is joining a Ted talk. So listen to five talks and typically it works best if it's at random and summarize what you learned. It could be about anything and everything they cover the whole gambit, but listen to five random talks and they're usually what five to 10 minutes. So summarize what you learned in a really simple, you know, blog post, write in, write in a journal. And ideally, you know, share that with your colleagues. And if a group of people are doing this, you want to let you want to know the secret to getting an entire organization like way smarter than other organizations. If every person listens to five random Ted talks and you have a team of 10 people, you just learned 50 things. And only what were you only doing the action of five of them is because everyone else now summarizes and shares what they've learned. And so this is done this this type of style of learning is done in a lot of think tanks and startup hubs, where they get an entire team to read small little one or two page articles, and then that each team member will then share what they've learned in like a 30 seconds on bite. So this is a really, really great way to rapidly share and disseminate information. So five Ted talks for whole teams doing it. Now there's multiple that have learned something and they will share within a few paragraphs versus you having to sit and watch another 10 minute show. And the last pillar of fun is finding your focus. So finding your focus typically means is we're going to, and this one, this one's the one I think it's very deep in your, in your challenge set. So we, we learned a lot of new skills I learned how to talk to people for the first time I learned how to approach a stranger. I learned how to approach them that doesn't like me. I learned how to ask for money asked for funding right a proposal. I learned how to discover myself by reading or doing things that I've always wanted to do like read a book. And so this one this focus idea is the challenge are geared around how can we improve how we interact and how can we get to constant achievement. In order to do that we really got to focus in on our strengths and weaknesses. And so finding your focus one of the easiest ways or the most thought provoking ways is it's called and I call this like a spirit journey or moment of solitude is be by yourself for 24 hours or in 24 hours, or longer if you can. Don't talk to anyone. Just be you. And a lot of times when people do this type of thing the psychology behind it is you discover things about you that you never realized, such as like I need constant attention, and I didn't realize I needed attention and that's why I'm a presenter I suppose. So I get people to laugh and like me. But the idea is that when you spend 24 hours by yourself you then start to prioritize what's important to you. Because once those 24 hours are over, it'll be I want to call my mom, or I want to go complete that project that I put up for far too long. And it's this this weird social or this weird mental dynamic that kind of expands because now you, you've been by yourself for 24 hours you're not really doing anything except being you. For me what I do is I'll go to a random city and just explore. And also without tech. So I try to double up. But then you start to learn and explore new things. Another really cool thing to do and this one's a lot of doing like self studies. So one challenge is doing the Meyer Briggs indicator, taking the step farther and finding out because if you're doing this as a group, then you'll know what other personality traits are. And they say so I have a huge spreadsheet that I'll be sharing that if you're if you're one type of personality you have positives and negatives. But if you focus on your negatives you can then transition those and partner with the right people that will augment where you struggle so now you have an even better strong routine because you're working with the right people that collect. The interesting thing that I stumbled upon is understanding your love language and you're like, I don't want to date my coworkers Brian this sounds strange. I'm not saying that like the idea of knowing your love language also determines how you have just simple interpersonal relationships like relationships to coworkers relationships with your family. Because we all have a certain way we act in a certain way we work with each other. And if you understand those pieces, you know how so if someone's love language for instance is, you know, affirmation that employee or that co worker, you probably need to tell them, you know, hey great job, more often than not. And another really cool one is sharing a secret, whether that's a positive or negative with your closest friend and after their input. I personally believe like as this type of challenge. We all have something that's on our minds that's waiting us or something we've always wanted to accomplish but don't know where to go. So, roll it off with a best friend and see what happens. So, these like inter perspective ideas as the last challenge is it's called expanding your circle of influence. And what your circle and the theory of circle of influence it's it's simply a marketing term, or business term. And the idea of your influences you only have they say you only have one mom or one dad. And that's all you know but if you expand your circle influence outside of your friends, because your friends have friends so there are people that you probably won't connect with. And the challenge is simply asking five friends of yours to introduce them to one other friend that you've never met, and go have lunch, go talk, go meet whatever it may be, with the goal of expanding you know who you're connected with in the world. And so by doing this for instance for me, I built it what I call a cloud or a platform. And so I made all sorts of different friends and different backgrounds and different technologies and the only way my business has been successful is because I asked them all the time. What do you know when you're in your marketplace that I should talk to, which has worked really really well so for some of us might have heard of light up and make little like connectors that you can build circuits from. They've actually introduced me to competitors of theirs competitors that make very similar products because that's what they that's what I asked them for. And so then I'll meet another company that makes very similar products that they like. And now I've, I've expanded my circle of influence simply because I asked, who else do you know. So putting all this together at the end of this 40 day experience. Hopefully you should discover new things about yourself, your team, you met new community members you met new people. And hopefully if all goes well, which I'm sure it will. You've elevated yourself now and you you're more connected, you're more confident and things of that nature. And so, my vision for all this is to do like a rollout plan so every week, you're the you're the first group has ever gotten this teaser. And so hopefully you've enjoyed it. And you know that now that I know it's been 10 years it's like perfect it's the world's have aligned I guess for it.  So if the July date doesn't work after school starts up with typically most schools are back in session by September, and then we do these 40 day challenges. So I will website and if you're interested in participating I can send you a reminder when it's live. And the email is I am ready at the library challenge.com. And I chose I am ready it's a, it's an affirmation for yourself that hey I can do this. It's a plan words hopefully you enjoy it and my psychology tricks you into believing in yourself. I am ready. There you go. So, the other part of this is the community aspect. So we're building this platform, it's free that people can share their success or failures. As I do each challenge, but the important piece that I try to make sure everyone understands is there's this component of community that we often forget. And the best store I've ever heard about why communities important is the wilderbees and lioness story. And so the way the story works is lioness is hunt wilderbees, right. That's their food source. And the way they lionesses hunt the wilderbees is they find the wilderbees that's old or young or weak or injured in the herd. But how do they do that, like they're not like, they're not like sniffing around like hey what's your age over there. They figure that out because as the herd moves, the week, the small, the young, the old, or always left behind they're always behind everybody else. And they become in theory without community they're on their own.  And then all of a sudden, the herd of wilderbees paused, and they go, wait a minute, there's like 100 of us and three lions. What if we attacked the lions, like we don't got sharp teeth we don't got claws, but there's 100 of us. And so he's like I was watching all of a sudden these wilderbees are chasing lions or lionesses away from their group and so he brings it all back by saying the importance is community, that if everyone works together as a group and supports one another well, if you're weak or you're old or you're struggling as a whole the 100 of us can become successful together. So that's my pitch for you my motivational speech on why communities important hopefully that was your favorite part of today. And the other piece is consistency. Not all the challenge you'll want to do, I'll be honest like some of these challenges like nope not doing that Brian that seems crazy. Or some of it might be too hard like I tried couldn't do it it wasn't, I just couldn't find the time to return it today. And that's okay. The important piece is just trying to be consistent. So, as a conversation piece. In the chat box, what do you think is let me let me before I ask my question. The reason my consistency is important is let's think of baseball, for instance, in baseball we all celebrate the home runs right like the home runs are amazing amazing and the best thing ever. What's more important than hitting a home run once every 10 times than 10 singles. So one hit you get the first base one hit the first it gets the first base. In theory, or in practice that one home run does not equate the same amount of 10 singles so 10 small changes, 10 small consistent wins is better than one person doing an awesome awesome challenge and knocking out of the park pun intended. So, as a really good analogy, using the restaurant world. What do you think the best burger in America is like throw the cat like the best burger in America is this. That's a loaded question. Anybody have any opinions go ahead and type into the questions what's your favorite burger. I'm trying to remember this name of a restaurant and back in Milwaukee. I used to go to it. A lot. It was and the baseball theme reminded me of it. That's good. And I used to love this place because they gave like a little container of peanuts that was at the table. And they didn't actually make you like neatly throw your peanut shells away you just chucked them on the floor. It was like the most therapeutic thing in the world where you just like it was and they had awesome burgers. And I like Milwaukee so like I will not have to find this place. Yeah. Someone mentioned the chat which is actually the first thing he did in my mind but only because we just had them my husband I just had them for dinner a couple of nights ago. Five guys. And I think the big thing with them for me is the plethora of toppings that you can get and you can add you see you can make your own there's no like, here's what we think should be on your burger is like here's the burger. Now what do you want and the toppings are all free and they have everything grilled onions grip mushrooms so you can make your own perfect burger. So, oddly enough. I'm not sure if those burgers making the top 10. But the number the number 11th burger in America rated as the 11th best burger is the Big Mac. But, you know, but so that that means they shouldn't be number one right like in terms of gross revenue like Burger King should beat them. And despite that knowledge McDonald's is the highest grossing fast food restaurant in fact it's, it has more revenue than the second third and fourth highest grossing restaurants in America, which is Starbucks subway and Burger King. So that's how, how dominant they are. So you might ask like, Well, how are they making so much money if they're in the 11th place, like, that should not happen that's not possible. They're making meat we're not like, mmm, that McDonald's burger is definitely well now the science has 100% meat I don't know what it used to be. That's the part that worries me I guess. But their burger is nowhere near the top of the line. They're 11th. And typically when we talk about customer service and McDonald's, they're typically rated the worst in business. So why is it that they're number one and the reason why is their consistency. No matter where you go in the world, or at least in America, a Big Mac in Florida will taste the exact same way as a Big Mac in Chicago, which will taste the exact same way as it will in Nebraska, because they're consistent to it. And that's why Japan. Yeah, what's that, but not in Japan. And yeah, they do different stuff in different countries. There's a, there's a world, there's a world of McDonald's in Chicago, which is on my bucket list of visit, where you can try different foods from other countries that McDonald makes. And watch Good Mythical Morning where they try food from around the world. And they have an episode where they try Big Mac or like burgers from around the world and just show like the funky different things that countries do. Yeah, different countries. Yeah. Because someone else actually said too about what their favorite burger is that it depends on what part of the country you're in. They're all great. There may be certain ones that are more prevalent in certain areas that aren't in others. And AJ bombers. AJ bombers was the peanut place in Milwaukee. Is it still open? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Fantastic. Going to have to go visit now. Right. So with that, I will end today's topic because I know it's lunchtime for everyone so hopefully we're extra hungry now after talking about burgers. Everything is timed perfectly. Are there any questions, comments, concerns, complaints or otherwise. Gonna be run out of burger joints who for everyone who's watching today, definitely.  We are the beef state. So, yeah, it's true. Oh no, I want a burger. It's going to happen. Yeah. All right, so does anybody have any questions, comments, thoughts anything you want to ask about about this challenge which is coming up. As you said Brian, the site is being designed now. Any ideas or thoughts anyone has about that. Go ahead and type into your question section. We do have someone to ask earlier and I was just waiting to get back to it. The, the pup thing that you mentioned Amanda, can you share what exactly which one that is or. I put a link out but I think it only went to the organizers and panelists. Oh, there it is. Oh, sorry. I didn't see that. Let me click on it. I don't have my drop down doesn't give me the option of send to everyone. So I'm not able to. That's right. I can get that. Yeah. But the, you can either click on the link that Chris is probably about to put in there, or you can just Google Kickstarter mini pepper. Okay. Yeah, so it's, it's adorable. It's the mini one of those creepy robot dogs that are going to take over. Got it. Adorable. And like the real one is awesome. Like I think it came out of Boston Dynamics. Yes. And yeah, and but this one is actually an open source kit, you can get it in three different versions. There's one that's already kind of pre put together that you can just use that one costs a little bit more. But there's also a kit that you can actually put together yourself and you can do all the magical programming and stuff yourself. You'll also learn how image recognition works and how all the little AI magic works in the inside. But you have to be a little bit comfortable with programming. But the one that's pretty put together is probably the most common one. And this is the one kit that I'm really hoping is just enters into mainstream. Everyone's going to beat you to it. I heard Brian said it's going to be a challenge. Right. This is actually one idea that I really want people to steal. So do it. They're gonna be wondering why are we getting so many emails from my brains all of a sudden. Right. And I could also see grab the presenter control to my screen so I can show this the page for it here. It is the and actually I'm just going to down here. There's a little videos. Yeah, I've watched all those videos. Those are amazing. And you can also learn bio mechanics using this little dude. You can see a side by side picture of like a real dog that's actually walking and like different for legged animals walking next to this little guy. You can start seeing how like the right front leg moves at the same time as the left rear leg. So just like a real dog, it actually moves on a diagonal so it doesn't tip over. And you can start learning how to do like the dynamics like that. Interesting. Yeah, I just say note over here if you are looking for the pledge this is in, you know, look down here for the US costs. It's not $3,000. No, no, it's actually like this is the cost is similar to like the pie top. So if you see like the, if you already use something like the pie top, then this is like, it's a classic. It's delightful. And it also has 3D printing 3D printed model options so that you can make your own to and reduce the cost. That's really cool. This is cute to the face that it actually you can change it actually. I mean, I wasn't sure if that was real, but the face does actually. Yeah, it's a little display screen. You can make the sphere one so you can change the display on the front, and you can make it moon people. So that is something a library definitely being because you know we are, you know, lots of libraries are doing these robot kits and things for learning how to do all this programming, or teaching the kids and the teens and adults. I think that may end up getting added to our things that we loan out here, Amanda or maybe. I want one too, Amanda, if you're on that so. They are adorable. I do see a lot of these challenge things getting incorporated into that meaningful work thing, because like before people get into like a meaningful work pathway they kind of need to work on themselves and build themselves up. So a lot of these challenges could probably pop into that too. Yeah, absolutely. And here is just the website in in in being built. We are still getting ready. So that will be the place to go to in the future. I'm going to just have this recorded video on there now make that make that easy. Oh, absolutely. Yes, the wax. Thanks for having me everybody. Yeah, it doesn't look like anybody has any desperate questions or anything else they wanted to ask gotten to all of them and we did just hit 11am central time. Unless anybody does have anything else you want to share or ask about get it typed in we have plenty we can, you know, don't get shut down 11 will go as long as you know whatever anybody has any. While we're seeing anything any last minute words. Brian or Amanda about the challenge. I'll definitely be looking into participating. I'll be using some of it so that'll be cool. Let's say to this is very obviously specific to public libraries it seems you know because you're talking about reaching out to, you know companies to help support something. But I mean academic libraries and school libraries are always looking for funding for various things too. Yeah, I would say it was good for everybody. Yeah. It definitely seems really flexible that way. Like you can set your own goals and find a challenge to match. Exactly. Just like anything with libraries is going to be specific to your community and what they are going to need and what you do at your library and use it appropriately. They would you like to leave the rest. So someone comment just saying thank you this is very interesting. And there's a lot of good ideas here, culminating one super good idea. We hope people will join with it. Yeah. As you see here on the session page I have a link to, you know, the evolve project, but I will. I can add a link to this page, you know, coming soon, so that it's got a quick link to that. And that will be available here when the recording is available as well that people will be able to just have that. And then here. All right, so thank you so much, everyone for being here with us this morning glad to have you here. Thank you so much Brian for coming on with us today and joined her piece week tech day. So have you on again in the future we had talked made mention that Brian had been with us before and I can just show you here in our archives they did a search. It had been a few years but yes the original evolved project session, and then you mentioned going to other conferences and I see here did a couple years talk about internet librarian, which is obviously library conference but CS consumer electronic show. Do you still go to that regularly. I still do still still nerd out over there. They're really cool show to go to. Yeah, we should definitely have you come on it because it's been way too long. Since you reported on that we should definitely have you come on again and what was the most recent one was it earlier this year. January, January that's when it usually is yeah. So we should definitely arrange for you to come and tell us what you learned at this year show. That'd be awesome love to. Yeah, so look for Brian to come back again and get even more techie with us. There we go. Amanda's tech, you know pretty sweet tech day she does have ideas for doing things do it could be on, you know, a specific special one just for Brian to. All right, while we're here. I'll show you let me just refresh this here. Go back to. This is our show archives. Actually, if you go to our end compass if you Google or use your search engine of choice to search look up and compass live. You will find where the only thing called that on the internet so far, nobody else can use that name. So you'll come up with either our main page or archive pages are upcoming shows we have scheduled and then link right here goes over to that archive page that was on today show be at the top of the list most recent ones are here I'll have a link to recording and link to the slides that Brian's going to send me so have that here too. Everyone who attended today show and register for today show get an email from me letting you know when it's ready. So you'll know when the archives up. We also push it out onto our various social media. We do have a Facebook page and compass live if you like to use Facebook. So on Twitter, Instagram, I think that's it. Using the hashtag and comp live little abbreviation. So definitely give us a like on Facebook follow us and thoughts library commission on Twitter. On Facebook and Twitter we do a reminder she's reminded login today show, promoting about our speakers, letting people know when the previous recordings are up. So that's how you can keep an eye on things going on the show. So here on the archives I'll show you there is a search feature. You can search the show, the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want something very current. That is because this is our full show archives and I'm not going to go all the way down here, but going back to when encompass live from your which is we are a little older than the evolved project which is in January 2009. So we're going on 1012 something years 13 years, yeah 12 years here. And all the show archives are here. We are librarians. This is one of the things that we do sometimes is keep things for historical purposes and archival purposes and as long as we have some place to host these these are all on our YouTube channel at the moment. We will keep them up there. So just pay attention when you're watching a show to the original broadcast date they all have a date on them. Some things will some topics and shows will stand the test of time and still be good useful information but some things will become old outdated services and products may have changed drastically some things might no longer exist anymore. Links may be broken, whatever. So just pay attention to what you are watching on here. There. Yeah. Alright, so that will wrap it up today show thank you everyone for joining us. As you can see here we've got some May dates and June dates scheduled I am working on finalizing some things for the first couple weeks in May so do keep your eyes open on our page for when we get those shows up here as well. And other than that, thank you for being with us today. Linda, we'll see you again in a month. Do you have any thoughts for next month. We're still working on it. Oh, the computers and libraries review. Oh, for May 25. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Alright, we'll make that. Are you going to computers and libraries to Brian. Yeah. Cool. I just finished so now I put the program together. And good times were had by all. Yeah. Internet library and coming up in the fall. Awesome. Alright, so May 25 come in here on all the cool things Amanda learned at computers and libraries. And it was shiny. shiny things. All right. Thank you everyone and hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode. That was good. Take care everybody. Bye. Bye bye.


Can you tell us who you are and what you do? Yeah, my name is Kai and I'm UX designer at Yoast, which means that I design user interfaces and I think about user experiences for people that use those interfaces. And yeah, that's basically what I do. My name is Luis Startha, I come from Spain. I was invited to this work camp. And yeah, I run a small agency, WordPress agency in Barcelona and also I run a meet-up, WordPress meet-up in Barcelona. So I'm very involved into the community and yeah. Is that your first contributor day or have you been here before? I don't know much about WordPress, I've been to a few times in the Netherlands, I've been to Utrecht, I've been to Pure App two times, so I've been to a few times. Later on? Yeah, sort of. Why do you think it's important to contribute to the WordPress community? Well, I think it's important that everybody can contribute and most people think it's only for developers or that you have to write code but there's also a marketing group, a design group, even a group that translates texts, I heard. So yeah, for everybody there is a role to contribute and I think that's nice about WordPress that a lot of people with a lot of different ideas work together to make WordPress better. Yeah, for sure, for sure. I'm not a help in code writer myself but you can actually translate, you can always do it you can help support, you can answer questions, for WordPress TV you can also fill in the titles, you can think about marketing, you can think about the community so there's always something to do, even if you're not so good at coding. You know, this is an open source, a software but it's also a very open community. Everyone is welcome and even if you have a very high knowledge of coding, if you have a very low knowledge of coding, you can contribute in many, many ways.  Yeah, it's from the WordPress community that it's important to be able to talk to people about WordPress. So it's a bit of a joy to give back to the community? Yeah, exactly. Great, thanks.


The judicial panel of enquiry and restitution on the lecky toll gate shooting and cases of police brutality has presented its report to the Lager State Governor. It recommended the establishment of a body to take over human right abuses in Lagos and also awarded 410 million and to 70 victims of police high-handedness. Plus, of the Africa's Lager State House. Correspondents Love y Cwku oeddwn reports. Mae'r panel dros yr ysgol yn cymryd o'ch bethau cysybeth cysylltion i'r ddweudiau ar y ddiwrnod 26-20 a fyddai 235 ar gyfer mai ddweud o'r pethau. Mae'r ddweud o'r 100 cysylltion ar gyfer yma ar gyfer yma ar gyfer yma yng Nghymru, ac yn ymgyrch â'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ffordd o'r gyfan, yn ymgyrchu cymryd i'r ddweud â'r ddweud, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r chymwylltio'r cyfnodd. Mae Y Romanwyr o'r panel bob aktur y Justus Dorris o Kobi, dystyn yn yw mwyad ar 10 unrhywgion o a chyfnodd mewn gwirio'r pryddynigau a phu ffair hyn wedi'i dod o bobl a ddragon. Y Justus o Kobi mwyaf ar 410 miliwnnyryn ar ryw yw cael eu fforddach ar 170 cyfain. Aber llaientio am gynnwys Gwfnodd Barba Gydys o Mwlu yn Ymhygu pa ydi'r panel o gydag oών yn Llwyl ac yn bynnag yn sgwrdd ddigon ddysgu ond bydd gan y dyneisheidol bring healing, reconciliation and restitution. This process will help us to start the very difficult process of proper reconciliation, restitution, Roedd cyfeirpolego'r ddwyledg, ddwyledg yna, o'r hyn yn un fflwrdd o ddeud i ddweud o ddweud y ddweud eich mynedd, bydd yn dweud eich clywedol o ddeud o ddweud o ddweud â'r cyflodd yn y ddweud, o'r ddweud honno i ddweud. Y ddwyledg ythodol 9 ydy'r panel o hwnnw rai'r cynyddenu, bydd yn y mwneud, gwneud mae gennyddu a laethu amgylched i rhan o ddiad mewn ddeud. A part of his recommendations includes the setting up of a body to handle reports of human rights abuses in Lagos state. From Lagos, Love Ikuku Uieduku, FAPLAS TV, Africa. The lawyer to the NSERS protesters, Mr Addition, or Gulana, lead council to NSERS protesters is joining us live on the news right now. Thank you very much Mr Gulana for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you. What do you think of the report, even though we're yet to see all of the content that is in it? Well, I want to say that it's a fantastic job that gives a whole lot of hope to us as Nigerians. That report, from the much I know about it, has been an insider participant as a council to many protesters. I find out that it exhibits courage, candle, forthrightness and meticulousness. It was clear, very strict. There was no shilly shally, no doubting, no very clear. There are reports of 309 pages. Yes, it's quite a whole lot of work. And I must commend all the members of the panel and the support staff, the secretariat, that worked assidiously with the panel members for about 30 months. And that is quite good. And the verdict was clear that there was a massacre and that it was the military that was responsible. The police were responsible and that you find bodies like the legal processionary company trying to do cover-ups. The commander, the medical personnel that came to the head of each article took that horrible night and the night that followed. And to find such courage, because when you set out the panel and if so many people were so skeptical, very skeptical that is impossible, how can the government set up a panel and the panel will conduct it to set up on a very controversial circumstances. And yet these gentlemen and ladies really rose up to the occasion to present what we call the credible finding. That's my view and I'm quite happy and excited and I'm very proud of the justice to the poor in that panel. Particularly justice to the poor of you. I'm curious about the recommendation for a body that will be responsible for human rights abuses in Lagos. What do you think that particular body would do? Are you sure or rather would you recommend that be done? Because of course we have so many laws in this country. We have so many bodies that have almost the same responsibility. So if we're making this recommendation, do you think that it would change anything? If the recommendations are followed through is to change a lot of things. And let me say that it was with a community panel, let's comment also the Bagidia Sa'u Olu government. Yes, even though there are politicians and one is still not convinced of their sincerity, you know. But so far generally it will appear that they gave that panel quite a free hand to work. Even though I have some reservations, but generally they are large and they are going to do well to this point. But it will do better or best if it does not come back or think back with the recommendations. The recommendations are holistic. If I include them and set up a memorial and try to heal the wounds. And I think I heard the governor, that's Babagidia himself saying something like a proper reconciliation. You know, if it's not a liftoff, if it's not a liftoff, if it's just not political statements, they should do the needful. But you see we are not begging them to do the needful. You see, the Sorosoki generation, the answers protest as a new breed of Nigerians. We want to change, we are not begging for our rights. We cannot beg them, they must do the right thing. If they do the right thing by themselves, distantly as gentlemen, as people who are accountable. Yes, the forces will oppose them. Well, I want to say a very big thank you to you. Thank you very much for speaking with us. We appreciate it.


Hey stampers! Welcome to another week of Watcha Weekly Wednesday. I'm Aubrey, part of the Stampin' Jill creative team, and today I'm excited to share with you another fun sweet that is in the annual catalog. The sweet is called Sweet as a Peach, and it is so cute. I love it. I think it's great for summertime. This is what the stamp set looks like. It has this cute peach and these other little ones. And then the greenery, some flowers, and all of these fun sayings. And then the dies that coordinate it with it. So awesome. One of my favorite things in this sweet though has to be the paper. Let me grab this so I can show you. Look at this beautiful paper. These peaches are so cute. And then all the designs that go with it. The colors that are in there. This splash of blue that's in there, it's just so beautiful. And I have loved playing with it. So I want to show you a few tips with this set and show you a few cards that we've made using it. So I want to start by stamping a little note card with you. And I've already started some of the stamping on here just to quicken things up a little bit, but we'll go ahead and finish it together. Now, I love the peachy color that's in this paper. And I feel like you can't get it with just one of our stamp pads alone. I feel like it kind of needs that like two toned look. So I want to show you the way that I get that look. It's really so pretty and so easy. So we're going to start, we're going to stamp one of our, I have to remember how I stamped this. Okay, we're going to stamp one of our three little peaches here. Okay, we're going to start with that. And we're going to start with mango melody. But I'm also going to use Calypso Coral. So I have both of those open here. And I'm going to start by inking up my peaches in the mango melody just all the way. And then I'm just going to quickly dab it into the Calypso Coral. So it grabs a little bit of that Calypso Coral color, but not all. So it kind of gives it a really marbled look almost. Let me just show you. Just like that. And you can even see on the stamp alone, because it's photopolymer, you can see through it. You can see that two different colored look on there. It just makes it so pretty. So then I'm just going to stamp this right down on my card here. Just like that. So you can kind of see in there both the Calypso Coral and the mango melody coming through. So, so pretty. So the only drawback to using the two stamp pads is that if you want to use this again, you'll need to clean it in between or just stamp it off really good on your grid paper. Okay. The other trick is always start with the lighter color. Always stamp in the lighter color first and then go to the dark because the lighter color can kind of go in the dark. But if you do dark into the light, it's going to get the colors mixed on the lighter pad. So make sure you do that. Now let's do one more here. We're going to use the big peach. And again, I'm just going to ink up my mango melody really good. And then just kind of dab it down into the Calypso Coral. And we're going to do one more peach right over here. Just like that. Okay. So cute. Okay, now I want to show you the stems on here. I'm going to use Pear Pizzazz. That's the green that's used in this paper. And I'm first going to show you this the leaves and the stems that are for these three little ones. They're so cute and it lines up really, really well. And now I'm kind of looking. I'm hoping I didn't stamp my big peach too close there. I think we'll be okay.  And it lines up all three of them just perfectly right on those leaves. So cute.  Now I haven't stamped any of my peaches yet because I wanted to show you this. This is one of the other really cool things about this leaf. You can use it either direction. So you can have your leaves facing this way or this way, depending on what you, what look you want. So it's really nice that Stampin' Up made it that way so that you can kind of do it either way. So we're going to do this one. Let's see. I did it facing that way, but I stamped those two close. So I'm going to do it this way. Like that. Okay. And then there. And we'll do this one facing this way so you can see. Like that. Okay. So cute and so easy. I am in love with this stamp set. So let me show you the finished project that I have here. I added a little saying here in the middle. I used our circle dies and cut out a cute little sweet as a peach just to go right in the middle there. And then I added some rhinestones and just like that. Super quick and easy. It's done. So fun. I also used the peach on the envelope here. So I have a cute little card and envelope that I can send to a friend. So fun. Something else I wanted to point out is I love to kind of do a card two different ways and see the difference that it makes. So on this one I used rhinestones. I thought that was really cute. And on this one I used pearls and you can see it just gives it just a little bit of a difference. But maybe you can use this for a different kind of event than you would use this for. So I love just that little change that can make a card be used for different things. So I wanted to show that too. Okay. Let me pull in some other cards that I've made using this sweet. This one and like I said the paper in this does so much work. So we have have a peachy day. So cute. Here's another one sweet as a peach. That paper. Oh I just love it. And have a peachy day. And this one I have a little one on the inside too. So cute. I have loved playing with this sweet as a peach sweet from the annual catalog. If you have any questions or have any comments make sure you comment below. If not make sure to visit us at stampinjill.com and thanks so much for watching another Watch Weekly Wednesday. See you next time.