Know what it is, baby, VS Tacos in the building. This is Startup Storefront. Between all the Mexican restaurants, food trucks, and street vendors, Los Angeles is the place to be when it comes to getting authentic, mouth-watering tacos. Thus, winning the award for the best tacos in LA is quite the feat. VS Tacos did the unthinkable. They were crowned as the best tacos in LA two years in a row. These back-to-back champions served their tacos on a handmade blue corn tortillas with guac that never cost extra and a drizzle of their family salsa. These will blow your mind. This week on the podcast, we're speaking with Victor Villa, the founder of VS Tacos, and how he got to start throwing house parties in high school, why he wants VS Tacos to be the in-and-out of taco franchises, and how life is easy, but people make it harder than it has to be. And on that note... Hey, you know what this, baby, it's not gonna be in the building. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. Vic, legend, two-time champ from VS Tacos. Tell us a little bit about how you got started, man. It all started off as an idea. I have a lot of ideas, and this one was an attainable idea. So I've always worked in restaurants and stuff like that. And I've always been an entrepreneur since I was like 13. But it even goes back to when I was like nine, pulling weeds for the senior sinists and ladies that lived across the street, get paid $5 and a can of Coca-Cola for pulling your weeds out there in 102-degree weather for like two hours. But that showed me that you gotta work for what you want. And you can hustle for sure. But VS Tacos started off as an idea. I wanted to own some taquerias and taco stands.  And I was tired of working for someone else. So I looked at the wall and I said, let's get to it, you know? And then I decided I had a couple thousand dollars that I really had much, but I had enough to buy a grill, a canopy, a couple of tables. The first round of meat, some vegetables, and I got to work. Where was your first setup? The first setup was in the front yard of my grandma's house in Highland Park on Avenue 50 in Lincoln. That was November 2nd, 2018. And then I quit my job probably two weeks after that. What were you doing? What was your job? I was working at a fine dining restaurant right there in downtown LA. I took the leap of faith. I was getting paid really well, but I wanted more for myself. You know, I had my own business, something that passes down to my kids or to my daughter. Did you have kids? Did you have a daughter at the time? How old was she then? She was one. Did having her change your whole view of this? Sort of. I say sort of because it's yes and no. No, because I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always wanted to own my business, own businesses. But yes, because when she was born, I needed to do it at that time. I had the urgency there all of a sudden. So I quit my job, took the leap of faith, started via stucco's, and the first year it was challenging. Just like opening any business, the first year it could be a challenge or it usually is. They say like restaurants and are the number one family business. And I see why. But I'm glad I started the way I did, which was like on the street as a pop-up because that first year it was challenging. But I slowly but surely started getting traction, getting customers, and building my brand. So now we're about three years in and we're getting ready to open up our first restaurant. And if you look at our Instagram, you see the lines of people that we have coming to dine with us. Yeah, it's incredible. So just Saturday we had a line of like 100 people. Yesterday on a Tuesday, we had a line of like 50 people. So we keep on going. So you start in a front yard, how do you get the word out? Like I'm assuming your neighborhood shows up just because you're familiar with them. But like beyond that, are you relying on word of mouth? Are you pushing the socials pretty hard? Like what's your strategy there? So I mean, I started the Instagram on the first day. But like I said, I've always been an entrepreneur before I started selling tacos. I was throwing parties. So I threw my first party at the age of 13 in my grandma's house in Atwater Village. So that was for my 13th birthday. I was a ninth grade, I think. You charged a cover? What kind of party was it? Yeah, you get a plan, didn't you? Yeah, never get in there, never get in there. So I told my parents like, are they asking me what do you want for a birthday? I said, no, I don't want much. Just maybe pay for a DJ.  Sure. A DJ that I met at one of those gas giveaways, his name was DJ Tremendous. I met him when I was like 11. I told him my sister was having a Quintanilla in about a year. Would love for you to come DJ. He DJed and my sister's Quintanilla and then that's how we build the relationship. So I told him, all I want is DJ Tremendous. Shout out DJ Tremendous wherever you are. That's awesome. We'll tag them. Yeah, I don't know where his Instagram is. But yeah, they said, okay, we'll do that for you. And I said, okay, stay less. So then I went to Kinko's. My buddy DJ C, he made the flyer. And then I went to Kinko's. I printed one flyer on a card stock, but like 16 of them. So I cut them by hand and then I went everywhere and then I passed them out. So I went to, you know, the E-Rock area, Highland Park area, everywhere. And I just passed out flyers. And then girls were $1 and guys were $2, right? Which is nothing. This is like 16 years ago. Right. Did you have drinks? You know what? You were 13. I was 13. I was 13. But you know what? There's a way.  I didn't sell any at the time. But sure enough, some hot. And then night I ended up pretty wasted. Did you put on the card that this is a 13 year old's birthday party? No, I just called Victor's birthday bash part one. Wow. Yeah, Victor's birthday bash. What was the age range of people that showed up? I'd say probably anywhere from like 13 to like 22. What did your family say? I mean, Or did they know? Or they like, ah, this is what he does. Well, at the time they didn't know that that's what I did because I didn't even know. That's what I did. That was my first one. But it was such a success that I knew I had something going on. At the end of the night, I had like $500 in my pocket. That's awesome. As a 13 year old's kid. That's a good story. So I continued it. I joined forces with some of my buddies who were also throwing parties. And then we took over the party scene in the Northeast area. And pretty much every week for like, I don't know, six years we would throw parties. So growing up at like, let's say when I was 16, we threw a warehouse party. I invested like $3,000. At the age of 16, left with $6,000. That's awesome. And one night I made $3,000 as a six year old's kid. That's a lot of money for a 16 year old. It really is. I knew that wouldn't last forever. At least that style. Where did you get that from? Did you learn that? The hustle? Yeah. Did you see that? Did you have someone in your family? When I was a kid, probably like 11 years old, I'd go downtown and lay. And be like, Oye, Daniel, ¿Cuánto para esta camisa algo? How much for the shirt? She'll say, 15. I'll say, solo tengo 10, right? I only have 10 bucks. And then it was my strategy. And then be like, perdón, niño, no lo puedo vender. So then I would pretend to walk away slowly or I would walk away slowly. Okay, okay, man, man. So it's kind of the hustle. You know, the hustle has always been there. So I threw parties for a lot of long time in my life. So that's why in my area, I was kind of known as that guy who threw parties. So once that guy who threw parties started selling tacos, they're like, oh, now he sells tacos, I guess. But a lot of people that would probably be embarrassed, but I've never raised them. You think so? Yeah, maybe. You know, a lot of people, I think people care too much about what other people think about them. Yeah, I think that's true.  I'm always gonna be funny, but I'm always gonna be about my business. And I'm always gonna try to make something out of nothing. Make a dollar out of 15 cents. What I love about you, and I think the thing I connected with, and I think the thing that people should really pay attention to is if you haven't followed BS Tacos do that, because there's so many entrepreneurs who aren't unapologetically them. And it bothers me. And they'll be at any level of success. So they'll be at zero or they'll have raised like $400 million. It doesn't matter where they are. It's just like, it's this thing where they feel weird to just lean into who they are.  Like you're as authentic as it gets, right? You're on your Instagram, people know it. Your hype, you're building the engine. Your commitment to the brand is there. And it resonates.  If he's excited, maybe there's something I should be excited about too. And that honesty is huge. Like to me, it's everything.  You know, I have to agree with you. It's like, I put my hand to my business and I think people see that and people love it. It's not only our food. Our food's amazing. I think if I wasn't the leader of this company, I think VS Tacos will still be successful. Because of the product itself, you mean? Product itself is just, it's the best. That's why we won Best Tacos in a late two years in a row. Like it's the real deal.  So, and it's not only like in the LA area. It's like, if I go to Mexico or if I go here, it's like, I just think our quality is unmatched from our meat to like the salsas to our own style of our own taco. You know, if you look at our taco, you know it's a VS taco. I call it a hood pattern because I try to get a pattern on it, but it didn't really work in my favor. So I just call it a hood pattern because everyone knows what our food is. You know, that's our taco.  How many locations will you do in a weekend? So, you know, sometimes we haven't done two, but I'm just focusing on one for now. Because I'm trying to build the restaurant. I don't want the quality to go down anywhere. Yeah, let's talk about that. So you figure out the game of like making tacos, setting up shop, having a team, now you're managing, delegating, you're making money, you're seeing how it's going and now you want to flip it to literally buying a building or owning your own place, getting a lease. And so what has that journey been like for you as you're in it right now? Oh man. Because it's like almost like a new sport, right? It's a different game. It is a different game, but it's like one that we've kind of been playing in. Like I said, we've had this like apartment thing, right? The bodega, I kind of like it as a restaurant without the benefits of a restaurant. Like the cost, it's there. But I think the main challenge I find myself in right now is the area that I want my restaurant in. There's no restaurants available. So there's like raw space. And the biggest challenge is the capital, right? Like in order to make a space that's not a restaurant, does it have like grease trap or none of that?  It takes like anywhere from like six to nine months, depending on who you choose. I think that's the biggest one because there is a bunch of other restaurants like over here or over here or over here, but that's not what I want. I know exactly what I want and I know where I want it. So I'm working with my realtor right now to try to figure that out. Yeah, what does it look like in your head? What does the restaurant look like? Is it to go? Is it sit down? It's to go. Is it cocktails? Yeah, it's to go. It's not like a sit down restaurant. We come take your order. That's not what I want. At least for the first one. Maybe we'll get there down the line, but I just wanna kind of get people in, get people out. Kind of how we're doing it right now. And the hard part for you is to build out that kitchen is like 800,000 to a million dollars depending on all the stuff you want to have. No, I'll say like 150,000 to two. 150,000? Yeah, to two. It's not that big, that's why. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah, not 800. I think just hiring the architect and getting that, that's the problem. So you gotta hire an architect. You gotta go through city approvals. Yeah, yeah, I've been talking to different people. That's gonna take you six months, just that. Yeah, the rent for six months, but I mean maybe they'll. They'll help you out. I mean the landlord should give you some sort of allowance. We signed like a 10-year lease. Yeah. Great. Is that what you're looking to do?  Yeah. It makes sense to do that. If I'm gonna invest this much money into the building and I'm making it home, then I want it to be home for a while. So how do you approach that? Let's just pretend that that number is 250,000. Let's just pretend. So then you want to go raise capital. So let's predict the future. So the future, you have a signed lease. You're doing it. So the only path to doing it is if there's nothing that's a restaurant, you have to sign a lease, cool, and you have to build it, cool. And then you have to learn a new game which is like raising, you know. Raising capital. Pretty good amount of money. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? How do you go about doing that? So right now, I mean, we probably have like half of that. Sure. So it's like finding the other half. Yeah. Finding that first half was a mission. Right. But we got it done. So I mean, we'll get that other half done too. I guess the way I'll do it is probably like raise money. Sell a lot of like merchandise. Merchandise has helped and we do a really good job of doing that. And you know what I might do too? Like open up another pop up. So I have like two streams of income coming in. That way we can generate more capital and use it like towards investments. I don't want to sell my company. That's what, you know what I mean? A lot of people, like just this year, probably like 10, 15 investors have reached out to us. What do they want to do? They want to buy your brand? They want to invest. They want to own a piece of Villas Tacos but that's what I say. I say like Villas Tacos is not for sale. At least this business isn't. You know, I have a couple other ideas. That I think are just going to be as successful as Villas Tacos. And that, you know, we can start from the, we can start together and you want to invest and maybe I can sell you a piece of my, a piece of the pie from that one. So you want to own it all forever? I want to own it all forever. I mean, you can do a lot of things. I mean, you can do like Kickstarter, right? Which is basically free. You'd crush that. We funder, you'd crush that. Because a lot of that is just you being president. There's like Indiegogo, right? What's that? Indiegogo. Yeah, Indiegogo. Yeah, Indiegogo. You can do it.  I mean, I never stop. I never stop. But that's another thing that people are like, oh, you need to find a social media manager or you need to do this. But like, I think that's really been part of our success formula. That's what you do. Yeah, that's what I do. Like I could delegate, you know, some of the other stuff I do, like carrying 10, 15 boxes on the second floor to like my prep lady or whatever. But like the real building relationships? Yeah. I do that. Yeah, people connect with you. And yeah, they do. They really do like knowing that it's me on the other side or whatever. Yeah. During the pandemic, you know, we switched from like street pop-up, street vendor, and we went back, we went back to our roots and instead of popping up in the front yard of Montgomery's house, we popped up in the back. But we didn't pop up for the public. It was only pre-orders. I don't know if you know about that. So it was only pre-orders. Tuesday at noon, we were to take orders for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. How would you take them on Instagram or what would you? On Instagram. Oh, wow. So I called it the VS Talks. So you had like drops. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like a supreme job, bro. That's awesome. Like one time, we sold out in 30 seconds for the weekend. Like 200 orders in 30 seconds. And then for like two months straight, we sold out in one minute.  As soon as they would send their order, I would send them the confirmation, pick up time. So there's a five minute window. From three to nine, there's five minutes. You got five minutes and pretty much people were around time every single time. And that's what I think though. I knew this. I knew that people were stuck inside their homes. Bars were closed. Theme parks were closed. There's pretty much wasn't anything to do. Besides go to work or work from home or go to the store and back. So people still wanted to like have fun feel sense of connection to community, to company, to business. I don't know. So I took that as like my chance.  Like thank you so much for your support. We look forward to serving you soon. Boom. They would come, they would pick up their order and then I'll still go out of my way and text them like, we hope you enjoyed everything. Thank you so much for dining with us. Thank you for allowing us to serve you. Welcome to the team is what I would say if it was their first time. And dude, there was some people that would order every single week because it was like an adrenaline rush. I think they would pull up to the corner in their car on the pickup designated pickup zone and then we would run, literally run the food to their car, give it to them in there. Thank you so much. And then run back and then run, boom, boom, boom. It was a system, dude. I mean, you're going several steps above the average delivery app. You know, when I order something on one of those, I'm not getting a personalized message from the shop owner. I'm not getting a thank you or a follow up or anything that you really are establishing a connection to your clientele. Definitely. I mean, now that we don't do that system, like let's say on Saturday, when we had the line of 100 people, I went and go thank everybody personally, like give me some, give me some, give me some. Thank you guys for being here. Thank you for coming. Thank you, thank you. So I know that like building relationships, building that brand identity, building that sense of connection, that's what really like makes a company, I think, more successful than they would normally be. Do you view that as the hard part as you scale and so as you go from like one location to maybe five, right, so let's pretend you get this Highland Park, we're in the future now, 2025. You got five, 10, 20, 30 locations. It's challenging, right? It would. To kind of keep, like you can't be everywhere. I mean, you kind of can. I think social media allows that. Yeah. It's like your presence is still felt, but. So I think, like let's say when we were popping up at Benning Point Highland Park, like people would go to Benning Point and I'm like, oh, I thought you were going to be there. Like I want to really. Like you personally or like? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Like, oh, like, or they would, they would hit me up on, on the weekends. Like, where are you going to be at? Okay. But I think, you know, with Instagram and like with social media, I'll still be like there, you know? Cause I'm not afraid to like record myself or post a funny video or a thank you message to everybody.   Thank you guys for showing up. We're back this Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We look forward to serving you or when we're coming out with the new shirt. And by the way, like we're going to be releasing this on Tuesday. So I think, you know, as, as we grow, I would still probably be doing the social media. Yeah. And still doing videos, you know? Yeah. Don't change what, what's already working. When you win the LA taco competition, do you win anything? Or do you see this massive spike? You win a trophy? You win a trophy. Yeah. I saw that. Sometimes I think bragging rights is worth more than money. Do you see like a spike in either Instagram follows or interactions or all of a sudden? I would say yes and no. Cause even before like the competition, you know, we're growing and we had a fat line.  So it's like, and even before the second, the second one, we had probably the longest line I've ever seen. And then after we've had the longest line I've ever seen. So it's like, yes and no. I think our food is just like, it's a word of mouth. The way I like to explain it, the way I tell people is like, you have a good experience somewhere, chances are you'll tell three to four people. You have a bad experience somewhere, probably tell five, six people. You have a great experience somewhere, probably tell like seven to eight people. Now, if you have an amazing experience somewhere, from the food to like the hospitality, chances are you won't stop talking about it. And I think that's what VS Tacos is. It's like a great experience. We have music playing, the vibes are up, but then you try the food and you're like, okay, I know why they won. I know why, you know they're the champions in LA. So our food is something special. Are there any Tacos you like besides your own? Like if you're, are there any other like companies that you're like, oh, they're doing pretty good stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're all pretty good. All of them that I made that list? Yeah. I'd say not one is like Nasty Taco, although I probably had one that I would never go back. Share it so that we don't make that mistake. Nah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that. When Taco Manage comes, I'm very competitive. I don't like to lose. That's business. That's what business is. Yeah, definitely.  Yeah, you sink or swim. Do you ever like experiment with different things? Like will you release a certain taco during a certain time or like a new? No, I have. During like LAN, I would, I did a shrimp taco before, but not really. I keep my menu kind of chill. I just love the drop idea. Like the whole like, like when food, there's a couple of people that I do it really well. Carlos Market, this guy, he just pops up out of a little restaurant on Sunset and he like, similar concept to what you were talking about. There's 20 once they go, that's it.  Like it is like life changing. He does it only like Tuesday, Wednesday. Like it's literally, it's not every day. It's never the weekend. It's like middle of the week. But the sandwiches are like, like you get your order in quick type of thing and then you pick it up. I just love the concept of like, I look at that as a creative. For someone to be doing something you see in fashion, in food, that's epic. And then I think about like collaborations too. It's like, can you collab with like a different meat provider? Like a vegan, like daring food, as an example, can you collab? And then now all of a sudden you're both, like it's new territory. It's never happened before, right? And so now all of a sudden it's like, you can pop up at Benny Boy, that's a street level collab. Like that's a collab. Then you have like daring chicken for like a vegan taco. That's another collab. And everyone's just basically benefiting off of each other's following or whatever. I just love that because it's new. It's, there's, I've never, at least in my life, I've never seen that happen before. And then everyone promotes it. They're all promoting each other. Yeah, I plan on, I plan on collabing with a couple of people.  Well, I mean, I like everybody, you know, but like your food and like company or whatever. So I plan on doing a couple of collabs soon. I just haven't, to be honest with you, we've been so busy. What does next year look like for you? So it's summer next year. Is Highland Park open? Yeah, Highland Park's open for sure. I'm very like goal oriented. Totally, yeah. Tell me about what's on your list. Yeah, what's on your chalkboard? Yeah, it's just getting, getting the restaurant open, this one restaurant open. So as soon as I start with that one, it's like I'm ready for another one. Obviously there's gonna be like new challenges and so, but I feel like I'm ready for them. I don't think anything's harder than like selling our type of food like in the street. So let's say Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We're selling probably like a thousand tacos, maybe more. And just for that amount of meat, for that amount of masa, for that amount of cheese, that amount of everything's salsa's. It's like, it's crazy going back and forth. When I say I don't think anything's harder is because, you know, when you have a restaurant, everything gets delivered there. You do the prep there. You do the cleaning there. You do the, everything's done there. So you just, you set up or everything's set up already. You don't have to set anything up. You just go maybe an hour before service. You get your stuff ready. You open the doors, you close doors.  But like for a pop, it's so much more than that dude. Coolers. I saw your whole team set up. Oh my gosh. It's like, that's amazing. That's a lot. We're bringing the heat, bro. We're bringing the noise. Like we're not there to sell out. You know, a lot of vendors there, they don't mind selling out right there. They just bring like, I don't know, I'd say like the bare minimum.  So as like, like literally. Oh wow, we sold out in like three hours. I thank you guys for coming.    Yeah.  I don't really believe in sound. If I have the capacity. That's literally the right add. It literally, I can't tell you. Like we opened up Border X in the city of Bell. We had three food trucks confirmed, two canceled day of, Vicho shows up. I'm like, get a second truck now. They literally went through three trucks that whole day. I mean, they crushed. The fact that people canceled was shocking to me. Like it's a grand opening, right? And then at Benny Boy, same thing. I'm like, Chelsea, tell everyone there to triple up for like the week, for the week. And then they had this barbecue place, which was, I mean fire, food is incredible. They sold out. And I'm like, why are you doing that? Like I went to talk to him like, don't do that. He's like, I underestimated it. I'm like, why would you do that? I'm like, look at this, look around. This is not, we're not messing around. I'm not messing around Chelsea. No one's messing around here.  Cause it really bothers me. It also takes back from the experience. Now you have customers and like, I don't think that's cool. Like I don't think selling out when I can smell the food is cool. Selling out in fashion, cool. Selling out when I can smell the food and I can see the owner. I think it's more, it's more like, dude, you can make more money. Like why are we doing that? Yeah, you left that on the table. So for me, like, dude, we're going through a bunch of meat. Like in one weekend, we'll probably go through like 500 pounds, right? That's crazy. It's crazy. It's ridiculous. So I'm saying like, we bring the noise wherever we go. So even on like, in front of a black party right there in Highland Park, we're bringing the noise. That's why when we have 500 people, when we're serving 500 people, we have like six, seven liters of guac. It's crazy that we have, yeah. So we're going through a lot and that's why it's a lot of work. I'm here to do it. I'm here to do the hard stuff. I'm here to do the stuff that no one wants to do. I love it. That way, you know, eventually I'll reap the benefits that. You will. Yeah. I'm not going to stop. I'm definitely not going to stop. I don't stop. I keep on going, bro. I wake up early and go to see Blake. Sometimes, you know, I don't even eat, but I'll do it again the next day. I love it.  Guess what? I'm here, baby. If I need to get there two hours earlier, then I will. Yeah, that's it. That's the game. Entrepreneurship made simple by Vic. Exactly, man. I'm hungry. You want to eat, baby? You want to eat? Go and eat. Life's easy. I think people just make it hard, right? Life's easy. You either do it or you don't. Fact. It's like sales.  Yeah, you do it. Or you don't eat. I mean, I don't. Up to you. Up to you how bad you want it. Yeah, so that's what we're doing now. I appreciate you, Mac. Appreciate you, man. Tell everyone where they can find you, man. You can find us at Highland Park. Where can't you find him? You know? Yeah. You find us on Instagram. Everyone. Maybe at Tacos, Los Angeles. It's probably the best way to follow us. I put everything on Instagram. Our hours of operation, where we'll be. But for the most part, we'll be in Highland Park for the near future until we get that restaurant open. I think I'm going to open up another spot. But like I said, as far as restaurants, there's a bunch of buildings that have in mind, but I want to stick to the plan. Highland Park's got to come first. Highland Park's got to come first. I love the commitment. Because yeah, it has to be like. You got to plan the flight. Yeah. Yeah. So I say via Tacos, I wanted to be like, like the in and out of Tacos. That's what I've said before. So I wanted to be like a private family on franchise. Nice. Like Porto's. Yeah, something like that. So I plan on it.  But I want the trunk of the tree to be based in Highland Park. And then, you know, the branch over here, branch over here, wherever you want to go. You want to go to Santa Monica. You want to do Venice. You want to do downtown. The base, the trunk has to be rooted in Highland Park. I love it. Smart. Yeah. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, man, it was a pleasure. Thank you guys for having me. Hey you. Yeah, you listening. Thank you so much for making it to the end of the episode. If you just can't get enough, check out our subscription on Apple Podcasts. For only $4.99 a month, you can listen to the full-length, uncut, unedited podcast episodes. We're giving out life-changing advice for less than the price of your morning coffee. 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Hey everybody, welcome back today to RetroTech. I'm very excited to talk to you a little bit more in depth first off about this monitor we're looking at today, the Sony PVM20L5. Now this does represent the very best professional video monitor that Sony made in the CRT format, that being again the PVM20L5 high resolution Trinitron monitor. Now the specific reason that this 20 inch CRT reigns supreme over all the other PVMs is the fact that it will do a lot of different video signals from 240p and 480i up to even other signals like 480p, 720p, 1080i. Now what we've got on the screen right now is 480p through Xbox, the original Xbox in component and the back main input on the monitor. Now the monitor will also accept inputs in the form of composites as video and then RGB sync which can be shared over that single component line and then there is an expansion bay on the back of this monitor that allows for an additional card to be inserted and that way you can have an additional input for something like a secondary switchable RGB slash component input with something like a BKM129X. But again just one of the greatest examples of what Sony could do in the early 2000s. This was kind of a step up as far as a lot of the performance would have compared to a lot of the earlier Sony PVMs and even the one right before this which would have been the 20M4U that would have been the more superior broadcast and production level CRT that wasn't a BVM. Now the one thing you should note is that when it switches from a analog video signal into one of the 720p or 1080i it is going to go into a 16x9 mode and shrink the screen down and when it does that you will lose 200 lines of resolution so it does go down to a 600 TV line tube and then sometimes when you do that you will notice that the red green and blue vertical blanking lines at the top of the screen will show. Now that is normal and it's standard for that to happen so don't think there's something wrong with your monitor if that is showing but it will show in that 16x9 format. Other than that the monitor weighs right at 60 pounds. It also does accept AC current from different regions so it will go from 100 up to 240 volts and it could do 50 or 60 Hertz. It can show NTSC video formats as well as PAL video formats without any additional hardware needed and it does have a mono audio speaker on board. That one's actually built into the bottom of this monitor which is not a great design anyway. That's more of just a test speaker. The monitor actually points directly down so if you don't have any extended or extension feet on the bottom of the CRT then you won't actually get a good sound at all from this single speaker because it's just bouncing back into itself and coming back out the sides. Now some of the problems with this monitor are the fact that it was still a PVM so there's still some plastic inside and again another interesting design feature is there are a lot of air holes on the sides and the top of the CRT for it to breathe but then it's got about a two or three inch gap where it's solid along the entire bottom just about and so what tends to happen is this one for example is from 2002 or 2004 so after 16 or 17 years and it never getting any servicing dust will get into these openings. It will land on parts in the board and eventually it builds up so bad in this particular monitor just because there's no way for that dust really to get up and out unless you clean it out and open the shell and get it off and clean it out. Let's go ahead and turn it off and I'm going to show you the proper way to tear this down so that you don't waste a lot of time or risk damaging parts that are very hard to replace on the shell of the monitor which is a very common thing and a mistake to do. So let's go ahead now we'll start tear it down and we'll look inside and see exactly what looks like inside of this one because I've not even opened this one myself yet. A couple of quick notes here before we completely shut everything off so whatever video format you're putting into the monitor it'll automatically switch to that for example right now the Xbox main menu is actually in 480i so if I put a game in and load it up it should automatically kick into a higher resolution if the game supports it so a lot of the games automatically should kick right into 480p and the monitor should click off in a second after the loading screen or it sounds like it clicks off but it just jumps up to 480 60p so just so you know that it will automatically change over into those formats there's nothing you have to do to the monitor itself one more thing if I turn everything off to the monitor and I pull up the menu depending on what the format I just put into the monitor that's what the menu can come out in so the monitor still it might be in 480p mode because the menu looks a lot more stable but sometimes it'll be in 480i and what happens then is sometimes it'll get flickery and jump around a little bit that is completely normal do not overreact and worry if your monitor does jump around a bit on the the service menu because again if it's in 240p it'll try to jump back to 480i or 480p I can't tell exactly what the menu is trying to do specifically but it doesn't want to be in 240p on this monitor so tries to jump into the other one so it'll flicker a lot but you can still look at it use it and read it and then when you put your signal back into it it should correct itself so if you pull the menu up with the signal actually on it shouldn't be as jumpy all right let's go ahead now and tear down our monitor you're looking at the back side of the pvm and really to tear it down initially we're only going to need one tool and that is a civil Phillips head screwdriver like the one I have here and another thing that you might want to have is some kind of container or something that you can keep the screws in here I like these containers these are just for fishing but they have a lot of compartments in them so I can separate the screws into each compartment that way I'll remember which ones to put in which compartment now one of the most common mistakes when disassembling this monitor and really any pvm or bvm that's in this style it's really only pvms for the most part there are a couple that are bvms that are designed like this but you'll notice that each one of the sides of the shell where the shell on the top the metal meets the plastic there are these plastic rivets now these plastic rivets are very pesky you can actually safely remove them if you could split them in half you'll notice there's a way to split them in half and you pull it slightly you don't pull it all the way out but I've shown that before sometimes when I've had to clean monitors but the problem with doing that is these tend to snap because again they're 16 to 20 year old plastic and unfortunately these are pretty unique and it's very difficult I've never found an actual good replacement for it that wasn't an original stock product so you'll have to go find it from another pvm more than likely if you break yours so 99.9 percent of the time we don't even need to mess with these rivets at all especially if we're getting in here and we're going to do something with the pvm for adjustment if you look at the sides of these monitors you'll notice that there are three chrome screws on each side on the major part of the shell we're not worried about the bottom one down here on this little plate because that's not important but what we can do is go ahead and take these chrome screws out so there's three on this side and then there is no difference on these three screws and then the three screws on the other side so all six of these screws are the same so you don't need to worry about saving them for any reason and not having to put them with the others where some of these other screws will be different sizes on the back plate you'll see that the second but this is a standard design for these 20 inch monitors just almost all of them had these six chrome screws in them there are some other models like the 14 and 20 l2s that went a little overboard and added a couple of chrome screws to it for some reason now you'll notice too when you get back here now we've removed those six screws the only thing we have to do is get the screws off the back here and they're actually labeled with arrows there's four of them and that's it no more maybe different on other monitors if you have a different size one the 14 inch may have more screws in it but not this one just four on the back and so we'll loosen those the two over here on the other side and so those actually aren't different either so now that is really all the screws that we need to remove here and what we can do now is is remove the shell now normally you should stand behind where I'm at where your camera view is but to try to make this easier to see I will stand on this side and work on this thing just trying to wiggle it loose again who knows when the last time this was even opened just pull back back back and then up like that and then you see we're able to leave that shell in a solid piece right here and then we don't have to worry about these rivets we can leave it all in one solid piece like this and just put it out of the way for now and concentrate on the back of our monitor and this is great it's going to show you exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned the dust built up in the bottom because this plate down here while there's a lot of plastic inside of here on this monitor these disarm and piece right here is plastic and so is this piece and then there's a couple other bracers in here that are plastic as well but the main bottom is actually metal probably aluminum or something but some kind of metal and so what happens is like I described earlier dust will build up in this and there's a bunch of dust in here so I'm going to grab this camera I'm going to take you a little bit closer and hopefully you'll be able to see exactly what I'm talking about here might have to bring some light additional light in but if we look down there might be difficult to see let's see if I can get a better angle okay so if I look down in here you'll just see an enormous amount of dust and especially this corner right here because if you look down here these are some of the more important components on here these ICs regulators they they can they what happens is these can short out and I believe it has a big thing to do with the amount of dust that can just build up in here because this isn't as bad as I've seen it I've seen it a lot worse if you go back and see some of the other ones we've worked on it's definitely not the worst but it at the least you need to come in here and clean this most importantly in here when you're concerned with your geometry that's one of the things we're going to be looking at on this monitor you're concerned with this board right here and this is your geometry block so not so much this board right here but the main board that it's attached to if you'll notice where my hand and finger are on the side there's a big heat sink with a much more regulators that generate a lot of heat here's a transformer here's a transformer some connectors large connectors going into the yoke and the power supply so this is going to be generating a lot of heat in some of these areas so these are capacitors we're going to want to take a look at and check but I will tell you that these are some of the highest components highest quality components available that Sony used inside this monitor for capacitors so we're going to be better off testing these capacitors rather than just running in here especially since there's no problems right now we'll want to run in here and test the capacitors and make sure that they're still have some life on them with some tools rather than just coming in here and doing cap kits because I've actually had monitors come out looking worse by changing the capacitors even with high quality replacements that we've ordered before but this is going to be one of the boards we're going to get out it could come out now so we'll go ahead now and start pulling it out we're just going to disconnect some of these things and then there's some screws on here that we need to be mindful of but but getting this out of the way is going to free up some space where we can inspect this board and then we can also get in here and clean off some of these areas around the flyback and this heat sink tube the power supply is going to be in the middle of that monitor also so there are again quite a few connections here we're going to disconnect a ground connection first if I get in there the good news is on this monitor we should be able to easily find where these connect back to you want to be careful when doing this though because sometimes this plastic can be extremely brittle and when it is the actual brace this brace that's moving it'll start to crack and fall apart when that happens you really have trouble trying to keep this board steady just working my way back now these larger connections do have spots on them to check for for for the releasing of the cable from the board I'm not sure why that one is always something you try come on I really don't want to deal with that so we're just going to move on we'll try to get this out of this frame before we do something to damage it so there's a screw there should be three screws for this frame one at the top again these are just philips head screws and the problem as you could tell with these pvms more than the bvms is they're difficult to get in and work around they're not as easy to service as the counterpart would be that being the d-series like a d20 d20 has got a lot more space in it and it's design is a lot more friendly for the service man so that's really appreciated I'm sure by sony tex and if you're getting one and you start working on of you realize just how much more user friendly or service friendly those bvms can be again I'm not sure why but this connection I mean it's being so stubborn I'm going to take it from the top it comes off the top of the yoke over here just unplugging it there I don't know why it's just giving me so much trouble I don't want to don't really need to worry about my goodness we're just going to leave it in there we don't need to worry about it there's not even a component that we'll be testing so just leave it in there but that's unusual I never really see them stick like that all right so that's as far as we're going to get into the monitor in today's video it's needing a thorough cleaning because there's quite a bit of dust and just nastiness built up inside of it so after this we're going to clean it off a little bit more and then we'll do some testing on the components on this board we'll also look at the main board we'll need to remove it so there'll be more tear down in the next video but the more important thing was making sure that you guys get the shell off your monitor without doing the unnecessary removal of those rivets on the shell that'll save you some headache and some time so just do it like that if you need to get inside your pvm for the rest of the video though I want to show you how much dust is in here so I'll let you just see a close camera view of that and then look for our servicing videos to come on the boards inside this monitor I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content


What I have wanted for my life is never going to be. And I don't say that to be a downer, a bummer, really a negative person. I say it because it's accurate. As a person who lives in a body that is in chronic pain with chronic illness and a leg that is missing that continues to have issues, the reason I say that out loud and I'm trying to look at dead in the eyes is because A, I think it's important to grieve it if you are someone in a similar position, but B, by actually acknowledging that, it allows us to reframe what a happy life looks like, what success or achievement, peace, happiness, whatever it is looks like for you.  So while I grieve the fact that I'm never gonna have a fully functional body, that I am gonna live in pain, that that is really, really hard to make peace with, I'm also working on reframing what my version of dream life looks like that is actually achievable.


This is stock number 9937. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used minivan headquarters. Today, we are checking out this superclean 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan GT. This vehicle has the award-winning 3.6-liter Pentastar V6 motor. From this HD video, you will be able to tell that this van is extremely clean all the way around inside and out. Octane Red Pearl is the color. You'll notice that it has the hideaway roof rack. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, or smartphone device, turn them on right now because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. Painted and polished alloy rims. Got Michelin Energy Saver 22565R17 tires on here. Right around half the tread on those tires. You get the blacked out headlight bezels. Front bumper is in okay shape. Headlight lenses are nice and clear. I didn't see any dents or dings on the hood. Passenger side fender, no scuffs or scrapes or dents or dings, and that passenger side rim is in nice shape. As you go down this side of the vehicle, you can see just how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. I didn't see any dents or dings down this side of the vehicle. This back rim is in nice shape as well. And for just everything here, that door slides open nicely. And you can see that this passenger side seat, nice shape, no rips or tears. And we got factory floor mats throughout in here. And then you press this button to close that door again. That has the stowing-go system, so those seats go into the floor. As we come around to the back of the vehicle, no major dents or cracks. The rear gate is in nice shape as well. This is a power lift gate. Back storage area is nice and clean. Those seats do fold into the floor. It does have the upgraded speakers with the factory subwoofer. You got your jack tools in there. And these seats, they go down really easy. I'll demonstrate how they work.  You can see they go down nice and flat. Second row goes into the floor as well, nice and flat.  And then to put that gate down, there's the button right here. You press that. It'll beep at you three times and then it'll come on down. See the back pillars there all in really nice shape. And down this side of the vehicle, just as clean as that passenger side. Back rim for full disclosures in nice shape. And I didn't see any dents or dings on those doors. It does come with the heated power mirrors.  You got the red stitching on there. There are no rips. There are no tears on the seats. Both of these seats are heated. You get a heated steering wheel as well. Driver side lumbar factory floor mats throughout. Power windows, power locks, power mirrors. What I like about the Grand Caravans, they still have the venting rear windows, which you can do from the driver's door here. And these second row windows roll down as well. We'll take a quick look inside here. And you can see the instrument cluster is nice and clean in that this van has 43,469 miles outside temperature and compass display as well as a digital speedometer. You get the heated leather wrap steering wheel cruise controls on the right. Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. And then on the back of the steering wheel, there are the audio controls. Speaking of the audio, you get the 430N radio, which comes with the factory navigation. This is also where your backup camera shows up. There's also a hard drive in this radio that you can put CDs in and download songs to. 28 gigs worth has an aux and a USB jack and to open the CD player you just go like so.  You get an econ mode. That's your hazard lights, 115 volt plug-in in the back. Then your stability control comes with the dual glove boxes, passenger side seat, no rips or tears on that. I don't believe this van's ever been smoked in. Smells very clean inside. You get these side window shades in the second row there, which are pretty neat. And the third row as well.  Map lights. And then up here is your home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood. This is a tilt and telescopic steering wheel and you do get auto headlamps as well. And to show you this side door works pretty nice as well. Second row seats are heated as well. Quad seating. And to get to that third row you can just put that down and it'll roll right up like so. Then it goes into the floor. When you do the stone go, third row seats by the way. Very clean as well. No rips or tears back here. It does have latch-child safety system back there as well. Then those side window shades are in back too. You can see how nice that is. Built right into the door. Person like to thank you for checking out the video today. Hopefully from this HD video you will have been able to tell just how clean this van is all the way around inside and out. Under the hood we have the 3.6 liter Pentastar V6 motor. Award-winning motor from Chrysler. Engine base very clean, runs very smooth. This van has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this one is 100% ready to go to see more pictures of this van or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers. You name it we got it go to our website www.summitauto.com Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summitauto.com. If you want to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this vehicle on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to help you with this super clean 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan GT. Thanks again.


Hello, I'm Tom Scherer. I'm an Extension Agricultural Engineer at North Coastal University. And we're at the Oaks Irrigation Field Day. And I'm going to ask to talk about irrigation during a drought. We're in the middle of a drought right now. Started late last year. We don't know how long it's going to go. And when it comes to irrigation, different things show up and problems show up with irrigation systems. So I'm going to cover some of those problems and some of the management. I titled my talk Irrigation Considerations in a Drought. And as my contact information there, as you can see on the screen, first off, when you talk about a drought, everybody should be concerned about their water sources. And on the screen here, I've got the map showing where the glacial drift aquifers in light blue are located throughout the state. And if I were to superimpose where the irrigation in the state is, most of it would be located on top of those light blue lines. The dark blue are the surface water systems. And we have a lot of irrigation that comes out of there, almost 50%. And if you don't know it, the State Water Commission has a large, large number of observation wells in all of the major glacial drift aquifers in the state. And they measure them periodically. Some are continuously monitored, some are not. But anyway, I checked them. And after this first year, actually our aquifer levels, probably because of the rains in late 2019, are actually at a pretty good high level. We're doing okay in terms of aquifers. They're not being depleted. But as this drought continues, the amount of pumping that takes place increases. And so there's going to be more of a strain on that. And the surface water systems obviously decrease in flow. And they can pose problems for intakes. So the irrigator has to be very conscious about their water supply and what's happening to it. But as of right now, I think most of our water supplies are in pretty good shape, especially the aquifers. The surface water systems, that's really dependent on the flow and rainfall amount. So some can actually get low. Here's another map showing the same thing. And I put this one in here because if you're a new irrigator looking to establish irrigation because of the drought, the green area is on this map. So where there's still open permits, you can obtain an irrigation water permit, although there might be some limitations. But the brown areas, the state water commission labeled them as poor because they're almost fully allocated for either rural water systems or irrigation or industrial use. So the competition for water in our aquifers has been increasing. So if you're a new irrigator, you really need to visit with the state water commission in your area to find out if they know what the water sources are and how hard it is to get a permit. So anyway, that kind of covers the basic water sources and what you need to be cognizant of during a drought. Now, it's been my experience over the last 40 years that when you get into drought, I got a picture here of a typical irrigation well goes up to the surface. Most of them in this area have a gravel pack around the casing. Casing can be metal or plastic. And then you have a screen where the water enters. And the problem is that even with normal pumping in good years, water entering through that screen and the gravel pack can slowly over time can tend to plug them. And when when the aquifers are fairly high, and irrigation demand is not as high when you got a let's say a normal or relatively wet year, these problems don't show up. But when you get to a dry year and you start pumping a lot more, this partial plugging starts to become a problem because the actual water table will drop because of the increased demand for the water, the aquifer levels. And so these the production during the critical time of the season, the growing season decreases. So what happens a lot of times over time, these screens can get plugged with either minerals or rust accumulation, or you can get iron bacteria on them. And so how do you take care of that?  It's probably a good time to visit in the off season with a well driller to have your system cleaned, jetted or chlorinated. It may be due to iron bacteria, maybe the mineral accumulation may be due to both. But if you don't take care of this problem and the drought continues into next year, this problem will get even worse. So the suggestion is to have your wells checked in the off season is the best time. And iron bacteria, it's always been a recommendation of mine. If you've got iron, if you see red on your center pivot, you should be chlorinating your well every year. That's about the only way you can really control and manage iron bacteria, otherwise it'll just keep building up and building up. Eventually it can plug up the motors, can plug up the well screen, can plug up the gravel packs surrounding the screen, and therefore it hinders any flow of water into it. And the next thing that I noticed during a drought is that a lot of center pivots, because they're out in the field, they're out of sight, out of mind, a lot of times the sprinkler packages are not taken care of. And during a drought, these streaks in the field as shown in this picture start to show up. And as you'll notice, these are right near the pivot point. And a lot of times, and this pivot is actually supplied by a surface water system, the Cheyenne River. And the Cheyenne has a lot of floating debris, probably during the season it drops. And typically the first nozzles that it'll plug or hinder water coming out is right near the pivot point. So this is a real good graphic. But you can see streaking throughout this field, which may indicate that the sprinkler package is not quite right for the flow rate. There may be several reasons to have this, but anybody that's been around irrigation knows that during a drought, these problems with sprinklers start to show up. So what do you do? Well, if you see this, and sometimes this shows up in your, if you've got a yield monitor on your combine, this starts to show up. So what do you do is in the off season you visualize your irrigation dealer and you look at what it would take to renozzle that pivot to check it out. But the easiest thing you can do is start to pivot up, run water through it and just walk the full length of it. And a lot of times you can identify where there's mechanical problems where sprinklers are not operating properly or they're broken or the pressure regulators are leaking. I walked a lot of them and you can visibly pick out individual sprinklers and or boots on towers that are leaking that can contribute to these types of problems. So during a drought, I would say if you see this type of action on your center pivot, I would visit with your irrigation dealer to see about what it would take to renozzle your pivot. But in order to do that, you need a pretty good accurate reading of the flow rate. So this is one of our pivots up at Carrington, and this is the same sprinkler head. You can see on the left, that was what it looked like in 1999 was put on. And on the right is that same sprinkler head. And when I looked at this one operating, it was turning, wasn't turning very well. There were some leaks out of the pressure regulator. This one should have been replaced. The normal life of a sprinkler head is really seven to eight years in our environment because regulators where that blue and that gray joined together, that they were water will leak out there if the diaphragm inside starts to become degraded. So if you got old sprinkler heads, now is a good time before next year to make sure that they're in good work and order. And what happens if your sprinkler package isn't right? This is, we did a can test. As you can see, I'm standing out in a field where we put out a bunch of cans, ran a pivot over the top, we catch it and we measure the amount. We know from what's dialed in at the pivot about how much should be applied. And then we measure it along there. And you can see that we had some areas that were under irrigated and some areas that were over irrigated. And I could pick those out just walking it when it was operating. You could actually see where that under irrigated area, the sprinklers are too far apart. When they put those drops on, they're actually too far apart. They should be closer together. In the over irrigated area, the nozzles were worn. So it's very important, especially during the drought, that you don't have these areas here because you're losing yield. And the over irrigated area, the yield there is not going to necessarily make up for what's under irrigated. If you really want to see how this can test was done, you can go to the end of issue extension YouTube channel. You can do a search on the internet for YouTube in the issue extension uniformity and it'll take you to this video and you'll be able to, it's only about a six, six and a half minute video, but it'll show you how the can test was done and how we measured it and even pointed out some of the sprinkler problems. And of course, I've mentioned this before, but typically during a drought, if you're on a well, the flow rate will drop because the static water level can drop or the water table, you're lifting the water higher, the pump may be worn because of age. Any number of the screen is partially plugged. And if you don't have a good, accurate working flow meter, you don't know how much you're pumping. Along with that, if you don't have good pressure gauges and they're relatively inexpensive, every pivot should have new pressure gauges every other year because they can wear out. But the only way you really know if the operation is, if the system is performing is you got to have an accurate reading of the pressure at either at the pivot point or at the pump. And you got to have an accurate flow meter. Now, flow meters are fairly expensive. And I've recommended for years that as you see the one on the left, that one is to cut a hole in the pipe and this fits into it.  Because the freeze thought cycles really wears out the gearing on these propellometers. But just for a drought, people really should be looking at these devices. They provide a lot of useful information, especially when competition for water and pumping really starts in July and August. So the last thing I want to talk about is the agricultural water year.  So I always talk about the agricultural water use starts in October. So on October 1st, and whenever you get a killing frost, and it's usually around October 1st, when you kill all the plants, there's nothing using water out of the soil. So any rain or snow that you accumulate between that killing frost and when the frost goes out in April, a lot of that might run off, but a lot of it might infiltrate during the fall and the spring. And that's the water that contributes to your soil. So hopefully most years, even in drought years, we may go in where the root zone actually has is at near field capacity or the maximum can hold for plant use. So when you look at the short season crops, like wheat, barley, oats, canola, they use a lot of water and their peak water use is usually around the first part of July and then starts to taper off. And typically we don't irrigate these crops because there's enough soil moisture that we get with rainfall during the season. It's these long season crops like potatoes, corn, soybeans, alfalfa, that's where the problem comes in. So this blue line I just put on there is represents the average rainfall we get through those months in most of North Dakota on an average year if there is such a thing. But anyway, so if you look at this area, that is the time when irrigation pays off is in that hatched area that I put on there because that's when we're not getting enough rain to supplement the peak water use of the crops. So what that tells you is that these are the time periods between usually July 1st and September 1st is when we need irrigation. That is when we get the most benefit. So this is usually true. We usually design for six gallons a minute per acre on a standard center pivot. So on a quarter section pivot, we look to have around 800 gallons a minute. And if you can get, if your water source will provide that, if you're growing potatoes, they like to have seven gallons a minute per acre. And as you can see on here, this is a seasonal corn water use for one year in 2012, which was a dry year. So that crop water use in July, as you can see, anything above that six gallon a minute line is where the irrigation system cannot supply the daily water demand of the crop. So you can see there's some peaks and valleys there. And those are the times when you get, you can get behind with a pivot. So hopefully you got some cool periods that come in. But some years you don't get those and you can have a long period there where you don't keep up seven gallon a minute. You can see that you got less of those those periods when you can't keep up. If you have five gallons a minute, that's even lower. That's about supplies about 2.2 inches per day. Well, now you can see that if you got less water, what do you do? Well, you probably have to start irrigating earlier if you only got five gallons a minute per acre. And you got to store it in the soil. So you got to watch you got to manage your irrigation water much more closer when you get less water. Some other options is if you know you have a low water use on your pivot, you might plant half the pivot to an early season crop, such as wheat or something like that, and the other half to corn. That way you're when you get to the high water use period, you've got enough water to water that that long season crop adequately. So those are just some suggestions for irrigation in a drought. So kind of a summary, if you suspect well problems, have it checked in the off season. It may need chlorination, it may need cleaning, depending on how old it is. If you notice crop streaks this year, maybe it's time to replace or in nozzle sprinkler package. If you have a low volume well, you might have to start considering starting irrigating earlier to maintain soil moisture or split the field and go with a short season crop as opposed and half to a long season crop. And a number of irrigators have done that. Now just remember that July and August is the highest crop water use period, but most research has shown that the most bank of your buck regarding yield is going to occur if you can keep your crop irrigated usually after the 4th of July up until the end of August. If you can keep it well watered, you're going to maximize your yield.


Hi, my name is Steven Gallagher and this is my compatriot, Mohan Bhattu, the International Man of Mystery. And we are here to talk to you today about Apple. So what is Apple? Apple is a business tool used to create spreadsheets and to work with... What are you talking about? That's Excel. Wow. It's Apple. Okay. Hold on, hold on. All right. So Apple is a prize awarded every year by an international panel of scientists. No. That's noble. Noble prize. You already changed the title of the talk. Come on. All right, all right, all right. Okay. So Apple is a member of the resistance against the fascist organizations of the world. No, no, no, no. That's rebel. Ah! Did you even prepare for this talk? Okay. I'm not going to answer that. All right, so Apple actually is all of these things in a way. There are many, many businesses out there that rely on the extra packages that the Fedora Project provides on top of Red Hat Enterprise and Linux and CentOS and the like. And in many ways, we could say that we deserve the Nobel Prize for all of the advances that we've helped enable in the scientific fields, the scientific Linux and CERN, all our users, very heavy users of Apple. And lastly, of course, being part of Fedora, Apple is naturally part of the rebellion against the proprietary empires of the world. Pause for applause. So how many people here have heard of this thing, REL8? Anybody? Nobody? Okay. We'll talk about that down the hall in a little while. You can go to that. But unfortunately, you're going to be lost. So last spring, Red Hat, you know, it was part of the daily news cycle, revealed this new thing, REL8, and, you know, it was just REL7 with the number increased, right? Right? No? Oh, that's right. It was really different in just about every way from REL7 that, honestly, we probably should have talked, we should have considered changing the name. So why don't we talk, why don't you talk a little bit about the differences here? Yeah. So, as Stephen here is saying, the REL7 and REL8 are really different. And even the Apple 7 and Apple 8 are based upon REL7 and REL8 respectively. So when Apple 8 was set up, which was like five years ago, the people who did the set up is not actually working in this area. So it was not very much documented. We need to figure out on our own, like how it was set up and how can we do it or replicate it in a way so that we can set it up for Apple 8. So that was a big challenge to start with. And then REL has modules. So yeah, I'm sure whoever came up with that idea knew what they were doing. Absolutely without question. Moving on. Then, so obviously modules are different. They are like sort of a virtual repose. So we never had a set up for Apple, which has modules has in it and like separate virtual repose because Apple always had a quantity to one repo as it will do it. So to figure it out, it was a challenge. And then we wanted to add Apple Playground. So it's a place where maintainers can play with Apple. You know, you're going to explain more on that later on. But this is another thing that we added. It's sort of a new release. And then there is, when you try to start working on Apple in staging, it was not actually as good as production. And there are a lot of things that are missing, a lot of services that are running the whole versions and a lot of data is missing. So we have... It had not been synced in what, like, five months. So it did not look anything like the production repo and the environment. And it was... Yeah, that was fun. Fun. Yeah. So we need to tweak around and finally get to a stage where we can just build something in staging. And then, as I initially said, there was not much documentation. The people are not around, so it's like a lot of trial and errors. Let's try this thing and see if it works. It didn't. Let's try another thing. Let's flip this switch over here. Oh, no, no, that electrocuted smooch. Try this one. No, no, no. That was Kevin. A lot of trial and errors. And, you know, it took some time to figure it out. So and now I want to talk about Apple Playground first because how we did the setup and the changes that we made, which we are going to explain in the next slide, is going to apply for the Playground as well. Apple Playground is sort of raw hide for Apple 8. So why we did this? There are like two reasons. One is we wanted to provide a place where maintenance can test things just like as in raw hide and don't want, don't have to wait like 14 years or so to get it into the build route and start building other packages on top of it. So this will help them test their stuff right away and that's one of the reason. And the other reason is Apple, Apple, to start with, it doesn't have any RPMs to build against. And it will be harder for people who are maintaining Apple packages to test their things because none of the packages are available in the build route. So and again, the 14 days turn around time will kick in. So we decided to have something like a playground where people can test their things and their builds will be ideally available and be prepared whenever the other dependency packages are available in the stable report. And another major part of the playground is it's meant to be a staging area too for big changes, which in Apple 8 we're going to allow large changes to land where we haven't in the past, but they'll have to land at a minor release boundary. So if you want to bring in the newest version of KDE, for example, you might build it in Playground and then when RHEL 8.2 lands, then you can merge it into the stable repo at that time. So Apple 8 Playground is in its own release and it has its own build route. We run Composers Nightly, which will be shipped and nobody can back to you. So among the set of things that we needed to deal with RHEL 8 was the fact that we now have this app stream repository or application streams. And unlike RHEL 7, which basically had one big pile of RPMs and you always just took whatever the highest number was, with RHEL 8 we now carry multiple different versions of things, sometimes higher versions, sometimes lower versions. And our tooling in Koji was not equipped to deal with that. And so what we needed to do was we needed to find a way to take the content that was published by Red Hat and then break it up because modules themselves are basically virtual repos sitting inside a single repo. So what we did was we took that repo, all of its metadata, and then broke it up into individual repos, one for every module and then one for all the stuff that wasn't in a module. And then we collected the set of things that we knew that needed to be in the build root, squished them back together, and stuffed that into a specialized build root for Apple. And the tool that we did that was called Grubby Splitter. Then another piece that we needed to make some changes to Koji to be able to handle generating a build root that may contain, let me start over, traditionally Koji would, when generating a build root, perform a bunch of sanity checks and make sure and deduplication and remove more than one copy of a package with a given name and all of these things interfere with the idea of actually sticking modules into the content. So we had to create what we called Koji Bear Mode to just say, this is your input, it all needs to be there. Just don't touch it. So we sent Mike McLean these nice warm arm warmers and he got right to work. The last part of the puzzle for dealing with the AppStream data was that once we had constructed this build root, we had to be able to apply it on top of a CH root in Mock or a container image that was in fact using the default module streams of this content. And because this new Koji build root repo was not modular and DNF has failsafe capabilities to protect you from accidentally installing a higher version of a non-modular RPM on top of a module that you have selected, such as if you pulled in a third party repo and it happens to be offering a package that has a higher version or you have a partial repo sync and you're missing the metadata, this failsafe prevented that from happening. So we also have a feature called module hot fixes, which you can set on a particular repo that says this repo is specifically allowed to override modular content and it's intended for in rel production environments to be able to ship out an emergency fix to a customer without having to do a full module generation until the next scheduled update cycle. So hot fixes. And once that is figured out, it's much easier to set up the Koji set of things with Koji tags and build roots and targets. It's easier. But then there is this question about the playground, how the branches are requested for that. So we decided to use a thing called packages.config and test grid branches. How many of you have ever used or known about packages.config in test grid? No one. Nobody. That's great. So I know a lot of you, how many people are maintaining packages in Fedora? Okay, yes. So one of the pain points in maintaining packages in Fedora is like you have to build package builds for each and every release going into different branches, right? So there is this packages.cfg file which will allow you to mention the releases that you want to build against. And once you submit for package build, it will look at this package.config file and it will build for all the releases. Whatever you specify in the package.config. So you don't have to switch branches and do changes and stuff like that. As long as they're all going to plan to build from the same grid commit, you might as well just build just one command. So we wanted to use that feature to build for Appalach Playground. So we have to make the changes in Fed package. Whenever they request Appalach branch, it should automatically request Appalach Playground and as well as it should handle creating the package.config file in Appalach branch because we want people to build against Appalach Playground as well when they submit it into Appalach because not many people will be concentrating on Playground. And the other thing to note is that when you want to separate them, when something is going to go into Playground for experimental purposes, all you have to do is remove that file and then you can commit to each of them separately. And to handle that part of things, we have to tweak FedS commitment, which actually processes the ticket. So we tweak that to create all these files and as well as create the branches. And so in Apple 8.0, we were able to build against modular content from the relapse streams, but we weren't able to actually have people build modules themselves for Apple 8. So now in 8.1, we've finally gotten through some of these hurdles and Mohan will talk a little bit about the configuration issues we had to face with that in bed. But at this point, it is possible to build modules for Apple and in fact it is now the default if you are building a package against Fedora, it will also build it against Apple 8.  Thank you. Thank you. Stop. What about Apple 8.0 Playground modules? That's still a bit of a work in progress. It turns out that there's a little bit of difficulty in generating modules specifically for Apple 8.0 Playground. But it's also probably less important because you can always generate a stream for Apple 8.0 Standard that is more less stable shall we say and play with that and just make it and just allow people to opt into that. So it's probably not that big a deal but we are working to try and figure out how we can get it to also generate Playground. Probably by Raleigh, Dr. Dane. Yeah, probably around Raleigh 3. In conclusion, computers were a mistake. Also, don't trust a remote runner. If you have questions, you may direct them at this man. But seriously, we actually, we had planned this, we had put in this talk for a half hour segment and we were told we were getting half hour segment and then the schedule came out and we had an hour segment. So we're going to just blame him that his 15 minute portion of this talk was supposed to be now. Yeah, he was supposed to talk about more about Grobb's platter and he did actual set up on that thing. So he has more pain points on that. But you were going to go into a bit of detail about the configuration changes that we needed for... Oh, it's actually completed that. Yeah, we talked about that. A lot of changes. That was very vague. The configuration changes that I had to make in the problem side of things is the changes related to both the and how it works for Apple 8 and as well as the modules. Because as we were saying, we never actually enable modules from Apple side of things. So those are the biggest changes that we have to make and then how we sync them for the mirror manager side of things. That's another challenge. And the Composers. We never actually did Apple Composers nightly. So initially we started with Apple 8 Composers just with our RPMs but then we added Apple 8 modules so we have to add that as well. But those are something that are related to relevant side of things. Unless if you have more questions regarding technicality into that, we can... Why don't we open the floor up to general questions? I'm sure that you have some. I thought you have some. Yes. Sorry, the question was can I opt out of making Apple 8 modules? Yes, you can. You have to specify in your module medical. Sorry? It's funny that the person who asked that question was in fact one of the module team leads. I believe he is just being a bit wise. Sure. It's a common question he says. He was asking it by proxy.  What about switching from module back to RPMs? Okay, starting with the hard questions. I like this guy. The question was what about switching back to RPMs from modules? The short answer is that right now that is a limitation in the technology that is being worked on. We are probably going to need new metadata for it and so we're going to need to make some changes to DNF to accommodate it. This is something that we don't just want. It is an absolute critical requirement and it will be resolved, but it isn't today. Yes. That's why I was not asking. I remember that when I was working with Apple, there used to be a problem that sometimes there was a newer version of a software that was in route. Somebody actually knew that. How do you know that situation now with modules? How do you make sure you have questions? Okay, so the question was sometimes there would be periods where Apple would have a newer version of an RPM than was available in RHEL. Usually that only happened over a short period and it was usually a result of miscommunication. What would end up happening is that RHEL would freeze at a certain point not let the maintainer in Apple know and then they would do a release that ended up having a higher one. Then usually what would happen is that we would end up just blocking and removing it from the Apple repositories. Today... If something like that happens, they will come back to release engineering and ask us like, hey, this is wrong. Then we will go back. Then we will block it in Koji. But that doesn't happen often. Usually communication is better than that. Also, one of the things that modularity is going to give us that's really nice is the fact that Apple can now start shipping module streams that are not available in RHEL of the same software. They can ship it even if it's in a RHEL RPM as opposed to a RHEL module. We now finally have the ability in Apple to say, yeah, I want to ship something newer than RHEL. Before we just had to say, you can't do that because you might break their system. Now they will at least have the opportunity to opt into that if they are willing to do so. The comment from Steven Tweedy was that modules override non-modular content. So you can build a module to replace anything that is in RHEL whether or not it was in a module in RHEL. You see that there will be a situation where migration of RHEL that Apple can ship possible. That means you can start something from Apple that you are unsupported. And then they will support migrations of system version of RHEL. I'm going to try to rephrase your question. So are you talking about system upgrades? Okay, so the upgrade process is still to be determined. Upgrades from something like RHEL 8 to a presumed RHEL 9 or 10 or whatever they decide to call it. That will largely be done in the realm of LEAP, which may in fact, that's one thing we should keep in mind is maybe we can have it just say, you know, yum disable any module that is in our whitelist. Do the upgrade and then see if you can turn them back on. If you can, great, if you can't, they can deal with it then. But that's a hypothetical. I haven't given that any thought more than that question, than since you asked that question. System. And they hurt, because the content streams for the patients and the models are not the same life cycle as your major release. So it just changes the nature of the problem slightly. It doesn't really introduce some substantially new problems, but we are looking to try to make it more seamless to do. So do I get that assumption wouldn't be that you would have like one person to turn it over, like you can relate to the real version itself. Yes. The source code is not related to the real version, but the boundaries are still built for this version. Yeah. I imagine probably none of that got onto the mic and I apologize, but I can't, I don't think I can re-create it all, so. Ideally, we would like that. Okay, I'm going to try and do a very quick summary. Steven said a lot of things that were right. Which honestly, everybody already knew. But, okay. So one of the things that modules help with is that we are going to be able, down the road, to be able to say, to build the same module for Fedora 29 and 31 and for REL 8 and REL 9 from the same git commit essentially, same exact source starting point. And then on upgrades, it should be able to just say, okay, give me the version of the same stream I have selected that matches the system to which I am upgrading. Doing that for REL is a major requirement and it's absolutely going to be done in advance of whatever the next new major release is called. With Apple, that'll probably have to be on Apple's side to make sure it works. And that will probably almost certainly trail the REL release by some months. Did I see a hand over there? We got time. Nothing but. You sir look like you have a question to ask me. Do you want me to ask a question? I do. I actually did have a question. So, do you have any policy guidance or guidelines so that if an Apple contributor says, oh, I'm going to module the rise of my stuff to kind of guide them to make sure that they understand the benefits of why and when to use modularity versus I'm just giving myself a little extra work and there's no real value. So, and also clarifying expectations, if you build a module, here's what we expect of you to maintain or compatibility and true upgrades, stuff like that. So, to get that in a nutshell, do we have packaging guidelines and advice to give potential packages of modules in Apple for when is building it as a module the right choice? When is it not optimal? That's okay. And if you do so, what are the trade-offs? What are you going to have to do to maintain it? What are your guarantees regarding its life cycle and so on? Some of that exists today. We're adding more as questions get asked because being engineers and experts of the technology, we're not always the right people to figure out what do you need to know to get it done. So, every time somebody comes to us with a question, we're adding to the docs at docs.fadoraproject.org under the modularity sections. Brian, the question was if I want to build modules in Apple, when do I get the tools to build it locally in my personal machine before I build it in Apple? Do you have them? They exist today. We have the ability to run the module build service in offline local only mode. You have to pre-cache the build-root stuff, but you can build it locally. It is not yet, MBS is not yet available in Apple itself, but you can build it from Fedora. And also, if anyone's interested, the set of steps necessary to accomplish that is actually not that high. I wrote a blog post about how you can actually fake it without any special tools, just the traditional RPM tools, and create repo stuff. So, I can link that to you later if you're interested. On this network, I'm not doing a live demo. We are lucky enough that Slides.com worked. Well, if there are no questions, Mike, you look like you have several, actually. Thank you. We have a question. Are there any plans for CentOS Stream and Apple? Plans is a strong word. My best guess is that CentOS Stream is going to end up looking fairly similar to what REL does. So, once we figure out the playground situation, it'll probably be the same solution that would allow us to just add a new platform that builds against CentOS Stream as well.


Peat is a soil-like material made up of decomposed plant matter found in water-saturated environments around the world. From the Arctic to the tropics, these peatlands act as giant carbon sinks, storing enormous amounts of organic matter. In the tropics, peat accumulates in dome-shaped mounds that can reach kilometers across and 10 or more meters high. Removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis in trees, this carbon can be preserved for thousands of years. But human disturbance by fire and drainage for agriculture is now causing re-emission at an unprecedented rate. This is especially true in tropical Asia. Because peat accumulation occurs via waterlogging of plant remains, which quickly degrade in the presence of oxygen, its deposition is determined in part by the proportion of time exposed to air. And this, in turn, is driven by the depth of the water table, which rises and falls with rainfall and discharge from the peatland into rivers. When the water table is high, degradation is inhibited by a lack of oxygen and peat accumulates. When the water table is low, oxygen enters the peat, enabling microbial oxidation, and the organic material is converted into carbon dioxide. To better understand how tropical peatland growth and loss and the carbon fluxes that accompany these changes are controlled by climate, sea level and drainage networks, an international team of researchers set out to develop a quantitative model of these dynamic processes. Travelling to Brunei, Jerusalem on the island of Borneo, the team identified a field site within a pristine peat swamp, one of the last protected tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia, where current processes affecting peat accumulation approximate long-term developmental processes. Taking numerous measurements, they characterized fine and large-scale morphology, groundwater flow and carbon balance in this area. These data were combined to create a mathematical model, which was then used to investigate carbon storage in the peatland. The model showed that the pattern of rainfall and the permeability of peat together determine a particular curvature of the peat mounds that defines the amount of naturally sequestered carbon stored over time. Using this principle, the research team calculated the long-term carbon dioxide emissions in tropical peatlands driven by changes in climate and drainage. The results suggest that fluctuations in net precipitation reduce long-term accumulation of peat in these systems. This means that the greater seasonality projected by climate models could lead to increased carbon dioxide emissions instead of sequestration from otherwise undisturbed peat swamps. Though natural carbon sinks, peatlands around the world may become sources of carbon dioxide if current trends continue.


Good morning, everyone. It's a beautiful Sunday morning here in Pasco County. We are out at the Robert Breeze Memorial Park Which is also known as like keys green key beach green key beach And we're here with the Jeep unit and we are partnering with salty soul foundation And they regularly do beach cleanups all across the state in different ways They do like triathlons and gallows and all different things to go ahead and clean up our waterways and remove plastic Because we all know how big of an issue that is so Today they partnered up with us. So, you know, corporate Madden is here You know leading the whole Jeep unit out here to clean up this area and it's a really beautiful thing that they are doing So we may speak to someone with salty soul later But I'm just gonna show you guys a bit of the area some of our volunteers They're helping out and it's just gonna be a really nice morning So if you guys ever want any information on how you can volunteer even if you don't have a Jeep I will go ahead and put that below in the description. So I'll see you guys in a minute I have the pleasure of on our YouTube channel John Helms along with Mary Helms Founders of the Salty Soul Foundation Absolutely love that and what is the salty soul foundation? We are a 501c3 organization that goes around the state of Florida and does beach cleanups once a month I absolutely love that. How long have you guys been doing all of this? We've been doing it now for three years Okay Officially as a 501c3 this year. Oh, that's really exciting though move progress 2019 was the year of all of that What have been some of your Biggest highlights of you know having the foundation Like your favorite, I don't know like your favorite clean up, you know Well, we the first cleanup we did we had eight volunteers two of them being us And small but mighty small but mighty and January of last year We had 235 That's impressive. Oh, that's incredible. Okay, so how can can anyone Assist you guys or find you to help volunteer? Is there like an application process or anything? You can find us on any social media platform. It's at Salty Soul FL that is the the foundation and We post our events on Facebook as well as use event right or tickets. Awesome. That is Like I said, it's typically the second Saturday of every month. Okay, every once a while we'll take a month off You have to if life happens. Awesome. So just so you all of you know I will link everything in the description below for you guys But I think it's a beautiful thing that you guys are doing and I absolutely love it. Thank you to you Are you doing today? I'm great. I love that. I'm great. Thank you. What are you out here doing today? We're out here picking up the trash here at the beach trying to beautify beautify things and keep these animals safe too Absolutely. Love that. Is this your first time ever doing a beach cleanup beach cleanup? Yes. Yes How long have you been volunteering with the Jeep unit going on two years two years? Do you have a Jeep as well? Oh, yes, I do. Yes. Is it like one of the things that you love like your favorite car ever? So I feel like it's a it's a combination of having a Jeep loving it getting help the community And you're out here on this beautiful Sunday and getting your wife to give you permission to buy the stuff I love that. Yes. Look, I've been married for a little over a month and I we are learning our roles But thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. My pleasure Did you guys exactly get started? So the first cleanup we did Was a friend asked to help out their charity and we came out and helped them on the causeway to a cleanup Like I said, it was eight of us us two Him and his wife. So there's four and I don't know who the other four volunteers were One was our kid. So there's five out of the eight That was the first one we did in April of 2016 And that cleanup Very small, which is eight people. We got a couple of bags of trash And at that point we decided this is the beach that we that we go to every weekend Why not keep it clean? So we started doing it every month from that day on we started doing every month Outside of the one or two that we take off Throughout the year That's incredible Okay guys, and Appreciate you joining in if you ever want an opportunity to volunteer reach out If you can't find the information on the website anywhere But do not forget to like comment subscribe and thank you for all of us for staying on and continuing on with us As we go ahead and show you our working relationships in this county and in the surrounding counties