All right. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our talk sharpen that edge edge computer ops We are gonna talk about Kubernetes at the edge, but I mean you've heard enough about it We're actually gonna talk more about networking problems with kubernetes at the edge so My name's marina would you actually if you want to flip to the other slide? Awesome. Yeah, my name is marina. Widget. I am a developer platform advocate at solo I focused on a variety of different things from delivering talks to You know talking about service mesh as a VPN etc. And with me I have My name is Kevin I've been in I'm an architect here at solo, which is just a fancy way of saying I work on some of our greenfield stuff I've been working with networking problems and service mesh for a couple years now and excited to be here Awesome. Thanks Kevin. Can we get that second mic working too if possible? All right, so we already know what the edge is but I wanted to create a I Wanted to create a little bit of a background here because When we decided we want to build our own little cloud with edge computing with whatever options that are available to us We have to think about the network. The network is probably the most critical aspect of it I mean, maybe there are other perspectives on what is critical with the edge But from my perspective coming from a network engineering background Networking is critical to make sure that you know we have connectivity between our services that we have clusters that can communicate with each other and then a whole wealth of other things too around security Observability automation and operations But one thing I want to point out is that there are a few kinds of edges There is the content delivery style edge where you know, you might have played with a CDN And then there's the edge that you roll your own where you decide Hey, I want to keep take complete control of my cloud environment or the cloud environment that I've built Distribute all my workloads out everywhere Distribute my compute everywhere and still have it all tied together so that I know when let's say app a fails It has a place to run somewhere else or I have a good resiliency built into my entire edge compute strategy But before we actually, you know dig deeper into the networking side of things. Let's talk about the reasoning behind why Why would we want to do edge compute? I mean, I think there's enough, you know Reasoning behind why we would want to do it. You know, there's a lot of IOT There's a lot of agricultural systems that take advantage of it In fact, I think Stephen mentioned a few good excellent use cases as an excellent talk happening later on today about a particular use case But when we're actually starting to form our edge strategy There are several key things we have to think about if we're deploying to thousands of locations We have to first understand why we want to do this Do we have some specific applications that suffer from latency if we're having to hop across the pond? Do we have any sort of privacy or security requirements as previously mentioned in the last talk? Or do we have any sort of concerns around running workloads close to, you know individual users? More like a geographical distribution of our workloads and apps But then it also comes back to people right do we have enough people to support the solution that we build? Do we have the right footprint and hardware to go out and deploy? I mean considering hardware you have to think about procurement you have to think about the right fit You have to think about how much it's going to cost you from a budget standpoint to not only deploy But also life cycle it over time because guess what hardware doesn't last forever as we know and the most most of the Time you see that systems are swapped out every three to four years because of newer technologies faster chips More density that we require in our nodes, but that's how we arrive at edge computing We start to see that we can pack many kinds of workloads onto a single little node that you might have seen in the last presentation like a nut But we also have to consider other aspects too. How do we get services to talk to each other? Sure, we can you know employ traditional means of networking like an MPLS technology or you know some sort of VPN style technology But then you also have to consider the other layers to like authorization Authentication being able to provide encryption between your services that are communicating across, you know various edges as well as Seeing what's actually going on like, you know, hey, we have an edge down. We have an app down What is actually causing this? So as we start to dig into it We want to focus a lot on the the networking side of it like I mentioned previously So that falls into the realms of communication cloud devices and metrics and and even security and automation But before we dive into that, I want to just bring your attention to an existing Solution today that many of you might have played with called kube edge so kube edge is more is not truly kubernetes, but it behaves and acts like it's a kubernetes environment and The way it works is you have a few components like edgedy Which effectively is the equivalent of what you would see as the kubernetes control plane in a you know cluster as Well as a few other components like edge hub as well as an upstream kubernetes control plane and the reason why you have to deploy a kubernetes control plane is because kube edge acts as a translation layer so that I can simulate as if it's running as a kubernetes cluster There's also one more thing. I'll mention in in fact that There's a technology called edge mesh that allows for connectivity between all these different edge locations that you could deploy but there are limitations with something around edge mesh around Achieving zero-trust security making sure that you can see what's actually going on and capture telemetry KPIs and metrics from your apps It only provides connectivity at a very basic level.  So let's talk about the network stack first and then we'll start to dig into how a service mesh helps with this a true service mesh So you think about your network stack for a second and you could either go with cloud or x86 hardware that you procure You can deploy a physical network or use something like SDN or a VPC And then you could take that further and then decide hey I'm gonna run kubernetes or in a CNI or a container networking interface and then a service mesh Because that completes the network stack and the reason why that is is because yes You can get connectivity through a CNI you can have things talking to each other But when we're starting to talk between various different services, we're talking thousands upon thousands of services The mesh or the service mesh really provides a significant layer that helps us optimize those communications to cure them and see what's going on But let's talk about service mesh specifically and see how this helps So in service mesh, there are three key things that it provides. I mentioned already connectivity The security aspect and the observability but in order to do so it uses something called a sidecar proxy So you have kubernetes which communicates with something called a control plane or the Istio D control plane because we're talking about Istio in this case and Istio D acts as your point of configuration your point of management with respect to how your sidecars operate Your sidecars are something that are deployed. These are these little artifacts that are deployed alongside your main application container and They do all the routing all the Request responses for that service or on behalf of that service But here's the thing if you look on the very far left there there's so many different services that are running let's say inside of your environment and Every service that you have gets a sidecar so that consumes CPU and memory also when you think about this from an operational standpoint What actually happens when you onboard services that you already have deployed into a service mesh? You actually have to restart your services and that is impactful That's a service impact at that point Which means there could be an outage or you actually have to schedule a maintenance to take these services off line For a short period of time so that they can come back online with your sidecar Now in order to get away from this there were so many different approaches out there But I will say that solo and Google work together to develop something called ambient mesh a sidecarless approach Now the sidecarless approach means the sidecar proxy itself is no longer deployed However, all the capabilities of the Istio service mesh still exist. How is this possible? So if you actually look on the far right diagram there We have two things called the else L4 proxy and then the L7 proxy if you actually combine these two This is your sidecar except we've just moved it away from the actual workload itself Now the layer for proxy, which we'll refer to as the z-tunnel going forward Basically acts as the sidecar on behalf of multiple workloads that exist on the same node so the z-tunnel is a daemon set and Effectively will provide layer for connectivity layer for authorization policies as well as MTLS so that you can still provide Encryption between your services that are communicating with each other Then when you decide you want layer 7 authorization or you're you're trying to capture some level of observability at that layer This is where you would deploy a layer 7 proxy, which we refer to as the waypoint proxy Now the waypoint proxy is is still based on if you're familiar with envoy the envoy proxy Which effectively has always been the basis for how we do service mesh with Istio however with the z-tunnel or the layer for proxy we actually Developed a lightweight rust-based proxy to strictly focus on layer for connectivity in that MTLS The reason behind this was to optimize how this would work to reduce the footprint of the actual Sidecar itself just to focus on those two key features and then still ensure that we provide full service mesh functionality Now, how does this look if we actually decide? Hey, we want to deploy edge computing We also want to use a service mesh and then we decide. Oh, we have multiple clusters enter multi cluster ambient mesh so Ambient mesh is sidecar lists multi cluster ambient mesh or multi network ambient mesh is the same thing Except now you're scaling with so many different kinds of clusters They could be kubernetes clusters that exist in your cloud platform that you've built so that you're using as a service These could be data center kubernetes clusters or even edge clusters But the interesting thing here is the way this all works Now let me describe a few components here now if we focus entirely on Just the edge compute cluster one. We have a base operating system. It could be any flavor. It could be something completely locked down We're using some flavor of kubernetes in the case of the edge you may want to consider maybe something like k3d or Maybe kind. I mean kind is not super production But you consider the fact that you want to use something lightweight that doesn't consume a lot of resources But still provide you the functionality of kubernetes and then you also want to consider Yeah, you've got your CNI layer, but your Istio ambient mesh layer as well. So that gets deployed into the cluster There are a few components that do get deployed like Istio D as well as your z-tunnel Because you need it between different nodes as well as the way point if you decide you want layer 7 authorization There's also one more thing that gets deployed that maybe you all have never really seen before but it's called Istio CNI And it actually acts as the mechanism to route traffic into the z-tunnel from the source workload So let's just say in this environment book info is split up into two different You know clusters Book info is just a bunch of microservices that produce a page that tells us, you know How good this book is or several books, but we've split those services up across these two clusters Now how do we route to those clusters? How do we route services in the primary cluster or cluster one over to cluster two? Well, obviously we'll need access to a load balancer because that load balancer gives us that external connectivity inbound But the other thing that gets deployed is something called the east-west gateway in Istio So the east-west gateway services traffic that goes either from one cluster to the next cluster and Ensures that we could get traffic all the way through and ensure that requests make it through the through the mesh now how this all works is Z-tunnel is Co-located with the workloads or the source workloads the identity is captured of a source workload Shared with z-tunnel so that it can impersonate its ID Z-tunnel will will basically indicate to the other end to the destination side Hey, you know I have a node that or so I have a service that needs to communicate with you now That service communicating with that destination workload needs to pass through a few things and if you actually follow the red line Book info is communicating with a z-tunnel Z-tunnel is actually tunneling to the east-west gateway The east-west gateway is tunneling to that to a destination z-tunnel which you're not seeing the z-tunnels right now But finally the traffic is un-capped or sorry the traffic While it is encrypted is actually un-encapsulated so it could be passed directly to the other services The reverse is entirely possible too. So what you actually have here is tunneling. Are you all familiar with IP sec? Yes, can I get some nods sure? This is very similar to how IP sec works now interestingly enough if you see This red line that follows all the way through to the east-west gateway and into book info This is actually double encapsulation that we're doing here now I'm going to pass it to Kevin because Kevin's going to explain a little bit more about this double encapsulation And why we do it with z-tunnels and east-west gateways Yeah, so now we can hear the You know, thank you for the introduction Rena on Istio ambient So again the pitch here basically is this a couple changes, you know just like in the previous talk, you know We're working with edge devices here You know, we have resource constrained environments But we may need to actually talk to disparate Kubernetes clusters think about like phoning home for updates talking from an edge device to a cloud device One of the things that's majorly different about what we're able to do here is that when we look at this request flow We go from, you know one z-tunnel is all we need in our local, you know edge Device or a cluster right and everything else lives in your remote which could be your cloud and another network We want to make sure that these communications are secure The real goal here is to get mesh like functionality You know standardized but bring it to edge devices and we part of the reason we can do this or what's improved is that z-tunnel or the zero-trust tunnel is Implicitly designed to be very minimalistic You know the XDS configuration is tailored to this use case It runs on the order of megabytes whereas like a simple envoy runs much larger, right? And this means that we can bring mesh functionality to devices at a much lower cost than we could before Further we can do it more securely than we used to if you're familiar with Istio and how multicluster works for You know the classic sidecar model they would do like SNI routing There's some potential issues there with being able to like DDoS backing pods. There's no validation done once you reach the remote network We improve on this model here with with Istio ambient multicluster because we do this double tunnel, right? So the there the tunnel has two TLS Encryptions in two different identities the outer one is on the right. You can see we have H bone outer and inner H bone is just the Istio protocol. It's basically an H2B connect tunnel It's just stands for H2B based overlay network and that's basically what we're building here These this network of z-tunnels are basically an overlay network And this allows us to standardize and bring our edge devices to a like broader network if we want to right? We can do all of our compute locally and you know on the edge device and then phone home You know periodically when we need to securely and so that outer identity is the Z-tunnel identity it allows us for to do connection reuse if that doesn't verify We we kill the connection and then the inner tunnel goes to the final destination in this case service B Yeah, that's the this slide awesome So one of the biggest challenges is if you try to do Istio multicluster at scale It actually is very challenging There's a lot of different elements. You have to consider one of them is actually trust another one is automation And how you employ something like get-ups so when you start to think at that level of scale You're not just using a single cluster with Istio or even Istio ambient mesh or even a single edge environment You're actually thinking about multiple edge environments. You have to start thinking okay How can I manage this under a single platform? So sorry, I have to plug glue platform because glue platform enables this it takes a get-ups approach To ensuring that you could run multiple clusters multiple edge locations still have Istio ambient mesh in place But you're actually using a centralized control plane to push out configurations So if you look up at the very top we use glue platform to provide a set of CRDs That effectively translate into Istio resources Now as long as I configure this single set of CRDs This gets applied to the necessary edge locations as I would need it to and because of that now I'm actually simplifying my overall operations because onboarding becomes easier life cycle management of my environment's running Istio becomes significantly easier and now I can see literally every single environment under the same Observability platform So if you're starting to think about that scale especially when it comes to service mesh and edge computing check out glue platform So with that I'm actually going to pass it to Kevin to actually run a quick demo And he's actually going to show you how ambient mesh works in the multicluster multi-network environment take it away Kevin Is that all big enough? I think you can see yeah Fantastic So we should have an environment set up here and because I'm very forgetful at typing the commands I've kind of scripted up in advance, but this is a live demo. So hopefully it works So yeah, I've taken the liberty of kind of setting up two clusters here for us to take a jump into The first one here is basically like representing our our remote cloud cluster. So this is We can look at all the pods that we have In here, we have default namespace with details product page ratings. This kind of just is the classic Istio you know Example product like service. It's not it's not really that relevant except that we're good this is what we're going to query at the end, you know, we're going to phone home to a remote service and Just like Marino I talked about we have the CNI nodes this ingress gateway is our our You know ingress gateway. This is an envoy proxy and then we have the Z tunnels which are the zero trust tunnels And then in our remote cluster, you know in our edge cluster, it's much more minimal So we just have Istio. We really didn't need the ingress gateway here, but we have a sleep pod this is just representing like one process that we want to run on an edge device and then everything else is very limited Z tunnel is just You know the only other component that you really need to to go ahead and phone home And it's getting all that configuration pushed down by Istio D and so if we want to go ahead and set this up so that we can go ahead and You know phone home. Let's go ahead and apply some configuration I'm gonna have to scroll through this so we can take a look at everything here Starting from the top we have An Istio gateway, which tells us to configure our you know ingress gateway to listen on port 15,000 8 for each bone This is gonna help us be the destination for our traffic for decapsulating that outer H bone We'd mentioned briefly, you know a double encapsulated H bone This is telling us to listen and decapsulate that outer one You know validate that we verify this traffic is coming from within the mesh and then we have a service entry here You know, this is basically the us defining a way for us to to phone home. This is the host We're gonna hit we're gonna make requests to service entry istio.io on Fort 9080 we're gonna go to workloads that have the apps, you know app selected and we're gonna go with these identities You know Istio is identity based. We use spiffy for identities. That's all standard and built-in And then that app is gonna select here this workload entry This brickled entry in our environment, you know, this address is the address of the east-west gateway in this example You know predetermined that this is the IP that we're going to be using so we can go ahead and apply that configuration and This is you know going to be that source of truth for how we want to handle routing So I'm going to go ahead and Copy this command need a second hand and then we can go ahead and make a request And what we're going to see here is It's hard to read but what I want to highlight here is so we're making a request to the service entry IO that that service entry host that we had defined on 9080 to the product page the idea here is that we want to hit that ingress gateway and get in the first cluster And then that service in that first cluster. We're actually failing that request because of a TLS Verification error the self-signed certificate. It's kind of a misleading error here But basically what we we didn't do here is we've got two disjoint, you know, Istio configurations We need to make unify our route of trust Because this is a demo. I'm going to be lazy and just copy that secret from two to one But realistically we would have generated those secrets with the same root trust So now that we've gone ahead and done that We should be able to move beyond that that error for making requests So always got the logs running again on the right And we make the request again Again, we see a TLS error, but now we're getting a different one So again, I talked a little bit about we're doing double validation here of identity to make sure that our traffic is secure to TLS We can see here that we have a sand verification error. So we're basically getting the wrong identity You can see that we expected the identity bad ingress gateway service account But we got a good account and so what we have here is actually a misconfiguration error If we look on the left at the service entry that we had applied earlier You can see that the subject alt name has bad ingress gateway You know, this is about it, you know configuration error something that maybe we could You know improve upon if it were generated or handle for us by a platform but if we want to go ahead and plot, you know fix this error we can apply the new resource and We do that So now that we fixed that error, we can do the same thing and Again, we're gonna get an identity error But just to highlight that we've done a double tunnel here. This error is actually a different one It's still a sand error, but now we've actually got an error validating the inner tunnel so we've actually detunneled the outer one and now we can see that we have a bad value for the the surface account on the default namespace and this This identity value came from the workload entry, which was which was here We had again misconfigured our resources with a bad value If we go ahead and correct that Then we should be good to go And I expect this to work Beautiful awesome. So we got a request served by review Z1 This is like a full web page We've kind of successfully demonstrated here that we were able to use H bone and go to our east-west gateway Make a multi-network request with Istio ambient and you know, that's that's what we have here for the demo Awesome. Thank you so much Kevin. So if you just saw all of that Would you be willing to sit there and do this a thousand times over for all your edge locations? Nope. Nope. This is why This is exactly why I think y'all should come talk to us the solo booth to learn a little bit more about blue platform And how we simplify this process Kevin. Can you switch switch back to the presentation? So I want to just tie off here with a few edge use cases I'm not going to enumerate or list them all out But I want you to think if you currently are working for an organization that maps to any one of these use cases Yes, I'm sure you can certainly figure out the edge computing piece of it But when it actually comes to the networking, I will be very honest with you You will struggle unless you consider something production grade like a service mesh So come chat with us learn a little bit more about if you if you don't know how a service mesh works Come learn from us. We can teach you a little bit more about it. We're gonna be here at KubeCon for the next few days Kevin and I are just gonna be hanging around the booth Actually, I will say I'm actually doing a workshop tomorrow, which I think you all should come to it's about network foundations And that's also gonna set you up to understand how a service mesh works I can't remember where it is. It's somewhere, but it's one of the first workshops in the morning Come check it out, but I just want to say to wrap up when you think about edge computing It's not just about the number of resources you have available on your your system It's not just about the kinds of apps that you're going to deploy But it's also about the the platform that you have to consider if you're going to be managing multiple environments It's also about the fact that you have various different connectivity options But these connectivity options present their own challenges for example You might have a very far geographical edge that has very limited connectivity And it could only use satellite internet or it might be able to only use maybe DSL And you have to factor that in as you're deploying your edge environment too But understand one thing when you have changing network conditions the service mesh is actually gonna save you So I just want to end with you know if you want to learn a little bit more about edge computing There's a great book by Sergio Mendez He wrote a book that's focused on K3's and linker D but the pot of the the concepts can still be applied to Istio ambient mesh as well as any kind of edge compute and On the far right if you actually look want to look more about or want to look into more about Istio ambient mesh There's an e-book that you can download as well or come by our booth We probably might have a whole bunch waiting for you and finally if you want to learn a little more about application networking hit up Solo Academy I want to thank you all for your time. I want to thank Kevin for an excellent demo I wish you all an amazing Kube edge day in a coupon. Thanks everyone


He has another novel, Go Songs, which will be published this year by Harmony, Inc. Press. Please welcome Andrew Demchak. Okay, hello. And I wanted to say too, if you like the stuff that you hear tonight, they actually have some of my books here at the library that are in right now and you can actually check them out if you have a San Francisco Public Library card, so you don't have to buy my stuff. You can check it out. Support your libraries. I'm a librarian. It's awesome. All right. I'm going to read a little section from my new YA novel, Go Songs, which just came out. I've never written a YA book before and I was really excited. Anyway, Harmony Press is really awesome and I love them.  Anyway, this is just a little embarrassing scene that happens to him after he's been out with his friend Jennifer at her 14th birthday party and they come back to Jennifer's parents' house with Jennifer's older sister Katie and their older brother. Anyway, this is this part. By 10 p.m., Jennifer's parents retreated to their bedroom in the farthest part of the house, way in the back with their scotch and sodas. Jennifer and I sat with Katie, Jennifer's older sister and Mark, who's the boyfriend of Katie, Roger, Jennifer's older brother and a stoner date Mandy on the thickly upholstered leather couches in their sunken living room.  We were watching Dressed to Kill, oh that's another thing, this takes place in 1982, so that's why this is going to seem strangely archaic. We were watching Dressed to Kill on select TV, the cable movie channel that came through a black box that sat beside their brand new front projection TV set, which was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen.  What, I gasped, staring down at the fire pit, too embarrassed to look up at her or anyone, a long deafening pause stretched out between us.  I just wondered, you know, he looks so young. Mandy continued as she produced a ceramic pipe, yellow lighter and a small ziplock bag that contained a few shriveled green buds. Who wants to get high?  Jennifer and I sipped our grenadine sweetened Coca-Cola's and watched. You want a shotgun? Mark asked me, as if I knew what he was talking about. Everyone laughed except Jennifer and me. I didn't want to seem like an uncool kid, so I answered yes. Of course I'd seen Eddie, which is his mother, smoking pot before tons of times, but I never wanted to try it. That would be like giving into her, like she had won. Before I could change my mind, Mark had moved over onto the couch next to me, the scent of his cologne mixed with the marijuana smell, exciting and dangerous. The big lighter snapped beneath his thumb and he took a drag from the shiny pipe.  I coughed and pushed him away, both flattered and ashamed by his attentions. Everybody laughed at me again. I realized this must be a pastime of people their age, getting kids high. It was about as funny as getting a dog or cat stoned.  My throat immediately hurt. A moment later, the same thing happened to Jennifer, who seemed a little bit cooler about it, since she knew what was coming. It felt like no time had passed, but the couples began to pair off. Lank arms wrapping wastes and shoulders. They stood and made their ways to their bedrooms. I looked at Jennifer. She gave me the signal with her eyes that we should evacuate. I got up. Jennifer followed me out of the living room and we ran down the hallway to her room giggling loudly. Tonight, I had a feeling Eddie had abandoned me there. She always forgot to pick me up. It was Friday night after all. Eddie painted the town red after work on Fridays, which meant hanging around the dingy bar at the Red Onion, our local Mexican restaurant. She did this every week. The Vanderlips had no problem with letting me spend the night whenever Eddie forgot me. I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of Jennifer's room. I only lived about five miles away, but they wouldn't let me walk home at night in the dark. And more strangely, never once offered to drive me home. Never. Mark's really nice. Yeah. I can see why Katie likes him. Do you feel stoned yet? I don't know. What's it supposed to feel like? You'll know. You've smoked pop before, right? I asked, sure that Jennifer had. Not really. But I guess I'm 14 now, so I'm old enough. I've seen them do it so many times. Believe me, you'll know when you're stoned. I thought about telling Jennifer about Eddie's pot smoking, but I wasn't sure what she would think. Better wait for another opportunity, just in case. Should we get ready for the munchies? There are Doritos in the kitchen. I'll go get them. Wait here, I told Jennifer. I wanted to be away from her right then anyway. I was feeling a little paranoid because I couldn't tell if I was stoned or not. I found my way to the spotless kitchen and discovered Mark was there already, poking around in the pantry closet. He must have had the same idea. Mark was very handsome, broad-chested and tall, with curly, soft brown hair. He wore a tangerine-colored robe that belonged to Katie, so I figured Katie and he had just been or about to go out into the jacuzzi in the back patio. He turned to face me as he heard me enter the kitchen. Hey, buddy. Hey, I answered him blandly. Do you have the munchies? Yeah, I think so. You think so? Yeah, we wanted to get the Doritos. OK, then here you go. Mark said as he tossed me a bag from the cabinet he was searching through. The bag made a loud crinkling sound when I caught it. As he continued rummaging through the shelves again, his robe parted up the front, and I saw he was naked. My heart skipped a beat, and I stood glued to the spot. I had never been so close to an unclothed, fully grown man. I didn't know what to do. I knew Mark was bisexual, but what did that mean anyway? I felt completely awkward just standing there, not speaking. And in any moment, he probably noticed that I was what I was looking at. But before I could say or do anything, he idly tugged his robe back over himself, just like that. The shining moment ended. Good night, I said, as I retreated, bag in hand from the kitchen, the crotch of my pants rising embarrassingly. So that's poor Todd. He's kind of a naive kid. And anyway, really strange things happened to him. And he has a friendly ghost. So it's kind of an interesting story. This next one I'm going to read is for my first novel. And it's called If There's Heaven Above, which is that Love and Rocket song, which I love. And this is all about the goth scene in Los Angeles in the 80s. The three characters in this are Matt, who's the lead character.  I don't know. So she's kind of like in between. But this is a scene where they're waiting outside the club that they go to called The Scream, which was a real club in Los Angeles. And they're waiting for Anya, who's Susie's girlfriend. And this is what happens. We turned the corner and went back one block to regal liquor. There was a row of newspaper stalls next to the entrance. We stepped into the thin yellow light of the store. On our left was an ice cream freezer covered with blue bunny product stickers. To our right were various narrow aisles filled with boxes of dry goods past their expiration dates. Baby food, bags of Doritos, strange racks of off-brand greeting cards, and the beer and wine section. Susie came towards the Algerian man at the register, the bottles of cheap booze lining the shelves behind him. Good evening, pretty miss. Can I help you? He greeted her. Yes, I'd like a fifth of vodka right there, Susie said, pointing down. The $7.99 one? No, the one right there, $5.99. Will that be all? I'd also like a pack of Marlboro Reds. When Susie ordered things, she seemed so sophisticated. Andy and I were jealous of how smoothly she broke the law tonight. She was always calm and poised. They never even checked her ID, never.  There was something aloof and irresistible about her, her solid cheekbones, her blue eyes, and platinum blonde hair, her slim figure, that untouchable size seven. Susie paid and grabbed the small bag, and we headed back to the car. We followed her like searchlights, beaming. No more than 25 feet from Regal Licker, we ran into the friendly black guy we saw every week, who liked to talk to us very much and always tried to sell us stolen items. Hey there, my darlings, he said, smiling in a buttoning a raggedy flannel jacket. Look at this ring, it's practically new. And for you, Blondie, it's only 20 bucks. We just spent all our money at the liquor store, really. You say that every week. You gotta bring some more money with you. Here, look at this, he said, pulling out a gold watch and looking right at me. When I was breaking into those people's house last night, I kept thinking, hey, he would like this watch. Man, I stole this for you. Do you have any money? If you found us before we went to the liquor store, we could talk business, I said. It's not that we don't appreciate what you're doing, Annie added, fumbling. It's just that we don't have that much money. Do you want a cigarette? Susie asked, reaching into the brown paper bag. Thank you very much. The black man leaned over to me and whispered out of earshot of both Annie and Susie. You know I love the ladies, but I like some of the boys, too. Susie banged the Marlboro box against her palm to pack the cigarettes. She handed the black guy one and pulled the lighter out of her pocket and lit it. As he leaned into the flame, I could see how bloodshot his eyes were in the butane light. He took a jeep drag to get the cigarette going and leaned back, exhaling. We had learned the secret early. You make friends with the local monsters.  We had talked to him enough to know he'd never tried to force us to buy anything and he was usually amused to talk to us, three weird looking white people. And now I knew that he had taken a shine to me. See around, he said. The end of his cigarette glowing as he exited down the side alley, puffs of smoke trailing behind him like footprints in the still air. I feel so sorry for that man, Annie confessed as we started walking. Hey, he's just trying to make a living. Same as you and me, Susie pointed out and lit her own cigarette. Anyway, maybe we'll buy something from him sometime. You have to admit, his prices are reasonable. With that, we were almost back at Susie's Mustang. One of the great features of her car was the shape of the metal seatbelt fasteners. We always forgot to bring beer bottle opener with us on the nights we had beer bottles of beer and we used the seat belts to pry the bottle caps. Susie unlocked her car door and let us in. We drank in her car every week, parked in the same places and we were never disturbed by the police. I shifted into the fold of the back seat. It was my turn to christen the vodka bottle. Last week had been Annie's turn. Susie removed the brown bag and crumbled it on the floor. I took the bottle and twisted the red plastic cap off and sniffed the sugar smelling liquor.  I gulped it down and shook my head. God, that's nasty, I squealed, passing the bottle to Annie. For the next 30 minutes, the bottle would circle counterclockwise around the car to Annie in the passenger seat, then to Susie on the driver's side and then back to me.  I asked, watching Annie take a swig of vodka. Who cares? I've had it with her tonight. Did she say she was definitely coming? Ask Annie, handing the half empty bottle to Susie? Of course.  Like that time, her sister Claire's boa constrictor got loose in their house. Remember, they looked for it everywhere. It was gone for like three months. And Anya found it beneath the bathroom sink. That poor thing was so hungry, kept striking at her.  That's so crazy. She could have killed that snake. I mean, that vacuum's got all those bristles turning inside of it. That snake would in there, it'd be chopped to bits. But what about when Anya was eating all that bran? I began. That super diet she was on to clean out her system.  Remember how puzzled she was? I know, I know. Did I tell you about when I was at Anya's after she found that rabbit in the desert? Susie giggled? No, what rabbit? Well, you know how Anya does really strange things for no reason at all? Really, she does, I said. Susie looked coldly at me and then continued. Well, anyway, she found this bunny up at Joshua Tree National Forest and somehow she caught it. It was living somewhere in her room under the bed or in her closet. I was up in Santa Monica and I stopped by to visit her one night. Her neighbor across the alley was being really loud. His windows were open and he was screaming at someone.  So Anya and I were on our hands and knees by her window feeling around in the dark for something to throw. I found these pebbles near their bookcase and I grabbed a handful and threw them out the window at the neighbors. I did this for about five minutes.  That is totally gross, Annie's grunt. Yeah, but I can't help laughing at her sometimes, Susie said, staring ahead at the lights along the deserted boulevard. She probably just forgot to show up tonight, I said, finishing the thought we had all started earlier. The vodka bottle had about two more inches left and each of us was feeling drunk, just sitting down. I knew if I stood up, I was going to stumble around. At that moment, a green Chevy Malibu swerved to its right and smashed loudly into the car parked a few feet ahead of us. Jesus, H Christ, Susie screamed. We stared blankly as the driver's brake lights lit. He put the car into reverse and he tried to back up and get away. His bumper was stuck on the other car's fender. As he tried to back up, the crushing metal made a horrible noise. There was no one else on the street, car or person. We were the only witnesses. Get his license number, I shouted. Annie scrambled into the glove compartment for a pen and some paper. It's RWZ 764, Susie said. I got it, Annie said, scribbling down on the back of an envelope from the auto club. The Malibu finally dislodged itself, put itself in gear and sped off into the night. The rear of the parked car was flattened. The left brake light shattered, red bits of plastic scattered on the ground under the hanging bumper. Could you believe that guy?  He probably didn't have insurance. Who can afford it anymore, Susie said. I'd probably do the same thing in his shoes. We sank into silence and sipped the vodka. 15 minutes passed. Could you roll down your window? It's getting hot in here, I asked Annie. Yeah, Annie cracked the window about halfway.   Just then, the crisp sound of high heels could be heard, clicking over our shoulders to the right of the car. Two girls in black tight dresses strutted by. They looked like scream goers. At once, the taller one of the girls dropped her purse onto the cold sidewalk and rushed up to the smashed car right in front of us. She threw her hands up, her friend coming up to her side. They inspected the damage to the bumper, hanging like a frown. Oh my God, it's her car, Annie said. Quick, get out and tell them we got the guy's license.  Susie checked her mirror and got out to the left. Annie and I emerged on the right. Annie held the envelope in her hand like a Valentine.   We saw the guy who hit your car and wrote down his license.  The girl responded. Yeah, here it is.  The taller girl walked over to the sidewalk and picked up a two by four lying near the chain link fence. She turned and walked to the car again and began slamming the board onto the trunk, denting it even more and smashing the other brake light.  I wanna get more insurance money, she said, pounding away. Do you guys wanna help me? Okay, Susie said and began kicking the fender until it dropped off completely. We were all really drunk. Up close, I saw the car was a BMW.  The tall girl's friend picked up the bumper and brought it down hard on the top of the car. Within minutes, we were all laughing, totalling the car. Annie was beating the back of it with her purse. Hey, let me go get the vodka, Annie shouted and she ran back to our car and got the bottle. The vodka gurgled as we swallowed it down, the last of it with our new friends. It was a frenzy of loud metallic banging, drinking and hysterical laughter. The cars that passed took no notice as if this happened every day in downtown Los Angeles. It was like an elaborate fertility dance. I'd switch places with the tall girl, she with her friend or with Susie. We circled the car for about 10 minutes denting and cracking it. It was a complete wreck after we had finished. The tall girl dropped the two by four loudly on the asphalt and walked over to the sidewalk. Her friend joined her. We continued over and sat against the chain link fence. The sky was dark with no stars between the shapes of the skyscrapers. The sweat poured off of me in thin rivulets. Each of us had felt a tremendous rush. What's your name anyway? I asked the tall girl. Chuli, like Pachuli. And this is my friend, Diva. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew.


So this is going to be lightning talks. I'm going to keep this as brief as possible. So we have more time for q&a So i'm going to keep it very precise generic and i'm going to try to smash as much information into your head as i can in the shortest amount possible with the flickering stuff that's going on. If you wonder about the puppy, the puppy, it's because it's the year of the dog. So let's celebrate that. Hey, year of the dog. That's the energy. All right. So what i'm going to go over here today is first of all, who am i to tell you stuff about word per staff. Second, we're going to go over some examples of what hooks can do and how they can help you. And finally, i'm going to go over how to use hooks while the screen is flashing left and right. Funny enough, that's exactly what happened with my presentation before. I don't know. They just don't like me. That being said, let's start off with who i am.  My real name is Andreas Lopez. Don't get it wrong though. I am actually from Germany. I took my wife's name. It's always a nice story to hear that i love to tell. You want to, yeah, okay, let's try that. So i've been a webmaster for four years. I don't use the term web developer or designer because i'm more than that. I don't work for an agency. I don't do freelance work only. I actually work in house at a local company in this point beach, florida. And i do everything they need. That means that they need an email set up. I'm actually giving tech support in there. I am making the websites with a crew of three people, including me. And so that's why i consider myself a webmaster. Also because i do a bit php work, i do mostly design, working with the Work commerce, work with the themes and plugins available to us. And so through the years, i consider myself now an e-commerce expert. That's where my strength lies and actually how i, so how is this relevant? That's how i got into the hooks in the first place. Because there's a lot of stuff that automatic left for us to Utilize inside of work commerce. They made a really great job because everybody is used to storefront, right? Everybody has when they use work commerce, the first thing you Encounter is storefront, this ominous theme. And everybody uses it and loves it, but there's so much more you Can do for your brand to not look like a WordPress site. Everybody knows when they encounter bootstrap site. You don't want to be that guy. Sure, it's only us developers knowing it, but you will be happy In knowing your site looks and feels different for better. So i was born and raised in Germany. That's where my weird accent comes from. I'm working on getting rid of that, but it's not really working. And that's me in Colorado actually like two years ago. I was really happy because i says no. You don't get that stuff down here. You don't. So this is a really, really, Really simple example of what hooks can do. Like captain hook here shows us i changed the logo and i made Some text in there, right? because everybody knows the WordPress back and login. What if i told you if you did Freelance work, you don't want to say WordPress. Why do you need a plugin to change the login page that Only box your site down? it makes no sense to have a Page to change the login page. It makes no sense. Sure, you're going to need a bit php skills. I'm going to go over a bit later. But so why, right? why? Purps, you want whoever you make the site for, you want them To be able to use WordPress to change the content, add New products, edit products, remove products, make a sale. Or purps, you made a really simple site for somebody who Can't access the blog. So now they need to go get in there And access the blog. And when you see this WordPress Logo they never saw before because they're not developers like you. They don't know what WordPress is. They don't care either. They're just going to be like, what is this? And if their logo would be on there, they would not even care. So you just eliminated another step for them to question Your abilities. Like why do you need It somebody else? i got this question actually before. And the text down there that could be helpful for if you have A client who has purps like multiple sites.  Don't worry about it. But if you, for example, had, let's say, second store, and Then you can tell them, look, this is the other store. This is WordPress store. Not word can Miami store. This is a different thing. Now here's an example of one Of the in-house product pages i've worked on. And this is how it looks out of the box more or less. I mean, i added some stuff. But this is how it looked before. And then actually like a month before word camp, i looked And was like, i need an example for the hooks. So let me make one. Bam. Again, before, regular WordPress, WooCommerce looking thing, completely customized. No more annoying tabs. Nobody clicks on tabs. Nobody needs tabs. Get rid of the tabs if you can. Nobody clicks on those ever. The price is right in your face, First thing, along with the add to cart. And so it's like, because here it was like right in the middle, That's too far down, we sat. So like right there where your Eye naturally lands. Because in the western civilization, We read left to right. So we wanted it exactly where Your eyes automatically go. Because if you open a book, You're not going to stand on the right side. Makes no sense. You're going to look first thing, Upper left. And that's where you want the action to happen. Subscribe here. Sign up on our newsletter. Check out our newest posts. This and that. Top left is where your eyes naturally land the first thing. That's where you put the add to cart button there. How much time is left? mc. All right. So these two buttons. And actually put a code in there, too. By the way, all the slides are going to be up anyway later on. You can just e-mail me and stuff. And here, our idea was the archive pages can get very long Because we have thousands of products. And what if you want multiple products? You want me to click into product, add to cart, And then go all the way back. No, no, no, no. It doesn't even refresh the page. And look at the code. Look at the code. Let's have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven lines. Even though i could just put it up there and then call it a day. Seven lines of code to just make that happen. A quick add to cart button, which is not native to WooCommerce for, i don't know what good reason. But so let's look at the hook. Our hook here is add action. We have six in total of hooks. Add action, remove action. And then we have the filters, which you can add one or remove One. And then you can add so. God, of course, the terms fell out of my head. Anyway, you have six different hooks that you can use, which Are free action and free filters. We had to use an action here because a filter only changes Existing functions. But we needed to put a new Function in there. And so the first that i highlighted in blue WooCommerce after shop loop item title tells us when is this Happening. So that is the first part we need for hook. We need to learn of where it is so we can modify it. And i only know it's an add action because i looked at the source code. For any action, you will always need to reference the source code Because you don't know what they call it. And you won't just find it in the page source. You won't find it with an inspect element tool. You will have to go through the source code. For WooCommerce, there's a references guide, which is very Useful. And on wordpress itself, we have the codex. Use that. You can dig through that. And then stand by. No. And then the rest of it is just a regular function. So our hook element is this blue part. That's the core. After that, so what function? Well, the function is WooCommerce quick add to cart because that's what i called it. So the second part in your hook will be which function do i Do now when i reach this point. And then i had to call out Of course global product because i need to access the Variable data such as the id, the title, this and that. Because right after that, i actually access the id. Well, the variable id equals variable product and get id, Which is a regular function from WooCommerce and wordpress. So you're not creating something completely new and put it Somewhere in the source code of anything.  Because they knew we were going to Use this and they were like, here, use this. Go ahead, use it, grab it. Do whatever you want with it. And then i just echo a short code out which, again, is Actually in the WooCommerce guide. They have it in their product documentation where you can Just go in there and be like, oh, what short code is Available and i just called it out after grabbing the id. And now if i were, and that's where you can see the Various ones say select options. Very strange. Why does it say select options? Because it's a variable product. So you can't quick add to cart a variable product. It won't happen. But on the simple product, just add to Cart. Done. Call it a day. So if you would click to select options, it would get you to the product page. And the great thing is you can do so much with it. I could make a filter which would go into the shop loop item title And, for example, make a prefix. I could, like, for example, i wanted Everything to say a certain phrase beforehand, which, of Course, makes some products less fenced, send it on, say, A blog article. You want to make sure each of These says your website name first. Or perhaps the category. Or sale, exactly. You can do that like that with a filter. And so here's the checklist of what you need before going Using hooks. First of all, use a child theme Because everything for the hooks necessary will go into your Functions php file. If you don't know what it is, Hooks might be not for you or you just have to start learning. Starts like i had to. Because i'm not a php developer. I just learned it on the go by experimenting with child themes and word press.  You are going to. If you never used hooks before and you're going to start Using it, you're going to break your site. That's why you need step two, ftp login. You have to have a way to get back into your site, into the Functions php file, and add or remove the code as you Need to, because you're going to break your site. One time, you're going to forget the same e-con. You're going to make a wrong call out. Or something else is going to happen, which is very strange. And third, of course, you're going to need to know what hook it Was. Like, for example, i knew it Was in the loop product type. I knew it was there. So you're going to have to figure out what do you need To reference here? Do you need to reference a filter? Or do you need to reference an action? Two different things. And then number four, Of course, what is the function you actually want to do? Do you want to echo a short code? Do you want to echo just regular text before or after? Do you want perhaps to just completely get rid of it? Because it's like the theme or the plugin is doing something You don't want? Or is it something completely else? Before you start working with the hook, you have to know What is my function going to be? so i actually suggest Even before you start working with the hook, make the Function. Make the function at least Pseudo-coded for the people who don't know what it is. Write it down in layman terms. What do you want it to do? Like, first, i wanted to make a button. Second, i wanted to grab the link of the product so that They can easily access it. Write it down. Think about it first before you start working with a hook. Because it might be that you're looking at the wrong hook. Because you have to look at what you want to do and when it has to happen. That has to both come together. Not every plugin, not every theme Has these hooks necessarily. That's why i keep emphasizing Wordpress and book commerce, too, because automatic made them. And they made it accessible. So i bag every single plugin Developer, every single theme developer that's sitting here. I bag you. Please add hooks. You don't know what we're going to do with them. Give us the option. Don't worry about how You want the user to experience it. If you're worried about that, build it in. But also allow us to change it. That's the only thing i'm asking of everybody who makes plugins and themes here. And i think, of course, five, we've got to find peter pan. Where's peter pan? Nope, not here. I guess i have to say thank you and go look for peter pan Somewhere else and work in miami since i'm captain hook of the day. There's my contact information. My github page is currently empty. If you guys are going to visit it, there's nothing on there. Just started it. And you will actually find some hooks And references. I'm going to put them all there. Such as my quick add to card and some other neat functionality. Three minutes, i see. All right. I'm also going to be available in the happiness bar. I have 30 print outs, handouts that i'm going to do Once we wrap up here. And i got speaker cards, too, So let's do q and a. Questions? Anyone have questions? Yeah. It is a great solution and actually talk. Oh, sorry, sorry. He's asking of we got Breaking the site if a local development would fix the problem. Yes. The reason why i didn't speak to that is Actually because i didn't plan for my presentation but i talked to fly Earlier today. I'm not sponsored by them. It's just something i came across. And i asked them, hey, is it Local by flywheel? that's basically local word for Development that you can easily push to your actual live Website. Is it finally available for windows? And they said, yeah. Because last year it was still Better. Now it's available. So i actually suggest if you're interested in having a safe Environment, hit flywheel up. They are in the main Registration room stuff. And yeah, that would actually help. Okay, what he just said is that most hosting companies these days Have like a one-click stage in store, which else would be the Solution. I personally like to develop Life. I don't know why. I like to live dangerously. Let's just hope no Crocodile comes through my hands. All right, other questions? Oh, great question. So he's asking if i'm only using it for design and Layout aspects? No. He has great back-end things you can use with that. Imagine you're making an export tool, even though WooCommerce has it now native, and then you would have to Loop and grab all sorts of data. There would be a great tool For the hooks, because you can just, again, piggyback Right what other developers did before you and just run the Functions as if they were doing it, because they have Already the functionality, sorry, to loop through every Product you ever made, because that's how they make their Archive pages. So there are definitely other Purposes than just design that you can do with different hooks. And again, by the way, on the action of filters, filters Is not just to change text, it's also to change attributes. One common problem i had that i fixed with the filter was Related and upsell items on WooCommerce. Anybody ever experience that only displayed free related or upsell Items on WooCommerce? if you have that problem, they fixed it Now, i think, with the latest version of WooCommerce, but You can also change it with a filter that you can force it To, for example, only output like eight items or four items Or how many items you wanted to. You can do that, for example, with a filter. Other questions? Thank you, Andreas.


Hi, my name is Pastor Brett Leonard and I am a pastor with Shiloh Fellowship Ministries in Calvill, Washington I suffered with a very severe digestive problem for over 20 years I had a condition that eventually the doctors diagnosed as pancreatitis caused a lot of vomiting and nausea and pain tremendous pain I remember one time I had pain so bad that I Thought I was gonna die affected my family my my my wife my children made hardships on all of us I had prayed for years for God to do a miracle in my life I went to go see my doctor because my diet was getting very very limited I seemed to not be able to eat any kind of fats. Couldn't eat dairy couldn't eat any meat hadn't eaten at restaurants. I hadn't eaten at a restaurant for over ten years and being a pastor and traveling Minister at times that can be very difficult So he prescribed me a prescription enzyme and I had to take this enzyme with everything that I ate with every meal I asked him I said so what's gonna happen when I can't eat anything When I just I couldn't tolerate anything and he looked at me very seriously and said then we put you on a feeding tube. Pancreatitis is pre-cancer of the pancreas and your pancreas is what produces enzymes to help you digest your food and my My pancreas was not functioning properly. It was not producing the enzymes. So at the beginning of 2015 This couple Friend of mine told me that they were going to Cameroon to visit Apostle John Chi and the egg calm Ministry and they asked me what I'd be interested in going I said well.  I'm waiting to hear your testimony. I went back to the hotel They made us African food and so I ate the food that night without my medication I went the next morning without taking my medication ate fried foods and Foods that I wouldn't normally eat eat me by the end of the day after dinner and nothing had happened I knew that I was completely healed over. I couldn't believe that my past was over that my healing had taken place It was just a tremendous Experience and I was just so thankful for what the Lord had done. I just want to advise those who have been praying for a Miracle or healing or deliverance don't give up Don't give up in your prayers. Believe what the word of God says God has a timing for your deliverance God has a timing for your healing. God bless you. Thank you for letting me share my testimony with you


Through it all, despite the struggles, despite any blunders, despite any hiccups. The passing game has looked really good. First question came from my guy, Les Goody. He said, that low engraving in team keeping clean hope everyone is well and healthy. I like to hear your thoughts on our passing offense. I'm currently watching the Miami game live right now, almost at halftime. So we know how that went. But anyway, he said in our passing game looks fire right now. Is this a sign that G-Roll is finally getting his act together incorporating these plays more effectively? I don't know how much about Chris Hewitt, but is he the guy who needs recognition for our passing offense and success thus far? Take care of yourself in one another. And then later on, after the game was over, he said, like everyone else, I'm still in shock after how that ended. At least the Cowboys did us a favor again, since he, I guess, with all the AFC North teams losing today. So took the good with the bad and the bad with the good. Anyway, yes, the Ravens. That was my biggest question for the Ravens going into this season. It was the passing game. That was my biggest question. How was it going to be? Were they going to emphasize? Were they going to continuously use it? Was it going to be effective? Were the receivers? How the receivers were going to do? Were they going to be maximized? How was that passing game going to look? And it has looked really good. It's looked really good. And I absolutely love it. I adore it. I look forward to it more and more. It's just been a beautiful thing, a beautiful thing. Now, we just, and again, I always say how crazy it is that Greg Roman, the offensive coordinator, Lamar Jackson's our quarterback. And this is a Ravens team. But we got questions about the run game. We got questions about the running game. Baltimore Ravens, those Ravens? What? Who's that? The question is about the run game. But again, let's, it's very early. It's week two. So let's see, in two weeks after the Bills game, because they will have had four weeks of film, four weeks of game, four weeks of everything, then that's when I can really, in my opinion, that's when we can really start to tell who these Baltimore Ravens really are. Yeah, this feels like a dream. Oh, just what I mean. What I mean. You two team, keep it clean. You see my boy, he like, I done made it. I done made it. Well, that's my homie. Ain't that right engraving? Right engraving. To you two team, keep it clean. Welcome to another episode of Questions from Subs. First off, big shout out to the newest team, keep it clean channel members. Gareth, Yuvelle, and Jay. Appreciate the three of y'all. And just appreciate team, keep it clean. They're really as a whole. Now, next question came from a film. Said thoughts on the Ravens loss. Ain't engraving, hope all is well with you and the family. This was one of the more interesting ways to lose a game. That's an interesting way to put it. Usually I feel like the Ravens deserve their loss because of the slow offensive starts. Last year Vikings called Steelers Dolphins, LOL, and the other teams. This week, I think perfectly, I think perfectly illustrated how we should run our offense. The running game was pitiful outside of the mall, of course, but I'm not too worried because whenever JK and Gus are back, I think we can get back to top five to 10 pretty easily. Some play calls I just don't agree with like the fourth and one. And some of the random run plays we had, or even not getting justice hill to ball enough because he showed some promise. That part right there. Ah, the defense, however. You could tell it was only a matter of time. It was going crazy with some of the plays allowed, even when we were up 21, because besides two picks, they were getting down the field. Kind of surprised how last year, we were able to prevent a lot of Tyree's deep shots, but I believe they had a bit more faith to not double team. The turning point was, of course, Marcus Williams' possible third pick of the game that was dropped in proper Ravens fashion. My main concern with the defense is actually not the secondary at all besides health. It's the pass rush. The pass rush sets up how much the secondary would have to deal with and every time I looked at Tua, he was relaxed. How was Tua getting all those deep shots? Because we gave him too much time. I don't like to try to get pressure without the blitz, but our guys just aren't that talented. I'm hoping with Ajabo and Jones, we can create some pressure and sacks, and I truly believe this defense can be the best. That's why the Bengals are all in two. The pressure to Steelers and Cowboys was just too much. I know this is extremely long, but what are your thoughts? PSI would advise to keep a strong guy on Hamilton, because Marcus Williams is already showing we have nothing to worry about on his side of the field. I like that. Yeah, pass rush is extremely important. Extremely important. And Ravens just have such a lack of depth there right now. Now, I'm recording this on Wednesday. I was about to say July. Wednesday is September 21st. And it's early in the morning right now. It's 7.15 a.m. You know what's funny?  So I'm like, you know what? Might well do questions from sub, but anyway, besides the point, they brought in JPP for a visit yesterday, but he left without a deal. Maybe by the time you see this video, they'll have brought in somebody else for a visit and maybe signed them, we'll see. But yeah, they need help there. They need help there. And you got like with the guys that you have coming back, they're coming back from injury. They're coming back from injury. And so you don't know. It could take them a couple weeks to really get into that football shape once they do come back. So I don't know, man. It's a lot of pressure right now in Houston and Adafi away. So maybe it's got to find an answer solution to that pass right soon. Well, this long season is going to get even longer. Well, in regards to the last question, actually this long season, if they don't fix the pass rush, it could get even shorter because the playoff time, that pass rush ain't right. You're going to be at the crib watching all the playoff games with the rest of us. But anyway, our next question came from my guy, Chris. He said, how to make the simple complex question. If we knew Tyree here was a deep threat after all these years as fans and then in the Miami game, he scores a touchdown on MP Juiceman on a goalball. How do we let Tyree score again on another goalball? Why is it so hard to have a safety over the top? Is it simple or are we just making things complex? Where is the game awareness from the players and coaches to say, no, I'm not getting beat deep. Maybe the regular players and coaches didn't respect to his arm strength so they didn't prioritize the deep ball. Please engrave and make it make sense. I can't make that make sense because it is something so simple. Like, yeah, that's Tyree Kill. That's Tyree Kill. Why would you not have help? Why would you not continue to have somebody over the top? Why, him one on one with anybody? Mistake. Mistake, mistake. He's one of the best in the game for a reason. Next question came from Chantay. Chantay said, yesterday's heart breaking loss. I ain't engraving hope everything is good with you and the family. I haven't seen the question in a long time. It's been a while. But after yesterday's loss against Miami, I felt that I had to send one. Actually, I have two. My first one is, do you think Lamar is too nice for his own good to tell Greg Roman no on some plays sometimes? I don't know. It just depends on how much he audibles and changes stuff up. So that it all just depends. But anyway, he said, the reason I asked is because on the Raven second possession where they went for the touchdown on fourth down, Greg Roman called a QB run play. I thought that was the dumbest play I have ever seen on fourth down for any team. If it's fourth and inches, I understand. Not to mention, he kept calling the play for a couple more fourth downs before, a couple more downs before fourth down. Lamar had to know it wasn't the best play to be called. I fully believe if the Ravens tried to punch the ball in for a touchdown another way, they would have won the game. Even if they kicked the field goal. So yeah, it's just, you just don't want the obvious stuff. And then there could be times where maybe even with Lamar where he feels like, no, I could get this. I could make this happen. Because a lot of times he has made it happen. But it's just, it got to be more situational awareness from everybody.   So not that you want to even doubt yourself, but you got to recognize like, man, these boys, I love them, but they ain't run blocking like that. So do I really want to run behind this offensive line? And then G-Roy got to be like, hey man, these boys, they ain't blocking for the running backs. They ain't blocking for Lamar. Do I really want Lamar to run it up the gut like that behind this offensive line? So anyway, he said, number two, why do you think the running game is so bad? Do you think it has something to do with the certain running backs that are taken over for JK and Gus not being used on the field much? Because justice is not the number one or number two running back. And Mike Davis was not the number one in Atlanta. Or do you think the whole line just can't move people when it's a run play? Started this email so long, but I had to get some frustration out. Thank you for reading this email. You and your family have a bless. They appreciate it. And I appreciate y'all too. Real quick side note, before we get into the second part of the question, we can't always answer every single email they get sent. We really, really try to answer all of them, but it's just, it's impossible to answer every single one. So I appreciate y'all being patient. I appreciate y'all still sending them. So thank you for that. Just had to give y'all a quick little shout out. But as far as the running game, I think it is the offensive line. But then a part of it could be actually the quality of the running backs too. That could be a part of it. But I think the biggest one is offensive line. Because they just haven't been many lanes. Haven't been many lanes. I know Justice Hill, he sort of missed an opportunity in the Miami Dolphins game to get even more yards on a big run. But I mean, why not have him out there? I wouldn't mind if they started him. I really wouldn't. He been in the system the longest. He been around these dudes the longest. Why not? What's the worst that could happen? Obviously that would be before JK came back. And even if JK came back. Because I'm sure with JK, they ain't going to have him just be, alright JK, you all be one.  That'd be nice. But I'm sure early on they're going to have him on a pitch count. They're going to ease him back in. They're not just going to throw him out there like that. So, might as well start Justice Hill. What was the worst that could happen? Next question came from my guy, Makai. He said, what's up in Graven? I saw something come across my timeline after this game. And I think it's a really good point. Lamar and the team also kind of had the same sentiment after there being 15 games left in the regular season. I personally trust our defense will get back to being the top five defense our team expects us to be. What do you think? Keep up the great work. Appreciate it. And what he saw was on Instagram and there was somebody, a Ravens fan. They said, all I'm saying is the last two games, our defense was fully healthy. So, Derek Henry to 40 yards and Josh Allen to 10 points. That's without a top five deep safety, by the way. I'll give Mike a little more time, but comparing ourselves to our last two healthy games isn't helping his case. I'll give Mike a little more time, but comparing ourselves to our last two healthy games isn't helping his case. So, yeah, the defense, no, they weren't completely healthy. Marcus Peters was out the first game and this is his first game back and then Marlon Humphrey was dealing with a groin injury, this game. But really, the defense is never going to be completely healthy. Kyle Fuller's out, so boom, there you go. Defense will never be completely healthy. Tyus Bowser will be coming back to Jabbo one day, we'll see. But you got to adjust. You got to adjust. Your team is never going to be completely healthy. There's never going to be a season where it's like, oh, man, we didn't have anybody on the injured reserve at all. We didn't have anybody get hurt. So it's important that the coaching and the players that are playing, that everybody does their job to the fullest because there's no excuses. Next question came from my guy, Josh. He said, I'm just going to be honest here. This loss was one of the least heartbreaking for me. I get why it's a big deal, don't get me wrong. We got a new DC starters on the pitch counting, rookie learning lessons. I'm not upset because no one can in good faith say Lamar can't throw. It's a complete quarterback doing it with a supporting cast that no one believed in. The run game has... He said the run game has brighter days ahead with JK and Gus eventually. Get the old line worked out and the defense on the same page and watch out. Yeah, I mean, it was a tough game. It was a crazy game. It was a fun game, but Raven's lost. And it was just wild how everything unfolded just slowly. It was like the slow pain. But yeah, it happened. And it was what it was. And I've seen some people compare it to the heartbreak that they felt for the AFC Championship in 2011, the Billy Cundermis. And I was like, no, not for me. Nope, I don't think it was even close to that. Because it's a completely different atmosphere, a completely different game. That was a game to get to the Super Bowl. This was a game to get to week three. Offensive strategies. Thank you for my guy, Rick. He said, I ain't great in first time writing. I hope you're doing well. I'm from Germany, so part of my English here and there. Not talking about the Dolphins game and the defense for now. Okay, that's cool. I was wondering why the Ravens don't implement a Chief Style offense. I thought about it for a long time now. Lamar can play like my homes. He can even do more by being faster. Kelsey equals Manjus. Hardman equals Duvenay. Dobbins, Drake can both be used like Clyde Edwards. And don't forget Justice Hill too. But anyway, he said, in detail, the shovel pass, Lamar can throw all the angles and it's a good short yardage option we do struggle with lately. You know, I never thought about that. And that Ravens don't, they don't ever do that. I don't even really think they did that with Flacco either. That's a really good point. Man, something so simple, but something that could be so effective. But that's also, that's not a screen play. But it's not a screen play. But it kind of reminds me of it a little bit, because how you just quickly dump it off to the running back or receive it, whoever you're doing the shovel pass to. But I know that, yeah, the way the Chiefs do it is so beautiful and just the way that they set it up and design it, it's just a beautiful thing. And it can be so effective because it can catch teams off guard. But anyway, he said, bringing Duvenay in the backfield as a Ravens version of Hill or Hardman, even if we don't give him the ball, you should have the opposing defense guessing. See with that, I know that they did all the jet sweeps. We remember Duvenay was a jet sweep king, but now he's been used more as a receiver and he's been doing a good job of it. So I've been like, okay, Duvenay, like he's been impressing me the past couple weeks. I'm like, whoa, okay, I appreciate it. So yeah, so they could do that. But I like them using him as a receiver because they did all the gadget stuff with him over the past couple of years. But now this new Duvenay, yeah, I'm with that. He said, number three, using the Chiefs RPO. Yeah, Ravens got their own, but yeah, I guess they could do that. And he said, if we can combine the Chiefs style with the stuff that's already working, teams won't be ready for all the same looks we give them. We could also combine the plays used by the Chiefs with our personnel to make it more Raven-esque. Best wishes. See, it sounds like you want the Ravens to move on from somebody and hire Eric B. Enemy. The Evolution, next question came from a guy that solution for kicks. He said, yes, we are all licking our wounds with a devastating shocking loss to Miami, but there's a civil lining to be found in that loss and the Jets game. Is this the Evolution of the Ravens offense that was alluded to last year? I know you have been chanting for a proven young veteran free agent why receiver to come to the Ravens or if they would have traded for one. But like I've been saying, if they weren't going to trade for one, if you're going to roll with the guys who you got, even though they did add to Marcus Robinson and he's helped. But if they were going to roll with the guys that they got and not get one of them guys that's like that right here right now and a proven guy, all right? Maximize them. Show us what these guys that we got half. And they've been doing that so far. I mean, James crochet, he been hurt. I mean, in the first game, he was only out there for a couple of snaps. He didn't really get nothing. But then he was out the last game. So we'll see what happens with him. But we've been seeing Bateman. We've been seeing a lot more dude as a wide receiver. They've been using the markets right. So yeah, they've been doing Tyler Wilders ain't been out there too, too much. But they're top three guys. They've been doing it. I love it. Anyway, he said, well, it's clear that that's not happening as far as the Ravens getting another receiver he was talking about. As of now, Bateman and Duvenay are showing the media and even you that they can get it done. The addition of Williams, who has exceptional speed is a concern for defenses. Williams, Williams, Williams. You talking about Robinson? I think you talking about the markets, Robinson, I think. But anyway, because he said Williams, he said defenses, defense view Bateman as a chain mover with good speed, but he's showing, don't press me or your pay. I like that. We still haven't seen Pro Shades reliable hands or Wilders toughens yet. And that's because of like disability, which appeared in this game sans that drop. He'll get there though. He'll get there. He's progressing. It's only been two weeks. So yeah, he'll get there. I know a lot of people like they, they like, oh likely, blah, blah, but he'll be fine. Anyway, however, the Ravens are showing what used to be a massive strength is now glaring weakness and that it's once vaunted run game is so far toothless. I'm not sure if the return of JK August will help fix this. The goal is not to run Lamar as much as he's clearly showing he's capable of carving up environment defenses into submission if needed. In summation, the Ravens are currently a big play passing team out of necessity, but it is sustainable if properly invested in. Love it. Next question came from my guy Java. He said, should we sign JPP? I think they should, but he left without a deal. So I don't know what's happening. And talk to Seattle about trading for Sidney Jones. That's the cornerback, ain't it? I don't know. I don't know much about Sidney Jones game. So I can't really say about him, but JPP, whoever's going to be yes to somebody because they need help in the past rush department and they just need depth there. They need more bodies there. Bad. Next question came from my guy Dominic. He said, what's up in Ravens? Hope everything is well. Sorry in advance, this might be long. I just left the Ravens game. Oh, you were there. And I have mixed feelings about it. I've seen that the Ravens did have a plan for the Dolphins cover zero defense, but our defense didn't have an answer in the fourth quarter. I noticed that we did go on the center more. So I guess that's a positive. And we were able to get open on one-on-one matchups. But once again, we couldn't run the ball. We were able to pass though, and that could lead to the offense gaining momentum in the running game down the road. Teams will continue to stack the box for the first four games until our opponents realize that you need to respect our pass game. I think they will. But hey, we'll see. Defense was solid until the fourth quarter. I think they forgot Tyree Keele was on the Dolphins. Tyree Keele that's in the fourth quarter. I don't know where the safety's wet. I think this game falls on the defensive coordinator, Mike McDonald. The first two games in the air, teams were throwing all over us, which is starting to look like last year so far. My question is, what were you disappointed in during the Dolphins comeback and what were the key takeaways from the game that you had enjoyed? Sorry for the long message, but I had to get it off my chest and just like Tyree Keele on the second touchdown, catch, I'm out. As far as what was I disappointed in, just again, the lack of adjustments, the team just getting stagnant. The lack of urgency, especially on defense to really stop the Dolphins and credit to the Dolphins for doing that thing. But just, and the lack of situational awareness by the Ravens team, just a bad lack of situational awareness. But as far as what did I like? What did I enjoy? Obviously, the passing game. Passing game for sure. Lamar, his big touchdown run. Yeah, so I appreciated the offense putting up all the points that they did. Devin Duvenay with his kick return. I appreciated the Ravens for putting up all the points that they did because that was a beautiful thing to see. Next question came from my guy, Howard. He said, what's happening in Graven? I will give my assessments of the Miami game and your post game thoughts video. Right now, I want to touch on the topic that I also wrote about last season and pertaining to the Ravens offensive line and lack of push-up front in the running game with our backs. We literally don't have any maulers up front to knock people off the line of scrimmage at the point of attack. When our running game was done and we had big maulers like Orlando Brown Jr., Tyree Phillips, DJ Fluka, moving people at will. Ronnie Stanley's been out and we've just got a line full of lightweights except for Morgan Moses, who's listed around 330 pounds. I believe our first round center is not even listed at 300 pounds and we've seen how he's been pushed around these first two games. Sorry about the long rant, but it's been a while since I sent an email, some questions from subs. Just want to know your thoughts on my rant. Hashtag Ravens Nation. Yeah, I remember you did bring up that point about the maulers. I do remember that. That was a while back. So yeah, we got to hope Ronnie Stanley could do it. With Ben Powers, we'll see about him because you still got Ben Cleveland. He could be one of the maulers. But we just got to hope guys get back and guys get healthy. And yeah, Raven just really saw pushing people back. As far as Lenderbaum, yeah, he is a little bit smaller. But we just got to hope with him getting pushed around these first couple of games, we just got to hope that that's just him being a rookie. Be him being a rookie center, him having to take on all that responsibility and him just adjusting to the NFL. So hopefully he'll get there. Next question came from my guy Manuel L. He said, how's it going, man? Hope all is well with y'all. I know it's early in the season, but my honest opinion on Patrick Queen is that we have to move on from him now that he has some value. He's just not the answer in the linebacker. Yes, he's got speed, but he misses a lot of tackles. His covering skills are very questionable at times. The only reason we still have Bynes is because they don't trust him at all. Just my opinion, let me know what you think. Thanks and have a great day. That part about Bynes is spot on. It's spot on because they just kept and keep on bringing him back. They keep doing it and that shows like, yeah, you don't fully trust Patrick Queen. I think Bynes was just a dead move because they try to get Bobby Wagner. If you set, I understand trying to make your team even better, but if you're set at inside linebacker, and you feel you're set at inside linebacker with the guy you got, you ain't going to try to get no Bobby Wagner because you're going to have to pay significant money to go out and get a Bobby Wagner. The fact that you try to let us all know, like, oh, yeah, we don't trust Patrick Queen like that. This is a big year for him. 15 games. First game was great. First game was his best game ever as a Raven, I think. It again suggests. Next game was like, ooh, okay, yikes. But so, again, it's been just two games though. So hopefully he can have more games like the first game and no more games like the second one. Next question also came from Manuel. But this time, Manuel, why? He said, what's up in Raven? I have a message for the Raven. Stop being cute or trying to look cool when you're winning. It costs us the game. It costs the Marge revenge on the Dolphins and most importantly, a game that could have been a tiebreaker. It doesn't matter if you win by 42 or 50 points. You keep going until the game is over. I hope you take this L as a lesson and not a loss one. I know it's just week two, but if we're starting with these bad habits now, then down the line it'll cost us more and then in the playoffs. PS, Lamar just showcased in this game he is worth 300 mil at least. I would recommend EDC. Start saving money for that check. Well, but shoddy, really. Yeah, man. This is why I always respected the Patriots in that undefeated regular season that they had because they were racking up the points, running up the score. Some people got mad like, oh, why are they doing that? It's not sportsmanship. No, no, no, no, no. It's this four quarters in a game. You finish the whole game. You don't play and get up at three quarters and be like, all right, we're going to chill. No, you continue to put up points. The lesson learned. Next question came from my guy, Gold Morano. He said, what's up in Graven? It's up to you to keep our spirits up after the loss to Miami. You're always a positive force and we need every ounce of that cheerful, positive energy that you bring more than ever now. Surely by now, EDC and Vashati have learned a lesson that having elite receivers can transform an average quarterback into a pro bow and super bow contender. We watched Tour Morph into, well, Patrick Mahomes. What's next? State Farm Insurance commercials? Yes, I know it's only game two, but we know that had the Miami quarterback been playing with the same offensive personnel as last season, the chances of our defense holding them to under three touchdowns in the fourth quarter greatly increases. If EDC refuses to trade up in the draft to swipe a top two receiver because he values a larger quality of memorable bust over fewer short thing players, who changes the outcome of the games? Then he needs to be much more creative in finding an end-season trade partner, meaning he's got to be willing to part with something that he values in order to get something worthwhile. And man, yeah, elite receivers do make a big difference as we got to see firsthand. On the wrong side of that, because Tyree killed the Ravens. Jalen Waddle killed the Ravens. And yeah, that's helped too a lot and just a big year for two. Now with the Ravens, Rashal Bateman, we talked about it last year. He had, it was so far so good. But now we just, I talked about going into this year, we just needed to see consistency. We've been seeing consistency. So hopefully that continues. And hopefully, because I don't expect him to do anything at receiver during this season. Off season, it just depends on how the rest of the season goes. But he said, unless there's a diabolical in-house plan in place, not to equip them all with the most dynamic wide receiver weapons possible for the intent purposes of ensuring that a few will touch down passes in yards per game, robbing the young QB of all his contract bargaining leverage. Nah, that couldn't be it, right? No way the brass would sabotage the season and Lamar's chances for success just to avoid paying him market value, right? No way JK is being held back for reasons other than health concerns, right? Well, I like how he left it off with a little bit of those real questions that they really make you think sometimes. But I hope that would not be the case because I think if that were the case, the Ravens were really sabotaging Lamar to try to not pay him as much money as he wanted. In turn, they would really only be sabotaging themselves because he wouldn't go for that. And the last two questions came from my boy, Flirt Nowinsky. He said, what's good, bro, back again. Hope all is good with you and yours. Don't you think it's funny everybody hated Wing for not passing out because he isn't running? Realistically, I'm going to need everybody to calm down. Our defense isn't going to have three straight breakdowns on defense every week. We weren't covered to 90% of the time. Those plays, the safety's bit. Williams and Hamilton, I'm sure they will never do it again. But yeah, overall, can you really be mad? No, it's any given Sunday. Wink and TJ looking cool up in NY, ain't they? And like Williams and Hamilton was when they were supposed to have deep halves. I'm out. He's crazy. He said, oh, and I pray to every guy we know that we don't rush anybody back. Because of that loss, we are good. We need them at full strength. It's a long season. I'm playing in my eyes. Jalen Armadavis did okay. He's a rookie. He's going to take his lumps. Same with Pepe, but they can only get better as they play. Also, them two are hitters. All right, I'm out again. And yeah, that's true. They will only get better with time and overtime for sure. And he also said, quick question, on that play where Lamar was scrambling and I seen him stop because he saw a lane and then the seen the flags fly and double-pumped and he was like, you know what, do you think that's why he didn't take off because he thought it was a free play? Yeah, for sure. I completely forgot about that that was a free play. But yeah, I think he was just like, you know what, free play. Let me take a shot, see what I can make happen. You


That's how a former Jamaica Football Federation president describes the current administration in his criticism of their handling of the contract renewal of former reggae girls coach Lorne Donaldson speaking in an interview with Sportsmax.tv. Tony James said it was unwise for the current administration to split from Donaldson. Here's what he said. The upcoming election is the exact reason why that decision with Lorne is poor. If you have an election in a couple of weeks, why are you going to make a move like this? You have a lame duck presidency and administration? Why are you going to take on a massive investment for a national women's coach when JFF is still in restrictive financing? Why would you want to do that now? So that decision is a matter of bad timing.


On the cusp of understanding, presented by science at NASA, constantly shielding us from the Sun's high energy particles is the Earth's magnetic field. Many imagine this field as a circle slightly larger than our planet, but it's actually shaped like this. And near our north and south poles, there is a cusp, a point where two branches of a curve meet. It's here that the magnetic bubble that surrounds us dips inward, creating a funnel of magnetic lines that touch down to Earth. This funnel allows the Sun's high energy particles to race toward our planet and deposit themselves in our ionosphere, 80 to 800 kilometers above Earth. We can even see the result. They create beautiful aurora, similar to the spectacular displays at night, but on the day side of Earth and only visible to the naked eye during the long polar night. Now, scientists who want to learn more about effects of these particles are embarking on a special initiative that is taking place from December 2018 to January 2020. In a coordinated effort between multiple countries to understand the physics of the polar cusp, scientists from NASA and the U.S., as well as from Japan, Norway, Canada and Great Britain have launched the Grand Challenge Initiative, CUSP, a series of sounding rocket missions that will provide the data needed to conduct nine unprecedented studies of near Earth space at the polar regions. This series will help scientists glean answers to a number of questions about the CUSP. Why is our atmosphere leaking out into space from the CUSP? How and why do the turbulent hot patches of dense plasma that exist inside the aurora region disrupt global communications? What sustains strong updrafts of atmospheric gas in this region that can cause enhanced drag on our satellites as they orbit? Doug Rowland, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explains the CUSP is a great natural laboratory to understand how Earth's atmosphere responds to direct energy input from the solar wind. This kind of science can be done nowhere else on Earth. Twelve sounding rockets conducting the nine missions will launch from two sites in Norway, Andea Space Center and Svalbard Rocket Range. In some cases, launches will be conducted at nearly the same time from Andea and Svalbard, providing simultaneous observations at different altitudes and latitudes. Why use rockets instead of satellites or weather balloons? Doug Rowland explains, Rockets are ideal for taking the measurements we need. These rockets will be packed with monitoring instruments to capture information as they move upward in an arc and on the way down too. They can gather up to fifteen consecutive minutes of direct measurements from a specific region of space, and you can launch them precisely.  Satellites cover a lot of area, but at high speeds, they don't spend as much time making observations of any one location. Balloons can't be launched high enough, and their location can't be controlled as precisely as rockets. The new data gleaned from the Grand Challenge Initiative, CUSP, will help scientists make better space weather forecasts and give us a better understanding of the particles responsible for one of the most breathtaking sites on our planet. Take the initiative to learn more by visiting science.nasa.gov