Dr. Olinda Johnson, especially because she's probably crippled right now, so never pick on somebody like that. She's a great person and every one of you who has not had the joy and pleasure of meeting her yet, you will love her. So anyway, today you've heard a whole good deal about the professional nature of military service starting this morning with Admiral Carter. His thoughts up front is tasking, especially to the new class on your year here, and I hope maybe as a end of the summer break, I'm looking at my friend Commander DeWalt down here to get you back in gear if you've had one semester left or two semesters left if you had a head start on the folks that were sworn in this morning. But anyway, tasking from Admiral Carter this morning, inspiring words from Admiral Luce spoken so long ago, but frankly as relevant today as they were then, there's no doubt about it. And then Admiral Hayward, Howard, sorry, Admiral Howard's truly inspirational and I'd say spot on remarks about what you need to be doing in your futures and what you need to be thinking about while you're here. And now, of course, Dr. Cook, thank you Martin and Dr. Johnson's spinning the web of the requirements of our profession as mostly military folks, but spinning it a little bit differently than maybe you've heard before or thought about before. You know, you've been challenged to broaden your perspective on the nature of that professional military ethic or ethics set to include your intellectual growth, the self-policing of the conduct of the profession, your profession, and also maintaining, perhaps more importantly, maintaining the trust and confidence and the conduct of the profession, maintaining the trust and confidence, not only of our leaders, but also of the American people, certainly for a person like me and of course for our international students, your countrymen and your leadership, it applies just as well. Making sure that the foundation of our ability to maintain our true professional status is founded, grounded, and that we are up to speed on it. That's what this year is all about. So as the Dean of COSL, I want to end our discussion today just by drawing out what I have as takeaways, if you will, a few practical implications based on what I'm hearing, not only today, but also are the concerns of our senior leadership today. So it's pretty simple. There's only three things. At any rate, number one, you will serve in times of great budget constraint. Okay. Often military organizations, as Martin's already spoken about a little bit, they respond to financial challenges in the two ways that are probably easiest. They adopt that defensive crouch. Okay, I'm going to huddle in. I'm going to try to keep and defend as much as possible of the programs that I have of the things that I have, or they can simply just sort of roll over, play dead, behave as the obedient bureaucrat. Now obviously, neither of those answers is right. Option number three, door number three is the right option. It's the only option that's right. That's grounded in the discussion of the professionalism that we've just heard from Dr. Cook. You don't want to be in a cut-dumb situation. You want to be in a cut-smart situation, right? Professions enjoy social trust only, only when they demonstrate their ability to act in the true interests of their clients. And again, that's the American people for the US folks here, the national governments in your countrymen for our international students. And as military professionals, and it applies as well, of course, to our interagency professionals, your job is to act within whatever the budgetary constraints you find yourselves in will be and to provide the most effective force or capability possible out of that money that you have. And sometimes, that will mean pushing back against excessive cuts if they truly threaten our military's ability to fulfill its core missions. For example, we've talked about Secretary Hagel a couple of times here, suggesting that we might be needing to reduce the number of carrier strike groups to nine or even eight. Okay, as Martin's already talked about, if that were to happen, the Navy simply would not any longer be able to operate as we have assumed as a Navy that we've had to since World War II. The professional ethical question is, can you find, are you sailors out there, right, can you find ways to employ and maintain eight carriers in ways that meet the objective defense requirements of our nation? Even if that requires new and creative thinking about how to use those aircraft carriers, or is that number simply too small to meet our real defense needs? And if so, how consistent with subordination to our civilian authorities, do you articulate the reality? How far can the objection go before it becomes in subordination? You have got to be able to make the eloquent argument. It's something to think about, it gets into Admiral Carter's piece. Are you brave enough, are you gutsy enough, are you smart enough to argue the answer the way it should be answered as a professional? Now, these are obviously not easy questions to answer, but some of you will have to work on answers to them in your near term futures. Not this year, not at the Naval War College, you'll be thinking about them, but in your next assignments. Of course, this is a US Navy example, but I think the other services, agencies, and nations in this room all face their own equivalents of those questions, and I just think the easy ones are Air Force, how many wings do we lose? Army, how many divisions do we lose in this argument? We've got to think this out, you've got to be smart on it. Second point, we've said that part of the obligation of a profession is to ensure that its members are educated, and are trained, and are developed so as to be prepared to best serve their client. Part of what our studies in Navy leader development have revealed, though, and what our senior leaders in the Navy are telling us, is that we have significant gaps in that development, and that applies outside of the Navy too, some of the statements from General Dempsey. Things like talking Navy now, maybe we wait a little too long, or a little too late in a career, or me, we miss completely learning the ability to think critically and strategically. To better know oneself, and how you think, and what your biases are, so you can work through your weaknesses, and better use your strengths as a leader. Now, a professional ethical challenge, if you buy that, therefore is to figure out how to better fill in those gaps, whether it's personal professional needs, or service professional needs. For us in the Navy, again, we've always done okay with experience and training, right, and training, most of it just in time. In other words, en route training, as you're getting refreshed, maybe in your platform, as you're heading back out to a sea duty tour, a sea duty tour, or something like that. But we haven't really given education and personal development the kind of focus that we should. We recognize that. For example, we tend to detail our sailors to this Naval War College, who have time to be here, rather than ensuring that the right sailor comes here at the right time in their career. Or, maybe we don't even fill all of our very, very, very valuable seats, in a place like this because there isn't time to immerse in a war college experience at the expense of community or joint needs, right, fair? Furthermore, across the whole of our Navy, we ignore or to value giving people the right attention at the right time to develop themselves personally, touchy-feely stuff, right? We don't have time for that. An MBTI or a 360 degree review, for example, if those are happening for the first time as an 06, it's too late. It's too late. So we're responding as a profession on this stuff. Take knowledge gaps that we know we have in overall leader development through a continuum that aligns that experience and training piece with education and personal development.  Why? So we can make better leaders across all the ranks and rates of the Navy and ensure that we can meet the demands of our clients, the people of the United States of America, and the chief of naval operations in doing our jobs. Keeping the war fighting first, all right? All you sailors know, war fighting first, operating forward, being ready to execute the orders of our civilian leaders, as well as our service chiefs, our combatant commanders, and our agency chiefs for the civilians in the crowd. Our national strategy has announced a rebalance to Asia, right? Rebalance to Asia. Power relations in the world, we know they're changing so rapidly, we can't keep up with them. Many of our platforms across all of our services are fairly old. Much of our equipment has reached service life way early, due to the demands of 12 years of combat. And it's obvious that our future acquisition programs will be few. So, point number three. You will need to think creatively and deeply about how you lead the military profession forward in this changing and complex environment. VUCA applies, thanks, Dr. Cook. We don't know what the future is gonna be, but we know it won't be more of the same. This year at the Naval War College is the best, maybe even the only opportunity that you will have to prepare yourselves to think creatively about this. Let's use a Navy example for the kind of thinking I'm talking about. Last October, okay, right here, our Chief of Naval Operations, Amal Greener, brought all of his senior leadership up here for a what we call a rock drill, a review of concept drill. Think how does the Navy, how does he as a CNO plan to handle the requirement that's levied on him as a service chief from all around the world. The players that came up to the War College to do this game were the senior leaderships of the Navy. The systems commanders as the designers of all of our weapons programs, weapons systems, if you will, and their supporting programs. The force providers and the OPNAV leadership, operational Navy staff, for those that aren't familiar, as our program implementers, the force providers and planners and allocators. And lastly, the fleet commanders, all of the numbered fleet commanders were here from around the globe as the commanders and users of the Navy. Now, CNO wasn't in this room. Dean Rubel, you'll all get to see McCarty Little Hall at some point in here, particularly in your JMO drills, but you'll get to know the forum that he used for this. Huge floor, a little bit bigger than the stage up here. Had a huge map of the globe, had what we had deployed where, what stuff we had in various stages of training and readiness, four deployments in the future laid out, or maybe four repairs laid out appropriately, so that he and his commanders could walk through our critical points. Shifting assets around the globe is required to answer the global demand and any crisis that he'd say, okay, what if that crazy guy in North Korea does X right now? Where do we shift? How do we do this? Anyway, he wanted to take a look at where we were and where we would be over a period of years that started this summer, like right now. Using the existing force structure that was in place set at the time of October last year and the agreements that we had on the table at the time, joint force stuff on force employment, on combating command, commanders' requirements, on the joint force directives at the time. And then resetting, his goal was, all right, let's take a look at it now, if you will, then let's reset, let's take a couple of future looks at intervals some years downstream so he could try to start getting his head about it. He wanted to work this whole drill in about three hours time frame with all of his leadership help. So, how'd it go? Well, suffice to say that in using all the time allowed, the three hours, okay, he only got through the current period of the drill. And the current period of the drill was so hard to do, to walk through, but so learning for him and for the other people that were in the room that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, okay. But what did he figure out is that it was obvious to everybody that we were not able to continue meeting the global demands of what our strategy was last fall, okay. So, what do you do with that, leaders, okay, what do you do with that? We have an ethical obligation, come up all through the day here. Ethical obligation to outline the issues for our senior leadership, be it civilian or military. CNO's got a boss too, right, okay, call the secretary of defense, call the chairman, all right, any ratings, but he's got to outline the issues for senior leadership and set the redefinition of the mission requirements, right. And so he did, he made the eloquent argument and get back to that piece again, the eloquent argument about our global responsibilities and our requirements and subsequently they changed to something that we could sustain, well, so far, right. So, how about another example, air-sea battle. I say it's a great example of the kind of thinking that's required here given our strategy. Air Force and Navy fully recognizing they can't go it alone, particularly in an anti-access area denial environment where defenses and the whole set of things that go with what we're talking about in ASB and in A2AD require us to work differently than we've ever thought about before. And it takes our joint force issues to new levels of cooperation that again we've never before reached, we've never even talked about things in some cases up until two years ago. And of course that debate has got to continue evolving. It's required of all of us in the profession. And Admiral Harward was pretty eloquent about that one this morning. And lastly if you need one more, think coalition operations, okay. Whether something like Odyssey Dawn, support of the Libya issues or around the Gulf with the task force commanders and the combined maritime force that's in play out there. Do the subordinate commanders of the coalitions that are involved in those operations, do those commanders have an obligation ethically and morally to define for their bosses, their commanders what they and their forces, their services or their agencies can and can't do along national lines as well as coalition lines and what those limits are. Well of course they have those responsibilities. They've got to be open and honest with the commanders, right. And you all have to think about leading in a coalition that changes daily in the kind of complex world that we've got out there. So let me close with this. All that I've tried to raise was being worked before sequestration, right. And all that goes with it. So everything that I've raised gets even more difficult. And all the issues that have come up today get even more difficult when you start folding that thinking in. You have to engage your brains. You've got to think differently than before. And you have to get it right. Your profession requires it. So open up your minds. Engage with your classmates. They're the best source always. And your teachers the unbelievable strategic resource that we've got here in this war college. Set your future path for success in a really tough world. Have the best year of your lives. Thanks for listening and good luck this year.


What's happening? It's Shane here. So today I'm going to be going over the top 10 bank accounts out there. Now a lot has changed over the last few years. There are some bank accounts that offer much better rates than others. Now a lot of traditional banks only offer you somewhere between 0.01 and 0.02 percent interest on savings accounts, for instance, whereas online banks and some of the newer banks out there will offer you over 1% interest. That is a huge difference. On top of that, there are still many bank accounts out there that will charge you ridiculous, hidden fees for just random stuff, fees for sending or receiving money, fees for replacing your debit card after a few years, fees for forgetting to update your address within a certain amount of time. And the list just goes on and on. Over the last few years, there have been a few different types of bank accounts that have stood out and they've shown that they are winners over the other ones. So if you appreciate me going through all this time to research, and in many cases actually just start an account with these in order to figure out if they're worth it or not, then please go ahead and smash the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Now there's some banks that are just really good overall, but there's also banks that are going to be better in specific situations. For instance, if you travel a lot, there's one bank that clearly stands head and shoulders above all of the others. So I'm going to be breaking down what banks are just good overall. And then also which banks are right for you depending on whatever situation that you're in. Now, number 10 on the list is technically not going to be a bank account. However, they do have a savings account and that is going to be wealth front. So when I first signed up for wealth front, they offered a 2.57% interest on their cash management or another word, savings account. On top of that, they were FDIC insured up to $1 million, which usually a lot of bank accounts are just FDIC insured up to 250,000. By the way, all the bank accounts that I mentioned are going to be FDIC insured at the time that I did the research up to at least 250,000. That's something you should always check out with bank accounts, make sure they're insured so that if the company goes down or anything like that, you can still get your money back. So I used wealth front for a while primarily for my emergency fund. And I was extremely happy with them because they were giving me 2.57% interest and overall their service was just really good. However, due to recent events, they dropped the savings account down to 0.35% interest. And I'm not very happy about that. I'm hoping it's just a temporary situation because of the pandemic that's going on right now. Hopefully they return back to offering over 2% on their savings account. After all of this stuff is over. So if they didn't do this, I would have ranked them a lot higher on the list, but it's kind of just seems like almost like a marketing tactic where they offer something really good and then you sign up for it and they take it away from you. And it kind of just seems like a bait and switch. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. And they returned back to offering over 2% on their accounts like they were before. So if they don't fix this soon, I will end up leaving them and I'll probably never use their service again. But before all that happened, their service was excellent. I really enjoyed using it. And I think they make a really good savings account overall. Number nine on the list is going to be PNC bank. So PNC bank is one of the largest banks in the entire country. I believe they're actually the sixth largest overall. They do have a good reputation overall. And it seems like they are customer focused and they always put the customer first. They are pretty competitive when it comes to interest rates and the lack of fees. And they actually do have some of the best customer service overall out of the ones that I looked at. So there's just one really big problem with this one is that they only offer their service in select states. So if you want to check out the website and see where they offer their services, if you don't live in one of those states, I wouldn't even consider this one, of course. But if you do live in one of those states, you should be looking into this one. Number eight on the list is going to be CIT bank. And this one is a primarily online bank. Now, when it comes to the interest that they offer on their savings account, this is one of the best options on the entire list. They're always competitive when it comes to the interest on their long term high yield savings accounts.  Now, some of the online banks don't offer checking accounts and that is not a problem with CIT. They actually do offer a checking account, which is another plus. But the big downside to this one is that they do not offer a free ATM network. This means that if you want to use an ATM, you'll likely have to pay fees for it. And that is a huge downside to using CIT. And I'm really not sure why they don't just offer that. They have checking accounts set up anyways. So why not? So for that reason, they didn't rank higher on this list, but overall it's a very good one if you want to just create an emergency fund. For instance, number seven on the list is going to be discover bank. Now discover is a really big name out there. You probably have heard of the discover credit card, for instance. And this one actually does offer one of the best banking experiences that you can get. Now they only have one physical branch. And so they are primarily just an online bank. They do pretty much everything online. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I actually prefer online banking overall just because of the fact that there are way less fees and way less overhead for the company. And therefore they get to pass a lot of that savings onto you. Now they might not have very many physical branches and depending on the person, that might be very important to you, but they do have a network of over 60,000 ATMs across the entire country. On top of that, they have a high interest savings accounts that's very competitive with all of the others across the industry. And then this one is known for having really good customer service as well. Overall, this one is pretty much just a complete package. It's really not bad at all. It's just there's others that are a little bit better on the list. Number six on the list is going to be Capital One, 360. This is another example where a big credit card company got into the banking game and they're basically offering a lot of different banking services that are pretty good. There's not going to be any physical branches, but the online experience is top of the line. It's truly one of the best out there. So this is another option where there's a ton of ATMs available out there. There's over 38,000 in their network. And that's always a really good thing to see when it comes to online bank accounts is you want to make sure that they have ATMs out there because sometimes you're just going to need to get actual cash. And from the research I did, this seems like this is one of the only online bank accounts that will actually allow you to deposit cash using the ATM itself. With other bank accounts, you'd have to basically deposit the cash at a physical location and then wire the money to that bank account online. That's not a problem with Capital One, 360. It looks like they've made that something that you don't have to worry about anymore. So that's why they ranked a little bit higher than Discover on this list. Number five on the list is going to be Fidelity Cash Management Account. Now, technically the Fidelity Cash Management Account is a brokerage account. This means that it's not a bank account and it doesn't have the same regulations or offerings that a bank account would have. However, I did make sure that the money you put into this account is still FDIC insured. And the reason for that is because they work with other bank accounts around that. And I have to admit when I was doing all of the research for different credit cards, bank accounts and everything, it does seem like Fidelity just pops up over and over and over again on every single list. And that shows how much of a focus and emphasis they have on the entire customer experience. It's obvious that they are just dedicated to delighting their customers and giving the most value possible. And on top of that, their apps are just really user friendly. I'd have to say maybe the most user friendly out of any on the entire list. So this is basically just a brokerage account that offers an option for short term spending if you want. What this means is you can invest your money, but at the same time, if you need some of that money to spend on things on a day to day basis, you can also have that as well. And a lot of companies that I look up when it comes to bank accounts or credit cards or, you know, different investing or brokerage firms will have one offer that's really good. And then all of the other ones are just eh, they're okay. But it seems like Fidelity is just really good across the board. And this really just shows where their priorities are as a company. Number four on the list is going to be Alliant Credit Union. Now, if you're familiar with what a credit union is, it's basically kind of like a bank, but at the same time, it's more of a nonprofit organization where everybody who stores their money there actually owns part of the bank. Now, a lot of credit unions offer better interest rates that banks do just because they don't have as much overhead and they aren't subjected to a lot of the same regulations that banks are. The downside to a lot of credit unions though is there's a strict membership policy where you have to get accepted. So it's not just as easy as walking into one and getting accepted right away. And then a lot of the time credit unions do lag behind banks when it comes to technology. And then another thing is a lot of credit unions are just local. So if you decided to travel to another part of the country, for instance, you might not be able to access your money nearly as easily.  So they basically combine the best of a bunch of different worlds. Credit unions costs are very low as it is, but when you're an online credit union, your costs are even lower. And so they get to pass that on to the customer. Now, one thing that you do have to worry about with some credit unions is you might not have access to your money if you go across the country. And you might think they probably don't have access to very many ATMs. And so you're going to have to get an ATM fee if you do try to access your money. So you might be surprised to hear that Alliant Credit Union has the most ATMs out of anything on this entire list at over 80,000. That's 80,000 free ATMs that you can access all across the United States. There's a lot to love here about Alliant Credit Union. I really do think they're headed in the right direction. I kind of want to use them a little bit more in order to get more familiar with them. Overall, I really like what I'm seeing from Alliant Credit Union. Number three on the list is going to be Ally Bank. And they have consistently been one of the best over the last few years. Out of all of the ones on this entire list, they have some of the best apps and user interface in general. You can tell that they really know what they're doing when it comes to creating apps that are just super easy and just seamless and flawless. An Ally is an online bank account, so they're able to not have all of those costs that brick and mortar bank accounts have. And so therefore they're able to pass down all of the savings to their customers. Now, they consistently offer some of the best interest rates on their savings accounts. You see this time and time again, they're very competitive with the rest of the market. About a year ago or so, it was well over 2%. Now, I think it's just a little bit over 1%. But still, it's definitely competitive with everyone else on the market. And you will occasionally see people offer better interest rates than them. But a lot of the time, like I explained before, it's some kind of promotional thing where they're going to get you to put your money with them. And then they're just going to take it away. And it's not as good. But I have seen Ally consistently give really good savings account rates. And I kind of trust them more than a lot of the new apps and the new online banks out there, just because I've seen them consistently put the customer first and the customer experience first and give some of the best rates. So these last few were honestly really difficult to rate, but I'm going to just go ahead and do number two here, which is going to be your local credit union. And in my opinion, I think everybody should have at least one physical bank account where they can go to just in case their identity gets stolen or, you know, something gets hacked or something along those lines. It's good to be able to just talk to a real person. And if you're going to have a physical bank account, in my opinion, the best one that you can possibly have is just to go and get a membership at a local credit union. Now credit unions are known for having like the most amazing customer service. Like it is an incredible experience in terms of customer service. So if that's something you're into, you like talking to real people and having really good customer service credit unions almost always deliver the best. They're going to have really good savings account rates. They're not going to charge you any of the dumb fees that a lot of the other ones do. And the weakness of, you know, them not being everywhere is kind of mitigated a little bit just because a lot of the credit unions form networks with each other. So you can actually access your money at a different ATM and maybe a different state just because they're in the same network. Now you can find a really good credit union and a really good network by going to a smarter choice.org. Basically just type in your zip code there and it'll give you the best options. Number one on the list is going to be a company that offers an exceptionally good banking experience. And this is one of those companies that I have seen over and over again just really focus on their customer. And that is going to be Charles Schwab. Now I first learned about Charles Schwab when I was hanging out with people who travel a lot. And they basically just told me that all of these other banks are charging them outrageous fees whenever they travel and they go abroad. Whenever they're trying to get access to their cash or just take money out of their ATM, they will get charged crazy fees for that and it was really eating away at their money. Charles Schwab on the other hand basically, you know, first of all they wouldn't charge any ATM fees as long as you're in the ATM network. But if you do get charged any fees, they would actually cover all of them for you. That's right.  Now on top of that, they really just have a good overall experience. You can tell that whether you're looking at credit cards, investment apps or anything like that, Charles Schwab is one of those companies that's trying to create an amazing experience for you. This is a company that I think has a lot of integrity as well. So I really trust them. And overall, I don't think you can go wrong banking with Charles Schwab. Now a few things about this list that might help you choose the best option for you. I just kind of want to go over my thought process when I was making this list. First of all, I do think that you should have at least one physical bank and one online bank. But I think that your primary bank should be online. The reason for this is because they have so many less fees. They charge you so much less in terms of, you know, ATM fees and all that sort of thing because of the fact that they don't have an overhead, they don't need to make as much money off of you. And so they pass the savings on to you. So online banking is definitely better than banking at a physical branch when it comes to saving money. However, I do still have a physical bank account just in case something happens, like my house gets burned down, my identity gets stolen or something along those lines. I want to be able to have a physical bank account that I can walk into. And there's people that I know. There's some people out there that have zero physical bank account and, you know, kudos to them. That's really cool that they're able to do that. But that's just not something that I'm comfortable with myself. But anyways, check out my video right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any comments, criticisms, et cetera, or any thoughts that you have about different bank accounts that you've used. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.


Welcome back to another product review, and today is an unboxing of the Monkey Island anthology. This is a limited run games edition Why now? Well, I got this a while back never open it like a bunch of stuff in here that I just look you know In their boxes and their opens, but they announced a new Monkey Island game, which is fantastic Can't wait. So I thought why not with that announcement super excited I might as well open this and why not unboxing may be interested in what's inside so let's check it out So that is the massive box here I should have never opened this Have I maybe the first time when I got it? No, look at that here is the certificate of our Authenticity limited edition number. What is this 1761? Very cool old Lucasfilm logo. I like it For this collection. Oh There you go. Let's open that a bit later all classic if you were as old as I am I'm almost like DJ Premier Salute the floppy the floppy disk. That's awesome. Let's see Wow Classic classic any of you ever installed photoshop or paint something something on like 32 discs windows or something That was a pain. But anyway, that's in there. What is this? That is a big whoop the big whooper snapper the whole power. It's the hurling tanker It's tanker ride monkey mountain coupon cool. Oh Of course, I like that. Hold on. I got here somewhere old patch from work Dusty here now I can add this to it There you go double-sided like that and like that and It's a USB stick Think the games are on there as well Now here comes. What is this? Oh, no slightly ripped the Monkey Island the map Little poster awesome careful careful careful all hitting the mics here is another one That's the classic Monkey Island 2. It's cool. The curse of Monkey Island Also awesome. Actually, I've never played this one. I'm gonna admit. I've never played this one I've only played parts of this Believe so I know I skipped one Cool. Oh, look at that. All right, hold on So many memories of physical game purchases like this There you go different discs here all In one is there open this here carefully. There's the Monkey Island Chronicles Back and spine as always What is in here? Behind the scenes 25th anniversary retrospective book with the pixel art here. I love it. Oh You know, I already this is such a long time ago that I barely remember what's in it. I just remember loving it This might be a separate flip-through. Well, it's like this backward style special things and credits. Oh The smell of a new book that is cool. Oh, yes, I like it turning a new course We're getting into classic territory Love it Yeah That is something that I need to install on the steam deck. Look at those Love it.  I think I remember something a lot of them had that Nice photo there too. Oh, man. This is so classic. Yeah How cool is that? Oh, this is straight Straight into my veins Actually, there was a remaster version for the iPhone as well Well, you can swipe over and it would be classic and into a denier version. What if that still works on my phone? So as all the games don't work anymore. Yes, seven max. I think in Monkey L1, I think there was something you could do Some potion or something Something in a I don't know and then he turned into indie for a moment. I can't remember. That's awesome. Come on That is so for me.  I'm going to devour that is so cool. I forgot Order so many things and I forget what's in it. That is really awesome. I love it. All right, I love with this here There's something else in there. I don't want to break things here. Oh Nice, what is that?  It's just classic. That's something that we used to do I think it was one camera which game where you had to have glasses red glasses to kind of see through something Anybody comment anybody old remind me what that was which game had the glasses reds to see through can't remember But that's awesome last but not least It's upside down It was not upside down Let's do it this way. All right Look at that Heavier than I thought heavy heavy pens Classic What is this ask me about loom nice actually also game I never played I played a lot Of them never played a loom there I say There we go. That one's nice. It's in here. Nothing else base. Oh, that's not a base. Look at that now talk about something That is for me. Oh How cool is that hold on hold on. It's like I ordered this such a long time ago that deep and I'm sure when I first saw This online went oh, this is cool. I gotta have it completely forgot what's inside So just like discovering it for the first time again Look at that I love it That is a hundred percent mind jam that might be my favorite thing of the whole box. Oh, I love it That is awesome That goes straight onto my desk So very cool looking at that if I had to guess This is where candle goes in and then the wax can melt go over it Classic pirate style I could be wrong but that is my guess since I forgot everything that was part of this box There you go. Come on. How cool is this box set so many awesome goodies? Obviously the games here be cool to put these on the steam deck play on to go for sure as well Well, it totally worked put that in a hub on here desktop mode There you go mounted that totally works. I love it. That's it for the unboxing and that's the Content of this anthology box. It's super cool as a fan. I love it so nerdy I mean, there's nothing you can do is I'm sure you can play it But I'm gonna put this somewhere to display. That's it for this blind unboxing and now remembering what's in there So cool, but that's it. Thanks for watching and I'll hopefully see you for more random stuff like that on my channel


Video equipment rental costs paid for by peep code screencasts. My name is Mike Parham and I'm from Five Runs here in Austin and I'm going to be talking today about how not to build a service. So who am I? I'm probably like a lot of you guys. I'm ex-Java, did Java for the last decade and started playing with Ruby when I started playing with Rails a couple of years ago and loved it. I'm probably best known in the Ruby community due to the data fabric gem that I wrote which adds sharding to ActiveRecord and that is now Rails Envy approved since Jason from Rails Envy this morning said it was an innovative technology of the year so thanks to him, thanks to him for that compliment. And Five Runs is my sixth startup since 1999. So I've seen a little bit of failure and a little bit of success both. So who's Five Runs? We're from here, we're focused on building tools for Rails developers specifically in the monitoring and performance realms. We have three products right now. Install is a free stack which has Apache MySQL and Rails integrated in it. Tuneup is a plugin, developer plugin for your Rails app which puts a little bar at the top of your web pages which shows you how long it took for your page to be rendered in the various parts of the rendering and how long those took. That's also free. And then our flagship product is Manage which is a full stack monitoring solution that monitors Linux, Apache, MySQL, Rails, Memcache, PostgreSQL, basically any major part that a Rails app requires it'll monitor it. And notice I've got 2.0 here because this talk is about the mistakes we made in building the 1.0 product and how we fixed it in 2.0 in a sense. So what not to expect? This is not a technical talk. You're not going to have any Ruby code in here. I'm not going to be talking about web services. So noWisd also for XML. I hope you're not too disappointed. Another caveat that I should probably add is I was not a member of the Manage 1.0 development team. So when I talk about the mistakes they made, there's a lot of speculation and hindsight on my part as to why they made this mistake. So I just keep that in mind. So I'm going to, I divided this talk into three parts, you know, generically talk about failure in the software world and what it means. I'm then going to talk about the mistakes we made. And then finally I'll wrap up and try and, we'll try and figure out what are some lessons we can learn generically from the mistakes that Five Runs made. So failure, why do startups fail? You know, I can't, I can't give you particular reasons for every single startup in the world, but more generically you can say that failure is due to the summation of a series of mistakes. You make one mistake, then you make another, then you make another, and that adds up to failure. If you think about something like New Coke or Microsoft Bob, right, they didn't fail for one particular reason, but it was a number of decisions that they made which turned out to be mistaken. So it thus goes to, it thus, that implies that there's more ways to fail than succeed because you make hundreds and thousands of decisions as part of a project in a company and any of those can be mistake, can lead to mistakes and thus when you add up all those decisions could lead to failure. So the question then becomes how do we, how do we reduce our chances of failure? Well in the software world there's a couple of very simple rules of thumb. You hire experienced people and you hire smart people. And honestly I think when you hire experienced people really what you're hiring is, what you're getting is other people paying for failures that they've made in the past. You're paying for guys who have failed a lot in the past and not having to pay for that failure and that's really all experiences.  I guess maybe they just, they're quicker to gather data and analogize from a previous situation there and into the current situation. But, and money of course is the third thing, money just allows you to make more mistakes because you can then afford the time to correct those mistakes. So to wrap up how do we avoid failure, you have to think about the decisions you make when you're writing software, when you're starting a company. And you have to understand that each of those decisions has a cost if it turns out to be a mistake. You then, you need to avoid making those most costly mistakes and, or you have enough money to correct those mistakes and then you won't fail. So let's talk about types of mistakes that you can make. Like I said, you wanna prioritize the decisions that you make to determine which ones are most likely to lead to failure. And when I was thinking about the mistakes Five Runs made, I came up with three categories plus a fourth which I won't really talk about much. But in general, the three categories I came up with were business, social and technical. And I tend to think of them in order of importance. That is, business decisions are gonna be, have wide ranging effects if you turn out to be, if you make a mistake in one of those decisions. And in technical, I tend to think, aren't necessarily as important. Because usually it's just a, you know, a man hour, a man day, a man week to fix a technical problem. So let's talk about business mistakes. Everybody loves that guy. Business mistakes are those, are business decisions and business mistakes. Are those mistakes that you make that involve an entire company, all right? These are the most deadly because they can take man years to fix. And indeed, we made a couple of those business mistakes. I think the most, the first and most fundamental mistake we made was simply knowing who our customer was and knowing what we're building. When we first started out, we were targeted at the enterprise systems management space. And we really just used Rails because it was the hot technology at the time. And we wanted to get something bootstrapped really quickly. Well, it turns out that the enterprise systems management space has wildly different needs and wildly different expectations of their software than the Rails development community does. So when we spent, you know, half a year building all this software for enterprise IT departments, it turns out the Rails developers really didn't value a lot of that. So Managed 2.0, a lot of the parts that we rewrote in Managed 2.0 were simply kind of refocusing or retooling the managed service so that it would be more appropriate to the Rails audience. So once we figured out that we were going to focus on Rails developers, the question then was, what do we know about these guys? Obviously, we are Rails developers. And I think that's where that was the fundamental decision we made, is that we need to take our own Rails, our own development team ourselves, and sort of work the way that they want to work, because they're going to work how the Ruby on Rails market works in general. So all the stuff that we did around the enterprise market turned out all for not. We had all the support stuff that we had, things like a 24 hour, 800 number, that makes no sense in a Ruby on Rails world. It's much more you need email, you need campfire support, you need forum software, that sort of thing. Pricing is another thing that varies dramatically between those two markets. And marketing in general, taking out magazine ads doesn't make any sense in the Rails world. Whereas you much more focus your marketing on things like conferences, on things like open source and blogging. So the other realization we came to in the business category was that the trial is absolutely fundamental to getting customers. The trial is something that you start with and then you need to treat it organically, that is you need to constantly be improving it. Because every single person that tries your software that doesn't turn into a customer, that's lost money. So you have to understand what value they want to see in the software and you have to show them that value as soon as possible. And like it says, getting the audience to the trial to click that download button, that's your marketing department, those are marketing decisions that you have to make on how to get those people there. But once they download it, they then have to install it, they have to be able to use it quickly. That's all about development, it's all about us having to write good code so that the customer immediately says, okay, this sounds good, I wanna buy it. So social mistakes. Social mistakes, usually the picture is misleading, it doesn't represent any sort of drunken, drunken hilarity. I think the social mistake is involving a single department in your organization. So business mistake again was the entire corporation. If you make a mistake there, you've gotta get marketing, sales, development all involved. With a social mistake, you're talking a single department, you make a marketing mistake or you make a development mistake. First social mistake I think we made was we started off building the system in Rails but our team had no Rails experience. And this led to a number of fundamental problems in the source base. We invented the wheel on a lot of technologies. We didn't use Capistrano, for instance, for deployment. We used a shell script. And I think that's just a matter of, you just don't know the ecosystem that you're playing in, right? The experience is not just how to write Ruby but it's also knowing all the various tools that are out there to be used. We misused technology a little bit. We had some demons, some headless demons that were running 24-7, that were running Rails, the full stack of Rails. Well, that's completely unnecessary and memory intensive, right? I think the reason they were doing that is because they didn't know how to spawn off a Ruby demon. They were just reusing Rails and its mongrel code to spin off the demon. And they also didn't know how to use ActiveRecord by itself. So instead we got demons that were running the full stack of Rails. And lastly and possibly the most important was we simply had Java guys writing Ruby code. So we got Ruby code that looked a lot like Java. It had getters and setters. It had all sorts of really, really awesome design patterns that made no sense. So Ruby's completely different from Java. It takes six months, a year, two years to really sort of get your head around it and understand how best to write Ruby. It is a different language. I know that sounds dumb to say, but it is a different language. So another social mistake we made was no testing. We had nothing. And I don't know why that is. I'm assuming that they were thinking that to stay agile, you couldn't have tests breaking. All tests do is slow you down. And that may be cruel to say because these guys were an experienced team. But at the end of the day, everyone knows you've got to have tests. I hope everyone knows that you've got to have tests and I don't need to explain it to anybody. But the fundamental issue that this caused was the Manage 1.0 system was impossible to refactor. Remember I said we had no Ruby experience. So the code oftentimes looked like a shark attack. Well, what do you do with a shark attack? You refactor it, right? Slowly piece by piece. Well, if you don't have any tests, what are you going to do? How do you know when stuff's broken? You don't. So we had to throw away a lot of code because it simply took less time to completely re-implement it than it did to refactor it. So obviously we're a lot better these days. We've got a lot more. We've got unit functional integration tests. We don't have any automated browser tests. Is anybody using Selenium or automated browser testing? Okay, a couple. Yeah. It seems like it's diminishing returns once you start getting into automated browser testing, but your mileage may vary. The last social mistake we made. We didn't need our own dog food. We are Rails developers. We are selling development tools to Rails developers. Therefore it goes to a figure that we should probably be eating our own dog food. Dog food is the best way to show value to the customer because you are acting as your own customer. In fact, we were telling people, here's how to monitor your own systems, but we weren't actually using it to monitor our own system. Well, what happens there? What happens is you get what we had before, which was a product that was targeted toward enterprise systems management, and we were selling it to Rails developers, and it wasn't showing as much value as it should have. And so we weren't getting the trial conversion. All this stuff starts to roll together into a big snowball. So there's a question, catch 22, how does a system monitor itself? Well, you don't have your production system monitor the production system. You have the production system monitor your staging systems, your development servers. But the point is you should be doing what you can to eat your own dog food, because otherwise you're not going to show as much value as you really should. Technical mistakes. Like I said, I think of these as probably the least important of the mistakes, simply because we're developers, if we know of a mistake, we just go in and fix it, right? It takes a day or two, no big deal. Ideally, it takes a day or two. There are absolutely times, though, where a technical mistake can take a lot longer to fix. And this is one of them. We had a client. The managed service, you download our client installed on your machine. It detects everything and then runs 24-7, collecting data and uploading it to our service. Well, the client that we originally wrote was written in Java and C. Now, why this is, I don't know. Again, there's a lot of hindsight here, but I'm guessing there was concern, because, again, we were going after the enterprise market, there was source obfuscation concerns. Ruby generally runs directly from the source code. So with Java, you have that compilation step. And there's source obfuscators for Java also. So they also wrote parts of it in C, even, believe it or not, so that there would be 1,000 lines of C code to collect a bunch of metrics. Well, that's way, way, way low level and takes a lot more time than it probably should. Our new client is written in Ruby. It is obfuscated. It is just a raw binary. But the source code is in there. It's just encrypted and what have you. So it is protected in that sense. But when it collects metrics, all it does is cat the proc file system, do something as simple as that. It's not going into native binary land and APIs and what have you. And so the results reflect that improvement. The old client was almost 70,000 lines of code. And the new client is over 90% less. It's also 40% more memory efficient. There's another problem. We do still have a design issue that we have to deal with every day. And that is we have permissions problems. We haven't fixed everything with the client. Because the client runs as a five runs user, the Rails app may be installed as some other user. And so our client can't see the data in the Rails app. So we do have file system permission problems that we oftentimes have to help the customer fix. So we're still working on getting all the client issues resolved. A couple others. Because we had that enterprise focus, we built a bunch of unnecessary features that the Rails world simply does not need. We didn't use SSL. Why we didn't use SSL? I don't know. I suspect they thought it would be blocked at the firewall. But instead we wrote our own custom HTTP encryption to go over port 80. And so that's time wasted on technical detail that we could have spent providing more value to the customer. We also built a custom proxy so that if the machines that the client was installed on were behind the firewall and couldn't talk to the internet directly, they could have a machine in the DMZ which proxied for the rest of those machines. And there are a few enterprises where they do have the firewall locked down that much. But in practice, in the Rails world, it's not a concern. We've had one customer that has a problem with this. And so in the end, it's just not cost effective for us to build this complex proxying system when we only have one customer that needs it. And in a similar sense, support for these other subsystems just aren't cost effective because in the Rails world, they're just not really all that popular. Jay Boss and Tomcat and Oracle, certainly. We do have one or two customers that are running FreeBSD and one or two that are running Windows. But again, at $40 per month per server, we can't afford to spend man weeks building this stuff. So lastly, we didn't have integrated billing. Now if you remember, I talked about how you give them the marketing message, they come to the site, they download the trial, then your development takes over, you show them the value. Now they want to buy it. We've made that process as easy as possible up until now. Now they want to click the Buy button. So they click the Buy link, and it takes them to a page that says, please fax us at this number with your credit card details from 9 to 5. Well, what you've done is introduced another hurdle that the user has to jump over. And so you're going to lose customers here, too. Even ones who are convinced, if they're on the sort of borderline, if they think, OK, maybe there's enough value I'll buy this. But then they find they have to call somebody up, just another step that they have to go through. Today, obviously, we've now got online buying so that you can try the managed service, and you can buy it at 4 in the morning without having to talk to any of our fantastic sales guys. So what can we learn from this? Well, Five Runs is no different from any other software company. You're going to make business mistakes. You're going to make social mistakes. You're going to make technical mistakes. You have to recognize that you're making a decision that could turn into a mistake. You have to think to yourself, what is the size of this decision? How important is this decision? What is the ramifications if I'm going to make a mistake in this decision? And in general, the rule of thumb is the more knowledge you have, the more context you have, better your chances that you're going to make the right decision. So the question is, which level of ignorance can you afford? Here's the levels of ignorance. This is one of my favorite slides from the ACM a couple of years ago. But I've gotten you to the third level of ignorance now.  But when you're talking about those business decisions that are absolutely critical and take man years to fix, you got to be to the 0th level. You've got to have a business plan. Venture capitalists talk about how important a business plan is. Well, this is why, because these business decisions you make cost man years to fix if you get them wrong. And maybe something like a social decision, maybe you can get away with first level. I don't know. But that's something that you need to recognize and come up with for yourself. And remember that the longer it takes to fix a mistake, the longer it takes you to recognize and fix a mistake, the more costly it is. This goes back to the whole software engineering phase where, if you make a design decision, it costs a lot more to fix than a simple implementation bug at the end of your deployment cycle. And that's because it's fundamentally weaved itself into the software that you're building. So effectively, you're taking out insurance by raising your level of ignorance by getting more knowledge and more context about a decision that you're making. You're taking out insurance up front by spending more time so that you don't make a mistake and don't have to pay a lot more in the future. So there's two things I think that can lead a software group to making more mistakes than usual. One is group think. I think group think most often happens when you have a group of developers and one of the people in that group is seen as an expert in a domain. Now when you have to make a decision in that domain, that person just automatically voices their opinion and people agree with them. However, oftentimes things are conceptually slightly different from their experience. If you have a guy who has worked in rich client development for 20 years and he did performance tuning that entire time on rich clients, he would be seen as a performance expert. But now if he goes to work on a web application, a lot of his knowledge about performance tuning rich client apps makes no sense in a world of browsers and assets and the stateless HTTP protocol. So what you have to be careful of is taking an expert at face value and not thinking through yourself to verify that you think that indeed their opinion is correct. The other thing that I think affects software groups is optimism. We're all optimists. There's a reason why we, if you're in the Java world, why you run Ant or Maven or something to build your software, and that's because you think it's done.  You're saying, OK, I'm done. Well, unfortunately the compiler tells you whether or not, in fact, your opinion goes with reality. But it also goes when we're giving time estimates for how long something is going to take. We oftentimes give an estimate that is just how long we think it's going to take. It doesn't include any time to get that knowledge, to get your level of ignorance about the thing that you're building. As Fred Brooks says in the Mythical Man Month, which is an excellent book, if anyone hasn't read it, go read it, you estimate what you think it's, what it ought to take, not what it actually will take. So what has five runs learned? Well, to recap, we learned that changing markets is extremely expensive. That's the fundamental question that underlies almost every other business decision that your company makes, is who is my customer? And how do I interact with them? How are they going to use the software? How are we going to support the software? How are we going to price it, market it, all that sort of thing? Everything comes out of which market you've chosen. So it goes to show, it stands to reason then, if you change that, that's going to take a million years to fix. And indeed, it took us, it's still taking us many years, even today. So the trial experience, that's the user's first impression of you. It's critical to get that right if you're selling software. And the trial is not something that is frozen in time, right? You throw it out there, you see how people use the trial, and then you need to get feedback as to why aren't they buying your software after having used the trial. And then you iterate over it. The trial is software in that you use agile development on it, just like any other piece of software. And lastly, use your own software. If you're selling development tools and you're developing it, you sure as heck better be using it so that you know it has value, and therefore you know your customer will find it valuable. So what can you guys take away from this talk? Obviously, the lessons that we learned at Five Runs aren't necessarily lessons that are going to apply to you. But I think generically, as I've said, the bigger decisions require you to gather more knowledge, gather more context.  And technical problems are the least of your concern. As I said, the technical decisions, oftentimes one, two, three people can fix them in a matter of a week or two. It's those customer decisions, those business decisions that you really need to watch out for. And we're all developers, so we tend to focus on the tree, not the forest. But the forest is something that sometimes you need to step back and look at and say, are we doing this right? And finally, we're all developers, knowledge is the only thing we bring to our job, what's in our head. So you have to learn, you have to be growing, you have to be getting experience. And as I said, the best way to get experience is by making mistakes and learning from them. That's what you've got to do. And as I said, I'm not going to talk about any really dumb mistakes, but we made one or two of those. So you're welcome to ask me about it afterwards. That's my contact info. And that's all I got. Thank you.


Okay, so here we have the animal hero kids with me, all amazing little activists. Hi. Say hi. Hi everyone. Hi. Okay, so I'm going to ask you guys, what is the animal hero kids about? Animal hero kids is just trying to spread the message of kindness to all. Kindness to all? Yes, kindness to all kinds. That includes animals. All kinds includes animals, doesn't it? Do you think sometimes animals get excluded from that? Yes. They do, don't they? And what's your favorite animal? My favorite animal is a turtle. A turtle? Turtles are cute, aren't you? Horses. Horses? Probably... Oh yeah, pigs. Pigs? Oh my God. Who else likes pigs? Do you love pigs? Pigs? What do you love about pigs?  They're like toddlers? Yeah, and a lot of people don't recognize that they're so smart and they're not dirty. They're actually some of the cleanest animals. They're more intelligent than dogs and cats and they're just some of the best animals. Wow, that's beautiful. So you guys are all co-presidents of the animal hero kids, I heard? Yes. Wow, and what sorts of things do you do? You got someone behind me? What sort of things do you do as being part of the animal hero kids? First off, we go for vegan, obviously. Vegan? Yeah. What's a vegan? Someone that doesn't wear or use any animals at all. Wow, that is a good explanation of what a vegan is. And how long have you been vegan? Four years. Four years. So tell me, what do you guys do as part of being the animal hero kids? Well, we go to protests and we go to meetings. Yeah, amazing. You try to influence other kids to be vegan as well? Yeah. What sort of things do you say to other kids to help them understand what we do to animals? I just try to tell them slowly and then I'll let them get it and once they get it, try to make them feel more connected to animals. Yeah. Who here thinks most kids care about animals? Me. Do you think most of your friends at school do and think most kids do? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Does anyone think that most children even know that they're eating real animals? No? No. They don't? Nope. Wow. So when it sort of looks like a sandwich, kids don't actually know they're eating a real animal, do they? No. It looks like a sandwich but these animals have lives and feelings and actually my best friend from kindergarten went vegan not that long ago because I told him that that was an animal he was eating so that's really exciting. Wow. And don't you guys think it's interesting how like when there's like a fish finger or a chicken nugget, it doesn't actually look like a fish or a chicken anymore, does it? It sort of disguises it but like kids wouldn't want to eat real chickens or real fish, would they? No. No. And how about you? What sort of things do you do to spread the vegan message? Well, I do tend to a lot of protests and marches but also I like to do a lot of outreach and education awareness because I think that's the key to making change. Conversations? Yes. Conversations? Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Now, we've got this book here, Animal Hero Kids Voice for the Voiceless book and they're distributing this to all the schools? So all the school libraries will have one of these. So that's a big, we can reach a lot of kids with this animalherokids.org. So if you go there you can convince Ellen to get this book into all the different schools. Now what do you guys want to see happen in the whole world in the next five years? The world go vegan. Go vegan? Yeah. The world to stop eating animals, stop riding animals, stop, stop wearing animals and all that other stuff. Yeah. And how about you? Go vegan.  Change from abusive to kindness. Wow, that is so, so important and you? I would like to get all like animal performances, whether it's like in SeaWorld or in zoos or aquariums for them to be in sanctuaries or set free and shut them down. Yeah. Because they're like prisoners in there, aren't they? It's really sad. And you? How about you? What do you want to see in the next five, ten years across the whole world? Go vegan. Vegan. Total animal liberation. Yes. You've been watching my videos or? For the climate change to turn upside down. To reverse climate change. Do you think we have enough time for that? Time is running out though, isn't it? Time is running out. How about you? Oh, Genesis. Yeah. We all know Genesis, don't we? You got a bigger YouTube channel than me by now, don't you? What, like, for the world to become vegan, I want for all animals to be free because animals don't deserve what's happening to them right now. No. No. It's really sad, isn't it? But luckily, we've got a lot of youngsters here. So the next generation can help us free all the animals. And I think we've got a whole bunch of activists here which gives me hope for the future. Yeah? Animal Hero Kids Hall of Fame. I'm actually, I'm already with the Hall of Famers right now. Hey. Thanks guys. Thanks for the interview. Thank you.


Hey everyone, it's Gabrielle with Oxmer Audit Group. I'm here today at Oxmer Toyota for Facebook Use Vehicles of the Week. I have three vehicles I picked out for you guys this week. So I'm going to go over some details on this first one. This is a 2016. It's a Lexus RX350. It is a wheel drive. The exterior color isn't a black. Kind of has like a little sparkle to it. The vehicle is all wheel drive. There's a sunroof. So the vehicle has heated and ventilated seating. There's blind spot monitoring. Has the heated express express a walnut steering wheel. There's the premium package on this. It also has a power lift gate, backup camera, and it has Bluetooth. That interior was a black. Mileage is $33,348. The price is $33,316. Moving on to our second. This one's a certified pre-owned 2018 Toyota CHR. It's an XLE premium. The exterior color is called silver knockout metallic. So this vehicle does have blind spot monitoring. There is heated seating. Vehicle has Bluetooth backup camera. There's a clean car fax with one previous owner. That interior color is in a black. Mileage is $25,699. The price is $19,548. For our last vehicle. This is a certified pre-owned 2014 Toyota Venza. It's an XLE. The exterior color is called classic silver metallic. Now this vehicle is a rare find. It has extremely low miles. Mileage is $17,335. So this vehicle does have navigation. There is a sunroof. Heated leather seating. There's a backup camera. Power lift gate has a clean car fax with one previous owner. And the pricing on this is $19,995. If you guys have any questions on any one of these, please feel free to let us know. Best phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Also, make sure to check out our new express store, which is on our website, oxmortrayota.com. And I'll have a link to each one that I just went over in the comments. Thanks guys. I'll see you all soon. Bye.