So, welcome everybody to the DPL wannabe buff. It's on. Our facilitator, moderator here is Stefano Zachiroli, the DPL. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Daniel. So, I started with an apology. I completely misread the schedule of this day. So, that means that I didn't expect this buff to be at 10 a.m. So, it's way less prepared than I wanted it to be. But, okay, we could do it anyway. And the idea of the buff was to actually... Well, try to dispel some myth about the job of the DPL. I think we know in general in the project way less about what the DPL do than what we should know. And also to ask you for a review of... Okay. Hi, everybody. So, the idea was to share some experiences among past DPLs, and now I can use the plural, given that Steve has arrived, and people who are interested potentially even in becoming DPLs explaining a bit what their role is about, and also ask you for sort of a review of the... especially of the communication stuff I've been doing and how I've been doing that to see what we can improve. So, I guess the first message on what the job of the DPL is about, which I want to share, is that it's way less about changing things than how it is about doing routine stuff in the way you see fit. So, I remember having read a lot of BDL. Do you want to come on stage? Steve, you too. You know, that's an advantage of being DPL. You can call the whole DPL on stage and it will come. Yeah. So, yeah, the first thing which surprised me a bit when I became the first few months of being DPL is that I had an idea proposing my platform to change a lot of stuff, but actually the actual amount of work you need to put in day-to-day activity is way more than you can expect. So, you will receive a lot of requests to moderate conflicts, press inquiries, to interviews, and a lot of this routine work, which is actually a lot of work, and in essence can reduce a lot the time you have to actually change things. So, my first suggestion is that if you're planning to run for DPL, well, you need to have a good workflow to deal with day-to-day activities before you think about what you want to really change in that way. So, just a quick poll. Who in this room have ever thought, even for a moment, and then forget about it to run for DPL? That's good enough. I thought I would have seen no ends at all. At least one of them has been accounted for. Yes. So... You should have a good election this year. You should have a good election this year. So, Ian, we've run out of chair. No, come on! So, I think I want to turn the rest of the discussion with you and I welcome input on what do you want to know from people with the experience of being DPL in case you want to run for DPLs? So, we are here to answer your questions. But also in particular, I want you to think about the relationship among the DPL and the project and think about the kind of communication I've been doing and we have been doing, if it has been transparent enough or not, and what do you expect more from DPL than what you have actually got? So... We're open up for questions, comments on this stuff and all this. Whoever has raised the end, I'll try to keep notes. I have just a different question, but it concerns me a lot, is that I have the feeling that half of the DPLs just left Debian. So, we have Richard Ackermann, we have Brandon, yes, exactly, and maybe some others are not visible anymore. It is so exhausting that you can't be it anymore. Doesn't the stage answer the question? I'm sorry, you are not the right person to ask. Do we have it anymore? We need a mic for here, or we can pass this one. We have only one? Okay, I think we can... I mean, it is very visible that some of the previous DPLs have left the project. I don't actually think it's any more a higher proportion of DPLs than any other developers necessarily, it's just you possibly notice it more. I don't know, I haven't actually worked out the numbers, but you can see there are a number of previous DPLs still here. We still, me, BDEL, Ian, and TBM are all here. Me? Exactly, previous DPLs. We're all still here, we're all involved. Hell yes, after doing the DPL job for a while, there is a big potential for burnout. You don't get much rest at all, and by the time I got to the end of my time, I really did need a break, so I did slack off for a while. For some of us, we're so involved in Debian, we're not going away any time. It's really interesting, the things that happen to you the morning after you're elected as DPL, and I had an interesting conversation actually with Brandon Robinson right after he was elected DPL, and part of the reason was that I was about to give a talk about Debian at Linux Conference Australia, and since he wasn't able to be there, they expected me to be able to report a few words from the new DPL, and so he and I had a conversation about this, and his sentiment was exactly the same one I had had immediately after becoming DPL, and it was this incredible sense of responsibility. And the reason for that is that I think all of us who have been involved in Debian for a long time, and even those of you who have not been involved for a really long time, understand just how significant this project is in the grand scheme of the free software world, and to all of a sudden find yourself as the person who's expected to be the public representative for the project, the first point of contact for people outside of the project who are interested in finding out more about what's happening, the person that everyone looks to to resolve the conflicts, particularly the ones that are not technical and therefore are the most challenging to cope with, the emotional personality and whatever things.  And it does, I think, change your perspective just a little bit on what's important. But I certainly, I was involved in Debian long before I was elected DPL, and here I am long after, still hard to get rid of. So I think, to me at least, they're separate. There's no direct relationship between spending time as DPL and I certainly, as Steve said, I've had points in time where my level of engagement has ebbed and flowed. There was particularly a period for a couple of years when I was off very focused on trying to get an amateur satellite project finished where my attention to anything Debian related was probably an all time low. And I don't think any of that's unusual, surprising or to be of concern. Just a comment on that, like a tip or whatever. I decided that if I would have become DPL I would have stopped doing all the technical work for the period that was going to be DPL and that has been a very wise choice. I think we have all done that. But making it this, well, okay. For me it was really clear that, okay from this time on I stopped doing the technical stuff and it's been a very wise idea. It's difficult because first of all you cannot in just one click orphan all your packages. So if you look at my DDPO page I've listed still in a lot of packages and uploaders even though I've made clear to the other commentators that I wouldn't have done any technical work in the meantime. And it's difficult also because in a volunteer project people always try to get you engaged in stuff. So if you've been working on a package for five, ten years as I've been doing even if you made clear that you didn't want to do that for one year or two years or whatever it is people will ask you can you please do this and do that and it's not always easy to say no. This is I think a point where there is a very good risk of burnout. We are all volunteers so when a volunteer asks you something that you know how to do saying no is pretty difficult. But trying to do that on the non DPL stuff it's been very helpful for me. Penny. Yeah, I think we can. So someone asked on Monday I think whether the role was eventually going to continue being sustainable. And so my question is do you think inevitably it's going to be some house split or some particular duties are floated to other roles so essentially split and if so how? As far back as maybe was a debcon from Helsinki I think I led a discussion there about this notion that maybe the job had become too big for one person and we ought to consider even the possibility of some sort of a constitutional change to going to some kind of a ruling board or committee kind of structure or something and then there have been experiments with that. I mean Steve was sort of on both the leading and following side of the idea of a second in charge kind of mechanism to try and share the workload some. I think Zach's actually demonstrated what all of us probably knew which is that the DPL has always had the power to delegate things and if you are capable of making that sort of mental leap to I don't have to do this all myself there are lots of other people around here who want to do things and I just have to pick a few victims I mean volunteers to assign things to it's unclear to me it remains unclear to me whether there's actually a better structural approach than the one we have or whether what we just need are people as DPL candidates who use the word we a lot more than the word I. So I think there are these two moments in which you can think about splitting tasks one is going up front and saying in a platform you know I would like to work with this, this, this and this person and this is something which I don't think is particularly fair because after all the institutions put their responsibility on one person but what I would like us to try out is actually to have some sort of committee or board of directors or stuff like this which is independent from the DPL elections but is there to actually help out the DPL so if you look at the governance of more young free software project that exists right now you see most of them have some sort of board of directors and those boards actually have stuff like periodic public meetings like once per month where they review what is in need of being done and they go through it they welcome questions from people and all this kind of stuff so this is something I think we should try but it's not clear how to go there so ideally it should be something like the DPL send a call for volunteers which are people interested in helping out the DPL tasks these people show up, get delegated in some way maybe we give them some sort of governance which election, internal elections, stuff like that and those are independent from being the DPL they're just there to help the DPL and I think it could be also a good place where to learn more about the task which usually the DPL deals with and also to be more transparent because if you're up to every single month a meeting, a public meeting well it can be a way to be more transparent about what is going on than if there is only one person doing the job I think that the main reason why previous attempts of DPL teams failed is that they were mainly about let's do a team and then we figure out how it works and I think it's something that could work well I'm wondering whether something like government could work where the DPL would delegate some specific topics to someone else for a short period of time for example the DPL could decide that it doesn't care about following a specific press release that would take a lot of work that would take a lot of time to work on and delegate that to someone else we'll work on that and report to the DPL and do you think that this could work and how much of your work could be removed by doing that kind of thing? Okay so what I'm a bit scared about when I do delegation is that they tend to be more sticky than what you initially imagined so doing a delegation is kind of I was not thinking of delegations as in the constitution you don't need to use delegations as in the constitution to do that you can just say someone to the people that will interact with him that you trust him to do that to work on that for the next two months and that he will follow whatever he decides Yes so you're breaking the areas of all this I think to a certain extent that's already been happening I don't know how visible that is I mean I was trying to get more people involved and taking charge of individual tasks like that when I was DPL I think BDEL was doing it without doing that we'd have DPLs burning out every year without fail so yeah absolutely it's the better way to go I think Can you give examples of things that were delegated that way? Well there have been plenty of delegation going on so I think part of the problem is that actually calling for people on specific tasks requires quite a lot of job on the DPL side so in the immediate I mean in the near future you decide to do that it takes a lot of work to actually find the people decide the breakdown in tasks and all this kind of stuff so that's why I was trying to see if we can have sort of board which is you know autonomous which is created some way and there's some way of renewing himself which is exactly what other people are doing with boards and delegating various stuff I mean auditing stuff and I'm about to try to delegate away the spring stuff I've got some wonderful volunteers so it is going on but as long as it's there is the DPL which is the bottleneck every time finding a task and delegating I don't think it's really scalable and also I think me and you discussed sort of a government DPL gets elected and create a sort of government and then it works with the minister or whatever but one year period is actually very short and the time it takes to create this stuff it's a good deal of the one year term we appreciate if people can take notes in this DC 11 DPL wannabe goby document and maybe if I can just add what you said about those informal delegations I mean certainly when I was DPL I asked people for favors constantly and I knew what people were good at if I needed something to proofread I would go to those people if something else needed to be done I would know someone else who I could ask so you just don't see those things because we don't talk about it it's like a small thing can you proofread that press release that small thing but I mean everyone who knows me I'm sure you have been asked by me for some favor over the years that goes on all the time Just a return of experience I've been for instance asking a bit more heavily in the second term if people are interested in helping out with DPL tasks and want to sort of learn the job come to me let me know and I will be happy to show sort of to-do list and outsource to use some tasks two people have applied to that and I've shared a specific task but in the end nothing has happened yet so it's kind of difficult to do that and I think it's a problem because we have people that decide to run for DPL last minute without having an idea of what is going on and it's not particularly good for the project I think So I don't know if you were imagining like every DPL bringing in their own team a bit like say the American government I don't think that would really work for us for two reasons one is the one year thing that's been mentioned but also in Debian we tend to create roles and then people stick with them often for much longer periods of time and that's actually healthy because it means you get people who have some idea what they're doing that does mean that the DPL doesn't really get to they tend to inherit all the people who are doing everything from before and I think that's probably healthy as well because it means the DPL doesn't have to that's one more thing that's not on their plate Almost like a civil service Well there's this other element of it that I think in the medical profession is that you will start with do no harm you're supposed to try and do things that make things better and not make them worse and one of the things you realize very quickly you know if you think about this you don't even have to be the DPL to realize this but once you're the DPL it's absolutely abundantly clear to you is there a lot of people who are volunteering to do stuff that isn't terribly visible to the public and yet is absolutely vital to the project and the very last thing you want to do is demoralize or demotivate those people because in the same sense as civil service hopefully with a stronger sense of reward for whatever everyone doing these jobs is a volunteer and I think on some level we have to understand that we have to honor the contributions that they're making that doesn't mean don't fix things when they're broken but it does mean be careful that you understand what's actually broken before or taking some kind of precipitous action I think there's one question there well actually there's three questions already from IRC the first one is one moment please you say we have volunteers for the DPL election next year already the first question was that was the email address always leader at dbn.org because it sounds a little bit military like and I guess the BD knows that you know there's a point in history where the new maintainer process was waving and smiling at the right person there was a point in history where we did uploads to the archive without using cryptographic signatures on the uploads where there was a single login to the master FTP server that had a shared password you know history is full of all sorts of things like that there's certainly no military intent here you have to pick some token and in this case our constitution refers to the elected person as the Debian project leader so the word leader comes entirely from that and not from you know I think you know in hindsight calling this person the leader has had some interesting connotations in that regard I don't know what else you would call this role but it's yeah so I'm responsible for this at the time at the time when I when I wrote all this down we just had Bruce disappearing off and we really did have a leadership role that was somebody who thought they could tell everybody what to do I mean it didn't occur to me to call the job something else there is an advantage and having called the job the leader you know has to be something out of Debian or the leader is the obvious thing to call it the leadership role in Debian is really very weak compared to most leadership type roles because the authority is fairly limited but on the other hand you do have an enormous amount of credibility which is useful both within and without the project you're really the only person within Debian who's got a broad elected mandate and so that means you can stand up and you can say well all of these people voted for me so you know in some sense I represent them all and you should do what I think you should do because everybody else thinks so too effectively and the other thing that's really useful about this is a term is that it gives some handle for the rest of the world to talk to us and one of the I mean we're not talked about that very much officially in the list of jobs but anybody who wants to talk to Debian really you know if you're some journalist from a trade rag you've got really no idea what's going on and having somebody who's called the leader who's got a fixed email address gives you somebody to email and also it means that you're pretty sure that the replies you get from that person are you know in some sense representative of the project and not some kind of Debian of course being a place full of wackos Yeah the next one is well it's actually a question to all of you up there what was the most unexpected task you did as a project leader I can tell you the most of the tasks I got to do were actually expected I can tell you the most unexpected mail I've ever got as DPL like one week after my first election and there was someone proposing that Debian drop support for the Linux kernel and switch to MAC MACH kernel and getting away of all the other kernels because they are crap compared to MAC maybe others more serious replies answer to the question you know it's been a number of years now and trying to remember details is not always easy but I think the thing that I was the most I generally was how much interest there was in having me go to various places around the world to talk about Debian and I eventually realized it's the because my immediate predecessor didn't like airplanes and wasn't interested in traveling long distances so and then this was also sort of the flames were fanned a little bit by the fact that I had good support from my employer for travel expenses at the time I don't think I had any idea when I signed up to be DPL that I would spend you know the better part of the year traveling to strange corners of the globe to give talks about Debian I think every DPL since then has had the opportunity to go to some really interesting places and talk about Debian and I don't know why I was so surprised by that but I really was I didn't expect to spend as much of my time out sort of being a public figurehead and a representative for the project as people seem to want me to be at that point in time the thing that actually probably shouldn't have been a surprise but did really hit home was when I heard the news about Timo Soifer being killed in a car crash a few years ago he was a good friend and obviously just on just on that level it hit home but also to be asked by journalists and people outside the project essentially to lead the tributes to him to you know like they were asking how did he fit into the project what had happened you know how would we be hit by his loss I said it shouldn't have been a surprise but it was a very humbling thing to be asked about Yeah I was really surprised to discover how much external interest in Debian there was from people who didn't understand it at all and to find myself the contact point for all of those people and that took up the majority of my time and I found that quite difficult actually I can't remember anything like specific at the moment but I think like as a general theme one thing I guess I found unexpected I mean I was expecting a lot of work but still something you don't see we have had people complaining over the years that the DPR is not transparent enough but just how much stuff is going on just to keep things running and you don't see it because there are people who make sure that things don't break but just on a day to day basis how much effort you have to put in just to keep things running I guess that was unexpected part of a serious answer to your question so the amount of legal or legal like things that are actually going on and to be honest that's also an example of a thing that not necessarily should be done by the DPR itself we can imagine having a team of people interested in this kind of stuff and asking the DPR when they want a decision but having done all the underlying research work so this is an example of a task that can be probably applied to some other team or the like sorry no not exactly and there was a third one right yeah but I will ask this later because I don't yet understand the question either okay what else whistle Felipe about training the new DPRs one thing that may work at least would be a fix while transitioning for a board or something like that is having the elections a little bit earlier and then having two DPRs working together for a few weeks two weeks that do you think that might work well even let's assume that it works out you can have it even without changing the period of the election you just say that for the first week or whatever they are both on board to be honest even less formally than that I've yet to find any of the DPRs who just vanish and won't talk to you whether it's before the election or after the election so if a new wannabe DPR does want help I'm sure there's at least five people here who will happily give advice probably more than you need more than you want but you know if you ask for it you'll get the advice I think it's also a fallacy to believe that somehow you flip a switch and all of a sudden a big change happens Martina we're talking the other night I guess over drinks or something about the fact that when he took over after me I had already made commitments to travel to various places to speak about Debian different conferences for maybe six or eight months into the future you have to because you have to plan these things and the conference organizers want a name and a photo to put on the program and so forth even just on that level these tend to be soft transitions but I can't remember any transition between DPLs and the history of the project really that didn't involve a lot of overlap a lot of communication a lot of advice and guidance and I certainly personally feel really privileged to have been asked questions by and had the opportunity to provide some advice and guidance at one time and other to everyone who's ever been project leader all the way back to Ian Murdock even so and then I've got an anecdote from Deb Conn three years ago I remember getting into an elevator at the conference and meeting up with Margava going down to breakfast where she told me that morning she'd had a nightmare and she woke up believing for a moment she was the DPL and it was hilarious it was a good joke on the way down to breakfast and she said at that point no no no she would never do it and yet in 2010 when she did stand in the election I know she spoke to me I believe she spoke to BDL I'd be amazed if she didn't speak to I know she spoke to lots of other people asking for advice and I think we were all very supportive gave all the advice she needed we got a great DPL we could have had a different great DPL and I hope she'll stand again obviously we will happily support anybody else who wants to volunteer for a really really big job and I guess the other thing to say is that if the people who run for DPL are really well connected within the project anyway because otherwise you would never get elected you have to talk to teams you have to know a lot of people otherwise you don't have a chance being elected anyway so you have good connections anyway and most people we get along pretty well so I think it would be nice to see some more documentation and some more written down some of the experience to be written down but I think the informal way we have at the moment works pretty well so some of you mentioned that it took you quite a while to get set up in your new role do you think Debian as a whole would benefit from maybe electing the leader for two years instead of only one? So there is pro I think it would but it's also quite risky so I think we have briefly discussed that starting from an input by AJ in the sorry in the past DPL elections and so the point is that yes so there is a set up time also there is some commitment you make like as Bidale has mentioned you make commitment with people and you say okay I'm gonna talk there and also it takes a while to you know get to know people outside Debian you need to interface with can be GNU, can be FSF, can be GNOME can be whatever big project which want to be in touch with Debian in some way and at that level it really gets personal so it's not that they talk to you just because it's your role they go along with you and they will not go along with someone else so yes there will be an advantage but it's also risky because if a DPL goes missing in action like six months of the election then you have one year and a half in which he might be not or he might not be very active so what we have mentioned is giving some easy exit way at middle ground or something like people can call for an election or you can stand down some easy way I don't know. I think we did at some point shorten the time periods involved with the actual election process. I remember a long long time ago we started with I think three week chunks or something so the entire process ran sort of nine weeks start to finish and if you think about it that's a fairly significant fraction of a year particularly you know because that's a period of time during which people who are candidates for DPL I think think even more than usual about the things that they're going to say publicly who they might upset with various positions or actions and whether it's really what you would like or not the time period of the election itself often ends up being almost a quiet period for the DPL where things don't happen as publicly visibly as you might hope so I think one of the steps in the right direction was doing that I've always had sort of mixed feelings about the timing thing I certainly felt at the end of the year that I wasn't done and it would have been nice to have had more time to do more things not to take anything away from Martin because I think he did an excellent job too but the flip side of that is you still haven't gotten rid of me well yeah but I was just going to say you know you're never done so there's always something to do yeah so I didn't have the experience of standing for re-election because I basically decided not to yeah exactly certainly some of our past DPLs have made that look very easy and what I want to know really I suppose is whether it actually is easy if it is easy then we don't really have a problem there you could just stand for re-election well yes you have a point but still even when stand for re-election the campaign period is some quite some work as well so you know preparing the platform answering questions this year and still even this year it took me some time anyhow because you know and then people ask for interviews and all this kind of stuff so you're right it's not such a big deal but it can be somehow more efficient I guess yeah the third question from IRC I just read it as it is so this is my first virtual depth conf I followed a lot of talks listening and reflecting shows me a big focus on developers in the sense of contributing code my personal experiences are coders really bad at marketing even marketing their own software management skills and so on yesterday I listened to the financial management accounting talk is Debian aware that for those areas you need people with special skill in management accounting and so on and does the DPL report regularly on his done work is there a handover of the business companies from DPL to the next one so that part the answer is yes those details do get handed over and I think we've taken various steps over time to try and do a better job of accounting it's also true that the actual money that is held on behalf of Debian is not actually held by Debian it's held by organizations like software in the public interest about which sometime tomorrow I think we have a BOF session on behalf of the project and one of the things I wanted to say though is that a good friend of mine who is a machinist talking in a news group about home shop machining a few years ago made the observation that the problem is that in any organization you have to make do with the people who are there and what that means is that while as a project Debian understands that there are different skills and different roles and lots of different people with different interests coming together is what makes this thing so powerful at the end of the day the people who actually are willing to do things for Debian are the ones who are available to do the various jobs and about the specific point of documenting what's going on so I've been trying to do that with the sort of daily bits of what's going on which helps me preparing monthly report and I hope will also be a good source of information for future DPLs and then there is the sort of the mail archive which helps a bit but in my experience it's not something you use you have a look at the beginning to see if there are some to do item left or something but it's not that useful I just wanted to get back to that question from IRC and also the discussion yesterday on the finances I think what we have to realize is that we are not a commercial entity out there that has to form with other commercial entities so we might choose to do financial statements but we don't actually have to do them professionally and if we screw up we are not going to lose out on it so this creates a project which on the one hand still means that we are actually focused mainly on creating the best operating system but also gives everyone a stage to do whatever they want to do and whether that's accounting marketing or I mean I'm looking at Holger over there for instance I don't think Holger was brought up to be a video professional and I think he is you know and that's because of we have five minutes left I was just going to comment I mean I think one thing that people don't realize is that a lot of people in Debian are actually not programmers if you look at what people have studied I mean sure a lot of them have studied computer science but not everyone has and I agree we need more skills I've always been someone who has always told people don't package we have thousands of people doing packaging you have to do something else as well and for example in my Debian career I'm not famous for packaging I'm famous for other things so you can definitely be successful at those things and I think we also have in the past made the mistake of electing people as DPL because there were good packages and that didn't turn out well and I think we did learn from that and I think if you look at the recent DPLs most of them are good at coordination and that kind of work but yeah we definitely need more people doing other things I'd have a quick question to the former DPLs does any one of you have any plans maybe in the distant future to run for DPL ship again that is not a fair question maybe you'd have to ask my fiance whether or not I'm allowed to for start so I certainly don't have any plans too but that depends on like any situation in Debian you go and do work where it seems the work needs to be done and at the moment I don't think the role of DPL needs my input yeah absolutely 110% agreed on that I mean like a lot of jobs in Debian you don't do it because you want the fame or anything like that you do it because you know the job needs doing it's awesome to be able to finish the job or not finish the job but do your part of it and hand over to another safe pair of hands so I would like the answer from Bidel and TBM they are both thinking about running again next year and we go ahead with Andrea's answer yeah I have a question do you think that number of candidates somehow is reflecting the problems we have inside Debian I remember one election with 10 candidates and I remember one election with only one candidate well I think it definitely I think there is definitely a reason for that I mean I think in the past when people were unhappy you know we have different candidates and sometimes candidates who promise that they would radically change things and I think you know in recent years we still have a lot of things to improve but you know people are really happy and you know people are happy with what Suck was doing so why would anyone else run I mean if things don't if it's not broken don't fix it I think it's also worth pointing out that the fundamental themes that have been part of the various platforms for DPL candidates over the years have all sort of coalesced and converged if you look even not just this year but if you look back a couple of years there are themes that come up over and over again I'll be more open about communicating I'll do more things you know publicly I'll delegate more work these are all excellent themes but it's really been a long time since we had any feel or need for any sort of fundamental change of direction and in this sense I would be surprised if there were lots and lots of people who thought that you know there was a desperate need to go be the person who tries to lead or something through that process and I think as we've all come to understand over time the role of the DPL is not necessarily one that conveys some huge amount of power to make abrupt changes anyway Okay so time is up I just want to do you have a question I just want to apologize again for not having organized this both too much but we provide just a good show for pictures I guess then I want to observe that we suck at taking minutes and we didn't get at all to the procedures of how the DPL communicates with the project if you have feedback about that please mail me or catch me in the corridor I'm always looking in ways to improve that part Alright so let's thank the speakers coming up next is going to be talk about the NM process by Enrico Zini Thank you guys


Hi, my name is Dr. Majanath Haridas. I'm a colorectal and a GI surgeon in the Department of Gastro-Science's Manipal Hospital, Whitefield. We have a state-of-the-art technology and dedicated operating room for the patients who require any kind of surgeries that is related to the Department of Gastro-Science. Any patients who'd like to visit us can come and visit us on a dedicated floor. There is a dedicated endoscopy suit where endoscopic procedures and other complex procedures are also performed. Colonoscopies and endoscopies are routine procedures that are performed on a daily basis. All patients who require any kind of a major surgery, we have a dedicated operating room which are with a state-of-the-art technology that is available. Laparoscopic surgeries are very routine in our facility. We have a very high-end intensive care unit to take care of the patients who are sick. Please, allow me to take you through our department and show you what we have.


Hi there, and thanks for stopping by Elasticsearch's virtual booth. We'd rather have been able to have this conversation in person, but at least we know you're not just here for the cool stickers. I'd like to take the next few minutes to tell you, no, scratch that, show you how Elasticstack and the Kubernetes world play together. And don't worry, there actually is virtual swag. First, let's start with the basics. Elasticsearch is a free and open data store and search engine, commonly used in projects where speed and scale are crucial. From powering the engine that connects drivers and passengers at Uber, to helping NASA explore questions about life on Mars, the search and analytics capabilities of the Elasticstack is powering mission-critical applications for thousands of companies globally. Elasticsearch is the heart of the Elasticstack and serves as the underpinnings for multiple use cases. In today's always-on world, your customers, partners, and team members need to find things. But think about it, most user experiences start with a search box, the right product, relevant support information, or that document that you simply can never remember the name of. That's where AppSearch and EnterpriseSearch come in. This always-on world also means that you've got to be vigilant with your ecosystem and infrastructure. Monitoring and compliance requirements continue to evolve. You need to secure cloud deployments as well as your network, users, and hosts. Elasticsearch security, built directly on the Elasticstack, ensures that you can maintain a security posture across your entire organization, regardless of deployment type, while protecting users, assets, and sensitive data. And you need to do all of this at an unprecedented scale. Our world has become even more virtual, and the increasing demand for software is also causing an uptick in the amount of infrastructure needed to run it on. Whether that infrastructure is self-managed, in the cloud, or, most commonly, a bit of both. Along with the endpoint monitoring mentioned earlier, it's important to also know how these disparate systems are performing. And Elastic Observability lets you see what's running where, which hosts, pods, or containers are overcapacity, or give you a preemptive heads-up if you're about to breach an SLA. We'll dig a little deeper on this area later. The best software can't help you if you can't use it where you want. Elasticstack has multiple deployment options, letting you run how and where you want. Whether it's one ginormous cluster for everything, or separate clusters adjacent to your workloads, sharing information via cross-cluster replication and search. The easiest way to get started with the Elasticstack is with the Elasticsearch service on Elastic Cloud, where you can create and manage your deployments from a simple web UI. If you decide that you need more storage or want to span more availability zones, then that's just a few clicks away. Picking up the latest and greatest features is also easy, with the latest versions available the day they're released. If you'd prefer to manage your own deployments, you've got multiple options. You can download the Elasticstack for free and manage it yourself. If you'll be provisioning new deployments frequently, or want a SaaS experience, then Elastic Cloud Enterprise provides the same great management experience as the Elasticsearch service, only on your infrastructure. But what about running on Kubernetes, you may ask? This is KubeCon after all. Elastic Cloud and Kubernetes, the official operator for the Elasticstack in Kubernetes, is a great option for running Elastic products on Kubernetes. ECK extends Kubernetes orchestration capabilities to support the setup and management of these solutions on Kubernetes, not just for day one operations, but also day two and beyond. I'm going to jump into a terminal and go through a quick demo on ECK to show you what I mean. I'm basically going to walk through the steps from the Quickstart docs. I'm running a newly installed Kubernetes cluster on GKE. If I list out some of the namespaces, we can see that we've got the default namespace and some Kube system ones as well. Installing the operator is just a simple Kube control apply command with the URL for the most reason version. It's echoing out the assets as they're loaded. If I check again, we've got a new Elastic system namespace, and the Elastic operator pod is all that's running in there. I'll quickly make sure it's generating logs. And it is. Now let's stand up an Elastic cluster. I'm just going to use the defaults directly from the Quickstart. Now the provisioning happens asynchronously. I can check the status with a getElasticSearch command. This shows that the health is not yet known, and we want it to be green. I can use a selector to list the pods in my Quickstart cluster. As we can see, it's still starting up. Okay, it looks like it's done now, and the health is green. Let's go ahead and verify connectivity. To do this, we need the password that was generated for the Elastic user at startup. This gets stored as a secret. We'll use a query template to extract and decode the password from the secret, and stuff it into an environment variable, as well as into my max clipboard to use later. To reach the cluster, I need a tunnel, since it's running remotely on my GKE cluster. And now, I can just use a curl command to verify the connection. It turns out that there's a newer version of ElasticSearch, and a one-known cluster really isn't all that robust. Let's upgrade it to 7.8, and move to three nodes instead. This time, I'll just run a little loop to check its progress, so I can speed it up in post. It's going to upgrade and scale, and after a short time, I'm back to all green, now with three healthy nodes. I also want to spin up a Kibana instance, and that's similar to how we started ElasticSearch. We can monitor this, like the last one, but instead, with a Kibana selector, until it also turns green. Okay, now that it's all green, we'll set up another tunnel, load Kibana, and log in with a password we got earlier. So this was a quick and easy run-through of creating a cluster with ECK. ECK has many more options and capabilities, setting up an APM server, persistent storage, backups, and more. Start a chat to learn more, or explore resources in the resources section. Earlier I mentioned the importance of monitoring your infrastructure. As we've seen with ElasticSearch and ECK, cloud native deployments are dynamic. Applications come and go, they scale up and down, and with CICD workflows, they're constantly evolving with new features and fixes. With the dynamic app ecosystem, we need dynamic monitoring as well. Mixing and matching static monitoring with an ever-changing application stack negates that goal of agility and hampers evolution. Kubernetes and Docker provide mechanisms that allow you to add metadata to your application stack. These hints and labels allow you to describe the jobs when deploying or scaling applications or services. This metadata is also a perfect way to trigger automated monitoring for new or changed services through automatic discovery. With automatic discovery, Elastic's lightweight data shippers for logs, metrics and availability, file beat, metric beat, and heartbeat can automatically start monitoring new pods, containers, and services as they get spun up or scaled, and then ship logs and metrics to ElasticSearch. Elastic has integrations to gather logs and metrics for many services and formats. This includes several CNCF projects, graduated sandbox, and those in between. Some examples here are things like NATS, Core DNS, and Envoy Proxy, plus integrations for cloud native adjacent services, things that aren't CNCF projects, but are commonly used alongside Kubernetes deployments like Istio, Nginx, and Postgres. Plus, most integrations come with visualizations and dashboards that you can use out of the box, customize, or mix and match. If you're already using other high-level infrastructure monitoring tools like Azure Monitor, Google Stackdriver, or AWS CloudWatch, you're likely facing swivel chair monitoring, where you have to look at multiple interfaces to get the full picture. With Elastic Observability, it's easy to pull in logs and metrics from these services, enabling you to consolidate your infrastructure monitoring from multiple cloud providers to a single stack. Prometheus, a CNCF graduated project, is another tool commonly used to gather, query, and serve metrics in Kubernetes environments. Pulling them into Elastic Search allows you to chart them alongside your other metrics, along with the logs and metrics from your infrastructure, apps, and services, with recently added support for promql queries. Logs and metrics let you see what's happening at points in time. For even more visibility of your full stack, you can enable application performance monitoring.  With service maps to give you a bird's eye view of how your services are interacting, while machine learning-powered health indicators let you know when something's wrong. Once you learn of an issue, whether it be by integrated learning, machine learning, or just browsing around, you can start investigating and drill down to get those transaction details. Not seeing any errors, we can check out the JVM metrics, where we see a telltale sawtooth pattern showing an increased garbage collection and heap growth. Because all of our data is in one data store, tied together by the Elastic Common Schema, we can avoid swivel chair investigations. I can take my theory and jump directly to the corresponding logs, search for a keyword to zero in, then back up a little but stay in context. In this case, I see that something's wrong with our caching algorithm, with cache misses where it should be getting hits. Elastic APM agents are available for common programming languages and frameworks, and Elastic APM also has support for other open instrumentation specifications and formats, such as Open Tracing, Yeager, and Open Telemetry. The Elastic stack lets you work where and how you want to with multiple deployment options, on-prem, in the cloud, self-hosted, or as a managed service. Out of the box solutions for observability, security, and enterprise search, seamlessly combine your business data and KPIs with your monitoring data for all your services in a single unified platform. Try it out today with a trial on Elastic Cloud, download it and manage it yourself, or follow the same quick start we walked through and install ECK on your Kubernetes cluster and manage the full lifecycle effortlessly. We hope you enjoyed this video. Check out the resources pane for more information, and if you have questions, start up a chat. We'd love to hear from you.


This study examined the accuracy of unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, derived digital surface models, DSMs. It found that the accuracy increased as more ground control points, GCPs, were added, reaching a maximum accuracy of 0.25 meters vertically and 0.09 meters horizontally. Additionally, it was determined that the accuracy of the DSMs decreased as the distance from the nearest GCP increased. Furthermore, the surface texture of the glacier did not significantly affect the accuracy of the DSMs. This article was authored by Saskia Jindrox, Ruedi Bosch, and Daniel Farinati.


Turn, if you will, to Philippians 4. Let's just pray, shall we, before we begin. Our precious Heavenly Father, we just thank you, Lord, for this day, Lord, for opportunities to just freely talk about you and worship you and get into your Word and share our lives one with another. So we pray, Lord, by your Holy Spirit, that you will continue through this day, minister to each one where they are at. And the things you want to talk to them about, in Jesus' name, amen. Well, my talk is just a little bit different than the others today because, as you can see, it's very hard to follow the testimony you just heard. I'm thinking, how am I going to follow her? It's so fascinating to see the amazing things that God does in lives, isn't it? The miracles that he wrought. And after me, Sandy and Ruth are going to go on and expound on the Word a little more. But I'm just kind of like in the middle of all this, and Marie asked me if I would share some things from my life. And so, if you will turn back to, we're going to talk about a couple of verses here, but Philippians 4, verse 8, finally brethren, so I'll say finally sister, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of a good report. If there is any virtue, and if there's anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things, praiseworthy. I just wanted to share some things out of my own life that I do just praise the Lord for. And I'm hoping that they will encourage you and your walk with the Lord because I grew up reading missionary stories and about testimonies and Corrie Ten Boom, and it's so ministered to me. And so I think when we share with each other, it helps to lift us up. The Lord is able to do great things, He is able to do small things, which are just maybe important to you and no one else, but it makes God so real to us. And I find in life, if I take my eyes off of my problems and I start looking for those blessings, those miracles, those praiseworthy things, those lovely things, those things that God's doing in my life, it brings joy.  I'm from Costa Mesa area. And so yeah, yeah, yeah, I ask another friend and then I thought, great, I get in the car, I turn on my GPS, he says, can I help you with that? And I said, no, no, no, I've got it, pride, you see, got me in trouble. And so I get in the car and it goes. It puts me on the 55 and get off on the Pomona freeway, Santa Ana Pomona took me all the way up. And I'm going to Sharon Reese's church, I'm going to Diamond Bar, I'm supposed to go to Marie's church, I'm supposed to go to Chinoil, and I'm going, I had that bit of anxiety. I wasn't quite being strangled yet, but it was coming, and I'm going, I'm going to be so late this morning. And then I just stopped and prayed, and I thought, you know what, if the devil could get me anxious, he would. And I just passed Diamond Bar and just came on in. I remember my girlfriend saying to me yesterday, and she said, Jean, just remember, just follow the GPS and do what she says. And so I just did. I just got off on the Santa Ana freeway, I just went, and I thought, I hope I'm not going to Disneyland because I don't want to go there today. So I'm following this thing, and then the thought came to me that, I don't see, I don't trust the GPS, that she lies sometimes, and so that's what scares me. But then I got to thinking that, you know, our GPS is like the Holy Spirit in our life, and I can trust him. And I just thought, what a great example that is, is that tells you where to go, what direction, what he wants you to do, and we can trust him. He is trustworthy, and the Lord will bring you home safely to where you're supposed to be. I love that illustration. He's able to do the big things and the small things, such as maps, when you're on the freeway, and fix that for you. And I was thinking that a couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a book, and somehow I misplaced it because we had all this work done in the house.  You might as well move, really. But then you get all the dirt and dust with it. And so it was like crazy, and I couldn't find this book that I needed to study because I'm going to be teaching on Joshua in a few weeks, and I thought, I need to take that. I was going on a trip to Montana. I need to take it with me. I looked everywhere for that book. Do you ever lose things? It drives me crazy. And I'm looking for that book, and I'm looking in all the places I would have put it. I've been studying it this summer, and I'm thinking, where is it? Jesus, you know white word is. You can see it. I can't see it. Can you just show me where it is? Anyway, I couldn't find it. I went through my suitcase, a book bag, carry a briefcase that I take with me, and I couldn't find it, went through it two, three times. I just packed up and left, and I was in Montana the first morning, and it was dark out. It's dark up there a lot in the winter, and I didn't want to wake up my husband yet, and so I just turned on the coffee, got my flashlight, and I was just feeling around in my book bag to grab my Bible for devotions, and my hand landed right on the book I was looking for to study. In the dark, in the early morning, and pulled it out. And I had awakened that morning, thinking about that book, being very stressed about not anxious, about not finding it, and it was like, Jesus just had a smile, I'm sure, and said, I knew where it was. I just wanted you to trust me. And he can do those little things in your life that wouldn't matter to anybody else, but that really mattered to me, and I thought, you see me. You see me, Jesus, in the little things. And I love that, because it makes him so real to me. Doesn't it make him real to you?  And I said, well, that's really interesting, because I just talked to him this morning, you did. Yeah, I talked to him this morning, well, what'd you say? I said, well, he just spoke to me about a lot of things. I said, and then I just started sharing some things where the Lord had showed me things and done things, and she goes, really? I go, yeah. I said, you know what, why don't you ask the Lord to reveal himself to you? I want you to pray about something, and then wait and see what he says, because he wants you to know him more than you want to know it. And then I'm going, Jesus, please just answer this prayer. Make yourself real to this girl. Next time I saw her, she says, come here, come here, come here. Guess what happened? I go, what happened? She said, I did what you said. And she said, my girlfriend had disappeared. We were all worried about her, and I prayed she'd be safe. And she was at a friend's house when she was safe. You were right. And I said, you know what, honey? I just don't want to get to heaven and not find you there. He's real. And when we meditate on the miracles, on those great things that he does, those lovely things, those wonderful things, it builds our faith. It does mine, doesn't it yours? And it makes him so real to me. And I realize he sees right where we are. He does the big things, too. Last summer, or in the spring, my husband said that we had been invited to go to South Sudan on a mission trip. And then we went to the mission place, our reaching ministries, and we heard the whole thing about what it was going to be like. And I heard such horror stories. I left that place, and I said, I think it's a guy's trip. He said, well, I'm going.  So you just pray about it. So I said to my son, we might be going to South Sudan. And he said, you're serious?  All the terrorists, everything that goes on there. He said, well, just let me know where all your paperwork is before you leave home. So I tried my other son. I called him up. I said, hey, I got a great idea. I think your dad wants to go to South Sudan, and I really think that it should be a father-son trip. He goes, I don't think so.  That was a no. And so I begin to ask my friends to pray, and I prayed, Lord, just give me scripture. And the scripture he gave me was, he that will not leave houses or land, families, whatever all that is. For my sake in the gospel, it's not worthy to be called my disciple. Well, that was pretty clear. And it was in my devotions in the morning. Two days later, in Mark, I got another scripture. It says, and he who will go, I will give 100 fold to in this life and in life to come. And suddenly peace just came in. And I thought, I'm going to be OK. I'm going to be OK. The Lord is going to take care of us. And if I die, I die. Just don't let him torture me too badly. But if I die, I die. May it be quick. But I just had a total peace about it. You know, that we were to go. And then this little thought corrupt in mosquitoes. Malaria. I could get malaria from a little, forget the big guns in the soldiers. Mosquitoes, they're quiet. And then I was, and so I had to pray the Lord just get and take the mosquitoes. You know something, we went on that trip. And we went to dedicate a Calvary Chapel in South Sudan. My husband was preaching. And the general came and all these big wigs from the country. And this three star general was in charge of the defense of South Sudan. And so with him came a whole entourage of soldiers that lined the walls with their guns. And what I didn't see is right behind me in the aisle, because we were across from the general, was a soldier with a guns barrel this big, and it was a grenade launcher. I did not see it, but someone took a picture of it. And later I saw it. And I thought, you know what, I wasn't afraid at all. Even with all of that going on. I thought maybe it was the safest Calvary Chapel in the world that day, all those guns. But the thing I have to tell you is I came back home. And I was so blessed to be there, because those African women were so grateful. They came out of refugee camps, out of difficult situations. They were pastors and their wives. And they said, you made us so happy that you came. And we shared the gospel with them. And I got home, and I have to tell you that out of millions of mosquitoes that I saw daily, I did not get one mosquito bite, nor neither did my husband. And I got home, and I got two mosquito bites at home. So he's in the big things and in the little things. And I just have to praise him. He is praiseworthy, girls. He is so praiseworthy. We need to meditate on the miracles. We need to look to them. It will encourage us. And when we share them with others, it will encourage them. Fear and unhappiness and stress and complaining.  You don't trust him.  Amen.  I learned about God's ability early on. My parents believed in Christian school, so they decided to send me to a Christian school. Only the thing is, it was in Florida, and I'm from Pasadena. They felt like I would get the gospel there and that it would be good for me. I went to school with a lot of missionary kids, because in those days, missionaries could homeschool their kids for a period of time, but then in high school, they had to send them to boarding schools. And so into that boarding school came a lot of missionary kids. And I have to tell you, I had read books about missionaries, but now I was learning faith by watching their children. And I was, it was a privilege. It was really a privilege. I remember one of my best friends was named Marilyn, and she, her parents were missionaries in Africa to the Pygmies. I don't think that's politically correct anymore, but they were the small people, those adorable people. And they were there. Her father didn't see her for four years because she was away at school and he didn't have a furlough at that time. And so her grandmother lived in town. She would visit her. But I remember looking at Marilyn's life and seeing the joy of the Lord and she had such simple faith. And her favorite verse I think was Romans 4.17. God who gives life to the dead and calls those things that do not exist as though they did. And she just lived like that. She says, hey, God can make things exist that aren't there. Yet it's not a problem. And she needed a hairdryer and she had very curly hair, red curly hair. And we were in Florida in Orlando and you really needed a hairdryer. It was serious there with the hair situation and the humidity. And so she would just go to the Lord and say, Lord, you know I need a hairdryer and my folks are in Africa and, you know, and so she'd just tell the Lord about it. And sure enough, a lady came out from town and gave a hairdryer to one of the teachers and said this is for a missionary girl, this is for Marilyn. And I just looked at that. This is so amazing. And I think it was from Marilyn that the thought came to me that God can do big things. He can do great things. He can take care of all of those things in our life that are important to us. Another missionary kid, her parents were missionaries to Columbia. Her name was Becky and Becky needed a pair of shoes. Her shoes had holes in them, they were wearing out pair of flats. In those days, she'd get a pair of flats for about $25 and so I thought let's try this. I went to Becky and I said, Becky, let's do what Marilyn does and let's ask God to give you a pair of shoes. She said, okay. So we prayed for a pair of shoes for Becky. My mom had had surgery in California and so she sent me a letter late and she usually sent me some allowance and so it was very late this time and the allowance came. But this little note from my mom came and I hadn't told her anything about Becky. She said, here's $25 extra dollars to give to a missionary kid that needs something. I went to one of the teachers and I said, can you run into town and get Becky a pair of flats? And I want you to give them to her and I don't want you to tell her where they came from. Okay. I'll never forget Becky's face when she ran across the gym field a couple days later and said, Jean, Jean, guess what? God gave me shoes. You know what? We can pass it forward, can't we? And we can get in that mix too and let the Lord use us to help others like he's helped us. What a blessing that was for me. It was my sophomore year in that school. I had already become a Christian when I was seven years old because I was blessed to grow up in a Christian home and I accepted the Lord on the front row at a conference center called Mount Hermann and I think it was the second row. With tears down my eye, I just knew I did not want to go to hell. That was really important to me. I thought, you know what? There's heaven and hell. You're going one place or the other and if I don't accept Jesus and I don't become his child and I don't believe on him, I'm not going to heaven. I seriously want to go to heaven. And so I asked the Lord in my heart but I ran my own life and I was having a nice time and I was 15 years old.  You've got your ticket on the train to go to heaven but you're not letting me run your life or direct your life. And I said, wait a minute. I remember I was kneeling by my bunk all along my roommates were asleep and I just had it out with the Lord and I said, you know what? If I say I will follow you anywhere, you could lead me to India. This would not be a good thing because they don't eat hamburgers and I like cows. I like in and out burger. And I just, you know, and you could take me places that are miserable. And if I went to a mission field far away, I'd have to give up my country, my family, my friends and no one will want to marry me and go with me. And so do you want that kind of a life for me? And I have to give up my country. God, you don't want me to give up my country. That was my last try with God. And of course there's like silence from heaven. I'm sure he's like put off with me at that point. And then the thought came and of course it's a scripture. But at that time I didn't think about it being a scripture. He just showed me a picture of myself being born. And it's where it's where when you came into this world, you didn't bring anything with you. You didn't bring clothes. You didn't bring a purse. You didn't bring any money. You didn't have a friend. You came and naked and that's how you're going out. And the only thing you're going to take with you is your relationship with me.  Amen. Amen. What do you want to do with the rest of your life? And I suddenly knew that I knew that if I allowed him to lead me and I would follow him and be obedient, that I would be happy. That it would take that stress away, that anxiety. And I thought, you know, if I were Oprah Winfrey or Queen Elizabeth, the richest women in the world, I would never be happy outside of obedience to Christ. And I knew that all the money and all the fun and all of that would not be fun. That joy would only come through obedience and following him. And so I said, yes.  And looking back on my life, because I'm older now, I would not trade a day of it for anything. For what he has done and the immeasurable miracles, the great things, the lovely things, even the hard things have been a blessing in my life. And I have watched God move and supply all these years. He has never let me down. We first started out in ministry. My husband took a job with his Chuck Smith and Costa Mesa ever heard of him. So we were on staff there and I have three boys, we have three sons. And the middle one was 18 months old and he began to hemorrhage and he was passing blood. And so they put him in children's hospital and we don't ever know what happened. He had a hole somewhere in his intestines and I'd given him an aspirin because he had a cold and maybe it ate a hole. I don't know whatever it was. I remember Chuck had the whole church pray for him and they gave him a blood transfusion at children's hospital and in a few days he was home and he was running. He just got healthy. It was an amazing miracle. But there was another miracle that tagged along with that. And my sister and I had come over to the house. My husband was there and we were talking and she said, do you have any health insurance? And I go, actually we don't right now because they were changing the guard and insurances at Costa Mesa and we didn't get in on the new thing because Michael wasn't feeling well. And so our son and so I said, we don't. And she said, you've got this hospital built. I said, yeah. And she said, ooh, I remember she was looking at me like this is not good. We didn't make a big salary being in the ministry anyway. So all of a sudden just when she asked this question the phone rang and it was a wall phone behind me which really dated me, didn't it? And I picked up the phone and this woman said, are you Mrs. McClure? Yes. Do you have a son named Michael? Yes. Has he just been in children's hospital in Orange? Yes. Well, I'm from the Cripple Children's Society and we would like to pay your entire bill. I got off that phone and I looked at my sister-in-law's eyes which were about this big. I don't know how amazing at that moment the phone rang. And that's what our God does all the time. He watches over us and he guides us and he leads us. Mm-hmm. Verse 19 in the chapter we're in in Philippians 4 says, And my God shall supply all your need according to his riches and glory by Christ Jesus. Underline that verse in red if you haven't underlined it and hang on to that verse. It's a promise for you. The Lord will take care of us and watch over us. We moved to Lake Arrowhead and passed her to church up there and then we moved to Redlands which isn't so far from here and we were in Redlands for 11 years having the Calvary Chapel there. And while we were there I was raising those three boys. We were, it was something. I remember a lady at church came to me. She had four girls and one day she just looked at me and said, you know, your three are like anyone else's six and I don't think it was a compliment.  They gave me a lot of message illustrations but it was just, you know, I felt like I was raising a little rascal sometimes. And one day when we had first moved to Redlands my oldest son came to me who was about nine and the little one was about three and he said, what do we do if Donny's sucking on the ant poison bottle? I go, he's not. Yeah, he is. No, he's not Marcus. Yeah, mom, he is. So I ran out the kitchen and sure enough I even got an ant hotel so he couldn't get to it and he got into everything. He had pulled a stool up to the sink and way behind the sink on the other side, I didn't even think he would see it. He had found it. He's very crafty. I prayed he'd live to be five actually. He's alive now so it's okay, he's in his forties.  I call the pediatrician, he says, get epikec in him. I said, I don't have any. He said, get to the pharmacy. Went to the pharmacy, they sat him down and poured it down at the pharmacy and he threw up and ends up he did have arsenic in him but the epikec had diluted enough that he was okay. It was just shortly after that that my oldest son had come home from school. I was on my way home and I called them and I said, I'll be home in just a few minutes. I'm just down the street and he said, mom, mom, guess what? There was a baby snake at the door, the front door and I picked it up and threw it in my snake box. He liked reptiles. It was sick, I wouldn't do it again. But he just had this box he had won at some club or something and had glass on it and he said and it hissed at me. I said, don't go near it, is it shut? Yeah, where is it? It's in my room. I said, don't go in your room. I got home and I looked at that box and it was a baby rattlesnake and it was the meanest thing I've ever seen. It kept hissing and striking the glass. Now if you know anything about baby rattlesnakes they're much more poisonous than the adults because it's concentrated poison. I don't know how he did not get bit and we'd have been in really big trouble. The interesting thing is, well I have to tell you this, my husband disposed of it and I called him and I said, you need to come home and I said, we have a problem. We've got a baby rattlesnake here.  So don't report me to the green people.  I go, snakes swim. He goes, no, I don't think only water moccasins swim. I said, no, I think they all swim. They swim. So he finally got it flushed down. Well, I never used that room at night without turning the lights on. That's just a side note. The important thing is, I was having a quiet time with the Lord right after that and I was reading in Mark chapter 16 in my devotions and verse 19 it says in Mark 16, they will take up serpents rattlesnakes and if they drink anything deadly, ant poison, it will by no means hurt them. I could not believe that all of that was in one sentence. In Mark, I go, wow, you really covered it Lord. And once again, God was showing me how he watches over my kids when I can't get there. He watches over us. He knows what's going on. Nothing passes through his hands that he doesn't know about. After that, we went up to a church called San Jose. My husband had gone to Chuck and he likes to get churches going, get him doing well and then he moves on. And I think I'm married to someone like the apostle Paul. He just starts churches and he loves that and I just follow him around. And he went up to San Jose and he had said to Chuck, send me to a place no one else wants to go. And Chuck got a big smile on his face. He said, I got a place for you, San Jose. And this church was another denomination. It was over eight million in debt. It was gonna be very, very difficult.  But you know what, that's where the Lord called us. And I wouldn't trade those years for anything in the world. We were there 11 years. I say they're my missionary years because that's where I saw God really supply everything. Even the things in the church that were needed. I remember one time a missionary called one of our assistant pastors and they said, you know what, we have someone on the field. I might have been Africa, I think. And they said, we have a native out here that needs a wheelchair. And we hear you have a food bank. Do you ever get wheelchairs? And he said, you know what, we do have a food bank and we give away clothes and food and everything but he said, we don't, we haven't had a wheelchair. But give me your telephone number and if we ever get one, I'll call you that week. A wheelchair shows up in front of the food bank. We don't know who left it, it was just there. So he gets on the phone and he calls the missionary and he says, you won't believe it. But a wheelchair did show up. And it's for you and you can have it. He said, I'm just embarrassed about one thing. It doesn't have the feet pedals on it. It's missing the feet pedals. And the missionary said, perfect. Because a guy getting the wheelchair doesn't have any feet. And it was just things like that, constantly. That I went, you are the most amazing God. And then there's another one that really, during that time meant so much to me with my kids. My middle son was graduating from high school, Michael. And he wanted to go to Vanguard and I was praying and I said, Lord, we don't have any money for college right now with the situation of taking this church. Could you just find a way to get him into college? We always promised him he could go. And so I just left it with the Lord. And then I went to his graduation. He went to a Christian school up there. And it was graduation time and they were announcing scholarships. I hadn't asked for one. I didn't think about that from the school. I didn't know they gave them. And they started listing them $500 to so-and-so and $1,000 to so-and-so and maybe $1,200 to so-and-so. And it wasn't a lot of money, but it was helping and it was a neat thing to do with the school. And all of that was the amount of money they were giving. And then all of a sudden they said my son's name, Michael McClure, $9,500. Something close to that, 9,000 something. I remember sitting there between that and him being in cross country at Vanguard. It paid his first year through school. And I sat there and I was in tears and I just thought, I can't believe you did that. I can't believe how you even did that. And then the Lord began to speak to me. You know how he does?  And he said, what you don't get, Jean, is that I love Michael more than you do. He loves your kids more than you do. And sometimes I have to go back to that when you worry about your children. Now that they're all grown and married with kids of their own, I still worry about them. Do you do that? Or is it just me? Is that bad anxious thing that happens? Where you wanna go tell them what to do, but it's not a good thing when they're boys. It's how you just pray. But I find that God takes care of them. And those things I even pray for them now, I watch God do. And it's so exciting in life to see that. Another time I remember that I was at the grocery store up in San Jose, and I'd gone in, we were having company the next day, and I got in my car and I went, oh no, I forgot. Do you ever forget something at the market? And I thought, oh I forgot the tomatoes and cucumbers for the salad tomorrow. And I remember saying to the Lord, you know, I don't wanna go back in that store. And I don't even wanna spend any more money in that store. But I really need tomatoes and cucumbers. And then I remember sitting there smiling, thinking, wonder how he's gonna do this one. So I went to church. It was Wednesday night. And this little adorable Asian lady came up to me. She barely spoke English. She was from Santa Cruz, and they would come over to our church, and she handed me a paperback. And I go, what's this? She said, it's nothing. It's just something I grew in my garden. Those gorgeous homegrown tomatoes and those homegrown cucumbers. I looked in that bag. That's all that was in the back. Those things. And I looked at her and I just said, you'll never know what this means to me. Meditate on the miracles girls. When you have hard days and write them down, put them in your devotional books. Put them in a journal. Whatever you do. I'm not a person that journals every day. But these kind of things, oh I have to write them down because I never wanna forget them. And on hard days, go back and look at them. Read them. Your spirits will be lifted up. Your faith will grow. You will be blessed when you do that. Now let me say that life is not always easy. You all know that. There are trials. But I wanna tell you that he's praiseworthy even in the hard times, even in the trials. And remember that the trials, they have been allowed to come to you through his hand. Nothing passes to us that it doesn't go through the hand of God. For some reason he's allowed this. And I always think he's teaching us something. And sometimes it's in those hard things he's really teaching us something. Those impossible situations. Those hopeless times. Those times where you're hitting the wall and there's no answers. Shocking things that can happen. Things where we don't seem to get an answer to prayer. And as I looked in scripture it's full of people like this. I looked at Hannah. Took her a while to get that prayer answered and what an answer. And I looked at Esther. I think she had a really bad day when she knew she was gonna, her cousin was gonna hang from the gallows and she was gonna die.  It was a bad day. And yet she trusted God to lead her. And he did. And it was out of that book of Esther that such faith is built in so many of us from that story being told for thousands of years of what God can do. I look at Israel today. And I think of Esther. And I think God saved his people when the enemy wanted to destroy him. And it is here where we grow deeper with God. Every time we feel like we're gonna die. Just remember, it just brings you closer to heaven. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, verse 12. A few years ago, I experienced this one. It was great. I was flying. My husband and I have, we retired from our last church in Laguna Beach. And we have been, I call these the pilgrim years where we're just traveling and sharing award and conferences and helping younger pastors and Bible schools and mission field. And I love this time in my life. It's pretty exciting. But sometimes it can get tiring. I often look at the clouds and there's a scripture that said his strength is in the clouds. And I think about that when I'm flying up there. And so I remember one time we went to Florida on a red eye. We came back. Dawn was speaking in the church. The pastor had been ill. So it was important that we were there. We'd come back into LAX. We were flying out to another place in the early morning. And so we had just gotten a hotel at LAX. It was like 11 at night and I was exhausted. And there was no point in me complaining to my husband because he was just as tired as I was. But I remember we got held up on the tarmac and all I wanted to see was that hotel with a pillow. So I just longed for it. And I remember looking up the window and saying, Jesus, I'm really, really tired. I have no more strength. I just need you to get this plane to a gate. And if you can just get me to the hotel, it would be so wonderful. Well, we finally did get to the hotel. And there was a nice bed and pillow. We slept good, got up really early, made our next flight. And we landed in the next place where we were supposed to be. And I got off the plane and we went and we were staying in someone's house. We got there and my phone went off and it was a text from a pastor's wife, a dear friend of mine named Kim in Texas. And all she said, she didn't know where I was. She didn't know what was going on in my life. She just had a great relationship with God. And she just sent me this text. It was Psalm 68, 28.  I went, oh my goodness. It was like, Jesus just sent me a letter.  You cried out last night. OK, he just sent it to you. And I realized that he heard my whispers through the window of that plane. I said, you know what? I know all about it. You can be OK. And I've watched him. And I look at those miracles. And they blow me away. Even in the trials, we have had hard things on our journey. It hasn't all been perfect. He didn't answer every prayer. And he does in his own way. Sometimes he just says no to me. And yet I have seen him work in my heart more deeply when I go through the hard things. The hard times are where we can often see God pull back the veil and let us glimpse more of his glory. One of my kids was a rascal. He was just the rascally one. And so I prayed so hard for him. And he really caused my devotional life to grow so much. Jesus, give me something for that kid today. I just need something. And he would. I remember the main scripture was, all your children will be taught of the Lord and great will be the peace of your children. Oh, I love that.  And he was going to keep that promise to them and Isaiah. And I just thought, that is so awesome. So I'm crying out to Jesus. But my devotional life is growing. I'm realizing that he is right there every moment. And pretty soon, I got so I couldn't wait to get up in the morning, like Sandy says, and get that cup of coffee because I need it. I know he invented the coffee bean for us. And sit down and see what he has to say to me because whatever I've been worrying about at night that seems so dark, he answers me in the scripture in the morning. It's the most incredible thing. I just love it. And sometimes it's not all about us. It's about someone else you're going to share with that day that needs to hear a word from the Lord. And he pulls back that veil and he lets us see his glory. Our God is an awesome God. There's so many other things that I could share with you. I've had a prodigal grandchild. She's come around. It's in the book. I don't have time to tell you.  The Lord did. I asked him to take it away and he said, no. And so I had to have surgery and I'm fine. I'm doing well. It was years ago. But the process I went through in that, in my anxiety, I woke up one morning and the Lord spoke to me as clear as if he stood in the room. And he said, enjoy the journey on this one. And you know what he did? He just did miracles through that whole thing as well. But he brought me deeper. And all of those things. So when you go through the things that don't seem lovely to you, they're the hard things. You can praise him for that too. Say, Lord, in this I don't understand. In this, this is hard. You didn't answer this particular thing. Or you said, no. But I can trust you to know that you know best because you're drawing me closer. And this is the thing, women. Others are watching you.  Is your God big? Do you trust him? Can they see that? Is there peace? Are you so anxious that they're going, her God's really little. I'm not going to trust him.   My dad's favorite scripture, and it has become one of mine, is Psalm 3725. I have been young and now I'm old. Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.