Let's start it here. Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the executive editor for Data Diversity. We would like to thank you for joining today's Data Diversity webinar. Big challenges in data modeling, staying relevant and valued as the data modeler. An interview with Alec Sharp.  Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A section. Or if you would like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag BCD Modeling. Big challenges in data modeling. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the recording of the session and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Today, we have a single interviewee, the infamous Alec Sharp. Alec has managed his consulting and education business, Clare Tech Systems Consulting Limited for close to 30 years. Serving clients from Ireland to India and Washington to Wellington, Alec's expertise includes facilitation, business analytics, this process improvement, and, of course, data management. In addition to his consulting practice, he conducts top-rated workshops and conference presentations on these topics globally. Alec is the Officer of Workflow Modeling, Second Edition. Alec's Tech House 2008, which is widely used as a consulting guide and university text and is a bestseller in the field.  Karen is a senior project manager and architect of InfoAdvisors. She has 20-plus years of experience in project and data management on large, multi-project programs. Karen specializes in the practical application of data management principles. She is a frequent speaker, blogger, and analyst on data quality, data governance, logical and physical data modeling, data compliance, development methodologies, and social issues in computing. Karen is an active user on social media and has been named one of the top three technology influencers by IBM Canada and one of the top 17 women in information management magazine. She is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP specializing in data modeling and database design. She's an advisor to the Daima International Board and a member of the advisory board of Zachman International. We meet both Karen and Alec in person at this year's Enterprise Data World 2014 conference in Exo in Austin, Texas. And you can check out an interview we did with Karen on dataversity.net about her upcoming presentation at the event. And with that, I will turn it over to Karen to get us started. Hello, and welcome. You're awesome as usual. Thank you. And that was a lot of stuff today. And I hope it's Alec. I'm so happy to have Alec with us today. And if you haven't seen him present, you have to add that to your data bucket list for certain. He does such a great job of keeping people logically and physically involved in the subject matter. And very much so. And I would just point out that he does Canada proud as a gal event around the world talking data process and other kinds of interesting stuff. And sometimes Alec and I get to be at the same event at the same time. So as some of you were hearing in the early parts of this, Alec and I travel a lot. And so we're really in Canada at the same time. So this is another anomaly. We should both buy a lottery ticket. Except what other lottery tickets pay Alec? Like $40,000? Something like that? I guess $80,000. A little bit more. So as Shannon said, we don't have a panel today. What we're going to do is have just a discussion with Alec and hopefully a little snarkiness, a little bit of fun, a little bit of laughs, some serious stuff. And that means there aren't any slides. So don't bother asking why the slides aren't moving or whether or not you can download them. What you see there is what you get at this. But that means that you can focus on the chat that's going on in the WebEx. And in that chat, you can ask questions and talk to all the other people logged into the meeting which I really find is a value for our events that we have. As far as you can ask formal questions in the Q&A panel that you should see just below that. And I'll try to make sure that we get to those as well. What you can do is you can also tweet your insights or share some of the insights with the hashtag BCD Modeling for big challenges in data modeling. I also try to keep an eye on that too. So we're all sort of multitasking here. Today's theme about adding more value and being relevant is something that I speak and do workshops on. And certainly Alec does. Even if he might not use those terms in his presentations, I know every time I've heard him speak, that really is his focus. We're not covering, neither one of us covers, you know, here's just the theory behind data modeling or any of the other modeling or process flows or any of those things. But I hear a lot of stories when I go out and speak or when people ask me questions or even what we see in the chat of data toddlers focusing on, you know, that they don't feel like their teams value them or that their management values them or that not all of them do. So that's what I'd like to talk about today. And another thing I want to point out is we've been hearing these stories for my entire career and remember my career has that 20 plus years because I stopped counting at 20. Yeah, I'm kind of close to that too. I'm just stopping at 20 plus. I'm not really thinking of backing it out to 10 anyway. So just so I sound more relevant, right? Because we know old people can't do modern development, right? Is that true? Or is old just a mindset? What's old is new again. I'm amazed these days at how full circle things are going. Anyway, can you carry on? I have a question living in there. There is, but the one thing I wanted to say, since I'm talking about old people, I've been doing this stuff for a long time. What sort of things are you working on now? Like what steps, not necessarily products or anything, but what concepts and things are you working now that you haven't worked on in the past? Well, in my helping business, I'm always working on something that I haven't worked on in the past. So I'm going to be starting a job coaching at my major genetic research organization. I recently did some process and data work for a traditional print newspaper that's making a major shift into the digital platform world. So there's always something new going on, but as I said a minute ago, I feel in some ways like the skills that I've been holding for 20 or 30 years are more valued than ever these days. And I think we've gone through, if you look back over the last 15 or 20 years, there's been any number of developments that have apparently made the modelers obsolete. I remember once a client told me, gee, Alex, we won't be needing your help with data modeling anymore. And I said, why is that? And they said, well, because we're going client server. I remember that. A few years later, well, it doesn't matter anymore because it's the eating of everything. This was in the late 90s. And then it was packages. We don't have to worry about that because the people of Waldorf have already done the data model. And then it was all sorts of red and agile. Gee, there's no time for data modeling. And inevitably, organizations get in trouble because they haven't dealt with the fundamentals. And some old dogs like me get called in to help with things. And it almost always begins with data modeling. And as I always say, I don't tell them we're doing data modeling because then they light their hair on fire and run screaming from the room. But that's absolutely what we just have to go back to. What are the concepts? When do we call them? How do we agree? How do we disagree? And I have both at the genetics organization and at the newspaper, just spending 30 minutes doing a simple model of content. Is there a UI opener? So Elsa, oh my gosh, we've opened up so many questions here. So let's start with, since we're talking about relevance and value, why do people run away when they're either we run on a data model or I think we need a data model? Why do you think that happens? For the same reason I run away when somebody tells me I have a six sigma black belt. And that's the most depressing introduction in the world. And I think it's because just like people who've overdone it with something like six sigma, some data people, they get a very narrow focus and focus so much on data without putting it in context. How does our data model, and by the way, I'll just note that increasingly, as I don't call it a data model, but how does what we do support the discovery of user stories in an agile environment? How does it contribute to developing better requirements? Why is it essential to understanding business processes? So one of the most important things that we could do is figure out how to use our skills in these other domains. So I've been very surprised in these years at how each agile teams are adopting some of the techniques I teach because I'm putting them in context. I'm showing how this can cut out a lot of re-factoring as it's known, or how it can cut out iterations in the cycle. I don't really like to use the word silos, but I think what works for me is getting out of the data silo, and that makes my data modeling techniques more valuable than ever. Can I throw in one more? Sure. Empathy. We have empathy. It's so easy to get focused on data and forget that not everybody else understands what we're talking about or shares our enthusiasm. I make the same point with business process audiences. Number one rule is don't ever forget that everybody else actually understands what a business process is. 90% of people think it's the same as a procedure. And when we talk about data modeling, they understand that we're initially talking about a completely business-oriented or should be talking about a completely business-oriented technical view of the domain we're in. Yeah, so that's me. I mean that's what I talk about. One of the workshops I got coming up at EDW in Austin is it's about developing enterprise data models for drive development projects, meaning contribute to them. And my number one factor there is this is not, okay, first you stop everything and then you go to six months to a year to three years of doing an enterprise data model. And only then do you let developers do it. One of the hardest things, so I work on almost all my projects lately are Agile and Scrum. Right. And most projects are troubled projects, which means someone has brought me in just like you said to say, my gosh, we started trying to get some data value out of our development and it's not there. Can you help us? And they're always like, yeah, and we don't want a data model. I'm like, it's okay. I'm going to do a data model because that's my tool and technique. I can do it really fast. I can be agile at it. I know the tools. It doesn't take me long. And I can deliver all kinds of value after having written it down. In this situation, it works well for me. It might not work well for people who've never done a data model and never used a modeling tool, but agile, right? Use the right tools. Use the right level of documentation. And they're like, well, we don't do any documentation. We're agile. I'm saying, yeah, you do write things down in the code. Write it down in the code. Now we can drift off into agile or fragile assumptions. The agile manifesto say no documentation. Everybody misinterprets it. It says we value documentation, but we value code, working code, or work software more. But there's no value to documentation. Let me back up a bit. I couldn't agree more. We have to be able to do something in a more time frame. And my current time frame is 90 minutes. If I can deliver something useful within a 90-minute session, then doing something wrong. Exciting a printer, right? Exciting a printer. You get an extra 30 minutes, right? Yeah, something like that. Or if your WebEx isn't working. I do have WebEx operating, which is why I'm signed in. But I can't see any chat or anything like that. Oh, it's probably, there's a little globe. Probably there's a little globe app that you need to open up. It says I have to log into my account, but I have no idea what my username or password is. So it would be your email address, but there shouldn't be a password. But anyway, I can help you screen for questions and everything. Okay, I thought I'd mention that. I can monitor on Twitter. Yes. The ability to do something without turning it into a boil the ocean without worrying about perfection. My official company motto is G-E-F-N. Which is for good enough for now. Yes. We use done for now.  Let's do lots of stuff. So you use done for now. It's not for now. Let's do this for now. When I was working in Belfast and I shared my good enough for now, and somebody said, oh, around here we use U-B-A. So I was thinking, well, gee, it's nothing. U-B-A.  Sounds like a good philosophy for life. That's right. And anyway, a few post-its and a few definitions go a long way. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like looking back over my career and how we started doing the whole information engineering and it was very, it was more iterative than how it was taught. It was still a lot of big upfront modeling and it was to build, to start documenting architectures from a very strategic point of view for a company, which is why it was that way. But most of the work I do lately isn't strategic stuff. I do have some strategic stuff. But because I've been stuck in these troubled projects, which means people don't really realize they're in trouble until they're trying to actually build something. Because I've been just floating along building model models and building code and they haven't tried to actually figure out what their data requirements are yet. And that's why they can't get the answers out of the data they did find or created or captured and their answers are wrong. One of the things that I like to do is that when I look back, though, the way I work and the tools I use and the type of elements of quality have really changed over the years. And if I went back to the 1990s me, she would probably be horrified at these small bundles of work that I produced and couldn't instantly map them back to a giant enterprise model. But as I come at it from me, that's not what my current project needs. Like my current project, like one of the projects I worked on had a $1 million a month penalty for every month there was delay. I was going to pull off and start doing a master data quality initiative and start aligning their business, their BAAs, what were those called? You know, back to some strategic plan. That's not where we were. We were fighting a fire at a million dollars a month, you know, with the other value at some time when we've got the fire under control. I think, you know, that's not a balance. I'm doing, yes, I'm still supposed to not use the word but. But I'm still doing a lot of strategic projects too, like the newspaper. That was, I mean, not to bet the business kind of initiative, or something I've been working on in higher education is really strategic. And you still have to get people talking the same language. There's always, whether it's something very tactical, I haven't done anything with a million dollars a month penalty without any attention. But whether it's something very tactical or something strategic, I'm still, there's no substitute for doing a little concept modeling and getting people talking the same language. Absolutely. Like the first step in the yearbook projects is to do that. You're absolutely right. If I look at the time I would spend, 20 years ago, 20 years ago me, at the time I would spend analyzing over the data model. He has shocked me now. And in lots of cases, in lots of cases the work I do, people are quite happy not to even have me put my findings in a tool. Like I don't necessarily have to put my process models into some BPMN compliant tool or my data models into a tool. They're perfectly happy with photographs of the post-its and flip charts to photos into a PowerPoint deck so they're easily transportable. And that's good enough. I think we've had that discussion once on Twitter. And I think from our point of view, that works. Where do I find that works is, again, in that strategic, more enterprise, more business-oriented reason you're modeling. Like when people ask me questions about, you know, does the data model do this or do we need a data model? I mean the first thing I have to ask them is, what are you trying to accomplish? Because, you know, when I'm on a troubled project that's trying to build an actual functioning service or set of software, I need to build data models that can now really generate DDL and do that. So if I just did the whiteboard or the napkin or the PowerPoint data models, which I've worked with data modelers on these troubled projects, that produce a data model, use a data modeling tool, produce it, embed models in a Word document, and hand that over to their DBAs. And all of a sudden their DBAs think they aren't adding a lot of value. It's ironic, right? So it really, I think one of the things that frustrates a lot of people is we keep talking in terms of the data model. And I don't really think, you know, any more that there's one even process model or business model or conceptual model, those all kind of have just no one billing architecture diagram. I mean you build specific diagrams in the architecture, the physical architecture world for different reasons. Right. And I think that's where, you know, our recent experience would diverge. So I'm not in cases where I'm expected to actually, you know, put something together that can transform into DDL. I guess I am more often working at the more strategic end. Or honestly, most of my work is in large-scale process change. Yeah. Just getting people talking the same language is a big deal. And I suppose those things are valuable, right? Definitely. And going back to, you know, how do we add value to data modelers? I think it's taking more of a marketing-based approach and going out and looking for situations where our skills will add value. And, you know, one thing that I would recommend to people, it's actually what I would recommend to people is that they read your blog from January on seven tips for staying relevant and valued as a data modeler. Thank you. Just thought I had to mention that because according to Shannon's introduction, you are esteemed whereas I am infamous. That's excellent. There was a few things from that blog that I had starred. You know, number seven, build a data modeling process that allows you to produce releases quickly. I mean, modern world speed is of the essence. So, as I've said, if you can't figure out how to do something useful, you know, an initial concept model, you know, a short period of time, 90 minutes to three hours, then you've really got to work on that. And you also said get experience data modeling for integration projects and learn how to correctly reverse engineer application databases. So, let me just dive in on that. Sure. So, this is a lot of value that I've been able to add. But, or Collins had told me I've added terrific value through reverse engineering. I've been building golden physical structures, abstracting it back out to the logical model, and then up to a business-friendly concept model and then bringing that back to the business. And not necessarily calling it a data model, as I've said repeatedly, just saying, well, here is how your current application sees the world.  So, after one of my data modeling workshops, I always tell the participants, the most valuable thing they do in this workshop is reverse engineer a conceptual data model out of the gations or systems they're working with. You've had the same experience. We've been to a company, and nobody has a business-oriented view of the production systems. Yep. Which is pretty amazing when you think about new requirements, et cetera. How do you really assess whether that application is up to the challenge? So, there's one piece of advice, and let me just dive in with another, and that is how to use your skills in the world of packaged applications. Right. Right. Because I have done a lot of work over the years helping companies understand why they hate the package they selected. And it's virtually 100% of the time. It isn't the UI. It's not even the logic. It's a data model mismatch. The way they see the world is not the same way the package sees the world. Yeah. I guess we could also mention outreach. Like, tonight I'm doing a presentation for the IIBA here in Vancouver on concept modeling. Those are business analysts, right? The business analysts, exactly. Yep. I mean, that's who really can use these techniques, so we've really to do some outreach and show them in a practical way just how useful this technique is. And an example that I'm going to be looking at in this presentation was for higher education when just a few minutes of concept modeling in the management arena helped articulate a concept model or a data model for them. And it was a major concept in there that just was not present in the application they're looking at. And that's the kind of thing that people figure out in the game instead of early in the game and would really help out in that arena. So, like... Oh, go ahead. I was going to say that the package saw courses and classes as a two-level hierarchy and the university saw it as a three-level hierarchy. It was this middle layer that was the intent to offer a course to meet certain capacity at some point in the future. And that concept just wasn't even in the package. And these are the kind of things where we can really highlight these gaps in one view far more effectively than just big requirements. To asking people and getting 20 different answers. Yes, the analyst is a stenographer. Yes, oh yeah, we've had that one. So what I'd like to do is take some of the questions that I have in the Q&A. So one of the questions is, isn't it good enough for now dangerous if you never get back to making it right? For example, siloed, redundant, or any of the other 10 biggest mistakes? Nope, not at all. Because good and... No, good enough for now is how you get people engaged and how they start to see the value of this perspective. So I guess I could agree if you never did make it any better. But the point is, good enough for now is like a client set of stairs. You do it one step at a time. It'd be nice to leap to the top all at once, but we can't do that. So I think it's far greater danger in trying to get things perfect too soon rather than doing something useful in the immediate timeframe. Yeah, I really agree with that. And finding that balance is hard. You need experience. That's why most... I mean, that's the ongoing question for all architects and all designers. How do you know when it's good enough for now? That's the hard thing. Through experience and with mentoring with other people, I work with too many architects, especially data architects, who are just trying to reach perfection and they're losing their entire team because their entire team is moving on. Exactly. They're climbing the stairs. Yeah, they're climbing stairs. And one of the great things about how you get the opportunities of doing things is that it has a disciplined approach to good enough for now, is that you can put things in a parking lot and they can practice and then there's someone responsible for making sure we don't forget them and you can report on this thing was taken out of scope or we agreed to go forward with this defect or use cases to educate. And that's something we need to learn from the agile process is that, yeah, it's a trade-off, but oh my gosh, it's such a wonderful trade-off.  It's just a nightmare for quick and dirty. When you're in a truly agile environment, there's not a lot of discipline and rigor. And that's what I wanted to talk to in the idea that good enough for now doesn't mean being flaky. I teach people constantly in my workshops that if you have a framework and techniques and you follow them with a degree of discipline and rigor, you can get a lot done in a short period of time. It's overdoing it, but it's not flaky of the other extreme. Exactly. So the next question is, so we've had a couple of these in chat and one here about how do you reverse engineer a COTS product, meaning a package? With great difficulty. Yes, and that's something that's going on in the chat. So of course, you can reverse engineer the database by pointing tools to it and getting pretty pictures of it, which as some people point out in the chat can be problematic because packages are usually highly generalized designs because they're trying to solve a data problem in the world in that space, as well as also designed by many different people over several years with not clear architectural focus. So there's usually a lot of duplication and nasty data design approaches. It's hard, right? So in the sort of mid-90s, it was common for these large ERP packages to come with not just reverse engineered data model, but sort of a logical data model of the package. And I think those have kind of gone away. I don't run into those anymore. I haven't seen that. And sometimes it really is archaeology. I coined the phrase systems archaeology 20 years ago to coin it. I'm sure other people have said the same thing. But I have had cases where it was really simple because the vendor had a native SQL server implementation that was no urgent generalization. And it was pretty easy to pull that back out to something I could present to the business. In other cases, you really have to do a lot of inference. It means it's getting a test version of the application and testing behaviors and from that, inferring the data model. And it's way more time consuming. But it's really essential. I think that it is. So you can tell the business that's where there's a gap. This is where there's overlap. I mean, I've had cases here in Canada where we had to point out that there was functionality in this large sort of HR system that actually was illegal in Canada due to the different employment laws. And you kind of want to point that out. And they had a rule of we're not changing the package at all. That was a rule. And then I'm like, well, you might want to change these few things because they're actually, and I know just a tiny amount about labor laws here, but it wasn't the obvious things that I know for sure aren't legal. And so, you know, it was examples like random drug testing and some hourly management things and some benefit things. And it's kind of like, gee, I think maybe I had a budget some time for at least not a jail. Your number one goal is to keep your CAO out of jail is a good goal for an architect. In the process world, I'd like to point out that what you're trying to do is keep the company off of the Consumer Affairs Show on TV. Which we have some good ones. You have the archaeology term. Oh, go ahead. Oh, that's an interesting experience as lately where companies did end up in a very negative light on the Consumer Affairs Show. And it was a business process issue. Yeah, yeah. Usually, right? Because usually the processes aren't completely automated, so they involve that horrible human factor. Right? And it's all, you know, if we... I know it's, I guess, off the topic here, but my framework for looking at business processes is don't just look at the process design and workflow. Look at the human elements like policies, motivation and measurements, human resources, and that's where things break. That's another topic. Yeah. Well, I once sent my bank, my former bank, two different process models for doing something with my credit card. And I showed them how they had this most 16-step process that my other bank only had one step for me to do. And I sent that when I complained about they were having some issues legally with what they were asking me to do. And then I pointed out how often... I did get a nice letter back saying, when's ever sent us a process model? And I'm like, you need more of this. I volunteered once on a customer service call that had been escalated a couple of levels. I had volunteered to come down and map out the company's process. And they... I think that I was serious, so they actually solved my problem. We'd hop on a plane for that one.  Let me just briefly relay a story. I've written about this one before, just to show how data modeling can fit into that environment. I had a company many years ago that was about to implement SAP. The business people, the plant management people called me up and asked if I could come out and do that thing I do, which is music for the years of a consultant. And that turned out to be data modeling. And they wanted it. It was the last time I'd been out doing that. They all felt they understood their business better. And it turned out that because their CEO had told them they had to implement this thing called SAP, they thought it would be a good idea if they all got on the same page. So I went out. We spent two or three days building a conceptual model of their business, plant management, plant maintenance, and so on. And they used that as the framework, the architectural framework for implementing and configuring SAP. And they realized that that was the most valuable two or three days in the entire project, and they became a global reference account for SAP because they had that integrating framework that only a good concept model can provide. So this was the case of going in and reverse engineering the package. This was a case of the business saying, here's how we see everything fitting together. Let's not make any bold headed configuration options that break this. And they didn't. Yeah. I think that's the hard part about these very large packages is, one, they're so expensive and they cover such a wide breadth of functions, business functions that they're not understanding, you know, that there are minor differences that you might be able to live with or these much bigger larger differences that you need to identify early on so that you can find a way of dealing with it.  And they just paid for that for years. And honestly, a little bit of concept modeling early on in the game would have shown how important that was. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's lots of stories about that. So, you know, we as a data profession, we should talk more about sharing these experiences. I mean, I do this a lot at conferences like EDW, like Enterprise Data World. I mean, that's one of my primary reasons to go to conferences like that is so that I can ask questions and stories and everything with people who are living in the same world I am and dealing with the same struggles. And I mean, to me, that's the real value.  I don't think that's ever going to go away because none of these virtual things are going to replace that, even though I'm saying that right in the middle of my webinar. But I mean, that's the best thing. Why aren't we doing more besides having Enterprise Data World about sharing this stuff? Like, I feel like our community does it the least. Like, we have very few bloggers. We have very few people on tour. Why do you think that it is? You know, I just don't get it. I wish I could answer, but it goes back to that work I brought up earlier, which is outreach. We just, all I can say is, boy, it sure has worked for me. You know, when I built my first data modeling workshop, that was the first course I put together. And as you know, every occasion is a big part of my business. I get four or five continents a year under my belt delivering these workshops. The first one I developed was data modeling back in 1986. And I sat down and I thought about it beforehand and I realized my audience was not data modelers, data architects, DBAs, data administrators, etc. My audience was business analysts. I needed to put together a data modeling course that would help them do a better job. And also, this sounds a little cynical, but that also meant that the potential audience for my workshop was an older magnitude or more larger. So it's worked out really well. And I think my mission in life almost is showing people how this modeling techniques, whether it's requirements modeling or process modeling or data modeling, can really make people's lives easier. But we just got to get out of the... There's some value in things like EDW. I'm really looking forward to this year. I have more at the EDW conference than at any other conference I go to. It does a brilliant job of putting together different threads and disciplines. I'm speaking on data modeling for the IIBA tonight. I've spoken on data modeling at business process conferences. It's just something we need to do. So, for instance, I've been active, again, because I've been more focused on the physical side of modeling or the logical and design side. Let's say that. That's why I go and speak at SQL Server events, or I'm going to speak at TechEd North America coming up. It's because that's a whole new audience that has very little exposure to relevant, valuable data modeling artifacts and why they need to do it. It's hard for me to begin to those because they all run screaming when they hear the word modeling, and they think I'm going to talk about first, second, third, fourth, fifth normal form, which is not really what I talk about at all. I talk about really practical reasons on why people need to love their data. And to me, that's something we should all have in common. I think on that note, well, two things. When I tried something along those lines, even at EDW, Tony asked me if I could, because once I'm to an updated version of presentation called the human side of data modeling. Yes. Really, just a whole bunch of techniques and case studies on how to get people engaged in this thing we call data modeling. The other thing is, even though we're in the age of big data, social, mobile, presentation data, I find I have some success when I don't use the word data because that just raises all kinds of assumptions.  Often I don't even call it anything. I just do the old Nike methodology. Maybe. And when you do that, you can get people engaged. And when they're engaged and interested in contributing, then you can start to introduce some of our terminology and adding more regular. So that's the saddest thing I've heard in all these webinars. And I so understand where you're coming from. And I feel like, I mean, I have to resort to the same things, like when I show people on a project that I'm just trying to gather these, I mean, even saying the word requirements, people hate because it's a tough thing to do and most builders don't like those things, do that work. And I say, no, no, the good news is, I love doing this. It's frustrating, but I love doing this. So I'll take this job. Use the job of making it work fast. I'll try to hold you accountable for making it work right and we'll work together.  I don't care how the sands can be feared. I want to trust that you're passionate about those things. Let's be a team. I think, though, that, you know, are we really just paying for the sins of all the data modelers and architects and process modelers and process engineers and all of those things because they couldn't figure out how to be relevant or how to explain the value and that we're having to... Unequivocally. ...highly who we are. It's so fair. Well, I'm not hiding who I am, but I'm judicious with my terminology. And let me put it this way, it's not just in the data world. In the business process world, there are many environments where I just do not use the word process or business process. Because people don't... They just don't see themselves in those terms or more than they've been burned. That's what you said, that we're paying for the sins of somebody else. So I often avoid the term requirements because business analysts have the endless list. I've seen documents with eight or 10,000 individual requirements. Well, I'm going to disassociate myself from that. I'm going to disassociate myself from people who are doing orderly, rigorous, and technical oriented business process work. So I'll avoid those terms just like I avoid data modeling because it's a term. Yeah. And I think... So the other term, so I grew up, I was a methodologist, right? That's the ultimate bad word, right? Especially in the agile, grum world. But that literally is still what I'm doing because what I didn't do was say, here are the 400 paper deliverables you need to make. This is what a methodologist does. It was helping people find right tools, techniques, models, approaches that made sense for what we were trying to accomplish right now. Absolutely. And here a few times, was it ever all 400 deliverables? It was like, Yeah. I mean, everyone needs to do a project charter, maybe not formally, but write down, here's our goal, here's who's going to do it, and here's when we think we're going to have it done. You know, agile people will run from a project charter, but they'll let me write down all the things in a project charter and say, hey, that was good. He wrote that down. Precisely. So again, the terms, we've been burned by people going overboard with requirements or process models or data models or project charters. We still need to do that. And we keep coming, I keep getting into situations where people don't understand that there are these different levels of detail. So we've got contextual models, conceptual models, logical or detailed or specification models, and finally physical models. And there's a lot of fear out there with people who have only ever seen that detailed or even physical level of model. Yes. Yes. When we're really adding value, we're out there at the contextual and conceptual levels. That's why I did a presentation, I think the first one was close to 10 years ago called the Lost Art of Conceptual Modeling, which was my way of pointing out that in our field, people have lost sight of what a conceptual model is. I find the majority of people in the day to field, a conceptual model to them is just a slightly toned-down logical or specification model. In fact, it's really radically different. Yes. We've even made the distinctions over the years. Initially, we called it a conceptual data model, right? And now we call it a conceptual model to try to reinforce that it's something quite different. Then, sort of the information engineering approach of it was just really your boxes and lines with no cardinality, right? I mean, that's certainly how a lot of people taught it, and that was incorrect, but there was that. But all the boxes were still there. Yes. Or maybe there were only 50 of them out of the 300, but it was just some sort of sub-sum of your anthropological model or something like that, right? So we have this really big question in the Q&A is provided a recap of the value of data modeling. So go. The value of data modeling is that it provides a technology-independent view of the business. And again, I'm going to push back on calling it data modeling. It provides a way of seeing the things that Agnes works with, the things that their processes and applications deal with. And that is a very unique and valuable perspective to be able to add. Because most of the time, people haven't seen that. I'll draw a parallel. I did a process architecture for an organization lately, and the high-level, the high-level of the process architecture, absolutely thrilled the C-level executives because they had never seen a picture of what their organization does. They had seen because of how it's organized, but never what it does. A data model can accomplish the same thing. It's a picture of what the things are that the organization deals with and how they fit together. And I think that definition shows your point of view of what you've been doing, because you have to throw in that the data modeling I do on, like other projects, I have to do project-specific, getting to design data modeling as well. And it's a completely different thing than what you just talked about. And I kind of circle back to where we started is that we're our own worst enemies because we don't have a sort of humanly-understood set of terminology and their descriptions. Like the de-body of knowledge from Dama tries to establish that, but most people don't have access to that and don't use those terms. And I think that's the hard thing. So what you said is absolutely true, and I do that type of data modeling. Matter of fact, I'm doing that with a client right now. One of the things that has pushed me, not pushed me, but invited me back to the strategic data modeling and the more business-oriented data modeling, is now that organizations want to get into business and data analytics because they don't have this sort of common understanding of the concepts and the data that they have right now and what they're going to need to get to the analytics they want and the answers they want. They realize that they have this need for not just enterprise-wide data modeling or logical modeling, but as business models that focus on the concepts and then eventually get to the data. And I'm not going to call those conceptual models or logical models. I'm just going to call them models or analytical models, and we're just going to end up drilling down and then comparing them to reverse-engineering physical models and try to get them to get the questions. They need to ask the questions and find the answers and then just see that with spreadsheets, I think. This is why you're pointing to your blog. Can I plug your blog once again? Absolutely. Okay, number three. Okay, I'm sure you'll share the link to it later on. Get experience data modeling for integration projects. I've sometimes involved in a situation where I had to show people that they're trying to integrate data from these disparate environments and each of them has a different view of the world. And until you can demonstrate that, you know, an understandable picture up and say, well, here's how marketing sees the world and here's how accounting sees the world and here's how operation sees the world. And you can't miss that they're all different. There's also something I've done a lot with when companies decide they hate the application they chose. It's really moving forward. Here's how you see the world. Here's how the package sees the world. See the difference? Yep.  I really wanted to make sure I mentioned today and that is I've heard people for years say, well, how do I convince management that I need to do this? Or how can I convince business analysts that they should be doing data modeling? And one of the best decisions I ever made was 15 or 25 years ago, I decided to eliminate the word convince for my consulting vocabulary and replace it with demonstrate. It's a real cool idea, but how do we demonstrate the value of doing this? You can bang on people with a big stick trying to convince them of something. It's really a lot less painful and more productive just to demonstrate. It means you're going and doing something real, but it's an idea that has served me well. That's a really good life lesson as well. You can tell people you want to if you show them, they'll come along. I think I've blogged about this somewhere, but I definitely have told this story in my workshops about people, data modelers always come to me as like, how do I convince the developers that they need to use the data model? And that is completely give up on that. No, give the DBAs and the developers what they're asking for. Now, that doesn't mean do it the way they're asking for it. But if a developer or a DBA wants DDL, then they can be valued by them. You have to get them to DDL even if you don't do it. If the developer just wants you to go figure out what the DBAs means by double declining balance in their depreciation requirements, go help them do that. The developer is not going to take the time to go understand that. You go do it. And that's really demonstrating. But the other big thing is I tell people, focus on convincing the business people that's valuable and the business people will ensure, yes, yes, demonstrate, but that's how you convince them. You demonstrate, right? So you're demonstrating to the business users that it's valuable. They will make sure that the developers have the right motivation to make sure that you get the resources you need. And it's not just the developers, but it's IT management. If you remember the time when a business user, you could see the light bulb going off in his head when I started a new project and brought all the models he had just worked on for another project. He goes, we get to reuse those? Yep. It's going to be a lot faster. Yep. While he turns to the lead developers like, why didn't you bring your models? And the developer said, but it's a new project. All the models, all those UML models we did, we're going to use a lot of those. He goes, no, no, new project. You don't want the burden of another project. And he's like, go get the models.  And that's what I work on. And eventually, it all comes along. Yep.  And that is really the essence of our conversation now. You're going to be more valued and more relevant by being more valued and more relevant. Right? By acting that out. Yes. And just up out of the weeds and, well, I guess I've made my point already. Yep. Let's go there again. Yeah. So do you have any other interesting questions lurking out there? Well, yeah, because we're getting close to the end. So what's coming next for you? I know you're working on, but are you doing some speaking and you talked about tonight you're doing stuff, but what's coming up in the big picture? Oh, boy. I've got a lot of kinds of things going on. I'm excited that I'll be doing this concept modeling for the business analysis group here in Vancouver. I'm also, I'll be back at Enterprise Data World in April for the humans data modeling. Yes. I'm back. I'm down in Portland for the IIBA business analysis there. This time, I'm talking about going from process model to IT requirements. So it's going to be a big chunk of the value of data modeling in that. I'll be doing my usual business process classes in various places in London and Helsinki. It's been a big tour of Australia and New Zealand. That's coming up again. Wow. Actually, I'm looking at my speaking schedule and most of the events that I'm speaking at are business analysis events. Yeah, good. They're going to be talking about data modeling and process modeling. Excellent. Doing my outreach thing. That's good. I want us all to do more outreach. And I blogged on Data Diversity about data architects and modelers are null in the blogging world, meaning they don't exist to the world. And so there's a good blog post out on Data Diversity about that, so I won't take up time with that. And some of the things that I have coming up, I'm going to be speaking at the Buckeye Daima chapter, which is Columbus, Ohio, just in early April. I know. And I'm also doing a panel at the Business Analytics Conference in San Jose coming up. That's a past conference. It's going to Las Vegas, Sequel Saturday, TechEd, North America. We're going to be talking about Hadoop and business intelligence and all kinds of fun stuff. I'm going to do Sequel Saturday, Houston, which is right before TechEd. I hope I run into a bunch of astronauts there. And for EDWU, which is coming up, if you're a Daima member, you can ask your Daima chapter for a discount code to go register. So that's one of the benefits of being a Daima member. And I have some other Sequel Saturdays and other events coming up. I've applied for a lot more. I have some NASA stuff coming up. I'm so excited. But that's bringing us to the top of the hour. So one of the things we do, Alec, is stay on afterwards that we turn the recording off and we'll stay on after maybe for about 15 minutes and try to get through maybe some more of these questions. Is that all with you? Okay. Can I just give you one quick piece of advice when you go to Columbus, Ohio, remember the Ohio State University. Well, as a Boilermaker, I might allow that. And if you get an Ohio State University t-shirt, you can wear it anywhere in the world and people will come up and talk to you. Excellent. I don't know if that's all. I know this from experience. Okay. Excellent. So, Shannon, do you have some amazing things? I'm going to leave Karen and Alec. Of course, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much. And thanks to all the attendees, as always for being so active and engaged in the conversation. I will turn the recording off here. And just as a reminder, I will get links out to the recording of this session, a copy of the chat that's been going on. And thanks to Alec and Karen for the many mentions of Karen's blog and to Edie Debbie. I'll make sure you have a link. So, here's the recording is shutting off, Karen.


Hi, my name is Mary Johnson. I am the teacher of the visually impaired for ESU-8. And today I'm going to tell you what my role here at ESU-8 is and explain a little bit about the referral and the evaluation process for a student with visual impairments. So let me switch over to my PowerPoint here. OK, let's go ahead and get started here. As I said before, I am the teacher of the visually impaired or TBI for short here at ESU-8. Some people also refer to it as vision consultant, and either one is fine. I'm starting my third year here at ESU-8 as the TBI. Prior to that, I taught special education 7 through 12 in Pierce. And I did two years at Fremont Middle School and two years at Seward High School. I am the TBI for all ESU-8 schools. So any school that has a student with a visual impairment or has a referral for vision services, I would be the person that you contact. Currently, I have 18 students in eight different schools and two of the ESU learning centers. I serve all students' birth to 21. The main office is in Neely. I do also have an area in O'Neill that I go to. My home is in Creighton. So I do cover quite an area. So the best way to get a hold of me is either by my cell phone or my email, as I am not in the main office very often. I will provide my contact information at the end of this webinar. I also would just like to remind you, because I do cover such a wide area, to be flexible, especially when setting up meetings or evaluations or if I need to reschedule seeing a student. I try very hard to stick to the schedule I set up to see students, but things come up, such as in-services or weather or school changes. So I need to rearrange a few things and I appreciate your patience and help in that. I also ask that you notify me immediately of any changes. If you know them right away, you can email me and so we can make that adjustment. Otherwise, if it's kind of a last-minute change, please just send a text out. Because I'm in and out of all the different schools, I don't necessarily have a designated spot to meet with students. So if you could, when I arrive or at the beginning of the year, kind of set up a space that I can meet with any students that I do pull out and do activities or testing with, that is greatly appreciated. So we don't spend too much time trying to find a place that I can work with a student. And I try very hard not to pull students during any instructional time or during their specials time. So just kind of helping me guide what would be a good time in the day that they're not missing that direct instruction or I'm not pulling them from their favorite activity like PE or ART. Any conversations in the hallway I do are great. But anytime that you don't see me write something down or punch it in on my phone, please follow up with me about any conversations that we may have had if you haven't received a response for me in a few days. Just like everybody else, I might have forgotten that conversation and just give me a friendly reminder through email or through text. I do wanna mention that orientation and mobility, O&M, is a separate related service. And those services we contract through ESU-1 with Stacey Rickert would be our O&M specialist. You may recognize Stacey prior to me being at the ESU, Stacey was the TBI for ESU-1 and contracted ESU-8 schools as well. But so for the students that need O&M services, Stacey will still be providing those services. And that would be for students who need additional help accessing their environment with mobility or using the white cane in their environment to travel. Okay, so let's begin with the referral process. Number one thing is get a copy of that eye report. Part of the requirements is that there has to be a verified visual condition. So we would need that eye report as part of the referral and evaluation process. And really it's hard to proceed without the eye report. So if you can get me a copy of that or if you want me to request the eye report and the information I would need, I just need you to get a signed release form by the parent. That form can be found on the ESU website under special ed department under forms or you can just email me and I will send it to you. And then give me the contact information for the eye doctor and I can request that report. Just to kind of go through some of the Nebraska requirements for a student to be verified as a student with a visual impairment. Number one, there has to be an educational need. The visual condition has to adversely affect their education in some way. And then some other kind of guidelines as the acuity student with correction either with glasses or surgery. If it's 2070 or higher, they're partially sighted. 2200, they're considered legally blind. We also look at other visual behaviors. Such as field of vision, peripheral vision. Can they fixate on certain objects? Can their eyes converge? Can they track? Can they shift their gaze between two objects? And then we also look are there deficiencies in daily living, social interaction, academic achievement or orientation and mobility. If it doesn't look like the student is going to meet the requirements from the eye report and from information from parents and staff. We might at that point decide that we don't need to proceed any farther. And then we would decide if we want to refer them back to the SAP team or which direction we want to go. If there are additional concerns about vision from the staff or from the parents, I would come out and do an observation once an informal observation. Once we have parent consent, not for testing, but just to do an informal observation, just to gather some additional data to help us decide if we want to proceed further with the evaluation process. Some reasons for that would be if there's other verifications, you know, medical such as cortical visual impairment, that we would definitely want to test if the student has a diagnosis of CVI. Vision therapy I will talk about in a little bit, but that's another area that I see referrals for. And then once I do that informal observation, I would meet with the team and the parents as part of that team and go over a report that I write out from the eye report and the observations, the informal assessment. And just go over some recommendations and whether we want to proceed with testing or if we should refer back to the SAT team. Okay, I just want to address vision therapy quickly here. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. Vision therapy is a controversial topic right now in the vision world between ophthalmologists and optometrists and whether it should be provided in schools and through teachers who are visually impaired. In order to provide vision therapy, it is a medical intervention diagnosis that is provided by the optometrist or a trained vision therapist. It is not something that a teacher that visually impaired is necessarily trained in. And like I said, it is medical. So what I am looking at is the vision condition adversely affecting their education and then what educational services can I in the school provide for that student? We are not licensed to provide vision therapy. So I'm just going to leave it at that at this moment and if you have any questions about that, you can certainly contact me. So if a student is receiving vision therapy, that does not necessarily mean that they will qualify for vision services in the school, but we would need to do further evaluation to rule out other vision concerns if there are any. So if we do decide to proceed with the evaluation, there are a couple of forms on the ESU-8 website under special ed, department under forms. One is the referral sheet that the administration, excuse me, signs so they get permission for that testing and a checklist of what your concerns to give me a better idea of what the team is looking at and then I will email you some interview forms for the staff and for the parents and then I will be interviewing the parents as well. So once those forms are completed and you have parent consent to test, I will come out and do some observation because nobody uses their vision in the exact same way and we can't tell 100% how the student's vision is affecting them. A lot of the information I gather is through observation. The student doesn't necessarily know what they're not seeing. So I'm observing how they're using their vision. Is it effective and then ways that we can help or are there issues with how they're using their vision and what would be the best way for them to access their environment, whether it's auditory, visual, things like that. So a good chunk of the evaluation is observation and I try to gather information from a variety of settings, not only just in their classroom, but at other times such as lunch, PE, their specials, recess, things like that to get a better picture of the student. And preferably we like to do this over a couple of different days to kind of get a better snapshot of the child. I know sometimes we have a short assessment timeline or there's a great distance that people have to travel. So we might do one full day of observation but we try to break it up into a couple of different days. As I said, for observation is a great part of the assessment. And then once I move into the assessment activities, this again will take a couple of different sessions of me meeting with the students and doing some activities, hands-on activities with them. Because this can be visually tiring for the student, I do break up the time, not only with short breaks that I give them and the activities that I give them, but I try to spread it out over a couple of days. Or if I need to do it all in one day, I might work with them for a little bit in the morning and then let them go back to the classroom, do some other activities, give them that kind of visual break and then pull them again in the afternoon to finish up the assessment. The evaluation process, the assessment that I use is called the Functional Vision Assessment, the FVA. And the other piece of that is also the LMA, the Learning Media Assessment. This assessment gives me an idea of, as I said earlier, their best way of learning. Is it visual, is it auditory? Do they need borough instruction? Things like that. And the reports are quite lengthy just because of all the different visual conditions that I listed earlier, behaviors that I listed earlier that we do need to cover. And so just as a reminder to the MDT team that I do go over the report, I don't read it, because it's anywhere between eight to 20 pages, however long it needs to be. But I will need some time to make sure that I cover all the different areas that are on the report. So if a student, after testing, we decide as a team to verify them as a student with the visual impairment, what can you expect from me? So my first thing would be to set up time with the case manager and the teachers to meet with the student. Typically I will try to see them in their classroom and see how they're accessing their classroom and give suggestions or accommodations ways that I can help the student and the teacher provide for the student. But I will also need to do some pull out sessions with students just to work on some of the different areas. In vision, we have what we call the ECC, the expanded core curriculum, and it covers nine different areas of addressing the student, that's career education, independent living skills, social skills, and of course the academic piece too. So there's a wide variety of areas that we wanna make sure that the student is receiving the education that they need in. So I will pull out to do some of those activities. And again, as I said before, please notify me of any change. If it's a last minute change in the morning, students not there, pep rally, whatever it is, text me as I may already be out on the road. But if it's something in advance, you can certainly email that. As far as the IEP, I will fill out any of the vision sections on the IEP. So this would be on page two, that underneath the assessment or evaluation, I will fill in the current I information from the I report, and I will request the I report annually so I can keep up to date with the student's condition and inform the team of that as well. I will fill out the vision section on page three of the PLEP providing any information that I need to there. For most students, I do have a vision goal if I'm seeing them, if I more than just consultation or sometimes I do pair with the OT, the occupational therapist, as we both might be working on some fine motor visual skills, but generally I have my own goal for vision so I will provide that. If the student is of transition age, I will work with the case manager to fill out the transition page and then of course my service time. Progress reports, I just ask that you please give me at least a week's notice before you're gonna finalize that progress report and send it home. As I said before, I do have a variety of schools and everybody does it a little bit different and sends it home at a little bit different time. And I have found out that if I go by the progress dates on SRS, that is not always the case, as some schools do finalize that before that day and send it home because they wanna send it home with report cards, which is fine as long as I have the notice to fill it out because I will fill out the vision, the update for vision on the progress report for my goal. That is my way of as it says on the IEP of notifying the parents and the team of the student's progress. I typically don't give like a report for every vision or anything like that. I do keep a Google form for every student of every time I visit on my write down what we did and progress monitor any assessments or any informal assessment I did about the goal, but I don't share that every time unless I'm asked by a team member or parent and then I certainly will. But my progress report and the updates I put on there is that time that I share that information of how the student is progressing on the goal. So it's very important that I fill it out and I get notice before you finalize it and send it home. Just a reminder, I am not a case manager for any student simply because I am not in the school every day. I am a team member and hopefully a very involved team member with your help, but each school needs to have their case manager for students with visual impairments. That way it gives the student, the parent and teachers in that building a contact person on the days that I'm not there. And they know their school and they can set up meetings and things like that much easier than I can. So just a reminder, I will not be the case manager for any students with visual impairment because I'm a itinerant, I'm traveling around. But I do communicate with all teachers and team members, including the parents quite frequently. I will be emailing teachers, texting parents, things like that. So the communication will definitely is a big part of what I do. I provide consultation and or direct services depending on what the student needs. Most of my students do receive direct services, sorry. I do have one or two that's just consultation where I'm providing suggestions, recommendations to the team for them to kind of carry out. Consultation is available for all students. I don't just come in and work with the student and then leave. I do consult with all the parties involved to provide the best services that we can for each student. Just lastly, a quick overview of some general accommodations that you can start doing for your student with visual impairments. And these are good for most, if not all of the students in your classroom. With my background in special education and in the resource room, a lot of these accommodations help all students, whether they have learning difficulties, attention, deficits, things like that. These will be beneficial to all. As you may have noticed throughout this PowerPoint, I've had different backgrounds on the different slides. And one thing with students with visual impairments that the black background with the white text might be a little bit easier for them to read to access or it might not cause so much strain on their eyes. With this blue background, it's a little bit more soothing. So let your student choose the settings and the technology that they're using, whether it's their iPad, their laptop, the Chromebook. And that way they can personalize it to what their needs are. Clear copies are always good. Now the copy machine, sometimes it's low on ink, things like that, smudges. Make sure that you get those problems resolved as quickly as you can so that the student is provided a clear copy of what they need. It just is one less barrier that they have to accessing the material. Good markers, I chuckled at this because when I was in the resource room and I was working with the TVI, this was something she always stressed. But it is important to remember if that marker is starting to go run a little lower, it's getting a little dry, throw it out and always have new markers there. Black is typically the easiest color, the clearer color to use. Red and green are typically the harder colors for students to see, especially when there's glare on the board. I do have a student that prefers purple though, so it depends on the student and that will be written on their IEP. But general rule of thumb is to kind of stick with that black marker and make sure that it's working. Keep it simple. This includes the handouts that you give, but it also includes your environment as well. I know sometimes we try to fit everything on one page so we don't have to run off more than one page and so we cram everything on this one handout. But in doing so, we've really diminished the size and kind of cluttered things up for the student. So if it takes two pages to put all the information on there, that'd really help the student out because then they can focus on each area instead of just being overwhelmed by everything crammed together on that one page. And the same with the environment.  Sometimes we post things up there, but if we really want them to focus on that area, we need to take away the clutter from that area so they can focus on what it is that you need to. What they need to, excuse me. Allow that extra processing time. So it does take a little bit of time to focus on what they need to see, visually see it and then interpret what they're seeing and then provide that response or come up with the answer. So it'll just allow a little bit of extra time. And lastly, reduce glare. I know we love to laminate things, but sometimes that causes glare on things. And I'm not saying don't laminate. Just be aware of what you're doing. And there's also matte spray that you can get. So if you do laminate something, you can spray that on there to reduce the glare on it. Be aware of where the lighting is in your room. If there's a light right above the clock, the student might not be able to read the clock because there's a glare from the light on it. Or if there's light coming in from a window, it might be providing a glare that we need to kind of be aware of. And when you're presenting, many times we do turn off the lights, which is good, it helps us focus. But then if you're asking the student to write something down on their paper, you might need to provide like a pen light or something for them so that they can see where they are writing. Now this definitely isn't an inclusive list. It just is a few reminders. And of course we would outline all of these accommodations on the student's IEP or maybe even a 504 plan if needed. As I said, my contact information, my email is there. The office phone number and my cell phone. The email or cell phone are the best way to get ahold of me. This was just kind of a brief overview. If you have any student that you have vision concerns, please contact me. I've enjoyed all the schools that I have been out. Everybody's been very friendly. And I look forward to working with you further. Thank you.


So I've obviously joined us after our Johnson-Pain match here at Olden. Defeating the game, I felt certain it was a harsh defeat, but Jordan's not had too much to do with the game. Yeah, I think I was already short on goal, but I'll come remember and hold back to come so late and have a chance to respond. It's a cruel way to go out. In terms of the way we played, I think actually it was good. I can say something good here in the second half so maybe in that way we needed to get it off. I think we've gone on to a really good console. Yeah, certainly we mentioned that in the second half in particular, obviously, Jason Kenner has a lot of chances of making it. I thought the majority of the second half we looked more comfortable with the two things. Yeah, we started the second half really well. They did have a good game just before we made the subs and then we got into the groups for the game again. We've been punished really thoroughly. I think we've gone into the laps and we've been doing our part for the 90 minutes and we've decided to go through a lot of important help. Looking at the positives in the game, certainly one of the French defenders, Chris Boutis, he looked very solid afar on his debut for the club. Yeah, it's a good debut for Chris. You've got to bear in mind that the last game we played against Bradford Parkham was quite a long time ago and he's worked hard and trained very hard to maintain his fitness levels and he's going to be a good player for us. He's a great professional. He's composed on the ball. He's brave, has a sense of progress. He's a good player for us. And not only Chris, he's given you a chance to look at a few other players, like Colin McBurnie as well. You know, this game has given you a chance to have a cast hour. Yeah, for Ollie, he's probably as well as expected on the night. He had a good chance with the header, which he went in bravely in the first half. He hasn't played in the game at all, in the game time at all this season. Even in the previous season, I don't know if it's short for him, but he's been in the game for years. So that was a big ask on the night, but he'll come on a lot for that performance. Firstly, football is tough, isn't it? There is a way to certainly want to enjoy the game. We've really experienced that in the back of the time and therefore we did a lot of things.


Do you feel represented do our representatives truly represent us? It's a representative democracy. Do they talk for me or others? I do not trust it's us What moves their decisions the ones who give them votes their electorate's opinions arisen other interests a recent studies Call us the opinions of most citizens of no effect at all Politics is under the influence plastered with its super packs tipsy on its interiors loopy with the lobbyist The lobbyists who literally help write the laws Technically it's legal the ones that we chose to represent us come to represent those who can give them the funds But then I'll help them to win when the next election comes and we choose them again


Hi everyone Joe for jazby's case breaks calm coming at you with 2019 2020 Panini Donnery's optic Basketball blaster additions a 10 box half case break random team break number 15 We sold 15 spots one spot gets you to no vet base ships no veteran commonship per usual Right chasing that guy and drama rents and the other great rookies in this draft class Let's double you up here like Sir mix a lot All 30 teams are in let's roll it. Let's randomize it four and a three seven times one two three and Seventh and final time after seven we got David Bruns down to Jeff Thorfinson seven times teams and seventh and final time Minnesota Timberwolves down to the sacramento kings There you go David Timberwolves even Cohen Palakins Dan Tyson Grizzlies Josh with the jazz Brett with the pistons Jeff I mean pistons have taken to Boya Jeff with the Nuggets Daniel with the Warriors couple rookies there Miami Heat for Josh Proust Mavs for Josh X-Line Derek with the Raptors Josh with the Spurs even with the Wizards Derek with the Bulls Derek with Derek Melanson with the Bulls Derek Ewing with the Trailblazers Jeff with the Cavs Daniel with the Nets even Cohen with the Hornets Jeff Thorfinson with the Suns David Bruns with the Rockets Brett with the Hawks Derek with the Thunder Derek M with the Knicks Derek E with the Pacers Dan with the Magic Diane Celtics and my Lakers a little rivalry mojo right here Derek Melanson with the Bucks Derek Ewing with the Sixers Steven Schwartz with the Clippers and Jeff with the Sacramento Kings Let's sort this by column B by team If you need a if you need me to read off your team again, let me know while you're thinking about trades potential trades Let's pop this fresh case open And let's see which ten we're gonna do Laster boxes always get all over the place one two three four five All right, so You can see on the top camera me moving around the boxes here a little bit. That's half right there. That's ten boxes And then this I'm gonna slide Over this way right here. That's another ten boxes But probably you have time to run this back tonight if you want to ladies and gentlemen All right, I'll select a die Select that one right there one two three over here four five six for this group of ten right here And it's one so we'll do that side right there these We will save for next time One two three four five those back there for now Five these behind my pile of briefcases back there and then All right, I'm gonna pause the video really quick allow a couple extra moments for trades when we come back We'll have the break stick around BRB and we're back No trades So here is the official printout right here. Thanks everyone for getting it to the action. Appreciate you spending a bit of your Thursday evening with us Thanks for the support These these times now remember ladies and gentlemen things Shipments are gonna be delayed If you receive a tracking number Then that means your order went out that day After that it made the tracking may indicate that it's stuck in LA, but it's not it's On the way I think just to try to move things along a little bit more quickly the Pulse of service who have been slammed have been Have not been scanning as consistently as they usually do in addition to that there's also been Just delays in general So there are a lot of a lot of our customers are experiencing anywhere from one to maybe even seven business days of delays Little event your stuff will eventually get there Boys and girls, but before you fire off an email to us just kind of keep that keep that time frame in mind It's been it's been crazy. Some people getting very very little delays Some people getting a lot of delays everyone's at home ordering ordering online and So that pulse service is slammed so be patient with them and we appreciate your patience as well. Thank you Let's open up five boxes here, and then we'll rip all these packs and we'll go through the next five Veteran comments won't ship everything else will What do we got on TV here? We got New England. Oh, it's Super Bowl The Patriots Ram Super Bowl wasn't this wasn't this a snoozer like not much kind of a snoozefest for most of the game Rams Delta, I know this is a basketball break, but we got time to chat about other stuff, too Rams give up Brandon cooks for some picks But I don't know how much cap relief they're gonna get not much according to Sean Corbett Rams fans Sean saying that cooks for a fourth and And a For a second and picks is a win But yeah, they gave up a lot for him a few years back and a lot of money, too Mark N is here saying the Rams build a team for two years now. They have no money to keep any of those guys around No, they don't They should have won this Super Bowl that would have that would have built a little capital with I Guess with Rams fans anyway I'm gonna be like, all right. That's what it cost to win the Super Bowl and Now that we got that under our belt we can Kind of re-establish ourselves in LA. I guess that's the plan Didn't quite work out Ross what what what is the $600 about the what? I don't know I Think so it should be in the is it not in the item description how we're gonna give that away Yeah, Sean saying there's still five million over the cap and not at all And they haven't even signed any any of you their new guys future draft ease etc. Etc It's not in the item description Well, it's not sold out. We still have to do that sell-o pack to officially sell that out It says right here in the item description in all caps The breaking box is not a part of the break We will be randomizing the box at the end of the break to one customer at the end box ships sealed You go read the item description folks Greg Lang, how are you? How long would that drive take this time of day? Which drive? Oh? Are you still talking about Long Beach? Oh, he might be might be lagging behind It's the title says $600 plus break King box giveaway All right. This is half case blaster number 15. Good luck everybody Got Westbrook right here and RJ Barrett rated rookie blue blue purple Purple Nick's that goes to Derek Melanson. There you go, Derek There's the no-name Kendrick Nunn poor Kendrick Nunn Miami Heat Josh Proust Trey young my house Hollow Darius Garland base John Moran Gris that will be for Dan Tyson and The Darius Garland hollow will go to Jeff Dwarf it's in Autos are gonna be few and far between in these blasters But it's all it's all about the parallels in this stuff ladies and gentlemen There's DeAndre Hunter Stack cards is about to slide over that goes to the Timberwolves David Bruins All right, the next five boxes. Good luck everybody Other the other ten boxes the other half of this blaster case is already in the store and already moving and grooving So get into it if you want to knock that out tonight Although I think with a lot of break getting close I think we're we're already running out of time on some breaks here All right Well, we'll figure it out just keep in mind that there may be some breaks that that might have to be Might have to be pushed back to the next day Just because I think if we have that If we have that basketball mixer ago, I think that's gonna be like an hour-long break So that's gonna gobble up an hour of the time. I don't think we have too much time left and So, I don't know just buy what you want to buy on jazby's case breaks calm and then just And then just hope that your break happens tonight First to fill first to break Sean I did not see that they officially canceled UFC has officially cancel all events. I thought they got the I Got they got I thought they got no covert island. I thought they got an island where they were gonna like Like it's some sort of Hunger Games Island where everyone was gonna fight to the death and did not that that did not convince Did not convince people. I imagined a Hunger Games style island Where all fighters would be placed into one Island-sized octagon and they would fight their way out Now Dan saying they will still do it on On no covert island. Oh I see I see He has PN didn't want them to do it, but they will still eventually do stuff on fight island Gotcha. Gotcha. I see Aaron pets. I didn't the mouse the house of mouse says jump Dana. Why is this all right? It's kind of important though. I get it. They pay him a lot of money Last ten boxes. Good luck, everybody Gold or is that just gold because of the Lakers just gold because the Lakers that'll still ship though I thought it was like a parallel Jalen Brown Brian LeBron James that insert is kind of cool The Lakers that'll go to Diane. I Want like a give me a hollow Jameran. Let's let's see it Hollow hollow Zion. No, nothing Lucas Amon. She didn't get his name on there either Mo Bamba checkerboard. That's pretty cool. We'll pattern right there Mo Bamba for the Orlando magic That's gonna go to Dan Tyson save that Kendrick none That's what I heard Shawn Corbett. I think they beat the 1927 Yankees to oh Nick Jasper. Are you still here? Jeff Mason ruined your random number block plans He's saying that he purchased the bill straight up and break 16 Devin Booker to 149 Nick's not still not listening or is not in the chat anymore. I'll I'll message him jam PJ Washington to hollow at something Something for the Charlotte Hornets that'll be Stephen Cohen With the Charlotte Hornets and there you go. So no no Zion's earning a drama ran We have that bass John Moran nothing super huge, but maybe in the other half Thanks for getting into this one ladies and gentlemen Joe for jazby's case breaks calm. I'll see you next time. Bye


You know, definitely it's a real feeling. Just sitting here, you know, I was waiting for the sixth round to come around. And the next thing you know, I'm getting a phone call with the Atlanta area code. So, you know, I'm more than excited and, you know, definitely grateful for the opportunity. You know, I just had to repeat it in my head a couple of times.  So, you know, it was great to get that call. You know, by no means have I made it.  I needed to, you know, make an impact and change the game at the next level. That's my culture when you think about Atlanta, from all aspects. And I'm looking to add to that, you know, I'm looking to bring my energy and, you know, change the team and, you know, progress.


The Appalachian Artisan Center held a beginner-friendly natural dye class on Saturday, January 27th. Yeah, a lot of the things that I do do are dye and art. I've come to realize there's the people that do do it are older and they're up in years and they're not able to do it as much anymore. They're not able to pass it on to people. The people that do know it are family members. And, you know, today's age and time, things that are passed down really don't get carried on. Do you worry about having enough money to last throughout retirement? Give Reed Potter at Raymond James a call. Reed has 26 years experience helping folks enjoy their best life in their retirement years. Those in attendance got the opportunity to pick their own wool and learn how to dye it using walnuts, lichens and copper pneumonia. As natural dyeing becomes more of a thing of the past, Carter feels it is important to maintain and pass down the art to those interested in keeping the tradition alive or using it to make crafts at home. A class like this would definitely help people that like to do things at home. Giving them the knowledge to be able to add color to their, I guess, most things when you buy them from the store, they're dull, you know, dull in color. You know, at the finished product, if you do a natural dye, it definitely puts a twist on the color of your project or whatever it is you're making. For more information on future events, you can visit the Appalachian Artisan Center Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Fidell.