Super brief intro, my talk is called Life on My Home Planet, and if you read the description and you happen to be particularly cynical, you might have thought with a talk title and description like this, Giles could be talking about anything, and he might in fact have written the description before he decided what he was going to talk about. Unfortunately, that would be exactly correct. However, fortunately, the weirdest randomist thing in the talk description is that I said, you know, one of the questions I'm going to talk about is, do you need a goat if you're trying to get to the moon? And that actually random crazy part is the part that I'm serious about that I knew what I was going to say about. So I'm actually going to talk to you a little bit about riding a goat to the moon. And before I do that, I want to explain where it comes from. So this is Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, and the concept of riding a goat to the moon actually came up in a Twitter discussion about Mel Gibson, and someone was saying, Mel Gibson's insane, right? And there are a lot of people who agree with this point of view, and you know, there are many reasons. He has these allegations against him of homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, domestic violence, and general lunacy. However, I had the counter-argument that you can't actually admire Mel Gibson anyway because he put together this hit movie, which was in Mayan, and he put together this hit movie, The Passion of the Christ, which was in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew. Now these languages, making a movie is hard. Making a hit movie is hard. Making a hit movie using languages that are no longer spoken anywhere on the face of the planet is just crazy. It's ridiculous. That's like saying it's not enough that I'm going to fly to the moon. I'm also going to do it riding on the back of a goat for no reason. So the thing is, Mel Gibson might be crazy. I'm certainly not saying Mel Gibson is not crazy. I'm not saying he is either, but I'm saying whether crazy or not, you've got to, you know, admire the fact that he makes these incredible things happen. And this reminds me of a really good book called Purple Cow, and the basic idea of this book is in the tagline, transform your business by being remarkable, and basically the idea of the book is that the only marketing worth a damn is being worth talking about. And I read this book at about the same time that I read this book. My job went to India, and all I got was this lousy book by Chad Fowler. And I haven't read the new edition, but he rewrote the book and republished it under the passionate programmer. So if you're like, wow, this is a good talk, I should check out this book, it's actually easier to find this version because that version is no longer in print. I don't actually get along with this guy in person, but this is a really good book. Some of you know exactly how much I don't get along with him, but it really is a very good book. And it's about how one of the best ways to have a good career as a programmer is to create good stuff that people like. So I'm going to talk about My Goats, which are basically based on a combination of the Chad Fowler thing, which is that if you want to have a good career, create cool stuff, and the Purple Cow thing, which is that you should create really, really interesting stuff. So My Goats. First goat is Archaeopteryx, which I sometimes just refer to as arcs because people can figure out how to spell it. Here is a quick demo, if I can find it. This is some music software, right, and this is what we were sound checking earlier, right. It's a drum machine, basically. So let's see. I'm going to have to do this while looking behind me. Basically, this is what you do. You run it, and you get a drum and bass. What you can do is actually change the code. It's more interesting by changing this to a random number. And you get like much sparser, but much more varied rhythms. So that's how it works. And let me just come in here. Thank you. Thank you very much. So that's what it is, and the real name is Archaeopteryx. And it's based on this thing here, this software drum machine, is actually based on a very, very old model of drum machines. And I don't mean an old model as in like a model car, but like an old conceptual model. This was created in like the late 70s, and people are still creating software drum machines based on the same idea. Let me show you a real basic intro to how this works. If I come back in here, right, and say I'm going to create a really simple drum beat, right, I'll start here with the bass drum, right. So you say, I want it to play on the one, and I want it to play on the nine. And that's out of 16 beats, right. So it goes like that. And say you want to have the snare drum play on the five and the 13. So that goes like that. Or you could shake it up a bit like this. And then for, you'd also want like a hi-hat in there. Here's a hi-hat. So you could do like this for the hi-hats, right. So that's how it works. Now the reason I showed you that, what you're wondering, is to clarify how this model works, right. This grid at the bottom represents the beats for a particular drum. So when you create this thing, you're adding up these different rows. What you're actually doing is setting up a matrix of three drums of 16 beats. So the way this actually works is it has 10 drums. So you're actually creating a matrix of 10 drums by 16 beats, right. And obviously these are on-off switches, right. So this is a matrix of booleans. But what my code basically does is it changes it to a matrix of floats. So here, instead of just yes and no, you can say yes, no, and maybe, right. And then if you have a random number generator, which gives you a number between zero and one, these represent the percentage probabilities, right. 0.5 and 1.0 is effectively equivalent to 0%, 50% and 100%. So the way Archeopteryx handles that, I don't know if you can see this with the colors, but it represents it as an array of arrays, right. Because it's a two-dimensional matrix. So an array of arrays is a very intuitive way to do that. And these probabilities are all floats that describe the percentage, right. So for one of the hi-hats, I want it often to play on, this is an eighth note pairs, I'm sorry, 16th note pairs. And there's eight of them in a measure of 16 beats, right. So 85% on the first half, 35% on the second half, means that you're very much going to, you're very likely to hear like that. And then the little ones in between are like sometimes happen, right. So you create this array of arrays, and then you go through the MIDI note numbers, which is basically MIDI is just a way that you can assign note numbers to particular sounds in your software. And you create drum objects in Archeopteryx, which is basically just a thing that sends a MIDI message to the music software. And you populate it with these, what I'm doing here with the L is it's basically lambda, which gives you a closure, and it really just allows you to use Ruby as if it were JavaScript, because you can now add a method and put it anywhere you want on the object, because these are just adder and accessors basically. And then probabilities gets the probabilities of the MIDI note number. So each drum now knows what its probabilities are. So that's just a way to assign this grid of floats. Now I want to talk for a second about porn.   And I feel as if I have some culpability there, because I have in the past shown pictures of good-looking women for no reason in the middle of talks, other than the fact that people, when you see them in, you know, images, cause your brain to pay attention. And I frequently exploit that as well as images of food, images of terrifying animals, and so on and so forth.  And also I threw in some George Clooney for the ladies.  This porn only demeans camels, right? There are no women demeaned by this porn, right?  This porn is also demeaning to rhinos and elephants, unfortunately. This porn is demeaning to everyone who sees it, which means it is demeaning to women, but it's demeaning to women and men equally, which I think is important. Now, to get you over the trauma of what you've just witnessed, here's a puppy. Thank you. This is more cuteness, although this is a bunny, so it's kind of horrible because something that's adorable could still grow up to molester chicken. Anyway, so we created a grid of floats, right? And we populate it with these drum objects. We then hand it off to this thing called generate beats, which actually includes a recursive lambda, which is much more prosent than it probably sounds. So, basically, here's the code. You've got this method and it's called generate beats. Later on, it passes, you know, to MIDI timer at just says, later on invoke some code. And the code that it says to invoke is this here, lambda generate beats. It basically just schedules itself for later replay. I'm hiding something off-screen in this tidy code because if you look here, you can see that this block of code actually includes a little bit else. And that little bit else is evil timer offset WTF. I'll talk about that later. Anyway, this code is on GitHub. I want to talk also about another goat. Hopefully I've got time. This goat is named Wheatley, named after a character from a video game called Portal 2, where you play this character and you eventually face Wheatley. Sorry, Wheatley. It's too late now. Hey, guess what else? The cake is alive. Here he is in the part where he kills you.   And that's basically what Wheatley, the programming thing, is. So, Wheatley started life as Tauley. Tauley was a library created in 2008. Tauley keeps your code dry. And what it does is it analyzes legacy code. It goes through Ruby code, and it isolates duplicate methods. And it can also do very, very primitive repetition detection. But it is extremely primitive and extremely slow. Then, just this last year, I think 2011? No, last year, 2010.  And I created a similarity detector for blog comments in JavaScript. And I was like, oh, this is really fast. So I was like, okay, cool. I just kind of discovered it by accident. So I discovered how to make Tauley fast. But I didn't want to rewrite Tauley because it was like an old project. I wanted to start over. And one of the reasons is I didn't want to analyze Ruby at that time.  So Wheatley is a library for automating JavaScript repair. And if you feed it two pieces of JavaScript which are equal, right, these function foo return true, function foo return true, it can say, okay, the parse trees of these two functions are identical. And it can give you that parse tree, which is basically underneath, you know, the language when Ruby goes through or your JavaScript interpreter goes through, it parses your language out into a parse tree and then turns those into instructions. And this thing is written in Ruby. It gets the parse tree from a library called Johnson which ties into SpiderMonkey, which is a C JavaScript interpreter. We talked about monkeys earlier. This is a spider monkey riding a goat, which is not what they do all the time. But in case you've forgotten what monkeys look like, when Wheatley finds that two pieces of JavaScript are identical, it says that they have 100% similarity, right? Parse tree zero, similarity, parse tree one, should equal 100%. And it does. Now, say you've got this where this has three tokens. No, I'm sorry, four tokens as a parse tree would understand it, right? Function foo return true, function bar return true. So in each of those, there's only one token which is not equal to all the other tokens and the other thing. So therefore, that's 75%. And if you ask Wheatley, it'll say parse tree similarity to parse tree is 75. It gives you an arbitrary percentage. The code for that is actually incredibly simple. This whole thing's built on arrays, right? So it just says it calculates the intersection with the other tree, multiplies it by 100, divides it by the other size and turns it back into an integer. Now, you can also get absolute numbers. Going back to purely identical JavaScript here, function foo return true twice. It'll say that the parse tree token diff with the other parse tree should equal zero. And I call it a token diff because when you're dealing with a parse tree, you're dealing with a set of tokens and you just want to know what the difference is in numbers. So here, obviously, the token diff is one. So when you run the specs, parse tree token diff parse tree one, should equal one. So it can count. And again, the code is actually really, really simple. The code that gets into the JavaScript can be quite hairy, but the actual comparison here is again just arrays against other arrays. So it's really very easy to understand. It's just array subtraction, really.  You can also extract similar code blocks. Ignore this next picture. If you have this highly similar JavaScript, console log foo and console log bar, you can ask it for echoes. It can tell you that two sections are highly similar to one another. So if you say, show me the parse tree echoes with a maximum token diff of one, it'll say the first section of the parse tree has this array of echoes, which only contains the second section of the parse tree. And likewise if you give it something like this, console log foo, bar and baz, it'll say the first section of the parse tree over here, parse tree zero, has this array of echoes, which are parse tree one and parse tree two. And you can do that with an arbitrary number of tokens. And actually, I don't remember the percentages version, but it's actually pretty easy to figure out. And I call this echoes because it's like the tree is echoed elsewhere within it. Now here's the code for echoes and you can see it's a bit more complicated than the other methods. And that's because once you get in here you're dealing with some more complicated stuff. I think it might be recursive, but to be honest with you I forgot how it works. I was in the cafe, putting the presentation together for this and I looked at that method and I was like I don't know. So I invite you to find out how my code works and tell me. You can see it's only like 10, 12 lines. It's actually easy to figure out. It took a while to write, but it's pretty easy to read. Anyway, here's an innocent chipmunk, although he looks like he's getting ready for a date, so he might not be that innocent. And here's a horrified hedgehog. And yes, moving on. Here is some highly similar JavaScript. So Wheatley can also extract the variant tokens. Let's go back one. Here it has console log foo, console log bar, right? So you can say what are the variant tokens and variant tokens should equal foo and bar. You can also ask for the invariant tokens which is what tokens in those two parse trees are identical and it will give you that as an array. Now Wheatley also extends Johnson. Johnson is really cool but it can only parse JavaScript. It can't reassemble JavaScript and the parse tree that it gives you cannot actually be edited. So Wheatley re-ads well, it has a Johnson translator module that gives that functionality to Johnson which you can then use to actually construct JavaScript parse trees that can be rewritten. Although I have to tell you it's quite hacky, but it works. This enables Wheatley to add function calls, replace literals with variables, and create wrapper functions. And if we zoom out on this one, Wheatley create wrapper code function should equal refactored, we see this which is kind of like Wheatley's claim to fame. It can do an ultra-simple refactor, namely creating a wrapper function. Here's the code, it says console log foo. Here's the refactored function which is console log query, then it calls as the foo. So it extracts the code, pulls out the literal, creates a wrapper function, and you could use this for instance if you had a lot of code which called console.log in production, because IE, various versions of IE will barf and go nuts if you use console.log. So what you do is you run this and then you fix that wrapper function but it will automatically create these here. Now this is a proof of concept refactoring, it would actually require a bit more work to use a great deal. The code is on GitHub. A little more about this, I only have eight minutes left so I'm going to kind of hurry. The code which generates new JavaScript is as I said, quite involved. And if you're looking to get your GitHub on this is a place to start. It could use some cleaning up. Also the variable naming is clearly idiotic, as different QWERTY are not good variable names. I have not figured out a way to automate variable naming. Although I do have a wild-eyed idea to consider, I also want to look at cosine similarity, sim hashing, and if I were to do it over, which this is the second time I've done it, so I might, if I were to do it over I might do it in CoffeeScript instead using Jison. But all told, I'm actually pretty happy with Wheatley, it's a very good goat. Although these projects probably look extremely experimental, I actually used parts of Wheatley and a companion project that I haven't open sourced yet to find easy refactoring points in a legacy JavaScript code base of over 14,000 lines. In fact, it was 14,551. It would take a very, very long time to go through that kind of code by hand and reading bad code is depressing. It was also able to auto-generate some very simple code fixes just a tiny bit. And legacy code is tedious and repetitive. Tidious, repetitive tasks are why we have these boxes in the first place. You know, programs are hard to hire, but certain types of tedious, repetitive programming programmers are actually easy to write. So, I am actually firmly of the opinion that hackers should not do repetitive tasks. I believe hackers should write new hackers to do those repetitive tasks for them. It is the circle of life. Now, earlier I mentioned program or self-promotion and you know, in the context of this stuff I came up with this whole thing about how to build a goat. Unfortunately I didn't time the length of this presentation. So, although I do go into how to build a goat I'm not actually sure I'll be able to go through. I will give you the first, you know, the first core of how it works. Building a project like this is a gamble. It's an experiment. You don't know for sure if it's going to work. There are four things you need to know. When to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away, and when to run. There's more to it, but I really, I've got six minutes left on this timer. So, say what? All right, all right. Well, the first thing is to do substantial research, okay? This is a list of books and stuff that I did to, like, learn about music, right? These are only the good ones that I remember. I've got books waiting on my iPad to be read. I got this one here, which is a Music Theory PhD thesis on Detroit Techno. And this, this was written by a guy who wrote AI code that can write orchestras. In fact, this is his second thing. His first one would write orchestras in the style of arbitrary composers. And when orchestras refused to play, I'm sorry, I can write orchestras, can write classical music. Orchestras refused to play his music in the style of various composers, because they were outraged that he could do that, and they found it sacrilegious. So he wrote this new thing, which does orchestral music in the style of, you know, hybrid style of various composers he likes.  But that's another thing.  I'm going to do another version of this talk, like an hour long version, and put it on my blog, so I can go into more detail there. The long story short is that if you're going to try and do something, you know, genuinely remarkable, you're going to have to do your homework, right? And correspondingly you need to choose something you care about. It should be obvious, but to a lot of people it isn't. The obvious reason is you're going to be doing it a lot, so you need to have something you'll have energy to look at. Consider the idea of rock star programmers, right? It's kind of a silly idea in many ways. But one thing that's kind of cool about rock stars is they have to like, memorize all this stuff with guitars. So a lot of time you're rehearsing. The other thing is that in the world of programmers, a rock star is a specialist. Like here, this is a great rock star. This is Jeremy Ashkenass. He created CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, underscore.js.  And obviously it takes a lot of energy. The other thing is you're going to learn a lot about it. You want it to be the kind of information you will be happy to have inside your brain. This is Alan Perlis, one of the sort of great, like early opinion havers about programming. Actually, the folder I filed him under was Code Profits when I was putting this together. And he said this, you think you know when you can learn are more sure when you can write even more when you can teach but certain when you can program. And well, here's a story I'll just skip. But if this is true that you're only certain that you know something when you can program a computer to do it, then to automate something is to study it and indeed to some degree to master it. So you choose something you care about because you will master it. And Building Archaeopteryx certainly made me a better musician. Writing Code which analyzes Ruby made me better at analyzing Ruby. Writing Code which analyzes JavaScripts made me better at JavaScript. And of course, the meta thing that I'm going into here is AI which is actually the study of like decisions and automating decision making. Oh, many years ago I grew disillusioned with technology. I learned how to do this. This is a video graphic stuff. Basically I wanted to like make film music and I was just like very frustrated with code for a while. So I learned how to do all this stuff and parts of it are actually done with JavaScript as surprising as that may be. And later I actually went and did some animation in Ruby. This is SVG animated in Ruby. It just creates like a very long series of SVG documents. And then there's some Java that turns these SVGs into JPEGs. You can just import those series of JPEGs into animation software. All the animation is already done. You can find that on the GitHub and on my blog. Let's see. I got a minute and a half. I don't know how good this is going to be. Next step in building a goat this is very important.  So the iPad was basically designed in 1968 at Xerox Park by this guy who is holding up a prototype. It was called the Dynabook. Now when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone this guy was right there at the conference. And when he got off the stage he asked him, you know, what do you think? And he said, make the screen 5 inches by 8 inches and you'll rule the world. So that's basically what he did. The interesting thing is Apple was working on this for a long time. Apple knew about the Dynabook. This was made when Steve Jobs was not at Apple but the engineers were still very interested in creating a Dynabook. And you can actually look at this. This is a very very similar notes application running on an Apple Newton to the one running on the iPhone. And I'm sure there was some die-hard engineer at Apple when the iPhone was made who thought, yeah, we've made a half-assed Dynabook. Awesome, right? And, you know, it continues, right? This is actually like a long tradition in Apple. Let's see, let's see, okay. So the iPhone... Ipad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All this stuff. This is Jim Cameron quote. The guy, the film director. If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success. This is the guy who made Avatar, Terminator 2. So if you look at the iPhone or the iPad as a failed Dynabook, right, it's still an amazing success as a phone. And this is what people were saying about the iPad, right? Limited IO, no USB, no flash. Why the iPad will fail. There is a whole genre of why the iPad will fail, right?  Do it wrong. This is where you, you know, this is why you should do things wrong. Because if you set out to do something awesome and you do it wrong, it's still gonna be awesome. And in keeping with this, this code is copied from a flash tutorial and then melded with code from a Ruby book. And I did the flash tutorial wrong and the Ruby tutorial wrong and it still turned out pretty cool. This here, I was talking about before, evil timer offset WTF, right? Does this look like good code? This is not good code, right? Just because I'm standing up here in front of you, if I have a variable named evil timer offset WTF, that's not good code. And we all know what WTF stands for, but it's still not good to see it in there, right? And if you're going through the code with a WTF stamp, it's just not how it would be. There's something similar here. Wheatley replaced literal with variable. The actual code for replaced literal with variable has this comment. It says to do, fucked. I find comments like that in my code from time to time. Fix me, stone. Not actually informative.  But the funny thing is is like one of the things that made this habit of you know cursing variable names worse with me and you know encouraged me in this naughtiness was working with terrific programmers because they complain about their own code all the freaking time. And the funny thing about this code is it may have motivated the creation of this gem, right? This gem is a much better way of handling which I may rebuild archaeopteryx on top of. Now again, I went all out promoting archaeopteryx and went to every conference so I was like, oh I'm going to promote myself as a programmer, it's important. And also I was like, wow this is awesome, everybody needs to see it. Now the funny thing is that may have inspired the creation of that other gem, right? Someone might have been like, wow, there's all this attention on this thing, I'm going to look at it.  That may have happened with that gem I just showed you. I know for a fact it happened with this gem, right? And that is actually awesome, right? Ben Blything saw the code for how archaeopteryx handles MIDI and thought, no, no, it should be much cleaner. And so he made it cleaner, he rebuilt the foundation and then I just moved archaeopteryx over to sit on that foundation. And this is the magic of open source, right? If you create code and share your code and your enthusiasm people will respond and that's a great thing. Here is a kitten cuddling a lizard. We don't know what they got up to but we're not looking but it doesn't matter because they don't have any pictures of that one. I am now out of time, should I keep going? Yes, okay.   The next step, the last step is to do it over and over again. This is not how I mean. I created Tally in 2008 that was, of course, code to prevent, you know, don't repeat yourself. This was Wheatley 2011 also code to enforce don't repeat yourself. I wrote code which is enforcing don't repeat yourself I'm showing you this slide twice, right? Do repeat yourself, right? Don't repeat yourself as a great rule rule for code. It's good for computers. It's not good for humans. If you actually read up on the human brain and how it works, repeating yourself is key to getting good at stuff. Also when you repeat yourself you're going to do it slightly differently, right? If you think back the other version of this slide the colors were inverted. This slide is probably, we're probably not looking at the first motorcycle he ever built, right? You will come up with variations when you rebuild stuff that you're really interested in. And it's worth doing. Consider Archaeopteryx. I went to all the conferences in 2008 to talk about it. But I actually built an earlier version in 2006 which ran on a completely different framework of continuations in chaos math. And this is actually a very old email from 2006 about how I was going to show it off at the Albert Kirky user group which I did and it was built on this which I don't have time to explain.  Because I might do another one of these in 2012 and it'll probably be better than the first two. Also public service announcement animals are perverts. This is three cats getting it on at the same time. And compared to all the other perverted animal pictures I showed you they're coming out ahead of everybody because they're all the same species. Anywho you don't even want to see the picture I found of the elephant orgy. There are baby elephants there. If it had been people it would be illegal to even look at the picture. It was unbelievable. I was horrified. Anywho this is who I am Giles Boquette and please google me and follow me on Twitter Giles Goatboy I actually chose the name long before I came up with the proposal theme or whatever the presentation theme but obviously if you're interested in goats I'm all about goats but not that way. Thank you. Brighter Planet is a cloud based computation platform so we provide an API for developers to build complex scientific calculations into their applications pretty easily. One big client we have is MasterCard International and they have a partnership with us where users of corporate cards who charge things like flights and hotel rooms onto their corporate card all those pieces of data go into a big database and we go in and using all those details calculate the environmental impact and put that information back in the database so the users of these corporate cards can use that information for making energy efficiency adjustments and corporate reporting.


From Seattle, Washington extracting the signal from the noise. It's the cube on the ground at Linux con North America 2015 now. Here's your host Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with the Cube We are on the ground in Seattle, Washington at Linux con North America 2015 show wanted to come out here See what's going on Linux obviously the grandfather of of the open-source movement and open-source software That's really kind of taken over. We're excited for this next segment Duncan Johnson The founder and CEO of Cloudsoft welcome. Thank you. Nice to be here. Absolutely. So tell us a bit about Cloudsoft Sure, so Cloudsoft is an open-source application management Company, so we're the curators of Apache Brooklyn, which is now a well established incubator project inside of the Apache software foundation So unsurprisingly, we're here talking about open-source And and talk a little bit about Brooklyn. We haven't heard much about Brooklyn I'm sure other people probably have some people who I haven't yet give us gonna be on that Absolutely, so basically gives you a standard space way of modeling applications So people talk a lot about blueprints, which you know essentially capture the the topology of an application the policies You want to apply to it when you actually run it or instantiate it? And so we do that and then we just we essentially take that blueprint and we can deploy it and run it in any environment It's a virtual physical or cloud So like a lot of open-source projects It stands on top of the giants of the open-source movements So we use things like Apache J clouds make heavy use of that. That's the sort of lingua franca for talking to infrastructure And here at this event. We were talking about a new project called clarker Which really lets you spin up a docker-based cloud So that seemed people seem to like that idea, you know Obviously darker is is and containers generally are one of the sort of hot topics at this event Yeah, so we were at docker con. I don't know. I guess it's come three four weeks ago now It's been a little while very hot topic people are very excited about containers the promise of containers We've talked to people putting containers into storage all kinds of interesting stuff So then so what is your piece add to the puzzle that wasn't already there before sure? So so one of the things that we felt was missing was the ability to actually stand up a docker-based cloud That was there for you know self-managed. It would actually you know scale itself It would then present itself and serve up containers on demand in our case given our background in Brooklyn We wanted to treat that as a first-class destination for blueprints. So the difference is a difference of degree It's the focus on hey, I've got all these blueprints. I've created I'd love to run them in a container base rather than the virtual physical world. So that was really the motivation Now you talk about docker con. We were there and in fact one of the sponsors and Probably the most significant announcement was actually nothing to do with technology But around the open container initiative, which of course is hosted by the Linux Foundation It talked a bit of it about why you think that was so important and why that someone packed full Because there definitely was you know a real tension and you know clearly Coro s great product Docker, you know well established and a lot of enterprises scratching the heads going well, you know What I do, you know, do I do some kind of evaluation bake off whatever and you know fortunately, you know Alex Pauly, you know headed that off by reaching out Solomon and the two of them sort of squaring this away and so realizing that There's way more to be gained by by working collectively on on things like run C And then everyone could differentiate on top of that which is you know the classic model Yeah, it's interesting how people are coming together that Diane talked earlier that you know You don't have to do it all yourself It's really this idea of kind of the building on the API economy and leveraging other other people's investments So you had a keynote here. What are some of the things you covered in the keynote for the folks that missed it? Well in the actual fact we started by actually talking about what I think of as 21st century alchemy Which is open source and the whole point of of open source is it is a magical transformation Where you take base matter and you turn into something, you know new and and and exciting and you do that through collaboration So so one of the big topics of conversation that you know We've been having here and was sort of talks around in the in the keynote was you know collaboration You know the way in which you compose things, you know bringing other open source projects to bear on what you're doing And having that kind of open-minded attitude that Collectively we can do way more And you know I I'm old enough and grand enough to have made my my share of mistakes You know, hey, I know I'll build a you know, I'll go build a sockets library There's a sockets library go use it, you know, I mean, but I think nowadays it's you know The modern kind of idiom is to it's to look outside or beyond your walls and see what's out there And make use of it And then and then of course there's the risk right when you have so many people collaborating There's a risk of things going different directions, but it sounds like kind of the maturity and it's interesting Or at linux con the like said kind of the granddaddy of all the open source projects in the enterprise That people can kind of keep on task And I think what you just talked about really shows a maturity to kind of stop that You know complete sharding or people really going in different directions, which is a real risk Damn right it is and I mean, you know, I think I would say the linux foundation has really played a key role here I mean, of course the apache software foundation is is out there and we're we're members of that and we support that too But the notion of collaborative projects is something that that really, you know Jim and the guys at the linux foundation have have really championed So each project can have its own governance model, but the important thing is it has a governance model So it's a light touch. Here's you know, we'll we'll host you we'll help you You know, I'm great friends with sam ramji and a huge admirer what he's doing Within the cloud foundry foundation and you know, if any of you missed Keynotes from here, they should watch his because you know that was Looking at the philosophy of you know working together and being respect for and it's not every it's not always the person Who shouts loudest that has the most interesting thing to say But but certainly it's it's been shown that for just pure innovation speed of development speed of Speed of innovation ways to attack problems. There's really nothing that really holds up to the open source model No, I agree and but one of the telltale slides that sam put up was that you look at the scale of projects Projects that are single vendor that don't have a if you're like a home a governance framework are a tenth of the size of those that do So it's really important for people to collaborate, you know openly and and and extensively over a period of time You have to have a clearly defined independent way of managing a project and I think you know, we've learned that the hard way You know, we've learned that through you know, what happened with my sequel and various other projects in the past So we have learned from that and I think now You know, we're comfortable with that model You know Enjoy the as from IBM talks about it's not just about code. It's about culture. It's about community You know, all of those things are key ingredients Yeah, I think the the community the culture thing Maybe doesn't get maybe does get talked about enough But I don't think it does because it's really such a source of motivation such a source of pride And and but also as a management challenge because how much of your people's time Do you want working on the open source stuff versus stuff that's really directly contributing to the company? You want them to be able to feel good about themselves be Respected in the community make big significant contributions But at the end of the day you got a next marginal unit of engineering. How do you manage it? How do you make sure that they're doing I guess the right thing whatever the right thing means? Well for cloudsoft it's dead easy. We are an open source application management company So everything we do is in the open it wasn't to be fair when we started but But you know two years in we realized that that was definitely the model to follow and I'm glad we did But if you're talking about sort of larger enterprises Yeah, I think it's you know, it's a challenge for some management to really grok it as they say and understand You know what's really going on and obviously some people will do it in their spare time in their evenings and so forth and that's you know That's that's great. I mean it's great that there is that kind of groundswell I mean, you know one thought one observation I would make is um, you know I remember the first one went to a red hat summit and just you know the sheer You know the sheer unleashing of good will because yeah They flew in people from all around the world and a lot of them couldn't afford to fly So they flew them in and it was a bit like summer school. It was like, yeah It was like, you know We've been working for like 50 50 weeks or 51 weeks of the year for one week We get to actually meet our fellow contributors and there was a real sense of camaraderie enjoyed of you and And obviously a great deal of beer and pizza And that's and that's tough to replicate right that's tough to get people so excited and motivated Well beer and pizza and and and getting to see the long lost guy, right? You've had this intimate working relationship with On a virtual basis and suddenly being able to see him in person and really share those ideas Yeah, and I think it's essential that we have events like this. We are still human after all. So, you know, I think that's One of the reasons we're here and we support this kind of event Along with obviously the the classic sort of industry events like doc the con and so on is for that reason Yeah, well dunkin. Thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by appreciate it. I'm jeff rick You're watching the cube. We are live from linux con in seattle washington. Thanks for watching


this up here I'm gonna say f2 on the keyboard f2 plus f2 so I can scroll back down checking goes down we're negative on the checking so that's not good we're overdrawn we better collect on this soon but that's where we stand let's do the similar kind of process over here in in in the Quickbook software realizing noting that I put the cost of goods sold actually recognizing the cost of goods sold and then we'll recognize the revenue in a future presentation for that time period okay let's go back on over and let's say that we're in our projects now in QuickBooks in our project number two where we left off last time and I'm just gonna say we have an expense form and it's gonna be for project number two actually it's going to the a vendor that we're paying I'm making generic vendor here and we're gonna go through this and say this was I happened on 022825 and project two so it's pulling over the the data from the last from a from a prior expense from I'm gonna delete this stuff and put in a whole new thing so we could see it being put in place so I'm gonna say that we have materials that we set up the item for in a prior presentation and I'm gonna put the materials on the books for what we said we said seven thousand on the materials so alright seven thousand materials I'm gonna actually make it billable because I would like to pull the materials now over to the revenue recognition which I'm gonna report on an invoice so and some and I'm actually not gonna give that invoice externally this is gonna be for my internal revenue recognition and I'm gonna make it 30% markup that's gonna be the standard markup that that I'm gonna be using now let me before I record this I'm gonna delete this and just remind us that I turned on the billable items by going to the cog up top and accounting and taxes and then I'm gonna go to the expenses here and I'm gonna go to the bills and expenses and we have this I think they currently have it on by default I don't even think I turned it on this time it used to be off by default and you had to turn it on if you wanted to but I think it might have been on by default but in the case you want to have this on and then I've added the markup of the 30% because that's gonna be our markup we're gonna have our costs and then a 30% markup is gonna be our standard markup that's just the way our billing processes I'm gonna do something that'll populate automatically if I put that in place here and then I want it the track billable expense items as income that's generally the default that we would want but we're actually we're gonna be applying we're gonna be using items in conjunction so that'll be that'll adjust a little and then charge sales tax I'm not gonna charge the sales tax so we're gonna say okay keep it there and then we're gonna go back on over let's do it again boom s expense form this is gonna be random vendor number one date 022825 I'm gonna delete the stuff down here so I can re-enter it it's gonna be materials materials we set up an item for it last time and I'm gonna say once again this was 7000 I think 7000 billable 30% markup so the sales estimate comes up to that and then we're gonna say the class is gonna be class number two okay and then we have labor which I think was 3000 also billable and there's the markup this is gonna be class number two and so then we've got the overhead which came out to some random number of 1318 so 13018 billable comes up to that so there's the total of the 2318 which seems high let me check it out again k-passo 73318 733 this should be 33018 not 1 3 okay there's the 1318 so there's the 1318 and that 16923 is gonna be the revenue that we recognize so if I pull out the trustee calculator and we go back on over here I can see that that's gonna be what's gonna pull into the invoice from this item which will be 9100 plus 3900 plus 3923.4 there's that 16 that 16923 so that looks good we'll do that next time but that link is something that's gonna be kind gonna be important for our revenue recognition kind of recording if you don't you do it that anyways so let's what's this gonna do it's gonna reduce the cash account and the other side is gonna is gonna be going into the cost of goods sold driven by the items that we set up we didn't use the categories we use those items that are going to cost the goods sold so let's save it and close it and check it out so now we have an a cost of goods sold in our project that showed up this is basically the project is kind of like an income statement showing us the income statement performance accounts and then if I go to the balance sheet now we've got the checking accounts if I go into the checking account it's going down for the expense form that we put in place scrolling back up and back to our report income statement is the other side if I run the income statement then notice that I've got the expense which is happening now in February and that's the timeframe that we actually paid for the stuff so we're kind of and hopefully that's the point that we're kind of consuming it we're saying we're thinking in order to to make the whatever we're doing in the long project and then we're gonna match up the revenue I'd like the revenue to match up in the same month right so if this was my cost I'd like this revenue to match up in the same month which is what we'll do next time we can also see if we saw the profit and loss by the way for the whole year 010125 to 123125 and I break this out by classes now you can see our income statement job reports that are basically redundant to the classes but you get a nice job by job this way by using the classes and then you get a and then you get a total for all of it which is which is quite useful and if you assign everything and cost a good soul to a class it also gives you this non-specified item which is great because that tells you it didn't get assigned to a class so let's go into that I'm gonna say there's a problem here that didn't get assigned to a class I'm gonna go into that and say class to fix it then fix it it's bokeh it's bokeh so now I'm gonna say all right let's go back on over and run it so so now we've just everything's in class one or class two for our two jobs which is a little bit different than our report over here because if I look at my my project reports I usually see a profitability you know just for one job or I can look at a project report this way duplicate tab and go to reports on the left-hand side and project project profitability summary from 010125 to 123125 and run it running so you get this nice little breakout but it doesn't give you the full detail so this is kind of nice but you get this nice breakout here and then if you use the classes you also get some of the balance sheet accounts if I run the balance sheet accounts for the full year 010125 to 123125 I can see some not the checking account but the billing's account is breaking out by class and that can be useful because I would like to see what's in the billing's account on her job you know and so I can see that either this way or I can actually go into that billing's account and I can sort this area by customer and that'll break it out if I had more than one activity in the billing's account here it would break it out by billions and I can see the subtotals this way as well so so there's a couple different ways we can find the same information but I think that redundancy is actually useful okay that's enough next time we're going to go into recognizing of the revenue for that for this month


Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's Adam Payne, County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Vanderstien, who isn't to my left and hasn't been now for the last month. He is recovering from some surgery and certainly we miss him, but we'll be back with us later this year. Today, we're very pleased to have one of our important department heads with us, Mr. Aaron Brault, who is currently the Interim Planning and Conservation Director. Aaron, welcome. Thank you. Aaron, you've probably recognized from doing previous shows or certainly if you followed the Non-Motorized Transportation Program, Aaron's had a leadership role with that for a number of years now, but very recently was promoted to our Interim Planning and Conservation Director and a number of changes in the department.  Sure. Well, you touched on a little bit of it. I was previously with the Non-Motorized Program and still managed that program within the county. Taking a step back even further, I used to work for a private consulting firm called Vandal Wall & Associates, straight out of college. That's a private consulting firm down in Madison, Wisconsin. Originally from the area, I grew up in two rivers and then moved down to Madison for school and worked there for a number of years and spent three years in Indianapolis running my own business as well. Well, I was with Vandal Wall. We had the fortunate chance to work on a number of Sheboygan County communities, so I was quite aware of a lot of the communities in Sheboygan County, not only from having grown up so close, but also having worked for doing the city of Plymouth's comprehensive plan, working on that, also working on the Blue Harbor layout when I was at Vandal Wall and doing some of the comprehensive planning for the city of Sheboygan as well. So when did you first start with Sheboygan County? When did you come aboard? About four years ago now. Okay. And you're married family? Yep, married family. My wife's a pediatrician here in town. That's actually what brought us to town was her job and I have two fine children, one two and a half. He's Sawyer and I also have a daughter who is nine months old and... Very nice. Isabel. That's your hands full. Yes. Two rivers right now isn't sitting real well with me because they just blew the socks off Plymouth where my son plays basketball. Yeah. Pretty powerful basketball team this year. Yeah. From what I understand, the last few years have been a little rough, but this year they're doing all right. When I was in high school and I was a basketball player, Plymouth was our rival. I think my senior year, we split for the conference title, we each beat one another and that was it. All right. Well, they took it to Plymouth real well last week. Nice looking team. Good. Nice looking team. A nice community. That's a nice community. As planning and conservation director, what are some of the broad roles and responsibilities that you have or your department has? We have gameter programs. We touched on one, the non-motorized pilot program. That is a pilot so that'll eventually end. 2012 we figure we'll have a lot of our projects wrapped up on that. Some of the core programs in our department are the septic maintenance program that's mandated by the state of Wisconsin, so we oversee that. We also oversee all our recreational facilities, so the boat landings, the trails, the Marsh Park, Marsh Lodge, things like that. On the conservation division side of things, we have buffer strip programs, different farming types of programs to help farmers out in their land use and conservation efforts. Let's see, what else? All the county's mapping. We do a lot of the mapping for tax records, things, land records, things like that. I know probably what most people are familiar with with the planning areas, the shoreland zoning or if they're putting in a septic system, you have code administrators that are pretty active in that area. Those are two of our main core programs. As you know, we don't have county-wide zoning. The only zoning purview we have in the county is our shoreland ordinance. Anything that's going to be built within 300 feet of a lake or a stream or 1,000 feet of a lake, you come to our office if it's outside of municipality. If you live around anybody of water and you're looking to put an addition on or a new deck or something like that and you're within a few hundred feet, you want to call the planning department. I imagine we'll be interacting. Very good. A breadth of responsibilities, what about total staff, total budget? Well, recently we combined with the land and water department, so now we are officially the planning and conservation department. With those folks being added to our department, we have 15 full-time employees. The budget is a tough question because that varies year to year based on a lot of our grants, things like the non-motorized program, any other grants that we may receive, but typically it's about a million dollars or less. About 700,000 comes out of our tax levy to run our department, which is about down about 25% over the past five years. That can be said about so many departments in county government, obviously with the economy and all levels of government looking to hold the line on taxes and take on more responsibility with less resources, less staff. Many of our departments have consolidated or streamlined, and as you said, a 25% overall reduction in the planning and land and water departments. From the levy. Yeah, from the tax levy. From the tax levy. But your staffing, I think, is down as a whole as well, is it not? Yeah, I believe we are down four positions after we combine that department, or combine the two departments. And of course, with Aaron taking on the Interim Planning and Conservation Director, he is the department head now overseeing this combined department. So where we used to have two department heads, we now have one. So, again, a lot of changes in county government and all levels of government. As the new director, what are your key responsibilities and what are some of the key projects that you intend to focus on? Sure. Well, day to day it's overseeing the department, obviously. And again, I mentioned that I'm also still in charge of the non-motorized program. Right now we have about 27 infrastructure projects that are going through the state and federal processes that we have to follow. So that takes up a good chunk of my time just getting those through the process. We should, you know, a lot of the folks out there probably heard about this for three, four years now, and probably want to know when shovels are going to be in the ground. And we've had some shovels in the ground. County Highway O was under construction last year and will be under construction again this year. That was done in phases. And so that project is moving forward. Miller Road in the town of Sheboygan will also be moving forward this year. Come spring, couple projects in Usberg and Adele. Bike lane striping project is out to bid currently. So February 8th will be opening bids for that project. So that will add about 20 to 30 miles of bike lanes throughout the county. And a number of our other projects are in the engineering phase. So that's a lot of day-to-day interaction with the different engineering firms that we're working with and involving the other communities in the county that are involved in the project. So reviewing those projects. And some of the folks who maybe aren't real familiar with the non-motorized transportation program and just heard us talk about, well, geez, you just consolidated two departments into one, you're streamlining and consolidating throughout county government all levels of government. How is it that you're able to build a bunch of bike paths and recreation paths and perhaps just set the stage there a little bit? How is it that we're able to do this? Sure. In 2005, so like I said, three, four years ago, when times are still good or considered good or relatively good, 2005, under the Bush administration, the county received a grant for up to $25 million to promote non-motorized transportation. You're one of four communities in the country to receive that and to act as a pilot, basically to demonstrate to Congress what works in this kind of funding and what doesn't. So we've certainly seen some of the things that don't work and we certainly have seen some of the things that do work. Overall, positive reaction from the community. I think the biggest thing has been some of the time delays going through this federal process. And to be frank, you know, Sheboygan County, I don't think in the past has received a lot of federal money. So if you ask anybody in the federal level, they say six to seven years to get a project through the process and we're four to five. So I guess we're moving a little quicker. It's all relative. But I know you receive that question from time to time and I do as I interact with friends or family members or bump into somebody at a gas station, you're like, well, how is it they're able to put that new trail in right now? Times are tough and I know you've laid some staff off and it's because of that grant that we received way back in 2005. Yeah. I mean, that's the short end of the stick. Federal money moves a whole lot slower than local dollars. And speaking of grants, we also receive what CMAQ grants. CMAC. CMAC. That's the acronym. What's it stand for? Congestion, mitigation and air quality is what CMAC stands for. And I guess, unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, Sheboygan County is eligible for CMAC grant funding from the federal government. Where the non-motorized grants 100% federally funded, a CMAC grant is 80-20. So we do have to come up with some local dollars for CMAC grants. Going back to unfortunate fortune and how you want to look at it, because we have poor air quality in the County of Sheboygan. That's what makes us eligible for CMAC grants. The theory behind CMAC grants is to provide bicycle pedestrian types of projects, also transit, transit capital types of projects to try to get folks sort of the same goal of the non-motorized grant, get folks out of their cars and biking and walking and using transit and more efficient forms of transportation than the automobile to help improve air quality. How's that working? I don't know the statistics on if that's working or not, I can't comment on that. However we did receive two CMAC grants in addition to the non-motorized grants for the extension of the Interurban Trail from Usberg up into Sheboygan. Right now the Interurban Trail, you can basically go from Usberg to Chicago on a bike facility. Most of it's off-road. There are a few portions in Ozaki County and Port Washington area and in Milwaukee where you're on street on a marked route, designated route. But basically you can get down to Chicago on a bike trail. You're going to do that in one day obviously, no, that's more of a recreational type of focus. But the shorter trips between different communities, see your girl of Usberg, do have some utilitarian types of aspects to them. But again we got a grant for Usberg to Sheboygan, a CMAC grant on that. And then we also received for the Union Pacific Rails to Trails conversion. A portion of that project is funded with the non-motorized grant as well. And that's a section of rail line that's been abandoned in the heart of the city of Sheboygan. If you think of by the Walgreens on the corner of 14th and Erie, there's the old rail line that runs behind that, the bridge is still over the Sheboygan River. So that's the section about two miles, actually 1.67 miles of that rail line will be converted to a trail in the heart of Sheboygan, again using not only non-motorized grant, but the CMAC grant as well. And it's probably predominantly city of Sheboygan residents who follow this program, although I know it's broader than that. When can they expect that work to continue or begin and when will it be completed? On the Union, both of the projects that I mentioned for CMAC will be built in 2012. 2012. That's our hopes at least. The Union Pacific, I mean we're keeping our fingers crossed that it's 12. We're in the appraisal process right now. We still have to negotiate with the rail lines and that can be a bureaucracy in itself. I would say rail lines are almost a bigger bureaucracy than any government entity. So we're hoping we can get this taken care of this summer, get things negotiated and purchased, and then be able to start cleaning up some of the environmental problems that have been there. It's an industrial corridor through the city, or at least was once an industrial corridor. So there's some cleanup efforts we have to do and then get it built and get the bridge resurfaced and re-decked. And so we're looking at 12 for that. And I'm sure as our viewers are seeing, you're clearly an expert in this area and this is where you've spent most of your career in Sheboygan County working on this. Sure. If anyone has questions or suggestions, don't ever hesitate to contact Aaron Brault in our planning department or any of his good staff to get more information or if you have suggestions on how to make improvement. Let's turn a little bit from non-motorized program and trails for a second to other areas of the planning department. Sure. From one extreme to the others, perhaps, and that is the Sheboygan Marsh. There are a lot of good people in this community who enjoy fishing and recreating at the Sheboygan Marsh, just a tremendous jewel for Sheboygan County. And this year perhaps so more than any year that I can recall, perhaps in the history, I don't know, you may know, but we had a real issue with the bogs, with the wind and the rain and the water levels going up. How much did we spend to remove bogs this year and what's being contemplated to improve upon the situation? Sure. Like you said, that's a real gem for our community, but we did have an issue out there this summer. We spent about $67,000 to keep the boat landing open out at the marsh for a variety of factors. I'm no biological expert or wetlands expert, but we had some very high rains and high winds this summer that attributed to those cattails breaking loose and floating down to the dam area at the marsh. If you think about the marsh, a lot of people don't realize what kind of a watershed that marsh encompasses. It's about the way I understand about 130 square miles that all drain to that one point at the dam. So if we get a rainfall in the area in Fond du Lac County, Calumet County, Sheboygan County, that dam or the water levels in that marsh fluctuate quite significantly. So with those actions and then having a lot of those high wind events that we had this summer, that high water and high winds just basically ripped the cattails out. And they float to that one point that I mentioned being the dam area. And so not only from keeping the boat landing open, we don't want to put excess pressure on that dam and have the dam break. So they need to be removed. Historically, if you look at the records, it's about every eight to 10 years we start to get events like this. From the recorded history that we have, there's never been anything as large as we experienced this last summer. There were some events in the late 90s, early aughts, if you will, that were quite large as well. I believe in 01 or in 2000, we spent about $40,000 removing bog. So it's not a one time problem. What the experts at the DNR recommend is that you do a drawdown every so often to try to mimic past drought types of events. And what happens then is the cattails get to root more so. There's not as much water on them. And so they have a stronger root system. And so they recommend every five, six, seven years you draw down the marsh. So we're going to do that this spring again. We lasted it in 2001, I believe. And from 2001 until last year, this year, or 09 and 10, we had good summers. I made one or two, three loads that we were taken out of cattails. And this year we're up over 500 loads. County truck, the big orange trucks you see on the highway, at least 500 of those truck loads of cattails were taken out this summer. It's quite the sight. If you have never been to the Sheboygan County Marsh, first, I encourage you to get out there. It's your jewel. And it's a beautiful one. We have the new Marsh Tower there, excellent restaurant, excellent food, excellent service, campground. And again, if you've never been out there, park on the side, well, you can be on either side, the restaurant side or the tower side. But you can see just in front of the dam, if you can imagine this whole area, was so full of bogs this year, you literally could walk across from one side to the other. Chairman Mike Van der Steen, I know, received some phone calls from some duck hunters or bull hunters out there that were concerned and asking the county to get on top of that and get it removed as soon as possible so they could access the the boat launch there and get out and hunt or fish. And but it's not just those using the boat launch. It's also the campers. It can get a little ripe in the summer when those logs come down. And as Aaron said, every year we get a few. It hasn't been too bad the last five years or so. But the Marsh Advisory Committee, I understand, is recommended that we do another drawdown. The Resources Committee will make that decision. And it's always controversial because there's a number of people who are concerned when that drawdown occurs. That impacts the fishing or impacts the ability to get in and out of there with your boat. Sure. There's a number of, you know, as with anything, I guess, in our day-to-day activities, there's different sides of the coin and different user groups that have different opinions on everything. So, you know, some people say that the drawdown is a good thing. Some people say that you shouldn't do it. You should actually keep the water higher. And then again, you know, the fishermen don't like that. You know, they won't be able to fish for a summer. They will be able to fish in the south channel.  Duck hunters tell you one thing. A lot of them will say that it's a good thing that you do the drawdown because that provides more forage for the ducks and other waterfowl. So, it's a tough situation. It will be controversial. Like you said, you know, I'm not going to pretend that it's not going to be. And speaking of controversy, the recreation fee that the County Board enacted about a year ago as you well know, and certainly your predecessor was a big part of that, we established a recreation fee. So, if you launch a boat at one of our six boat launches, or if you camp at the Sheboygan County Marsh Campground, correct me if I'm wrong, $16 a year for an annual pass. If you're a Sheboygan County resident. If you're a Sheboygan County resident. If you're a non-resident, it's 24 years. And then the daily pass. Our four and six. Four and six. Why was this recreation fee established a year ago? What's the purpose of it? Let's start with that. Well, I think we touched on it earlier. It was to help offset costs from the tax levy. As I mentioned, our department were down about 25 percent. And, you know, the cost to maintain these facilities doesn't go down. And our revenue streams are. So, again, I can't speak, my predecessor, you know, dealt primarily with this, but I can imagine those discussions are revolved mostly around that point. You know, how are we going to continue to pay for these things that we have and that people want to use with shrinking revenue streams? So, tremendous pressure on the county board to reduce property taxes, yet there's tremendous pressure to maintain law enforcement or health and human services or other programs that are actually absolutely essential. Recreation facilities, though I certainly in part feel they're essential because I enjoy them and I know you do and a lot of people do. The fact is a lot of people who are property taxpayers don't use our boat launches, don't camp at the Sheboygan County Marsh. And the board obviously has put this fee in place to have those who predominantly utilize these recreation facilities take a greater responsibility to help pay for them. As we both know, and I think folks who have been following county government know that there's some concern right now about the recreation fee as it's currently on the books. What are some of those concerns, Erin, that are being shared and what is being contemplated to improve the ordinance? Sure. You know, definitely I think some improvements can be made to the current ordinance. Some of the big complaints that we've heard are that it's not equitable to all users. For instance, on the Old Plank Road Trail we charge for bicyclists and mopeds currently. We exclude snowmobilers in the wintertime and folks in the summer who may be using it to jog, walk, roll or blade, what have you. So I think that's probably been the primarily, the biggest concern is that if you're going to do it charge everyone or charge no one. We've recently been meeting and will continue to meet with the Sheboygan County Conservation Association to get their input into making the ordinance better. Again, I think there are some improvements that we can be made or that can be made and I think in the next few months we'll see some of those come forward and I guess it's up to the county board then whether or not they enact that ordinance or not but I think some good compromises are out on the table now and well I guess we'll see where that takes us. And with the trails for example, you and I both know that by federal law the fee could be applied to some trails but not others and then there's some state concern with snowmobilers and that we could apply it to some users and not others. My sense is the county board is going to very likely eliminate the recreation fee on the trails just because we can't consistently apply it to all trails and all users but on the boat landings, that's pretty common. Sheboygan Harbor has an annual boat landing fee I think it's $70 a year. Random lake, it's very common throughout the state so I think the boat landings it can be consistently applied and the bottom line is though most people including myself don't want to pay these fees if we're going to maintain these facilities and be sure they're good for our future generations someone's got to pay the bills. Yep, the money has to come from somewhere. So moving right along, we've talked about non-motorized we've talked about the Sheboygan Marsh and you touched on a number of programs and services another one that was a recent initiative and I think a very successful one is collecting hazardous waste as well as unused medical waste pharmaceuticals. Yes, we have our household hazardous waste program has been very successful. This year we'll do it again starting in March so it'll be in every other month collection similar to what it was the last few years and then in May we have our big clean sweep event and there we partner with Manitowoc, Calumet and Fond du Lac counties and on the same weekend or Friday May 13th and Saturday May 14th we'll have collection sites set up where we do a big clean sweep for the county and you know you would think in this day and age that there wouldn't be that much out there but every year we still get DDT last year a guy called up and said what can I do with two tons of glycerin you know I don't I glycerin is not hazardous but you know those are the types of calls we get there's a lot of stuff still out there and an old barn or something that may have been sitting there for 50 60 years and you know the kids are starting to clean things up and they want to know what can they do with this stuff rather than throwing it in the stream in the backyard which is exactly what we do not want to happen and that's one of the main reasons we have this or not so much just throwing it in the stream throwing it in the backyard which ultimately gets in the stream or yeah or dumping it off at our boat land instead we end up having to pick up refrigerators every year that we have to pick up and dehumidifiers and things like that so so yeah it's been very successful we get some grants from the dat cap department of egg trade and consumer protection as well as there's also local monies the county board is deem this a necessary program and so we get funding from the tax levy as well to help cover the costs of the household hazardous waste program waste pharmaceuticals a lot of that comes from grants as well but that's been successful as well right now we have drop boxes permanent drop boxes at the city of sheboygan police department city of plemoth police department and this year we will be adding additional permanent drop boxes at city of sheboygan falls and village of elkhart lake police departments and that's again one so it doesn't get in the hands of teenagers and and those who might want to use those drugs in a not so recommended for a type of situation but also to for water quality you don't want to flush them down the toilet you don't want to flush them down the toilet no I mean they're finding fish are starting to mutate and some bad stuff going on in our waterways from waste pharmaceuticals even if it's just Tylenol, acetaminophen, things like that you want to get rid of it properly we only have a minute remaining and I know one of the major initiatives that we both have been participating on is the work group on the superfund site the sheboygan river finally getting the sheboygan river harbor cleaned up and eliminating the superfund designation very quickly what's the status of those efforts what's the good news for the community good news for the community after 30 years it's finally going to happen I think folks have been trying to get this done for 30 years and we finally got the monies in place locally only 200,000 from the city of sheboygan and another 100 from the city of sheboygan and 100,000 from the county of sheboygan as our local match to finally get EPA, DNR the locals all on board to get it cleaned up so and overall upper river lower river we're talking about a 50 million dollar project yep overall 50 million dollar project so I don't think that's a bad return on our investment so absolutely deeper you name it cleaner well nice work thanks for joining us we've got to wrap it up thank you for joining us again if you have any questions or would like to talk to Aaron Brault directly don't hesitate to contact our planning and conservation department again he's our interim but certainly doing a fantastic job and I'm hoping to be working with Aaron for a long time to come so Aaron thanks for joining us today yep thank you and thank you on behalf of the sheboygan county board chairman Mike van der steen and all of us thank you for joining us next month Rebecca Persick will be here our family court commissioner


Hi, so please introduce yourself. Okay, I'm Levin from High Future. High Future is established since 2016. Now we are selling to more than 50 countries and we have more than 4 million users. Where are you based? We are based in Shenzhen, China. And you have some really cool looking... Oh, this smartwatch? Yeah, this one. What is the CPU and the OS? What do you do here? This smartwatch we are using a 1.43 inch AMOLED display and we are using a feature with Bluetooth call and also support longer battery life up to 12 days. IP68 waterproof. So basically it is introduced by the latest chipset technology. What is the chip? This chip is RTL, Leotech. Leotech? Yes. Is it ARM? It's ARM, yes. ARM CPU and 14 days battery? 12 days battery. 12 days battery? Yes. Does it have apps? Yeah, it has apps. It has app and it can support to make sleep management. Also it supports... It supports... It supports black oxygen. Hard rain. Yes. Alright. Yes. And that's already pre-installed? Yes. What kind of price can be? This Leotech price is $199. $199. Very affordable. Yeah. For cool looking smartwatch. Yes. Long battery. It tends to do Android Wear. It's not Android Wear. It's not Android Wear. Can you do it also? Or you only do this? Not now. It's just much more power, right? Yes. Yes, not now. Yes. And so under here it has the heart rate... Heart rate, yeah. Heart rate, yeah. Temperature. Temperature. Let me show you. Temperature. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Temperature. Yes. Heart rate. I might have to be here. Wait. Yes. I saw it blink just before. Yeah, yeah. There it is. All right. Yes. Reliable heart rate monitor. Yes. ECG. ECG, yes. ECG. ECG enabled. It's ECG enabled. And to do ECG you have to touch it with the other hand? Yes. You have to control, check it on your app. Okay. On your app. Nice. All the other smartwatches you have here have the same function? Yeah. Same CPU. But we hand made by different materials. Different materials. For example, this one we make it by Stanley Steel. Stanley Steel, the whole frame by Stanley Steel and the strap by Stanley Steel. So this is the new generation of the smartwatch with top quality of the material. And of course it supports up to 20 days battery life this month. Cool. Yes. And it's not heavy. It's a little bit heavy. It's like a little watch. 20 days. Yeah. How do you charge it? We charge it by our charger. We have a customized charger here. Yes. Just put it on there in the back. Yes. Easy to put it on and then you can use for 20 days. Yes. My smartwatch, I have to charge it every day. I have the Samsung. It's like every day. Okay. Okay. It cannot last for two days. This is the iWare. This iWare we introduce with 3D directional audio technology inside. And you know, it can friendly use for you to make a phone call without only by slide control. And also you can listen music daily. It supports up to five hours battery life. Nice. Yes. What's the price on those glasses? This one we are selling at 69 US dollar. Nice. Yes. Does the other one have same functionality? Yeah. This is another one that can change. They can change the flame. Oh, wow. Yes. Is compatible with people who have to wear glasses? Yes. It's compatible. It's compatible with headphone jack. You can change the glass based on your favorite. Yes. Nice. Yes.  Yeah. Bluetooth earphones. So the good sound quality? Yes. It's amazing sound quality. We have built our own acoustic design inside to make it. It also built in with ENC technology. It can make your phone call quality is much better than normal one. Nice. Yes. So long battery life. Good price. Yes. Yes. It's cheaper than the 249 Samsung. No. Of course. Of course. Much cheaper. Much lower price. Much more affordable. How much maybe? This one, little price is 29, 39 something. 29 US dollar. That's a good price. Very good price. At this price people will be happy with the quality. Very happy. Very good. Long battery. Long battery. It can support up to 6 hours music time. One charge. 6 hours music time. And this charging case can support another 18 hours. So with the charging case the earbud when you have full charge it can support up to 24 hours battery life. Nice. That's cool. What do we see here? This is a new. This one. This is new generation of air conduction. Air conduction earbud. Okay. So this earbud can. So you have a surrounding sound. You can hear ambient sound doesn't interrupt it. Not this one. Not this one. This one is for sport use. When you are running lighting and then you can. You want to hear the traffic? Yes. You can have a safe. It's more safe and more comfortable to wear and also more base. Can you use it on the bicycle and scooter? It's perfect for bicycle. Nice. Because you want to stay safe. You don't want to listen to music and you cannot hear the cars coming. Yes. It's important. Yes. It's for safe. Yes. More safety than other earbuds. It's still very high quality. You can extend the surrounding sounds. Then the outside noise. So it's safe. Before you were talking about this. Is this similar? It's the same. Yes. Similar. It's also air conduction headphone. Air conduction headphone. So when you wear it. You can feel it. Okay. It's safe. And it's comfortable. It's live way. And it can support up to 8 hours battery life. Nice. Yes. That's awesome. What is this? It's ANC headphone. How is compared with the Sony? I'm joking. I was talking about Sony. I would like to say the performance is almost done. We can talk in two ways. The song quality is almost same as Sony. And second is about active noise cancelling. The deep of the noise cancelling. And the finishing quality. And the comfortable feeling. And the design. You can see it. So it's amazing. What is that for? ANC. Really? That's good. Yes. Very good. This is hybrid ANC. Hybrid ANC. And it can... We have two microphones each ear bus. One here and one here. So it can detect your inside noise and your outside noise. This we call hybrid noise cancelling. Wow. What's the price on that? This one we are selling around 99 year strong. Nice. 99 year strong. Cool. And over here I also see you have Bluetooth speakers. Yes we have. Like for example this one. It's a big one. Yeah. This one. It's amazing. I can play for you. This Bluetooth speaker which our own. Inbuilt two-way speaker system. The device is connected. Two-way speaker system. So it can support play music up to six hours. And it's IPX7 waterproof. IPX7 waterproof. So it also... Big watts. Yeah. It's 45 watts. 45 watts. So if you do maximum volume they will hear you in hole eight. Yes. All the way to the next hole. So it's better not to do it. Because also I'm afraid of music on my YouTube channel. They don't like copyright. If I don't put music then I cannot publish this video. Okay. So I'm afraid if you don't play music. You want to feel it? The music? I'm afraid. Maybe some Chinese music. Something nobody... No. Something not famous. Not famous? Maybe it will work. Oh. Food. Okay cool. Yes sir. Oh that's great. Great sound. Okay. I think I will pass the copyright test. Okay. All right. Yes. That's awesome. So hi future. Say hi to the future. Hi future. That's what it means right? Yes. Hi future. And distributed contact to you. Who is your target? All over the world? Yeah we are targeting. Hi future is selling to more than 50 countries. In Europe we are selling to more than 15 countries already. And also we are selling to Latin America. We are selling to North America. And each Asia market. And Middle East as well. So hi future. It's a global plan. And in not 7 years development we have been convinced more than 4 million users using our audio products, our smart variable products. Nice. But the market is 8 billion people. So you have big potential. Yes. Of course. We are working hard every day. We are playing hard every day. We are here to try to push hi future to more countries, to more customers, to more people. Yes. And all these products you can provide long warranty? Basically we provide 1 year warranty. And in some regions because of the law we can provide 2 year warranty. That very depends on local policy. People can find your brand or other brand. Is always hi future brand? Yes, it's always hi future. Can you find an Amazon? Yes, with us.