This is, they say it looks fine over there, so. I just need to, how many, is the light tube, I don't know if the light tube is associated with this. I think three. Nope, it's helping. What's up y'all? I'm gonna pull up this so I can see what you're saying. I'm new. She picked these amazing colors. Lipstick pink, it's my artist's do. I don't have a problem with that color. This, which I can't tell you the name of, because it's a mystery color. Black. I don't know if you guys have seen me paint ever, but lime green is a kryptonite color for me. That makes perfect sense, because it doesn't do well for me ever. He just goes, hmm. Can't see it right there, man. Can't see it with me. Let's show him these. Happy birthday. Elizabeth, I'm glad you're here. Happy birthday. We're saving that for when people donate to us. So whenever you hear that, somebody has given us to the cause. Y'all, hey y'all. And I'm starting back this up for the donor giveaway. We're doing it July 31st. So I'm gonna say about that. So, what a day. Been a while since I've had this rid. Oh, key chains. We've got these key chains in y'all, but just gonna have to hold this closer to the camera so you can see them. This is my lovely Vanna White Corinne. She's the one that cursed me with the green. Looks like this. And I'm so glad they're amazing. They're bananas. They're not healthy. I'm gonna have to practice my high butts and skills. I know I need you better. Sometimes you just have to put your hand behind it to focus it. Anyways, you're still an amazing Vanna White. So y'all, we have a class tomorrow. So we're doing a quick pour tonight. Also have friends in town. Something, we're gonna have these key chains on the website soon. Which one do you like better? A clear one. This one with Jeff's first ever logo. Or a not clear one. There's one missing. I don't know what happened to it. I have a banana on the loose. I'm not sure what sizes the Micah's come in. Is it the same size that I got? I thought this was just a tester size. Anyways, also I still have two seats available for the class tomorrow. If any of you guys are in and around Dallas and wanna come check it out, love them all. The black one. Vance, you got your gift. Thank you so, so much. How long does it take to get the stone coat order? I guess it depends on where you live, but we get ours within like two days from Ohio. No. Oregon. I don't need that much resin for this. So let's do five hours. I tried to get Karina to come paint with me, but she was like, I'm not gonna get on camera soon. But is it? Children, the Micah can hear everything. Just so you know. Connie's my daughter's name. What's up, Connie? The daughter. Is this enough? This should be enough. Anybody? Yeah. Anybody else? Bye. Should be good. I just wanna just be good. Also, I got some necklaces and earrings as well, but they're in there because I don't want them to get resin. I wanna know how she stained that paper because it was amazing. I'm glad you made it, Deanne. Oh, Corrine. Perfetto paint today. There's two. Perfetto. Is that the people? Is that the same as metallic? Metallic mart? It's so weird. It's split going this way too. Yeah. It's split going this way too. I used the art. I accidentally zoomed it in and. And I don't get all the comment. I haven't pulled up here. Do you want this? You're cutting half. Bonnie, we got the camera working, but our internet isn't fast enough, they should be done with the fiber in like two weeks, so we'll have the camera flowing and running then. Sweet pea, I'm glad you're here. What's up, shy? Also, shy, we have a present for you. What's up, y'all? This is my also lovely assistant. Banana white. Banana white? I was looking for a male version of. Banana white. Banana white. I can't accept that. I love you too, shy. What's up, LeCron? I got those gifts from you. They are beautiful. You guys check out her channel and her amazing jewelry. How did you stain that paper? I don't even understand it. It was so beautiful. I'm sorry, sweet pea, hope you feel better. I made little cups. Y'all remember that? That lizard that was like drinking addict cups? It was someone that was like tripping on. Tripping on something in it. Things. They recorded themselves in a closet. It's the most random thing you could ever do. Like, do I sound sort of like it? Drinking addict cups. It was a lizard talking about drinking addict cups. It's the only way over here. Anyways, he has like a Boston accent sometimes. I don't know. Very interesting. How long is a Stone Coat coupon good for? Marcy, I don't think there's an end date because as long as we have our friendship with Stone Coat, that coupon should work. Not my chair, not my problem. Who that chair in here? Right? See? Y'all know. Not my chair, not my problem. I'm gonna have to show you that. Yeah, I don't know how to get it, but it was a whole time ago. It was. Way back. It's at least seven, eight years old. It's a rule. It's so glad we're not alone on that.  Hey, Paula Wall. Paula Wall. She has the funnest name on my eye. Any idea how to deal with that? It's probably like a mock. Mock? The emergency room is what I would do with that. Yeah, I wouldn't mess around with that. I know people that got dried resin in their eye, but not like still fluid resin. Not resin on my eye. Like eyelid. I got, I had it on my eyelids. Like just a little bit that was the art resin. You just have to kind of wash it and keep it dry. You're supposed to. You don't have to put any oils or lotions or ointments or anything on it. Well, we are not doctors. Don't take anything. What we say for what it is, is just our experience. Call a doctor. Full disclosure, I am not MD. I know. You're double audio. Awesome. Where's double audio? Well, we have the phone's audio and then this one. I'm gonna start with the not one. Our thumbs up party people. Huh? I want to start with that. Here's the thing. I can't just make it a little bit. Who's your favorite color? And what kind of friend would I be? If I made your favorite color, the co-star instead of the leading actor. At least this is a good green. This lime green by Artisou is pretty good. And lipstick pink by Artisou, which I can never get open. Gain. We're missing stuff. Stuck my thumb in it. Oh, okay. Hey, Jeff, Erica, all four peeps. Oh, hey, Terry. Hi, Judy. Yeah, the lime has a good color. I just, it never works out the best for me. That's too far away. Here. Vamps in the house. Oh. That is from Vamp, by the way. Did we say that before? I did. But she said, you may have another one on the way. Don't ask. And I said. Thump up.  Thanks, thump up. Give up. Okay. Sometimes you just have to ask. Kill it with fire. This smells like gasoline. It is fun. Is it a little out of heart? I don't want to try it.  Yeah. Yeah, that stuff is pretty stout. Smells like it would stay on fire. He's watching you guys. Hey, Ann's dad. Hope you feel better soon. Diane's in the hospital too. Diane Cardinale has a PayPal set. Nope. A GoFundMe set up her medical bills. She is having kidney problems and organ problems. No bueno. There you go. You drink and wine out of a high wablow. Nope. What is this? A tumbler? Because I'm fancy. In Spanish in the house, I kind of know. Oh, no wablow. But I'm pretty sure other people wablow. I just don't wablow. Such a great color.  There's something in there. That black is nuts. Are you guys so proud of me that I did do a negative space so far that may change? Lucy, the color is Artisou hot. What is it? Lipstick pink? Lipstick pink. Lipstick pink paste. It's Artisou. Looks like color score of a bright watermelon. I don't know, it does. That black is so crazy. Crazy. It's almost like it starts to blend with other colors. And it's like it's going like a vis, like down deeper. I want to put some of that through here. Do it. Go all geode. Geode? Mm-hmm. You're just sniffing around here. Yeah, the black is stone coat. It's this one here. It is black base tint. There's got to be some oil or something in there. There's got to be oil or something in there. That looks so bananas. I wonder if it's going to stay. Let's see that. Y'all. Look at that. I just want to zoom in on it so that they can see like part of it up close. They can see it. Oh my god, it even goes over the side. It looks like acrylic. Does look like acrylic. So freaking pretty. Yeah, the black, but you know what? Everything sinks in that black. So look at that. That is insane. See, this is what we're talking about. We're heating this up, heating this up, and this is staying. That's what the stone coat does. The resin. The resin, it just stays where it was. Wait, OK. OK. It has some kind of oil in it. Hey, Jan, I don't want to mess with it. But I do. But I don't. The spot? Were you just worried if you could get it to speckle like that one over there? Well, it did. No, it did even over there. Oh, I can't see that one. The black is a stone coat base. Stone coat black base tent. I'm going to go broke watching ATD. There's cells underneath cells in there, y'all. What are your cell multidimensional? Why do we have to do this spot? Or should I leave it? I would just leave that. That is amazing. Look how shiny. Of course, just a new hair in there. Look at the ceiling fan on, it's the on kind of thing. Everyone's like, step away, just stop, don't touch it. It didn't bother y'all that there's white just on one side? This red is so relevant that it's like balancing it out. That's how I see it. I mean, I don't know. It's in there. It's very light, too. It's a powder. This is this red and the black, or the pink and the black are a paste. It reminds me of an abstract watermelon. I can see it. Look at that. Look at how it's like a mushroom cloud. That black is something else. Where's some of that blue in there? No. Do a big one. Yeah. And if she pours that black over that, what do you need, Diane? And I will. I got a box in today and every one of the whites was busted. So. Should we show them? Yeah. Let me get the. We can just take them over there. This piece is done. I need to put it up because I'll move here. Or you can bring it over. Is that zoomed in? Look at this, y'all. Can I see that? Like all the lids are like this. They're all broken. At no fault of Artisou, these got busted in transit and all of the lids, like chocolate coating on an ice cream bar, they're just all busted. Look at that. You can't even pick them up. We're pricing a rush order now. They were bubble wrapped. They were all individually bubble wrapped. And I'll send the invoice. Be with you, Jessica Cameron. When I opened that box, I was like, it looks like you're on the first Ace Ventura when he was working for HDS. And he was like kicking it out the hallway and believing it in the elevator. Royal Purple did not make it. Tiffany Artisou is distraught. She's still dealing with her mom's health issue.  I can't get upset over spilled paste, but we are like getting it expedited, shipped over here with the other colors that didn't make it. And I don't know if it was sped up. Unfortunately, we have to deal with this fast shipping. Well, I'm going to, Khaleesi, I'm going to sift through that. And some of the jars were broken into the paste. So I can't just find a new lid for them. There's chunks of lid in the paste jar. So I'm going to have to sift through it, see what's salvageable, see if it still works. And then I'll probably divvy it out into mystery boxes or send them. Like I have little 10 gram jars that I'll probably just put in with people's orders that have waited. The piece I just did was stone coat art resin, stone coat black base tent, Artisou lipstick pink epoxy paste, and just resin something teal, and Artisou lime green powder. Sherry, I do have lipstick pink in stock. Barb, I'll sift through it and take all the chunks out that got into it. And I'll put them into sample jars. Absolutely, Diane. I'm sure she insured the box. Thank you again in a minute. Brown, the green is lime green powder by Artisou. I do have it in stock. Hey, stone coat in the house. Mike, add a question. Don't want to run over Kujo. This filler to make resin thicker, that came with the quick set. Can I mix this into any resin to make it thicker? Does it change how fast it sets up? I meant to email you. Forgot, because of life. Thank you, Paula Wall. That's true, Diane. Sounds great, Thumpa. All of Stone Co's videos are super cool. Natalie wants to see my geode. Are you talking about the black geode? Just wear a mask. OK, does it change how fast it's set? This is just the first layer. I need to do many, many more, at least one, many more. Hi, Lisa. Thanks, y'all. So tomorrow, we're going to, Judy, it's the Art Co. I had to get them just a mailing for it. I'm not sure why I couldn't find it either. But I have the link in the description box below for the Stone Coats, Art Coat resin, and the base tent. I know, like, where'd Jeff go? Quick coat sets for two minutes. OK. This is how it looks. Looks good. The Glitters by Recollections. Hi, Michelle B. Hi, Shelly. Sorry, I don't oblong espanyol. I wish I did, but I don't. One day, I'll learn. All right, they all love the apron. Cool, you guys can get them on Monday. Can order them. Even the camera ones? Yeah, why not? I was wondering. They're a little bit more than the black ones, but not too bad. Rob, they're fastest setting resin as a quick coat. I have some somewhere. Oh, it's right there. I'm going to be testing it for a geode coming up soon, and I'll let you know. What's up with it? Wear gloves and using a thickener. It feels very tacky on her skin. Makes sense. It does. Carrie has a question for Stone Coat. Do you have a distributor in Australia, and do you have one in Canada? Fixie is geodeversing. Thank you, Leigh Ann. I don't have any teal by artist Lisa. I have yet to get any in, but she guaranteed that I'd have everything in that I've ordered by the end of the month, this month. You're going to love your Stone Coat. And it's not expensive either. This half gallon is $50. It has every bit of the working time that art resin does. It's easily as workable. And actually, I prefer this because it's thicker. One area will stay while I work on another area. So I know everybody in there watching has done a piece that they like except for one little area. And so you try to work this area and doing that wrecks everything else that you liked about the piece. So that's what's great about this is you can heat just this area, do what you want with it, and the rest of it stays pretty well where it is. I'm glad you got them, Debbie. They do ship to Canada as well as Australia. I'm sure they are looking to get around that shipping cost. The Cronk ordered two gallon jugs, if you dare addiction. I do have Egyptian blue, Lisa. I'm glad you like it, Michelle. I'm happy to check. I did get that email, and I responded that I can just let me know how many of the large ones you wanted. I don't know why it wouldn't have sent out. Ask Mike, what is in the black base color? Well, ask him. So they say they can give you a break on shipping. Just contact us directly. They have their direct office line on their website. I think it's a 514 number. Super awesome to work with. Just give them a call. Thanks, Ron. Thanks, Judy. Sure thing, Lisa wanted Egyptian blue. His items listed for sale in stock. Yeah, they're in stock, Tony. Lisa, I'll sub that out for you. Happy check. I can send it again. Shy, all you have to do is put ATD in all caps in the promo code when you order a stone coat, and that'll give you the discount. Creative outlet, I have their art resin linked in the description box. Should be. Yeah, it's down there. Just click the little down arrow. Jeff, you're so quiet. I just let her do her thing. Anyone coming to Canada for vacation, stone coat delivery? If we come up there, we'll bring it. Thank you, Andrea. Michelle, it should be there by now, but wait. Let me check on that. Chris, let's get all the details worked out before we make that announcement. That's not a bad thing, Jen. There's such great sense. Where does this Chris Hart come from? That's the email we got today about. I know, but what? Stone Coat says, ATDs totally change our outlook on live videos. We'll be doing live soon. Well, you're going to be doing a live with us, so that's intro into live. Also, I look forward to those right. Three more days till Amazon Prime Day.  Very awesome. Mike, is there stone coat? Nope. Is there oil in the black base coat? I'm sorry, Robin. LaCronche, you can just get one of those little phone tripods. That's what we started with. Thank you, Sam. Yes. I think that answers to Judy. There is something oil based in there. Amy, for color obsession, we should be getting our order in soon. I don't have it yet, so if you order through them, at this point, you'll just go through them. What happens on Amazon Prime Day? They just have super big discounts. No fellowship to Mexico, but I'm sure it will soon. We have our order on the way, though, Amy. The promo code is ATD, ATD, in all caps. I don't know how to do it, sorry. That was me buying my bed. Thank you, stem coat. All right, y'all. I think we're done for today. Those are scary looking. And thank you to everybody that gave us a donation tonight. You will be going on this list for our giveaway at the end of the month. And you'll hear this more often, hopefully. I think I did it wrong. I thought you were about to hit the height button with never mind. I desperately need the white, too. Hopefully she can get that expedited, and I'll have it by mid next week. Elizabeth, I will post in the ATD's poor fan group. Come here. Come here. Come here. I'll post in the poor people's group. Come here. When we're going to go live with Mike, so you guys can all make sure to make it. All this important stuff. All this. If you want to go to classes, stir sticks, mystery boxes, or artists who paint sold in the US, shoot us an email if you have any questions. Thornartisttollips.com, 2Ts, 2Ls, patrons will also be on our Artists to Live shop by Monday. Have you had? How do I get them backing up the sticks, please?  I use my nails. It gets it off fairly easily. Let me get a stick out to show you. Or you can just cut into the resin just until you get the stick and peel it with the scissors. You get this. I'm sure you have the brown ones, but it's the same. You can also use some duct tape to get. Oh, bad. And as the brown one comes off, you hear them. Just peel it all the way off. Yeah, if you get some. Well, the blues. That's why we didn't send these out. Anyway, that's how you get it out. I'll just join our Facebook group, ATEEZ, four people. Our racist Facebook group is still dead. You want to see all of Thorn's amazing thing. Buy some merch from Teespring. Looks like this. And if you want to send us a letter, check them with us, whatever. It's nailail. The green hand is ATEEZ 3O1409, south of Marshall Street, Dallas, Texas 75215. Jeff, and I love you so much. Thank you for tuning in all the times. Bye. I said bye.


Being part of the leadership groups is to be able to foster similar collaborations between all stakeholders and to bring the change that we need to affect the small-scale industry and also to bring equity to future generations. One question is– We should not be seduced by knowing about the challenges and the problems before the industry but we should take responsibility and gain momentum to actualize or implement whatever the outcomes of this dialogue on the ground to bring the change that we really want to see. Together we can achieve the extraordinary. Thank you.


Hello, everybody. I'm JBD. I work at Google on our instrumentation team. My main focus on is actually instrumenting Go servers. And I was previously working on the Go team, working mainly on Go's diagnostic tools. Today I will talk about distributed systems observability at Google. So how many of you have heard about observability? I assume that it's, I was expecting more in this audience. Since there are so many conflict definitions of this term, I want to clarify my definition first. What we call observability is this holistic approach to be able to observe a system for properties such as reliability, performance, deployability, and so on. We look at multiple different signals in order to achieve that. Metric collection, distributed traces, profiles, logs, are a few of those. This talk is mainly about the motivation and the core concepts we came up with in the recent years to make Go production systems more observable. So I said signals. I'm not going to favor one signal type to another, but rather focus on how we collect signals and why we collect them the way we do. And this talk is going to mention a lot about metrics, traces, and profiles, but don't assume that these are the only signals we care about. So to give you a little bit of history, Google is dominantly a distributed systems company. One of the most common architectural patterns we use is microservices architecture. We have, you know, 10,000 of different microservices contributed and maintained by hundreds of different teams. And being able to observe our system is a fundamental reason why Google is reliable, fast, and user friendly. In order to be able to observe our systems, we care about instrumenting our systems, obviously. We invented some collection methodologies and export formats as well as, you know, entirely new philosophies in this area. Our instrumentation stack cares about efficiency and the overall overhead of the collection. And I would say that observability is a part of our engineering culture and we enable it by making it easy and also low overhead. Before digging more into the distributed systems observability, I want to briefly explain you why it is different than, you know, observing monolithic systems. This is a typical architectural diagram for pretty much every product at Google. We usually have this user-facing business logic heavy front-end server that depends on other various services. Authentication, billing, reporting are some of the examples here. In this example, all of these relatively low-level services depends on spanner, our database, and eventually hitting the blob storage service for persistence. At NWICO services architecture, it's very expected that some of the services are becoming such a common dependency.  It's hard for them to tell the root cause of the problems triggered by their users. Blob storage team will see some fluctuations maybe in their dashboards, but we'll have a very hard time breaking down the data and figuring out where the problem is actually originated at. It's also not only when things are obviously going wrong. Infrastructure teams always want to have some answers to be able to just say that, you know, things are going right. Some examples of the questions they need answers for, hey, are we meeting the SLO for the spanner team? Are we providing them the service we promised to serve? As the blob storage, you need to be able to tell. What is the impact of this high-level service on this low-level blob storage service? And what happens if this particular product scales up 10 percent overnight? Is the blob storage deployment going to be able to handle the new scale? So this is why we want to be able to break down our signals in various different ways. We call these different various ways dimensions. With dimensions you can query the collected data in ways that will help you to, you know, answer some of the earlier questions I had. Give me the blob storage request latency distribution for RPCs originated at, you know, Google analytics front-end server, for example. Or give me the traces and reports contains the specific RPC method. Or give me the CPU profile for this library for the RPCs just generated at Google analytics. So it's great that you know that we can query this data, but how do we really collect signals in order to be able to query them this way and break down? The answer is we record the data with various key value pairs. We call these key value pairs tags. And then the backend, for example, a metric collection backend such as Prometheus can filter data by tags. So the entire promise of, there's something very confusing here. The entire promise of microservices is that you have no tight coupling between services. How can a low-level, you know, service such as the blob storage can tag with the right thing if they don't know nothing about its dependence and their, maybe, you know, business cases? This is where we get help from context propagation. So the tags are actually produced at the high-level services and pass to the lower-level stack as a part of the RPC. You can see that from all the way up from the bottom, you can see the RPCs are tagged. So the blob storage doesn't have to know anything but can record the signals with the incoming tags. We have a culture of, you know, producing these tags at high-level services, depending on the specific requirements of the teams, and we, you know, propagate these tags all across the stack as a part of RPCs. And each component in the system can record metrics, profiles, and so on with the incoming tags. As I mentioned in the beginning, we see observability as a holistic approach because each signal type is useful to answer different questions. For example, distributed traces are not going to be able to tell you about the CPU hotspots or CPU samples cannot tell us about the overall latency end-to-end. So we collect various signals and examine them from very different perspectives and break down with the tags. It's impossible for developers to think about all these dimensions and signal types and build highly efficient instrumentation libraries and, you know, instrument each layer they depend on. That's why we built a common framework and decided to open source and make it when they're agnostic so anybody can use them with any provider. Recently, we announced that we are our project OpenSensors, which is a holistic instrumentation framework. It is inspired by Google's internal project called SENSUS. The main reason we are open source on this is we want to feel that missing, you know, building gap in the open source world. We want libraries, frameworks, and all sorts of infrastructure projects to be able to implement these instruments without having to reinvent these concepts. We also want to, you know, help other organizations to adopt these solutions and if they're not, they can also use OpenSensors as a reference. So OpenSensors provides a single set of libraries. We have tags, metrics, traces, and more is coming in the future. We have language support available today for people to go Java and C++, Python, PHP, JavaScript, C-Sharp, and Orlang are coming next. The libraries, our instrumentation libraries are vendor agnostic. So you can upload data to any backend. We currently have support for Prometheus, Zipkin, Yeager, and some APM vendors. Some other APM vendors are also thinking that this is a useful solution to instrumentation rather than inventing their own instrumentation libraries. So they're working to provide OpenSensors support. We provide out-of-the-box integration with some of the frameworks, such as GRPC and HTTP packages. Also, libraries provide inspection and can render a tiny dashboard from the process that, you know, contains a summary of what is going on in the process. Without having to rely on an external service, you can see what is going on in the scope of a server. And it's a very useful thing when you know that the problem is at a specific process, or you can use it during the development time to see what is going on. So speaking of framework integrations, I just want to show briefly what it looks for GRPC. At Google, we're also responsible for all the GRPC's study observability, and these integrations are what we are planning to use internally at Google. For now, you need to import this plugin and pass it as a stats handler to the GRPC client and the servers. In this case, we're looking at the GRPC server. You can see the new server stats handler. In the handler, you can extend the incoming tags from the current context. In this case, I'm inserting hello as the originator server and inserting the user ID as well. Then it will be possible for the backends to break down the collected data with originator service and user ID. This is how to record values. I have a measure total hello that represents the number of times we said hello. Stats record will say one with the tags in the current income context, so you will be able to tell the number of hellos for the request, originator, whatever service, or by a specific user.  You can break down the data by dimensions. In this case, the baby blue one is the total number of hellos from the RPCs originated at the out service. The purple one is the ones coming from the billing and the other two colors are representing other services. The GRPC plugin also automatically creates traces for the incoming and outgoing RPCs, but you can also add custom spans by using our trace packages. Here, we are creating a custom child and finishing it. You can create as much as you want and annotate them. Just propagate the context and whoever starting new spans, whoever the new spans will be basically direct children of the current span in the current context. Here is an example of the traces collected from an RPC. You can see the internal RPC is made in order to satisfy the original incoming request. OpenSense also provides PPROF support. If you use tag do, we collect actually CPU samples with the tags inside the incoming context. Then, you can see the hotspots in your code for specific requests, RPC names, and so on with the dimensions you have defined as tags. This is the GRPC server profile with OpenSense. We are looking at the typical visualization of PPROF data. You can see the runtime concat strings spend 9.43 seconds for RPCs coming from the authentication service and 3.20 seconds for the RPCs coming from the authentication service. Let me focus on some of the core principles we have. One of our goals is to make instrumentation as much as possible without our engineers thinking too much about the cost. This is why we have a separation between instrumentation and collection. Because instrumentation is cheap if you don't collect them, like if you just drop whatever is collected, it's very cheap. Rather than collecting all the metrics, we defer it to the end user to enable the collection. The instrumentation bits are left here and there and almost zero impact on the critical path. The end user, the end developer usually decides what to collect. This allows libraries and frameworks to instrument without worrying too much about the cost. They provide some measures and then users are enabling metric collection, for example, on the provided measures. As I mentioned just right now, the collection requires explicit enabling, but this is also true for disabling. This allows us to dynamically enable or disable collection and production. For example, imagine a jizzab library that has been instrumented to measure the compressed chunks. Until you're suspicious about this library, you don't have to collect any metrics, but if you do, then in the production you can enable collection and start receiving metrics. Observing becomes very easy when you have a static list of things to observe, but systems are usually surprising you. That's why we're encouraging a model that you can dynamically expand whatever you are collecting. We sample expensive and large data. Everything that is cheap to collect and aggregatable is usually don't have to be sampled. Examples of sample signals are traces because they are very big and profiles because they are very expensive. On the other hand, we aggregate data in efficient ways to produce cheap and small data to avoid sampling. This is what we do for metric collection, for we never have to sample our metrics. It's great that you don't have to sample the metrics because this is how you see all the 1999 percentile stats. I was repeating that the data size could be a reason why we aggregate or sample data. One of the obvious other reasons is we want to be able to limit the outbound bandwidth that is spent on data collection. For signals that are aggregatable like metrics, we try to aggregate them in process or near process and to reduce the bandwidth. We are either aggregating them in the process or by an agent that is living very close to the process and do the aggregation there. At Google, we try to use the same instrumentation libraries everywhere. When we are providing black box monitoring, we are trying to use the same libraries for compatibility. For example, a trace can be started at our load balancer and then our engineers can use the same libraries to add more spans to the existing trace. Similarly, our microservices frameworks like GRPC provides tags and a course of instrumentation out of the box. It is easy for our engineers to facilitate what is already there and put stuff on top of it rather than thinking everything from the various scratch. One of the other useful tools we have at Google is this introspection pages. You can imagine introspection is a small backend that collects and visualizes what is collected in the process. It is a great useful tool to understand what is happening without having to rely on a backend and also useful during the development time, as I mentioned. Here you see the traces page. There is a small dashboard that displays spans from different names and gives us the overall latency distribution. You can see the details for ten samples for each distribution bucket and the errored ones. You have a clue about what is the main reason, main problem. To summarize, we have a holistic approach. We use multiple signals, metric traces and more. Tags allows us to break down data by dimensions. Each team can produce them and pass them to the low level services. We instrument our core frameworks and service meshes and load balances out of the box. Users automatically get a lot of instrumentation through them. Then they can use the same libraries to add fine grained details, just like in the case of creating custom spans. Our instrumentation layer is optimized to be low overhead and low cost. It makes it easier for libraries and frameworks to instrument without thinking too much about the cost. We will share these concepts and put them in place. It gives you a good foundation layer. OpenSensors is very similar to all the approaches we have done internally and currently is available and vendor agnostic. We already have support for Prometheus, Zipkin, Yeager and more. I highly encourage you to take a look and give us feedback and contribute. Thank you so much. Testing. Okay. Do we have any questions?  Yes, one there. Thank you. How does this relate to open tracing? It's a common question we have. One of the easy answers is we have a holistic approach. Open tracing is focused on tracing. The way open tracing sees themselves is more of API, not a real implementation. Data models are quite compatible. We can currently say that if there is open tracing instrumentation there, we can actually convert it to our instrumentation and still use our back end exporters to export the data. We are talking to open tracing right now to see if we can actually get on a similar page in terms of naming. But it's a little bit difficult because we have tags, for example, dimensions decoupled. Whereas open tracing puts this as a part of the tracing API. So we're discussing and seeing what we can do. Next question. Is this open? Okay. So one of the problems of monitoring and collecting data from services is when a service has a problem or crashes, the data that it generates, it's much higher. Depending on the design of the application, it can be five times, 20 times more. You talked about aggregators on the node. I wanted to collect, I mean, what is the rule of thumb? How much data should produce more? So it really depends. But at Google, we have this other concept of having aggregators outside of the process. So we usually have agents located nearby and collect raw metrics sometimes and like use that additional agent to export the final thing. And it depends on the latency expectations you have and the expense between your process and the agent. The question is because we face this problem is what would be your advice on the percentage of like in size, how much data would make sense to produce? We were talking about specifically like how much data we should buffer. Yes. It's again hard to say, like it's really hard to say, like there is one typical rule. So you just need to experiment for your case. And again, you need to, I think, be able to depend on different models to export. You know, you can export from the agents rather than the process or the process. I mean, I cannot like tell one rule. There's one perfect rule that works. Next question. Hand up. Is that school? Because it is a school? Okay. So I'm going to ask a question. Sure. You say that it's very low overhead. What would be the typical number of nanoseconds taken for an event you're throwing away? And nanoseconds of what? For, you said the instrumentation is low overhead. So if you have an event for which there's no use of it, Fred Ron, what sort of cost? So the ideal thing is we drop the events. We collect metric collection, for example. It happens this way. We collect record events. We drop them if there is no one subscribed. And we need to still iterate those events. And it's just like very minimal. Usually we just omit it. I don't have like real benchmarks for the Go implementation right now, which I am responsible for. So I cannot tell. And this project is just, you know, in the early stages. But for C++ implementation internally, we just like really don't care too much. Any other questions? Going three, two, one. Thank you very much.


This review evaluates the existing evidence for non-pharmacologic modalities in treatment of hydradonitis suprativa, HS, including weight loss, vitamin B12, vitamin D and zinc supplementation, and dietary avoidance of bras yeast. However, limitations such as small study size and lack of randomized control trials limit the strength of evidence for these therapies in HS. Future large-scale investigations are needed to better establish efficacy in dacing regimens for non-pharmacologic treatments in HS. This article was authored by Alexei J. Hendricks, Penelope A. Hurt, Sahil Sikon, and others.


to the backstory on train noise and quiet zones in Longmont. My name is Tim Waters and as a volunteer for Longmont Public Media, I enjoy the good fortune of interviewing experts, activists, policy makers, government officials and community members on topics of relevance and interest to Longmonters. And today we are going to dig into or tell the story of a big deal, a significant project that's about to move forward in Longmont that will get the attention of almost everybody in town because of what it's going to require. But this is an opportunity to tell the story about where it comes from, why we're into it and what Longmonters can anticipate. So joining me in this conversation is Dr. Rick Jacoby. Welcome, Rick. People who will be viewing this out to know that you just took one hat off on as a practicing physician and have moved into a new chapter of life. I want to tell you it's a great chapter of life, chapter after full time employment. Jim Angstad, Jim is our chief, is Longmonts. I do this with my volunteer hat on. So I'll say Longmont's chief engineer, Tyler Samy is our traffic engineer. So if people haven't had a chance to work and meet with Jim and Tyler, you should know these are A-team, City of Longmont engineers and good people as well as a very highly skilled. And if you do know them, you can just affirm what I've said. So gentlemen, let's get into it. Let's start with where this conversation started. Personally, this conversation I was ever in about trains and train noise was with Rick Jacoby. So Rick, I'd like to start with where you started, at least with me in telling the story about train noise and why we're in this conversation. Sure, thank you. Well, we talked I think in 2018, but the story goes way back before that. It really started, I've lived in town for over 20 years, but it started for me in 2005 when a federal mandate came out to make the train horn louder and longer. And it was a big issue for the city at that point too, apparently, because the city did a survey asking, was this a problem? And something like half the residents said it was a serious or very serious problem. And the city actually said, well, look, we're gonna make quiet zones, which is a way to rebuild the intersections so the train doesn't have to blow its horn. And they said they would do it. They put it on the capital improvement plan, but as an unfunded project, and it's pretty expensive and it was convenient to forget, and it got forgotten for about 10 years. I got involved about 2015 when the renovation of the old turkey plant site came about and the city was working with the developer for them to pay for half of the quiet zone, compliant crossing at First and Emery. And I didn't know the full story at the time. I just saw that I was being RTB'd again. I've been paying taxes for about 10, 15 years. And all of a sudden my tax money was going to help somebody else with a quiet zone crossing down there. So I marched down to city council and I gave them a piece of my mind that public invited to be heard and said that, hey, we've been living with this and suffering with this for a long time. And I came away from that. I hit a nerve. I had a lot of neighbors and residents in the city come to me with, you can tell them and what can we do? We've got to change this, da da da da da. So we actually, a group of us met in my dining room and we talked about how to get involved and put a fire under the feet of the city government to get this done. And so since then we've met with Transportation Advisory Board. We marched in big groups to city council and we talked to city council at several presentations. And we tried to make it an issue with city council elections. We kept bringing it up with council members. And you may remember that, Tim, when you were first running that we tried to bring it up with everybody. And then after you were elected and others were elected, I brought the information back to council members. And I think that's when you contacted me. So it's been going for a long time. This has been, what's it now, 16 years? So that's kind of how we got to where we're at. Three observations. One is this is an affirmation of the value of perseverance, right? Persistence number one. Number two, that you turned RTD into a verb, right? And number three, for residents who think individuals or neighborhood groups can't make a difference. Sometimes it's not overnight, but it is an affirmation that you can have an impact. And in this case, it's going to be a big one. So thanks for getting us started. Who would like to tell some of the history here? I think it's useful. Rick made reference to what happened in 2005. Let's go back to when the train jams showed up in Longmont. Why was that important? And what were the concessions that had to be made to get a train to come through Longmont? Jim or Tyler, do you have that part of that story? Or Rick, any of you? Well, so when you want to talk history in Longmont, going back to the 1870s, there were no automobiles, horse, yeah, horse-drawn carriages. Bringing a train to town was a big thing. It was a big thing for transportation of not just people, but also of goods and services. So it was the big thing in town that we could get a train in that came in. So the concessions at that time was basically a property and you can see that in the ownership of the property today. The city conceded and actually didn't actually give up property, but gave up easements along at least from third up to ninth so that the railroad didn't have to come in and buy property. But looking back historically, that put Longmont on the map. That put Longmont on the map, that you had a train coming through and it has moved and still moves today a tremendous amount of goods. Throughout our history, we were a farming community just starting out and that's what, to sell your bring your stuff to market, to sell things, that's how you moved goods at that time. So the easements or the property rights were granted like in perpetuity, is that correct? As best as we can find in the record, yes. Looking back, they were all, nowadays you do stuff electronically, then everything was handwritten. Yeah. And for Longmont, to Loveland, to Fort Collins, the train, getting the train to come through town was like a lifeline, wasn't it? I mean it was the difference between surviving or not, potentially, to have that kind of commerce that was associated with the train. So there's a long, rich and valued history of the train in Longmont. So for, you know, 100 years, month plus, not big issues, but Rick made reference to what happened, what changed, that gave rise to some, the issues were now problems, we're not trying to solve. I think, a little bit more into that. A decision was made, was it 2005, Rick? Well, I think the feds made the decision before that, but before that it was up to the states to regulate train horns, I believe, and the horns, when I moved to the historic east side were definitely present, but not a big nuisance. But I think it was in Florida, they made a law that said the trains don't have to blow the horn at their discretion at night, because certainly it can be a big nuisance. And there was a big accident at night. And then the feds came in and said, look, we can't have this, we've got to make it safer. And they came with a standardized rule, but the train became much louder than the traditional train and much longer horn. And that's when it became a big problem. Tyler, you want to add to that? Yeah, so if I could add to that. So Rick, you, Rick's definitely up to speed on a lot of the history of that. So beginning about the 1970s, a lot of the communities starting, started enacting whistle bands. And that was really, Rick Mission, Florida, I think Chicago was one of the pioneers as well and implementing a lot of the whistle bands where they said, operator's train, sorry, you can't blow your horns, your whistle's coming through town. As a result of that, the FRA did see an increase in crash rates with trains. And I think that that was one of those big studies they did was to tie use of horn to crash rates at grade crossings. And there was a positive correlation made to, the horn does provide a safety benefit at those crossings. And first and foremost, the whistle is a safety tool. And really it's to help prevent those crashes at the intersections. And so when you talk about creating a quiet zone or taking away the whistle, that big safety tool, which is, it's very crude and rudimentary, but it's a direct feedback tool. The operator whistles the horn. He knows he has positive confirmation. The horn is working. It's about as easy as it can get for a safety tool. So in the FRA, in this case it is. I'm sorry, what's that? The FRA, you made reference to the FRA. Yep. Thank you. FRA Federal Railroad Administration. So they regulate the railroads. So local control over railroads is, it is not, not very much. FRA is the governing body over railroad decisions. Which I think is an important part of the story locally. As, as people have expressed their concerns, why doesn't the city council or why doesn't fill in the blank, the city manager or the chief engineer, somebody do something about that. Well, it has a lot to do with who's authorized to set those regulations. And in this case, the federal railroad administration because of what had happened across the country in terms of accident rates going on, right? So in Longmont, we've read, you read in the, the TC line or correspondence that council members get or just generally comments about how much people enjoy that the nostalgia associated with trains, train horns, right? So we've read about, I live in town and I've enjoyed that train horn for my entire life. I'm a native of Longmont. Why would anybody care about that? Right. I'm going to talk a little bit about your experience as a resident along the trail. And they're not just yours. What's the experience of people who, who live in proximity, who when they bought their homes, there was one set of regulations subsequent to the purchase of their homes, a new regulation, which changed your life a lot. Right. Right. You know, I train noise in a distance is a nice, whistful, romantic sound, but too much of a good thing is not a good thing. And I like a nice campfire too, but I don't put my hand in the fire, you know, living in old town, we have beautiful old homes, but they're a double-edged sword. The architecture is not designed for air conditioning. I have actually, my house was built in 1885. It's a lot of fun, but I have three gas heaters in the place trying to keep it warm here in, in January now. And to retrofit it for air conditioning would be very difficult. And, but I have 10 foot high ceilings and what the old, the pioneers did was they had high ceilings, the heat would rise in the summertime was very manageable because of the high ceilings. And what we do is we open the windows at night to let the hot air out and let the cool air in. And we open the windows at night to let the cool air in. Because we have, we're blessed with such lovely cool evenings here in the summer. And that worked fine until the train noise came along.  Every time the train goes by. And it certainly wakes people up at all hours of the night. We just never know when it's coming. So it's been a big impact downtown, but I can tell you also, I'm hearing about it from folks on the West side. I'm hearing about it from folks all around the city. And it's amazing to me how you can have someone three blocks or two blocks from the train. Tell me, how come you're doing this and spending our taxpayers money.  And I have people, you know, a mile away from the train saying, thank goodness you're working on this. This is a huge nuisance. Our tolerance of noise is very variable. And how do we get people out of the train? And how do we get people out of the train? And how do we get people out of the train? Well, and noise, not just train noise. Noise. Is becoming a growing concern in terms of. The kinds of forms of pollution, right? That have serious effects. Real effects on people in a variety of ways. So as a resident. And as a volunteer at Columbine elementary school. When we could be at Columbine elementary school. And I was like, you're to be with to be in that school. I just, I was always amazed at how teachers. And kids in Columbine could just kind of carry on as the train. Would roll by and blast that horn. When for me, it's all you could do a stop. And the disruptions to the learning process. Were very disconcerting to me as. As I would be involved as a, as a leap as a volunteer. I would be involved. I would be involved. I would be involved. I would be involved. I would be involved. So. If I could say something, you know, it's interesting. I pointed out, we discovered in our research, when we were trying to. To lobby. City council to do something about this. There's a lot of data on train noise. And it's adverse impact on education. There's been studies where. A classroom next to a train. Is almost a year behind in reading. And then the next year they, they moved the classroom and say, switched them. And it negated the, the. Disadvantage of that. And so it's, it's really interesting. There's been many other studies too. And I could go into detail on that because we researched a lot of that. And I was surprised at how much. The impact of consistent noise can affect, especially developing kids. So we're, we're headed toward a solution. But before we get into the specifics of it. I just want to acknowledge that the solutions that, that long monitors will begin to see implemented. In 2021 and beyond. Or not universally supported. There are some issues here. And I think it's important to acknowledge. Number one, the process, the city's gone through. To get to a solution or an approach. And the trade-offs that happen. Jim. You were point person on a lot of this in terms of process and listening. And I just want to, I just want to, I just want to, I just want to, I just want to, I just want to get into the discussions with you and Tyler and, and other members of the city staff. Trying to get a sense, get the priorities from the community, what they are, what they're not. And then come up with a plan. That accomplishes something with, with respect to train noise, but also some other objectives that the city was trying to accomplish in terms of transportation. Talk us through. What the process was. So when we looked at quiet zones as a whole, you know, it's important to remember there are, are, I believe 17 crossings in the city and Tyler, you can jump in at any point. If I got the numbers wrong. And at various stages of, of kind of development. And in various areas of the city, some of them are going through kind of commercial industrial areas where their impacts for quiet zones or the, to the point where we were asked to present in front of council. And present a series of options for how to get. And move the project forward. And a project like this. We've done a number of studies. And Tyler had taken the lead. On, on how to implement. Quiet zones. We had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had, we had to implement quiet zones. We had a number of costs. Cost analysis, the noise analysis. To move the project forward. So we had a lot of the, the work had been slow, but it had been moving forward. The hardest thing is, is the implementation of it because of the cost. With 17 intersections. Most cities are implementing quiet zones, but they only have one or two crossings. We've got 17. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Jim, just to talk about the 17 crossings, just to be clear, we're talking about the BNSF mainline that runs through town. Basically Ken Pratt, south of Ken Pratt on hover. Up along Ken Pratt. Up at one up through 66. It does not include any of the spur lines, the spur line that goes to lions or the spur, spur line that heads out east towards me. Those are not included in this, just to be clear on what we're talking about scope of the project. We're talking about the BNSF through town. From kind of the south, southwest. And then as you go kind of north. Going east and then north. But, you know, as we looked at it, you know, we did a series of public engagement meetings. And to offer up what, what, what type of, of improvement, safety improvement. Do you want to do the, the easiest and simplest and least expensive would be just close all the roads and have no crossings. And then the train can move through one of blood's horn is off. Certainly not a practical solution. In light of emergency services and movement of, of vehicles, pedestrians and bikes through town. So we threw out and looked at a number of options when we had our public engagement meetings of what type of crossings we would want to improve. What safety improvements do we want to do? We included a couple of closures where they were practical. As well as a series of double gates and street improvements that would help as well as the system to tie it all in so that the trains can communicate with the crossings. So that they would, would, would not have to blow the horn. One of the, the, the, as we were looking at our transportation system throughout the city, one of the, the other improvements that is currently ongoing is, is how to, how to move buses in a, in a more improved manner in conjunction with RTD and, and Dr. Cog, which is the Denver regional council of governments. They are an organization that helps fund and looks to multimodal projects and want to move buses around. So we, we've looked at the city has been trying for a number of years to get another crossing at Boston avenue to help trans move goods, again, people, goods, services. But the challenge with dealing with BNSF is they have a rather detailed manual that requires in part there's a requirement that for every one new crossing, you have to close too. So one of, of one of our plans is one of the other crossings, we were, we were going to close it. It's a dead end street has very little use. So we were looking at Tyler with the street was very street, very street between kind of the, the, it's just two blocks west of Maine. And so we were looking for another crossing and we were proposing fifth, sixth, one of the areas in the, in the downtown. And, and finally came to, to a recommendation to council, which we have to bring back in the future for that, but we were proposing to close fifth, which is certainly it is one of the least expensive options. So there are other, other considerations for what, what crossings and then there's also considerations as we implement in our project is where, where to start and how to move forward and get the biggest bang and the quickest bang. Because it's, it's also important to note that we will do the improvements. Okay, do the safety of improvements, but we still need to, to file with the PUC public utility commission, who is the governing body kind of of crossings and railroads in, in the state for a quiet zone. So we will be done with one or two of these intersections in the future. And we can take that next step to file with the PUC. What's also important to note, because this, as you can say, this is very convoluted, very confusing. Is that in the downtown area where you have crossings every 250 to 300, 500 feet. The train blows its horn a quarter mile before. So what you hear sometimes you hear, it depends on the, the engineer of the train. How he blows his horn sometimes he'll blow it with a couple of bursts as he approaches its intersection. A lot of times, and I've heard it at, you know, 430 on a Sunday morning, where he just holds onto that horn as he moves through town. So we can, we can institute some of these crossings and crossing projects in areas further north where it, you may then have a greater benefit. We're currently looking at handling the downtown in a, in a kind of the downtown area from third to ninth in an order, because that's where we see most of the impacts and most of the complaints. And that's actually the direction we got from council. But it's also, as we look at how we budget these, it may be beneficial to jump ahead to one of the other intersections, because that crossing will be less expensive to do. So we're, it is a, we're, we're trying to plan this as we move through. Currently we're, we're working in finalizing design. So that's kind of the current phase. We've been, we're almost completed with design on almost all of the intersections. And we've been working, and I don't want to jump ahead too far Mr. Waters in some of this. So I'll leave it at that for now. I'm just going to go ahead and get back to the next slide. And I'll go ahead and get back to the next slide. So we're at with the phase. We've got most of our design done. We're working towards it. So just to acknowledge, we're still not learning our way forward, but staging as we go forward. There's decisions and you've got to take stock and do that. What is the analysis of disruptions, costs, et cetera. And I, and I get that.  Because decisions simply haven't been made. I know that I know that, but when you haven't, when you have made a decision, you can't, you know, I don't want you to speculate. I'm one of, I'm one of the residents in town. And sometimes with my city council, I just wondered, why don't we just take on the NSF. Let's go to the PUC and challenge them there. And then as I learned who has authority and what the implications are, it's not quite as simple as simply taking a hammer to be an SF. Either of you want to reflect on the, the stakes in terms of our relationship with BNS, their authority. I mean, they, they can operate with impunity coming through long month. And then sometimes only as a courtesy that they notify us that they're doing something. Is that fair or accurate? I think that's very accurate. They're, they're, they're, they're their main goal is they're a business. So their goal is to, to move freight as much as they can. And they've got, you know, 100 plus years of history of running trains. And in that time, I think as a public or as a business, they've, they've learned how to, how to do things very well. They've got really good lawyers and really good. So they've got, you know, a lot of the rules that are written by like through FRA are to that, the, the, the, the, that company's advantage. And, you know, when, when I think when the train rule, the horn rule first came out, there are a number of communities who, who tried to, to, to fight in or still fighting and have not been successful. You know, there are, there are, are, are states who sued the NSF trying to get improvements or not, maybe not be NSF, but other train companies and have lost in trying to, to have them do improvements or not have trained. One of the other challenges we were focusing on train noise, but last year we had BNSF decided, let's run longer trains. So they're running these trains through town, mile long trains that are running from third, the ninth up to mountain view.  So, you know, there are, are challenges with that. And the city has, has, has while we try and we put file complaints, file complaints with FRA, we don't see a lot of, of, of, of action on either part to, to help us out. Yeah. Without being too critical of BNSF, it feels at times like municipalities are simply an inconvenience at this point to, to their operations. And that doesn't, it doesn't feel very affirming. So they have good lawyers, they have a lot of money. And they have precedents, right? The railroads. So, yes. So then the, so municipalities are left with what hands or cards do you have to play to, to bring a solution to the residents. Part of the tradeoff here, you mentioned the Boston Avenue crossing part of the tradeoff, both for cost and for, based on their regulations or policy required closing a couple of streets. And that, that's where there is some disappointment or some unhappiness in the part of some long, long residents that we're going to see at least one intersection or one street, maybe more blocked in order to accomplish the objectives here. And that's regretful, but it's, it is what it is. So if we're going to move forward with the creating quiet zones, is that a fair statement? Yes. And we've looked at the, you know, studied that the kind of the proposed crossings to, to try to. To identify which crossing would have the least impact from a pedestrian movement of pedestrians, moving to bikes, moving to vehicles, as well as, as would it, you know, in that area of, of fourth, fifth, sixth. Would, would, you know, would it impact the school that's, that's along there? We would, we would, that's one of the factors we also looked at to try to, to understand, you know, should we go ahead with a full blown cross closure? You know, how would that impact that those, those, the movement of, of, of all types of traffic?  You can get around there. It's a more of a, it's a, it's a bit of an inconvenience, but not as bad as if we were to close the street that has a half a mile distance to the next. I can clarify, it's not. The closure of Fifth Avenue isn't necessary for quiet zones. We could put another quiet zone compliant crossing in there. The closure of Fifth Avenue is required for the continuation of Boston Avenue and we're coordinating it with a quiet zone project. Yes. It's been very controversial in my neighborhood and we're more impacted than anybody by the trains because eighth avenue was closed in order to put 21st Avenue crossing in. And yes, the FRA holds all the cards. You know, there's the regional government, there's the state government, there's the federal government, there's God, and then there's the train, as they say. But it's so it's very frustrating for my neighbors to see Fifth Avenue being closed, but it's not necessary for the quiet zone. It's necessary for the Boston Avenue extension. That is good. Yes. So talk a little bit about. We've had it just as you're staging this project. There's been staging in the budgeting process, right? Decisions had to be made high. We're going to pay for this as a city. Are you going to ask people to, are you going to finance it with debt financing? You're going to do it cash and carry. Where, how, why are we now. In 2021, budgeted to move forward with this project. What happened? Decisions that were made and. And successes in terms of pursuit of other resources. Just talk a bit about why we're now positioned to proceed with this project. So we were, you know, Year, year and a half ago, we were directed by council to, to, to begin forward with, with the quiet zone project. So we, we looked at how we could budget. And what we're talking about is we're talking about, you know, with, with 17 crossings. An eight million dollar. Plus project. And then the numbers came in all, you know, in, in different forms. That doesn't include the design. So we. We looked at, at basically the, the, the. There were a number of options. Could we debt finance at that point? We, we, we were not able to, as the tax, the, the main funding for our streets group. Our streets fund is out of our sales and use tax. And that was a, was not a permanent tax at that point. There was an effort later that we did get it approved for that. Now we do have that as an option, but we've been able to spread the project out over a number of years. Okay. So we looked at, there's, there's a million dollars, I believe. And I can tell you, I have to look away from the screen to check my budget. There is in the 2020 budget, which we, we planned in 2019, we put in $1 million. We carried over some dollars that were there already. So it's about $1.2 million there. In 2021. We have $2.1 million. And then in 22, 2022. We budgeted four million. And then one million in 2023. So. Back in the beginning of 2020. There was an opportunity and throughout this whole thing, we were looking for other, other means of funding to help leverage the city dollars. We were going, knew we would have to program into a budget.  Many years before and that we were unsuccessful with that. And so, but we continued that effort. And then I would like to thank Tyler. He was the one who took the lead on it. And so in February of last year, we got noticed that our grant was an application was approved.  Able to budget over a course of time. The full component of the project because we received a, or in the process of, of, of getting a $4 million grant from the FRA. So basically we're matching. Well, we, we got, yeah, it is, it actually is a reimbursable grant. So we have to put out it basically $8 million to get reimbursed. $4 million. But that can go through the course of four years. We'll start be able to work some of those and then seek reimbursement. But we show the $8 million in, in, in our expenditures in the budget, there's also a $4 million revenue shown in there now. The, and kind of we had, we had originally proposed to be started in December of last year and early this year in construction. The challenge of why the project's now delayed is, is we, we got noticed that we got the grant, but we have to go through and do a grant agreement with FRA, which is what is taking a bit of time right now. So it's, it is a Tyler inside the organization known as the $4 million man now. I think you're going to be a point person, right on. At least I know Jim defers to you. In terms of laying out schedule and what, what people can expect or anticipate. Talk about once this gets moving, once you get the agreement set with, with FRA. What can local, what can long monitors expect? There'll be, there'll be disruptions. I'm guessing to some intersections because there's a lot of infrastructure work that has to be done. Talk about the schedule and what we should anticipate. Sure. So for 2021. We've got five. Crossings on the docket that we're looking to make improvements. One of them. Emery street is, as Rick mentioned earlier is not. Included specifically in this project. It's being funded through partially private funding. From that development adjacent. The other crossings we're looking at doing. Third avenue long speak. Ninth and 17th avenues are the ones we're looking at. Trying to get done in 2021. In terms of what will residents see for the work. We've got some carbon gutter work to do. There will be potentially some storm sewer adjustments. Overall scale of the actual project is not. It's not like a major road reconstruction or a big rebuild. So the actual scope of the work is. Relatively minor. The big, the big. Work is railroad work. Then the NSF installing their infrastructure for their equipment. Is going to be a bulk of it. There will be some. Anticipate some lane closures. Potentially some. There'll be potentially some storm sewer adjustments. Overall scale of the actual project is not a major. It's not like a major road reconstruction or a big rebuild. There will be some rain closures and that potentially some road closures to facilitate some of the work. I don't think that'll be a long. Particularly long duration. So what. Is it more than just putting arms that. Come down with lights to blink. There's. Yes. More than that. Sure. The big thing and one of the big cost items in this is the constant warning times circuitry that I think Jim mentioned earlier. So that's one of the big cost items. The gates and arms and flashers are. Not necessarily large cost items, but. That helps provide that feedback for. Hey trains here, you need to stop. There's some other when you mention curb work. And there's meat. Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? Are there meetings? There's some other when you mentioned curb work and other. Are there. Medians that will be installed in some of those intersections. Some, depending on the intersection. It's some, some of the treatments could be gates only some will be a combination of medians and gates. I think 9th avenue. We're looking at extending median from the track and then adding and then going with the all quad gates. And the reason is to limit options for automobiles or other vehicles to try to game that intersection, right? To find their way, navigate their way around the arms. Absolutely, the thought process is if you only have the approach gates without any medians that drivers could absolutely do that. They could navigate through there and try to beat the train per se. The median, generally, what we're looking for is a hundred foot length of that median from the track to the end of the median. And that seems to be effective at preventing people from making that decision. So, Tyler, do you say four intersections in 2021? And then this will extend through into 2023, right? To finish the- The 2024 is what we're showing is our out here. So we've got three crossings in 2022. Four more in 2023, and then four more to finish it off in 2024. And when it's all finished, should long moners anticipate that they never again hear a train noise? Train or train horn? So trains are noisy even without the horn. So I will say that the train will absolutely still make noise. For the most part, the only time that we would be hearing a horn would be if there's an imminent threat. So a train operator will still sound the whistle if there's, say, a trespasser on the tracks or they see some safety scenario where they need to blow the whistle. All right. Fellows, I appreciate your willingness to spend time telling this story. What have we not shared that we should? Any last comments that any of you would like to share or that you think residents should hear before we wrap this up? I think from my perspective, I think that we will work and continue to work on schedule as we've laid out as best we can. We talked a lot about the railroad and their regulation at the federal level. I think that ultimately there is some scheduling that we do not control that falls in the hands of BNSF. So we will do our best to follow the schedule that we've laid out. There could potentially be some variability that we don't control with BNSF scheduling. Anybody else? And then as we move forward and we get closer and closer, there will be more public engagement and let people know what the status of the project is, where we're gonna be working. Certainly notices to the surrounding residents of any disruptions. You'll see, as we get closer and closer and it's imminent, there'll be more than likely some type of variable message boards posted on some of the major roadways like Third Avenue where we're working to notify the vehicular traffic. But we will certainly have a more aggressive public engagement as we get closer and have definitive start dates and time frames. Very well. Any last words, Rick? I actually have a question, I guess, for either Jim or Tyler. As we're doing this in stages, are we gonna sequentially get the quiet zones in town or do we have to wait until the whole thing is built out to quiet the trains? Because this shouldn't have happened, this should have happened to me 15 years ago, it can happen fast enough. I think it's great that the city's been responsive. I'm still amazed that after sitting in my dining room with a bunch of folks that I could go and rank the right folks, but in the city of 100,000 people, we can make things change and I'm heartened by how the government has worked. And I'm curious about will the quiet zones be coming in starting next year and expanding over time or will we have to wait the full three years? So, Rick, I do anticipate that as we create zones that can be classified as quiet zones that we would be applying for those quiet zones. I think Jim mentioned earlier that kind of in the old town there's several crossings that need to be improved before it can be implemented. So that can't be applied for until all of those crossings are complete. There are some per se 17th, 21st that are isolated crossings that could potentially be created as standalone that can qualify to be quiet zones themselves and don't depend on any other adjacent intersections being improved, but also as we mentioned that direction from council was to work in the old town first. So if you'll notice in the first two years it's really focused on working on those old town crossings. Great. We ready to put a wrap on this? Certainly. Rick, I wanna thank you for your leadership on this, your activism in the community and all that you do what you did with your professional life and what you do as an active member of this community. Jim and Tyler, you are two of the unsung heroes in town and in the city of Longmont. So thank you for what you guys do every day. I know Tyler gets a lot of input on everything from speed to street repair to traffic flow and handles it with grace and with integrity every time. So thanks to you, Longmoners. That is your backstory on train noise and quiet zones in Longmont. Thanks for listening.


The University of Minnesota Extension and North Dakota State University Extension service have developed Recovery After Disaster, the family financial toolkit to assist in financial recovery from disaster. The toolkit is free and available at this website. In a perfect world, we would be prepared for a disaster, but we know that this is not always the case. This video series has been developed to assist in the immediate need for financial recovery information following a disaster. The six videos in this series will identify important financial considerations for your disaster recovery. Following a disaster, insurance can be a key piece of the puzzle for a successful recovery. In this video, we will discuss the different types of insurance and which disasters they cover plus how and when to contact your insurance agent. Start by determining what type of insurance you have and if it covers the type of disaster that has damaged your home. Using insurance language, the cause of a disaster is called a peril. Your insurance agent will be your best source of this information. Call your agent. Don't make assumptions about what is covered and what isn't. Ask your agent. It's important to know what your plan or policy actually covers. I think a lot of people assume because they've had a home before or had homeowner's insurance for a long time that it covers things that maybe it doesn't. So it's always good to review what your policy does and doesn't cover so that you're not making big assumptions about the kinds of benefits you should be getting when maybe they weren't in your policy to begin with. The first thing was they offered reassurance that this is covered. Your policy covers this type of a disaster so rest assured we'll take care of you. I had no clue and thank heavens he did. He knew everything that I needed to do so that was very reassuring. If your insurance policy has been lost in the disaster, ask your insurance agent for a copy. If you don't have a copy of your policy you can always contact the insurance company to get one. They may refer you to their website. Lots of companies now have a standard policy on their website or a way that you can download it. Basic homeowners insurance will generally cover fire, lightning, hail, explosion, riots, civil commotion, damage from aircrafts or vehicles, smoke, vandalism, malicious mischief, theft, and broken glass. Basic homeowners insurance covers the structure of the home, personal property, loss of use and other structures on the property. Renters may also purchase insurance to cover personal property and loss of use caused by a disaster. Individuals may want to investigate other types of insurance to maximize coverage.  So as a renter you really want to be covering the things that are inside your actual possessions and that would include your TV and your gaming system and your furniture, things that are not included in your tenant's lease. Additional insurance policies would need to be purchased to cover damage caused by floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes. They are not covered under basic homeowners insurance. It was a huge relief, a little bit of guilt. I didn't know anybody else that had flood insurance. And I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to say, well, I'm okay. But I had a lot of friends that didn't and it was very difficult watching them struggle with their finances and trying to figure out how they were going to pay for this and what they were going to do. Flood insurance policies are provided through the federal government's National Flood Insurance Program and purchased through your local insurance agent. Purchasers can purchase flood insurance only if their municipality participates in the National Flood Insurance Program. Typically there is a 30-day waiting period from date of purchase before your policy goes into effect. Be sure to check with your insurance agent to determine your coverage. If you have completed a home inventory prior to a disaster, this is the time to put it to use. Documenting your loss and damage is very important when working with insurance. If you had a detailed inventory of your personal property before the disaster, that will be very helpful now. But if not, gather as much information about your damaged property as possible. Unit 4 of the Family Financial Toolkit provides a worksheet for documenting loss and damaged property. A disaster recovery log smartphone application is also available to download for use on your phone. As possible, written documentation should include the manufacturer, model, serial number, age of item, value when new, and the damage incurred. We call them a proof of loss and that really ranges from receipts to owner's manuals, pictures of your property. But again, if you did a home inventory at the beginning, some of that stuff might be in order. And also, when you're purchasing a policy, often your insurance agent will walk through an inventory that they might have and that might suffice as well. Consider taking photos and or video footage of the damage to your home to support written documentation of the loss. Before we moved out, we took photos of the various rooms in the house and the surfaces. And then when we gutted during that process, we took photographs again and all of that got sent to my insurance agent. Document damage to all household items, no matter how small. If possible, find sales slips and receipts for high value items, such as appliances, computers and entertainment systems. Such documents will show proof of purchase, date purchased and purchase price, all of which will be useful when filing insurance claims. Search your property for these documents and secure them before volunteers, family and friends begin to help with the cleanup so they are not thrown away by mistake. Your insurance may cover loss of use and provide funds for you and your family to live elsewhere while your home is being repaired. Loss of use could include temporary housing, moving costs, temporary storage, fees for laundry and parking. Check with your insurance agent. So for instance, if you have a fire in your kitchen and you need to feed your family but you're finding that you're going out to eat instead, loss of use covers the excess amount of what you would normally have paid to use, for instance, your kitchen.  Loss of use covers the difference. Following a disaster, insurance coverage is always considered the first type of assistance used to repair damage, even in a federally declared disaster when FEMA is involved. If your insurance settlement is less than FEMA's estimated cost to make your home habitable, you may qualify for funds to supplement your insurance settlement to meet unmet needs. The video, FEMA and SBA, provides more information regarding applying for federal assistance. When there's a FEMA event, essentially your own insurance has to be used first. And so if you have flood insurance and you have flooded or if you have sewage backup insurance, all of that needs to be touched first. It's important that you register for FEMA immediately and everyone should register for FEMA, whether or not they're a renter or they're a homeowner. Something that it doesn't cover, that's what the disaster and emergency funds are for. And that, again, is if your area is declared a disaster area. In the last few minutes, we have heard about the different types of insurances and what types of disasters they cover. We have talked about the importance of documenting the damage in your home, plus the importance of contacting your insurance agent. It is important to recognize that your life will never be exactly the same as it was. After what you want your new reality to look like, knowing your insurance agent and your insurance coverage may help you frame your new reality. We encourage you to view all of the financial recovery after disaster videos, the Family Financial Toolkit and other materials at this website.


Well, hello everyone. This is Byron King with Investor Intel. Today we are talking with Mark Varney of Wedgemount Resources. Wedgemount is a very new oil play that works in the Central Texas, kind of slightly West Texas part of oilfield country. Classic old oil country. It's been that way for a hundred years. Lots of vertical wells drilled with these kind of rotary bits. Not a lot of fracking and directional drilling, whatever. Interesting business model to grow production.  We've talked about your company before in another of these Investor Intel interviews, but you've just put out some brand new news. So what is the news that you want to get out there to the viewers of the Investor Intel site here? All right. Well, thanks, Byron. We're happy to be here giving an update today. So we had some news out today, which we think is very significant for shareholders and potential new shareholders of Wedgemount. As we pressed release a little while ago, our asset number one was the Willow Bend project, which is about 40 minutes south of the town of Abilene, Texas. Again, this is conventional oil and gas, historic vertical wells, and it's really part of our strategy of rolling out and optimizing, developing, and focusing on underexploited reservoirs. That's what Willow Bend is about right here. And when we picked up the Willow Bend asset, when we signed the PSA at the end of 2022, the field was averaging in the fourth quarter of 2022 about 25 BOEs per day of production. We went in and started our initial program on existing producing wells in late January of 2023. And all we've done today, we selected three wells of the 11 producers in the field, and we did chemical treatments of the wellbores and of the formation. So we're really injecting chemicals under pressure wellbores into the formations.  Our most recent average production from the field now is 104 BOEs per day. And again, that's with only treating three of the 11 wells. So quadrupling production, again, we were kind of hoping we could get double or triple, but we quadrupled production here. And we have not even done the well workovers yet. We've only done the chemical treatments. The other really important factor here with all that growth is we did it for $45,000 US. That's total cost of the treatments today. So we're growing production at extremely economic rates. So we were really excited to let people know about that today. Well, frankly, that's really exciting. I'm an old petroleum geologist from way back, and I showed everybody my drill bit here that I have sitting on my desk. That's exciting. You took 25 BOE barrels of oil equivalent, and you turned it into over 100. So that's a quadruple. That's a 4X. And for those out there who aren't deep scholars in the oil patch or whatever, when we talk about the oil wells tend to crud up with paraffin, which is a fancy word for wax or asphaltines, which is sort of what it sounds like. It's the heavy, cruddy oil that they make asphalt out of, which they put onto your streets and roads and such. So you chemically went down there. You cleaned that dup out with chemical treatment and under pressure. And you haven't even done the workover yet, which is that's a whole nother operation to kind of clean up the well. So you quadrupled it in a very short amount of time. For 45,000 bucks for three wells. Okay, I'm impressed. Where is it going from here? What are you, what else are you going to do? Yeah, the next part of the plan we actually start next week, it was in today's press release next week, we're going to hit the next three wells. We'll do the, again, the well and formation chemical treatments. And by the way, these are proprietary chemicals. Our partner Petrosaurus, their CEO, Heidi Flag, has a chemistry background and she's been developing these chemical specifically for these types of reservoirs in West Texas for over 20 years. So we feel like we do have an advantage versus just off the shelf chemicals. Anyways, next three treatments are going to happen starting next week. Then we'll wait for about a week for testing and bringing those wells back on. And then as we get into March, we'll do the balance of the well. So all 11 producers will be chemically treated by the end of March. And then our injector well, we have one injector well, the 12th well in the field, we're also going to treat the injector well. So that's what the rollout looks like. Again, we anticipate the cost per well per treatment is $15,000 US. And then as you touched on it, and I think, you know, showing people what the further upside is here is that we haven't done the well workovers yet. We will have, at the beginning of April, a service rig on site to do well workovers for all the pumps on all the wells, which have really been neglected over the last 10 years or so because the operator we bought it off was somewhat financially distressed. So we should get a fair bit more growth. We're very optimistic that we can, you know, add significantly more production just on this initial acquisition of ours. Well, that's your business plan, isn't it? That you're going to go around to these distressed wells. And these are not Exxon's wells or Chevron's wells. This is just like Farmer Jones and Farmer Smith and Farmer Brown with his wells. And the guy doesn't have enough money or the family doesn't have enough money to really keep them as well maintained as you would like. And you're working with the owners to acquire the rights.  That's the idea, right? Exactly. You hit the nail on the head here. We're not trying to reinvent the well work. We're trying to use modern best practices on older wells in an area that's very well understood, conventional reservoirs, very understood. This area has had a lot of activity the last 60 or 70 years. So these are older wells that they basically just need work. And you've used the analogy before. You have an old car sitting in the barn and nobody's touched it in 17, 20, 25 years. And now you want to take it out on the road. It's going to need some work before you can really gun it up. But once you do it, the car will ride pretty good, right? Yeah, that's right. Like on our Willow Bend acid, the average age of the wells is about 16 to 17 years. So they're not super old wells. And before we bought it, we obviously, as part of our due diligence on it, we checked the integrity of the well boards and the cement jobs and everything else from A to Z. They were in very good shape, but they had just really been neglected, right? It's like you've never taken your car in for a wheel limer and an oil change or anything like that. There's no difference here, right? It's we're using best practices to optimize these wells. And again, that is just the starting point on this field. What I would also mention, because people always ask me about what's the blue sky growth here, right? We know you can do this. You can grow production here. But there's also the zone we're producing from is called the garden. It's about 4,200 feet deep. So not super deep for Canadians out there. It's about 1,300 meters. There is a whole bunch of upper zones of bypass pay that have had historic production, generally limited historic production. That if again, if we use our modern best practices, all these wells we, sorry, a multitude of these formations, we know our oil bearing and we will perf a bunch of those zones later in 2023. So not only to have our existing production that are ramping up, but there's a bunch of bypass pay where we think there's even more potential than the zone we're currently focusing on. And again, just for people who aren't familiar with the oil patch and the technology out there, the difference in technology today, just in terms of well logging versus picking number 20 years ago, 30 years, 50 years. I mean, it's just absolutely spectacular in terms of the signal processing and the artificial intelligence that goes into massaging the well log. So yeah, you may have some existing wells that are really just waiting for the service companies to lower those little perforation devices down there and blow holes in the steel and the concrete and just pull some more oil in there. So there's a lot of production upside to what you're doing is what we're saying, right? Absolutely. And what I will tell you, the thing that initially attracted us to the area was not the zone we're producing from, which we think has a ton of potential, but was for this, these upper bypass pay zones. For example, there's one zone that's about 3,600 feet is called the crosscut. It stretches for over 10,000 acres in our core area. There was one historic producer in the crosscut zone, which came on at 120 barrels a day about 40 years ago. It cued about 40,000 barrels in total. And that zone was pretty much ignored exactly because of what you said, Byron, they just didn't have the technology to properly analyze the zone. The logging was poor, the understanding of porosity and permeability and all those technical engineering factors was poor. Based on what we know now, we've mapped 36 million barrels in place. And we think on a primary recovery, we can probably get 10 to 12%. And it's also potential for a water flood down the road. And that's just one of a multitude of these bypass pay zones that will be the real blue sky for Wedge Mount. Once we ramp up the existing production, that's probably more of a Q4 2023 and into 2024. We're going to tap some of those zones and see if we can really grow to the next level. You know, you're on the right track.  Take a look at this one. It's brand new. It's definitely not over marketed, not yet. And you're looking at growing barrels in a solid oil market in classic, you know, classic central Texas oil field country.  You know, none of that, none of that risk. So thank you so much, Mark. We wish you well, you and your team. Thanks, Byron. I really appreciate the time.


The students in this module, we will look at a bit of housekeeping to put your house in order. House is the code and we will look at number of things which on the face of it may seem to be very simple, but they have a tremendous impact. Let's start with the outline of the module. You see that we will talk about case sensitivity, we will talk about white space, we will talk about comments and we will also talk about semicolon. So bear with me and you will be having some wonderful useful tips also at your disposal. So JavaScript is case sensitive. Case sensitive means that if you have say for example the while command, the while reserved word and it is all in lower case, it is fine. But if it's an uppercase or if the W is capital, then you may encounter some errors which are hard to debug. Okay, so that is one issue. So the reserved words in JavaScript are in lower case, but you can have a combination of uppercase and lowercase variable names in your code. So as you can see over here that there is a number of options of using different variable names. So you have this capital over here and you have this capital over here and all capitals. But remember that a variable name cannot start with a numeral. Okay, so with this in mind we move to the next slide. Now we look at the importance of white space. Now the code which you see over here, this code and this code over here, they are both same. They are both same, they are identical. But this is very difficult to read, difficult to read. Why it's difficult to read because over here when I add the space over here, this makes it readable. Okay, why because the thing is that after a couple of time or maybe weeks or months or years, the code becomes very difficult to understand if it's not properly spaced. Understand and you have to be visiting this code. You write, writing it takes less time, very less time but you might be using it for years. So you need to add the white space over here. Now look at the comments. Now there are different ways of writing the comments. This is one way of writing the comment. We have these box over here or this is multiple lines. This is multi-line. This is a single line comment over here. And this is another combination of the comments. So creating readable code and maintaining that code over a long term comments are your friends. Code that seems obvious now won't be nearly so obvious in the next time when you look at it, especially if a lot of time has passed. Understand. So you have this multi-line comments over here and you have the single line comments over here. Now try to understand, although they are all comments, but they have their utility in different domains also. For example, if you are explaining the code, if you are explaining the code in the beginning, then this is a better option. Why? Because you can make a lot of edits. You can make a lot of edits and changes over here and without having worrying about this thing. Understand. So the thing is that you can use the two slash method for small comments that spend one line or a few lines for large comments such as those at the beginning of a program or skip the multi-line comments style is a better choice because it makes adding or deleting the information very convenient. I hope you understand this. Now these are very small things, but remember comments are very, very important. They are very critical, especially with reference to the maintaining the code. Maintainers. Maintainers, code maintainers. For code maintainers, comments are very important and critical. Now let's look at the semi-colons. So in this slide, we will look at the semi-colons. Semi-colons delineate expression, separate them, but you have to be careful because JavaScript can insert semi-colons on its own. Now you actually wanted to write this, this you wanted, okay, but this you actually wrote, this you wrote and this semi-colon was inserted by JavaScript, by the JavaScript interpreter, okay, and this creates a problem over here. So you have to be careful because the JavaScript interpreter could not understand your intentions. That's the problem. Now if you are using semi-colon with if statement, you have to be careful because over here you put the semi-colon over here and it will just match this and do nothing. This code is not going to work. So you have to be careful. You won't use a semi-colon at the end of the if statement. The reason is that the statement or block of statements in opening and closing places that follows the condition is part of the condition statement. In this case the if statement, a semi-colon marks the end of the if statement and if improperly placed disassociates the first part of the if statement from the rest of the code. For example, the following code is wrong. The code within the braces will execute regardless of whatever is there. This is wrong. So that's all I have for this module.


This is the first time we've had a C-17 land at the airship here in 29 Palms in three years. The commander is trying to build combat power in a certain AO. He's obviously going to want to choose a C-17 over any other aircraft that we have available within the United States Marine Corps because he can mass combat power more effectively and faster. We haven't come to this point in a while, so to be the first unit to do this here in 29 Palms is pretty legit. It's awesome.