While winning is important for some, just finishing is top priority for others. John Coker was never going to win the E-Pay Silver Firm. His 65 horsepower Skoda 130LR brings up the rear of the field, but he will eventually finish, and that's more than a dozen cars can boast. It's a similar story elsewhere. Taking the checkered flag is the last thing on Greg Paul's mind. Teamed with his mate Peter Martin, they're ticking the bucket list. After all, this is the first time in more than two decades a gravel marathon has been run in the North Island. I prefer to be down the field. It's certainly much more sociable. The guys that we're rallying with down the back of the field are all good chaps, all driving similar cars, similar paces, and we're having a lot of fun. Gravel's always been in my blood, so when Greg said, hey look, we haven't got the sun being ready, let's do it in the field, I said why not, let's have a go. So we had a chat with Federal, threw some Federal tyres on, exposed that product, and we're having a ball, so it's really good. Out to prove that competing doesn't have to break the bank, Paul and Martin were hoping to make the finish on just one set of tyres. But discretion is the better part of Vella. The slippery roads convinced them the field should be reshot, with two new Federals ready for the morning. Now that's budget rallying.


With all the guys you've gone through in the secondary dealing with injuries over the last month, has it gone about as well as could be expected back then? Oh yeah, it's going pretty good.  When you're a coach that's used to work with professional initiative and speaking about what you guys have in your time, and the ability to make plays beyond the scheme, from your perspective, is that something that we need to understand? Yeah, it's unique. It's all about what's coming. When we know what's coming, each guy give a guy a heads up of what's coming, whether we in that zone or they in that zone, to help them play it better, and it's all about communication. It just shows that the coaches have trust in us, what we do and how we take the approach each and every week, and we're just going to continue to do it. I recognized the formation and I know he was dropping down and I was running out, so I just gave him a heads up and he made a play. Can you give teammates tips that will help you this week based on your experience with the Saints? Yeah, I'm going to give him, you know, as much as I know. Ten a hand, I already been in my head already. Guys in the deep of the back room been in my head, so I'm going to give him as much tips that I remember. And if I had some calls on the field that I know and I remember, then I let him know. What's the main thing you would tell him, maybe especially as it relates to Alvin? Just everybody's going to the ball. We don't need one man tackling, we need everybody tackling him because he's dangerous with the ball. And just go play fast. Do you have to change, I guess, your approach when it's Taysom Hill or quarterback? Not really because we're going to look at him on the back end as a quarterback and just play what's called and within the scheme and then whatever happens, we're going to run to the ball and fly around and make the play.


A review of the joint book, a complete guide to woodworking joinery, a three-minute overview by the small workshop guy. Hola, woodworkers, Paul Carlson here, a small workshop guy. Let's talk about this terrific little reference book, just to give you a feel for it. And it's really nice sometimes to have something you can physically pan through instead of using your mouse on your computer to look for another YouTube video. This is just terrific, I really like it. To give you a feel for it, let me kind of tell you from the table of contents what the major chapters are. There's a chapter on age to accuracy and to order, in other words, measuring things. There's a chapter on designing joints and how wood grain works and how you'll avoid certain joinery depending on the grain of your wood. It talks about edge and scarf joints. It talks about lapped and housed joints. And it's got a whole chapter on mortise and tenons and mitres and bevels, dovetails, dowels and biscuits, and fasteners, hardware and knockdown joints. And it's beautifully illustrated, if you are interested in a particular topic, like cutting a mortise by hand, it's got a section on that and just the color, the illustrations, the showing of the wood grain, are all really, really well done. I've got a link to it in my description down below. It's only about, I think, $13, $14. Get it in a couple days off Amazon Prime and you too can have this available for a little relaxation when you're not, when you get tired of watching all these YouTube videos. That's it. I highly recommend it. Small Workshop Guy, signing off.


Bacterial cellulose, BC, is a type of cellulose produced by certain types of bacteria when grown under optimal conditions. It is composed of a three-dimensional network of pure cellulose nanofibers and has been used in various industries due to its unique mechanical properties, conformability, and porosity. BC nanocomposites are made up of BC combined with other materials, such as polymers, metals, ceramics, and biomaterials. They can be fabricated using static or agitated cultures, and the resulting material retains the original matte structure from the synthesis process. Biocompatibility testing is important for developing BC-based materials for use in bone, skin, and cardiovascular tissue engineering. This article was authored by Omar Petronkoso, Solene Kamos, and Fernando G. Torres.


Hi, everyone. Thanks for being here. I know there are equally good attractive choices to other sessions going on. It's really wonderful to have you guys here. I'm Harish. I work for Software AG, which is the second largest software vendor in Germany. We are about a billion euro company, primarily dealing with enterprise products, application integration, and lately into cloud and big data. Today, what I'm going to talk about is the story of the WebMethers R&D division, just of which I'm a part of in Software AG. Three years ago, we embarked on the adoption of agile from the traditional waterfall model that we've been practicing for more than a decade. And so some stories on why we embarked on that journey, what happened, some of the lean principles, why we chose lean, how did we implement lean in our own context, the lessons we learned along the way, and a bit of a scorecard of what we've achieved in these three years. So this is, as you see, we are a distributed organization about nine locations across the world. The time zones start from India to West Coast to US. There are about 30, 35 products in the WebMethers suite, 20 odd teams distributed all over locations and plus a lot of individuals working from their own homes. And we are also a very diverse culture. These 30 odd products, many of them have come into Software AG web methods through acquisitions. So the enterprise suite generally has a lot of small products. So every time we acquire, we not only acquire a new product, we get a new team with its own culture, a new location, a new time zone. And hence it's pretty diverse. And then when we go sell the solution as a product company, it's very difficult to integrate all these projects, all the products that have been developed in different time periods, though everything is mostly Java based. But still the code differs, the kind of interfaces, a lot of standards around. So it's pretty difficult to integrate all of them. In fact, around 2010, one of our major releases when we started, it was planned originally for 18 months. And we slipped big time, 50%. We shipped nine months later on that 18 months project. And when we shipped, our product had 11,000 loan defects. Now it's startling, but in the kind of space we operate in the kind of magnitude, this is quite common. We are an industry leader. Just imagine the rest of the companies. But then we also realized this is not a sustainable model. And we were actually looking at an era where there'll be more acquisitions. We'll be moving to cloud and big data. The time to market has to be compressed. Because of these reasons, we decided to embark on the agile journey. It was pretty easy. Scrum was the most popular, most practical thing that you want to adopt. And at the team level, things were pretty OK. You can find a product owner. For 30 odd products, we had the product owner for each of them. You find the team. Somebody is always ready to be the scrum master. Scrum is done. But how do you aggregate these individual teams at a big level? How do they add up? In fact, it could really become more difficult. In Lean, they talk about this assembly line model. And when there are streams of various operations feeding into each other, all of them will have to work at a particular rhythm, which is coupled to what comes earlier in the stream and what comes downstream. Otherwise, everybody starts jumping into agile, developing faster. At the end, nothing gets better. So we needed a metaphor to basically look at it from a sweet point of view. And Lean was the answer, which is the most appealing, in which we could really see the entire model of the web method suite, especially as a single value stream. And the one single agenda for each of the team, the product would be to accelerate the flow of value to our customers. So in a sense, each one of these people has to move away from my product, my team. And we had to actually make them look at one suite. And what is the overall solution in the future that we are developing? And how fast we can actually deliver that? So that's what took us to the Lean. There are several interlocking things that we went about that are really necessary to make this transition to a Lean and Agile culture. Primarily, some are the soft aspects, the people aspects, mindset, how to recreate the right culture and stuff, and the hard process aspects. How do you implement a value stream? How do you actually build the cadence, the rhythm in which we deliver software? How do you do quality control? And how do you actually implement the Kaizen or the continuous improvement which comes from the Lean model? Today for this talk, I'm going to focus on the process aspects and not on the people aspects. So this is a visualization. It's a construct we came up with as a single value stream so that the entire division can look at it as one single assembly line. So we have these ideas from customers, the field, the sales, the architects coming up which are shaped into features. And then based on the guidance from the business that says these are the investment areas, this is the amount of effort or money you can invest on a particular feature or a product. So these features are actually broken into these buckets. We create a single suite backlog for all the 3D products. And then we come down to the team levels where each team picks a portion of what it's relevant to it from the suite backlog to its own spring backlog. And they have their own iterations they built. And then they create a build set out of that product. And daily they do a testing to ensure it's always working, which is code in agile. And then we have a separate process called the promotion process where daily there is the integration of all the products that go into the suite. So it's continuously doing. And we have an integrated suite build set every two days or so, two or three days. So we kind of do it continuously. And then this is fed to a suite test sandbox, which is the next stage where you do the non-functional test and do it. The idea is to actually develop a shipable build set, a potentially shipable build set, which is very stable and which is tested for regression. We try to develop one full build set, which can be potentially shipped every four to six weeks. And that is the cadence, that's the rhythm we try to build on. And once we are ready for a major release, which is a timed release, we could really do these release readiness activities, basically the internalization, porting, testing on some rare platforms and so forth, and really doing some system testing, which we do once in a major release. And then it goes out. So I'm coming back to the conceptual model. We borrowed this from Scrum, the backlog basically at the suite level, we have a single backlog. We don't have a single product owner. Each 35 odd products have their own individual product owners. So what we make them do is they create the features and create the product backlog. They rank their features according to their priority. Then when they feed it to the suite backlog, there is an algorithm. So we really can't have one person mediating between 30 conflicting product owners. So technology and Max comes to rescue. We have an algorithm that basically takes weights from based on what is the business guidance on how much should go. We know the capacity. Based on that, we create the algorithms and that ranks this product backlog. And then teams actually have their own views on what are the features that are relevant to them in this feedback block. From there, they pull their features into the value stream and they do the stage-wise promotion that I talked about in the previous slide. One of the most important things that we do here is something called we try to maintain a continuous visible flow. And this concept of Jidoku or Andon card comes from the Toyota lean model. Basically, this means at every stage we ensure when we take our deliverable and hand it over to the next person, the handoff happens with 100% quality, at least known quality. We don't knowingly shift something which is slightly defective to the next step. It is time box. This stage-wise thing is time box. And this is what creates the interrupt in that time box. So even if you're going to miss the deadline, but if you know your whatever you're shipping to the next stage has a bug or a defect, then you really stop the line. In the Toyota lean model, every single worker, it doesn't have to be a manager who takes a decision that the production would stop. We implement the same thing here. Any engineer, any test engineer, or even a developer who finds, OK, I know there is a problem here in this thing. So I will stop it so that this build never leaves unless this issue is fixed. It doesn't go to the next stage. So we implement this as the most critical process step in which we literally stop the build. And we try every one of the persons involved who can really correct that bug actually makes it the highest priority. They stop all other activity. They ensure this bug gets fixed, the build is refreshed, and then the cycle is resumed as soon as possible. The iteration lengths differ from two weeks to four weeks, depending on the time. So those details are completely in the team's discretion. We don't really enforce it, which means somebody who does two-week iterations can ship two builds. And if somebody has a four-week iteration, they just stay with the old build in their promotion. And then by this way, we try to establish a cadence. So every four to six weeks, we have a shippable build set. And one of the ways we do it is to actually seriously limit the work in progress. We do multiple things to do it. First thing, people only work on the right features, because there is enough work just to get the right features and the right quality done. So you don't do anything else. So that also means the tooling itself hides most of the other stuff. If you can't work on it, there's an automatic V collect metrics on what is the capacity, what is the sustainable velocity with which a team can push features or build out to the next stage. If they are not meeting it, if that capacity is full, then they can't really see the rest of the pipeline. So that way, teams are under no pressure. You just work on what is in your plate and try to get it done. You don't worry about whether you're lagging behind or what is going to come later. And all of this thing works in a continuous improvement model where teams themselves shape. There's a lot of autonomy for the individual teams to try out new practices, do their own things, where they experiment how to do things, and then they share it with the rest of the teams. And if it's a popular model, if it's working, it kind of goes global. So there's a lot of its bottom up. Some of the principles and the constraints are driven by the global vision and how we want to do the entire thing, but how it is being implemented is just left to the teams. And they experiment with that a lot. Now, what are the key lessons we learned along this way? The first interesting lesson was slow is faster. So the first year when we moved into Lean and KSN, after six months, everybody was, there was a lot of dissatisfaction in the team. Everybody felt we were going slow. So much of automation test was being written. People were really trying to resolve these problems. And most of all, as I said earlier, you have this practice of pulling the hand-on card. So there is a blocker in one product, then everybody stops working. You either help that person who's trying to solve the problem, or you just sit straight, because according to Lean, if you are doing your own production, then you are increasing the inventory. So even though it is not optimal for you at your team sense, we are trying to optimize the global whole, which means understandably teams get frustrated, especially in 30 products, if teams A and B that are in some other location have a blocker which they cannot resolve for three days, your source code is locked, and you can't push in your changes. Either you do some other thing that doesn't affect the code, or you just wait for the thing. So such things can be really unpopular. So the teams went through a period of dissatisfaction because of these things, but in the end, after a year when we really came close to the one-year thing, sudden thing happened. We realized we didn't need that old stabilization period anymore. In the previous example I told, I mentioned we were nine months late on an 18-month project. And at that time, a lot of that time was really spent on this stabilization, which means everybody said the code is done, we went on and we finally integration has certain some new things were discovered, or they said this is getting a little unstable, let me stabilize it, and that itself took more time than how much we had taken for the original implementation. So that phase suddenly disappeared. And we suddenly saw we didn't need that, we in fact had planned for a two or three month stabilization period at the end of the feature freeze. And we suddenly realized we didn't need that. At one week, this is nothing left to do. We had a stabilized thing, we had our tests, everything said things were working fine. So suddenly with what we thought was a very slow process turned out to be a really fast thing. And we also learned the value of tests. Evidently as we started tests where like the second class citizens, we soon learned, I have five minutes, I have to rush. We learned that it's a very good investment because these tests allow us, give us confidence to go and do changes. Earlier we used to be very conservative in taking big bank changes, changes to interfaces and things. Now with a safety net of automated tests, people were more ready to actually go and change because within a day or two, you will know if you're breaking somebody else's thing. So it's not a black box thing anymore. And in fact, once we finished one major release and turned that to sustaining, those guys also saw enormous improvements because now we could really give small fixes. We didn't really have to deliver a big bank service pack or something like that. So tests really paid in a better way. Progress is getting simpler. One of the other things when teams themselves experimented and tried out new processes, what we learned was getting lean and being more agile is not about doing more things. In fact, eliminating base means doing lesser things. To do lesser things, you have lesser failures and stuff. Just keep it simple, keep it incremental, and it's actually that simple. It's usually a greed that makes us a complicated thing. And the change initially comes with a lot of resistance. People really don't know what they're getting into at the start because so many things are bandied about. The management is also trying new things. But once people really appreciate when they are given the autonomy and they try out certain things and after one release, they really see what they have gained, they become believers. And after that, it's pretty easy. Even you can't really go to the team and say, hey, no more lean. Let's go back to the old system because they now have tasted the success on their own and they really self-sustain the process altogether. This co-card will go very quickly. We had a six-month release. We have actually from one and a half-month year releases. We've gone to six-monthly releases now for the entire suite. And we shipped the Navamina 2013 release that shipped overall for, I think, at this point after a few more acquisitions, we are around 40, 42 products now, I guess. And the overall thing was about 1,200 defects. And manual testing, we now have nearly 50,000 manual automated tests running daily and the total number of tests, including regression is around 200,000. And this is really paid off. Initially, it doesn't look like a good investment, but in hindsight, I think that's the best investment you can make on automation. And we now have completely moved on to six-monthly releases. And nowadays, I think for the last two releases, six months in advance, we can say, this is the rate we are going to ship and we ship really on that date. Which for, if we look at the 10, 12-year-old record of the company, it's stupendous. And even in sustaining, we have a fixed calendar. You would be able to give the fixes on. In advance, the moment a new issue enters, you could really predict which date you can really deliver the fix. So that was the quality and the predictability parameters in productivity. We are seeing that our process are becoming more and more lightweight. Earlier in the waterfall model, we had a lot of checklists, we had compliance, people checking, auditing and all that stuff. Nowadays, most of the metrics are really collected by tools. And we don't really prepare this status reports anymore. It's all there in Jira or a few custom tools that we have for certain products. And anybody who wants to know whatever is the current status can just pull in the reports and teams do their own self-practice. They define, in some of the teams, they define their own metrics. They figure out what is the next thing that they want to do. And mapping software AG in terms of agile currency that Martin talked about yesterday, I think we are somewhere between one-star company and two-star organization. We now our teams have the agile culture. The people have really moved in their minds with a sympathetic attitude of why we are doing these things and really want to do it on their own. And we have our features driven from a business perspective. It's not just we are developing products anymore. We really understand why we are doing this as a business. And the next step I think our growing edge would be to actually make the skill set shift on how to really get the skills where we will be able to deliver on the market cadds. So if market would be able to pull features from us, if somebody wants us to ship in three months, we should be able to kind of develop the feature and give it to you in three months. That's the capability that would be our next step towards leaning. Thanks, that was my think. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer. My question is working. Yes. And like the working software development part appears to be agile and the whole process appears to be deep. Is that true? Yes. In a sense, in the micro level, we practice the scrum. And there were few teams that were also practicing Kanban. The teams they were doing mostly sustaining and stuff. But at the higher level of scaling, we kind of did the leap. That was possible? Yes. You actually do that? You're literal that? Yes. So was it possible that instead of locking the whole board base for all the center, you would be able to do it? Isn't that possible? If that's possible, we have various things. So the real system works like this. We have a hierarchy of locks. We have local locks. We have global locks. We've gone into global locks once or twice in the three years. That's the extreme thing, like after 10 days, nobody knows how to get out of that set of blockers. But usually they are local locks. Teams are not very ready to actually pull back their changes. Because usually the way the integration suite works is some of the time when I do a change and something breaks, the right way of solving it is not to withdraw this code, but have somebody else, because we have exposed a problem and somebody else's code and that has to be fixed. And they don't have a test that catches it yet.  So the change could have occurred in product A, but product B could have the problem which needs to be fixed. So they would probably respond by adding a test that was missing in the first place, that within their interface exposes the same problem, then they'll go ahead and fix it. That's the reason we don't really recommend just blindly taking off the change. That's more optimal. It's okay for us to ship. So that's why the shipable build set, we don't have a clear cadence that every month we release. It's like four to six weeks. So we kind of make that flexible, but we don't compromise on the zero defective mentality. So if somebody says the entire thing, a particular product cluster has about 50,000 test cases automated at this moment, all of them have to pass. There's just no way of getting around it. And people have to keep adding test cases. That's one of the things where we keep raising the bar and stuff. So at a macro level, it really looks good. At the team level, it's all blood, sweat, and toil. It's the team. They do their self-pulsing. So we don't have managers or VPs checking and testing it. They're being given to kind of put that mindset. It's a good question. I would like to answer for our... That's the part I left when I talked about the people and process. So we had a fairly well-designed people aspect. We had some change agents teams. We had some experienced programmers who taught some of our QA engineers. Initially, when we moved to agile, not a lot of our test engineers were hired for coding. So they were excellent testers. They would do manual testing, but they were not just comfortable with writing JUnits or stuff. So after office hours, we really had these self-help groups where some of our managers and experienced guys actually did Java trainings. And they really helped out. So the teams basically helped each other out to build that capability. Or not being visible to the developers.  How do you do that? It's not that the entire backlog is not visible. What I meant was they had a view of the entire suite backlog. So the suite backlog would have like 200, 300 features, but only 10 or 15 of them would be relevant for a particular team. And at that time in a sprint, only two or three of them would be visible. So in order to control the work in progress, it's very tempting. There is this particular feature that I'm developing. I'm 50% done and I cannot move beyond because I have a dependency on somebody else. So this is a temptation that while I'm sitting idle, why don't I pull the next feature and start working on it? So we wanted to curb that stuff because at the system level, we wanted to keep a cap on WIP. So one of the ways of achieving it is you can't even see it unless you have the capacity to start pulling it. Only then you would be able to see it so we can pull it off the tool. So they see a portion of it. It's not like they don't see it at all. It's only the things that they can work on at that moment. And only after you're finished, you can start the next. It varies from team to team. Some critical teams basically that are core platform teams, they would work at around 70, 80% capacity. Others would vary between 40 to 50% but then as a team, we had a huge history of technical debt. So the teams which have spare capacity would really start building those things. So do those, you know, writing those test harnesses, making the framework better, and those kind of technical debt addressing activities would be carried on by them. So everybody was fairly, you know, the utilization was also there but not in the conventional sense. They're planning for two weeks? Yes. So it'd be like two hours. They're co-ordinated. They would do this. They would plan for the two weeks. Yes. And they would have their own retrospective. That's where they do their own experiments on how to do things. Yes. It's done by the teams themselves. And they would post their reports on the map. So that way everybody in the company, from the top person to the... even somebody in a different location and working on a different product could just go and look at this particular team, how they are doing. That way they can use this as an input to your planning. It's all there on a common wiki in the internet web. So everything is transparent.  You're talking about the demo or the retrospective? The demo would be done by the team, and it would be done to the product owner. Yes. A multi-mistake one. For example, if it's a core team, there will be other downstream teams that would consume that. So they will attend these retrospectives. And they will also... because they will have to start writing that as cases of the other. Not retrospective. Yes. We kind of use that... reviews are generally called retrospectives. Okay. But we do go. This is a technical part, and this is a process aspect. But you're... Yes, I'll upload it on Slideshare. Right away. And in fact, there's also an experience report that is published along with it. And in fact, maybe I also thought the people aspect I'll probably write a couple of block pieces just to explain how we actually went about that. There's a lot of tooling behind the scenes here. Does that... Like you built that yourself? We built some of it. We bought some tools. We had to standardize on certain tools. But there's a lot of homegrown tools out there for various aspects. Thank you very much. Thank you. They would have their own retrospective. That's where they do their own experiments on how to do things. Yes. It's done by the teams themselves. And they would post their reports on the... So that way, everybody in the company from the top person to the... even somebody in a different location and working on a different product could just go and look at this particular team, how they are doing. That way, they can use this as an input to your planning. It's all there on a common wiki in the internet web. So everything is transparent.  You're talking about the demo of the retrospective. The demo would be done by the team and it will be done to the product. Yes. Yes, multiple stakeholders. For example, if it's a core team, there will be other downstream teams that would consume that. So they will attend these retrospectives. And they will also... because they will have to start writing that as cases of the other. We kind of use that. Reviews are generally called retrospectives. But we do both. There's a technical part and there's a process aspect that... Yes, I'll upload it on Slideshare right away. And in fact, there's also an experience report that is published along with it. And in fact, maybe I also thought the people aspect... I'll probably write a couple of block pieces just to explain how we actually went about that. There's a lot of tooling behind the scenes here. Is that like to build that yourself? We built some of it. We bought some tools. We had to standardize on certain tools. But there's a lot of homegrown tools also for various aspects. Thank you very much. Thank you.


qualification or some type of report other than a standard unqualified report. Auditor, not independent, happens when auditor has some form of prohibited relationship with the entity. So independence is going to be a key component when we're thinking about putting this items together, the audit together. It needs to be independent specifically in terms of the relationship of the auditor and the client. In other words, independence isn't just something typically that will be independence in the way we conduct the audit. We also want to have appearance of independent because remember that the audit is is geared towards an independent third party. So if someone has some relation with someone in the in the organization that's significant, even if they even if they conducted the audit in an independent fashion, that the appearance is not independent. So that could cause some type of difference or some types of qualification independence is kind of is a big deal within the auditing process. So then what would we do about it? What would happen if there was a scope limitation? Well, if there's a scope limitation, we'd have a qualified opinion or some disclaimer of opinion, right? If it was a scope limitation, we could say, Hey, there's just one piece that we couldn't audit. And therefore, we're gonna have this qualification that we couldn't audit that one piece and tell the reader that. However, if it's a large piece, if it's very significant, then we're just gonna have to say, Hey, we couldn't we couldn't complete the audit to our satisfaction. Therefore, we have to issue a disclaimer opinion given the scope limitation, not in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles, we would have a qualified opinion or an adverse opinion. So again, it depends on on the degree here. If there's one thing that wasn't in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles, and we could say, Hey, management recorded it this way possibly and maybe they have some reason for doing that. Although we believe it's a deviation from generally accepted accounting principles, we may say, Hey, this component is a deviation from generally accepted accounting principles, we believe. And the rest of the financial statements according to our testing is in conformity with financials accounting principles, we might have something like that. Or if there's a if there's a significant deviation, of course, we can't give an opinion that the financial statements and in like, that's pervasive through the through the through the financial statements, we can't give an opinion that the financial statements are in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles when they are not, and therefore would have to issue an adverse opinion, which is basically like the worst type of opinion, auditor not independent. If the auditor is not independent, then we'd have to have a disclaimer of opinion, because the auditor can't basically give an opinion if they don't have that independence factor. So here's an example just a just an example of how the terminology would look on the disclaimer. Remember, what you want is basically to memorize the qualified audit report. And then you can kind of think through what would happen in some of these other types of deviations from that. In place of an opinion section, the auditor's report includes the section titles, disclaimer of opinion on the financial statements followed by the name of the company's who financial statements the auditor was engaged to audit and a statement identifying each financial statement that the auditor was engaged to audit. This is often followed by a basis for disclaimer of opinion section in place of a basis for opinion section. So an example might be something like this disclaimer of opinion on the financial statements, we were engaged to audit the accompanying balance sheet of the company as of the date and related statements of income and cash flows as described in the following paragraph, because the company did not take physical inventory and were not able to apply other auditing procedures to satisfy ourselves as to inventory quantities and the cost of property and equipment. We were not able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion on the financial statements and we do not express an opinion on these financial statements. So notice we're just basically saying, you know, we were engaged, we have this problem that happened, we're not able to give an opinion on the financial statements because of it. The company did not make a count of physical inventory in the year stated in the accompanying financial statements at 28 million as of the date. Further evidence supporting the cost of property and equipment acquired prior to date is no longer available. The company's records do not permit the application of other auditing procedures to inventories or property plant and equipment basis for disclaimer of opinion. These financial statements are the responsibility of companies management. We are public accounting firm registered with the company accounting oversight board United States PCA OB and are required to be independent with respect to the company in accordance with the US securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the securities and exchange commission the PCA OB. Here's an example of a type of deviations or type of alterations of the standard unqualified report that may happen if there's a scope limitation. So now we have a qualification qualified report as opposed to unqualified. Again, think about the unqualified report and then think about the the deviation that would happen for the qualification standard wording for the opinion paragraph except that a reference to the scope limitation is made example in our opinion except for the effects of such adjustments if any as might have been determined to be necessary. Had we been able to examine evidence regarding the foreign affiliate and earnings, the financial statement present fairly in all material respects and so on and so forth. So once again, we have in our opinion and then this qualification given the fact that we have a scope limitation, we couldn't get to this information and therefore couldn't audit it. What we did audit this is my paraphrasing of this by the way, what we did audit looks like it's in conformity. We believe we have evidence to back up our assumption that it is in conformity with generally accepted accounting principles. We weren't able to get the evidence with regards to this item. And then a paragraph following the opinion paragraph will describe the basis for departure from the unqualified opinion. We were unable to obtain an audited financial statement supporting the company's investments in foreign affiliates stated at 10 million at date, or its equity in earnings of that affiliate of one million, which is included in net income for the years then ended, as described in note seven to the financial statements. So obviously we'll refer to the note. The note will give more information on this, but it's significant enough for us to put it in the audit report here. We were also not able to satisfy ourselves as to the carrying value of the investments in the foreign affiliate or the equity in its earnings by other auditing procedures.


So one thing that we don't really think about or consider very much is lighting. Lighting in the studio, lighting for art. For a long time I had a single studio desk and that required me to have like one studio light. So I bought this with the purpose of filming. That's this guy right here. So if you don't know, it's the newer 18 inch ring light and I've had it for probably four or five years now. No problems with it. It's great. It plugs into the wall. It's on its own like tripod so it stands on its own and that extends really tall or really small. These are typically used for filming. If I turn it on, you can see it's pretty bright. It actually has a dimmer so it can get brighter and darker. It comes with its own carry case and it actually came with orange rings to go on the outside as well so like these things actually pop off just like that. And it's like an actual light in there, light bar. So the idea of the ring is that you can like slide your camera in here or like slide this on the top of your camera and then go to town because it rings around whatever you're shooting film-wise or video-wise. But it works really great just as a general purpose light because it's so bright. I mean technically you could put your arms through it and work on things like right here and it would light them completely. And so what I would recommend you having this in your studio is not just for actual paint lighting, also for photography. So if you finish a piece, this is the light I use to light all of my photographs and my photographs turn out pretty sweet. And so you don't need like a crazy softbox setup or anything. So here's currently the painting process. But if I just slide it in here and I can tip it, it gives pretty good lighting on whatever you're working on. It lights up that workstation pretty well. It's just really easy to move around and maneuver. The one thing that it does do is it shows up rings on your glasses. It also shows rings in your eyes, which I don't love the ring in your eye look. I mean it works. I could recommend this light to anyone who's doing art, anyone who's doing film, photography, anything. It's pretty amazing. I use it for literally everything. And the other piece of studio light that I use is this daylight. The daylight is actually a depression light. So I was gifted it when I lived in a dark basement suite. So it's supposed to cheer you up. It has a light setting and a bright setting.  I don't really get that from it. But it definitely, it illuminates this whole system. You can see what I'm working on really clearly. So of course I am right-handed, so I need light on the left so that I don't shadow anything. The only thing I find as painting is sometimes it may be beneficial to have a second light coming in from the other side just to see my paint work better. But for sculpting, this works great. So that's another good one. It's kind of big and bulky though. And it has a really big base that it stands on, which is a bit of a pain. You really don't have to get that fancy with it if you just want to use a desk lamp or whatever. That's cool too. But the ring light is really awesome because it does work for that multi-purpose filming, photography, and artwork studio lighting so that you never struggle with lighting again. It's the best thing I've bought, and I use it in all of my videos, in all of my filming, all of my photography. Everything that I do now involves the very light. So yeah, I would highly recommend getting that if you don't have a good studio lighting setup already. The link to the light is in the description below. And I'm linking the one that comes with the stand and the carrying case because those are also really awesome and beneficial. The carrying case was very helpful in my move. The stand you need for sure. Thank you so much for watching, and this has been DJB Studios, and definitely get yourself a ring light. It'll change your life.


The Sumi Naga tribe are the major ethnic group among Nagas in Nagaland, India. Dance is the mode of communication through body language, face expression and gesture of hand. The tradition of Sumi Naga dance has certain distinctive characteristics like aggressive movements, strong rhythmic folk music and beat. Mostly this folk dance illustrates the stories of bravery, power, courage and strength.


Alison, Alison and Steve have been continual presence at Max Doc over the last nine years. And not always able to be here in person every year, but certainly here in spirit. The love and support that Alison and Steve both show for Max Doc means the world to me. Thank you so much. I am proud to introduce everyone to Alison Sheridan as our love presenter for Sunday. How do dogs? How many microphones am I on? Am I on? You hear there? Am I on there? No, you've got to get you on. There's one presenter that doesn't need a mic. We got it? Hello? I think I'm on now. There we go. Mike and Barry were the first two people Steve and I told we were having a grandchild because it was the date of Max Doc and we had to tell him we weren't going to be able to be here. If that tells you how much we love Max Doc, that was the first people we told. I sort of feel like everybody's already told my talk already, so I have really any questions. Learned by teaching. Maybe it's an obvious topic, but I thought it would be fun to go through a series of kind of disparate stories that I would loosely string into an agenda. Alright, he got it. Alright, let's bring it on up. Make it go. Let's see. I'm probably more comfortable clicking a button. There we go. Learned by teaching. So what I wanted to talk about was think about there's a lot of different ways you can learn to do things. A lot of people like to take classes and they like to have an instructor who stands up and spoon feeds him the information and that's a great way to learn, but it isn't how I like to learn. People like to read online tutorials and I'm really glad people like to read online tutorials because I write online tutorials, so I really want you to keep doing that. You know, when Rachel was talking about stop consuming so much and produce, no, do not listen to her. I need consumers. I don't want you all producing just to go back and read and listen to what I'm doing here. People like to watch videos to learn and you could watch YouTube, of course, but you probably really want to watch ScreenCast Online. Big disclaimer, I work for ScreenCast Online as well. So videos are a great way to learn, but I actually don't learn that way either. There are some people out there. Anybody out here read manuals? I've heard about that, but it's just not my way. It's too slow. I want to get in and start doing stuff and then get stuck. That's kind of more my strategy. So one of the things that, an example, I write blog posts that are full tutorials of things that I know how to do. And it might be just introducing you to a new app and the way a new app works and I'll go through and explain step by step how it works. They're really in depth. You've noticed I talk a lot? I write a lot. I write about 5,000 words a week. But then the other thing I do is that same content is what you hear on my podcast. And I remember somebody telling me once, why do you let people have the blog posts if that's what you're going to talk about on your podcast? They're going to read instead of listen. And I said, oh gosh, you're right. It'd be terrible if they got the content the way they wanted it. I should stop doing that right away. So I do both. So you can consume it any way you want and pick and choose what you want to listen to or what you want to read and you get both for the same price free. And I thought I'd go through an example of how I learned in order to put stuff onto the podcast. So my friend Pat Dengler, a good friend of Steve Sobo's here, she sent me a link to this app called Shutter. And it's a screenshot app. Well, I've got about 12 screenshot apps. I'm addicted to screenshot apps. I love screenshot apps. And I was really enamored with CleanShotX. But she said, no, no, no. Try this one. At the time it was free, it is now the grand total of $8. Not per month, not per year. $8. Not much this app costs. And I thought, well, how good could that be? It's free at the time. You know, I've had, ah, that's not going to be very good. But I thought, I'll go take a look at it. The first thing I do is I push all the buttons and just go around push because again, I don't read the manual. I don't want to know how to do it. I want to just push all the buttons and see what it does. And I'll give you an example here and you don't need to be able to read what's up on screen there. But that's an example of what CleanShotX looks like. And there's a row of icons across the top. And I take a look at that and I go, well, I see a save icon, a copy icon, a pen. That's all pretty obvious. But the next button over is a piece of paper with like six braille dots on either side. Wonder what that is? And you click it and it turns out it's how you drag images out of it right into another document. Well, that's kind of cool. And then I go, well, the next button, what is it? It's an arrow. So it sort of looks like a selection tool, but it's also got like a little crop symbol. What does that do? Well, it turns out it selects and it crops. And that's an unusual way to do a tool. As I keep going across, you see an arrow. Well, it's going to put an arrow in T. It's going to be a text. I don't care about those. But the next one over says one, two, above a line with like two vertical lines next to it. What does that do? It turns out it's a measurement tool. If you hold down the one key and you drag your cursor around, it tells you the horizontal distance between any two elements on that screenshot. So somehow, and there's probably somebody real smart here who knows how it does this, but somehow it's actually looking at the images and the text on screen. It can measure the distance in pixels. And so if you're a designer that's trying to do layout, it can be really, really helpful. You hold down the two, it does vertical distance. So anyway, I'm just sitting there banging at these buttons, just poking them to see what they do. So now at this point in the process, I need to take a critical eye and really look at this and see whether, is this something I'm going to want to do a review of? I'm going to want to teach how to use. So my first question is, does it solve a real problem? And Kershyn stole my line there, but yes, that is the line I always like to ask. What kind of problem does this solve? If it doesn't solve a problem, then don't go talk about it. Now the problem can be I'm bored and I want to be entertained. Like I did a review on an app called Clack. Anybody heard of that? It's a menu bar app, and its whole job is to make your keyboard sound like a clicky keyboard. I love this app. I love it. It makes me happy every day. It's the dumbest thing, but it makes me happy. So that solved a real problem. I might ask, is it unique? Is it actually going to do something that I can't do any other way? And you look at Shutter, well not really, right? Because I can do my Clean Shot X. I got all these other ways to take screenshots and annotate them. But maybe it's like something else, but it's better. Or in this case with Shutter, the conclusion I came to was it wasn't better. It was just different. And it was fun. And it was playful. And I really really liked it. So that actually made the cut in that one. So I don't bother doing the review unless it meets that criteria. So one thing I never do, people say, well, you should tell us about apps that are bad. So we don't accidentally buy them. And I say, that doesn't sound very joyful at all. I'm not interested in that. And I'm not going to slam somebody. If I do find a bad app, by the way, I write to the developer and I say, I have a few suggestions for improvement. If it's really bad, I don't bother. But if it's like, oh, you were so close, but you missed the marg. So at this point in my learning, I start digging a little deeper. It's time to just really dig into the app and get into it. So somebody's at the door. So here's another shot of Clean Shot X. And when I was sorry, I keep getting those two mixed up, Shutter. And when I clicked on the blur tool, I noticed at the top it says blur, blur text, erase, and erase text. What is this sorcery? So I selected a region and you can see that there's still a little gear there under the region I've selected, but the text is gone. So right away, I mean, that's eight bucks, right? I mean, to be able to do that. So obfuscating information that's private that you don't want to have shown that you can do blur, you can do the regular kind of blur and it pixelates it and things like that. But to be able to just erase the text and leave the graphics, that's magic right there. But when I get to this point, now it's time to start writing. So what I'll be doing is I'll writing, you know, use the blur tool to select an area, blah, blah, blah, and I'll actually start to write it out at this point in the process. The next thing I do is I just start poking all the buttons and system in the settings and to be honest, I don't poke every button. I may look at it and go, oh, that sounds too hard. So one of the things Shodder does that's really cool is it does scrolling screenshots and a couple of apps do that. But what this one does when you select the region, it auto scrolls. So you don't have to guess like how fast to go, which is really cool. But it has an option here, it says scrolling screenshot max height 20,000 pixels. I have no idea what would happen if I change that to 10. No idea. Never poke that button just something would happen. I don't know if it gets shorter. Does it make it wider? I don't know what it does. So after I've done poking all the buttons invariably I'm stuck. I find something I don't understand. So when I get baffled, I've got something, I've got to figure something out. How does this button work? What am I supposed to do? At this point, I do the unthinkable. I look at the user manual. But I only really like user manuals where they're very specific and great. And I put up the Gold Standard, Audio Hijack from, well, Rogue Amoeba in general is the Gold Standard of basically everything. And their user manuals are spectacular. The best thing in there is there's a search box. So I could search for the thing I want so I don't have to read the manual, which is what I really don't want to do. But they also give great screenshots and that like, have you ever used, oh there's a tool, Dave loves this one, it's a Pixelmator I think.  What's it look like? And there were like no tool tips back then. There might be now but the user manual is horrible on that. But in this one it's really, really good. But invariably, I don't get to the point where I actually understand how do you use something. So what I do is I contact the vendor, the developer. And you would be amazed how much developers actually like to write back to you about their tools if you approach them correctly.  This doesn't make any sense to me. And I always tell them, I hope it's a mistake I'm making because it's easier to fix me than it is to fix software. So if I tell them that then they're like, oh yeah, well you know what you could do is this. And every once in a while you get somebody who's snarky and gives you a snarky answer and that's good to do. But what's fun is you start to get to know them.  You know, be playful when you write to them because they can help you and make your life easier and you can make them happier. You know, start by telling them all the stuff you love about their software. In fact put that in the title and then put the part you're mad about inside there. And if you bother them long enough sometimes you get an app like yeah, feeder from a reinvented software. This guy named Steve Harris.  And I ask him a lot of questions so for the people who can't read it from here, in his about me page for feeder it says, thanks to Allison Sheridan for use of her feed and screenshots and for being generally annoying. I had an opportunity, Steve and I had an opportunity to go to England to meet up with Don McAllister and he did a tweet up in Liverpool.  He was hilarious and I'm talking to him before he left. I said, God, it means so much to me that you drove four hours just to meet you or to meet me and he goes, no, I came to meet Don. Actually, I wish Adam Christensen was still here because he's the one who pointed this out to me. It was up there for two years before I ever noticed it. Steve never told me. So it works. Just get to know people. They're people and they're happy to talk about the stuff they've learned and what they've got to tell you about the tool. Now if I really want to learn something, I sign up to do a screencast online tutorial. There is no better way to learn a tool than to have to demonstrate a tool. That's where you realize that you've been kind of skipping over some parts and just using the parts you know about the screencast online tutorial, you really need to do it in depth because people pay for this service. It's a podcast but you subscribe to this because you're learning stuff. It's a tutorial service. So you can't just do a half big job when you're selling something to people if they're actually paying for the content. So I got to tell you, I did one on Retrobatch which is a really cool tool for image manipulation. Super fun automation stuff and doing the video for screencast was way, way, way, way, way, way harder than it was to do the blog post and talk about it on the show. Because I have to be able to practice it so many times so that I can fluidly go from step to step. Seriously, you can't hand wave.  Once you've laid that down on tape, you have to keep going. So when I want to learn it really well, I'll sign up to do a tutorial. And the thing that really brought it home to me thinking about learn by teaching was that if I do a screencast online tutorial on something I already know how to use, I learn it so much better. Audio Hijack is a tool that is just a central of my workflow on doing the podcast. I'm using it all day every day. I couldn't believe how much I learned by teaching it on screencast online, even though I've been using the tool forever. This is a mind map that I did a couple years ago. I did a mind mapping tutorial which I thought. Yeah, it's on my thoughts. It's a great mind mapping app. And what I start doing to do the videos is I start taking notes in just little bubbles and then I start you can rearrange them real easily to tell the story in the way you want to go. Because I like to start my tutorials with, why do you care? Am I ever going to need this? Because I figure I've got about 20 seconds for somebody to go, I don't care about that. That's a banking app. I don't have any money. Whatever it is. I got to catch them. I got to give them a hook. So I work on how to tell the story to get them to go, oh well I might do that someday. I might try that. And so I really work hard to get a story in a cohesive order. And one of the other things you have to figure out when you're teaching it is where do you teach the preferences or the settings for a given application. Because you can bore the heck out of people if you started settings. But a lot of tools, you have to starting settings. And ShotR was a good example. If you didn't set things up in settings you couldn't actually use the tool well. So you have to figure out where do you feed it in. Usually I try to make it at the tail end. Is the end the amuse-bouche? No, that's the middle. Anyway, dessert is where I usually put that in. But sometimes you got to put it in the right place. So I use a mind map to help me learn. And I just, I could not believe how much I learned about audio hijack when I did that tutorial. New story. I'm really interested in accessibility.  The people with challenges, man they get some of the coolest stuff. And one of the things I wanted to learn was voiceover which is the built-in screen speaking tool for the blind in macOS and iOS. And I was really interested in this. From a little kid I've always been interested in Braille and things. For some reason Braille just really blew my dress up. I was excited about learning about it. So I had played around in voiceover and I just, I couldn't get the hang of it. I just, you know, I would play with it a little bit. I would just kind of shy away from it. So in a moment of madness I volunteered to do a presentation at MacStock blindfolded. And I love what Don McConn... Sorry, Mac Roll, what'd I say? MacStock. Yeah, no, I'm never doing this again. I am never doing this again. This was the hardest thing I've ever done. Oh yeah, he just goes, yeah. 2024? You were there? Oh, okay, yeah. It was 2012. There we go. No, he just said in... Before I have to do this talk. Oh my gosh, now I don't have enough time to get ready to do it because that was really, really hard. It turns out the iPhone's actually not that hard to use in voiceover because you've got this constrained area. It's only this big. You can't be that far off. And it's always in a little grid. The back button in almost every app is always in the upper left. And the APIs that Apple gives you in developing tend to make it automatic to label the buttons. But when you go over the Mac side, it's free range. I mean, you don't know where anything is on the page. You don't know what window you've got in front. Don't even get me started on how the web is to navigate because every developer is designing everything differently. So I think I rocked the iOS part. I crashed and burned when I did the Mac part. How many people know the rule? Never change anything in your presentation at the last minute? I moved my presentation to the desktop right before I went on stage. And I got it stuck to me. And it was like I was like this. I was going around in a circle with this thing stuck to my foot and everybody could see that I was everywhere I went the presentation was just following me around on screen. But I didn't know I actually had to take the blindfold off and I was crushed because I had worked so hard to do it perfectly. I'd practiced it a thousand times and I didn't get it right. But what I liked was the audience said to me afterwards they said, no, no, you showed us how hard it is. If that's what you were trying to teach you definitely got that message across to us.  The cool thing about podcasting is blind people can listen, right? So all these blind people listen to my podcast and I talk about accessibility in the middle of mainstream podcasting. And so I have a lot of blind friends and so I enlisted them all. How do you do this? How do you do this? And I remember I called a shy who's a blind audio engineer who has a studio out in New York. And I called him up and I said, do you think I can really do this? And he goes, oh Allison, it's not that bad. It's great.   And he says, yeah, I know, right? It's really hard. Why did you do that? He says, why didn't think you'd do it if I told you how hard it was.  I enjoyed doing it. Again, I was crushed that I didn't just nail the whole thing but the audience was very nice. I believe you guys were very forgiving afterwards. But learning that skill because I did that tutorial is now what I can do is I can test apps for accessibility. So I try to remember every time. I don't remember every time. But when I'm going through an app, about three cores of the way through I'll go, ooh, I wonder if it's accessible. And I know enough to stumble my way around to tell you if it's inaccessible. I can't tell you if it's great but I can tell you if like, nope, nothing's labeled here or you can't navigate this at all. I came across an app recently that I won't call out but they came out with a new version and the old version was accessible and the new version isn't. Like, nothing was labeled. Couldn't navigate. I mean, train wreck bad. And I wrote to the developer and I got an email back in 17 minutes and the guy said I didn't do it before the new version and I'm going to work on it now. I take personal responsibility and I'm ashamed that I didn't do it right. Now, that's almost as good as if you'd done it right. This tool makes me real. Actually, in case you know anybody Bear is the software. Bear 1.0, Bear 2.0. If you know anybody blind, do not let them upgrade to Bear 2.0 because you can't go backwards either. So until they get it built in, they literally can't use the tool. So that was rough. I also found out recently that Mac Tracker Mac Tracker is not accessible. It's just a table. But on the Mac you can't use it at all. There used to be a web version but that's gone. But the iOS version is pretty good. It's not bad. That's what I'm talking about. On iOS stuff is a lot easier to be accessible. But I use this all the time and what I was able to do was write a tutorial for all y'all to learn how to do it. I walk you through. Okay, hold down these buttons, do this arrow key and I give an example of how to walk through and try to do it. And actually Mac Tracker is the one I call out in there because I was really surprised that it was it. It's been around for 140 years. I thought it would have been. Older than the Mac. Older than the Mac. Yeah, it's got all the iOS stuff in there too. So, new story. Steve and I got solar panels and then shortly after we had solar panels installed we had a whole home battery system put in. And we found that a lot of people are interested in the topic. They want to know and they're usually like, oh, it's never going to pay off, is it? Well, batteries aren't for us. But the solar panels will in seven years. But we had a lot of people asking questions. How does it work? How do you manage it? What happens? What are the different scenarios? And we started thinking about, well, okay, if the sun is out and the grid is down, what can I use in my house off the battery? Because when you get the battery you get kind of a budget of, I don't know, amps or watts or kilowatts or something. Steve would tell me. He's a double EM and ME. And so you have to decide what circuits are going to go on the backup battery. In our house our electric vehicle charger can't be on the battery and our oven can't be on the battery. So those two are off. But everything else in our house can be run off the battery. Well, we started getting these questions about how it worked. And so one of the tools I used to teach is I create diagrams. I'm always giving Dave a hard time. I'm always saying, hey, could you diagram that for me? I'd really like to see that. So you don't have to understand anything on here. This is just a representative of what we do. We probably made, what, 25 versions of this, Steve? I think as we went through, we made like 25 versions of this because we couldn't figure it out. We realized we didn't understand how it worked. So what this, if you could see it and if you cared, it tells you what happens when the grid is on and the grid is off. Is the sun out? Is it nighttime? How much battery is left? How does the energy flow? The energy always flows to your house first no matter what. And then it tries to full the battery and then if it's got excess it sends it back to the grid. But if the power is out, if the grid is out, you actually, we can't use our oven or our cars. However, well, we can use the cars. We just can't charge them. However, we discovered in drawing this diagram that if the grid was up we could use the battery power and keep from using grid power. We're like, whoa, that's interesting. But we figured it out. We learned it because we did this blog post and this diagram and wanted to teach how it worked. So that was a really great example of learning by teaching because we learned something we actually didn't know. I also test drove this on some friends of mine who are real smart but know nothing about this. And their questions were really invaluable because they're like, well, what's that line mean? Oh, if I made it dotted, maybe that would help. So I love doing diagrams. This is done with the free diagrams.net is a website. You can also download it locally and it's got a different name but I won't confuse you with that. Really good free diagraming tool. I use it all the time. New story. So we do my show live on Sunday night. Steve produces it and I'm the on air talent as it were. But what it really is, it's not like Mac Geekab where you're actually getting to see the real show. You're seeing the making of the podcast. So I stop and start and chat with the audience and goof around and they pay no attention to me in the chat room at all. Marty, I'm looking at you. Where's Marty? Yeah, that's Drunk Nick Nolte in our chat room. He's definitely trying. Oh, and John, where's NASA night? He's really annoying. Did John Lee? Oh, there he is. I can just get a creepy feeling when he looks at him. So he's always making snarky comments. But anyway, these people and Jill is on team Allison so she's one of the good ones. There's Jill. She says she learned how to podcast by watching my live show. The setup of this is somewhat complex because we're piping a lot of different things around. So again, I diagrammed it to make sure I learned how it worked. So at the top you can see that my audio and my video both go into Streamyard, which goes to YouTube for the video, but also my recording software called Hindenburg, which gets a lot of laughs every time you say, you expected that would work out well. It's actually a great application. But anyway, I need to learn it better so I really need to do a screencast online tutorial about it because I don't know how it all works. I taught Jill how to podcast. She's teaching me how to use Hindenburg because you know what she does? She reads the manual. I was like, Jill, how do you do this? I don't know. She'll help me. That was another thing I was going to put in here is just get friends of yours to read the manual and tell you how to do stuff. It's a great way to learn. You just have to find the right people. But separately we pipe Steve in and we've got the video and audio going different places and Discord has the audio but not the video and so piping all of that all around is difficult. So I keep diagramming and I put down all the settings. This is Audio Hijack and Loopback and like I've got a button there important to be unchecked. I can't hear the audio from Hindenburg if I forget that one button and I forget that button. Sometimes it gets flipped back so I diagram that and I took diagrams of what the way Hindenburg is set up and the way Streamyard is set up and once I've done these diagrams that in the heat of the moment we're trying to get ready. It's three minutes to five and man, there's heck to pay if I don't start at five o'clock on Sunday nights because that's what time we start. If anything goes wrong I can just flip up these charts and go, oh, okay, there's the button. I didn't check that. I didn't check that. Something got flipped the wrong way. So I find diagramming things to be a really good way to document it, learn it and then you have it as a resource to go back to when things go wrong. I used to use a different piece of software that had literally a 15 page document to go through things. Don't use it anymore and I'm so happy we're on Streamyard. So much simpler. Now I'm going to flip over to doing examples from other people. I wanted to learn to program when I got out of, when I retired. I thought that would be fun. So I talked to a buddy of mine who was a programmer and I said, I want you to teach me to program. He says, I'll get you a book. I don't want to read a book anymore and I want to read a manual so I'm not going to learn that way. So I was talking to Bart Buchatz out of Ireland who's a programmer, cis-admin, security specialist, and he does a segment called Security Bits on my regular podcast, the no-silla cast. And he said, well, I'll teach you. What if we do it in an audio podcast? That sounds like a really silly idea. An audio podcast to learn programming. Imagine reading shell scripting out loud. You will hear that, but that's a dense language. But what he does is he writes perfect tutorial show notes. So you can choose not to listen to us at all. You can read his tutorials and go along. Or it's even better if you hear him explain it.  Can you repeat that? I don't get it. And he says, that's where you make me step back and I have to explain it better. And that's the tiny contribution I make other than producing the show. But the interesting thing was just a couple of weeks ago, he told me, like I said, we're doing the shell scripting section. He said, Allison, what you don't understand is I am one week ahead of the class understanding this. I am learning as I'm going. So he's been doing shell scripting forever. But he knows that if he has to teach it, and I'm in the front row and I'm going to ask, he said, you're going to ask the wrong question. I said, I would say I'm going to ask the right question. But that can really throw him off his game. If he, he's not like me. He's not just going to make something up. He has to, he's like all factual and writing stuff. And so he tells the exact story. He has to know exactly how it works in order to teach the class. And so he's been learning more and more about bash programming that he ever knew before. A funny thing about this show is I was just telling somebody over here today, the people who take this class are mostly programmers. People who already know. And they end up going back to try to refresh their memory and get deeper into it. Which is really depressing for me because I'm the junior programmer going, I don't know anything. And these people are like, well, I've been doing this for 38 years and I just learned this. But the good thing is I have a whole bunch of people to help me with my programming. So it's good for me too. Last example, my friend Linda was just telling me a story. She wanted to get this teaching job and it was like earth sciences, something like that that she was going to teach. And in the interview they asked her, do you know what the tectonic plates are? And she says, yeah, those are those dishes I keep in the top of my cabinet for company. And she said they thought she was just being flippant because it was such an obvious question. I had no idea what the tectonic plates were. But she faked her way through by being funny. But what she said was she was one week ahead of the class, just like Bart, reading the book, understanding it and then being able to teach it to the class. Because of course they're probably not reading the book. But it was just another great example that I learned by teaching. She said, I know all about the tectonic plates now because I had to teach the class. The final thing I wanted to say is that as a result of the work that I've done to teach other people, I have over 3,200 blog posts. So when I need to know something and I go out and I Google it, I cannot tell you how many times the answer is at podfeat.com. And I know it's because I'm logged in as me for a long time. I thought, oh, I'm famous. But then I logged out of Google and it was not nearly as exciting. But I stay logged into Google. I can always find the answer because it's at podfeat.com. And it's like, well, I knew how to do that at one point, huh? Well, that's good. It's in here. I'll just figure it out. So I learned by teaching and then I got documentation of that. And then I can go back and I can learn it for myself. So learn it again because memory is bad. So any questions? You learned everything. See, everybody wrecked my topic ahead of time. They told you all the answers. Come on up, Mike. Mike's following me. That one may not be on. I've now learned that I should pay attention to who's carrying the microphone. Wilson, in 3200 blog posts, what was the hardest thing that you had to learn? What was the one that almost broke you when you sat down to try to figure it out? That's got to be voiceover. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, voiceover was... I probably worked on that for like a good six months where it maybe take me a couple of weeks to write one of my regular blog posts or a week and a half, something like that, to build it out. Learning how to use voiceover was really, really challenging. And especially on the Mac, I forget what the keystroke is, but you can bring up the help menu and it's maybe 20 things long, but you drill into each one and there's 20 things below that and 20 things below that. I am a mere novice at using it and I've been trying to learn it for years. So, yeah, that was the biggest one. I'm trying to think of anything else. What was the most fun one if you were going to recommend one of the most to somebody who'd never listened to the show before? Wow. Well, there's an interview I did. Can I go sideways and ask me, what does my shirt mean? Does anybody know what my shirt is? Oh, Steve says, what is my shirt mean? I'll give you a hint. SO2 is my favorite star. A woman named Dr. Andrea Gez is an astrophysicist up at UCLA and she studied the center of our galaxy and determined that this little star, SO2, has a 16-year orbit around the center of the galaxy and it proved that because she was able to map the entire orbit of that star that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. She is the fourth woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in physics. For women total in history, there's two alive right now. It's the first time there's been two alive and I got an interview with her on my show. I interviewed a Nobel Prize winning physicist. I really should have done a mic drop. I was just like, I'm not going to beat that. But I do want to tell you, it is really accessible. It is she is so good at explaining it. Like a couple times I threw an analogies and she brought it down to an even simpler analogy than the way I was going to explain it. Now I did have the advantage of I had heard her speak four times on the same topic. So here's a little secret, how I do my interviews. People go, wow, you're such a great interviewer. I take notes from, or I can get the people to write it so I know what question they want to answer before I ask it. So I had a list of things to ask that I knew exactly what she was going to say next. And that really helped me put it together. I think I saw a question over here. Wait, wait, microphone. I was going to ask if you asked her what a tectonic plate was. Oh, the snarky comment from Ron in the audience was, did I ask her what a tectonic plate was? She would probably know. She's incredibly well rounded and awesome awesome person. She's absolutely delightful. She chooses to teach undergraduate astronomy. And I asked her in the interview, why? And she said, because I want to be seen by the men and women of that age group that I'm up here, you know, that I'm doing this. And she loves teaching so. All right, we have a question from not Charles, that's it. Did not say George. No. So most of this is involving learning initially, and especially learning by working with it and using the program. What did you say to do about retention for actually remembering all of the stuff that you remember? You go back to the 3200 blog post and you find the answer to the thing you can't remember how to do. My memory is definitely not my strongest suit. I don't, I really should have started keeping a tally to how many times Bart would say, Allison, I taught you that last time. Because it comes up a lot that I don't retain a lot of information. So once I've written it, it's like I've gotten it out and now I can go get it. I know that it's there. And to me it's sort of do you need to know the answer to everything in your physics textbook or do you need to be able to know where it is in your physics textbook, you know, to learn it. So it isn't a big concern of mine because I don't think I'm ever going to crack that code.   She studies, she calls herself Crusher of Dreams. She teaches, what she does in her research is they induce memories in people. So she can get a group of about 30 people, she can get over half of them in two weeks to tell a story of their childhood that never ever happened to them. She loves to mess with it. She goes in front of the ethics board all the time at her university. And why did I bring that up? My memory family. Oh, there we go. So she's had me read some, Alzheimer's is rampant in my family so I'm terrified of that. And there's been research that correlates, don't know any causation, that learning to do things that are really, really hard for you mentally has been correlated with not getting Alzheimer's.  Don't just get up to where you can play. Mary had a little lamb, you've got to be able to master that. And so that is one of the reasons I started programming is it's really hard for me. And whenever I'm like, bam, I head on the desk and I'm in frustration. I don't get it. I sit back and go, okay, it's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard it wouldn't be preserving your brain. So that's how I'm trying to do some retention. But see previous comment about Bart saying I told you that last week. Any other questions? Back here with Mike. And assistant Brian. So sort of related, do you have any sort of system or cue for the things that you want to learn or is the goal just always be learning something? That's a good question. I'm a little bit more of a just in time podcaster.  I haven't started writing this coming Sunday show. I don't know what's going to be in it. I've got a couple of ideas. But now I think it's just continuously learning and I think I just love learning tools. I just love learning applications. I love learning what they can do and finding out what they do. The really depressing thing is when you get like halfway through working on a screencast online tutorial and it was like, this app is not going to make it. I can't do it. It's not good enough. And to have to start over when you've got like a week and a half to go, that's brutal. Well, you know. And everybody who's worked for screencast online has hit that wall where you go, uh-oh! This is not going to happen. It's unstable in some way and it's not going to get it through. So yeah, I don't think far enough ahead. I'm pretty much just learning everything as I go. I do have that panic moment when J.F. says, okay, what are you going to do next time?  There definitely is not a Q. Yes? Rachel Smith has a question too. Oh, let's see where... We'll come over to you. We're good with that mic, right? Oh, sorry. That's good. So I think most poscasters know that consistency is key. What do you do when you get behind? And I mean, just a little bit behind on one episode, but kind of that perfectly you're just kind of missing production dates. I have not missed an episode in 18 years. And now, that comes with a caveat is that I have a little help from my friends. There are people in the audience here who have contributed to my show when I'm going to go on vacation or I'm going to go to MacStock and I knew I was going to lose the middle of this week the entire weekend and so that meant I had to get the show out by Wednesday and then this coming weekend was going to be more of a challenge because I don't get back into the office until Tuesday is I ask for people to make contributions to the show. So I definitely have help. Then what do you suggest to say your top three suggestions to keep your podcast, not necessarily your podcast, but anyone's podcast consistent? Have an obsessive personality that likes a streak. So if you're good at it with your Apple Watch, like once you've got an exercise streak going, you don't want to break it. If you can't get obsessed by that, I don't know that there's any hope for you. And now at this point, the whole audience is invested. Guys, we've got to keep the streak alive. Come on, give me some content. Everybody's like, okay, let's get the content in there because we don't want to break this streak. We don't want to be the ones to let it die. So that's probably the, I don't know how to make you an obsessive, you know, keeper of schedules, but I've just always been that way. I'm not, once I start doing something, I'm going to a hairdresser. I've been going over 25 years. I don't even like her. But I've been going for 25 years. What am I going to do? Stop? I mean, find a new one. I have the same mechanic for like 30, 40 years. I only had one mechanic until he actually passed away. And that's the only reason I bought a Tesla instead of a Honda. It was because I couldn't, I'd lost my mechanic. So yeah, no, be obsessive. That's my recommendation. Dave says have a production partner, but you have to have a production partner who is also committed to that. A lot of times partnerships, they don't work because you're dragging the other person along. I actually wasn't even talking about the two of you. I remember when Katie Sparks and David Floyd said they were going to do Mac Power users together, and I said, what did I say? Katie Sparks and David Floyd. So on that retention thing, George, anyway, when they said they wanted to do Mac Power users together, I just said no, don't do it. Because you're depending on another person. I never want to be dependent on somebody else to do it. But I got lucky with Bart. Bart is rock solid. Bart never misses.  Yeah, there are people, and Jill actually talks about that on her fabulous podcast, Start with Small Steps, is that if she commits to somebody else, like if she commits to a trainer, she'll work out. But without the trainer, she won't. So she has trouble committing to herself, but she's good at committing to somebody else. So if you are that kind of person, yeah, that would actually be a good way to go. Good shot, Dave. Is that because you're not good at this and you need people to help? Okay, that's good. Rachel, and then Jill coming out. Okay, Rachel. Alright, I have always been willing to teach, even when you don't know it, because I feel like a lot of people would not teach in this room. I can venture to guess. A lot of people in this room would not want to teach unless they've mastered it. So have you always been going to teach something and figure it out on the fly, or was there a point in which that changed for you and you were going to do that? So I think I would answer that question a little bit sideways is that a lot of people in my career tried to get me to care about something. You need to learn this and care about this. And I didn't. I worked in a systems engineering or a software engineering organization that wanted me to care about the interactive development environment they were working on and I didn't care. I do now, but I didn't then. And so learning that was not something I wanted to do. I have to care to learn it and be an independent podcaster. I get to pick. Nobody gets to tell me, but I have people all the time telling me, you should teach this. Screencast online is a good example. People will say recommend tools and it's like, I don't do online financial planning. I'm not going to do a financial app because I don't care. If I cared, I would take it on as a challenge. That's probably the delineation. I don't learn something from scratch like you said, like you described, unless I care. Because I want to learn it. Alright, Jill. I'm not that obsessive person, so I have to find ways of getting around it in part of the discussion. Because if I recorded my Thursday and edit it on Friday, that means I have to read the book on Monday and have my show notes ready on Tuesday. So I back everything up and so I use scheduling. So it can help me because I am not that obsessive person. And then you're right. I also know that when people depend on me it motivates me. And when I first started seeing a trainer, she says I will know when you don't exercise. And she said never tell me if that's true or not. She will take me exercise forever. You have to be willing to follow your own schedule, I guess. And I'm sure there's people who can manage to not do that. Knowing the live audience is coming on Sunday night, that is another thing that really helps. If I'm going to miss that, I mean I had to tell them I'm not going to be there this week. I'm really sorry, but we're going to skip over a week. I do the show early most of the time, every once in a while, a couple of days late, but I always keep like a mental balance of I'm not overly late, I haven't actually lapped myself and missed an episode or anything like that. But having that live audience there really helps me do the show. And you might think it sounds really bad to hear somebody read their blog post, but there's two things. I write the way I talk. So my blog posts are in my voice, so it comes out pretty naturally. But when I'm talking to an audience, I'm going like this and I'm telling stories.  And it doesn't matter, but the live audience is there. And like I said, John's paying no attention whatsoever. And it doesn't matter because I feel like somebody's out there listening. When I did it originally for a long, long time, more than a decade, I was just sitting by myself in front of a microphone and I'd sit there like this. And it's gotten a lot better, I think, since the live audience. It helps. Anything else? I'm probably out of time. Oh, 10.02. I'm out of time. Thank you very much.


folks. This is Tom O'Brien of TFNN. We go five days a week. We go seven hours a day. We go 24 hours a day on the internet at TFNN.com. Always remember, folks, whatever you think about, you bring about whatever you focus on grows. Hope everyone's having a great day, safe day. It's a TGIF, folks. Let's make it a great one. Be impeccable with your word. Replace fear with love. The human mind is like fertile ground with seeds that continually be implanted.  Your mind is only fertile for the words that come from love. Excuse me, folks. Mockin' wise! Let's take a look at it out here. We have the Dow Industries up $2.36. NASDAQ up $2.90. S&Ps up $0.65. Gold. Gold contract down $16.80. Trade into $2,054 an ounce. We get Sylvan out $0.43. $22.80 an ounce. Light sweet crude. Down to $1.75. $72.07 a barrel. Notes and bonds. Ten-year note. Down one full point. Plus seven ticks at $111.21. The third year off two points plus four ticks at $121.29. And $king dollar. $king dollar. Straighten up $845 ticks at $103.893. Euro 107. Yen 148. British Pound at $126.01 U.S. dollar. Our phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Give us a call, folks. I know what's going on in y'all world. In the world of the S&Ps, let's take a look at it. I'm going to go into the futures first because this is pretty spectacular we had happen. But this is the type of market we're in. We're in a momentum market, folks, that has huge momentum. So we take a look at this and what you're going to see is this. We had the jobs number come out this morning, wants the jobs number 300 plus. They were only looking for $170, $167. What that did is that that took the S&Ps from the $4984, $4984 all the way down to $4925. Bagged. Straight down. Guess what? Market shakes it off like nothing and we're at $4995. We go into the spies. We take a look at the spies. What you're going to see here is that you're over the highs. You're getting price spread out here. We're going to get some decent volume out here today. So bottom line, higher markets continue to come at us. We go into the NDX 100. We take a look at the NDX. Now, when we take a look at the NDX, this is pretty amazing. The strength, okay, is meta. Facebook is up 20%. Amazon is up 8%. You got, what is this? I'm not sure what that is. You got Datadog up 5%. Taking away from the chat of communications is down 16. You got Comcast off 2. We go back to meta for a second. Okay, this is, you talk about a move, man. This is absolutely amazing. So meta, you know, the low for the year is 167. The high is 485. Okay, this put $200 billion of market cap into meta. It turned around and put another $20 billion into Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth. He's number five out here. Pretty amazing. We go over to Amazon. We take a look at Amazon. This is performing also. You take a look at Amazon. This is a high for the year. 88 was the low. 172, which we're at right now, is the high. That baby went up. Okay, here, let's put this in a weekly because it's going to be ABC up. Yep. Yeah, nice ABC up going here. Okay, so let me see what we got here. You got 157. Yeah, 20. You got 30, 38, 40, 40, 78. Yeah, you're up at 180 or something, 185. Bottom line is it's going to go a lot higher because what you have here right now is that you get price and volume going with it inside of Amazon. The highs out here, 189 or 172. Now, what you also have with Amazon is this. So check this out. This is pretty wild. I'm sure Basos was looking at this the last time we was at the high. Is that, is this the one? Yeah, here it is. So Jeff Basos plans to sell 50 million shares over the next 12 months. He put this disclosure in today. Yeah, so the bottom line is that Basos wealth jumped 13 billion today puts him at five, gain 13 billion Fridays to put him at 5.7 billion. Well, how do you jump 13 billion normally 5.7 billion? That doesn't make any sense. Anyway, the bottom line is right behind Elon Musk, but he also they just they he just he just also filed that he's going to be selling 50 million shares in the next year, you know, gold, gold. Well, here, now, let's go to the note and bond market first, because you talk about high volatility. It's it's in space. And we're still on the other side of the rate cut, folks. That's the bottom line. And you'll be able to see it right here. So the 10 year, the 10 year bottom line, you know, this the ABC structure, potential ABC structure is still in place. Why? Because we did 3.2 3.5 million contracts on Wednesday. And you're pulling back with 2.5. You know, bottom line, this is this still wants higher price, fast, and furious on the way down. No doubt. If we go to the gold contract, because these are all in harmony with each other, meaning that if you get the rates going higher, gold goes lower, dollar goes higher. That being said, guess what, you only got down to 2044 today, a rejected lower price, you had 200,000 contracts traded and watch this, we do the same exercise here. And what you're going to see is that yesterday we went up with 250,000 contracts. And then you get into the dollar. Now, the dollar we don't have volume on, but what we have is that this is where it's been trading. And this right here is a last engulfing. Now, the way a last engulfing works with candlestick charting folks is this, is that first you had the uptrend, which we were uptrending since December. You had a consolidation going sideways. Then what happened out here this morning, it started lower. It's finished tremendously higher. We had the low of 102,901, we're almost up 1,000 ticks, we're up 876. Now, in order for this to, this patent to go to fruition, meaning it's a bearish patent on Monday would have to be down once again. Stay right there folks who are coming right back. Our phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. This is a market that will just shake anything off folks. It's a heavy momentum market to the upside. Stay right there. We're coming right back.


Let's see the review for lesson two. In lesson two we talked about energy intensity. You need to know what energy intensity is and you need to also know about this quadrillion BTUs. Quadrillion BTUs is 10 raised to 15 BTUs. Trillion is 12 and quadrillion is 15, 10 raised to 15. And the highlights of world energy consumption and United States energy consumption are given here. You need to know about that. There was a mistake on screen 14 of the lessons where when you put in what is the percentage of fossil fuels you put in 85% and it says wrong but that is 85% so just be aware of that. And you should also know in how to calculate doubling time. There was an equation that I'm going to provide you but that equation is 70 over rate of increase is gives you the doubling time. So there will be some numerical problems relating to this and basically it comes from the equation n equal to n0 e raised to RT. Okay so you need to know how to use this equation and calculate or project the energy demand in future and try to remember the differences between energy reserves and resources and how long each of these reserves last. Approximate numbers like you don't need to remember exact numbers but roughly what is the lifetime for coal oil and natural gas for both the United States and the world you don't have to remember about any other country. Pretty much those are the facts that you need to know for this chapter. I don't expect you to remember exact numbers statistics but you need to know the top ones like most of the petroleum is used for transportation. Most of the coal is used to generate electricity. You don't need to remember how much but you know the majority or majority of or most of the oil is used for transportation. And those kinds of you know details like you know which country has most of oil deposits or how do we do in terms of deposits etc. Those are the basic things and again you don't need to remember any of the formulas or any of the conversion factors I will provide you with those things. If you have any questions you can always you know send me a question or post a question on the message board and I'll try to answer those.