Your host for today's special episode of Community Matters, Think Tech's Place in the Community with our guest, the man behind Think Tech, Jay Fidel, who is celebrating a special day today. Happy birthday, Jay. Thank you, Carol.  But your birthday gives us a perfect opportunity to reflect on the gift that you have given to our community. Think Tech Hawaii is now in its 17th year. So welcome, Jay. And on behalf of all of us at Think Tech, staff, volunteers, our board, our guests, our hosts, everyone who watches Think Tech, thank you so much for your years of creativity and devotion and hard work in giving us this opportunity to present to the public awareness and raising civic engagement and promoting public awareness. Thank you, Carol. Okay, so give us a snapshot of Think Tech Hawaii. What is it now? It's fabulous. It's got this fabulous splendid studio here. We are so lucky. Thank you, MW Group and Pioneer Plaza for making this possible for us. We've got this great equipment that works like a charm. Thanks to our underwriters for funding that. And thanks to our staff for putting on these incredible programs and our volunteer hosts and volunteer guests, so many people, hundreds of people come through here. And they're all dedicated and all volunteer and they speak their minds and they teach us about what's happening on the ground here. I don't think it's any other media that I know of in Hawaii anyway that tells you what's really going on on the ground, how people feel, how they think. We have it here, right here. So how would you define Think Tech in just a few short sentences? Well, tech is only part of it. I'd square that away right away. You know, it started at Tech, it started in the year 2000 all around tech and now radio show on Hawaii Public Radio from 2001 to 2008 and thereafter on AM, that was about tech. But, you know, it sort of evolved into other issues. You talk to somebody about tech and you find out that tech is enabling some other thing. You find out the person you're talking to has other interests and you get interested in these other issues and interests and, you know, evolutions and events and world. And you wind up expanding your consciousness and so you start at Tech, good place to start, but we cover everything. But when you started in 2000, right, it was only on the radio? That's true. We had a website, thinktechawaii.com, dates all the way back to that. And my cohorts and I, we were doing luncheon programs for the Building Owners Association because we involved in that part of the business community and we did increasing, you know, increasing range of subjects in those luncheon programs taught me a lot. But then in the last part of 2001, early 2002, we got involved in HP, our Hawaii Public Radio, 89.3 FM. And we had a weekly show there called, Guess What, Think Tech Awaii. And this, of course, is while you were practicing so far our viewers who don't know, Jay's been a long time practicing attorney in the firm of Bendett Fidel. Right now it's Bendett Fidel and Sugimura. Right? And what type of law were you practicing? Oh, really good. What is that general business? It is a general business firm. It still is, of course. And it's a real estate firm and, you know, we make deals, try to help people. We try to be on the positive side of the equation. So when people think of lawyers, they should think kindly of our style and our, you know, kind of practice. So Think Tech, starting Think Tech, it then was more of a side interest for you because of your interest in technology? Well, you know, I told you that we were doing programs at Building Owners Association. Right. That was actually a suggestion on one of my clients. I see. And the watershed event was the sinking of the Hemi Maru off Waikiki in 2001 where PBS engaged me. I should talk to their audience on national television, you know, like 50 million people. Every day, while the court of inquiry at Pearl Harbor was going on, and I met hundreds of people in the press, I became familiar with that community and I got to know them, including the ones here, including NPR.  My brother, who is very close to me, said to me at the time, he said, this is going to change your life. And it did. So getting close to the press made this possible and it sort of opened up my eyes and opened up this possibility way back in 2001. And you were chosen for the Hemi Maru because of both your law background but also your Coast Guard background? Yeah, I was a legal officer in the Coast Guard and I had experience in this kind of court of inquiry and in court marshals and, you know, other investigations. I was the investigation guy for the Coast Guard. I mean, I was right up there. And so as a result, you know, I was probably a good pick for this Hemi Maru thing because it was a big investigation. So now, let's fast forward then a few years. So at what point did Think Tech become video medium? Well, you know, in 2008, we left FM radio and HPR and we went to AM radio for a year or two. And in the process, we started doing video in the radio studio. And this was downtown? Well, downtown in Kalihi there, AM. And then we sort of brought the video into a studio here in Davies building and we would have the studio and the radio both the same. We wired up. That was really creative. We wired up. So what we said in the video studio was going out on the air, on the radio. It was cute. And how often were you broadcasting? Oh, once a week. Once a week for half an hour or an hour? An hour. So you were doing this by yourself? At first, yeah. And then we started to get hosts and then more hosts and then we started doing more than one show. And then we had more guests and before you know it, a lot of this was not my idea. It was a staff's idea. People were around. We were helping. They had all these ideas about expanding. It's okay, let's expand. And we now have multiples more of them. I mean, wow. Back then, during the radio at HPR, we had four people in the team and we rotated two and two. We went to AM. It was maybe the same, maybe less. And then when we got into video, all of a sudden it started to flower out. And people really wanted to see this go and they were open to the idea of having more shows, many more shows. And now we have 30 plus, maybe 35 shows in a given week. We have hundreds of guests come through. We cover so many topics. We have such an interesting array. And I have to, you know, I have to hold myself back at two o'clock in the morning. If you turn on our stream on thinktecawaii.com, it's really interesting. It's interesting as anything else, I tell you. Right. And so I understand we also started a podcasting. Yes. Oh yes, as of what, December, January. Right. I have the suggestion of one of our staff and one of our directors too, they got on us. Said, you got to do podcasting. We did podcasting.  People love them. We had a tremendous response to that and hundreds of people listen to them all. And gee whiz, it's really popular. I guess it's the generation, right? People like to see podcasts. So give us an idea of the range of topics you cover now because you said you're not just tech anymore. We're not just tech anymore. How much time you got? Short. I want a short list. There are ranges everywhere from, you know, tech and energy, a lot of energy. We have like six shows a week on energy. No kidding. And, you know, all kinds of science. We do, you know, community affairs. Law. We do social policy. We do the arts. Gee whiz. Education. Education, thank you. Politics. Politics. And we have wonderful, wonderful hosts who come in and they're experts in this area. And they can really help us. And they're guests. We have a whole array of, a roll of decks of guests who are just incredible. And I mean, I just, I want to tell you if there's one thing that take away, it didn't take away, right? If there's one thing, you know, is we want to feel the pulse of this community. We want to show off the expertise in this community. We want Hawaii to be great. We know the world also listens and watches. And we want them to know that Hawaii is a really special place. And the people here are special. And they know some stuff. They do. They know some stuff. And we want to show that off. So, again, the importance to think tech in our community. Have you seen it growing? And does it extend beyond our local community? Oh, yeah.  And a word on the net, you know, you and I went to the National Association of Broadcasters last year in Las Vegas. I'm going to go again this year. It really gets you going. It really excites you to find out that the net is growing so quickly. And, you know, to go on the net is to go global right there and then. Furthermore, the net is catching up with TV. One of these days soon it will surpass or become morph and go confluence into TV. People watch a lot of TV, but I think as time goes by, they will find that the net has either the same or sometimes better content than TV does. I mean, I can show you some programs on TV. That you shouldn't be watching. But, you know, some of the stuff on the web is fabulous. So we have shows on YouTube. Yeah. How many are you think of our previous shows that are archived? Oh, 6,000. 6,000 shows on. We've done a lot. Thousands of different topics, different speakers. All over the place. One of the things that we didn't mention is we do a lot on Asia. We will continue to do a lot on Asia, every country in Asia. We want to know about diplomacy. We want to know about their internal politics. We want to know about their thinking, their art, their culture, their people, their globalism. This is a time for globalism, despite what Donald Trump thinks. We, you know, we have to expand. We're part of that expansion. We're going to keep on doing that. So what kind of shows get the most hits? Good question. I guess the shows that get the most hits are the ones that are timely and topical. If we're tripping off a headline of some kind, if we're talking about something that happened right now, that show is likely to get more attention. If a guest is good, likely to get more attention. If the conversation is active, you know, and scintillating with interesting points and remarks, that's likely to get more attention, because it's not the first guy who watches. It's the first guy who watches and sends out something else to someone else, the internet, right? And so you get this viral effect, and then, ooh, it goes, you know, so it's not the immediate impression. It's the first guy who gets more attention over the days and weeks to follow. We had one yesterday with Governor John Wahey, one of our hosts, and Carl Campani, another of our hosts, and we talked about executive orders. We wanted to explore what an executive order is and what the authority of the president, wow, what an interesting inquiry that was. I was fascinated myself. So tell me, how do you distinguish between, what is the benefit of a small media company like Tech versus a broadcast station? We don't have maybe the size of the studio or the staff, but we have flexibility. We can, how do you see the advantages? We don't need a big studio. We don't need, this is perfect for us.  This is perfect for us, and our staff is perfect, and our equipment is perfect, and our whole model of doing business is journalism, volunteer, voluntary journalists, it's all just swell. And what is really interesting is that we have a live view camera now. We can go out in the field, thanks to our underwriters, and we can take live pictures anywhere, and we do that, and we show them live on our system. So we can go walk talk anywhere, any island, anywhere in the world, with our live view camera. Now what this means, all of it taken together, is we are nimble and efficient, and those things really are different. We have really a very few people doing a lot of things with really highly leveraged systems and equipment, and wow, that's different. Right. Okay. Well, we're going to use this opportunity to take a little break, and thank you, Jay, for, again, happy birthday, and for starting Think Tech Hawaii. So we'll be right back. Thank you, Carol. What I want to tell you. Aloha. My name is John Wahee, and I actually had a small part to do with what's happening today, served actually in public office. But if you don't already know that, here's a chance to learn more about what's happening in our state by joining me for a talk story with John Wahee every other Monday. Thank you, and I look forward to your seeing us in the future. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Kondo Insider, and we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at 3 o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners, and I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Carol Monly, and I'm here with Jay Fiedel in Community Matters talking about Think Tech. Jay's very favorite topic, right? You bet. 24 by 7. You know that. Absolutely, right. And Jay and I are both volunteers for Think Tech. But tell us, where do you see Think Tech in two to five years, and where do you want it to go, and how is it going to get there? Well, I think the outline is in place. There's no big surprises coming. The only real expansion and growth will be using existing things that we have. One thing is that camera I mentioned, it's a digital broadcast unit. It's the live-view digital broadcast unit. We're going to use that. We're going to go everywhere with that. We're going to capture scenes and people all around the state with that. So both here, in the studio, but outside the studio, on location, and also to the neighbor island? Yes, exactly. We're going to talk to people, and you know what? They talk to us.  They tell us how they feel, and we get these kind of little snapshots, vignettes of how it is on the ground. I don't think a lot of media do that, so happy to do that. That's one thing. And we'll cover, you know, not only the news that's reported to us as citizen journalists, but we'll cover the essence of the place. And I want to do that more and more and more. So I think that's important for us to come together. You know, one great concern about the state is it's drifting. They're going to insulate drifts along the islands. We want to try to reverse that, bring the state together. The state that thinks and knows what it is and what it wants together is a better state, a better community. So that's what we want to build. The other initiative that will grow over the years is our program, which we call The Hub. It's called, you know, thinktechbetter.com. And it's a program that we're building now thanks to another underwriter and a grand tour who has helped us get a filemaker program system that allows us to build all kinds of functionality and just do huge things with the push of a button that we need to do anyway. So it makes life easier for all of our staff. We have, what, eight or nine people on the staff now? Well, 10, including you and me, right? And that will enable us to free us up to do many, many more things. So the idea is to be as efficient, use the software, if for all. We began in tech and tech is still our middle name. This is something we got to do. But as we evolve this program, as we implement it, roll it out, socialize it, we will find that it changes the way things operate. And that's the growth I see in the next two to five years. Well, you mentioned that this equipment is funded by grants that thinktech has been able to receive over the last year or so. How is the funding going to continue in the future? I mean, how do you see that as being supported? What kind of resources are there out there? Well, we are so, so appreciative of our grand tours, our underwriters. Most of them really, most of them have been with us from the time we started operating the studio. And they keep on supporting us every year. And I really love that. I love that, you guys. I love that. Thank you. But as we do more, as we go out farther, we have to have people to do it. And we have that transportation to do it. And there are expenses.  So we always have to be looking for new underwriters and new grants to support our activities. So do you see a specific focus on topics? Like I know you mentioned, we already have five or six energy shows. And that continues to be important to our state, politics, education. But are there other areas that you see think tech as being more better equipped or able to focus on than the rest of the media? I want to get into the schools more. I want to find out what's going on in the schools. I want to have those kids come down here. I want to have a connection with the schools, the student body, the teachers, the faculty. I want to be all over the science fair and all the science activities they do. I want to be connected with them. Not just for making videos, but for understanding them and encouraging them and building our educational system and connecting Bishop Street with the educational community out there. I think that needs to happen more than it's happening now. Okay. Do you have a particular favorite among all of the different topics that you... What is that? Science. Really. I know a closet scientist. Yeah, I love the scientists.  What particular area in science? Well, I certainly like ocean and earth science. I like biology. I like information technology. I like engineering. I like all those things. Those are the things I should have taken more in school. This is my way of making up for lost time. I see. I see. And how about the arts? Oh, I love the arts. We have performing arts. We went and made a movie of the ceramics program in which Santa Marata was involved and two recognitions. The museum, the performing arts, the fine arts, all the arts. And you know, I think the problem is people are busy. They don't have time. The music, the opera. Oh, yeah. We've had the opera on a number of times. I went to see a streetcar named Asire last weekend. And we have to have this in our community. It opens your mind. And so ThinkTech wants to help do that. Wants to help promote, help understand, help socialize the arts, every kind of arts. Yes, absolutely part of the array. And so among your 30 to 35 shows that we broadcast a week, how do you determine the topic for each show? How do hosts get in touch with you? And who makes the decision to put on a show? How does that work mechanically? Lots of email. Lots of contact. You know, we manage a stable of 30, 30, 40. Actually, there's more than that in terms of hosts, because some of them are every two weeks. So you get this more than 30. It's like 50 hosts already. So we have to talk to them, write to them. And that's one of the reasons the FileMaker program is so important that we can communicate automatically and schedule things and make sure that everybody knows where they're supposed to be and they decide on the topic and they let us know the show information. We have to have that on a regular basis. And it's hard to keep it all under control with a few people, a few volunteers we have in the studio. So are there always new shows coming up? Always new shows coming up. So if somebody is interested in a particular topic that needs to be... We're always open. So they should contact you? Yeah, 780-9254 or jayatfidel.com. And we want new shows. We want to go down the path of the evolution of our state and try to keep at the front of the envelope there, you know, the frontier of what's happening, what people are thinking and what they want and what bothers them. You know, all the issues that we are faced with every day. We want to cover that all so we know the rainbows of the state. So tell us a little bit about the board and how the board of directors is involved in running Think Tech. I think about the board a lot. It was posted here in our reception.  They're very diverse. They come from diverse backgrounds, diverse jobs and expertise. They're all sweet. They're all behind us. They all contribute. And I think they're a great board. And boards are important. Last night, Charlie Rose was interviewing Ursula Burns, the really incredible woman executive who's the CEO of... She has been the CEO of Xerox. And I was so impressed with her. And one of the things she said is the success of the CEO, the success of the organization, directly related to the quality of its board. Not only must you have a good board with good people willing to put in the time and thought, but also you have to manage them. You have to listen to them and understand them and use or not use their advice. So it's a relationship. And our board, we enjoy that kind of relationship. Great. So I know you have a board. We have underwriters. We have, of course, hosts. We have guests. We have our staff. We have volunteers. And now we have a new advisory board. Tell us about the advisory board. Advisory board, also diverse, young. It's not as much a commitment, I would say, as being a member of the board, but it's a sounding board for us. It's a feedback thing where we can go out and kind of survey them on things we're not sure about how people will react. This is very valuable because you need to be in touch with your audience. They are our advisors as to what an audience might think. And I know we're very involved in social media. How has that changed over the years from? Oh, gosh. I remember being really concerned about social media. That it was a kind of hole in the boat. And that it was dangerous. And you'd be careful what you say and do. And those things may be true, but the fact is that social media has changed our lives. In the last five years, it has gone viral everywhere. And it is all over us. And we have to learn to learn by it and be engaged with it and manage it. So it doesn't take over our lives. How many emails do you get? How many messages do you get every day?  But it's changed our world. It's changed our way of communication. It's changed journalism. It's changed the way we perceive politics, national events, and geopolitical. So I would say it is the new normal. And it is never going to stop. It's only going to get bigger, better, more powerful, and in some ways more worrisome. Right. So are you personally on Facebook? I am. But I don't spend much time on it. Like millions of others. And it's my birthday today. I've got 500, you know... And you're going to get more?  Well, let's talk a little bit about your personal life now that we know it's your birthday. And I think we have some pictures, Suri, that we can show. But how long have you been in Hawaii, Jay? Since October 1st, 1965. Uh-huh. And who do we have here on our screen? Oh, that's my wife. My wife Sharon, who I met like a week after I got here, you know. Sharon Fidel, who is a beloved employee at First Wine Bank, and a great supporter of Fink Tech. And she's there with my dog, Minky, who's no longer with us. But tell us about... So I know you just came back from a wonderful trip this summer. Where were you? Oh, we went to Portugal. Uh-huh. It was great. Yeah. Portugal is wonderful. I urge people to go to Portugal. People are nice, they're sweet. There's a real similarity between Lisbon, you know, people in Lisbon and all around Portugal and the people here in Hawaii. They're very nice, unassuming people and they really love... And the food is out of this world. And the prices are real reasonable. So...  It's a whole new world. We've been to other places in Europe. But Portugal has to be one of my favorite, actually. Great. Let's see. We have any other pictures here? Very... Aha! Jay. Oh. And let's see. Jay is with a group of people with the illustrious former Governor John Y. Hay and Evelyn Lance, retired Judge Evelyn Lance, who... in myself. And this is at our holiday party just recently in December. And Evelyn is representing the H.O.T. Yeah. Evelyn's been on the board. She was the president for a long time of the Kulaiapa Theater. And she accepted the award. And what award was this? This was an award for Distinguished Community Service. And we gave it to five people, five organizations. And it was one of them. And I think it's wonderful what they do. I've always felt that you need, as I mentioned before, you need culture. You need music in our community. It uplifts all of us. Go to an opera. You'll see what I mean. Right. And any more pictures? Aha! But what is that? Jay. That's the award at OC16. Yeah. Yes. In 2016, O'Lello... I mean, sorry. OC16 presented to Think Tech Hawaii its Mahalo Award. So we were there to accept the award. There's a picture of Jay holding the beautiful glass star. Yeah. That was a surprise. Didn't have any idea. And that's a picture of Jay and me at the NAB, which is the National Association of Broadcasters. What do they call it? A show? Yeah. Show in Las Vegas last April. Right. And last April. And we're going to go again this year. So, okay. So Jay, you have some parting thoughts on Think Tech, dreams for Think Tech, how viewers can get involved. Well, let me say that in the spat between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump, Schwarzenegger said that he thought that they should switch places. Mm-hmm. That he, Schwarzenegger, should be president, even though he wasn't born in this country. And that Trump, you know, should be back on the, what do you call it, your fired show? The apprentice. The apprentice show. And that would be better. Why? Because it would allow people to sleep at night again. Okay. And what I'm saying, and the reason I tell you the story is, what I'm saying is that a lot of people have trouble sleeping at night because of what's happening in this administration. And, you know, it's like the New York Times has said, we're going to follow this very closely. Because there was never a time in our lifetimes when we needed to hear from the press on what was going on. And they're stepping up to the plate. And I really appreciate that. Same thing with Washington Post and others. Well, I think Think Tech has to step up to the plate, too. We have to be citizen journalists. We have to cover these things. We have to be the connection for people on the things we do, the things we cover. And I want to fill that role. I think we can. We will fill that role. And so in a funny way, we become more important in the confluence of media today. Think Tech, there's a place for Think Tech going forward. Thank you. And on that note, I want to wish you, again, a happy birthday. Thank you on behalf of so many thousands of people who watch and enjoy and learn from Think Tech. And again, this is my guest, Jay Fidel. And we have one part of the picture of someone very familiar to you. And who is this? Oh, my baby. That's my baby, Emily Caihea Fidel. Okay. On that note. Aloha. Thank you very much. Thank you. See you next time. Okay.


Join me and my co-hosts every Saturday at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Pacific for cartoons and movies at the 50th Street Studio Twitch Channel. See you there Greetings everybody The Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. This is certainly the first Hemingway that I've reviewed I think it's the first Hemingway novel that I've read Having grown up in the late 20th century. I am of course familiar with the idea behind the story of the Old Man in the Sea The title says it an old man who goes out to sea fishing. I Remember seeing movie versions when I was younger didn't remember much about them And I certainly never read the book and I have to tell you that the writing is excellent It is amazingly excellent The one thing I can say about it is that the writing is just damn good It didn't end the way I expected it to I expected there to be a tear-jerking tragedy after all that struggle and everything But there wasn't I'm glad I read it. I encourage everybody else to read it Thumbs up That's it for this week Please come back again next week and please become a sponsor follow the links on screen and in the description below You can pledge a monthly amount or a small one-time amount and please subscribe to this channel. See you next week


Is that gonna speak about GovCMS? It's not just Drupal, it's an ecosystem of tools. Good morning. I'll start slowly so that people get the chance to come in. Yeah, I'm the guy that comes to a Drupal conference and doesn't talk about Drupal, because that's where I roll. So yeah, I'm Toby. I'm the GovCMS tech lead. What we're gonna do is talk a little bit about all the things that go into running a platform for Drupal sites. GovCMS has always been known as a Drupal distribution. That's its roots, that's where it comes from. But in the last year, we've gone through a bit of a journey and new hosting platforms, a whole wide range of new opportunities for us. So we're now looking after two, seem to be three distributions. There's scaffolding, repositories, there's Docker images, there's Drupal modules. There's all sorts of helpers and tools and other add-on stuff that we do. So I'll talk about some of those, and we'll do questions and stuff. So GovCMS is growing. It's something that we don't talk about a lot, but the actual numbers behind where we're growing. We're getting 15 million SaaS page views a month. This time last year, we were at 10 million. This time two years ago, we were at 5 million. So we're adding 5 million page views, monthly page views every year to GovCMS. 600 million hits a month across the whole platform, 50 terabytes of traffic. I remember in the conversations when we're talking about when we got to five terabytes of traffic, and it's just growing. 300 sites, 50 plus in the works. It's not structuring any signs of slowing down. So from a platform point of view, we've got to build a platform that can support this. And that's what we've been doing in the last year. We went to market two years ago, 80 months ago, to replace the existing GovCMS platform. We selected Lagoon, and provided by Maze.io, and Solstice Digital to be the platform we chose. And the reason we chose it is because it's flexible. We can sort of choose and scale and grow. And if a tool works, we can use it. If a tool does a job better than one we've got, we can replace it. And that's the view we take with a lot of this. So what I'm going to cover is where we've got to on a lot of these things. But the ability to shape some of these tools for our needs has been really, really useful. So stuff that we use every day, it's testing, it's analysis, it's building, it's auditing, it's reporting, it's all this other stuff. Lagoon is the main platform that underpins GovCMS, open source, to Docker, build and deploy system. Basically, it allows you to build a local stack on your local machine, build, test, check it's okay, and it will convert it, and magically put it up in the Internet. And it'll look exactly the same, and it'll work perfectly. And there won't be any slowdowns, problems, delays, or holdups on route. GovCMS, the use of Lagoon is sort of pushing the boundaries of what Lagoon can do. So we've been working really, really closely with Maze to help Lagoon meet our needs. And Maze has been fantastic in allowing us that partnership level. And so together with Solstice, we've put a lot of thought into stuff that Lagoon could do to make our lives easier and to make our agencies and developers lives easier. So we've collaborated on a few things. We've been quite active in contributing to Lagoon. There's an awful lot of Carl in my presentation. But Carl wrote a task for running Cron. Chris from the Department of Human Services renamed a file to fix NGINX rewrites. I added a catch all option for variables. Steve re-did MariaDB Client Configure A, Tom. These are all the contributions that GovCMS and Solstice have put back towards Lagoon to say, we're using this platform. We're doing it. These are things that we think could be done better or these are enhancements. And Maze has said, yep, that makes sense. That makes total sense. If it doesn't make sense, not afraid to tell us. That's a good thing. But they're scratching our itches. But they're itches that other people are experiencing. So that's the whole point of the open source thing, is that if we can fix something for ourselves, that's great. If we can fix it for everybody else who's using the platform, that's even better. A couple of really big things, when we took Lagoon on, we acknowledged that the authentication control, role based access control wasn't as fine grained as we needed it to be. We need sort of the concept of protecting prod environments and agencies be able to define permission levels for users. So we worked really closely with the team at Maze to build a role based access control system that was released in August. Lagoon episode one, The Permission Wars, because naming stuff is the most fun part of doing any job. So we basically funded this role based access control component for Lagoon. That's now a standard part of the Lagoon product. Everybody that's got Lagoon elsewhere around the world now uses that. And it's integrated tightly into all the way the API and the authentication subsystems work. The Lagoon CLI is a tool that was built by Matt Glammon for his own purposes for a Lagoon site that he was running in the US. And he got to the end of his project. Some of the Maze team had been using the CLI, saw potential in it. And GovCMS said, well, yeah, that sort of scratches are rich too. We're administering a platform, a CLI that means we can add and remove projects, makes our life easier. It'll make the Salsa digital team who do a lot of our frontline support. It'll make their lives easier. Yeah, let's spend some time making this CLI and fully fledging it. And Ben's done a great job of building this tool and really thinking about how someone's gonna interact with an application. So we're really proud to be part of this and to be involved in the evolution of a product. The way that you don't get when you buy something off the shelf. That's the whole crux of the open source thing for us. We run a big GitLab installation inside our cluster, because for us, security is paramount. If everything is inside the same VPC, it's an awful lot easier for us to secure. We use GitLab to provide the authentication base. So someone logs into their GitLab account, and that's the same account that the role-based access control uses to control access to their projects and their environments and all their tools. We pay for GitLab because we use some of the features in it that don't come in the free edition, but it's an open source project. It's all out there, the code's all there. One of the nice things it's got that we make use of is a container registry. So like Docker Hub for public images, we can put images into the container registry inside our cluster, and we can do a bit of stuff with that. GitLab's a CICD tool, we've done a lot of work over the last few months in really building out a high quality CICD pipeline. This is where some of the proof of concept work is at, but the idea is that a job will go from being built on your local machine and it's up and it works, and you commit it to Git. And Git then picks up a workflow and it'll go through and it'll run lint tests, unit tests, it'll run a vet step and that's for us the check that this is valid, that you've not changed something you shouldn't, that you've not broken something you shouldn't. It'll do preflight tests. If you wanna do more integration tests, you can switch on auditing. Carl will be talking a bit about auditing this afternoon. You can switch on B-hat tests, you can do functional tests. You get through all those steps and it'll trigger a deployment and it will go up to the guin. We've not rolled this out to production, but we're looking at how we can leverage some of those steps to help agencies build better sites, to deploy sites that work. A lot of flexibility in that. One of the other things that we've come across with GitLab is that there's a couple of things it didn't do that we really needed it to do. But same as the guin, it's an open source project. So because we're using GitLab heavily for roles, there was a webhook that wasn't firing if you change a role a certain way. And we raised this with GitLab as a bug and they said, look, it's a bug. Yep, I think we can get someone on it in the next sort of nine to 12 months, unless you've got someone that can write Ruby. I think Carl was busy that weekend. So Brandon from AMAZE wrote the code for GitLab to build a webhook for permission change. He learned Ruby, he wrote the code, pushed it up to GitLab. They approved the PR and so his code went live into GitLab and GitLab.com in version 12.3. They looked at the work we'd done and said, yeah, that's brilliant. Tom did work rewriting their charts for deployment into OpenShift or Kubernetes, supporting an issue that we'd come across with that container registry. Again, submit the PR, normal workflow, it's up. It's released in the next version of GitLab. We've got this direct access to the product that we're using. And because we've engaged people who are smart, people who are contribution savvy, we can get the changes we want into the products we're using really easily, I'll say really easily. But we've got unprecedented level of access to the tools we use. In terms of running on the cluster, we're very heavy users of the Elastic Stack. So Elastic Search, Kibana, LogStash, we use them again inside the cluster because it's nice and safe and secure, it's within our install. But we've got the option, we can use Elastic Search in the cluster. We're at the process of trying to work out whether Lagoon can handle a hosted Elastic Search or multiple Elastic Search and all these sort of possibilities there. Trying to work out what the best, most sensible uses for them are. We use Elastic Search to collect all of our logs, which it does a good job at, mostly. But Kibana is really valuable for visualizing some of this stuff, to try and put logs back in people's hands, to put data back in people's hands. So we do quite a lot of analysis and insight and visualization of this stuff. We've got, there's a chart of GovCMS sites by type. So we can see SAS versus PASS, Drupal 7 versus Drupal 8. The outcome of some of that audit tests we've got, you can see the red bars are things that everyone fails at. The green bars are generally good. It gives us really quick insight into what's working, what's not. This horrific chart on the right-hand side is the top 50 sites traffic over a 24-hour period. So you can see it's nice and quiet overnight and then just goes crazy. You can't tell much from this other than whatever site that is, did something wild about 10 a.m. We've got all that kind of information. How do we use it? How do we process it? To get it in, we use LogStash and FluentD. Log Collection is a really exciting subject. But what we've done here is we've built some custom pipelines that we use to go out and gather information. So as well as collecting logs from sites, we're collecting information from GitLab. We're collecting information from Lagoon. And we're trying to work out what the best way of using it is. So, token code slide. We do this to check whether sites are live and collect the routes. So if a site's got a route attached and we can check whether that route's actually on the internet or not, we can see whether it's actually on our platform or not. If there's a header present, we can go in and we can look at jobs. So anytime you submit a GitLab job to build in CI, we can track that and we can report that. And we can see who's taking the longest time to run CI jobs and have a small bit of list on the wall. It's not a contest, but there's obvious winners. We collect our logs from Simple Email Service out in Amazon. Again, that comes back into Elasticsearch so we can visualize and we can analyze it. We do stuff in here to make sure that sites are up. Putting it all in the same place, you've got a richness of information that helps to see this, the state of a platform at any one time. We use a tool called Grafana, quite a bit for doing analytics and monitoring, whereas LogStash, Elasticsearch and Kibana are very much sort of application level. Individual sites, individual projects, individual tools. Grafana is much more in the actual platform weeds, so we can see the state of all of the Elasticsearch indexes. We can see how much memory usage an individual site has used over the last three, five, six hours, that's a fairly standard one.  There's a good example here of sort of traffic to sites over a time period. Here we can see the total volume of cron jobs running on the platform, so you can see it spikes at six o'clock and then goes back down. We've got uptime metrics for databases and CPU utilization. We've got all that kind of information. It's up to us to work out how we use it and what's good, what's bad, how do we measure, how do we report, how do we learn from this? So it's a real journey for us.  It means when we're trying to work out what's happening at any stage, we have all this stuff, trying to find out the most important things is a bit of a hit and miss game sometimes, but we do a lot of automation on the platform. There's a lot of manual tasks involved in running a platform this size. Stuart and Alex gave a talk at Dribblesaf last year about using AWX for migrating 108 sites to have CMS. And they wrote a really cool pipeline that would go out to Acquire, it would grab a site, it would transform, it would move it, and it would transport it across onto Lagoon and make it go live magically. We didn't really think at that time we could do more with AWX and Ansible. Over the last year, we've really built a lot of Ansible tools to automate the stuff we're doing. So whenever we build or deploy a new site, if an agency comes and says I wanna build a new site called coolgovsite.gov.au, we'll provision that site using Ansible to make sure that the projects are set up correctly, the permissions are set up correctly, the names are set correctly, the routes, all that stuff is all done in a repeatable manner. We've got a lot of processes that we run, a lot of the collectors that we run in Logstash and that we put into Elasticsearch come out of AWX processes because they're repeatable. We use it to do some of the bulk platform work. So if you've ever got an email from us saying we're doing scheduled maintenance or GovCMS Drupal 7 sites have been deployed on a Friday night, Tuesday night or whatever, we'll use AWX for that because its strength is in automation. It can trigger a deployment, it can watch for that deployment to complete, it can run five or eight or 10 or one or two in parallel really easily. So we've written some really cool tools. We can do nightly audit runs, we can do database backups, we can a bulk run command. So if we wanna find out who's running the latest version of admin views on a Drupal 7 site, we can run Drush admin views against our whole inventory of Drupal 7 sites. In five minutes later it'll all come back and it'll say here's your 160 sites, 157 of them are running 1.7, 10 of them are running 1.6. We now know which ones are out of sync. It'd be nice to make that automated and make that more collectible but it's much better than having to SSH into every single site individually and find out what it's doing. We can run a scheduled jobs. So we run edge and beta scheduled jobs overnight. We can push the next version of GovCMS out to sites automatically for testing purposes. It's something that we do quite a lot internally. We've not released it externally to too many customers yet but if someone's site builds on the next version of GovCMS repeatedly night after night we can be confident that the next version of GovCMS is good and it's not going to cause and play havoc with people. The bulk redeploy environments, that's the biggie, that's the one that we run. We will kick that off and that will, yeah, go through, we'll say we wanna do five sites at once and it will just stroll through the whole of GovCMS updating and redeploying sites. To make this happen, we've done some really cool work in the background on inventories. I've learned a lot about Ansible working with people that actually know about Ansible but the concept of an inventory is a list of sites. What we've done is we connect Ansible up to Elasticsearch because everything's reporting into Elasticsearch.  And then when we're setting up a job, we can say, okay, I want SAS, I want Drupal 8, give me those sites, go into the inventory and just show me the Drupal 8 sites. So it will go through because Elasticsearch knows what's what and where's where. It will create an inventory that's only got Drupal 8 sites in there so that when we run that job, we know we're only running it against Drupal 8 sites. We can run it against Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, we can run it against production, non-production, we can run it versus SAS versus PASS. And it makes the deployment jobs really easily. We run against an inventory, we've got some pretty cool stuff going on with vaults to store secrets and passwords and stuff. So our deployment script is like 20 lines long because we're making use of Ansible's inbuilt features. The script hasn't always been 20 pages long. It's gone through many iterations because we're running in production. It needs to work. If it works, we're happy. If we can do it better, we'll look to do it better, but that's not our first priority. So there's been iterations that have done, the first iteration couldn't actually be paused once it started to roll out. It would just keep on going. Later versions brought in pausing. We can now sort of work out how much parallelism it's doing. So we sort of made quite a lot of changes to this over the time and the team at Salsa has been really good at leading a lot of this automation and process automation work because there's a real interest in reducing the manual input required. We've been experimenting with a tool called Key for anybody that's familiar with Docker.  Key is basically the same as Docker Hub but it's got a few really nice features in there that from a security point of view, we really like. So container image scanning, the Zordit logs, there's some of that stuff. We've not moved all of our images across there, just a few that we're building, but when you build, so I've got an image here, we've got an image we use for our CI pipelines. It's got six vulnerabilities in it. Each of those vulnerabilities has a version fix. So what we will do is we'll go back and we'll look at the way we're building this tool and we'll work out where those vulnerabilities have come from, fix the vulnerabilities, push a new version up and those will all magically go away. We know that because Key tells us that we have those vulnerabilities because we know about them, we're better prepared. It gives us a nice audit log so we can see who's pushing to it. We can see who's pulling it. Unfortunately, because most of the pulling is done from our OpenShift cluster, it all comes as an anonymous call from an IP address but if someone was doing an authenticated login, we could track that, we could see that happening and you've got build histories and you can roll back inside Key, you can roll back an image, whereas Docker Hub, you have to create the image and push it back yourself. So it's something that we've been sort of experimenting with and playing with. One of the things I'm most excited about is a tool called Tugboat. Now we've got a really nice swanky platform, Lagoon, it does all the building, it does all the deploying, but we've got a lot of public distribution repos that we wanna be able to do public stuff and encourage public contribution and we don't wanna over complicate by adding all the Docker stuff in and all the Lagoon stuff in. We wanna try and keep them as simple and plain as possible. I came across Tugboat, tool built by Lodibot and it's basically for deploying and testing PR environments. So on our GovCMS-8 and GovCMS distributions, our testers now can use Tugboats to build an environment from a pull request. So if we're doing an update to the entity revision module, we can build that pull request in Tugboat and it builds an environment hosted somewhere else. So it's not on our infrastructure. So if anything nefarious happens or if someone logs bad PRs or whatever, it's all separated in air gaps from us. From a testers point of view, the tester can deploy it themselves. They can click on preview and it fires up. So they can log in and they can say, okay, today I've gotta do this, this, this and this. They can build those tests, they can pass them, they can shut them back down again when they're finished. So our developers don't need to provision environments for them and hand hold them. It's got a couple of really nice features. The logging all comes out to the UI. It's got terminal access. So if they do something really weird, you can SSH it and you can see exactly what's happened. It's got a mail catcher. So if they're testing email, you can see the mail appear in there. Pretty easy to set up. But it's got also a really nice tool, visual regression testing. So the GovCMS distribution comes with a default theme. We install that default theme and it will go through and every time it builds one of these environments, it will run a full set of tests on whatever URLs you tell it. So in this case, it's picked up that this page has changed in this PR. Shock horror, what's happened, it turns out the date's different. So that's not the biggest issue in the world. If that page was completely blank or missing something, yeah, we're gonna have to dig in and find out exactly why. So it's a really good solution for being able to build and throw away those environments. Yes, the first iteration we had did do it inside Lagoon, but we had to do a lot of converting and we had to build a lot of tooling to allow that to happen. Whereas this way we can keep those distributions pure Drupal so that they're more reusable outside of our platform and for the cost of a monthly subscription, the amount of time that we don't have to spend supporting the building of environments for testers and because the test load is shared between GovCMS and Salsa, anybody can step in and test anything at any time. It just makes it that much easier. Since day one, we've used a tool called CircleCI. Now we use GitLabCI in the cluster. We use CircleCI outside the cluster. Again, we could do a lot of it inside the cluster but having that separation between public projects and private repos is really important for us. It helps to sort of clearly define what's production GovCMS and what's our workflow outside of GovCMS. So again, nicely integrated cloud hosted. It'll go through every time you do a pull request or build a new branch, it will run a set of tests. So we've got, in Drupal 7, we've got a whole range of B-hat tests. In Drupal 8, we've got less tests but it will go through. It'll do some pretty, it'll run whatever you need it to run. So it will build the environment, it'll run your set of tests, it'll collect whatever outputs you need it to. One of the, some of the things we do is we do outputs of like double checking PHP versions and we'll do a drush module, drush PM list so that we can see at a glance we were expecting this to update search API attachments module. We should be able to look in the output of the CI and see, yep, search attachments module has been updated, we're on fire. One of the things that we built in the last few months is a set of D9 tooling using the static Drupal 9 analysis tools so that when someone submits a PR, it'll go through and it'll do a Drupal 9 readiness check on that PR so it'll analyze the GovCMS core, the GovCMS modules, but it'll also go through and scan all of the contrib modules for the Drupal 9 flag so we know whether Drupal 9, like where we are in relation to being able to do Drupal 9. It's really handy getting that in the CI. It's run, it can be run every time. We've used Drizany for a long time. Drizany is a fantastic tool. It's open source, it's developed by the Tamas at Aqueer. We've got custom policies, profiles, remediation in place. Go and see Carl's talk. Someone's calling me. He'll be talking a little bit about what we do with it and how we use some of the outcomes. One of the things we do at a platform level, and we've done proof of concepts with a tool called Satis and Satis is a composer resolver for those that were in Blaz and Tom's talk yesterday morning. They went about this a different way. There's many ways to skin a cat but what we like about this is it allows for fine control of PHP package versions. From a GovCMS point of view, GovCMS the distribution has sort of one state. It's to use GovCMS is tested on these versions of these modules and we know it works for those. It may well work on other versions but we know it works for this. So we've traditionally had a very tight control over that. The way we build our images currently has the image versions baked into them. The proof of concept we've done on Satis allows the site to exist like a normal Drupal site and it goes off and it tries to resolve the list of modules that make up GovCMS. Satis basically sits in front of the traditional composer and packages workflow and says you can only have this version. So instead of us having to bake hard code all of the modules in we let composer go and do it stuff and it can say well give me all the stuff that makes up GovCMS and because Satis only knows one way to build GovCMS that's what it gives you. It allows really fine control. We can add other stuff in. So you can build a project and rather than pointing to packages, so Satis itself points to packages, packages Drupal, couple of other GovCMS ones and all it's doing is building GovCMS, beta 11. It builds scaffold tooling and it builds required dev. It will go through do that and it will generate the actual buildable Satis and that will only give you version 8.79 of Drupal because that matches beta 11. It'll only give you alpha two of the UI Kickstarter theme because that matches that. So the resolution is really fast because it doesn't need to work out which version of which works with which and how does it all come together? For our need, there's a couple of things that Satis didn't do. If we absolutely don't want to use a version of a module because we've done a very thorough review on it and we've said, look, I really, really don't like the 1.6 version of entity reference revisions. We need more information. We need a patch. We can't let that on the platform. We wanted to be able to say under no circumstances should sites be installing that module so we can use Satis to say blacklist that. So when it goes through and builds, it will come to entity reference revisions and say, well, no, I can't use 1.6, I'm gonna have to go 1.5. We can do that for old versions. If there's a security vulnerability on an old version of Ctools, we can blacklist that version of Ctools and nobody will be able to install it because packages and Satis won't let you. Satis didn't do that out of the box. So Cy wrote the blacklist component for Satis. That's now part of Satis. Cy also wrote a match best candidates. One of the ways that Composer works is it can come up with multiple candidates and Satis occasionally would get polluted and have two or three versions. It also allowed us to restrict the dependencies to the bare minimum. So rather than a file being 27 meg, the resulting resolution file 700K. Again, Cy contributed it. It's seen the Satis now. It's just another example of the stuff that we've built. It's real world experience that's now being benefited from by everyone else. We've got so many more tools that we've built. We have a really cool mail relay that we use to get our mails out of Drupal sites and into SES that Carl made a couple of really good contributions to. Carl did a rewrite of amazing IOs, Pigme tool that it's really, really good. And it's much a diverse improvement on the original. We talked about that kind of CMS CI image. So we've got a Docker and Docker image that we use in our CI pipelines. We're trying to do all this stuff. It's made our lives easier. We're trying to release it so that other people can benefit. And our ethos with a lot of this is rather than fork it and use it internally, let's try and contribute to the upstream. And our experience has generally been really good dealing with upstream maintainers and saying, look, we've identified this, the SES mail relay, we fixed a problem where it couldn't handle multiple recipients. We enabled it to support AWS config sets. The maintainer even moved closer to Australia to be more used to us. That's what he told us anyway. Yeah, configuration set name, the Docker image, the Pigme rewrite, it's all part of what we do. We're trying to use our experience to help and guide other people forwards. A bit more extension to sort of what Blaze and Tom talked about yesterday. We've been through a bit of an automated dependency management journey. I once had all three automated dependency managers running on my fork of Gov CMS and I'd get somewhere in the region of 200 emails a week, just of updates to things. We're not running any of these. We are technically running one, but we're trying to evaluate which is the best. I really like Violinist. I think Violinist is a really good dependency manager. It will go, it'll scan your GitHub repo and it will come back with updates. It integrates really well with Drupal so you get the proper Drupal changelog in there. It only does PHP. Dependabot is now part of GitHub, but they do more than just PHP. They do PHP, they do Node, they do Docker. We're running Dependabot in some of our GitLab CI because Dependabot publish an open source version of their dependency resolver that we can then run inside the cluster to check for updates to Docker images for some of the LogStash pipelines we do. So if someone pushes a new tag of the LogStash image, we can get a PR with that inside our cluster. For us, that's really important because we want as little talking to the outside world from inside as we can. So all it's doing is basically talking back and it's pulling down a file and matching that file and doing the resolution inside. Dependencies.io, again, does PHP, does Node, does other things. They've all got their pros and cons. I think eventually we'll settle on one or three of them, but it's really good information. It's really good takes against some of that automate, automating some of that manual step. If we get a pull request into our repo on a Thursday morning for the latest version of whatever module, we can then build, it'll go through CircleCI, so it will build, it will test, it'll get a green light. A tester can open it in tugboat, test it. And by the time we've sat down on our desks at 11 a.m., I mean, 9.30 a.m., this can be PR, it can be tested, it can be manually tested. It'll just streamline that workflow so much more. It's a really big photo of me. So if you wanna talk about any of this stuff, I'll take questions now, but I'll be wobbling around for the rest of the day. Happy to show, demo stuff, happy to answer questions and talk about our experience doing this. But I think it's really important that there's so much more to running Drupal than just Drupal. All this stuff, all of our experiences, platform owners, we're really keen to sort of show you what we're doing and where we're at. So anybody got any questions? Questions? That makes my life easier.


وصلاته والسلام على أشف الأنبياء والمرسلين سيدنا ونبينا أبن قاسمي محمد وعلى أهل بيته الطيبين الطاهرين المعصومين المبلومين ولعنة الله على الدائهم أجمعين من الآن إلى قيام يوم الدين آمين يا رب العالمين يارب العالمين ونحن أردت لنا أكثر من الأسلحة بشكل أفضل ومن أعلى الأسلحة تحاولنا أن نرى الأمر موجودة بشكل موجودة ونسألنا بأسلحة موجودة بشكل موجودة بشكل موجودة ونرى الأمر موجودة في نظام الملعب لكن نظر at our religion as an entire package, an entire interconnected set and system of beliefs as opposed to just a series of isolated beliefs which should be justified, explained away and thoroughly analysed individually because as we've stated we as human beings have a limited amount of time on our hands because we do have a limited amount of time on our hands and I realise that time is indeed of the essence I have wasted much time trying to give a brief demonstration of how this particular method would work in application in applying it to other worldviews in our engagements with them and yesterday I laid out more of a comprehensive framework as to how we should analyse a person's worldview not necessarily by asking them for a label because at the end of the day a label does very little justice to the individual we speak to a label could mean a thousand and one things and unfortunately today we as Muslims particularly we the Shi'a the followers of the original Islam as was taught by the Holy Prophet Muhammad ﷺ we all know what it's like to be conflated with others who call themselves Muslims that's not to say that every single non-Shia is a bad person but what I mean is that unfortunately Islam receives very negative press in the limelight in today's day and age and so we're not strangers to the need to go beyond merely simple labels and conflating one person who labels himself with one word as the same thing as the other person that labels himself with the same word someone might traditionally say that I lean towards the right wing of politics or that I'm traditionally conservative and depending on what era you belong to that is going to be seen in a particular way likewise someone who said 10 years ago that I'm a liberal it might have had very different connotations to someone that says it today and again depending on what country you're in that would have very different connotations to what it would mean in another country so when we say that I'm a Muslim or I'm a Shi'a these things all have very different connotations depending upon the context so in analyzing world views in asking these bigger questions these major questions which show us how a person's thinking is shaped we're able to go beyond merely looking at the labels but unfortunately in dare I say the time constraints that I'm faced with in the duration of a half an hour live show it's been quite difficult for me to address some of the concerns that the viewers who are following me may have and I was blessed this morning to receive some concerns by a brother who's been following along and so I'd like to address those concerns today insha'Allah to Allah tonight I'd like to address those concerns before we move any further on with the concept of the world view but once we have these out of the way insha'Allah to Allah we will be applying the discussion of world views and starting in a very very basics that is to say we will not be discussing other schools of Islam rather we will be discussing how we build and construct our very own world view but before I do so allow me to just clarify some of these questions which the brother asked and they were as follows the brother was quite concerned over my portrayal of a particular school of thought of the Muslim theological schools which of course is the Salafi or more popularly known as the Wahhabi School of Thought now I don't particularly encourage people to call from Wahhabis because they don't like this title but in theory they are the very thing which is known as Wahhabis by the popular media for the sake of politeness and dare I say etiquette will be referring to them as the Salafi or the Atheri School of Thought from now on insha'Allah to Allah the brother asked me in regards to whether or not my portrayal of the Salafi School of Thought was one which was accurate to the claims that they make for I had stated that the Salafi School of Thought undermines the intellect in its attempts to engage with theology and I had stated this quite categorically I had stated quite categorically that it therefore excludes itself because it doesn't make the cut as it undermines the ability to trust the reason and in doing so reduces itself to an absurd worldview which is not worldview being followed I very much stand by what I said and some might take issue to that due to very same reasons that the brother who contacted me this morning took issues to this particular statement which is that he had seen certain statements attributed to people that we could call giants or very revered figures within the Salafi School of Thought who had stated otherwise and the two that he brought up or the one that he brought up rather but I will increase him by giving him a second name too who says the same thing is of course Ibn Taymiyyah Ibn Taymiyyah has a whole work which is four volumes pertaining to the apparent conflicts between the intellect and textual sources and how we are ought to engage with such apparent conflicts and contradictions of course Ibn Taymiyyah argues that there would never be such a contradiction because the sound intellect would not contradict the textual sources or revealed sources of Islam likewise the second name which I will add to the list of quotations of people who say something similar is his student أمن القيم الجوزي أمن القيم الجوزي in his book سواق المحركة likewise states the same thing he states that the intellect does not or the sound intellect does not contradict the textual sources of Islam so given that they have stated this given that they have made these statements very clear in their works why is it that I have stubbornly misportrayed them in such a way that I have said that they do not believe this the very reason and a very example I gave the brother this morning when I responded to him was that sometimes people might make a claim but for a methodology belies that claim it essentially falsifies and means that whilst they make a claim they don't really believe it so an example of that that we're going to see in شاء الله تعالى throughout the duration of this show is those who claim that they don't believe in a divine superpower and how at times they contradict that very claim in their behavior this phenomenon is what we know as in the English language as cognitive dissonance to hold two apparently contradictory beliefs and I would argue that those who happen to follow the Athery methodology or the Salafi methodology in theology very much fall under this set of adopting two contradictions at the same time the first contradiction or the first belief which contradicts the second I should say to be precise is the belief that they are actually respectful and give a level of position to the human intellect because this claim is laid out particularly by Ibn Taymiyyah in this four volume work and by Ibn al-Qaim and Josie so they do make this claim but then I have argued that the methodology they utilize essentially belies that claim and renders that claim to uselessness allow me to give further analogies if we are to state that we respect the intellect but then we are to suspend the usage of the intellect when it comes to understanding very key doctrines which on the apparent or anti-rational or irrational to use the word for negating rationality then we are not respecting our rationality I have said it before there are three different types of beliefs there are rational beliefs there are irrational beliefs and there are non-rational beliefs it is necessary for me to clarify all of these prior to moving on any further for I believe this is where the area of confusion that the brother fell into was caused rational beliefs are those beliefs which align with human rationality that is to say they are fully aligned with the intellect and nothing contradicts the intellect nor is a stumbling block for the intellect in accepting them now before I move on any further allow me to state this it is very necessary for us to define what the intellect is in order for us to have this conversation Imam Assad has kindly defined the intellect or rather described the intellect may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him as that by which Ar-Rahman is worshipped but this is a description it does not tell us much about the intellect other than it has a key role in our salvation and in our Iman so what would be a good and act description of what the intellect is the intellect is essentially the gift which every human sane individual has been given by Allah and when we look at the very key basic agreed upon principles of the intellect we could say they are the three laws of rationality what are the three basic laws of rationality they are basically number one the law of non-contradiction that something cannot be 100% right and 100% wrong at the same time that one thing cannot be the opposite of the same thing at the same time that makes perfect sense this cannot be a book and the opposite of a book at the same time I cannot be a finite human being but at the same time be an infinite deity these two are contradictions and contradictions never meet at the same point this is the first law which governs the intellect the second law which governs the intellect is known as the law of non-excluded middle which is to basically affirm that something is either a thing or the opposite of that thing and there is no third option so this is either a finite object or it's not a finite object there is no in between option to those two options and so we have essentially eliminated that something is either a thing or it is not a thing there is no third alternative and the last principle which governs the human intellect is of course the law of identity that the thing in front of us is the very thing that it is it is not something else it is these laws which govern the human intellect and allow us to utilize our intellect and allow us to understand the phenomenon around us in using these laws we are able to trust our rationality and in doing so we are able to live functional lives without going crazy on a daily basis dear viewers let's go for a short break and when we get back I will summarize the laws of the intellect and what the intellect is so essentially we are stating before the break that the intellect is the thing which functions three basic rules and every sane human being would agree that these rules are the things which govern the intellect this is what we mean by something to be أقلي or non-أقلي if something goes against these three principles then it is by very necessity non-intellectual it is against reason so for example to me for me to say that is all-powerful but then has limitations would be for me to make an irrational statement allow me to repeat that again something which goes against these very three basic laws of rationality is what we would call irrational that is to say it goes against everything we know due to our rationality so for me to say that is the infinite creator and is all-powerful and was not created but then for me to say that he has limitations and has a form this would be an irrational statement it goes against everything I know rationally and so it would be to contradict my reason it would be unreasonable this is an irrational statement an irrational statement is one which directly clashes with human rationality but we have a third category of beliefs which do not necessarily conflict nor contradict our rationality we call these beliefs non-rational beliefs or some people would call them I personally don't like this term because it's very confusing but super rational or super rational that is to say above rationality these are things which now transcend the laws of rationality but by transcend we do not mean that they are in conflict with the laws of rationality but rather they are beyond the remit and scope of rationality so allow me to give an analogy which I constantly give when a mother gives birth to her newborn baby often you would find that a mother is able to sacrifice herself immediately for that newborn baby but this goes against everything we know about the concept of human love why? because love is not normally something experienced between two people that do not know one another rather love is an expression of a feeling or an emotion which is developed between two people that have a knowledge of one another and an understanding of one another you do not normally find that a man is willing to sacrifice his life and holds someone so dear when he has never met such a person before in his life likewise you would find the same as true of females rather we would be willing to sacrifice ourselves for people like our mothers our sisters our wives our brothers our fathers our grandparents our best friends perhaps why? because we have formed a relationship with such people we know them and we know their value to us maybe very subjective but this is the rational process which goes on in our mind yet a new mother who's just given birth to her baby this willingness and this insistence to be willing to go to the death to protect that baby is not one which makes sense to us rationally speaking it goes against all observable trends and the reason for this is we traditionally understand love to be something which is understood on the basis of our daily interactions so this would be a non-rational belief or another non-rational belief would be our understanding of certain ريبي concepts by ريب I mean in Islamic theology those things which are of the unseen those things which we have never seen before and we know about them merely from being told these things via news so for example the belief in the jinn is not necessarily a rational belief which we would arrive at using the intellect the belief in these unseen beings known as the jinn is not something that you and I would naturally if sitting on a desert island think to ourselves wow there are these unseen beings and they are known as the jinn no because we cannot observe them using our rationality nor can we observe them using the five senses and therefore this would be another non-rational belief that is not to say irrational this is to say non-rational we know about them through our knowledge of receiving information in revelation so these two things must be distinguished and why I say this is because there is a big difference in believing in that which is non-rational in addition to a very rational basis and submitting to those things which are irrational I had already shown and demonstrated in one of the previous episodes that one of the very best arguments for demonstrating the existence of Allah depends upon us utilizing our rationality to know that anything with limitations anything with a distinct set of qualities these qualities which we can see are limited is a created object I know that this rock did not bring itself into existence because it has a certain color and it has a certain dimension did it give itself those dimensions? no because had it been infinite then it would not be finite likewise if I am to believe this in order to exclude the rock from being my creator or being infinitely there I would also have to exclude from my theology the concept of Allah being limited in his shape and his dimensions and yet there are certain theological schools which would tell you that he is limited in his shape and his dimensions this would be the difference between someone affirming that rationality never goes against the revealed text and someone actually applying this case now the brother also asked me but Atharis or Salafis are not the only theological school which are non-sheer that is to say there are other Islamic schools of theology which are not sheer and yet nonetheless believe that we do not have to believe in this literally and we do not have to literally affirm that Allah does have limitations but بلا كيفير or without going into the howness of such my response to such a brother is that is true there are other theological schools which are not sheer and we will be engaging with them when we reach them I did not merely intend to highlight the Salafis from the start but rather I intended to demonstrate that there are certain schools of thoughts within every ideology who don't make the cut for having a long and prolonged discussion with them rather they are excluded from the very start due to the lack of a role that they give to to reason in addition to revelation so now the question comes in very quickly how do I deal with those traditions which tell us not to think about the self of Allah Azawajal the vat of Allah this is very simple to think of the vat of Allah Azawajal would be to involve ourselves thinking of things beyond the scope of time and the vat of Allah Azawajal the essence of Allah Azawajal is something which would be again irrational and non-rational for us to even try to assume things about it we are not claiming that Allah revealed these things and therefore we are going to suspend judgment no, there is a clear cut difference and insha'Allah in the next episode I will also elaborate more upon these differences it is very important to understand these differences because we are not a blind textualist school like others we promote to elevate the status of reason as Imam Al-Sadaq and the other mams have described it it is like the imams and prophets it is a hodja brothers and sisters thank you so much for joining us tonight once more and I pray that I have been able to elaborate upon this topic to the best of my ability if anyone has any further questions I'm at your service and I pray I will be able to answer them thank you for joining us once more from the holy city of Karbala والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته


Hi, Tim McMahon Associate Professor of Practice in the Hydro College of Business at Creighton University. I adopted Eric's book because it actually does a better job of anything I've seen to date to explain the competitive challenges in today's marketplace, in particular managing public opinion and dealing with public relations in general. I asked students to read chapter three in particular, stacks, automations and funnels, and tell me that it did not in some way affect their understanding of how digital and social works. They're all digital natives. What they really need to understand is the mechanics and the realities of how we make this work to our benefit. Eric does a marvelous job. I urge you to adopt it for your classes. It has stimulated discussion and stimulated a true interest in learning more about the way the world works today.


Here are three awesome upgrades that you can do to your desktop diode laser to make it even better to use and more convenient. My name's Jim, and this is the Edge of Tech. Desktop diode lasers have become so popular in the last couple years that everybody is making them. But in the race to the bottom of the price range and the race to get them out there for every brand, they're leaving out features that would make them 100 times better to use. That brings us to King Gubby designs. They're a small two-person business that focuses on making upgrades like these for desktop diode lasers like these. They sent me three must-have upgrades for the Laser Master 3, and today we're gonna check those out. The first one is this Z-axis adjuster. And I can't tell you how much of an improvement this really is, especially on the Laser Master 3.  And to be honest, it's not all that accurate because it can actually move when you're tightening it. That's not awesome when you're trying to be very accurate with your burns. What the Z-axis adjuster will do is allow you to mount it to the machine and adjust it with a knob on the top, which is very accurate. All you have to do is turn to loosen and turn to tighten when it's installed. That's much better than the stock solution. The Z-axis adjuster is super easy to install. You just need to start by unplugging the top wire out of the laser module, unscrewing the side and taking the laser module out of the bracket. Now you wanna take the stock mount off of the carriage. Next we wanna screw in the new mount using the top holes as seen in the instructions from the King Gubby Designs website. Now we want to mount the stock slider to our new slider and we do that by grabbing a couple bolts and going in through the back of the three holes that are right here.  On the flip side, they'll screw into the existing slider's top two holes. So when you're done, you'll have your two bolts on this side and it'll be screwed into the old slider here. Take the new mount with the laser module and slide it right onto the new slider. Now we wanna take the barrel nut and put it into the top hole and screw the M6 bolt into the barrel nut. Now you wanna screw this all the way down so the barrel nut goes all the way to the top of the mount. Grab the bolt clip that came with the kit, slide it over the top of the bolt and then attach it with the two M3 bolts that came with the kit. I do need to interject real quick because mine came with this Z-Access knob package. That's what you saw me just install here. Normally it would just be a regular piece here and then you would use your Allen wrench to spin it up and down like we saw a little bit ago. But this one actually came with a few different handles that we can use and I really like this. There's different handles, so if you have the opportunity, grab the Z-Access variety pack. I'm not sure if that comes with every kit or not but you definitely want that because it'll make life easier when you can just pop on knobs like this and turn them. That one looks nice. I really like that one. Now slide the Oortour laser module onto the new mount and tighten up the original Oortour screw like this. Now your Z-Access kit is installed. It actually works by turning this knob up and down to raise and lower that laser module. Now the last thing we need to do after we install the Z-Access kit is actually replace the end stop with the new Z-Endstop spacer. This will allow the laser module not to smash into the front of the machine and you don't want that to happen. All you have to do is unscrew the limit switch right here, put the spacer in and screw it right back in with the screw that came out. At this point, you just want to move your laser module to the front right of the machine and just make sure it doesn't hit anything but it shouldn't with that new spacer installed. That's it. Now the Z-Access kit is done and installed. This thing is much better than the stock adjustments. Again, all you have to do is turn this knob here and that'll make the module lift up and down.  It's gonna save you a lot of time and it's gonna be way more precise. Next on the list are these stackable brick feet. They allow you to lift the laser up if you have something thick underneath that you need to burn or maybe you want to use that rotary with a tumbler. You'll definitely need to get that laser up off the bed to use something like that. Also, they allow you to make sure that your laser is in the same place every time you put it down on that spoil board. This is especially helpful if you burn a grid into your spoil board and you don't want it to be off every time you put your laser back down or if you build any kind of jigs and you just want to make sure your laser doesn't move. To install the brick feet, we need to start by taking the rubber feet off of the bottom of the machine. Now using the screws that came with the kit, we want to install the new brick feet to the bottom of the machine in all four corners. Now snap the new bottom piece onto the piece you just screwed into that machine and then place the laser on your spoil board exactly where you want it. Now you want to use a pen to draw an outline around where those feet are. Now remove the bottom of the brick feet and place them in the areas that you just drew. Grab some small wood screws and screw them down into the spoil board. And that's it. The brick feet are now installed. Yeah, this spoil board is a little bit small for the Laser Master 3. I actually stole it off my Laser Master 2 for this video. But what's really cool about this is you actually use Duplo blocks to lift the laser and set it on here. So we could take a couple, let's just say two on each side and we can set them right down on the blocks that we just put in. Then we just take our laser, we bring our laser right over, we match up the feet and I'm backwards. We match up the feet like that. It'll go in. It'll go in and your laser is set. It's all locked into place now and it's not going to move off of your spoil board. What's really cool is that you can use as many as these Duplo blocks as you want to lift this thing up as high as you want.  Last but not least, we have the honeycomb bed mounts. Now I don't have a honeycomb bed to test with this laser. The idea is to use these to lift your honeycomb up when your laser's lifted so that your honeycomb is at the right height. This also allows you to put like a catch pan underneath your honeycomb that would catch any debris that fell through while you were cutting. Also, if you just want to keep your laser lifted all the time, you can use this to have your honeycomb lifted all the time with a laser.  I think that would be really handy to use. Now you can get all three of these and much more on Amazon or on the King Gubby Designs website. But they agreed to give you guys a discount code for 15% off any of their printed parts or kits like this if you use the code HotMakes as seen here. Or if you want it faster, you can use my link below to go straight to Amazon and that will give me a small portion of the sale. It won't charge you anymore but it'll help the channel out as well. Either way works for me and if you don't need the parts as fast as Amazon could deliver them and you want to save some money, I say use their website and save that money. Now, I think these upgrades are must haves for this LaserMaster 3 and pretty much all of the Oortour lasers. But don't forget, they make these upgrades for a bunch of different laser brands out there so check out the website and see what they offer. If you don't see your laser on there, just reach out to them and there's a good chance they'll help you out and make these modules for your laser as well. And if you want to see more laser upgrades, check this video out right there.


This year I probably cupped it 15 times. A pretty good bow fell player is asking me like they say, who are you? I had it so many times this year and...