text:
But we struggled with how to make this data (mostly email and document data) available to customers in an easy way. We tried MANY different data stores until in 2010 we came across a new data store that had figured out a way to scale Lucene indexes – Elasticsearch. We very quickly became a huge early user of Elasticsearch – at one point employing many of the top ES code committers.
Fast forward eight years – and Elasticsearch is now one of the most popular open source databases in use right now. Driven by the other popular open source projects of Kibana and Logstash – which made it incredibly simple to consume and process machine-generated logs and give an easy to use API endpoint to query this data. As someone who's scaled Elasticsearch clusters to petabyte scale with hundreds of billions of documents, it's been one of the most amazing tools to have at my disposal. The problem is that you are left with dozens, or hundreds or Elasticsearch servers, which were designed for the fast consumption and query of data – yet keeping data for any reasonable amount of time becomes too expensive. Due to cost reasons, many companies (including ones I've worked for in the past) end up simply throwing away the data. The data becomes a liability to the business from a cost standpoint. If you can't store it cost effectively AND query that data – why even bother keeping it around.
That's why I was so excited when I met with the CHAOSSEARCH folks and had a chance to see what they had built. This team figured out a way to finally decouple storage and compute when it comes to managing and querying huge datasets. They can process your data as it sits in your S3 bucket, and make that data both compressed (for cost and performance) as well as queryable using similar Elasticsearch APIs. When I learned their new storage format was lossless as well, was when I knew I needed to get much more involved in the company. There was now finally a way to get value out of all that data sitting on S3 as well as finally making it cheap for companies to SAVE the data they had been throwing away.
Imagine now you have the ability to query datasets over 90, 180 or even 365 days without needing to run ANY Elasticsearch servers. Since the new storage format is lossless, customers can shove their raw data to Glacier (or just delete it) and save even more money and headache.
I am thrilled to join CHAOSSEARCH as the VP, Products and am excited to build out the Product organization and help customers solve their data problems. As a technical operator for nearly 20 years, I understand how hard of a problem this is to solve, making the long tail of data available in a cost-effective way. I don't think companies should have to choose between saving money and keeping data that could have value to the business. For the first time in forever, companies can save MORE data, run FEWER servers and spend LESS money. I can't wait to work with and help companies finally realize the value of their data, in ways they never thought possible.
Over the next few months I'm going to be looking for companies who can help us be Design Partners. If you are a company running on AWS, using Elasticsearch and wishing you could store more data and run fewer servers, please reach out to me (My twitter DM's are open). I would love to chat about your use cases and how we can help you do more with your data.
Check us out at chaossearch.io]]>
Edit: If you want to skip this most and learn more about how startup equity works - check out this awesome Github repo: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation
This whole thing started when I saw a blog post titled "Advice to Grads: Join A Winning Startup". It's not a bad blog post, but I was immediately turned off by the title, "Join a Winning Startup". So simple right? Just go pick a company that is going to be a huge success, and go work there, make millions on your stock options and retire by the time you're 40.
Luckily in another post the author tells you how to analyze and pick one of these winners.
Now that you have your target domain, geography and stage, focus on picking out a few winners - the hot companies that everyone thinks has great momentum and potential. After all, why would you want to work for anyone other than the absolute hottest company in a given category? How does an outsider figure out who the winners are in a given domain, market and stage? Ask a handful of insiders. Find the top 3 VCs, angels, tech lawyers and headhunters in your target geographical market and ask them for the two or three hottest companies that match the domain and stage you are interested in. Compile this list, pressure test it, and see what patterns you find. The firms who get the most mentions with the most compelling underlying evidence will naturally rise to the top.
Again, this isn't bad advice, but the problem lies in the fact that all the people you are supposed to ask about the HOTTEST STARTUP are likely going to be wrong. The VC returns over the past 10 years shows how incredibly hard it is for the experts at Venture Capital firms to pick winners. According to Cambridge Associates, the 10 year VC return is about 10%, compared to the S&P 500 at about 7.5%. That 2.5% might look good to some, but I don't think that comes even close to compensating the LP's (Limited Partners a.k.a "The Money") for the added risk that comes with investing in early stage businesses.
So - let's say you follow the very rational advice given above to pick your startup. You need an amazing run of positive events to occur in order for you to have "a huge win" on your stock options. Let's take a look at a recent example of one (extreme) scenario where those hard earned options could go bust.
Spotify Raises $1 Billion in Debt Financing
The fact that a large "startup" is taking a huge fundraising round should not be new to anyone who's been paying attention. We've seen many other large companies raising huge private rounds. Even the fact that they are taking a debt round shouldn't be shocking. Companies are going to go where the money is at, and for Spotify the best terms they were able to get on additional fundraising was clearly using this convertible debt option. The reason this news has been making the rounds in various tech publications is because of some painful terms in the deal.
In addition, TPG and Dragoneer are permitted to cash out their shares as soon as 90 days after an IPO, instead of the 180-day period "lockup" employees and other shareholders are forced to wait before selling shares, the people said
Take the scenario that you are an employee at a startup who has vested stock options. In this simplified example, when the company goes public you are unable to exercise your stock options (sell them on the open market), until a 180-day period of time called a "lockup". If there are more sellers than buyers to a stock, then the price will go down. If someone has the ability to offload lots of shares before you, its likely (but not guaranteed) that the share price will be pushed down as a result.
So - those stock options that you have been coveting for years and hoping they turn into millions? By the time there is a market for you to sell them in, and the lockup expires, the share price could be down dramatically. So instead of ending up a Dot-Com Millionaire, you'll end up a Dot-Com Thousandaire (maybe). In the case of Gilt Groupe you could just end up with nothing, or worse a tax bill for exercised options that now have no value.
So, stock options are bullshit?
No - definitely not. There are lots of ways you can make money on them, the problem is that there are MANY MANY MORE ways that you can get screwed on them, things that are 100% out of your control.
Here are a couple examples of things that 100% definitely did not happen to me or my stock options at any point in the past. Any usage of "I" or "Me" is for storytelling purposes only.
Fake Scenario 1: Start at a company where I have a stock option grant of 0.75%, this was calculated based on the number of shares granted divided against all outstanding shares (numbers your CEO or CFO should be able to tell you). The company works hard to bring on big customers and partners who are using the product. The CEO makes a mis-step on the timing for the B round fundraise, we reach the end of the month and on Friday are literally out of money. We go to our existing investors with our hat in hand. Needless to say the worst time to ask for money is when you're locking the doors if you don't get it.
End Result: Massive dilution in the option pool. Meaning (simply), many more shares have been created/issued, yet the value of the company value did not increase. We had to get sold for a few hundred million dollars for anyone to make money on their options (they didn't).
Fake Scenario 2: Work at a company for a while, living thru the ups and downs normal of startup land. Inevitably we reach the point where its time to fundraise again. Yet the company hasn't increased their revenue enough to justify the valuation for the amount of money they want to raise. So in this scenario the venture firm does a 'participating preferred multiple' as part of their investment. There are people smarter than me who give great descriptions about what "participating preferred" is, so I'd recommend you read their posts. The very simple definition is the money that comes off the top in the case of an exit. For example: if I invest 20mm at a 1x multiple, and the company gets sold for 100mm, I take 20mm of the top then I split the 80mm with the other shareholders.
End Result: Company takes large investment at a 4x participating multiple. Would need to get sold for about 500mm for common stock to have any value at all (They didn't).
So what does this all mean?
Don't go work at a startup because you think you are going to get rich (you won't).
Don't go work at a startup making significantly less than market rate salary just to get stock options.
Go work at a startup because you like to learn more than just a single part of your job.
Go work at a startup because you like the speed at which things can change day by day.
Go work at a startup to have an incredible amount of impact on the success of your organization.
Go work at a startup to have the chance to build something from nothing.
Go work at a startup because the amount of experience you can gain during just a few years will be FAR MORE than a the same time working at BigCorp.
Just don't go under the impression that you will "strike it rich", the odds are stacked against you in far too many ways.]]>
DevOps is a term that has absolutely blown up in the last 5 years. As someone who's been involved with that community from the earlier days, it's been interesting to watch the conversations around DevOps evolve over time. For many people, they had an immediate adverse reaction towards Yet Another Buzzword – especially when the core concepts that people described as being "DevOps" were things that many people had already been doing for years. (I'm not going to bother getting into the specifics of "what is DevOps" since there is already a plethora of blog posts that you can easily find on it.)
One of the core tenets of what people consider to be "DevOps" is to shorten the feedback loop in your development cycles. By reducing the amount of time for those feedback loops, your teams can iterate more quickly on changes and ship those features to your customers sooner. This tenet ties in directly with Agile methodologies utilized by software engineering teams. With the advent of easily accessible cloud infrastructure, and with the various operational tooling around those new infrastructure providers reaching a new level of maturity, we are now seeing a world where "DevOps" is mainstream. For companies starting new product development initiatives, using some form of Configuration Management is now table stakes to iterate quickly. Additionally, we see more and more companies shed their physical data center presence in order to leverage the flexibility and accessibility of public compute resources provided by companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
The inherent nature of these IaaS providers is to make it as easy as possible to provision systems to meet your infrastructure needs – and to do so very quickly. Speed to market is a major competitive advantage that many companies are leveraging through the concept of Infrastructure as Code. Provisioning hundreds or thousands of compute instances in mere minutes is now considered an everyday activity. Everyone wants to move fast.
Continuous Integration. Continuous Deployment. But who (or what) is continually monitoring the state of your operational security?
To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops.— DevOps Borat (@DEVOPS_BORAT) February 26, 2011
We now have a world where your junior system administrator is able to make a small change to a Chef Recipe, Puppet Manifest, or maybe an Ansible Playbook, and deploy it to production within minutes. But what is the scope of that change? System Administrators don't want to be slowed down by the security team. They don't want their configuration management changes to be passed through a Change Control Board. They want to change a variable, open a pull request, and once merged, they want their operational tooling to do the rest. They want their change to hit production servers as soon as possible.
If one of the primary tenets of DevOps seeks to value empathy between teams that traditionally had different incentives for their positions (Devs valuing constant change, Ops valuing stability), We need to evoke the same outcome with your Security teams and the rest of the business.
When you are in a world where you are continually deploying change, you need to move towards a world where you are continually monitoring the security implications for those operational changes. Often times, there is no single person at your company that is able to say with absolute certainty which changes to your infrastructure have additional risks towards your security posture. And if you have a traditional network security organization that is manually reviewing and approving changes to production, you've now introduced the newest bottleneck in your organization.
It's this conversation that excites me the most about joining Threat Stack. As a technical operations veteran of the last 15 years, this is the most important (and exciting) problem to solve in many organizations. Having the opportunity to help build a product that will enable companies to continue to break down operational silos while improving the speed in which they are able to track and respond to security incidents is an absolute dream job for me.
How do you improve your security monitoring and response times, while maintaining your ability to continually deploy changes? These are hard problems to solve, and we are all excited to be in this unique position where can actively help companies solve this problem.]]>
One thing I have found is that when you take a vacation from work, you likely are still working. You are still thinking about work. Thinking about email. Thinking about meetings. It's hard to really let everything go. I've found that it takes at least one full week away from work before I can even start relaxing. Before I can really let go from the day to day that I'm constantly drawn back into.
But….when you quit your job. Everything changes. You don't need to worry about all the email you'll have when you get back. You don't need to thinking about what meetings you might be missing, what decisions are being made without you there. It all doesn't matter anymore. There is no amount of vacation that can replicate that feeling.
The best advice I can give to anyone who is changing jobs is to take at LEAST 2 weeks off between opportunities. Those two weeks, when you have nothing to do. You'll find, they become the best few weeks of your life.
Be smart with your money. Stockpile up cash, and try to live a generally debt-free life. You'll find that you can take even more time off. More time to find the right opportunity. More time to have conversations with companies that you would never have if you were still working.
Funemployment comes to an end! Very excited to announce that I'll be joining @threatstack to build and lead their ops and support teams.— Pete Cheslock (@petecheslock) July 8, 2014
The most amazing part of taking time off is when you find that next opportunity, and you are EXCITED to start. It's no longer just a "job". It's a clean slate to go and build some amazing stuff again.
I couldn't be more exited to be joining an already amazing team over at Threat Stack. I know that I've taken just the right amount of time off because I can't wait to get working again. I can't wait to dive into hard problems again and find a way to solve them.
If you are someone who is in a similar position. Someone who is going to be changing jobs soon. There is no prize to jump from one job to another. Take the time and enjoy the break.]]>
Monday (today), May 19th is the first day I've been unemployed in nearly a decade.
No plans. No job. No idea what my next step is going to be.
The End. pic.twitter.com/lg5Vl9rPde— Pete Cheslock (@petecheslock) May 16, 2014
Saying "unemployed" doesn't quite feel right for this one. I wasn't laid off or fired. I simply quit. I ended up in a situation where I was no longer able to continue doing the job that I was originally hired to do. I give Dyn a lot of credit, they offered other positions but none of them sounded interesting to me. I had been increasingly unhappy for the past few months anyway, so it seemed like a perfect time to take a break.
I've had a lot of people ask me questions about my leaving, and I feel like (since I have some time on my hands), I would get back to writing again and maybe share some thoughts. The question that I've most often received as been:
How can you just stop working? Don't you have bills to pay?
I never used to do a good job at saving money. I used to make money, and then I would spend it. Granted, I never had a job where I made enough to actually cover expenses, so it wasn't like I was wasteful either. Like most Americans I lived on debt. I had credit cards. I had student loans. I had a car payment. I was a "normal" American. Even though I worked my way though college, $7 an hour wasn't enough to cover my living expenses.
In 2004, I moved out to Boston. I didn't have a job, my girlfriend (now wife) was going to grad school here. I sold my car for $2,500 (which was the first time I ever had a savings account), brought myself and my $40k in debt out to Boston. Even though 2004 was a rough time to be looking for a tech job in Boston - I got lucky and of the 2 interviews I had, one of them gave me a job.
Fast forward 2 years, and the company was acquired. You would technically call it a acqui-hire. I was not part of the acquisition, but at least I got a small severance and a 2 month head start looking for a new job. I still had lots of debt, and was freaking out. So, I took the first job that came along. It was a train wreck. After 30 days there my boss didn't even know who I was. I quit, and it took 2 months to find something else. That next startup only lasted a couple months before they shut down the US office.
Back to where I am at again…
I knew that someday I would have a house, a wife, a child, and this might happen again. I needed an emergency fund. I needed to get out of debt. So I trimmed my living expenses down to nearly zero. Didn't go out to eat, sold a bunch of stuff, whatever it took, and paid off that debt in a couple years. I kept living like that for many years after, saving money until I had an emergency fund that could last me for a while…just in case.
Many people in technology make crazy money (over $100k a year), most of us make far above the median household income of ~$51,000 per year. My first tech job paid me $24,000 per year. Everyone's situation is different, but if you don't have enough cash in the bank to cover at least 6 months of expenses, then you need to change your spending habits. If you work in the volatile tech industry, you should have a year.
Do you need that new iPhone every 2 years? Buying a $4 coffee from Starbucks every day? Do you have every single premium channel on your cable bill ($200/mo). Eating out twice a week? ($400/mo). Gotta have that new iPad that just came out? Buying a new car because it's "only" $200/mo? (for the next 8 years).
It all adds up.
Everyone should be free to live life the way they want to. But, always have your "fuck you" account ready to go. You might need it one day. And it's a hell of a lot more enjoyable to take time off knowing that you can wait to find the right job for you, not just the next thing that comes along.
The alternative? Sitting at home looking at all the stuff you own while drowning in debt. All the while thinking about the shit job you have that you wish you could leave.]]>
I have fallen victim to the the abuse of the DevOps title. And I see it all the time; in the devops twitter hashtag, people contacting about DevOps job opportunities. It's got to be a real thing, right? I mean, we totally have people that are doing DevOps these days, right?
I recently lead an Open Space session on this very topic at DevOpsDays Austin. We talked for about 40 minutes, with about 35 people in attendance and I wasn't able to find anyone with an dissenting option. Now that doesn't mean that I'm right, or even that everyone in attendance is right. But there is one very important reason why you might want to think twice before using "DevOps" as part of your job title.
When I ran that session, I started the session with a recent story. My friends (rightfully) give me shit for the fact that I self assigned my title at Dyn to be the Dir. of DevOps (I still feel bad about it). I really hate job titles in general and this is what happens when you don't give a shit about what your title is. How the story goes is that when I received the offer from Dyn, my original title was "Director of System Automation and Release Engineering". Since I'm pretty sure that doesn't fit on a business card, I took the job and asked that we change the title later. Fast forward a month, and I've been working at Dyn for about 2 weeks at that point. After talking and trying to formulate my job description & title for about 20 min, I say simply enough…"Fuck This, just call it DevOps, I've got other things to do". I was far too busy to really care much about an arbitrary title.
Fast forward a few weeks to Monitorama, and I was chatting with Mike Rembetsy. After talking for 2 minutes about how the new job was going he says, "Oh, that reminds me, you need to change your job title, it's fucking terrible". I tried to convince him for about 3 more minutes, mainly trying to express to him that it doesn't matter. He then dropped the knowledge bomb that gave me the Ah-Ha moment.
When you are the Head of DevOps, you "Own" DevOps. If DevOps fails it is your failure, when it should be a failure of the entire company to change, adapt, and accept the cultural shift.
That is the major problem with being the "head" of DevOps, or the "Director/Manager/VP/Etc of DevOps". If DevOps fails inside your Company, it's a really easy way for the executives/etc to say "Well, you are the head of DevOps so obviously it failed because you failed." The reality is that DevOps is a culture that should be accepted by every facet of your organization. Everyone needs to embrace the changes of a DevOps culture, and there can not be a single owner of it.
Soon after that conversation, I relaunched my team and title in general to be the "DevTools Team" (A brilliant Etsy recommendation). The more I thought about it, it accurately describes the work that we do. We build the tools needed for Developers(and Ops/QA/NetSec) to spend more of their time writing code, and less time dealing with distractions.
I know some people want to have a DevOps team, or want to call their team the DevOps team. Jez Humble wrote a wonderful blog post last year that I highly recommend that you read. In his post he summarizes that there are scenarios that a "DevOps" team label works, and I do agree with what he says. But don't just label a team DevOps, assign a new Manager of DevOps and wonder why three or six months go by and things are still shitty. Things are still terrible because all you did was change a team name, or give a brand new team a name. Or in some cases created a new silo, the "DevOps Team Silo".
Here are some of the examples that came up during the Open Space.
I don't know why recently there is a need to move away from the same job titles we've used in the past, as if there is some negative connotation towards them. It's not that the jobs have really changed much, it's that we're just getting better and more efficient at doing them with the tools at our disposal. The tools have grown so quickly, it has enabled us to be much better at our jobs, but only if you are willing to learn something new.
In the end - titles really don't matter very much, and they shouldn't matter much. But they can actually have a more powerful (negative) impact internally by making you the owner of a culture that should be accepted by everyone. But there is one point that I believe is so important it needs to be repeated:
If DevOps fails, it should be a failure of the entire company.
If you missed DevOpsDays Austin - you can check out my talk "How to Keep the People You Need", where I discuss recruitment and retention of your hard to fill positions.]]>
Don't Say No - Ask Why Instead
When you have work coming in - inventory to release to the factory floor - don't say no and stop the release of work, and don't blindly say yes and push more work to your team. By agreeing to the request, you have done two things.
In most organizations the Ops team is the bottleneck (it definitely was when I took over the team while at Sonian), and the Theory of Constraints (ToC) tells us that releasing work to a bottleneck resource is the LAST thing we should be doing in that situation.
Here is one scenario - an executive comes to you and gives an abstract request for work. You can respond one of three ways:
You look at the request, and it appears that it should take about a week to finish. It's highly likely that a few parts of this request are quite easy to complete, you knock them out in days, but a couple more are taking longer than expected. Turns out two of the tasks require bottleneck resources, and you can't pull the resource you need from other tasks. Weeks and months go by before you are able to complete the request, but at what cost? You just released more work to your already constrained resources. And you probably didn't make a great impression on the executive who thought it would only take a week to complete.
The ToC also says that an hour lost on a bottleneck resource is an hour lost across the whole system. So not only did you stress your bottleneck, you also slowed down everything that was dependent on Operations.
Well, this one is much easier to break down, if you were to simply say no (which sometimes is a necessity) you can come across as combative, argumentative, and identified as "not a team player". Sad as it is, this is often why people can't say no to requests. Sometimes you don't want to let people down. You want to be the person that "gets it all done". But the reality of the situation is that we can't do everything. There is not enough time in the day and we don't have unlimited resources even if there was. Our first job as managers is to prioritize and release work to the team. The whole system can, and often does, fall apart when we fail to do our jobs.
So what can you do instead?
Why ask why? We need to break down the request, find out what impacts our bottlenecks and which ones do not. Let's go back to our request, 3 of the 5 items are non-bottleneck tasks, which means we can release that work and not stress our bottleneck, these are the items are get done quickly. That leaves 2 items left. You either need to find a way to release this work without impacting your bottleneck, or you just need to say no to that part of the request.
Saying no helps you manage the expectations with your executive team. Remember last month when you all agreed on the next set of projects, your team is focused on 3 main company goals. Half way through the month the company wants to add a 4th task to your list. When this would happened to me, I would handle it simply:
then quickly followed by
"Which of those other 3 tasks do you want us to push to another month?"
As a manager, you should know how much work in progress your team can handle. And you need to make sure to communicate that to the necessary parties at your company.
I always believe that more tech people should take business classes. Not only is it great to learn new things, but part of the game is learning how to speak the language. Learning what is important to the business, and finding out ways that you can help enable the business.
I had a manager who told me this:
"I'm going to just continually give you work, it's up to you to say no".
It was my responsibility to push back when necessary and let him know when I was being overloaded. I was the bottleneck resource, and when I was reaching my limits of throughput he would stop releasing work to me. He was able to avoid slowing down the entire system my limiting the work that was getting released to his team. I'm not saying that this is the best or the correct way to do it, but any system of managing your WIP and how you release work is better than no system at all.
If you haven't yet - I highly recommend you read the following books. "The Phoenix Project" tells a fantastic story about Agile & DevOps process while touching on the Theory of Constraints in a technology focus. "The Goal" is a story about a man and his factory, a story about how to identify and exploit your bottleneck for fun and profit.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement]]>
Just the other day I was listening to the excellent FoodFightShow podcast talking about HPC computing and Chef. During the conversation, James Cuff, Anthony Goddard, and Brandon Burton talked about how you should treat your systems more like cattle than pets. This podcast came at a fantastic time as I had just had a similar conversation with a friend who works at a nameless large public company. He told me how he recently attended a multi-hour meeting where they were deciding the DNS naming convention for the servers. It was one of the few times in recent memory that I was completely speechless.
A properly deployed configuration management solution should allow you the ability to disconnect emotionally from your deployed systems. Your systems should represent a series of roles or tags that define what software packages or other configuration are needed. There should be no difference between "web01", "web02", and "web03".
As an example - using chef you can run searches and connect to systems based on the roles or recipes applied.
1 2 3 4
Configuration management has allowed us to move away from the world of building bespoke systems. Having multi-hour meetings to determine what to call the systems are a thing of the past. And in the current economic climate, most tech companies are understaffed and looking to add more resources to their already constrained teams. Why are you wasting your time on trivial issues? The theory of constraints teaches us that any time saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage. The reverse is equally true, time wasted at the bottleneck essentially shuts down your entire organization. The ability for your company to be a success and win against your competitors can come down to your ability to move fast. As you and your teams decide how to best define the DNS names for your servers, your competition is pulling into the distance.
This is a rant, pure and simple. Name your systems whatever works best for you. Everyone has different requirement and needs. Remove the emotional relationship with your systems by working towards a point where you can nuke and replace your systems in the most automated and easiest way possible. Losing and replacing or rebuilding systems should be a trivial task for any member of your team]]>
Many TechOps teams manage complex environments and with more people using configuration management (such as Chef, Puppet or CFEnging) there can be disastrous consequences for even the smallest of changes. At Sonian, we manage a large number of systems across four separate public clouds. That by nature creates a high level of complexity that can often be difficult for a single person to keep track of. Small changes can have big consequences and we need to mitigate that risk as much as we can (without slowing the high velocity of new code changes).
I've noticed that people who are held accountable for their actions are likely to exhibit the following traits:
Accountability can bring maturity to a growing organization, but it can also crush teams with overreaching process and procedure. They key is to bring just the right amount of process, slowly over time.
Another point to mention is that being cautious is not the same as being slow. You can have an organization who is cautious and still push changes with a high velocity. Building continuous integration into your workflow and expanding your test driven development are two of the many ways that can provide validation and mitigate risk.
Something very simple that we do at Sonian is to have another dev review before you push your changes. As part of our workflow we developed an application that helps to control our deploy of system code changes (roles, databags and cookbooks) to various Chef organizations. If you are curious to learn more of our Git/Chef workflow, you can check out a presentation I gave at a Chef Meetup this past summer. Within our deploy application, which we've named Mise en place, you can see the information that we care about when pushing new infrastructure code.
This application has changed the nature of how we push code out to our many chef organizations. It provides logging of actions so that we are able to track back a change if we are seeing an issue (which provides quicker remediation). And the most important part of what Mise does for us is to provide accountability and control before changes reach production. When you push your change to a "protected stack" you need to get an approval for that push from another person. That other person is now also accountable for the changes you are about to push. They should review the Git diff to validate what you are pushing will have the intended result (to the best of their ability).
This feature, having someone else "turn their key", was influenced by a scene from War Games. In this scene, you find two officers in a nuclear missile silo moving through the procedure to launch their missiles. They both authenticate the message and the launch codes to check for validity. Finally they are both required to turn their key in order to launch.
Pushing the wrong code, or pushing a poorly written change could be the same as launching a nuclear missile at your infrastructure. Having that simple bit of accountability and review of your changes before they hit production could be the difference between a successful deploy or dealing with nuclear fallout.]]>
After seeing that his idea could possibly work for us, and after much discussion with the team making recommendations and shooting down ideas, we decided to invest some time and man hours into building a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). After a few weeks the structure and design of Sensu was built, changed, refactored, and tested heavily. By September, we migrated our non-production environments over to using sensu for monitoring. By October we had moved over our entire production infrastructure over to Sensu. In November, after internal discussions and approvals, we released Sensu as an open source project under the MIT license.
Open source can work if you make it work. I can honestly say that Sensu would not be as powerful or as mature today if we had not had the support of some awesome people in the community. People like Joe Miller, Jeremy Carroll, Anthony Goddard, James Turnbull, the Heavy water guys, the Sonian Team, and everyone else out there who has helped make Sensu what it is today.
Thank you everyone for your support, your testing, your contributions to documentation and source code. Thank you for continuing to prove that open source works and that truly amazing things can be done with the right community behind it.
I look forward to seeing where this next year takes us.
And if any Sensu contributors are ever in the Boston area, let me know. I'll buy the drinks.]]>
When building and running an entire cloud based infrastructure - you can make similar calculations as you would in the physical world. The premise that if you have existing systems running on AWS (for example) that have excess capacity, you could add additional applications for essentially zero cost (since you are already paying for that running instance). The difference I find in the AWS world, is that you could potentially have your developers, operations team, and even your support team require instances for testing or for other short term technical needs. The process for new system acquisition is often just a command talking to an API which provisions your instance. The beauty of public clouds is that you can provision new instances quickly to satisfy Development or Support needs. In the physical world - new server acquisition would likely go thru an approval process that would likely require multiple levels of approval. The largest part of cloud cost containment is keeping a watchful eye on new instance usage to ensure you don't have wasted/excess capacity.
In the past at Sonian, we had not invested much into visibility or process around managing our overall costs on AWS (and other public clouds). This resulted in a stratospheric AWS bill that did not represent our current capacity needs. To battle this, we created a small team of people including myself, our VP of Eng and our head of Support Ops to review our usage and cost. Since at the time there were not a lot of great apps that could help up correlate our instances across our multiple AWS accounts, we decided to build our own. The initial iteration was to simply correlate instances in AWS with our instances in the Opscode Chef platform. Since we had heavy Chef integration, if a node was on AWS but was not registered with Chef it was likely a node that failed and/or could be terminated. We continued to improve and build more features into our cost tracking application in order to find more unused or underutilized instances.
Over the next few months, we continued to review our usage, clean up and removed unused instances and disk, and even redesign our reference architecture taking input from all areas of development and operations. Just a few months after assigning ownership and accountability to managing our AWS costs we saw a decrease in our AWS bill by over 50%. And when you deal with the amount of scale that we deal with, it equates to massive cost savings that has benefited the entire company.
Since then and even up to today, the precision and ownership of managing our cost containment has trickled down to all parts of our Engineering and Operations teams. When discussing new features or changes to our systems or code, you will often hear our software developers discuss the per hour pricing of m1.large nodes and adjust their code to support excess capacity we may have with m1.medium nodes (for example). This has continued on in the usage of our metrics hosting provider Librato. Since we pay per metric data point, we keep a close eye on the metrics we are tracking, ensuring they have meaning to us and that they are actionable. Personally I believe this keeps the quality of the data we are tracking high while keeping our costs low. If we were in a physical world (or even did a Graphite setup on AWS) we would still have the same cost per metric stored idea, but with slightly different cost basis/model.
In order to create a culture of cost, you must have ownership and accountability on your cloud assets. Just because you are pushing infrastructure to an IAAS provider does not mean you can ignore managing those assets. If you are struggling with a massive AWS bill you may have just received, maybe you should ask the question, "Who owns this?". Accountability and ownership are key to the success of any project and this is no different.
But for us, the proof is in the AWS bill. We were able to decrease our costs by over 50% applying ownership. We are able to maintain our AWS costs while increasing our data storage and object counts by 300%. Ownership leads to people taking the time to understand reserved instance costs, spot node usage scenarios and other AWS cost savings features. And ensures that everyone at the company, Devs, Ops, Support, PM and even our Sales team will understand our costs and usage of public IAAS providers.]]>
Google knows big data and big data centers. They have been around long enough that they have already built out the necessary infrastructure in order to be competitive in the cloud computing space. Their barrier to entry is already much lower than other providers in the market, and this allows them to tell a more convincing story around moving your applications over to their cloud.
Google has made it clear that their intention is to win on price. This one was area where I was slightly disappointed with the price for the compute and the cloud storage. I ran some basic numbers for the cloud storage and found that for 1 Petabyte of data, you would save approximately 8% a month over AWS S3 platform.
Their compute pricing is similarly discounted for retail pricing only. Google does not yet have reserved or spot pricing for their instances, and until then it will be difficult for long time AWS users to make the move as AWS is likely still cheaper for them. If they intend to capture the market and catch up with AWS, I think they are going to need more aggressive pricing. But, they'll have to make some bold moves as Amazon has a pattern of decreasing their prices as well.
These guys know all about availability and uptime. The question you have to ask yourself is how many times has Google even been unavailable. Not very many. They know how to build reliable data centers. The real question is if they can bring that experience over to their cloud. If they can, they may very easily win over some jaded Amazon customers growing upset with recent AWS outages.
In my opinion, you need to have at least a compute service to be classified as a "cloud". Rackspace, Amazon, IBM SmartCloud and Google all have that. Google had jumped in front of Rackspace with their BigQuery service. They have also jumped in front of IBM by having an API based object storage. At this time IBM SmartCloud only provides compute and persistent block storage, no object storage yet.
In some ways the new offering from Google is quite compelling, even while it's still in beta. Their pricing is good (hopefully better after beta if they really want to capture market share from AWS), and their BigQuery service is also very interesting as well. I'm always interested in any new cloud provider, especially ones that are cheaper and potentially more stable than Amazon AWS platform. The benefits of Sonian being cloud agnostic is that we can leverage new cloud compute infrastructure and object stores when the pricing makes sense. For just being released, I like what I see, but will be more interested to see where they go from here and if they can take away any of Amazon's massive cloud computing marketshare.
When the clouds battle over price - the consumers win.]]>
Needless to say - I had a lot on my plate when I first started. Here are just some of the things that I started working on.
I went down many paths over the course of last year. Some things worked for us, many things did not. It was important that I stayed as flexible and able to adapt to changes. As I look back on the past year, and the successes that we have accomplished as a team, I find there are a few specific things that helped us along the way.
If you want to build the best team - you need to be willing to hire people from anywhere. It is nearly impossible to build a top tier team unless you can be flexible on hiring remote staff. Additionally, look internally for people that may be a good fit. You may find some hidden gems in your organization that you can invest in to build your team.
My entire team works remotely. We keep in contact with IRC, Skype, Google Hangouts. We do standups everyday to review the status of our projects, blockers, etc. Most of the Sonian engineering team is remote, and we bring them out to the HQ in Newton, MA a couple times a year to meet, plan and spend time in person working together. Managing remote teams works if you make it work. It's not easy, but it's one of the only ways to build the best team possible.
Every organization needs process, the hard part is creating just the right amount of process without burdening your team with the overhead associated with it. When I started managing the DevOps team, our previous ticket management system had no policy around how new projects can get put on the board. This resulted in a Kanban board that had thousands of tasks that people had placed there over the past many months - some things were simple configuration changes that would take minutes to solve, and in many cases were solved in already deployed code.
I declared a "ticket bankruptcy" for our old system, and helped to move our team's tasks over to Jira. The rule was simple - if we weren't going to complete it in 30 days the task died in the old system. After the move I took a hard stance towards the stories that could get put on the board - and I wouldn't let anyone put a story on the board without talking to me first. This helped us create clearer and more concise stories for the DevOps team - and what we put on our board had more value and could be prioritized appropriately. Over time our processes evolved and this requirement was no longer needed to ensure quality stories were getting created.
Additionally we stopped putting small configuration changes as stories on our board, instead if someone needed a change - they could reach out to us directly and we would do our best to solve the problem right there (often times I would make these changes myself - to keep the team from being distracted). This helped unblock our development teams and increased their story velocity. One thing we strive for in DevOps is to help out our engineering teams with simple changes they need. Instead of having them dump a story on the board where we would "get to it later" - we would help them out on the spot.
I think every team should look at the tools and technologies they work with and ask if they can be provided to the open-source community. When we had reached our pain point with Nagios, we came up with the idea of Sensu. Before even starting the project, I knew this would only work if we created it with the intention of it being an application that we open-source. Luckily, my VP of Eng and CEO both understood the value of open-source applications and the benefit they can provide to the community.
We tasked two of our team members to spend the next few months building out, testing and deploying Sensu to all the nodes in our organization. We continue to make that investment in Sensu my devoting 20% of one of our engineers time to maintaining and leading the community. Over the past year we have also made contributions to Fog, adding in support for IBM SmartCloud, as well as updates to the AWS VPC code. We hope to make available other tools and chef cookbooks to the open-source community.
Ownership of tasks is a big deal for me. Since we write the code that automates our systems as well as deploying all other code, it's imperative that we own the deploys. Over the past year, we have built a culture around deploying our code and changes quickly (we operate in a 3 week develop/deploy sprint) and methodically. Since we started this initiative about 8 months ago - we have deployed new software to our various stacks without unplanned or unintended results, every 3 weeks.
The solution in the end was quite simple - we created a detailed deployment checklist that required signoff from each team who had code going out the door. But in the end, it was the team of DevOps engineers that were in charge of that checklist and gave final approval (or rejection). When it came time for the deploy, they simply "followed the checklist". Over time as we increased our automation we required less and less items in our checklists. Changes and optimizations in our deployment procedures helped to decrease our deploy times in half. We got to spend more time writing code and building apps and less time deploying - always a plus.
There is a fantastic book by Robert Greenleaf about Servant Leadership and I try to incorporate his principals into my management style. I've detailed below a few parts of the book that I have adapted to my needs, and so far, it works quite well.
1) Listening - It's important to listen to your team and help support them in their decision making process, your team has the best chance or growing when they can identify a problem at hand as well as the solution required. Simply telling them what the problem is and how to fix it can only makes them more dependent on you as a manager.
2) Persuasion - I do my best to help convince my team of the best course of action. I don't believe that my ideas are always the right ones and welcome anyone on my team to tell me that I'm wrong (I often am). But at the same time, If I feel that a particular path needs to be taken, I do my best to convince them and bring them to my side.
3) Commitment to the growth of the team - I give my team a significant amount of trust and support to solve problems and complete tasks. They are given the freedom to go and make mistakes and learn new ways of managing our systems and applications. I often urge the team to pair while coding as well to promote learning and knowledge transfer.
Finally I act as the "buffer" for the team. They are most successful when they are able to work without unnecessary distractions. If there are tasks that need to be worked on (such as hotfixes, systems/infrastructure updates or support, etc) I try to complete these tasks without pulling them away from their projects.
We do this to keep support, engineering and our customers happy - which in the end is the most important thing we do as a DevOps team.
Interesting in joining us? We're always looking for new members to add to our team. Here is a general idea of what we do.]]>
I started by reviewing the AWS documentation but found that their example for restricting access to a specific IP didn't seem to work for me. After some back and forth with the AWS support team - we were able to nail down the problem and get this working. I figured I would share what we learned for anyone else trying to do something similar.
The way that we have decided to configure our VPC is such that when the VPC nodes connect to S3 - they will connect out to the internet via the "gateway" nodes that we control. Since all traffic from a VPC to S3 needs to traverse the public internet (over https of course), it must route outbound from your VPC to get to S3 (there is not currently a direct, internal to VPC access to S3). This design allows our nodes to connect to S3 from a single IP address, an elastic IP attached to our gateway node.
So - based on this design, we needed a way to only allow access to a set of buckets from this single IP address. For example purposes we are using the IP of 72.309.38.2.
IF you were to follow the initial example laid out by the AWS documentation - you'll end up with a policy that probably looks similar to this.
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What you're going to find, after banging your head on the table a few times, is that this policy does not work. There does not appear to be an implied deny rule with S3 buckets (similar to how IAM access policies are setup). I did my testing with the s3-curl command - When you have that tool setup - you can make a query like the following:
Using the policy above - returned this:
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After troubleshooting this with the AWS support team - they let me know of the following:
By default accounts are restricted from accessing S3 unless they have been given access via policy. However, S3 is designed by default to allow any IP address access. So to block IP's you would have to specify denies explicitly in the policy instead of allows.
Once I learned this - the policy was easy to adjust. I flipped around the policy from allowing access from only my IP address to denying access from everywhere that was NOT my IP address.
My new policy looked like this:
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And when I ran my s3-curl command again - I now received the following response.
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This could be used as well for added layers of security with your existing applications that use/access S3 - not just nodes within a VPC. I hope this helps someone out there from any undue stress when trying to securing your S3 access.]]>
About a month ago my Jira board grew with more and more stories asking for new or monitors, bug fixes and additional metrics for Sensu. We've had a few large projects start recently with came with tight deadlines and large resource needs, so I didn't expect to complete these stories for at least a few months. Based on the schedule, I thought if we can have everyone spend one day to work on some of these stories/tickets, the larger projects shouldn't be delayed.
We have engineering-wide codefests during our company meetups three times a year. These are fantastic opportunities for team members across all parts of our engineering teams (devs and non-devs alike) to work on and present new solutions and ideas to the entire company. We needed a day to hack on a specific project (our Sensu monitors and metrics), and I didn't want to waste codefest on that. I needed a separate day, just to hack on a specific project.
I presented the idea to the head of engineering, who signed off on our experiment as long as we had some clearly defined goals we were working towards. I wanted specific tasks defined before we started so that we wouldn't waste time planning when we should be hacking. So, I started planning for our hackday about 3 weeks in advance. I made sure to coordinate with all the rest of the teams leads to make sure they were aware and would send any requests directly to myself for the day. I would then act as the buffer for any 3rd level support or other assistance our DevOps teams provides.
Over the next 3 weeks, everyone on the DevOps team added ideas to a wiki document; things that were keeping them up at night, code they wanted to refactor, etc… Two days before our hackday, we reviewed the list of items and assigned ownership to all the tasks (Pairing was encouraged). This allowed the geographically diverse team to be able to hit the ground running when they logged on for the day (Since everyone starts working at different times). On the day of our hackfest - everyone had their task list and began working on the various fixes we had lined up. We had a quick standup mid-way thru to check on status, blockers, etc, and to make sure we were making progress.
So - what were the results?
Comparing the diff for our branch on github - we saw the following:
47 changed files with 689 additions and 478 deletions
Now - what did we really get done?
Overall - the team enjoyed taking a break from our big projects to fix things that keep us up in the middle of the night (literally). And I enjoyed a much smaller backlog of work as well as personally fixing and adding new sensu checks.
We were able to complete about a week's worth of work in a single day. We added in a few hours of testing and validation, and deployed the code out to production the next day (Oh, the joys of DevOps). The success of this project has already sparked the interest of other engineering teams who are considering doing similar hackdays. My team has already begun to discuss doing this again once every couple months with different focuses each time.
Sonian is continually committed to Sensu as an open source project - which is why we share many of our checks with the rest of the community - you can check out many of the new and refactored checks (the result of our hackday) by heading over to Sensu's community plugins page.]]>
One of our AWS accounts is a non-production account where we spin up and down test systems to support new feature testing and other activities to support development. Our build cluster (which lives in a separate AWS account) needs access some S3 buckets that live in our non-production account. The problem is that this account also contains some of our more sensitive stacks, like QA and UA systems, which are locked down from a moderate to a production level of access. So, in this case, I needed to create an IAM user on our build cluster account that could access specific buckets in our Non-Prod account. This is to ensure we're not giving out keys that could be used to potential cause data destruction.
Here is how you can do it if you are looking for the same level of Amazon cross-account access for S3 buckets (with granular per-bucket IAM level permissions).
This guide assumes that you already have an IAM user on the account you want to enable access from (Our build cluster account). And you'll need to know the S3 bucket in question (This will be a bucket called
my-shared-bucket-20932 in our non-production account). I'm also going to assume you have a basic understanding of IAM (How to create users, groups, etc…)
First step is to get your AWS account ID number - this is a 12 digit number. You can find it in your account activity report.
Next - go to the IAM user you are going to be granting access for to grab the User ARN. You will need this when you create the bucket policy on the bucket in the other account you're granting them access to.
After you have both the AWS account ID number
1234567890 and your User ARN
arn:aws:iam::1234567890:user/test.user, access your S3 bucket properties for the bucket you are going to allow access to. My example is going to use the bucket
Now you are going to need to paste in a bucket policy in JSON format - here is an example one below to enable "Get" access to anything in the bucket
my-shared-bucket-20932. If you wanted to allow full access, you could change the
s3:Get* to
s3:* or even
s3:Put* if you only wanted to allow uploading files.
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Now that you have your S3 bucket policy in place - it's time to create a new group that your user(s) will be a member of to allow them the ability to access the bucket in your other account.
Access your IAM tab in your AWS console - Create a group - and when your group is created - create a policy with the following information
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It's going to look something like this:
Finally - make your IAM user a member of the group you just created - any they will now have access to your S3 bucket in a separate AWS account.]]>
In addition - I'm working to increase my knowledge of Ruby as we use Ruby for all our tools and applications. Coming from a non-computer science background, that will be a challenge in itself. I've starting by reading the fantastic book written by Chris Pine - Learn to Program.
I'll be writing more about some of the challenges of managing big data and large system at scale in the cloud - where you have no control over network and disk I/O (among other things we can't control), and discuss how we deploy, monitor, scale and secure our systems.]]>
This new service will allow companies who have systems in the AWS cloud to leverage a lower cost solution to store data that can easily be retrieved from another location or re-processed from source data. You can now design your application to request data from S3 RRS, and if the data object does not exist, your application can retrieve it from another location or recreate the object (maybe from source data on the more resilient S3 storage). This may be a great solution for companies that are using EC2 just for computing or processing large data sets, S3 RRS could reduce your monthly costs by quite a bit.
The only problem with this new storage service is that the cost is still pretty high for what you get. Also, AWS did not decrease the cost for the data transfer to the RSS service (it's the same as the standard S3), so they can potentially lose your data and the worst of it is you have to pay them to replace it. But with a 99.99% reliability over the course of the year we're probably not talking about a lot of data.
My company makes its living by storing an unlimited amount of our customers' data indefinitely. We can do this because we can leverage the highly resilient and low cost S3 storage to keep email, IM's and social media messages on our system forever without making huge capital outlays in storage systems, colo's, etc… I think it's great that AWS has brought in this lower tier of storage to differentiate itself with the other up and coming and established cloud computing providers by not forcing everyone to use the same "expensive" long term storage. But for my money, it's worth it to pay such a small amount more (5c per GB) for such a large improvement in resiliency.]]>
Email is a management nightmare for companies. People want to keep their emails forever, they don't want mailbox quotas, and they have decided that email is the best place to store all their documents. While working as a technology consultant, many people I spoke with wanted to outsource their email problem, and you see this as large organizations such as the City of LA move to Google Apps. Now, most companies are not there yet when it comes to outsourcing all their email, but outsourcing archiving is something that many companies are steadily moving towards. They don't want to spend thousands on storage and servers for an archiving solution that is only used from time to time. This is where Sonian comes in. We can take your emails that you've been saving for 5 or 10 years, bring them in to our cloud based service and keep them securely, forever. And no, we won't charge you huge amounts to do this, just a simple flat monthly fee per user, per month. We'll also provide you a web based interface to search and categorize your emails for compliance or investigatory reasons, and well as end user acesss.
So, it is a pretty exciting time here at Sonian, with almost 1900 customers in the past couple years we must on to something. And our explosive growth here only confirms that "The Cloud" is here, and people are ready to push their data up to it.]]>


text: Friday the 13th (2009) I found on the internet that another Friday The 13th is coming out soon. The release date is February 13th, 2009. But when I saw a preview of it, looks like it a remake or the original Friday The 13th. Here the link to watch the preview

subset: commoncrawl


text:
UPDATE 03/15/18 Hello Everyone!-The Whatever Variety Show has been POSTPONED, New Date TBD – dates being considered are April 20th or 21st, among others. If you have a preference, please respond or contact Bert Fitzgerald! Thanks- Janie Paige.
"Whatever" the Variety Show and Potluck, at Yonder House in NE Portland, March 16th!
Shake off hibernation with an evening of low-key performance and potlucking at Yonder House. We'll take in each other's poetry, music, movies, comedy, skits, musings, etc., and just eat drink and hang out.
March 16th at Yonder House, 5311 NE 15th Ave, Portland, OR
Potluck starts at 7pm, Variety Show starts at 8pm
Don't have something to present? Yes you do. Just lower your standards. Respond via facebook here, or Call Bert at 574-213-5468 to get on the list (but you don't have to).
Try to bring some drinks or snacks to share potluck style. We'll have some stuff.
MC Bertrand will be presenting the commercial sponsorships for our acts, hopefully with live musical accompaniment. Contact Bert at 574-213-5468 for further information.


text:
You're in : / online-store / clothing / FOOTWEAR WOMENS / all-collections / Women / Grace
Harley-Davidson® Women's Grace black, beige, or dark brown leather motorcycle boots. Uppers made from the best full grain leather available, a full-length soft cushioned sock lining, and industry's best, most durable YKK® locking inside zippers for ease of putting on and taking off. Designed with 2 front straps with Harley® logo buckles, and an embossed Harley-Davidson® Bar & Shield logo on the heel. Total height: 8.25-inches, Shaft height, 6.75-inches, Heel height: 1.5-inches. Lightweight outsoles for comfort, whether walking or standing. Finished with state-of-the-art cement construction, allowing for a flexible and easy stride


text:
For the most part garages are just a place to park vehicles. This garage is one that will impress the entire neighborhood. We first installed new drywall to give us a clean slate. From there the Flow Wall storage system was installed with plenty of organized cabinets and shelving. The floor was covered with an epoxy coating that is easy to clean as well as looks beautiful.
Smullen Family
Summer 2014
Denver, Colorado
1 Week


text:
Our Team
We have a team of inspiring experts that have dynamic skills and are dedicated to helping students achieve success. The desire and potential we see in our students is quite remarkable. However, we also know that simply having the desire is not enough. This process requires a methodology to help students stay consistent and motivated along the path to graduation and acceptance into college. We are intentional in helping students know the value they hold and inspiring them towards the exciting future ahead of them.
Sherri Morrison - Graf, CEO / Founder
Shelly Burton, Education Consultant
Betsy Morris, Education Consultant
Lindsey Sharpe, COO
Suzanna Ammenheuser, Education Consultant


text:
Sirk TV Graphic Novel Review: SUPERMAN & WONDER WOMAN VOL. 3 – CASUALTIES OF WAR [DC Comics]
The idea of two superheroes coming together where the idea of what is acceptable and undue in the course of gods makes for an interesting dichotomy. Of course, this loss of structure usually turns into a litany of lost grudges. Like some of the rumors permeating "Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice", collateral damage creates a notion of what is lost through maybe a lack of perspective. In this progression: "Superman & Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Casualties Of War" [Peter Tomasi/DC Comics/144pgs], the two heroes are an item. As a goddess of war, Diana (aka WW) can put Superman in his place with distinctive fervor, simply because she is older and supposedly knows better. Problem is that in this iteration specifically she is ruled by ego which comes out as her latest impediment by the villain Margos. The reality is that Margos is simply a metaphor for those people who have been inadvertently killed by our heroes. Through Margos' eyes comes demons from Wonder Woman's past, specifically Circe. The story seems to take on a stream of consciousness bent as if our superheroes are having their intentions moved against them superfluously. Ultimately Circe takes Superman's unchecked rage which he bottles up and unleashes it against Wonder Woman. It is simply the fact that her lasso of truth keeps him from completely losing himself that saves them from being defeated. Margos retreats to being the man child he used to be. This story arc is a cautionary tale for sure but it is actually two intimate moments with Diana and Clark Kent (aka Superman), half in and out of their costumes that makes the most sense and grounds the narrative. At the beginning Clark is trying to put the lives that he has inadvertently affected into words on a type writer. He reaffirms to Diana that he can type fast but writing takes time. By the end of the story, the structure is full circle as Diana puts words to paper to ensure that certain stories are not forgotten. The art in this volume is amazing and mythic seemingly vaulting out of the tablet reminiscent of Alex Ross' grandeur. While some of the story points are overwrought as is understandable in this structure, this pairing and volume still pack quite a punch.
Posted on November 23, 2015, in Other Reviews and tagged cable television, Casualties Of War, college television, Graphic Novel Review, Peter Tomasi, Sirk TV, Superman, tim wassberg, tv colleges, Wonder Woman. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.


text:
Hello readers. Welcome to my heart. Lets begin.
Now, our forefathers has exposed a secret desire in all of us. The pursuit of happiness. And, I love the word choice because its so flawed. :D No disrespect to them, but, you'll understand after I'm done.
So, dictionary.com defines pursuit as:the act of pursuing. An effort to secure or attain; quest.
As you can see, terrible word choice. Because as many of us have discovered if you've lived any measurable time on this beautiful corrupted Earth, HAPPINESS cannot be securely attained. We can be happy on Monday and miserable on Friday. OH, even better, we can be happy Monday morning and miserable Monday night! I'm a monster with analogies so lets get into some.
The pursuit of happiness is like chasing a kid that cannot sit still. Or even cuter, a very hyper puppy. We can catch it, but whenever its ready to move again it just darts out of our grip. Even threatening it doesn't work all the times. I remember my beautiful and wonderful friend Tisha once quoted something she heard, "Happiness depends on happenings, joy depends on God." And as you can imagine, it rocked my world. Because it does. A lot of miserable people are miserable because of things that happened to them. And a lot of people are happy because happy things have happened to them. Natural response, I mean? Come on. You find $100 every two weeks, that's a reason to be happy. You finally find a boyfriend that treats you right, that's a reason to be happy. You are finally accepted by some friends, that's a reason to be happy right? Like how I'm tossing this ball up in the air? Now let's crack that bat on it.
What happens when your car breaks down and you HAVE to get it fixed, no money? What happens when you lose ALL of your money? What happens when that boyfriend dumps you? Cheats on you? What happens when those friends betray you? Stab you in your back? Sale you over for 30 pieces of silver?
Hey, news flash to the newbies who doesn't know this, but LIFE HAPPENS! Stuff happens. And if we're living off this happiness kick, then we're in for a rollercoaster way of life, a bumpy road in an old car, a jog through rough terrain.
So, what's the other half of that quote? But joy depends on God. Now I can't leave you without introducing you to a beautiful part of my Father. Joy. I could end it right there, but I'll continue.
Joy is obtainable. Psalm 19:8 The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. Joy can be securely attained because God can be securely attained in our hearts. He is the giver of that joy. And it can be so internalized that NOTHING can touch it. Paul wrote a lot of his letters when he was in prison. And he was just this old chipper church planter in prison writing to all his friends about talking about Jesus and how thankful he was. Paul was in touch with this thing called joy. He knew he lived for a higher purpose. He had tasted a sweetness that the world can't offer us, that our happenings can't offer us. He tasted God in a heavenly realm to where he was separated from this world enough so that his happenings couldn't effect what was securely attained in His heart. HALLELUJAH!!!!!
(I literally screamed that).
So with the security of joy, its becomes instead of a roller-coaster, but like Aladdin's magic carpet. It becomes the Mercedes Benz with the great shock system, so those bumps on the road doesn't rattle you. Or those $200 running shoes that you can't feel every rock that you step on. Because there will be rocks, and there will be bumps, but what you're riding in determines the ride. So, let's try the Pursuit of


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*Photography by Josè Luis Zapata
Where do you see yourself saying "I do" in Belize? If you're planning a destination wedding in Belize, we are pretty sure you have an idea. If not, we can help you figure it out whether it's at a secluded beach, a luxurious resort, a charming seaside cottage, a catamaran, a sunset cruise, or even a Mayan ruin. Because we're local Belizeans, we collaborate well with various resorts, and we also have a wide selection of private vacation homes to choose from. With our guidance, you can discover the perfect wedding venue from locations on Ambergris Caye, Caye Caulker or the mainland of Belize. Here are some of the locations where we've planned Belize destination weddings for our brides:


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By Pastor Bruce K. Oyen, First Baptist Church, Spearfish, SD
You might have known some Fourth of July Christians, or perhaps know some now. Here are some of their characteristics: 1) They go off with a big bang, and aren't heard from again. 2) They sparkle for awhile, and then disappear. 3) They produce a lot of smoke, but that's it. 4) Someone lights their fuse, but they turn out to be duds. What we need are more Christians like the man named "Mnason," referred to in Acts 21:16. The New King James Version and The Modern English Version say he was "an early disciple." This means he had been a Christian for a long time, in contrast to Fourth of July Christians. This takes commitment to the Lord, and his grace to stay committed.


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Probability Modelling: Language and Physics
In two week's time we will have Daniel Bernhardt from Facebook, London presenting to us at the Data Hide. He will spend the tutorial session beforehand discussing the details of spell checkers at Facebook.
To prepare for the 17th this we we will have a discussion of n-grams and how to model language, and starting thinking more about the spell checking problem that Daniel will talk about. We'll have a simple review of probability and how to relate marginals and conditional probabilities and think about how probability can be used to represent sequences. In particular you should refresh yourself on the sum rule of probability and the product rule of probability.
Think about this type of modelling and how it relates to Navier Stokes. In particular what are the abstractions in Navier Stokes? What are the abstactions in n-gram models and how they are applied to language?
Which model would you think of as "Higher Level" and which model is a "Lower Level" model.
Navier Stokes is often thought of as a "Physical model" can n-gram models be thought of in this way? If so how why? If not why not?


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Olympos Express
Olympos Express takes over athens airport transfer and tours and the company is active in the field of road transport since 1995.
Our fleet consists of vans and buses, from 10 to 50 seats. All our vehicles are modern and comfortable and they have GPS, air conditioning and mobile phones.
We provide reliable and safe transfer services 24 hours a day to and from the airport, to and from ports and marinas, tours of archaeological sites in Greece and tour in the city. Our drivers are professionals and speak English.
Our fleet and our experienced staff are at your disposal to provide you with a pleasant, safe, comfortable and economical travel wherever you choose.
We are at your disposal 24 hours a day throughout the year.
Olympos Express is a certified partner of the Greek Tourism Organization (GTO) with registration number 0208E60000479500 and our company guarantees nothing less than customer satisfaction, at reasonable prices.
Always with respect to customer needs.


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A Water Metaphor
A storm blew in Monday night, just after people started their fireworks celebrations for Victoria Day. The temperature dropped and a cool breeze blew into the attic windows. It felt lovely . It is now Thursday, however, and it still feels like the storm is lingering in the air–muggy and full of hostile intent.
So I am inclined to use the oppressive weather as some sort of excuse or explanation for my own feelings of fogginess and hostile intention. But that is unfair to the weather gods. Fact remains, though, that I feel unsettled and pessimistic. I want to do things in my professional life that will maximize the potential for good and my capacity for change, but WHICH of the things should I concentrate on? I also need to do those things which replenish and restore me as a person, a partner, and a mom. I want to feel the flow that happens when you're content and I want my children to see happy, content grown-ups who are at peace with themselves and their place in the world.
But I don't feel it right now. I feel depleted. I feel half-empty, at least. Everywhere I look, I see half-assed commitment, half of a genuine interest, half of a morsel of motivation. I can't even knit at night for more than 30 minutes without feeling bored, bored, bored like it is all useless and will never work out and why did I think I was good at this, anyway? And when I run with the dog I wonder why I'm slower now than I was two years ago and maybe if I REALLY committed to that weight lifting program I'd get super lean and fast and would be awesome at that. But maybe not, because I'm me and I'm old and slow. And I finished writing a book and it's getting published. That is a good thing, though it took me too long, and I should start the next project but . . . why bother? I don't have that career any more, so no one will miss it if I don't write that other thing. And now, you see, I'm drowning in a wave of sappy, self-involved bad feelings that I don't need, my family doesn't need and you, frankly—why are you still reading this? You don't need this, either. You would be oh-so-right to point out that I am a materially comfortable, educated, happily married middle-class woman with two healthy, bright children–two cars, a house, and a dog in the bargain I have zero problems. Zero.
So I need to find the source, the well, will fill this glass of water again. And it can't come from the outside. It isn't God (sorry, folks) or the love of my husband or kids (though that's great, of course). . . and it's got to be around here somewhere.
3 Responses
This all sounds oh, so familiar. I regret that I have no fast and easy answers for you. Only a bit of empathy – empathy that perhaps you need to find for yourself. If you stop judging yourself for being bored or unproductive or unmotivated or… I bet your glass will soon fill up again. Love your lovely self.
Oh. And please keep writing. I take such pleasure in reading what you have to say.
I feel you.
I don't know if it's something we're injesting, exposing ourselves to, or some sort of realization, but you are not alone.
First World Problems — are still problems. Don't let that pile on, and don't "borrow tomorrow's trouble today."
I hope you find your spark.


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Airfrying is definitely the new craze right now and I am personally very obsessed with it. When you have kids, it can be quite tricky to cook, especially when frantic times of the day arrive.
As such, I make use of machines that make my life easier as much as possible. Without a doubt, being a mom is hard, so getting all of the help that I can get is probably the smartest thing that I do on a regular basis. Thankfully, I have an airfryer now.
I have been using my airfryer for a few weeks now and would describe it as a small oven on steroids. It is incredibly fast and very effective and can crisp up food like nothing else. The best part is that I can make foods that my kids love, but in a healthier manner and with minimal fat. I no longer worry about trans-fat, either.
While I know that fat is important for a child's development and brain, the mere thought of deep frying food still sends shivers down my spine. I do not like the idea of filling up a pot with a ton of coconut oil just to make some healthy chips for my children, either, because it simply isn't affordable. Thanks to my airfryer, I can just use a tablespoon of oil and get the same results as regular fried food – just without the guilt.
On the first day that I used my airfryer, I cooked some beetroot chips, roast pumpkin, grain-free Thai Fish cakes and vegetable ratatouille. Everything tasted great and I was particularly impressed by how quickly the airfryer worked. It only took 15 minutes to make the pumpkin, 10 minutes to make the fish cakes and 20 minutes to make the crispy roast chicken. In a regular oven, it usually takes 15 minutes to preheat the food and a whole hour to roast the crispy chicken.
The beetroot chips were delicious, too. All that we did was slice up some raw beetroot and mix it with some salt and coconut oil before throwing them in the airfryer for 15 minutes. The beetroot chips ended up crispy enough for the kids to turn them into one of their favorite snacks.
I have had a lot of fun with our airfryer so far and I would highly recommend it to any family out there that is looking for a fun and versatile machine to cook with.
So far, my favorite airfryer recipe is for garlic prawns. Let me teach you how to make them.
- 100g of cashews
- 70g of frozen shelled green prawns
- 2 chopped shallots
- 2 teaspoons of minced garlic
- 2 tablespoons of sweet chili sauce
- 1 tablespoon of melted coconut oil
- Chopped coriander
- Salt and pepper
- Use a big mixing bowl to mix all of the ingredients together.
- Place the ingredients into your airfryer for 10 minutes on 200 degrees.
Generally speaking, airfryers are both fun and functional. Plus, they can help you serve delicious and healthy favorites to the family with crispy results and less fat. Airfryers use patented Rapid Air technology, so you can use air to cook delicious food with up to 80% less fat.
If you need more ideas on what to cook with your airfryer, simply do a quick search online. You will find a lot of safe recipes and creative recipes to last you a lifetime of healthy cooking.
Welcome! I'm happy you're here. I'm Sara McConnell. I have a passion for cooking and desire to make healthy eating easy, tasty and fun. I often spend my free time searching for, creating and trying tasty new recipes in my kitchen. Through the blog i want to share with you my cooking experience, and I hope it can help you. Thank you so much for visiting!


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Like the surrounding temples, Sakuramoto-bo is a centre of Shugendo mountain worship (mountain asceticism). The main draw here is a large weeping cherry tree in front of the temple. Sakuramoto-bo's numerous statues - such as that of En no Gyoja, the founder of Shugendo - are worthy of interest, but to my mind the most interesting room is the Ohiroma or large hall for meditation. This hall has a wealth of intriguing details - a large dragon painted on the ceiling, calligraphy on the inner wall, the Yoshino mountains outside to contemplate during meditation, statues and Shugendo paraphernalia to the front of the room. If you have the time, I recommend meditating in the centre of the room, facing the mountains.
Some of the best times to visit Sakuramoto-bo are during the Flower Festival (around 8 April) and the Autumn Festival, when the temples in Yoshino become extra-lively and merry.
Established his throne with the auspicious dream of cherry blossom, the Emperor Tenmu had ordered to build the temple, together with the Empress Jito. It is a training hall where Shinto and Buddhism are syncretized. Having Jinben-daibosatsu (important cultural property of Kamakura Era) as the honzon (principal statue), it enshrines numbers of temple treasures including the Statue of Seated Shaka Nyorai (important cultural property of Asuka-Hakuho Era), and the Nenjibutsu (the small statue of Buddha always kept beside the person) of the Emperor Tenmu. In Shoten-do, Japan's oldest Shoten-son (Nandikesvara, which is a Buddhist pantheon)perceived by En no Gyoja is being enshrined. By dedicating the octagon "ema" (the votive tablet of horse) that brings various connection of people, one prays for the accomplishment of a good match.
Sakuramoto-bo Temple
(8:00 - 17:00)Accepting only Japanese
●Address/1269 Yoshinoyama, Yoshino, Yoshino
●Admission/Adults 500yen; Elementary School students and younger free
◆Access/From Yoshino ropeway Yoshinoyama Station: - 23 minutes on foot from the station.
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Winning the lottery or any jackpot not only does it offer life-changing financial benefits, but also many winners become local or even global sensations. That being said, some players do prefer to keep a low profile and enjoy their wins in private, while others simply want to shout it from the rooftops. But often, in the sometimes bizarre world of gambling, things are not always how they seem.
Scratch card conman
A man who tried to con the UK national lottery ended up being the butt of his own joke when he received nothing but a sarcastic reply to his claim that his scratch card's bar code had 'accidently' been burned off. Also, he claimed the scratch card endured an ink spillage. Despite attempting to glue amounts from previous scratch cards, the national lottery simply told him to fireproof his home and use better glue in the future. Ouch!
Can I have a pizza that jackpot?
Media outlets started reporting on a story about a pizza delivery guy named Chris Fields who had won $31,411 while playing at a mobile casino. According to reports, Fields was given 80 free spins while playing at a mobile casino during his lunch break, which he then used and won a five-figure jackpot. It turned out that this was a fake story concocted by a mobile casino to get people to sign up. In addition to spreading the story, the casino also added a geotag that could change the location of where Chris worked depending on the location of the reader. This made the idea of winning a mega jackpot more realistic as it happened to someone close to you. Talk about clever marketing!
I'm not loving it
Apparently, fast-food outlets are the base for many of these fake news stories. An article began circulating in 2015 that a McDonald's employee named Martin Reiter won $362,259 while playing bingo. Reiter then proceeded to quit his job at the Nevada eatery, but not before cursing at his manager. This story turned out to be untrue and was attributed to a fake news website.


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Join other members of the solo and small firm community for a day of learning
and networking around the theme of Loving Your Law Practice. From
mindfulness to business development and minority-owned business certification,
this conference is packed with insights you can use to level up your practice.
9:15 - 11:15 a.m.: Free BASF Workshops / Coffee and Breakfast
Make It Rain!
Best Practices to
Sign More Clients - RSVP NOW!
* Harness the Power of Social Media for your Law Practice program - RSVP NOW!
a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
MCLE REGISTRATION: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
SOLO/SMALL CONFERENCE: 12:00 - 4:45 p.m.
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MCLE Luncheon Keynote by Judi Cohen of
Warrior One
1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
MCLE Program - Best Practices How to Level Up Your Law Practice
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MCLE Program - Minority-Owned Firms
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Program - Client Control: Strategies for Managing Challenging Interactions
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MCLE Program - Trial Against Goliath: Strategies To Level
the Playing Field
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Adventures in Professional Sports Negotiations
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p.m.: Reception
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Baylor-led researchers identify gene associated with familial glioma A global consortium of experts led by Baylor University of Medication has identified for the very first time a gene connected with familial glioma providing fresh support that one people could be genetically predisposed to the condition. 'It really is widely thought between the scientific community that there surely is no association between genealogy and advancement of glioma www.kamagrapris.com . Because we realize hardly any about the contributing genetic elements, when situations occur in several family members, it really is seen as coincidental,' stated Dr.
SAFYRAL may be the second Bayer OC which includes folate. With the FDA acceptance of Safyral, Bayer gives two oral contraceptives which contain folate now, stated Leslie North, Vice President of Advertising, Women's HealthCare, Bayer Health care Pharmaceuticals. The Centers for Disease Avoidance and Control, the U.S. Preventive Providers Task Push, the March of Dimes and various other leading health authorities advise that all ladies of childbearing age health supplement their diet plan with at least 400 mcg of folic acid daily.


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Chrome Beta for Android has already seen many updates and today it's getting another bringing a wealth of improvements bringing the version number up to 25.0.1364.64 (try saying that 5 times fast!)
A wealth of changes include much improved graphical performance (mainly by moving CPU intensive tasks off the main thread) of which users have reported the lag reduced greatly when using the beta.
As well as a few bugs fixes, this makes it quite exciting. However, there is some known issues (that's what you get for using a beta!) including:
- More unhappy tab screens :(
- Some graphical glitches on some sites
- Selecting text may be a little funky at times
- Tab controls are a little odd at times
The update is on Google Play now (if you push from the web it might work faster)
[appaware-app pname='com.chrome.beta']
Source: Google Chrome Releases Blog
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I have turned on the slider to activate Cortana to respond to my " Hey, Cortana" but unless I click on the microphone icon she doesn't hear me?
I don't think it's a mic problem since t works fine with Cortana otherwise. I've tried other people's suggestions without any luck.


text: As a member of the Bosch Group, Rexroth pays particular attention to those initiatives that engage in raising environmental awareness, deal with the question of alternative energy sources and the efficient use of natural resources.It was this spirit that initiated the Rexroth Pneumobile Competition a few years ago. In this creative and innovative competition the participating students have to design and construct compressed air-driven vehicles before putting them through their paces at an event consisting of a number of categories and disciplines. During the course of the design and production process the students gain first-hand experience of pneumatic, that is to say compressed-air technology, while at the same time they become familiar with Rexroth products. On top of all the program presents an ideal opportunity to tighten the co-operation between the Bosch Rexroth companies and the technical universities and colleges in Hungary.


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- Reference: CV2800005
- Price £2,395,000 • €2,800,000
- Traditional Vale do Lobo Villa
- Three bedrooms on ground floor
- Open plan living and dining area
- BBQ area
- Large swimming pool
- Covered terrace with awnings
- Landscaped garden with irrigation
- Master bedroom on 1st floor with fireplace
- Fitted kitchen
- Marble flooring
- Extensive terracing
- One bedroom self contained annex
- Two car garage
- Plot size:2,318 m2
- Build size:387 m2
- Ownership:Private
Interested? Contact us for further details
A substantial four bedroom traditional villa situated in the prestigious golf and beach resort of Vale do Lobo. In need of modernisation, the property offers stunning views from all levels down Vale das Laranjeiras to the lake on the 14th fairway of the Royal Golf Course.
A secluded, long calçada drive leads to the property at the end of the secure landscaped grounds. Mature pine trees and a colourful garden envelope the extensive terracing overlooking the family sized, west facing pool.
The open plan marble floored living and entertaining space is bright and leads out to the main covered terrace. Three large bedrooms are located on the ground floor and a grand master suite featuring its own fireplace looks out over the first floor terrace to the sea beyond the pines.
An enviable plot conveniently located uphill from the trendy Praça area, boasting a plethora of inspirational restaurants and bars.
Interested? Contact us for further details