Podcasts about megacorp

What are some essential steps for leaders to take when developing a strong company culture and ensuring effective team dynamics?We're thrilled to bring you the latest episode of "Empowering Entrepreneurs," where we hear about the inspiring journey of Scott Fleszar, a seasoned leader in the B2B Vertical SaaS sector and a senior adviser for SafeSend.**Choosing the Right Path:**Scott shares his decision-making process for attending Eastern Michigan University, influenced by proximity, affordability, and a strong encouragement from his family.**Global Experience:**Hear about Scott's international assignment in Switzerland with Thomson Reuters and how his family adapted to the new cultural environment. Discover the impacts of this experience on both his career and his family, including his daughter's success in securing a job in investment banking.**Corporate to Start-Up Dynamics:**Scott contrasts his experiences in large corporations versus small companies, emphasizing how he leveraged the structures and strategies from his time at Thomson Reuters to drive growth at SafeSend.**Real-World Job Insights:**Reflecting on his formative job experiences and the importance of practical, real-world jobs over fancy internships, Scott discusses the value of developing people skills and resilience.**Growth Strategies for Businesses:**Scott shares actionable strategies for business growth, including:- Investing in potential and mentorship- Establishing guardrails for controlled risk-taking- Creating a culture of psychological safety- Encouraging continuous improvement**Seeking Purpose-Driven Work:**Scott expresses his desire to transition towards more purpose-driven work, aiming to make a societal impact beyond the tech and accounting realms. He is currently involved with a charitable organization providing meals to those in need.Empowering Moments05:57 Grandmother's influence outweighed parents' roles in life.09:42 Selling flowers at Detroit's Eastern Market.11:44 Teens need real jobs for valuable experience.17:12 College degree or trades; multiple career paths.19:48 MBA pivoted career, leading to diverse roles.21:13 Mega Corp offers more opportunities than small businesses.25:06 Kids thrived through international move and challenges.30:22 Networking led to SafeSend opportunity, joined Q4 2019.31:49 Led company growth; CEO; pivotal career achievement.36:03 Platform improves tax return process for accounting firms.39:23 Invest in and mentor potential leaders for growth.44:16 Building cohesive, ego-less teams through coaching.47:05 Desires purpose-driven work beyond accounting profession.Running a business doesn't have to run your life.Without a business partner who holds you accountable, it's easy to be so busy ‘doing' business that you don't have the right strategy to grow your business.Stop letting your business run you. At Harper & Co CPA Plus, we know that you want to be empowered to build the lifestyle you envision. In order to do that you need a clear path to follow for successOur clients enjoy a proactive partnership with us. Schedule a consultation with us today.Download our free guide - Entrepreneurial Success Formula: How to Avoid Managing Your Business From Your Bank Account.This episode is brought to you by

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I work at a large tech company, been there for about two years at the time of writing this question. I got in by sheer luck since I've interviewed at many teams in this company before finally landing an offer and I'm starting to think I don't belong. I constantly feel like I don't do a good job to the point where I'm starting to feel incredibly depressed. My question is, what would you do in this situation? I keep thinking I should leave but it's not like the work is stressful and not interesting. I also realize I have a pretty solid setup (6 mile no traffic commute, great coworkers, free ev charging, and job security seems solid) so I'm hesitant on giving that up. I also think even if I leave, would I just repeat the cycle again at a new job/company? I'm pretty stuck I'm a year into my first job at Mega Corp post-graduation. Due to high turnover, I've ended up taking on tasks that would have originally gone to more experienced developers. I've grown and received positive feedback from my manager and skip manager, who have both mentioned potential for promotion. However, in my 1:1s, I've expressed that I'm not looking for a promotion yet because I want to solidify my current role and improve my work-life balance. I still have many coding fundamentals to develop, and I've been stressed and working long hours to take on these responsibilities. I'm now worried that my honesty might have affected my chances of being promoted and that I might be seen as someone not interested in progressing (which is probably frowned upon in big tech). How should I navigate this situation? Is it okay that I've been candid, or should I reconsider my stance on promotion? Thanks!

John Gillespie and Joe Lynch discuss the grocery & produce supply chain. John is the Chief Technology Officer at MegaCorp Logistics, an award-winning logistics firm with remarkable growth based on their superior service. About John Gillespie As an Information Technology Senior professional with over 15 years of experience, he has worked in a variety of industries including healthcare, banking and logistics. Starting in 2008, John was in the healthcare industry providing network and security support. In 2014, John moved into the banking industry and focused on information security, data center management and Enterprise Architecture. In 2020, John returned to the Logistics industry creating an effective IT department at MegaCorp streamlining processes and moving to 100% cloud platform for freight management. About MegaCorp Logistics For nearly a decade, MegaCorp Logistics has reigned supreme as a top US freight leader, consistently recognized by Transport Topics for its excellence. Catering to diverse clients, from Fortune 500 titans to small enterprises, MegaCorp thrives on being a trusted, reliable partner. Led by Ryan Legg's 35+ years of expertise, the company fosters a culture of innovation, aiming to become the premier long-term partner for both customers and carriers. Offering FTL, LTL, and intermodal solutions, MegaCorp boasts a vast network of vetted carriers across North America, ensuring efficient deliveries. Their success stems from dedicated employees and partners, creating a performance-driven environment exceeding customer expectations. Unwavering in the face of evolving supply chain challenges, MegaCorp prioritizes innovation, quality, reliability, and understanding each client's specific needs. This commitment solidifies their position as a dependable partner in today's complex logistics landscape. Key Takeaways: The Grocery & Produce Supply Chain John Gillespie and Joe Lynch discuss some of the unique logistics challenges posed by the grocery & produce supply chain including: Multi-pick and multi-stop shipments Cold chain monitoring Federal regulations including USDA and FSMA Grocery & produce are perishable Hard to predict shipping because of weather and harvest variability Seasonal nature of the freight makes capacity planning difficult MegaCorp Logistics specializes in grocery & produce transportation so they understand how to manage the unique challenges of grocery & produce shipping. MegaCorp Logistics is an award-winning logistics firm that is recognized for superior service and growth. MegaCorp customers enjoy the following benefits: National reach: Operates across the continental US and Canada, with offices in multiple locations. Focus on partnerships: Committed to building long-term, strategic relationships with customers. Full-service provider: Handles full truckload (FTL), less than truckload (LTL), and intermodal logistics. Carrier network: Maintains a network of vetted and certified transportation partners. Innovation focus: Continuously seeks ways to improve efficiency and reliability. Dedicated team: Emphasizes employee satisfaction and performance-driven culture. MegaCorp is also recognized as a top workplace with low employee turnover. Learn More About The Grocery & Produce Supply Chain John Gillespie | Linkedin MegaCorp Logistics | Linkedin MegaCorp Logistics Master a Golden Work/Life Balance & Your RFPs with John Carter Gillespie | Dissecting Popular IT Nerds Podcast John Gillespie, my journey to becoming CTO of MegaCorp | Fractional Podcast MegaCorp Logistics: The Courage of Confidence | Boss Magazine The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Join us for a powerful episode of "What Gives" as Erin Satzger engages in a dynamic conversation with two influential leaders shaping the landscape of Northern Kentucky. Meet Nancy Grayson, President & CEO at Horizon Community Funds, and Lee Crume, President & CEO at BE NKY Growth Partnership.Nancy brings her wealth of experience as the head of Horizon Community Funds, the community-wide foundation dedicated to making a lasting difference in Northern Kentucky. Discover how Horizon Community Funds provides a unique platform for pooling resources, enabling both individuals and businesses to contribute to the betterment of the community.Lee Crume, with over 30 years of experience in economic development, private industry sales, and operations, sheds light on the multifaceted role of BE NKY Growth Partnership. Learn about his passion for creating collaborative organizations and driving sustainable business processes to achieve impactful results.Together, Nancy and Lee share insights into the intersection of economic development, philanthropy, and community-building in Northern Kentucky. From complex business decisions to efficient, sustainable processes, this episode explores how their leadership is driving positive change and making a difference for generations to come.Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the visionary leaders behind the economic and philanthropic growth in Northern Kentucky. This is a conversation you won't want to miss!#NorthernKentuckyLeaders #EconomicDevelopment #Philanthropy #CommunityImpact #HorizonCommunityFunds #BENKYGrowthPartnership #WhatGivesPodcast #LeadershipInAction #ErinSatzger

Episode:Title: Show: ohmTown Daily - Science, Technology, & SocietySeason: 2Episode: 355Date: 12/21/2023Time: Weekdays 8PM, Weekends 6PM ET@ohmTown Episode Article Vote: https://www.ohmtown.com/elections/Past Episode Votes: https://www.ohmtown.com/past-elections/Live on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ohmtownYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/ohmtownPodcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ohmtown/id1609446592Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ohmTownDiscord: https://discord.gg/vgUxz3XArticles Discussed:[0:00] Introductions...Ray-ban Meta Glasses Perspective. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/smacktalk/f/d/ray-ban-meta-glasses-convinced-me-to-believe-in-smart-glasses/ Ballerina Sensor Suit to Help Nutcracking. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/ballerinas-are-stepping-into-sensor-suits-so-one-christmas-you-may-be-able-to-understand-the-nuances-of-the-nutcracker/ Hollywoods next Megacorp. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/a-potential-warner-bros-and-paramount-merger-could-be-hollywoods-next-megacorp/ Quantum Electrodynamics. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/technologytoday/f/d/beyond-the-void-new-experiment-challenges-quantum-electrodynamics/ Raphael Painting that wasn't Raphael Only. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/technologytoday/f/d/ai-study-shows-raphael-painting-was-not-entirely-the-masters-work/ Wireless Tracking System to Help XR Experience. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/technologytoday/f/d/wireless-tracking-system-could-help-improve-the-extended-reality-experience/ X-Ray Mission to Launch in January 2024. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/innovative-x-ray-lobster-eye-mission-set-to-launch/ AI Consciousness Becomes Urgent Research. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/greenagram/f/d/ai-consciousness-scientists-say-we-urgently-need-answers/ Booze Nooze from 2023. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/ofthegrape/f/d/the-10-most-ridiculous-booze-news-stories-from-2023/ 153 new species in 2023. https://www.ohmtown.com/groups/mobble/f/d/scientists-describe-153-new-species-in-2023/ Broadcasted live on Twitch -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/ohmtown

Another podcast for you, we have some news of the week and lots more for you this week. Also, for the record, no Tyler did not murder the puppy. Something fell. Sorry for the noise, we will do better.

05:11 VHS Celebs - Don't Cry09:44 Fatal EmpathIn - The Pocket And Out Again [(In The Pocket And Out Again)]20:22 CoolAm7 - Maya23:10 Megahit - Megabuilding 23 [(Megacorp)]30:13 Dave 808 Turner - Tail Light Dreams [(Tail Light Dreams) )34:41:00 Light4storm - Collapse ProjectFull Power42:24 DIGITAL Love - She Comes Alive48:11 Manhatten - On My Own54:08 ABOBO - ADRIATICA57:58 JESSY MACH - Get wild (retrowave edit) [(City Hunter Remixes)]64:04:00Echo WolfStillsuit

05:11 VHS Celebs - Don't Cry09:44 Fatal EmpathIn - The Pocket And Out Again [(In The Pocket And Out Again)]20:22 CoolAm7 - Maya23:10 Megahit - Megabuilding 23 [(Megacorp)]30:13 Dave 808 Turner - Tail Light Dreams [(Tail Light Dreams) )34:41 Light4storm - Collapse ProjectFull Power42:24 DIGITAL Love - She Comes Alive48:11 Manhatten - On My Own54:08 ABOBO - ADRIATICA57:58 JESSY MACH - Get wild (retrowave edit) [(City Hunter Remixes)]64:04:00Echo WolfStillsuit

In this week's episode, we discuss writing dialogue in fiction, and share eight tips & tricks for writing better dialogue. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and a Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 162 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 26th, 2023. And today we're going to discuss some tips and tricks about how to write dialogue. You may notice that I'm recording this a few days earlier than usual. There's some things coming up in the next few days I want to get a jump on, so I'm getting the episode recorded early so I can still get it out. First up, some updates on my current writing projects.  I am now 72,000 words into Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which puts me at Chapter 16 of 20 of the book, so I am past the 75% mark and I'm hoping to wrap up the rough draft soon, possibly the week this episode will come out. After that I will write the bonus short story that I will give away for free to my newsletter subscribers. I think it's going to be called The Final Shield this time, and if all goes well, Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, no, Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods will be out sometime in August. Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs is the audiobook that I am currently proof-listening to and that should hopefully be out towards the end of August or possibly September. Once Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods is out and published, the next project will be Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the final book in the Silent Order science fiction series. So it'll be exciting to get to that to finish the Dragonskull and the Silent Order series back-to-back. You might remember, on last's week show that I had a 10,000 word day, while writing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, and I'm pleased to report that I've had a second 10,000 word day while writing Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, which makes sure makes my second 10K word day of 2023. Since I had only one of those in 2022, this is very gratifying. If I remember right, I had nine in 2021 and 22 of them in 2020. Well, there wasn't much else to do in 2020 except write, which I'm sure we can all recall it quite well. Before we get to our main topic of writing dialogue, we have a question from reader Judy, who asks: Are you finished with Caina? And the answer to that is no. After I write Silent Order: Pulse Hand, the next book I'm planning to write will be Ghost in the Serpent, the first book of the Ghost Armor series and hopefully that will be out sometime this fall, if all goes well. 00:02:19 Introduction to Main Topic: Writing Dialogue Now on to our main topic of the week: writing dialogue. The thing about writing dialogue is that it's often tricky because the way people talk is frequently very, very different from clear and lucid prose. Conversations are often rambling and incoherent, even to the participants. The tricky part when writing fiction is that 1: you're writing a story, and you need to move things along and 2: you want the dialogue to be comprehensible so people don't abandon reading your story. However, you don't want your dialogue to sound like two computers exchanging precisely written and grammatically accurate factoids. How to strike a balance between these points? Here are some tips and tricks for writing interesting dialogue: 00:03:02 Tip #1 Speech Should Reflect the Character Who is Speaking Number One: Remember that speech shouldn't sound like prose, and it should reflect the character who is speaking. Consider the following sentence: Maura parked her car at the gas station on the corner of 48th and Truman. Now if she needed to convey that information in dialogue, you just repeat that like this: “I parked my car at the gas station on the corner of 48th and Truman”, said Maura. However, unless the character tends to speak very precisely, most people will not talk that way. It will probably sound more like this: “Yeah. Parked over at the gas station on 48th”, said Maura. “You know, the one across from the dry cleaner.” Or depending on Maura's personality, it might be more like this: “You know that gas station where Jenkins threw up in the aisle?” said Maura. “Parked the car there. Yeah. I didn't go inside. Places is a dump. They may not have cleaned up the puke yet.” Dialogue as we know is often a reflection of personality. If Maura was a law enforcement officer setting a trap for a bank robber, she might say like this: “Parked at the gas station on 48th and Truman”, said Maura, “Ready and in position. No sign of the suspect.” But if she was a criminal who had left stolen merchandise in the car for her contact pickup, you might say like this: “Car's at the gas station across from the dry cleaners”, said Maura. “The one where Jenkins threw up after the 5th vodka martini, you remember. Stuff's in the trunk.” Dialogue will generally be less precise than clear prose and should reflect the character's personality whenever possible. 00:04:29 Tip #2: Avoid Info Dumping Number Two: avoid info dumping. One common technique is to use dialogue to convey information about the story to the reader. This can be done well, or it can be done clumsily. Science fiction and fantasy writers, alas tend to fall into this trap all too often because we have exotic concepts to explain to the audience, but you can see the problem very easily when it's done badly. Let's use a modern day example. Jenkins and Maura are about to fly on a plane departing from an American airport, and Maura has never flown before, so Jenkins needs to explain how a TSA security check works. In real life, the conversation would probably go like this: “So what am I supposed to do here?” said Maura Jennings sighed. “Didn't you read the PDF I sent you?” She rolled her eyes. “Fine”, said Jenkins. “Look, you put your stuff in these plastic tubs and then you take off your shoes and go through the scanner. Since you're wearing a tank top and TSA guys are usually pervs, you're going to get the enhanced pat down.” He feigned groping his own chest. “Don't be a jerk.” Now a writer succumbing to info dumping would probably have the conversation go like this: “So what am I supposed to do here?” said Maura. Jenkins turned to her. “As you know, Maura, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which created the Transportation Security Administration, which henceforth would have authority over civilian airport security on United States soil. Initially part of the Transportation Department, the TSA was moved under the authority of Homeland Security when that department was created in March of 2003….” You see the problem? No one actually talks that way in real life. The problem comes in when writers use infodumping and dialogue as a shortcut to worldbuilding. Fantasy and science fiction writers succumb to that temptation a lot, but we're not the only ones. Thriller writers, mystery writers, and romance writers whose protagonists have a lot of back story tend to fall into the shortcut as well. The better way to deal with this is with just enough information in the dialogue for the conversation to make sense, but to leave out enough that the reader is interested in finding out what is going to happen. Humans are innately curious. This is why when someone mentions something interesting that you've never heard before (like for example, your new boss is recently divorced and now engaged to the departmental secretary), the conversation immediately moves in that direction. But if two fictional characters mention something the reader hasn't heard before, they aren't obliged to explain it to the reader immediately, which will help hold their interest. For example, let's go back to Jenkins and Maura: “You've seriously never been on a plane before,” said Jenkins as Maura collected her stuff from the TSA's plastic tubs. “Nope”, said Maura, her frown edging towards a scowl. “Why not?” “Tyler was always going to take me to LA”, said Maura. “Where are we going next?” Her expression said further questions would not receive any answers, so they continued to the gate. In the story, if this is the first mention of Tyler, it adds a bit of mystery. Who is Tyler and why is Maura mad at him? If this is a romance, Tyler could be her ex. If this is a mystery or a thriller novel, Tyler could be a fellow criminal or another law enforcement officer. Not only is this closer to the way that real people actually talk, it provides a bit of a minor hook to keep the reader interested in the book and to keep the reader reading on. 00:07:40 Tip #3: Subtext Number Three: One of the most incredibly annoying things about human conversation is that people rarely say what they actually mean, and the surface topic of the conversation is often unconnected with the real meaning of the conversation. This is called subtext. One of the most common examples is Sherlock Holmes and his archnemesis Professor Moriarty playing chess. Holmes and Moriarity are discussing the game, but that's just the surface conversation. They're really talking about their rivalry. Or a Mafia thug walks into a shop and tells the owner that these rickety old buildings really need to have fire insurance. The Mafia guy isn't talking about the fire code or actually selling insurance. He's giving the subtle warning to the owner that he needs to pay protection money or his business is going to start suffering “accidents.” This can take place in less fraught circumstances. Like for example, a woman is angry than a man has been promoted over her at work. Rather than address the issue, she might start complaining about the contents of the vending machines, or insisting that every new project is doomed to failure. The contents of the vending machine or the scope of the project are irrelevant. The subtext to her complaints is that she's not happy she wasn't promoted. Communication breakdown can occur when the person speaking thinks their subtext is obvious and clear, but the person listening (listening, that's hard to say), but the person listening misses it entirely. Let's have some examples. Say Maura and Jenkins both worked for MegaCorp and Maura thinks the current district manager is incompetent and wants the job for herself. “Profits are down, production is down, and turnover is way up,” said Mora. “This can't keep going on.” “Uh-huh”, said Jenkins. “And I suppose you have a great idea about how to fix it?” Maura put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Well, what if I do? Someone needs to step up and fix things.” In this conversation, Maura isn't flat out saying “I want to be the district manager.” She's just saying that things aren't going well and they need to be fixed. Indeed, she doesn't mention the district manager job at all. But it's immediately obvious to Jenkins (and hopefully to the reader), that Maura wants the job. If Jenkins misses the subtext, it might cause a conflict with Maura: “Profits are down, production is down, and turnover is way up,” said Maura. “This can't keep going on.” Jenkins shrugged. “The economy is bad. Inflation's up. Can't do much about that.” Maura folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Maybe we need some new leadership.” Jenkins groaned. “From where? We would need another search committee.” “An internal hire would be a better choice.” Jenkins laughed. “The people who already work here are idiots. If we did an internal search for a district manager, we'd probably end up with one even dumber than the one we already have.” Maura scoffed, shook her head, and stalked off. Jenkins watched her go, wondering what had annoyed her so much. Maybe those high heels were pinching her toes. So subtext can be a way to make dialogue more interesting to the reader, which leads us to the opposite of this technique: 00:10:40 Tip #4: The Character is Imagining a Subtext That Doesn't Exist Number Four: the character is imagining a subtext that doesn't actually exist. This happens all the time in real life, where people impute meanings to your speech that you didn't actually intend. Examples are myriad and you can no doubt think of several you have personally experienced from off the top of your head. For example, say someone invites you to a movie and you declined to go, saying that you don't feel up to it, maybe your stomach is upset. You have a headache, your knees hurt, or you're simply exhausted or broke and don't feel like going, but if you felt better or had more money, you would go to the movie. Except the person who invited you takes it as a personal insult, even though that wasn't your intent and not the subtext at all. The person who invited you imagined a subtext to your answer that did not exist.  This also happens a lot on social media, where a lot of the visual and auditory cues that usually accompany conversation are absent. No doubt you like me, you can think of many examples. A great example from fiction is from J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, which is a collection of side writings and alternate drafts from when Tolkien was working on Lord of the Rings. In one section, Gandalf the Grey is speaking with Saruman the White, and they're discussing the problem of the One Ring. As they talk, Gandalf is smoking a pipe and blowing smoke rings. And Saruman (who by this time has fallen to Evil and is seeking the ring for himself) thinks that Gandalf is taunting him with the smoke rings, but Gandalf is doing no such thing. He still thinks of Saruman as a friend and trustworthy ally, and he just wants to smoke a pipe as they discuss the problem. The smoke rings are just to tease Saruman a little since Saruman has been giving Gandalf a hard time about smoking. At this point, Gandalf doesn't even know that Bilbo Baggins' magic ring is actually the One Ring. In his pride and paranoia, Saruman is imagining a subtext to the conversation that doesn't actually exist. Imaginary subtext often occurs when one character knows something that the other does not, but is unaware that the other character doesn't have this information. Let's have an example. In this version of Maura and Jenkins, Maura has arranged for the district manager of MegaCorp to get fired so she can get the job, but feels guilty about it. Jenkins is unaware of her machinations. “So, we're getting a new district manager?” said Jenkins. “Well, security just escorted the old one out the door, so yeah,” said Maura. “I wonder who the new one will be.” “An absolute moron,” said Jenkins. She glared at him, but he didn't notice. “Only a complete idiot would take over that job. Someone with more ambition than brain cells.” “Oh, very clever,” said Maura. “You've just been waiting to say that. Why don't you let me know how you really feel?” “What?” said Jenkins, surprised at your irritation. “What did I say?” As we can see in that example, Maura felt insulted, but Jenkins' intent wasn't to insult her, merely to observe that anyone stepping into the thankless job of district manager would regret it. But Maura thought Jenkins was talking about her and took it personally. 00:13:33 Tip #5: Profanity is Overrated. Number Five: profanity is overrated and everyone swears all the time in modern fiction, but it happens so often that profanity has become stale and overhead. It's like garlic salt or maybe cayenne peppers: a little bit goes a long way, and it's usually less than you think. Like, profanity might have been shocking 40 or 50 years ago, but most people swear constantly now, and writers tend to use profanity as a crutch, so it's best to go against the current and dial back the profanity. If you use a lot of profanity in your books, you're not being shocking or subversive, you're just being boring like everyone else. A good example might be The Avengers: Endgame movie. In the movie at a climatic moment, Tony Stark says, “And I am Iron Man.” However, in the original script, the line was apparently “F you Thanos.” Wouldn't that have been so much more boring? It sounds like something someone would say in a minor traffic accident or an argument about the building's shared dumpster: “Stop putting your ****** recycling in the trash can, Thanos!” But apparently one of the producers thought up the line at the absolute last minute, convinced the directors and the actor, and they shot it as a reshoot. It was a good decision, in my opinion, because the line is so much better. It perfectly fits how Stark's character always needs to have the last word and is an excellent callback to the first Iron Man movie from 2008. So it's best to be intentional with the use of profanity and not to use it as a crutch. An otherwise straightlaced character swearing in a moment of crisis could demonstrate the seriousness of the situation. Alternatively, you could have a character who swears a lot, except when he gets really angry, when he calms down and stops swearing entirely-it's the people who calm down and get calm and focused when they get angry you really have to watch out for. An observation after 12 years of self-publishing: no matter the level of profanity you have in your books, someone will be annoyed at you. If you have no profanity at all, people will complain that's unrealistic, especially if you're writing about soldiers and workmen and other people who traditionally curse a lot. Alternatively, if you have any level of profanity, people will complain about this as well. Like I recently got an email from a reader expressing gentle disappointment that Nadia swears so much in my book, Cloak of Dragonfire. But here's the thing: I tone it way down for the book. In my head, Nadia swears like an angry drill sergeant, or maybe a roofer who just accidentally shot himself in the foot with his nail gun, especially when she gets angry. But for the reasons I listed above, I don't like to overdo it, so that's a good reminder that no matter what you write, someone will be annoyed, so you might as well write as you think best. But overusing profanity is, in my opinion, just lazy. 00:16:14 #6: People Very Often Don't Answer Direct Questions Number six: people very often don't answer direct questions. If you listen carefully to real life conversations, you will notice that people rarely answer questions directly and often go off on tangents unconnected to the question. There's a quote from Lord of the Rings that illustrates the point perfectly, and short enough that I'll just read it here. The quote comes from pages 611-612 of the single-volume THE LORD OF THE RINGS hardback edition published in 1991 by Houghton Mifflin: ”Are we riding far tonight?” Gandalf asked Merry after a while. “I don't know how you feel with the small rag-tag dangling behind you but the rag-tag is tired and will be glad to stop dangling and lie down.” “So you heard that?” said Gandalf. “Don't let it rankle! Be thankful no longer words were aimed at you. He had his eyes on you. If it is any comfort to your pride, I should say that, at the moment, you and Pippin are more in his thoughts than the rest of us. Who you are; how you came here, and why; what you know; whether you were captured, and if so, how you escaped when all the orcs perished—it is with those little riddles that the great mind of Saruman is troubled. A sneer from him, Meriadoc, is a compliment, if you feel honoured by his concern.”  “Thank you!” said Merry. “But it is a greater honour to dangle at your tail, Gandalf. For one thing, in that position one has a chance of putting a question a second time. Are we riding far tonight?”  Gandalf laughed. “A most unquenchable hobbit! All wizards should have a hobbit or two in their care—to teach them the meaning of the word, and to correct them.” This quote is almost a perfect example of what I was talking about. In this conversation, Merry wanted to know how much farther they were riding tonight. Gandalf, his mind still occupied by the recent defeat of Saruman at Orthanc, ends up talking about that, which Mary mentioned as a joke. But Merry points out that Gandalf failed to answer the question, and Gandalf laughs and concedes the point. Here's another example with Maura and Jenkins. In this example, Maura has just become the new district manager of Megacorp and is very pleased with herself. Jenkin needs her to sign off on the Busywork Reports for the month, but Maura is still too happy with her new job and is going off on tangents. “Since you're district manager now, mind just signing off on those Busywork Reports?” said Jenkins, dropping the sheaf of papers on Maura's desk, which was entirely too large and expensive, he thought, given that it held only a laptop computer and Maura's new nameplate. “Assuming you're not too busy rewriting the dress code.” “Oh, that's just the start,” said Maura. She rose to her feet and paced to her windows. They looked impressive, but they faced the western parking lot, and Jenkins knew for a fact he got unpleasantly hot here during the afternoon. “There are going to be big changes around here, big changes. First thing, we're getting rid of all the deadwood. No more two hour lunches. No more days off so people can have a mental health day with their dogs or whatever.” “That's great,” said Jenkins. “But can you do that after you sign the Busy Work Reports?” Maura gave him an irritated glance. Now you can use this technique in a couple of different ways. It could show what someone is intending to do, as Maura's example indicates. You can also use it to show if someone doesn't actually want to answer the question, since the person being asked will keep locking onto new tangents and changing the topic to avoid the question. 00:19:06 Tip #7: Avoid Phonetic Dialects #7: avoid phonetic dialects. This might be a personal preference, but I strongly dislike when writers use phonetic dialects in dialogue. This is when the reader mutilates spelling to create an illusion of a dialect or an accent. For example, let's say Jenkins was about to say this: “Well, I reckon it's my it's time that my dog is hankering for his dinner,” said Jenkins. “Well, Ayuh reckin it's a-time fer me dahg to be hankerin' fer his dinnuh,” said Jenkins, his voice covered with the accent of a writer attempting to create an illusion of a dialect and failing miserably.  Really, I find that very annoying and I'm not the only one. It's lazy writing. It borders on indulging in stereotyping, which is another kind of lazy writing. Since a stereotype is just a symbol used to represent a person so you since you don't have to do so, you don't have to do the hard work of describing that person. Phonetic dialect is also really hard to read, since your brain has to interpret the odd spellings. HP Lovecraft had a bad habit of doing this, and perhaps the single worst example I've ever read is at The Color at the End of Space, an otherwise excellent story. When the farmer attempts to explain the sinister alien force that invaded his farm and Lovecraft does his best attempt at a rural New England farmer accent and fails miserably. JK Rowling writes the excellent Cormoran Strike private investigator novels, but she occasionally uses phonetic dialect to represent the various different regional UK accents and it's just annoying. If you want to represent a regional accent, in my opinion it's better to do with patterns of speech, vocabulary and perhaps regional slang than with phonetic spellings. 00:20:42 Tip #8: One More Thing #8: One more thing. One curious feature of human conversations at the main point doesn't often arrive until the conversation is nearly over. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals notice this a lot. During an interaction with the patient, the main point, the actual reason for the visit, often won't come until the end of the conversation, usually presaged with “oh, one more thing.” This is usually true if the ailment in question is sensitive or somehow embarrassing. You see this in police procedurals and mystery novels quite a bit. The detective will be talking with the suspect or witness about something else entirely, getting them into a conversational rhythm and then drop the main question- when was the last time you saw Maura and Jenkins talking together, for example. And what were they doing? Let's have an example. In this example, newly promoted district manager Maura is asking Jenkins about Megacorp's most important account, which the company is in danger of losing: “So,” said Maura, fiddling with the paper clip holder on her oversized desk. “How are things in your department?” Jenkins shrugged. “About the same? No one really misses the old manager. Though people are just loving all the new dress code memos.” “Right, right,” said Maura, still sorting through the paper clips. “It's important that we represent a professional appearance. No more showing up to work in jeans or cargo shorts.” Jenkins smirked. “Yes, that will increase profits, won't it? Good to know that we are prioritizing the important things.” The sarcasm went right over her head. “Look, um, said Maura, and she stopped playing with the paper clips and folded her hands on the desk. “The government account. We need to talk about that.” “Ah”, said Jenkins. “I suppose you didn't call me in here to talk about the dress code after all.” In this example, Maura is worried about the big account, but can't bring herself to ask Jenkins about it right away. You can use this technique frequently or occasionally to indicate if a character is nervous or what the main thing they're worried about is, since they won't bring it up till the end of the conversion. So hopefully, those eight tips and tricks will help you write more realistic and entertaining dialogue for your readers. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

It's time for the long awaited NFL Head Coach draft where we go around the room and pick the best Head Coaches in the league (00:00:00-00:29:09). We talk about Justin Herbert being paid and Saquon getting also paid (00:29:09-00:34:03). Hot Seat/Cool Throne and Hank is allowed off the leash and attacks PFT for bad reporting by Leroy's Ghost (00:34:03-01:00:27). Brian Harman joins the show to talk about winning the Claret Jug, Georgia Football, Hunting, what the english fans said to him and MegaCorp (01:00:27-01:34:51). Mt Rushmore of girls not to fuck with. We finish with guys on chicks (01:34:51-01:54:49).You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/PardonMyTake

The boys are back together in Chicago. We talk Open Championship and Brian Harman pissing off the entire Country of England plus what the hell is MegaCorp (00:00:00-00:26:51). The running backs have gotten on a zoom call together (00:26:51-00:35:08). Who's back of the week including Messi the GOAT and bunk bed technology getting out of control (00:35:08-00:56:21). Joe Buck joins the show to catch up on his first year doing MNF, whether or not he misses Baseball, his now rectified beef with Eli Manning and who he will root against this upcoming season (00:56:21-01:42:03). Mt Rushmore of Blue Things (01:42:03-02:01:14) and we finish with a Monday Reading of "Husband Dinner" (02:01:14-02:18:30).You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/PardonMyTake

This week Sean and David discuss the latest updates in the Microsoft-Activision drama, this time Google and Nvidia join the battle to poke the bear and feed the fire. David finally got his hands on his long awaited Steam Deck and it's all he's ever dreamed of. And Sean has finally started watching Kaleidoscope but David has some issues with it.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/seen-on-screen/donations

Jeff Dangelo and Joe Lynch discuss creating the future of logistics. Jeff is the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Impact Officer of Fura, a technology company that is building the future of logistics. About Jeff Dangelo Jeff Dangelo is the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Impact Officer of Fura, a technology company that is building the future of logistics. Prior to joining Fura, Jeff co-founded Turvo, the world's only collaborative logistics software platform. Earlier in his career Jeff was the VP of sales and first employee at MegaCorp Logistics, a billion-dollar freight brokerage. Prior to MegaCorp, Jeff was the 25th employee and served a variety of sales leadership roles at TQL, the second largest freight brokerage in the US. Jeff also advises for and invests in startups in the supply chain/logistics technology sector. Jeff is a graduate of Miami University (Oxford, OH), with a degree in Marketing and Operations. About Fura  Backed by next-generation technology and a dedicated team of industry experts, Fura is not just another logistics company. It's a platform and service that empowers shippers and carriers of all sizes to take control of their freight and deliver on their goals. Fura is a logistics service provider that implements a fundamentally new vision of how freight is moved – empowered with digital technology. The Fura believe in creating seamless, flexible, and transparent supply chains as a result of combining technology, expertise, and a collaborative infrastructure. Key Takeaways: Creating the Future of Logistics Jeff Dangelo is the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Impact Officer of Fura, a technology company that is building the future of logistics. In the podcast interview Joe and Jeff discuss how Fura is creating the future of logistics by creating seamless, flexible, and transparent supply chains powered by technology, operational expertise, and a tech-centric perspective. Fura is seeking freight brokerage businesses that want to transform, scale faster, and go digital. Once acquired, growth is achieved by: Carrier consolidation Technology Superior processes Better service Fura is a team of talented and energetic professionals who are experts in data analytics, supply chain, software engineering, and finance. The Fura team has built leading players in the freight brokerage space and worked with top global companies like Amazon, Google, Uber, Ernst and Young, TQL, Turvo and Deloitte. They are well equipped to acquire and scale freight brokerage businesses. When sellers approach Fura, they mention various reasons for selling their business now. Some are looking to make a change in their life after spending so much time in freight, e.g. vacation, new venture, retirement. Other sellers exit because of limited growth potential of the current business – need to scale working capital, train new employees, or face increased competition. Some are looking to take advantage of the current high demand for acquisitions. Interest in freight brokerage M&A from Private Equity will not last forever as the economy is entering a new cycle. Carriers love working with Fura because they have upfront pricing, instant booking, fast payments, and concierge level support. In short, Fura helps them scale their business. Fura delivers next generation value to shippers using technology and expertise to provide full visibility, collaboration, transparent pricing, actionable insights, and optimization strategies. Learn More About Creating the Future Jeff on LinkedIn Fura on LinkedIn Fura Launching a Successful 3PL in the Age of Tech with Nicholas Reasoner and Jeff Dangelo The Supply Chain is Broken – How to Fix it with Jeff Dangelo The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

Episode 64 - Fall Games! Games discussed: Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver, MinecraftDungeons, Skyrim, Ghost of Tsushima, Hades, Inside, Elden Ring, Bloodborn, Ghost Wire Tokyo, Dragon Quest, God of War & various GameBoy Color games    Thank you to Carter for buying a 50% stake in Blake's copy of Minecraft Dungeons - check out his Youtube here! https://www.youtube.com/@CarterDahlgren *copies of games bought for or gifted to members of The Sticky Buttons Podcast are not eligible for resale or refund (after the refund period of 81.26 seconds). If you'd like to get in touch with our customer service you can reach us @ Megacorp.scam Thanks goodbye!   Twitch: Brandon @ stickymunchkin Blake @ blake_n_thegiantbeanstalk   Please subscribe to our Youtube channel and please support us on Patreon. You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok. https://www.patreon.com/thestickybuttonspod https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJvGgcb44cEp6nQrMxCz1g

Joel, and Stephen take a peak at the new trailers for Ant-man And The Wasp: Quantumania, and Avatar: The Way Of Water, then share their thoughts on The Peripheral, and Star Wars: Tales Of The Jedi.

Knocknahay, IRELAND- The Kathleen O'Mara Residential Centre for the Arts. We meet the NORA, the cook and housekeeper who was hired by the late, beloved, Hollywood film star, KATHLEEN O'MARA herself-- and her younger assistant TERESA, in the kitchen. The agency sent a new KITCHEN TEMP, who is silent but an ace at chopping turnips. Teresa strikes the gong calling residents to the dining room for dinner. SHANNON, an Irish-American textile-artist has just arrived in Ireland. She saves a seat and is ecstatic to soon be meeting her cousin BRIGIT, a Druidic poet and Celtic healer-- but Brigit is running late and dinner is being held-up by her. DAMIEN, a famous, radio personality turned historian-- wants to find out more about MARY's A.R.S.E. (Artist's Residency Society Exchange)status. ARSE is a clannish, worldwide artist's organisation, founded by James Joyce himself and shrouded in secrecy. GUNTER is an audio soundscape artist and eco-warrior. His mission to collect audio samples of the king stoat's mating rituals is not going well. BARNEY, the British-born residency director is worried about funding to keep the place from ruin. AGNES, an aristocratic French artist who refuses to be categorized-- doesn't care about much unless.. it involves her hero: OLIVOFF SMIRNOFF, a famous Russian dissident artist-- whose location is unknown. MALACHY, the residency groundskeeper-- receives a call from his childhood playmate, SKYE JETJETSKI, a corporate image consultant, niece to the late, film star Kathleen O'Mara and thwarted heiress. The conversation doesn't bode well for the artists. Barney announces that MEGACORP, a scandalous, worldwide corporation, is backing much-needed renovations and will build a new exhibition hall. With much opposition to the plan from Mary, the plans are debated. Dinner is waiting for Brigit to arrive. Brigit finally arrives, the cousins unite and dinner is served. The night is almost over but not until she delivers her Druidic blessings.

The artist-cousins get an early start and head off to the local fairy fort. BRIGIT moans about her sleepless night at UNA's B & B. They meet MALACHY on the way. SHANNON is smitten. A helicopter arrival prompts MALACHY to run off. SHANNON deserts her cousin and follows MALACHY. The helicopter is transporting SKYE JETJETSKI, the would-be heiress returns to her family's former estate. BRIGIT is on the run from DAMIEN's unwanted attentions. GUNTER begins his audio art installation in a secluded, old, hedge school under the bushes. When a storm breaks BRIGIT seeks shelter and is beckoned by MARY to into the hedge, with the other residents... including DAMIEN. The residents gather for dinnertime. SKYE JETJETSKI makes a grand entrance. But once again, OLIVOFF SMIRNOFF, (that's right, the famous, Russian, dissident artist) cancels. The GHOSTS make themselves known. TERESA is convinced but AGNES is having none of it. BARNEY announces the residents are now required to record daily audio logs of their creative practices in the new Diary Room, offered by Megacorp-- in exchange for renovations of the house and grounds. The residents don't all agree to the terms. SHANNON is impressed by SKYE and tries her best to get friendly. BRIGIT reveals to DAMIEN the reason why she is single. BRIGIT and AGNÉS agree to swap lodgings.BRIGIT will come to the big house and AGNES will go to UNA'S disgusting BnB. The cousins, (BRIGIT and SHANNON), try out their artistic collaboration in the diary room-- but instead of working, they talk about the awards they will get for the work they can't ever seem to begin. SHANNON prepares her award acceptance speech and thank you list. SKYE is secretly listening in on the cousins. She commands MALACHY to pursue SHANNON to make her into an unwitting pawn for an underhanded MEGACORP takeover bid.

After a fresh from the dumpster, freegan breakfast at UNA's BnB, the artists and staff march to the KATHLEEN O'MARA RESIDENTIAL CENTRE FOR THE ARTS to confront SKYE. But SKYE is one step ahead and has used SHANNON's diary recording to revoke her grandmother's will and intends to turn their residency back into private ownership. Hers. DAMIEN is exposed when FREDA, his ghostwriter and former roommate is discovered lurking about in a daze. MALACHY reveals he was using SHANNON all along with Skye's knowledge. SKYE won't talk to SHANNON anymore and fires BARNEY, NORA, and TERESA. The gang retreats to UNA's leaving SHANNON behind. BRIGIT is still levitating up in a tree. SHANNON understands and is remorseful. She takes off her fake nails and gives TAENG, (her Thai fabricant and positivity guru) a ring. She wants to learn how to sew. The guy from the kitchen turns up with BRIGIT to the B & B and reveals his true identity as OLIVOFF SMIRNOFF, the famous, Russian dissident artist and he has a plan. MARY calls SKYE to grovel. GUNTER joins in the groveling too. Together they persuade SKYE to let the artists return to the big house, take part in the exhibition to meet all the Megacorp big wigs and art collectors for their careers. They agree to sleep in the new dormitory. They have nowhere else to go. The plan seems to be working.

DAMIEN is in his element as the MC for the grand exhibition. He welcomes SKYE on stage who welcomes the MEGACORP big shots and eager art collectors. GUNTER shows his stoat cam footage proving that MALACHY and SKYE plotted to steal the residency from the artists. They also reminisce about murdering Kathleen O'Mara's only son Mickey. The police arrive. SKYE fires MELANIE her loyal assistant. GUNTER calls in his loyal stoats. TERESA reigns in the stoats after they invade the hall with a toot of her tin flute. NORA hands in an envelope of TERESA's DNA. TERESA is the granddaughter and heiress to Kathleen O'Mara's estate. Meanwhile, SKYE and MALACHY are arrested. AGNES sells "The Madness of Ireland" sculpture with Una's decaying dog inside to a London hedge-fund investor for millions. SHANNON's lopsided healing quilt comes in handy for UNA. BRIGIT's poetry has been published and the cousins are cosmically retethered. Whoa. OLIVOFF SMIRNOFF, the famous Russian dissident artist, does an interpretive dance in front of underground footage that proves MEGACORP is running an illegal cloning operation using DNA gathered from clients using their genealogy and ancestor website. MEGACORP board members in the audience try to make a run for it but are stopped by the Knocknahay police. A marching clone parade comes onstage to close the spectacle. The next morning... the artists sit down for a final meal. TERESA is now the lady of the house and NORA rings the gong. AGNÉS donates the 10 million she got for the sculpture to fund the retreat. DAMIEN pledges that his history book has been published and that FREDA, his ghost writer will get all the credit for her writing. BARNEY has quit his job to join MARY to produce a musical of Waiting for Godot. MARY is free from A.R.S.E.'s constrictions. SHANNON and BRIGIT have begun a blog and online shop for Druidic healing. They all join hands for BRIGIT's final blessing. The real ghosts appear revealing themselves as... TERESA 's parents singing Down By The Sally Gardens. END OF SEASON 1.

In this final episode of Megacorp we take a look back at all the scandal at the heart of Amazon that we've learned about through this series. For anyone not in the know, this can be their “too long didn't read” introduction to everything we've uncovered throughout Megacorp. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the penultimate Megacorp episode we look into how Amazon got fined $60million for stealing money from the tips of their freelance delivery drivers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode we drink Simply Smoothie Orchard Berry Juice and Larry's Last Imperial Oatmeal Stout from Bell's. RLXP includes ceiling sanding and missing breweries. We've played Planet Alpha, Record of Lotus War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, Just Cause 4, and Archvale (all on XB Gamepass). Bonus Gamepass recco for future coverage - Skul: The Hero Slayer. Our reccos are to get a kitty you can belly rub and the Cool Zone Media podcast Megacorp.      Links -             Megacorp -  https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/megacorp-2181980       Cartmart - https://www.cartmart.games/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/grandrapidians/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/grandrapidians/support

Jake Hanrahan talks profiling big business practices in Season 1 of “Megacorp,” the tech giant he has his eye on next, and why he's skeptical of digital assistants. 

Hello & welcome everyone. This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session #3. Let's dive in. Panelists: Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Matej Lančarič Roblox Steam hosts 55K Games vs Roblox 20 Mil “experiences” 47,3 Mil DAU Half of the users are aged 12 and under Current Market cap 38 Bil $ Roblox Cut 75,5% Roblox takes a 30% cut of every transaction on their platform Discoverability Robux Minimum Withdrawal to real life money 100K (1000 $) Second life comparison (10$) Withdrawal only possible with Roblox monthly 5$ subscription On every 1$ revenue of roblox only 17% make it out Historic example of “Company money Scrib” Workers spend their money at the company Workers become afraid to break company rules as company rules over their “money” This dependency increase friction on quitting the system Illegal in US 1938 Platform Capitalism - business model based on unsustainable expansion in order to monopolize a platform Experience based payouts Roblox “editor knowledge untransferable “Make serious cash” claim removed from the website after video Roblox moderation - shut down official forums in 2017 because they couldn't moderate them Roblox Collectible Market Tie ins with Brands Collectibles that are sold for limited time skyrocket in value from 10 to 15K $ dollars Roblox still takes a 30% form all of the transactions Roblox Black market Rewarded Interstitial ads - 6 months in Around 6 months ago Google and Facebook announced the roll out of Rewarded interstitial ads. An interstitial ad that pops up and users can opt out of and thus forgo the reward Admob are pushing very hard on this format which is still in Beta Facebook were pushing it but not so much anymore Don't monetize with this format! You're opening yourself up to unnecessary stress and risk Only FB and Admob support it - thus you'll get lower prices FB on iOS is pretty much non-existent so you have no competition Calling it now that in 12 months they won't exist. Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me

For a big chunk of my working life, I have been ruled by fear by my bosses.  With the value of hindsight and having run Dale Carnegie Training here in Tokyo now into my twelfth year, I wonder why it was like that or had to be like that.  Not every boss was a tyrant, but most were.  Today we are talking about psychological safety, diversity and inclusion, the end of power harassment, etc. I didn't see any of that in my career as an employee.  Sadly, I inherited some of these negative leadership traits myself and ran my teams hard.  I was ignorant and thought that was how it was done, because that was how I was being managed.  I am a slow learner, but I have subsequently learnt that leading through fear gets you compliance, but it doesn't get you brilliance.   I wonder how many bosses out there in supremo land are still running their teams in this fear first mode?   My way or the highway is a dead duck for a recruitment strategy today.  Many big Japanese companies have recruitment staff from HR clinging to the “your lucky to get a job here sunshine” philosophy of hiring new staff.  Young people today have so many choices.  True, the pandemic has obliterated the tourism and hospitality industries, so there has been a major displacement of people working in those sectors.  This has temporally brought previously unavailable staff into the workforce, to be picked up by survivor companies.  If you're hiring and retaining strategy is built on this lever, then you are in big trouble, because at some point the pandemic will ease and people will be looking to rebuild their careers.   Big companies take blank sheets of paper out of varsity and then twist, crease and shape them into the origami pattern they like.  Young people are not that interested in being shaped in that way.  They want to have careers which they can shape and they are not afraid to leave the mothership and strike out on a new path.  Once upon a time, it would be unthinkable for people only three or four years into their careers with “Megacorp” to just up and quit and go somewhere smaller and less well known.  Their parents and grandparents would have been saying go with size and safety, don't step out into the unknown, avoid the risky world of mid-career change.   Young people are facing a different world where disruption can threaten any sized company.  If “Megacorp's” strong suite is incremental kaizen style innovation they can be wiped out by a nimble competitor, who just changes the game and the industry overnight.  Weeping executives at Nokia spring to mind, gnashing their teeth and pulling their forelocks about they didn't do anything wrong, as Steve Jobs drove a stake into the heart of their business and completely changed the industry.   In the old currency of driving all forward through fear, I drove my teams to get to world number two for two years in a row and then the next year to world number one in that business. The global scale is much bigger now at Dale Carnegie, but our team here in Tokyo has been continuously in the top 10 for sales results since 2016, getting to number 5 with a bullet in 2019, before the pandemic swept all before it.  We finished number 6 last year in 2021. I make the point not to brag (well okay, a little bit of bragging), but to note that none of this was done off a platform of fear.   When I was younger, I didn't have anything in my toolbox other than fear, because I didn't know there were other ways of achieving results with my teams.  I hadn't seen any other models that worked and believed that was how you did it.   We know from the world of big money sports, that coaches who delve deep into the individual motivations of their team members and then align the heavens around achieving their goals, do extremely well in the rabid, winner takes all game of professional sports.  In the same way, for leaders, if we can fathom the motivations held by our team members and then work toward helping them achieve their individual goals, then the team can win.  But are we doing that?   The new year is a great time to re-think our beliefs, biases, habits, proclivities and preferences.  If you haven't read “How To Win Friends and Influence People” or haven't read it for a while, then this is the time to read it.  Probably like me when I first read it, you will find yourself on every page, but not in a good way, as a model leader, but more likely as the villain of the piece, leading through the wrong levers.  Reading it changed me and for the better.  Sadly, I am still not perfect, but I am a lot better than I used to be and I am striving to be better everyday.  I am now on the path to discover how to help my team members self-motivate themselves.  Is this harder than barking out orders like a crazed pirate captain?  Yes, of course it is, but the lasting rewards make the case compelling.  Which way will you swing this year – full tyrant or motivator of individuals?          

This week on the Tiger Bloc Podcast, we're excited to share with you our conversation with Jake Hanrahan, the journalist best know for his conflict journalist project, Popular Front. Popular Front reports on underreported conflicts from around the world. Jake has been all over, to places like Artsakh, Ukraine, and Rojava. We talked about what makes Popular Front unique — it's entirely listener funded. When examining global conflicts, one of the things that Jake shared with us was the democratization of anti-government techniques and strategies. From the use of commercial drones, to Internet forums to share strategies, and even 3D printing firearms from free plans online. Of course, many of our followers may know Jake from his documentary Plastic Defense, where he spoke to JStark, one of the designers behind the Fuck Gun Control 9 (FGC-9). The FGC-9 is a special gun, one that can be assembled with a 3D printer and a pipe using no actual firearm parts. In America, there's a tendency for legacy media and American residents to view foreign conflicts through an American lens. We talked about how legacy media not only ignores nuance, but so do Western leftists, disregarding nuance to fit preconceived ideological schema. We also wanted to talk to Jake about his new podcast, Megacorp. On the show, Jake explores and exposes the behavior or the world's most unethical corporations. And where better to start than Amazon. We talked with Jake about how Amazon has managed to amass the powers one would normally associate with a state — vast wealth and a lack of accountability to any laws excepts its own. All while Amazon abuses workers, some of whom have died in its warehouses. But how to stop it? Unionization would be the natural answer. But even though interest in unions is growing in the United States, the unionization rate overall remains low. And in the UK, the younger generation seems to have have lost interest. This all may seem like unrepentant doomerism, but as Jake said, “If Rome fell this shit can.” What do young people have to lose?

Robert is joined by Jake Hanrahan to discuss Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. Footnotes: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/1/10/18176048/jeff-bezos-ami-extortion-medium-photos-divorce https://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/love-sex/inside-the-bezos-divorce-adultery-lies-and-mile-high-trysts-18776678 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/10-things-you-didnt-know-649386/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/jeff-bezos-defends-amazon-workplace-in-response-to-article/ https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-has-a-sexist-and-toxic-culture-some-employees-say-2020-9 https://archive.md/tWoVG For more about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, check out Megacorp. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, Q Clearance fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations.  Here is a short introduction explaining exactly what Megacorp is and isn't.  Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, It Could Happen Here fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, Behind the Bastards fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, Hood Politics fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, After the Revolution fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Hi, Q Clearance fans! We're excited to introduce you to Megacorp - a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Listen and subscribe to Megacorp wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

A short introduction explaining exactly what Megacorp is and isn't.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Megacorp is a series by Jake Hanrahan that exposes some of the world's most unethical corporations. First up, we're investigating Amazon. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

About NickNick Heudecker leads market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl, the observability pipeline company. Prior to Cribl, Nick spent eight years as an industry analyst at Gartner, covering data and analytics. Before that, he led engineering and product teams at multiple startups, with a bias towards open source software and adoption, and served as a cryptologist in the US Navy. Join Corey and Nick as they discuss the differences between observability and monitoring, why organizations struggle to get value from observability data, why observability requires new data management approaches, how observability pipelines are creating opportunities for SRE and SecOps teams, the balance between budgets and insight, why goats are the world's best mammal, and more.Links: Cribl: https://cribl.io/ Cribl Community: https://cribl.io/community Twitter: https://twitter.com/nheudecker Try Cribl hosted solution: https://cribl.cloud TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Jellyfish. So, you're sitting in front of your office chair, bleary eyed, parked in front of a powerpoint and—oh my sweet feathery Jesus its the night before the board meeting, because of course it is! As you slot that crappy screenshot of traffic light colored excel tables into your deck, or sift through endless spreadsheets looking for just the right data set, have you ever wondered, why is it that sales and marketing get all this shiny, awesome analytics and inside tools? Whereas, engineering basically gets left with the dregs. Well, the founders of Jellyfish certainly did. That's why they created the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, but don't you dare call it JEMP! Designed to make it simple to analyze your engineering organization, Jellyfish ingests signals from your tech stack. Including JIRA, Git, and collaborative tools. Yes, depressing to think of those things as your tech stack but this is 2021. They use that to create a model that accurately reflects just how the breakdown of engineering work aligns with your wider business objectives. In other words, it translates from code into spreadsheet. When you have to explain what you're doing from an engineering perspective to people whose primary IDE is Microsoft Powerpoint, consider Jellyfish. Thats Jellyfish.co and tell them Corey sent you! Watch for the wince, thats my favorite part.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is a bit fun because I'm joined by someone that I have a fair bit in common with. Sure, I moonlight sometimes as an analyst because I don't really seem to know what that means, and he spent significant amounts of time as a VP analyst at Gartner. But more importantly than that, a lot of the reason that I am the way that I am is that I spent almost a decade growing up in Maine, and in Maine, there's not a lot to do other than sit inside for the nine months of winter every year and develop personality problems.You've already seen what that looks like with me. Please welcome Nick Heudecker, who presumably will disprove that, but maybe not. He is currently a senior director of market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl. Nick, thanks for joining me.Nick: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.Corey: So, let's start at the very beginning. I like playing with people's titles, and you certainly have a lofty one. ‘competitive intelligence' feels an awful lot like jeopardy. What am I missing?Nick: Well, I'm basically an internal analyst at the company. So, I spend a lot of time looking at the broader market, seeing what trends are happening out there; looking at what kind of thought leadership content that I can create to help people discover Cribl, get interested in the products and services that we offer. So, I'm mostly—you mentioned my time in Maine. I was a cryptologist in the Navy and I spent almost all of my time focused on what the bad guys do. And in this job, I focus on what our potential competitors do in the market. So, I'm very externally focused. Does that help? Does that explain it?Corey: No, it absolutely does. I mean, you folks have been sponsoring our nonsense for which we thank you, but the biggest problem that I have with telling the story of Cribl was that originally—initially it was, from my perspective, “What is this hokey nonsense?” And then I learned and got an answer and then finish the sentence with, “And where can I buy it?” Because it seems that the big competitive threat that you have is something crappy that some rando sysadmin has cobbled together. And I say that as the rando sysadmin, who has cobbled a lot of things like that together. And it's awful. I wasn't aware you folks had direct competitors.Nick: Today we don't. There's a couple that it might be emerging a little bit, but in general, no, it's mostly us, and that's what I analyze every day. Are there other emerging companies in the space? Are there open-source projects? But you're right, most of the things that we compete against are DIY today. Absolutely.Corey: In your previous role, which you were at for a very long time in tech terms—which in a lot of other cases is, “Okay, that doesn't seem that long,” but seven and a half years is a respectable stint at a company. And you were at Gartner doing a number of analyst-like activities. Let's start at the beginning because I assure you, I'm asking this purely for the audience and not because I don't know the answer myself, but what exactly is the purpose of an analyst firm, of which Gartner is the most broadly known and, follow up, why do companies care what Gartner thinks?Nick: Yeah. It's a good question, one that I answer a lot. So, what is the purpose of an analyst firm? The purpose of an analyst firm is to get impartial information about something, whether that is supply chain technology, big data tech, human resource management technologies. And it's often difficult if you're an end-user and you're interested in say, acquiring a new piece of technology, what really works well, what doesn't.And so the analyst firm because in the course of a given year, I would talk to nearly a thousand companies and both end-users and vendors as well as investors about what they're doing, what challenges they're having, and I would distill that down into 30-minute conversations with everyone else. And so we provided impartial information in aggregate to people who just wanted to help. And that's the purpose of an analyst firm. Your second question, why do people care? Well, I didn't get paid by vendors.I got paid by the company that I worked for, and so I got to be Tron; I fought for the users. And because I talk to so many different companies in different geographies, in different industries, and I share that information with my colleagues, they shared with me, we had a very robust understanding of what's actually happening in any technology market. And that's uncommon kind of insight to really have in any kind of industry. So, that's the purpose and that's why people care.Corey: It's easy from the engineering perspective that I used to inhabit to make fun of it. It's oh, it's purely justification when you're making a big decision, so if it goes sideways—because find me a technology project that doesn't eventually go sideways—I want to be able to make sure that I'm not the one that catches heat for it because Gartner said it was good. They have an amazing credibility story going on there, and I used to have that very dismissive perspective. But the more I started talking to folks who are Gartner customers themselves and some of the analyst-style things that I do with a variety of different companies, it's turned into, “No, no. They're after insight.”Because it turns out, from my perspective at least, the more that you are focused on building a product that solves a problem, you sort of lose touch with the broader market because the only people you're really talking to are either in your space or have already acknowledged and been right there and become your customer and have been jaded to see things from your point of view. Getting a more objective viewpoint from an impartial third party does have value.Nick: Absolutely. And I want you to succeed, I want you to be successful, I want to carry on a relationship with all the clients that I would speak with, and so one of the fun things I would always ask is, “Why are you asking me this question now?” Sometimes it would come in, they'd be very innocuous;, “Compare these databases,” or, “Compare these cloud services.” “Well, why are you asking?” And that's when you get to, kind of like, the psychology of it.“Oh, we just hired a new CIO and he or she hates vendor X, so we have to get rid of it.” “Well, all right. Let's figure out how we solve this problem for you.” And so it wasn't always just technology comparisons. Technology is easy, you write a check and you hope for the best.But when you're dealing with large teams and maybe a globally distributed company, it really comes down to culture, and personality, and all the harder factors. And so it was always—those were always the most fun and certainly the most challenging conversations to have.Corey: One challenge that I find in this space is—in my narrow niche of the world where I focus on AWS bills, where things are extraordinarily yes or no, black or white, binary choices—that I talked to companies, like during the pandemic, and they were super happy that, “Oh, yeah. Our infrastructure has auto-scaling and it works super well.” And I look at the bill and the spend graph over time is so flat you could basically play a game of pool on top of it. And I don't believe that I'm talking to people who are lying to me. I truly don't believe that people make that decision, but what they believe versus what is evidenced in reality are not necessarily congruent. How do you disambiguate from the stories that people want to tell about themselves? And what they're actually doing?Nick: You have to unpack it. I think you have to ask a series of questions to figure out what their motivation is. Who else is on the call, as well? I would sometimes drop into a phone call and there would be a dozen people on the line. Those inquiry calls would go the worst because everyone wants to stake a claim, everyone wants to be heard, no one's going to be honest with you or with anyone else on the call.So, you typically need to have a pretty personal conversation about what does this person want to accomplish, what does the company want to accomplish, and what are the factors that are pushing against what those things are? It's like a novel, right? You have a character, the character wants to achieve something, and there are multiple obstacles in that person's way. And so by act five, ideally everything wraps up and it's perfect. And so my job is to get the character out of the tree that is on fire and onto the beach where the person can relax.So, you have to unpack a lot of different questions and answers to figure out, well, are they telling me what their boss wants to hear or are they really looking for help? Sometimes you're successful, sometimes you're not. Not everyone does want to be open and honest. In other cases, you would have a team show up to a call with maybe a junior engineer and they really just want you to tell them that the junior engineer's architecture is not a good idea. And so you do a lot of couples therapy as well. I don't know if this is really answering the question for you, but there are no easy answers. And people are defensive, they have biases, companies overall are risk-averse. I think you know this.Corey: Oh, yeah.Nick: And so it can be difficult to get to the bottom of what their real motivation is.Corey: My approach has always been that if you want serious data, you go talk to Gartner. If you want [anec-data 00:09:48] and some understanding, well, maybe we can have that conversation, but they're empowering different decisions at different levels, and that's fine. To be clear, I do not consider Gartner to be a competitor to what I do in any respect. It turns out that I am not very good at drawing charts in varying shades of blue and positioning things just so with repeatable methodology, and they're not particularly good at having cartoon animals as their mascot that they put into ridiculous situations. We each have our portion of the universe, and that's working out reasonably well.Nick: Well, and there's also something to unpack there as well because I would say that people look at Gartner and they think they have a lot of data. To a certain degree they do, but a lot of it is not quantifiable data. If you look at a firm like IDC, they specialize in—like, they are a data house; that is what they do. And so their view of the world and how they advise their clients is different. So, even within analyst firms, there is differentiation in what approach they take, how consultative they might be with their clients, one versus another. So, there certainly are differences that you could find the more exposure you get into the industry.Corey: For a while, I've been making a recurring joke that Route 53—Amazon's managed DNS service—is in fact a database. And then at some point, I saw a post on Reddit where someone said, “Yeah, I see the joke and it's great, but why should I actually not do this?” At which point I had to jump in and say, “Okay, look. Jokes are all well and good, but as soon as people start taking me seriously, it's very much time to come clean.” Because I think that's the only ethical and responsible thing to do in this ecosystem.Similarly, there was another great joke once upon a time. It was an April Fool's Day prank, and Google put out a paper about this thing they called MapReduce. Hilarious prank that Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker, and wound up building Hadoop out of it and we're still paying the price for that, years later. You have a bit of a reputation from your time at Gartner as being—and I quote—“The man who killed Hadoop.” What happened there? What's the story? And I appreciate your finally making clear to the rest of us that it was, in fact, a joke. What happened there?Nick: Well, one of the pieces of research that Gartner puts out every year is this thing called a Hype Cycle. And we've all seen it, it looks like a roller coaster in profile; big mountain goes up really high and then comes down steeply, drops into a valley, and then—Corey: ‘the trough of disillusionment,' as I recall.Nick: Yes, my favorite. And then plateaus out. And one of the profiles on that curve was Hadoop distributions. And after years of taking inquiry calls, and writing documents, and speaking with everybody about what they were doing, we realized that this really isn't taking off like everyone thinks it is. Cluster sizes weren't getting bigger, people were having a lot of challenges with the complexity, people couldn't find skills to run it themselves if they wanted to.And then the cloud providers came in and said, “Well, we'll make a lot of this really simple for you, and we'll get rid of HDFS,” which is—was a good idea, but it didn't really scale well. I think that the challenge of having to acquire computers with compute storage and memory again, and again, and again, and again, just was not sustainable for the majority of enterprises. And so we flagged it as this will be obsolete before plateau. And at that point, we got a lot of hate mail, but it just seemed like the right decision to make, right? Once again, we're Tron; we fight for the users.And that seemed like the right advice and direction to provide to the end-users. And so didn't make a lot of friends, but I think I was long-term right about what happened in the Hadoop space. Certainly, some fragments of it are left over and we're still seeing—you know, Spark is going strong, there's a lot of Hive still around, but Hadoop as this amalgamation of open-source projects, I think is effectively dead.Corey: I sure hope you're right. I think it has a long tail like most things that are there. Legacy is the condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money.' You were at Gartner for almost eight years and then you left to go work at Cribl. What triggered that? What was it that made you decide, “This is great. I've been here a long time. I've obviously made it work for me. I'm going to go work at a startup that apparently, even though it recently raised a $200 million funding round”—congratulations on that, by the way—“It still apparently can't afford to buy a vowel in its name.” That's C-R-I-B-L because, of course, it is. Maybe another consonant, while you're shopping. But okay, great. It's oddly spelled, it is hard to explain in some cases, to folks who are not already feeling pain in that space. What was it that made you decide to sit up and, “All right, this is where I want to be?”Nick: Well, I met the co-founders when I was an analyst. They were working at Splunk and oddly enough—this is going to be an interesting transition compared to the previous thing we talked about—they were working on Hunk, which was, let's use HDFS to store Splunk data. Made a lot of sense, right? It could be much more cost-effective than high-cost infrastructure for Splunk. And so they told me about this; I was interested.And so I met the co-founders and then I reconnected with them after they left and formed Cribl. And I thought the story was really cool because where they're sitting is between sources and destinations of observability data. And they were solving a problem that all of my customers had, but they couldn't resolve. They would try and build it themselves. They would look at—Kafka was a popular choice, but that had some challenges for observability data—works fantastically well for application data.And they were just—had a very pragmatic view of the world that they were inhabiting and the problem that they were looking to solve. And it looked kind of like a no-brainer of a problem to solve. But when you double-click on it, when you really look down and say, “All right, what are the challenges with doing this?” They're really insurmountable for a lot of organizations. So, even though they may try and take a DIY approach, they often run into trouble after just a few weeks because of all the protocols you have to support, all the different data formats, and all the destinations, and role-based access control, and everything else that goes along with it.And so I really liked the team. I thought the product inhabited a unique space in the market—we've already talked about the lack of competitors in the space—and I just felt like the company was on a rocket ship—or is a rocket ship—that basically had unbounded success potential. And so when the opportunity arose to join the team and do a lot of the things I like doing as an analyst—examining the market, talking to people looking at competitive aspects—I jumped at it.Corey: It's nice when you see those opportunities that show up in front of you, and the stars sort of align. It's like, this is not just something that I'm excited about and enthused about, but hey, they can use me. I can add something to where they're going and help them get there better, faster, sooner, et cetera, et cetera.Nick: When you're an analyst, you look at dozens of companies a month and I'd never seen an opportunity that looked like that. Everything kind of looked the same. There's a bunch of data integration companies, there's a bunch of companies with Spark and things like that, but this company was unique; the product was unique, and no one was really recognizing the opportunity. So, it was just a great set of things that all happen at the same time.Corey: It's always fun to see stars align like that. So—Nick: Yeah.Corey: —help me understand in a way that can be articulated to folks who don't have 15 years of grumpy sysadmin experience under their belts, what does Cribl do?Nick: So, Cribl does a couple of things. Our flagship product is called LogStream, and the easiest way to describe that is as an abstraction between sources and destinations of data. And that doesn't sound very interesting, but if you, from your sysadmin background, you're always dealing with events, logs, now there's traces, metrics are also hanging around—Corey: Oh, and of course, the time is never synchronized with anything either, so it's sort of a giant whodunit, mystery, where half the eyewitnesses lie.Nick: Well, there's that. There's a lot of data silos. If you got an agent deployed on a system, it's only going to talk to one destination platform. And you repeat this, maybe a dozen times per server, and you might have 100,000 or 200,000 servers, with all of these different agents running on it, each one locked into one destination. So, you might want to be able to mix and match that data; you can't. You're locked in.One of the things LogStream does is it lets you do that exact mixing and matching. Another thing that this product does, that LogStream does, is it gives you ability to manage that data. And then what I mean by that is, you may want to reduce how much stuff you're sending into a given platform because maybe that platform charges you by your daily ingest rates or some other kind of event-based charges. And so not all that data is valuable, so why pay to store it if it's not going to be valuable? Just dump it or reduce the amount of volume that you've got in that payload, like a Windows XML log.And so that's another aspect that it allows you to do, better management of that stuff. You can redact sensitive fields, you can enrich the data with maybe, say, GeoIPs so you know what kind of data privacy laws you fall under and so on. And so, the story has always been, land the data in your destination platform first, then do all those things. Well, of course, because that's how they charge you; they charge you based on daily ingest. And so now the story is, make those decisions upfront in one place without having to spread this logic all over, and then send the data where you want it to go.So, that's really, that's the core product today, LogStream. We call ourselves an observability pipeline for observability data. The other thing we've got going on is this project called AppScope, and I think this is pretty cool. AppScope is a black box instrumentation tool that basically resides between the application runtime and the kernel and any shared libraries. And so it provides—without you having to go back and instrument code—it instruments the application for you based on every call that it makes and then can send that data through something like LogStream or to another destination.So, you don't have to go back and say, “Well, I'm going to try and find the source code for this 30-year old c++ application.” I can simply run AppScope against the process, and find out exactly what that application is doing for me, and then relay that information to some other destination.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: I have to ask because I love what you're doing, don't get me wrong. The counterargument that always comes up in this type of conversation is, “Who in their right mind looks at the state of the industry today and says, ‘You know what we need? That's right; another observability tool.'” what differentiates what you folks are building from a lot of the existing names in the space? And to be clear, a lot of the existing names in the space are treating observability simply as hipster monitoring. I'm not entirely sure they're wrong, but that's a different fight for a different time.Nick: Yeah. I'm happy to come back and talk about that aspect of it, too. What's different about what we're doing is we don't care where the data goes. We don't have a dog in that fight. We want you to have better control over where it goes and what kind of shape it's in when it gets there.And so I'll give an example. One of our customers wanted to deploy a new SIEM—Security Information Event Management—tool. But they didn't want to have to deploy a couple hundred-thousand new agents to go along with it. They already had the data coming in from another agent, they just couldn't get the data to it. So, they use LogStream to send that data to their new desired platform.Worked great. They were able to go from zero to a brand new platform in just a couple days, versus fighting with rolling out agents and having to update them. Did they conflict with existing agents? How much performance did it impact on the servers, and so on? So, we don't care about the destination. We like everybody. We're agnostic when it comes to where that data goes. And—Corey: Oh, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. Everyone's been saying it, but you've turned it into a product.Nick: It's very spiritual. So, we [laugh] send, we send your observability data on a spiritual [laugh] journey to its destination, and we can do quite a bit with it on the way.Corey: So, you said you offered to go back as well and visit the, “Oh, it's monitoring, but we're going to call it observability because otherwise we get yelled out on Twitter by Charity Majors.” How do you view that?Nick: Monitoring is the things you already know. Right? You know what questions you want to ask, you get an alert if something goes out of bounds or something goes from green to red. Think about monitoring as a data warehouse. You shape your data, you get it all in just the right condition so you can ask the same question over and over again, over different time domains.That's how I think about monitoring. It's prepackaged, you know exactly what you want to do with it. Observability is more like a data lake. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this stuff. I think there's going to be some signals in here that I can use, and I'm going to go explore that data.So, if monitoring is your known knowns, observability is your unknown unknowns. So, an ideal observability solution gives you an opportunity to discover what those are. Once you discover them. Great. Now, you can talk about how to get them into your monitoring system. So, for me, it's kind of a process of discovery.Corey: Which makes an awful lot of sense. The problem I've always had with the monitoring approach is it falls into this terrible pattern of enumerate the badness. In other words, “Imagine all the ways that this system can fail,” and then build an alerting that lets you know when any of those things happen. And what happens next is inevitable to anyone who's ever dealt with the tricksy devils known as computers, and what happens, of course, is that they find new ways to fail and you generally get to add to the list of things to check for, usually at two o'clock in the morning.Nick: On a Sunday.Corey: Oh, absolutely. It almost doesn't matter when. The real problem is when these things happen, it's, “What day, actually, is it?” And you have to check the calendar to figure out because your third time that week being woken up in the dead of night. It's like an infant but less than endearing.So, that has been the old school approach, and there's unfortunately still an awful lot of, we'll just call it nonsense, in the industry that still does exactly the same thing, except now they call it observability because—hearkening back to earlier in our conversation—there's a certain point in the Gartner Hype Cycle that we are all existing within. What's the deal with that?Nick: Well, I think that there are a lot of entrenched interests in the monitoring space. And so I think you always see this when a new term comes around. Vendors will say, “All right, well, there's a lot of confusion about this. Let me back-fit my product into this term so that I can continue to look like I'm on the leading edge and I'm not going to put any of my revenues in jeopardy.” I know, that's a cynical view, but I've seen it over and over again.And I think that's unfortunate because there's a real opportunity to have a better understanding of your systems, to better understand what's happening in all the containers you're deploying and not tearing down the way that you should, to better understand what's happening in distributed systems. And it's going to be a real missed opportunity if that is what happens. If we just call this ‘Monitoring 2.0' it's going to leave a lot of unrealized potential in the market.Corey: The big problem that I've seen in a lot of different areas is—I'll be direct—consolidation where you have a company that starts to do a thing—and that's great—and then they start doing other things that are tied to it. And in turn, they start, I guess, gathering everything in the ecosystem. If you break down observability into various constituent parts, I—know, I know, the pillars thing is going to upset people; ignore that for now—and if you have an offering that's weak in a particular area, okay, instead of building it organically into the product, or saying, “Yeah, that's not what we do,” there's an instinct to acquire a company or build that functionality out. And it turns out that we're building what feels the lot to me like the SaaS equivalent of multifunction printers: they can print, they can scan, they can fax, and none of those three very well, so it winds up with something that dissatisfies everyone, rather than a best-of-breed solution that has a very clear and narrow starting and stopping point. How do you view that?Nick: Well, what you've described is a compromise, right? A compromise is everyone can work and no one's happy. And I think that's the advantage of where LogStream comes in. The reality is best-of-breed. Most enterprises today have 30 or more different monitoring tools—call them observability tools if you want to—and you will never pry those tools from the dead hands of those sysadmins, DevOps engineers, SREs, et cetera.They all integrate those tools into how they work and their processes. So, we're living in a best-of-breed world. It's like that in data and analytics—my former beat—and it's like that in monitoring and observability. People really gravitate towards the tools they like, they gravitate towards the tools their friends are using. And so you need a way to be able to mix and match that stuff.And just because I want to stay [laugh] on message, that's really where the LogStream story kind of blends in because we do that; we allow you to mix and match all those different pieces.Corey: Joke's on you. I use Nagios and I have no friends. I'm not convinced those two things are entirely unrelated, but here we are. So here's, I guess, the big burning question that a lot of folks—certainly not me, but other undefined folks, ‘lots of people are saying'—so you built something interesting that actually works. I want to be clear on this.I have spoken to customers of yours. They swear by it instead of swearing at it, which happens with other companies. Awesome. You have traction, you're moving forward, things are going great. Here's $200 million is the next part of that story, and on some level, my immediate reaction—which does need updating, let's be clear here—is like, all right.I'm trying to build a product. I can see how I could spend a few million bucks. “Well, what can you do with I don't know, 100 times that?” My easy answer is, “Something monstrous.” I don't believe that is the case here. What is the growth plan? What are you doing that makes having that kind of a war chest a useful and valuable thing to have?Nick: Well, if you speak with the co-founders—and they've been open about this—we view ourselves as a generational company. We're not just building one product. We've been thinking about, how do we deliver on observability as this idea of discovery? What does that take? And it doesn't mean that we're going to be less agnostic to other destinations, we still think there's an incredible amount of value there and that's not going away, but we think there's maybe an interim step that we build out, potentially this idea of an observability data lake where you can explore these environments.Certainly, there's other types of options in the space today. Most of them are SQL-based, which is interesting because the audience that uses monitoring and observability tools couldn't care less about SQL right? They want search, they want regex, and so you've got to have the right tool for that audience. And so we're thinking about what that looks like going forward. We're doubling down on people.Surprisingly, this is a very—like anything else in software, it is people-intensive. And so certainly those are other aspects that we're exploring with the recent investment, but definitely, multiproduct company is our future and continued expansion.Corey: Expansion is always a fun one. It's the idea of, great, are you looking at going deeper into the areas you're already active within, or is it more of a, “Ah, so we've solved the, effectively, log routing problem. That's great. Let's solve other problems, too.” Or is it more of a, I guess, a doubling down and focusing on what's working? And again, that probably sounds judgmental in a way I don't intend it to at all. I just have a hard time contextualizing that level of scale coming from a small company perspective the way that I do.Nick: Yeah. Our plan is to focus more intently on the areas that we're in. We have a huge basis of experience there. We don't want to be all things to all people; that dilutes the message down to nothing, so we want to be very specific in the audiences we talk to, the problems we're trying to solve, and how we try to solve them.Corey: The problem I've always found with a lot of the acquisition, growth thrashing of—let me call it what I think it is: companies in decline trying to strain relevancy, it feels almost like a, “We don't see a growth strategy. So, we're going to try and acquire everything that hold still long enough, at some level, trying to add more revenue to the pile, but also thrashing in the sense of, okay. They're going to teach us how to do things in creative, awesome ways,” but it never works out that way. When you have a 50,000 person company acquiring a 200 person company, invariably the bigger culture is going to dominate. And I don't understand why that mistake seems to continually happen again, and again, and again.And people think I'm effectively alluding to—or whenever the spoken word version of subtweeting is—a particular company or a particular acquisition. I'm absolutely not, there are probably 50 different companies listening right now who thinks, “Oh, God. He's talking about us.” It's the common repeating trend. What is that?Nick: It's hard to say. In some cases, these acquisitions might just be talent. “We need to know how to do X. They know how to do X. Let's do it.” They may have very unique niche technology or software that another company thinks they can more broadly apply.Also, some of these big companies, these may not be board-level or CEO-level decisions. A business unit might decide, “Oh, I like what that company is doing. I'm going to go acquire it.” And so it looks like MegaCorp bought TinyCorp, but it's really, this tiny business unit within MegaCorp bought tiny company. The reality is often different from what it looks like on the outside.So, that's one way. Another is, you know, if they're going to teach us to be more effective with tech or something like that, you're never going to beat culture. You're never going to be the existing culture. If it's 50,000, against 200, obviously we know who wins there. And so I don't know if that's realistic.I don't know if the big companies are genuine when they say that, but it could just be the messaging that they use to make people happy and hopefully retain as many of those new employees for as long as they can. Does that make sense?Corey: No, it makes perfect sense. It's the right answer. It does articulate what is happening there, and I think I keep falling prey to the same failure. And it's hard. It's pernicious, but companies are not monolithic entities.There's no one person at all of these companies each who is making these giant unilateral decisions. It's always some product manager or some particular person who has a vision and a strategy in the department. It is not something that the company board is agreeing on every little decision that gets made. They're distributed entities in many respects.Nick: Absolutely. And that's only getting more pervasive as companies get larger [laugh] through acquisition. So, you're going to see more and more of that, and so it's going to look like we're going to put one label on it, one brand. Often, I think internally, that's the exact opposite of what actually happened, how that decision got made.Corey: Nick, I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me about what you're up to over there, how your path has shaped, how you view the world, and also what Cribl does these days. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about the world, or even possibly going to work at Cribl which, having spoken to a number of people over there, I would endorse it. How do they find you?Nick: Best place to find us is by joining our community: cribl.io/community, and Cribl is spelled C-R-I-B-L. You can certainly reach out there, we've got about 2300 people in our community Slack, so it's a great group. You can also reach out to me on Twitter, I'm @nheudecker, N-H-E-U-D-E-C-K-E-R. Tell me what you thought of the episode; love to hear it. And then beyond that, you can also sign up for our free cloud tier at cribl.cloud. It's a pretty generous one terabyte a day processing, so you can start to send data in and send it wherever you'd like to be.Corey: To be clear, this free as in beer, not free as an AWS free tier?Nick: This is free as in beer.Corey: Excellent. Excellent.Nick: I think I'm getting that right. I think it's free as in beer. And the other thing you can try is our hosted solution on AWS, fully managed cloud at cribl.cloud, we offer a free one terabyte per day processing, so you can start to send data into that environment and send it wherever you'd like to go, in whatever shape that data needs to be in when it gets there.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:21]. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.Nick: No, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.Corey: Nick Heudecker, senior director, market strategy and competitive intelligence at Cribl. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment explaining that the only real reason a startup should raise a $200 million funding round is to pay that month's AWS bill.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Well we certainly talked some inside baseball with Amanda this month! I (Rick) took liberties with editing on this. It'll make for a more amusing listen if you don't have deep inside knowledge of music retail. If you are in music retail it's not so disguised that you maybe can't figure out the companies discussed. Y'know, MEGACORP!?  I also took the opportunity to add some spooky sounds since this is episode that is most current for Halloween. Heck, you may even figure out your own side story to go along with those sounds.  Oh yeah, so we talked about music retail business, record shows, the various stores Amanda has worked at from Slipped Disc to Needle & Groove, and Generation to her job as a representative at All Media Supply and her work putting on record shows with Vinyl Revolution. We also talk about what we're listening to, what Amanda is listening to and what Amanda grew up listening to including her musical background.    Amanda's LinkTree (with many links to pretty much everything discussed on the show) Amanda's Instagram @wearesmelly Opening Music: Iggy & The Stooges "Search & Destroy" Raw Power (Columbia/CBS...) Rick's Listening: Loraine James "Simple Stuff" Reflection (Hyperdub) Hoodoo Fushimi "Furarete Nambo" Kenka Oyaji (180g/Syntax) Richie Hawtin / Concept 1 "96:12 23:00" Concept 1 96:12 (From Our Minds) Sevdaliza "Clear Air" The Suspended Kid (Twisted Elegance/Music On Vinyl) Pan Daijing "Dust" Jade (Pan) John Glacier "Trelawny Waters" Shiloh: Lost For Words (PLZ Make It Ruins) Josh's Listening: Sarah Davachi "Abeyant" Antiphonals (Late Music) Amyl & the Sniffers "Security" Comfort (ATO Records/Rough Trade/B2B Records) Trees Speak "Elements of Matter" Post Human (Soul Jazz Records) Amanda's Listening Track: Possessed "The Exorcist" Seven Churches (Combat/Roadrunner/Century Media/High Roller Records...) Sound FX from various spooky compilations. Closing Music: Liz Phair "Never Said" Exile In Guyville (Matador) The Redscroll Podcast is a monthly show (new episodes on the first of the month) that works as a companion to what we do at Redscroll Records in Wallingford, CT USA. We are a record store that has a heavy emphasis on the left of center / underground music of the world. Whether it be underappreciated or just has a niche audience, marginalized or just off the radar it's all of interest to us. With the show we'll generally have a localized focus. We'll discuss what is in our personal rotation at the moment. We'll talk to guests who have to do with all of the above. And we'll talk about specific dealings with the store. If you have input you're welcome to contact us through email (redscroll@gmail.com). Oh, and please do subscribe! New episodes on the first of every month! (Subscribe on Android)(Subscribe elsewhere just by searching for us please!)

Web Novel Site : https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/wiki/authors/AgroSquerril  If You enjoyed consider leaving a Tip : https://www.paypal.me/agrosquerril  OR Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/agrosquerrils    {TimeStamps} 00:00 Intro 00:36 Humans Collapse the Terraforming Mega corp  05:15 Battle Prayer Check Out the Podcasts!   Greetings Ladies and Mentlegents and welcome to my channel where I like to make LEGAL Audiobooks of various types from web novels and short stories. If you are new to the channel then click on the information icon for the entire playlist to help get you up to current faster. This Oneshot was Taken from the HFY subreddit which hosts mostly Sci-Fi based short stories called oneshots and series. As Always i hope you enjoy and can find some content on my channel you like. Feel free to recommend a series or a story and i will have a look into it. Email : Agrosquerrils@gmail.com  Twitter : https://twitter.com/agrosquerrils  Streamlabs : https://streamlabs.com/agrosquerrils  Discord : https://discord.gg/XeMwEqX  All Donation are welcome and much appreciated. Thank you all for listening and your support.   Youtube Playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcfzFNUhrNS0-gdyOWx2JEqL14UrG6TTd  

We explore one of Cyberpunk's first plot hooks and look at some of the adventures early players had. We cover how Arasaka became so powerful, and discuss the tragedy of The Long Walk for the nomads. Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/FloreFantasyandLore Email:   Flore.FantasyLore@gmail.com Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/Flore-Fantasy-and-Lore-100356535213434 Twitter: @jbendoski YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHY5X5UdWTS_cESmJaYzHYA

today i'm talking about the craziness on wallstreet, unwritten rules of tabletop games and Megacorp