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15 episodes with team gleason
2 episodes with team gleason
2 episodes with team gleason
2 episodes with team gleason
2 episodes with team gleason
2 episodes with team gleason
Discover Lafayette welcomes Dale Clark, Ursula Quoyeser, and Harriet Hoag to discuss the upcoming 4th annual Fin Feather Fur Food Festival ("F5"). This event raises funds for the Team Gleason Foundation, which supports individuals living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (“ALS”). Team Gleason, through its diverse and broad-reaching programming, brings assistive technology, equipment, and robust support services into the hands of ALS patients – to help individuals with ALS not just survive but thrive after a devastating diagnosis. Each of our guests has either been personally affected by ALS or has supported a loved one with the disease. Event Details: Date: April 24, 2025 Time: 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM Location: Blackham Coliseum, Lafayette, LA Tickets: $45 Website: https://teamgleason.org/f5/ Attendees can enjoy great food, beer, and wine while supporting a worthy cause. F5 is a cooking competition where teams compete in four categories: Fin, Feather, Fur, and Dessert. Awards will be given to the best dishes, a "People's Choice" winner, and a "Team Showmanship" winner chosen by a panel of judges. Additionally, a silent auction will offer a selection of valuable items. Teams also compete to raise the most funds for Team Gleason, with prizes awarded to top fundraisers. About Team Gleason Foundation: In January 2011, New Orleans Saints star Steve Gleason was diagnosed with ALS. Faced with this devastating diagnosis, Steve embraced a new mission: to show that people with ALS can not only live but thrive and to inspire others facing similar challenges. “People were simply expected to fade away quietly and die, that was not acceptable to me. That is not OK.” Steve and his wife, Michel Varisco, founded Team Gleason, a nonprofit dedicated to helping individuals with ALS lead purposeful and fulfilling lives. Team Gleason has provided over $55 million in resources to individuals with ALS. Their work includes supplying mobility equipment, power seat elevators, speech-generating devices, and essential home modifications. Personal Impact of Team Gleason: Ursula Quoyeser's Experience Ursula has received significant support from Team Gleason. These resources have been life-changing, enabling her to maintain independence. Ursula reflects on how Team Gleason anticipates needs before they arise, ensuring that people living with ALS receive assistance promptly. One of the most important things that Team Gleason provides is pathways of communication to connect ALS families with each other so that resources that are no longer needed are generously shared. Many of you know Ursula as a superstar Volleyball coach! She is still a superstar and it is an honor to share her story so that the Team Gleason message may be distributed to a wide audience! Harriet Hoag's Journey Harriet's late husband, Monty, was diagnosed with ALS during the height of COVID-19, making the journey even more isolating. Doctors struggled to diagnose him, but Harriet's own research led them to Baylor Hospital, where they received confirmation. She credits Team Gleason for providing invaluable resources such as a speech-generating device that allowed Monty to communicate with their granddaughter even in his final days. Dale Clark's Commitment After being diagnosed with ALS, Dale was inspired to help others in the ALS community. Witnessing the challenges faced by fellow patients at his clinic in Houston, he saw the opportunity to make a difference. His dedication, alongside generous contributions from local companies like Badger Oil and Gas and Service Chevrolet, has helped F5 grow into a major fundraising success. For a more in-depth interview we did in 2024 with Dale and Ursula, listen here. Dale Clark says, "100% of the money goes to Team Gleason. In fact, we tell people to mail their check to Team Gleason so we don't have to handle any money. The Importance of Fundraising: Over the past three years,
Welcome back to Joe and Mike's annual off-season sports card opening podcast marathon extravaganza benefitting an ALS charity as chosen by a friend whose family has been affected by ALS. The guys are also joined by Katherine O'Hagan from Team Gleason, The charity they're supporting this year is Team Gleason. teamgleason.org/poscast This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theposcast.substack.com
Joe and Mike are back to open baseball cards for charity. The charity they're supporting this year is Team Gleason. teamgleason.org/poscast Get full access to The PosCast at theposcast.substack.com/subscribe
Joe and Mike are back to open baseball cards for charity. The charity they're supporting this year is Team Gleason. teamgleason.org/poscast Get full access to The PosCast at theposcast.substack.com/subscribe
A diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is difficult for anyone to hear. But that was especially the case for Joe Redmond, a music executive from Denham Springs who spent his career in radio. While he is losing his voice, Joe has been determined to take advantage of all the opportunities he has, including working with the Team Gleason organization, and a new caregiving program called Pathfinders. Redmond joins us today more on his career, his diagnosis and the vital role that caregivers play in the lives of ALS patients. The New Year's Day attack on Bourbon Street left many New Orleanians worried about the city's security. But for many of the area's Muslims, they're concerned about increased discrimination and anti-Muslim sentiment. Verite News reporter Safura Syed tells us more about the rise in Islamophobia and how local mosques are responding. The truck attack on Bourbon Street has led some residents to call for better pedestrian security in the French Quarter. Some even want parts of the Quarter to be pedestrian-only — no cars allowed. Earlier this week we heard from Chris Olsen, French Quarter resident and business owner with a petition to ban cars on her certain blocks. WWNO's Matt Bloom spoke with Olson and a few others those behind this new push. ___Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Alana Schreiber. Our managing producer is Alana Schrieber. We get production and technical support from Garrett Pittman, Adam Vos and our assistant producer, Aubry Procell.You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at noon and 7 p.m. It's available on Spotify, the NPR App and wherever you get your podcasts. Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you! Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to.Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!
We have video! Joe and Mike are back to open baseball cards for charity. The charity they're supporting this year is Team Gleason. teamgleason.org/poscast Get full access to The PosCast at theposcast.substack.com/subscribe
Joe and Mike are back to open baseball cards for charity. The charity they're supporting this year is Team Gleason. teamgleason.org/poscast Get full access to The PosCast at theposcast.substack.com/subscribe
On Thursday July 11, Steve Gleason was honored at the ESPY awards with the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage. The former Saints player first rose to fame when he blocked a punt against the Atlanta Falcons in the team's first game back in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. But in the years since, Gleason's been living with ALS, a disease that attacks nerve cells and renders patients unable to move, speak and breathe on their own. Still, Gleason has had some extraordinary accomplishments since his diagnosis, like fathering two children, founding Team Gleason, and most recently, writing a memoir, titled ‘ A Life Impossible.'He spoke with Louisiana Considered's Alana Schreiber about writing a book with his eyes, and what his memoir reveals about his life, family and journey with ALS.The Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocate's editorial director and columnist Stephanie Grace recently held a town hall meeting with insurance commissioner Tim Temple. She joins us to discuss his plans to attract more businesses to the state and try to reduce high property premiums. We know many big weather events and disasters by their names, like Hurricane Sandy, the Thomas Fire and most recently, Hurricane Beryl. But these days, one of the biggest threats to health and safety is extreme heat. The Gulf States Newsroom's Drew Hawkins explores the question of whether or not to assign names to heat waves. ___Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Alana Schreiber. Our managing producer is Alana Schrieber. Matt Bloom and Aubry Procell are assistant producers. Our engineer is Garrett Pittman.You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at 12 and 7 p.m. It's available on Spotify, Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts. Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you! Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to.Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!
Guest: Emily Kornman, MCD, CCC-SLP - Emily brings Team Gleason to you in this one-hour conversational audio course podcast. Team Gleason is a 5013(c)(3) organization founded in 2011 by Steve and Michel Gleason - Team Gleason has provided over $40 million in adventure, technology, equipment, and care services to people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and countless others through advocacy and support. Emily highlights how Team Gleason supports people with ALS and their families with an interdisciplinary approach. She describes how SLPs can support speech, swallowing, voice preservation, and AAC options to empower people with ALS to live purposeful lives.
Dale Clark and Ursula Quoyeser join us today to discuss the third annual Fin Feather Fur Food Festival benefiting the Team Gleason Foundation for people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis ("ALS"). Team Gleason Foundation was founded by Steve Gleason, a former New Orleans Saints safety who was diagnosed with ALS in 2011. Since its inception that same year, Team Gleason has provided over $40 million to people living with ALS, supplying critically needed mobility equipment such as shower chairs, wheelchair accessories, and power seat elevators, as well as speech generating devices for those who have lost the ability to speak. Dale Clark is a Lafayette native who works as an engineer for Badger Oil. He was diagnosed with ALS in October of 2020. Ursula Quoyeser is also a Lafayette native and was an educator and coach at ESA and other schools before being diagnosed with ALS in July of 2023. The Festival, known as F5, is a cooking competition where teams compete in the Fin, Feather, Fur or Dessert divisions, along with an auction featuring itmes such as season tickets to UL-Lafayette's four major sports, framed jerseys of Drew Brees and Jake Delhomme, a pellet grill with wifi, and much more. Tickets are $45 each and entitle you to taste all 45 teams' food entries along with beer and wine included. F5 was started by Dale and his good friend, Joe Bernard, as a way to help people living with ALS. "Team Gleason was the obvious choice," says Dale, and Joe had experience hosting other F5 events for oil and gas industry charitable fundraisers. Last year F5 raised $170,000 and in the previous inaugural year, $168,000. This year, F5 will be held at Blackham Coliseum on Thursday, April 25, from 4 to 8 pm. That day also features Festival International and Dale encourages people to drop by Blackham Coliseum first before heading out to a night of musical entertainment. You can purchase tickets to F5 by visiting https://www.facebook.com/events/787195629932250 About 5,000 people in the U. S. are diagnosed with ALS each year. It is difficult to diagnose and is often diagnosed by ruling out other diseases, which can take months or years. There is no cure for ALS, which is a fatal neurodegenerative disease in which a person's brain loses connection with the muscles. Symptoms start with a progressive loss of muscle control. ALS kills motor neurons, causing muscles to weaken and eventually paralyze. People with ALS lose their ability to walk, talk, eat and in time, breathe. The average life expectancy is 2 to 5 years once diagnosed. 10% of cases are inherited through a mutated gene; the remaining 90% of cases occur without a family history of ALS. Military veterans are more likely to get ALS. For more information, visit https://www.als.org/ Baseball great Lou Gehrig is one of the iconic heroes who was famously diagnosed with ALS in 1938. He went on to play baseball for a full year before retiring on July 4, 1939, giving his "Luckiest Man" speech. Each year, Lou Gehrig Day is celebrated on June 2 by Major League Baseball, marking the day he became the starting first baseman for the New York Yankees. Here at home, Dale and Ursula are bravely facing ALS and doing all they can to help others with the disease, as well as working to keep up their strength. Dale is relatively lucky, having only lost the use of his right arm and developing hoaresness. Ursula exercises daily by going to Red's Health Club and riding her incumbent bike alongside her Aussie Doodle, who wears goggles in sun to protect its eyes. They both have incredible attitudes and want to do all they can to raise awareness of ALS among us here in Acadiana. They are also both patients of Dr. Stanley H. Appel, a world-renowned neurologist at Houston Methodist, who has been at the forefront of ALS research for decades. In his 90's, Dr. Appel is still working to find a cure for ALS. To all of my awesome family and all my amazing friends,
In this final episode of "Mindset Matters," I, Ronan Rupesh Kotiya, wear my own shirt representing the journey we've embarked on together through this podcast series. As I share the invaluable lessons learned from my dad's courageous battle with ALS, I reflect on the insights gained from the incredible guests who've joined me along the way. From understanding the depth of ALS to appreciating the strength and resilience of those around me, especially my mom, Siobhan Pandya, this series has been a profound journey of discovery, grief, and ultimately, hope. I delve into how this experience has shaped my perspective on life, the importance of cherishing every moment, and my commitment to raising awareness for ALS through Team Gleason. Thank you to everyone who's supported, listened, and joined me in honoring my dad's legacy. As I sign off, I carry forward the lessons of courage, love, and the unwavering belief that mindset truly matters. How to Support and Share: I encourage listeners to subscribe and share the podcast to help spread awareness and support the ALS community.
We have a special treat for you today! Erin interviewed Renee Hetzler, PT, DPT, NCS and Bernadette Cummings, OTR/L, ATP who both specialize in working with people with ALS to have a conversation about caring for individuals with ALS. There are do's and don'ts when working with this population and we wanted to bring it to you! If you're someone who doesn't see this population very often and you want to know what to focus on, the timeline of events you should be tuned into and how to prioritize your plan of care, this is the episode for you! Some of the topics discussed include: The types of ALS, initial symptoms, warnings signs and timeline Outcome measures and assessments to consider How to be prepared based on the timeline How to have conversations with the patients and their families Favorite equipment recommendations from PT and OT Exercise recommendations Resources for individuals with ALS and their families ALS Association: https://www.als.org/ Team Gleason: https://teamgleason.org/ Muscular Dystrophy Association: https://www.mda.org/ I AM ALS: https://iamals.org/ Compassionate Care ALS: https://ccals.org/ https://shower-buddy.com/ https://razdesigninc.com/ https://www.fawssit.com/ https://www.etac.com/en-us/us/products/patient-handling/slings/molift-rgosling-toilet-highback/ https://www.performancehealth.com/air-soft-resting-hand-splint https://www.performancehealth.com/rolyan-adjustable-wire-frame-cervical-collar#sin=35206 https://www.amazon.com/DRIVE-Rollator-Walker-Removable-Storage/dp/B07TCTBLD9/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://kineticresearch.com/product/the-noodle-classic-afo/ https://www.amazon.com/Medline-Lightweight-Transport-Wheelchair-Handbrakes/dp/B007WA1ZG4 And no need to take notes, we've got an info sheet with everything that was covered for you to download HERE
SLP Emily Kornman discusses her work as a part of Team Gleason, a nonprofit supporting people with ALS. When ALS erodes someone's ability to speak, many turn to augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC, to find their voice. Kornman discusses her work with AAC devices and voice and message banking.Plus, we'll hear a first-hand account from a family Kornman assisted with message banking in her work for Team Gleason.This conversation was originally published in September 2022.
Blair Casey is the Executive Director of the @teamgleason Foundation. Their main mission is to empower those with ALS by giving them purpose, independence, and technology to live their life to the fullest. Blair grew up in New Orleans, has 3 undergraduate degrees, 3 masters, and speaks multiple languages. When he got the message of Steve Gleason's diagnosis, his whole world changed. Blair has been a part of the Gleason Family Team for 11+ years helping with the foundation and being a true friend to Steve. There was so much covered in this episode and could've gone on for another hour. Steve Gleason's journey and what Blair has helped accomplish is remarkable. This foundation has brought tremendous awareness to ALS not only locally but globally as all.----In reference to the Team Gleason Adventure. . .“Life experience - it's everything leading up to it, it's everything you experience during it and it's the story you tell after it.”- Blair Casey----Follow Us On Social!Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheNXTEntrepreneur Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenxtentrepreneur LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-nxt-entrepreneur NXT #111 is Sponsored byLatter & Blum: https://www.latter-blum.comTurn Key Solutions: www.tks.la/NXT MBD Automation: https://www.mbdautomation.com/ MFB Firm: https://mfbfirm.com/ Centura Advisors: https://www.centura-advisors.com/ Season 3 of NXT is Proudly Presented by b1 BANKwww.b1bank.com/ The NXT Entrepreneur is Produced by Propel Production Studiowww.propelyourstory.com/ BioThe NXT Entrepreneur Podcast shares the stories of an entrepreneur's journey and the lessons learned from the successes as well as the failures. We want to share all of the stories from the rejections to the huge wins, the long hours, and the ultimate payoff. The journey is many times dramatic, sometimes unbelievable but always fascinating. It's all about the stories; pull up a chair and listen.
Today on Louisiana Considered, we hear about an upcoming cook-off event in Lafayette to benefit Team Gleason, an organization dedicated to improving life and providing technologies for ALS patients. Plus, we hear about an upcoming art exhibit that celebrates the life of a Baton Rouge native. This Thursday, the Blackham Coliseum in Lafayette will host the second annual Fin Feather Fur Food Festival – or F5 – a cooking competition. The cook-off also serves to benefit Team Gleason, an organization committed to finding solutions for people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. The organization was founded by Steve Gleason, former New Orleans Saints safety who was diagnosed with ALS in 2011. But while Steve Gleason might be the name you recognize, the F5 cook-off actually all began with two good friends, Joe Bernard and Dale Clark. Upon Dale's diagnosis with ALS, they teamed up to host their first event last year, and now they're making this dream a reality for the second year in a row. They joined Team Gleason's director of development, Kearney Gay, to speak with Louisiana Considered's Alana Schreiber for more. Derek Gordon, a Baton Rouge native, led an impressive arts career before returning to his hometown to serve with the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. After his passing in 2012, his family approached the Arts Council about what to do with his substantial art collection. Now, the Arts Council is displaying a selection of 50 works from that 500-work “Derek Gordon and Rodolfo Ramirez Collection.” The exhibition will begin tomorrow, April 27, with an opening reception on May 11th. Lundyn Herring, curator of the exhibition, and Francine Ramirez, family of Derek Gordon and his late partner Rodolfo Ramirez-Rodriquez, join us to discuss the significance of this collection to the Baton Rouge arts community. Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Adam Vos. Our managing producer is Alana Schreiber and our digital editor is Katelyn Umholtz. Our engineers are Garrett Pittman and Aubry Procell. You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at 12:00 and 7:30 pm. It's available on Spotify, Google Play, and wherever you get your podcasts. Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you! Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to. Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This episode of Roots Radio is a special one! Joining us on Episode 8 is Emily Korman. Emily is speech and language pathologist who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana and works as an assistive technology specialist for Team Gleason. This incredible conversation is one that we will never forget! Thank you Emily for sharing with us your love for Team Gleason, your passion for the ALS Community, and your determination to never let those who are underestimated feel alone and without a voice.
SLP Emily Kornman discusses her work as a part of Team Gleason, a nonprofit supporting people with ALS. When ALS erodes someone's ability to speak, many turn to augmentative and alternative communication, or AAC, to find their voice. Kornman discusses her work with AAC devices and voice and message banking.Plus, we'll hear a first-hand account from a family Kornman assisted with message banking in her work for Team Gleason.This episode was produced in anticipation of the 2022 ASHA Convention, where Team Gleason founders Steve Gleason and his wife, Michel, will be honored with the Annie Glenn Award.
Hear my conversation with Lori Larson Heller as we talk about love, loss and moving forward instead of moving on. Lori is a writer, speaker, fierce ALS advocate, and a widow. She was in a season where life was going better than she could of planned. Lori had a husband who was her best friend and soul mate, the absolute love of her life. Then without warning, her plan changed. On September 6, 2018 … her husband Jim Heller was diagnosed with a terminal illness, ALS. She left her successful commercial real estate investment career and became a full-time caregiver that day. After losing her husband Jim to ALS, everything Lori was planning for her future vanished before her eyes, which is when she realized that we are not always in control. Eventually Lori realized she had to make a choice. Either stay stuck in a mindset of “why me”, or dig deep to see if she had the strength to shift her perspective for what the universe had in store. We chat about "the old Lori" and "the new Lori." She shares the superpower we all have: the ability to flip our script and view life through a different lens. Lori shares that life doesn't happen to us, it happens for us. You'll hear how she's found acceptance of adversities, and discovered blessings in all the tough stuff. I love how faithful she is and encourages others that we're all here for a reason, and we have to find our purpose. Be blessed, listen in and share with a friend. Hugs, Lorri
The Saints will beat Tom Brady 5 straight times in the regular season. We explain how. Andrew goes over his player grades, and we review Saints injury report.Try Saints Happy Hour and if you do not love us...FULL REFUND.Our Twitter Spaces is presented by JLD Hot Sauces and Knives! Get 10% off when you use code saintshappyhour! Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
We chatted with Patron Cody Yarbrough about his Saints fandom, the possibility of a trash NFC and also that time Jared Cook fumbling almost got him arrested. Patrons like Cody make Saints Happy Hour possible! Become a Patron at any level you can!Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Saints locked up center Eric McCoy to 5 year contract extension. Plus we recap Thursday practice report.Are Adebo, McCoy and Werner all good for Sunday in Atlanta? Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Great news for Saints 1st round pick Penning, as he could be back in early November. Plus we go over LSU insanity and Marcus Maye gun play. Sign up as Patron and if you don't like us love we'll give you FULL refund.RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
We had a Twitter Spaces and let fans speak their mind on the Saints trading CJ Gardner Johnson. Plus broke down the 53 man Saints roster!Spaces is free courtesy JLD Hot Sauces and Knives. Please Support them! RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Saints offensive line doesn't need Trevor Penning to be great. Jameis looks incredible, the roster looks loaded and Saints face difficult cuts, and our UDFA adopted sons are disappointing us. RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Saints beat Chargers to close Preseason. Jameis and offense was awesome. Only negative is Trevor Penning hurt his ankle. RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Lots of banged up Saints, but Honey Badger and Jarvis Landry looking good and a solution at linebacker you may have forgotten about!RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Jameis is back, Michael Thomas is still out, and the Saints look to wrap up the preseason healthy Friday vs the Chargers.Is Sean Payton Benjamin Button? RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Saints practiced at the Superdome, but the big news Sunday was Dennis Allen said Thomas, "Has a little bit of a hamstring." We break it down plus go over the rest of the Saints practice news.RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Dennis Allen sat every player that mattered but Will Lutz, Trevor Penning, and Blake Gillikin all looked great. Ian Book? He tried hard. RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Saints players that matter look great vs. Texans! Andy Dalton on FIRE, Paulson Adebo was amazing too! Trevor Penning was up and down, the backup running situation remains undecided and our UDFA sons struggled!RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Ceedy wants a new deal, Kiko Alonso could only stand one day of New Orleans heat before he went back to senior living center, and we debut our Trevor Penning Fight Meter! Plus everything happening at camp!RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Saints Camp is a week in. Dennis Allen is being too nice to media, Mark Ingram looks young, behold the power of KRULL and as always Roger Goodell is POS.RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!!Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
We tell you what to watch for at Saints training camp, not to panic about Thomas and Davenport on PUP list, and Greatest Saints Villain Bracket Elite 8!RSVP for our Live Show Sept. 16 at Port Orleans to Get Free Souvenir Saints Cup and support Team Gleason!! Get the full version of all episodes by becoming a Patron AT ANY LEVEL!! Amazon Prime users can support Saints Happy Hour FOR FREE! Instructions on how are here and link to help us is here.We need more support to keep the show great, do more cool things and make Ralph's dreams come true! Support the show and get every complete episode of the show without commercials! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://thecitylife.org/2022/01/19/comcast-and-team-gleason-partner-to-revolutionize-tv-control-and-more-for-people-with-physical-and-speech-disabilities/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/citylifeorg/support
In this episode, Karen speaks to Jeff Cosentino, an Assistive Technology Professional (ATP) with Numotion in south Louisiana, and Blair Casey, the Chief Impact Officer for Team Gleason, about Numotion's new 5-year partnership with Team Gleason to be their Preferred CRT (Complex Rehab Technology) Partner. Team Gleason is Steve Gleason's charitable foundation. Steve Gleason played football for the New Orleans Saints and blocked a punt in the first home game following Hurricane Katrina in 2006. Steve's blocked punt led to a Saints victory, which lifted people's spirits across New Orleans. In 2011, Steve revealed that he had been diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). Steve started recording videos for his unborn son, Rivers, from the beginning of his diagnosis, and this eventually became a documentary called Gleason, which you can find on Amazon. Jeff is the ATP that helped Steve with his first wheelchair. Blair Casey was Steve's caregiver at that time, and this is where the relationship between Jeff, Steve, and Blair began. Numotion and Team Gleason have collaborated for years, leading to Jeff Cosentino coming up with the idea for Numotion's ALS Council. The ALS Council is a group of ATP's and other Numotion employees who work on sharing information about the latest technologies being developed for customers living with ALS. This ALS council at Numotion led to the strategic 5-year partnership with Team Gleason to improve access and development of advanced equipment and technology to serve people and families living with ALS. Team Gleason provides critical equipment, technology, and life adventures for people living with ALS in the United States. As the Preferred CRT provider of Team Gleason, Numotion will work to provide technology services and solutions that ensure those with ALS continue living productive, purposeful and meaningful lives. Jeff and Blair explain some of the details of this partnership and throw in some humor as well.Here are the links discussed in the podcast:Gleason DocumentaryA Football Life: Steve GleasonTeam Gleason Assistive Technology LabGleason DocumentaryGleason NFL Films Machu Picchu (YouTube) Full VideoTeam Gleason/ Duck Dynasty Adventure
For the last 20 or so years we've been living through a technology revolution. When we talk about the pioneers behind this revolution, we usually refer to the creators of phones, software, e-commerce, or a combination of all three. For example, an app that summons a car to pick you up. Or an app that creates a playlist of your favorite music. Some of these tech advances are so integrated into our daily lives, we say we “couldn't live without them.” In reality, though, we could. If Uber, Pandora, or even Amazon disappeared tomorrow, it might take a little adjustment, but our lives, for the most part, would go on just fine. But, there are advances in technology that have an extraordinary impact on the quality of life for people whose lives do, literally, depend on them. Here in New Orleans, since 2012, an organization called Team Gleason has delivered more than $15m worth of life-changing technology to 20,000 people living with ALS, a neuro-degenerative disorder, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Inspired and guided by Saints football legend and ALS patient Steve Gleason, the technology that Team Gleason is most involved with is a sophisticated interface that allows someone with ALS who no longer has the ability of speech, or other motor functions, to use miniscule motions of their eyes to trigger a device that talks – in the person's own voice – and performs other commands, like operating a motorized wheelchair, or changing channels on a TV. As you might imagine, this extraordinary technology is expensive. Team Gleason has been instrumental in every step of its production and implementation. They've gotten these high-tech devices funded, designed, and developed. And they've spearheaded the political lobbying that has resulted in this assistive equipment being covered by Medicare. Blair Casey is Team Gleason's Chief Impact Officer. Among other responsibilities, Blair heads up the division of the organization that finds the people and the money to fund and build this technology. There's another kind of real-world tech I want to tell you about. This one takes the Virtual Reality most of us associate with gaming, and turns it into a product with a profound application. The product is called Stratus. It's developed and built by a Virtual Reality company here in New Orleans, called Kinemagic. I'm far from an expert on any of this, but broadly, this kind of Virtual Reality is built by creating what's called a “Digital Twin” – an exact, detailed digital re-creation of a 3D space, say, the room you're in right now. If you think about writing computer code that represents every single tiny facet of that space, viewed from every imaginable angle, you can understand why this process takes an enormous amount of computing power, time, and human input. What Kinemagic's product, Stratus, does, is create a Virtual Reality digital twin in a matter of minutes. And it's done by one person. This is revolutionary. Which is why Stratus, which was only unveiled in 2019, is already being used by companies like Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobil, and many others. The creator of Stratus and the CEO and founder of Kinemagic is Brian Lozes. Most of us take our business, our career, or our job seriously. But, mostly, we manage to keep things in perspective by reminding ourselves that, at the end of the day it's just a job. We're not changing the course of human history. And then there are people like Blair Casey and Brian Lozes. The work they're doing is allowing people with neuro-degenerative disease to regain the power of speech. And revolutionizing Virtual Reality. When they're having a tough day, they don't have the benefit of shrugging it off by telling themselves what they're doing isn't all that consequential, because, simply, it is. Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Delvin Breaux closes out the show talking about the Team Gleason fundraiser
Objectives: - Highlight a life of leadership via positive influence and successful outcomes- Discuss elements of the courage and accountability portion of Northwest FCS framework- Explore practical elements of living a life of accountability and courageParticipant Bios:- Michel Varisco-Gleason Michel has been described as the pillar of Team Gleason. Although most pillars don’t collect swords and wear jackets in the summer, she is eclectically the structure that completes and supports Team Gleason.In her original role as Co-Founder of Team Gleason and also as Steve’s wife, Michel had a crash course in ALS and all that implies. In the film, ‘Gleason’, she and Steve shared their story with the world, creating enormous awareness for the disease and Team Gleason. Her official roles are as an advisor and also managing merchandise for the organization, but she remains a pillar or maybe two. And, every good idea is always attributed to Michel.Also revealed in the film, ‘Gleason’ was Michel’s vision as an artist. Since the film’s release, Michel’s art has been sold across the country and beyond. Her artist statement is:“I’ve always liked my brain occupied, not with current events or poetry, but with more mundane distractions, like busy work. In 2011, my husband, Steve Gleason was diagnosed with ALS, a paralyzing terminal illness with a 2-5 year life expectancy. We were both 34. I became consumed with fear, anxiety, heartbreak, resentment and relentless grief. The idea of tomorrow frightened and depressed me. One day I came across an old sketchpad with a single drawing on it (One). I brought it, along with some sharp colored pencils, to the hospital during a particularly worrisome surgery. For the first time in years, I was able to sit in one place for hours and feel contentment and peace. My drawings started to change into things I didn’t fully understand. Forms and symbols were creating a new language through which I could express things I never could verbally. Experiencing a still mind was exhilarating. I still experience that same exuberance every time someone buys a print. This art has given me something new to love. It has brought back some of the light I lost. I feel lucky that I can share it with my family, friends and now, strangers. Besides being my children, Rivers and Gray’s mom, my artwork is the thing I'm most proud of right now.”- Scott Linklater is a native of rural Washington having grown up in the heart of apple and cherry country in Okanogan. Scott has earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Washington State University, a master’s degree in adult education from the University of Idaho, and a doctorate degree in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University. Scott is a learning and development practitioner with experience directing training efforts at Monte Carlo Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and Red Lion Hotels Corporation. Currently, Scott is the Vice President – Learning Design at Northwest Farm Credit Services. Scott has published books and academic research with a focus on leadership, employment, organizational development and trust in business. Copyright © 2020 Northwest Farm Credit Services. All Rights Reserved.
Blair Casey is the Assistant Executive Director of Team Gleason - an organization founded by former NFL player Steve Gleason. The organization is committed to providing for and finding solutions for persons living with ALS. Team Gleason's staff and volunteers work tirelessly every day to empower those living with ALS to live with continued purpose and as productively and independently as possible. Blair joins the Dudes to talk about their work to support Google's Project Euphonia and how we can all work together to improve voice recognition for people who experience disarthria. To find out more and contribute your voice samples to the effort, visit: teamgleason.org/projecteuphonia
Blair Casey is the Assistant Executive Director of Team Gleason - an organization founded by former NFL player Steve Gleason. The organization is committed to providing for and finding solutions for persons living with ALS. Team Gleason’s staff and volunteers work tirelessly every day to empower those living with ALS to live with continued purpose and as productively and independently as possible. Blair joins the Dudes to talk about their work to support Google's Project Euphonia and how we can all work together to improve voice recognition for people who experience impaired speech. To find out more and contribute your voice samples to the effort, visit: teamgleason.org/projecteuphonia. https://youtu.be/OAdegPmkK-o
Hey, hope you enjoy this new episode, here are some links if you want to donate. Team Gleason: https://teamgleason.org/ Laura relief: Direct Relief: https://www.directrelief.org/emergency/hurricane-laura/ Family Promise: https://donate.familypromise.org/give/297999/#!/donation/checkout Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org/
“This COVID pandemic closely resembles a diagnosis like ALS. When I choose to see the trial or adversity as an opportunity, I'm able to accept and acknowledge the reality of my situation rather than resist or deny reality,” says Steve Gleason. He’s fought tirelessly for policy changes that have transformed lives and made crucial technology accessible to others living with ALS. In this episode, Steve reminds us what a gift it is to be alive, as he delves into finding purpose and strength in fatherhood. Listen on for his insight on our current state of social isolation, and learn more about Team Gleason, an organization developing innovative technological solutions that give back so much of what ALS takes away.For more information about Microsoft's In Culture podcast and to read the transcript, please visit: microsoft.com/inculture/podcast
Blair Casey, Assistant Executive Director for Team Gleason, joins the show to talk about Steve Gleason receiving the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday, Jan. 15, and the continued work of Team Gleason.
Paul Varisco of Team Gleason joins the show to discuss Gleason Gras.
Paul Varisco of Team Gleason joins the show to discuss Gleason Gras.
Former NFL football player Steve Gleason founded a charity, Team Gleason, helped create the largest ALS research project in history, has a congressional medal of honor, a law passed in his name and is the star of a Super Bowl commercial and film about his life. Most importantly, he is a proud father of two kids -- Rivers and Gray. Steve accomplished all of the above and more while unable to walk, talk, eat or breath on his own. Steve shared his story with ALL THE WISER while typing with his eyes. He recorded and banked his vocabulary to preserve his authentic voice which you will hear in his candid interview on finding his purpose, the pitfalls of being called a hero, his insecurities, hope for his children and the things he misses most about his life before ALS. In Today’s Episode: Being told he will be dead in 2-3 years (3:58) Losing his ability to walk and talk (5:54) A day in his life 8 years after being told he would not live (10:02) How to live a meaningful life with ALS (13:52) How ALS affects families (20:27) Why he believes technology saved his life (22:42) A trip to space and changing the the future of ALS with virtual reality and artificial intelligence (31:13) Wise Words: Would I spend all my time left, would I spend the time searching for ways to be cured, or would I try to do whatever I really wanted to check off the bucket list? (4:50) People with nothing left to lose have nowhere to go but up. (9:48) As someone who’s lost most of his physical abilities over the past 20 months, I can tell you that the anticipation of loss is worse than the actual loss itself. (15:06) ALS is a remorseless and humiliating disease. It can annihilate families. Spouses become unrecognizable to each other, veiled in frustration, anger and shame. Michel and me included, life begins to unravel into chaos as the person with ALS becomes more reliant on their spouse, and before anyone realizes it, frustration and resentment and shame end up clouding the entire relationship. (20:27) It’s really true for all relationships. If you can’t communicate honestly and if you can’t have compassion for the other person’s pain, you have no relationship. But ALS magnifies and intensifies that principle. Michel and I were in the low point. Our breaking point. Fortunately we found a way to thaw the ice, start communicating openly, and understand each other. Things are very different than before I was diagnosed and we definitely struggle, but we’re in a good place. We communicate well and we’re a tightly forged team. (21:20) I’ve thought a lot about suffering, and I notice it doesn’t matter whether you are poor or wealthy, white or black, talented or untalented. It doesn’t matter if you have ALS or not. Every human experiences suffering, and some people who have any type of chemical imbalance or mental illness, they suffer mightily to stay positive. Every human experiences suffering. While I’m not saying we should complain all the time, it’s our most powerful tool as humans to share our pain and vulnerabilities with each other. (27:11) I rarely get caught up in the things that I cannot do. I suppose that means that I’m either really stubborn or I like to think that if a person can find the way to live a fulfilling and meaningful life, things like walking around or talking far and away is less important to a person if they can feel they are making an impact in other ways. (28:13) Links Mentioned: Steve’s Charity: http://www.teamgleason.org/
With the release of the Windows April 2018 Update, we chat with Microsoft engineers about three exciting features that Insiders voted as part of their top 10 favorites. Tom Alphin joins Jason Howard in the studio to talk about Timeline, a new, chronological way to keep track of all your stuff, including across multiple devices. Jake Cohen chats about Eye Control, an accessibility feature that Microsoft developed with the help of Steve Gleason, an NFL football player for the New Orleans Saints who is living with ALS. And Samuele Dassatti, an 18-year-old Windows Insider from Italy, shares his experience developing his app, Fluenty, using Fluent Design. Then, Dona Sarkar and Jason have a candid discussion about what it's really like to be a Microsoft engineer and evolve an operating system used by more than a billion users worldwide. Episode Transcription JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Jason Howard, and this is Episode 15: Updates and Features and Engineers—Oh, My! This episode, we'll chat with Microsoft engineers about Timeline and Eye Control, as well as a Windows Insider about Fluent design. All three of these features were voted by insiders as part of the top ten features within this update. Later, Dona Sarkar and I will chat about what it's really like to evolve an operating system used by more than a billion users worldwide. JASON HOWARD: To talk about the new Timeline feature today, we have Tom Alphin. Welcome to the show. TOM ALPHIN: Thank you. JASON HOWARD: So could you please introduce yourself to the audience and tell them what you do here at Microsoft? TOM ALPHIN: Sure. So I'm Tom Alphin. I've been working at Microsoft for about 15, 16 years. Been on the Windows team for most of that, and most recently, as you introduced me, I've been working on the Timeline feature. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: And for those who may not be familiar, or may not have watched some of the webcasts we do, back in December of 2017, we did a little demo -- what was it? About a week early before the Timeline feature showed up Insider builds? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Actually had you on the air, got to do some demos -- they worked. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Which was awesome. (Laughter.) Doing live demos is always a risky proposition. So for those that are listening to the show and may not be familiar with the functionality, since it's just now like properly releasing to the public, can you give us a bit of a rundown on what Timeline is? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Before talking about Timeline itself, it's worth speaking for a moment about what problem we think Timeline solves. We identified some years ago that people were struggling to find their stuff. It used to be that I knew where all my stuff was. It was on my one laptop on the hard drive. And now with a world of cloud services, OneDrive and Dropbox or whatever your favorite storage solution is, it's kind of hard to find stuff sometimes. Or it might even be on the C drive of a different laptop. And it's like, "Where's my stuff?" And so rather than just trying to make sure even puts all their stuff in one place, which of course we're investing in making OneDrive a great place for your stuff, we also recognized, you know, people are going to use a mix of things. So why don't we give them one view of all their stuff? And it's organized, actually, chronologically, not by physical storage location. And that was sort of the conceptual journey that we went through to get to the idea, "Hey, maybe we just give people a timeline of their stuff." And that's the gist of it. When we ended up, ultimately, shipping today is the ability for users to click on the task view button that's been part of Windows for a while now. Instead of just seeing what's running, you can actually go back in time. And you're seeing your chronological view of stuff you've done in the past. And from that chronological view, you can click on something because you want to get back to that document or that website, and it will just launch. And we've made it really easy. We're hoping people habituate to that as an alternate way to go back and find things they care about. JASON HOWARD: And it seems like the name was pretty easy to stumble upon, it kind of named itself. (Laughter.) TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the name of the feature kind of just is the essence of the feature. Although, we use that name as a bit of a guiding principle. We were, like, when we started thinking about search results in the timeline experience, we could have organized the search results in any manner of ways. We could have organized them by application, we could have organized them by some sort of relevance algorithm. We chose, ultimately, to organize them chronologically because we're, like, "This is Timeline, we've got to keep things organized in a predictable, consistent way." And that bounding concept is chronology. So reverse chronology, center of Timeline. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And, I mean, if you've got files in five different locations and you're struggling to remember where it was to begin with, right? Because if you knew where it was, you could possibly just go and open the file and be done with it. Having remembered when the last time you worked on it, for some people, myself included here, it's probably a little bit easier to do it that way as opposed to, okay, which PC was this on or which, you know, cloud-based service did I upload this to at what point in time? And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, yeah, I worked on this on this other machine, it was two days ago, cool. Zip back in time, and there you go. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So, basically, we're giving people one more way to find their stuff. You can already find it if you know where it is, go find it in File Explorer, the appropriate app. You can already find it in search if you know exactly what it's called. And now we've got a way you can find it if you know when it happened. JASON HOWARD: That's awesome. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like that was a bit of the core of why the team was excited to create the feature. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: So as an end user, right, it sounds like they have this third kind of pillar of a way to go and find files. But besides just finding something that they had been working on, right? Like, how does this change the game for users? Like, how does this improve their workflow and make lives easier for them? TOM ALPHIN: Well, we know that people use computers in a lot of different ways. Some people will do simple tasks, just get something done, move on. Other people use it for more entertainment or shopping or any of these other scenarios. And every one of those scenarios is going to have a different use case or use pattern. And for each one of them, they might use something like timeline differently. If you're using it for shopping, it's great to be able to go find that thing you were looking at a couple days ago because maybe you saw something you really liked, but you weren't quite ready to pull the trigger and buy it. You closed the Web browser, it's pretty hard to find it again. And now, you know, you just scroll back in Timeline, you can find it, get back to it, make a purchase decision. If you're doing a more complicated task, maybe you're working on writing a book or trying to research a trip or any of these tasks that take many days and many, many documents and objects it's going to take you a while to build out that state. And then you've got all the information at your fingertips, and then you have to switch to something else, getting back to that stuff is challenging and Timeline is one way we think people can do it more easily because it's all there. And since you're going back in time to two days ago when you were looking at the trip planning, you'll see in that two days ago area, other things that you're doing at the same time, it's very likely those are the same things you want to bring back as well. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. So instead of finding just the one thing, you may have forgotten about something else that's important and relevant that hadn't kind of clicked back into your memory. And, you know, when you go back and find this, it'll be sitting there waiting for you as well. And you're, like, "Oh, my goodness, I completely forgot about that." TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. Exactly. JASON HOWARD: So it sounds like everybody's going to get this kind of "one history to rule them all" type, you know, experience, right? In a recent survey, Windows Insiders chose Timeline as one of their top ten features that is now going to be available in the April 2018 Update. Obviously, it's now out in public. From your perspective, are there any users, individually or in particular, that you can think about that are going to be super excited about this feature? TOM ALPHIN: I think the feature is valuable if you have exactly one Windows PC, but it's going to be significantly more popular amongst people that have either multiple PCs or multiple PCs and a phone where they're choosing to use Office or Edge because then you can actually pick up the activities across the device boundary. And that's really powerful because once you find that cool website on your phone, trying to get it off of your phone is a pain. And if I could just change nothing about how I use my phone, but when I sit down at my PC, I know with confidence if I go into my timeline it's going to show me the stuff that I was viewing on my phone earlier today or yesterday. That is a bit of a game-changer because I don't have to change how I use my phone. All I have to do is have confidence I can get back to that stuff easy in the future. JASON HOWARD: Well, even when you look at individual applications, right, you look at Edge, and it can port your favorites across different devices, right, correlated to your Microsoft account. And there are other Web browsers out there that will port your history and things like that so that, you know, you're on PC A, you search something, gets correlated. But, again, that's a separate profile that you have to have connected in the background, things like that. Rather than having two or three different profiles, or five different profiles across all these different applications, at least in this type of scenario where you have your one Microsoft Account that's connected to these multiple machines, you don't have to worry about remembering five accounts and five logins and tying all of that together. You get to kind of have this one simplified, seamless experience where, hey, this is the same login I have across multiple machines. And guess what? All of this just happens seamlessly in the background and the user experience seems like it's pretty smooth. TOM ALPHIN: That's right, yeah. Because your activities are roaming between your devices based on your Microsoft Account, so long as you use the same Microsoft Account on both of the devices, you'll have the same Timeline. Actually, that's a good segue to another capability that's tied up in Timeline is if I go from my first PC, where I do have a particular application installed, to a second PC where I don't have that application installed, we will actually help you when you click on that activity from that app, get that app installed on that second computer and we're really bridging the gap for the user so they can really get right back exactly into the app and content that they want on a device that maybe they don't use as often or maybe that device is new to their ecosystem. And we're just helping bridge the gap there. We really think this will help the multi-device user a ton, and again, that phone scenario is super cool. I can get back to that Word document I was reading on the go super easily on my PC, get back to that website. It's all really nicely integrated, and we think that it will continue to grow as people habituate to this and as developers embrace the platform that Timeline's built on, you'll see more and more high-quality activity cards in Timeline coming from the various apps you love. JASON HOWARD: So, obviously, this is available on Windows 10 across, you know, all the PCs that, obviously, have taken this newest update, right? So the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, you need to have that installed kind of as the baseline, and that's when the feature will show you. So you mentioned mobile OS's. What mobile platforms is this available on currently? TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. So if you have Edge on your iPhone or your Android device or your Office suite on those platforms, those will be sources that activities can get created back to appear on your PC. And it requires a new version of Edge which either is out or is about to be out for that to work properly, but Office is already working today. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Future plans, right? I don't want you to give away the secret sauce, right? I love asking this question because anybody I ever talk to and ask them, "Hey, what are you doing next?" You know, there's that mixture of, "I can talk about some of it, I can't talk about some of it." Any cats you want to let out of the bag? TOM ALPHIN: Well, I actually can talk about something, because we've already been talking about it for a while. At Build last year, almost exactly a year ago, because we're getting ready for the next Build Conference, we made it very clear to app developers that if you write these activities into the roam APIs, they will make it into your timeline on all your PCs. And that's a big deal. What we're excited about is that we really think these activities can showcase elsewhere in Windows. One example that is already part of the product as well is if you switch between devices and there's a strong signal that that activity you were working on PC A is something you'd want to resume on a second PC, we could offer a little notification for you, "Hey, would you like to keep working on this?" And we think that's the beginning of a whole host of ways to infuse the Windows operating system with exactly what you need next. And I can't speak to exactly what we're going to do with that, because we're still kind of inventing the future, right? But we know that these activities that the Microsoft first-party applications and our third-party partners are creating, that those activities are sort of at the center of a new type of productivity in Windows. JASON HOWARD: I know we've covered a lot here, but anything else? Any other tips or tricks that you want to share about Timeline? Obviously, people need to get the newest build and get it installed so they can use it. TOM ALPHIN: Yeah. I mean, the main point that people encounter when they play with it for the first time is that we do want to make sure people's privacy are respected in this experience. So you will see when you use it for the first time, we do ask you if you'd like the activities from this PC to go back up to the cloud so they can get to your other devices. We give you a couple days of Timeline, and then below that, there's an experience built into Timeline to actually opt in and move those activities back up to the cloud. So that's something people will discover when they play with it for the first time a little bit. Another thing is I really encourage people to play with the search capability as well because I kind of find the combination of even an imperfect search term, I happen to love LEGO projects, so I might search for LEGO. It gives me a filtered Timeline, which is all of my stuff that has that keyword in it. So if I know about when it was, but I'm not sure exactly which day, I can use the combination of search, which filters the view, plus that sort of temporal timeline view to find exactly what I'm looking for. So people should play with that as well. They don't feel like they need to type enough search terms to find exactly that one thing. Just get it down to a small enough set that you can quickly scan and find what you're looking for. I think that's probably a good tease for people. Really, we want to hear from people, too. Because, you know, this is the beginning of a story. JASON HOWARD: And, obviously there's, you know, the Feedback Hub to drive feedback for Insiders. If you're on a retail build, you know you can provide feedback and Feedback Hub as well. TOM ALPHIN: Yes. And we've gotten great feedback from the Insiders watching the initial response to it when we went out end of last year and seeing what people had to share and trying with the little time we had to respond in some small ways has been really awesome. And not having that opportunity would have made for a less polished product. JASON HOWARD: Well, Tom, thank you so much for stopping by the studio today. TOM ALPHIN: Absolutely. JASON HOWARD: It's been great talking to you. TOM ALPHIN: Thank you very much, cheers. JASON HOWARD: Cheers, man. JASON HOWARD: We chat with our next Microsoft engineer about Eye Control, one of several accessibility features that the Windows team has really been investing in over the last few years. Jake, could you introduce yourself to our listeners? JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. My name is Jake Cohen, a program manager on the Windows Interaction Platform team. And I was fortunate enough to work on Eye Control the past few years and I'm really excited to talk about it. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Real quick, for those who may not know, can you tell us a little bit about what the Windows Interaction Platform team does? JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So we work on providing support for all input device types on Windows, both in the operating system as well as public APIs for developers. We provide support for mouse and keyboard, touch, pen, precision touchpad, now eye tracking, the dial, and more. JASON HOWARD: That's quite the list. And it seems like there's a few important things that users interact with Windows through. (Laughter.) JAKE COHEN: That's right. JASON HOWARD: So before we get into the details of Eye Control, could you tell us a bit about accessibility in general and how Windows is prioritizing accessibility features as it evolves? JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. I think it really comes down to Microsoft's mission statement that Satya has defined for us, and that we've been really working towards. And it's all about empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. So accessibility has been super important for us for the past 20-plus years. We've been working hard in the past few years to really aspire towards our mission statement, and when we think about accessibility, it's about empowering every person of every level of ability. And we've been taking a really focused approach to continue improving our products to fill the gaps and help people use their PCs and use Windows to improve their lives and do the things they are passionate about. JASON HOWARD: So, speaking about Eye Control, can you tell us, you know, a little bit more about it? Like, walk us through how it works and what it's like using the feature. JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So Eye Control is a product, it's built into Windows, and it allows customers to control their PC using only their eyes and a compatible eye-tracking device. So it's built leveraging eye-tracking technology, and it provides access to control a mouse, a keyboard, and a text-to-speech experience to communicate with friends and family, all with just your eyes. JASON HOWARD: Wow. So is there some sort of a camera that the user looks into? Or is it just like kind of reading where a person's eyes are gazing across like a pre-defined screen area? JAKE COHEN: We work with eye-tracking hardware that you can connect to your PC, and some devices have them integrated. Two of our hardware partners that support Windows is Tobii and now EyeTech, which is new for the April 2018 release. What you do is you connect that device, and this uses infrared lighting and cameras to basically detect where your eyes are looking relative to the screen to allow you to interact with your PC. And Windows takes that information and allows you to, say, control a mouse or keyboard with where you're looking on the screen. JASON HOWARD: So are there, say, like icons on the screen? Like, if you were trying to switch between -- what would be, like, keyboard input versus using a mouse to drag and drop and things like that? Are there, like, icons that you would look at and almost virtually eye-click them somehow? JAKE COHEN: Exactly. Yes. So Eye Control starts with a launch pad, which is UI that's always present on the screen. And when you dwell your eyes on an icon, which is the act of fixating your eyes somewhere on the screen and waiting, it'll activate a click. So it's basically a press and hold with your eyes. And you have access on the launch pad to the mouse, to the keyboard, to text-to-speech, and now in the April 2018 release, many more options to quick access to start, task view, device calibration, settings, and more. And this is really your launching point to get to the action you want. So if you want to, say, use the mouse to scroll a Web page, you first look at the scroll button basically saying, "Hey, I want to scroll." And once you're in that mode, you can fixate your eyes somewhere on the screen and then use the arrows that are provided to scroll up and down using your eyes. So lets you browse the Web or scroll an app. JASON HOWARD: Something interesting for me, the difference between a left mouse click versus a right mouse click? JAKE COHEN: Yes. For that, we do have individual UI for a left-click action and a right-click action on the launch pad. We also have one option for precise mouse interactions that let you position your eyes on the screen, fine tune the position of the mouse, and then select what action you want with that mouse, which could be right click, left click, or double left click. JASON HOWARD: That was going to be my next question -- what happens between a single click versus the double click? JAKE COHEN: Yeah. And you raise a really good point, too. There are a wide range of interactions that are supported on Windows that people do every single day. And it's quite a complex problem to provide support for that with just your eyes. You know, we're just getting started with providing support for left click, right click, double left click for scrolling, for the keyboard, but there's more interactions that we need to work towards as well like zooming and drag and drop. And these are really fun, complex problems to work towards to let someone do all of these things with just their eyes. JASON HOWARD: So what's the story behind how Microsoft went about developing this eye-tracking feature? JAKE COHEN: It's a very exciting story. It started several years in the 2014 Microsoft company-wide hackathon, and started with Steve Gleason, NFL football player, New Orleans Saints, that is living with ALS. Sent an e-mail and challenged Microsoft to help improve his life with technology. A famous quote he has is, "Before we have a cure for ALS, technology is that cure." And it brings up a really good point. You know, as technology evolves and as technology can do more and more for people, it helps fill the gap and empower people to do things they couldn't do before. And with that e-mail, there was a team got together, built a hackathon project on eye tracking to let Steve drive his wheelchair. JASON HOWARD: Oh, wow. JAKE COHEN: He can drive his wheelchair with his son around his house, which is incredible. And from there a team at Microsoft Research has dedicated their time the last three years plus to building technology to help improve people's lives that are living with mobility impairments, both with eye tracking, as well as those who are blind. And they've evolved and grown their technical expertise and have learned a ton and are working with people living with ALS in the community to learn more and work with them and help them individually. And in this past year, we found a point which there was a great opportunity to bring all of this learning and opportunity right into Windows, so more customers around the world can leverage this technology in an easier way to help let them control their PC and do what they want to do. JASON HOWARD: Just thinking, you know, you buy a new computer and you're booting up. Previously, that out-of-box experience was very -- there were no audio cues or anything. JAKE COHEN: Right. JASON HOWARD: You had to be able to see what was on the screen. JAKE COHEN: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: It required somebody of full abilities to walk through the process, really. And now, Cortana's integrated where she actually speaks to people. JAKE COHEN: That's great. JASON HOWARD: Right? There's high-contrast mode included as part of the out-of-box experience. It's like, piece by piece, we keep bringing Windows closer and closer to those who may need some additional assistance and going through what are just some of the common tasks in using the operating system. JAKE COHEN: It's a great evolution, I'd say, of Windows and what we are doing to fulfill our mission statement and to fill the gap and to help people with variations of ability better use their PC, use their devices, have an impact on their lives. And it's a really good trajectory we're on to really be customer focused and focused on the end to end solution, not tools that you can plug in and use in certain scenarios, but what is the from beginning to end, I get my PC, I'm started, I'm booted up. I can now use it on my day-to-day, I can use it at work and transition to future devices and updates as well. JASON HOWARD: So knowing that we kind of have a habit around here of starting a good thing and then opening up a bit more broadly so that additional third parties and users externally can kind of plug in and take it to the next level, what is the future past what we've done so far? Do you have any plans for, like, APIs or anything that you're going to do to try to enable developers to kind of build on top of what you all have already put together? JAKE COHEN: Absolutely. This is one of the things I'm most excited about for this next release of Windows. In the Fall Creators Update, we released Eye Control in box for the first time. In the April 2018 Update, we have really great improvements to Eye Control, but the next step we're taking as well is releasing public developer APIs and open-source libraries that was used exactly the same in Windows to build Eye Control to allow third-party developers to build apps and experiences that can leverage eye tracking. And imagine all of the gaps that third-party developers can fill for customers who are living with mobility impairments to use in their day-to-day life. You know, I think it comes down to Microsoft's core roots. We can't fulfill this mission statement alone to empower everyone, we have to empower everyone to empower other people and to build a platform. We're a platform company, and this what I'm most excited for next is to see what developers can think of and come up with and build and make an impact. JASON HOWARD: Seems to be one of the things that we as a company are good at is we put together a solid foundation that has the right hooks and integrations into the OS, and then open the door and see what other people can come up with. JAKE COHEN: Yeah. So these APIs just came out and we're showing them off at Build and we're excited to see what comes next. JASON HOWARD: What are some of the next things that you think are super important that you and the rest of your team will be working on? JAKE COHEN: We take a very customer-centric approach, especially for Eye Control, since it is designed for a targeted set of audience and people who really need it. We've been working closely with Microsoft Research and people living with ALS in the community, as well as Team Gleason, a nonprofit foundation that helps people who are living with ALS, to collect feedback, to let them use Eye Control and tell us what works great, what's missing, and what's needed next. And it's really inspiring to get this feedback because we hear people say, "This is amazing technology, this is really helping me." And also, "This is the next thing I need." It's about empowering them to do everything they can think of, not just a subset of interactions or abilities. And that's what's driving the next steps is collecting feedback and addressing the next top things that people want to do in Windows. JASON HOWARD: So for you individually, what drove you to become part of the Windows Interaction Platform team? Like, what landed you here? JAKE COHEN: Well, it started with a really strong interest in thinking about how we're evolving the way we interact with devices and technology -- the evolution of the smart phone and touch interactions being such a huge player in how we use these devices, and how that's changing the way we work and live with voice as a key interaction being more predominant today with voice-activated assistants, as well as smart home speakers. And it's just really exciting to think about how we can push the boundary and make things and PCs more natural and intuitive to use and just make it more smooth throughout your day-to-day life. And eye tracking is a really exciting space where there's a very natural aspect to where your eyes are looking on the screen and what that intent is and what you're thinking and doing, and can help you if you are only using your eyes, as well as if you're fully able and can use other modalities to do multi-modal interactions. So the interaction space is very, very cool. JASON HOWARD: Well, Jake, thank you so much for thinking the time to be here with us today to talk about eye tracking. No doubt, it's something that has a very long and bright future ahead of it. Can't wait to see what's coming next. JAKE COHEN: Yeah, that's so much. It's been really fun. JASON HOWARD: For our third feature today, we'll be chatting about Fluent design. Fluent design is a new design language for Windows 10 with guidelines for designs and interactions covering components such as light, depth, motion, material, as well as scale. Fluent design makes applications look great across all types of Windows-powered devices. Speaking on this topic today is Samuele Dassatti, a Windows Insider who developed his own productivity and scheduling app called Fluently, which is now available in the Microsoft store. Samuele is only 18 years old, and has been coding since he was 13. He's using the proceeds from this application to pay for university. Welcome, Samuele, where are you calling from today? SAMUELE DASSATTI: I'm from Italy, in the northern region of Italy. JASON HOWARD: All right. So, tell us a little bit about your app. Can you give the audience a walk-through of what your application does and what prompted you to create it? SAMUELE DASSATTI: Well, my app is a digital diary with the support for the Surface Pen. I decided to create it because in my school, we use a tablet instead of books. And I needed a way to write on my Surface Pro, my notes as if I were writing on paper. So I started developing this UWP app, Fluently, and I really liked the Fluent design system, which was presented at Build 2017 so I decided to implement it in my app. And the fact that the app looked so beautiful made me proud of it and I, ultimately, decided to publish it on the Windows Store in October or so. And after I published it, I was nominated for the Windows Developer Awards 2018, so it's a great result for me. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. So your application basically lets you keep a calendar and notes by handwriting on a Surface with the Surface Pen. So it seems like it's good for people who like the feeling of paper, but want the flexibility of a digital calendar, it seems like those would be the kind of people that would love your application Fluently. SAMUELE DASSATTI: Yeah. From what I've seen, many of the people that write me usually come from pen and paper, maybe they add a Surface or a similar device with pen support, but they use it not that often, and maybe just for some basic sketching. But after seeing Fluently and acknowledging how intuitive it was, many of them thank me because I gave them a reason to use their Surface or XPS two-in-one, for example. JASON HOWARD: Just in talking, right, we heard a little bit about you, that you were self-taught when it comes to coding, and you started when you were 13. Obviously, you're a bit older now and you're about to start university, so can you tell us a little bit about your plans and, you know, what you're dreaming about for the future? SAMUELE DASSATTI: I just got admitted at the University of Trento, near where I live, which I heard is a really good university for computer science. And I want to study programming there because I believe coding opens many doors in the future because it is required almost everywhere, and I hope that the fact that I have some experience may help me in the university. JASON HOWARD: Awesome. Thank you so much for stopping by the studio today. SAMUELE DASSATTI: Thank you for the opportunity. JASON HOWARD: Ever wonder what it's like to be an engineer on the Windows Insider team and to be part of the massive rush that is evolving the most popular operating system in the world? Dona Sarkar joins me in the studio to talk about the joys and headaches of engineering. DONA SARKAR: Hi, Jason. JASON HOWARD: Hi, Dona. DONA SARKAR: What are you doing? You're on my side of the booth. (Laughter.) JASON HOWARD: I won that argument, everybody. DONA SARKAR: He did. Jason won an argument, everyone. He's now on my side of the booth. Therefore, I think we should have our connect on the air, Jason. JASON HOWARD: I don't think anybody wants to listen to that. DONA SARKAR: Jason, what are three things you could have done better this year? (Laughter.) JASON HOWARD: Well, one thing I did right was standing on this side of the booth. DONA SARKAR: That's about it. Now, this is going to cost you three articles on the website described your day-to-day. (Laughter.) JASON HOWARD: I'm making my own job harder here. DONA SARKAR: Yes, he is. JASON HOWARD: I don't like how this is turning out. DONA SARKAR: Yes, he is. All right, so I have some questions for you. JASON HOWARD: All right. DONA SARKAR: You have been "Insidering" for, what? Four years? A long time. JASON HOWARD: A while. DONA SARKAR: Right? Yeah, a long time. You've been "Insidering" longer than I have, you've been "Insidering" longer than most of the team. So before I showed up here, you talked about three of the Insider community's favorite features in the new update, and they were all super exciting -- Timeline, Eye Control, Fluent design. Those are some of my favorites, too, along with all of the stuff around focus assistant, etcetera. Can you share with everybody, what role did Insiders play in the evolution of these new features? And how did their feedback make it to the table where decisions are made? JASON HOWARD: Well, it's -- I don't want to expand the discussion super far, especially not coming right out of the gate, but it's the same as any other feature that we've introduced along the development of Windows 10. You know, the development teams come up with this awesome idea of something they want to put in, it shows up in a preview build and everybody freaks out and gets excited and they're like, "Oh, my goodness, what is this new piece of awesomeness that's here?" And then they're, like, "Okay, well, I want it to work this way or this part's broke, you know, what can we do to change this? Have you guys thought about this? Because it currently doesn't do it this way or it doesn't do this at all." So Insiders will use the feature, they'll send us all the good feedback. You know, they yell at us on Twitter and all that kind of fun stuff. You know, that's one of the fun parts of my job. But, you know, for each of these individual features, along with everything else that's in Windows 10, it's the same usual process. And I don't mean to make it sound mundane, because it's absolutely awesome, you know, it kind of goes like that. We introduce a feature, we take in that feedback, and then we see what changes. It's easy to talk about the Fluent side of things because it's one of the most obvious because it's something that everybody sees. Like when Fluent showed up in the settings panel, it was one of the things that people were, like, "Oh, my goodness, this changed dramatically." Because all of a sudden there's this smooth transition of light from, you know, item to item in the panel, and there's this glow around whatever you're highlighted over. It was a super obvious type thing. For Eye Control, not everybody uses that feature. Even though it's super important for those who do. DONA SARKAR: That's right. JASON HOWARD: And then, of course, Timeline. You know, it having replaced the old Task View, it's a paradigm shift. You know, when this was announced it was, what, Build last year when they announced it? DONA SARKAR: Yeah, that's right. JASON HOWARD: The fact that that's available now and, you know, can literally transport you back in time to something you were doing on a different machine on a different day, that's huge. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: And users talking about some of the bugs that showed up with it, and even now as, you know, we're having this discussion, there's an interesting bug that has shown up late that it's one of the interesting things about how interconnected everything is within Windows. Because as I'm standing here talking right now, there's a bug being actively worked on by the development teams that, when it triggers, your screen blinks. DONA SARKAR: That's right. I've seen it. JASON HOWARD: And it's, like, wait, how is this the fault of Timeline? And without getting too far into the details of the bug itself, it's related to an empty value being returned to the Timeline feature when it's looking for some of your history. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: So something that you were using on one machine that isn't even installed on the machine that you're experiencing the bug on, it's making a call to bring some of that Timeline activity over, and it's receiving this unexpected empty value, and then that ends up translating into the service crashing, which gives you the blink on the screen. But instead of it crashing once and recovering, because every time it keeps recalling back, it keeps looping in that same experience. DONA SARKAR: That's right. JASON HOWARD: So you just end up with this just blinking screen. DONA SARKAR: Yes. JASON HOWARD: And once every three to five seconds, your screen just blinks and blinks and blinks. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. I've hit that on one of my machines, and that was a fun adventure. But it reminds me of this bug that I ran into like in Windows 7 where we were not getting the return back from Open Search. So we were in infinite Open Search loop, and the search box would just open, close, open, close, open, close. It was amazing. People were like, "Oh, my God, my machine is haunted." Yeah, this is pretty awesome. So we called that the "haunted search box." It was pretty good. Okay, so we know Insiders really want us to do better at letting them know when their bugs and feedback is addressed. Can you share with the audience a little bit about how feedback on preview builds get processed and prioritized? JASON HOWARD: Yeah, of course. I mean, we did a webcast last year on this. DONA SARKAR: That's right. JASON HOWARD: I think it was October where we had some of the devs and some of the PMs from the, you know, from the Feedback Hub team come and talk to this. But the gist of it is, you know, there's a giant deluge of feedback that continually comes in. DONA SARKAR: Petabytes. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. The amount of data is -- DONA SARKAR: A day, yeah. JASON HOWARD: It's pretty insane. And then when you look at the number of pieces of feedback -- because, you know, all those petabytes are attached as logs and machine info, so we know, you know, hey, is this happening on Surface Books or is it happening on a different brand of laptop? You know, whatever the scenario may be that's triggering whatever bug or feature that somebody's reporting information on. So when a team sees all of this, because the feedback comes in based upon how it gets filed. And so there's a primary category and then a secondary subcategory. And, you know, each one of these categories is assigned to a team. And the team will go through and look at the feedback that has come in and they look at, hey, so for this development cycle, we have, you know, three or four or whatever number of core priorities, things we're trying to land, right? And so whether it's revamping an old feature, creating a new feature, or in some circumstances, you know, if they feel that their product needs some extra special attention they'll be, like, "Hey, we're going to focus on making the quality of our feature really good in this particular release, and then we'll add stuff later." So all the feedback that comes in, they take a look at how many pieces of feedback have come in, what's been up-voted the most, what's going to have the greatest impact, and they compare all of that with what are the big milestones that we have on our internal roadmap? DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: And so then it kind of gets shuffled and prioritized and stacked and even with some bugs that come in where it may not have been something that was expected to be on our radar, if there's a big bug that slipped up and it's affecting a lot of people, it's going to get prioritized. So to go back to Fluent for a moment, there's been a big cry to have Fluent introduced into the Feedback Hub itself for a while. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: But one of the big things that Feedback Hub has been as a team that, you know, for that particular application, the team has been working on is in being more robust when it comes to log collection. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: So that there's less additional tools that users will have to run and all that kind of thing. Because if you can streamline the pipeline of the intake process, then all the engineering teams within Microsoft, you can get consolidated in one process, everybody knows where to go for the data. You're not having to have users install extra apps or run troubleshooters and all this kind of stuff. DONA SARKAR: Or go back and forth with the dev six times, like we've had to in the past. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And that's another interesting thing is, you know, a dev can take a piece of feedback and say, "Oh, I need more information," and enable extra log collection so people can resubmit that. DONA SARKAR: Which is super cool. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. So, you know, using all those processes together, you know, the teams will determine, "Hey, what is the thing that we should focus on now?" DONA SARKAR: I totally agree with that. One of the things that we've been hearing from Insiders is whether the bug is addressed or not, they just want to know, right? And I like that. I love that idea. And I think so far, we've been really one-to-one with letting Insiders know when their bug is fixed. Like, you know, we did the project where we popped up the notifications like, "Hey, Insider, your bug is fixed, thank you, it's in this build." And then we also sent e-mail in case they're not looking at SIFS or have them disabled. But then we realized that Insiders are not able to see all of the things they may have experienced, but didn't necessarily file or up-vote. So I am going to do an experiment starting this month on tweeting out the bug fixes that have been impactful that a lot of people up-voted. So I'm looking at bugs that have, like, 30-plus up-votes and just doing a tweet when it's fixed and in which build, because I think that a lot of Insiders will be, like, "Oh, yeah, I ran into that, I couldn't isolate it or trap it, but I did run into it." So that should be kind of interesting. I asked the Insiders last week on Twitter if that would be interesting and everyone was like, "Yes, we want to see that." I said, "Okay, it might be noisy and annoying, but we'll see." Okay, how do new features get chosen to be developed? Please tell the Insiders, because they all want to know. JASON HOWARD: That's fun. I kind of alluded to a little bit of it in my last response, right? Where, you know, teams figure out what they want to work on, and they go and work on it. But it's a little more complicated than that. As a company, Microsoft has a direction that it's headed in. And it's the responsibility of all the teams that are working on -- at least in this case within Windows, right, to make sure that their work ladders up to meeting those overall objectives. Each team, of course, gets some leeway to work on special side projects or things they think are important, but the overall message of, "Hey, these are the things that are important for Microsoft as a company, and these are the features that we want to bring to Windows, these are the goals for the product itself." Each of the teams, they have a responsibility to ensure that what they're working on drives to the mission that we as a company are pushing forward to. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: So part of it comes from top-down, which is, hey, somebody makes a decision at the top, you know, an idea that Satya has or somebody in the SLT at that level -- SLT being the senior leadership team. Somebody comes up with an idea, they get buy-off on it, and then it filters down in the teams that are going to be impacted, right? Because there's tons of sub teams that make up the whole Windows Engineering organization. So each of those teams will figure out which pieces of the project do they own, what is it going to take for them to, you know, put their piece of the pie together? You know, put their piece of the puzzle in there, and then that becomes part of their roadmap, whether it's in the current development cycle, the next one, two out, three out. And for some of them, especially like if you look in the deployment space, some of the things that they've been working on started back in RS1. DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah. JASON HOWARD: And even now that we're just kicking off RS5, you know, it's still going and it will be there in 6 and whatever names come beyond and into the future. There's stuff that they're doing now that is just a -- we'll just call it a multi-year process, because it's not just -- you know, it's not just flipping a switch and all of a sudden, it's there and everything's great. If it was, hey, you know, development would be a lot easier than it is. DONA SARKAR: Absolutely. Most of our features don't get done in six months and they don't get done in a week or two weeks. I've seen, for myself, like just working on the HoloLens project, that started in 2008 and didn't release until like 2014. So it's not small, this Windows development thing. And even just like, you know, making changes to an app, that is not small because you change one thing, and it may have, you know, like you were saying, these repercussions in all parts of the operating system -- years lasting. JASON HOWARD: It brings up an interesting point for me because one of the curiosities that I see sometimes is when somebody says, "Well, I reported this last week, why isn't it fixed?" DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah. JASON HOWARD: It's tough when you're working in an organization this big sometimes to get attention to the right thing -- at least when you feel it's the right thing. And it goes to the point we made earlier about a competing priority. There is shuffling that happens within teams and sometimes it just requires a sizable chunk of the day to be, like, "Look, we're going to impact this many people if we don't fix this." DONA SARKAR: Exactly. JASON HOWARD: Or, "We are impacting this many people by not having this implemented." DONA SARKAR: That's right. JASON HOWARD: And, again, that's where some of the ideas of what should we do next, that's where some of that stuff comes from. And that's the suggestions from Insiders, that's suggestions from, you know, enterprises and companies that we work with and that run our products and services. It really is global input both on the individual scale as well as being on larger scales from those that we partner with. DONA SARKAR: A very real example was Creators, where when Surface launched, one of the coolest things it had was inking capability. And initially, it was like, okay, this works great in OneNote. And we got so much feedback from Insiders, starting 2014, like, "Hey, we're artists, we're writers, we're illustrators, we work in education, and we feel like there can be more inking in the operating system. Since you have a device with a pen, let's put more stuff in the operating system for pens." So the entire year of Creators Update and Fall Creators Update was all based on providing opportunities for those audiences, which I really liked because that was one of the first times we've really looked at consumers, broad consumers, who, you know, people aren't really catering to. Right? Not many people are creating technology for people who write, even though that's something everyone in the world does, right, at some point or another. And I really like that we spent a year working on, you know, these really awesome inking features. And many enterprises are now saying, "This is awesome, we like this a lot," especially for notetaking and such and such. And as we translate like my horrible handwriting into auto typing and such. Okay. So we love all of our Insiders, but my goodness, you guys can be a little creative sometimes. Sometimes. So, Jason, what is the craziest request you've ever received from an Insider? JASON HOWARD: Oh, goodness. (Laughter.) I've got years' worth of thinking back to do on this one. DONA SARKAR: Yeah, exactly, because you're engaged in some very exciting conversations sometimes. JASON HOWARD: That is true. One of the things that I can't do that I get asked, and it surprises me how often I get asked this, is: You're Microsoft, why can't you just remote into my machine and fix it? DONA SARKAR: Oh, my. Okay. JASON HOWARD: I'm, like, "Um --" DONA SARKAR: I'm sure that would go super well. JASON HOWARD: I do not want to be on your computer. DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: Not to mention the legal side of it that I don't want to have to wade through. DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: I just don't want to be in people's personal machines, right? DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: It sounds funny. The thing is, oftentimes, the things that people are requesting that I fix aren't really things that I could log in and fix anyway. Yeah, it's easy to change settings, it's easy to go through and delete some files and clear up disk space and things like that, but those are things that I can guide users through. And we've got documentation and things like that I can refer them to, right? I don't need to log in and do that stuff. But it's, like, "Hey, I'm getting specific error code this that's preventing me from updating this Store app." I will tell you, there is no magic wand for me to go into your machine and wave and just magically fix that for you, unfortunately. Do I wish there was? Oh, absolutely. Right? It would make my job a lot easier. But in the grand scheme of things, that's not really something I can do. Something else that's super fun is when I get asked to specifically push down an update faster. DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah. JASON HOWARD: I'm, like, um, I don't know what kind of bandwidth you have. DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: I don't know where you're located, but those are like physical hardware property things that I really can't control. DONA SARKAR: Uh-uh. (Negative.) JASON HOWARD: And it goes to show the difference in -- it's one of the things that I absolutely love about this program, but it can prove interesting at times. It's the difference in like -- what's the right way to say this? DONA SARKAR: Words. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, I know, words are difficult sometimes. How connected a user is into the intricacies of technology. That's not exactly how I want to say it, but it takes work and it takes time to make things change and make them work the way you want to. DONA SARKAR: And it's human made. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And you know there are still physical limitations. You know, I would love a new update to download to my machine -- like here on campus, I want it to download in two minutes. It doesn't. DONA SARKAR: No. Which has the best connectivity in the world. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. I mean, you know, this is Microsoft's headquarters, of course. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: But at some point in time, sometimes it's just about setting realistic expectations. DONA SARKAR: Agree on that. I once got a request from someone to come to their school in Singapore and yell at the principal to let them install Insider builds on all the machines. JASON HOWARD: That actually seems like a laudable goal. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. It seemed pretty legit. I was thinking about it. Like, this wouldn't be the worst, we could go to Singapore and yell. We go lots of places and yell, so we can yell in Singapore, that's fine. We yell, that's fine. (Laughter.) Okay, so Windows is an OS that serves more than a billion people in lots of languages -- let's say "lots." It's crazy complicated, takes a lot of work to get updates ready for the public -- like today. So why do we torture ourselves with this? Why do we ship twice a year to the general public? Why do we ship to Insiders sometimes three or four times a week? Why do we do this, Jason? Why? JASON HOWARD: Because it's awesome? I mean, it really is. When you think about Microsoft five years ago, ten years ago, there was the perception of it being a slow-moving iceberg, really, where it would take two, three, four or more years to get this gigantic update that would come out. And it would be almost a wholesale overhaul of the entire OS. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: The look would be different, the feel would be almost completely different. I mean, especially like when you look at the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 8, like we threw the world for a loop with that one. DONA SARKAR: XP to Win 7, too. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. DONA SARKAR: It was, like, "What is the search box you've introduced?" JASON HOWARD: And then that little hop in the middle called "Vista" that everybody -- DONA SARKAR: Yep. I was there. I was there. JASON HOWARD: All those question marks that came up. So not only was it about getting features out to customers faster, there was a lot to be said for getting bug fixes and just general changes out. And I mean all of this culminated in the reason the Insider Program was created was the old -- let's call it what it is, the old beta program was, "Hey, we're a year out from a release approximately, we're going to give you a build of what we've built so far, so you can start." DONA SARKAR: And it's pretty locked. Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. There's not much that's going to change. DONA SARKAR: Other than like UI things or maybe a driver or some app compat. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And users would, you know, test it out, check it out, throw some feedback over the wall on User Voice or whatever other channel they decided to use, and who knows if it would get fixed or not? So as the world of technology itself continues to evolve with speed to market becoming vastly important, there's and point in sitting on a new feature for two years because, number one, somebody else is going to beat you to market with it. DONA SARKAR: Absolutely. JASON HOWARD: Somebody else already knows about it and is probably already working on it. But who wants to be sitting on a broken build for two years? Right? DONA SARKAR: No one. JASON HOWARD: I mean, we've got Patch Tuesday or whatnot, but some things require a bit more lifting than can just be dropped out in a monthly servicing-type release. So now with our new -- I'll just call it a sped-up model, right, of Windows as a service of us dropping a few times a year, new features don't require a two- or three-year holding period -- DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: -- before people get to come and check out the latest and greatest. Like I mentioned, the Insider Program, it's not, "Hey, we're going to give you this a year ahead of time, and you'll get what you get when we release it later." DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: You know, users have that return voice channel between the Feedback Hub and reaching out to -- DONA SARKAR: Us. JASON HOWARD: -- Microsoft engineers directly. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: You know, that's one of the fun things, like I mentioned earlier about being on Twitter all the time -- it's really fun to connect with people that are super passionate about Windows and changing the future of it that love to share their voice. Now, granted, you know, it's the same as with anything, you know? We don't always take every single piece of feedback. It's not always going to show up in the product. DONA SARKAR: No. JASON HOWARD: Especially when you have two people that have diametrically opposed ideas. DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah, absolutely. JASON HOWARD: I like this in light mode, I don't like it in dark mode. DONA SARKAR: I like this in hate mode, yeah. JASON HOWARD: It's not always possible to make both at the same time. You just can't do it. But, really, a lot of it has to do with making sure that the technology we're creating gets out to users in a fast, and hopefully friendly manner. You know, even our updates have gotten way better than they used to be. DONA SARKAR: Oh, way better. JASON HOWARD: So between that, making sure that we're staying more reliable with, you know, the productivity side of the OS, you know, those features showing up, and then making sure the OS is actually functioning correctly. DONA SARKAR: That's right. JASON HOWARD: Like the number of unexpected crashes and things like that. We continue to get better on those metrics year over year and release over release. And then, of course, there's the entire side of getting the features out, like I mentioned before, but if we don't do it, somebody else will. DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: And I would rather us be doing it and helping drive the technology, the sphere of what's coming next, as opposed to being reactive and being, like, "Oh, they did it, okay, let's hurry up and catch up to what they're doing," just to try to achieve parity. Because you can't be a leader in the marketplace if you're chasing parity. DONA SARKAR: No. I just like the fact that people are heard in real time. Right? Like we rolled out this thing, you know, last Monday and then we get feedback on Monday. And what's so curious to me is it's still hard for some of the more traditional engineers to wrap their heads around. At least once a week, I get an e-mail from an engineer in the company who says, "Hey, I checked this code into the build, it's going to hit WinMain soon, how do I get it to Insiders." I said, "No, you're done. Your part's now done. If you checked in code, it's going to Insiders in two days." They said, "How does that happen?" I said, "It just happens. They get the exact same build we have two days later." Everyone is still kind of wrapping their heads around this, that we can just ship externally, we've been doing it for four years now, it's not new. But to traditional engineers, it's still mind boggling that things can go out to all the customers who've opted into this, not just like, you know, specific partners and not just like super NDA people, but to anyone who wants it, they can get our fresh coat of paint work two days later. So that's fun. JASON HOWARD: I mean, the fact that that curtain got lifted and that we're showing people so much -- DONA SARKAR: In real time. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. Of what used to just be, you know, hidden and behind the scenes. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: You know, you don't talk about kind of, you know, for pop culture reference, you don't talk about Fight Club, right? DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: The fact that we're showing a lot of what's actually being done that quickly. And whether it makes it into the product or not. I mean, there's been stuff we've checked in that, oops, we have to -- DONA SARKAR: Backsies! Backsies! Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, we're thinking that back out. We're showing the human side of code development along the way. DONA SARKAR: Which is it's messy and awesome in real time. All right, what's your favorite part of the job, other than being on our team? JASON HOWARD: Besides having you as my boss -- DONA SARKAR: Obviously. JASON HOWARD: That's definitely the best part of the job. (Laughter.) DONA SARKAR: I'm not yelling at him behind the scenes, Insiders, nor am I beating him with the cake spoon. JASON HOWARD: I'm saying that so she doesn't get mad at me from earlier of stealing this particular microphone. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. Jason's not going to have an office this afternoon. Stay in the booth. JASON HOWARD: I know, I'm going to just be sitting cross-legged in the hall with my laptop in my lap. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: That's going to give it the real name of a "laptop." DONA SARKAR: Yeah, in the hallway. JASON HOWARD: It'll be sitting in my lap. Favorite part of my job? It has to be the interaction with people from around the globe. The fact that we have these huge fans that take time out of their personal lives and out of their day, whether they're at work or at home or, you know, spending time with their family or whatever, to engage with us, to come and talk shop with us about our products, the things that impact their life to the extent that they are willing to dedicate their time, their emotions, their energy into helping make it better than it is, and hopefully the best that it can become. And the fact that I get to play a role in spending time with them and somehow I manage to get paid to do that, that still boggles my mind. But I couldn't think of a better thing to be doing at work. DONA SARKAR: What's keeping you up at night? Good and bad? Other than your back pain. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, that's not fun. DONA SARKAR: Yeah. JASON HOWARD: Making sure people are heard. Going through the long list of feedback that we get and finding what I will call the "diamonds in the rough" of feedback that may be underrepresented, but that is going to have a huge impact. DONA SARKAR: The millions represent the billions. JASON HOWARD: Yeah. And when you only hear the voice of two or three people complaining about something, and it's really impactful to them, figuring out that this is really going to affect a lot of people, and it takes data, it takes time to compile that and figure out, you know, hey, how does this scale in the broader scheme of things? Are these people representing just themselves or a ton of other people, like you just mentioned? DONA SARKAR: Right. JASON HOWARD: I'm constantly thinking about how do I do a better job of this, what is it that I missed that's going to affect a lot of people? What can I stop that's going to have a broad effect on people? And how can I keep them from having that bad experience? DONA SARKAR: I really love that, too. I like when you and, like, two or three Insiders are troubleshooting some super-random-sounding thing. But then it winds up being like a big deal that affects, like, 100,000 people. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, we've caught a few of those along the way. DONA SARKAR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. JASON HOWARD: You know, two or three people, and the next thing you know it's like -- DONA SARKAR: Oh, a lot. JASO
The Therapy cap is GONE! Get the scoop on the cap from APTA CEO Justin Moore. Jimmy also talked about the record-setting 16,000+ PT's headed to CSM this year in New Orleans, the Team Gleason party we're throwing, and the "beyond opioid" Facebook live and PSA that the APTA released this week.
Grant Mattos is a former NFL wide receiver for the San Diego Chargers, Denver Broncos and Tennessee Titans. After struggling to find a new identity after his football career, he eventually competed on the television show, Survivor and found solace through practicing yoga. I came across Grant's Instagram account through Eben Britton, who was our guest in episode 75. It didn't take me long to notice that Grant had written a book called "The Fifth Down." Grant's memoir takes readers through his NFL journey, which was filled with adrenaline-charged highs and anxiously-depressive lows. Like many of the listeners of this show, Grant consistently sacrificed the health of his brain and body to acquire these highs. The book also sheds light on Grant's life after he was let go from the NFL where he had an excruciating journey to rebuild a new identity. He ultimately found yoga, and learned what it meant to actually love himself. This book is his account of what motivates someone to continue grasping for extreme experiences. And, conversely, finding the path to reclaiming a balanced life. One of the first questions I asked Grant was, who is this book for? (even though I had a hunch it was perfect for you listeners). The Fifth Down is for anyone who has reached for certainty and stability through career, only to come up empty handed after decades of hard work. It's for those who have felt the sting of alcoholism, drug abuse, and broken homes. It's for those who have, or wish still, to pick themselves up while at their lowest. “Football equaled time with my Dad” Grant started writing the book about 5 years ago. Writing proved to be very therapeutic for him because it forced him to face all the things he wasn’t willing to face during his career and immediately after it ended. It gave him a better understanding of why he went through everything he did throughout his football career and beyond. Grant eventually realized that his NFL dreams went much deeper than just wanting to be one of the guys he saw on TV every Sunday in the fall. The more he wrote, the more clear his WHY became. During our conversation, Grant explained the revelation of realizing that football was never really his dream that he was going after, it was his father's dream. Ironically, the higher up in football ranks he got, the more he pushed his father away, "I was a leaf blowing in the wind" I am... Like many athletes, there was no goal for Grant after the NFL. Many athletes who have come on the show often credit their one-track mindset for their success. After taking us through the final moments of his NFL career, Grant described himself as "a leaf blowing in the wind" when trying to figure out his next move after football. The wind eventually blew Grant to Las Vegas where he worked at a gentleman's club where he was once a patron. Grant and I dive into this difficult time in his life where he describes his thoughts as being an "internal civil war." If you are reading this blog post, you most likely know this exact feeling, I know I do. The learning lesson to take from this part of our conversation is that even at your lowest point, there is always a way out. That way out for Grant was a very good friend who pulled him out of Vegas. Removing himself from a negative environment led to some life-changing additions to Grant's life. These additions include meeting his wife, immersing himself in the practice of yoga and the opportunity to compete on the show Survivor. It wouldn't be a Heads 'N Tales podcast if we didn't talk about injuries. Grant takes us through the various ailments he struggled with throughout his career and the "more is better" mentality that led to some of those injuries. Grant's injuries include a hip cartilage injury and broken collarbone in high school, concussions and knee injuries. Grant also echoed the statements of Ka'Lial Glaud from episode 95 in that there is a lot of pressure to play through injuries as an un-drafted free agent constantly fighting for a roster spot. Emotionally, injuries made Grant feel like he was weak and fragile. At this point in the interview Grant tells some behind the scenes stories on the pressures to play injured with NFL coach Steve Mariucci. On the contrary, Grant also talks about some of the great lessons and experiences he had with coaches like Marty Schottenheimer. "Give yourself time and credit." Grant's advice to transitioning athletes is to "give yourself time and credit." We only scratched the surface in this episode. If you enjoyed listening to our conversation and want to learn more, help Grant fund the publishing of his memoir The Fifth Down by visiting the link to his kick starter page. There you will find what the money will be going towards and what charitable initiatives are linked up with this campaign, which include recent hurricane and natural disaster relief and Team Gleason. I personally pledged 37 dollars which gets me both a paperback and kindle version of the book and recognition on the thank you page. WHERE CAN YOU HELP SUPPORT THE FIFTH DOWN? KICKSTARTER WHERE CAN YOU FIND Grant MAttos? Website | INSTAGRAM | facebook | TWITTER Download Episode 96 : iTunes | Stitcher | SoundCloud Permalink
545-01.28.2016New Orleans Pelicans & SaintsOnline radio show focused on Pelicans and Saints news.Grant Napear (tv voice of the Sacramento Kings) and Paul Varisco (executive director, Team Gleason) are on today's Black and Blue Report. 34:
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