Rolandt

Lonsdale Quay, Saturday April 12.

Calgary-based Shaw Communications announced it would temporarily lay off approximately 10 percent of its nearly 10,000 employee workforce due to COVID-19.

The layoffs, which will begin on April 16th, largely affect the company’s retail and sales staff. Shaw’s president, Paul McAleese, attributed the layoffs to the necessary measures the government has taken to protect the health of Canadians. The measures resulted in “dramatic shortages or stoppages of work” in specific parts of Shaw’s business and ultimately lead to the layoffs.

“We value the hard work and expertise of all our employees in helping deliver connectivity to our customers across the country. Unfortunately, these changes are necessary until our business activities resume to more normal levels,” McAleese said in a Shaw press release.

Further, McAleese said Shaw would provide financial support to affected employees beyond the applicable government programs. The company plans to welcome those employees back “when business conditions improve.”

In the release, Shaw notes that it is currently ineligible for any emergency government assistant programs. Instead, the company plans to use its own funds to “top up” government Employment Insurance payments depending on employee earnings.

Additionally, Shaw will continue to extend benefits and pension contributions for eligible non-unionized employees during the temporary layoff period.

Finally, McAleese noted that Shaw continues to see increased network usage but that it is in a “solid position” to handle the increased traffic. Shaw directed customers looking to pay their bills or order services to visit the company’s website.

Additionally, Freedom Mobile customers can find select locations that are still open, process payments through online banking, the My Account website or app, or through the call centre.

Update 14/04/2020 at 7pm: Corrected the number of employees to 10,000 as per the company’s website.

The post Shaw to temporarily layoff 10 percent of workforce, mostly in retail and sales roles appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Using 3-D simulation data from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, The New York Times shows how droplets from a sneeze or a cough can spread in a space. In a nutshell, six feet is the recommendation while in public areas, but the farther you away you can stay away the better. Go to the end, and there’s also an augmented reality segment that puts a six-foot range around you.

I may never set foot in a crowded place again.

See also: how different cough coverings can change the spread of droplets.

Tags: coronavirus, droplets, New York Times, simulation, social distancing

Vanessa and I have been talking about how we can help contribute to the Drupal Association, and by extension the Drupal community, in these uncertain times. We want to show our support given Drupal's positive impact on our lives.

We have decided to donate a minimum of $44,000 to match all 485 individual donations so far. We will also continue to match new donations up to $100,000.

In order for your donation to be matched, it needs to be an individual donation or an individual memberships, not an organizational contribution, and it needs to be donated by April 30, 2020.

Together, we can provide $200,000 to #DrupalCares. Our total fundraising goal is $500,000 so $200,000 coming from individuals would be an incredible start, and will help us raise the remaining $300,000.

We hope you join us in donating.

Be kind to others and help where you can! 💙

As if the Coronavirus itself wasn’t bad enough, fraudsters have been quick to take advantage of the situation. In fact, Action Fraud says victim losses from coronavirus fraud in March were almost £970,000.

Lots of fraudsters are using emails and texts to find their victims, so here’s what to look out for to make sure you don’t become one of them.

Phishing emails

We recommend that you only open emails from people you know or companies you recognise have a legitimate reason to contact you – for example you have an account with them or you’re opted in to receive emails from them. 

But at the moment, lots of companies are keeping in close contact with their customers. And as people rejig their plans for the next few months, they’ll be expecting to hear from certain organisations, like travel companies, to help them do that.

It’s common sense to always go through your providers to get refunds or rearrange, but often fraudsters will try to imitate legitimate companies to scam you.

So, here are some more detailed tips for seeing whether you should trust an email:

1.         Check the display name. A favourite phishing tactic among cybercriminals is to fake the display name of an email. Hover your mouse over the name or, if you’re on a touch screen, hold your finger over it. You’ll see who the email is really from – is it who you expected?

2.         Check the links. Hover your mouse over or hold your finger down on any links in the body of the email – is the address that pops up what you expect it to be? Make sure you look at it closely – sometimes websites have fake URLs that closely mimic the ones they pretend to be. 

3.         Check for spelling mistakes. Legitimate messages usually do not have major and recurring spelling mistakes or poor grammar.

4.         Beware of urgent or threatening language in the subject line. It’s easy to panic at the moment, but take a moment to think whether that seems right in the context of your email. Quite often, it’s a tactic used by scammers so people open their emails without thinking about it.

5.         Don’t click on attachments from recipients you are unsure about. Often phishers will Include attachments that contain viruses and malicious software (malware). Malware can damage files on your computer, steal your passwords or spy on you without your knowledge. Don’t open any email attachments you weren’t expecting.

Be careful with your text messages too

We all should have received one message from the government to tell us to stay inside, but there are lots of reports of ‘smishing’ (SMS phishing) scams. 

These can come in lots of forms, but some topical Coronavirus ones are designed to play into people’s current concerns. These include messages from HMRC about benefit payments or ones from the government to say you’ve been fined for going outside.  

So far, the government has sent just one text message to the public about Coronavirus, so you should treat any you receive with caution. If you receive another one, don’t click on any links and go to the government website (www.gov.uk) to check if they’re genuine.

And just because a message might appear in the same stream as previous government messages, it doesn’t mean it’s genuine. Scammers can now ‘spoof’ a number, so it looks like it comes from the same place as before.

Report any fraudulent text messages or emails to Action Fraud.

The post Coronavirus scams to watch out for appeared first on Zopa Blog.

Apple has shared a new web-based tool that provides insights from Apple Maps on mobility trends. According to Apple’s press release:

This mobility data may provide helpful insights to local governments and health authorities and may also be used as a foundation for new public policies by showing the change in volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit in their communities.

The tool can be found at apple.com/covid19/mobility, where you can view driving, walking, and transit trends for 63 countries as well as major cities around the world. Apple’s press release also explains how the data is collected and addresses privacy:

Maps does not associate mobility data with a user’s Apple ID, and Apple does not keep a history of where a user has been. Using aggregated data collected from Apple Maps, the new website indicates mobility trends for major cities and 63 countries or regions. The information is generated by counting the number of requests made to Apple Maps for directions. The data sets are then compared to reflect a change in volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit around the world. Data availability in a particular city, country, or region is subject to a number of factors, including minimum thresholds for direction requests made per day.

Having tried the tool, it’s fascinating to see the differences between the effect of mobility restrictions around the world. I’m glad to see Apple sharing this information on an aggregate, privacy-conscious way that hopefully can help governments and health organizations around the world assess the effectiveness of measures put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19.

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This was the trend in online conversations on education recently (we're focusing mostly on the U.S. market here) as students expressed a mix of anger and disappointment about the sudden conversion to online, loss of summer internships, and uncertainty about what will happen in the fall. Meanwhile, “Remote learning” is our new catchphrase for the pandemic. It is "mostly used by educators, edtech, and journalists." I guess they didn't want to use the terms e-learning or online learning. Anyhow, "the phrase appears most often in helpful blog posts from educators, resource and sales pitches from edtech companies, and headlines of news articles focused on K12 remote learning. It does not appear often in student conversation."

I actually want to highlight only one thing here: point number 5, "single source of truth." Now this is at once a technical term for database management and also critical advice for working in a distributed environment. "Workers need access to the big picture about an organization’s strategy and priorities, and perhaps even about work in progress that may not be directly relevant to them. It’s a repository of information that is clear, uncontested, and accepted as true at that time, and then maintained so that it is always current." Maybe one good result from all this will be that organizations and institutions and even societies will realize that they have always been distributed in the ways that count, and will begin to think of 'single source of truth' (beginning with the technical sense) as an organizational and even a social imperative.

With the shut down of a large part of the public life in Vancouver I noticed two major changes.

1. The air quality improved
2. My neighbourhood is much quieter due to less cars.

But that wasn't the only thing. I no longer have drunk people hang out on the beach at night or have the pubs trash their empties in the middle of the night.

So I decided to go for a "sound walk" and record usually busy places to capture how the sound scape in the city has changed. There is still ample hammering and people revving their engines, but much less so than you would expect with the weather we have.

Note that the video only has stills of the locals. I decided against shooting video as I wanted people to concentrate on the audio instead of the visual changes.

If you just want to listen to the audio there is also a soundcloud version.

I recommend listening with headphones for the best experience.

One of the most valuable components of open source hardware and software making is availability of code and guides built by a community around a solution, hardware, or topic.

The corollary to that is that no open source solution or hardware will succeed without a critical mass of active users.

Duh
Ok, so that might sound obvious. But let me illustrate what happened to me last week.

I’ve been breaking down and inspecting a patient monitor recently. I wanted to have it send some HL7 messages to a server, so I could see the kinds of messages and see how that messaging can be hacked. I had a Raspberry Pi 4 from another project looking for something to do, so I typed in ‘open emr raspberry pi’ to see what I could find.

There were a few. Cool. And there was one that already had an image for the Raspberry Pi. So I downloaded it, put it on a SD, and then tried to use it.

Nope. It was only for the Raspberry Pi 3.

No worry, there seemed to be a wiki with instruction on how to install it from scratch. Though it seemed like there were some missing pieces, the code was a bit too generic for Raspbian, the applications to download didn’t really map to PyPi where it as coming from.

No worries. I slowly worked my way through things, stepping forward, and falling back as I did my troubleshooting. What became obvious was that not many folks seemed to be talking about the process, so I really was flying blind, no examples, tips, forums, guides to help me in the install.

Ok, worries. I saw what hinted to be easier ways to install from PyPi. Why wasn’t that in the official guide? Why didn’t the PyPi stuff match the stuff in the official guide?

No matter. I managed to get the EMR server up and running, learning along the way what was needed to make this thing run.

Then I tried to install the client. And the official guide wasn’t helpful at all for a n00b like me to sort out the errors. Why was it so f-in hard to just install the damed thing? Hadn’t this EMR been around for years?

I then saw that what little was written up for this EMR talked about SUSE, a distribution of Linux I didn’t know at all. But the SUSE site had a guide for installing this EMR. So I loaded SUSE on an SD and did the painful thing of setting it up to use.

Though this time I set a time limit, as the whole process really was disheartening.

Needless to say, the time ran out.

Community helps
That evening, looking back on the two or so days I was trying to make this happen, I realized the value of a broad user base sharing code and insights.

I’ve built a ton of projects, designed boards, coded things – all with a backdrop of guide, tutorials, example code, easy to deploy tool chains, and lots and lots of community chatter.

I couldn’t find anything of the sort for this EMR (and I think it’s been around for 10 years!). And the lame state of the official guide, websites, and such suggests that this isn’t really something that I can do.

Two lessons
The first lesson is for me – stick to things that reside in a healthy ecosystem of code, hardware, examples, history, and people to talk to.

The second lesson is for all of us – if you want to succeed, make an effort in building that ecosystem, one the feeds on itself and rapidly grows as folks use what you make, share what you make, and hack what you make.

A belated realization
When I was selling a Hadoop version way back when, I was wondering why the more established players flaunted the levels of commits and the like.* I knew it was a proxy for interest. But now I know that it’s also a proxy for examples, creations, and support from the community. That should be considered also when choosing software or hardware platforms to build upon.

Right?

What do you think? Do you have similar stories?

*Actually, when reading up on a repo on GitHub, I always look at the last commit dates, not only to see how active the repo is, but to tell me if I’m going to have any trouble. This isn’t a petty thing to think of, but actually an important indication of things such as quality, relevance, and usability (as I guess I’ve always implicitly known, reinforced by this EMR fiasco).

Image by Tumiso

I’d guess about half of our clients have wanted to create a community that provides members with a sense of belonging and purpose.

Yet, in almost every survey we’ve undertaken, making friends/a sense of belonging ranks bottom at what members need.

The hard truth is members probably don’t need another social network in their lives to make friends. In my experience, your members probably need a combination of:

• Unbiased reviews and recommendations.
• A quick, easy, method of getting answers to problems.
• Advice, tutorials, and walk-through guides.
• Inspiration and new ideas.
• Learning new trends.
• A place for self-expression and getting validation from others.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it’s a useful place to start.

This doesn’t mean some members won’t feel a sense of belonging, but it’s not what draws them to the community nor what keeps them there.

I’ve had a few low-energy days over the last few weeks, that’s for sure. It feels like I’m making progress though, and actually finding bread flour for sale in a shop will absolutely make everything ok again, won’t it?

<denial>

The post The Grieving process appeared first on Open Visual Thinkery.

Another week of lockdown. As I write this the UK has passed 10,000 deaths from the COVID 19 virus.  We are heading to be one of, if not the, countries in Europe with the highest death toll.  In Scotland where live, the death toll is no where near as high as in England, but for a relative small country the death rate is still higher (566 at time of writing)  than other equivalent countries for example Denmark with 273 deaths (at time of writing).  

Our UK national response was too slow, our government messaging and actions seem inadequate – this piece in by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian today summed it up for me. Whilst I am glad that our Prime Minister has recovered, his illness continues to be used to deflect attention from the real issues, like the shortage of personal protective equipment, the need for mass testing and tracking and then of course some kind of plan for a return to some semblance of normality.

These wider issues continue to hoover around everything that I do.  Like veryone I guess, I have waves of hopelessness and  anxiety coupled with powerlessness.   However, life does go on and again, like everyone else I am settling into a kind of life in lock down rhythm.  Twitter in lock down has felt like a more positive experience over the past couple of weeks, mainly due to the level of sharing of resources, experiences etc. However it is still quite overwhelming and more and more crap is creeping back into my timeline, which again does bring another level of anxiety.  However I am grateful to those in my network for their support and kindness when I mentioned this last week in a tweet.  Care really is evident. 

My use of Zoom this week has been a bit more social with the addition of a surprise birthday party. For the record imho surprise online parties don’t really work without a lot of planning and a really experienced aka bossy person in charge. For one thing, if the “surprisee” is using a mobile phone it can take them quite a while to see everyone on the call, never mind try to unmute their mic, get their phone turned round the right way, whilst others are doing much the same . . .

Much more successful was joining in one of Ken Bauer’s  Educator Coffee (or tea) time sessions. It was so lovely to have a cuppa and chat with some lovely people from all over the world (Ken, Maha Bali, Autumm Caines, Joseph Murphy). This is something I think that should continue well after lock down ends.

On the work side, things are picking up and week 3 of lock down has felt a bit more ‘normal’ in that respect.  My only MS teams meetings were small ones, focused on work.   I get the feeling that people in HE anyway are managing go now take a breath and start thinking about “stuff” instead of just working  to the bone to get “stuff” online for the remainder of term/semester.  A short break before the next wave of what to do now . . . which leads me nicely to a plug for something for the new week – Gasta Goes Global.

I’m not quite sure how this happened, well actually I am, Tom Farelly just asked me! So I am now one of seven others (and I’m not suffering from imposter syndrome being in this line up at all!!) who have agreed to do an online Gasta session to:

” draw people together in a show of togetherness and solidarity. #GastaGoesGlobal is about getting the community to imagine a new future in a spirit of fellowship, solidarity and yes, a bit of light-heartedness.” 

If you don’t know what a Gasta is then there is more information here – but 60 minutes, 7 speakers and 250 educators (and rising) just about sums it up.

If anyone can pull of MC’ing an online experience then I have no doubt that Tom can. I on the other hand, am equally excited and terrified about the whole thing and what I am actually going to say.  Another week of new experiences awaits. 

This week’s picture is the rainbow my niece made me to put on the window. Thank you too, dear reader, for being here just now.

Just learned of The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates. This is in addition to the UK’s Coronavirus Bill 2020, which is (as I understand it) running the show there right now.

This new bill’s lead author is Prof Lilian Edwards, University of Newcastle. Other contributors: Dr Michael Veale, University College London; Dr Orla Lynskey, London School of Economics; Carly Kind, Ada Lovelace Institute; and Rachel Coldicutt, Careful Industries

Here’s the abstract:

This short Bill attempts to provide safeguards in relation to the symptom tracking and contact tracing apps that are currently being rolled out in the UK; and anticipates minimum safeguards that will be needed if we move on to a roll out of “immunity certificates” in the near future.

Although no one wants to delay or deter the massive effort to fight coronavirus we are all involved in, there are two clear reasons to put a law like this in place sooner rather than later:

(a) Uptake of apps, crucial to their success, will be improved if people feel confident their data will not be misused, repurposed or shared to eg the private sector (think insurers, marketers or employers) without their knowledge or consent, and that data held will be accurate.

(b) Connectedly, data quality will be much higher if people use these apps with confidence and do not provide false information to them, or withhold information, for fear of misuse or discrimination eg impact on immigration status.

(c) The portion of the population which is already digitally excluded needs reassurance that apps will not further entrench their exclusion.

While data protection law provides useful safeguards here, it is not sufficient. Data protection law allows gathering and sharing of data on the basis not just of consent but a number of grounds including the very vague “legitimate interests”. Even health data, though it is deemed highly sensitive, can be gathered and shared on the basis of public health and “substantial public interest”. This is clearly met in the current emergency, but we need safeguards that ensure that sharing and especially repurposing of data is necessary, in pursuit of public legitimate interests, transparent and reviewable.

Similarly, while privacy-preserving technical architectures which have been proposed are also useful, they are not a practically and holistically sufficient or rhetorically powerful enough solution to reassure and empower the public. We need laws as well.

Download it here.

More context, from some tabs I have open:

• COVID-19 and Digital Rights and EFF and COVID-19: Protecting Openness, Security, and Civil Liberties, by the EFF.
• We Mapped How the Coronavirus Is Driving New Surveillance Programs Around the World—At least 28 countries are ramping up surveillance to combat the coronavirus, by Dave Gershgorn
• Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) technical guidance: Surveillance and case definitions, by the World Health Organization
• Coronavirus and the Future of Surveillance: Democracies Must Offer an Alternative to Authoritarian Solutions, by Nicholas Wright, in Foreign Affairs.
• PRIVACY EXPERTS SAY RESPONSIBLE CORONAVIRUS SURVEILLANCE IS POSSIBLE, by Sam Biddle, in The Intercept.
• About Face, in which last October I opposed facial recognition by entities other than people, their own devices, and their pets.

All of this is, as David Weinberger puts it in the title of his second-to-latest book, Too Big to Know. So, in faith that the book’s subtitle, Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts aren’t the Facts,Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room, is correct, I’m sharing this with the room.

I welcome your thoughts.

Zoom will allow paying customers to select which data centre regions route their traffic starting April 18th, in an attempt address privacy concerns.

This move comes after a report from the University of Toronto disclosed that Zoom creates encryption keys for some calls from servers in China, regardless of whether users on the call are actually in the country.

The report found that Zoom’s encryption practices could essentially allow Chinese officials to request the company to disclose those encryption keys. The company has since said that calls won’t be routed through China after it fixed the flaw.

The platform said in a blog post that “every paid Zoom customer can opt in or out of a specific data centre region. This will determine the meeting servers and Zoom connectors that can be used to connect to a meeting you are hosting and ensure the best-quality service.”

Zoom notes that its data centres are currently located in Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America and Japan.

It should be noted that users won’t be able to change or opt out of their default region, which is the region where a customer’s account is provisioned.

“This feature gives our customers more control over their data and their interaction with our global network when using Zoom’s industry-leading video communication services,” the company notes.

This comes after the company has been facing increased scrutiny for its security and privacy practices. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan recently said that the company failed to fully implement its best practices due to added service capacity amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zoom has announced a 90-day feature freeze to focus on implementing new privacy measures and to fix the numerous current security flaws.

Business plans for the service start at $20 CAD a month per host, and includes 100 participants. The enterprise plan costs $27 CAD a month and includes 500 participants.

Source: Zoom

The post Zoom to allow paying users choose which data centres route their calls appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Es handelte sich um geheime Daten wie die Specs zu einem Mörserabwehrsystem.

Google is reportedly prepping its own chips for use in future Pixel phones and potentially Chromebooks too.

According to a scoop from Axios, Google’s chip was designed in cooperation with Samsung. Codenamed ‘Whitechapel,’ the chip relies on Samsung’s 5-nanometre process a source familiar with Google’s work told Axios. Samsung manufactures its own Exynos systems on a chip (SoCs) as well as some chips for Apple. That includes earlier A-series chips (more recent ones like the A13 Bionic were made by TSMC) as well as chips found in the Apple Watch.

Further, Google reportedly received the first working versions of the Samsung-made chip in recent weeks. But don’t expect these new chips to be in Pixel phones until next year.

Plus, the chips could come to Chromebooks in the future, but that is much further off.

The Whitechapel SoC will reportedly include an eight-core ARM processor along with hardware optimized for Google’s machine-learning technology. Additionally, Axios says that some of the SoC’s silicon will help improve the performance and ‘always-on’ capabilities of Google Assistant.

The shift to custom-made chips could mean a major blow to Qualcomm, which currently makes a variety of SoCs under the Snapdragon brand. Those chips power the majority of Android flagship phones.

Further, Qualcomm unveiled a new line of ‘compute’ chips late last year. These chips will take on Intel in the laptop market, especially in ultra-portable thin-and-light PCs and 2-in-1s, such as Chromebooks. However, if Google goes custom, it could mean more competition for Qualcomm’s fledgling compute platform and another potential threat for Intel.

Google isn’t the only manufacturer going custom

Of course, this all assumes that Google’s custom designs are able to take on the Snapdragon line in the first place. The SoC is just one of many components in a smartphone, but it plays a critical role in almost everything from speed to battery life. In other words, if Google’s custom efforts fall short of Snapdragon chips in any of the key metrics, such as CPU performance or graphics, it could degrade the experience across the board.

However, Apple also designs its own chips for use in the iPhone, iPad and perhaps Mac computers in the future. By designing its own chips, Apple ensures control over every aspect of the device and can fine-tune software for improved performance. Plus, there are cost savings involved since Apple doesn’t have to buy chips from other companies.

Likewise, custom silicon already benefits some functions in Google’s Pixel line. Pixel phones include custom chips for machine learning and image processing. The company also hired chip experts from competitors like Apple. Unfortunately, success with specific custom silicon won’t necessarily equate to success with a custom SoC.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen how Google implements the custom chips, if it chooses to do so at all. The implementation could be different from what we expect. Further, it could lead to better performance in Pixel phones, or perhaps worse performance. Finally, going custom likely won’t remove Qualcomm from future Pixel phones entirely. The company also makes smartphone modems and its Snapdragon X55 and upcoming X60 platform will be critical in ramping up 5G adoption.

Source: Axios

The post Google developing custom chips for Pixel phones and Chromebooks: report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Roku has announced that during the first quarter of 2020 its streaming numbers have jumped nearly 50 percent to 13.2 billion hours.

The company’s first quarter ended March 31st, meaning only the first month of the world-wide self-isolation is recorded in the data. If it continues, the company will likely have larger numbers to report in Q2.

It also says that it has added nearly 3 million subscribers which likely means new people buying devices and making accounts.

Sadly, it’s not all roses for Roku, which posted a $60 million USD (roughly, $83 million CAD) loss at the end of its quarter. It’s also taking out a $70 million USD (roughly, $97 million CAD) credit to deal with the current conditions according to Engadget. 

So while more people have been watching content on Roku’s platform, it hasn’t translated in more ad sales or a crazy amount of people buying its set-top boxes.

Source: Roku, Engadget

The post Streaming time on Roku devices jumps to 13.2 billion hours appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Hi everyone, this is Anna – I’m working on keeping administrative regions in the Datawrapper choropleth and symbol maps up to date (e.g. districts, ZIP code areas, states …). I’m also responsible for the shaded relief in our locator maps.

Shaded relief (what we call the “Mountains” feature in our locator maps) has been a feature in Datawrapper since November 2019. Recently, we improved the quality: Our mountains now look crisper with a higher resolution, going all the way to zoom level 10.

To try it out yourself, create a new locator map here (no need to sign in or up), then go to step 2: Design Map and select “Mountains”.

The following article is a technical, high-level walkthrough on how we generated shaded relief for the entire world with NASA data and the help of GDAL, a library for processing geodata. We won’t go into much detail how to download the data, set GDAL up, etc., but we will name and explain some formulas. Let’s start!

Shaded relief: What is is

Shaded relief – also called “hillshading”, “hill shading” or, more broadly, “terrain” – is a technique to indicate shapes of mountains on a map. Two-dimensional topographic information is important for navigation and accurately representing the landscape. But shaded relief is not an exact measure of heights or true representation of mountains, but rather hints how steep the terrain is.

An early example of visualizing mountains can be seen in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Tuscany from 1503, where the mountains are sketched as small hills:

Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Tuscany, 1503, from Wikipedia Commons

One of the first known use of shaded relief in cartography was by Swiss cartographer Hans Conrad Gyger in 1668. He created a military map with shaded relief as we know it today: a visual 3D effect of the topography, created by an artificial light source:

Map by Hans Conrad Gyger, 1668, from Wikipedia Commons

Today, shaded reliefs are standard practice. There are numerous ways to generate shaded reliefs for digital maps: Desktop apps like QGIS have a shaded relief function, 3D graphics tools like Blender can be used to generate shaded relief, and it can be calculated directly in the browser.

At Datawrapper, the decision on how to create our shaded relief was driven by our users: We wanted to enable them to edit the shaded relief – like the rest of their locator map – in vector graphics software like Adobe Illustrator after they download it as PDFs or SVGs. So we decided to implement shaded relief as a vector tile layer. Let’s see how we went about this:

1. Getting DEM data from NASA

To be able to calculate shaded relief, we needed elevation data. One common format is the Digital Elevation Model (DEM). In a DEM, the elevation data is stored in the pixels of a raster – each pixel has a certain gray value, which represents a height value.

For this project, we decided to use the ASTER DEM^[1]. The data covers the entire world up to ±80° latitude and comes in 22,192 TIFFs with a total size of 380GB. Each TIFF shows 1° by 1° (approximately 30 meters at the equator):

1° by 1° of the ASTER Digital Elevation Model.

To process the DEM, we used three tools:

• GDAL, a translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats
• Python, a programming language
• PostGIS, an extension for PostgreSQL that can handle geographical objects and functions. We used it to store the shaded relief vectors.

2. Calculating shaded relief with GDAL

To calculate shaded relief from the DEM, we needed four values: The altitude angle, the azimuth angle, the slope, and the aspect.

The first two values are defined globally by us for the whole calculation:

• Altitude angle of the sun, which tells us how high the sun is standing on the sky surface. If it’s noon, the sun stands in zenith, meaning, the angle is 90°. If the sun sets, the angle is 0°. We used 45°, which you can think of as an afternoon sun – the shadows are not invisible (as they would be at noon), nor are they too long like at dawn.
• Azimuth angle of the sun. That’s like a compass direction. If the sun comes directly from the north, the azimuth angle is 0°; if it comes from the south, it’s 180°. In most hillshaded maps, you’ll see that the sun comes from northwest, so that hills are perceived as such and not as valleys. We went with the default value of 315°.

The slope and aspect for each pixel are calculated for each pixel, using the ratio of change in height of the eight neighboring pixels (so our so-called “kernel” is nine pixels big).

• Slope (steepness) of the terrain. As mentioned earlier, shaded relief doesn’t show the height of a location, but its steepness. That’s why we need to calculate the slope – is this pixel surrounded by pixels with the same grey value? Or is it surrounded on one side with pixels that have a lower value and on the other side with pixels with a higher value?
• Aspect of the terrain. That tells us in which direction the slope is facing.

Left: Zenith and azimuth angle. Right: Example of a 9-pixel kernel with the position of the pixels, as referred to in the calculations below.

These are the calculations:

When the all the angles were obtained, we calculated the shaded relief value for pixel e with this algorithm:

shaded relief = 255 * ((cos(90 - altitude) * cos(slope)) 
    + (sin(90 - altitude) * sin(slope) * cos(azimuth – aspect)))

The result was a raster with shaded relief values from 0 to 255. Each pixel in this raster can again be shown as a grey tone, like in our DEM. But the hillshading values don’t give us information about the height, but is a combined value of altitude, azimuth, slope, and aspect:

A more detailed description of the algorithm can be found here.

GDAL has a nice, short command for calculating shaded relief for a DEM. It uses the default values for altitude (45°) and azimuth (315°):

gdal.DEMProcessing(target, source, 'hillshade', 
    options=[], azimuth=45, altitude=315)

3. Polygonoizing the raster

To create the vector tile layer, we had to extract polygons from the raster.

The polygons you see in the locator maps are divided into six classes, two classes for the brightest values for highlighting and four classes for the darker shades. Each class has an opacity and the steeper the hills are, the more polygons will overlay, the opacity adds up and the shade will get darker.

To group similar values from the shaded relief raster together to polygons, we used the GDAL command “contour”:

call(['gdal_contour', '-p', '-fl', 
    classification_value_min, classification_value_max, 
    source_raster, target_vector)

It extracts isoline polygons (lines with equal distance from each other), but the same concept can be applied to extract shaded relief polygons. Think about the classified grayscale values in the raster as areas with equal distances!

The polygons were exported directly to a PostGIS database and the vector tiles were generated.

Different zoom levels need different resolutions

All the fine details of the final shaded relief can’t be distinguished on lower zoom levels, so they don’t necessarily need the details of the raw data – and the embedded map would load too slowly with them, anyway. So for different zoom levels, we first decreased the resolution of the DEM, then did all the calculations, getting eight rasters for eight zoom levels.

To decrease the resolution for each zoom level, we used the GDAL command “Warp”:

gdal.Warp(target, source, 
    options = [xRes = res, yRes = res], 
    targetAlignedPixels = True)

We chose the resolution for each zoom level as a compromise of appearance and data volume:

The resolution is 3000 m for zoom level 3 (meaning one pixel shows 3000m if you zoom out to see the whole world) and 100 m for zoom level 10.

Speeding up the calculations

The biggest challenge was to process (resample, calculate the shaded relief and vectorize) the 22192 TIFFs from NASA containing the height data.

A virtual raster saved us time and disk space. It “mosaiced” (combined) all the TIFFS, so that we could then access certain kernels or regions of it instead of going through TIFFS individually.

But even the virtual raster would get too big to hold the detailed shaded relief of the higher zoom levels in memory. The solution was to split up the virtual rasters in smaller chunks (10° stripes), which also had the benefit that the shaded relief could be run in parallel.

The polygonizing was the most time-consuming part of the processing. We sped it up by splitting the 10° areas in the raster into even smaller chunks (200px × 200px). We also ran the 10° areas in parallel processes. By doing this, we reduced the processing time from an estimated time of 6.5 weeks to around 26 hours. (In case you’re curious, we used an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight-Core Processor with 8 cores per socket, 2 threads per core and 16 CPUs.)

We will continue to improve the layers for locator maps continuously. The next project is to add contour lines and add more detail to our green areas (like forests, deserts and agricultural areas). If you have any questions about this blog post, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at anna@datawrapper.de or leave a comment below. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates and improvements!

1. The ASTER is a Japanese space mission and it has acquired images of the earth since 2000. To create an elevation model from the images, they use a stereoscopic correlation. ↩︎

Zoom is the easiest to use of all videoconferencing systems, but its security was questionable. After two weeks of spectacular advances, it’s now on a path not only to fix its security, but to restore its brand. Zoom surged in popularity because it was easy to use for both novices and experts in a variety … Continued

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Apple and Google, who last Friday jointly | announced new capabilities for contact tracing coronavirus carriers at scale, released a new statement yesterday clarifying that no government would tell them what to do. Or, to put it in the gentler terms conveyed by CNBC:

Apple and Google, normally arch-rivals, announced on Friday that they teamed up to build technology that enables public health agencies to write contact-tracing apps. The partnership is being closely watched: The two Silicon Valley giants are responsible for the two dominant mobile operating systems globally, iOS and Android, which together run almost 100% of smartphones sold, according to data from Statcounter…The fact that the apps work best when a lot of people use them have raised fears that governments could force citizens to use them. But representatives from both companies insist they won’t allow the technology to become mandatory…

The way the system is envisioned, when someone tests positive for Covid-19, local public health agencies will verify the test, then use these apps to notify anybody who may have been within 10 or 15 feet of them in the past few weeks. The identity of the person who tested positive would never be revealed to the companies or to other users; their identity would be tracked using scrambled codes on phones that are unlocked only when they test positive. Only public health authorities will be allowed access these APIs, the companies said. The two companies have drawn a line in the sand in one area: Governments will not be able to require its citizens to use contact-tracing software built with these APIs — users will have to opt-in to the system, senior representatives said on Monday.

The reality that tech companies, particularly the big five (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook), effectively set the rules for their respective domains has been apparent for some time. You see this in debates about what content to police on Facebook or YouTube, what apps to allow and what rules to apply to them on iOS and Android, and the increasing essentiality of AWS and Azure to enterprise. What is critical to understand about this dominance is why it arises, why current laws and regulations don’t seem to matter, and what signal it is that actually drives big company decision-making.

Scale and Zero Marginal Costs

Tech, from the very beginning of Silicon Valley, has been about scale in a way few other industries have ever been: silicon, the core element in computer chips, is basically free, which meant the implication of zero marginal costs — and relatedly, the importance of investing in massive fixed costs — has been at the core of business from the time of Fairchild Semiconductor. From The Intel Trinity by Michael Malone:

What Noyce explained and Sherman Fairchild eventually believed was that by using silicon as the substrate, the base for its transistors, the new company was tapping into the most elemental of substances. Fire, earth, water, and air had, analogously, been seen as the elements of the universe by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Noyce told Fairchild that these basic substance — essentially sand and metal wire — would make the material cost of the next generation of transistors essentially zero, that the race would shift to fabrication, and that Fairchild could win that race. Moreover, Noyce explained, these new cheap but powerful transistors would make consumer products and appliances so inexpensive that it would soon be cheaper to toss out and replace them with a more powerful version than to repair them.

This single paragraph remains the most important lens with which to understand technology. Consider the big 5:

• Apple certainly incurs marginal costs when it comes to manufacturing devices, but those devices are sold with massively larger margins than Apple’s competitors thanks to software differentiation; software has huge fixed costs and zero marginal costs. That differentiation created the App Store platform, where developers differentiate Apple’s devices on Apple’s behalf without Apple having to pay them; in fact, Apple takes 30% of their revenue.
• Microsoft built its empire on software: Windows created the same sort of platform as iOS, while Azure is first-and-foremost about spending an overwhelming amount of money on hardware and then charging companies to rent it (followed by software differentiation with platform services); Office, meanwhile, has shifted from the very profitable model of writing software and then duplicating it endlessly for license fees to the extremely profitable model of writing software and then renting it endlessly for subscription payments.
• Google spends massively on software, data centers, and data collection to create virtuous cycles where users access its servers to gain access to 3rd-party content, whether that be web pages, videos, or ad-supported content, which incentivizes suppliers to create even more content that Google can leverage to make itself better and more valuable to users.
• AWS is the same model as Azure; Amazon.com has invested massive amounts of money on logistic capabilities — with huge marginal costs, to be clear, which has always made Amazon unique — to create an indispensable platform for suppliers and 3rd-party merchants.
• Facebook, like Google, spends massively on software, data centers, and data collection to create virtuous cycles where users access its servers to gain access to third-party content, but the real star of the show is first-party content that is exclusive to Facebook — making it incredibly valuable — and yet free to obtain.

None of the activities I just detailed are illegal by any traditional reading of antitrust law (some of Google’s activities and Apple’s App Store policies come closest). The core problem are the returns to scale inherent in a world of zero marginal costs — first in the case of chips, and then in the case of software — that result in bigger companies becoming more attractive to both users and suppliers the larger they become, not less.

Understanding Versus Approval

Facebook, earlier this year, took this reality to its logical conclusion, at least as far as its battered image in the media was concerned. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on the company’s earnings call in January, said:

We’re also focused on communicating more clearly what we stand for. One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that because we wanted to be liked, we didn’t always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people. So this led to some positive but shallow sentiment towards us and towards the company. And my goal for this next decade isn’t to be liked, but to be understood. Because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for.

So we’re going to focus more on communicating our principles, whether that’s standing up for giving people a voice against those who would censor people who don’t agree with them, standing up for letting people build their own communities against those who say that the new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us, standing up for encryption against those who say that privacy mostly helps bad people, standing up for giving small businesses more opportunity and sophisticated tools against those who say that targeted advertising is a problem, or standing up for serving every person in the world against those who say that you have to pay a premium in order to really be served.

These positions aren’t always going to be popular, but I think it’s important for us to take these debates head-on. I know that there are a lot of people who agree with these principles, and there are a whole lot more who are open to them and want to see these arguments get made. So expect more of that this year.

The social network, for once, was ahead of the curve, as the coronavirus showed just how critical it was to allow the free flow of information, something I detailed in Zero Trust Information:

The implication of the Internet making everyone a publisher is that there is far more misinformation on an absolute basis, but that also suggests there is far more valuable information that was not previously available:

It is hard to think of a better example than the last two months and the spread of COVID-19. From January on there has been extensive information about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 shared on Twitter in particular, including supporting blog posts, and links to medical papers published at astounding speed, often in defiance of traditional media. In addition multiple experts including epidemiologists and public health officials have been offering up their opinions directly.

Moreover, particularly in the last several weeks, that burgeoning network has been sounding the alarm about the crisis hitting the U.S. Indeed, it is only because of Twitter that we knew that the crisis had long since started (to return to the distribution illustration, in terms of impact the skew goes in the opposite direction of the volume).

The Problem With Experts

If I can turn solipsistic for a moment, while preparing that piece, I warned a friend that it would be controversial, and he couldn’t understand why. In fact, though, I turned out to be right: lots of members of the traditional media didn’t like the piece at all, not because I attacked the traditional media — which I mostly didn’t, and in fact relied on its reporting, as I consistently do on Stratechery — but because I dared to suggest that a world without gatekeepers had upside, not just downside.

I went further two weeks ago in Unmasking Twitter, arguing that the media’s overreliance on experts was precisely why social media should not be censored:

It sure seems like multiple health authorities — the experts Twitter is going to rely on — have told us that masks “are known to be ineffective”: is Twitter going to delete the many, many, many tweets — some of which informed this article — arguing the opposite?

The answer, obviously, is that Twitter won’t, because this is another example of where Twitter has been a welcome antidote to “experts”; what is striking, though, is how explicitly this shows that Twitter’s policy is a bad idea, not just because it allows countries like China to indirectly influence its editorial decisions, but also because it limits the search for truth.

Interestingly, this self-reflective piece by Peter Kafka, appears to agree with at least the first part of that argument:

As we head into the next phase of the pandemic, and as the stakes mount, it’s worth looking back to ask how the media could have done better as the virus broke out of China and headed to the US. Why didn’t we see this coming sooner? And once we did, why didn’t we sound the alarm with more vigor?

If you read the stories from that period, not just the headlines, you’ll find that most of the information holding the pieces together comes from authoritative sources you’d want reporters to turn to: experts at institutions like the World Health Organization, the CDC, and academics with real domain knowledge.

The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete. Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isn’t yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that they’ll tune us out?

What is striking about Kafka’s assessment — which to be clear, should be applauded for its self-awareness and honesty — is the degree to which it effectively accepts the premise that journalists ought not think for themselves, but rather rely on experts.

But when it came to grappling with a new disease they knew nothing about, journalists most often turned to experts and institutions for information, and relayed what those experts and institutions told them to their audience.

Again, I appreciate the honesty; it backs up my argument in Unmasking Twitter that this reflected the traditional role the media played:

In the analog world, politicians and experts needed the media to reach the general population; debates happened between experts, and the media reported their conclusions. Today, though, politicians and experts can go direct to people — note that I used nothing but tweets from experts above. That should be freeing for the media in particular, to not see Twitter as opposition, but rather as a source to challenge experts and authority figures, and make sure they are telling the truth and re-visiting their assumptions.

This, notably, is another area where the biggest tech companies are far ahead.

The Waning of East Coast Media

Yesterday the New York Times wrote an article entitled, The East Coast, Always in the Spotlight, Owes a Debt to the West:

The ongoing effort of three West Coast states to come to the aid of more hard-hit parts of the nation has emerged as the most powerful indication to date that the early intervention of West Coast governors and mayors might have mitigated, at least for now, the medical catastrophe that has befallen New York and parts of the Midwest and South.

Their aggressive imposition of stay-at-home orders has stood in contrast to the relatively slower actions in New York and elsewhere, and drawn widespread praise from epidemiologists. As of Saturday afternoon, there had been 8,627 Covid-19 related deaths in New York, compared with 598 in California, 483 in Washington and 48 in Oregon. New York had 44 deaths per 100,000 people. California had two.

But these accomplishments have been largely obscured by the political attention and praise directed to New York, and particularly its governor, Andrew M. Cuomo. His daily briefings — informed and reassuring — have drawn millions of viewers and mostly flattering media commentary…

This disparity in perception reflects a longstanding dynamic in America politics: The concentration of media and commentators in Washington and New York has often meant that what happens in the West is overlooked or minimized. It is a function of the time difference — the three Pacific states are three hours behind New York — and the sheer physical distance. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, a Democrat, found that his own attempts to run for president were complicated by the state where he worked and lived.

Jerry Brown ran for President in 1976, 1980, and 1992; this analysis was likely correct then — before the Internet. What seems more likely, now, though, is that this article takes a dose of my previous solipsism and doubles down: the New York Times may not pay particular attention to the West, but that is not necessarily reflective of the rest of the world.

Critically, it is not reflective of tech companies: what has been increasingly whitewashed in the story of California and Washington’s success in battling the coronavirus1 is the role tech companies played: the first work-from-home orders started around March 1st, and within a week nearly all tech companies had closed their doors; local governments followed another week later.

This action by local governments was, to be clear, before the rest of the country, and without question saved thousands of lives; it should not be forgotten, though, that executives who listened not to the media but primarily to social and non-traditional media were the furthest ahead of the curve. In other words, it increasingly doesn’t matter who or what the media covers, or when: success comes from independent thought and judgment.

Coronavirus Clarity

This gets at why the biggest news to come out of Apple and Google’s announcement is, well, the lack of it. Specifically, we have a situation where two dominant companies — a clear oligopoly — are creating a means to track civilians, and there is no pushback. Moreover, it is baldly obvious that the only obstacle to this being involuntary is not the government, but rather Apple and Google. What is especially noteworthy is that the coronavirus crisis is the one time we might actually wish for central authorities to overcome privacy concerns, but these companies — at least for now — won’t do it.

This is, in other words, the instantiation of Zuckerberg’s declaration that Facebook — and, apparently, tech broadly — would henceforth seek understanding, not necessarily approval. Apple and Google are leaning into their dominant position, not obscuring it or minimizing it. And, because it is about the coronavirus, we all accept it.

It is, in fact, a perfect example of what I wrote about last week:

At the same time, I think there is a general rule of thumb that will hold true: the coronavirus crisis will not so much foment drastic changes as it will accelerate trends that were already happening. Changes that might have taken 10 or 15 years, simply because of the stickiness of the status quo, may now happen in far less time.

This seems likely to be the case when it comes to tech dominance, or at least the acceptance thereof. The truth is we have been living in a world where tech answers to no one, including the media, but we have all — both tech and the media — pretended otherwise. Those days seem over.

The truth, though, is that this is, unequivocally, a good thing. To have pretended otherwise — for Facebook to have curried favor, or Apple to pretend like it didn’t have market power — was a convenient lie for everyone involved. The media was able to feel powerful, and tech companies were able to consolidate their position without true accountability.

What we desperately need is a new conversation that deals with the world as it will be and increasingly is, not as we delude ourselves into what once was and wish still were. Tech companies are powerful, but antitrust laws, formulated for oil and railroad companies, don’t really apply. East coast media may dominate traditional channels, but those channels are just one of many on social media, all commoditized in personalized feeds. Centralized governments, predicated on leveraging scale, may be no match for either hyperscale tech companies or, on the flipside, the micro companies that are unlocked by the existence of platforms.

I don’t have all of the answers here, although I think new national legislative approaches, built on the assumption of zero marginal costs, in conjunction with a dramatic reduction in local regulatory red-tape, gets at what better approaches might look like. Figuring out those approaches, though, means clarity about where we actually are; for that, it turns out, a virus, so difficult to understand, is tremendously helpful.

1. Above-and-beyond the whitewashing about what happened in the San Francisco Bay Area

I first met Christopher in 2010 after giving my first talk at a local meetup on (Webkit-only) CSS Animations. A tall, soft-spoken man wearing Chuck Taylors approached me afterwards to say he enjoyed my talk and we instantly bonded over Doctor Who. I was smitten by his excitement and energy for the Web and CSS so much that I had him on my poorly produced local area podcast that week. It’s rare to have a recording documenting the first time you met someone, but I can say without a doubt that this happenstance meeting changed the trajectory of my life and career.

Little did I know at that meetup, I was talking to the Christopher Schmitt, author of a multitude of books and the O’Reilly CSS Cookbook. He and his partner Ari and their company Environments for Humans were purveyors of in-person conferences as well as pioneers in online conferences. I had some experience speaking, but Christopher truly made a bet on me as a conference speaker. This story isn’t unique. Dozens of people I know can attribute some of their visibility in our industry to their events. He and Ari were good at scouting out up-and-coming speakers and bringing people together. Some of my deepest industry friendships, fondest memories, and biggest laughs were formed at Christopher’s conferences. My life wouldn’t be the same without having attended those conferences and, as my co-worker Trent said, his impact is incalculable.

Christopher cared deeply about the Web. In addition to his educational conferences, he worked on Web Standards curriculum through the WaSP project. After spinning down his conferences for health reasons, he eventually went on to work with Knowbility to help make the web more accessible. Those passions ran deep in him. There were only a couple times I saw him truly angry and upset and one of those times was about poorly coded websites.

He had a thorough mind. His books were all encompassing deep dives and left no question unanswered. One chapter from one of his books was about image maps, I thought to myself it was a bit unnecessary, but from his point of view if someone was going to ask about them, he wanted to have an answer. You see this illustrated in this recent article on Color Theory and Contrast Ratios for 24 Accessibility, it’s one of the best articles on accessible colors I’ve ever read. He told me once that he produced all those conferences and events because he liked collecting information.

Christopher and I shared an interest in making podcasts and traded guest spots back and forth over the years. I had him on the ATX Web Show a handful of times, he invited me on his podcast Non-Breaking Space, we had him on Shop Talk… but Christopher trumped in kindness. Environments for Humans sponsored nearly every episode of the first two or three years of Shop Talk. That was a big gift from a small events company that allowed Shop Talk to pay hosting fees, hire an editor, and not burnout. I lack the words to properly say thank you.

Christopher was one of those unique situations where my online friends and my real life friends would overlap and we developed a good friendship over the years. We’d meet up quarterly for tacos and talk comics, podcasts, movies, and web design. Often he had an agenda to get me to jump on some idea he was working on. While I agreed to a lot of his schemes, in hindsight I wish I would have said “yes” to more, because only good can come from saying “yes” to Christopher Schmitt.

We’d frequently run into each other at the Alamo Drafthouse. That was his second home, so maybe it wasn’t so strange running into him there, but seeing your web friends at movies makes the world feel small again. I remember the time he rented out the Alamo for his birthday so we could watch a bootleg restoration of the unaltered Star Wars on the big screen. And it was always a joy that at every Star Wars premiere, in the sea of cosplayers there would be one tall 6’7” Chewbacca lingering in the theater lobby and I could proudly say “There’s my friend, Chewy.”

Last week Christopher passed away unexpectedly. He passed away at his home, sudden but peacefully. I’m still in shock, angry, and working through the news with tears. There are no guarantees in life, but not getting a chance to say “goodbye”, “thank you”, “I love you”, and all things you wish you had the foresight to say is heartbreaking and feels unjust. My heart goes out to Ari and his family. This dreary world is even dimmer and I shake my fist at God. I hope for peace.

I’ve been reflecting on my friendship with Christopher for the past few days. This may sound trite or strange, but in a lot of ways Christopher’s trademark Chewbacca costume is emblematic of our relationship. It’s a well established fact that Wookies are fiercely loyal in their relationships and supportive for life. And that was Christopher. He relentlessly supported and cared for me, my family, and the Web community. He was a good friend. He was Chewy in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, letting me pretend to be Han Solo, letting me yell “Punch it!” from the pilot seat, while he did all the work and pulled all the levers as we made the jump to hyperspace.

I owe a lot to my tall friend Christopher and I want to say “Thank you” one last time.