Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine.

The men’s lifestyle publication Thrillist has rolled out a new site design. Thrillist’s design team put its 12 million-user website under the microscope for nearly a year before unveiling the new look.

A complete redesign can be high stakes for a large site. Digg 4 earlier this year showed what can go wrong in the rollout of a new user experience (in Digg’s case, a noisy uproar and traffic dive). Twitter, on the other hand, this year launched a redesign that enhanced user experience with few snags.

Mashable got a sneak peek at Thrillist’s new design, along with the scoop on what the inside of a massive art project looks like. Read on for the anatomy of this full web makeover.

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

I'm 16 and, unusually, I use Twitter quite a bit. I say unusually because perhaps you've heard that teens don't tweet. This first came to light last year when a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern wrote a report [PDF] where he explained that teens "realize they are not going to update it," and that "no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless."

One challenge at yesterday’s CTF was a seemingly-impossible SQL injection worth 300 points. The point of the challenge was to submit a password to a PHP script that would be hashed with MD5 before being used in a query. At first glance, the challenge looked impossible. Here’s the code that was running on the game server:

What’s a cookie? How do I protect myself on the web? And most importantly: What happens if a truck runs over my laptop?

For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web but were afraid to ask, read on.

If you’ve been keeping up with the indie game world recently, you would have heard of a game called Minecraft. For those who haven’t, Minecraft is a sandbox-style game where players can use different materials to create and destroy worlds as they please. It’s multiplayer, allowing for online collaboration, and some of the structures, cities, and makeshift games that the players have made are truly spectacular.

Exactly how much fun is it possible for someone have playing a game? My game design philosophy has always been that games create an Experience. For the vast majority of games that are made, I would say around 99%, the core experience that companies, student developers, and indie developers are shooting for is for the game to be fun.

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

Humans are naturally competitive. (We do call it the ‘human race’, after all!) We like validation of our place in the world. When society provides independent measures of our success, we can contextualize our personal achievements.

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

I’ve played a lot of Travian over the last few years and perhaps one of the first things you learn as a Travian player is that one player on an account is not enough to be competitive. In my recent mini-return to Everquest 2, this has got me thinking of how this would work in an MMORPG. Granted, MMOs don’t have quite the time constraint as a 24/7 strategy war game would, but they do still consume an awful lot of time if you want to be a hardcore raider.

I make fun of systems designers a lot because I am one. I wear a lot of hats, and I actually love to code, but deep down, it’s all about the game systems.

People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

Diary of a Second Life trainwreck

Most micro-ISVs use a serial number/registration code system to allow end users to unlock or activate their purchase.  The problem most of us have run into is that a few days or weeks after our software is released, someone has developed a keygen, a crack, or has leaked a serial number across the internet.

There are several possible solutions to this problem. You could license a system like Armadillo/Software Passport or ASProtect, or you could distribute a separate full version as a download for your paying customers. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. What I am going to show you is a way to keep “rolling your own” license key system while making working cracks harder for crackers to produce, and working keygens a thing of the past.

Making games run faster is a pet topic of mine. Code samples are too specific to help many people, so here are some general principles I’ve learned.

Listening to good entrepreneurs make their pitch is great fun. How well, or poorly, they align their passion and persuasiveness to the product details reveals a lot. Are they pushing an idea or telling a story? Is it all about their own charisma or is the innovative idea the real hero? Are we having a conversation or am I being sold? How will they get me to "get it"?

One of my first icon projects for Campaign Monitor was to create a set of Apple iOS icons for our mobile web application. These are the icons that show up when you bookmark our mobile site to the ‘home screen’ on your Apple device. Now, with all of the iOS devices floating around out there, you can do things the easy way by creating one large icon which is then scaled down for that particular device, or you can do it properly by creating a pixel-perfect icon for each device. For the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.5/3G/3GS, the icon size is a miserly 57 pixels square. For the iPad, it’s 72 pixels square, and for the newer iPhone4, it’s a whopping 114 pixels square.

I recently saw the cool mood lamp by Philips and I liked it. What I did not like was the price. I set myself to discover what the industry has to offer in terms of high-power LEDs. It turns out that since the old 20mA red LEDs the market has evolved in such a way that it seems the light appliances of the future might be completely LED-powered.

The only strange thing about this talking wolf is the high quality of its conversation. “I could shoot you, you know,” I threaten the wolf, having already established that my daughter might still be alive inside its belly. That wasn’t picked from a dialogue menu; I typed it in. Without missing a beat, the wolf responds, “I’m afraid you’ll have to.” Sentient characters and interactive dialogue have been common this entire play session. Impressed? The game’s responses are driven by game designer Jason Rohrer.

You’re not alone, I was also doing prototyping wrong until a few years ago. There are probably many different ways of prototyping games correctly, and maybe your way works great for you. In that case, a more accurate title for this post could have been “Prototyping: I Was Doing It Wrong”.

A good game prototype is something fast/cheap that allows you to answer a specific question about your game. The key points there are fast/cheap and specific question. It’s not a level of a game, it’s not a “vertical slice”, and it’s certainly not an engine for the game.

Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold gave one of the best presentations on the subject of rapid prototyping. It was hugely influential for me, and it made me re-think the way I do prototypes. If you get a chance, find the audio for the presentation, it’s definitely worth it.

If you're anything like me, you usually think of your pics in terms of content: Here's me smiling. Here's me looking tough. Here's me in Hawaii with that wacky turtle. And so on. Today, however, we'll analyze photography from a numerical angle—we'll discuss flash, focus, and aperture instead. We feel like people don't really think about these things when they choose a profile photo, and yet, as we shall see, their misuse can seriously mess you up.

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference entitled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the "?". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out the JS1K demo contest. The goal is to do something neat in 1 kilobyte of JavaScript code.

I couldn't resist making one myself, so I pulled out my bag of tricks from my Winamp music visualization days and started coding. I'm really happy with how it turned out

You’ve been depressed for like a year now, I know. All the hardcore Objective-C developers have been having a hay-day writing apps for the iPhone. You might have even tried reading a tutorial or two about developing for the iPhone, but its C—or a form of it—and it’s really hard to learn.

Clearly defined goals and fair, incremental rewards are two game design techniques that could motivate the 'gamer generation' in the workforce, according to a US academic.

Lee Sheldon of the Indiana University believes managers may have to rethink how they engage the next generation entering the mainstream workforce.

Lee Sheldon is an accomplished screenwriter and game writer, having worked on TV shows like ST:TNG and Charlie's Angels as well as the Agatha Christie series of games from The Adventure Company. He now teaches game design courses for Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications. Instead of assigning his students a grade at the end of the course, he instead starts every student at 0 xp and they earn points through completing quests like solo projects and quizzes in addition to grouping up for guild projects and pick up groups. How many points they have at the end of the course determines their actual "grade."

Challenge and Change - DLDwomen

“It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of [the pictured] Ricochet Infinity pirated it.” It’s moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn’t go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

This blog post is about the bright side of software piracy. It's about the times when not only is it OK to steal my games, but, in fact, I get something out of it. Perhaps an unusual topic for a blog post from a game developer.

Why start this site?

Well, I believe that game developers are interesting, and have a lot to say. I also know that a lot of them keep blogs. But I don't think they promote them, and I don't think they are too easy to find. The reason that I think this is because I have too often seen people ask the question "does anyone know any decent developer blogs?"

Hans Rosling redux: Mixing analog with digital visualization

You have probably heard Hans Rosling's presentations on world population using the cool Gapminder software before. In his latest presentation — his sixth for TED — he mixes in some analog technique as well. This new analog teaching technique he picked up from Ikea, he says. This presentation below is excellent and is a good example of mixing analog and digital visualization techniques that result in a memorable short-form presentation. Watch the video below.

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to mold a complex topic into something both palatable and interesting. These are the characteristics I strive for in Guru Speak, and I hope you consider my efforts to be a success. Please be sure to let me know what issues tend to trouble you the most or in what areas you would like to expand your knowledge and understanding. I am happy to cater to my readers.

This edition's topic is storing sessions in a database.

Everyone knows that SmugMug is a heavy user of S3, storing well over half a petabyte of data (non-replicated) there. What you may not know is that EC2 provides a core part of our infrastructure, too. Thanks to Amazon, the software and hardware that processes all of your high-resolution photos and high-definition video is totally scalable without any human intervention. And when I say scalable, I mean both up and down, just the way it should be. Here's our approach in a nutshell...

5 Things Big Publishers Don’t Understand About Small Games
Sean Murray, Hello Games

I’m Sean Murray, one quarter of Hello Games. We’re a tiny studio. Four friends. A young startup, we’ve just released a game called Joe Danger on PSN. We’re bedroom developers and bedroom publishers. We published our game as well as developed it.

We're sort of a weird group in community and social media management. Our newly-minted "profession" is still being defined. Most people have no clue what we do for a living. We have few if any professional guilds (I did find the excellent Community Roundtable). The language and jargon defining our activity is still in flux. It's not like the US Department of Labor even recognizes the term "community manager" - unless referring to the guy who manages an apartment building (which is what most people think I do when I reveal my job title). We're definitely a breed apart.

Over the past 2 years, the relatively close knit blog universe has exploded in a massive confluence of social expression and corporate reaction. A cottage industry of owner-operators, trawling social media on behalf of themselves and others, has cropped up in lofts, dorms, agencies and iPhones.

These are the new social media Community Managers and corporate is clearly looking. This post offers a granular look at crucial skills, essential duties and a job description for the CM role.

Dear Blizzard; I’ve been enjoying your game for quite some time now — nearly six years in fact. That’s an awfully long time for a video game to hold my interest, so congratulations on producing a game that is engaging enough to do so. Hooray! But you know, I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about this silly thing you’ve implemented called Real ID. I’m sure you’ve been getting a lot of feedback on it already, but seriously, stick around. This is worth reading, this right here.

I joined Etsy back in February and knew immediately that there would be no shortage of technical challenges. Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts”. I got a taste of that within my first weeks on the job. We are in the process of redesigning a few of the major sections around etsy.com. Every item being sold on the site can have up to five photos posted with it. When a seller uploads a new photo, it’s resized automatically into six different sizes that are displayed throughout the site. As we redesigned some pages we realized we would need to replace a few of the existing image sizes.

- I’ve always said employees should be using their real names to provide transparency and accountability. If you can’t handle being the public face of a company and all that implies, get another job. It’s that easy. It is not always that FUN, mind you. - My customers are not public citizens. Making them public citizens against their will is crappy. I can think of half a dozen reasons why someone should be allowed to be anonymous, and I’m not going to list them because any one of them is good enough. Want people to stop acting like asshats on the boards? Suspend in game accounts for out of game behavior. Hire more mods. Close the board. Whatever. This is just chickenshit.

You’re a programmer. Have you ever wondered how multiplayer games work? From the outside it seems magical: two or more players sharing a consistent experience across the network like they actually exist together in the same virtual world. But as programmers we know the truth of what is actually going on underneath is quite different from what you see. It turns out that it’s all an illusion. A massive sleight-of-hand. What you perceive as a shared reality is only an approximation unique to your own point of view and place in time.

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

PHP makes it easy to write scripts that access databases, enabling you to create dynamic web pages that incorporate database content. PHP includes several specialized database-access interfaces that take the form of separate sets of functions for each database system. There is one set for MySQL, another for InterBase, another for PostgreSQL, and so forth. However, having a different set of functions for each database makes PHP scripts non-portable at the lexical (source code) level. For example, the function for issuing an SQL statement is named mysql_query(), ibase_query(), or pg_exec(), depending on whether you are using MySQL, InterBase, or PostgreSQL.

Cactus may get away with abusing his players just for fun, but he's well recognised enough to be invited to talk at the GDC. I for one can't afford even to momentarily bore or annoy my audience, because they'll drop me like a hot coal and move on to something else. It's not like there's any shortage of free alternatives for them to try (none of my games are on that list - ledsen). You don't get any favours when nobody's heard of you (not that any of my games actually are any good).

I don't want to be all negative though, so how about something constructive? Let's have a look at "how not to make your game abusive", so as to preserve the universal balance of... the universe? To do so we'll be exploring three problems which can contribute to making your game particularly annoying: repetition, randomness and incoherence.

You can learn more by attending a rare tech talk by Vint, presented by the Greyglers*: Reimagining the Internet: If wed known then what we know now, what would we have done differently?

Back in the Internet's design phase, Bob Kahn and I spent six months developing concepts and architecture and a year creating the TCP specification, but we didn't know that the idea would work. We concentrated on solving the problems we envisioned, such as networks that couldn't handle each other's packet lengths. Security against direct attacks and authentication of sources weren't high on the agenda. Now that we have spam, DDOS, viruses, and worms, we look back and think about what we might have done differently had we realized that we were creating a global infrastructure for the 21st century!

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

Best HTML5 and CSS3 tutorials - June 2010

Data visualization is an obsession around here and viz-wiz duo Wattenberg and Viégas are among our absolute favorites. At the recent Personal Democracy Forum, they gave an excellent talk about some of their recent projects and how data visualization can be used to better comprehend behavioral patterns acorss the social web.

Among the highlights: Web Seer visualizes how different groups — men vs. women, Democrats vs. Republicans — complete the same Google Suggest search queries. (Remember Question Suggestions?)

The Boardgamers of Greater Akron Design and Prototype (BoGA DaP) Committee helps non-digital game designer’s develop quality prototype board games by the sharing of design information and providing playtest opportunities. BoGA is a flexible, open and largely self-organizing group committed to high quality games.

Your brand is not my friend

As programmers we’re continually accused of doing a sloppy job. There are countless programs in the wild, crashing, locking up and accidentally writing “I am a fish” a million times over someone’s mid-term essay. The effect? Something like this: This damn computer and excel r fuckin my life up! Hatin life right now – MissAlauren (and everyone else at one time or another) It’s experiences like this that cause people to rant about Microsoft and curse the anonymous programmers who suddenly (yet inevitably) betrayed them. We all know this; it’s burned into our very souls by countless hours of tech support provided to family and friends. Time after time we see that programmers who do quick, sloppy work make other people suffer. And so we try, we try so damn hard not to be like that. We try to be the good programmer who checks every return value and handles every exception.

As long as there have been video games, there have been ways to cheat in them. They range from harmless codes that change the weather in Red Dead Redemption to serious hacks that make your aim perfect in Counter-strike. There are different layers of the severity as well; while wallhacking will get you a VAC ban on Steam, it’s likely that no one is going to care if you turn on The Sims 3 and give everyone in your town some free Simoleons.

The Web Design Ledger is a publication written by web designers for web designers. The primary purpose of this site is to act as a platform for sharing web design related knowledge and resources. Topics range from design inspiration to tips and tutorials and everything in between.

Some days I'm just in an odd mood. As poor Vanesta found out. A few months ago when we were planning out the in-game loot items for the upcoming Legends of Norrath set (the online trading card game that ties in with EQ and EQII) I had another of those moments. I'd been working on Tinkerfest quests at the time (a gnomish festival of all things clockwork that comes around once a year) and so I suggested something along those lines.

If you travel back in time and show a student from the 1950s an iPad or Twitter they'd have a tough time making sense of it; show them a classroom desk, though, and they'd see it's changed little.

Steelcase's IDEO-designed Node chair aims to change that, with a modern re-fresh of the schoolroom desk-chair combo.

In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.

Wird das iPad als Lesegerät von den Konsumenten angenommen? Diese Frage beschäftigt Land auf Land ab die Medienbranche. Doch die Antwort hängt wesentlich davon ab, wie Medienhäuser das iPad bespielen werden.

CCP Yokai, the Technical Director over in EVE-land, just posted a dev blog about their new rack setup. This is pretty rare insight for any operation, so it’s definitely worth reading. You don’t get the nitty-gritty details but you get a good overview.

Here's an interesting promotional video from Gatorade, which extols their ability to monitor social conversations, apparently using Radian6 and IBM technologies.

This video snipit was taken from the Apple Keynote about the New iPhone 4.0 OS software updat. This section showcases a new feature iPhone app developers called "iAd", which allows the developers to advertise new or exsisting apps. This is a section showcasing a Toy Story 3 iAd.

Back in April of this year, Realtime Worlds announced the pricing model for its soon to be released MMO, All Points Bulletin, or “APB” as the cool kids say. A lot of people were looking forward to the futuristic cops vs. robbers game, but the announcement about the pricing,

I find Gevlon, and especially his various projects with which he proves World of Warcraft to be a sandbox game by veering of the ordained themepark path, to be interesting, even if I find many of his opinions abhorrent. So on the one side I'm sad he cancelled his ganking project in what looks very much like a hissy fit, but on the other side he has some interesting arguments on PvP, if you arrive to sort them out from the rest of his rant. Gevlon then explains why it is easier to give adequate feedback for PvE than for PvP, and concludes that because you can't have adequate feedback for PvP, you can't get into the "flow", and can't have fun. That leaves, in Gevlon's opinion, only three "small minorities" of types of players who enjoy PvP: Casuals who just want to batter the wall of Wintergrasp with a catapult from time to time (that would be me), Killers who enjoy ganking others, and a tiny "elite" who play PvP for the challenge they can't get from AI opponents.

This Escapist’s publisher, Alexander Macris, strikes a note that is all too familiar to many veteran gamers. He’s feeling left behind as a gamer, and explains the simple economics of why this is the case. Why they aren’t makin’ ‘em like they used to anymore. While I’m not sure his numbers are entirely accurate, they do paint a pretty sobering picture of why games have adapted the way they have…

As examined in Part I, a game’s meaning springs from its mechanics and not necessarily from its theme, especially if the two are in conflict. Such a dissonance can leave players feeling lost, perhaps even cheated. Thus, designers should strive to keep the two in harmony. At the very least, they should not be fighting each other.

The following was published in the February 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine… Who decides what a game is about? At first glance, the popular board game Ticket to Ride seems to be another link in the great chain of rail baron games, such as Age of Steam, Eurorails and the 1830 series. During the game, the player draws unique route challenges, to connect certain pairs of cities – New York to San Francisco, Miami to Chicago, and so on.

I was browsing my old hard drive last night while trying to find some old material in preparation for a lecture in a local game dev school. I found a couple of good docs I've written in 2006, which I thought would be worth sharing. The grammar in the docs is the same awful you are used when reading this blog.

In 2007, the AVEA project proposal called for a new research effort into "so-called virtual property, artificially scarce digital objects that have rapidly become a viable business model for software products and online services." Gold farmers and real-money traders in massively-multiplayer online games had recently broken into popular consciousness. There was an expectation that virtual economies were going to continue to expand in one way or the other. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Finnish interactive media industry had already had a good start in grasping the phenomenon thanks to some successful early ventures and research projects. Now was a time to push on and take part in creating the next wave of the phenomenon.

Every web designer or developer has heard a version of this from someone who is going to make ‘the next big thing’. And, if you’ve been around for a while, you have bought into a truly charming individual (who has the best intentions, they really do), and have wasted many hours working for free on something that will never go anywhere.

The Breakdown: A lot’s been going on in the Content Strategy community. Rachel takes a moment from her packed schedule to talk about some of them, including April’s Content Strategy Forum in Paris.

Peter Funch Portfolio

When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it's easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, economic model to boot.

This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.

My name is Jeffrey Rowland and I am an actual dude.
I used to live in Oklahoma but now I live in Northampton, Massachusetts.
I got problems like everybody does. I got a few stories to tell you.

There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier. Starting with the mysqldump utility that comes with MySQL, we will review several examples using mysqldump, including the backup of your database to a file, another server, and even a compressed gzip file and send it to your email.

FREAKANGELS is a free, weekly, ongoing comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Drop by the Whitechapel Forum to discuss this week's installment.

The following are axioms for software architects by software architects. These axioms have been contributed under the Creative Commons, Attribution 3 open source license.

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
These are the axioms accepted into the book which will be published by O'Reilly Media next year.

Other Things Software Architects Should Know
These are axioms that were contributed and are good in their own right, but were not accepted into the "97 Things" book.

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Continuous Deployment isn’t just an abstract theory. At IMVU it’s a core part of our culture to ship. It’s also not a new technique here, we’ve been practicing continuous deployment for years; far longer than I’ve been a member of this startup.

At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. I find these on-the-ground descriptions of the system and how they work so much more credible than just theory-type posts that I am excited to share them with you. I can personally attest that these guys know what they are talking about; I saw them do it first-hand. I will always be full of awe and gratitude for what they accomplished.