Speaker 0 | 00:00.500

Welcome back to today’s episode of dissecting popular it nerds. I’m your host Doug Kameen. And today I’m talking with Lee Lottie, director of it at Spectralink Corporation. Welcome to the show, Lee.

Speaker 1 | 00:12.425

Thank you, Doug. Glad to be here.

Speaker 0 | 00:14.006

So before we got on the call, we were talking about talking about our history of computers and technology and how we got started in things. And you were like, Atari 2600. That’s my jam. Yeah. So like, like, Oh, Before we even start talking about leadership, let’s go back and talk about things like Pitfall. Pitfall 2, which was better than Pitfall. I mean, that was superior, clearly.

Speaker 1 | 00:36.551

Yeah. Those were the 80s games on the Atari where you could actually do some things. I got mine, oh God, I think it was in the original vintage. I think I had mine at Christmas 76. Could have been 77, but yeah.

Speaker 0 | 00:53.366

It was like Space Invaders time.

Speaker 1 | 00:55.376

Oh, yeah. I mean, the original Combat that came with it used to play the Indy 500 that you could do with the driving paddles. Paddles?

Speaker 0 | 01:04.884

I remember the paddles. We had the paddles when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 | 01:07.106

Well, there was the paddles and the driving controllers. So the Indy 500 was the separate one for that one. But yeah, I used to get up in the morning. I remember on the weekends getting up real early, jumping on, playing the Atari 2600. My parents would tell me. uh after they woke up like a couple of hours after i started playing it’s like you really need to turn the volume down because i would play play but on this thing constantly as a kid but yeah it was the atari 2600 that that was my first step into technology and

Speaker 0 | 01:37.684

wanting me to work in it i wanted to write computer games um until atari had that thing remember i’m sure you’ve heard this story about they they made too many of like what was it the et games or whatever yeah then they They buried them all in a landfill in Arizona and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 01:55.254

And I think a couple of years ago, somebody actually found.

Speaker 0 | 01:58.376

They did. They went and dug them up.

Speaker 1 | 01:59.517

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, the Atari 2600 was what really got me interested in things. My dad was a programmer for a company called Genrad back in Massachusetts where I grew up. And I kind of just followed in his footsteps. I remember learning to program eventually. I think my first computer was a Texas Instruments

Speaker 0 | 02:25.531

994A. The I-994A, man. That was a classic. That was mine too.

Speaker 1 | 02:29.254

Yeah, I got that. I think I got that probably around 83 when I was like in seventh or eighth grade and learned to program on that. And then when I got into high school, I was actually learning to take programming classes. I upgraded from the TI ultimately to a Commodore 128. because it was the newer version of the 64, had a little bit more power. And I’m really good at math, really good with technology, kind of the computers, still where I wanted to go. I still wanted to write video games for a living. Became a programmer, studied programming in college, computer science degree, eventually graduated from there, worked for the federal government for about four years as a programmer. And very quickly realized that I had more fun playing with computer hardware than I did writing code. And that’s actually how I made the transition from being in as a programmer to working with infrastructure. And now ultimately network cybersecurity, the things that I work on as an IT leader.

Speaker 0 | 03:42.798

So go back to your first roles. You said you worked for the federal government. you did some programming work, but you transitioned from being a programmer to doing the technology setup and support work. Now, that was in the 90s. This is a lot changing at this period of time in terms of the technology, what was happening, building out new networks. How deep into the network field were you at one point?

Speaker 1 | 04:10.870

Oh, network 3.1.

Speaker 0 | 04:14.844

Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 04:15.824

yeah, network. Network 4, I was a C&E for a number of years. I remember getting that. That was my, I think my second computer certification. My first one was an A plus cert that didn’t have the expiration date on it. Oh yeah,

Speaker 0 | 04:31.076

my friend does that too. I got in like a couple years before that did. Yeah, it’s great. I’m A plus forever.

Speaker 1 | 04:36.660

Yep, exactly. Yeah, it’s not like I’ve referenced that certification in the last 25 years. But yeah, I remember getting, I think the A-plus certification was my first. Yeah. Actually, when I was learning about systems, I was still a programmer. So I was, I had. Where I was working, we kind of had an unlimited training schedule through, I think it was Digital Equipment Corporation. They would put on classes. And I started the first year I was doing it, I was taking all the classes about programming and motif and Fortran and C. And then I started learning about networking. And I was concentrating on, I think it was DeckNet was the networking protocol that kind of came out of that. you could also take classes on Novell or you could take classes on Windows NT. And I kind of played around with both of those. And when I moved from the DC area out to where I am now in Colorado, the company was looking for somebody who was NetWare certified. And I had taken all the classes. I just hadn’t gone through and completed the certification. So I had like a six week period where I think I took the eight classes. that I needed to get done to become network certified. And then that was the first non-programming job I had. The title was network. It eventually became network engineer. It was network technician, then network engineer once I got the C&E certification. And then ultimately, that company brought me from working externally with the clients. to managing the systems in-house. And that was actually my first IT manager job back in, oh God, 96.

Speaker 0 | 06:30.895

Oh, yes. So yeah, the 90s. So I think back and I remember like just the comparison, I’m a couple of years younger than you, but you know, not too many, but maybe like maybe like 10 or 12. But the you know, so the late, late 90s. I’m doing stuff. I’ve been doing my first kind of couple like tech jobs and computer jobs and everything else. And I remember things like, Hey, we need to do an update to windows NT on these computers. And I, you know, my job wasn’t it, but I was, you know, I was going to college and I expressed an interest in that. So they would be like, Oh, here’s, here’s a stack of like four discs and you need to go to every computer. I need to load the four discs in one at a time as it tells you. And that’ll apply the update to this, this, you know, these, the operating system. And, you know, I would spend like an entire day. babysitting computers, sticking three and a half inch floppy disks in into computers to do updates and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 07:22.948

I think in the 90s, did we actually do updates to operating systems?

Speaker 0 | 07:26.930

It might have been an upgrade. I’m calling it an update now in 2025, but I’m sure at the time it was the big deal. Oh my god, it’s Windows NT whatever this new version is of 3.5.1 and then there was 4 and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 07:43.102

I remember doing a… Upgrades on computers, even my personal computers. Upgrades on like DOS from 3. I think it was 3 or 4 up to DOS 5 and then DOS 6.22. And then I want to say Windows for Workgroups was the first kind of networking that I played with. I remember when Windows 95 came out, that was a huge technology upgrade. And then starting to get into more of the networking. So, yes. um network 3 network 4 network 5 and then ultimately um windows nt windows 2000 windows um got window windows 2000 or windows windows networking for small businesses i remember installing that a lot i

Speaker 0 | 08:31.748

did i did a ton of uh small business servers like this yeah sps 2003 2008 2012 exactly i think it was it was a 2012 2011 might have been 2011 the last one yeah yeah but it used server 20 12, didn’t it? But regardless, you think about all these things and how much you hit a certain period in your career. I’m 25 years into my career and you’re 37, you said. And it’s really amazing to think about how significant the changes are in terms of how we’ve worked and what things have kind of changed. I mentioned about the floppy disks. We used to stop disks to do the upgrades and now we… Now it’s all fully automated and pulled from the internet. And how much time something like that consumed and the steps that we had to go through just to get the basic stuff done. And how each of these steps in their individualness, I’m sure they felt important at the time, but they didn’t feel dramatic. But when we look back, it’s crazy to think of how we used to do things.

Speaker 1 | 09:37.649

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s… what is it? Newton’s law of technology. I mean, technology improves, um, a hundred percent, like every 18 months to two years. And yeah, when you talk about careers that have gone 25, 30, 30 plus years, you’ve seen a lot of changes in technology. So yeah, how we do things now versus how we used to do them, it’s completely different. I mean, working on computers, popping in the cards, having to go in and set the IRQs on the, on, on com ports that we used to have to do. Now it’s okay. Let me plug a USB-C connection in. and it really doesn’t matter what it’s for. It just figures it out, and everything just happens automatically.

Speaker 0 | 10:23.814

I’ve got this one universal adapter that has a USB-C thing at the end, and it’s got like 17 ports on the side of it. So it’s cool. It’ll work, right? Yep. You think about how many things we’ve solved, how many challenges have been solved through that type of technology adoption and that effort to just simplify things and make it easier to work. So I want to… change gears a little bit here and talk about your current role. You’re director of IT at Spectralink Corporation. And I think now, you know, maybe even a career trajectory for you, you know, you highlight a lot of the work you do in the cybersecurity space and some other stuff. But I’d love to hear a little bit about what you do in the Spectralink, what the Spectralink does for our listeners benefit. And, you know, maybe some some information on like kind of where you are in your career currently. Sure.

Speaker 1 | 11:12.222

Spectralink. Corporation, and this is an oxymoron, is a small international manufacturing company. But we make telecommunication devices that are geared toward medical retail manufacturing. It’s kind of to make it so it’s a little bit more secure, a little bit easier to do. It allows you to, a big area that we do things in is healthcare. So the phones are… more secure than your average standard Android or iPhone. We keep the data better protected. But we do, the company has three main offices. Our headquarters is in Louisville, Colorado. We do corporate operations and some engineering development here. We have a sales office in the UK, and then we have an engineering office in Horsens, Denmark. And… between all of that and then contractors that we work with to help with additional manufacturing or additional engineering kind of makes us, like I said, it’s a small global company. And that’s actually why I joined them. I’d gotten to the point in my career that I’m like, okay, you know, I want to experience more than working for a small organization. Because other than working for the government, every company I’ve worked for has basically been a small business. And, um… I liked the idea of working for a smaller international company to at least get the base for some skills and learning new experiences. Because when you work in this field, there are a number of days that you don’t necessarily learn something new. But by joining a new organization and learning to become a leader for a global company, it was kind of reinvigorating. And it’s really been interesting joining. And seeing what I’ve learned about how you manage the technology when you are working across the globe rather than when you’re working in just a single building.

Speaker 0 | 13:22.217

Interesting. So in this role, I’m pulling the depths of your LinkedIn profile to get a little bit of tidbits to start talking about here. But one of the things that you highlight is a lot of your work in the cybersecurity space. And I think just given the nature of the… what you just described your the goal of spectra link is to provide more secure communications technology and uh so i think it’s without a doubt you have some you have some kind of cyber security stories to share here and i’d love to hear something that you’d love to you’d like to share oh gosh um or that you can’t share you know well we’ll we’ll we’ll stop we’ll stop to the journeys right um oh god um

Speaker 1 | 14:08.731

Can I go back in time a little bit? Really before cybersecurity kind of became the forefront. It was more a networking story. I remember the first… Where I was really learning about wide area networks and doing VPN connectivity. I was working for a company. I was their network operations manager. And we were… The company managed a lot of… It was a nonprofit. They managed a lot of… affordable housing apartment complexes throughout the country. I think when I’ve worked with them, when I started, they were at about 80 complexes. And when I left about a year later, they had just merged with another organization and they were approaching about. almost 200. And we, I was using a VPN client for the first time. And the backend was, I think, a Cisco PIX firewall. And there was a version of the Cisco client, and it may very well have been AnyConnect. I mean, because that application has been around for years. But I remember, we built out a bunch of systems for preparing computers. And we would basically get an order from one of the sites. And they would order however many computers they needed to run the property. And I remember sending a computer to this person. This was back in when AWOL 9, I think, just came out. So you’d get the AWOL 9. So you’d be able to find those disks everywhere. You could walk into a convenience store. You could walk into a grocery store, Kmart. um target walmart whatever and there would be aol disc that you could just grab to be able to sign up for their their service yep and right out and that’s setting aside that the five a week that you got in your mailbox at home right yes yeah and and we had just sent uh computers out to a um facility in arizona and i i remember the the the the property resident manager signing for the gear and about a couple hours later he’s like I can’t connect to the network. I’m like, what do you mean you can’t connect to the network? One of the things that we test before we could go out was making sure the VPN connectivity worked. And he’s like, no, I can’t get on the network. So I’m working with him because we didn’t have a network connection. I couldn’t remote into it, which back then would have been PC Anywhere. I think we didn’t have the technology to remote it.

Speaker 0 | 16:41.116

Or into PC Anywhere,

Speaker 1 | 16:42.036

right? Yep, or an early version of the remote desktop. Would have been the other things that we’d used. And walked him through all this testing. My team and I spending probably the better part of a day trying to figure out. I’m like, all right, send me the computers back and we’ll take a look at it. We get it back and we look at it and there’s some AO online software on there and a couple of other pieces of non-corporate software. So we clean that off or reimage the disks, test it, make sure it works. I mean, ripple checking to make sure that the VPN connection worked. Send it back to him. I’m like, all right. Don’t load any non-corporate approved software. He signs for it, not even 45 minutes later. These computers don’t connect to the network. Did you load the AO online software? No, no, I haven’t loaded anything. I’m like, all right, I’m going to have you send these computers back to me again. But if I find any software that’s on there, your facility is going to be paying all the shipping charges. No, no, no, no, there’s nothing I did. I get the computer back, plug it in, turn it on, hit the CD button. ejects that out and there’s the aol9 cd sitting inside the computer so i took it and basically mounted it on the wall with a nail and that kind of started the it hall of shame that we kind of put together at that company where we would track like the five silliest things that we had ever done and that’s that position number one for a while so

Speaker 0 | 18:10.906

yeah there was one time i’ve told the story of the podcast before so listeners listeners have heard episodes would be. You’ve probably heard this one before, but I had one where this is a story of oops moments that you had to live through. I was doing consulting work for a manufacturer locally here. At the time, I was an IT consultant. I’d done work for them for several years, so I was well-known quantity to them and regular at their offices. We were installing some new server. This was 2008, 2009 maybe. And their server room is like a hundred-year-old brick building. And the server room is like the best of what 1986 has to offer in terms of setup. It’s like plexiglass walls with some wood doors and literally wood paneling all around. And then there’s just racks that they’ve got servers thrown on. This pile of cables in the back, just an absolute rat’s nest, spaghetti of cables underneath. And we had to go and put in… That’s… put some new server in or something like that. There was a rack, an actual telco rack alongside it, so there was some racked stuff. In order to put stuff in, you have to walk behind the racks. So I walked behind the rack and you have to step on the cables because it’s the only option. One rubber cable pulls on, the next rubber cable pulls on, the next rubber cable through this chain reaction in it and it yanked out the power plug of the expansion chassis of the AS400. Boom! And it wasn’t obvious either. It pulled it out enough to disconnect it, but not enough to drop it. So you didn’t know. It looked like it was plugged in. And yeah, so all of a sudden, I’m in there with the network admin and doing our work, and the guy, the AS400 guy comes storming in. What the hell did you guys do? Why? We didn’t do anything. What are you talking about? It turns out, you know, we threw some investigation. The expansion chassis had been cut off.

Speaker 1 | 20:10.163

Yeah, a couple hours later of going through, trying to figure out what went wrong.

Speaker 0 | 20:14.986

But unfortunately, it did take a lot to figure out what had happened because he’s like, there’s something wrong with the AS400. So we started looking at it. Of course, you look at the front of the thing and the lights are all off. So we’re like, obviously, something’s wrong. So we started that. You know, that part was easy. But then, of course, then you have to IPL an AS400. You know, an initial program load on an AS400 is, you know, a 30-minute affair.

Speaker 1 | 20:38.725

I have a lot of experience with, like, VMS-based systems. So to me, that would be my AS400 running the old alpha, oh God, really, really old digital VAX systems. And then ultimately they got to the point where they would run on Intel-based hardware, so you didn’t even have to have the specialized alpha hardware anymore. And then it wasn’t until just recently, probably five years ago, that they got to the point that you could actually virtualize.

Speaker 0 | 21:14.738

a the vms operating system and run it under vmware yeah i had uh when i was at college we had a vax and that was you know there was a small vax for programming work and stuff like that that’s i believe that’s where i that’s where i learned cobalt oh yeah it was it was the late 90s so you know like everybody it was like it was the last heady days of yes we’re still teaching cobalt because you will all need this to go get jobs doing y2k

Speaker 1 | 21:44.434

remediation work on all the cobalt systems i i actually taught myself cobalt i was a in in being a computer science student i was working in the computer lab and i started helping out and one of the instructors was like hey i need a teaching assistant and i’m like sure what’s the class he’s like cobalt and i’m like okay um so i was learning cobalt as the students was learning it but i was about two weeks ahead of them learning it on my own so that when it came time for grading and helping with the exams i was at least knowledgeable for what they were trying to do that week but if you’d asked me about what they were doing three weeks before would not have been able to tell you anything what they were doing and so the irony for me was that that was the only time i ever encountered a vax um but then uh

Speaker 0 | 22:35.375

in multiple roles you know jobs over my career i’ve had as for hundreds and okay production and uh Most of the time, my job is intersected with the decommissioning of the X from the dream. I was a county CIO for almost 10 years, and the one I was at for a really long time, that was one of our big projects. I live in IBM country, so I live in the Binghamton, New York area. And this area is where IBM was founded in the early part of the 20th century. had its primary manufacturing sites and stuff like that. So at one point, it was like 30,000 people in this area worked for IBM. It’s all basically dissipated at this point as IBM is globalized and doesn’t do manufacturing anymore. But as a consequence of that legacy, there’s tons and tons of… Everybody, if you were going to buy a core system, you bought an IBM system. I worked for a dairy company. We had an S400. I worked for… We’re for the county. We had our own AS400 programmers who trained at IBM, trained at the site, so they came over to work for the county.

Speaker 1 | 23:38.740

Yeah, I worked on the VAXs in the mid to late 90s. And then when I started getting into the networking, I never thought I would run into a VAX again. And the company I worked for bought a new I was working for a lease management company. I worked there for a number of years. And they put in a new financial back end system that they were using actually at the time was the whole financial system and that used to run on a vax and it was like it was 15 years almost to the date of the last time i had touched one i’m like okay i vaguely remember this but this is going to be scary and it took me a while to to remember how to do things the operating system had changed so much i think when i used to be a programmer on it was like it was like vms you four and then when i started playing with it it was like some kind of version like eight or nine it’s like celine dion says it’s all coming back to me now it took a while but yeah i got to the point where i could be dangerous but thank god we had consultants that actually did the majority of the management on it so so

Speaker 0 | 24:45.541

let’s change gears again here i want to make sure we talk about we talk about leadership and your leadership background and and you know you when you were sharing your career history you talked a bit about uh you talked about your first leadership roles and how you moved into your government role, you moved into an IT. support role in the 90s. Then as you got your certifications, you moved into more of a leadership and management role. So you’ve been in management for quite a long time in various capacities. Can you tell us a little bit about what are your most important qualities when you’re leading teams? How do you get the most out of them? And how are you trying to focus them to deliver what you need done?

Speaker 1 | 25:27.827

Ooh, that is really a good one. I think the biggest thing… for me is, even as a leader, I am not going to ask somebody on my team to do something that I’m not willing to do myself. If we need to do a deployment and it’s okay, well, we’re rolling out 100 computers today. Okay, Tom, I’m going to physically touch stuff. We went through a cyber attack a couple of years ago and it was a ransomware attack. And we… When it hit, it just happened to be timing wise, we got lucky. We were active. It was 11 o’clock at night local time. And most of my team was actually online still working for the day because we had somebody who was traveling to our European site, one of our European sites. And so he was just coming on for the day. My net admin had been was trying to complete some work for him so that he could take over. I think that that. my, my, my system engineer needed for where he was at. So he was just finishing up for the day. And I was actually online kind of just going through emails to getting caught up on stuff that I needed to work on. And when the cyber attack hit, I mean, it was all hands on deck for our team. And we were, we were working 16, 18 hours a day. I think my net admin told me in the first 10 days after the cyber attack, he worked like 150 hours. Um, so, but yeah. But, but, but everybody was doing that. It was just like, okay, you know, I’m, if I’m in the office at 6am or if I’m online at 6am to help work on things or troubleshoot stuff that, that, um, we discovered over, over the previous night. Okay. I’m not going to ask my team to work an 18 or a 20 hour day if I’m not willing to do that myself. So I think, I think showing that, okay, when the time is necessary, I’m willing to be hands-on, I think really does help. me get some of the best out of what I can get out of my team, but also knowing when to delegate, because the guys that I’ve got on my team are experts in what they do. That’s the reason why they do our office administration, our systems administration, manage the databases in our Oracle systems, handle our security and network administration, handle the storage or the security. systems engineering that need to be done for our company. And where I work, we’re a small technology company. But wow, the technology needs that we have in here because we have so much development and R&D efforts that are going on. When I came in, I was so overwhelmed. Having come from a single location or single location in a co-lob site finance company. Okay, there was a kind of finite amount of systems and all of a sudden getting into our r&d capabilities i’m like okay i just came from a company that the revenues were 10 times the size of this and but i feel like the smaller company the technology needs are 10 times the size of what i just came from yeah like your it spend is your it spend is like five times as much it just given the nature of what you have to what you’re spending it on yeah yeah it’s just making sure that we optimize that and get the best bang for the buck out of everything that we’re doing so

Speaker 0 | 28:59.656

When you mentioned you found a ransomware incident and some other stuff like that, what qualities of leadership do you think are most important? And I ask this for our listeners out there. Inevitably, all of us will go through some sort of crisis incident, whether it’s a cybersecurity incident or just a general like, you know, oops, the server just died, whatever the case may be. What are the most important qualities that you found as a leader to be successful and carry through? um, to, you know, from, from the beginning to the end of that process?

Speaker 1 | 29:32.991

Um, having the ability to quickly diagnose the scale of a problem, um, making sure that you communicate and over communicate is probably a good thing, um, regarding where you are on dealing with a situation, whether it be, we’re still triaging, whether it be, okay, we’re now going back through the forensics and trying to figure out what the problem was. Um… We were actively troubleshooting the problem. Okay, we’ve completed our troubleshooting. And now we’re just kind of wrapping things up. But making sure you document what has gone wrong. Making sure that you’ve got that communication. And then, as I said before, if you have to get involved, great. But know when to be hands-off and be a leader or know when to be hands-on and physically get involved in things. or when to be hands-off and when you need to be the leader.

Speaker 0 | 30:31.407

Yeah. So I’m going to go back to, you mentioned about the communication thing, and I’ll just share some experience I think that I’ve had, and notes comparison here. So what I found, as far as communication goes, and I’ll run this, when I was at the county, I started as a CIO of a county. And I get there, and there’s not a huge earth-shattering crisis, but a vehicle hits one of the… telephone poles and it knocks out the fiber that communicates between a couple buildings. So the public safety building is disconnected. Next thing you know, I’ve got the sheriff’s secretary calling there. Well, the sheriff wants to know what’s going on. Well, we have an outage. We’re working on it. Well, the sheriff wants you to give updates. Call in every hour. You need to call and give an update to the sheriff and tell us what’s going on. I’m like, yeah, I’m not calling to give you an update every hour. Every time I stop, I have to remember to call you. and that I do that for everyone else, nothing will get fixed. So it just got clear. But, you know, I, I, I start from there because I think about the efforts that I, that I put in over time to invest in communication. Like, so this is going back to what you had pointed out about the effectiveness of regular, ongoing, honest, and open communication, uh, pays dividends in the long run. So like the. The time to start that type of process is not when the crisis begins and be like, hey, let’s all talk about this. But if you build that level of trust amongst the constituencies that you serve, when the crisis hits, they give you more slack and more leeway to trust that you’re getting the stuff done. So I make the comparison of that when I started, they were like, we want an update every hour to six, seven years later, a similar thing happened. you know i don’t actually know i think the first time was a squirrel chew but then the second time you know seven years later some car literally hit the pole and snapped it in half yeah and uh you know this this apparently our alliance love getting aimed by various things but anyways the by that time you know i’m six years in and the call from the sheriff’s office was hey we just wanted to make sure you’re we’re sure you’re aware but we wanted to just let you know you know officially from us that we we do have an outage here and we’re like absolutely we know you uh here’s what happened here’s what’s going on like okay could you just give us an update when when it’s resolved uh and and we’d love to just make sure we we know what happened you know like and the difference in tone and the request and the demands the you know all these things were dramatically different and it comes back to that element that you know i i think you highlighted in your list of important qualities which is how do you communicate and how do you build an effective communication strategy that that helps to alleviate the stress and the because like in that investment starts way before the crisis hits number one and if we do it right it pays so many dividends because it gives you the breathing room to actually do the work yeah yeah i mean i i remember saying

Speaker 1 | 33:32.802

it was like okay we will provide an update as things change and if we’re waiting on a consultant or a third party like as you mentioned and a phone outage okay or internet outage we’ve lost circuits plenty of times And, but all we know is that the vendor is working on the problem and it’s like, okay, well, we have no expected resolution time and two hours goes by, four hours goes by. You’ve had people that have been in the office that, okay, well, we’ve lost connectivity to the office. So being in the office doesn’t do anything. Your remote users can’t get into some of the resources, even though we try to distribute around the world, something may only be in one location. We may not have redundant access to that capability. And you’ve got people who are down. And yes, you want to tell them, okay, well, we’re still, we are working on the problem, but we’re waiting on the vendor. And I hate saying that message over and over again. But I also don’t want to go a day without providing an update. I want to say, okay, well, when we’re in the middle of a situation, let’s at least say, yes, we are continuing to work on it. We don’t know what the anticipated resolution time is, but we understand how important it is to get this fix done, to resume normal operations so that everybody can get back to doing the things that they need to. So we try to do that, but I also don’t want to say that message over and over again because it tends to make you look. a little bit foolish when you don’t really have a true update. So it’s finding that balance between communicating the important things versus just communicating for timing’s sake, I guess is a good way to put it.

Speaker 0 | 35:17.289

Yeah, that’s great. So I want to step into the humorous side of things for a minute or just the fun side. We’ve talked about your work on your early connections with the Commodores and Atari, that type of stuff. But I’m going to ask a really serious question.

Speaker 1 | 35:32.612

and critical question star wars or star trek star wars oh man star wars oh man you killed me you killed me oh i i i saw i saw star wars when it was called just star wars yeah so before episode four or got renamed retro name retconned yeah i i remember seeing it in the theater that tells you how old i was um and back then you My parents could drop me off at the theater with my couple of cousins who were about the same age as me. And we would pay for our tickets. It’s like a buck to 50 or something to go in and sit. And we would go and watch the movie and then they would come back and pick us up. And sometimes we’d stay and just watch it twice. But I lost track of how many times I had seen Star Wars at 300. And that was when I was.

Speaker 0 | 36:23.652

That’s it. That’s I’m calling that statistic out right now. And that is it. only for the purposes of highlighting it in this podcast. That’s a big number right there, 300 times.

Speaker 1 | 36:34.198

That was when I was 10. Wow. I remember my family didn’t have a VCR then, but I remember going over to a friend’s house and they had Star Wars on VCR. And every time I was over there, we would play it. And then in college, I had a copy of all three of the movies on a single tape that I had recorded. And I’d be up. like all night working on a project or doing some homework and i’d pop it in and it would play as background noise but because i knew the movies so well i could just hear it i didn’t actually have to look at it and watch it because i knew what was happening based on the audio or the dialogues or hell even r2d2’s beeps i could almost probably tell you what was going on yeah so it tells you how much of a of a geek and a nerd i am yeah well now so star trek you

Speaker 0 | 37:24.628

Star Wars. So I’m a Star Trek fan, as you might have guessed. But I always clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Star Wars. I just really like Star Trek. But Star Wars has a very active universe of TV shows and movies and other things going on now. Are you keeping up with any of that stuff, too?

Speaker 1 | 37:42.535

I am behind. I mean, when The Mandalorian came out, I was on that every Friday. I’ve made it through the first couple of seasons. I think I still have to watch part of the third season. um i have not watched andor i’ve watched most of kenobi uh i still need to watch ahsoka i watched uh the book of boba fett so i i i’ve seen all the movies i remember pre-pandemic um when episode eight and episode nine came out um actually i remember when episode seven and um rogue one when those came out how difficult it was to get tickets so I got to the point where I would actually rent a movie theater so that I could have my own private showing. And we would invite friends and people that I work with and coworkers, and we would fill the movie theater. I mean, I never had a large theater, but we always were able to fill like a 120-person theater. And we would schedule we would have our own private showing of it. So we had guaranteed seats on opening night because I would start talking to the movie theaters probably six or eight months ahead of time. We did that with episode eight. We did that with episode nine, which was right before the pandemic.

Speaker 0 | 39:01.210

This is pretty cool. Like you’re pretty serious about this. Like you’re doing big things. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 39:05.812

Yeah. I mean, it was people, it would be like $15 a person, but people were so guaranteed to have their own, to be able to see it either opening day or even the preview day. Cause we would see it at like. eight o’clock or nine o’clock on thursday night before it was readily released on a released on friday um and you you mentioned star trek i mean i i love star trek i love watching some of the the old tv series the original series next generation i

Speaker 0 | 39:34.270

i follow that too but i’m so much more heavily involved and invested in star in star wars yeah my my older son is super into star trek so we watch it together we’re actually currently we’ve moved our way through multiple series we’re currently in the middle of the original series which I think is great because, uh, I mean, I watched it as a, you know, as a kid growing up, uh, on, you know, rerun syndication for years. Uh, but the, the dialogue, the, the storytelling, the things that were there, like. I look back and I was like, oh, my son might think this is like, you know, chintzy or cheap or whatever. But he’s actually pretty into it because it holds up quite well for what it is. Like, as long as you accept the fact that, you know, hey, in 1967, this was the best they could do for special effects and other stuff like that. And the method of which you tell stories had to be different in the media that was there. You know, if you needed to do off screen, you know, if somebody. if somebody had something terrible happen, you just did it off screen. And you had somebody look over the horrified look and you just had to imagine what was happening. Right. You know, well, you saved on the special effect. So, you know, like, like it was, it was compelling in its own way, but I would focusing on just based on the things you told me you have, I’m going to, I’m going to declare you to have a certain expertise in this and therefore a valid opinion that, that would be influential, if you will, on what current series is, are some of the best.

Speaker 1 | 40:59.330

Oh, geez.

Speaker 0 | 41:02.212

If you were ranking the Mandalorian, the Bob Fett, or any of those, what was the better ones? What ones are not the better ones?

Speaker 1 | 41:08.336

I think of the ones that I’ve seen. As I said, I have not seen everything that has come out on Disney Plus since they’ve taken over. I really did enjoy the Mandalorian seasons one and two. I can’t say everything about season three because I still have to get into that. I did like Obi-Wan. Um, the book of Boba Fett was had some good parts to it, but it was also there were parts where it was slow Um, and then gosh even getting into some of the Star Trek stuff. Um, what’s the the new one? about the strange the new the new live-action one strange new worlds and then the below bow

Speaker 0 | 41:51.390

Laura Dex Laura Texas. Yes. So well, Laura checks just ended they ended their run five seasons, but yeah, it was I refer to Lower Decks as like a love letter to Star Trek fans because that’s how it’s built. It’s literally built to make all sorts of inside jokes and references while still being accessible to anybody who doesn’t know all the inside jokes.

Speaker 1 | 42:11.541

And I remember watching in the Star Trek area, one of my favorite original series episodes is The Trouble with Tribbles. And then when they did the DS9 episode where they go back in time and they’re all interacting with it, I thought… That was one of my favorite Deep Space Nine episodes, just how they tied that all in together.

Speaker 0 | 42:34.476

Out of Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is my jam in Star Trek. So I loved Deep Space Nine as it—don’t get me wrong, definitely love Next Generation, the original series. But if I’m picking something I want to sit and watch over and over again, I love watching Deep Space Nine.

Speaker 1 | 42:50.151

In seven seasons— 120-ish episodes per season. You’ve got a lot to binge watch if you’re going to watch the whole series.

Speaker 0 | 42:56.735

About 175 episodes for each of the series that went seven seasons now. And there was a statistic that I saw somewhere that showed the number of hours, just because of the mediums that they were developed for, the number of hours that’s available to consume, if you will, of content in Star Trek is like an order of magnitude larger than Star Wars. It’s like thousands of hours of media content. or content to consume in the Star Trek world, but only like a couple hundred hours of Star Wars content or something like that. My figures are not precise. I can’t remember. I was actually trying to look it up while we were talking, but I couldn’t find it fast enough.

Speaker 1 | 43:34.612

Now, would that be like audiovisual content or would you be getting into like books?

Speaker 0 | 43:39.196

Just movies, TV, just movies, TV, like stuff you could watch on the screen.

Speaker 1 | 43:45.561

That I would definitely agree with because you’ve had multiple series that went six or seven seasons. versus all the Star Wars series, many of them are only six to 10 episodes, and you’re lucky if you’re getting a second or third season out of that. And then you have to wait 18 months or two years to be able to watch season two after season one comes out. Whereas with Star Trek, you were getting a new series every year, you were getting 20, 25 episodes per season.

Speaker 0 | 44:17.640

Oh yeah, it added up fast. Yeah. So… We’re coming up to the end of today’s episode of the podcast. And before we leave, I always try to make sure to ask our guests for your advice to emerging leaders in the space. And what would you give? So I actually ask this two ways. One is what advice would you give to emerging leaders about becoming a leader? And two, what would you tell yourself? If you could go back in time and tell your younger self, like, hey, man, don’t do that, you dummy.

Speaker 1 | 44:48.128

Oh, all right. Um. To an emerging leader, I have to say, find your leadership style. Find what works for you. I know for me, I kind of like to say my leadership style is informed hands-off. talk to my team on a daily basis. It may just be in a stand-up. It may just be, okay, hey, let’s have a quick catch-up call. Just tell me what’s going on in this project. But I’m going to trust them to work on the project and meet the deadlines or the tasks that they’ve told me that they can meet. And then I’m going to use that information to be able to provide updates to my leadership team. So usually the executive or senior team in the organization. And when things change or when there’s problems that arise, I’m going to go back to each of those different groups to say, OK, we’ve had a change in priorities. We now have to either drop this task or we have to work on it more from my team level. Or I’m going to go to the execs and say, OK, we’ve run into problems. We are expecting to have a delay in this project and try to communicate that as early as possible. It’s not good going into. a meeting with the leadership team and having to tell them that, okay, we thought we were going to make this deadline, but we’re not going to. And I’m kind of reporting that we’re not going to make that deadline to them two hours before the deadline. That really doesn’t look good. Oh, now what would I tell my past self? Find a way to invest in Google at an early time.

Speaker 0 | 46:31.925

Right. or any text, you know, any of the tech stacks, right? Like NVIDIA.

Speaker 1 | 46:36.748

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that would be a big one. No, really, if I could tell myself what, if I had to tell myself something that I knew now that I didn’t know back then, it would be probably to think about cybersecurity at an early stage in my career and not really when I got thrust into it, probably for the first time. maybe 10 years ago. Think about the cybersecurity capabilities, things that you had to think about back in the late 90s or early 2000s and become the expert that I want to be now back then so that I can hopefully kind of not necessarily change the trajectory of my career, but maybe have a little more variation in it than what I’ve done. Interesting.

Speaker 0 | 47:26.892

Okay. Well, Lee, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 47:32.042

This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 0 | 47:34.165

That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.