Speaker 0 | 00:09.705

Welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we’ve got Joe Whalen. And Joe, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?

Speaker 1 | 00:19.850

Sure. So I’m a Director of Information Technology for an electronics manufacturer in the DoD sector. I’ve been in the industry for about 30 years now. I started out a long time ago doing computer work for Radio Shack, actually. I was a computer specialist for Radio Shack.

Speaker 0 | 00:45.391

I know them.

Speaker 1 | 00:46.972

Yeah, I used to know them, and they’re really not around anymore. I think I just dated both of us.

Speaker 0 | 00:53.837

Sorry.

Speaker 1 | 00:57.920

So from there, I wound up moving into, I was invited to come to an ISP at the time, dial-up ISP, in the 90s from a manager that I had actually worked for at RadioShack. And that was really where, you know, I was a computer specialist at RadioShack, but I mean, how special is that? To be honest. But my real IT career started working for the… internet service provider doing dial-up support. I was doing tech support for them, build out their web development group, build out their network engineering group, came in literally at the bottom level. And about seven years later, I walked out of there as the operations manager. And things just sort of took off from there, moved into the software industry. After that, I was working for a wireless middleware company there. So I got the… playing in the wireless space for a while there, which was fun. Then I left there and was invited to a software company down in Delaware, actually, that was handling rebates, which the irony of that is I’m the type of person that I never use rebates, and here I am working for a company that does rebate fulfillment. So that was kind of like the inside joke for the family for a while there. And again, that was another one where it was the CEO of my former company had moved down to there and invited me to come down to work for him down there. And I was there. I came in as a consultant there for a while. Then they hired me on. And after my stint there, I wound up where I’m at now. Came as a business analyst where I’m at now. And then I inherited everything to do with technology. Built the IT department, built the development department there, and inherited an IT staff and a company acquisition that we picked up a few years ago. And it just sort of snowballs from there. And 30 years later, here I am still playing in space.

Speaker 0 | 03:11.457

So how long have you been at the current one?

Speaker 1 | 03:15.218

December will be nine years for me.

Speaker 0 | 03:17.659

Nine years. And how big is the staff if you don’t?

Speaker 1 | 03:20.956

If you don’t mind. We’ve got a couple hundred people divided between multiple sites.

Speaker 0 | 03:30.805

Okay, 100 IT people or 100 people on multiple sites? Total employees?

Speaker 1 | 03:36.510

Total employees. My IT staff is about 12 right now.

Speaker 0 | 03:43.557

12? How do you have them divided up? I mean, it’s like when I was working with my group and it was smaller like that, you know, it was like the guys that kept the blinky lights blinking and the guys that put together the code and tried to make the magic happen.

Speaker 1 | 03:58.961

Well, it’s been difficult because when we acquired the other company, they were running their own systems down there. And it’s been an 18 month, 24 month process of migrating all of their services up to our data center. uh where we’re at now and we just have a couple of it folks on staff down there basically for desktop support and you know maintenance stuff and stuff like that the bulk of the staff is at my facility with my developers and my it guys okay and then the um so

Speaker 0 | 04:37.232

let’s let’s jump back in time just a little bit you know you’re talking about um radio shack and computer specialists If I’m remembering right, that’s back when we were buying individual components and kind of really building it, or were you selling a lot of the TRS-80s? That’s right.

Speaker 1 | 04:58.616

That’s around the era that I came into computers was the TRS-80 era there. So most of what we were working with there were those, the Tandy 1000s and, you know, the PC clones that Radio Shack was putting out at the time. And that’s largely what I came in with. You know, first computer I had was a TRS-80. And that was, I don’t know, I guess I was. 16 at the time, maybe, went out and, you know, worked my butt off with a paper route so I can go out and buy that computer. Because before, it’s worthwhile stating, full disclosure, before I worked at Radio Shack, I was one of the kids that used to go there and hang around and bang on the computers and play around with stuff. But not coming from a house, a family of means, we couldn’t afford to buy a computer. So if I wanted to use a computer, I had to go use theirs until, you know, I was able to earn the money myself, saving pennies here and there to go out and buy it myself. And that sort of started the addiction from there.

Speaker 0 | 06:07.991

Yeah. Wow. And then, so then came the ISP and you started off at the lowest rung there and then started helping them build and grow. And you mentioned that you helped build up the different departments. So what were some of the, I can only imagine, that you learned some lessons at that point that helped you build this stuff up? Or either that or, you know, the hard-earned lessons of banging your head against the wall.

Speaker 1 | 06:43.365

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 06:44.826

You know, trying to teach users which is the power button for the monitor and which is the power button for the CPU.

Speaker 1 | 06:53.076

I think the biggest thing that I took away from that period was really the value of working smarter rather than harder. Because it was one of those things where you could throw bodies at a problem, but if you didn’t have the know-how to do it, you weren’t going to solve the problem. So a lot of what we wound up doing, when I walked in there, our ticket system was literally a piece of paper that we would write stuff down on. And… And one of the first things that I did, because we were on a Unix system at the time, one of the first things that I did was I went and wrote a CRM, basically, in Bash that we could do customer name lookups. And it would go out and use the finger tools. And we had utilities that connected to our total control machines that would go out there and pull dial-in information. So it was prude, but it was effective. in a text interface and it was worlds better than what we had and everything dumped into a flat file that we eventually moved into a windows-based web application later on so i wonder if things were we had to build the tools ourselves because they just didn’t exist right

Speaker 0 | 08:06.448

and i wonder how many of our listeners today even know what the finger the finger command did um

Speaker 1 | 08:15.016

or does or is it even still available is it still around maybe in linux but by i don’t think it’s installed by default in linux you have to install there’s a package you install that you get you know finger and usenet all the all the basic one oh

Speaker 0 | 08:32.225

dang that’s taking me back to those days of chat rooms and bulletin boards yeah it’s funny just before uh we went on the air here i uh

Speaker 1 | 08:44.176

I was looking at a message that one of my vendors had sent me, excuse me, that was a massive BBS list. And he showed me, you know, because we were chatting last time he was in the office. And I went and looked it up and my BBS is listed on there from, you know, the early 90s. So I’m kind of nostalgic about that. Dang.

Speaker 0 | 09:06.756

Okay. So, and I kind of just jumped over the fun of. of taking the phone calls from ISP users, people calling for support, you know, that probably couldn’t get online or once they were online they couldn’t find stuff. The amount of resources and the things that were online at that time was minimal.

Speaker 1 | 09:31.372

Oh yeah, I mean it was at a point when we started out you didn’t have DNS, you had a list of IP addresses that you… slipped into the disk that you sent out to your customers and you go to these and this is what they are and you know this is how you get the things out there it was really before you had any kind of search engine technology at all yeah i remember um what was it netscape or what one of the other ones where you could do that

Speaker 0 | 09:59.194

Like Wheel of Fortune almost. You just hit a button and it would randomly pick up some web page and just bring it to you.

Speaker 1 | 10:05.777

And you were just,

Speaker 0 | 10:07.477

that was how we used to thirst the internet.

Speaker 1 | 10:09.798

Yeah. And you could do it back then because you could count the number of websites on your hand almost. And then they exploded. Like, you know, 94, 95, it all exploded.

Speaker 0 | 10:22.864

Yeah. See, I think that’s the time that I really started getting online. a little closer towards 94, 95. I was going back to school and working on my bachelor’s. So you also mentioned that then you started helping them build up the teams and things like that. So talk about that experience a little bit, going from answering the phone and creating the CRM. So they must have seen something in the fact that you started to build a system for them, made them more efficient. And then

Speaker 1 | 10:54.614

It was one of those things where there was a need to do things. And I was always the type of person that I didn’t ask permission, right? If there was something that needed to be done, you do it. You figure out how to do it. And as I started doing these things, people started noticing. And at one point in time, they came to me and said, look, you know, we need to hire more staff here to answer the phones and to help out. Could you interview people? And I wasn’t even. a supervisor at that time. They literally just wanted me to talk to people because I knew the work, I knew the job, I knew the company. So I literally just started out interviewing. And I was interviewing everybody. It wasn’t just technical. The sales guy had me interviewing his people because the people that I hired, the retention rate that I had on the people that I hired was something like 95%. You know, I think I, out of, out of maybe 30 people that I interviewed and said to hire, I think I lost one person, maybe if that. So the salesperson, sales manager came to me and had me interview his candidates too. He just gave me his list of what his requirements were. And I was able to weed through the candidates there. And that they kind of, I fell into that leadership position. It was never something that I looked for or sought out. It was just, it was thrust upon me because of my, I don’t know, my force of personality, I guess you could say. And from there, it just sort of went on that, you know, I was the guy that when you needed something done, you went to Joe to get it done. And that was just sort of the reputation. In fact, when I was working at the software place, the first software place I was at, they used to call me Gandalf because I was the guy that didn’t matter what, you go to Joe and Joe will fix it for you. And I think that’s kind of one of those, you know, victim of my own successes type things where I’m still in that.

Speaker 0 | 12:51.798

position now where you know it could be anything you know the door’s jammed oh call joe he knows how to fix it and let’s say it’s like you’re almost stumbling over yourself with all the requests that are coming in yeah i’ve run into that same kind of thing and man there’s days where it’s not fun hey you can fix this right or or i need something that does that right right and so quick question on on one of the other things that you said you know you didn’t ask for permission to do stuff you would just do it fix it so you’d see a need and you just make a solution for it and then you also had lots of times where all of these different people are coming to you for solutions how often was it the boss coming to you for the solution versus the um the co-workers or i’m trying i’m coming up with all kinds of adjectives and none of them are kind so i’m not saying them you

Speaker 1 | 13:48.866

Well, it’s funny. At the ISP, the boss never really came to me for answers. He always did an end around. It was largely because he and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. At the software company, I did the same exact thing. I was a level three tech support guy at the time. And it was mobile middleware. And it was a completely new animal to me, but I was doing it from a system administrative standpoint, handling the server side of things. And there was a need. There was a need for an intranet site because we had information everywhere and none of the documents were managed. So I spent one weekend, I worked through the weekend at the place, I built out this entire website for the company. Not even for the company, it was for the department, but it handled all the stuff for the company. The CEO comes down Tuesday after I put that online and congratulates me personally, comes down, shakes my hand, congratulates me. And I’m like some kind of celebrity now because I’m on a first name basis with the CEO of the company. so again it’s a mix it’s a mix of depending on personalities and and which company i was at some some were much more hands-on than others um others um when i was working just in it it is you know that necessary evil because we don’t generate we don’t generate income so we’re always a loss leader for everybody so a lot of times you They don’t want to talk to us unless something’s broken. The real visionary ones understand and appreciate what you do for the company, even though there’s not a dollar value associated with what you bring in. If you can get to a place like that, that’s where I’m at now. That’s really what the situation is. They have a deep seed of appreciation for what technology does for the company. So it’s a lot easier to have those conversations.

Speaker 0 | 15:55.628

Yeah, see, I’m at that kind of a place currently within my career also. But we’re also starting to flip the tables on that a little bit more. And we’re starting to show that we’re not the loss leader that everybody thinks because they look at us and they think, okay, expense, expense, expense. But then when we help them instantiate software or create an intranet site like you just did, there’s a huge product. gain. And if you can document that stuff and you can legitimize the productivity that comes from it, then you are a profit center, not just a loss leader. And that’s one of the biggest struggles, I think, we as the industry, especially as the support or the internal IT for any given organization. It’s one of the biggest fights we all have is trying to prove to people that the financial value, because there’s a lot of people who see the other value. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have all the requests that we have. You know,

Speaker 1 | 17:05.461

exactly.

Speaker 0 | 17:06.141

And you mentioned it earlier, too. You know, if you’re a victim of your own success because you’ve helped people. And so now they keep coming back to you. They keep coming back to you for more help and to make them better at what they’re trying to.

Speaker 1 | 17:21.508

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we’re solutions providers, you know, and sometimes, most of the time, that solution that I provide you is a technological one, but there’s much more value. You know, I’m dealing with one of our internal organizations now where they need to acquire a server for a hosting environment that they’re working in, and they happen to be going through an MSP to make that acquisition. And the MSP is really just trying to give them a canned solution that doesn’t, it might solve their problems, but it’s not really what they need. And it’s much more expensive. So I’ve been taking a lot of time to walk the decision makers through what the technology is, what the costs are, what your options are. You know, their number one concern is reliability. And the MSP is selling reliability in, I don’t know, a RAID 10, for instance. And. And the argument that we’re having is, okay, well, that’s great, but then we don’t have the capacity that we need. And they’re telling me, well, you need to go this route because performance. You need the performance on the drives. Okay, well, I’ve got 16 people working in this environment. You’re moving me from 10,000 RPM drives to SSDs. Rate 10 is not going to give me a significant improvement in performance over that. So. I can throw that out the window and start looking for other options. Like they didn’t even explore with them the ability to spin virtual machines up in the cloud if there’s an outage or anything. It’s like their number one priority is reliability. And you can get to that. And it’s a multifaceted approach. And the MSP is only looking at it from one particular perspective because they assume that the end users. don’t understand the technology. And that’s really a failure on the MSP part, not to educate your customer at that point. Because an educated customer is a customer who’s going to be a better customer in the long run.

Speaker 0 | 19:28.551

Right. Yeah. And when you educate them, then they’re going to become more loyal. They’re going to ask you more. They’re going to look for you more. And they’re going to lean on you more because they recognize that you’re going to bring more value to them than just… This is the hardware you want.

Speaker 1 | 19:46.710

Right. And I’ll admit, I’m very guilty, and my daughter will attest to this, of over-explaining things. When you come to me and you ask me a question, I don’t like to just give you the answer. I like to make sure you understand the answer. And sometimes that requires over explaining. My, you know, my one boss at the office now, he’s, you know, he’s fond of the phase of this phrase of explain it to me like I’m an eight year old. And I can’t because an eight year old can’t understand these things. So I have to give you that background to really make you understand it. But a lot of times. IT isn’t just about working with technology. IT is working with people. A lot of times I’m a hostage negotiator almost. You know, I got to talk people down off the ledge. I got to convince people that this is really what your problem is or this is really what you’re looking for. A lot of times people come to us and they tell us what they want and they tell us how to do it. And I have to tell my guys all the time. We’re the guys that provide the solutions. The customer needs to come to us with what their requirements are, and then we’ll figure out the best way to do it. Because a lot of times people want something, especially from the software standpoint. Oh, can I have this feature added? Well, okay, we can add that feature and it’ll do what you want, but it’s going to break five other things for another department. And the users don’t think like that. So we’ll be able to do it.

Speaker 0 | 21:19.780

I don’t care. Just do it for me.

Speaker 1 | 21:22.001

Right. So our job is to provide a holistic solution for everything because we’re solution providers. Yes, I could hang that picture with a sledgehammer. Chances are I’ll probably go through the wall with it. Maybe we should use something different than the sledgehammer you want me to use. So a lot of it’s sorting out what tools to use. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 21:42.940

that’s one of the ones that I always tried to teach everybody too was, you know, so many of the users come to us and say, hey, I want this. I want it this way. make the Excel spreadsheet do this. And I learned early on to ask, well, why? What’s the goal? What are we trying to get done here? Because there’s a lot of times where I’m like, oh, you need the Excel spreadsheet to do this. But guess what? The system already has a report that gives you exactly what you’re looking for. And all you gotta do is push this button. And they’re like, really?

Speaker 1 | 22:19.618

Yeah, you know, our job is to solve problems, not to treat symptoms. So don’t tell me part of the problem. Tell me what you’re looking to do. And then together, and I’m not trying to exclude the end user, together we can figure it out and give you the best answer that will solve your problem.

Speaker 0 | 22:36.342

Yeah, no, it’s actually, it’s one of the most important things is to make sure that that end consumer, that end user is involved in it. Because otherwise, there’s been so many times that we’ve created stuff. brought it to them, you know, like we disappeared into the back room for a while. We come out going, here you go, just what you asked for. Yeah. Oh, thanks. Great. And then they just reach over, set it down and go back to whatever solution they found or figured out while we were off in the back room.

Speaker 1 | 23:03.254

And that’s what I try to avoid, what we like to call the black box technology. You know, I don’t want to give you a black box that does something magical. I want you to understand what you’re asking for. And I want you to understand what the technical limitations are. And what the impact is, because every time you ask me to do something, I have to do an impact analysis to make sure it’s not going to break something else. So the next time you come to me and you decide that you want pink polka dots on the screen, understand that that’s going to cause other impacts elsewhere. And it might influence what you ask for at that point.

Speaker 0 | 23:37.023

Yeah. What about those colorblind people?

Speaker 1 | 23:42.522

And so really the biggest issue is with development most of the time, because once people see what your developers are capable of doing, then it’s, you know, the world is your oyster at that point. And they start asking for every crazy thing under the sun. And it’s like, okay, we’ve got a development timeline that we work with. We’ve got a roadmap that we have to fit this stuff into. If you really want this and you really need it, it’s going to take you six weeks to get it. And when you say that, then they start backing off, well, I don’t really need it that bad. And, you know, then they start to prioritize how important it is.

Speaker 0 | 24:19.050

Oh, see, I usually get, okay, we want that. And then about two weeks in, they see a new shiny bauble, and then they want that. And they can’t understand why if we work on the second shiny bauble, the first one’s going to take longer.

Speaker 1 | 24:35.859

Right, right. Well, or that, or the shiny bauble you sold them in the first place. Has four or five different requirements changes by the time it actually comes out. And it’s not shiny, nor is it a bauble anymore.

Speaker 0 | 24:47.985

Amen. So tell me a little more about the rebate job and the irony of it. Working at a rebate center, but not taking rebates. Did you learn any tricks? Did you learn anything? Do you take rebates today?

Speaker 1 | 25:06.329

I still don’t do rebates. And working for a rebate processor told me exactly why, because it was largely a scam. And I can say that now because the company’s out of business. But. I walked in and they were doing, they had just acquired a contract for a major retailer who’s also out of business now. And they were given 90 days to build a solution where they were taking receipt information. And their magic secret sauce was instead of filling out all these annoying forms and mailing in those cards and all that stuff, you come to our website, you punch in these three pieces of information, and then we’ll… compare that to all the receipt data that we’re getting from the retailer and we’ll qualify you. And on paper, it worked great. And 90 days into it, they put up a website, they collected all that customer data and people started hitting the site and filling all that data in. And they didn’t have to redeem any of the rebates for another 90 days. Well, when it launched, There was literally nothing in the background for it. There was no engine for it. There was no qualification engine for it. There was nothing to process it. They spent the first 90 days just building this facade that you could put the data in. And they were collecting all the data, and nobody was getting any updates that you’re qualified, you’re not qualified. It was a disaster. And the company had actually contracted out with a third-party development house for it. And they gave them one local developer who came in, did the first part, building the facade, took a vacation, and, like, had a nervous breakdown or something when he was on vacation. He comes back. Three weeks later, he comes back. He dyed his hair, divorced his wife. And, like. completely different personality, spent three months writing the engine itself, and then just disappeared from the project and was never heard from again. It was the most obscure thing that I had ever experienced in technology when that happened. Then they wound up offshoring everything to a company in India, and we wound up getting a team of people that we were working with. And it’s difficult trying to do stuff like that with the time difference.

Speaker 0 | 27:43.501

Yeah. A time difference is, I notice a time difference in two hours, you know, working with people out on the East Coast. I’m out in mountain time. And it’s amazing how much of a difference two hours makes, let alone the three that we get from Pacific to East Coast.

Speaker 1 | 28:00.026

Yeah. Well, we were dealing with, sometimes it was a 12-hour difference, sometimes it was a 13-hour difference. And trying to schedule, because they wanted to have daily calls with these guys. Well, it’s like midnight. you know where they’re at they got to stay at the office late whenever they wanted to have these calls and it was eventually they wound up flying a team of three of them in uh to the office in delaware and they put them up for three months in delaware so these guys literally had to live in the states for three months to do this job which

Speaker 0 | 28:31.510

they weren’t very happy about but and then they they also had to um fit both time schedules again because they would work with you guys during the day and then they’d have to stay up to communicate with the other team on the other side of the planet.

Speaker 1 | 28:45.821

Yeah. So, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:47.602

Oh, man. All right. So, how long was that one? That one sounds like it didn’t last very long.

Speaker 1 | 28:54.428

Well, that project itself lasted about a year. I was working as a consultant for them at that time. And then when that kind of went away, they moved on to a few other projects and they weren’t. nearly as ambitious because they had already had a qualification engine that they were using for CompUSA, as a matter of fact. And they built one for CompUSA’s rebate system and it worked. It wasn’t anything fancy. It didn’t do anything automatic or anything, but it did the job. And they kind of abandoned this one for the new retailer and went back to that one. And they started servicing customers on that and it worked out. They were able to keep a trickle of customers going through there for a while.

Speaker 0 | 29:36.422

Okay. So the current place that you’re working on electronics for, how many mergers have you been through? Just the one?

Speaker 1 | 29:46.607

They’ve done a couple of acquisitions since I’ve been there.

Speaker 0 | 29:52.966

Okay. And any lessons learned from that? Because that seems to be something that I’ve seen a little more of that happening lately. And maybe it’s just my awareness of it or, you know, there’s just more consolidation happening at this time in our history.

Speaker 1 | 30:12.696

And it is. And it’s happening across every industry out there. And I think probably the biggest takeaway is to don’t go into those things with. any preconceived notions. Because it’s going to be, like, for instance, they do the same type of work that the parent company does, but they do it very differently. They have a very different style of manufacturing that they do. And a lot of the things that, you know, we basically tried to squeeze a square peg into a round hole and found out that the corners of that peg got trimmed off and somebody’s missing those corners now. There was a lot of going back and cleaning things up. There’s been a huge load on the developer staff because we develop an in-house system that goes along with the off-the-shelf system that we use. So there’s a lot of customizations that are going in to handle, accommodate all the different needs that we have there. And really, it was just a matter of we thought we’d just bring them in, pick them up, drop them in our system, and it would just work. And they did. I mean, when is that ever realistic? Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 31:23.442

that’s why I’m laughing, man. That’s why I’m laughing. And we’ve had to go through a couple of those where we just took over a business or took over like four stores and going out there and spending a weekend so that they’re Friday night. They close business as one company. Monday morning, they start a business as another company. And. Getting the networking going, the PCs going, making sure the accounts are there, that you didn’t lose documents, that all of the in-flight transactions are still available. It can be a challenge, and it makes for a long weekend.

Speaker 1 | 32:02.643

Yeah. I was very blessed because I had a very competent team of guys down there who were intimately familiar with the systems and very experienced. dealing with these types of things. So they certainly helped to make that transition better. And we had a lot of backing from management on it too. They understood how important this was. And I didn’t have any pushback on funding for any of the equipment that we needed. We went down there in the first six months and ripped out all the layer two switches that they had, replaced their entire network down there because they knew that they needed it. It was heartening to me to have that level of trust placed in me to go down there and do what I thought was right. And then to sit back and see the successes that came out of it afterwards. And I give our management team total props for having that level of confidence in me.

Speaker 0 | 33:05.982

Yeah, well, and you know, you built that confidence too. You provided that and gave them… the experience with you succeeding at what you did so that they built that trust because trust is earned you know it takes a long time for us to earn that trust and only moments to break it yeah yeah

Speaker 1 | 33:29.148

i tell my daughter uh that trust is like currency it’s hard earned but it’s easily wasted and she understands it when you say it like that yeah well um so

Speaker 0 | 33:44.578

Somebody mentioned something else. I believe you do a podcast.

Speaker 1 | 33:49.859

Yes, I do.

Speaker 0 | 33:51.540

So tell us a little about that, and then we’ll expand on it a little too.

Speaker 1 | 33:57.401

So I started doing a podcast for my daughter when she was about 12. She was having some issues adjusting to middle school and going through the various changes that… teens and preteens go through. And it was more a therapy session that we did for her. We would sit down, we would do a podcast, you know, 45 minutes or so. We’d pick different topics and explore them. You know, we talked about everything from braces, because she was getting braces at the time, to anxiety, to depression, to… We did a two-part episode on her getting, going through puberty and It was conversations that I think a lot of parents want to have with their kids, but they don’t know how to approach them all the time. And after about, I don’t know, 20 or 30 episodes, we started getting some feedback. And I was getting feedback not only from kids, but from parents. And I had one woman, we had done an episode on depression. So what we do in the format that we do is we’ll go out, we’ll do research on a topic. We’ll do read-throughs of a script on a topic. And then we’ll banter back and forth and discuss it and go into detail. So the research that we did on the depression. I had a woman reach out to me afterwards and thank me because she had this stigma about depression where she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it. You know, she was brought up in a house where it was just, you know, get over it, stop being so mopey and so forth. And listening to me and my daughter talk about it, it made her realize that it’s okay to talk about stuff like that. And I explained it to my daughter. And she really understood at that point in time that the podcast didn’t just help her. It’s actually helping other people. And that totally reinvigorated her approach to how she did the podcast. So we were very fortunate in how many people we’ve been able to reach with that. And we do, you know, I do a podcast with my wife. We do an entertainment one, and that’s more for fun. And then I do kind of a current events one with my son. Because it’s sort of the stuff that you want to have those conversations. You know, we talked about everything from SETI to the election to, you know, women’s rights, all kinds of stuff that we talk about. But it’s stuff that I wouldn’t normally have that opportunity to talk about if I didn’t put it into a podcast format. You know, it never comes up at the dinner table.

Speaker 0 | 36:40.347

Right. Well, I mean, it’s stuff that could or at least on Leave it to Beaver, supposedly it did. You know, but I. The brilliance of how you handled that with your daughter. You know, you started talking about it because in all honesty, I heard about it. So I went and hit your website and I saw the different topics and then I saw who the co-hosts were. And I just kind of assumed that it was going to be individuals like you did your topics and your daughter did her topics and your wife did her topics, not the back and forth. And what a way to… broach some of these conversations with your daughter in a way that you set it up for a different type of conversation. It’s not dad talking to daughter. It’s two people talking about that topic who happen to be a dad and a daughter.

Speaker 1 | 37:37.969

Right. Right. Yeah. She comes in as a subject matter expert on a lot of these things and it’s a confidence builder for her.

Speaker 0 | 37:45.275

Yeah. So how long have you guys been doing it?

Speaker 1 | 37:51.383

February, January, February will be our end of our third season doing it. We’ve been doing it for three years now.

Speaker 0 | 37:58.927

Cool. And so, you know, I just, once I realized that it was a family affair, I thought that that was really cool. And I just was amazed that you guys are doing that. And now to find out that it’s really more of a family affair than even what I was thinking, because like I said, I was just. envisioning each of you having your own guests and doing things with like you know you’re out there talking or being a geek or a nerd and and you know that the daughter’s tough a mean it had like my daughters you know they want to do the makeup tips and things like that yeah and so it but obviously you know your daughter’s not doing those kinds topics she’s talking about deeper topics that um, near and dear to what she’s experiencing.

Speaker 1 | 38:49.687

And she’s come out of a lot of like, she’ll, she’ll go into some of these, like when we’re doing the anxiety and the depression, uh, she would go into them thinking she was depressed. And then after we did the research and we did the podcast, she would come out of that and say, yeah, I’m not really depressed. I think it’s just anxiety. It’s, it’s this causing anxiety and school and band and this and that. And, and she would walk away thinking, okay, I’m not depressed now. It’s anxiety and we can deal with that. And then we deal with it. So it makes her realize that she’s just like other kids and it’s not the world against her. And it’s just we try to keep it as uplifting as possible.

Speaker 0 | 39:30.970

All right. So three seasons of doing this, dealing with family members, talking about multiple types of topics. One, tell everybody where to go to listen to any of these.

Speaker 1 | 39:43.374

Oh, yeah, you can get audio and video versions of all of our podcasts at insightsintothings.com.

Speaker 0 | 39:50.566

Insights into things.com. Okay. So the things that you’ve done with that, what lessons and did you learn anything from doing this or did you gain any experiences from doing this that you brought back to your professional life?

Speaker 1 | 40:09.456

I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the technology needed to do it. I’ve learned sound engineering. I’ve learned video production. I’ve learned how to. sound condition of room, and all that stuff actually has wound up translating into doing a similar thing. I wound up inspiring my company to actually start their own podcast, which they recently started recording. And I guess I’m a technical consultant for them on that to keep coming to me for questions. But what it really is, it’s a big time management learning lesson. You know, you have a set amount of time, you have a set amount of topics you want to talk about, and you need to do it in a timely manner. And, you know, when I was working for the ISP, they used to have a show, a short-lived show on public television, and I had to write the scripts for it. So I got a little bit of understanding of how to write a script and how to write segments and stuff like that. And that helped me here. And in what I’m doing it here from a podcast standpoint, you know, you have to write the show in such a way that you don’t have dead air, obviously. And you’re going to ask a question. You kind of need to know what kind of answer you’re going to get when you ask a question because you can’t ask a question and get a one-word answer and then just sit there, you know, trying to come up with another question, right? There’s an art to interviewing people, I think. That was something that I definitely learned. And it helps me every day having conversations with people and knowing how to react to them. You know, you ask someone a question. This is largely why I do video, too. I didn’t want to just do audio. But you ask somebody a question because occasionally we’ll have guests online, subject matter experts. And the answer isn’t always just what they say. It’s how they say it. It’s facial expressions. It’s the micro tics that people have. And you pick up on that type of thing, which is why video conferencing became so popular during COVID. You know, you could have the same conversation on the phone call, but you’re not going to get the same value out of it. So a lot of it is, you know, learning how to read people and understand conversations. And I don’t want to say control the conversation, but guide that conversation.

Speaker 0 | 42:38.503

Yeah. Well, and so, you know, in all honesty, I’m coming in. these interviews and a lot of things that I’m doing where I’m just completely winging it. I come in and I just want to have this conversation with you and I feel that I’m good enough to understand most of the technology that it’s easy enough for us to have a conversation about that. Then we get off into unknown territory and I can easily see where it could just suddenly be some dead air or something like that.

Speaker 1 | 43:06.799

Yeah, and it’s funny. My son just graduated from college and and he majored in broadcast journalism. So I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him and the experience that he received during his courses on introductions and how to handle the intonations when you’re answering. And it was, you know, I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him during this whole thing. And it’s great. Even, you know, situations my wife laughs at me, but I’ll go back and listen to our shows. And she’s like, why do you listen to your own show? You sat through the whole thing. I said, because when you listen to your whole show, you hear things. You hear those ums and the ahs and the fillers that you put in that you subconsciously don’t realize you’re putting in. And when you go back and listen to it, oh, that’s what happened there. Okay, so I’m coaching myself at this point to get better. We went back and listened to the first couple of podcasts with my daughter, and they’re almost, you can’t listen to them. because we were so inexperienced at the time and didn’t know what we were doing. And you listen to what we do now, and, you know, it almost sounds professional at this point in time.

Speaker 0 | 44:22.089

Well, that’s cool. I mean, here I go stuttering because now I’m highly conscious of it. Oh, and then headed right into the dead air as I try to think of the next question. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 | 44:40.416

Well, our joke is always, oh, don’t worry about it. Because my daughter and I always joke around. We do our shows live and we record them. And what goes on live is what goes out for the production on Mondays. I don’t really cut anything out. We’ll just do some sound editing and clean up the sound so we don’t have background noise and stuff like that. But you’re healing. You’re going to make mistakes. And we don’t try to hide the mistakes. We celebrate those mistakes. We try to get them all in the beginning of the show if we can so that the rest of the show goes nice and smoothly. But it’s one of those things where, you know, the joke is we’ll fix it in post. Don’t worry. And the majority is like, no, you won’t. You’ll never do it. You’ll never fix it in post.

Speaker 0 | 45:23.556

Yeah, Ted, you just hit the publish button. I’ve watched.

Speaker 1 | 45:26.379

I’ve listened.

Speaker 0 | 45:28.721

So actually the thing I was trying to think of was. You guys started in 2019 or 2020?

Speaker 1 | 45:35.668

2019. It was before the pandemic. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 45:41.810

All right.

Speaker 1 | 45:42.350

So we haven’t had anybody in studio as a guest since COVID hit, though. So all of our in-studio guests were before that. So we’ve had to do everything remote since then.

Speaker 0 | 45:54.133

Which reminds me of something else you mentioned on the ISB and working with the public TV. Do you ever watch tech TV?

Speaker 1 | 46:02.392

Oh, I loved it. Yeah. I still watch Leo’s podcast now.

Speaker 0 | 46:07.854

Yeah. Yeah. And one of my favorites was always Leo and Steve, Steve Gibson. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 46:12.236

Yeah. They still do their Security Now podcast. And, you know, if you can sit through the two and a half hours of deep in the weed stuff, there’s a lot to take out of it. That’s for sure.

Speaker 0 | 46:25.961

Oh, man.

Speaker 1 | 46:26.582

For sure. In fact, they were in Jersey. Oh. I want to say in 97, 98, they were doing a lecture tour here. And I went to go see him at one of the local hotels. And it was right at the start of .NET because when he went through questions and answers, I had asked about that. Nobody else had asked about the impact that .NET was going to have. And he was doing the tour with Patrick Norton at the time. And they were phenomenal. in person doing the show. They were very gracious, signing autographs, everything. And then when I started working for the company I’m at now, one of the owners of the company is based in California, and he’s a fan of the show. In fact, he still says, one of the reasons I got the job was because he asked me if I knew who Leo Laporte was, and I went off on him with that story. And he actually, I flew out to California, we went up to… uh, San Francisco. We did a day in San Francisco and actually went to watch one of the live podcasts of, uh, of his, uh, this week in technology, which was really cool.

Speaker 0 | 47:35.800

That would have been awesome. That must’ve been a fun experience to do that. What, what lessons you got for tomorrow or for the kids that are following us who are, who are listening to this, trying to figure out how, how do I go from being help desk? or answering the phone to help somebody with their DSL or their cable modem today. How do I get from there to being a director of IT or a CIO?

Speaker 1 | 48:06.714

Well, the first thing is you have to be passionate. The one advantage I have is I love what I do. I’ve loved it everywhere that I’ve done it. And if you love the work you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s the first thing. You got to love it. You got to have a passion for it. The other thing is… Don’t be afraid to learn. I am the type of person that I consume knowledge everywhere I can get it, whether it’s podcasts, TV shows, books, magazines, blogs, articles, doesn’t matter. If there’s something that I can get out of it, I will sit there and consume that, even though I may never need it. The fact that you’re making your brain do these things. I explained to my daughter that one day, actually Neil deGrasse Tyson had said it, that kids are like, why do I need to learn calculus? I’m never going to use calculus. And Neil deGrasse Tyson said, well, it’s not about learning how to do, it’s not about learning calculus. It’s about training your brain how to learn to do calculus. It flips switches in your brains and allows your brain to learn differently and learn more things. So the more things that I can learn. the better I can train my brain to learn the things that I need. So never stop learning, whether it’s industry specific or, you know, something that interests you. Even though you may be learning something that’s not specific to IT, you’re training your brain how to work differently and how to think differently. My very early start before I got into technology. I was an emergency management coordinator for my town, and I was saddled with having to write the emergency procedures that were FEMA compliant. I had to work with FEMA and go through courses for that. That made me learn how to troubleshoot because you don’t just have plan A, B, and C. We had D, E, F, G. We went through the whole alphabet because you literally had to plan for every single contingency. And it makes you… I don’t want to say paranoid, but it makes you hyper aware of what could go wrong and what order you need to prioritize your troubleshooting in. And it had nothing to do with technology, but the lessons that I learned in emergency management, I employ every day in the work that I do just because of how I learned how to do things.

Speaker 0 | 50:35.699

And I’ve had ups and downs in my career where learning how to. how to write that plan from a through you was the way to get things done. And today I’ve learned to keep that shorter to only get to like F because there’s a couple of those possibilities that we’re going to put on out there that just are, you know I’m trying to remember who said it, but I remember hearing the saying, don’t build the bridge until you get to the, to the ravine. Cause IT people, I always had this tendency to try to foresee all of these potential issues that are out there and trying to protect against each and every one of them. And I would never deliver because I was too busy protecting. So I’d never achieved the goal. Well,

Speaker 1 | 51:30.680

it’s funny you mention that because it’s not about building the solutions. The way it helps me in IT is it makes me ask the questions. I ask the questions that other people don’t ask, and it makes them think of the problem in a different light or come at it from a different perspective. And every time I’m in a conversation, it just happened today when I was in a meeting today, I asked a question that nobody thought of because it was plan D or plan E that I’m thinking of, and I ask a question. And the reaction I get was, well, that’s a good question. Well, yeah, I don’t ask them if they’re not good questions. And it completely changed the conversation where people were not, this was the conversation I was talking about with the server, you know, where they wanted redundancy. And all they thought about was, okay, how am I going to set up my RAID array for redundancy? And I ask the question, what kind of backups do you have? What’s your backup plan?

Speaker 0 | 52:38.242

Immediately what went through my brain when you started talking about RAID 10, I’m like, well, what’s backups? Right. And how are you achieving these backups while maintaining service?

Speaker 1 | 52:47.969

Right. And that’s where the emergency, that’s where that preparedness comes from is like a good lawyer. You never ask a question that you don’t have an answer to. But sometimes to get people to where they need to be in the conversation in that meeting, you have to guide them to it. And you have to do it by. asking questions that I know the answer to, but they didn’t think of it. So you ask the questions and one, they feel great because they come up with an answer at that point in time and they give themselves total credit for it. But you also help them down that path. So you get the buying, you get the knowledge transfer, and it works out much better than me saying, okay, this is what your backup needs to be and then dictating it to them. So that’s where it is. It really, it helps to guide conversations and requirements gathering. and troubleshooting.

Speaker 0 | 53:37.656

Yeah. Oh, man. And all of those things are so necessary in everything that we do.

Speaker 1 | 53:43.798

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 53:45.338

Requirements gathering, making sure you know what the goal is.

Speaker 1 | 53:49.339

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 53:51.020

And troubleshooting. How do you fix it?

Speaker 1 | 53:54.701

How do you make it better? You know, everyone complains when you call up your cable company and you have to, my cable motor’s like, oh, did you do this? Did you do that? And they run through their script. And it’s like. Like, yes, okay, I work in this industry. I’ve run through your script already. But they don’t know how to step through that script other than step through that script. Right. And that’s how they’re trained. So the one thing I try to instill in my guys is you need to think on the fly. Yes, it seems silly when we tell people, did you reboot your computer? But if you’re running Windows, 90% of the time a reboot is going to solve the problems. Oh, way too often.

Speaker 0 | 54:34.820

Clears everything out. Starts fresh. This is the only program you’re running now. And suddenly it works.

Speaker 1 | 54:41.063

And everybody grumbles, oh, I got to close out all my programs. Yes, that’s actually, those 52 times that you have opening Chrome are probably what’s causing your problem.

Speaker 0 | 54:50.670

I love how Chrome says, reload?

Speaker 1 | 54:54.231

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 54:57.072

You didn’t close down properly. Would you like to reload? Yes. And suddenly 15 windows spawn.

Speaker 1 | 55:03.815

And every one of them sets up their own virtual space and their own memory and their own processor space. And it’s like, you just, you watch your memory utilization, just, you know, your available memory just dip to the ends of the earth when that happens.

Speaker 0 | 55:19.414

Well, it’s my augmented memory because I’m getting old and I can’t remember all that stuff anymore anyway.

Speaker 1 | 55:25.958

So I’m good with it.

Speaker 0 | 55:27.980

I just add a little more RAM.

Speaker 1 | 55:29.421

There you go.

Speaker 0 | 55:33.283

Any other tips or tricks for the young into NOS following?

Speaker 1 | 55:40.088

For people in IT, NOS is never an option. But you have to tell people sometimes things they don’t want to hear. to manage expectations. And that’s one of the biggest challenges I think we run into on a daily basis is managing people’s expectations.

Speaker 0 | 55:58.475

Yeah. Well, and like you said, sometimes the manual way is the better way. Yeah. I can automate so many things, but there’s some times where it’s so much better to just pay somebody to do a process than try to figure out how to do it programmatically.

Speaker 1 | 56:19.282

Absolutely. And IT, like I said, IT is a tool. You don’t have to go to the toolbox every time you have a problem if it doesn’t require a tool.

Speaker 0 | 56:29.849

All right. Favorite podcast out there?

Speaker 1 | 56:34.512

My favorite podcast, present company excluded, is probably Security Now.

Speaker 0 | 56:44.619

I really enjoyed that one too.

Speaker 1 | 56:46.480

And I listen to that pretty religiously.

Speaker 0 | 56:50.178

All right. A couple other quick questions. So Linux, Mac, or Windows?

Speaker 1 | 56:58.300

Yes. There are all three of them in-house. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 57:02.981

but which one’s your preferred? I mean, I believe that’s an iPhone poking out of your pocket.

Speaker 1 | 57:08.042

I do. I have an iPhone, so I’m an iOS for mobile. I’m not a big Android fan, which is a point of consternation with my wife. She’s a diehard Android phone. person? I used to be. Back when the HTC Evos were out, I loved my Evo, but as soon as I was able to get an iPhone on my carrier, I got it. And my wife is always telling me, oh, I can’t do this or I can’t do that or my watch didn’t work. And I always tell her, well, if you had an iPhone, it would just work. And her retorted, well, if I had an iPhone, I’d be like everyone else. Yeah, everyone else, it would work. I’m not getting in the middle of this debate from a desktop standpoint I’m primarily a Windows guy I do have a new studio Mac studio downstairs that I recently bought to do video production on a couple of Mac notebooks I got a MacBook Air MacBook Pro I use them you know they work they get the job done i i bought them originally because i had to support max um because we every place i worked there was always some artist or some marketing person who only swore could only do what he needed to do on a mac so you always have to support them so i export i support them at my expense by by acquiring the hardware myself um and linux is just it’s just it’s too simple not to have and to use. So I run a couple, I run my Plex server off of it, I run a couple other things off my Linux box. So it’s great for an internal server resource because Microsoft servers are really expensive to run.

Speaker 0 | 59:00.091

Yeah, especially the licensing.

Speaker 1 | 59:03.072

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 59:07.894

All right. Well, this has been quite the conversation. I’ve really enjoyed this time.

Speaker 1 | 59:13.116

This has been great. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 59:14.837

Is there anything else you’d like to promote? Anything else you want to bring to people’s, the forefront of anyone’s mind?

Speaker 1 | 59:22.741

I think we’ve pretty much touched on everything and then some for what I had expected to talk about.

Speaker 0 | 59:32.147

And I just remembered one other question. So who’s going to grow up to be more of the techie and follow in your footsteps, your son or your daughter?

Speaker 1 | 59:42.593

Probably my daughter. I thought it was going to be my son, but my son is very retro. He’s, he’s. Working in radio now. He works for a local studio here, a local network here. So he’s a radio guy and he’s a vinyl guy. So he’s kind of retro when it comes to stuff like that. Yes. My daughter is the one that embraces technology. We just went to Disney and the amount of technology that we travel with is probably 70% me, 30% her at this point. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 60:19.934

man. How many battery banks do you guys take with you?

Speaker 1 | 60:23.555

Oh, my. I just bring big ones down. It’s a lot easier than dealing with the little ones.

Speaker 0 | 60:28.597

Oh,

Speaker 1 | 60:28.957

man.

Speaker 0 | 60:29.177

All right. Well, Joe, great conversation. Thank you very much for your time. And that’s it for another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.

Speaker 1 | 60:40.661

Awesome. Thanks for having me.