Speaker 0 | 00:09.648

Welcome back everybody to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today it’s Mike Kelly and we’re interviewing Adam Nold. Hey Adam, welcome to the podcast and why don’t you tell us a little about yourself.

Speaker 1 | 00:23.980

Hey Mike, yeah glad to be here. Yes, my name’s Adam. I’m currently the IT manager of an accounting firm, which was a startup about 10 years ago by Silicon Valley CEO type. And they didn’t have any internal IT until I came aboard a couple years ago. So it’s been a great experience. But my journey has been, you know, what I like to tell people is that I’ve always been into computers my whole life. When I was I don’t know, 12, 13 years old, and I’m 34 now, so about 22 years ago, back when computers weren’t as popular, and most people were on Windows 95, Windows 98. My mother, coincidentally, she actually worked at a job that had a computer at that time, and she would own her work laptop, and she would go out on trade shows during the weekend, but at night, she’d let me go on her work computer, and that’s when I started to get into things like the internet. And we can delve into that further if you want. Old school things like Yahoo Games, AOL Instant Messenger, IRC chat channels and things like that. I then just stayed on a computer, I’d like to say, throughout my whole life. I wasn’t as social as a kid as I am now. So that allotted me a lot of time to. be on computers when other people might be like out hanging out and having fun or something like that i was getting the way that i can kind of explain it best what i tell people is that a computer i almost see as an extension of myself like literally myself flows through my arms through my hands through my fingertips into the keyboard and i almost become one with the computer which is interesting how that you know the subject of like neural link and things like that are starting to come up in today’s popular culture. And with that, I’ve become one of the fastest typers in the world as well, and we can get into that too. But ever since then, you know, I don’t know how much you want me to go into the entire history right now, but I’ve essentially never stopped using a computer throughout my whole life, even before it was as fashionable as it is today.

Speaker 0 | 02:51.083

Yeah, see, we had such a, well… so I got about 20 years on you. So, you know, when, when I was growing up, I was telling somebody the other day, I remember standing in line at the local local supermarket so that I could throw quarters into asteroids. Cause it was the first arcade video game that was out there. And so that’s, you know, I, I spent a lot of time wandering the canyons of the city that I grew up in. So slightly different experience there. And I didn’t really pick up computers until somewhere a little earlier than you did, but around that same time. And like you were talking about IRC and AOL, and I’m thinking back to all of those CDs that they used to send us. And like wanting to make mobiles out of them and just hanging from the ceiling. Or I knew some people who had taken and replaced. not replaced, but covered the ceiling tiles in their office with those CDs. So it was like a little disco room, you know, and to just jump off into another weird thing or not, not necessarily a weird thing, but one of the things I noticed inside of your your history was that you had a small stint doing marketing. And I haven’t seen too much of that crossover between technology and marketing but then I also saw that in the time that you were doing your independent consulting that you were doing consulting for nightclubs so just being the partier that I used to be interested in what that was like doing IT for nightclubs but tell me a little about the marketing piece.

Speaker 1 | 04:41.370

Yeah so there was a point in my life where I had to move to Wisconsin, which is where I’m originally from. So, I grew up in Wisconsin. I spent a little bit of time in California, but that was short-lived. That was only a couple of years. I’ve gone full circle. I’m now back out in California. I’ve been for the last 10 years. But I had moved to Chicago and that’s when I had my first job in IT as the IT specialist at the Blommer Chocolate Company. But then there was a situation where I had to move back towards my home city. And really the only employment that I had found that I wanted to participate in at that time was this up and coming They were trying to be a competitor to Groupon back when Groupon was, you know, first coming out as well, although, of course, they were the established dominant market share. And I had actually found out, and this will be a common theme throughout my career and possibly it is with other people. I haven’t talked too much to other people about how they got the jobs that they got. But it was through a friend of a friend or actually. a mother of a friend who had a couple of people running this company for her. And they brought me on. And essentially what I was doing was being a salesperson, helping out this startup game, you know, its first initial batch of clients to get them off the ground. And then, of course, you know, this is also a theme throughout my life. I also did some semi-IT related work. You know, it was a small staff, only a couple of people, like five people or less. But if there was any technical issues that came up, I would have helped with that and things of that nature.

Speaker 0 | 06:37.034

Okay. Yeah. Was that with the chocolate company or was that one of the other ones?

Speaker 1 | 06:44.156

Oh, sorry. That was with, it was called Pointfall. But if anybody looks on my LinkedIn or happens to come across my resume or anything like that, I believe I put it as the neatest innovation group.

Speaker 0 | 06:58.364

That’s when I did the marketing. Yeah, that’s okay. Yeah, that was the entry that just piqued my curiosity a little bit, looking at that and seeing the marketing. I do have some people in marketing at our organization that are fairly versed in technology and leveraging that for the recruitment and just trying to utilize social media to provide access to. potential employees and internal customers. So tell me a little more about the history and the things that really, you know, you know what, go for it. Tell me about the speed, the speed typing.

Speaker 1 | 07:45.755

Yeah, so, and just let me know if you want to sort of dive into anything any further.

Speaker 0 | 07:51.300

Yeah, I’ll bug you and interrupt you, don’t worry.

Speaker 1 | 07:56.548

Yeah, so growing up on a computer, that’s, you know, I would say 70% of my free time, time that wasn’t spent at school or doing schoolwork was on a computer. And again, like I talked about before, getting into things like IRC channels and things of that nature. For a brief period of time, I got into, back when the, and I’m going to get into wrestling here for a brief second, but back when the WWE was actually the WWF. And at the same time that WCW was still around, so it was the two main wrestlers, the WCW, WWF, right around the time that Stone Cold and The Rock and Mankind and everybody were around the big show. I got into, and I don’t even know how this happened, but I got into communities back in the day when message boards were extremely popular. They were called Titantron videos. So when a wrestler comes out. And there’s a video playing on the big screen behind them. And it’s like clips of them and it’s into music and stuff. I got into a pretty large community where people collected those videos, made their own. It allowed me to get into some video editing very early on in my career. Getting into programs like Adobe Premiere or TMPG ENC, which I would imagine no one’s ever heard of if they weren’t a part of that community. And got into actually like… editing and making my own titantrons or like wrestling music videos for example and that’s kind of where IRC channels come into play too because a lot of communities back then were on those sorts of channels. I would say at about this time I kind of started to see that I was becoming a pretty fast typer and then interestingly enough I got into gaming, I think as any kid would when they’re on a computer. And I got into, I was introduced to Half-Life. which I’m sure you’re probably familiar with, but more specifically, it’s mod Counter-Strike. And I played it so much that I became a semi-professional Counter-Strike player. This was before Steam came about. Steam is like the main gaming engine nowadays, but before it was on the WON network, the WAN network, and I became a semi-professional. So, you know, me and… I was working at this Kentucky Fried Chicken in my hometown, and four other people and I all played Counter-Strike at a competitive level. Just somehow, coincidentally, we all met each other. I couldn’t tell you how it happened, but it happened. And we would travel around the upper Midwest region playing, and it was 5v5 tournaments. And Counter-Strike was known as being the very first… game to have serious competitive tournaments where people from all over the world would compete. And when I think the first was like a hundred thousand dollar pool prize, which, you know, 20 years ago, you know, who knows how much that’s worth now, but you’d have people coming in from Sweden, people coming in from, I don’t think the, the Asian countries were as into gaming back then, but certainly it was like. Usually America versus Sweden was in the finals every time. I never got to the level of like we won a $100,000 prize, which is why I say semi-professional. But we would place first or second at more regional tournaments back when land centers were a big thing. I’m sure you remember that. Everybody would get together at these big hallways of computers and they would game together.

Speaker 0 | 11:53.414

Yeah. Yeah, and I remember starting some of those things, the LAN parties where everybody would grab all of their stuff and set it all up over a weekend. Well, not over the weekend, but set it up on Thursday or Friday and then just play all weekend and then have to tear everything back down so they could take their computers back home.

Speaker 1 | 12:15.643

Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 0 | 12:17.884

Yeah, it teaches you a little bit about networking, doing that kind of stuff. But that was all still self-contained, too, most of it, versus online, which you guys were starting to do the online and the LAN.

Speaker 1 | 12:31.903

I do remember that now. Our team would have LAN parties on weekends, and we’d all be in somebody’s basement, and we’d all hook up to the same switch or router. And it was so great because—so this was back before—so when Counter-Strike and all these games, these Half-Life engine games, went to the Steam network. And— in mine and my contemporaries opinions, that’s when gaming on a computer switched from how good are you at the game to how good is your computer.

Speaker 0 | 13:02.467

How good is your equipment?

Speaker 1 | 13:04.308

Yeah, it really leveled the playing field. Unfortunately, you know, you’d have people like me that would scrimmage and practice five days a week. And all of a sudden, if we didn’t have the top of the line computers, then we weren’t going to be playing as good. as the people that just started playing more recently. But I do remember getting onto those LAN networks and our latency, our ping would be like between zero and five, which was just, it would make you feel good even seeing that because there was no delay whatsoever, as opposed to even hopping on like a local regional server, your ping could be anywhere from like 20, if you had cable at the time, or if you had dial-up or something, you’re looking at like 150 or 200.

Speaker 0 | 13:49.375

Oh, man. Yeah. And dial up, dial up for online gaming. Oh, God.

Speaker 1 | 13:55.576

Yeah. And I do stuff like that. I do remember speaking of which I my father has been a bass player his whole life in various bands that either he started or he’s been a part of a roadie as well for a few more popular bands. Like I think Motley Crue or something like that for a period of time. And when I when I was like around. this would have been middle school so like 14 15 probably something like that um that that’s when the uh napster and it’s spin-offs like imesh morpheus um kazaa all those things were around and uh i remember yeah yeah and uh or before it was bit torn it was uh direct plus plus i think is what the original thing was called um And I just remember when my dad would want me to download songs because they would like put songs onto a CD and then they would like play with them in their studio and everything so they could learn the songs. I do remember any time I would go on that, the phone wouldn’t work. And you have to get off the phone or you have to get off the internet if you want to use the phone, man. That seems like a world ago.

Speaker 0 | 15:11.685

Oh, it was a world ago, man. Yeah. And then the downloads that you’re talking about, even though they were only megs, they were taking a long time back then. You know, and you weren’t even talking about movies. You’re just talking about music.

Speaker 1 | 15:28.375

Yep. Yep. And this was even, I think, maybe MP3s were coming around, but I certainly remember WAV files were a lot more prevalent. And there were certainly no MP4 video files. They were all MPGs or MPGs and things like that.

Speaker 0 | 15:44.562

The search for the right codec.

Speaker 1 | 15:48.423

The DivX codec? The Xvid codec? Oh, my God. And that’s where this program that I had referenced before called TMPGENC. was this program, it was one of the first of its kind, where you could convert a video or audio file into any other codec that you could install onto your computer. I mean, this was like in the days of like Winamp 2.91 and things like that. So this is a while ago.

Speaker 0 | 16:17.401

Oh man, you’re bringing back so many different memories, like being able to skin Winamp and thinking that I was cool because I could skin it.

Speaker 1 | 16:27.080

Even trying to create, I don’t know if they call it radio stations or something on Winamp, and you would have the URL with the port number at the end, and I would share it with my friends on AOL Instant Messenger. Oh, and I do remember too, and then I’ll wrap up the whole teenage years or kid years thing, but I also remember being on, I don’t know if you remember either of these website builders, there was Max Pages and Angel Fire.

Speaker 0 | 16:55.736

I remember AngelFire, not MaxPages.

Speaker 1 | 16:58.296

Okay, yeah, basically the same thing. And I do remember a funny little tidbit about AngelFire. I remember, because I was kind of deep into it a little bit, that if you were to ever try to post, if you were to upload a photo onto your AngelFire server, the allotment that they would give you at the website, if you were to try to post that link anywhere else on the internet to show the picture, it would say, cannot view this picture.

Speaker 0 | 17:24.576

due to angel fire blah blah blah blah blah so i always thought that that was interesting as well that oh that brings me back to the days of having to go in and like setting up my own web servers and having to change the permissions file by file and you know yes you’d set it up for the directory but if you didn’t give the right permissions for the user the world and everybody um the uh nobody could um Nobody could get to that asset, the picture, whatever it was.

Speaker 1 | 17:59.152

And I would say, so I also, just as a little side note, I have a little theory about, because I was thinking back, you know, I said Windows 98 earlier. I have this little theory about Windows operating systems, and it’s proved to be pretty truthful that every other Windows operating system is very popular. And then the subsequent every other ones are very bad. So the way that I put it is like Windows 98. I don’t know. It might be my favorite one ever. It’s between 98 and XP. I don’t remember. But 98 was followed by like Windows 2000 NT, which wasn’t that popular. Then that was followed by XP, which everybody loved. But then what was XP followed by? Vista.

Speaker 0 | 18:44.808

Oh,

Speaker 1 | 18:45.948

and EMI. Yeah, so I think EMI came out at the same time 2000 did, I’m pretty sure.

Speaker 0 | 18:52.053

Yeah, because 2000 was more of the server line, and they were pushing that one more towards that group.

Speaker 1 | 19:00.519

Yep, yep. And EMI, and my father, he had this compact Rosario with EMI on it. It was what it was, but again, not the popular one. XP became popular. Vista was atrocious. It was that. And also during this time, I really got into, and this is probably why I say a computer is like an extension of me, I feel like. I would start to get into background processes that were running. There was this website. It was, I can’t believe I remember this, blackviper.net. And I hope that doesn’t go to anything crazy or scary nowadays since I’m saying that on the podcast. But back in the day, that would. somebody went through every single background process that was running on a Windows operating system, and he would create these custom profiles that if you wanted high performance, you turn these off. If you want just bare bones, you turn those off. Windows XP, you were able to get down to less than a dozen background processes running. As soon as Vista came out and forever after that, you couldn’t get below 40 background processes, and it just expanded more and more. afterwards but anyways So Vista, terrible. But then 7, again, 7 was like XP. Everybody loved 7. But then what came out after 7? Windows 8 and 8.1. Everybody hated that. The tiles and everything, my God.

Speaker 0 | 20:26.579

And I got to remind everybody, too, that, you know, some of the very first ones of these that you’re mentioning, we were still dealing with megabytes of RAM. 8 megabyte chips, 16 megabyte chips. You know, we thought we were styling when we hit 32 and 64 meg RAM chips.

Speaker 1 | 20:47.555

And it’s funny you bring that up. That reminds me that I had built my first computer ever at the age of 13. I have to admit, I didn’t use my dad did fund it, but I bought every single piece and I put all of it together. And I remember it actually not being that hard. Like, sure, you look at it and with no prior knowledge, it might be like what’s going on in there. But everything has its slot. Everything has its place. The only thing I remember having, and I got everything off of Newegg back when before Amazon was even a thing. And Newegg was like the place to go for it.

Speaker 0 | 21:25.173

Newegg or CompUSA if you had a brick and mortar in town.

Speaker 1 | 21:29.876

So we had, I don’t know how prevalent they were, but we had what was called an American. retest the midwestern thing um or of course like you know radio shack but that really wouldn’t have what you’re looking for um so the only problem i remember having and i had to bring it into like this local computer shop which i felt really bad about because i was very prideful and like created my own computer and everything and i’m like what’s going on here why am i getting this code you know like it used to be when your computer didn’t start you would get specific beeps and you had to figure out what those specific views meant and for my One of my two sticks of RAM, I didn’t push in hard enough because I think at the time I was thinking, man, if I push this in any harder, I’m going to crack the freaking motherboard.

Speaker 0 | 22:17.721

But you had to get that little lever to pop up to lock it into place.

Speaker 1 | 22:23.503

And I don’t even remember. Oh, no, I don’t remember what I was talking about beforehand.

Speaker 0 | 22:27.845

But when you’re talking about RAM, you were talking about Windows 8 and the tiles.

Speaker 1 | 22:33.527

Oh, sure. So. Windows may have, so yeah, then Windows 10 came out, again, just like 7 and XP. I think the general consensus is everybody really liked 10. At least it was a lot better than 8.1. But now Windows 11 comes out, and again, it’s that every other thing that’s happening here. Because Windows 11, you can change it around, but it defaults to the middle aligned taskbar. And you can tell they are trying to… round things out round graphics out they’re trying to be more uh mac appearance like so to speak and i i don’t know how i feel about it um and then of course they’re probably going to go to some sort of subscription model to operating systems if they haven’t already and

Speaker 0 | 23:21.062

uh yeah it’s just that every other thing that i noticed yeah um and me and my friends we always talked about how you know the first release you wanted to wait until at least the the second major update, maybe the third major update before you ever really wanted to adopt any of them. But you know what? I think you’re right with the, because once like 8 and 8.1, I’ve done my best to just forget about them, and we never migrated to those for the office. And then, you know, Vista and ME and, oh, man. Yeah, I think XP was one of my favorites too.

Speaker 1 | 24:01.267

So good.

Speaker 0 | 24:02.532

Yeah, yeah, most definitely. So I haven’t asked this question for a little while. Are you a geek or are you a nerd?

Speaker 1 | 24:12.319

How would you define the difference?

Speaker 0 | 24:14.320

Well, that’s that’s why that was leading into the question. Or are you just you just a person who likes tech and, you know, depending on how it’s defined, you could be either one.

Speaker 1 | 24:29.030

You know, I would. I just naturally tend towards more the nerd word than the geek word, because I think the geek at least to me implies some sort of awkwardness to it, like overzealous, whereas nerd to me just seems more like almost akin to an expert.

Speaker 0 | 24:51.190

Okay. Because I grew up in that time period where we had revenge of the nerds, and those were the guys with the pocket protectors and the pens and definitely kind of socially awkward. And then I’ve seen a couple of other definitions of geeks and nerds. My kids always told me that a nerd was somebody who specialized in any given subject. So you could be a… pokemon nerd or you could be a a marvel nerd and i always took geeks and nerds as being both it focused but but it’s just been interesting to see how those terms have changed over the years and and how you know it for me at the very least it was very much a social norm for either the nerds of my generation to not be health-centric. And I’ve noticed that the generation behind me, there are some really buff individuals, whether male or female, are very health-oriented IT people, which I think is a great thing. But, you know, they used to be like mutually exclusive.

Speaker 1 | 26:12.150

I’m glad you brought that up because I completely agree. And I’m glad it’s… especially in the last few years. And I believe the lockdowns over in 2020 and 2021, I think accelerated this where the stigma for IT, I think is all but eradicated. Now you’ll still see it in popular culture. Like I was watching this really, really good show called Barry on HBO, which for your listeners, if you haven’t watched it, the premise is it’s a hit man. that turns into uh he becomes an actor um and it’s it’s just really good but uh they have a couple of i.t guys trying to hack into this um i think it was like a like a recording device or something at the police department and they you know they you know it’s it’s a dark server room that they’re in like their hair is too long and scraggly and they’re they’re not really acting necessarily appropriate or socially aware and i believe that 20 years ago Absolutely. I believe even 10 or 15 years ago. Absolutely. That’s how it was. That’s kind of how I probably was. And I saw my coworkers where there was at least some sort of social awkwardness among almost everybody, which allowed them to become nerds and geeks in the field of IT because they can just kind of put away with all the social stuff and focus in on what they believe to be like logic and rationality. But, you know, I first started moving away from that. and feeling like, okay, I should be going to the gym. I should be watching what I eat. I should be reading, let’s say, self-improvement books. I should be going out and socializing, meeting girls, getting guy friends, things like that. And now when I speak with other IT people, I want to say most of them are like me now. Most of them are well-socialized. Most of them, you can tell that they’re well put together. They’re not, they have more emotional intelligence than I think IT departments in general have had in the past. And I think it’s a really good thing. And I think also working from home has also helped that because now we’re not spending that extra hour. You know, we’re not waking up at 6 a.m. so we can shower at 6.15 so we can be out the door at 7 with like a bagel and cream cheese. And then we have to work for eight hours because it’s going to take another hour in traffic to get home. Now we can, you know, we can wake up a little bit later. We can hop on a little bit more relaxed and we can work and take breaks throughout the day. And then there’s no stress about traffic on the way back. And I was working from home or work working remotely before the lockdowns happened on a hybrid basis. So it wasn’t new to me. But obviously, when everything got locked down and I was working for UCLA Health at the time. It just went fully remote. Now, I never stopped working during the lockdowns because all of my work could be done remotely.

Speaker 0 | 29:18.831

Yeah, see, most of my work has all been in office, in person. And even when the lockdowns happened, I am still in the transportation industry. And so, you know, we had to keep those trucks moving to keep. Food to everybody. And then once everybody started to get a little bored and started ordering things, we were busy because we were helping get all that stuff across the country to everybody.

Speaker 1 | 29:44.825

So thank you for that. I appreciate that.

Speaker 0 | 29:48.250

Thank you. It didn’t take very long being at home before my wife was like, it’s okay, you can go back to the office because she needed her space. And we had a full house at that point. And there was no, there was no single room that I could go into and have meetings like this. And the daily meetings and just constantly on the computer talking to other people where I can’t have somebody watching Jeopardy or… you know, days of our lives or something in the background. It just does not hold the same weight when you’re trying to have a meeting with your team and somebody’s and the dogs are barking.

Speaker 1 | 30:27.733

Yeah. So I’ll one up you in one specific regard here. So I was hybrid, but before the lockdowns, I was living on my own and my girlfriend at the time was living on her own. We moved in together on a Sunday. And then on that Monday, she came home and she said, everything’s being locked down. I was just let go of my job. So we went from living separately to living together to being around each other 24-7. Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 31:06.267

And I’ll leave you to finish that story if you want.

Speaker 1 | 31:09.408

Yeah. Well, I mean, she’s no longer my girlfriend. But yeah, it’s just it. but you know everybody can relate to that it’s tough you know i think it was just very call it coincidental or whatever that we move in and then literally the next day everything uh stops um so it was just you know an incidental situation i guess yeah

Speaker 0 | 31:34.378

that’s that’s just kind of amazing and what a shock to the system too i mean i know that we all kind of Heard rumblings and thought that it might be coming, but then when it just happened, it just seemed like it was, to me, it was like out of the blue, almost. But luckily, my team had been thinking about it and had made sure that we had one of the guys, one of the admins, he’s like, I’m enabling the Doomsday Protocol. And I’m like, go for it, dude, call it whatever you want, spin up the resources, make sure that we’re ready. And if everybody has to go. work from home, you know, by all means, have it ready. And like within a week, we were using it. And I was just like, oh, man, I’m so glad that, one, I was glad that we had already done a lot of migration into the cloud and were utilizing a lot of cloud services and remote applications so that we could provide those services to people remotely without having to bring everybody’s house into the home. or into the corporate network.

Speaker 1 | 32:43.016

Yeah. And to bring it full circle to back when I was a kid, that reminds me of when Y2K was coming up and I remember getting the CD and I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. It was a CD that was like Y2K preparation where I don’t know what it did. I was like 12, 11 at the time or however old I was. And it was. I mean, obviously the idea was that when all the system went from 99 to 00 for the last two numbers of the year, everything was going to crash. We were all going to die or something like that. And the CD was supposed to prevent that. I don’t know if it was like an operating system update or if it was for some sort of third party applications or something. But I do remember that now. I haven’t thought about that CD in 20 years.

Speaker 0 | 33:27.845

I haven’t. I haven’t thought about that CD. I don’t think I ever got the CD, but I do remember spending that night, 1999, looking out the window at midnight going, okay, where are the fires starting? And then waking up the next morning and everything was quiet and everybody was just chugging along. I don’t remember hearing any major disasters or even crashes due to the Y2K. ironically you know and speaking of things and disasters and stuff like that i started at this at the job that i’m at currently um a week before 9 11 so i was in my first week and and i’m listening to things going on about the the plane hitting the towers and then come into work and i’m getting my cup of coffee in the break room they’ve got a tv going see the second plane hit and you know i just did that the surrealness of all of that and to still be at the same organization 22 years later. It’s just amazing.

Speaker 1 | 34:36.799

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 34:38.592

So, you know, speaking of that, so I’ve got that perspective on the world. I’ve watched this organization grow from being a, I don’t even want to call it a small business, but, you know, it was a good-sized business for the area. But then we definitely went from the medium-sized, and we’re right on that verge of going into the enterprise by most every metric out there. But staying at a single organization through all of that growth. And then I noticed on your resume that you’re more of that generation that every couple of years you’re having a chance to change and grow and experience something new. You got any questions for me? And I wonder what it was like for you going through those kinds of changes.

Speaker 1 | 35:28.659

Yeah, I feel like maybe your generation, you guys had that upward mobility. Once you got the good jobs, you kept them.

Speaker 0 | 35:34.904

And then we had to keep bouncing around to be able to get to something or to have that increase.

Speaker 1 | 35:42.067

No, I mean, I would say like looking back on my resume, it was generally out of necessity that a job would be switched. And I think that necessity would usually be finding a better opportunity, whether that’s learning more, whether that’s more money. That. upward mobility and, you know, specifically like, so I worked at UCLA Health for a bit and UCLA Health, it’s state funded. And the sort of idea there is that the money’s going to be okay, but the benefits are really good. And the sort of person that that attracts is like a lifelong career UCLA Health person. They are totally fine with that. They’re going to, and I think Unfortunately for me, I don’t think I would go this route, but I would see the majority of people, they would live somewhere, let’s say, less expensive, like in the valley over the hill. Then they would drive that brutal 45 minutes to an hour every day to work, and then that brutal 45 minutes to an hour every day home, if not longer. That was not the life that I was looking for. You said it pretty good with, I’m the generation of dot, And I’ve talked to HR or people operations representatives about this and directors that the whole two years and then you find something new is so common. Now, of course, is that the best thing? Is that what HR representatives are looking for? Probably not. But so the way that my trajectory worked was, you know, before I had to go do the I moved back to the home state. and, um, and, uh, did the marketing thing. I, my first it job, I was, I was granted as a, um, internship. Uh, my mother was working at like a sister company to, to Blommer. It was like the same CTO at both companies or something like that. So they gave me an internship, even though I’m not sure I was even going to school at that time, but they had granted me an internship. Um, and that’s where I got introduced to the business side of. of it. Um, and I just, I remember being so, um, ignorant going into it, like thinking I knew what I was doing and I’ve been on a computer for 10, 15 years and not to the point of like, do you know who I am? But like, certainly I thought I knew more than I did. Like they would show me like, uh, you know, speaking of like max pages or angel fire, um, they would show me like their SharePoint website and I’d be like, yeah, I can, I can. build something better than that in a couple days and not really understanding the intricacies of what SharePoint even was. I had never even heard of SharePoint before. But there is where I learned to be remote support. I learned about RDP, remote desktop protocol. I learned about Active Directory. They had me in charge of the backups back when it was this semantic program. called Backup Exec. And it would run, you would set up schedules where it would back up data to physical tapes. And then there was this process where we would put these tapes into a lockbox and we would have specific times for I don’t know what the company was, like a gardener, some sort of like security company come and we would have to like hand them the locked lockbox and like sign it out and everything. And we would do that every day. It’d be, I think it was IG2 tapes or something like that. And then also just generalized, just help desk support for them. And, um… But then again, I had to move to my home state, did the marketing thing for a while. And then I had the opportunity to move out to California. Just a little side note about that. My brother had already been out here. Like I said, I lived out here for a couple years as a kid. When I went back, he stayed here. So fast forward 15 years, and we didn’t really like each other growing up, but fast forward 15 years. um he wanted me to come out and live with him and and get into the and you asked about this before so we’ll start talking about this now about the nightlife scene so he’s a dj not somebody you would the average person would know by name but somebody that if you were living in hollywood and you would go to what they call industry nights so like you’d be going to the club on like a tuesday or like a thursday and you know you just had that sort of autonomy where you could be out until two three in the morning because you didn’t have a nine to five your your source of income was elsewhere you’re there that rich parents or you were an actor or whatever it was going to college um so i came out to be a promoter for him we were going to do like a brother thing he’s the dj i’m the promoter um and during that time so he had gotten me a job at national credit advisors uh initially as a salesman which is what he was doing he’s been in sales his whole uh life and now he’s ceo of his own company and he’s actually one of my clients still um but uh he uh we we first got into sales and then when the company was brought under new uh management a new ceo was brought in they uh transitioned me over to technical support specialist where essentially the company was about I want to say a hundred employees, most of which were sales agents. And the IT department was the CTO, me, and a coder that was coding some of their proprietary software that was integrated into their Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Okay. And that is where I really expanded my knowledge of… Because with Blommer, you know, there was… four plants four chocolate plants but i had a very limited role there was you know a couple thousand employees i believe but i had a very limited role now it was like if the cto wasn’t doing it i was doing it because the coder was just coding that he wasn’t going to help somebody with a desktop issue he wasn’t going to uh help trouble directory and networking and phones and exactly that’s where i got it and yeah so for phones i got into like the short appliances were a big thing. So the shoreline appliance, the Barracuda web filter and backup appliances, the Sonic NSA firewall appliance. We had a small server room that had, I don’t know, I want to say about a dozen appliances and servers.

Speaker 0 | 42:47.379

The server room, you mean the closet that was now a data center?

Speaker 1 | 42:52.700

You know what? I would say it might’ve been a closet. But it would have been about twice as big as anything that I would call a closet today. But I bet that’s probably still a closet.

Speaker 0 | 43:05.504

Yeah, but I mean, so what I’m joking, thinking of the areas where we will stick IT and then bolt on all of the things necessary to try to keep it running. So typically like that closet environment. And then at some point you suffer some kind of a heat event. So now they start piping in. So AC specifically for that one room, and then you add security, and you add batteries, and you just keep bolting on stuff instead of it being a purpose-built data center to provide that service 24-7. What things helped you, especially with this trajectory and the changes that you were going through, how did you work your way off of that? help desk? And I’m sure this time where either the CTO or you were doing it, because that gave you that jack-of-all-trades experience. But what helped get you off the help desk and start moving more towards leadership?

Speaker 1 | 44:16.478

Very good question. And it’s probably a variety of factors. I think at a very base level, I was always interested in the infrastructure. And I always saw self-dust as a means to an end. I was never… If I was ever passionate about like hopping on an RDP to help somebody with their printer settings, it was probably not a very extended period of time. I just, even the idea of IT infrastructure and architecture excites me. It’s something that I’ve always liked doing. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I mean… Going back to when I was very young with the Windows operating system background processes, you would never deal with that in the help desk situation. Well, definitely not anymore, maybe back then. I think that there’s that, but I also think that, and maybe this is IT specifically, or maybe I’m just short-sighted because I’ve generally always been in IT, but I’ve been just simply put in positions where I was able to learn more. And I was held in those positions generally until I became pretty proficient in everything. Because there’s certainly been times where I’ve wanted to leave certain roles and pursue greater opportunities too quickly. Just thinking like, all right, I know everything. It’s time for me. There’s CEOs out there that are 22 years old and I’m older than that. So I should be continuously just. you know moving on to more money and more responsibility and stuff but for me the reality of the situation is if i don’t really know everything um i shouldn’t be moving or trying to move on to the next step it might just be a hamster in a cage just spinning that wheel um and i think my current boss uh explained it to me in a way that was good for me to understand which was you know um it’s best to be qualified for the position you’re looking for, rather than assuming just based on tenure that you’re going to get that position. So if you’re trying to move from a manager to a director and you think you deserve it just based on tenure and sort of the responsibilities you do, that’s one thing, but to actually write down a list of director responsibilities and qualifications and then looking through each bullet point and being like okay am i actually qualified for that or even better do i have prior proven experience in that responsibility or qualification you know what’s holding me back and that kind of took me down a little bit of a rabbit hole when it came to you know when i would search for jobs on linkedin and i would get into the skills that get shown on LinkedIn and aligning my skills with the skills that people post jobs for. And then, you know, just literally going into, we’ll just stick with the director example, going into open director of IT positions and going through each of those qualifications and requirements. And you can even just look at, let’s say, a dozen and then see, OK, what are the biggest common denominators? that they’re asking for that I am not qualified for? Is it AWS? Is it integration? You know, what is it that I don’t have? Because generalized experience and generalized certificates, in my experience, are only going to get you so far. They’re not going to bring it home.

Speaker 0 | 48:08.185

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I love that approach, though, too, of taking a look at… the position that you want going and looking at multiple documents that people put out for said position from different industries but for that same I mean IT is IT across all of these but being able to look at that and find the different common requirements and that self-evaluation because that self-evaluation is critical. You’ve got to be able to look at yourself honestly and and know where your strengths where your weaknesses and you know how each of those can be the reverse too because every time i think something’s a strength like i can find it being one of my weaknesses at the same time um so along these experiences and everything that you’re doing to grow um you find yourself at a startup you find yourself at a startup and being the only um it person there Now, that was the startups over 10 years old and you’ve helped them grow. How big is the team currently?

Speaker 1 | 49:23.113

For just my department specifically?

Speaker 0 | 49:26.015

Yeah, or well within IT or what you would consider the group that you help lead and guide.

Speaker 1 | 49:33.800

Okay, yeah. So just at a higher level picture, the company itself has about 250 employees. I would say two-thirds of that is located in the Philippines. And my team essentially is me and we have an MSP, a managed service provider, two guys. It’s just two guys that own their own shop in Indianapolis, Indiana, that actually came about through… an acquisition that we had so before i i came so the company was started initially as there was this girl her name was jess ma she’s been in you know i uh fortune cover of fortune magazine a couple of other maybe forbes 40 under 40 or something or 30 under 30. um inc magazine i think she made the covers that of that as well her first big accomplishment as far as as i know was creating this I think she wanted it to be a competitor to QuickBooks or NetSuite or something like that. And it was called Indinero. And that was the idea of it for a few years. And then I believe somewhere along the line, they saw a better business model in simply providing different types of accounting services to different businesses. I think primarily like medium-sized businesses, but maybe small and large as well. Don’t quote me on that. And They decided to start acquiring other accounting firms and picking up, you know, the talent there and getting the client list and everything. And they acquired, I think, four or five different companies. And one of them was from Indiana. And they had been using this MSP already. The MSP’s name is Bionic Cat. And I can’t say enough, I cannot say enough good things about them because they are just… You know, and I hope some people see me like this, even though I’m not in a help desk capacity anymore. But anytime, anytime I speak to them, it is just like you almost want something to go wrong with your computer so you can talk to these guys. They are just so personable as well as so good at what they do that they are just like the perfect IT person. So what they do for me is they handle 95, 99% of the help desk requests. They’ll bring me in if it’s something that’s out of their purview or they need approval on, as well as they’ll be my project resource as well. So I’ll generally be like the main IT point of contact, project manager, project doer. But then if there becomes more monotonous or redundant work that needs to be done that I just. it wouldn’t make sense for me to do. I’ll give it to them. So that’s the US side. We generally only take care of US things, although we have globalized the department, but there’s still a little bit of separation in practical matters. And then on the Philippine side, I have one employee who takes care of, I would say the best way to explain it is uh philippines um onboarding processes off boarding processes technical related um and uh any help desk requests that he gets um and that that’s kind of to summarize the team currently okay

Speaker 0 | 53:06.093

what did what do you think helped get you to the leadership position here so they uh i think the best way i can explain it is they initially brought me in

Speaker 1 | 53:20.808

And again, so they’ve also gone under management change while I’ve been there, and I’ve been there for about a little bit under two and a half years at this point. And they brought in a new CEO, Jess has gone on to start creating other companies and things of that nature. And when I was originally brought on to the HR department, or they call it the People Ops department, I believe the idea was they originally brought me on to replace. bionic cat but as soon as i showed up i knew that that was not going to be the case um in my own opinion and i had to persuade the person that hired me and the people that fired me that that was going to be the case that they were looking for someone to do not only everything that the msp was doing so like the help desk and all that sort of stuff but also the high level stuff and like the stuff that i do right now the project management the direction the strategy you preventative work. They wanted somebody that was going to be able to do all of that at the same time and the reality of the situation is for a company of that size. It’s impossible for one person to be able to do all of that without outsourcing something. And honestly, that showed when I first came into the company. There was so much as an MSP, the relationship was they will put out fires and they will do assigned tasks. There was no one at the company that had any sort of… IT leadership or management experience. So there was no preventative work getting done. So as just an example of that is, you know, they use Google and the Google accounts were severely over bloated. I think we had like between 50 to 150 Google users with a license attached to each that were not being used. So we’re talking. thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and getting stuck into these annual contracts where they allow you to add licenses, but they don’t let you take away those licenses, which I’ve never liked that model. And, you know, it is what it is. That’s what a lot of companies do nowadays, especially big companies, big vendors. But I then essentially got brought in to create and I sort of made my own job title or job role at this point. establishing policies and procedures, doing preventative work, starting to actually bring a sense and a semblance of project management and reducing redundancies and third-party apps that we didn’t need because the same features existed in other apps that we were also using and just bringing a sort of cohesion to the department that it never had before because I was literally the first internal IT person they ever had.

Speaker 0 | 56:15.694

So did you have the… the PMP certificate prior to this or did you get it while you were there?

Speaker 1 | 56:22.578

Yeah. So I’ll, I’ll go into the certs here. Um, so when I was at UCLA health, this was sometime before the lockdowns happened. They reached out. I somehow saw like a email, a marketing email that they sent internally about they do a PMP bootcamp, uh, that is actually hosted and done at UCLA by someone that’s employed by UCLA. and it’s like a months-long boot camp. You’re there, I think it was once or twice a week for a couple of hours at a time. And I had always, there was a certain point. So when I was at UCLA Health, I was essentially a desktop support person for the first half of my tenure there. And then the second half, I was an identity access management manager. So, you know, creating accounts, deleting accounts, provisioning access, things like that, really just being an active directory all the time. And but during my desktop support role, I became a project leader. And it was really my first introduction into like real like real project, especially on an enterprise level. And I got really close with the project managers there. They actually had a team of. specifically IT project managers. And I really, really liked all of them. And I really, really liked everything that they did. And UCLA had its own project management software that I was given access to and training videos on and things like that. And since then, I’ve used, I’ve tried different things like Asana or ClickUp or right now, I actually, I subscribe to Microsoft Project because I just. I love it so much and I like Gantt charts and for whatever reason I just really I liked the idea of of projects and maybe that’s because I have sort of like an organizational organizing type mind and I like that idea of projects that begin have a middle and have a finish so I signed up for the PMP I had to convince my superiors that you know I wanted to do this and it’s in line with my um my goals and my career and it’ll help my current position and etc. So I got accepted into it. Halfway through, everything shuts down, but they were gracious enough to continue it online, which they had never done before. So they did that. I studied ferociously. I re-read or re-watched every video because they would record all the two, three, four-hour-long sessions. They actually might have been full day sessions now that I recall. So I apologize for a bad memory. But I literally had to rewash them all. I did so many practice tests. And on the day of, I ended up passing the exam. It’s a grueling like. I don’t know, I think it’s like a 200 question for our test, I think.

Speaker 0 | 59:33.224

Yeah, it’s a tough one.

Speaker 1 | 59:34.665

It’s a tough one. I passed first time, I was so thankful for that. And then right away, I decided to go after my CSM, my Certified Scrum Master, a girl that I knew that was in desktop support at UCLA Health. I think I saw it in her LinkedIn. that she had CSM after her title. So I asked her and she introduced me to this guy that does classes and he’s very good. I think his name is like Giori or something like that, but he’s got like his own website and he gets a lot of clients every single term. But it was, I believe it was like a two or three day, all day class. And then it included the exam. You literally took the exam either on the last day or the day after. And luckily, I passed that the first time as well. And I will say this, just so I don’t puff my own resume up or anything like that. I did pursue Microsoft certificates, specifically MSCA, something like that, the Microsoft Server Administration. I can’t remember exactly the acronym. But I failed that. And I might have done another one and failed. I can’t remember. But what I took away from those was that the Microsoft exams, for me at least, proved to be pretty difficult, especially when I didn’t pay for an instructor-led live class, whether any person or remote. I was just going to courses on. like a course website, like Udemy or something like that, where it was geared towards the exam, but just the fact that it was a do-it-yourself-at-your-own-face, I somehow could not take full advantage of that. It wasn’t how I learned ever. And since that point, I’ve taken that into account, and I’ve never done that again. I’ve never tried to pass an exam just from taking courses by myself on a course website. I will always opt… to pay more money and to go after the live instructor-led classes. And it has proven to be without fail for me, works every time. It did with the PMP, it did with the CSM, the Certified Scrum Master. And then about a year after that, I went after the ITIL certification. I was reaching out to a couple of IT gurus that I found on the internet. I wanted to see if I could pay to have some IT mentorship that could help me with my career. And I found a bunch of people and I was also talking to my previous directors and CIOs and CISOs and all that. And a common denominator that I was hearing was get your ITIL if you’re looking for certs. That’s the next thing you want to get. You get your ITIL. They’re essentially, the ITIL is the, what was it called? The table legs. of being an IT leader or something like that. And I paid, I think I went through global knowledge for the ITIL certification, just the ITIL 4 Foundation. I think that that was also like a three, four day course, all day course for all the days. And again, CERT exam came with that. And I also passed that on the first go around. I really, really, really liked ITIL. I see ITIL as almost the, and I’m sure you might agree, the PMP for IT. The knowledge, because PMP, you know, the majority of it is still about, you know, they’re still talking about construction and manufacturing and stuff like that. And if you want all that, a good amount of that information, but IT specific. you go for your ITIL. And just to wrap up here on the certs, there’s two different ways that I might go. I might go cybersecurity, get my CISSP, I think is the acronym, or CISM, or I was talking to a previous boss of mine, a previous CTO, and he said, go after your AWS stuff and get that under your belt. So… Right now, I haven’t decided yet which one I’m going to go after first.

Speaker 0 | 64:12.235

Yeah, both of those. I mean, I would suggest that you do a little bit of soul searching and decide, you know, are you wanting to go towards. infrastructure are you wanting to get into the security because both of those are huge areas of of opportunities but they’re they’re there’s some bleed between the two but they’re definitely very distinct and i think once you pick a path it it’s it won’t be impossible to go come back and go get the other one also but i think that you Once you get bit by whichever bug it is, you’ll immerse yourself in that world and it’ll take another decade before you come back up for breath. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 65:02.113

I think my goal, my ultimate goal is to hopefully become a chief information officer somewhere. At this point, the industry nor the company size doesn’t necessarily matter as much to me. And so I guess the way that I’m looking at the certs is if I need to specialize in something to reach that goal, I’m fine with doing. But that is still the ultimate goal to to have sort of the a good amount of knowledge in every facet in order to be a well-qualified chief information officer.

Speaker 0 | 65:40.710

Yeah. And both of those will serve you well on on that path to a CIO. Having both of those, of course, will serve you a little better than having a major amount of either one. And a major amount of the cybersecurity stuff is going to send you more towards the CISO versus CIO. So as you look at where you are today, I mean, you’re a good ways into your career. What would you start? trying to provide for advice to somebody in their

Speaker 1 | 66:17.577

20s who’s coming to you and hey man how do i how do i get off of the help desk how do i move forward what what would you give them yeah so in my experience um i’ve been fortunate where some of my jobs have been begotten from people that i knew whether it was relatives or otherwise so i was fortunate there um the jobs that I had gotten that were not like that, were not nepotism related or anything of that fashion, were me hitting the ground running. And I think my dad said it best to me when I was a kid. And he said, looking for a job is a full-time job. So in my opinion, I knew I had to have my resume completely. And at this point, in today’s day and age, I suggest paying somebody to do your resume for you on Upwork. found a girl that’s extremely good. Even if you search it on Upwork, she’s probably going to be the number one for career resume writers. Very, very good. And I think that that’s important to do that. The money is well worth it. And start applying at jobs that you’re looking for relentlessly. And I’ll even say this. I was looking for, when I did a job hunt a couple of years ago, I was getting to… second and third interviews, panel interviews, almost every single time. I don’t even remember a time where I did not. And then a more recent job hunt, I never got past the first. And I don’t see that as a reflection on me. I see that as we are experiencing a very, very tight labor market. Fortunately, and there’s websites out here that track that. when it comes to the layoffs that have been happening for the last six months to a year and continue to happen um it’s not directly hitting i.t for the most part where i see it getting directly hit is engineers software engineers developers as well as um project not managers like it might have been no it wasn’t project managers or something else private related but i haven’t seen cios directors infrastructure. I haven’t seen specifically IT hit too hard. So moving out of help desk, yeah, you have to figure out what it is that you’re looking for as well. What’s your goal? I knew my goal was going to be, has been CIO, God, probably since my first day at Blommer Chocolate Company, you know, and I’ve slowly and steadily gotten there. One last thing I will say about that, and specifically when it comes to switching jobs, is that you don’t want to be somebody that resents the place that they work at. And it can be easy to… have that happen especially in a help desk role when you feel like you’re either undervalued and or underpaid and i remember even this one uh sort of like course class uh that they were having us take at ucla uh for it um that so and i have no data to back this up but they said in in their in their textbook that i.t desktop support in general suffers from depression and drug abuse almost at levels of no other position, no other white collar work. And I found that it’s very interesting. And I equate that with probably just being frustrated or just having to deal with people that might not be technologically savvy, like as a small example before this podcast today. So I have my main. W2 Indinero job, but then I also have a couple of other clients on the side as well. And I had enabled mandatory two-factor authentication at one of my clients for their Google. And they have like 20, 30 employees. One employee was swearing up and down that they enabled two-factor authentication, which they did not. And they also couldn’t even get into their account because they were typing in the wrong password over and over again. even when I was resetting their password, they were continuing to enter in the wrong password. And I just had to get onto a Zoom with them and just do it for them. And sometimes that’s gonna happen. Sometimes that’s the best way to go about it so you don’t get frustrated. It’s just sometimes do the work for the person because at the end of the day too, the thing to remember is that these people that are reaching out for help desk support, they might not be as technologically savvy as you are. Most likely they won’t be. It’s almost like if you have a question about HR or sales and you go to their department and they get all frustrated because you don’t know the ins and outs of their department, that’s the way you got to look at it. You don’t want to be getting upset because people don’t understand computers at the level that you do.

Speaker 0 | 71:39.343

Yeah. Yeah, even just understanding what and why MFA or two-factor is important and why it’s so needed today. And or, you know, trying to even teach people what the thought of a no-trust network is or a zero-trust. Yeah. It’s one of the reasons that this podcast exists is so that you and I can talk to each other and we both understand the technology at that level. And, yeah. I’m assuming a majority of our listeners get it at that level too, but it also helps us try to help those guys on the help desk to set down the aggregation and be able to find a way into something that they love or an aspect of. technology that they enjoy and that feeds that inner need for, I find it when I solve the problems or solve the puzzles, you know, somebody brings me, oh man, I can’t figure out how to do this. And I’m like, well, you know, if we turn this one this way and we do this with that piece and we grab these wires, it’ll do this, watch. And they’re like, holy cow. And I would have never thought of it if they hadn’t brought me the problem.

Speaker 1 | 73:07.169

Yeah. And at the same time, too, and I’ll forget this. Just remember, you’re living in today’s day and age. And if you’re a desktop support representative and I don’t want to I don’t want I don’t want to take it for granted or anything. But you have a nice, cozy job compared to 90 percent of the country of the country or the world. You can be outside right now roofing for minimum wage. You could be working at a sewage treatment center. There’s a million jobs that if you weren’t doing what you’re doing right now, might prove to be harder and more stressful and not leading in the direction that you want your life to go. So I know at times it can be tough if you don’t feel like there’s a way out and you’re just stuck in your role. And I’ve felt that. Many times, probably in almost every role, that there’s going to be periods of time. And by periods of time, I mean, you know, maybe weeks on end where it’s like, I don’t like what I’m doing or I don’t like my employer or I’m worth more or I should already be past this by now. And then all of a sudden that that yang turns into a yang, that pendulum swings to the other side. And all of a sudden something comes up, whether it’s a project or some sort of acknowledgement. And it’s like, oh, that’s right. I do like what I do and I do like the direction I’m going in and I do like my employer. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. So I would say, and this goes without saying, probably in today’s day and age as well, do not quit anywhere unless you have something else lined up. And one last thing I’ll say, and I’ll borrow this from, I think Grant Cardone, he’s a self-improvement author and he wrote a couple books about the… I think it’s the 10X effect. And I was listening to an audio book of it, and it really struck me in many areas of my life where he said, simply, if you’re thinking about where you want to go, and you think about the effort that needs to be put into it, you better put a 10X on that effort if you want to get to where you want to go. We as people just for some reason undercut the amount of effort that we think needs to go into anything. And whether that’s… Because in social media and in TV, you just see these people that seemingly did nothing and became superstars, even though in the background they were working, getting their 10,000 hours in to become an expert before they ever achieved any sort of level of success and mix that with luck. So just, you know, figure out your goal and then just assume that you’re going to have to put in. And I think he uses 10x just to be over the board to kind of allow you to understand the concept. Ten times as much effort as you think it’s going to take to become that IT manager, director of IT, CIO, and then see where your career leads you. Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker 0 | 76:08.678

So this is a part of the show where is there anything you want to promote? You got any websites or any? Any side hustles that you want to promote to the world or bring up and get out to that wider audience?

Speaker 1 | 76:23.108

Yeah, I have a side business. It’s called Technology Biased, B-I-A-S-E-D. And the website is technologybiased.com. And it’s generalized IT services. I have about… a half a dozen clients right now and at least at this point unless i get overrun with calls from this podcast or something like that um you will be dealing with me directly i don’t currently outsource many things unless it’s something that’s so far out of my expertise that it wouldn’t make sense for me to help like for example i was helping somebody with a uh at a university recently with a sequel issue and just it happened to be throughout my career that I never dealt with SQL. So it didn’t make sense for me to try to learn something and fake it. I’d rather connect you with, you know, bring on a contractor to do a little bit of the work and then, you know, say bye to the contractor and then we continue on with our relationship.

Speaker 0 | 77:28.253

And what was that URL again?

Speaker 1 | 77:30.354

Yeah. So technologybiased.com. And I’m not going to lie, this might, this will probably make it look bad, but. I believe I need to do something with the domain registrar in order to have the website show. I think there was some sort of issue recently when I switched from, what did I switch from, like Bluehost over to my own. And it didn’t carry the WordPress site properly. So it might not resolve right now. But since we’re doing this podcast, I don’t know when it’ll air. But I’ll be sure to work on that and get that up pretty soon.

Speaker 0 | 78:05.832

Yeah, it won’t take too long. So you might want to spend a little bit of time tonight. It’ll be a couple of days, but everybody that’s listening to it, of course, it’s already posted. So beautiful. It’s working by now.

Speaker 1 | 78:19.704

Yeah. I mean, I will do everything in my power to have a show by the time this podcast is.

Speaker 0 | 78:27.211

All right. Well. It’s been a great discussion, Adam. You know, you took me in a slightly different direction than most people do, but I enjoyed it. And it was fun hearing about the history and where you’ve gone and what you’ve done with technology. And it’s nice to meet somebody that is one of the fastest typers in the world.

Speaker 1 | 78:45.641

Oh, yes. Right. And to that note, the fastest I’ve ever typed, my record is 180 words a minute. So three words a second. But my average, like if I go on type racer.com, which is just a simple, like, I think it’s like a flash-based thing where they link you up with a couple of other people that are driving race cars and stuff. I average about 110 words a minute at about 99% accuracy.

Speaker 0 | 79:14.883

Nice. I have not tried that, and I’m sure I’m nowhere near that. I’m still hunting and pecking, man. After 30-plus years doing this.

Speaker 1 | 79:25.496

I appreciate it. It was definitely a pleasure, and I hope we can do it again soon.

Speaker 0 | 79:30.244

Me too. Thank you very much, sir. You have a wonderful day.