Speaker 0 | 00:00.996
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have on the show, Roland Kornblau. And this is another public sector show today. So there’s a big difference when we talk about money and numerous other things of IT directors that are in either mid-market space, in business, or in non-profit slash public sector. But without any further ado, Roland. Welcome to the show. Why don’t you just give us a brief rundown of where you’re at right now and maybe the size and expansiveness of the network and people that you manage.
Speaker 1 | 00:39.564
Sure. Thanks. Glad to be here. So I’m a director of technology for a school district in Southern California. We have 17 locations, 14 schools total. The other locations are like district office and such. We have about 8,500 students, about 1,000. roughly staff. My staff is about 10 folks plus myself and voice over IP, telephone system. We’re doing a bunch of things. I think we have about 6,000 Chromebooks and miscellaneous hardware. So a pretty good operation.
Speaker 0 | 01:16.474
6,000 Chromebooks is a pretty big deal. So now… Of those 6,000, I’m assuming that a large group of those are used by the students or how, like, what’s the breakdown there of like people that actually, I don’t know if you’d call them employees, government employees, whatever you’d call, you know, teachers, et cetera. But what are the majority of the Chromebooks for?
Speaker 1 | 01:37.344
Sure. So we have, we call them certificated staff and classified staff. So the teachers are certificated. All the rest of the folks are classified. And the Chromebooks, so we’re not one-to-one. We have about 8,500 students. We’re almost… we’re trying to get to the one-to-one. So the Chromebooks are mostly for students. I do have a couple of my schools that use Chromebooks for staff, but mostly staff use regular PCs and Mac laptops and desktops. So mostly we, and we do have a spattering of iPads in there as well.
Speaker 0 | 02:09.977
So, I mean, honestly, the last time that I was in real school, you know, I had a DVD slash, no, I didn’t have a DVD. I had a CD-ROM drive. okay so and then it was you know number two pencils uh k through 12 which is really the the the realm that you’re in so how does that work i’m just you know i haven’t been into like a school in a long time is there just a pile of computers sitting at the door when you walk in like how do you guys what are we utilizing these for on a daily basis sure
Speaker 1 | 02:38.915
so hopefully uh we’re utilizing them daily for instruction um the the classes have i mean your papers everything’s basically online now right so We write papers on them. The students take tests on them. So testing, of course, is a large requirement for online so that the students can know where they’re at. But from day-to-day operations, they do anything from writing papers to doing homework to doing research, publishing, different software things. I mean, we’re a K-12, so… We run the gamut all the way down from transitional kindergarten, which is right below kindergarten, all the way up to high school. And in fact, we have adult school and continuation school as well. So you name it. Anything that you can do now, whether it used to be with pencil and paper, you can do on a computer, bigger, better, faster, maybe a little bit more dangerously. Good story about what you mentioned with number two pencil is my first school district that I started in was actually the school district that I graduated from. So that was the oddest feeling in the world, going to a room that used to have typewriters, which I learned to type on, and now going back in there and seeing computers. So that was, yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 0 | 04:05.539
That’s, I can’t imagine working in the school that I had so many good and bad memories from.
Speaker 1 | 04:14.012
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 04:14.192
it was a good experience.
Speaker 1 | 04:16.533
Going back and what you notice is everything looks so much smaller the bigger you get, I guess, because everything when you’re younger and hopefully shorter and smaller. I mean, I really have to say.
Speaker 0 | 04:27.140
It seems huge. I understand.
Speaker 1 | 04:29.461
It seems huge back then and then going back and go, wow, this really doesn’t seem that far and why did it take me that long to get to class?
Speaker 0 | 04:36.726
Crammed us all in here. This is kind of off subject of what we were talking about the other day, but I’m really fascinated. Like how do you manage that many devices and how often do they break? And I’m just curious, these Chromebooks, are they fairly durable? Or I mean, you got 6,000 of them. So how many come in a week?
Speaker 1 | 04:53.433
Sure. So most of the schools are pretty good. They manage them on-site. We manage them through G Suite, which is a Google administration tool. And because they’re basically a browser, right, so you can’t really install anything on them overall. And so they’re not that terribly difficult to manage. They do break. The keys do pop off. They do get dropped. But surprisingly enough, if the students are on staff or on subject, then they actually use them and they want to make sure and they take care of them because they want to make sure they’re going to be functioning for the next time that they need to use them. Right. Because all the curriculum is there and everything on them. So they take they take pretty good care of them, actually. I mean, mishaps do happen. I would say, you know, we’re below 10 percent right now in the break fix arena. So. But having, because they’re just a browser, we really don’t deal with viruses like on normal computers, if you will. We don’t have to deal with, you know, corruption of software as much, different things. So management is, I mean, that and of course, I have a team of 10 because I couldn’t do it by myself.
Speaker 0 | 06:09.448
Nice. So of all the grades, who, which grade? And there may not be an answer for this, but which grade is the most, I don’t know, tricky or which grade would you say is the smartest with technology in being able to get around the firewall, so to speak?
Speaker 1 | 06:33.941
Sure. So the, I think my high schoolers are the most ingenious. I’ll use that word because they have a lot of time. They’re really sharp. I mean, you know, all of our students are a lot sharper than we give them. credit for. And they have a lot of time and a lot of friends in their network to, you know, bounce ideas and try different things on. So I think there, if you want to use the word challenging, but I like to use, you know, we learn the most from our high school students with respect to, you know, how to run our networks and how to tighten down security and how to keep everybody safe.
Speaker 0 | 07:09.674
So we, you, last time we talked, you had a very, I would say. I don’t know if I say like life altering or very, just a very unique special perspective when looking at your students. And you said, you know, we spend too much time teaching them and not enough time learning from them. So maybe just, maybe just speak about that for a few minutes because you kind of were hinting at that just now with, you know, you know, we can learn a lot from them because a new generation, you know,
Speaker 1 | 07:46.025
finding ways to you know break things or get around stuff but you know like talk to me about that sure so we do we i mean we’re in education so our job is to educate the students but they’re really really sharp you know um i’ll start with uh you know my story that i like to tell is for my school district when i first started you know we had a student that was kind of in the library by himself you know off task i give the time frame too by the way because this is a this is interesting that like yes so this was this was probably in the early 90s right so the the internet and filtering and hacking and everything was in its infancy um so yeah about early 90s i don’t recall the exact year um so we any we’re looking we’re monitoring the network and we see this one student that’s uh you know off task navigating to somewhere they really shouldn’t be And of course the first instinct for everybody is shut them down, go catch them, go discipline them. And I kind of took a different take. It was my location. And
Speaker 0 | 08:51.361
I went. First of all, was it just you by yourself then? Or like you said, because you’re talking we like there’s a group of people like, hey, shut them down, go discipline them. But like, who were those people? Like who’s saying that? I just want a good idea of like, you know, what’s going on here in the early
Speaker 1 | 09:06.193
90s. So this school district was. About 20,000 students I would say. So we had a nice team of about 15 people in the tech department. Five of us, the district was split up into quadrants. So you had four high schools and all the subsequent middle schools and elementaries that fed into those high schools. I was in charge of one of those quadrants along with another colleague of mine. There happened to be about five people in the room when we were monitoring toward the middle of the day. And when I say we, I would be talking about myself, my colleague, and I would include the principal and dean at that point because they’re in charge of discipline. So we noticed the student. He was where he basically shouldn’t be. We locked to the computer and then we went to the school to figure out what happened. Well, you know, everybody wants to stop it, discipline the student, you know, call the parents, whatever. I took a little bit different approach and I went to the principal and said, do you mind if I talk to the parent first and ask a couple questions? See if I, you know, see if I can get permission to maybe buy the kid lunch and find out what’s going on. You know, it was kind of interesting because that’s the same, you know, like a dog kind of looks at you kind of sideways when he doesn’t really understand what’s going on. And I felt that same kind of pressure from the principal and the parent on the phone, you know, kind of like, why do you want to take my son to lunch? What’s, you know, what’s going on? I said, well, because I want to find out what he did, you know, and again, that same sideways look of, you know, you should know because you’re the expert. And in fact, you know, IT changes so often, even back then, you know, we can never learn it all. We’re always learning. And so I basically went, I bought us some wonderful deep fried burritos for 75 cents a piece. So you know how long ago that was.
Speaker 0 | 10:59.831
Sounds great right now, by the way. A deep fried burrito right now sounds really good to me.
Speaker 1 | 11:06.633
It was really good. You know, so we were chatting and basically the student basically told me everything he did. You know, he was proud of it. And as well, he should be because he outsmarted, you know, half of my team, including myself. And so he told us everything he did. He basically tunneled, created a tunnel, a V tunnel, T tunnel, whatever was popular at that time. He bounced off of his home network and got around our filter and got out on the Internet, you know, wide open to do whatever he wanted to do.
Speaker 0 | 11:37.605
So what did he do at home? Did he have to leave like a dial up modem on or something at home? I mean, I’m just trying to think, like, what would you do then?
Speaker 1 | 11:44.230
He was at the time because I don’t believe I think, you know, AOL was still in its. in its heyday then and so I don’t really think we had anything close to a cable modem or…
Speaker 0 | 11:53.709
Just wondering what he did like before he left home like dialed up and like… Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 11:57.773
he must have dialed up and left it on,
Speaker 0 | 12:00.955
you know. And hope that the party line doesn’t activate or something like that.
Speaker 1 | 12:04.158
True, true, right? Or if he wasn’t dialed, I mean back then if you needed to download something, you know, you do your dial up and hopefully it didn’t fail, you know, at 97.
Speaker 0 | 12:12.546
Come back a late, come back a day later and yeah.
Speaker 1 | 12:16.093
and you’d have it there. So that’s basically what he did and we were able to find this out. It took a whole lot less time instead of going, you know, pouring through logs and finding out what exactly transpired at the time. You know, I found out in basically a half hour we were able to come back, block it. Same student, about a year or two later, we started kind of like a mouse squad, kind of like where students can help troubleshoot, you know, just different things like printer issues and small issues on the network and so he ended up putting in some time. The school, I don’t think they ever made a class or anything out of it specifically, but anyway it worked out to the benefit of everybody. I won’t say that the student didn’t get disciplined because that that happened you know with the dean and the principal so he may well have, but everybody was better for it. So just going back to that same point that the students, kids, whatever have so much time it you know back in back in my day. you’d have that blinking 12 on your VCR that you’d have the, you know, your grandson or your son or daughter, you know, fix for you a set the correct time. So it stopped blinking. Kind of the same premise, right?
Speaker 0 | 13:31.284
Can you. I got a new TV. Can you plug in the Betamax and then the VHS and can you use all the audio cords and make sure they all line up correctly? That was my choice.
Speaker 1 | 13:42.133
There was a lot more cords back then too. Now you have one HDMI and power and you’re good to go. But back then you had the RCA cords and who knows what else connecting everywhere. So I’m assuming that for most adults, it would look pretty complex. For students, the other thing that students have is they don’t really have they don’t really have that fear, you know, that’s kind of ingrained in you. So they’re not afraid to fail. You know, as, as we get older, I think we’re afraid to try things because we might not succeed and how that will look to others and what the repercussions will be and everything. And I, you know, I think as adults, we, we realize the repercussions and we don’t want to deal with them. Students don’t have the experience yet of what those repercussions are, good, bad, or otherwise. So they just go for it. You know, they, they, they just do it.
Speaker 0 | 14:28.997
And you were kind of talking about that earlier where you’re saying like they’re more ingenious, but does that necessarily mean that they’re smarter? Not necessarily. It just depends on like, I guess, what your definition of smart is. It’s interesting that you say that too, because fear is something that we’re always saying, you know, confront. You know, fear is the problem. Like, you know, confront your fears. That’s what’s holding you back. That’s what’s paralyzing you. But in this particular case, we’re actually saying fear is. actually kind of a good thing, at least when it comes to security and just doing stupid stuff on the internet.
Speaker 1 | 15:05.286
Oh, yeah, everything, everything in moderation. And you do have to you do have to know your plan B. So I mean, in IT, we have that plan B, where you have to understand, preparing for disaster recovery, things like that, right? So you have to know those limits. But I think if same thing with everything else, if you have if you you know, set up some boundaries and you work within those boundaries, I think it’s good. But definitely, yeah, you can’t be fearful. I mean, you have to use fear as kind of a well-rounded, you have to respect it. I should just say that, you know, and once, if you respect it, then you’ll tread lightly, but you also won’t be scared of it. You’ll just have a good, healthy respect.
Speaker 0 | 15:46.195
You know, for parents out there listening and stuff like that, what would you say is that fine balance? Because I think there’s people always looking at how can I lock down a person? a network, what kind of firewall can I put in place, what can I do to protect my kids, and I think maybe some people just, you know, throw their hands up in the air and say, you know, screw it, because there’s really nothing I can do, and then some people might go too far and really try and lock everything down. Me, personally, I put the computer in the kitchen. I don’t give my kids devices to just kind of willy-nilly have access to the internet, but as much as I try, the somehow it’s just like the evil slips through from time to time and you just you know i’m like where the hell did you learn that from and i don’t know i saw it on some youtube video that slipped in or you know something like that and uh it’s just it’s just different now and i was my sister in law was talking with my wife the other day and i just remember my wife and i were talking about you know when we were a kid we never saw xyz um And her sister was kind of there at the dawn of the internet. And she’s like, you know how much of this I saw before I was, you know, this age? And it was just, you know, it was just kind of shocking. So I’m just curious, like, what’s your philosophy or any best practices for people out there that just have kids in general? I have a 15-year-old. I’ve got a 13-year-old. I’ve got an 11-year-old, a 9-year-old. You know, I’ve got twins that are seven. You know, they’re all have… going to need or have access to the internet of some sort? What’s the, you know, what’s the solution? And I’m not saying that there is.
Speaker 1 | 17:24.454
Yeah. So I don’t know if there’s a perfect solution, but I think the best thing that we can do, and it gets, it goes back a little bit to that fear is, is we need to go out there and educate ourselves as adults, as parents, as teachers on what’s going on out there. I think we, because a lot of folks are afraid. And so, like you said, they’ll, they’ll just ignore it. And that’s about the worst thing you can do. The best thing you can do. do is probably learn it together, you know, with your students, with your children. Know what’s going on. Find out what the latest communication phase is, whether that’s Instagram, whether that’s Snapchat, whether that’s, you know, I’ll date myself with MySpace or, you know, Facebook, which I don’t use anymore. That’s for the old folks, you know. The younger ones are on WhatsApp or, you know, the latest and greatest. So I think that’s key. you can’t stop learning. I mean, I eat my own dog food. I’ve been in education for 23 years in the technology side. I’m still taking classes. I tell everybody that I’m not that smart because I’m still in school. So you have to keep learning and figure out what your kids are doing. And once you know, I think the comfort level goes up. So you can Snapchat your kid. You can text your kid. You can do this and that. And so they feel more comfortable. They’re going to communicate. It opens up that communication. Yes, keep the technology, depending on the age level, right? Keep the technology within viewing distance. So in the kitchen, in the living room, wherever you’re going to be. It just, you know, a healthy respect for that as well. So that they can know, hey, I can’t be off task. I can’t be doing this because somebody could see me. You know, somebody could watch me. But at the same time, you know, they could be out there and if they have any questions, hey, dad’s in the room and could you come over here and take a look or help me do this or, you know, where do I look for this? So the students, what I generally tell my teachers is the students know how to use the technology, right? We might not, but the students know how to use it. And if our job is to basically teach them or train them on how to use it for good, how to search, how to use it for finding out what you need. Anything is right now, as far as the internet goes, you know, I know everybody thinks it’s huge and it’s vast and whatnot, but you can take free college classes online and complete your degree. You won’t get that paper because you haven’t paid for it, but you can get the same college level education right now all over the internet taking classes. It’s fantastic. But you do have to know where to look. You do have to know where to navigate. You can’t spend all day on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. So
Speaker 0 | 20:06.568
I think actually like what is knowledge, right? Like, do you really need a degree? And, you know, you know that you really care about being in school when you’re willing to take a class to learn the knowledge and you don’t care whether you get a degree or not because you’re 43 like me. And quite frankly, I just. don’t need a piece of paper that says you graduated from something.
Speaker 1 | 20:28.817
I’m sorry.
Speaker 0 | 20:30.038
Well, it’s just that now, like when I go to seek out something, right. And this may be a very immature thing because I’ve always told people, you know, the real people that are in college are like the top, like one to 2% of people that really know they want to be a doctor, really know they want to be a lawyer, really know they want to be some kind of engineer because they are diehard in the books all day long. And they’re going to college for a reason. The rest of us are in college because America tells us we need to go to college and we’ll be a loser if we don’t and we won’t be able to have a job and we won’t be able to make payments on a house and a car and all this stuff and go into debt and all these other things. So anyways, when you get older and you start taking courses, you know, like you said, whether it be for free or you pay for them, you don’t care whether you get a degree or not. That’s when you really know that you’re seeking knowledge for the sake of seeking knowledge. Anyways, that’s just a rant, side rant. I don’t even know why.
Speaker 1 | 21:20.613
It’s totally true. I mean, I. I didn’t like, I didn’t feel I had the time and I didn’t like reading when I was younger. And, you know, as you get older, you learn more, you have more experiences and whatnot. And I love to read now, you know, but now it’s like, do I have the time? You know, because I’ve got three kids, three grandkids and a bunch of other stuff going on. So, you know.
Speaker 0 | 21:40.359
A half hour before bed, you know, when you’re not wasting, it’s probably like all the time that we do waste on stupid social media stuff that we could fit in reading or whatever. The other thing is, is we learn how to learn too. Um, we learn how that we ourselves as an individual learn or learn better. Like for me, I don’t know when it comes to jujitsu, I need to watch videos and I need to visually kind of like digest that and watch it over and over and over again. And then I go practice it kinesthetically, you know, like in class. Right. Um, but I’m not good at just like watching an instructor in class and then going right to drill. Like if I watch it on a video, like over and over again, like that’s great for me. Um, same thing with like reading. Sometimes I can read something and you know, you throw the book down and then like, that’s it. But audio books for me are great. And I think maybe I had like learning disability in school or something. I was I was terrible student. But um,
Speaker 1 | 22:30.489
Well, I’ll dovetail onto that. And that’s another great, fantastic thing in technology that we may or may not take full advantage of right now is that everybody learns differently, right? So you mentioned that you need to do it one way. And you might have a student that, you know, needs to hear it 17 times like myself. before they get it. And you can hit replay on the technology. You can’t really ask your teacher or ask your friend to repeat something to you 17 times because they’ll give you that same sideways dog look, you know, like, why aren’t you doing this? And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, it truly goes back. You can go on the internet and ask a stupid question, you know, whether you believe in stupid questions or not.
Speaker 0 | 23:07.535
But-I do believe in stupid questions. I absolutely do.
Speaker 1 | 23:10.757
And nobody’s really going to judge you, you know, because they don’t know you. Just that you’re just a- paragraph on the internet, right? Unless they’re famous like you are.
Speaker 0 | 23:19.600
How does Bitcoin work?
Speaker 1 | 23:22.221
You know, I mean, and you wouldn’t necessarily be afraid to ask that on the internet, but you may be afraid to ask that in class or in front of your peers or something like that. So that as well as being able to choose your learning style with technology. So, you know, in education, we have something like if you want to call it flipped learning or however. where you have some instructors and mostly in college, but it’s coming, it’s coming down. It’s, it’s rolling down a little bit, um, down to high school and such, but you’ll have the instructor or teacher record a lesson and send that home. And the student that’s their homework is to watch the lesson when they come into class. Now you actually do the work and what’s great about it.
Speaker 0 | 24:03.483
And that is so much better.
Speaker 1 | 24:05.483
That is awesome. Cause you have somebody there now to ask questions of you have somebody there that’s watching you do what you do instead of going home with your homework.
Speaker 0 | 24:13.882
And that is genius. That’s genius.
Speaker 1 | 24:17.264
And that couldn’t happen without technology.
Speaker 0 | 24:19.365
And how much easier is it to watch something at home than to come home with a pile of books and have to get out a pencil and paper?
Speaker 1 | 24:26.649
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 24:27.710
Yes. You know what? You just blew my mind. That that’s, you know, it is things like that. Like how do we change the system? Um, I hated Spanish. I mean like languages are the hardest thing for me. Now I love taking language. Now I do it like, you know, outside of school. Like, but I took a memory course, right? And I learned about all the different memory palaces and like how to map things out and like various different memory tricks. But in high school, it was like, no one told you that. They didn’t tell you how to memorize. They didn’t tell you like, it was like rote learning. You know, it was like, write this out a thousand times. It was just memorizing. There was actually no, if the teacher had given me some tricks on memorizing and stuff and made it, like, I think that would have made a huge difference. Because with language, a lot of it is just, you know, memorizing, you know. translating verbs and conjugating and stuff like that. For me, the grammar, I understood the grammar. I just didn’t want to memorize stuff. It was boring and long.
Speaker 1 | 25:22.280
Yeah. My daughter is a special ed teacher and she uses some of those same techniques that we actually, I remember back in kindergarten, you learn to sing a song, but that actually contained either the language you’re talking about or a problem or some type of issue. You’re learning with music. right and we kind of lose that as as we move through the grades and you know that’s no longer practiced but I mean that’s a learning technique as well music is huge you know if you’re if you happen to be talented and play an instrument or something like that that’s proven to make you understand language better make you learn languages easier just because you’re playing an instrument or something it unlocks something in your brain but that’s a whole other subject I get it I birdwashed a little bit too But it’s fantastic, you know, and those type of techniques, whether that’s technology, whether that’s the technique of using the different types of learning to get that understood, that’s huge.
Speaker 0 | 26:23.640
To circle back and to kind of completely go back to kind of where we were, I want to ask you what your first computer was and how you got started in technology. I usually ask that first, but I’m going to ask it now. And my follow-up question. would be do you think uh software developers people that are in technology may have a jaded view of the world based on what they see on the internet and have access to so
Speaker 1 | 26:53.657
part one what was your first computer how’d you get started and then the dark question okay um so the first computer was actually a timex sinclair i actually had to look it up And I think it debuted in 82 and got discontinued in 83. So I can’t remember the specific date that I actually got it. It was given to me by a friend of mine’s father. I think it was $99 at the time. Back in the 80s, that was a lot of money. I mean, still a lot of money, but it was a lot more money back then.
Speaker 0 | 27:23.041
Yeah, remember $100 bill? You’re like,
Speaker 1 | 27:24.703
what? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Benjamin, right? Yeah. So. That was my first one. I think I learned how to program in BASIC, if that’s what the language was back then, where you can write your name and have it stream across the screen. It was hooked up to a television set, and I thought I was the greatest stuff since sliced bread when I did that. I was just like, that’s wild. Next computer was probably the Commodore 64. It debuted about the same time, but I didn’t touch that one until a little bit later. So those were the first two. How I got into the industry is a little bit more complicated kind of a little bit of accident a little bit of Luck, I guess I had Family that moved out of state and said let’s let’s communicate via email and I’m like that’s that’s great idea I have absolutely no idea what email is or how to do that And so I bought a computer that didn’t have a modem It didn’t have a CD drive the hard drive wasn’t large enough the memory wasn’t enough And so I was like, okay, I guess I was out of wait
Speaker 0 | 28:27.076
Oh, you mean it had a floppy disk?
Speaker 1 | 28:31.339
It had a 3.5 floppy. Didn’t have a large enough hard drive. I couldn’t even tell you what the hard drive was. Maybe 10 meg, maybe 8 meg. I don’t know. And then memory was minuscule as well.
Speaker 0 | 28:47.871
At least it was a meg.
Speaker 1 | 28:49.833
Yeah, you know, I got that AOL CD. I’m going to get online. I was like, okay, so I don’t have a CD player to put it in. That’s awesome. And, you know, so I guess.
Speaker 0 | 28:58.996
Yeah, we had attaching CD-ROM drives or attachment. Did you go buy an attachment? No,
Speaker 1 | 29:05.563
I went to, I think it was CompUSA or a store or something of that nature where I actually bought a CD drive and I had to learn how to plug it in and, you know, put it up and get the system to recognize it. And I think that’s where it all started for me. And then finally the email is like, okay, I sent the email that, you know, let’s move on. Let’s go to, you know, I think it was windows 3.1 or something at the time, not even 95. So.
Speaker 0 | 29:29.346
I can’t remember. Did we, were we only allowed to open one program at a time in the early windows? I thought, I thought I remember for some reason it was like you had to close the program. Like, like if you had word open, like you’re using word, but you couldn’t have multiple windows open at one time. I can’t remember. Is that. I remember it was like Windows, I can click on things.
Speaker 1 | 29:47.899
Very possible you got me, but I know it was really limited. It wasn’t anything like what we have now.
Speaker 0 | 29:53.662
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I’m just curious. And so you move to front.
Speaker 1 | 30:02.327
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 30:03.928
so, you know, because you see, I’m getting ready to write. I’ve got, I’m putting together a newsletter that’s called The Whole Telecom Truth and Nothing But. And one of the… You know, I work with a lot of MSPs or a lot of managed service providers, IT guys, and a lot of them run, like, you know, hospitality hotel. And they’re like, look, I just I shut down like the area of the firewall that allows me to see what people are actually doing in their hotel rooms, because it is just, you know, like ruining my life. So I’m just, you know, I’m just curious, you got you have software developers, you got people that grow up in this industry and kind of grow up in this world, can you get jaded at all?
Speaker 1 | 30:42.238
I would assume yes. I mean, just like anything else, what I generally tell, again, my daughter’s a special ed teacher and to most of my teachers, you have to care, but you also have to be careful too, because much like a doctor, you know, you’re going to lose some patients. You’re going to have some patients go sideways or whether that’s they’re leaving your service because they didn’t like you or something worse. So. I think you just have to do your best, you know, you have to make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons and you keep doing what you’re doing because, yeah, there’s a lot of ugly stuff out there. And, you know, and even more, and that’s amplified for me because, I mean, I’m in a school district, so I want to make.
Speaker 0 | 31:24.250
I didn’t want to tie it together. Yeah. So that’s the tie in, right? So the tie in is our kids, high school kids, responsible is not the word.
Speaker 1 | 31:36.714
Yeah, actually it is right now because we used to have, we used to make everybody sign a contract when they get online, 13 and over, that they signed a, oh gosh.
Speaker 0 | 31:49.137
It’s like signing a no hazing contract in high school. I will not torture the freshmen, but everyone kind of like, as they’re signing, as the seniors are signing, I can remember this, as the seniors are signing the hazing contract, they’re looking at you with like a grin on their face. Yeah. So it’s like, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. Like, and that was back when you said like, the kids are ingenious, but are they smart? So I guess my question is, is, are they emotionally intelligent? Do kids at that age have emotional intelligence? My, my guess would be they have more curiosity than they have emotional intelligence.
Speaker 1 | 32:24.072
I would, I would agree because you can watch kids and you have. younger kids and I’ve had, my kids are older now,
Speaker 0 | 32:30.155
but I have consequences. I’m sorry. Consequences was the net was the word I was thinking of. Do they understand the consequences of that?
Speaker 1 | 32:35.939
I don’t think, I don’t think so. No, we still, we still need to, everybody, a lot of, a lot of students still learn by mimicking, right? So they, they, they pick up everything from their environment. So we definitely have to set a good example, number one, and no, they don’t know the consequences and that’s another repetition. So. you know, every year you sign that and it’s called an acceptable use policy now, instead of an authorized user policy. So, a responsible use policy, rather. There we go. So we want to make sure that they’re responsible. We want to inform and educate. I mean, obviously, that’s the business we’re in, but we want to make sure to do that for our students, for our teachers, for ourselves. And because you are going to hit, you are going to hit some bad stuff out there. I mean, as a school district, you know, we have to abide by a bunch of acronyms, COPA, SIPA, FERPA, all these laws and regulations. So we do have to have filters in place that filter all the bad stuff out. Do those filters work 100%? No. And that’s the reason for the contract. And hopefully, we can educate students, staff alike that, hey, you’re going to hit some bad stuff out there. You know, it’s not a foolproof system. And that’s why we have to talk about it. If it was foolproof, you know, we’d put you in a… a padded room and just, you know, you can bounce around all you want without getting hurt. That’s unfortunately not the reality. So, you know, just like the students are ingenious, the hackers are ingenious, and there’s always stuff out there that’s going bad. So we have to educate and make sure that they stay on the right track. If they do hit something that’s bad, you know, okay, yeah, it’s bad. You have a chuckle, you have a grin, and you move on. And hopefully they notify an adult saying, hey, you know, this happened. I wasn’t trying. This is what I typed in. This is what came up. Thank you very much. Adults have to understand that that happens and not to, you know, explode and find, you know, actually document. OK, here’s what happened. Let’s report it to IT. Let’s report it to somebody so they know what happened. Not for the, you know, to discipline, but to simply find out so we can fix it. Right. because it does happen. And so once we’re at that level, which, you know, it’s a challenge, it’s a challenging level to be at, I think, but once we’re at that level, I think everything can get fixed easier, a little bit less issues for students. We try and take away a little bit of that fear because, yeah, I mean, you have everything out there from phishing, you have, you know, viruses, you have all kinds of stuff that’s just looking to steal your information or to do bad things to the hardware that you’re on. and all we can do is prepare for it. You know, that’s, we can educate ourselves and prepare for it. It’s kind of like not if your car is going to die, but when your car is going to die. And so you have to change the oil. You have to, you know, give it a tune up. You have to make sure the tires are good. Bad stuff will still happen. But as long as you’re taking the proper precautions, I think it’s less likely that that bad stuff will take you out.
Speaker 0 | 35:33.039
Well. That actually made me think about a completely other side subject, but are you in charge of physical security there too? Security cameras, like all that type of stuff.
Speaker 1 | 35:46.685
So we have security cameras at some of our locations. Fortunately, we also have a school police that monitors and reacts to those. I’m just in charge of making sure they’re up and running and working. And if they need assistance in recalling some of the data. for the dates or hour or minutes in question that I can assist there but
Speaker 0 | 36:09.762
I’m not willing to leave a better somebody better prepared yeah gotcha gotcha well man it has it’s been a pleasure talking about these it’s just the the biggest learning I think is is taking away from you know we do a lot of teaching but we don’t do enough learning from our students and kind of understanding that they’re at that age where it’s You know, we ask them to be responsible. We tell them you can choose your response. Right. And there will be consequences to that. But, you know, how much do they really understand at that age as well? But that doesn’t take away from their ingenious ability to do things.
Speaker 1 | 36:51.018
True. And if they’re if we’re learning from them, we’re teaching them. But hopefully it’s a it’s a win win situation. Right. You want them to learn from you. You want to learn from them, which means that you’re understanding what they’re doing. they’re understanding what you’re doing. I think it just works out better all the way around.
Speaker 0 | 37:06.494
If you had one piece of advice to anyone in the public sector or kind of mid-market IT, mid-market IT leadership, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 37:15.579
The one word I think would be kind of lower your fears a little bit and just understand you keep learning, keep learning and stop fearing.
Speaker 0 | 37:25.365
All right, Roland man. Thank you so much for being on the show man.
Speaker 1 | 37:29.147
Absolutely, no it was a… Wonderful to be here. I appreciate it.
Speaker 0 | 37:32.655
Alrighty, sir. We’re going to talk again soon.
Speaker 1 | 37:35.179
Okay. Sounds good. Thanks again, Phil.
Speaker 0 | 37:37.142
Yep. All right.
