Speaker 0 | 00:09.646

everyone out there listening to we are listening to you are listening to dissecting popular it nerds i have not had enough coffee yet today and my allergies are killing me they’re starting to to uh pipe up here in northern maine but i’m talking with uh with fred fred gaggle you give me your official title because you’re going through murder acquisitions and all this stuff right now?

Speaker 1 | 00:32.141

Yes, I’m the vice president of technology and also the chief security officer here at BioPlus, especially pharmacy. We’re based out of Florida.

Speaker 0 | 00:40.909

Okay, so at least you got some nice weather down there, I’m assuming right now.

Speaker 1 | 00:44.532

Oh yeah, it’s nice down here.

Speaker 0 | 00:46.413

Okay, so one of the things that I like to talk about is, well, first of all, how is it being in technology nowadays and do you feel like you chose the right career path?

Speaker 1 | 01:00.936

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely changed with the pandemic and working remotely. That’s probably been the biggest change for us because we’ve been a pharmacy. We were almost all, you know, at our company’s offices in various capacities. So at any time, we may only have like 30 people working remotely or had some outside sales folks on the road. So that totally shifted, ended up being over close to 300 users that were working remote. So that was a big change. Huge change for us. As far as technology, you know, I’ve been around it, you know, all my adulthood and even we had a previous conversation, even when I was probably got introduced to computers when I was like 10 years old. And, you know, I started learning some very basic programming that back in the day when you, you know, programming to draw like these little simplistic pictures and things like that. So I got into that. My brother got into it. My father got us all into it. So that became our hobby. And. So I’ve always had a passion for technology.

Speaker 0 | 02:03.423

And I should just, earlier today and it was a, it was a telecom situation, believe it or not, kind of similar to what we were talking about top secret, but the, they were migrating off an old PBX to the cloud and everyone’s working from home and COVID hit and we’ve got people using Google voice and all kinds of bandaid situations. And What I ended up doing was helping them. I’m helping them with a provider that’s kind of gone south. And I’m trying to differentiate, is it really the provider’s fault or is it the end users and their home networks? I think in this particular case, it actually is mostly the provider and kind of their shady application. But how did you deal with 400 end user? 400 home networks. I mean, what is the common problem? And let me ask you this. How do you deal with 400 home users that don’t even know if they have a firewall or not? Right. I mean, this is a question I asked. I sent out like a little spreadsheet. Like, can you answer these five questions for me? Like, do you have a firewall? If you don’t know, just put don’t know. Can you make changes to your firewall? Do you know how to make changes to your firewall? Can you run this latency and jitter test? Yes, I can run this latency and jitter test. And give me all your complaints. And how many people are on your home network are using the internet, right? So you’ve got anywhere from four to eight people using a home network. You’ve got 60 to 70% of everyone in America that’s working for a company that does not know if they have a firewall or not, let alone be able to make changes to it. How does one deal with that?

Speaker 1 | 03:45.590

Well, it’s challenging. To be honest, we didn’t even have a chance to provide a survey. We sent everyone home on a short notice, and we actually, you know, our remote terminal server, it couldn’t actually handle the capacity. So that was the first issue we ran into. You know, it just wasn’t sized for that many users, and so we had to stand up a new remote desktop server, and ordinarily something like that would take a month or two once we test it and make sure everything’s good. But we had to… get that up and running in less than two weeks.

Speaker 0 | 04:20.381

It’s kind of like finding a cold vaccine in one year.

Speaker 1 | 04:24.763

Exactly. We’re working on it days, nights, and weekends to get that server up. So that was our first challenge. And then, like you alluded to, all the user issues at home, we didn’t have to deal with all those before this. So you’re right. People had children at home attending virtual school. It’s taken up bandwidth. There’s computers. you know movie streaming and game playing and you know all these other things so we have a lot of employees that you know they just didn’t they had like the bare minimum internet connection and we had to do a lot of testing and um you know so that that was it was for sure a challenge it it really uh bumped up our our time our resolution time for our tickets it went through the roof um so yeah the the troubleshooting and support um very common problem we ran into is obviously voice you know trying to do voice over the internet, which is not a guaranteed service anyway. And then having these kinds of connections, not only did we run into those with poor internet connection, but then a lot of employees didn’t have good Wi-Fi type connectivity either. Maybe they had it upstairs, downstairs. And we even had somebody connecting to our network with the, you remember the huge satellite connections? I didn’t know about it at first, but over 600 milliseconds away.

Speaker 0 | 05:47.179

my dad’s you know this has to go to space and come back right you know yeah my dad still gets those cards like he was internet like is this faster is this a better deal i’m like it’s a better deal it’s not good though right right exactly so yeah we ran into all that wow from you know so you have security in your title how insecure how insecure is this i don’t want to make you like you know reveal yourself here, but how insecure is a bunch of end users not having, I mean, if they VPN, they got a VPN in your firewall. How insecure is it from a company’s standpoint? Should companies be concerned that their end users don’t have a firewall at home?

Speaker 1 | 06:33.375

They definitely should. We use a VPN, like you mentioned, at BioPlus. And we also had the employees bring home laptops with our software load on it. And so, you know, because you get into the home environment, not only, you know, may they not have a firewall, but they may not even have an antivirus software or anything on their personal computer. So, yeah, it does introduce a lot of security risks for sure when you go into the home office. And especially because we’re a health care company, especially pharmacy, you’re dealing with patient data, right? You have now employees accessing. PHIs, which is protected health information. So that’s another thing that we have to, you know, be concerned about and put the proper controls around it. So yeah, security, definitely for sure, moving out of the office to Simone’s home, that really was a challenge as well.

Speaker 0 | 07:29.275

I just, it’s got to be in, it has to be almost somewhat overwhelming. So what were some of the fixes you guys did for any, is there anything like… like, you know, pops into your head and always like fixes for home network, other than just, you know, like yelling from your home office,

Speaker 1 | 07:44.563

get on the internet. Yeah, we, we, yeah, there were, yeah, I mean, we did have to educate the employees for that. You know, just let them know that, Hey, it is your internet is a shared resource. And in many cases, it’s a shared resource with your entire neighborhood, depending on what kind of, you know, internet they have. And, um, it’s definitely as education.

Speaker 0 | 08:07.542

It’s definitely.

Speaker 1 | 08:08.143

party line let’s be honest right yeah for sure and nobody really gets what they’re paying for right either so uh we had to do a lot of speed tests and diagnostics to see what they’re you know really were getting at home so that was kind of where we started with uh education like i mentioned um soft phones uh a lot of folks were using cell phones forwarding their work phone to their cell phone and they had cell phone uh cellular signal issues in their house that was another thing that we had to deal with We introduced soft phones. We weren’t a real big soft phone using company before that. And that pretty much the pandemic forced us to use a mat. That’s the other thing I actually forgot about. We had to roll out soft phones. And I remember there was a shortage on headsets. You probably remember that too, Phil, when just trying to find, you know, just a basic headset going into Walmart and Target and all the local places. They were wiped out. I was going into Target trying to buy every headset I could to get for the employees, and I couldn’t find any. Target hand sanitizer. That’s right. Yeah, everybody was looking for hand sanitizer. I was looking for headsets, USB headsets. Toilet paper,

Speaker 0 | 09:23.324

I’m good.

Speaker 1 | 09:23.964

Headsets. That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 09:27.387

Yeah. I’ll trade you. Excellent. Okay, so headsets. So some people obviously were using what speakerphone on their computer and that sounds great.

Speaker 1 | 09:35.496

So speakerphone, yeah. Audible problems, you know, all the conference, you know, type things and we use Teams heavily. You know, like they said, I guess the most. Common saying in 2020 was you’re on mute, right? Everybody’s on conference phones. And yeah, that was a mix. Some of them were using their phone, their cell phone. Some of them were using different ways to connect. And yeah, that was, you know, I think in the end, it made us a stronger company for technology, remote workers, because we did a 180. And like I said, we were not a big… working remotely company before all this. So we’re a different company now.

Speaker 0 | 10:17.613

If there’s only a way to make executive management really kind of push IT into the forefront more other than COVID-19, you know, like that famous, like, multiple choice question, like what drove your technology revolution? You know, like this A, B, C, you know, whatever it is, D is COVID-19 and everyone circles that. So, yeah. What is it that, why does it have to be a, why does it have to be a disaster to get someone to notice something? Is it, what are we doing wrong? Are we not communicating enough? We’re not speaking in money terms. We must be speaking in, must be speaking in more like insurance and risk, risk evaluation, which no one really knows about. You know, how can we talk, how has IT made anyone money?

Speaker 1 | 10:59.202

Right. Yeah. IT’s often looked at, you know, a cost, right? Like a utility cost. And, you know, we, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. I like to try to change that around and, you know, through different things like automation and saving money. And, you know, if we could do something with our system, like, for example, we did some things where we automated what’s called cash posting, which is we get these large payments from these insurance companies and that has to be done manually. And we we automated a lot of those. So. So, yeah, I always, you know, try to have I.T. have a component of not just becoming. a cost center, but actually either saving costs or generating revenues.

Speaker 0 | 11:38.583

For examples. That’s a good example. So first of all, automation and getting rid of, um, I don’t know, paper forms, like, right. That’s another big one,

Speaker 1 | 11:46.849

but so you have a paper batch posting.

Speaker 0 | 11:49.851

What else, what else could we do?

Speaker 1 | 11:51.973

Yeah. Um, you kind of hit on another one. We, we kind of went to paperless office. Um, we tried to, you know, believe it or not, faxes are alive and well, and, and, pharmacy, right? When you go to the doctor, they more than likely will send in the fax. And so we’ve digitized all that and that comes into us electronically through this e-fax system that we use. So that’s one way we’ve moved away from receiving all this, getting rid of all the paper. Some other ways we’ve helped with patient engagement, we introduced some online bill payments for… some of our patients so they could, you know, pay online. That’s something we didn’t offer before. We also have a patient outreach called, we call it the patient journey, where in the past it would take, you know, a lot of people to reach out to patients. And what happens when you call a patient, you know, you usually get their voicemail or they’re at work or something like that. So, about seven years ago, we introduced IVR. So, we rolled that out. So, that’s basically calling the patient and then they could do a press off and then it puts them right in queue if we’re able to get a hold of a patient, you know, instead of us having to do all these, you know, playing voicemail tags and things. So that’s another big thing we did. Years later, we switched to, we still use IVR calls, but we also use text messaging and also emails and video, believe it or not. So a lot of the Pharmacy consultations, you’re on this specialty pharmacy drug. This is the first time you’ve been on this drug. You don’t know a lot about it. There could be bad side effects. So we actually have, when the patients log into our web portal for their patient, we have a patient portal. They could log in. They could watch videos, educational videos that explains in basic terms what this medication does, what are the side effects, and those kinds of things. So, yeah, we’ve tried to go more toward that. Amazon experience. We have something also called the two-click refill where patients can just in two clicks request a refill instead of going through a whole bunch of other things and sitting in a queue in a call center for a long time. We introduced that a couple of years ago. We’re really starting to see an uptick in that. So yeah, a lot of people don’t want to speak to anyone over the phone anymore. I don’t even want to type information in.

Speaker 0 | 14:23.415

I don’t even want to… You need to go to this form. You need to type in all your information over again. You need to put your credit card in. You need to do all this stuff or any of the telehealth stuff. I mean, the two-click refill. That’s genius. I just need to click on something.

Speaker 1 | 14:35.803

Right. Yeah, just click on things. We have your credit card information stored already. So, yeah, it’s just and some people like that interaction over the phone, and we’re still available for that, obviously. But those who don’t want who want minimal contact or no contact, we tried to catered that to them and it’s been it’s been real successful so far.

Speaker 0 | 14:57.771

did you ever think back in 1986 see what was going on back in 1986 bag phones in the car that you had to like have uh like an installer actually install who knows i can’t remember how much you paid per minute to make a phone call from the car but the cell phone did not exist yet i try to tell my kids out like you do realize like the internet didn’t exist like it did not exist except through like a movie called like weird science where like, you know, you’d have guys like with like a weird coupler, like phone, you know, crazy, like stuff, you know, you’re just like, no, this is so nerdy. Did you ever think that you’d be able to make money in this field? And this would be a real, like, at what point in your life did you say, oh, wow, I can, this is actually going to be like a career?

Speaker 1 | 15:43.103

Yeah. Early on, I didn’t really think about it. I was just having fun, you know, and computer games, of course. And I tried my hand at programming, um, some basic things I’d get. those magazines and try to copy some of the things so I could reproduce some of the different little games and graphics that they’d produce. I was just having fun at that point. But fast forward a little bit to high school, I actually needed a job full time. I went to my parents and said, hey, can I have a car? They said, yes, you can. I was like, great, when do I get it? And like, well, when you start working and you save up for a car, that’s when you get it. So. So they used to say I had to find a job. And luckily, I found a job at a computer store. So when I was a junior in high school, started working for a local computer store. And that really got me in, you know, thinking, wow, there could be something more to this, right? There could be a potential career. What were you doing?

Speaker 0 | 16:40.462

Can you remember like the first day?

Speaker 1 | 16:42.103

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 16:42.703

Or like what you guys were doing back then? Were you like fixing motherboards or were you?

Speaker 1 | 16:47.386

Oh, yeah. Yeah, this would have been in 91. So 91, a lot of the computers back then, you had to kind of come in, you order, you customize whatever you wanted. And you got like three different options, right? It wasn’t a whole lot to choose from. And so, yeah, we would custom build computers. And of course, over time, as I ended up working there for close to two years, I would do some basic repair and swapping out components of computers. We sold software there. um you know it’s a small crazy thing it’s called the cd rom that’s right yeah do you want it yeah yeah we had the the floppy disk back then you know the three and a half and five and a quarter that’s what we we sold software on in the box and uh so yeah that that was my first introduction of actually getting paid to do something that i liked so

Speaker 0 | 17:43.375

That’s cool. Yeah. I remember I was jealous of the kid that actually one day had a CD, like CDR or whatever. He was able to actually learn CDs.

Speaker 1 | 17:52.880

I could just read them. Yeah. They were super expensive. Yeah. I remember that.

Speaker 0 | 17:59.464

So then what does one go to college for then?

Speaker 1 | 18:05.047

Well, funny enough, I actually went to college and I didn’t know, like most college students, I didn’t know what I was going to get into. I was kind of thinking healthcare and taking some classes, actually, funny enough, some pharmacy classes. I mean, working in a specialty pharmacy now, but I was actually taking some of the classes to be a pharmacist. And, you know, again, I got to college. Money was a need. You know, I needed, you know, money, gas money, rent money, all that stuff. So I started doing consulting, and I did technical consulting. Basically, some of the skills I learned on my own and in a computer store, I went out and helped. small companies that didn’t have their own IT person or company. And I just did miscellaneous things for them. And then things kind of shifted. I started to say, well, why am I getting into pharmacy when I have a passion for technology? So why not do what I have a passion for? So I actually changed majors. All those organic chemistry and physics classes, they just counted as electives.

Speaker 0 | 19:08.778

You’re deep breathed. You don’t have to do that anymore.

Speaker 1 | 19:10.979

Yeah, I don’t have to do that. And I changed majors. I got into decision information science, which at the time, this was at the University of Florida. That was really the closest thing that they had for, unless you wanted to get into, you know, programming or something specific. But as far as a general course study and degree, decision information is also known as MIS, management information science. So I did that, graduated there, and then worked. came out of college and worked for the local county property appraiser. And I did, there was only two people in the IT department, me and a FoxPro database guy, and I did everything else but database. So that gave me a lot of experience right out of college. I was very appreciative of that because it really had me getting into everything. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 20:01.930

Yeah. Do you think someone can actually go to school for technology now? Obviously you have to maybe get the basics and understand things, but is most of it hands-on? Do most people learn things hands-on as far as some of like a networking perspective and managing end users and all that type of stuff? I mean, like if you’re to actually go to school and say, I want to do what you do now, would you actually go to school for it?

Speaker 1 | 20:24.901

You know, it. School is always, I think college is still always behind what the real world is, especially when it comes to technology and security. But, you know, I have been seeing a lot of more specific classes, for example, networking. Like, that wasn’t a thing when I was in college. It wasn’t even a concept. But now there’s some community colleges that offer, you know, Cisco networking classes, which is great. Because if I was a college student now and no one would know now, I’d probably. Definitely sign up for those more specific knowledge courses like that because the management information science, it basically gave you a broad view in technology. It gave you some electives that you took and you took some computer programming. But then you took all the other basic things like statistics and finance and there was a business component to that. So for me personally, I had to do a lot of on-the-job learning and in my personal time. uh, you know, worked on things in my house and technologies and just, I just did that as a hobby as a pastime just to, you know, get involved in it as before I had children. And, uh, but I really did a lot of that, a lot of self, a lot of reading, a lot of, uh, you know, creating my own, you know, little labs at home and things like that, you know, back in the day.

Speaker 0 | 21:44.496

Well, the business thing must’ve helped, but you bring up a good piece too, which is, is children because my son who’s 14 now is asking me like, dad, I want to I want to do what you do or how do I make money? How do I do this? How do I do that? You know, it’s actually a good question. Like if, if you were to go to your kids or one of your kids came to you right now and said, dad, I want to do what you do. And I want to bypass all. And I kind of said, I’m like, look, a lot of this is comes with time. Like you’ve got to like put in the, you got to put in the hours, you got to do your time. You know what I mean? You got to get that hands-on experience. But I do want my children to avoid all of the pitfalls and pain and suffering that I had to go through. So if you were to suggest to any youth, specifically a 14 year old, what would you think would be the most valuable thing for them to study maybe outside of the normal curriculum of school? Like where could they get the most valuable information?

Speaker 1 | 22:42.230

Sure. You know, I actually went through that with my daughter. She’s now, she just turned 21. And She did a similar thing. She’s like, hey, dad, I want to do what you do. And, you know, I was, you know, kind of surprised about it.

Speaker 0 | 22:56.958

First, you’re like,

Speaker 1 | 22:57.859

yes,

Speaker 0 | 22:58.839

you’re my favorite.

Speaker 1 | 23:01.881

Yeah. So she actually went to we changed her out of his middle school at the time. And there was a technology focused school. And it was more geared toward technology, which is really cool. Because, again, when I was going to school, everybody took the same classes, high school, middle school. You didn’t really get a focus on anything. Now there are some schools out there that are a little bit more progressive. So she actually got into that. But then she also found, well, maybe I don’t want to get into that. Because they had her taking an HTML class, and it was all HTML coding by hand and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Website building and things. She’s like, I don’t know if I like this so much now. So it’s kind of boring. I think it’s yeah, it’s kind of boring. You know, I think some you have to really find a passion for what you want to do. And the earlier you could do that, the better. Like I said, I changed degrees in college and probably set me back a year from graduating. But, you know, I think that a lot of students go through that. So my advice is just really, you know, try to find a passion. of what your passion is and not just because, you know, your, your family member does this and likes it and all that, you know, just because it’s their passion, don’t mean your passion. So I never would, my, my advice is just, you know, I’d never want anybody to be forced into something. Don’t, don’t get a career or go into a college degree program unless you really liked it. Don’t go into it for the money. Don’t go into it, you know, because you’re pressured or somebody else will be miserable otherwise.

Speaker 0 | 24:37.174

exactly so thing you did i was pre-med i was pre-med i’ve taken chemistry biology right yep And I was a five-year college student, did the same thing.

Speaker 1 | 24:46.132

Five years, yep. That’s what I did.

Speaker 0 | 24:48.374

I probably threw away a year of credits. You know what I mean? And I did creative writing and look where I’m at now.

Speaker 1 | 24:56.080

Right,

Speaker 0 | 24:56.381

yep. I’m writing creatively, technology, emails.

Speaker 1 | 25:00.604

Yeah, and for me, I went to school for pre-pharmacy and now I work for a pharmacy, but in technology. So it’s funny how things work out.

Speaker 0 | 25:10.012

Yeah, perfect. So let’s just go through it. But let’s go to just brainstorm real quick. What are the areas of like technology that kids could maybe, you know, research? So you got web design, you’ve got programming slash data. I mean, we’ve got networking. What else do we have?

Speaker 1 | 25:26.297

You know, that’s a lot of it. The hardware, you know, the landscape is really rapidly changing. You know, like Phil, you and I talked about cloud services and how things are shifting and our company is looking at moving a lot of our servers offsite. You know, I remember… It wasn’t all that long ago where you had storage administrators, sand administrators. That’s really hardly a thing anymore. So it changes so much. So if I were giving advice to someone, I would basically say, kind of look at what the future landscape is. And then if you have a passion about it, and then kind of go toward what you know will always be there. Don’t study to be a sand administrator. You know, you have to kind of, you know, not predict the future, but I think there’s a lot of things that, you know, will still be out there. Right. So technology will always be there. Mobile is big, obviously. And a lot of people, they’re getting into like mobile application development and know some people that are into gaming. Central Florida has a lot of like artificial intelligence and there’s some military contracts. If you’re at University of Central Florida that they worked out. So there’s all kinds of. you know, those kinds of things. I think definitely it’s going to be on the software side. I think we’ll always be there. So those innovative, if you could do anything on the software side, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen on the infrastructure side, right? The physical, you know, the hardware, the servers and the physical network and switches and all those kinds of things. But software, I think, will always be there.

Speaker 0 | 27:00.704

Yes. Satellite might actually be fast someday.

Speaker 1 | 27:03.447

That’s right. Could be. Maybe Elon Musk and… SpaceX, he could turn to, you know, making satellite an option.

Speaker 0 | 27:12.414

I’ve got at least one provider that’s offering 100 megs down and 4 megs up.

Speaker 1 | 27:19.861

Yeah, it’ll get there, I think, eventually.

Speaker 0 | 27:25.105

Well, excellent. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Any wise words, massive piece of advice? If I asked you, like, actually, maybe we should ask it this way. Over the last year during COVID-19, what is the dumbest thing you’ve seen? Is there anything that comes to mind?

Speaker 1 | 27:42.183

I’m trying to think. There’s a lot of lessons learned for sure.

Speaker 0 | 27:47.566

Let’s do it now.

Speaker 1 | 27:48.167

Yeah. Lessons learned. Yeah. I really think that phone, being connected in ways that since everybody’s not in the office, everything is virtual and still to that degree. even now um you know i think phone and um you know just really the conference call um getting used to the conference calls right and being uh on those is the biggest lesson learned if you’re at home you know make sure you have a really good ethernet i mean a a really good wi-fi connection and a really good internet connection what is a really good wi-fi connection i mean to you and i we might know that but to like i

Speaker 0 | 28:33.378

the common, you know, and user, like for me, I have like Phil Howard telecom. My kids get on there. Like, what’s this Phil Howard telecom? What’s the password to that? I was like, you will never know that. I will never give you the password. I will never give you the password to that. You know what I mean? Dad, come on. I need, you know, so anyways, no, that’s not going to happen. But like, what is a good, why fiction? Are you talking signal strengths? Are you talking?

Speaker 1 | 28:59.585

Signal strengths, one of it. Yeah, that’s a part of it. And, uh, You know, a less known to your non-technical person is actually conflicts, right? Because there’s people don’t realize there’s channels within, you know, Wi-Fi. And there’s a lot of competition, you know, the Internet of things. I mean, look at all of your at my home. I mean, my garage door is connected to the Internet. My thermostats are connected. You have a lot of people connect everything to the Internet. And what they don’t realize is, is all those things could cause a conflict. You could have a good signal strength. But then there could be something causing a conflict. So my biggest piece of advice is there’s software. I mean, there’s channel scanners and different Wi-Fi type devices, some of them for free. You can just Google it and you could determine if there’s any kind of conflicts and you may have to move things around. If that’s getting a little bit too technical, then know someone.

Speaker 0 | 29:54.138

What do we want? We need to teach. We need to bring up. Here’s another thing. There should be a class in college on how to be a good Googler. What should they Google? So, so we’ve got, we’ve got, uh, you know, three dozen people in a company and they all have crazy, the it guy needs some help. He’s only one guy he’s drowning. And he’s got all these end users with horrible home networks, maybe their wifi. What do we tell them to Google? Um,

Speaker 1 | 30:20.240

probably something like, uh, wireless, uh, wireless access point, um, uh, conflict software, or I’m trying to think there’s a software, um, Hmm. I don’t have it in front of me right now as I use several of them. I forgot which one I settled on. I’m pulling up Google.

Speaker 0 | 30:38.920

Wireless access point scanner?

Speaker 1 | 30:40.941

Conflict scanner? Yep. Scanner could work because that basically scans your networks. And believe it or not, you know, for the listeners, you could even be picking up conflicts from your neighbor. You know, they could have devices on their network that’s overpowering. You know, when you look in the frequencies and signals and things, there could be devices even. Since not only your house you have to worry about, but it’s your neighbor, especially if you live in an apartment, there could be a lot of different things out there that you can’t see this stuff until you scan it and you look through it. And basically, the software, when you load it, it will let you know a good software. I sell them on a good software. I forgot the name of it. I’ll have to give it to you later, Phil. But it basically let me know what conflicts there were. And it assisted me and allowed me in my personal. network to kind of move things around so there weren’t any conflicts anymore and and also there’s different you know there’s different wireless you know standards too so you’ve got the you know the 2.4 and you’ve got some different things that you know there’s a lot of competition for some of these older wi-fi wireless technologies that you have to take in account for but if you use the newer standards it’s better but again those conflicts can be resolved pretty easily and my advice is if you If you don’t feel comfortable with it, talk to someone like Phil or me. You probably have somebody in your family that knows a lot about IT that are IT nerds. You probably have at least one in everybody’s family. Get hold of them.

Speaker 0 | 32:12.871

Don’t call that guy because he hates you.

Speaker 1 | 32:16.153

Well, I’m that guy from my family. By the way,

Speaker 0 | 32:19.455

could I talk with Mark from Microsoft? He says there’s a problem with my computer. It’s only going to cost me $600 to fix.

Speaker 1 | 32:25.799

No.

Speaker 0 | 32:26.720

Do not talk. Mark from Microsoft is not from Microsoft. Do not talk to him. I have to say this again. Do not talk to him. This is a problem on my computer. Ignore the call.

Speaker 1 | 32:35.405

Right. A lot of scams. That’s maybe for a future podcast. But yeah, there’s a lot of phishing scams and social engineering scams. That’d be a great future topic. But a lot of those we had to deal with, you know, with a remote from home. You ask about challenges, Phil, and we’ve been inundated with, you know, nuts. just from domestically, but from all over the world, trying to, you know, fool our workers and things like that. And, uh, uh, you know, they’re impersonating as, you know, our employees or our CEO and things like that. That’s, that’s another challenge we had to deal with for the 2020 and it’s continued really. I mean, it’s, we went from having a, you know, I mean, we’ve always seen that, right. But it’s just been multiplied by many times. We’re probably 10 X of dealing with that from, from the beginning. Compared to say 2019 and earlier. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 33:27.237

It’s unfortunately, it’s unfortunately scary how easy it is to just call in and give someone else’s name.

Speaker 1 | 33:33.679

Oh yeah. And pretend to be somebody else or pretend to be a company.

Speaker 0 | 33:39.161

Yeah. Like, Hey, I’m so-and-so it director or whatever. I don’t have my, I need my IP address range, please.

Speaker 1 | 33:45.464

Problem.

Speaker 0 | 33:45.944

Here you go.

Speaker 1 | 33:46.985

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 33:47.985

Yeah. Oh,

Speaker 1 | 33:48.585

could you email it to my personal email address? Yeah, it happens.

Speaker 0 | 33:54.508

As far as the conflicts, it’s interesting when I Googled the wireless access scanner conflict, avoid placing Bluetooth gadgets near my microwave or fluorescent lices. But what if my microwave is a Bluetooth device in itself? It’s scary when I’m in another state and I get the notification on my cell phone that your oven is at temperature. Your oven is at 350 degrees. So I know my kids are cooking something. I’m like, why is the oven on? What are you doing with the oven? You know, and that also means that someone else could. hack into the network somehow and turn my oven on or open my store.

Speaker 1 | 34:26.294

That’s right. That’s right.

Speaker 0 | 34:28.636

So I’ve been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 | 34:30.878

Thank you, Phil. It was a great talk today. I really appreciated it. And everyone have a great day. Thank you.