Before Jupiter Broadcasting, we worked for a local IT services company, and we have some stories to share.
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This is The Launch, Episode 12 for March 4th, 2025. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, We greet you all a good morning, good evening, or wherever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings, indeed, to one and all. This is The Launch. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Angela. We're going to warm everybody up with a good launch this week. We've got stories. You've got stories. You've got surprises I don't even know about. Yeah, you don't. I don't. So just a few things everyone needs to know before we get going. This here podcast is live on a Tuesday at 11.30 a.m. Pacific, 2.30 p.m.
Eastern, and 7.30 p.m. UTC at jblive.tv, or in your podcast app of choice. I say that because it's going to become more important than ever soon. It releases for download Wednesday morning. I invite everyone to join us. We've got the Mumble Room open. I'd love to hear from our members as well. We'll have a live open mic before and after every single show. We'd love to have you in there. Get a direct line to us. And we have an always-going chat room, The Launch HQ, which is linked at the top of our website at Winkly. It's not bad. We should register that. Winkly Launch. The Weekly Launch dot rocks. That's where you can find links, past episodes, chat room.
And I think even if we're live, I wonder, does it show if we're live right now over there if you go to Weekly Launch? Because I want to get that going. Yeah, it does. Look at that. It shows if we're live right now. That's great. So even if we're a live show, you can just go over to the Weekly Launch and get it play. Be like, hey, it's Tuesday. Are they recording right now? I'll go over to Weekly Watch on R-O-X. Listen in. Okay, Enders. So I've been waiting. We just have a line in the doc that says Ange has something to talk about. And I really have no idea.
If I were going to guess... Food-related? I don't know why. I just feel food-related. Oh, you know, it was supposed to be food-related, but it's not. Okay. We'll save that for another day because I can go on that for a long time. Okay. No, so I had an audition yesterday. Ooh. Audition for what? For, at the moment, a voice role in a Star Trek short film. No way. That's so great. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what the role is? Yes, I am. Let's see. It wasn't, I can't remember the title, but the commander of the horizon. Okay. I can tell what era of Star Trek it is just from the universe.
If that, or from the uniform, if that uniform is accurate. Well, it's a uniform. Yeah. I don't know if the uniforms are really necessarily consistent, but I was sent a couple of different links of, of uniforms that I could get if I wanted to do a video role. Oh, right. Yeah. So they have like a place you can buy Star Trek uniforms? Mm-hmm. What? Yeah. That's not bad for a whole uniform, $130. Yeah. This would be like the DS9 and Star Trek First Contact style for Star Trek fans out there where they revamp them. They look good. I like those ones. Yeah. They even have the undershirt tunic kind of like thing, whatever you call that, like a, I don't know, a jacket.
A vest. Yeah, a vest. Yeah. So those were the three options in range of cost. Oh, my God. That's so cool. Yeah, I'm excited. I think I could really, I feel like during the audition, I channeled my Janeway. Oh, yeah, good. Do you know one of the lines? Do you remember one of the lines? Oh, gosh, no. Okay. I want to hear it. So it hasn't been written yet. Oh, okay. So I read other things. Oh, good. Went and found some Star Trek quotes or something? Well, they were provided to me by the person who, by the way, is Samuel Cockings. he is a faux show fan oh no way yeah he was one of the younger ones with admiral murphy and um i can't remember the other one right at the moment but anyway yeah he has moved on to be a star trek film producer uh writer all the all the things and so yep uh that is upcoming i.
Want to hear a line. Okay yeah i'm looking for it right now oh you know what it was in it it is uh forever Never locked in the Zoom chat. Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought it was in my messages with him, but it's not. Oh, that's fair. I'm sorry. That's all right. Maybe one day. Maybe, you know, I could think of a few, you know. Mm-hmm. I have a Janeway line. Like, this is my favorite Janeway line. Isn't that great? That's so random. I know. Yeah, that's early season for you. There's coffee in that nebula. Well, that's pretty exciting. So when do you hear? Like, when do you get to know more? Well, I just need to ask you a couple of questions, and then I'm going to get back to him today.
So I think this, he's going to start writing it next week. Okay. And depending on whether I do just voice or video or voice and video, it'll be like a three episode span. So I have so many questions about how you would shoot the video, but they would use it. Like you would set up a camera. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I can send you a link to the production so that you can see. You said you had a question for me. Yeah. But off air. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. I'd like to know more. I wonder if there's a way they could replace your background, too. You know, there's all kinds of technology available now.
That's pretty neat. Okay, well, stay tuned and find out more, I suppose. So this week also was rough for the folks that have the desk jobs. I heard multiple complaints about a Microsoft Teams outage this week. And then also, sounds like there was a pretty significant Slack outage. There was. Which hit you. Yeah, which is crazy. So my whole job doesn't necessarily rely on Slack, or so I thought, right? Like, it reminds me of in the past when email was down. Like, nobody could work, right? But now it's Slack. And so I did some things that I could do, but I wasn't motivated because I couldn't connect with anybody at work.
I couldn't reference conversations that we had had. And unless I missed them responding to a conversation, then I could search my email for it, I guess, because I have Slack sending me, you know, missed messages. But so then I'm like, OK, well, then I'll just email except the draft of what I needed to email was in my Slack in a message to myself. So, you know, like, yeah, yeah, I have so much message to myself. So later in the day when it finally came back online, I told my boss, like, hey, somebody needs to look into this. We are way too dependent on Slack. Yeah, it's funny how those things you're so right. And maybe we'll get into this later in the episode.
Email was this critical business communications tool. And if it was down, I would have clients just absolutely erupting on the phone. Like big business deals. And you're right now, it's Slack. And there's nothing for your local IT to do. And it's everybody. I mean, thankfully, they emailed the whole company to be like, hey, we're aware. And hey, it's resolved. Yeah, but during the business day is rough. I didn't even notice it. I don't use Slack as probably as heavily, but, We're really dependent as a culture now on all of these cloud services. And as a business, like there's real economic impacts when giant percentages of the businesses just go offline.
I really feel like a business should seriously consider running their own internal communications. I know it's a lift, but there are solutions out there like Mattermost or others like Matrix or whatnot that are Slack equivalents and Slack adjacents. that are not necessarily that difficult to run if you're only talking like 1,000 people or something. Right. They get more tricky when you're talking to tens of thousands of people. And then your reoccurring cost is just the cost to run the infrastructure and not the slack, which is ridiculously expensive.
It's like, what is it, 12 bucks a person or something like that? I don't even know. Yeah. Yeah, that's just bad. But we thought today we'd share some stories on the show because before we did Jupyter Broadcasting, we actually did a lot of IT consulting services in various forms. And you've heard me maybe make reference to that from time to time. But we've never really kind of laid it out there. And I was trying to think of how to really kind of frame the story because ultimately what ends up happening is Angela and I end up working for the same IT services company. And boy, do we have stories from that.
But I think it kind of goes back to a company I was working for that no longer exists. and they were called Dream Dinners. And maybe Dinner's Ready is still around? I don't think so. I think Dream Dinners is still around, just only a couple. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, they were trying to franchise. This is before you had your boxed food services that you could go online and get a month's worth or a week's worth of food delivered to you in a box. Before that idea, there was Dream Dinners. It was a similar concept, different in execution. You go online once a month, and you order your dinners for the whole month. And they have a bunch of different options, like a menu.
You pick the ones you want, and then you arrive at one of their facilities and assemble. The benefit is you could assemble to taste, and everything gets assembled at once. The downside is you need to go find an hour or two in your busy week, which you're trying to save time by having these dinners pre-made, but yet you also have to clear like an hour or two during your weekday to go make the dinners. It was initially pretty successful, but then they decided to really get serious. They needed to emulate a much larger company. And the company they decided to emulate was Starbucks.
And so they hired one of the fired Starbucks CEO back in the day. And this gal decided we need to run an efficiency audit on the entire company. And she zeroed in on the fact that the IT manager, my boss at the time, who was great, she zeroed in on the fact that that gal really didn't have any credentialed experience. I mean, she'd been running the IT from the beginning of the company, but she didn't have any credentialed experience. And if we're going to become Starbucks, we need to bring in a heavy hitter chief technology officer. So let's go hire somebody that just got laid off from Boeing.
And they brought in a Boeing IT manager who had worked at Boeing his entire life. And no disrespect to folks at Boeing, but to us at the time in the wider IT industry, these folks were sort of frowned upon. because they basically just knew one vertical and they knew that vertical extremely well and they didn't know anything outside that vertical if they came from Boeing. And this guy just seemed to like prove the stereotype. First thing he wanted to do, because reasons, even though everything was working like a top, he wanted to rip out all the Linux systems.
He wanted to rewrite from PHP to what was called active server pages, ASP at the time. And he wanted to go from a fully integrated Samba authentication mail system with spam screening and all of that to Active Directory and Exchange. And he wanted to quadruple the number of servers we needed to do all of this. Okay, whatever, you know, fine. I don't really like it, but he's the boss. But then he started to turn out to be a real dick. I would get in like 7.30 a.m. So that way I would get in just before the rest of the users. And so would my coworker, Josh, he'd get in a little bit later and what we would do is we would stagger i'd get the morning crew people having issues in the morning even though it wasn't technically my job because i was server guy but i would i would take the bulk of it in the morning and then he would stay till about 5 30 and he would catch the folks wrapping up for the night having problems and that was our little system so we always had coverage we're always there so four o'clock comes around i'm like wrapping up for the day 4 30 it's time for me to leave and i'm going out the back and the boss i'm going down the stairs and the new boss is coming up the stairs.
It's like a scene from a movie about a bad boss. He puts his hand on my chest and he stops me and he says, you know, I notice who stays late and who leaves early. And I consider that. And I'm like thinking like I didn't say anything to him. I'm just like, OK, you know, that's all I said. Of course, the moment I walk out there, I'm like, I'm leaving this place. This is done. That was it. That was the moment. I'm like, I just quit in my head. But he got in like at 839 o'clock. So he never knew I was there early. Yeah. He just saw me leaving late. And that, oh, man, the guy was a total jerk.
And now the company's, you know, pretty much collapsed in on itself. Their IT infrastructure migration never finished. And it was just sort of a hot mess. But it was at that moment I was like, I am done working for companies. I want to go do IT consulting and bop around for a bit, but I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But my mom happened to know somebody in the business and she made a connection for me. And I start doing an interview and it starts going pretty well. And we get high. I get hired initially to do a lot of their clients that either have some Linux systems, some Windows and some Mac. Like a lot of the mixed network systems was what I was brought on to do and then sort of moved more into infrastructure for clients.
And the company, should we give the name out? I don't know. Yeah, I was wondering if you were going to. I mean, they're still around. They're still going. We have no ill will. True North ITG, they're still going today. And they were growing like crazy back in the day. I mean, like, you know how a new company kind of like hits the right market fit and all of a sudden they got to like increase office space. They got to staff up and they needed somebody to come in and help run the back office stuff. And I said, hey, I think I know somebody. So what was it, like six-ish, maybe eight months I'd been working there?
Yeah. And what was your title at the time? Do you remember? Was it operations officer? Was it, I can't. That is a good question. We had so many things we needed fixed, right? Because we had inbound support calls. We had client billing that needed to be sorted out. There was sales proposals that we were putting together and sending out to clients and then tracking if they engaged. There was so much inbound. That's what I remember. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I was hired on as, oh, gosh, it wasn't an operations manager. But after a couple months, I was promoted to operations manager.
And that's because I came in like a boss. I came in and basically they were paying their CPA to invoice clients. Yeah, right. And she was doing it not on a schedule, whenever she wanted. Charging her full rate. Lacking detail, like for the clients. And there was like over 100,000 in accounts receivable. So I came in and I collected that. And I have a knack for optimizing software. So I connected their, let's see, what was it? The ticketing system to QuickBooks to have the detail actually come over to QuickBooks. books and fill in the invoices and which.
Was big because, Clients were receiving bills and not really clear what they were getting billed for. Not at all. Yeah. And once I got it connected, I was able to like redo the invoices that she had previously done. And that's why they paid. They're like, oh, right. Yeah, I do remember that, you know. So it was really cool. It was a good experience. And I also was like first level tech support, you know. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Like if you're picking up the call, you would have to do a lot of like the first level screening stuff, which is always. Because I remember for a little while, we were like a three-room office and you could hear the phone ring.
And so you could hear you pick up and listen. Okay, she's got it. All right, she's got it. We can keep going. Yep. Yeah. But basically we had like what, four or five of you guys that you were all assigned your own clients and would go to them regularly. And, you know, it was really the start. We were converting from time and materials to this subscription system where you pay a flat rate monthly and you get this many hours and then whatever's over that gets billed. And that actually worked kind of nice because it meant, all right, well, every Thursday I show up at this client and I'm here from, you know, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. or whatever it would be.
And it also meant that you had a way to make just maintaining security updates. Remember, this is Windows servers back in the day, a lot of them. So there's a lot of that. It just meant making that stuff like actually financially sustainable for the IT company, too. It did mean, though, that clients felt like they had they had you. Right. Because, hey, I'm paying you every single month. Right. Some of them were big checks. Right. And so it gave them this sense of privilege and that you would be available immediately. And if you've got five, six, seven, eight, a dozen clients, you can't be available immediately for all of them.
Nope. That's always a constant source of friction. But I think also one of the things that I discovered through that process is that I was actually pretty good at both the engineering, but the sales engineering too. So I'd start going and sitting on more of the sales calls. And I had to learn during that time. I'd never had to do this. I had to learn how to like write a proposal to a client on like what you need to do. Here's the cost. Here's the work breakdown. Here's the time breakdown. Never really had to do that kind of stuff before. That kind of stuff I hated at first, but now I'm really glad I had to go through it because it works.
I use that skill set today even like when dealing with sponsors. Right. And, you know, interestingly, this experience of working for the same company was like the crux of realizing that we could work together. True. You know, because like you do the IT stuff, I do the back-end office stuff. And that is how it continued after that. We even got to carpool together. I was just thinking like, yeah, for a while we were carpooling, which makes sense, right? Yeah. Especially if it was a day where I was going to stay in the office all day. There was a couple of those.
Well, even if you didn't, I was staying in the office all day. Yeah. Yeah. I can still take the car. Except, you know, when I rear-ended somebody on the freeway. And it was so dumb because Chris saw it. He knew exactly what was going to happen. And I, I don't know, I locked my brakes. Yeah. And I rear-ended a green Jetta. And that was, was that the Civic? Was that your, or what car was it? Cause I don't think it might not have an anti-lock. I never drove a Civic. It had to be the TL. Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. I was just trying to think. I don't remember having anti-lock brakes or something like you just, it might've been raining too.
Yeah. I don't know, but gosh, it was so dumb. It was, it was. And I did try to get off to the side and then I did have to get off to the side after I hit him and, uh, and it sucked. Uh, I got out of the car with it still in drive. Yeah i mean there's a lot going on also didn't uh somebody from work pass us by yes yeah so one. Of the owners saw us on the side of the. Freeway yeah yeah so that was a that was a rough start of the day they. Knew we if we weren't going to make it to the team meeting. On time that morning and from that day we had to drive separate no yeah right yeah that was the end of carpooling right there there was there were times you know where i was driving just crazy miles, Seattle, a lot of going down to Seattle from, you know, up north and sitting in traffic a lot.
Yeah chris hates seattle and chris hates traffic yeah so basically. Those two basically those two things go together. Yeah and and it like it it definitely contributed to burnout like it's funny because you're not like actually actively doing anything but it's it's such a dead you could be you could be doing something yeah. It's like okay so i went down there and i billed for three hours and i drove for two hours at least. Minimum yeah it was It was a law firm, and they paid a decent amount. They did. Not obviously straight to you, but yes, they were a high payer. I got all of the high payer problematic clients.
Yes, you did. All the neurosurgeons and ophthalmologists. Yes. Yep. And boy, are they particular. And like you were saying earlier, I remember one time the exchange email server went down for the law firm client. and it was something like a three or five million dollar deal that one of the owners was working on and he called me up and he starts screaming at me immediately like immediately like i say you know hello this is chris and it just starts shouting and somewhere in there i hear like you're responsible if this five million dollar deal doesn't go through i'm holding you personally responsible you get your ass down here and get this server online and i'm just like yeah i don't need this right i don't need this pressure i don't and this guy was a really high stress guy Yeah.
And high-functioning lawyer. Yeah. So the high pressure of his clients and the commute and whatever, Chris was reaching burnout. And the company was doing pretty good considering I collected all that AR and then was invoicing regularly and the cash flow was really good. So they actually... let me book a cruise. And Chris. And I went on a cruise. And paid for and. And it's funny because in our memories or at least okay I won't speak for you but. I'm pretty. Sure this has been a thing we consider that our honeymoon. It was much more of a honeymoon than the actual honeymoon yeah yeah.
Because we just went to Vegas right. And it was uh it. Was like what a year year after we got married. Yeah uh. That we went on this cruise and it was so nice. It was super nice we. Had never done anything like that before and it was just really cool. Yeah it was true relaxation pre-kids yeah so there was like nothing to sort out with kids or worry about how things are going with the kids back home it was just here you go work's paying you to take some time off and they're paying for the trip thanks for the hard work you two and so you know we're flying to florida we're doing excursions it was we went on the beach that is the corona beach that they shoot the corona commercials on yep.
I was trying to remember the name of the beer. Yeah the white sand beach yeah yeah which was great i got. My uh hair braided. Yeah like. I i don't think it's called a weave i don't know what it's called but like a bunch of tiny braids. Yeah in a pattern it's the kind of thing that i don't think we would have ever spent the money on i've thought about taking another cruise since but, i don't know you do a lot of eating you know yeah a lot of food a lot of food but it was very great and i don't remember how long we ended up staying there you know but i definitely felt like it was a good boot camp for learning how to do a client services business how to do the invoicing all that kind of stuff.
And I made it possible when I was ready to essentially spin off our own company and do that just with a handful of private clients. And then that worked really great because I was able to focus on some clients that were closer, which was so nice. Didn't have to go any further than, you know, ever, which was 20, 40 minutes away. And then was able to transition them slowly as more sponsors came on board for. Jupiter Broadcasting and could make kind of a Right. So keep in mind, the timeline here is we were already or Chris was already podcasting. And in 2009, when I had when I had when I had Dylan, that's the day that we set up the green screen to start doing video.
And let's see, it was about Dylan was nine months old. No, it was the end of that year. The end of 2009 is when I stopped working there. You had already stopped working there, I think. I can't remember. No, you outlasted me. I can't remember. Regardless, I became a stay-at-home mom. So we weren't full-time with Jupiter Broadcasting at all. We were in the early days of getting the video going. I think in 2009 is when we made it an official company because we had our first sponsor. Or 08 might have been? It might have been 08.
Yeah. It was really great though to be able to lean on the tech support and the learnings because all of that, like the worst stuff, like I had this, I had this dentist client. It's my only client that ever fired me. And I still think about it to this day. Like, so this stuff was, you know, there was some emotional investment and this dentist, uh, he's actually just down the street from you. Um, and I go in there and he says, uh, well, you're my third IT guy. I hold my IT company responsible or my IT support responsible, and I have high expectations. Okay, fine.
So do all my other clients. Right? No big deal. I don't recall before we'd even fully engaged. Like we'd done the sales meeting. I think they'd probably signed the contract. I had maybe been out there once during the, because we would do this evaluation where I would go out and evaluate the systems and kind of give them a report when they first became a client. And about two days later he called me up and said you're fired i was like what wow he was so angry because i think they were having an internet outage something was down wasn't related to anything we'd worked on so we hadn't worked on anything yet he's like i you you haven't even made it two days before we have our first outage and this is what i'm talking about and i have learned by working with you guys did not give an inch and you're fired i was like i didn't even do anything wow oh man just just a wildest like and you know and one of my clients was i don't i wonder if he's still going i could probably give his name out right it's probably okay.
Uh, is he still going? So, uh, oh, no, his office is closed. Okay. Yeah. So, um, one of my clients was Dr. Sanford J. Wright, who is, was the leading neurologist in the United States. And he had converted an old mansion into his clinic. And the gals that had been working for him had worked with him for like 20, 30 years. And they were very facts and document based. And during my window of IT consulting, Obama signed a law that said essentially all the clinics need to digitize their records. And so this guy who had been in practice for 20, 30 years and had avoided going digital, all of a sudden had like a deadline before he started getting fined.
So he brings us on board to help figure out where he's got issues, because if he's going to bring all these things online, he wanted to secure his network, figure out how to improve things. And then, you know, also just take care of general tech support and migrate a system over to this digital imaging system and slowly replace like this cockamamie, like remote access systems that his previous IT guy had built. And that was a great client. And I worked with them for many, many years. But it was always a strange one because I was working out of this huge mansion. It used to be like maybe I think used to be the governor's mansion or something on the waterfront. Yeah.
Yep. So I'd show up. And it was funny, too, because, like, you know, a lot of a lot of folks, because it was also a historical site. The front was immaculate. It just looked great. Like it fresh paint and plants. But then you go around the back and it was just a mess, you know, like they weren't anything that the public didn't see. They were not maintaining and it was actively falling apart. It was it was a real challenge. And good lessons, though. You know, a lot of a lot of things in the medical space were changing back in those days. All right. You think that's any other stories to share? Is that.
No, I think that. Yeah. Feels like it feels like a thousand years ago. It does. And yet, today, not so far away. All right, we want you to boost into the show and tell us what piece of technology that everyone else loves but you hate. What is it? What is the technology that the world seems to love and you just cannot stand? Give me your hot take. I want to know. Boost them in. And I think you had a question, too. Did you have a sneaky question? Oh, I was just thinking you could ask a Star Trek-related thing based on that audition. but I don't know or not based on the audition but like what character would you want to play who's your favorite Star Trek captain I don't.
Know if I could answer that because I could make an argument for nearly all of them except for the Discovery stuff but you know maybe I'm at my hot take I like Christopher Pike the OG Christopher Pike how about that. I have something weird it's not tech but like that's fine and I am trying to understand this but I don't like being signed into Google on my phone, like I use the mail app, and I have several Gmails set up in there, but I don't like being in Google signed in. I don't like the tracking. Nope. And it sucks because the school sends Google Docs all the time, and you have to be signed in to view it, so I have to wait until I get home.
And that's not convenient because—. What about a signed-in browser? You just install Chrome, and you just leave that logged in, and you never log in Safari. Sorry. And then like, if you got to open up a Google doc on your thing, you just do it in Chrome. Yeah. On my phone. I can get Chrome on my phone. Yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't, it didn't even occur to me. I don't know. Cause I, I agree. I don't like, I don't sign in. And every time I go to Google search, it always asks for my location. I say no. Yeah, exactly. And it knows, Hey, you know, based on your previous searches, we think you're in this city.
They still get, they still get an idea. Dang it. Yeah, you got me. I wonder if anybody else out there does that. Do you resist the sign-in and the location tracking, or have you just embraced it? Okay, if you're listening as this episode comes out, Saturday, March 8th, 7 p.m., we are doing a dinner for the Scale crew, whoever's coming to Scale or Planet Nix, if you're going to be around Saturday, March 8th. We're getting together at El Cholo. Their tacos are killer. We've been there once before, I believe. And we have room for 40 or 50-ish people.
I'm sure some people will cycle in and out, but that does mean we would love it if you RSVP'd. We have 31 RSVP'd right now. Maybe plan to bring like Cash App or Venmo or a little bit of cash if you want to get some food. And we have the menu linked at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Looking forward to it. We usually do a lunch, and we have traditionally done them at the Yardhouse. and so we call up the old yard house and we're like hey yard house keys we'd like to do what we did last year but instead of doing it at 1 p.m we'd like to do it at 7 p.m and they're like cool that'll be a minimum of thirty two hundred dollars.
Oh goodness gracious. Yeah wow and i'm like prime time yeah exactly and they and also because we we have a large crew and they have a very large area yeah they close off the patio and they want to close it off an hour and a half ahead of time so that way people clear out so they want to charge us a little bit for that i see, you know what we probably would as a as a group collectively spend thirty two hundred dollars but the way they do it at the art house it has to go on one card right so i'm like i'll just call el chocho i meant they make me a better deal and they did so that's why we're doing it over there but 7 p.m we're doing it in the evening the idea being that you can scale kind of goes till about But then kind of wraps up a little earlier.
If you don't need some of the later talks, you get a little refreshed and come join us and then head out to some of the after parties afterwards. That's, that's my hope. All right, Andrews, you ready for a little musical break? I am. So this is one of my favorite value for value tracks. This is tiptoe by Jack holiday. It's performed by both Jack holiday and Katie Beth. And the track is linked in the show notes. I recommend you listen if you like it and boost because the stats will go directly to the artist. Here is tiptoe. There you go. Tiptoe by Jack Holliday. And we have some great boosts.
And Bobbypin is our baller booster this week with 20,000 sats. And Bobby writes, I've been listening to the backlog of the launch. What? How did we get the backlog of the launch? I thought I unlisted it. It starts at nine. Yeah, everybody knows that. But what you said about episode six, which doesn't exist, about AI assistants and podcasts, plus hearing the podfather talk about his pirate radio days. has inspired me to make a podcasting 2.0 podcast based on my favorite book series. By the way, do you get a boost from older episodes for the upcoming week boost segment? Is it all the same feed? Yes.
And of course, welcome back to the Mike and Rip Women's Tech Radio, the faux show gone, but never forgotten. Thank you. Thank you for the shout out. Yeah. Bobby Penn is an OG. OG, nice to hear from you and tell us about your podcast once you get it cooking. Eric the Magician comes in with 2,345 sats. I'm using VS Code with the Rue Code extension. It's so good. I'm currently trying to push it at my company as it has completely changed my workflow. With tools like that, I can see why big tech is cutting the workforce. Okay, Robo Code, or Rue Code, R-R-R-R-O-O Code.
I'm taking a look at it right now. This looks interesting. Thank you for the recommendation. RootCode is an AI-powered autonomous coding agent that lives in your editor. That's cool, Eric. Thank you for the boost. Listener Jeff, a.k.a. PJ, is here with 6,666 sets. He's got some follow-up on time travel. He says, my career is a bit too modern, so I would need to learn more on the, probably I would need to lean on the electrical side of my work. I'd probably go back to the 70s. If I failed to be an electrician, I think I could keep up as a rock drummer of the time and get to see my favorite band's rise to fame as heavy metal is formed.
Maybe ensure Lars gets kicked out of Metallica and take his place. Nice. That's like you got to play an A, you got to play an B, and you got to play an C in there, PJ. Jeff's a dreamer. His first computer was one that he learned on was a store-bought HP with a single core AMD, 512 megabytes of ram and a massive 160 gigabyte hard drive i eventually received my first dedicated agp graphics card i remember the agp standard a geforce 5500 which served me well for years, i definitely had a system like that at one point maybe two cores my first machine that had a lot of ram and it came with four megs of ram which was a big deal back in the day and i upgraded eventually to 16 megabytes of ram it was a big deal and just a little ram compression and it was really like you had 32 megabytes of ram and then pj says he would call in all right i'm keeping track of that i'm keeping track of who says they'd be willing to call in i think that's good to know, chakaraka is here with 4444 sats i think that's a big old duck.
Hey Jovians, I'm relatively new to Jupyter Broadcasting. I like the shows and this one was no exception. I'd really appreciate getting to know the idea behind the show. What idea? Like we have no, you know, it's boy, that's a big answer. Let's see if I can shorten it down. You know, I'm a big believer in super serving your best customers and always making them happy. And sometimes that means we make content that is really just to super serve the niche of JB audience that wants to know us a little bit better. And one of the things that is true that keeps people turning into podcasts over time is when they develop a bit of like for the personalities involved.
But a lot of our shows like Linux Unplugged and Self-Hosted are very content focused. And so we don't take a lot of time sharing stories about ourselves or rambling about things that we find interesting. we try to stay on topic so that way the value density of the episode is extremely high we're going for a high signal to noise ratio in those shows not to say this is a noise show but to say that this is an opportunity for us to slow down and for you to get to know us a little bit better and the idea was it's not a replacement to kota radio but it's something people can tune into each week and we'll just kind of see how it goes we hope that you know we can do the show for a while and it grows and it finds its audience and it becomes sustainable it may not happen and it may happen and you know our hope is is that we'll get and i'm going to talk about more of this in a little bit we're going to come up with new ways to engage with the show that we've never done in a jb show before and you know maybe that'll give the show a little chance i hope that answers yeah that's okay.
Um, I am here in the Mediterranean area and, uh, and this is the salad oil for the coastal people, olive oil, Namjee Namjee. Um, okay. You also add some pumpkin seeds. There you go. Or some pumpkin seed oil. I think that olive oil can have some greater value for some people. Oh, right. The olive oil heist. Yeah. I think most people know they use it for, uh, you know, like dressing, maybe tristle for fishes, chopped garlic with a little bit of olive oil is also great. This is a great dip for say sea dishes. You can use searching for, it gives me a name, but I'll just have to copy and paste it.
Tarasco Maca? Yeah, that might be it. I do love a good sauce. And, you know, this is when I became okay with mayo again, when I realized it's like just eggs and olive oil, basically, and a few other things. It's really simple, depending on where you get it. You know, I learned that, and I was shocked, first of all, and I'm still thoroughly disgusted, so nope, I'm not convinced. Yeah, that's fair. That's totally fair, I think. It is a little odd. It's a lot of oil. It is a lot of oil. Open source account at his back with 2,000 sats. I would definitely call in. All right, there's another one, Ange.
As far as my first PC, I had a Tandy TRS-80. Oh, I did two. From Radio Shack. That was actually my very first computer, and I got it from a garage sale. He said after that I had a Panasonic electric word processor. I remember those. They were like a typewriter computer combo. As for the Ask Me Anything, If you could have stopped the advancement of technology, at what point in your journey would you have paused? Wow. If you could hit pause, I mean, I definitely want CD players and DVDs. Maybe Blu-ray. Right after Blu-ray got introduced, if we could just hit pause there for a while. You got everything. You need high fidelity entertainment. What else do you need?
And I think maybe we had basic cell phones. The internet worked. But we didn't have social media. And that might have been for the best. Right? Yeah, maybe pause the social media aspect. It just seems like it's gotten worse, like with the tinies and stuff. Like, it just, I don't know. But it's hard to say. That's a really great question. It is. Do you have any thoughts on when you would hit pause in the technology? I mean, I had a pretty big eye roll with the advancement of media, both music and music. movies right because we had just collected so many series via dvd yes and and then came blu-ray and digital blu-ray and and then you wanted them in blu-ray and and.
Then you want them in streaming because they're on. Streaming and yeah it sucks yeah that evolution was so annoying we got. Burned and also like like for star trek at least like i got. Them on vhs too yeah right yeah vhs dvd and blu-ray yes yeah we had all yeah i don't think yeah if you're not our age that wasn't really a problem for you you just came in like our kids yeah they're just the digital yeah downloaded age they don't even know about the physical aspect of it but. You know what and this is just me being cantankerous but the streaming services still have not cut up to the quality of blu-ray blu-rays are still a better fidelity picture and better sound.
I don't know i i feel nostalgic for when netflix did uh dvd mailing yeah that was cool right and then game fly right was it gamefly yeah gamefly uh mailed the games in the same fashion and uh that was just a cool time and that was just at the cusp of switching to the the digital streaming it. Was fun to get those three red envelopes or whatever your. Plan was yeah right yeah we had the three yeah. Oh yeah that was that worked and you know it wasn't that bad swapping the discs and with you didn't have to buy all of them. So maybe, yeah, I think that's maybe where you hit pause.
Yeah, and they did a nice little, or I think, I'm sure somebody will complain about it. Netflix did a nice transition of, yeah, you can watch these movies and you can still get mail. And we did that for a while, but ultimately it is nicer to not have to rely on Postal. Yeah, and not have to send them back. They would sometimes sit around for a while. Yeah. Oh no, I found a Gamefly game recently. I was wondering how you remembered it. That's a great question though. If anybody else wants to chime in, And I'd love to hear when you would hit pause on the technology evolution landscape.
Thank you, open source account. Nice to hear from you. And our last boost above the delimitator this week is from Turd Ferguson. 933 sets. If animals could talk, which would be the biggest jerks and which would surprise us with deep philosophical takes? Hmm. Good question. I think squirrels would be jerks. Oh, I think cats. Yeah, I could see cats. I mean, they'd sometimes be sweet, but they'd probably mostly be cranky. Mostly. You know, my belief is we are all actually just subjects to the birds. Like, we think we are the king species. Right.
But I don't know about you, Ange. I don't go around crapping on everybody's cars and I don't go around crapping on people's literal heads. The birds do and they get away with it and they get to fly. Do you fly? Right. I don't fly. I mean, I can get in a place. I can't fly just like. So they're clearly superior because they can fly and they get to just roam the whole earth and they get to poop on us. Yeah. With absolute zero repercussions, they get to poop all over my cars and all over me. And so I feel like the birds in a way are the biggest jerks. And because they can fly, they probably have a superior attitude.
Right. I was going to say birds for the deep philosophical takes. I could see some of them because they're flying around thinking. Yeah. Well, so Dylan and I walked the Centennial Trail yesterday morning before school. And it was all birds. Like that's all you can hear in the morning. And there was an eagle in the tree next to the nest. And we heard two woodpeckers, one normal and one lazy woodpecker. And we had this whole conversation about birds the whole time, right? Yeah. Uh, there was a, I thought it was an owl and he's like, no, that's a dove. Right.
And I'm like, dude, I don't think that's a dove. And then we heard it again on the way back in a different direction. I'm like, that's not a dove. And he said, well, sometimes doves look like other birds. And I'm like, oh really? Oh really? You know, cause I haven't seen doves, but I don't know. Maybe. Uh, it was, anyway, it was really funny. I think eagles, they, they watch and can see so much. They could, they'll have some deep philosophical things. They're hardy animals too. But how long do they live? If they only live for like 20 years, maybe they wouldn't be the deep philosophical.
Oh yeah. Yeah, elephants. Elephants, maybe. I feel like sometimes older dogs, I think they go through an evolution process, accelerated like humans, and by the time they get to their later few years, I feel like a lot of them have wised up and they're just watching as humans, judging. But the squirrels seem like they just take. I mean, they're cute, but they're really just fuzzy rats that take. And then they live in the trees and they taunt our animals and then the birds poop all over everything. And, you know, crows are smart, but that doesn't mean they're smart in like a nice way.
They can be smart in like an evil conniving way. And I suspect that's how crows are too. But perhaps that's a future episode. Crows are attracted to smoke and will bring something that's smoldering back to the barn. Catch it on fire. Yeah, that's devious. I will never get the picture out of my head when we took, Hadea and I took Bella to the zoo and we get food. And Hadea goes to eat the hot dog. and just as the hot dog is going towards the mouth, a crow swoops in, snags the hot dog right out of the bun, flies off. With the hot dog.
With the hot dog, lands on a lamppost, and then flips the hot dog up in the air and just one gulfs the whole. Oh my gosh. And I'm talking like a ballpark dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The full length. The full length. Just all a go, one go. And I'm just, and it happened like within 15 seconds, the whole thing. And then so she's sitting there. With a bun. I'm watching this thing eat the burger, or eat the hot dog while she's sitting there with the empty bun in her hand still. Like what just happened? And the worst part is like She was the one that waited in line for the food for like 15 minutes.
So we were just chilling at the table, holding the table. And then after all that line waiting. That's crazy. So crows are jerks. I know they're smart, but I think they're also jerks. Thank you everybody who boosted, including those who boosted below the 2,000 sat cutoff. I see you there, Magnolia Mayhem and others. And thank you to our sat streamers. Collectively, you all streamed us 25,824 sats. That was 17 of you out there. combine that with our boosters and we stacked 71,712 sats for this episode not too bad for our baby show if you want to get started there's a few easy ways to do it i love river but things like strike work in like 110 countries so if you're outside the u.s look at something like strike grab some sats and load up a podcasting tutorial app like fountain and then you can get your message in and support this here production this is episode 12 and uh combined we had 24 individuals participate in the value for value boost program thank you everybody now andrew is there something i want to talk about it was hinted there in those boosts something that we're working on on the back end.
This rings a bell. Ha ha ha i see what you did there, So when we get back from Planet Nix and Scale, Mr. West Payne and I are going to start working on a call-in phone system running on top of free software. And it's kind of rough, but here's what we have planned so far. We want to create a two-line system initially. The first line is a members-only line. Ooh, dedicated. Dedicated members line. Prioritized. So when we're live, you can call in and go front of the line. and when we're not live, we'll have a members-only voicemail box and you can leave us voicemails that we can play on the show or not, depending on the email.
The second line would be a live line where anybody could call in and we take calls during the live stream and we could make calls. And I'm hoping some of you listening out there might be down for a random call from the launch. Yeah, isn't this a fun idea? Oh my goodness. Yeah, we'll have segments where we'll call people up. Ask them a random question. We could. Ask them the question of the. Episode I was thinking too we could also play millionaire there's all kinds of things we could do, so we'll have more details on this but we'll give out a number once we have it the idea is you'd save it to your address book as like the launch or whatever Jupiter Broadcasting you'd have to let us know and we'll figure out this more but you have to let us know it's cool to get a phone call around 12pm Pacific and then one day you might just end up getting a call while we're live, and maybe play some games maybe give out some sats and then another thing I think would be fun so that would be the listeners We could have like maybe like a bench of listeners.
And then the other thing that'd be fun is to call up JB members from time to time. You know, like call up Wes today or call up Brent or Drew and ask Drew how he's doing and stuff like that. So I just think it'd be really nice to be able to make calls and send calls. And I think we could do the whole thing using free software. I don't know how functional, like it might just be kind of just an MVP at first. But if it's popular, how great would that be? Yep, that sounds fun. You call in, you answer some questions. You get some sats. It could be pretty great. So that's kind of in the works.
The real intention is to kind of start cooking on it once we're done with scale and planet Nick. So we'll have more details in a future episode. Well, maybe it's a good thing we're doing podcasting now because I think IT is going to get replaced in the medical industry. Microsoft, a long time ago, bought Dragon Natural Speaking, which a lot of doctors use for dictation of their notes. But now Microsoft wants to take it to the next level, and they want voice-activated AI assistants for doctors that go in the room with you and listen for the entire session and take notes for the doctor.
I'll play for you. This is Microsoft's pitch video for the service. For over two decades, Dragon has been the trusted name in medical speech recognition, empowering healthcare professionals around the world with industry-leading voice and AI capabilities. This continues with Microsoft Dragon Co-Pilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow. Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, it's an extensible workspace that brings together natural language and ambient speech capabilities with fine-tuned generative AI and provides a consistent experience, whether mobile, web, desktop, or through leading EHRs with a modern architecture, enhanced security, and healthcare-specific safeguards.
Yeah. Yeah, you use Microsoft Intra and it uses their trustworthy cloud computing platform with their trustworthy AI platform. The tool can draft documentation like clinical notes, referral letters, and post-visit summaries. Microsoft says the tool should help clinicians spend more time focusing on patients and less time on administrative tasks. And CNBC sent one of their reporters out to try one of these AI-assisted medical clinics. We'll play a moment of it. You know, when you go to your doctor's office, you've probably noticed that your doctor spends a lot of time during your visit typing into the computer, documenting your symptoms into your electronic health records.
Well, those EHRs are really the bane of doctors' lives. A lot of them actually end up finishing those notes later, often at home in what's become known as pajama time in the business. Microsoft's Nuance Technology Unit has an AI-enabled app called DAX Express that just could put pajama time to bed. To see how it works, I did a simulated doctor's appointment with Nuance's Dr. Julie O'Connor, and she didn't type at all. To be clear, Nuance set this up. This is like a fake clinic visit. It's at their headquarters, right? So how successful this thing is, I mean, this is going to be a best case scenario.
Bring our visit. I'm actually on my phone and I'm inside our DAX app. It actually can record the conversation and use that ambient AI to automatically create a draft clinical document from our conversation. So I'm with Bertha, who's a 50-year-old female here today for foot pain. So tell me, Bertha, what's going on? I love to run for last 15 years until about 2017. It was great. It was a great stress reliever. I really enjoyed doing it. And then around 2016, 2017, I developed plantar fasciitis. So I had to literally step back and I wasn't running much anymore. But recently it's become worse. Is that correct?
You can see the AI bot. She has it projected up on a screen doing like, you know, like airplay. and you can see it's just kind of quietly listening in the background. If I do that, the next day I will feel some aches, more aches in my feet. Okay. It's like you're walking on marbles and now also my ankles sort of feel a little... We're spending a lot of time with her as well. I don't know if it might be arthritis. My grandmother had arthritis. I think the MA told me that you're going on a vacation, you're hoping to hike. It's up in the Adirondacks. My in-laws, they have a place in Lake Plot.
I think what they're trying to demonstrate here is that the doctor is more engaged with you and talking to you more instead of taking notes. That's why they're going on and on. You see, because now she can focus on you instead of taking notes about you. I don't know. How do you feel about AI taking notes, transcribing, listening to you the entire time? Well, I have seen inaccurate visit summaries without AI involved. Oh, for sure. That's a good point. It may increase accuracy. It could. It could. I don't like the idea, though, because it is AI. Is it— It's cloud-based. It's listening on their servers. It's processing on Microsoft's infrastructure.
Like, if it's only recording what was mentioned, that's one thing. But if it is drawing conclusions. Diagnosing— No, my understanding is it's giving the doctors, like, the ability to help do that, but it's not doing the diagnosing itself. I do think that a doctor reading that during pajama time to make sure for accuracy would be a lot less time than trying to recall it and type it up. Definitely. And you are going to capture it at the moment versus trying to recall it later. I think those things are all good. It makes sense here. what does rub me a little wrong is like big tech always goes fast for the medical they always go they always go quick to try to sell medical a solution even before it's fully ready that's one thing and i've witnessed this and then the second thing is this is just where it begins so if you're picturing this at the doctor's office then maybe picture it also at the dmv and maybe picture it at the unemployment office and maybe picture it when you call in for any government thing or whatever the irs right like yeah it's going to be listening analyzing and filling out notes automatically all the time and this is going to become normal new.
Tncs new privacy. Acknowledgements all of this i mean or a lot of it at least is going to be done on cloud infrastructure run by some of the big tech companies that is vulnerable to information leak potentially that's right it's a it's a more you know negative look at it but those are just things that i feel like especially medical should be considered subpoenaed yeah oh absolutely oh 100 wow yeah Yeah. Because if, yeah, it's recording. Yeah. When she held up her phone and she's like, yeah, I'm recording this. And then she, like, it's a whole different feeling. And it didn't feel good.
I agree. Like, it was like, ooh. I agree. I don't like the phone right there recording me. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it removes the intimacy that you can, like the patient doctor privilege you can kind of have. Yeah. Of course, they're probably going to note down whatever you say anyways, but. But not have a recording of it. And they could maybe have some discretion or something. Yeah. I mean, I think for a little while, it could be proven in court that AI may have missed something or heard something. Yeah, right. But as I dial it in, it might be harder and harder to fight that. Oy.
Yeah, it's going to be good and bad with a lot of this stuff. I'd be curious to know what you out there think, listening to this, how it makes you feel. If you think about it spreading to other areas, when you call your insurance company, when you call your credit card company, when you call your bank, they're all going to be doing this, right? It's in their best interest. Their incentives align to do it, so that way they can attach it to your account and serve you better. So, I don't know. Not to be weird about it, but it's something to consider. Something for us to think about.
All right, Andrews. We're just about out of here. And this is the last show I'm recording before I hit the road flying out tomorrow. And I think everything else has been checked off, and it's in Editor Drew's hot little hands right now. So, if you want to catch anything we talked about, you can go to weeklylaunch.rocks. We'll have links to it. And, of course, we have episodes going all the way back to episode nine where the show began. And it began no sooner than nine for reasons that are totally understandable and not a critical mistake that will haunt the show forever.
Weekly launch dot rocks for that. I think if everything goes as planned, nothing is a lock at this point. If we're lucky, we will be live next Tuesday right as I'm getting back, hopefully without the pod cred. If I have pod cred, I probably won't do the show. but we'll be here if we can next Tuesday of course that is at 1130 p.m. Pacific or just in your app a.m. thank you that'd be crazy nighttime show 1130 a.m. Pacific but it gets converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar it'll also be in a podcasting 2.0 app all right Andrews you ready to get out of here I'm ready well there you have it from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast thank you for listening and we'll see you next week.
This is The Launch, Episode 12 for March 4th, 2025. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, We greet you all a good morning, good evening, or wherever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings, indeed, to one and all. This is The Launch. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Angela. We're going to warm everybody up with a good launch this week. We've got stories. You've got stories. You've got surprises I don't even know about. Yeah, you don't. I don't. So just a few things everyone needs to know before we get going. This here podcast is live on a Tuesday at 11.30 a.m. Pacific, 2.30 p.m.
Eastern, and 7.30 p.m. UTC at jblive.tv, or in your podcast app of choice. I say that because it's going to become more important than ever soon. It releases for download Wednesday morning. I invite everyone to join us. We've got the Mumble Room open. I'd love to hear from our members as well. We'll have a live open mic before and after every single show. We'd love to have you in there. Get a direct line to us. And we have an always-going chat room, The Launch HQ, which is linked at the top of our website at Winkly. It's not bad. We should register that. Winkly Launch. The Weekly Launch dot rocks. That's where you can find links, past episodes, chat room.
And I think even if we're live, I wonder, does it show if we're live right now over there if you go to Weekly Launch? Because I want to get that going. Yeah, it does. Look at that. It shows if we're live right now. That's great. So even if we're a live show, you can just go over to the Weekly Launch and get it play. Be like, hey, it's Tuesday. Are they recording right now? I'll go over to Weekly Watch on R-O-X. Listen in. Okay, Enders. So I've been waiting. We just have a line in the doc that says Ange has something to talk about. And I really have no idea.
If I were going to guess... Food-related? I don't know why. I just feel food-related. Oh, you know, it was supposed to be food-related, but it's not. Okay. We'll save that for another day because I can go on that for a long time. Okay. No, so I had an audition yesterday. Ooh. Audition for what? For, at the moment, a voice role in a Star Trek short film. No way. That's so great. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what the role is? Yes, I am. Let's see. It wasn't, I can't remember the title, but the commander of the horizon. Okay. I can tell what era of Star Trek it is just from the universe.
If that, or from the uniform, if that uniform is accurate. Well, it's a uniform. Yeah. I don't know if the uniforms are really necessarily consistent, but I was sent a couple of different links of, of uniforms that I could get if I wanted to do a video role. Oh, right. Yeah. So they have like a place you can buy Star Trek uniforms? Mm-hmm. What? Yeah. That's not bad for a whole uniform, $130. Yeah. This would be like the DS9 and Star Trek First Contact style for Star Trek fans out there where they revamp them. They look good. I like those ones. Yeah. They even have the undershirt tunic kind of like thing, whatever you call that, like a, I don't know, a jacket.
A vest. Yeah, a vest. Yeah. So those were the three options in range of cost. Oh, my God. That's so cool. Yeah, I'm excited. I think I could really, I feel like during the audition, I channeled my Janeway. Oh, yeah, good. Do you know one of the lines? Do you remember one of the lines? Oh, gosh, no. Okay. I want to hear it. So it hasn't been written yet. Oh, okay. So I read other things. Oh, good. Went and found some Star Trek quotes or something? Well, they were provided to me by the person who, by the way, is Samuel Cockings. he is a faux show fan oh no way yeah he was one of the younger ones with admiral murphy and um i can't remember the other one right at the moment but anyway yeah he has moved on to be a star trek film producer uh writer all the all the things and so yep uh that is upcoming i.
Want to hear a line. Okay yeah i'm looking for it right now oh you know what it was in it it is uh forever Never locked in the Zoom chat. Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought it was in my messages with him, but it's not. Oh, that's fair. I'm sorry. That's all right. Maybe one day. Maybe, you know, I could think of a few, you know. Mm-hmm. I have a Janeway line. Like, this is my favorite Janeway line. Isn't that great? That's so random. I know. Yeah, that's early season for you. There's coffee in that nebula. Well, that's pretty exciting. So when do you hear? Like, when do you get to know more? Well, I just need to ask you a couple of questions, and then I'm going to get back to him today.
So I think this, he's going to start writing it next week. Okay. And depending on whether I do just voice or video or voice and video, it'll be like a three episode span. So I have so many questions about how you would shoot the video, but they would use it. Like you would set up a camera. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I can send you a link to the production so that you can see. You said you had a question for me. Yeah. But off air. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. I'd like to know more. I wonder if there's a way they could replace your background, too. You know, there's all kinds of technology available now.
That's pretty neat. Okay, well, stay tuned and find out more, I suppose. So this week also was rough for the folks that have the desk jobs. I heard multiple complaints about a Microsoft Teams outage this week. And then also, sounds like there was a pretty significant Slack outage. There was. Which hit you. Yeah, which is crazy. So my whole job doesn't necessarily rely on Slack, or so I thought, right? Like, it reminds me of in the past when email was down. Like, nobody could work, right? But now it's Slack. And so I did some things that I could do, but I wasn't motivated because I couldn't connect with anybody at work.
I couldn't reference conversations that we had had. And unless I missed them responding to a conversation, then I could search my email for it, I guess, because I have Slack sending me, you know, missed messages. But so then I'm like, OK, well, then I'll just email except the draft of what I needed to email was in my Slack in a message to myself. So, you know, like, yeah, yeah, I have so much message to myself. So later in the day when it finally came back online, I told my boss, like, hey, somebody needs to look into this. We are way too dependent on Slack. Yeah, it's funny how those things you're so right. And maybe we'll get into this later in the episode.
Email was this critical business communications tool. And if it was down, I would have clients just absolutely erupting on the phone. Like big business deals. And you're right now, it's Slack. And there's nothing for your local IT to do. And it's everybody. I mean, thankfully, they emailed the whole company to be like, hey, we're aware. And hey, it's resolved. Yeah, but during the business day is rough. I didn't even notice it. I don't use Slack as probably as heavily, but, We're really dependent as a culture now on all of these cloud services. And as a business, like there's real economic impacts when giant percentages of the businesses just go offline.
I really feel like a business should seriously consider running their own internal communications. I know it's a lift, but there are solutions out there like Mattermost or others like Matrix or whatnot that are Slack equivalents and Slack adjacents. that are not necessarily that difficult to run if you're only talking like 1,000 people or something. Right. They get more tricky when you're talking to tens of thousands of people. And then your reoccurring cost is just the cost to run the infrastructure and not the slack, which is ridiculously expensive.
It's like, what is it, 12 bucks a person or something like that? I don't even know. Yeah. Yeah, that's just bad. But we thought today we'd share some stories on the show because before we did Jupyter Broadcasting, we actually did a lot of IT consulting services in various forms. And you've heard me maybe make reference to that from time to time. But we've never really kind of laid it out there. And I was trying to think of how to really kind of frame the story because ultimately what ends up happening is Angela and I end up working for the same IT services company. And boy, do we have stories from that.
But I think it kind of goes back to a company I was working for that no longer exists. and they were called Dream Dinners. And maybe Dinner's Ready is still around? I don't think so. I think Dream Dinners is still around, just only a couple. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, they were trying to franchise. This is before you had your boxed food services that you could go online and get a month's worth or a week's worth of food delivered to you in a box. Before that idea, there was Dream Dinners. It was a similar concept, different in execution. You go online once a month, and you order your dinners for the whole month. And they have a bunch of different options, like a menu.
You pick the ones you want, and then you arrive at one of their facilities and assemble. The benefit is you could assemble to taste, and everything gets assembled at once. The downside is you need to go find an hour or two in your busy week, which you're trying to save time by having these dinners pre-made, but yet you also have to clear like an hour or two during your weekday to go make the dinners. It was initially pretty successful, but then they decided to really get serious. They needed to emulate a much larger company. And the company they decided to emulate was Starbucks.
And so they hired one of the fired Starbucks CEO back in the day. And this gal decided we need to run an efficiency audit on the entire company. And she zeroed in on the fact that the IT manager, my boss at the time, who was great, she zeroed in on the fact that that gal really didn't have any credentialed experience. I mean, she'd been running the IT from the beginning of the company, but she didn't have any credentialed experience. And if we're going to become Starbucks, we need to bring in a heavy hitter chief technology officer. So let's go hire somebody that just got laid off from Boeing.
And they brought in a Boeing IT manager who had worked at Boeing his entire life. And no disrespect to folks at Boeing, but to us at the time in the wider IT industry, these folks were sort of frowned upon. because they basically just knew one vertical and they knew that vertical extremely well and they didn't know anything outside that vertical if they came from Boeing. And this guy just seemed to like prove the stereotype. First thing he wanted to do, because reasons, even though everything was working like a top, he wanted to rip out all the Linux systems.
He wanted to rewrite from PHP to what was called active server pages, ASP at the time. And he wanted to go from a fully integrated Samba authentication mail system with spam screening and all of that to Active Directory and Exchange. And he wanted to quadruple the number of servers we needed to do all of this. Okay, whatever, you know, fine. I don't really like it, but he's the boss. But then he started to turn out to be a real dick. I would get in like 7.30 a.m. So that way I would get in just before the rest of the users. And so would my coworker, Josh, he'd get in a little bit later and what we would do is we would stagger i'd get the morning crew people having issues in the morning even though it wasn't technically my job because i was server guy but i would i would take the bulk of it in the morning and then he would stay till about 5 30 and he would catch the folks wrapping up for the night having problems and that was our little system so we always had coverage we're always there so four o'clock comes around i'm like wrapping up for the day 4 30 it's time for me to leave and i'm going out the back and the boss i'm going down the stairs and the new boss is coming up the stairs.
It's like a scene from a movie about a bad boss. He puts his hand on my chest and he stops me and he says, you know, I notice who stays late and who leaves early. And I consider that. And I'm like thinking like I didn't say anything to him. I'm just like, OK, you know, that's all I said. Of course, the moment I walk out there, I'm like, I'm leaving this place. This is done. That was it. That was the moment. I'm like, I just quit in my head. But he got in like at 839 o'clock. So he never knew I was there early. Yeah. He just saw me leaving late. And that, oh, man, the guy was a total jerk.
And now the company's, you know, pretty much collapsed in on itself. Their IT infrastructure migration never finished. And it was just sort of a hot mess. But it was at that moment I was like, I am done working for companies. I want to go do IT consulting and bop around for a bit, but I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But my mom happened to know somebody in the business and she made a connection for me. And I start doing an interview and it starts going pretty well. And we get high. I get hired initially to do a lot of their clients that either have some Linux systems, some Windows and some Mac. Like a lot of the mixed network systems was what I was brought on to do and then sort of moved more into infrastructure for clients.
And the company, should we give the name out? I don't know. Yeah, I was wondering if you were going to. I mean, they're still around. They're still going. We have no ill will. True North ITG, they're still going today. And they were growing like crazy back in the day. I mean, like, you know how a new company kind of like hits the right market fit and all of a sudden they got to like increase office space. They got to staff up and they needed somebody to come in and help run the back office stuff. And I said, hey, I think I know somebody. So what was it, like six-ish, maybe eight months I'd been working there?
Yeah. And what was your title at the time? Do you remember? Was it operations officer? Was it, I can't. That is a good question. We had so many things we needed fixed, right? Because we had inbound support calls. We had client billing that needed to be sorted out. There was sales proposals that we were putting together and sending out to clients and then tracking if they engaged. There was so much inbound. That's what I remember. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I was hired on as, oh, gosh, it wasn't an operations manager. But after a couple months, I was promoted to operations manager.
And that's because I came in like a boss. I came in and basically they were paying their CPA to invoice clients. Yeah, right. And she was doing it not on a schedule, whenever she wanted. Charging her full rate. Lacking detail, like for the clients. And there was like over 100,000 in accounts receivable. So I came in and I collected that. And I have a knack for optimizing software. So I connected their, let's see, what was it? The ticketing system to QuickBooks to have the detail actually come over to QuickBooks. books and fill in the invoices and which.
Was big because, Clients were receiving bills and not really clear what they were getting billed for. Not at all. Yeah. And once I got it connected, I was able to like redo the invoices that she had previously done. And that's why they paid. They're like, oh, right. Yeah, I do remember that, you know. So it was really cool. It was a good experience. And I also was like first level tech support, you know. Oh, yeah. Definitely. Like if you're picking up the call, you would have to do a lot of like the first level screening stuff, which is always. Because I remember for a little while, we were like a three-room office and you could hear the phone ring.
And so you could hear you pick up and listen. Okay, she's got it. All right, she's got it. We can keep going. Yep. Yeah. But basically we had like what, four or five of you guys that you were all assigned your own clients and would go to them regularly. And, you know, it was really the start. We were converting from time and materials to this subscription system where you pay a flat rate monthly and you get this many hours and then whatever's over that gets billed. And that actually worked kind of nice because it meant, all right, well, every Thursday I show up at this client and I'm here from, you know, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. or whatever it would be.
And it also meant that you had a way to make just maintaining security updates. Remember, this is Windows servers back in the day, a lot of them. So there's a lot of that. It just meant making that stuff like actually financially sustainable for the IT company, too. It did mean, though, that clients felt like they had they had you. Right. Because, hey, I'm paying you every single month. Right. Some of them were big checks. Right. And so it gave them this sense of privilege and that you would be available immediately. And if you've got five, six, seven, eight, a dozen clients, you can't be available immediately for all of them.
Nope. That's always a constant source of friction. But I think also one of the things that I discovered through that process is that I was actually pretty good at both the engineering, but the sales engineering too. So I'd start going and sitting on more of the sales calls. And I had to learn during that time. I'd never had to do this. I had to learn how to like write a proposal to a client on like what you need to do. Here's the cost. Here's the work breakdown. Here's the time breakdown. Never really had to do that kind of stuff before. That kind of stuff I hated at first, but now I'm really glad I had to go through it because it works.
I use that skill set today even like when dealing with sponsors. Right. And, you know, interestingly, this experience of working for the same company was like the crux of realizing that we could work together. True. You know, because like you do the IT stuff, I do the back-end office stuff. And that is how it continued after that. We even got to carpool together. I was just thinking like, yeah, for a while we were carpooling, which makes sense, right? Yeah. Especially if it was a day where I was going to stay in the office all day. There was a couple of those.
Well, even if you didn't, I was staying in the office all day. Yeah. Yeah. I can still take the car. Except, you know, when I rear-ended somebody on the freeway. And it was so dumb because Chris saw it. He knew exactly what was going to happen. And I, I don't know, I locked my brakes. Yeah. And I rear-ended a green Jetta. And that was, was that the Civic? Was that your, or what car was it? Cause I don't think it might not have an anti-lock. I never drove a Civic. It had to be the TL. Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. I was just trying to think. I don't remember having anti-lock brakes or something like you just, it might've been raining too.
Yeah. I don't know, but gosh, it was so dumb. It was, it was. And I did try to get off to the side and then I did have to get off to the side after I hit him and, uh, and it sucked. Uh, I got out of the car with it still in drive. Yeah i mean there's a lot going on also didn't uh somebody from work pass us by yes yeah so one. Of the owners saw us on the side of the. Freeway yeah yeah so that was a that was a rough start of the day they. Knew we if we weren't going to make it to the team meeting. On time that morning and from that day we had to drive separate no yeah right yeah that was the end of carpooling right there there was there were times you know where i was driving just crazy miles, Seattle, a lot of going down to Seattle from, you know, up north and sitting in traffic a lot.
Yeah chris hates seattle and chris hates traffic yeah so basically. Those two basically those two things go together. Yeah and and it like it it definitely contributed to burnout like it's funny because you're not like actually actively doing anything but it's it's such a dead you could be you could be doing something yeah. It's like okay so i went down there and i billed for three hours and i drove for two hours at least. Minimum yeah it was It was a law firm, and they paid a decent amount. They did. Not obviously straight to you, but yes, they were a high payer. I got all of the high payer problematic clients.
Yes, you did. All the neurosurgeons and ophthalmologists. Yes. Yep. And boy, are they particular. And like you were saying earlier, I remember one time the exchange email server went down for the law firm client. and it was something like a three or five million dollar deal that one of the owners was working on and he called me up and he starts screaming at me immediately like immediately like i say you know hello this is chris and it just starts shouting and somewhere in there i hear like you're responsible if this five million dollar deal doesn't go through i'm holding you personally responsible you get your ass down here and get this server online and i'm just like yeah i don't need this right i don't need this pressure i don't and this guy was a really high stress guy Yeah.
And high-functioning lawyer. Yeah. So the high pressure of his clients and the commute and whatever, Chris was reaching burnout. And the company was doing pretty good considering I collected all that AR and then was invoicing regularly and the cash flow was really good. So they actually... let me book a cruise. And Chris. And I went on a cruise. And paid for and. And it's funny because in our memories or at least okay I won't speak for you but. I'm pretty. Sure this has been a thing we consider that our honeymoon. It was much more of a honeymoon than the actual honeymoon yeah yeah.
Because we just went to Vegas right. And it was uh it. Was like what a year year after we got married. Yeah uh. That we went on this cruise and it was so nice. It was super nice we. Had never done anything like that before and it was just really cool. Yeah it was true relaxation pre-kids yeah so there was like nothing to sort out with kids or worry about how things are going with the kids back home it was just here you go work's paying you to take some time off and they're paying for the trip thanks for the hard work you two and so you know we're flying to florida we're doing excursions it was we went on the beach that is the corona beach that they shoot the corona commercials on yep.
I was trying to remember the name of the beer. Yeah the white sand beach yeah yeah which was great i got. My uh hair braided. Yeah like. I i don't think it's called a weave i don't know what it's called but like a bunch of tiny braids. Yeah in a pattern it's the kind of thing that i don't think we would have ever spent the money on i've thought about taking another cruise since but, i don't know you do a lot of eating you know yeah a lot of food a lot of food but it was very great and i don't remember how long we ended up staying there you know but i definitely felt like it was a good boot camp for learning how to do a client services business how to do the invoicing all that kind of stuff.
And I made it possible when I was ready to essentially spin off our own company and do that just with a handful of private clients. And then that worked really great because I was able to focus on some clients that were closer, which was so nice. Didn't have to go any further than, you know, ever, which was 20, 40 minutes away. And then was able to transition them slowly as more sponsors came on board for. Jupiter Broadcasting and could make kind of a Right. So keep in mind, the timeline here is we were already or Chris was already podcasting. And in 2009, when I had when I had when I had Dylan, that's the day that we set up the green screen to start doing video.
And let's see, it was about Dylan was nine months old. No, it was the end of that year. The end of 2009 is when I stopped working there. You had already stopped working there, I think. I can't remember. No, you outlasted me. I can't remember. Regardless, I became a stay-at-home mom. So we weren't full-time with Jupiter Broadcasting at all. We were in the early days of getting the video going. I think in 2009 is when we made it an official company because we had our first sponsor. Or 08 might have been? It might have been 08.
Yeah. It was really great though to be able to lean on the tech support and the learnings because all of that, like the worst stuff, like I had this, I had this dentist client. It's my only client that ever fired me. And I still think about it to this day. Like, so this stuff was, you know, there was some emotional investment and this dentist, uh, he's actually just down the street from you. Um, and I go in there and he says, uh, well, you're my third IT guy. I hold my IT company responsible or my IT support responsible, and I have high expectations. Okay, fine.
So do all my other clients. Right? No big deal. I don't recall before we'd even fully engaged. Like we'd done the sales meeting. I think they'd probably signed the contract. I had maybe been out there once during the, because we would do this evaluation where I would go out and evaluate the systems and kind of give them a report when they first became a client. And about two days later he called me up and said you're fired i was like what wow he was so angry because i think they were having an internet outage something was down wasn't related to anything we'd worked on so we hadn't worked on anything yet he's like i you you haven't even made it two days before we have our first outage and this is what i'm talking about and i have learned by working with you guys did not give an inch and you're fired i was like i didn't even do anything wow oh man just just a wildest like and you know and one of my clients was i don't i wonder if he's still going i could probably give his name out right it's probably okay.
Uh, is he still going? So, uh, oh, no, his office is closed. Okay. Yeah. So, um, one of my clients was Dr. Sanford J. Wright, who is, was the leading neurologist in the United States. And he had converted an old mansion into his clinic. And the gals that had been working for him had worked with him for like 20, 30 years. And they were very facts and document based. And during my window of IT consulting, Obama signed a law that said essentially all the clinics need to digitize their records. And so this guy who had been in practice for 20, 30 years and had avoided going digital, all of a sudden had like a deadline before he started getting fined.
So he brings us on board to help figure out where he's got issues, because if he's going to bring all these things online, he wanted to secure his network, figure out how to improve things. And then, you know, also just take care of general tech support and migrate a system over to this digital imaging system and slowly replace like this cockamamie, like remote access systems that his previous IT guy had built. And that was a great client. And I worked with them for many, many years. But it was always a strange one because I was working out of this huge mansion. It used to be like maybe I think used to be the governor's mansion or something on the waterfront. Yeah.
Yep. So I'd show up. And it was funny, too, because, like, you know, a lot of a lot of folks, because it was also a historical site. The front was immaculate. It just looked great. Like it fresh paint and plants. But then you go around the back and it was just a mess, you know, like they weren't anything that the public didn't see. They were not maintaining and it was actively falling apart. It was it was a real challenge. And good lessons, though. You know, a lot of a lot of things in the medical space were changing back in those days. All right. You think that's any other stories to share? Is that.
No, I think that. Yeah. Feels like it feels like a thousand years ago. It does. And yet, today, not so far away. All right, we want you to boost into the show and tell us what piece of technology that everyone else loves but you hate. What is it? What is the technology that the world seems to love and you just cannot stand? Give me your hot take. I want to know. Boost them in. And I think you had a question, too. Did you have a sneaky question? Oh, I was just thinking you could ask a Star Trek-related thing based on that audition. but I don't know or not based on the audition but like what character would you want to play who's your favorite Star Trek captain I don't.
Know if I could answer that because I could make an argument for nearly all of them except for the Discovery stuff but you know maybe I'm at my hot take I like Christopher Pike the OG Christopher Pike how about that. I have something weird it's not tech but like that's fine and I am trying to understand this but I don't like being signed into Google on my phone, like I use the mail app, and I have several Gmails set up in there, but I don't like being in Google signed in. I don't like the tracking. Nope. And it sucks because the school sends Google Docs all the time, and you have to be signed in to view it, so I have to wait until I get home.
And that's not convenient because—. What about a signed-in browser? You just install Chrome, and you just leave that logged in, and you never log in Safari. Sorry. And then like, if you got to open up a Google doc on your thing, you just do it in Chrome. Yeah. On my phone. I can get Chrome on my phone. Yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't, it didn't even occur to me. I don't know. Cause I, I agree. I don't like, I don't sign in. And every time I go to Google search, it always asks for my location. I say no. Yeah, exactly. And it knows, Hey, you know, based on your previous searches, we think you're in this city.
They still get, they still get an idea. Dang it. Yeah, you got me. I wonder if anybody else out there does that. Do you resist the sign-in and the location tracking, or have you just embraced it? Okay, if you're listening as this episode comes out, Saturday, March 8th, 7 p.m., we are doing a dinner for the Scale crew, whoever's coming to Scale or Planet Nix, if you're going to be around Saturday, March 8th. We're getting together at El Cholo. Their tacos are killer. We've been there once before, I believe. And we have room for 40 or 50-ish people.
I'm sure some people will cycle in and out, but that does mean we would love it if you RSVP'd. We have 31 RSVP'd right now. Maybe plan to bring like Cash App or Venmo or a little bit of cash if you want to get some food. And we have the menu linked at meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. Looking forward to it. We usually do a lunch, and we have traditionally done them at the Yardhouse. and so we call up the old yard house and we're like hey yard house keys we'd like to do what we did last year but instead of doing it at 1 p.m we'd like to do it at 7 p.m and they're like cool that'll be a minimum of thirty two hundred dollars.
Oh goodness gracious. Yeah wow and i'm like prime time yeah exactly and they and also because we we have a large crew and they have a very large area yeah they close off the patio and they want to close it off an hour and a half ahead of time so that way people clear out so they want to charge us a little bit for that i see, you know what we probably would as a as a group collectively spend thirty two hundred dollars but the way they do it at the art house it has to go on one card right so i'm like i'll just call el chocho i meant they make me a better deal and they did so that's why we're doing it over there but 7 p.m we're doing it in the evening the idea being that you can scale kind of goes till about But then kind of wraps up a little earlier.
If you don't need some of the later talks, you get a little refreshed and come join us and then head out to some of the after parties afterwards. That's, that's my hope. All right, Andrews, you ready for a little musical break? I am. So this is one of my favorite value for value tracks. This is tiptoe by Jack holiday. It's performed by both Jack holiday and Katie Beth. And the track is linked in the show notes. I recommend you listen if you like it and boost because the stats will go directly to the artist. Here is tiptoe. There you go. Tiptoe by Jack Holliday. And we have some great boosts.
And Bobbypin is our baller booster this week with 20,000 sats. And Bobby writes, I've been listening to the backlog of the launch. What? How did we get the backlog of the launch? I thought I unlisted it. It starts at nine. Yeah, everybody knows that. But what you said about episode six, which doesn't exist, about AI assistants and podcasts, plus hearing the podfather talk about his pirate radio days. has inspired me to make a podcasting 2.0 podcast based on my favorite book series. By the way, do you get a boost from older episodes for the upcoming week boost segment? Is it all the same feed? Yes.
And of course, welcome back to the Mike and Rip Women's Tech Radio, the faux show gone, but never forgotten. Thank you. Thank you for the shout out. Yeah. Bobby Penn is an OG. OG, nice to hear from you and tell us about your podcast once you get it cooking. Eric the Magician comes in with 2,345 sats. I'm using VS Code with the Rue Code extension. It's so good. I'm currently trying to push it at my company as it has completely changed my workflow. With tools like that, I can see why big tech is cutting the workforce. Okay, Robo Code, or Rue Code, R-R-R-R-O-O Code.
I'm taking a look at it right now. This looks interesting. Thank you for the recommendation. RootCode is an AI-powered autonomous coding agent that lives in your editor. That's cool, Eric. Thank you for the boost. Listener Jeff, a.k.a. PJ, is here with 6,666 sets. He's got some follow-up on time travel. He says, my career is a bit too modern, so I would need to learn more on the, probably I would need to lean on the electrical side of my work. I'd probably go back to the 70s. If I failed to be an electrician, I think I could keep up as a rock drummer of the time and get to see my favorite band's rise to fame as heavy metal is formed.
Maybe ensure Lars gets kicked out of Metallica and take his place. Nice. That's like you got to play an A, you got to play an B, and you got to play an C in there, PJ. Jeff's a dreamer. His first computer was one that he learned on was a store-bought HP with a single core AMD, 512 megabytes of ram and a massive 160 gigabyte hard drive i eventually received my first dedicated agp graphics card i remember the agp standard a geforce 5500 which served me well for years, i definitely had a system like that at one point maybe two cores my first machine that had a lot of ram and it came with four megs of ram which was a big deal back in the day and i upgraded eventually to 16 megabytes of ram it was a big deal and just a little ram compression and it was really like you had 32 megabytes of ram and then pj says he would call in all right i'm keeping track of that i'm keeping track of who says they'd be willing to call in i think that's good to know, chakaraka is here with 4444 sats i think that's a big old duck.
Hey Jovians, I'm relatively new to Jupyter Broadcasting. I like the shows and this one was no exception. I'd really appreciate getting to know the idea behind the show. What idea? Like we have no, you know, it's boy, that's a big answer. Let's see if I can shorten it down. You know, I'm a big believer in super serving your best customers and always making them happy. And sometimes that means we make content that is really just to super serve the niche of JB audience that wants to know us a little bit better. And one of the things that is true that keeps people turning into podcasts over time is when they develop a bit of like for the personalities involved.
But a lot of our shows like Linux Unplugged and Self-Hosted are very content focused. And so we don't take a lot of time sharing stories about ourselves or rambling about things that we find interesting. we try to stay on topic so that way the value density of the episode is extremely high we're going for a high signal to noise ratio in those shows not to say this is a noise show but to say that this is an opportunity for us to slow down and for you to get to know us a little bit better and the idea was it's not a replacement to kota radio but it's something people can tune into each week and we'll just kind of see how it goes we hope that you know we can do the show for a while and it grows and it finds its audience and it becomes sustainable it may not happen and it may happen and you know our hope is is that we'll get and i'm going to talk about more of this in a little bit we're going to come up with new ways to engage with the show that we've never done in a jb show before and you know maybe that'll give the show a little chance i hope that answers yeah that's okay.
Um, I am here in the Mediterranean area and, uh, and this is the salad oil for the coastal people, olive oil, Namjee Namjee. Um, okay. You also add some pumpkin seeds. There you go. Or some pumpkin seed oil. I think that olive oil can have some greater value for some people. Oh, right. The olive oil heist. Yeah. I think most people know they use it for, uh, you know, like dressing, maybe tristle for fishes, chopped garlic with a little bit of olive oil is also great. This is a great dip for say sea dishes. You can use searching for, it gives me a name, but I'll just have to copy and paste it.
Tarasco Maca? Yeah, that might be it. I do love a good sauce. And, you know, this is when I became okay with mayo again, when I realized it's like just eggs and olive oil, basically, and a few other things. It's really simple, depending on where you get it. You know, I learned that, and I was shocked, first of all, and I'm still thoroughly disgusted, so nope, I'm not convinced. Yeah, that's fair. That's totally fair, I think. It is a little odd. It's a lot of oil. It is a lot of oil. Open source account at his back with 2,000 sats. I would definitely call in. All right, there's another one, Ange.
As far as my first PC, I had a Tandy TRS-80. Oh, I did two. From Radio Shack. That was actually my very first computer, and I got it from a garage sale. He said after that I had a Panasonic electric word processor. I remember those. They were like a typewriter computer combo. As for the Ask Me Anything, If you could have stopped the advancement of technology, at what point in your journey would you have paused? Wow. If you could hit pause, I mean, I definitely want CD players and DVDs. Maybe Blu-ray. Right after Blu-ray got introduced, if we could just hit pause there for a while. You got everything. You need high fidelity entertainment. What else do you need?
And I think maybe we had basic cell phones. The internet worked. But we didn't have social media. And that might have been for the best. Right? Yeah, maybe pause the social media aspect. It just seems like it's gotten worse, like with the tinies and stuff. Like, it just, I don't know. But it's hard to say. That's a really great question. It is. Do you have any thoughts on when you would hit pause in the technology? I mean, I had a pretty big eye roll with the advancement of media, both music and music. movies right because we had just collected so many series via dvd yes and and then came blu-ray and digital blu-ray and and then you wanted them in blu-ray and and.
Then you want them in streaming because they're on. Streaming and yeah it sucks yeah that evolution was so annoying we got. Burned and also like like for star trek at least like i got. Them on vhs too yeah right yeah vhs dvd and blu-ray yes yeah we had all yeah i don't think yeah if you're not our age that wasn't really a problem for you you just came in like our kids yeah they're just the digital yeah downloaded age they don't even know about the physical aspect of it but. You know what and this is just me being cantankerous but the streaming services still have not cut up to the quality of blu-ray blu-rays are still a better fidelity picture and better sound.
I don't know i i feel nostalgic for when netflix did uh dvd mailing yeah that was cool right and then game fly right was it gamefly yeah gamefly uh mailed the games in the same fashion and uh that was just a cool time and that was just at the cusp of switching to the the digital streaming it. Was fun to get those three red envelopes or whatever your. Plan was yeah right yeah we had the three yeah. Oh yeah that was that worked and you know it wasn't that bad swapping the discs and with you didn't have to buy all of them. So maybe, yeah, I think that's maybe where you hit pause.
Yeah, and they did a nice little, or I think, I'm sure somebody will complain about it. Netflix did a nice transition of, yeah, you can watch these movies and you can still get mail. And we did that for a while, but ultimately it is nicer to not have to rely on Postal. Yeah, and not have to send them back. They would sometimes sit around for a while. Yeah. Oh no, I found a Gamefly game recently. I was wondering how you remembered it. That's a great question though. If anybody else wants to chime in, And I'd love to hear when you would hit pause on the technology evolution landscape.
Thank you, open source account. Nice to hear from you. And our last boost above the delimitator this week is from Turd Ferguson. 933 sets. If animals could talk, which would be the biggest jerks and which would surprise us with deep philosophical takes? Hmm. Good question. I think squirrels would be jerks. Oh, I think cats. Yeah, I could see cats. I mean, they'd sometimes be sweet, but they'd probably mostly be cranky. Mostly. You know, my belief is we are all actually just subjects to the birds. Like, we think we are the king species. Right.
But I don't know about you, Ange. I don't go around crapping on everybody's cars and I don't go around crapping on people's literal heads. The birds do and they get away with it and they get to fly. Do you fly? Right. I don't fly. I mean, I can get in a place. I can't fly just like. So they're clearly superior because they can fly and they get to just roam the whole earth and they get to poop on us. Yeah. With absolute zero repercussions, they get to poop all over my cars and all over me. And so I feel like the birds in a way are the biggest jerks. And because they can fly, they probably have a superior attitude.
Right. I was going to say birds for the deep philosophical takes. I could see some of them because they're flying around thinking. Yeah. Well, so Dylan and I walked the Centennial Trail yesterday morning before school. And it was all birds. Like that's all you can hear in the morning. And there was an eagle in the tree next to the nest. And we heard two woodpeckers, one normal and one lazy woodpecker. And we had this whole conversation about birds the whole time, right? Yeah. Uh, there was a, I thought it was an owl and he's like, no, that's a dove. Right.
And I'm like, dude, I don't think that's a dove. And then we heard it again on the way back in a different direction. I'm like, that's not a dove. And he said, well, sometimes doves look like other birds. And I'm like, oh really? Oh really? You know, cause I haven't seen doves, but I don't know. Maybe. Uh, it was, anyway, it was really funny. I think eagles, they, they watch and can see so much. They could, they'll have some deep philosophical things. They're hardy animals too. But how long do they live? If they only live for like 20 years, maybe they wouldn't be the deep philosophical.
Oh yeah. Yeah, elephants. Elephants, maybe. I feel like sometimes older dogs, I think they go through an evolution process, accelerated like humans, and by the time they get to their later few years, I feel like a lot of them have wised up and they're just watching as humans, judging. But the squirrels seem like they just take. I mean, they're cute, but they're really just fuzzy rats that take. And then they live in the trees and they taunt our animals and then the birds poop all over everything. And, you know, crows are smart, but that doesn't mean they're smart in like a nice way.
They can be smart in like an evil conniving way. And I suspect that's how crows are too. But perhaps that's a future episode. Crows are attracted to smoke and will bring something that's smoldering back to the barn. Catch it on fire. Yeah, that's devious. I will never get the picture out of my head when we took, Hadea and I took Bella to the zoo and we get food. And Hadea goes to eat the hot dog. and just as the hot dog is going towards the mouth, a crow swoops in, snags the hot dog right out of the bun, flies off. With the hot dog.
With the hot dog, lands on a lamppost, and then flips the hot dog up in the air and just one gulfs the whole. Oh my gosh. And I'm talking like a ballpark dog. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The full length. The full length. Just all a go, one go. And I'm just, and it happened like within 15 seconds, the whole thing. And then so she's sitting there. With a bun. I'm watching this thing eat the burger, or eat the hot dog while she's sitting there with the empty bun in her hand still. Like what just happened? And the worst part is like She was the one that waited in line for the food for like 15 minutes.
So we were just chilling at the table, holding the table. And then after all that line waiting. That's crazy. So crows are jerks. I know they're smart, but I think they're also jerks. Thank you everybody who boosted, including those who boosted below the 2,000 sat cutoff. I see you there, Magnolia Mayhem and others. And thank you to our sat streamers. Collectively, you all streamed us 25,824 sats. That was 17 of you out there. combine that with our boosters and we stacked 71,712 sats for this episode not too bad for our baby show if you want to get started there's a few easy ways to do it i love river but things like strike work in like 110 countries so if you're outside the u.s look at something like strike grab some sats and load up a podcasting tutorial app like fountain and then you can get your message in and support this here production this is episode 12 and uh combined we had 24 individuals participate in the value for value boost program thank you everybody now andrew is there something i want to talk about it was hinted there in those boosts something that we're working on on the back end.
This rings a bell. Ha ha ha i see what you did there, So when we get back from Planet Nix and Scale, Mr. West Payne and I are going to start working on a call-in phone system running on top of free software. And it's kind of rough, but here's what we have planned so far. We want to create a two-line system initially. The first line is a members-only line. Ooh, dedicated. Dedicated members line. Prioritized. So when we're live, you can call in and go front of the line. and when we're not live, we'll have a members-only voicemail box and you can leave us voicemails that we can play on the show or not, depending on the email.
The second line would be a live line where anybody could call in and we take calls during the live stream and we could make calls. And I'm hoping some of you listening out there might be down for a random call from the launch. Yeah, isn't this a fun idea? Oh my goodness. Yeah, we'll have segments where we'll call people up. Ask them a random question. We could. Ask them the question of the. Episode I was thinking too we could also play millionaire there's all kinds of things we could do, so we'll have more details on this but we'll give out a number once we have it the idea is you'd save it to your address book as like the launch or whatever Jupiter Broadcasting you'd have to let us know and we'll figure out this more but you have to let us know it's cool to get a phone call around 12pm Pacific and then one day you might just end up getting a call while we're live, and maybe play some games maybe give out some sats and then another thing I think would be fun so that would be the listeners We could have like maybe like a bench of listeners.
And then the other thing that'd be fun is to call up JB members from time to time. You know, like call up Wes today or call up Brent or Drew and ask Drew how he's doing and stuff like that. So I just think it'd be really nice to be able to make calls and send calls. And I think we could do the whole thing using free software. I don't know how functional, like it might just be kind of just an MVP at first. But if it's popular, how great would that be? Yep, that sounds fun. You call in, you answer some questions. You get some sats. It could be pretty great. So that's kind of in the works.
The real intention is to kind of start cooking on it once we're done with scale and planet Nick. So we'll have more details in a future episode. Well, maybe it's a good thing we're doing podcasting now because I think IT is going to get replaced in the medical industry. Microsoft, a long time ago, bought Dragon Natural Speaking, which a lot of doctors use for dictation of their notes. But now Microsoft wants to take it to the next level, and they want voice-activated AI assistants for doctors that go in the room with you and listen for the entire session and take notes for the doctor.
I'll play for you. This is Microsoft's pitch video for the service. For over two decades, Dragon has been the trusted name in medical speech recognition, empowering healthcare professionals around the world with industry-leading voice and AI capabilities. This continues with Microsoft Dragon Co-Pilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow. Part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, it's an extensible workspace that brings together natural language and ambient speech capabilities with fine-tuned generative AI and provides a consistent experience, whether mobile, web, desktop, or through leading EHRs with a modern architecture, enhanced security, and healthcare-specific safeguards.
Yeah. Yeah, you use Microsoft Intra and it uses their trustworthy cloud computing platform with their trustworthy AI platform. The tool can draft documentation like clinical notes, referral letters, and post-visit summaries. Microsoft says the tool should help clinicians spend more time focusing on patients and less time on administrative tasks. And CNBC sent one of their reporters out to try one of these AI-assisted medical clinics. We'll play a moment of it. You know, when you go to your doctor's office, you've probably noticed that your doctor spends a lot of time during your visit typing into the computer, documenting your symptoms into your electronic health records.
Well, those EHRs are really the bane of doctors' lives. A lot of them actually end up finishing those notes later, often at home in what's become known as pajama time in the business. Microsoft's Nuance Technology Unit has an AI-enabled app called DAX Express that just could put pajama time to bed. To see how it works, I did a simulated doctor's appointment with Nuance's Dr. Julie O'Connor, and she didn't type at all. To be clear, Nuance set this up. This is like a fake clinic visit. It's at their headquarters, right? So how successful this thing is, I mean, this is going to be a best case scenario.
Bring our visit. I'm actually on my phone and I'm inside our DAX app. It actually can record the conversation and use that ambient AI to automatically create a draft clinical document from our conversation. So I'm with Bertha, who's a 50-year-old female here today for foot pain. So tell me, Bertha, what's going on? I love to run for last 15 years until about 2017. It was great. It was a great stress reliever. I really enjoyed doing it. And then around 2016, 2017, I developed plantar fasciitis. So I had to literally step back and I wasn't running much anymore. But recently it's become worse. Is that correct?
You can see the AI bot. She has it projected up on a screen doing like, you know, like airplay. and you can see it's just kind of quietly listening in the background. If I do that, the next day I will feel some aches, more aches in my feet. Okay. It's like you're walking on marbles and now also my ankles sort of feel a little... We're spending a lot of time with her as well. I don't know if it might be arthritis. My grandmother had arthritis. I think the MA told me that you're going on a vacation, you're hoping to hike. It's up in the Adirondacks. My in-laws, they have a place in Lake Plot.
I think what they're trying to demonstrate here is that the doctor is more engaged with you and talking to you more instead of taking notes. That's why they're going on and on. You see, because now she can focus on you instead of taking notes about you. I don't know. How do you feel about AI taking notes, transcribing, listening to you the entire time? Well, I have seen inaccurate visit summaries without AI involved. Oh, for sure. That's a good point. It may increase accuracy. It could. It could. I don't like the idea, though, because it is AI. Is it— It's cloud-based. It's listening on their servers. It's processing on Microsoft's infrastructure.
Like, if it's only recording what was mentioned, that's one thing. But if it is drawing conclusions. Diagnosing— No, my understanding is it's giving the doctors, like, the ability to help do that, but it's not doing the diagnosing itself. I do think that a doctor reading that during pajama time to make sure for accuracy would be a lot less time than trying to recall it and type it up. Definitely. And you are going to capture it at the moment versus trying to recall it later. I think those things are all good. It makes sense here. what does rub me a little wrong is like big tech always goes fast for the medical they always go they always go quick to try to sell medical a solution even before it's fully ready that's one thing and i've witnessed this and then the second thing is this is just where it begins so if you're picturing this at the doctor's office then maybe picture it also at the dmv and maybe picture it at the unemployment office and maybe picture it when you call in for any government thing or whatever the irs right like yeah it's going to be listening analyzing and filling out notes automatically all the time and this is going to become normal new.
Tncs new privacy. Acknowledgements all of this i mean or a lot of it at least is going to be done on cloud infrastructure run by some of the big tech companies that is vulnerable to information leak potentially that's right it's a it's a more you know negative look at it but those are just things that i feel like especially medical should be considered subpoenaed yeah oh absolutely oh 100 wow yeah Yeah. Because if, yeah, it's recording. Yeah. When she held up her phone and she's like, yeah, I'm recording this. And then she, like, it's a whole different feeling. And it didn't feel good.
I agree. Like, it was like, ooh. I agree. I don't like the phone right there recording me. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like it removes the intimacy that you can, like the patient doctor privilege you can kind of have. Yeah. Of course, they're probably going to note down whatever you say anyways, but. But not have a recording of it. And they could maybe have some discretion or something. Yeah. I mean, I think for a little while, it could be proven in court that AI may have missed something or heard something. Yeah, right. But as I dial it in, it might be harder and harder to fight that. Oy.
Yeah, it's going to be good and bad with a lot of this stuff. I'd be curious to know what you out there think, listening to this, how it makes you feel. If you think about it spreading to other areas, when you call your insurance company, when you call your credit card company, when you call your bank, they're all going to be doing this, right? It's in their best interest. Their incentives align to do it, so that way they can attach it to your account and serve you better. So, I don't know. Not to be weird about it, but it's something to consider. Something for us to think about.
All right, Andrews. We're just about out of here. And this is the last show I'm recording before I hit the road flying out tomorrow. And I think everything else has been checked off, and it's in Editor Drew's hot little hands right now. So, if you want to catch anything we talked about, you can go to weeklylaunch.rocks. We'll have links to it. And, of course, we have episodes going all the way back to episode nine where the show began. And it began no sooner than nine for reasons that are totally understandable and not a critical mistake that will haunt the show forever.
Weekly launch dot rocks for that. I think if everything goes as planned, nothing is a lock at this point. If we're lucky, we will be live next Tuesday right as I'm getting back, hopefully without the pod cred. If I have pod cred, I probably won't do the show. but we'll be here if we can next Tuesday of course that is at 1130 p.m. Pacific or just in your app a.m. thank you that'd be crazy nighttime show 1130 a.m. Pacific but it gets converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar it'll also be in a podcasting 2.0 app all right Andrews you ready to get out of here I'm ready well there you have it from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast thank you for listening and we'll see you next week.
Intro
Nightmare Noms
Attack of the Killer Taco
