 Me me me me me me me happy birthday vlog Thursday. Hey, it's Tracy's birthday. My wife's birthday. Hi, honey So he's got to be nice to his wife. Yeah, I have to it's one well two days a year Her birthday and our anniversary and then that's it own thing. Yeah, I don't know after that. I'm a total jerk Yep, Marvin could go back to doing Marvin things Just got to get through the next few hours next few hours And sometimes we we our wives may watch this. We're not sure but they may yeah She usually does it may not be like today So I might get like a week out of it, but you know, she'll watch it and I'll know because I'll hear her yell from the office Yeah, something like that She'll say you're a jerk all the time That was my impression of my wife so All the time Oh, that's all right Hi everyone And so lots of projects like always now we say that but you know, that's true. We got a lot going on which is awesome We did a we did that quick vlog Tuesday because I was just like it I just want to share sometimes like what's going on I'm trying to figure out better ways to do it because people I think are curious and and Tom gets bored. Well, no So let's let's roll back to some topic we were talking about and I was reading this and it was interesting Me because it completely makes sense and Marvin's gonna go. Yep. That makes sense They were talking about how people with ADD or whatever is we are and I say we are not that I have any diagnosis I just love everything going on around me. I like a little bit of chaos and I'm very random I'm not a doctor, but Tom you have ADHD But this is one of the reasons why people diagnosed with that are often prescribed stimulants It's because it's a lack of activity in the brain So you're trying to make all the activity go around and I'm like, you know That makes a lot sense because I'm always trying to have everything going on and like I have all these things going around me And I'm like wait a minute I didn't post a video in a few days because I got those doing other things So then I'm like, let's just post a video real quick And then I found time yesterday because I finished all my projects and I posted two more videos Yeah, I posted two. I don't know. I posted more videos And so I didn't think I'd have time to do it before today, but I got it done No, I posted one on invoicing. I did video and invoicing that's what I did. Yes You know probably why I was supposed to do invoicing Marvin's probably going Tom was probably supposed to be doing invoicing Yeah, but instead he made a video on invoicing. Yeah, pretty sure I got a slack message that said such and such is invoicable So is this one? That was this morning. I did the invoicing video yesterday. I was supposed to do the invoicing yesterday I didn't because that's the thing that's what I'm doing today. Yeah This guy's gonna do some invoicing. Yay. That's an important aspect in business. It totally is and I'll watch the video to make sure I'm doing it correctly Yes, it's because of my simplicity and invoicing and I wanted to talk about that because we've we've discussed before and We we want to bid against another IT company and one of the complaints was we don't know what they're trying to charge us for And I looked at it and I'm like really they they just decided to line item every single little thing Including every single individual wall plate. They were charging them for not that we are not charging you for wall plates We're just not creating a two-page bid to put in 15 wires And I one of the invoices I demoed was when we sold a hundred and twenty two drops in This company had individually and this was not a big project, but they had so much on the bill They created like a confusion for the client going. I don't I don't really understand like you're you have this Short paragraph that you're gonna do this and they have this long thing now And that's where I divide up scope of work versus invoice scope of work all the details that matter to IT people Invoice signed off by someone in management that just wants to know that this thing was done And it's okay to pay the bill and good. I'm clear. It says you installed a hundred and twenty two new drops in her office I don't need to know exactly how many of them had mud rings how many of them had You know a two connector three connector four wall plate one ball plate two gang three gang and how many blanks were used Yes, they counted they would use a four whole plate and then counted the extra little individual blanks They would put in because only three drops necessary Yeah, so you created this confusion and it wasn't one of the things As we were very Similar in price me and the other IT company, but they just didn't get the best impression from dealing with them They seemed overly complicated and we try to keep things very very simple. You're paying us for a service We make sure you just understand the value of the service and then we put that in simple means what we do is very Complicated in IT. It's a very complicated space. There are many moving parts to it, you know But when I installed we just installed three VPNs for a client For all the different locations basically they have a head end and then they have satellite locations And then they have what referred to as a road warriors, which are gonna be their sales guys on the road It really simply says installed VPN firewall with PF sense It's a very basic invoice for a lot of money. I could put the entire oh, yeah We set up all these TLS Authentication keys and did this and did this they don't who cares. They don't really care No, yeah, you care. No, maybe they're tech guy cares. Yes, but I really like the business owner because he He's like here's one of the guys was asking me some tech questions that works there because he's on the side He likes technology stuff and he owner had walked in behind he goes oh man VPNs love those good VPNs with all that security thingies and stuff with them No, he's not he doesn't like he likes technology as it serves him his purpose He does not care what brand we install. He does not he goes Thomas is secure. All right I approved the project here. You go go ahead and install it. That's he goes. I trust you'll secure it. Yep. Okay, cool Implement it for me. There you go. That's we've actually get along great with him as a client. He's been using our services for 11 years, I think 11 or 12 we I met him early on in business. I've known that company for a while and Smart business guy. He's actually bought several companies. So now it's kind of funny through one guy We now service for companies, but it's all his companies. So they're not really for different companies. Yeah, yeah They all have different names. They're in different categories. He's just a really good smart business guy Diversify man. I'm more of a tech guy who learned some business But it's working it's working quite well We are debating about slack now I don't mind paying for products and I'm using if they're worth it and we're using a free version of slack But we want some more features and I just think it gets pricey like they might want me to go for these features To spend quite a bit more and I'm kind of like oh, I love open-source software. So what are some open-source alternatives? Matter matter some matter dumb matter something. I don't know. I'll probably put the link right here Because whatever it is. I think it's matter them There's an open-source copy of slack that we're gonna look at we and even they're hosted Prices is really reasonable. I just think for the number of team members and what we use slack for which is primarily memes Food discussion. Yeah, and how we handle clients. Yeah. Yeah, you'll get a post of you know Hey, did you do this thing at this place? Yes. Hey, look at this meme. Look at that meme Hey, Tom when you come back grab this from grab lunch here. Yeah Hey look what somebody said Slack for us is what in because we treat people You know, I would how we word that I would say we we treat people like people not like treat people like humans Not like tickets. Yeah, you're not you're not a ticket number You're not a ticket number and so people ask what's your ticketing system? I'm like, we don't assign exact ticket numbers for it We put things in a project. Our ticketing system is try not to speed and get one Yes, that's your ticketing system, but it doesn't work. We still get them. Yeah I mean, there's code IDs when there's projects So there's there are things that have be done for larger scale projects And how they're coordinated matter of fact when there was a large scale project that will often get its own slack channel to discuss that particular project and the Details of it, but just assigning every time someone has a problem We don't assign it a ticket number in a traditional way If it's a larger can't be fixed immediately thing it may go on our project management list Which is really a Google Sheets thing which you've been slowly enhancing And then from the Google Sheets stuff most of the problems though are like, oh, no I broke outlook. We had someone who broke outlook again with 30,000 spam emails It was a misconfigured We've been trying to talk them in and getting off of the hosting It's really crap-tastic that they have because it doesn't have proper filtering and things like that Which is what led to 30,000 of the same email It's just bombarding and being allowed to get into their inbox and outlook crash because it couldn't handle all those emails At once and trying to filter them so we had to go in the back end and filter it But that was an actually easier fix. It wasn't really a project It was just log into the back end of the system match this and delete So those things come in they come to our support email and then we throw them in slack and say hey So-and-so at such-and-such company needs this done and whoever's available will just jump on it Go I got it and take care of it. So we know it's being taken care of Whoever said that is going to be the one champion the project You know mini project ticket if you will but the customers like it because we reply to them right away The person who's going to be doing will reply to the email So when you send support it gets to all of us that someone will tackle it We mentioned in slack who's going to tackle the project and that's actually where our slack integration is getting a little bit confusing as we're getting Is just got a slack message right now. Yeah, cool But the what the goal is to have it come right into a support box on slack and it slack wants money for that And it's the only feature that we really want to use that's a paid feature But it would actually get kind of pricey for all of our team members We got eight people in there eight or nine and if we all paid I think it's seven dollars a month That's cost more than G-suite that we're paying for we don't says I don't mind paying for things But that just seems like a lot just to have the email. So we're looking at other Alternatives to slack 56 bucks a month to send memes to each other is not yeah We don't need any archiving features. We never put passwords in slack or anything overly detailed occasion We throw a phone number and they were probably the most personal information like hey call So and so this is the number and extension to reach them at you know, because they're having a problem with something but there's not a We can't really find a compelling reason to pay for slack. You know, I don't mind Yeah, so we're looking at open source alternatives and even the open source alternative They actually have a hosted option a I think it's like dollar fifty a month or dollar twenty-five a month per person Which is fine. I mean that's cool for hosting and it's more for this coffee. That's more for this coffee You know if we use in slacks an awesome product and if you use all the features I have friends that have tons of integration level things. They've done which is great We just don't plan on integrating all those things in the slack for us But it's something we think about a lot is you know process flow making sure customers are serviced which Leads me to one of the things I've done as a business owner is very focused on customer service Because I care much more about my reputation than speed at which I expand this company. That's One begets the other though. Yeah, you have a good reputation with your cup with your clients your company will expand your company Well, I because they'll tell other people hey these guys are great, right? So that is one of our brand reputation means so much to us and that's something we focus on a lot That's why we were so slow to instill slow to grow because I care about making sure everything is done at a perfectionist level Making sure everything inside flows really well and then we can service others You know, it's kind of like they'll joke the mechanics cars that we spoke I've seen that in a lot of the time it happens You see it companies they have some chaos going on inside their company and we try to be not those people everything runs We have a relaxed environment here and everything runs really smooth It's what allows us to have some free time to think as opposed to the high stress IT Where people are just hammering, you know and there's some of these guys that go as far as you know I know a lot of people in IT that work in this like do you have a boss that just yells at you because you didn't come up with it enough billable hours this month and Why'd you tell them they could fix it over the phone? You could have drove out there and build them for that in that kind of concept or other ones that go into the man of service Providing that don't service your clients even though they're getting a monthly fees to do so Which the last one we took over was such a disaster where you find out that they haven't done an update since 2015 was it? Oh, that was the backup company. Yeah. Oh backup. Yeah They were paying the company for backups and the last backup was in May of 2015. So And this was like a month ago. Yeah, we yeah, so not really like a couple weeks ago. So was it okay? Yeah Yeah, so yeah, yeah two years and two years We also I've been playing a lot with Zen server we were spinning the board around I've done some more deep diving into it So I'm getting ready to do a video on that. We'll probably migrate away from virtual box over to Zen I just I'm all those people that I have to understand things perfectly because it has to integrate into our business continuity process That's really important. So anything goes down. We make sure we have an easy path by which to recover it It's also good to know how these things work so that we know how to destroy them Because we're it seems like we've gotten a reputation for figuring out ways to blow things up not like well We'll literally blow things up But also just like, you know really like tax a server or whatever to like see how can we you know? How can we make this thing fail and like we're getting people sending us things now? They're like, hey, we're gonna send you one of our products Yeah, break it. They have a company reshot to us. It says, you know, you want to have some more fun with this I'm like, yeah, so we will I would do that and that's one of the things I'm going to do So we actually built I've got two different Zen boxes over here We're gonna migrate our system over to Zen that way we have several servers here And we're gonna play with the failover stuff So the video will be about the resilience of it and things like that so I want to go if I get into a product I want to make sure one I understand it very well But then if I do a video I want to make sure I'm sharing with you a deeper understanding of the product And why we like it and pros and cons We should build one of those big sandboxes the big Zen garden things to do. Oh, yeah I like that in the stones get the rakey rakey garden. So it's called. That's a Zen garden Zen garden. Yeah, it's not a rakey the rakey rakey is that oh is the massage thing with just massage stuff just energy you're just Yeah, I don't do that like if I pay you for massage and you just wave hands over me Yeah, I don't get angry. Yeah, if I don't I want yeah I want to I want to actually I want to feel worse coming out of the massage when I did going in Yeah, cuz I know the next day. I'm gonna feel wonderful Exactly. I want to be limping when I leave that massage I'm going to do some more videos on Network design. I think I think people have asked me about that and I There's planning that goes into it, of course and someone's like, how do you come up with this or how'd you do this? And I'm gonna talk a little more about that. I'm also muddled around with it. So with my Sunday morning Linux review, we have a lot of fun with all the news sections that come into it and So I may start because I produce a lot of show notes And there's a lot of work that all of us put into the Sunday morning Linux review and as co-hosts of putting these news items get I'm like, you know, I don't know that all of you are listeners and or would want to listen to the nice podcast I thought about taking those same Show notes and then just redoing a news rip of all the security topics and discussion around them So that might be something I start doing we record the way Sunday morning Linux review podcast goes we record Every week we have a release, but we actually record every two weeks So every two weeks is when you actually have the our news items So maybe I'll do it every two week security news thing because a lot of it has to do with open source and security news Which is so much going on So many things and I laugh because what we covered and published and the last Sunday morning Linux review We try to get up to the minute like we're doing show notes. I'm still adding to my show notes right before we go live and So we've covered all these news topics and published them on Sunday And I laugh because so many of them were big news items by Monday and Tuesday. I'm like, hey, we talked about that first I heard you're first folks. I heard you're first folks. So you need one of those drops. D d d d d d d d You're here first. Yeah So I mean I may take some of that and put some more news in there Because we cover a lot of topics on there and also related to the Sunday morning Lynch review is we got it It seems to be official now we can set talk about this. We are doing a Trip to Florida with me in there. Maybe maybe the floor is still there Assuming Florida's still there in a week or so. Brace for impact, Floridians. Yeah, right, because if the hurricane doesn't get you. We're coming. So is Microsoft coming too? Yeah, Microsoft and Tom. And Microsoft, so Microsoft flew the Sunday Morning Linux Review. Me and the co-hosts, we all flew out there to Seattle. And that was for us covering some Linux news on the Azure stack and got to interview people like Jeffrey Snover. And if you don't know who he is, amazing individual, he's the guy who actually invented PowerShell and wrote it and published all that. We are interviewing people at the top of the Azure team that are developing things. So it's been kind of fun. We actually have this Sunday, another podcast, Sunday or Monday. There's some clarification we have with Microsoft. They say, can you release it on Monday? We're like, well, you don't want to release things on Sunday. I got a reply to that email that came last night. The Sunday Morning Linux Review. The Sunday Morning Linux Review. We did another interview with the person who actually developed the Azure App Deployments. It's called Platform as a Service. It's an available feature right now in Azure if you're into cloud hosting and things like that. And it's actually a really clever system. And what we do, because we're Linux people in Microsoft, is we don't talk to each other. We've got some emails from our fans going, hey, you're selling out or whatever. And I'm like, no, no, no. One, we have our own strong opinions about Microsoft, but we are also covering only the aspects of Microsoft that are in related to open source. And this is where a lot of confusion comes in. Because you're like, oh, you didn't ask them about lawsuits they have or things like that. I'm like, honestly, when I'm talking to the guy who's in charge of developing the Azure thing, one, he's got no control over it. Off camera. Oh yeah, he's got an opinion. He thinks he shouldn't do it. But he's like, do I keep my giant engineering job looking for a Fortune 100 company developing the next generation of software and doing everything open source, which follows a common belief that he has and the way he thinks software is structured. Or does he be the guy I refuse to work for that company and I'm going to do nothing to try to change the culture. He actively is changing the culture in a company or trying to do it. It's a big ship that has a board of directors and billions of dollars. So there's not any way you can on a dime say, don't do that thing. It just doesn't. It's like turning an aircraft carrier. You can't just turn an aircraft carrier. You have to swing out this way and come around and then back this way. Yeah. It takes like 40 miles to turn an aircraft carrier around. It's a fair assessment and you kind of want people in there that are for that change. Feel how you will about Microsoft. They've done a lot of wrong things. I don't agree with a lot of their philosophy. In Windows 10, well, I don't know. That's a love hate because we make money off. If it just worked and it didn't randomly decide to crash, what would we do? If Outlook just didn't break randomly for no reason other than it's today, what would we do? Yeah, really. So thanks for that, Microsoft. Thanks, Microsoft, for creating that, which leads me to why we run Linux here because, well, I don't have time for that. Ain't nobody got time for that. No. That meme is dead. We don't even post that one no more and that's out of our selection. I don't think it is. I think we can bring it back. You can bring it back. I'm bringing it back. He's bringing it back. I am bringing it back. That's it. Every meme I post from now on is that. With that, we're going to bring it to the end. Let's do it. Let's go to work. We got work to do today. More stuff on updating that project sheet. Invoicing. Yeah. And maybe once we are clear on it, maybe we'll share with you. We don't mind sharing it. It's just that the process is not as clear as I want it to be. Share how we do the project management thing and the ticketing thing and how we're doing that different. At least I think different. Maybe a lot of people are doing it this way. But yeah, we do not have a signed ticket number. Your tick number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that doesn't... But we're doing this small business support. So maybe that works for us. It doesn't work for you because you're doing... You have 200,000 users that you support and you need something to assign them tickets and go through a call center with hundreds of people. I guess that's how you do need a ticket system. But when you're a smaller IT company, I... Yeah. It's just easier. I don't want to get a number and then have to look up who was assigned to that number or whatever. Yes. Just tell me. And I had a meeting with some other IT company and it was funny because when I said that we treat people like people and not like tickets, they got aggravated. They guys said, you know, that's a great saying because I'm dealing with our internal ticketing right now. I just want to talk to a person. Like, we are our own call center. I can't just call them because I want something fixed anymore because we've become so big of a company. And he goes, it's so simple what I need done but I need someone to do it and open a ticket and then a ticket they can get addressed. And he goes, I've typed so much. I just... I'm like, come on. Just activate this feature on my... Yeah. Well, because the ticket thing too, like where I used to work, like you would... Like I would talk to somebody in the tech department. They would do the thing. They would fix it and then they would be like, hey, can you put a ticket in for that so that they could get the ticket. They'd already done the thing. Yeah. But they want to get the ticket so they can close the ticket so that there's... I was like, but you did the thing. I used you to put the ticket number in. I used to open a ticket. But you did the thing. Just open a ticket. All right. I think sometimes people concentrate too hard. You're trying to quantify every statistic in the company. And if you have people actively gaming the system and actively doing that, you need to look at the system and figure out, are those people just protesting or is there a reason for their behavior? They're going, hey, this system is just burdensome. It took longer for me to put in the ticket. Yeah. And for them to get it and to close it out, then it did for them to just do the thing. And I've heard this before with some of the different MSP platforms. Some of the management sales points are it gives you amazing insight sticks to your company and I always reach out to the technicians using it. I want to know, what do you think of this software? And you're like, oh my gosh. One of them told me it was 72 clicks from the time a ticket comes in to the time he can close it. He goes, 72 clicks. He goes, then I have to rate this and rate that and do this. He goes, you just get to the point where you blindly click yes, yes, yes. I don't even know if I'm answering all right anymore. I just am trying to close it out and he goes, I spend so much time doing it I suddenly don't have as much time as I need to actually solve problems. I'll go back to one of the common problems we have. We have a client that we know the Outlook plugin. They have the same plugin across 17 different sales workstations that's part of their secure stack for doing these quotes. It's a little quote plugin. All just to do is uncheck it, recheck it. That fixes it. If we made them open a ticket each time, all they do is message us, hey, I'm getting that error. Some of them have watched us do it remotely and they can do it themselves now because they watch it. We send it. We met the message. We're like, okay, we're going to remote in. We remote in. We uncheck the box. You check the box. The thing goes exactly back to working. And we don't know what causes it to break because it breaks randomly on one of the 17 computers that have it maybe once a month. But if we understand that and we do want to track it, we don't know the catalyst for it and we may never know because there's always updates that come through for this particular software. But if we had to do a bunch of tickets, you would suddenly have this, I just want to check the box, but I got to have 72 clicks to close a ticket for them. First, we got to get them to put it in the ticket system. Then I have 72 clicks to get it out of the ticket system and it's only two clicks to actually fix the problem. No, it's 74 clicks. No, it's 74 clicks. So, yeah, yeah. It's all about reducing number of clicks but so providing good support. It's not humanly impossible to do. So, some of your hate and feedback on this topic. Yeah, there you go. We're going to roll out and get back to work. And if Earl watches this, he said make sure we put the B on the outside. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I got it. Earl's our local Big B. He is, yeah. Yeah, you had to be an outside. It was right here. Was it? Oh, was it? Okay. It's on this side. Oh, there it is. Oh, there it is. Okay. Yeah, we both had our Big B today. Mm-hmm. So, double B. Double B. Big Bs. See you next week. Happy birthday, babe. Okay, happy birthday to his wife. My wife.