 Welcome to another Thursday vlog. Yay! It's Thursday! Yay for consistency. We have stuck to this and it's not been easy because there's things I should be doing right now that I'm not doing. Yes, but it's fine. It's fine. This is now the thing I should be doing. I've put this in front of the other things I should be doing. See, this is the level of care and consistency you get from us. That's right. We love you guys. Yay! The winner is 3,330 of you that have subscribed to this. Thank you! We love all the people that click the subscribe button, so click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Wherever over there. Where it is. It's probably right about here. It's probably right about here. Anyways, I will start with a little bit of Tom's philosophies. Oh! Do tell. Yes. We were sharing these for the first time at Marvin. I had two thoughts. I think a lot while I drive. That way it keeps me from disliking all the other people. And you drive a lot. I drive a lot. You know, I got to take my kids to school every morning. Oh, by the way, no special guest. The wind storms over. The kids are back in school. Oh, goodness. The wind storm is over. Yeah, because he didn't have power for a while. He was Amish for how long? Like five days. All right. Yeah. I don't know how they do it. I can basically never go Amish again. So the policy, this is an interesting concept. Now, this is a story. Historical context is Elvis got to meet the Beatles. And the Beatles were super stoked to meet Elvis. Elvis was super stoked to meet the Beatles. And Priscilla Presley was super excited about a specific luxury of Elvis. And this is about a 60-ish, 68, I think. And this is interesting how society has progressed in a technological form. So it does have a technological thing here. The Priscilla was so impressed because Elvis was able to, and he had the money to do this, go to the theater and just for them and play a movie. Like they had comfortable seats. They could play a movie anytime they wanted. So he had on-demand movie going. He had on-demand movie going. Interesting. That was like a huge luxury that average middle class Americans have no problem with today. Your middle class is going, I watch Netflix. You know, even broke-collar kids are going, yeah, I can Netflix, I watch a movie whenever I want now. The other thing, now when the Beatles, there's all the excitement, they play from everything. There's all kinds of cool, look up the story. There's a lot of other things that happen. But what the Beatles were so impressed with, what device that was amazing to them did Elvis have? Got past. You're thinking dirty. I kind of am. I'll be honest with you. The smile on your face. Yeah, I kind of am. I'm not going to lie. He had a remote control to a TV and they were like, wow. Oh my, was it wired or wireless? I think he had the one of the first wireless remotes if I remember the story I was just thinking about that. That was like, if you were wealthy, you could afford a TV with a remote control. And now it's like, everyone, I can go buy a TV with a remote control. It doesn't even scale. I mean, they're so inexpensive now and everything else. It's just kind of interesting. Growing up, we had a remote control in my house too. It was me. Yeah. Me and Marvin grew up on remote controls were a big deal too. Yeah, it was still like, we had one of the remotes, it was like actually a sonic one and so you could turn the TV off by jiggling your keys. Yeah. Which was awesome. Oh, we're heading out. Oh, I forgot to turn the TV off. Shake the keys. And the TV would turn off. Yeah. So it's really weird that those things have come all the way that far and it just kind of fascinates me that the luxury, the definitional luxury over the years has changed so much and we just take for granted what something that was a big deal to the Beatles. Right? Yeah. Right. So I just want to think about how technology advances and how all these conveniences and everything we have and we just grab our phones and say, okay, you find me a restaurant and it goes and finds us a restaurant now and it just happens. Yeah, that's just it. Our phone, I would say we're almost, I don't want to say we're getting lazy but in a way we are. I don't have to know my times tables and I don't have to remember phone numbers or any of that stuff anymore. None of it. Just like you said, right? I don't know how to get anywhere. Used to have to remember directions. We don't know. I don't know how to go anywhere. No. Right. There's a few places that are still kind of locked away but for the most part I get in and I go Siri. How do I get to... Yep. Exactly. And she tells me. And that's how we make it there. What is it? Was it Asimov that said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic? Yep. And for a lot of people everything we do is magic. Absolutely right. We have a box that you put cold food in and when you take it out it's cooked. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Anyways, back to more topics related to us. So we had some proposals in and that's been busy going through things and we got approved. We just onboarded another bigger company taking over MSP, put it all in. We were very honest with our clients and the previous company was very not honest and it's the reason they switched and this is always the hardest part I think for being an IT company. They generally deal with all the shortcomings of their IT guy. They know he's kind of a peanut butt. They know he doesn't answer the phone. But it's until it costs them a serious amount of money from a service failure, from a data recovery standpoint that they ever switch. And we're always trying to figure out how to get those people to switch to us beforehand because it's not about price. I mean, matter of fact, we are more money than the other guy and they weren't really trying to save the price. They have money. They even said that we're not afraid of spending money. We can't get answers out of this guy as to what to spend money on when he does come up with things. They don't make any sense. We ask him like, that doesn't make any sense to do it that way. Money certainly should play a part in it, but it's the service that you want to get, right? These are your computers or your servers. This is what makes your business run. So if any of that is down for any amount of time, it is immediately costing you money. And now that we've onboarded them, we're looking at things. The last time the firmware was updated on the firewalls, and there's plenty of firmwares available. The good news is I checked the CVE and there's no known vulnerabilities. There's minor, lots of bug fixes, but four years ago. But he charges them annually for updates to firewall as a line item. He's not updated them. And there are numerous versions behind on the software. And I'm like, wow, I mean, just things like that. Now, we thought it was kind of funny. He actually, we use Screen Connect. We've done a review on the video. We really like it. He is a Screen Connect. So we had to remove all his Screen Connect sessions so we could put ours in there. And it was kind of funny because first you're like, well, wait a minute, which ones did you install it on so we can figure out which one difference? This is real easy. All of the Screen Connect sessions are from, his update was over a year and a half ago. We stay current on all the software because of the features and everything else. So even his own software is way out of date. And it's a shame. I mean, we went to his website. His website says he does all kinds of cool and fancy things. And I'm not trying to pick on other IT guys, but I'm pointing out the fact that they simply aren't doing what they were on a invoice charging them to do. Keep firewall and maintain updates on firewall. This is how much we charge for it. Wasn't doing it. The backups, when he couldn't restore something, even though he charged for it, clearly was not being backed up. I mean, there's no other way to describe it. He charged them for doing backups. He cannot restore files. And I've seen, I don't know if you watch this, but one of my other IT friends, he's running into the same thing. They onboarded a client as well and ran into the similar issue where one of the hard drives died kind of in between the onboarding and the other guy doesn't have backups because he forgot to check that they checked the backups. And that's part of the reason he was switching to another IT company in the same problem. So now you have this weird problem of, well, they fired the other guy, we're trying to onboard one. This is my friend's company and he's posting about this because now they had a failure. Who owns the failure? There's no backups because we just started, so we can't roll backwards. And the other guy doesn't have them either because he admits he wasn't backing them up even though he's charging them, which is why they're switching. So they're like, well, did you guys cause it? And I'm like, no, just we went to load our software, you have a failing hard drive on this computer. So now that's going out to data recovery for that company. You know, I participate in a lot of forums and we have discussions about this all the time. And it goes to the end users as well. We're getting phone calls every single week from people who got their bank account cleaned out like the lady the other day. Now I feel bad. It's tragic that she maxed her credit card out to a grand or whatever it was, that's what they took. And she's getting it disputed but she needs her computer fixed and she has no money. And I'm just like, I don't know. I mean, we feel bad for the people. We want to help. We really do. And we help people, we give them discounts. But at some point, you know, someone called from India, which we tell you that and they are, I don't think they're really from Microsoft. I'm like, you're defending them after they took $1,000 should be. And locked your computer out and said for more money, we will unlock your computer. Because nobody wants to admit they were fooled. Another one of those things. It's easier to fool a person than to convince them that they have been fooled. Yeah, so that's always something we're very aware of, acutely, and it's- Don't be afraid to ask your tech people questions. I think too often people are afraid that they're gonna look stupid or sound stupid or whatever, like, why should, it's not your business to know these things. It's our business to know these things. So ask your tech people questions, you know? Be like the fearless thousands that do call us and ask questions like that. Yeah, please, we would love to answer your real questions as opposed to some of the dumb ones we get sometimes. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting questions we get. And we're fine with it. Absolutely. And please note, I'm talking about the people who call me for directions every day, because they don't know how to use it. Our number one phone call isn't ransomware, isn't, how much for virus removal? It is, how do I find your store? Now we were just talking about how we don't know directions either. We don't know either, but- At least we know how to go, how do I get? They're younger and they come from a smartphone. I'm like, you can Google us. It's easy. In my most popular Facebook messages, so what's your- How do I get the PC pickup in Taylor? She's gonna say, oh, you're there already, Marv? Yeah. So it's one of those things too, one of the more popular Facebook messages is that we have to reply is what's your phone number? And it's literally on our page of Facebook. It's a very popular question. What's your phone number? That's a Facebook message to our page, I don't know. We should just start screenshotting that with an arrow and just set that back down. We have some auto replies set up to reply for what's your phone number. I mean, they're messaging me and things like that and then they wanna call and I'm fine with that, please call, but I don't know. Anyways, specs, other things that are more fun to talk about. Tom visited a data center. It was cool. They had flywheels. And I had heard of this technology and concept. I just didn't realize it was as widespread as it is. I don't know how widespread this data center uses at their data centers. What they do is they have giant spinning flywheels instead of batteries. So the flywheels act as an alternator so they keep them spinning. And if there's a power failure, the inertia of the flywheel generates the power to wait to the switch over. So that's instead of batteries. Now it is environmentally much more friendly because lead acid batteries are big, bulky, dangerous, and have to be replaced every couple of years. Flywheels, they actually had a serviceable bearing system it looked like. I was just kinda looking at some of the specs on the product they were using. And it's like they last for a super long time because as long as the bearings are good and they said the bearing life was guaranteed for so many years, blah, blah, blah, and then we could switch bearings. I'm like, this is just really cool though when I'm looking at it going, wow, that's a deep technology. So that's a, that's just really cool. A deep technology, yeah, I like that. It's neat. A deep technology. Deep, oh yeah. Well. It's a deep technology. We're de-technifying things. Yeah, I said neat, that's all right. I thought you said deep. I don't see it very well occasionally. And I don't listen, let's be honest. Yeah, he's probably not paying attention at all. What? We've been buried in websites still. People keep coming at us for websites. We have no problem in doing it. People have also been asking me about doing cause I've done some commercials for people. I think there's a misconception sometimes. So it was one, we have to have an idea. Two, it costs money to do this. And people are like, oh, you got a camera, Tommy. You come in and produce it. I'm like, for any of the work we do with the camera, there's almost way more hours, I forget the ratio, but like this video is easy to edit. But if there's a bunch of shots, we have to compile together, there's hours of video editing time in there. I think in general, you have to count on an hour of editing for every minute of video. If you're doing- Well, editing in production, I'm sorry. Yeah, editing in production. You have to count for every minute, you have to account for an hour. Yeah, so we just like to let people know, I mean, we are willing to do it. We do some video work here and there. And mostly we do it for ourselves cause that's our primary thing. I've helped out a few friends and done some fun videos because mostly I just have an idea and I'll work with them on the idea. But there's so much time after the camera's done recording that goes into it. That's one of the big things about is all the editing work that goes into it. So it's just something to keep in mind when you're asking- It's something we will do. Yeah, and it's also- It's something we love to do. But that's also why it's so expensive to do. And that's also why any of the people I recommend, I have a few friends who are videographers, I refer them out. They're really good, that's what they do for a living. But you may only see them at your place for an hour and you're like, how'd they make that much money in an hour? They didn't. All the hours came after, that's where all the billable time is. So it's just something to think about. The production of video has gotten easier and easier, but there's still so much that goes into it in some of the hours, you know- Gotten easier and easier also means a lot of people think they can do it who can't. That's something to keep in mind too. Anybody, sure, anybody can make a video. But if you want quality, you need to be- If you want quality, you want entertainment, you want high production value. We put a lot of time into the videos you see like for some of our projects. Except these. Except these ones. These we just set the camera up and start talking. We do, we don't even script it. Yeah, this is word salad and brain dump for us. That's- Word salad, brain dumping right here to the screen, that's why it's our Thursday vlog post. Love it or hate it, it's your choice to watch it. Yep. And a lot of people have told us, I don't know why, but I can't stop watching. We have you. They're like, that's like 10 minutes- And you want me for it. Yeah, absolutely, like, I just 10 minutes, I won't get back, but I'm looking forward to next week. Yeah, there's a, Tom Scott does his park bench ones. I love, he's a great YouTuber, he's a great science guy, and him and, I forget the guy's name, but Tom Scott has the park bench. And they just sit on a park bench and talk for 10 minutes randomly about things. And I watch it, I can't stop. It's on my subscription list to YouTube. I can link below, just a great channel. And Tom Scott does a lot of other cool things too, but that park bench one is just kind of the behind the scenes. They sit at random park benches and talk. It's just funny. Plus he has a cool first name. Yeah. Tom. Tom. Anyways, other exciting news in tech is FreeNAS 10 is out. And I'm going to be doing some videos on that. It is the latest install of FreeNAS. It's pretty amazing what they've done. They've integrated Docker, they've integrated virtualization. And so I'm building my new home server with it for testing before we put it in production because it was released yesterday, which doesn't mean I put it into production today. That would be scary. Oh, let me grab something. A magical video, ow. I gotta get rid of that. There's a VCR under here. Oh. What's this? So the next time somebody asks you who has a VCR, PC Pickup has a VCR. There's a VCR right under here that I just stubbed my knee on again. It's the most used that thing has gotten in years. I'm gonna take a picture right after we're done here. We're gonna insert it VCR here. So yes, we have a VCR. So we keep everything on Raider Raids. We don't just tell our customers to do this. We keep redundant drives and things like that. And I've talked about them before. This one in particular though was different. Now this drive is not that old. Oh, I see the problem with it. It's assembled in the USA. Oh, well, that solves everything. Anyways, SSD failures do happen. And this was part of an SSD mirrored Raider Raid that runs our more critical servers. And the Linux server that runs all this for the virtualization stack started throwing errors. And I was like, well, that's scary. And it turns out the Raider Raid failed. No, the Raider Raid didn't fail. The Raider Raid actually worked perfectly fine. This particular drive in the array broke. So it does happen, SSDs do go bad. Our backup system, and I've documented some of how we back up and the other details. I don't know if they're interesting enough for people to do another video, but I have a video on how we back up our virtual stack. But on the daily, actually on the hourly is our data backups for our SQL dumps. They are synchronized offsite every hour during normal business hours from 8 a.m. till 8 p.m. every hour. Because we don't produce as much data at night, they back up again at nine and then they don't back up again until the morning because we're really not creating anything. But if I ever, if we actually have a manual process too, we can just press a button and force all the backups to happen, which I did that at night when we replaced this drive. And so we can do it manually. For the most part, we just back up every hour. It syncs, it goes offsite. But with that being said, running Raterrays is hugely important because this meant we had no doubt time. It failed during business hours. All we did was take the drive offline. I don't have them hot swappable because it doesn't matter that much to me yet. We may build the next server hot swappable though. That way I can not even have to take it out. So I had to slide the server out and pop the drive in, but not a big deal. But Raterrays, this is the first time we've had an SSD fail on a Raterray. And for non-techie people, a Raterray is a series of redundant drives, right? Serious redundant drives, but backups are important. We don't just tell our clients to it. We do it as well because I don't have time to deal with broken systems and things like that. So I've documented how we have our virtual stacks set up. You can find that and not through my videos. And we've talked about our rocket process. Also, we get a lot of good notes on our documentation process. We're trying to be as forthcoming as we can about how we do things. We keep things very locked down. We keep them very secure. That's one of the reasons we self-host a wiki. And I demoed my wiki-wiki in a previous video, just a couple of videos ago from this one. And we just show how we create documentation. Someone did comment like, well, you know, you're using templates for formatting. Do we have trouble keeping employees with that? Honestly, let's look at the bigger picture. Look at Wikipedia and the fact that the structure stays the same across everyone. So, and that's with a global scale. It's a little bit easier to manage because I sign paychecks and I wouldn't sign paychecks for people who don't follow the rules. So, they generally, yeah. Oh, yeah. But I'm- I may have some wiki things to fix. I will be auditing Mark and Ricky later today. Oh, fantastic. Great. Tomorrow's Friday too. I gotta do this all today. Yeah. We'll pull the paycheck off the wall. Dang it. So, that's it. Documentation is so important to us and you're making our jobs easier. The nice thing and I demoed in the wiki is how, even if we just change a password for client one, I know which one of my texts changed it. I keep a change history of it. We also did a demo on how our Unify software and how we manage people's things wrongly. We, if there's more questions on that, as I've said on each of these, leave questions below. I'll make another video. But we're really all in on the Unify things. I've got Unify camera systems in order because we've really liked everything I've read about the Unify camera systems is amazing. The reason we have not been much deployments is because they seem to be in such high demand. They were a little bit hard to get a hold of when we had a couple of big project requests so we used other cameras. We wanted to use the Unify ones like the first iterations of the Unify cameras were only 720 and the clients were specifically asking for 1080 or higher so we went with some other cameras. But I'm going to be doing a whole from start to finish Unify video for their video system, their video surveillance system and I'll be doing a video for the free NAS home build and if everything goes well this Saturday and I'm not too busy with other projects and the onboarding finishes up today I will be doing the free NAS video because it's my home server. I can talk about how I, so everything up. I'm just less worried about showing anything because it's not any customer data on my home server. Just beware Tom will be at home so there's a possibility he will not be wearing pants when he does this. I dress for comfort not dignity. So just beware if you watch the video. You guys don't know if I'm wearing pants now or if Marvin's wearing pants. I'm not, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you. We're like those newscasters. We just put shirts on. We put our work shirts on and then otherwise we're just. Otherwise we wander around without pants. That's why we're always sitting in every video. Actually, I did a video where I put a button up shirt on and Marvin looks at me and he's like, you're wearing shorts. I'm like, well, I'm only going to shoot this high in the video. Yeah, he's got his button up shirt and like tacky cargo shorts on. It's an awesome look. It was sandals. Yeah, exactly. Yes, that was the, I actually don't even think they were flip flops actually. They weren't even like full sandals. No, I don't wear flip flops. They were like shower shoes. I don't really wear flip flops. I don't like pants. I don't like shoes. I walk around barefoot all the time. It's true. These are, actually it happens a lot with all the employees. Once the whole time is doing it, it's starting to do it. I'm like, yeah, pretty much. That happens. Oh, turning clicks in the clients. That was fun. That was my talk yesterday. We had a full house of people there. I'm going to be doing, I've done that video. It's on our blog. It's on our YouTube channel. It says turning clicks in the clients, SEO and SEM 2017. I love social media. I like to talk about the ramifications and the details within it. So that's an entire video of me talking about social media. If it's not your thing, don't watch it. It's long. If you're really into social media, you go, wow, that was a good talk. If nothing else, scan through it. You'll see there's some, you'll still be able to pick out some interesting things. And some scary things about how much Facebook knows about you. When we talked about, well, we, you talked about whatever. I like to throw we in there to make it seem like I was the part of it. He was there. I was there, yeah. I was eating the bacon. He ate the bacon? Oh, so good. But I love the reaction of people when you talked about the proximity, like send out a coupon to people who are walking past your store at that moment. And everybody was just like, Facebook knows that I'm in front of your store and they'll send me a coupon. It's like, yeah, they sure will. So the talks I do are the Build Your Business Workshops is one of them I do in partnership with our bank. And someone says, oh, the bank's sponsoring. And I'm like, well, yeah, did you want to pay money? As a matter of fact, the bank doesn't really push much advertising other than putting their name first, going the downriver community credit union presents, Tom Lawrence's turning clicks to the clients. They put me on the front page of the bank's website. They have signup forums. So yeah, the bank does it as a draw, but that also is why you can have $5 as an entrance fee because it costs more than $5 for Tom to talk. And if you're a member of the bank, you get in free. So if you're in a bank, yeah. So the bank does sponsor it. If someone else paid for the bacon at you, you can't buy bacon in that quantity with potatoes and eggs and everything for $5 because they give you breakfast. And what the talks are is for business owners. Generally is the attraction. So we have about 35, 40 people there. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's about 35, 40 local business owners that come out to these talks. But I mean, doing more of them is we like helping people launch. And I already have an invite for doing another talk, which is kind of cool from another business association. Actually, two of them want me to come and talk. So I love doing this. I love public speaking, which because of some projects up and coming, I did skip submitting to PenguinCon. I've talked there in the last few years. I'm only doing my podcast there. I don't know, I might change my mind about it, but for the most part, I mean, I really wanted to, I just know all the projects I got lined up as I might skip this year at PenguinCon. That looks like I didn't submit a talk, I know. But I will be speaking probably at the Ohio Linux Fest because I'm going there, it's on my agenda. So we'll talk about all that. My podcast is going well for talking about Linux. It's just one of my favorite topics to go rip through Linux stuff when I'm not talking about social media. It really is. It really is. So I think we've taken up enough of your time. Yeah, let's call it. We'll call it. Thank you. If you've made it this far, thank you very much. Click like and subscribe and see you next time. I'm also, it leaves me having something about doing a rip through the news too. So we're working on that as another thing and we might share it doing once a week and run through tech news headlines and give some thoughts on them. So let me hear you. Or if you'd like us to rip through regular news as well, we'll do that too. Let us know in the comments what news you would like to see us rip through. Yeah. There's no other context. If you told anyone 10 years ago, the president of the United States would be tweeting at Snoop Dogg. I don't care if you support the guy or not. That isn't what this is about. The president of the United States is having a Twitter debate with Snoop Dogg. We're gonna leave you with that. There's nothing more we need to say. That's it. Take it for what it's worth. What do you love about it? I mean, whatever. Does it speak to the president or does it speak more to how much social media has infiltrated our society? Twitter's loving all the attention. Also, I know everyone's on Twitter now because I don't know what's going on on Twitter. All right. Thank you guys. See you next week.