 Do you know what today is? It's Vlog Thursday. It's Vlog Thursday, and Tom upgraded his car. Tom has a new toy. Tom has a new toy. I totally want one of my car. That should be today's project. I think they should come standard on cars. Absolutely. So the back story is the horn broke in my car, which meant it wasn't horny anymore, which is just not good. So we decided I could fix the horn, but what fun would that be? Because the horn doesn't allow me to quite articulate how I feel sometimes while I'm driving. People ignore horns, really. They really do. I mean, you hear it, you're just like, who is that jerk? And I thought I was winning one time, and I did blow the horn in person, dropped their phone, they didn't go, they dropped their phone when I blew the horn, and I'm like, ah, they dropped their phone, and I'm like, crap. Now they're looking for their phone. I have accomplished nothing, nothing done. Made the situation worse. But the look on your face when you get out of a microphone in a car and go, put down the phone is a freak out. Because they think it's the cops. Which is awesome. But I'm not impersonating an officer. I'm just saying, I'm just expressing my feeling that you should not be on your phone. I mean, someone can say you shouldn't be on a microphone, but I'm doing it because I'm stopped. I'm doing nothing. I'm like sitting here going, look at the light screen. Yeah, so that's my car upgrade. So that's thing one. Thing two is, I'm gonna talk about a little hardware. I'm gonna cover more hardware builds and more fun stuff. We got a Ryzen build, which is AMD's new stuff. So if you're in a hardware you're into stuff like that, and we are kind of a little bit, we build computers for people. We build custom gaming systems. We build custom editing systems. And I'm hoping, I talked to my cousin. We're hoping to do a video with her. She needs a new gaming, or new video editing system built for her YouTube stuff. So that's gonna be exciting. I'm hoping the video's gonna come soon. She, I just dropped her off. I live by the airport, so she doesn't. People who wanna come visit Tom is usually cause they wanna park their car cause it looks so close to the airport so I can drive them off the airport so I have to pay her for parking. So we got this. We got a cool liquid cooler. Oh, look at that. Yeah, yeah, exciting. So we're gonna do a whole video on this and all the details. We're doing some serious processing for that. Serious CPU processing time. So that's, we're getting a lot more into that. We're gonna do some more build videos. That's the kind of thing that makes tech people horny. It's sexy. See what I did there? It's sexy hardware, what can I say? What can I say? Anyways. Nothing to say. Nothing to say. We also have an art project that's almost done. I threw a sneak peek up on my Facebook page. I probably should post some of this stuff, more stuff to YouTube. I'm getting there. I don't know why. It's just one of those Facebooks easy. So we throw things on there. But it's all a combination of where I put all the stuff. We're trying to consolidate more things. I'm also thinking about with these builds, detailing them more out in a blog as well. So we do the video, which is all that, but then we're gonna have it on our website. We're gonna start increasing more on there. We were just kind of focused the website on just the business people for our blog, but we've kind of realized that there's more traffic coming from YouTube to my blog than some of the general public stuff. So we're gonna blend in everything. And if they don't wanna read articles about us building a Ryzen or a FreeNAS box, then they can skip up on them again. Maybe they do wanna read articles on that. So we're gonna start embedding more things on there and then we're gonna start editing what it's on my to-do list. What else is fun in going on? All these cameras being installed. Oh gosh, yeah, that's pretty awesome. Everybody loves the Unify system that we've been touting as of late. It is a very, very cool system. And I mean, once you show it to people, they're just like, yes, I want that. Yeah, that's why I did that video on there. So my videos sometimes are, well, they're always for everyone who wants to watch them, but some of them have a kind of more specific purpose. So we did a review of the Unify software, which seems kind of like a basic one because they didn't cover super technical details. But part of it is, that stuff we actually send to our clients, they go, well, what does the video software look like? And it's one of those hard things to do. So some of them are unhappy with their previous camera people, which is why they didn't call them back. They installed it several years ago. They're like, look, the camera software's awful. It's hard to use. The support was terrible from the people. So we like to showcase, you're like, we'll do a whole video on how to use the software and you can watch that video before you buy it. And they go, wow, you took the time to make a tutorial on this. I'm like, exactly. You can demo it. You can see it. And then they want to come and see it at our store. I said, come in, stop in our store, check out our camera systems. Putting the whole thing together for them, that's part of it. I mean, I don't see why you wouldn't do that. These other guys are like, they're in it just for the money, I guess you could say. They're so focused on, I'm just trying to get a sale and they're trying to find the cheapest NVR, DVR, combination they can that they can get away with, which is really crappy. And it's a shame. I'm like, we look and thoroughly test technology before we deploy it, before we start reselling it. So that's why we don't. Just people like, oh, what about this company? I heard they have a great commission sale for it. I'm like, yeah, they probably do. They got a great restart program. I care more about the product than a restart program. It's funny how what people get used to, like they'll ask like, how long will these last? You know, can I get like a year or two years out of them? And we're like, you should get like six or seven out of them. Yeah. But they're just prepared for like, oh, it's probably just going to be a year or two because that's what it's been with all the other ones. And we're like, no. Exactly so. You get way more out of it. Any of the products we deploy are generally well tested or something we've researched thoroughly before we went and got it and put it into the client. And that's where so many IT companies, I see kind of fall short. They get hooked on a product and you go, but they have a great restart program. And I even talk to a lot of technicians mostly. And it's less business owners interact with. I have more fun interacting with technicians because I'm a technician at heart who happens to own a business. And they end up with bosses that are, you know, they're being counters. They're numbers driven. They're going, you're going to resell this product not because it's great, but because me and the owner had a great meal the other day and he's going to increase our commission rate to 9% on everything we sell. And you're like, but the product doesn't work. Well, that doesn't matter. It's 9%. We'll talk to their engineering team and they'll improve it, you know. Or we'll sell them another one in a couple of years and make more commission. Yeah. So it's kind of like, yeah. And they look for all these, oh, look, I can make this much on recurring licensing for all this. And we, you know, that divided licenses for us. We've taken out so many systems like that because you get caught in this trap and there's no product proven or anything. You're like, well, this is just crappy software they're using and yeah. So we try to avoid all of that. Backups. I'm going to jump on this train again. People need the back up. I smell a Tom Rant coming. Yeah. I mean, we do everything we can to tell people to back up. And it's, I have yet another proposal. We found out that they're storing a bunch of things in our local machine. We try to audit this. It's really tough. Like, unless we're our managed client or we're in there all the time, they change things. They install software without telling us. And these are unmanaged clients. These are clients who call us on an as needed basis. And they a lot, in our industry, they call us a break fix client. So they don't call you unless something broken and we need to fix it. That's fine. So they don't pay us any monthly fees. And in between, we, you know, like, hey, what do you recommend for backup? I said, well, you want to manage it yourself. I drive as a cool product, but you're responsible for it. Then they do things like install random software in different locations than my documents. And that turns into, whoops, I need to restore everything. Oh, the program I was using stored it under some other directory. And they're like, well, you didn't tell me. You're the one who recommended iDrive. And they get mad. I'm like, I wish I could help you, but here's our fee for a full system backup. And they're like, why don't I pay that? I'm like, okay. That's why you went with iDrive and set up yourself. And that's fine. You can do that. But you have to realize that if you're doing all these changes to it, you can't just make the absolute assumption. And we tell people that. And they go, I know, I know, I know. I don't want to pay no monthly fees. I just want to do everything myself. I'm like, okay, that's fine. You technically can't. People always ask, can I do it myself? Of course you can. If you have a comprehension of computers and you take the time to read the documentation, you absolutely can do it. That's what we do to get where we are. There's not any real secret to it. Can I do it myself is pretty much always, you can take the transmission out of your car yourself if you've got the tool. I don't have the right tools. So I take it over to my friend at Matz Auto and he'll take the transmission out of my car if it need be. Because they've done it a thousand times. This is the reason you hire professionals for things. And I don't understand why so many companies kind of skimp when it comes to tech. Especially the size of some of the companies. I'm like, I know what you guys must be spending. You have a fleet of vehicles. You have this or that. And you're going, man, I don't want to spend even more than $20 a month on backing up the critical infrastructure for my country. That's kind of my, you know, my company has a budget of about $30 a month. I'm like, to back up every, we don't have that much stuff. And that's factually true in some of the manufacturing cases. They really don't have a lot of documents. They have a QuickBooks file and a few things and they sell expensive parts. So there's not a ton of data. They don't have terabytes of data. They literally have three gigs. And which is great. They can do millions of dollars with three gigs with the data. That's fine because it's manufacturing. But back it up, spend a little bit of money. You're selling expensive parts. Just find a budget and go, hey, I'll spend a couple of dollars on this. You have to look down the road and say, how much is it going to cost me if I don't have those three gigs of things? Exactly. You have the ticket right there. Exactly. So we do our best to encourage people. I'm always looking for suggestions for different angles. We try to, my best customers are always people who have had a major loss or had the crypto lockered or something bad happens. Those are great customers because afterwards they realize the severity of it and they're go, that's it. So that's something that's important to us. We're gonna go ahead and spend a few dollars on it. It's not like you're spending a fortune. It's not like this is some huge money maker spending 50 bucks or 60 bucks a month to get a backup of a computer. It's just spending more than 20 and trying to babysit it yourself. It's just not something that's outrageously expensive to get a backup plan in place or spend a little more time and a little more money but it's worth it and build an entire disaster recovery plan because you have to think what happens if this doesn't work or what happens if the server goes down. That's something I thought about detailing out. I mean, I talked about ours in a couple of videos ago. I talked about disaster recovery plans we have but I thought about getting more detail into that of like, these are the steps that we will go through because these are something we've thought a lot about and planned out what happens if, what happens if this happens or that happens and that's what you really have to do you have to play with the scenario of if your business, something burst into flames or whatever or something bad happens in your business you can't get into the building for days how are you gonna get the data? How are you gonna handle the customers? How are you gonna make the phone calls? What are you gonna do? And we have plans for that. We've thought those things out and I try to encourage other companies as well and maybe I'll get more thorough in documenting how our thought process on that. I try to stabilize because we just have procedures that may not fit everyone but at least if I put together, maybe I'll put together a video of our disaster recovery plan and what we plan to do and that would help you create some and we wanna help other technicians do this and encourage this, you know, this type of behavior really think through all the scenarios. So. People don't like to think about those bad things though. We don't wanna think about bad things happening. Only happy, pretty, flowery, pretty things. Yeah, yes. Unicorns and. All that fun stuff. In my technical detail videos I also did a couple of news orata ones about the RNC and the contractor for them that lost all the data. So I have a whole video on that. Yeah. That's just one of those misconfigured things. People gotta configure things more in a better way. They have to consider how they configure. Consider how you configure. Before you put it in the cloud, did you lock the cloud? And when the cloud leaks, is that just rain? Ooh. Our data leaks from the cloud rain, we don't know. Let's go with yes. We'll go with yes on that. That's really cold and then it's snow. Exactly. Yeah. So we won't bore you with every little detail. Is there anything else this week, Parmen? Nah, I don't think so. Yeah. Let's keep it short. If not short, we mean just like 12 minutes this week. Yeah, 12 minutes this week. 12 minutes long. So mostly it's gonna be about build videos. We're gonna focus more on those cause we had to, well, after this we started assembling that computer. We're gonna be videoing the assembly and putting together, you know, more things related to that. Also, thank you for 6,000 subscribers. Oh yeah. Well, 6,100 I think when I checked this morning. It's been, you know, it's a lot of work you put in the channel. I'm so excited when I see more people joining in and the comments and the feedback and we love that. That's just wonderful. Makes me think I'm not just talking to the forest by myself. Which I was. It's just yelling at trees. Yeah, I'm just yelling at trees. Trees, look at me. Trees, look at me. Oh, you know what? We should let people know that you do not want to come to our parking lot, smoke your cigarettes and throw the butts out the window. Yes, that did happen. Because we will return them to you. Yes, yes. And we will find you and return them to you. Maybe I should post that video on YouTube as well as I posted it. And what we're doing is people decided they wanna smoke in our parking lot because there's two different medical facilities across the street and you can't smoke in parking lots in medical facilities in Michigan. There's a law and you have to be so many feet away. Well, we are enough feet away that they come over here and smoke. I don't mind if they sit in the parking lot and smoke. That's fine. What's not fine is they, like the cigarette out the window. So, we have been picking the cigarette butts up as we see them doing it because we have windows in front of our place and we hand them back to them and go, we think you dropped this. That's amusing. Steve has certainly found some joy in doing that. And the shocked look on their face is always, oh, sorry. And it's actually working because those people that have handed it back aren't throwing it. But you always have that obstinate person. And one of these obstinate people decided to, they realized what we were waiting for. They had it right to the edge. Then they started the car, then they started driving and then they flicked it just before they drove out of the parking lot. But that didn't stop us from dropping it into an envelope saying, I think you dropped this and walking across the street with it. There's our parking lot. And there's the nursing home. So, it was a short walk across the street and we still returned it. I think we may have gotten someone in trouble because we let the people know at the place. They said, well, are we over there? And we let them know we're returning the cigarette butts that their people, their staff have left over here in our parking lot. So, that's our good deed for the day, returning lost property to its rightful owner. And putting it in their car. Left it on windshield. Yeah. We also made sure we let the managers because they asked what we were doing. We let them know returning your employees who drive across the park that are throwing their cigarette butts in our parking lot. So, we're not trying to really get you in trouble. We're just trying not to have the literal pile. I mean, not like one or two piles of cigarette butts that we have to sweep up out of our parking lot. It gets a little bit ridiculous. You know what? Maybe we're going about this the wrong way. Maybe there is still an empty space, a couple doors down in this plaza. Maybe we need to open some kind of medical facility there. Yeah. Then they can't smoke in our parking lot either because you can't smoke within so many feet of a medical facility. Yeah, so maybe I'll post that video as well. Are dispensaries medical facilities? Well, you're getting those here in Michigan. So that's a whole other thing. Yeah, we'll open up. But that's a dispensary that dispends the stuff you can smoke, so. Or eat. Or eat. I've heard. They've had animals. And just coffee. It's just, it's all it is. You notice it's not green. No. So, thanks for watching Vlog Thursday. We kept it short today. I do have one more thing I'm going to pull in the video real quick. Oh. This has, let's count them. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four. Six times four is? 24. 24 drive storage array. Two dozen. Two dozen of these. Dropped off by a friend. So this is going to be a build that we're going to do for us. It's a used case and we're excited about it even though it's used because it has all these drives. It has one, two, three, four power supplies in it. So that also makes it equally exciting. But only two little fans. There's a lot of fans. There's more fans inside. But this might be another build video. Very thank you to Nick who dropped this off. I don't know if you want me to say his full name in here. I'll let him decide because I know he's someone who watches this on YouTube. We love gifts. No, we sure do. Especially cool gifts like this. If it's cool tech gifts, we're even more excited. So. It'll get you mentioned on Vlog Thursday. It'll get you mentioned. And I don't know if Nick wants his full name out. What we'll do if he does, I got to reach out to him again. We will do a full video. And trust me, credit to Nick for hooking us up with this really awesome server case. No hard drives in it yet, but that's going to change. We will get this thing filled up with lots of drives. So thanks for watching Vlog News Day and have a great day. See ya.