 It's December 29th, for as far as you know, okay? It might actually be December 20th. Snats out. Two-hundredths of one percent of the Daily Tech News show were brought to you by me. If you would like to decrease my already meager equity, go to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News Show for Tuesday, December 29th, 2015. I'm Tom Merritt, and I'm not actually here. It's the holidays. I'm off gallivanting about. I hope you are too, but we pre-recorded some excellent episodes for you, and this is one of them. I've been doing this on the Buzz Out Loud days and the Tech News Today days, where we bring in folks from our audience to talk to us and let us know what they use tech for and why they're interested in technology. Starting from, I don't know if it's right to left, but it's the bottom of my dock. Jeffrey Beard is with us. Jeffrey, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. We're going to talk to each of them in depth in a little bit. We also have a husband and wife very happy that Dave and Tammy McClain have joined us. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Tom. And extra special thanks to Dave for talking Tammy into being on here. Thank you, Tommy. You're welcome, Tom. And then joining us from the road, he's out being Santa Claus right now, is Sikani. Sikani, thank you for joining us as well. Thank you for having me on here. It's a pleasure. It is really nice of you to pull over to the side of the road, give us a nice view of some palm trees, and take some time out of what I can tell is an extremely busy day. It's a busy time for you guys. So let's start with you because I know you got to get back on the road. First of all, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, as you can see, I'm a FedEx driver by day. But at night, I also moonlight for a company called Uber, which has made many, many headlines in the past year. So I think it's been an interesting experience driving for one company and the other, largely because they both share, believe it or not, they both share the same sort of independent contract relationship just in different ways. Interesting. So Jenny Josephson, our producer, is with us along here too. And we've both been happy to have some contributions from you on topics like that over the years. And that is interesting that we talk about the contractor relationship with Uber and the contractor economy. That's not actually a new thing necessarily, right, Sikani? No, it's not. I have been an independent contractor for FedEx Ground for going on 11 years now. The only difference to it is some of the concerns over the independent contractor or the gig economy have been how much control that the company contracting out exerts over its independent operators. Right. So for instance with Uber, do you provide your own car? I know some do, some don't. Yeah, I provide my own vehicle. I pay for my own insurance, my own gas, my own car washes. Everything comes out of my pocket. Basically, I use my own phone. But I'm assuming you don't have your own delivery truck though? Actually, I used to, believe it or not. No kidding? I actually, yes, I want to show it to you now unless you really want to see it. But I actually use my own delivery truck. I sold it later on because I did not want to be, it was just too much hassle. That's cool. So what, I mean obviously when we talk about these driving services, the ride sharing economy, it interests you because you're living it, right? What other topics are of interest to you? Well, so I know you guys don't cover gaming much, but bear is that. I'm also interested in security and social networking and the way that say the smart phone has changed the way we communicate with each other. You know, being an old man that I am, I know good genes. But I was raised in a world, I went to high school and no one had a cell phone. I mean, I was in my senior year before I saw a web browser for the first time. Now compare that to today where people are growing up with Facebook and Instagram and everything else at their fingertips. It's just the way that we all communicate with each other has changed so much that I am not sure if it's a benefit or a detriment to our society. Well, I would say since you're standing at the side of the road talking to us live on your mobile phone, it's a benefit. It's going right there with it. I mean, it's just to me, it's always amazing how much this technology has progressed. I didn't have email until college. I didn't have email. And now here you are in one place with palm trees behind you. And here we all are in four others and we're all talking live. I love it. Yeah, there was no such thing as a web browser yet when I was in college in the county. I believe that. No, but it is, it's amazing. And you're right, there are good and bad things about it. What are some of the things that are most top of mind to you when you think about communications? Just the way that we communicate more. I believe that the internet has brought to us a way to communicate without the face-to-face interaction. You don't have the non-verbal cues of body language that let us know how our messages are being received. Yeah, not all the time. Or our intended use. Yeah. And I think a lot of that, there's also the aspect of say, look, this person is not really here. So we tend to act in a certain way as to they don't really exist. They're not real. And as such, I think communication has gotten a lot more blunt for better or for worse, but at the same time a bit more hostile and more argumentative. I mean, you know, we can express ourselves in different ways and perhaps better ways. I think I'm actually better at expressing myself in the written word. But at the same time, there seems to be a disconnect between, you know, what I say is just going to be read or heard by a person and not just some random people on the other side of the computer screen somewhere. Do you think we're getting better at that, though? Do you think we're learning as we have these little blow-ups on the internet and these flame wars and things like that? Do you think that we're actually figuring out how to better use that kind of tool? I want to say yes. I find that the empathy necessary for a lot of good personal interaction is still in many ways. You're right. There's a big rig backing up about five feet from me. I need to move out of the way. You go ahead and do what you need to do. And if you jump back in, just let us know. That's great. Thank you for the time that you had, Sakane. We really appreciate it. No problem. I will be in via audio if you need me. All right. That's good. Thank you very much. A pleasure, Jenny. Pleasure time. A pleasure to use, Sakane. And thanks for all the contributions and emails, man. It's awesome. All right. So let's turn to Dave and Tammy. You guys are not in a truck, as far as I can tell. Just go ahead. And big thanks to Sakane for doing that in the middle of his work day like that. But you guys are husband and wife, and you watched DT&S in the mornings. Is that right? I do. We don't use really regular television at all. Is my mic picking me up? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. So I can watch your program whenever I choose to, and that seems to be in the morning, which that's much different than traditional television, to be able to just do that. Just grab a program. And I think that a lot of people know that there are folks out there who don't watch traditional television and watch the internet, and they generally think they're all 18-year-olds and watching it on their phones. So why is it that you guys prefer to watch things that way? Well, we got cable internet here at our house. Our town has a telephone company that's kind of an incumbent internet service, and their service was terrible, and I found out that Charter offered television, cable TV, and internet service in our town, so we tried that out. And after a couple months, we just dropped television because we really didn't watch it. We probably turned it on five times during the course of the two months we had it. So what do you guys watch on the internet then? We watch some stuff on Leo LaPorte's network. We watch Netflix. We have Amazon Prime. And I use the YouTube app quite a bit. We use a Roku at our home theater to watch that kind of stuff. And it's pretty handy. I think DTNS needs an app. We're getting there. We got an app on Apple TV, thanks to one listener. So yeah, it would be great to put together one for the Roku. Although there is the diamondclub.tv app for Roku, and I think AlphaGeek Media keeps us on in video now as well as audio. Yeah, and if you go on the Roku app through tune in that app, you can get to the AlphaGeek part of it. I've done that. And it works. It's a couple extra steps, but it's really great. There is an AlphaGeek Media app just for Roku too. Yeah, because I helped Todd do some testing on that when he was putting it together. So if you go to alphageekradio.com, click on Watch or Listen Live. It'll show you all the different ways that you can use to watch the show. Okay. Or how to tune in. I'm sorry. How to tune in is the page that he has now for all of that. I see we have a... Have you... Do you see this, Tom? We have a new joiner on the Listener Co-host show. Okay, that's hilarious. So your cat just ran in at the same time as my dog Sawyer came running over. It's like you could smell the cat through the hangout. They have a way to... What's your cat's name? Jade. Jade? Yes, she has eyes. Now we got a whole family now, all three of you on there. That's true. Then there's another cat in here, Henry. He'll probably be in here in a minute or two. I'm trying to think. I got a Roku when that first came out. That's really kind of how I started going in that direction with television. Like I said, originally it was strictly Netflix. Then they started adding some different apps and things like that. I've done some beta testing even on some of their boxes. I don't know. I've told some other friends about that that have also tried that. Because dish and things like that can get really expensive. Yeah. Especially if you're only using it for a couple of programs. We've really been able to find plenty to watch. Yeah, it depends on what your consumption patterns are. Sometimes it doesn't save you anything. I argue that even then it's better because it gives you control. You can cancel Netflix when you want. You can put Hulu subscription on pause when you need to. But if you're not watching a lot of television anyway, it's probably going to save you some money. I'm curious what you guys watch on YouTube. Oh, I watch... It depends. Recently I did some upgrades on the home theater. I got a new receiver. I set it up to support Dolby Atmos with the overhead speakers. I watched a lot of stuff on YouTube about that. Product reviews and how-to's and that kind of thing. The Twitch show home theater geeks, there's a lot of old ones on there. It's cool because you can go back and learn things maybe a year ago, but you can pick it up whenever you need to. That's pretty handy. I use it quite a bit. Yeah, Scott's great about that too. A lot of his knowledge that he imparts, Scott Wilkinson, the host of home theater geeks, is timeless. It's about impedance and matching frequencies and stuff like that. That doesn't change. That's just physics. Right. That's really how I use the YouTube stuff quite a bit on there. Amazon Prime and Netflix is pretty self-explanatory. Tammy uses it to binge-watch some shows occasionally. Ooh, what do you watch? I want to know. Oh, gosh. I'm going to embarrass myself probably. Family Guy? Oh, great. Are you kidding? Yeah, that's a great show. Let's see. Ghost Whisperer, for some reason, that's been on my radar. I've watched a few of those. They're pretty good. Yeah. We watch a lot of Mythbusters over and over. Great show. And Top Gear. Yeah, you got good taste. The British Top Gear on Netflix is always good. Well, and Jeremy Clarkson, although he left the BBC Top Gear, is going to do a similar show with his crew for Amazon. I think it's starting in January? Is that right? That's what I've heard, I think. Yeah. And I've been watching a few of the episodes of The Man in the High Castle, the alternative history show on Amazon. And that's been pretty good, too. And it's totally an independent show that's only on there. I hadn't really watched any of those other ones that were that way. What was the one about the... Transparent? Well, that's one of their independent, or one of their net only shows. Mozart and the Jungle is a good one. I've never watched that one. Oh, Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot. You've got to be prepared. You've got a couple of seasons to get through, too. Yeah. So that's kind of how we've been doing our television doing. And as far as other technology goes, we've been Windows phone users, which it's sort of unusual. I really like the operating system. There is a sort of a deficit when it comes to a lot of different apps, but I really don't use that many apps. I use my phone mainly for taking pictures and making calls and that kind of thing, you know. Well, again, it's kind of like the cord cutting scenario you were talking about. If the tech does what you need, it doesn't matter whether it's iOS, Android, Windows, or what else. It's about delivering the things you need. And if you're not worried about having that new app bluster or whatever the next thing is going to be called. Now I want that app, an app called Bluster. I don't know what that app does. Then, yeah, it doesn't really matter. And then it's more about specs and cost and whether it works with your service. Right. We do wish that it had better integration with the Google services. I mean, it does get my mail from my Gmail account and things like that, but it doesn't integrate like with, well, the chat and things like that. Yeah. And one thing with Gmail I've noticed, if you're not using the Gmail app, a lot of the settings you might set up on the web say like, for instance, if I get email to Daily Tech News Show, I have Gmail set up to notice that and reply with my Daily Tech News Show address so that it's the same address. That doesn't work if you've set it up through your Windows phone for mail. You have to get a Gmail app. Right. I see. Yeah. Sure. But I'm pretty cheap when it comes to computers. Most of the machines I use at work are here at home or put together PCs that are all kind of old. Like, this machine is six years old that we're using. That's amazing. And is it running Windows? Windows 10. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. We use it as a server for play on. I've got a bunch of DVDs that I've ripped to the hard drive and we can use them through the Roku. And it does great for that. It's just an old AMD machine. And I really haven't any need to upgrade it. But what's interesting was it was a Windows XP machine and I upgraded it to Windows 8 and it became a lot more effective at streaming the content via play on. So, I don't know. It's almost as if that stuff's become more efficient and it runs better on the old hardware. I've got a five-year-old Windows machine. It was a Windows 7 machine, I think, when I bought it. And I've kept updating it. And Windows 10 runs great on it. So, I think for one thing, machines are lasting longer because we've kind of reached the maximum on processor speed. We're getting close to maximum on RAM in some ways. And like you say, those operating systems are getting more efficient now instead of just getting bigger as they were in the years from Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Right, that's true. So, are you saying there's an app that will allow me to get rid of all the DVDs in my garage that I've been storing and play them through my Roku? Is that what I took away from this conversation? Right. I think, I've never used Plex. That's a real popular one. The one I've got is Play On. Play On. And I've just ripped, really they're Tammy's DVDs mostly. But I ripped them to using Make MKB. And they're pretty small on the hard drive. There's probably 200 of them or so on. They're real easy. And you can go through and pick them on the Roku box and stream them across our network. And as long as you haven't circumvented any copyright protection, you're not breaking any laws. No, I would never do that, Tom. He's talking to me. Hold on to the story. I was going to ask you, Tammy, because it sounds like you guys are pretty tech savvy. And I think Dave mentioned in the email that you sometimes end up being the tech savvy person in the room when you're out and about. Sometimes, yeah. And for work, I kind of update the website and do some website development for them. We'll... Do you end up being the person everybody asks if their computer breaks down? Yes. Yes, in the circle of people I know, I can usually figure out something or find out what the program's doing wrong or what they should be doing. Or I can ask Dave. If they're doing something like running the screen in a real low resolution. You know, that kind of thing. It's always interesting, I think, the levels of knowledge flow from the people who are the coders to the people who are the designers and the developers. Everybody's got a little piece of the knowledge. And then there's this... I would count myself, Tammy, in your same sort of band of knowledge, which is I'm just not afraid of the things. So I'll root around in there and try to figure it out, try to work on it and try to solve a problem. I know the answer, but I'm not afraid to find it out and I know who to turn to to get a real answer, which is my boss, Tom. Well, like when, Mike, I got my Windows phone, the data wouldn't work. And I read on, I don't know how many blogs about what I should do or try to do, and it ended up that I finally I conquered it, like, after about, I don't know, months of research. The exact things AT&T couldn't help me. They would tell me to do something that still wouldn't work. But after combining a whole ton of different things, I was able to figure it out. It's like, gosh, darn. Did you run around your house like a superhero? Tom, you're close. Yeah, kind of. And that's the thing, when you work on those problems like that, it's super frustrating, but then you come away with it feeling accomplished once you've fixed it. It's a very similar problem that starts to inform, like, wait a minute, this is similar to that other thing I fixed. You fixed that one faster, and it just kind of snowballs from there. Sure. I think that's one area that I've benefited greatly. We were talking about social media and stuff with the first guest. That, I use a lot of online forums through my work. We do engine building, automotive stuff, and there's a lot of really good online forums and stuff like that where you have questions and answer type situations. Sometimes communication is a little awkward when people are all typing. I know exactly what he was talking about. Sometimes it seems to be kind of gruff, but at the same time, you can learn so much. It's a good thing. I rely on that quite a bit with work. I really do. I find myself unable now to understand a single sentence without a smiling emoji. I think in 100 years the smiling emoji will actually replace the period. Word of the year. You have to. I understand. I didn't know what emojis were really about all that much, but now I understand because expressing emotions when you're typing is hard to do. We all tend to read things that they could possibly be intended. Yes. Yes, we do. It helps to smooth over those things, because there's a few guys that I know personally that I had met through online forums, engine, high performance type people. When you meet the real person, they're much different than the person that types on the computer. It's always very interesting. All right. Well, I want to bring in our other listener co-host in here to join the conversation. Jeffrey Beard, thank you for your patience and hanging around, and thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm an IT consultant by day and a bit of a consultant at by night as well in many capacities, but also full-time dad. Obviously, technology and being a dad is an interesting combination. Having grown up in the late 80s, early 90s as the internet's coming about and all that stuff, and now having to deal with having children who are born in the internet age are always connected in all that stuff. So dealing with all that. That's what I do. Are you the same Jeffrey Beard who sent me this? Daily Tech News show is brought to you by me. Oh, thanks me. Is that you? Yes, that was me. That is one of my favorite of the ones. Just because of that. Aw, thanks me. So I'm hoping that you'll like, because we've changed it, we want to direct people to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. I was hoping I could talk you into doing one at some point when you have time. Sounds like you're a busy guy. Absolutely. With that URL. I think one would be great because I just adored that. Every time. Absolutely. Next time I find some time to lock myself in this little club, there might be pounding on the door and trying to get in. That's fine. Yeah, no, I totally understand. Well, edit that out. So how did you get into all of this? How did you get into technology? Well, like most people or a lot of people who get into tech, it started with my dad and kind of ran into family. Dad was an electrical engineer and was into computers. We had Amigas and Commodores growing up and where I did. My sister didn't care for it too much, but so the technology was around me. We were running BNC token ring networks and through the ceiling and our drop ceiling in our basement and all that stuff. So yeah, it's just so we could play our little Star Trek Star Wars game on the Amiga with the ships flying around and shooting each other. That was a good time. You grew up in a LAN network. Exactly. I was connected almost at birth. Yeah, so I don't know if I really had so much of a choice. I guess my sister escaped that she's more artsy, but just kind of being helpful by nature I guess kind of landed me in the consulting biz and the IT. I kind of started in like a help desk capacity and then just kind of moved on from there and learning new technologies and moving up the chain like hey, you can kind of manage a whole customer relationship in addition to being technical. So that's kind of how I ended up in that. One of the things I noticed when I was doing work at CNET back in the day was I would run into things where the company was moving very slowly on a product because they were running an enterprise solution which sometimes are great. But every once in a while there'd be something where I'd like hold on, these guys are, this little startup is doing it in a way that can blow away what you're doing. That's right. Do you continue to run into that problem where you're trying to get people to catch up with what's happening because things happen so fast? Yeah, well, there's a huge shift in IT now, especially in the last five, eight years is what they call the consumerization of IT. Your customers, your users, your IT users are savvy. They have iPads, they have they're all connected on, they have internet connections, they have all the devices, they have the stack app and device stacks that they like to use. They have Apple Mail, they have all this stuff. They don't want to be VPNing into work just so they can get their email. They want it on their iPhone, they want it on their Mac and all that. I've been fortunate the last five to ten years to work at a company that was pretty progressive, it was a large company but they were pretty progressive and they kind of sold those solutions to classic IT shops and, hey, our software lets you connect these people to their data, their enterprise data securely and all that stuff. That's a big trend right now. I'm seeing in my most recent capacity as a consultant with smaller companies who really want to bring that consumerization of IT to their user base. So things like Office 365, Moving to the Cloud, Hosted Mail, Hosted Chat, Skype for Business, all that stuff is really hot right now and customers really want to ditch all that old on-premise infrastructure. I actually had a client of about 50 customers recently say, we're moving to a new space, we don't want any servers, we don't want any switches, we just want wireless network in the office, that's it. All of us were like, oh my god. So we did talk them into fortunately having some wired phones here and there, VoIP phones but wired. But that's it, that's where it's going. People don't want to deal with having infrastructure to manage anymore. Jenny, we have a real live IT consultant here who could explain data centers in the cloud. Is there anything that you're like still doesn't, because sometimes we do the enterprise stories and we don't cover enterprise regularly, but they're big and you've probably heard me do it earlier, I have to say like, look, this all may sound like gobbledy gobbledy gobbledy if you're not in the biz, but it's really exciting. Yeah, definitely. Just the other day, I was at yesterday, you were mentioning the Office 365 announcement with the Skype for Business with built-in VoIP capability for businesses having that calling capability with Skype for Business. That reminds me I have a question. So Skype and Skype for Business are incredibly different entities because one is doing a direct person-to-person call and the other one is distributed in some way that makes podcasting on it question mark terrible? Explain this to me, because I just ran into a brick wall with this and I'm super curious. So I'm not extremely familiar with Skype for Business, other than the fact that I know a lot of it runs on the old Microsoft link infrastructure. So I believe you're going to have a hybrid on-premise link server handling your SIP calls, your VoIP calls and things like that in your enterprise but also go out over the Skype network for PSTN, for classic calls and for other Skype users. So I'm actually not 100% on that. It's relatively recent and our customers haven't actually asked for that yet. I'm sure it's coming. You can bring in a lot more server power with Skype for Business whereas Skype for Consumers is working off the old Supernode model as far as I understand, even though Microsoft brought the Supernodes into their I don't know if it's on Azure or not but into their own server network. So by the way I don't want to take too much away from you Jeffrey but I noticed Sikhani finally was able to get back to the side of the road there. He's showing us a little traffic shot there right now. So Sikhani, if you're still able to hear us I'm sorry we got cut short earlier man but thanks for popping back in. Another problem is I had to turn my microphone back on real quick and there's some scenery for your viewing audience there. Excellent, excellent. We're seeing some traffic out in the east. The east there a bit. The east of the California. A little Palm Springs area 4 o'clock traffic. Yeah, in case there's any local listeners out here, this is actually a shot of Bate Palma Derrotti being for Peter City, California. Cool. From 28 days ago, if you're listening to this out of the podcast. I'm pretty sure on the 29th you'll look exactly the same. That's a good point. I wanted to ask Sikhani one question that he didn't get to ask before he had to jump back in the car for his own personal safety. But in terms of Uber are you finding it a useful way to supplement your income? Because this is what I always ask drivers. And I know it's sort of pushy, but people have such different takes on it. I'm sort of curious how you find the experience in general. Well, to be honest it varies. I've had some days where it hasn't made enough to say I go out on some weeks and say, hey, I may have enough to take care of my car payment. Other weeks why I don't take home enough to cover the cost of a tank of gas. So there are, let me turn this off. But yeah, there are it just varies from day to day. That's the only thing I can say. The biggest problem with Uber and the reason why I don't do it full time is the lack of consistency. It does not help that depending on what day of the week or what night or whatever, you may get say one night you may be over saturated with drivers. Another night it may be a special event going on. Another night maybe just know nobody's in town. So you never you never know. It's hard to make a consistent living. Yeah, even in, especially in most markets, like say, even I'm working up to where I work in mostly Los Angeles and some of the larger West, some of the other places like Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, some of the more established, I guess, markets or more popular markets. There is enough activities where say an Uber drive can make a decent bit of extra cash, you know. You get more than just people going out to the club every week. We have people commuting to or from work. We have people trying to get to or from a grocery store. You just get some more overall and more varied usage as opposed to say out here where I am now in Palm Springs where I say, you know, unless it's Saturday night at 1 a.m. it's just big. I think that's part of the difference between Uber and Cabs that isn't discussed as much which one of the reasons the medallion system for Cabs in the past was to say like, hey, if we have too many Cabs out there none of us can make enough money whereas a system like Uber or Lyft or any of them say, there would be as many cars out there as you want. They're not detecting the driver in that way. No, I mean basically no, and this is going to sound a little counter here but Uber and Lyft these things operate like technology companies. They operate the same technology companies as opposed to from CAB companies. CAB companies see themselves as providing a service and the vehicles and drivers are the tools of your service. Uber and Lyft want to be platforms. Let's say, look here's an app you guys use and do whatever you want with it and so basically there is no guarantee no security for especially for the drivers because we are a pain in the Uber's bottom line they want to see us more of cogs, I guess like cogs working their technology system as opposed to say, hey look, we're doing this for you and if we're going to do this for you and help you spread to become the global entity you want to be to be the car replacement then we're going to need some kind of assurance for that because at the point where Uber's going to be saying, hey look we want to get you from A to B and we want to be no keeper in the CAB and for in many cases they're just barely more expensive than just a bus or a trip on a light rail well, okay so there are going to be drivers who are going to take care of the drivers that are providing these rides and obviously no Uber's answer where they came out and said their answer was so driving cars we won't have to worry about you anymore so that is going to be an interesting future. Yeah, and in that discussion you see more often all the time Yeah, so Uber is as an Uber driver and its own prospects are They're unknown, it sounds like Unknown, yeah But as a rider the experience of the driver showing up that human element is something that I think is in a lot of times in our app generation a bit undesirable I work in two industries this one and that one there one over there, yeah two industries where people just say hey look, I pushed this button on Amazon I pushed this button on Uber I pushed this button on Walmart.com and I have a thing that magically shows up at my door and part of the benefit of this is that there is not only is it more convenient but there's less human interaction involved I don't have to talk to another person to make this happen I just push the button and it just magically shows up and I think that the element of the driver, the Uber driver as a human being using his personal vehicle is lost on a lot of people this thing just magically shows up to me and do what I want and that's it I was taking an Uber drive with Brian Brushwood to a meet up one time and we were talking with the driver and she was saying sometimes it's not that she gets annoyed but she gets disappointed because people don't want to talk and she's out there part of the reason she wants to drive is that she likes to meet different people and have conversations I had an Uber driver who used his Uber driving to further his entrepreneurial business that is now becoming a method of getting leads getting business leads is driving Uber and if you find the right kind of person talk to them and I ended up getting a card for the guy who runs a furniture sales thing and I was like you used this because you were pretty cool so that may be the evolution of the purpose of talking maybe you'll find maybe it's like swipe left and get this driver and he's got this I don't know it was fascinating I can confirm that I have gotten business cars TV producers golf course executives lawyers doctors across the board don't know who's going to be given in their car and just from the nature of the Uber platform it's more than likely going to be someone who is fairly affluent speaking I'm sure the demographic is definitely more affluent I am finding that in some of the larger markets that you will see heavy uses in other areas for example some of the people I talk about is that you see Uber uses even like the South L.A. the South Bay gateway cities area and that's actually considered to be like some people the quote on quote the hood no one wants to go down there it is an area which is largely underserved by cabs and Sally is actually underserved by Uber drivers too because they are concerned about their own personal safety so I think Uber one thing to tout that it's like we're serving these lower income underserved communities that cabs don't go to and in part that's true but that comes at a certain risk to both risk to the driver and that's another thing that's really often not addressed right alright well we're going to wrap things up here and let you get back on the road Sakane but thank you so much for being a supporter of DTNS for sending us emails for taking time out of your busy work day to chat with us really appreciate it man no problem Tom I hope to meet up with you on our Uber ride one day that would be a great honor alright is there anything you want to tell folks before we let you go be kind to the delivery drivers that's all I mean I know that Christmas is over with and they have gone through their ranger trying to make sure to get you all your Christmas presents and things on time just know you don't have to do anything special just a thank you it goes a long way that's awesome and also if I can am I allowed to sell for a little bit if you just want more reasons about FedEx, Uber driver, and all around angry person you can follow me on the twitter at DJ Sakane I believe I do say interesting things DJ, S-E-K-A-N-I awesome and I'll leave that alone and go from there alright, thanks Sakane drive safe I will, been a pleasure, love you guys love you too now Jeffrey I wanted to get back to you for a second because I know we were jumping around a little bit there but um so tell me like what is your day like and how often do you roll your eyes when you sprained an eye muscle did your eyes get stuck up there rolling around people's requests or concerns you get a really good poker face my day varies a lot I'm a small company and we do IT I'm with a small company and we do IT for other small companies so there could be days like today I was sitting around imaging laptops getting windows 7 deployed on 25 laptops and that's not very glamorous but there are also days where we're kind of architecting network solutions and we're migrating people to the cloud to Office 365 and things like that and there are days when we have really dumb user questions um but they're you know like I said people are getting smart they really are getting smarter and smarter and a lot of people can help themselves you know given the right tools as long as you don't have some arcane IT infrastructure um by and large the people I deal with are pretty good you know I think it was like Tammy was saying they usually try to figure it out themselves and if they don't when I see that ticket come in or that email come in you just give it like 5-10 minutes before you reply just a few minutes and 9 times out of 10 they'll email you back and say oh I figured it out you know you were busy I figured it out so the biggest change now is that there's much more of a shared language between the people using the machines and the people who are in charge of actually understanding the very detailed picture of how the machine is working whereas when I was so when I used to work at CBS news I worked in the news part of it but I was the only one who could explain certain like proprietary systems to the cranky old news editors right like I wasn't I couldn't set up a proprietary news gathering system and I certainly could work the back end but I was very good at explaining the language of one to the language of the other and I think that that gap has narrowed tremendously at least just since at the time since we were using you know just plain old DOS yeah right even worse you wouldn't even it's something called news star news star yeah the news star server is down oh shocker that was like and I think that like that maybe I don't want to say it makes your job easier because it doesn't but like at least now there's this closer starting point at least that's what I found maybe you tell me I don't know no no I think I think you're you're 100% right you know I think the dialogue is halfway there you know when people come and talk to you they they they have if they already have a frame of reference from their own technology dealings and and really it doesn't take a whole lot to bridge that gap from you know from understanding why they can't access their mail or something like that it's it's usually a pretty simple explanation and you know it's not hard to it's not as hard to demystify the technology these days as it used to be so everybody understands if itunes is down they can't get their music well or is down for this you know Amazon East is having problems they understand what servers are and syncing and things like that which the baseline is a lot higher for technology understanding surely well Jeffrey thank you as well for joining us and thank you again for all the contributions and the pre-rolls and I know you sent a few emails in yourself that have been pretty helpful as well so really appreciate that thanks for having me is there anything you'd like to let people know be kind to your IT person be kind to one another but especially your IT person yeah but especially your IT person because I might respond to that email the second minute rather than the 10th minute after you send it no just kidding yeah no that's be kind to one another anything twitter wise or blogs or anything like that I do have a blog a website .com it's nothing fancy it's certainly not for monetization it's just for fun I write about things like my electric car when I have a moment things that I like to deal with my twitter handles JP beard but I really don't tweet that much but if you feel like following me please do so it's jeffrey right that's right pbeard.com and what was the twitter again JP beard well thank you again I really appreciate you joining us today thank you and Dave and Tammy before we let you go now that you've heard of the life of an IT person and an Uber driver you have any new careers planned I don't know Tom probably not but I see myself in a similar position to jeffrey in a lot of ways in our business we do machine shop work for automotive shops and car dealerships and regular people and I spend a lot of time on the telephone people will call with questions whether they're doing a high performance build or whatever it is and their skills range from very experienced to being first timers and answering their questions and giving them as good of information as I can is very important and it's a big part of our business it doesn't really make me money directly but it can sometimes make somebody be a customer for a long time yeah it's hard to track those things right you can't point to the accountant and say I was nice to that guy and it made me this much money but it has an effect I agree it's sort of like the value for value model in a little bit of a sense if people feel that you're giving them their money's worth they're going to come back that's something I was going to ask you about too on your chosen profession is that model becoming the way of the future for podcasting and internet webcasting I mean John Seedivorek likes that approach yeah and John and Adam are two of the people who pioneered it so you know big thanks to them for testing it out I think it can work it's certainly working right now for us I don't know what the conditions for it to work are because it wasn't something that I designed you know this is how I'm going to approach it's just something I used to compare it to jazz we just kind of played as we went along what seemed to work from moment to moment so yeah I mean I think there's something to it for sure it just has to be the right mindset it is not the kind of thing that's going to show a million dollar revenue in the first year which is what any startup shareholder etc is going to want to see so it depends on what what's important to you and what you want to achieve but I think it's a viable model for some people because it's not like you can go off a relative scarcity you know it's you've got an infinite number of copies of everything you do so that makes an interesting that adds a challenge it becomes about personal connection I would say that just having come into this only two years ago now two solid years ago you've got Tom has a 10 year or more personal connection to his audience and that may be right now what it takes to have a successfully crowd funded thing is instead of just this like I purchased this and you give me this it's now actually about what Sakane was talking about which is sort of like a shared connection or an empathy for what people are trying to achieve and patience for a slow build yeah well Dave and Tammy thank you both so much for joining us and for being involved in the show and taking time out of your day to chat with us do either or both of you have anything you'd like to say to folks well I just want to say that I really enjoy your show and I'm really glad that you found this outlet to be able to share with us every day well thanks Tammy we were really disappointed when you weren't on the tech news today anymore and we thought oh we're not going to see Tom Merritt anymore but then we discovered your new product I decided not to hide so I'm glad you found me well thanks Tom I appreciate it and any I don't know if you have any blogs or Twitter accounts or if you want to put your business out there whatever you want to tell people well I need to get a new website for our business McLean's Automotive.com it's ancient and I need to redo it in a bad way but we got folks in the audience might help you out with that that's true they know a lot more about that than I do but and that's spelled M-C-L-A-I-N yes McLean's Automotive.com well thank you see how much work I need to do did it work yeah I'm clicking it up now just to make sure oh no I must have spelled it wrong how do you spell it M-C-L-A-I-N-S Automotive.com M-C-L-A-I-N well maybe it's down it could be down well we'll try to figure that out and put it in the show notes for people but thank you thank you so much thanks for having us yes thank you Jenny Josephson shows before the end of the year here but any words from you before we steam on into predictions and predictions results and all that stuff well the word of the day is how much I enjoy talking to people in our audience we were lucky enough sometimes to talk to the people in the chat room and we've brought some people from our chat room onto our show as guests but this is one of my favorite shows of the year because hey I'm a I'm a tech I'm like conversational in tech but I'm not fluent or anything and yet I've spent the last two years I think the way a newsy girl would say it is covering a beat and so I'm always amazed at just how much our audience knows about technology at just like this granular level and I was thinking like how could we take advantage of that more and just you know getting to talk to three or four awesome people one time a year and so we have some thoughts about that I don't know how many more thoughts we're sharing on this cast but we have it's hard for us to tell from where we sit just how we're doing on getting the sixth the day of Daily Tech News show with Peter Wells done but we have some thoughts for what we might do if we meet that milestone goal I think that's what Jenny's kind of alluding to there something for the normal maybe a seventh day anyway you can get us there dailytechnewshow.com is the way you can help keep this show alive as Dave was saying it's value for value if you get value out of these shows and you've got a little value to spare back maybe a dollar or so dailytechnewshow.com has links to our Patreon to our PayPal and to our store even a Bitcoin donation if that's your thing so help us out if you can our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com you can give us call 51259 daily that's 5125932459 catch the show live starting January 3rd again Monday through Friday at 430pm eastern at alphagigradio.com and diamondclub.tv and visit our website dailytechnewshow.com tomorrow it's the predictions results show Justin, Patrick and I will see how we measure up last year get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hope you have enjoyed this program great show everybody