 Hi, video. We're live. Hey, video. In case you're wondering, well, actually I say that, but I'm lying to everybody who's watching this later. So I apologize for that. We are about to get the show going. Tom McLeod is here. Very excited. Okay. Long time listener, first-time guest. Yeah, 100 percent happy. Like that. Yeah. Long-time guest, first-time listener. Long-time caller, first-time listener. Wait. Long time. Yeah. Call. Occasional listener with promises to step it up. Really, tell them I have a question. Yeah, you know, running a company can't be that busy. I mean, you can tell by this ornate background. Yeah. That we've just been. It's good. You're, you know, you're keeping it real. Yeah. I mean, there's the router is right above me. People pay top dollar for that look. A little fall over networking switch. This is real stuff. Yeah. Some folks would pay a designer millions just to get that look. I wanted the stressed office look. Yeah. For their retail. You know what? What would a Chipotle basement look like? And that's. That's what I just imagined, like underground cilantro. Like grow up. To look like a cilantro farm. Is that what you're? Yeah, people grow cilantro in little rooms, cilantro, Sarah. Oh, OK. Sorry, I got it. Or maybe a raggedo would be a bit of better. I mean, I really did cilantro. Yeah, just not like the first. Yeah, green plants that comes to mind. Ah, there lies the genius. E. Barch in our chat room says, hey, we go cilantro in an urban farm. Mm hmm. The launch of cilantro was wonderful, and I I always feel for the people who yes, yes, cilantro soap thing, because they're missing out on a really wonderful taste. That's too bad. That's my wife. She says it's disgusting. Can't eat anything with cilantro in it. Was it soap? It tastes like soap to her, right? Yeah, there's like, yeah, there's like some sort of like genetic thing where some people just because it's always the same thing. It's I can't stand it. It tastes like there's soap in my burrito. Yeah. All right, you guys ready? Ready. Oh, I will give you control. Mr. Cheng, there you go. And. Oh, and Tom, are you doing this off the top? I've got a pre-record. Yeah. OK. OK. Here we go. And Nicola's show keeps you in the know. If you'd like to find out more, please go to dailytechnewshow.com slash support and find out how to keep us on the air. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 27th, 2017 from Studio Feline. I am Sarah Lane. And from DTS headquarters in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. It was a little bit different today, but it'll be the same show that you know and love also a little different. We got a new guest for the first time ever. Tom McLeod, founder and CEO of Omni. Hey, Tom. Hey, Sarah. Hey, Tom. Hey, everybody. So we not only have two Toms, but we have two Toms whose last names start with M. So our rundown has been a lot of fun today. It's been it's been a thing, for sure. Yeah. Tom, Tom McLeod, we're going to talk a lot more about Omni a little bit later in the show because we've got a real good discussion on sort of warehouse and logistics, which you're very well-versed in. But for folks who don't know Omni, what's a sort of one-liner of what Omni does? Yeah. I mean, we're trying to build an operating system for people's things. So where do you put your stuff? Where can it do more for you? How do you control that? Everything about it. Very good. All right. Well, looking forward to that and good to have you here. Thanks for being here with us. Of course, producer Roger Chang is here as well. Hey, Roger. Hello, everyone. Roger seems happier when you introduce him than when I do. It's because he's so, you know, that it's become very mundane with you, Tom. Yeah. It's true. It's like, oh, Thanksgiving weekend. We're starting new things. I had turkey. I had I had pie. I had I had a piece of crust. I had pie. And yeah, it was it was nice. Nice, relaxing holiday. Well, good. Well, nice to have everybody here. Let's get into the show and start out with a few tech things. You should know. Tumblr founder David Karp has announced via Tumblr, of course, that he is leaving the company he's been running for 11 years. It's a pretty long run. Karp's post said that the decision came, quote, after months of reflection on my personal ambitions and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future. So they won't be charging him back for his. You can see that either way, but OK. Imager says that attackers copied 1.7 million email addresses and weekly hashed passwords back in 2014. The breach was discovered when someone sent the data to Troy Hunt. He's the guy who runs Have I Been Pwned, where you can look up to find out if your information has been in any known breaches. He informed Imager of the breach on Thursday. Imager has sent reset the passwords of any affected accounts. And just so you know, they began using B-crypt to hash their passwords last year. So they will be more secure now than they were in 2014. Well, I mean, happens to the best of them. Now, here are some more top stories. Snapchat has been really not new filters that recognize what's in your snap. So stuff that you're actually snapping and can provide contextually aware graphics for certain kinds of images anyway. So filters use object recognition to, for example, show a graphic of bones. If you take a picture of your dog and snap can recognize that it's a picture of a dog. It works with things like food or other kinds of pets, sports equipment, that stuff, as well as types of locations like concerts or beaches. So you have to not be as creative anymore, let you know what filter you want to use. I can confirm it did not work with my dog when she was lying down on her side. I think it needs an upright dog. It wasn't a party. No, P-A-W-T-Y did not show up. Blessing or curse did not show up for me. But I like this idea of, like, say the beach, right? You'll get geolocation that tells you like Venice Beach or Miami Beach, whatever beach you are. But just being able to tell, like, oh, you're at the beach. Here's some fun beach related stuff without having to know the geolocation. I guess the concert is a better one where it can tell, like, oh, that's a band up there. Let's give you some music notes, something like that. I know it's probably a little nitpicky because, I mean, it's this, you know, Snapchat we're talking about. But I almost never use those filters because I can't make the picture look better and then put a filter on top of it. And I almost always do the single swipe to, like, kind of lighten up the original photo. And so I end up always using that and then, like, drawing on top of it. Not that I'm snapping all that much lately. Talking about, I don't see you on Snap ever. Yeah, I mean, I'm fully on the Instagram stories. I don't know. I don't know if I lost, if they lost me forever, but I feel like they might have. Yeah, well, I mean, you can also do the. You can do the products at this point. You can do the magic face and then do filters with the Instagram story. Ah, see, there you go. There is my solution. It's just a completely different app all together. That's like the old solution. If Windows is giving you a problem, use Linux or use Mac. Yeah, Snapchat's giving you a problem. Use Instagram. Facebook is rolling out something it calls proactive detection worldwide. Now we've talked about this before on the show. They were testing it in the US. If you don't recall, it scans posts or live streams for patterns consistent with suicidal thoughts. The system can flag posts, which will be reviewed by human moderators. So it's not an algorithm that's making any decisions. It's just flagging them for people to look at who can then decide, should I send some mental health resources to the poster? Should I send it to their friends to let them know what's going on? Or is it serious enough where I should contact a first responder? Moderators are specially trained and they are working in partnership with organizations like save.org, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Forefront to not only be trained on this, but to also get those resources. So this is, I think, a very interesting example of Facebook doing the creepy thing that everyone always gets up in arms about, which is reading your posts and taking action on them, but for a very good reason. And while a lot of people may say, well, hey, wait a minute, what gives you the right to decide this? There have been unfortunately examples of people who've actually killed themselves on live streams, not just on Facebook even. So it's an important thing for Facebook to get in front of, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'd have to agree with that. I mean, I don't know where, I don't know where we draw the line, right? Where it's like, if it's gonna be a, if we're gonna let them go ABCDEFG and H means less people die, we should probably let them go to H, right? Like, if you can get something positive out of the data side, out of what's being explored on the platform, then we should do it, you know? And we give them so much negative feedback when they use the data wrong, we should at least say if you're gonna attempt to do it the right way, good on them, right? One life saved is worth, you know, reading a couple of my emails or my chats. And I think it's a good example too of where AI is used appropriately, where you say like, well, let's use this to scan for keywords. Well, have a human review it, just to make sure because there may be false results or somebody may be doing parody or something, which, you know, maybe it's not funny, but it's not something we have to respond to. So I think it's a very good implementation. Where it will get dicey, I think, for some people is if it is used for something else, right? And Facebook, CTO even talked about that, like we need to make sure that we keep it for this use and not let there be mission creep. Yeah, yeah, always tough on the product side is you're thinking about the edge cases constantly. And when you have, what are they at? Two billion users now, something just shy of two billion users. The edge cases are not small. So, you know, the fact that X amount of people are doing or thinking about the act anyway, and you couple that with the fact that there could only be so many people that might parody it, you still gotta go forward with it. But man, it's tough to have a giant open platform with video chat everywhere and have to police the world, which is really what they're doing with this type of data use. Well, when you have two billion plus users, yeah. I mean, you have a significant percentage of the population of the planet. Yeah, and certainly the connected population. Yeah. Amazon announced Amazon Sumerian, a platform to build and host virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D apps with minimal coding for use on smartphones and tablets, headsets, digital signage even, and web browsers. Users only pay for the storage. So it's an AWS, you know, profit maker on that respect, gets people to use it and then they pay for the storage. It is a browser-based service at launch and it's in preview today if you wanna go check it out. But it's an interesting way to just kind of go ahead and try something out. If you don't have the coding skills to make a real VR app, you could have one that's sort of like it. Yeah, I mean, I think you see these in a lot of different spaces, right? Like this is like where space for our kind of, right? So it's saying, listen, you don't have the current skill set or the tools to jump on this, but you can go to town and start testing out these different things fast. You know, we power most of our systems on AWS here at Omni, I think most startups that you talk to are in some way using Amazon in some capacity for some degree of their back-end services. And if the future is in some capacity building out AR and different things around that, this is a pretty great opportunity for someone to make a quick land grab on the development side and not just the product app marketplace side because it's never gonna become real if we don't have more people actually creating quality content. And I think that's been one of the biggest hindrances to AR and VR in, you know, certainly the last recent months and the promises. There's just not enough of it. There's certainly isn't enough great stuff. I'm hesitating to use the phrase killer app because that's used to death, but those uses that make people go, oh yeah, no, I need to get a headset for that. You need more people making more things to hit on those. Even if it's not the killer app, if it's several things that appeal to several different types of users out there. Yeah, totally. All right, folks, if you're watching on video, you may have noticed that Sarah dropped off, her internet connection went out suddenly. So we're trying to get her back, but in the meantime, let's talk about YouTube changing its auto fill feature in search after it was reported that phrases related to child abuse were being suggested. The main example was typing how to have was auto completed with the word S asterisk X and I'm not leading it. It was literally S than asterisk, then X and the phrase with your kids. Auto complete derives its suggestions from usage. It's not AI, it's an algorithm and the phrase could have suddenly become widely used maybe or it could be some kind of coordinated attempt to gain the system and get that to show up at the top of auto complete. Either way, YouTube has cracked down on it and it doesn't auto complete that way anymore, but a lot of people noticed it. A lot of people are angry at YouTube about it and we actually had a listener write in and say, does this show that AI is not the end game and you should have common sense and have people review these things. Problem is auto complete A isn't AI. In fact, a solution to this might be AI that can tell when it's being gamed better, but I don't know. I mean, do companies even as rich as Google have the man hours to manually make auto complete? Does that undermine the whole point of it? I mean, I think the problem with that AI is that it just always needs more AI, right? Like the solution to fixing AI is usually a better algorithm. And over time, if it gets smarter, it should be able to figure these things out. We're just still so early. Auto complete is certainly not a true representation of artificial intelligence by any means. Certainly not their search, but their algorithm for displaying and choosing videos is one of the best. I'm a pretty heavy YouTube consumer and the suggested recommended section is spot on to my interests 80% of the time for what it's got there. And there was an article that made the rounds about a week ago, just showing about all the problematic content that is being created on YouTube with sort of server farms automatically generating content and videos based upon search ranks, where it's like face swaps and then they have frozen and weird singalongs and people with dismembered fingers and they're all being targeted to kids. And because the algorithm just keeps playing it, you hand your kid an iPad and you don't know what happens. And the idea that your kid is logging on to watch frozen and ends up seeing the suggestion you had right there actually had how to have sex in school would be a pretty wide departure, but pretty scary. No, I think you touched on this when we were talking about Facebook. When you have this many people using something, the small things that don't work well become huge. So YouTube having an autocomplete failure like this actually pretty common 10 years ago. I remember people talking about autocompletes on Google itself that were like, hey, did you see this? This is kind of weird. The usage was not at the level that it is now of any of these companies. These companies weren't as huge as they are now and impacting so many people's lives. And I think that makes what was sort of a quirk of autocomplete a few years ago now becomes a big scandal for people. It's similar to that conversation. When you're dealing with billions, when the number of people you're interacting it with is now in the largest amount of people on the planet window, small things like an autocomplete, besides the fact that they also determine people's livelihoods, right? It's what's driving traffic at any given time. People are actually making a living off of their YouTube videos and the content that they're creating forthwith. So it's tough. You got to get it right. You got to keep focusing. And you definitely don't want to randomly have a Sarah Lane show up in the YouTube search when she's trying to figure out how to get back on the podcast. Yeah, Sarah is back. What kind of luck it is to have your internet go out during the show, but that's what happened. Started my router and that didn't work. Now I'm just hangouts on the phone. OK, so your audio is a bit low. If you could do anything to bring that up, I think we'll be fine. You know, video will get real close. Yeah, video we'll deal with. You could even turn that off if you have to. But actually, your bandwidth seems pretty good. So far. All right, well, that's early. Yeah, sorry, guys. I see we're talking about YouTube. Yes, we just finished up with YouTube. Let's talk about Austrian designer Clemens Schillinger, who has created a series of five so-called substitute phones to help people shake smartphone addiction. Each model contains a row of stone beads. So it's the shape of a phone, but there's a row of beads either down the middle or diagonal or cross that can help you simulate the motions of swiping, scrolling, zooming, et cetera, like you would on a phone. Now Schillinger says he was inspired by a documentary showing Umberto Eco beating nicotine addiction by putting a stick in his mouth in place of a pipe. And he thought, hey, what if we did that for phone addiction? So he showed these phone replacements and a lamp that only turned on when a phone was put away in a drawer at Design Week in Vienna earlier this autumn. We were talking about this before the show, Tom. And you noted that you've got some similar items that are kind of not fidget spinners, but they're like little fidgety gadget things. Oh, let me tell you, just looking at those phones, I can feel the satisfaction just welling up inside my body because I have these two. I have two fidget cubes right here, which they have various textures. These are like joysticks and you've got little push buttons that click at different densities. Yeah, the idea of a fake cell phone that I can run my fingers over and get the satisfaction I get from scrolling an Instagram feed, definitely resonates with me and I'll be a buyer. You should kickstart those. Well, he has not announced whether, he's announced that he wants to sell them, but he hasn't announced any details about that. I think a lot of people are gonna think this is silly though. They're like, look, either use your smartphone or don't. Why do you want one of these? Yeah, but I mean, I can see the smartphone addiction, I certainly have it on some level and it's not even necessarily so much that I have anything to do on the phone. It's that I like to have it with me. I mean, to the point now where half the time I'm watching a television show, I'm like, I just, I haven't been listening for the last 10 minutes because I'm kind of like fidgeting with my phone, reloading Twitter over and over, even though there's nothing really to read. Or, you know, or, you know. Oh, sorry, I was texting Sarah in the middle of what she was saying there because I couldn't put my smartphone down. I see my notifications. Thanks Tom, way to make this just slightly more complicated, you know. Case to the Mondays. But yeah, I do think it's a, you know, it feels a little bit silly to have something that's not actually a phone give you any of the satisfaction of being connected to the internet really because that's what people are doing now. Whether or maybe your editing photo is offline. I don't know, but I do kind of see the placebo effect here and how there are indications that sometimes people have unhealthy relationships with all of the services that our little devices now give us access to. So it's interesting. The dopamine hit of seeing someone respond to your post seems to be one of the main drivers behind this. You're not gonna get that out of beads though, Tom. So I'm still curious, like what is it that you're like, oh yeah, no, this'll work. But for me, it's not just the dopamine hit of the internet. It's the actual tactile feedback I get from some satisfaction of doing this repetitive action with my thumb. I'd say the fidget ones in particular are kind of a, yeah, what you're doing, you're doing a pen flip. I totally, yeah, no, I do this subconsciously when I'm sitting there working. If I didn't have the, I would do these little actions anyway. I don't think most people need to do the double joystick action like I'm doing right now, but without question, I think you get some sort of a satisfaction from it. You know, we talked about the guy who putting the stick in his mouth, the cinnamon stick, similarly to quit the smoking. And I think one of the, that was your dad, Sarah's dad, cinnamon stick addict, post-cigarette addict. And what you found is like, there's obviously, just like there's oral fixations that are part of the smoking experience. I think there's sort of like things you do with your hands that become comforting over time and they allow you to stick in the same space. And maybe we all have a little ADD and these are different ways to control it. Yeah, little something, something. Little something, yeah. Folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. It's available as a podcast on the Amazon Echo in the Google Home and on the Anchor app, which you can find at anchor.fm. And that's a look at our top story. Sarah, what are we talking about? Yes, Tom. Well, you know, because Tom McCloud's on the show, this is actually a really good opportunity for us to have somebody who knows a lot about logistics and scaling a logistics company with physical goods because as we mentioned at the top of the show, Tom McCloud runs Omni. So to kick off this discussion, wanted to make a note of Amazon expanding into Australia, which is, it's not as if you lived in Australia, you couldn't use Amazon, but you would have to be using an international Amazon marketplace and their extra shipping fees and tariff costs and that sort of thing. So it wasn't as if Amazon had its own regional warehouses in the area. The company announced that they were moving into Australia back in August and it seems to have been a little bit of a delay and you've got a lot of customers there sort of wondering what's going on, but all signs point to that's still happening. But you know, Amazon is obviously the most famous company when you think of, okay, you know, a company that has lots of warehouses where they store things and then they send things to people. So, and they've been experimenting with, you know, drone delivery and automated robots within the warehouses and trying to scale their operations wherever they operate. Tom, I know Omni is currently only in San Francisco and play into where your company would want to expand because obviously the way that cities are laid out and driving grids and all of that is our factors. Yeah, so I mean, I think what we started to understand quickly as we started to look at expansion is that every single city has a completely unique set of challenges. At Amazon scale, you can solve them in a lot of cases with just brute force capital. So you can hire a lot of people, hire a lot of drivers and deal with it. You know, at a smaller scale with your company like us, you have to really plan ahead a lot. You have to think about seasons. You have to think about hourly traffic, like traffic on an hour-by-hour basis. You have to think about where does the population who will work for you live in relation to the people who might be purchasing from you. You have sort of two sides of that. It's not just a supply and demand of the business but supply and demand on the team that runs and operates your company. And if you were expanding to a giant oceanic island like Australia, you're gonna be locked off from a huge amount of your resources. Continental US Amazon has, I think they have five major fulfillment centers, these giant, multiple mile-long buildings that are constantly sharing resources between New York and Philadelphia and Boston and Upper Seattle and Arizona and Chicago and how they all can balance. They're basically running like an airport, a private airport network of things, figuring out how items move between each other and opening up an entirely new operation on a standalone continent that has been used on the back of other people's logistics networks leading up to that is quite an undertaking even for one of the biggest companies in the world. So I've actually been to Omni's warehouse in San Francisco, which is impressive and also very overwhelming because you're literally storing all sorts of stuff that people aren't using at the time that they can then get on demand as full of people. And those people have Omni vans that they deliver goods to and from people's houses or wherever they're delivering. How much does something like, okay, in five years, these self-driving cars are gonna make this whole thing much more automated but it's not a real thing yet. How do you plan for something like that that's still in most cases conceptual? I think a lot of that comes down to what most tech companies put a lot of their value into which is data, right? So we're tracking out of the gate even before self-driving exactly the dimensions of every single item. You're creating an understanding of how long it takes to go from point A to B to C to D and back to the warehouse if you call that point A. And these are all things that when self-driving is an actuality, when it becomes something that's fully realized we'll be able to take advantage of because we've already sort of put the legwork in on the, for lack of a better phrase, human-powered network that we've developed at this point. At the scale that you're looking at as an Amazon or any of the people who will be self-driving suppliers Uber, Google, Waymo, there's a lot of companies that are going that direction being able to actively tap into their networks with the things that they're gonna expect is a piece that we've been focusing on forever. And I do think even though it's five years out, I think it's five years from like legitimacy but I think we're probably 24 months out from that like validating tests. I think we'll have a delivery that moves from San Francisco's main facility to somewhere else in the city with a self-driving vehicle within 24 months. And that's for a startup, that's fast. I'm gonna be there in a blink of an eye. It's important to make sure we understand what we're doing because I think that's inevitability and preparing for it is a competitive advantage. Sure, well, and then on the flip side of it, especially because I think of, oh, if somebody has to reach a surfboard that's way up at the top of the warehouse and so it's like, okay, now you need a lift and you need the person and the whole thing, it would seem that if a robot could do that job that would help everybody out or certainly streamline the process. But are there certain things that you feel, at least for you and maybe for companies like Amazon as well, just can't be automated even if the technology exists? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff around quality control, similar to the stuff that we even discussed at the top of the show around the algorithms that YouTube and Facebook are dealing with. Their understanding is this item in the exact same condition as it was received? Is the quality of this experience being tracked in a way that the person who's using the Omni service is getting that same feeling that they would if a person was completely involved in the whole process? I don't think there will be a time, certainly in the near future, where you fully remove people from the process as it is, but I do think you start to look at how do you A, make a better quality of life for the employee? So maybe they're doing less repetitive tasks, right? So the things that are sort of high effort, low engagement, those are the types of things that you're gonna see automated first. But the stuff that still requires some degree of creative thinking and understanding of the dynamics of a system, right? A stroller might look exact. Yeah, a stroller. That might not be what? Sorry, you cut out there for a second. I was about to pick up. You said a stroller might be. Sure, no problem. A stroller might look in a photo exactly the same as another stroller, but a human eye will catch small little details, fraying on a strap is the seat in good tight condition. And when you're dealing with a person's child, I wouldn't want to trust that just to automations anytime soon. So the details are where you're gonna keep people. And I imagine whether you're Amazon, whether you're Uber, whether you're Facebook and YouTube on your algorithms, you're gonna have to keep some level of human detail and getting everything right for quite a while. All right. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We're in there all day every day. So thanks to everybody who votes up and down. And facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show is where you can hang out with us on Facebook as well. Thing of the day. Let's check in with Chris. Actually, we're not checking in with that. We're actually gonna wrap up here. But thank you, Tom McLeod, for joining us and talking with us. If people wanna find out more about what you think or your company's doing, where should they go? You can just download our app. You can search for Omni Storage and Access in the iOS app store. Or you can go to beomni.com and sign up right there. And you can test it out. If you're in San Francisco Bay Area, you can schedule a pickup immediately. Excellent. Go check it out folks, beomni.com. Don't forget there are lots of ways to support the show and none of them involved ads. We're very proud about that. Many of you may not realize we have a DTNS store right now, as in Monday, right now. You can get a DTNS coffee mug for 10 bucks. We have shirts. We have hoodies. Got all sorts of stuff. You can use the code BF2017 for free shipping with the purchase of two apparel items until the end of Monday. That's today. Of course, if you don't want stuff, you can always support us directly at patreon.com. Slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and we're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern at 21.30 UTC at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv. And our website, of course, is dailytechnewshow.com. We'll be back tomorrow with Dan Campos talking about digital content inside and outside the United States of America. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. I mean, what's in the world? We pulled it off. Well, the thing is, before the show, when Tom McLeod and I both dropped off, I was like, oh, this is just happening again. It's going to take two seconds. But then I'm looking at my router and my internet's down. So yeah, your service went out. My service is down. And it's weird because, sorry, I'm just walking around looking outside, because there's so much construction going on in my general neighborhood. And every so often, it knocks service out because I just don't know what else could be going on. I'm going to try to start the router again. If you really want to know what happened, it was a hostile takeover. It's going to be the Tom and Tom show from here on out. Only Tom's. Roger, you're next. So well played, guys. There was a little DDoS attack on your router. So well played. Well, that was actually another thought I had, where I was like, someone sabotage me because I started the show. Oh, God. No, that'd be weird. No, I'm just kidding. I know. My router is in a low place. I'm like crouching and trying to restart it again. Oh, I like the Daily Tom news show. Careful, Tom. Getting quickly rewritten on the script here. This has been a disaster. A real disaster. No, of course, we try to flip things around and your internet goes out. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's so... But things were going fine before that. And things went fine. Like, we didn't miss a beat. The only miscommunication we had is because you couldn't see the dock. So you didn't see that I had pulled out the couple of segments and bumped them till tomorrow. You know, I got... I mean, I was seeing your text notifications and I did see that you were dropping the email. I just didn't see that we were dropping the thing today. The other thing. Yeah, no, it's fine. Yeah, sorry about that. But yeah, it all ended up working out fine. Well, good. You know, at first I was like, because I've got my neighbor also named Tom. Ah, who lives a couple of years down. Who wants to be on the Tom show, obviously. Right, yeah, I wanna. And so I was like, okay, I'll just run over there. But he's in the middle of like moving and I know his internet is weird, it just... Well, and if yours is out... I'm glad you reminded me of the iPhone because I was like, oh yeah, wait, Hangouts works on iOS. Well, because if your service was out, his service might be out too, right? I know. It could be the whole neighborhood, so. It's very true. Someone might have cut the line or something when they were rewiring something. Our power was out on Sunday. Just went out for three hours and then came back. Really? Yeah. I mean, it is really windy here today, but that has never affected my internet before. That I doubt that that's what it is. If anyone wants to look up... It blew all the packets away. If anyone wants to look up Time Warner Cable outages, see if my neighborhood is part of it. CFC, they're just, they're getting out of control. I had a question. Yeah, you didn't pay for prioritized packet delivery. Here's your packet. It's next day service. Next day internet service. A show full of Tom's and M's. Tom, Tom, Tom and Lane. Worse face. Oh yes, we're at showbot.tv, Tom. We have a list of title suggestions from the folks in the audience. Oh, I'm into this. So shobot.tv. A show full of Tom and M's. There's a lot of here. The more TM's, the merrier. I like that. Yeah. Oh, it should be the more TM's, the meritor. I mean, that's not totally accurate, but okay. There's a step back from that ledge, my Facebook friend, that's a take. I like Fidgetphone too. Fidgetphone. I mean, as much as I like a third eye blind reference, we probably don't want to make light of that. You know, what's weird is those Fidgetphones, to me, don't look like phones. They look like something a masseuse would use, like on your feet, like you're the bottom of your feet. Like the little balls. Oh, these guys? No, no, the ones they were showing. Oh yeah, that you'd actually just roll your feet over them. Yeah, like you roll your feet over it to like massage the bottom of your soles. All right, guys, I'm gonna get back to running this here company. Oh yeah. Thank you so much for taking time. Thanks for hanging out, you're a great guest. We'd love to have you back. Yeah, and I promise next time it'll be easier for all of us. Yeah, if you'll put up with us after today. If you can do this show, you can do anything. We'll do it live! Yeah, no, I'm here. For sure, this was great. Thank you guys so much for having me. Thanks, DTNS audience. I'm out. Thanks, Tom. Bye. Bye. All right. Hello, is it me you fidget for? That's good. Ah, that's pretty funny. All right, my router is now blinking in different ways than it was blinking before. Oh, okay. Could be positive. That's, ugh, no. Oh, do you have a cable modem? Uh, well, I'm sorry, I'm talking about my modem, yeah. There's one that shows that you have a connection light. Yeah, no, that's what, yeah, I'm sorry, I was calling it my router, I'm talking about my modem. My connection light is very much off. My router is, yeah, I was kind of in my air port utility trying to figure out if that's the problem, but it's like, I just don't have internet coming in, so there's nothing I can do. You don't have sync. I don't have anything. The online light is simply dark. Ugh, oh, no. It was all much as smooth. Your place is huge, Sarah. Does it seem big? It seems huge. Maybe it's just your camera angle. Maybe. It's, you know, it's a decent size place. It's a two bedroom. You know, my smaller bedroom is the studio. In fact, I've, you know, Tom came over here, I don't know, however long ago that was. Yeah, it was October sometime, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's not a big room. It's not that small, but it's like, you know, I think it looks bigger than it really is, but I have thought about switching rooms because my bedroom, like, who cares? It's just a bedroom, you know? I don't need it to be like, luxuriously big. And thinking of putting my studio in the bigger of the two rooms and just, I don't know. But then it, that's a whole other thing. But do you keep a lot of things in your room that you need the space for? In the bedroom? Like the larger, yeah. Not at all, that's the thing. It's like, I mean, it's just me and, you know, bed a couple of nightstands. Like, I don't have a problem with a small bedroom at all. Really doesn't matter. But having a larger studio would actually be beneficial for a few reasons. I just better angles and depth and places to put lights and stuff like that. So, Big Jim. Vigit phone is leading. Should we go with that? Yeah, Vigit phone. Vigit phone. Interesting. So, Big Jim sent me a link in the chat room to the spectrum outage map. And there are hot spots in downtown LA, Inglewood, Torrance, and some spots in between. Not as thick. Huh. Well, that's not very helpful, but. Yeah, my internet went out when a semi rolled off the embankment and cut the line. Yeah. Well, I mean, I know these things happen ever so often. I've never really had an outage, like last multiple days, but. Usually they get it up the same day. Because that's one of those things that people really gripe about Well, tell you what, if you could tether off your phone, your connection right now is fine. Yeah, okay. Then you could use your setup. Well, and I mean, tomorrow, if by a certain time, this is just like still an issue, I would really prefer not to do it on my phone because it's not very comfortable. And I could just, you know, I could make arrangements to like, I don't know, sit in your living room or something. Oh yeah, no, you could do that, right. Of course, you're not even that far. You could totally come over here. We just do the show here. I didn't even think about that. It's just, you know, then I can like, because I can't really, I can't do much. No, I was saying tether your laptop to your phone. It's connection. I do not believe I have the capability to do that because I'm on an unlearned grandfathered and they don't allow you to do that. They take away everything except they had limited when they. That's right. That's right. That's exactly what they do. At least the last time I checked it was, it was like, oh, no, no, no, you can't do this. Would you like to sign up for a non unlimited plan? And I was like, absolutely not. So. Although they're back to offering unlimited on AT&T. So, and you can get unlimited from T-Mobile now like. T-Mobile, I really like T-Mobile. It's just not as strong and certain, you know, edge areas. Well, it all depends on where you go. I had no problem switching to T-Mobile because I was on Verizon and Verizon is crappy over in Marina Del Rey. So anytime we went over there for dinner or to hang out, I was like, I didn't have phone service. And then I switched to T-Mobile and I did. So it's just all kind of, and on the opposite side of that, my mom, I tried to put her on my T-Mobile plan. They get T-Mobile where she lives, but in her apartment, she couldn't get a signal. So I was like, well, you're not, then you can't be on T-Mobile. It's just not gonna work. You know, I have Verizon and I don't, I have any service issues in my general area, which Marina Del Rey is. So I wonder what that's all about. Oh yeah. Now go over to like Jay Nichols or that, the Chipotle, which I don't need that Chipotle anymore, but when I did, there's that Chipotle. I could not get any service on Verizon in either of those places. It's because they grow cilantro in the basement. Is it? Right. Is there a particular reason that you do not eat a Chipotle anymore? Cause I got sick. Oh, well. Oh, food poisoning. That's a good reason. Food poisoning, I wouldn't say food poisoning. That would be libelous, but or slanderous or something. But, you know, I just didn't feel well one day. And Eileen didn't either. We both had the same experience. And we're like, yeah, I gotta go back there. Yeah, well, it's hard to, yeah, I don't blame you. I admittedly have not gone to the Chipotle over there. So maybe the service would be bad for me. But I also, I've been on T-Mobile for a couple of years now. So Verizon may have, you know, up their game too. That's true. That's true. I do, there was our friend and former colleague, Heather Frank, when she moved to LA, which was basically at the same time that I did a couple of years ago, they moved into, she and her boyfriend moved into this really, really great house in West Hollywood, just adorable, you know, just one of those places where you're like, oh, what a find. And she had AT&T. And as soon as they moved in, which of course you just never think of beforehand, it was just a dead zone, the entire house. So she'd have to like make phone calls pressed up against one of the windows, you know? And she was like, this is a nightmare, you know? Was it a Faraday? Was it built as a Faraday cage or something? You know, I think it's just, it's just sort of like old thick walls and then a Spanish style house, you know? Like the lead lined walls that they used to, yeah. That paint, it's the lead paint. Well, it was something, because it was like she had to switch providers because she was like, I can't make this work. But switching providers fixed it, so it couldn't have been lead paint. Right, yeah, it was an AT&T thing, I think. I think that's who she was using at the time, because it was something where I went over there to test and I was like, works for me. And so it was like. This is the one thing I really enjoy about T-Mobile. In spotty areas like where my parents live or where my uncle is, where T-Mobile isn't that great, I can switch over to Wi-Fi and still make a call over their network. So as I get a Wi-Fi connection from the local router or whatever, I can call over my phone, receive calls and it's fine. Super handy. You know, I just really hope this modem didn't like just decide to die, because it's not new. This is not a new modem. I've had it for, oh, I don't know. I mean, at least five years. That's fine. Well, Roger, you said you saw an outage, right? Yeah, a spectrum outage map. Yeah, so without talking about exactly where it is, I mean. Yeah, I would say probably not if the thing turns on and all the rest of the lights are blinky-blinky. Yeah, I mean, it's the exact same. I mean, I've seen what it looks like with outages before. So it's like, it's not doing anything different. Yeah, if the modem really did go in the fritz, it probably wouldn't turn on or a bunch of other things would be wrong with it, not just that one bit. Yeah, that's true. Or you can also call, I mean, I use spectrum and I call there's a little automated down detector. Like, oh, you're just experiencing an outage. Expect service back in two hours. Always two hours, that's a reply. You know, there was one, I remember, there was one instance, this is back in San Francisco, where it was like something along these lines happened. And, you know, there wasn't an outage to speak of. I couldn't figure out what was going on. You know, I'm about ready to like file new hardware. And yeah, like they were able to like restart the connection to me on their end individually. It wasn't like, they didn't know it was wrong either. And that ended up fixing it. But there was a lot of time went by before that happened. So it was like, it wasn't my wits end. I had an outage with Frontier right after they took over from Verizon, lasted a couple of days, and they tried to do that very same thing. Like, well, let's reset the connection. Didn't work. Turned out it was squirrels had chewed through the line in our neighborhood. Squirrels? Wow, that's, yeah. Well, it took them a couple of days to figure it out. There's squirrels in my neighborhood too, but they usually just seem to run around. They are not chewing on much. There is an insane black bird. I may have mentioned it, well, a crow. Yes, no, I remember you mentioning that before. There's a mentally unstable crow in my neighborhood who's still around and he sometimes chews on wires, but I really don't think he could take this down by himself. I don't see anybody. Gathered the murder of crows. Maybe he did to get me back. You know, I think I've been very patient with that crow, honestly. There was a study at the University of Seattle and they found out that crows actually have really good memories. Like they can remember people, like people who've either messed with them or whatever, and they communicate that information to other crows. So it goes on like the crow grapevine. It's like revenge of the crow. Do you think that they talk to your crow though? Cause he seems like he's a little nuts. Yeah, I don't think. Well, see part of the reason that I feel he's so, he's so worked up all the time is the other crows avoid him and you can see them. Like he'll like fly towards them and they're all like, no way, man, you're out of control. And so he's an angry crow. Does he hang around like a park bench or a park, like a table? He hangs around just like literally the telephone. I'm going out on my balcony to see if there's anything I can see. No, I see nobody working on anything that would. It's probably, yeah, it's probably nothing. It's probably nothing in your local area. Probably something further down the line. Yeah, I guess so. It's annoying. Mr. Dabadina. What is that from? It's a Del Defunkey Homo Sapien. Trap Pro Quest song. No, Del Defunkey Homo Sapien. And it's actually a sample from a monkey's track. It's not a track called Quest Song? Really thought it was. Wow, Spectrum has a lot of, I'm just finally looking at this map link. They've got outages all over the East Coast too. Great. I guess we're going to have to put in metering for all the internet. Oh, I wonder if this is just... At least my cats are unaffected by... It's like weird. It's like weird. It's like a heat map of the United States. Yeah. That's a third-party site though. That's not from Spectrum. So I don't know where they're getting their data. From Crows? From the Crows Net? Probably from Crazy Crows. They got a story about how it was 20 years ago. I thought Crows didn't live that long. Well, you're seeing one crow that has. Actually, that would make a great story, short story. The crow that lived too long. Oh, dear Lord. You know, I went when I had my power outage. I went to the LA Department of Water and Power site, and I saw a map, a Google map, with listings of who else had reported power outages. And there were 12 other people in my neighborhood, which made me go, oh, okay. So it's a thing. They're on it. Great. Time Warner Cable or AKA Spectrum? I cannot, if they have it on their own site. Like, I don't know where it is. You have to call them. That's the most reliable way. I've, on the past two times, I've had internet issues. Well, balls. That's all. It's the only word for it. Well, it's just like, you know, I know these things happen, like, especially when we were like, let's try something slightly different. I know. You know, just like. It's the worst. It is. It is. We'll try it again, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally, totally. Because I liked the way it felt up until you disappeared. Me too. Me too. Like, it's a good option to have. Absolutely. Well, and it's also, it's, yeah, it's nice to change it up, and it's also like, I'm going to do it anyway, if you're not on the show. Yeah, right. So it's like, it's just, it's good. It's good to keep in the rotation. Yep. Agreed. All right. Thanks everybody for watching or listening. I hope you had a lovely day and a lovely Thanksgiving. If you're in the US and we will see you tomorrow. Bye. Bye.