Solo Tech Life with Carey Holzman (EP 972)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast. That's right. I am back live.

This is the Wednesday live show presented by our good friends over at ThreatLocker Zero Trust Total Protection. And yes, this is the show where we, well, we do a lot of things. We talk tech tips, we share stories, and we talk to vendors and other IT professionals, and we do all of that to try to help you run your business better, smarter, and faster.

It's been a while, folks. It's been a whirlwind four weeks, three conferences, two client road trips, and only one live show in that span. But we are back.

I am here in Fort Lauderdale, Studio B, and we should be here, I think, eight straight weeks before I have to be out on the road again. So it should be good. Of course, if you are caught up in your pod catcher, you'll notice that we are having a ton of shows out.

I am releasing the shows that were recorded at Zero Trust World in Orlando from last week. I've got a few more of those going. I also had a audio recording that was put out yesterday, and I've got a few more of those.

So we've got shows going, and we are on the road to 1,000. That's pretty impressive for me anyway, because I thought I would only do this for a couple of years, but yet here we are 10 years later doing this. And as part of this 10-year celebration, one of the things that I've been trying to do is to go back and find people that were kind of there before me.

Some of their precursors, the veterans, those that paved the way, whether it was on podcasts or YouTubes. So tonight I am doing that with a gentleman that, well, let's just say he is a YouTube sensation. He is somebody that has been on for quite some time, started doing PCs back in the early 90s before some of you were even alive.

That's not to say how old he is. That's just to say how long we have been in the business. I have been in the business almost as long as he has.

He is Carey Holzman. He has the YouTube channel that basically shows you how to build PCs the right way. Carey, welcome to the show.

Hey, Uncle Marv, good to see you again. Good to see you. It has been a while.

You look exactly the same. Stop it. Do me a favor.

Could you get a little fatter and a little grayer? I purposely kept the camera so it doesn't show the belly. That's the secret? That's the secret. Ah, I got to adjust my camera.

Yeah. It looks like I have man boobs, but it is what it is. Well, it's great to see you again, and thank you for having me back on.

Well, thanks for coming back. Thanks for doing this. I'm going to address something.

I do tune into your show every now and then. I hopped on the other day, and I answered a question, and you didn't know who I was because I wasn't signed in as Uncle Marv. If you're there, you don't normally speak up.

You have enough people that speak up. You don't need me trolling in on that. Never too many.

You were explaining to the people that you were going to be on my show, and you told them that I focus a lot on the business world. You did not, and you were wondering, what in the world could possibly come from having you on the show? Part of it was what I said in the open, that I am trying to bring back people that were influential to me in the sense of who were either podcasting or on the YouTube educating and freely sharing information of how to be in this business, regardless of where you were in the business, whether you're doing residential, business, enterprise. A lot of what we do does overlap, so I did want to at least acknowledge that and tell you thank you and get you on the show.

Not that my small audience is going to add a blip to your audience, but there's probably some people who don't know you, and I thought I said, let me get you on the show. Well, again, I appreciate the invite. My thought was that when I watch your podcast, it seems like you have a lot of larger corporations.

People, for example, I don't know, what comes to mind may be something like Backblaze, some bigger company that provides services to the MSPs, and then some of the MSPs, they have multiple employees or multiple locations, and then there's RMM Software. I don't do any of this. I'm just one guy.

I've always been one guy, and I've always been reluctant to release any control or trust. I've had enough cleaning up other people's messes and making excuses for other people. I have just no tolerance for it, so I just say, I'll do it myself, which may not be a healthy attitude, but it is what it is.

And so as a result, where I was 10 years ago as a business is where I am today as a business, where a lot of businesses grow and expand. I'm still me. I'm still doing my thing.

Of course, I adapt to the changing technology and the way that I do things, but for the most part, I'm the only one doing the work. I'm the only one doing the sales. I'm the only one. 

I do have help now. So at least I've got as far as like the billing and a lot of correspondence. My significant other loves, she comes from the corporate world and she's used to all of the paperwork. 

I hate the paper. I love doing the work. I hate writing it all out.

Yeah. So we have a so in that case, it a little bit has changed because now I'm with somebody who understands what it is I need done, has a technical mind and a technical background. Her technical background is corporate.

So a lot of the stuff she would work on was stuff way over my head. Big, you know, power company, 20,000 employees with the servers. And, you know, she'll tell you all the OSI layers of a switch.

So for this, you know, it works out really well. So as I was saying it, I realized a little bit has changed. And thankfully, I've been able to remove that burden, which is all of the paperwork and bill collecting so that I can focus on doing what I love.

But otherwise, it's still just me. Well, listen, Carey, it's not that much different. For the most part, it's me doing what I do.

I do have help as well. My wife works in the business and but I have subcontractors. I did have employees a while back.

And when the, you know, remote services took off for me, I didn't. I was going to say I didn't want them, but I didn't need them. Let's just say that because a lot of times they would just sit around the office waiting for stuff to be done.

If I could do it remotely, I didn't need them. So that's when I went to the subcontractor out and I've enjoyed it. But I've still only done businesses and I do a lot of law firms and one of my law firms.

Well, they just dipped under 100 users in a co-managed situation. So I don't have to deal with them on the day to day basis for the little stuff. But I do manage their network.

I do manage their connections between the offices. I manage their web protection, their endpoint protection, their cybersecurity, all of that. And then I've got other clients as well.

So. I like to tell people you can be a solo tech and still operate in the business realm. And I call it being a boutique MSP.

Because I still do the managed services, but I'm not striving to be that, you know, million dollar MSP that everybody wants to be. And then once you get to one million, you got to get to 10 million because that's just the natural progression of things. Agreed. 

I was going to say artisan MSP, but boutique, very French. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. 

So let me ask you this and we'll kind of start the conversation here because you have been doing this quite some time. And like you said, you in your mind, you're in the same place now as you were then, which really you're not. You know that.

But if you look back over the 10 years. Are there anything is there anything that really sticks out to you that has changed in the way that technicians look at computers? Well, I mean, I can't for other technicians and I don't really work with techs anymore. Generally, that was back in the first third of my first 10 years.

I think the biggest change. There's been three pretty big changes that stand out to me. One is the advent of the Internet.

Back when we had DSL or ISDN lines and. There wasn't much you could do online, so there weren't really any rules. Nobody could trust to shop online.

And, you know, if somebody was like, I'm going to furnish a house buying everything from Amazon, this was a news story like, is this even possible? And it was like in the newspaper. This guy is so convinced that the future is online. He's going to furnish his entire house, buying everything from Amazon.

And we've gone from that to then having to implement. Firewall and security software that prevents the employees from goofing off during work while they're on the clock and think nothing of it, that they're stealing from the company or in some cases downloading movies and music, holding potentially the company liable. And that was a big change, you know, getting to having Internet.

Then the next big change was 802.11b wireless. And it's amazing to me that, you know, being able to when I first set it up the very first time, which was probably the late 90s, I took a laptop outside to the parking lot and I was able to Skype with somebody while I was streaming music, while I was on Wi-Fi, on a battery, on a laptop, in a parking lot. Well, I couldn't believe it.

Like, how is all that data transferring? Anyway, and I'd say that the third thing has been with the advent of broadband and how inexpensive it's become. Oh, and also the advent of the smartphone, then utilizing the wireless and causing all the networks to go down because they've used every IP address up. That happened almost overnight.

We went from we don't need wireless to we can't connect. What do you connect? What are you trying to connect? My phone. Right.

And this is back when everybody had their, you know, how much data you. I mean, today there still are data limits, but it's not a need, not a phone. The financial need isn't really like it used to be to save your minutes or whatever it was. 

So then I'd say then remote access. And that has been the single biggest. Improvement to profit and service.

I wish I had that 30 years ago. Of course, the customer has to have it, too, right. But the ability that I can now help a client instantly.

I don't have to get in the car. I don't have to get into traffic. I don't have to worry about mechanical breakdowns, accidents, tickets, 115 degrees outside in Phoenix. 

I don't have to deal with any of that. I sit in my chair. I connect remotely to their computer.

Sometimes I ask them to show me. Can you demonstrate? Because sometimes I can't. Your computer's doing what? Let me see it. 

So I have to get in the car and go see it. Now there's no delay. Instantly I'm connected to their screen.

Show me what's going on. If I need to see it. Boom. 

OK. Let me take control of it. Dot dot dot. 

Is the printer printing? Yes. Is the network connecting? Well, I can see it is, you know, is there anything else I can help you with? No, that's it. Great. 

Have a nice day. Let me know if there's anything I can do. Boom. 

That service call. Could have been 30, 45 minutes in the car each way. There's an hour, hour and a half just in sitting in the car.

For a 15 minute or 30 minute service call. And then how many of those can I do in an eight hour or even a 10 hour day? Right. So.

One of the things that used to really bother me as I would go on site. And the client would say, well, since you're here. Would you mind taking a look at this other problem? I've never told you anything about until just this minute.

Yeah. And I'd say initially, OK, no problem. But this one customer kept doing it to me over and over.

And I said so I was ready for it. I didn't know what was what it was going to happen. But they, heaven forbid, they just let me finish my job and leave.

So I said, I don't mind helping you with whatever problems you have going on. However, the last few times I've been here, you've brought up things that I'm not prepared for. And I've got other clients I've got to get to.

And I've scheduled a certain amount of time. And I brought certain tools based on what you told me you needed serviced. The fact now that you're having this other unrelated problem, I have a few minutes. 

I'll take a quick look. But I need you to understand I have to go. I have another appointment and I don't have everything I might need to solve that particular problem.

And even saying that the customer did it again and they did it again. And I said, that's it. I don't have any available appointments for that customer anymore.

I got tired of it. But now that there's remote, it wouldn't have been a big deal if we're on the phone and I've got remote access. And they say, oh, well, you're connected.

Would you mind looking at this or looking at that? At least if there was something I needed to pick up and bring back, I could at least make that determination and schedule that or just take care of it while we're on the phone. So all of those frustrations and clearly the customer can hear the frustration in my voice. They see I'm not happy about it.

That's not great customer service. Right. But at the same time, it's like I don't blindside me.

I mean, I understand it can happen, but not every single time you're going to blindside me with something. And I just think it was a way to kind of get away from. Tricking with the billing. 

Yeah. You know, I just hired you to fix the one thing, but while you're here, maybe you just look at that for me like it's a freebie, it's implied. And I mean, I'm a nice guy, you know.

OK, I'll take a look at it and then we'll just include it as your hour, I guess, because I don't want to nickel and dime. Yeah, I don't want to be that guy. But on the other hand, I didn't want to be put in that position.

And so eventually the when trying to correct it and the customer kept doing it, I just I just we're done. You know, I just couldn't do it anymore. But the biggest change flat out.

Remote access. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, that's where I am as well.

The advent of managed services also helped in the sense that you probably don't have any full agreements like we do. But I just actually sent one out today that basically spelled out all the things that are covered under the agreement and all the things that are not. And in order for, you know, a system to be looked at without a charge or an additional charge, it has to be covered under the agreement, which means our software has to be on it.

It has to be managed. And if it's not, it's going to be billable at the full hourly rate. And that has helped a lot to their light.

Well, either let's get this on the plan. Or they know that, yeah, I know you're going to bill me extra, but can you just do it? That's a whole different conversation. I've had customers.

So we call the famous moves, addition, deletions or changes. Yeah, right. Never include those because they decide, well, we're letting this employee go or we're adding three more employees or we want this computer moved over to that area or we want to.

That is not maintenance. It's not a maintenance contract. The problem I have.

As I talk to the owner of the company, I come in, I take a look, I say, here's how I can help you. We work out terms and arrangements that are agreeable. It gets written up. 

They sign it. And we just continue that we continue it. And generally, I never raise my rate ever.

I've got one client for over 15 years. He's paying me the same every three months as he paid me 15 years ago. And the reason I do that is it's like a loyalty reward.

If you cancel with me and then you decide you want to come back, you're going to pay today's rates. But if you keep renewing, I'm going to keep the rate the same as an incentive for you to not leave. But the contract gets forgotten.

Right. And so the client may call and ask me to do something that we agreed, you know, back years ago in the contract. But I've had the client so long.

The debate I have with myself is just take care of the guy. Well, right. We'll chalk it up as the cost of marketing.

Just take care of the guy. He's been with you a long time. So I don't feel the need to be strict.

At least not with a client that's been with me for years. And it's understandable. They don't remember what's in the contract.

They got a business to run. So most of my clients, like I have lawyers. One of the law offices I have has maybe 13 employees.

And most of those employees have been there. Nearly the entire time, handful have changed out, but that also makes my job easier because you've got people now. Who know the routine, right? You don't have somebody knew that.

You have to start all over again. And in fact, because they've been there so long, they can do a lot of my job, in other words. If the printer is in printing, they know how to check for toner and paper. 

Right. Before they go, they know to turn the computer off and back on again. They've been through it enough with me.

And so they help that employee out. And then that employee learns. And hopefully they stay for a while.

And that's another reason I keep their rate low is they're easy. Yeah. It seems like I don't care for them for a while.

Then they might call every day for a week. Then I don't hear from them for another two months. So I don't worry too much about the hours, as long as overall we're within the three month number of hours they're paying for on a quarterly basis.

It all works itself out. All right. Let me shift that question.

Same question, but apply it to your listeners or viewers on YouTube. Now, I've got to imagine that with all the changes in technology over the years, the new processors, the memory, the RAM, the Windows operating systems and stuff. I want to say this in the gentlest way I can, but the kids today think a lot differently about computers than we did 20, 30 years ago when we were actually truly building machines on the regular.

How have those viewers changed in terms of the way that they interact with you, maybe ask you questions, maybe think that because they've asked ChatGPT that they know what's right and what's wrong? Well, there's definitely a different perspective about computers within the last 20 years that I'm not a big fan of. And there's nothing that's going to make me sound like an old man and get off my lawn. Like, why are you putting RGB and liquid cooling? Why don't you just go put hubcaps on your lawnmower? This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

If you're spending money you don't need to spend, you're having problems as a result because now the RGB software is not compatible with this other company's RGB and it's causing a blue screen. And oh my gosh, why would you do this to yourself? And you paid money for that. What's wrong with you? Why would you? It's a computer.

It's not a lamp. Go buy a lamp. Go buy a light bright.

They're 15 bucks. You can move all the pegs around and stick it on the side of the computer. RGB.

And yet, these many of these same people that I hear from on YouTube who had the money to pay for all of this nonsense that is a nightmare for support. And it's a nightmare to cable management. I mean, if you love it, don't get me wrong.

If you love it, enjoy your hobby. But you're not going to get a job in IT where you're doing liquid cooling and RGB and overclocking and this hobbyist stuff. Very unlikely, anyway.

So when I hear the same people say RAM is so much money. Well, you had plenty of money for needless RGB. So if you had the money, so much left over that you get out all this ridiculous nonsense to your computer, it's hard for me to also hear you say RAM is too expensive.

Because you actually need to have the RAM. And maybe if you didn't spend all of that extra money on nonsense, you'd realize RAM is still quite affordable. I mean, when you think about what we paid for RAM, I don't know, 20 years ago.

It's still a pretty good price today, considering. It's just that they got spoiled and they got used to a price. Whether or not that was a fair price, who's to say? But the bottom line is nobody says you can't have it.

Nobody's restricting you from getting it. You'll pay the same going rate as the rest of us. And if you can't afford it, you know, hey, you're not going to go without.

This is why I don't drive a Rolls-Royce. You don't think I want one? I can't afford it. So I've learned to live without it.

It turns out it's just fine. So that's a change I'm seeing. There's an entitlement.

Like, overall, I keep hearing this injustice. It's not fair. Well, I don't know about you, but I was raised out of the get-go.

Life isn't fair. Get used to it. You're not special.

But you can have anything you want. You can't have everything you want. And if you're willing to work hard and make sacrifices, you can be anything you want.

But you can't be everything you want. Or you can sit around and do nothing, right? But when you're 18, you're out of here. So that's your problem, right? So to me, and maybe I'm biased because that's how I was raised, that's what gave me the skill to be self-reliant and not dependent on others.

So when I hear people being dependent on others, unless they're children or they're in some way unable to help themselves due to a physical or mental disability, you're only alive for a certain period of time. Let's go. Let's do something.

Make it count. And it's fine you can play your games, but do something else as well as play your games. Spend a couple hours playing games.

That's great. Not all day. Find another hobby.

So I would say everything is shifted the best way I can explain it. From my perspective, everybody's living like they're rich people. Everybody's got a TV room and it's a big screen.

Everybody goes out to eat every night. And then they complain about how expensive McDonald's is. We went to McDonald's.

It was kind of a special deal. If my dad brought home a bucket of KFC, that happened once every couple weeks, maybe once a month. That was a special treat.

Now it's every day. There's an indulgence. There's a gluttony.

There's an entitlement. And they're not even happy. They're not even like, look how lucky we are.

They're just like, this isn't good enough. And I think that's what I see a lot of on YouTube is just this entitlement. Yeah, it is.

It's the same discussion that I see on HGTV when people are looking at houses and they just can't live without marble or granite countertops. And it's their starter home, but they have to have top of the line. And it's like, OK.

It's great to have standards. Yeah, it is. And yet when the contractor sees that the electrical hasn't been updated in years and needs to be replaced, nobody wants to do that because nobody sees that.

So kind of the same thing. Well, the thing is, is we grew up. I didn't know it at the time, but we were poor.

OK. I didn't know we were poor. We lived around a bunch of other poor people.

That's the way everybody else lived. We never had a new car. We very rarely ever went out to eat.

My parents were sinking in credit card debt. And we had a house without working heat. And I slept with a, I know I sound like an old man, but I'm so thankful.

I'm old too. I am. That doesn't make me feel better.

But I'm so thankful that I learned how to fix things because no one else in my family could be bothered. And I was like, it's got to be better than this. Like we had told the story the other day, we had a dishwasher that didn't work for about two years.

So we would wash all the dishes in the sink. And one day I was like, why? We can't afford to fix it, even though we don't even know what's wrong. Could be something very simple, but nobody could be bothered to look.

Both parents are working. Both parents are tired after work. The last thing they want to do is do anything at the house other than sit in front of the TV.

Okay. And have dinner and that's it. The one TV, one TV, by the way, right? Yeah.

We had a console television in the living room and you bake a better door than a window was told to me several times when I'd sit in front of it and don't sit too close to it and yada, yada, yada. And the parents did have a TV in their own room. Those are learning to read that living room and the master bedroom.

That was it. Kids did not have their own TV. And I decided I want a phone in my room.

And I saw that there were wires in the wall and they look like phone wires. So I bought a jack from Radio Shack and I plugged it all in red to red, yellow, yellow, you know, it worked. So I had a phone in my room.

And then one day I said, I want to see, I'm going to take apart this dishwasher. I mean, it's already broken, so I can't break it. And there were just two screws underneath the counter and there was no YouTube.

There was no how to manual. I just looked at it and looks like there's two screws. Take it out.

Whole thing slides out. There's a plug. It plugs in the wall like a blender.

There's a water line and there's a drainage line. That's it. That's all there is.

Take those all out. Dishwasher has a little thing underneath like this big. You look at it.

There's nothing here. What could be broken? I take the drainage line outside and I put the garden hose at one end of it and spray with the high pressure water and all this gook just comes out of it. Just this mucky, just gross, disgusting.

I don't know what it was. It'd been in that hose for two years, whatever it was. And it just flushed out all over the patio.

And I was like, maybe that's the problem. And I took turned our hose around, did the other side of it till the water ran clean. Plugged it all back in.

Dishwasher worked. And that started my fire, man. Because that's what gave me that sense of fulfillment of making a difference that I was capable of changing for the whole family.

We now have a working dishwasher. And that's what set it all off. Just that.

Now, how do you go from fixing a dishwasher to wanting to build computers your whole life? Well, in the 1980s, let's call it 1980. So I was born and raised in Detroit. And while I was there, from about 10 to 12 years old, I was delivering the newspaper.

And the thing was, I wanted some stuff. I wanted a stereo. And my parents said, if you want a stereo, go get a job.

We won't. My parents never had any chores for me to do. If I wanted to make a little money around the house, I could say, hey, mom, is there something I can do to make five bucks and mow the lawn? In fact, my mom would say, if you ever want to make money around here, there's laundry to do.

There's floors to mop. I'll keep you busy all day. There's no shortage.

And I'll pay you $5 for this and $10 for that. But I wasn't required to do chores. So I decided, I'm going to go get a paper route.

And so I did the paper route. I did the collection. And the money was mine.

And I could spend it however I wanted to. This is how I was raised. Let's say I was 10 years old.

So when we came out to Phoenix, I was 12. This is 1980. I got a job delivering the newspapers.

Stuck to what I knew. And I bought my first computer. And that computer was a TRS-80 Model 1. And I used it to connect to bulletin board systems.

And the reason I even knew about it is a neighbor of mine had an Apple computer. And I saw his. I think that's how I learned about it.

And in high school, in computer science class, we had a Commodore PET and an Apple II. And we were learning coding and stuff like that on those. So from the Model 1, I bought it used.

There was this old man who had a place in downtown Phoenix, like a house, just wall to ceiling of junk, a little bit of everything. And I remember I was with, I think at the time, it was a boyfriend of my mother's or something. And he took me over there.

And he saw this guy. And this guy was really, really old. And he's like, well, you better hurry up and buy this before this guy dies.

Don't wait too long. Anyway, so he bought it. I got online.

I'm making friends online because I wasn't good at making friends in real life. No self-confidence, no self-esteem. Didn't like to look people in the eye, that kind of thing.

And then what I wanted was to spend more time playing games. And the Atari 2600 just didn't cut it. It wasn't anything like real Pac-Man, not even close.

But the Atari 400, that one was very, very similar to the arcade. And I couldn't afford to keep spending all the money at the arcade. So then my next computer was an Atari 400.

And then I had a couple of Atari s after that, 800XL, 130XE. And while other people were getting Commodores, I was the Atari guy. Other people are drinking Pepsi.

I'm the Coca-Cola guy. You know? And then that led to my first IBM-compatible PC around 1989, 1990. And it was because of a game.

I always thought that the Apple wasn't a very good game machine. And I always felt that the IBM-compatible was not a good... The graphics were just terrible. Until I saw Wing Commander, and I had to have it.

Thanks to Wing Commander, a friend of mine built me the computer. And the first thing I wanted to do with it was to go on the BBS, because I hadn't been on the bulletin board system in a while, and see if my old friends were still there. And the modem wouldn't dial out.

And I tried calling my friend. He's not answering his phone. So this brand new computer, I haven't even had it a couple hours.

I opened it up, and inside there's a circuit board, there's wires and everything. And I see where the line plugs into the back of the modem. So I see the card.

This card must be the modem, because that's where the phone is plugged in. I'm just reverse engineering. And I see the modem has a ribbon cable plugged on to the COM port on the motherboard.

And I take it off, and I look at it, and I go, it looks like this can go on the other way. Like, I don't see any key. I don't see any way to prevent it from going.

Anyway, I flipped it around, pushed it in. Modem dialed and worked, and here we are. Here we are.

These little bits of successes where nobody around me believed that I had any capability or skill. There was nobody encouraging me to do this. I wanted to get online.

I wanted to play games. And that's what led those early successes, me figuring it out on my own, led me to where I am today. And that's how it all started.

All right. So I have a question that I'm not sure other people would know, at least in our space, that I want to ask you. But before we do, let me take a little quick break here and thank our sponsors for the show.

And of course, I mentioned that our show is tonight, my live stream. I don't have my glasses, so this will be fun. Live stream is presented by our good friends over at ThreatLocker.

If you're looking for a smarter way to lock down your IT environment, ThreatLocker helps you control exactly what runs on your network, blocking threats before they can do damage. It's simple, effective, and it gives you peace of mind that your systems are secure. And check them out at the link in the show notes and tell them Uncle Marv sent you over.

And then I also want to give a shout out to our technology sponsors, NetAlly makes troubleshooting and testing, makes network troubleshooting and testing fast and precise, helping IT pros solve problems before they become headaches. And our friends over at OneStream, the unified communications and contact center platform built specifically for MSPs and IT providers. And a quick shout out to our travel sponsor, TruGrid, for providing secure remote access.

And our digital sponsor, DesignerReady, for keeping my website looking sharp. And then a quick shout out to the folks that give us monthly donations to keep us going, Tom Bull, Jason Miller, and Jason Percival. So thank you all for your contributions to the show.

So Carey, one of the things that I did not know, so I knew that you were on a radio show called Computer America. I know that you did have a job working for, was it the utility company there in Arizona? You did that. Both of them.

Yeah, the two big ones here. Yeah. What I did not know is that you wrote a book called The Healthy PC.

Well, that's what got me the radio show job. Really? Yeah. Okay.

I was going to ask about that. So that book, let me first start with what led you to write that book? Yeah. I'm going to try and make my answers shorter because these stories, I try to be complete.

But essentially, I don't know how I can keep this short. I was on Reddit looking to solve a networking problem I was having. No, it wasn't Reddit.

I was going to say there was no Reddit back then. Newsgroups. Newsgroups.

CompuServe or ALL or something. No, it would have been alt dot. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. Something dot.

You know what I'm talking about. We're still out there today. Four newsgroups.

Anyway, once I figured out with the help of others and a lot of nonsense, once I finally found somebody who knew what they were talking about, solved the problem. And while I was waiting for my answer, I saw other people asking questions that I knew the answer to or had seen just answered. And I would notice a lot of the same questions came up.

So I wrote a little FAQ. I just opened up Word or something and started keeping track of the common questions and the answers. And eventually, I would just copy and paste that to anybody's question.

Just here's everything right here. Your question is in here. And this led to a lot of controversy because I was taking the steam out of a lot of people.

Hey, I was going to give them an answer. And you just pretty much copied and pasted my answer to somebody else. How dare you play? I don't want to go down that path.

It's a big argument. Bottom line is this guy was writing a book and he said, I'm writing a networking book. And I came across all these questions and answers about solutions to common, the most common problems people are asking about networking.

Can I publish that in my book? One thing led to another. It got published as like an appendix or something. And the publisher said to me, would you be interested in being a technical editor for another book we're working on with a different author? The author was writing in a way that I couldn't.

I'm like, I love the idea of being the technical editor, but not for this guy. Like, whatever he's doing, it's bad. And they said, well, how bad? And I said, well, I'm not an author, but I could write a book better than this.

And they said, well, what would you say if we made you the author? And then he became your technical editor. Oh, I'm sure that'll work out fine. So that's what we did.

And the guy was professional. And so the book got published and then they didn't really do anything to promote it. I'm like, why did I spend nine months of my life writing this? And then it's like publish and move on.

No. So what I decided to do is I was involved with a lot of computer clubs back in the day. And I said, I'm going to go self-promote this.

I'm going to present myself to the computer clubs as their speaker. And I'll buy a box of books and bring them and sell them myself. 14,000 books later.

I mean, I did a tour of Ventura County and Los Angeles County in California. I stayed with my mom when she lived out there in Huntington Beach for a month and just scheduled them all back to back to back to back to back. I did Phoenix, Las Vegas.

There's at least 60 at the time, 60 computer clubs in Phoenix. And I kept running out of books. And one of the things I did to promote the book was I did a couple radio shows.

And one of those radio shows was Computer America. I'd like to come out and promote my book. After the interview and I promoted my book, they said, hey, we're looking for a co-host.

And we're interviewing a couple people. What would you think about that? You know, join, you know, being the co-host for five nights a week, two hours a night. I'm like, I mean, I'm not a co-host.

I mean, I'm not a radio personality. It sounds like it'd be a lot of fun. So that's how that all started.

All right. There you go. As short as I could make that story.

That was fun. A lot of things just sort of happened. Yeah.

And I was like, yeah, I'll do it. That's kind of the way things were for us back in the day. You know, you just, you just did things.

You, you fell into industries. You kind of realized what you were good at and did it and people. I'm not, I'm not a writer.

No, but I'm not a radio show guy, but yet. Does it sound like I could do it? I mean, with the writing, there were editors that could clean up my writing. You have no idea.

I wrote that. It's very well done. Um, but with the radio show, um, you know, I cringe when I hear myself do that stuff.

It's, it's, uh, I'm not good at it. So I was grateful to have the experience and the more experience I got, the better I got. But even now I don't, it's a struggle for me to, uh, now I know I'm sorry.

Go ahead. I was going to say, I know that there was an update to the book, but if you had to write that today, how do you think it would go? Would it be much different? Um, I don't think it's necessary today. Okay.

You have to remember when I wrote in windows 95, 98. Yeah. And there's millennium.

So people were having a lot of blue screen driver related defrag. What is this? What is it? A lot of things that needed to be explained are more or less common knowledge today. Back then the heavy adoption very early on fuse Napster and all this other stuff, understanding files and folders, what all that means.

What's Java. Um, that all needed to be explained to people today. I think a lot of it is it's sort of, especially as younger people now are becoming the older people.

They grew up with it. Yeah. Well, and it's so much simpler too.

I mean, back then, I mean, when, like you said, we were building our PCs, you had a modem that you had to put in and configure. You don't have that today. Even if you had, you know, he had the comms for the keyboard and mouse, you had, you know, separate higher cues, you had separate video cards, um, extended and expanded memory.

Yeah. And then you had the little turbo boost command that you write in a batch code to really, really soup it up. And the turbo switch on the front of the PC to make a 486 go from DX 33 to DX 66.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

And so a lot of that just doesn't exist anymore. A lot of it's very much now what we used to tease and call plug and pray because it never quite worked. It pretty much works, you know, and windows is health healing for the most part.

Um, yeah. I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean, cause you're working with businesses, but my consumer side of things is pretty much dried up there. We're not dealing with bad hard drives anymore.

We don't really see bad power supplies as often as we used to manufacturing's all been automated. So there's not people sitting down with soldering irons much these days in the factories, the robots do everything the same. They don't have a bad mood or a sick day.

Everything comes out with consistent quality and, um, uh, all the problems that we used to have, we don't have those problems anymore. Well, we have different problems. We have, we have internet drive by downloads and people opening, you know, malware and email and sending wire transfers and that sort of stuff.

Are you seeing much of the virus and malware activity in your line of, uh, with your clients? So I'll be honest. I see some, not as much as others. There are people that see them a lot.

Um, because if people don't get the protection they need, whether it's the spam filters. Um, but again, our sponsor of the show threat locker, uh, prevents a lot of that because people can't just download and install what they want, which was a big problem 10 years ago because I was going to say that was, that was a problem. But I'm saying, is it really still? Yeah, it's still a problem because there's, there's some scale of it.

Yeah. The scale is different, but it still happens. And it, and when it happens, it happens big, you know, it's on the news, you know, I mean, it's a penalty goes down because of a bad patch or something like that.

So, uh, the scale is much different, you know, back, back, back when it was the, what was it? It wasn't the happy virus. What was the, uh, the one that popped up on the screen in an office and it was the, the, the smiley face virus. I forget the name of that.

You know, there's so many viruses, you know, there's been so many famous ones too. Uh, what comes to mind would be like a bad update, like the crowd strike event, but that's, you know, how often does that happen? Uh, when's the last time we've seen a windows update universally sort of take down a whole bunch of businesses. As much as you hear online, people talking about not trusting windows updates.

I don't know about you, but the last time I've seen a serious problem with windows updates been a couple of years and I grabbed the updates immediately. What are your feelings on that? Uh, I don't grab them immediately just because I'm still of the mindset that let's wait a couple of days. Let's see if there's anything that pops up.

There have been a couple of updates that, you know, all of a sudden we'll disable USB drivers. When was the last time you experienced an update that caused a problem that you or one of your clients experienced? Uh, probably, probably two or three years ago. So it's PTSD at this point.

Yeah. So you'll go, you'll, you'll say, I'd rather risk what this update prevents. Then do the update and maybe risk what the update causes.

It depends on the update. Now, if it's, if it's a zero day patch where it's like it is known to fix a vulnerability, that's different. But if it's just, I don't even read them.

I just, I just hit up. Yeah, see, I, I don't, I, I go through and I approve, uh, I've got a thing where I go in and I, I will manually schedule those updates. Just, um, and part of the reason that I do it this way too, is it prevents, it prevents the end users from downloading and installing their own updates and surprising me with an issue.

Whereas if I know that I'm installing these updates and I know that there's a potential problem, at least I'm ready. The one thing I, I, I laugh at it because I'm, I feel like I'm evil Knievel over here. I set it to auto update, do it at night, let the employees leave their computers on.

Nobody will know. And if they call me, they'll call me. And if they don't, they don't.

But that's been standard for me. And I haven't had any reason to change it. Now we've had a couple little security changes that the updates caused file preview.

Doesn't work to look at PDF files and documents in the file. That was a fun one. But you know, once you're aware of it, it's really, what do you do? Do you just say, well, never mind the security.

Let's just avoid that update. I, that doesn't work for me. No, you don't avoid it.

You just have to, I like to educate them and say, Hey, this is going to happen. You know, I know about it. I can't fix it until the next update or until something or whatever.

So I'd rather, you know, pre-educate than to be bombarded at, you know, seven o'clock in the morning with emails and phone calls and that sort of stuff. Because, you know, in the business world, you know, everything's got to happen right now. You know, that's right.

If I'm not working at seven o'clock, you better be here by seven 30. Oh yeah. And if you've got two clients or three clients at the same time with the same problem because of an update and there's only one of me, right? That's my, that's my biggest nightmare.

But I can't, life is messy and life is chaotic. And no matter what we do for preventive measures, there is such a thing as taking it too far. This has always been my struggle is identifying, like I kind of picture it as a pendulum.

And the pendulum is let's do nothing until it breaks, be reactive and panic. And the pendulum swings the other way and says, let's spend more time trying to prevent problems than the, if the problems would even happen would take to resolve. Because that's too far the other way.

So I'm trying to always find the middle where that pendulum swinging between reactive, I still call it proactive, but to a limit, like at some point when, when we're trying to prevent a common likely problem versus an uncommon and unlikely problem, like nothing bothers me more than somebody's talking about, well, right now I'll give you one. I'm sure you've heard of the anxiety online from end users who are worried about their boot certificate expiring in windows. Yeah.

You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And do you know what the fix for that is? Actually, I don't, I didn't look into it. Leave it alone.

It's nothing for you to worry about. It'll take care of itself. Microsoft will update the computers.

And if, and when in the unlikely event that you don't get the update for some reason, and you have secure boot turned on, if all the stars align perfectly, then your system will boot. You're going to call me and I'll take care of it for you. But instead I got a bunch of people going, you know, the boot certificates are going to expire.

What am I going to do? Windows 10 is going to expire. It's 2022. I go, yeah, it's going to expire in 2025.

So why are we talking about this? Well, what am I going to do? My computer's not windows 11 compatible. Why are we talking about this three years ahead of time? Why don't you give me a call when that day happened? I'll be here. And I'm not trying to dismiss people, but I'm dismissing people.

Can we, can I fix a problem you actually have in the real world? Is there something, not your friend, not what you read online. Is there a problem you are experiencing right now or recently that I can help you with? Otherwise I cannot help you. It's so frustrating sometimes.

And this is one of them. And then, you know, you've got all this misinformation. Windows 12.

There's no Windows 12. But there's, you know, no. Well, Windows updates killing SSD.

No, no, it isn't. But Tom's Harbor, it's a hoax. They fell for it.

Yeah, they go. Yeah, but, but these people online, I go, did your SSD fail? No. Have your SSD ever failed? No.

Well, when a Windows update causes your SSD to fail, you let me know and I'll help you. This is so absurd. So I'd say that's really frustrating right now is this.

I call it technocondria. Oh, yeah. And they want to know, how do we prevent it? How do we stop it? How do I keep it from happening? Well, you can't prevent everything.

Just take reasonable steps and don't worry about what somebody else's problem is. They're probably using their computer in a way that you are not. And they're having a problem nobody else is having.

But what about all these people? I go, well, where is it? Do you see in the news that all these corporations are having SSDs die from Windows updates? If Ford Motor Company can't operate their factory because of Windows update killed the SSDs in the factory, I'm pretty sure there's going to be a big lawsuit. It's not going to be on Twitter from some guy in Japan. It's going to be major corporations shouting and screaming and throwing lawsuits because of financial losses.

So just because you read something online, look at the world around you. How has that impacted your ability to have your electricity delivered to your house or buy groceries at the grocery store? Are you still doing all that? You don't think they're getting Windows updates? I mean, why are there two different sets of rules? So in any event, that's been really, really frustrating for me. And I don't know the cure for it.

All I tell people is if you're actually having a problem, you yourself personally, if you have an experience that is challenging, I can help you with it. But if you're just reading things online and there's a scene, do you remember the movie Airplane? I do. And there's a scene in the movie where he says, you know, some of the food that we've given out may have been tainted.

And if you start feeling a fever and then they pan to the people sitting in the plane and they're like, oh, I feel warm. And if you start sweating and if you're coughing and then people start coughing, it's like subconsciously feeding into this. And I'm trying to push back on it and I'm trying to have people take a deep breath.

Let's talk about what's going on with you. Don't worry about what's going on with everybody else. And that has been a part of being a tech that I never thought was part of the job.

Like it wasn't before. No, it wasn't. But, you know, because of the Internet, because of, you know, the water cooler type discussions, we have to be part psychologist, you know, because people will forward us that are, you know, instead of using reasonable deduction, they'll forward us an email saying, hey, is this legit? I don't mind that.

So I don't mind if they ask. What I don't want is them telling me. Gotcha.

I just thought you should know this is a problem. No, it isn't. But yes, and I encourage them.

I go, if you're not sure if something's real or not, send it to me. It doesn't bother me for you to ask. Yeah, send it to me.

I'll let you know that that works. If you've got a thing that says Malwarebytes wants an update or something and you're not sure if it's real, don't click on it. Just call me right then and say, is this OK for me to click on? I don't know.

Let me log in remotely. Let me take a look. It's a five minute call versus a three hour repair.

Yeah, you know what I mean? Speaking of, I wanted to get this in real quick. Not that they pay me or anything, but do you know what this is? Let me get my screen bigger so I can see. I don't have my glasses.

Is that a POE? No, you could. It looked like it was. Or are those USB? I have an HDMI cord.

I have a USB cord. Let me do this. Let me unravel these cables here.

And on the back, we have a RJ11 and RJ45. And what we can do is if I grab an ethernet cable, and they do make these with Wi-Fi too, but this one isn't one of those. We can plug our ethernet cable in.

And then the other two cables, one is USB and one is HDMI. And if I plug it into USB. Oh, is that a extender? This is called an IPKVM.

And what this allows me to do is gain access. This is a small computer. Think of this like a Raspberry Pi.

It isn't, but it's very similar. So what I do is I connect this to a computer I want to control. And on my local area network, I open a browser.

No software. Just the browser. Go to the IP address on the screen.

I log into this, which then transfers keyboard, mouse, and the video output of whatever I plugged it into, into my browser window. And then if I want to, I can configure this through GitHub with Tailscale or something like that. Or this is JetKVM.

They have their own cloud. And then you set up an account there. And then you bond this to that.

And then I can access this from anywhere in the world. No subscription fee. You pay for it once.

1080p. Pretty fast. When I drag the mouse around.

The downside to this is it replaces your computer monitor. So this isn't really for the terms of, like, desktop support. But let's say you had a server or a computer.

Over at my other studio, I have my computer on 24-7 with this plugged in. And I can log into it at any point in time. And I don't have to use any software.

I just log into, in this case, it's app.jetkvm.com. It's all free. I need a password to sign in. I need a password also to sign into the computer.

And it's all VPN encrypted. And then because that computer has two monitor outputs, I just duplicate the monitor output. And my monitor at the other studio is just turned off.

But it's plugged in with a duplication going to this one. And I have instant access from anywhere in the world. Even on anything that can open a browser.

A tablet, a phone, doesn't matter. Just type in the IP address. And or in my case, log into Tailscale.

And I'm logged in. Now, they do have more expensive units that have video pass-through. So you can put this in a chain.

And they're also made wirelessly for a little bit more money. This is about $100. Buy it once.

Use it for life. And never pay any subscription. Now, the primary purpose that I have it and why I'm so enthused about it is I like this to be my workbench here.

And I work a lot with mini PCs. So I get a mini PC. And the first thing I want to do is I want to update all the missing Windows updates.

It takes a long time. I'm not going to sit here waiting for things to update. I got other things to do.

But this is a two-story house. I go upstairs. And I wonder how that update's doing.

I go downstairs. I walk all the way around back here. And I look at my screen.

And oh, it's not done yet. Or I forget it's running. I come downstairs to go to the kitchen.

I go, oh yeah, I forgot I was running update. Anyway, I just plug this into the mini PC. And then I use the laptop upstairs.

And I just open the browser window. And I stay signed into it if it wants to restart. I can get into the BIOS.

OK, so you've just that's the first time you've said something that made me interested because a lot of what you were saying is there's a lot of free ways to get remote access to a system. Yeah, let me grab. But now that you've said that's OK.

But now that you've said it connects to the BIOS that actually sells it. Because otherwise, you know, granted, RMM software is not free. A lot of help desk software is not free.

But there is a lot of free ways to get remote access to a system on a network, that sort of thing. So you didn't have me at free. You had me at BIOS.

I'll keep that in mind. Let me demonstrate it. Because maybe if you see the way it works.

So I've just got a mini PC here. Pretty nice one, by the way. And again, none of this is promotion.

I'm just enthusiastic about some of this stuff. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug HDMI in where the monitor normally goes. And then I'm going to plug USB.

Any USB port. Now, I don't have this configured for Wi-Fi, so I do need to give this. They don't share the Internet, so I need this one to have its own Internet.

So let me. I'm standing probably on my. The Ethernet cable that you just had up there.

Well, I have two for just such an occasion. I have numbered my feathers. OK, here we go.

And then I just need a standard power cable here. So another one I'm standing on that will give it power. OK, that easy.

That's all I've got. Four cables. One, two, three, four.

Make sure my power supply is turned on. Let's hear now. This will be fun because I'm going to do something in OBS that should work here in Streamyard.

Let's see if this works. OK, I'm going to change to my. How do I want to do this? I'm going to change to my window capture, which means I'm not going to be able to see you.

Let's go to window capture and it should pull up my Google. Yeah, you can see that, right? Yes. OK, so I need to type in the IP address for this unit, which is displayed on its screen.

And it says now this is just on my local area network. OK, 192.168.68.67. Now, I've configured this to not require me to have a password. Some of the units don't let you do that, but I appreciate that I don't have to enter a password.

Right. So this is my desktop of the computer I just set up. You notice there's two mice.

Do you see two mice? Yes, I'm trying to get this to. Trailing is the little computer. Now, check this out.

Let's go start, shut down, restart. Now, this is normally where your remote software will disconnect you. Right.

And what I'm going to do, you never saw me hook up a keyboard and mouse to this mini PC. I'm using the only keyboard and mouse on this desk. And if the computer, when it's rebooting, if it cuts off USB, then the device itself, the little KVM, has to reboot.

And then I'll start pressing delete. If you look in the bottom left, it says keys and it says delete. You see down here, it says keys.

It's indicating which keys I'm pressing. I can go to setup BIOS, just as though I were sitting in front of this machine. Then up here, I've got a bunch of options like pasting text, loading.

So let's say I want to reinstall Windows. I can set up virtual Windows ISO image and tell the computer to boot to that right off of the space available on the KVM, like a flash drive. I can have the computer shut off and then wake it back up.

So I don't have to leave the computer on 24-7. I can set up a virtual keyboard. If there's some keys that I'm having some conflict with the local machine and the remote machine, I can just do this and pull the remote keyboard up.

There's other settings we can play with here. You know, 100 bucks. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, let's hit escape. I want to exit without saving. No, I don't want to do that.

Let's get rid of this keyboard, which is... I don't want to get rid of the keyboard. Just click that again. If I want to go full screen, check this out.

Now it looks like I'm on the computer. You would never even see the browser tab. Let's save and exit.

This card changes an exit. Now it boots up as though it's on your own monitor. I can press escape, put it back in the browser window.

If I want to, I can open another browser tab. Are you not entertained? Yeah. Like I said, you had me at bios.

I lost audio. No, you didn't. There you are.

What do you think? That works. Yeah. Very nice.

Yeah. There you go. So anyway, I can go upstairs.

I can do all the Windows updates, all the driver updates. I can run my optimizer. I can configure the machine the way I've configured thousands of them.

Without having to sit here, I do it all from upstairs. And when I'm done, I shut the computer off. And then when I come downstairs, I just unplug the cables, put the computer away, put the next one up.

I can do so many. I do three or four a day now. One a night because I keep forgetting to go.

And I don't want to keep going up and down the stairs. And that's just using on my local area network. Now, if I want to sign into Studio A right now, I just open the browser tab.

Cool. How cool is that? Yeah. I really should get paid to promote these.

You'll figure it out. But this is called a JET KVM. But they've got a lot of competition, Nano KVM, Comet KVM, Pico KVM.

And they're right around $100. So if you find that could be useful in the way that you run your support or for your own personal use, it's great, especially with headless devices, servers, and things like that, where you normally have some kind of a crash cart. And I love, to me, the big seller is no subscriptions.

It just works. Yeah, absolutely. I just think there's not enough awareness about these for people in our industry.

Doing my part. Yeah. Uh, let's do this.

We've gone over our normal time, but I want to keep the conversation going. So let me put the screen up here one more time. If you are watching this video, just stay with us.

I'm going to go ahead and end off the actual audio podcast. And I want to first say thank you to Carey for coming on the show and hanging with us and sharing some history and sharing now a new cool gadget that we can go learn from. Let's see.

Logistically, there will be other shows. Again, I told you coming from ThreatLocker Zero Trust World. I think I've got about four more episodes coming there.

We've got live shows happening every Wednesday, 8 p.m. Eastern, for at least the next eight weeks or so. I have at least one, maybe two shows coming up, where I will be doing conference recaps and talking about swag. Because I've not done that from any of the conferences.

So we'll talk about some of the gadgets and clothing and stuff. We've got some shirts going into the rafters. We've got hats going onto the hat wall.

And we've got pins to review and a whole bunch of stuff. So I will have a couple of swag things that we'll talk about. I know some of you are waiting for that, but that will probably be in another week or so.

I'm just getting reacclimated to being back at the office and working on stuff. If you found the show helpful or useful, I don't know, whatever you do on the YouTube, like, share, all that stuff in the podcast, make sure you subscribe to your favorite pod catcher. If you're not subscribed, you can head over to the website, itbusinesspodcast.com, find the app that works best for you.

Go back and check out some older podcasts and relive. And I can't relive all 10 years of the IT Business Pro podcast. I was thinking of Podnutz Pro.

That was the original name of the show way back in the day. But you'll see some of those shows there as well. But for now, we are going to sign off the audio portion.

Again, if you are here with us, stay through the video and we will continue on. But that's going to do it, folks. Thank you for checking out the show.

We'll see you soon. And until next time, holla!