Episode 82 – Peter Sighing for 45 Minutes

Scott: Friends with Brews.

Scott: It’s going to be a very silent podcast.

Peter: Well, I counted us down, now I have to do the intro too.

Scott: Yeah, we should do ASMR, you should just be sighing the whole time.

Scott: It could be Peter sighing, and we’ll see what effect that has on our listeners.

Scott: Does it make him happy?

Scott: Does it make him sad?

Scott: Does it make him nervous and tense?

Scott: Does it relax them?

Scott: Do they become, well, let’s just say, are you going to have to take out any restraining orders against any of our listeners?

Peter: Oh, boy.

Peter: Sure.

Peter: Yeah, let’s not do that.

Scott: Okay.

Peter: Oh, man.

Peter: So yeah, you’re Scott.

Scott: Yep.

Scott: And I’m not Peter, but you are.

Peter: Last I checked, yes.

Peter: Guilty as charged.

Scott: Also, there’s something about both of us.

Scott: Coffee drinker, huh?

Scott: We’re coffee drinkers today?

Peter: Yes, today we are.

Peter: So for me, yes, regular featured at this recording time slot, Wegmans espresso roast whole bean decaf, ground in my fellow Opus grinder, coarse grind, brewed in an AeroPress using the French press method, which is basically put the coarse grind in, fill it up with about 200 milliliters to 20 milliliters of water, let it sit there for a few minutes after stirring, gently expel, with foamed half and half, two ounces, just about two ounces of foamed half and half.

Peter: So it’s like a brevet, and it’s really yummy.

Peter: That’s my review of this drink.

Peter: It’s really yummy.

Scott: I see what I’m doing wrong in life.

Scott: You’re expelling things gently, and I’m doing violent expulsions.

Peter: Yeah, well, I mean, if you want to vomit your coffee, no one’s stopping you.

Scott: I don’t want to vomit my coffee, Peter.

Scott: My coffee is Wandering Goat Coffee Roasters, Decaf Peru Norte.

Scott: I actually need to go to our website now and use the search function to see if I’ve had this coffee before on this podcast.

Scott: I’ve had this coffee before.

Scott: Goat.

Scott: I don’t have it.

Scott: Nope.

Scott: So good news.

Scott: This is a first timer for this, and it’s decaf.

Scott: It’s good.

Scott: I brewed it in a…

Scott: This is completely different than what you did.

Scott: Nothing the same at all.

Scott: So listen up.

Scott: I used a fellow Opus grinder.

Peter: Never heard of that before.

Scott: But I did a medium grind.

Scott: I did right in the middle grind, number six.

Peter: Oh, that’s totally different.

Scott: And I poured it into an AeroPress, and I poured water over it, and I gently and calmly and carefully and slowly squeezed the, you know, push down to have the air force the liquid through the grounds into the cup, so that water, the color of coffee, and the taste of coffee was going into the cup, and then, yeah, that’s it.

Scott: So that’s pretty much it.

Scott: I boiled the water to 212 this time, which I don’t normally do, but by the time I get around to getting the grounds into the AeroPress and blah, blah, blah, it’s probably around 205, 206.

Peter: Yep.

Scott: But anyway, that’s the coffee I’m drinking.

Scott: I like it.

Scott: It’s, let me take a sip here and see if I can describe this coffee for you.

Peter: It’s just yummy.

Scott: I probably could have made it slightly stronger.

Scott: They claim that this has apple, almond, molasses and chocolate.

Scott: I don’t know what I taste.

Scott: It’s slightly bitter, but just not enough to cause me any problems whatsoever.

Scott: I like it that way.

Scott: It’s fine.

Scott: And again, it is a decaf.

Scott: So typically if I was drinking this in the afternoon, I might pour a little bit of oat milk in it.

Scott: But I wanted to have it raw, so to speak, so that I could try to describe the taste.

Scott: But apparently I failed anyway, so I might as well have just dumped a whole hell of a lot of oat milk in.

Peter: Raw, like your raw milk?

Scott: Raw, yep.

Scott: I’m into the raw milk, actually, no.

Peter: Yeah, I don’t know.

Peter: So I got a book.

Peter: My personal trainer recommended I get this book on nutrition, because, you know, I’ve gone through various levels of activity and inactivity.

Peter: And I’m trying, although overall, despite all of my joint issues, I consider myself in fairly good shape.

Peter: I say good shape.

Peter: I used to say very good shape, bordering on excellent.

Peter: But I say I consider myself good to very good physical shape right now.

Peter: But I have had a spare tire, you know, a little bit of belly flab for decades.

Peter: I was really chunky as a kid, right?

Peter: I weighed when I was 13, 15.

Peter: When I was about 15, I weighed more than I do now.

Peter: And I was a lot shorter.

Peter: Like I weighed 30 pounds more than I do now.

Scott: And you were three feet tall.

Peter: And I was three feet tall.

Peter: Exactly.

Peter: My all time high, I was 212 pounds.

Peter: That was when I came back from my trip to Japan.

Peter: So, you know, which was very low activity.

Peter: I mean, there was walking, but lots of eating, lots and lots of food, lots of drink, etc.

Peter: So, you know, even when I got into significantly better shape and was very active, never could lose that little bit of flab.

Peter: Even when I ran my marathon, my first marathon, I was in like the 140s range, but I still had belly flab, you know, because I wasn’t putting on muscle to compensate.

Peter: So I was skin, bones and flab at that point.

Peter: So he recommended this book.

Peter: And a lot of it is, you know, consistent with diet advice that I’ve seen.

Peter: But some of it also, you know, they make a big deal of eating whole foods, organic foods, not stuff treated with pesticides.

Peter: Don’t use the microwave oven.

Peter: Vary how you eat things.

Peter: So sometimes raw, sometimes stewed, sometimes fermented, sometimes, you know, stir-fried, et cetera, et cetera.

Peter: So I’m reading that.

Peter: Well, one of the things they recommend is drinking raw milk.

Peter: And I’m like, hmm.

Peter: Now, the thing is though, is you can buy yogurt, I believe, that’s made from raw milk.

Peter: But generally, most states…

Scott: But would you?

Peter: Well, I think I do.

Peter: I think the organic yogurt that I buy is made from raw.

Peter: Raw cultures, I think it’s said.

Peter: But generally, raw milk is, I mean, it’s even banned in many states.

Peter: So, the fact that RFK Jr.

Peter: is a big proponent of raw milk gives me pause.

Peter: And, you know, like just right there, I’m a little…

Peter: I wouldn’t say I’m triggered, but my hackles are up based on that.

Peter: So I’m a little…

Peter: I gotta think about that one.

Peter: Not sure.

Peter: Verdict’s out.

Peter: I need to do a little research, like legit.

Peter: Do a little research.

Scott: I think the problem with non-pasteurized milk is the various diseases that cows have right now.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Bingo.

Scott: And it’s not a religious thing.

Scott: It’s just the fact that right now, there are diseases that come through dairy that you don’t want, and you’re not going to know if you’re going to get them or not until you get them.

Peter: Yep.

Scott: Bingo.

Peter: So yeah.

Peter: So like I said, it’s concerning.

Scott: What is it about pasteurization that bothers people so much anyway?

Peter: It destroys the good enzymes.

Peter: It kills all the good enzymes that are in there that can be helpful for…

Peter: You know, they talk about the enzymes that are in yogurt, that are, you know, like the acidophilus and bifidus, I guess.

Peter: I don’t know if those are the exact ones I’m thinking of.

Peter: But there’s good stuff in the raw milk that gets killed by pasteurization or when you cook it.

Scott: Sure.

Scott: Sure.

Scott: But it also kills pathogens and it kills the enzymes that allow it to spoil rapidly as well.

Scott: That’s the point of pasteurization.

Peter: I understand.

Peter: But your question was, what is it about raw milk?

Peter: I’m telling you, I just told you that’s the argument for the good stuff.

Scott: Right.

Scott: OK.

Scott: You can argue.

Scott: That’s like saying, hey, our nuclear reactor has a leak.

Peter: You said it again.

Peter: You just said library.

Scott: OK.

Scott: So how do you say it?

Peter: Nuclear, just like it’s spelled.

Peter: N-U space clear.

Peter: Nuclear.

Peter: Nuclear.

Scott: Yeah, nuclear, not nuclear.

Scott: Nuclear.

Peter: Yeah, but you said nuclear.

Scott: OK.

Scott: That’s wrong.

Scott: I understand that.

Scott: But nuclear is also wrong.

Scott: Nuclear is correct, not nuclear.

Scott: Nuclear.

Peter: Yeah, but I said it with the emphasis on clear to make sure I put the emphasis on the syllable, which you were getting wrong.

Scott: All right.

Scott: So anyway, the nuclear.

Scott: Let’s say you have a nuclear plant.

Scott: I did a combination there.

Peter: That was good.

Scott: Nuclear.

Scott: Yeah, that was a hybrid.

Scott: Let’s say you have one of those plants and you’re dumping out radioactivity, but you also have some good stuff mixed in.

Scott: And if you keep the plant from leaking the radioactivity, the good stuff also doesn’t come out.

Scott: Now you’re arguing for the good stuff saying, hey, people who stop the leaks are bad because we’re not getting that good stuff out of the radioactive plant.

Scott: No, but you’re also not getting the radioactive stuff.

Peter: Right.

Peter: So similarly, like in this, in the same book, they talk about alcohol and they essentially said any amount of alcohol overall is going to be bad for you.

Scott: And I know people, I think that, yeah.

Peter: But you know, and I’ve had this discussion.

Peter: People are like, oh, but there’s a study that’s shown, there’s this and that.

Peter: I’m like, yes, look.

Peter: No, I get it.

Peter: Listen, I understand.

Peter: There is some benefit for drinking alcohol.

Peter: I drink a glass of red wine, I sleep much better.

Peter: That’s if I go for a run and I have some carbs and I drink a glass of beer in late afternoon, earlier evening, I sleep much better.

Peter: That’s a benefit.

Peter: And the drink does more damage to me than I’m getting the benefit from.

Peter: Studies have been shown, and meta studies was conducted about 10 years ago or so, eight to 10 years ago, and it showed that no matter what you do, any amount of alcohol, there’s always more negative outcome than good benefit.

Peter: And the question is, is that also true with raw milk?

Peter: And there, I’m not really sure yet, but I’m leaning towards probably just because RFK.

Scott: Well, it’s not just because of RFK, it’s because right now you don’t want to get bird flu and all kinds of other stuff that are going through cows.

Peter: That’s another very good point.

Scott: So the thing is, though, you were giving a subjective example of, if I drink alcohol, I sleep better.

Scott: But what they were saying was, but there’s been studies that’s shown that alcohol is good for you.

Scott: Those are two different things.

Scott: I wouldn’t necessarily say, your subjective argument proves that there are some benefits.

Scott: But what I would say is, they are absolutely correct that this always happens with all kinds of food.

Scott: This is good for you.

Scott: Now it’s bad for you.

Scott: Now it’s good for you.

Scott: Now it’s bad for you.

Scott: And so I understand why people quit listening.

Scott: I totally do.

Scott: And it also doesn’t help the people who don’t want to believe in science anyway, because they’re just like, well, scientists don’t know anything.

Scott: They’re just making it up.

Peter: Bingo.

Peter: Yes.

Peter: The thing is, like, you know, two things can be true at the same time, right?

Peter: And so there you go.

Scott: And also science is a process, and sometimes people get it wrong, just like we get everything that we do wrong.

Scott: Look at the planet around you.

Peter: I recall I listened to a podcast interview a few years ago and Bernie Clark, who’s a big name within the yin yoga community, cited an example people were talking about, like some scientific studies were wrong.

Peter: They showed this and it turned out not to be true.

Peter: So people’s response was, well, science sucks.

Peter: So I was, no, the answer is not science sucks.

Peter: The answer is you need better science.

Scott: Well, the answer is you have to do your science correctly.

Scott: You have to make sure you understand what is being proven, what is being disproven.

Scott: And sometimes you just keep learning stuff.

Scott: Like you keep building on what you know, or sometimes you find out more information, you find out what you thought was true was wrong.

Peter: Yep.

Scott: And sometimes you just have to be lucky.

Scott: Like you have to be lucky to replicate things in the way that gives you the correct information.

Scott: So it’s not that science is a sham.

Scott: It’s just that people are involved and people don’t always come to the right conclusions.

Peter: People, yes.

Peter: So one of the things I did this morning was, I don’t know, does this count as science or is it just troubleshooting in general?

Scott: Troubleshooting.

Scott: I always say troubleshooting.

Peter: Troubleshooting, yes.

Peter: So yesterday, my cleaners came to the house and like on Tuesdays, like they normally do.

Peter: When they do, that’s usually a good key for me to clean my coffee grinder out because it’s going to make extra mess and they’re going to spend extra time, you know, they do an extra good job cleaning up the counter that I don’t even.

Scott: Oh, I see.

Peter: I don’t know how they do it.

Peter: Like I’ll wipe stuff down and clean it up really well.

Peter: It always looks so much better after they come in to it.

Peter: Right.

Peter: One of these days, I need to just observe and watch.

Scott: I thought you wanted to be standing there cleaning your coffee grinder while they were cleaning the rest of the house.

Scott: So you could be like, look, I’m cleaning stuff too.

Scott: I’m not as lazy as you think I am.

Peter: I do often take the trash out before they come or at least, you know, I do.

Peter: I clean before they clean.

Scott: Right.

Peter: I do a little bit.

Peter: But anyway, so I was cleaning.

Peter: I cleaned out my coffee grinder.

Peter: Same way I normally do, you know, disassemble, unplug it, disassemble it.

Scott: Must not disassemble.

Peter: Wrench out anything that’s left, you know, and brew a coffee, a cup with whatever, you know, remains come into the catch bucket.

Peter: But this morning, and I tried to record it, and by the time I got the my camera up, it had stopped making the noise, my grinder started making a grinding noise.

Peter: Now I know what you’re saying.

Peter: It’s a grinder.

Peter: It’s supposed to make grinding noises.

Scott: It is exactly what I was going to say.

Scott: I think it’s just doing its job.

Peter: Right.

Peter: But what happened was it was making a bad grinding noise.

Peter: So it was making a grinding noise like the burrs were grinding against each other, like metal on metal type grinding.

Peter: It didn’t sound like metal on beans grinding.

Peter: So, we’re going to start off with a little bit of a cylindrical thing with a little handle.

Peter: You pull the little handle up, and then you use that as a lever to spin it.

Scott: Half the burrs, yeah.

Peter: That was harder to get out.

Peter: That was really jammed in there, so I think something somehow that got jammed in incorrectly.

Peter: So I took it apart, cleaned it all out again, put it all back together.

Peter: It made the wrong grinding noise one time, one more time, and then it’s worked normally since, and I made like four cups of coffee today.

Peter: So hopefully that was just a one-off, but it was a little disconcerting.

Peter: So it’s like in the spirit of right now how things are, like I definitely have more of a circle the wagons approach.

Peter: I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get one of these grinders again.

Peter: What happens?

Peter: The whole tariffs and stuff like that, which is totally an irrational fear, but maybe it’s not.

Peter: I don’t know.

Scott: Between you and I, I’m starting to think that the fellow Opus is not the most robust grinder in the universe.

Peter: I didn’t buy it because it was the most robust grinder.

Peter: I bought it because it was the quietest one that Consumer Reports had reviewed.

Scott: No, I agree, and you can’t know if it’s robust or not until you’ve had it for a while, but I think what we’re discovering is there are other grinders that we don’t want to use as much, but that will last a lot longer.

Peter: I had my…

Peter: What was it?

Peter: They were either Little Kitchen Aid or Mr.

Peter: Coffee Grinders, I forget.

Peter: But I had those for about 15 years, and never had a problem with…

Peter: Like one of them I had a problem with.

Peter: The only thing really where I had problems with them was the catch bucket, which is just made of clear plastic.

Peter: They would start to fracture and come apart.

Peter: And you know, like just like they get banged and knocked on things, they would start to break over time.

Scott: That’s a no catch bucket.

Peter: No, it would still catch.

Peter: It was still catch, but it was a fractured catch.

Peter: So I just ended up like putting gorilla tape over the pieces where it was coming apart.

Peter: So that solution worked for another like eight years.

Peter: So there you go.

Scott: Here, I have a live recording of Peter with his coffee grinder.

Peter: Why does it say paper jam when there is no paper jam?

Peter: So that description that I gave you of that problem, my grinder is making a grinding noise, right?

Peter: That leads us into my next topic, which was what are some of your favorite problems descriptions?

Peter: And what you said, I don’t even know what this means.

Peter: So I guess this one.

Peter: Now, my IT background to date anyway, has had included a lot more end user support than yours has, right?

Peter: Well, that might change, you know, you’re doing that kind of stuff now, so that you might overtake me, right?

Scott: For that part of it, yes.

Scott: But you have to remember that I worked in semiconductors for 31 years.

Scott: And one of the jobs that I did was having people tell me about the problems they were having, and I would go and fix those problems.

Peter: Okay, so that’s what I’m talking about.

Peter: What are the worst, least helpful problem reports that you have gotten?

Peter: Now, I’m not talking about someone who emails, like every the subject line of every email is help exclamation point, or the subject line of the email is their name, because they don’t apparently know that from field includes your name, like by default, you know, or a subject line of hello.

Peter: I used to be really militant about that.

Peter: Like they had one client who would like send an email, and the subject was always hello.

Peter: I’m like, oh, she’s just saying hi.

Peter: Okay, delete and move on.

Peter: Right.

Peter: But I wanted to ask you, what is one of your all-time favorite, like this was the stupidest way to ask for help, or the stupidest example that you could give?

Peter: So one of them, this was not me personally.

Peter: This is a friend, another friend named Scott, incidentally, who also had a job.

Scott: Not the brightest?

Scott: Oh, had a job, okay.

Peter: At another one of my alma mater’s.

Peter: His problem, the favorite problem reports, one time was someone, the report was, I can’t get my mail.

Peter: Meaning their email, right?

Peter: That was the problem report, I can’t get my mail.

Peter: And so being a diligent little sys admin, he looks at the mail server, mail server’s working fine.

Peter: Checks out their account, nope, they’re fine.

Peter: Email over quota, nope, that’s fine.

Peter: Nothing bouncing, run some diagnostics, everything’s going fine.

Peter: Come to find out when he goes to the person’s office, their computer won’t boot up.

Scott: Okay.

Peter: Now, well, in their mind, I need to get my email.

Peter: Oh, I can’t do that.

Peter: Hey, you, come here and fix this problem.

Peter: I can’t get my mail.

Scott: That’s a person that doesn’t use their computer enough.

Scott: If they literally come up with a problem statement of, I can’t get my email when their whole computer won’t power on, there’s no electron flow happening whatsoever.

Scott: And their problem statement is, I can’t get my email.

Scott: That’s true.

Peter: That’s an example of what I’m saying.

Peter: So do you have any stories like that?

Scott: Well, a couple of them leap to mind.

Scott: One is the time a piece of test equipment broke, and the person walked up to me and said, it’s broken.

Scott: And then they turned around and walked off the floor and left.

Scott: And I said, okay, that’s pretty general.

Scott: I guess I’ll go.

Peter: Just, it’s broken.

Peter: That’s it.

Peter: Just, it’s broken.

Scott: Not even a symptom, not even what they were doing at the time.

Scott: Not anything about the problem.

Scott: Just, it’s broken and walked away.

Scott: That was a person that wanted to go on break for a long time, I could tell.

Scott: Then there was a guy who was operating a packaged unit tester.

Scott: And it was a great big mechanical device with liquid nitrogen in there to cool everything down.

Scott: And because of the liquid nitrogen, sometimes stuff would stop working correctly.

Scott: It would just get jammed or something like that.

Scott: It was a very brute force way to control temperature.

Scott: Now we have much better ways of controlling a temperature just on the device without filling an entire chamber full of ice, you know?

Scott: And so anyway, it would jam up.

Scott: And so he calls my friend John up.

Scott: And John was one of the nicest, most patient guys.

Scott: But he kind of had it with this guy, this guy Joseph.

Scott: And this guy Joseph, English wasn’t his native language, so you can forgive him to some degree.

Scott: You should anyway, because he did the best he could.

Scott: But he just didn’t have any common sense.

Scott: So he calls him up and he goes, John, John, I keep eating retri, and I keep hearing a grinding noise, and I don’t know what to do.

Scott: And John goes, Joseph, it’s not retri, it’s retry.

Scott: And if you touch it again, I’m going to bonk you on the head.

Peter: Was this a coffee grinder they were trying?

Peter: Is that trouble with you?

Scott: No, no, there was no coffee.

Peter: Because I heard a grinding noise.

Scott: I know.

Scott: This was worse.

Peter: It’s broken.

Scott: It was, stop doing that.

Scott: Stop grinding the insides of this machine to bits.

Scott: Nothing should ever be grinding inside that machine, ever.

Scott: It doesn’t, it’s not even, grinder’s not even in the name, surprisingly.

Peter: Easy load letter.

Scott: Yeah, I don’t know.

Scott: Other than that, it’s usually just things like generic problem statements like, I got an error warning about an application that’s not supposed to be there, or stuff like that.

Peter: One of my favorites, and by favorites I mean like I was ready to blow my stack.

Peter: It was back when I was working at the hospital, and I got an email, a ticket report saying, there’s some security problem or some security is blocking us from something.

Peter: And I didn’t know some security thing is blocking.

Peter: Okay, what does that mean?

Peter: I don’t know.

Scott: Sounds like it’s doing its job.

Peter: But yeah, that was right up there with it’s broken.

Peter: It’s like something’s wrong, something’s wrong.

Peter: I’m like, what are you seeing?

Peter: What application is this?

Peter: What computer is it happening?

Peter: What, you know, who is having the problem, et cetera?

Peter: All these other things, right?

Peter: And so the rep who had requested it sends back a screenshot, and it’s just like a little yellow, like a little yellow thought bubble, like a little thought balloon, pop up somewhere, tiny little thing.

Peter: And I don’t remember what it said.

Peter: It was like, you know, your application has been blocked or something like that.

Peter: And I was like, what is…

Peter: I’ve never seen…

Peter: I don’t know what this is, right?

Peter: Got a little more detail.

Peter: I don’t remember how many emails back and forth, because, you know, I was trying to, like, can we do a screen share or something?

Peter: Come to find out, this was Internet Explorer, right?

Peter: So this was a little while ago.

Peter: It was not Edge, right?

Peter: Internet Explorer had blocked, like, an ActiveX control from running, something like that.

Peter: And within the whole IE window, right?

Peter: So he’s got his Windows desktop, and then there’s an IE window in there.

Peter: And then down in the bottom right-hand corner, there’s this little tiny little pop-up.

Peter: And he just decided to crop that out and just send me that little bit.

Peter: I like, I have no idea.

Peter: That’s not any, that’s not CrowdStrike, that’s not Silence, that’s not Sophos, that’s not McAfee, that’s not, you know, that’s no security software I’ve ever seen, right?

Peter: And I hadn’t used an Internet Explorer for some time, so I didn’t recognize that pop-up.

Peter: So I sent back a picture to him.

Peter: I was like, okay, you know, you got to step back and help me see the big picture, right?

Peter: Because it’s like, this is what you sent me.

Peter: And I sent him a little, you could see this like little green, maybe it’s Kanji, maybe it’s not, you know, maybe it’s Katakana or some, some little green symbol or something.

Peter: Like this is what you sent me.

Peter: This is the whole picture and what it was was a poster for The Matrix.

Peter: All right.

Peter: I was like, dude, work with me.

Peter: How the blank am I supposed to understand?

Peter: And I tried for the life of me to drill this in on a regular basis to my team.

Peter: It’s like, when you’re communicating, when you’re sending an email, or when you’re talking to someone on the phone or in person or something, look at things from the recipient’s point of view.

Peter: Right?

Peter: Say things.

Peter: Don’t just mash hands on keyboard so that the goal is to be able to hit send and walk away as quickly as possible.

Peter: Your goal is to convey and communicate something.

Peter: Right?

Peter: And so, like, if somebody needed to search for something, right?

Peter: I would tell them, you can send a screenshot, but I want you to copy and paste the text.

Peter: Don’t make the person on the other side have to transcribe your images that you’re sending them, right?

Peter: So if you’re asking a sysadmin, I need you to search the logs for this 64-bit GUID.

Peter: If you send them a screenshot and tell them to, I will punch you.

Peter: It’s like, do not do that.

Scott: By the way, now it’s even better, because with modern tools, you can easily OCR text out of things.

Scott: So if you need to OCR the text out of it and send them that or vice versa, have them do that.

Peter: But again, the sender should do that.

Peter: Do that for the recipient.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: Absolutely.

Peter: Be a considerate of their time and their effort.

Peter: And also lower the chance that they make a mistake, because maybe they will transcribe it wrong and say, nope, no sign of that.

Peter: We’re good.

Scott: No, that’s what I’m saying.

Scott: The sender can, instead of sending a screenshot, if what they want the person to do is use the text, they can OCR and get the text themselves.

Scott: If for some reason, they can’t just copy and paste the text originally.

Peter: Now that brings us to another topic.

Peter: Black versus teams.

Scott: Oh no.

Peter: Two very powerful, very powerful communications mediums.

Scott: What do you mean by powerful?

Scott: Do you mean powerful in the sense of being able to cause people to despair and kill themselves?

Peter: I was thinking just in the context of market dominance.

Scott: Oh, okay.

Scott: Okay, okay.

Peter: Yeah.

Scott: Not in terms of results.

Peter: Who gets measured by results, Scott?

Peter: Come on.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: So powerful is in activities, not results.

Peter: Right.

Peter: Exactly.

Peter: We’re talking gross revenues, not net profits here.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Oh man.

Peter: So we have both used Slack and we have both used Teams.

Scott: We have.

Peter: Right.

Peter: And previous engagement, we used Slack.

Peter: Most of my current engagements, we used Teams.

Peter: I think you could say the same.

Peter: Did you use Slack at your previous engagement?

Scott: No.

Scott: No.

Scott: And that’s why I always was like, why do big company, I can see tiny little companies using Slack.

Scott: I could not see any place like Intel using Slack.

Scott: It just would be unmanageable, I guess.

Scott: It’s not integrated enough.

Scott: Like if you’re already a Microsoft place, if you’re already using Outlook, if you’re already using most of the Microsoft apps, you might as well just use Teams because it’s going to integrate with everything.

Scott: And you may not enjoy the experience, but guess what?

Scott: If you’re only using Microsoft stuff, you’re not there to enjoy your experience anyway.

Scott: You might as well just use something that integrates.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: Well, I mean, there are integrations available for Slack, but a lot of them cost money.

Scott: Yeah, and there’s no way they integrate with one.

Scott: It’s just not the same.

Peter: Yeah.

Peter: No, I agree.

Peter: But what I’ve seen, and I think you’ve seen this too, is like…

Peter: So at one of my places where we use Teams all the time, 90%, 99% of the time, it’s chats.

Peter: It’s all chats.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: No one’s using…

Peter: Oddly enough, no one’s using Teams in Teams, which I think is kind of funny.

Peter: But it’s just…

Peter: I understand it’s a little hard to navigate, and if you don’t know your way around, it’s weird.

Peter: And I know, you know, I on-boarded a lot of people onto Slack, and definitely the learning curve to be effective with Teams is higher than it is with Slack.

Peter: But if all you’re gonna do is make a chat, either a direct chat to someone or a group chat with somebody, and just use that for everything in perpetuity, Teams is just as functional as Slack.

Scott: Right.

Scott: And I will say, I have never used a paid Slack account or been a member of a paid Slack account.

Scott: So threads are not, threads are ephemeral.

Scott: Eventually you start losing stuff.

Scott: Whereas with Teams, every time I’ve used Teams, well, there’s only one way to use Teams, and that’s to pay for it.

Scott: And so the chats will last basically forever.

Scott: I mean, I’m sure there’s some settings somewhere that manage how much, yeah.

Peter: You can configure retention policies on that?

Scott: But basically, anytime you search for something, you’re going to find it.

Peter: Right.

Peter: And that’s the trick, though, is like, you know, searching for things can be, you know, hard.

Peter: So, you know, it’s just, it took a little bit of time for me to get acclimated to it.

Peter: But what we would use to do, what we would do with Slack is, you know, we would just make different channels for each topic.

Scott: Right.

Peter: But there wasn’t the concept of different teams.

Peter: Different teams often would have their own Slack accounts.

Scott: Yes.

Scott: Right.

Peter: So, like the network engineering, they had their own Slack and we could be invited into it.

Peter: Right.

Peter: And the Windows Admin team, they had their own Slack and the security team had their own Slack.

Peter: And we could crosstalk, you know, and share channels and stuff like that.

Peter: A little different with Microsoft, the idea is you make a team and these are the people who are either like in this department or working on this project.

Peter: And from within there, you make your posts and the posts, I think, are analogous to Slack threads.

Scott: Right.

Peter: Or they are other Slack channels.

Peter: Right?

Peter: So like I could make a thing like, oh, this company is going on undergoing, or, you know, we’re doing incident response for this company who’s having a ransomware incident.

Peter: So we say company name ransomware incident.

Peter: That could be in Slack.

Peter: We would do that.

Peter: We would make a new channel just for that thing.

Peter: And then from within that, that might have threads.

Peter: So I can see how people coming from Slack, myself included, could be a little confused as to like, what’s the right way to do things?

Scott: Yeah, because in teams, that would be, you would have a team and then you would start a new post for that particular thing and then people would reply to that post.

Scott: And, you know, I think the way we used it at Intel, now that I think about it, here’s what we actually did do.

Scott: We did have teams, each group had their own team, but mostly what they used them for was organizing files together, keeping stuff together like that.

Peter: Yes.

Scott: And then there would either be a team meeting that the entire team would have, and then people would just use the chat from that forever.

Peter: Yes.

Scott: Or people would start a group chat somehow with all members of the team, but it wouldn’t be posts within the team, it would just be chats.

Scott: And that was how it worked, and that’s probably, you know.

Scott: So basically at Intel, we would have a chat of all the people that were within a specific group working on certain things, but in that chat could be anything about…

Peter: Yeah, and that’s exactly…

Scott: Not segregated by, like, not this issue, separate chat for this issue, no, it was all within that same chat, all topics in the same chat.

Scott: And the chat was more an organization of people.

Peter: Right, which we generally do, but then what we also will do is we will spin up separate purpose-built chats, because sometimes we need all those people plus an external project manager.

Peter: But that project manager, once that project is done, they’re not going to be interested in the day-to-day other stuff.

Scott: Yeah, right, right, right, right.

Peter: So, you know, again, that becomes, you know, you could say…

Peter: I don’t know, I think that…

Peter: I don’t want to say it’s a distinction without a difference, but it’s like, you could use chats and functionally accomplish all the same stuff as Teams.

Peter: With a couple of exceptions, though, you and I were looking at power apps and workflow automations.

Scott: Mm-hmm, right.

Peter: And those only wanted to be able to, like, post new messages to Teams.

Peter: They didn’t want to be able to, you know, make a new chat, all right?

Peter: So there’s some reasons to use Teams.

Peter: So anyway, it was just…

Peter: I just thought it was interesting.

Scott: For day-to-day, I understand why within a team, like, within a team, it makes sense to do it there, because then you can start a new post for a specific topic or a specific problem or a specific ticket that you’re working on.

Peter: Yes, I agree.

Scott: But it’s also kind of annoying in that whenever you get a message and you go back in there and look, if you want to just see it like an entire stream of messages, like you would see it in a chat, you have to click the link that says, oh, there’s more messages.

Scott: I don’t like the default view that it gives you in there.

Scott: I want to be able to have a post open and it remember that.

Scott: And when I go back into that team, I’m in that post unless I back out to look at all the posts.

Scott: You know what I mean?

Peter: Yes.

Scott: It just feels a little clunkier.

Peter: Yep.

Peter: Yeah, I agree.

Peter: But again, it’s a little hard.

Peter: And again, if you’re not using it, like if you’re an external contractor who’s brought in to join an organization who’s using teams and you’re expected to use teams just for the first time and stuff, it can be a little overwhelming.

Peter: It’s like, wait, where do I?

Peter: What the?

Peter: But that gets me into another topic, which we’re going to not do.

Peter: We’ll put a pin on that, on the idea of design culture or culture and design.

Peter: Because when I say like, it’s so freaking convoluted and how are you supposed to find and figure out how these teams thing is supposed to work?

Peter: Like, well, of course, that’s typical Microsoft.

Peter: It’s like it’s clunky and it’s hard to figure out and hard to, yeah, that’s Microsoft.

Scott: Yeah, but it’s also Google.

Scott: It’s also, what are those payment people that we can’t stand?

Scott: Who’s the one?

Peter: Intuit.

Scott: Oh, them too, but like, what’s the one that eBay uses?

Scott: PayPal, PayPal.

Scott: It’s all kinds of services that are clunky and unintuitive, but that alone doesn’t give you a sense of, oh, this is Microsoft.

Scott: It’s more than just that.

Scott: It’s clunky and weird in a specific way.

Peter: Microsoft has a specific level and a specific brand of clunkiness.

Scott: Yeah, a specific brand of what the hell.

Peter: Exactly.

Peter: But anyway, we should have that conversation, but we’ll see.

Peter: I reached out to a friend to see a friend who works in user experience and stuff to see if he might want to be a guest on the show to give his impressions of stuff like that.

Scott: If you can get someone that works at Atlassian, I would love to put their feet to the fire.

Scott: Have you ever used Jira?

Peter: I have.

Scott: First of all, was Jira unbearably slow for you most of the time, or maybe that was just us at Intel?

Peter: It was.

Scott: Okay, so it’s not just us at Intel.

Scott: I hate Jira with a passion.

Scott: It is such a pain in the ass, and you can’t link tickets or entries, problem tickets.

Peter: I don’t even remember.

Peter: Is Jira, is that even a self-hosted option, or is it always a cloud service?

Scott: I’m not sure, to be honest.

Peter: I think it’s just cloud, right?

Scott: Maybe.

Peter: Yeah, I’ve only used it as a cloud service, and it was always slower than molasses.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott: But you can’t link tickets.

Scott: Like, I was like, hey, if we have duplicates, how do I link this to this other one?

Scott: And they’re like, you can’t.

Scott: You just have to put a comment saying that they’re…

Scott: And I’m like, this is…

Scott: What is this?

Scott: I mean, even the open source ticketing software that costs zero dollars and which has its own problems, but it allows me to do that super easily.

Scott: So what year are we in?

Peter: And again, though, even then, it is relatively easy to use the links feature in lots of feature, but there are plenty of people who would just say, like, see ticket 12345.

Scott: Right.

Peter: But it would be so cool if I could just say, like, see hashtag ticket 12345, and it would, boom, automatically take me to ticket 12345.

Peter: What a novel idea.

Peter: Anyway.

Scott: Anyway, yeah, design, it’s difficult.

Scott: I will say this, I will say, it doesn’t really matter if you’re making a web app or a native app.

Scott: You can design really terrible UI, but I will say, I know that a lot of people want everything to be on the web, and I will say that the web is good for a lot more than, you know, people who want everything to be an app.

Scott: I think it is, but I also do think that it can be harder on the web to design a really good interface that’s smooth if you’re not careful.

Scott: It’s easier, in my opinion, to design.

Scott: Can I even say that?

Scott: I’ve used a lot of Microsoft apps.

Scott: I think that a lot of web apps have bad design, and the people who designed them don’t think so, because they made a web app.

Scott: Whereas they would look at something similar in a native app and they would go, well, that’s weird and clunky.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: So there’s a mentality there too.

Scott: I guess it goes back to the same thing as the problem statements that we were talking about.

Scott: When you’re the person looking at a specific thing and you know what the context is, you can’t imagine other people not knowing the context.

Scott: It’s the same with these people.

Peter: Right.

Peter: It’s obvious.

Scott: Right.

Scott: And it’s the same with people that make software.

Scott: By the way, going back to our terrible problem statement topic, I love my dad dearly, but here’s what he’ll do.

Scott: And I’m glad they’re screen sharing now so I can see this stuff and it works so well.

Scott: But what he would do is say, okay, here’s my problem I’m having and I’m like, okay, try this and now what’s it tell you?

Scott: And he goes, it says, and he just drifts off.

Scott: He starts to read me something and then he just goes, and then he stops talking.

Scott: I’m like, dad, I’m not asking you to try and understand it.

Scott: I’m asking you to tell me what it says in front of you.

Scott: Don’t try to interpret it.

Scott: Don’t try to understand it.

Scott: Don’t think about why is it showing me this.

Scott: You don’t care.

Scott: But I need to know all of the words, not just it says.

Peter: I mean, you know, my dad was dealing with dementia and, you know, real, like a lot of stuff.

Peter: And so the last several years, troubleshooting the computer when he was in Vermont and I was in Massachusetts was infuriating.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: And, you know, like click on this.

Peter: And, you know, I would try to watch him.

Peter: And I would get really frustrated because he literally could not focus, you know, and he would be and this is he was still running an eBay business and selling the things and collecting payments and stuff.

Peter: And he’s having trouble navigating the eBay interface.

Peter: I have trouble navigating the eBay interface, right?

Scott: I think it doesn’t people people who are at their sharpest have trouble navigating the eBay interface.

Peter: But, you know, like just looking at my team’s window, right?

Peter: I look at the menu, I see dial pad, hold, transfer, chat, people view apps, right?

Peter: If I had asked him, it’s like, okay, on your screen, click on chat.

Scott: No.

Peter: I’m like, you know, I’m like, what do you mean?

Peter: No.

Peter: Where do I click?

Peter: I’m like, it’s right at the top of your screen, right in the middle.

Peter: And he was like, where?

Peter: And I would watch him just move the cursor randomly all over the place, just like in random, in random patterns.

Peter: And I can’t find him like that.

Peter: Look, I said, look, I don’t know how you were taught to read in Greece, but here in America, we start at the top and work our way left to right.

Peter: And then we move back to the left and keep going and channeling my mom.

Peter: I realized that after a while, that’s where I got my sarcasm from.

Peter: It’s totally from my mom.

Peter: And but I would tell him, you’d be like, okay, dial pad, hold, transfer.

Peter: No, I don’t see it.

Peter: Like it’s literally the next button.

Peter: Literally the next button.

Peter: Oh, there it is.

Peter: You know, so I dealt with that a lot and it hurt.

Peter: It was really bad.

Scott: Maybe your dad thought it was one of those invisible message things where you have to spray the stuff over it to get the message to appear.

Peter: Scratch it, scratch the screen to reveal.

Scott: Yeah.

Scott: Oh, man.

Peter: All right.

Peter: So last bit I had was I got an offer in the mail from my health insurance for a free SmartScale.

Peter: It’s like, it says, if you’re at risk of type 2 diabetes, we could, you know, you could get this free scale.

Peter: So I was wondering what goes through your mind when I say, hey, someone wants to, like my insurance company, not just some rando, these are people who are already collecting a good bit of my money and also giving me back quite a lot because this year, you know, one surgery, boom, I’ve maxed that out pretty quick.

Peter: What do you think when someone like your insurance company offers you a free scale?

Scott: I think it’s going to be a crappy scale.

Scott: I think, is it based on actual data about me?

Scott: Like, I need to be watching my weight because of diabetes or whatever.

Scott: Or are they just giving scales to everybody, but then they’re denying people’s valid claims because they’ve spent all their money on free scales?

Scott: You know, I don’t know.

Peter: Well, that’s okay.

Peter: So you were like adjacent to what I was thinking all the time, but you didn’t quite get it.

Peter: My thought is they just want all my biometrics.

Scott: That’s true.

Peter: And they want to be able to say like, oh yeah.

Scott: They want to be able to deny it.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Hey, you’re not as good shape as we thought you were.

Scott: And you know, you know, Peter, if you if you weren’t three feet tall and 300 pounds, we might honor that claim, but we’re not going to because it sounds like you’re not even trying.

Peter: I was 196 pounds, Scott, not 300 pounds.

Scott: Okay.

Scott: Okay.

Peter: That’s my point is like, and that’s, you know, there have been other insurance companies that was a progressive, I think they said, we’ll give you a discount if you link your vehicles telemetry to us, you know, on your auto insurance and stuff.

Scott: That’s a bad idea.

Peter: But you say, you say, oh my God, but that’s coming, dude, that’s going to be a standard.

Scott: I know.

Scott: And vehicle makers are already sending way more data than we there.

Scott: Yeah.

Peter: Bingo.

Peter: But we’re seeing in cybersecurity, right?

Peter: Cyber insurance.

Peter: They want to say, okay, well, you say that you have EDR, anti-virus deployed full, you know, show it to us, right?

Peter: It’s not going to be enough to just attest anymore.

Peter: They’re going to want to say, prove it.

Peter: You say you have a sprinkler system at the house.

Peter: Well, we want to just send an inspector just to verify.

Scott: So do you think cybersecurity insurance would be looking at things like, aha, you clicked on naughty nurse.com.

Scott: We’re not going to pay for this ransomware.

Peter: I could absolutely see them saying, you said you had web filtering software and it didn’t stop you, you know, or it wasn’t properly configured to stop you from going to naughty nurse.com.

Peter: I could absolutely see that.

Scott: I know the real problem is that there’s naughty nurses to begin with.

Scott: The Republicans have the crap clamped down on that.

Peter: Oh, God.

Scott: All right.

Peter: Well, anyway, that’s all I had for topics today.

Peter: So what do you got?

Peter: Anything else?

Scott: I think the main takeaway for me is the fellow Opus is not built to last forever.

Scott: But it’s a nice grinder while it does last.

Peter: Well, it’s got a two-year warranty, right?

Scott: Yeah, it does.

Peter: So…

Scott: And here’s the thing, though.

Scott: Here’s what I’m wondering.

Scott: So as you know, and as I’ve talked about on this podcast, I had to send mine back.

Scott: You rescued me right in the next time.

Scott: You reminded me about the warranty.

Peter: I was going to say, I’m the one who told you to send it back.

Scott: Yeah, you’re like, hey, send it back.

Scott: And I did.

Scott: And they gave me another one.

Scott: Now, what I’m wondering is, how often can I do that?

Scott: Let’s say this one breaks.

Scott: Obviously, I’m not going to break my grinder just for the thrill of sending it back.

Scott: But let’s say this…

Peter: I think you owe it to our podcast listeners to just break your grinder and send it back.

Scott: All right.

Scott: I’ve got some tree.

Scott: I’ve got the remains of my Christmas tree.

Scott: It’s really just part of the stump, or the main…

Scott: What do you call the main part of the tree?

Scott: Without any branches, just the…

Scott: The trunk.

Scott: Yeah, well, okay, it’s a trunk.

Peter: The tree trunk.

Scott: It’s only like circumference of six inches or something like that, or diameter.

Scott: But anyway, I’ll just feed that through the coffee grinder, and then that’ll break it for sure, and then I’ll send it back.

Scott: But I guess what I’m wondering is, do I get a reset every time I send one back?

Scott: Like, I could just keep…

Peter: I don’t think you get a new two years.

Peter: Normally, the way things work is you get two years from the purchase date.

Scott: Oh.

Peter: That’s normally how warranties work.

Scott: Oh, so you don’t think I’ve got another two years running right now?

Peter: No, no.

Scott: Well, that’s disappointing, because I guarantee this one’s going to die within two years.

Scott: I don’t guarantee it, but I suspect it heavily.

Scott: Let’s put it that way.

Peter: But will it die within two years of the purchase date?

Scott: No, no, no, no, no, no.

Scott: That’s why I was saying I hope they reset my warranty.

Scott: With this, this is a new grinder.

Scott: It’s new.

Scott: Don’t they trust it?

Scott: Don’t they believe it?

Peter: I know.

Peter: That’s what you’re thinking, but no.

Peter: Anyway, there you go.

Peter: So if people want to get ahold of us, how can they do it, Scott?

Peter: You tell.

Peter: I can’t tell people.

Peter: I tell them every time.

Scott: Peter, they already…

Peter: No one listens to me.

Peter: No one gets ahold of us.

Peter: No one knows how to find us.

Peter: No one’s listening to us right now.

Scott: Actually, that’s not true.

Scott: I remember Donnie got ahold of us and suggested a drink that we don’t like.

Scott: Well, we don’t know if we like it or not, but it is an IPA, so we suspect we don’t like it.

Peter: We default to likely don’t like, but hey…

Scott: Yeah, most likely don’t like.

Scott: If you want to get ahold of us, you already have because you found this podcast.

Scott: However, if you actually want to be able to feed back us, we have a website called Friends with Brews.

Scott: That’s brews.com.

Scott: And on that website, there’s a wonderful search thing that you can search.

Scott: Anything you want, you might get some results, but it has all the different drinks that we’ve drunk and drank.

Scott: We’ve got thumbs up, down, sideways.

Scott: We’ve got contact information.

Scott: If you look at the Friends, I think it’s on, it’ll tell you how to get ahold of us.

Scott: And we’ve got Mastodon, we’ve got Blue Sky.

Scott: I don’t know.

Scott: We both have LinkedIn, but Peter’s not using his anymore, and I don’t want to link to mine.

Scott: I want linked out, if possible.

Scott: But yeah, go there.

Scott: And that’s it.

Scott: That’s all you have to know.

Scott: Don’t.

Scott: But all we ask is that if you enjoy this podcast, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, please.

Scott: Tell your friends.

Scott: And then push the big red button, and then.

Scott: Tell your friends.

Scott: I guess we’re supposed to push the big red button, but the listener can’t too.

Peter: I thought you were supposed to tell our friends to push the big red button?

Scott: No, I don’t trust our friends.

Scott: They’ll just push it and it won’t work, and then they’ll say, it’s broken, and then they’ll walk off.

Peter: All right, we’re done.

Scott: Tell your friends.