I today is July 21st, 2024 in a historic couple of days. We started out with massive IT outage, which we will not point fingers at, but we will comment on. Well, we can't really point fingers at because most people didn't even know the company that they could point fingers at. They didn't know they existed until Friday morning. So, real hard to point fingers when you don't even know the name of the person you're pointing at. It's true. They are sort of an important, but basically unknown company firm. I think they would have preferred that. Yeah. Now they, it was better that the people who knew them knew them and nobody else knew them. Yeah. Now other people are informed. Exactly. And just a few minutes before we started this podcast, the news, and I got this news from the Guardian in UK first, by the way, so I wasn't even sure it was true, not because I don't trust the Guardian, but because there were only people reporting that President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and we are a non-political podcast. So I won't say more than that except that it's historic and worthy of note this morning for sure. Worthy of note. Yeah. Regardless. Okay. Now, something we do a few things to say, although again, I'm not going to point fingers. And that's the CrowdStrike Microsoft outage. And you know, at first I thought, well, that's not fair in Microsoft. It's really CrowdStrike that caused a problem with the then, you know, then as the minutes and hours rolled by on Thursday night for me early Friday morning for the rest of the US is, oh, yeah, it is kind of a Microsoft only thing, isn't it? Doesn't affect the Linux and I should say CrowdStrike's endpoint sensor does work on Mac OS and Linux, but they weren't affected. And I was going to, you know, get snarky and stick on a high horse and say all kinds of snarky things. And then I read in Wall Street Journal, a unnamed Microsoft spokesman said that it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does and presumably Linux. Because of an understanding it Microsoft reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows at Microsoft gets. So again, not pointing fingers, but European Commission, hello. Well, there's going to be a lot of fingers that we can point here and I told you before the podcast started that I actually was not even aware that this was happening until about June on Friday made it through my whole morning without having any problems because the systems I was interfacing with did not have any issue, but I think I was the only person on the planet that way. Oh, oh, I have another news item for you that I put in our show notes. So you as you may know, many airlines, not all, but many large airlines, American United Delta for sure had just all kinds of problems, right? And still are having problems apparently today. I think I think I'll almost 1000 flights have been canceled today and today Sunday it started early Friday morning mainland US time late Thursday night for me Southwest air as you might have called had a huge outage all by itself earlier this year, I think was unaffected because it runs Windows 95. Yeah, it's not a fun little bit of information and also I think someone else was running Windows 3.1. It came out. Oh boy. So I mean, with these operations, I mean, three one didn't natively support networking. So you know, re one one, that's right. How it's basically an aircraft operating system that you for security reasons might not be a bad idea, but it's running three zero and three one in a job in early 1990s. And we had to go by, we had to go by network drivers, along with, you know, physical ether net hardware to get on a network like you said three one three zero three one didn't support you needed Windows 3.1 one Windows or groups, is that what it's called? Yes. Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, so I think it's just interesting to you can point fingers at a lot of places, a lot of pointing at the interconnectedness of everything. I think honestly, if you're an IT admin, this is a good opportunity to justify some extra time to auditing your dependence on cloud services and your mitigation plans. Because honestly, if you're an IT admin, you should have some way to mitigate some of these things. I mean, we're in airlines that were handwriting tickets again and say, well, you know, this was our mitigation. And we're at the tech went down. There should be some ways for things to stay up, even if they're limping along. And I've seen some businesses that were able to do that, but instead of pointing fingers deservedly at CrowdStrike, Microsoft, EU, whatever, we need to also remember that we have to own our own technology and own our own structures. Yeah. And it's beyond cloud, right? I mean, it's just even in old days when we weren't so cloud centric and we're getting updates, we had some pretty bad updates come through in various systems that, you know, if you did not take the time to do some testing before you applied the update to everybody in your enterprise, you could have gotten a lot of trouble. Yeah. So good for everyone to just use it as a reminder, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And the other amazing thing to me is that so Microsoft said, I don't have in our show notes, but I think they said something like 8.5 million out of all of the hundreds of millions of Windows systems running out there affected, which is, I think they said less than 1%. The others, and they were saying this in a positive way, the other way to look at it for me, you know, being a guy with, I'm not even a guy with a glass half full. I've got like, you know, where's the glass is, wow, less than 1% and look what it did. Yeah. So it's a wake up call, I think, with it, you know, this was, these happen. I'm glad it happened over a glitch. It didn't happen over any kind of actual malware or any kind of malicious intent or bad actor, which is how we know, but needs to, needs to remind people to change what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, as I, I used to tell people before I retired, you know, in our business or not your business, particular John, but although you've done IT stuff in your, in your career, an early part of your career, in our business, if you are in the news, it's usually a very bad thing, you know, and so my goal was to never be in the news, which I successfully navigated for my time. I very much agree on that. Stay out of the news. It, it is, it is amazing to see, I know a lot of, you know, Hawaii is a touristy destination. I, I think Alaska Airlines, which is, you know, for our region is one of the major airlines was unaffected. And I don't know about Hawaiian air, but I didn't hear about them. There are other large, and they're merging, by the way, Hawaiian air and Alaska air. I didn't hear them being in the news. So I think it was just a bigger, you know, the big three, for sure, and then Southwest was unaffected. So that was, that was pretty interesting. It was really kind of disturbing to read about people whose like open heart surgeries were owned because of this. That must have been very scary for everybody involved. So hopefully that's all settling down. Okay, you know, I, I just want to mention a couple of small things, literally small things. One, last, you know, I got my Surface Pro 11, two and a half, three weeks ago. I guess now. And it comes with a pretty nice, pretty nice stylus, it's called a Surface Slim Pen. It's kind of short, you know, it's like a carpenter pencil. And I compared it to the US I-20 stylus I have for my Android slash Chromebook systems and the Apple Pencil Pro, which is sort of a traditionally sized, you know, like a big pen or a pencil. And so I got a compatible, what's called, it's called the MPP, Microsoft Pen Protocol. So it's MPP-20 pen, hold it up here. You can see it's like quite a bit longer and I, I, it's really good. So it's MPP-20, this is MP, the Surface Slim Pen is 2.6, so it is a more modern protocol. But this is, this has 4,000, what is it, 4,096 pressure level things, which is the same as the Surface Slim Pen. It does not have an eraser function at the end, although it does have a button that can do it here. I find it much more comfortable to hold because it's not that flat carpenter's pencil kind of thing. It does have flat inside like the Apple Pencil Pro so it won't roll off, which is nice. And it's magnetic, so it actually won't charge on my Surface Pro like the Slim Pen does, but it will stick to it, you know, just as a place to store. So I've been enjoying using this a bit, hope these are a bit more, I'm trying that with one note, which you know, has some updated pen things. And the other thing is speaking of pens and pencils, even lower tech, I got this long point pencil sharpener, not a digital pencil, it's an actual, you know, for like, like, you know, like when you're a kid, like a pencil, how does this thing open up here? A dead tree type pencil. Yeah, it's got to renewable resource. Dead tree compared to sand, you know, solar con. It's got two pencil sharpeners in there, as you might see. And the reason is because it's called the long tip pencil sharpener. And so what you do is, you know, this is from my doodle a day project, oh, I sharpened everything in my excitement, but I don't care. So in for my doodle a day project, I've been actually using non-digital tools for a while. So what you do is you start off in the first sharpener here, and you get sort of the wood, you know, to a certain level, and then you put in a second to get the actual long point. And I don't know if you can actually see it, let me put it somewhere, it's pretty close there. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's pretty. It's very attractive looking point. Yes, it's very sharp, you know, so for people, and because it is long, a long point, you know, just not a sharp, short point, it's good for shading and things like that, because now you have a larger graphite edge. Anyway, I came to mind and I mentioned it because of, you know, the crowd strike Microsoft through how over the last couple of days there is, there is value and, there's value in low technology. Yeah. That's low. Well, I should say conventional technology. I'm sure the engineers who designed this have a lot of, you know, fancy digital tools to actually design the blade, which is, and the design, you know, for actually placing the pen in the hole and all of that. And even the way it empties is really quite good. So you know, I'm not saying it's low tech in its origin, but it is non-digital, there's no power needed, you don't have to plug it into anything. It's kind of refreshing. It's mark safe from crowd strike. Yeah. And you know, it'll pretty much always work, you know, and as I expect, we're well into July now and it was, we've had a couple of major power outages in our neck of the woods, including one that lasted a couple of days for some folks down near downtown Honolulu. So this is, you know, of interest in the technology that sort of is always working. Okay. Now you got some new toys. I liked it. Yeah. I picked up an interesting new toy and I had a little discussion that we can have toward the end on health metrics, but so this last week or two weeks ago, my wife and I were talking and she brought up this idea of these pet robots that are around. Now these are robots that you can treat as pets or they can spy on your pets, whatever. They are moving cameras in essence, a camera that you can move around your house or apartment and you can take pictures with it. You can interact through it. This one, the Anabot Evo Air has some AI features that spoiler alert needs to be a little bit more refined, but it also has ability to take video, take still photos. You can talk through it. You can listen through it. You'll auto adjust for night vision, low light, and those sorts of things. It'll auto dock if it sees its dock through IR, it can back up into it so you can drive it around when you're not home and get it back to where it needs to be charged. And we thought for our two cats that we have, this might not be a bad idea when we travel just to, you know, check on some of the areas that our cameras that we have in our apartment don't normally get to. So the principal one was under the couch because the cats do go under there occasionally. We have no camera under the couch, but when we can't find them, it's nice to know if that's where they're hiding because that's where they go if there's a thunderstorm or some other thing happening. And the first photo I put in the show notes is looking under the couch and the cat looking at it going, "What are you and why are you staring at me?" This is a Chinese piece of technology, which means it also has some very, I guess, Asian centric touches to it in a sense of some cuteness and some interest. Yeah, I mean it talks in a high-pitched voice, it has little emojis that it will show you like a cartoony voice. Yeah, so very cartoony voice. In fact, when you set it to go home, it literally goes, "I'm going home to charge," you know, and it drives itself away and it will basically, it has a little laser pointer you can turn on, you can play with your pets with it that way. Some of their models, this one doesn't have it, but some of their models actually dispense treats if you want to get your pets to play with it. Our cats just follow it, they find it very interesting in that way, so they're not quite sure what to make of it. I don't know if they think it's alive or if it's just some weird toy thing, but it's got some pros and cons. The pros, it can go pretty much anywhere that you need to go. Floor transitions can be slightly tricky between tile to, you know, laminate. Do not try to really drive it on, shag carpeting, it will not do well because it's basically treads on the bottom of it's own wheels, it's like a belt thread mechanism. But if you can't get it over the floor transition, you can take a running start with it and that'll usually help you get over it or sometimes slowing it down. You can't adjust the speed that it goes at, which is nice. It's also got auto change to the camera mode, so you can turn it, it'll go to night vision if it's low light, but that's very convenient. It has two driving interfaces because I think the manufacturer just can't figure out which interface they like better. So you can drive it in one interface, I think it's easier to do some movements in the other if you turn the device landscape, you kind of get like a video game or drone controller view or the video camera takes up your whole image on your phone and it does tip itself back. It's designed as kind of a globish sort of feature, so if it gets stuck, usually moving it one way or another will tip it back to center so that it can move away. Although, yeah, we have gotten it completely stuck two or three times where we've had to go over and push it. The cats unfortunately have not started pushing it around, which would be helpful when it gets stuck, if they just came over and whacked it back in, back any direction really, they probably get it loose. The cons to it, it does have occasionally a connectivity issue where it'll be laggy for about a minute where it'll lose connection and you have to wait for it to come back because it does have to go through a central server and that is the one of the biggest con I have for it. It has to have internet connection, there's no way to direct connect to it, so if the servers ever shut down or the company goes out of business, it was a rather high priced paper weight at that point, it's $200 for this model and the AI features are not quite there yet. There's collision detection on it, there's tracking features that it has, they work some of the time. It has a Sentry Mode where it can go out on a patrol and drive around and record video that you can review later if you want, because it does have a 32 gigabyte SD card in it by default, so it can record things to its local memory. If you have the money and you have pets that you want to torment, or I guess you need a little companion because you can drive it around and play with it yourself if you want to. I think it's fun, but it's also kind of unique and it's an interesting market that I sort of wish had some local ability to just run by itself, but that being said, that's hard to find anywhere anymore, things are completely local. I see that it also has a speaker on it, so you can talk to your pet? Yeah, you can say anything you want through it, which the other use that they had for, which I thought was an interesting one, was with elderly or older adults. You could have one of these in their house that you could connect to, and I know when my mother, in her later years, wasn't doing so well, sometimes just answering the phone could be tricky for her, so having this thing would have been sort of nice, it could have popped off its face, driven around the house, looked for her, and I could have said, "Hey, I'm trying to call you, are you okay?" or whatever, and then of course then listen in on what the other person says back, so if you do have an older adult that you're concerned about, and they're not always that good about keeping their phone with them or answering their phone when it rings, this might be a solution for that as well. That is interesting. I'm going to switch cameras by the way, I've been using this new 4K camera I've been testing, and I'm going to switch to my Surface front camera, so I'm smaller and you can see more of this e-bot thing, which is on this side, this guy right here, and I guess that's your camera interface on your, I guess that's a nice one. Right, yeah, on the other side, yep, and that's one of the interfaces, that's the full-screen interface, there's also a half-screen interface, so like I said, I think actually it can work a little bit easier sometimes for what it's doing, but... Yeah, there's a, I did notice, speaking of your network connectivity, I did notice it handles both 2.4 and 5, so have you tried switching it to 2.4 only, which has a little bit better wall penetration? I think it was, yeah, I haven't tried that yet, it's only at the 5, on the 5 right now, so I could try with 2.4 and see if that would help. Yeah, you know, some, a lot of IOT stuff I've noticed, doesn't actually work at all with 5GHz, I was sort of pleasantly surprised that this one does, so that was, that's kind of nice, but you know, again, 2.4, the lower frequencies have better wall penetration distance, might help. Okay, okay, so speaking of things for pets, I will, I will add a picture of what I got, so that, that thing on, I guess on, it's on my right, your left, that dog toy, which just looks like a dog, has a heartbeat and there's a little puck looking thing that you put into a pouch underneath the dog toy, and so it's dog sit, you know, pet safe, or at least dog safe, and it's meant for anxious dogs, I don't have a dog anxious or otherwise, but I do have a rabbit who's not anxious, but is all by himself, and rabbits are social animals, I thought, well, I like, I'll try, this is how he, how he takes to this, so I, I got this on review, and this is, and it's not very expensive, I think it's under $30, like maybe $25 or $30, something like that. It looks pretty durable, and like, there's a pouch inside that does Velcro pouch, pouch, you put in a battery powered 3 AAA batteries into it, and you press a button, and it starts, it starts having a heartbeat, I haven't timed the heartbeat, it's, it seemed a little slow, because dog heartbeats are higher than humans, and rabbit heartbeats are higher than dogs, so I wasn't sure they would really have the effect I wanted, but you know, when I'm carrying him around, he often hears my heartbeat, which is much slower than a dog or a rabbit, so I assume it's okay, and sure enough, even though rabbits tend to be very, as prey animals, they tend to be very wary of anything new, really, but seems to have adopted, like within minutes, this is what happened, you know, just sort of, yep, this, this is pretty cool, and so I, I'm going to give this a thumbs up, I gave it a thumbs up, it was a, it was a good, good attempt, and sort of interesting, you know, sort of like the surrogate monkey studies from the 1950s. Ah, yes, Harlow's monkey. Yeah, so it's except with the actual heartbeat, not just, you know, dolls and things, so that was kind of interesting, and I, I'm, I'm in favor of it, I like it. Okay, as, as you were talking, one of my cats decided to come make an appearance, and so, you know, the power of heartbeat, I suppose, against me right now, and chewing on my fingers, because for whatever reason, that is a comfort thing for this cat, he likes to chew on fingers and groom people. Oh, rabbits don't chew on fingers, but he don't like to lick you and groom things. All right, and you have one more. Yeah, the last thing I was thinking about, my wife and I were having a conversation about fitness trackers this week, and about the data they collect, and I was just thinking about, you know, what is the utility of most of that data? You know, I, I look at it from time to time, and it's interesting, it's unique, but for example, this morning, I woke up and thought, wow, I slept really well last night, and I looked at my sleep tracking, and it didn't look like I wasn't in deep sleep more than usual. Yeah, it got up a few times, I thought, well, I don't know how useful it is to even know this. I do think the only prevailing use I can really think of it right now is to have a baseline of your health, you know, what your normal resting heart rates are, and those are the things. And with epigenetic research getting better and better, I could totally see in 30 years, you know, qualified, a good doctor, looking at a lot of this stuff and piecing it together, a neurologist able to stay, you know, I think those weird blips that you saw might have been evidence of a mini stroke, and so let's heart you on, you know, blood thinners earlier than we might have, or a geneticist going, you know, you've got this particular likely change to your code. So let's try this treatment first, and I'm looking at the other treatment second, or especially with language models, and good enough, and AI models getting good enough that it might be able to detect those things as well. So I guess day to day, I don't think health tracking is as useful as it was built to us, but I think in the long run it is. I'm curious what your thoughts were, what you use it, because you've used a Fitbit, you use the classic Fitbit and you and I think both got around the same time when they first came out. So what do you use the metrics for? How did they useful to you? Yeah, like you, you know, on a, I think it's like weather, you know, day to day weather is hard to predict sometimes, but it's the trends, it's overall trends that are really sometimes helpful for, you know, seasonal predictions and things. And I found it the same way. So I've been using a Fitbit since it first came out, the very first one came out, I think in 2010, or there were just little clips. Yep, I had one clip to my belt for many years, until I decided to get a charge series, which we should actually don't fit bits now owned by Google, and this will be my last Fitbit, because Steve disappointed me, this one right here, actually, the Charge 5. And what's been most interesting is not so much my, you know, whether or not I slept well any particular night or how much I walked on a particular day, although that's interesting, especially when it's a lot of steps and a lot of miles, but it's been really interesting to look over the long term. So for example, when I was, when I had a day job, when I worked, you know, in an office and wandered about and we had kind of a campus environment, most of downtown Honolulu is many government buildings, and I'd, you know, wander over the meetings and things pre-COVID. I used to do 11 to 12,000 steps a day, which is about five to six miles a day, I think, just wandering around. And post retirement, I'm probably down to about seven to eight thousand steps a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. Like, I didn't feel well right after lunch on Friday, it's probably something I ate, and I, you know, still not 100%, but yesterday, Saturday, the day after, you know, whatever caused my stomach to be so upset, I only think, well, let me just check. I think I did like less than five thousand, like far less than five thousand steps. Let me, let me check what I did. I did, um, yeah, I did like, oh, yeah, far less. I did like four thousand steps, you know, it was like, it was crazy. 3,922 steps yesterday. So, so it tells me that, you know, even though I felt I was feeling better yesterday, obviously, I didn't feel good enough to just wander around as I normally do, and then get up to my normal seven, eight thousand steps a day, as I was about half of my normal step count. So that tells you a lot on a daily basis, but the, the average is, uh, you know, tell you more. So like I said, if I only did four thousand steps back when I was working, and I, you know, when I was doing 11, 12,000 a day, that's probably something really bad. But if I did four thousand steps, and I normally do eight thousand steps a day, that's not good, obviously, but it's to me, says, well, I was kind of moving around just, you know, not well. Well, and you, as you're talking about step counts, I put a graph in our show notes that is my, uh, Disney daily step counts difference from yearly average. And the, this actually was because I was thinking about how I've been to Disney three times in the last decade, or decade and a year. And each time, uh, the first two times, I would have quite a lot of the tea to my feet and be tired and those sorts of things. And I thought, you know, how do I quantify this? And I really couldn't use miles because the Apple Watch, which I've used on the 2020 or 2022 and 2019 trips is much more conservative on miles than Fitbit. Fitbit was much more liberal about, you know, so by about two miles on some of those days difference. Yeah, I went by step count. And it is interesting that as you look at my yearly average, well, I wasn't walking as much in 2013 or 2019. And so each day I was deviating somewhere between, uh, you know, five and 10,000 steps more than I usually take on those days. And then in 2022, when I sort of after I went through a fitness craze and start walking a lot more, there wasn't a day, there were only a couple of days where I did more than 10,000 steps. Yeah, normally would have done that year. And I felt no excess foot fatigue or anything else on the on that trip. I felt like I was fine. Everyone else around me was going, man, our feet hurt. We've been walking a lot. So it was great. Yeah. Well, I was walking the same amount as I would have, because if you actually look at the raw numbers, every time in a Disney park, I'm somewhere between 15 to 20,000. But compared to what I was used to from that yearly average. Oh, I was. Yeah. So all of this on this graph is a deviation above my yearly average for that particular year. So that's what makes it sort of an interesting thing to look at, not for raw step counts, but the difference between that and what I'm used to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my tip, if anyone is going to Disney, try to shoot for about eight to 10,000 steps a day the rest of your year. And if you do that, when you have to stretch to 20 to 22, 23,000 steps that day, it's not going to feel that bad on your feet. Your feet are already used to going that far. But if you're like, I was in 2013 and your daily step count was around 3000 steps, go into 20,000 steps is going to be real difficult. Yeah, I think the other tips having done Disney and Disney World, Disneyland and Disney World, Oh, and Tokyo Disney, see, we're good shoes that are broken in, so to speak, that are comfortable on your feet and designed for walking, don't try to do it in dress shoes or something. And also, take a mid afternoon break, especially traveling with kids, because they need a nap anyway. Harry and I remember on that 2013 trip, we spent about an hour on the Disney World Railroad, just going around in circles, because our feet were tired. It was a hot afternoon. And we thought this was just fun to drive, you know, right around on this and watch people. And we enjoy the people watching aspect in general. So that was, that was fine activity right now. Yeah, for sure. I did read that Disneyland might be voting for strike. So folks going there in a near future may want to keep an eye out in the news for those days and maybe less fantastic to go there when people are on strike in general, in general. Let me see if I can find something real quick. And but in a case, well, that's that's pretty much what we've got for this week. It's been a little bit shorter than usual, a little bit less techy than usual, in my opinion. But but for sure, it was a lot of fun. And we will, well, the future is going to be interesting, you know, I hopefully the crowd strike Microsoft thing. It's a little easier. I think there's still airlines that are canceling flights as of today, Sunday, a couple of days after this all started. So we will, we'll see how that goes. And we'll talk to you next time.
