Hey, guys!
Hey guys, welcome to the second installment of Beers and Gear.
Beer and Gear?
Oh, I gotta get that right.
It is Beer and Gear.
Beer and Gear.
I'm about to pop my tab.
Oh, what are we drinking?
Okay, so I am drinking a new one.
This is Four Sixes, Grit and Glory.
So for any of my people out there that have watched any of the Yellowstone, you know what
I'm talking about, Chris?
Yellowstone?
I know the show, I've never watched it.
Okay.
There's a, so it's, Yellowstone's about a ranch in Yellowstone in Montana.
And but they reference a ranch in Texas called Four Sixes a lot, and so I'm guessing this
has something to do with that.
Okay.
But first try, so we're gonna see.
All right.
Well, I wanted the Founders breakfast out.
Yeah.
But apparently Fresh no longer carries it.
Well, that could be a seasonal thing.
Perhaps.
They didn't, in fact, they didn't have anything from Founders.
So I went back to what we had the last week.
So I have a Modelo Negro.
Oh, okay.
Nice.
I've still got some of those left over.
This is a, this is an Amber logger, which is kind of what I trend towards, to be honest
with you.
Not quite as dark, but also not a Corona.
True.
So this is dark enough for me.
The one that I wanted the breakfast out is actually a, well, they call it a double chocolate
coffee oatmeal stout.
That makes it sound really kind of.
Frufru.
Frufru, but it's not.
Yeah.
I've had them.
They're Scotch ales.
Founders is all Scotch ales, I think.
And holy cow.
My favorite Scotch ale though is still Old Chub by a brewery in Colorado called Oscar
Blues.
Have you ever had Old Chub?
I have not.
Okay.
We need to make that happen.
That'll be one of the, one of these days that we're in the same place recording.
Okay.
We'll have to do that because I really enjoy it.
It's very smooth.
Yeah.
Well, that's some beer talk.
Yes it is.
Thought maybe for this episode of Beer and Gear, we could talk about kind of our thoughts
on post COVID.
I don't know if you want to say it's a technology boom necessarily, but like it was a boom for
zoom.
It was a boom for zoom.
It's a boom for a lot of things.
There's only a few.
I was trying to think through this the other day.
There may have only been one technology area that I could think of at the time that had
really suffered because of it.
But so many things just kind of blew up and then became, you know, everybody needs this.
Everybody's, I mean, the whole reason that we're doing this podcast the way that we are
is I think thanks to 2020, actually using a site called Clean Feed right now.
I'm not sure Clean Feed had much of a purpose before all of this happened.
Because you know, you would just always go to wherever you were supposed to be with whoever
you're supposed to be there with.
Everything remote is the word I'm looking for.
Remote is the hot thing.
Yeah.
It's way more, way more sexy than it used to be.
Yeah, it's definitely far more accepted than it was.
Yeah, there you go.
That's another good use for this.
You could call that digital adoption.
Digital adoption.
Yeah, so I guess the first thing that I had in mind to talk about was just like network
gear.
You know, I could be wrong about this because you know, we are and you know, a lot of our
friends are really into having networks at home that are safe and reliable and all of
that.
But it seems like again, after 2020, everybody at least, I don't know if they know more about
it or if they're just dangerous with it now.
There's way more of a market for that.
Everybody wants everything really fast.
Everybody's streaming everything on TV now.
Yes.
I mean, that was coming beforehand.
I actually had switched to only streaming services in like 2017 or something like that
and stopped using any kind of cable or satellite provider.
But since man, I mean, Disney Plus, Netflix has always been a thing that like, I guess
Hulu was right on Netflix's tails.
Yep.
Now that's all Disney.
And then just the fact that everybody wants to be able to stream movies and TV whenever
they want.
Correct.
Yeah, you can't be bored while you're sitting at home doing nothing, not working.
And then when you're stuck on old Northland cable, like I am, yeah, you get that amazing
hundred meg down.
And that's as good as it gets.
At least you're not listening to a dial up tone.
No, I'm close, but I'm not there.
And we're doing great if we get seven meg up.
And so you get a couple people hitting Netflix, somebody streaming some music, and then you
want to look at some websites and everybody feels it.
Yeah.
Mercy.
Yeah, there's only, I was going to say there's only so much that the really fancy network
gear can do when you have a limited connection like that.
Yeah.
So internet service providers, ISPs, have a lot, like they've had to deal with a lot
of demand, but then also at the other end, just inside of homes having faster modems
and routers and network extenders and stuff like that.
I know that I never had two APs in my house and now I have three.
It's just kind of the nature of wanting everything to be connected really well and not wanting
to have to, I mean, gosh, just thinking about it right now, I've got, right now I've got
four adults in my house.
And so that's, every adult has a computer and a phone and I have an iPad.
So that by itself is nine devices.
And then the kids have tablets, like the little fires.
That's another, so that's 12 and then TVs.
I mean, so you're looking at 15 ish devices real quick.
That's more than that little Linksys AP could do.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
According to my Unifi, I have 17 devices on the network.
17 devices.
17.
And I have one, two, three, four of them that are wired in.
Mercy.
So that means I've got...
And there's only four of you.
Yeah.
So the computer that I'm on is obviously wired in and then the the road caster is wired in.
And then I've got the other little computer running.
Start nine is my bit node and lightning code or node, I should say.
Oh, and then my pie hole.
I can't forget my pie hole.
I've got that wired in along with a home assistant.
I mean, most people don't wire in their pie hole, Chris.
You got to detach that thing from the pie every once in a while.
Wire steal king.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Again, everybody's looking for reliability and making sure that everything works.
We use Ubiquiti.
That's been one of those brands that has showed up in a burgeoning market.
Can you say burgeoning for something like this?
I think so.
It...
Sounds good anyways.
Yeah, it really showed up as that feature rich but still cheap and so feature rich and
reliable but still cost effective, I guess, and where it was sitting.
And so Ubiquiti gives a lot of tools to the end user without costing Cisco prices.
Correct.
And there's no monthly, there's no reoccurring.
Yeah, which is really good.
So there's always a give and take with that.
There's always going to be some, that didn't work exactly like I thought it would or whatever.
But I mean, I've really enjoyed it.
I think the UI is pretty easy for somebody who's, I guess, prosumer.
I don't really know what to classify myself as with that.
I think prosumer, that's a good label for the UniFi line.
And also not rolling in the dough.
Or paying somebody else to do it.
That's the other option, I guess.
You got to do everything yourself.
So yeah, like network gear has been affected pretty heavily.
Cameras, man.
Cameras are just...
I remember, like I used to watch vlogs that would talk about photography and stuff because
I really like photography.
I think photography is a really cool art.
My grandfather had kind of a photography knack, which I didn't know about until after he was
dead, which was very sad.
But I got to see some of his old pictures and that was pretty cool.
But so I was watching and I was trying to learn a lot on photography and then 2020 happens
and everything becomes how to integrate with your computer.
It's funny because it seems like there was less of an emphasis put on webcams.
Everybody wanted to go DSLR, everybody wanted to go...
I think action cams started to upgrade their stuff real quickly because they were finding
that for a real fast paced video, something like that was a fine optical setup with their
sensor and everything.
But people are now using them for webcams and people were using them for...
I don't know if you would call family vacations that weren't all action and things like that.
And so they started to upgrade, there started to be some competition in that with not only
GoPro doing it, but then DJI of course coming off of their drones and everything to actually
do mobile cams.
The other one was Insta360, turning the 360 cam into a super usable and affordable tool.
Everything got kind of crazy.
And then all the interfaces that came out that were like, hey, now you can plug your DSLR
into your computer and now you can have this really high quality image.
I mean, even Apple with their latest stuff is coming out with using your phone camera
connected to your computer.
Did you see that on the keynote?
I've read, I didn't actually watch it.
You didn't partake in the Apple keynote?
You know I never partake of those.
What?
No.
In fairness, I don't partake of the Microsoft version either.
I have actually, I watched a Microsoft one and the number of times the guy said flow
about made me want to kill myself.
Yes.
You got to stay in your flow.
It's very important that you flow.
I didn't know that I had a flow, but evidently I have a flow and it's detrimental to my health
to get out of my flow.
Another company who saw a lot of rise too with that was Elgato.
They've been doing a lot for YouTubers for a while, but that really also took off for
them with everybody doing everything remote and wanting a stream deck and all of those
pieces of the puzzle.
Yes, Twitch.
I had no idea how big Twitch was before 2020.
I knew that people were on it.
Don't get me wrong, but then after 2020 it seemed like... I had friends that were playing
trivia games with each other on Twitch.
Yes.
Again, use cases came flying out of this and people were realizing that they could use
all of this technology for things that they weren't immediately thinking, oh, this is
what this is for.
Elgato, huge.
Yes.
Yeah, we've used a couple of Elgato devices in the church.
I almost said flow.
The church process of cueing things in ProPresenter and things like that.
They came out with... Elgato came out with a couple of devices there after 2020 that
were still the buttons and everything like that, but they also did... They did devices
that had knobs and everything could be customizable to be able to do workflows inside of Lightroom
or Photoshop or Premiere Pro.
I guess we could use some of the other non-Adobe products, but those slip off of my brain really
easily.
Yeah.
If the Elgato people are listening, I would love a chance to play around with the StreamDeck
Plus.
That is the one that has the... It's got like, I think, eight buttons and then it has
the four infinity knobs, so to speak.
Infinity knobs.
Yeah.
Love infinity knobs, whoever came up with that.
Great job not having an end to that.
If it's digital, why in the heck would you put a stopper on either end?
Exactly.
Huge.
There was another one that came out recently, or I don't know if it came out recently, but
it's not Elgato.
There was another company making Headway in that same sector of things, and I cannot remember.
Loop Deck?
Loop Deck.
It's spelled L-O-U-P-E, I believe.
Yeah, P-E, P-E, L-O-U-P-E.
Because they had... They're for the longest time.
I had actually looked at their stuff beforehand because they had a photo editing console that
was kind of... I mean, it was very much like a Lightroom or a Photoshop or whatever tool
that it was almost like having a keyboard that had all the shortcuts already laid out
for you, but it had knobs and it had faders and different things like that.
But then fairly recently, Loop Deck came out with the live customizable streaming console.
They've got that little Loop Deck Plus and the... Gosh, what do they even call this?
The Loop Deck CT, which I guess is just a creative tool.
Makes me think of CAT scan when I hear CT.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, but these custom consoles that they've come out with are legit.
Though they were in the space, I think, before Elgato, I think they definitely... You can
tell by the way that they did their customizable buttons and everything.
That's heavily informed by the success of the Stream Deck and stuff like that.
Yeah, I'm looking at the CT now.
That's pretty impressive.
I'm telling you, the CT is no joke.
It's got a pretty price tag, but it looks really nice.
Sure.
I mean, again, if you get into a space and you make a superior product, and I'm not saying
it's superior than Stream Deck, I'm saying a product that holds up, I think that you
can sell it for a lot of money.
You've seen that time and time again.
I can see how it appealed to the Apple folks out there, nice and thin, considering how
much it does.
What are you saying?
PC folks don't like nice and thin?
Some do.
I would be fine with it being thick if I get better battery.
Are they all about that base?
Yes.
Anyway.
Other areas that have seen a lot of growth.
I put sound systems in here.
I don't know exactly what I was thinking with that though.
Are you thinking more of becoming network connected, more IP based, and so more easily
controlled versus having the physical surface?
Yeah.
That's probably a good point.
The number of sound systems that are connected over IP, using Dante now to be able to give
inputs and outputs over a wide array and just having to use Cat 6 or something to connect
it all makes it super useful.
We were already doing, they were already doing digital snakes and digital boards before 2020.
I think yes, the amount of mixing in a box that began to happen where you were having
to figure out how to, every church was having to figure out how to not only have a sound
system in their room but be able to take that sound and make something usable, take those
inputs, I guess, and make something usable for somebody sitting at home on their couch
with a TV or worse yet an iPhone.
Mobile phone, sorry Chris.
With mobile phone speakers, as good as they are, they're not a whole lot of low end coming
through those things.
No they're not.
Trying to mix everything in a way that's going to be able to be broadcast over so many different
mediums and then having everything as flexible as it possibly can be to be able to use network
and everything like that.
That's definitely part of it.
I think we're about to talk about remote work, teleconferencing and everything like that
but the streaming services just blew up.
There's no getting around that.
They were already on their way up and then it just got ridiculous.
Tiger King.
That's not what I was talking about.
I was more talking about churches being able to stream or just live streaming in general.
That too.
But the need and it seemed like overnight and I really do mean overnight.
We talked about this whenever our church went remote that it happened inside of a week.
On Monday we were talking about how we may need to tell people to just be aware of your
brothers and their sensitivity.
We're just all going to make sure and do the fist bump and the elbow of when we say hi
to each other we're going to make sure and do that.
That was on Monday and then on Tuesday or Wednesday they were like, okay so instead
of doing that we're going to stay six feet away from each other.
We're not going to do a meet and greet time.
We're going to make sure and do that.
If you need to wear a mask definitely wear a mask because we're finding out that singing
is definitely how some of this is being transmitted.
Then by Friday I was told nobody's coming to church.
We need to be able to be fully online on Sunday.
That Friday and Saturday was hectic if that's not an oversimplification of it.
I remember that we were in Texarkana.
We went up to visit my wife when she was working and that was spring break week.
Yeah, it was because my wife was in New York for spring break.
There you go.
We were there and on my birthday was when the NBA announced they were stopping the season.
Then right after that every other sports league was like, us too, us too.
It was just like what in the world is happening?
It was very strange.
It felt very, very weird.
I remember we had already planned for Easter.
We were going to stream our services for the first time.
We had already bought some of the gear that we thought we would need and that we were
moving things toward.
I know I was in the process of trying to implement things.
Then whenever everything hit you could not find gear to save your life because there
was all the chip shortage and everything.
On top of that everybody was buying everything that was out there just trying to piece together
some sort of way of being online.
People were even buying it on eBay even though they knew that they were paying premiums to
get it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I do not want to say it was a matter of survival because it is not a matter of survival.
It was so important.
Everything became how do we make this one thing work.
I remember putting it all together but then trying to help all the other churches around
us because we tried some things that did not really work for us but could work in a smaller
congregation or a smaller building.
We ended up giving a lot of gear away at that point just to try to get as many people out
there as we could.
It is a lot.
I remember all of that with the streaming side of things.
Of course, I think streaming hit churches really hard.
I know it probably hit a lot of places that I am not thinking about really hard.
There was some music industry streaming stuff that was really important.
Then what really did hit everybody else at least was the remote work, the teleconferencing,
and all the collaborative tools.
You want to talk about collaborative tools?
In that area, we were pretty fortunate.
We had gone to Zoom and actually had Zoom rooms about maybe six months to a year before
COVID.
Y'all were really set up for it because you were already distributing your...
Not distributing, not diversifying.
We were spread out.
Yeah, you were spread out already.
We were fortunate.
Our staff were even familiar with the concept of a VPN, how to use it.
Ooh.
To get to internal resources.
That's just the thing that you use to make sure that you're not being tracked by the
government, right?
Yeah that's what they sell us now.
There was a huge boom there.
Zoom was clearly the front runner.
They really exploded.
It would have been wise to have bought their stock a little before COVID.
Even Microsoft Teams saw a significant increase in the use of their product.
I would say that they're probably still at least number two there, if not number three
in that space.
Then with this is everybody was obviously at home and not everybody's home internet
or home network was really ready for this.
You're having people having problems and you're trying to remotely troubleshoot what's going
on and then you're ultimately having to say, it's your service provider.
It's your router or you're too far away from your router.
You need to get much closer, especially if you were wireless.
If you could string up a network table.
You tell us how much you need, we'll order it, we'll ship it to you.
If you don't mind dragging it across your living room and down a hallway into the bedroom
where you've got your desk set up just to try to improve the overall experience.
Yeah, there was definitely a lot of IT support having to be brought up to speed on what was
going on and for people to be able to troubleshoot for themselves was a part of that.
You said Zoom and Teams, I think Google meets were already going.
They probably haven't had the...
Google's problem is the problem that they always have is they just don't sit still with
a product.
They'll come out with something and within six months to a year, it's not working and
they'll shut it down or they'll rename it and relaunch it as some new service and it's
still the same thing.
It seems like with Google Meet, they've kind of...
Within recent memory, they've kind of left it alone.
They would be wise to just pick a name of the service and stay with it.
Well, whatever its name is, it's going to have Google at the front of it.
Of course.
Like Apple.
Yes.
It's almost like these guys are competing with each other.
I need you to know that this is our product.
Because prior to Meet, it was Hangouts.
And there was one other prior to Hangouts, I forget what it was.
They need to just stay with it, stop changing the name.
That's a good point.
I mean, Microsoft's not a lot better with stuff like that, but...
No.
It is what it is.
No, they did...
It's something else now.
They had Skype and then decided that that wasn't good enough and so now it's Teams.
But it's Microsoft Teams.
It is Microsoft Teams, just so you know who the service is from.
Yeah, there's been a lot of turnover in this sector.
There has.
And if it hasn't been...
I mean, it's definitely been a win for a lot of different product lines that have come
out, but I can say wholeheartedly that the people that have suffered have been the IT
support inside of all of it.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
I mean, again, nobody could have envisioned COVID becoming what it was.
I mean, it kind of showed up in late September, early October of 19.
And they were like, it's in China.
We think it's where it's at.
And in recent memory, we had had...
I guess it was SARS-CoV-1 that was in the early 2000s, maybe.
And again, started in China.
A few isolated cases in Canada.
And then it just kind of fizzled.
And then we'd had all the bird flu and that kind of...
It spread, but it didn't really quite hit that level.
Swine flu and bird flu.
Yeah.
Swine flu got a little bit farther, but not enough that people were thinking we got to
shut it all down.
But again, nobody could have anticipated...
Shut down camp for a week.
Well, yeah, we did do that.
In retrospect, if they had to do it over, I don't think they would have shut camp down.
But we did.
But again, nobody could have anticipated COVID going the way that it did, as fast as it did.
And so there were a ton of companies that they weren't ready.
We're still very much living in a older IT model.
And we even still had some of that to some degree, even when COVID hit.
We were just fortunate that our staff knew how to use a VPN and that we had recently
switched to Zoom.
And we were really able to leverage that.
But yeah, there were a lot of teams that were scrambling, like you were saying, trying to
order the pieces that they need, trying to train people as quickly as they could remotely
on how things were going to work, what to do, what not to do, how to try to stay safe,
with the information that you're using, so you don't have information ending up in personal
accounts.
And I'm sure a ton of that still happened.
Who knows what's floating out there in some people's personal Dropbox?
There could be critical company information.
Depending on your company, there could even be some HIPAA related items out there too.
No, people would never.
Yes.
So yeah, I mean, that was a crazy time.
I certainly hope we never have to go through it again.
Yeah, me too.
I mean, I guess for the most part, we've seen it once.
So as an IT community, if you can call it that, we kind of know what to do and how to
react.
But hopefully, it doesn't come to that again.
Well, I think it's made people more agile, to use a scrum term, in a lot of different
ways to be ready for.
I mean, the IT guys have always had bags of dongles and things like that to be ready for
physically being there.
But now to have another set of tools that you have with you all the time to be ready
for not being able to be somebody's support actually at their desk.
And just knowing the tools to be able to set somebody up remotely, to be able to have meetings
or to be able to do calls or feel like they're productive and a part of the team still.
That feels like it's not going away.
And the more practice we have with it, the better we can do.
And the more the infrastructure is ready for it, the better we can do.
Yeah, we don't want people under desk because they know they're going to call Roy a desk
rabbit.
Yeah.
Desk rabbit.
Was it rabbit or bunny?
I'm pretty sure it was rabbit.
Okay, we're going to have to.
I mean, because at one point we all thought it was desk bunny, but it sounded better.
But I feel like when we looked it up, it was actually rabbit.
Okay, well, there you go.
Moss was really freaking out, man.
Yeah, there it is.
Desk rabbit, IT crowd.
I think bunny is a better visual.
Yeah.
That whole show, worth it.
Definitely this episode brought to you by, well, probably not.
But y'all should definitely go watch it.
And then I can't let the other piece get too far behind us, you reference the bag of dongles.
That is a call out to Jesse and Craig.
Yeah, Jesse and Craig, who are never going to listen to this, but they need to know.
Yes, but if there's any Pine Cove people or former Pine Cove people, they will get the
reference in the inside joke.
I hope so.
Hey, thanks for hanging out with me.
I appreciate it.
It was good to get one of these under our belt.
Yeah.
The gear is at least working.
The gear is working.
The beer is working.
Yeah, the beer is working too.
The gear is working.
I feel good about this setup.
Yeah.
I could see doing a few little tweaks here and there.
I'd love to figure out on my end how to get this working to where I could actually play
audio off my computer into this.
Yeah, I think I can do that right now, but I can't hear it because I've got some weird
stuff going on with my setup.
We're going to work it out.
It's going to be great.
Yep.
Hi, Brad.
Hey.
Thank you.