Coming to the meeting tomorrow, Chet and Gary discuss March and April's upcoming meetings.
Let's go!
Music
Good morning Chet.
How are you today?
I'm doing good Gary.
How are you doing today?
Fantastic.
So this is our, can you believe this is our 43rd podcast.
It's unbelievable.
Only 43?
Only 43.
And seven more we get to celebrate our 50th anniversary or whatever.
Our series or whatever.
So what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk maybe a little bit about the
meeting tomorrow.
And if we do, then it's going to cause me to publish this today.
That's true.
Yes, I hadn't thought about that.
But okay, yes.
Yeah, I thought that one of the things that we could kind of mention to people is why
we're kind of taking the approach that we're taking with these last couple of meetings.
And what I've been looking at is the fact that we went to the table exercises and having
people get more involved in it.
But the other side of it is that I think that people need to get to the point where they
can help themselves where they don't need to have somebody that they have to wait around
for that person to be available like coming in for our help labs here or try to get somebody
on the phone to help them.
That's getting harder and harder and harder all the time.
So I think we need to build up some skills and people so they understand things.
The only way I can think to do that is to give them some background and get them over
the fear of touching the device.
So that's a lot of what's going on, trying to get the right information in the right
place so they can find it or find out where information is.
So if they do have to call somebody and they ask them, well, what model phone do you have?
They know where the model number is.
That kind of information.
Give them some avenues to explore that they can solve their problem, whether it be Google
searches or YouTube or whatever.
Yeah, a lot of different things.
And then for the April meeting, what I'm thinking about there is looking at understanding more
effective or more completely the user interface and how the user interface actually tells
you what you need to do and how to do it.
It's a roadmap.
You just have to understand it's a roadmap and learn to read the symbols on the roadmap.
And based on that, then you can go ahead and do things.
So that's what I'm looking at on the April meeting is to say, let's spend some more
time looking at the user interface and understanding how to actually interact with the device.
And again, getting you closer to the point where you feel comfortable touching things
and trying things and recognizing when you did something wrong or when there's something
didn't work the way you want.
So that's kind of what the goal on all of these things are.
And I assume that you'll have exercises to guide them through those processes.
Guide them through those kind of things and give them some playtime to actually try them.
And one of the other things that's going on is, and I just was watching a YouTube video
over the weekend talking about this, that there are some concerns about cybersecurity
and the fact that two-factor authentication and passwords and so forth are not as secure
as they used to be.
But there are ways around all of this, and we're seeing a move toward using external
devices that you plug into your phone or that you use the near field communication NFC stuff
for communicating with these little devices that contain a code that acts as an authorization
as opposed to fingerprints and those kind of things.
Trying to get around some of the cyber issues and so forth.
We're going to talk about one thing in the meeting tomorrow that has a very high potential
risk to it.
Luckily it's not a big thing at the moment, but I'm concerned now that the news is out
about it that it's going to become a bigger thing that it is now.
That's the way it usually is.
They get a lot of copycats.
Let me ask you this.
Now, with this going on, is it a good time to maybe our members to be looking into like
VPNs?
I don't know whether a VPN is going to solve any of this.
What a VPN does is it gives you an encrypted channel between your device and the server.
That server then acts as you and send the messages out over the rest of the internet.
There are some benefits to encrypting that way, but then when you look at Apple, Apple
tries to encrypt everything in transmission anyway.
Apple is about as secure as it can be, Apple stores information, encrypted.
Most of your information that's on iCloud, for example, is all encrypted.
I don't know if a VPN buys us a lot or not.
My experience with VPNs when I've tried them in the past is they slow you down.
I never have used one, but I've looked into it before.
If you do, because my assumption is that probably 90% of the hacking activity is affected by
somebody clicking on a link they shouldn't have clicked on.
So if you've got a VPN, if you still click on that link.
You got the same problem.
It hasn't protected you.
The only thing a VPN would protect you from is somebody listening on the circuit.
So if you're at the airport or public library and you're trying to access your financial
data, maybe a VPN would help.
So saying that, then the best way that we can protect ourselves is to watch what we're
doing.
Yes.
Clicking links or reading, you know, with these scam text and reacting to what they
want you to do.
Don't fall for phishing.
Right.
And the best policy for that is if you believe that there's an issue, just don't do anything.
Don't do it.
Call the institution or whoever the text is from.
Just call them directly and find out if there is a problem with your account or whatever.
Yeah.
One of the things to think about is that if a company is notifying you there's a problem
with your account, they shouldn't be asking you for your account number, your name, your
address or anything else.
They have all that.
Right.
So if they're asking you for any of that information, something's wrong.
Now, I had an instance just within the last few days.
A gentleman called me about these COVID home test kits and he was telling me that Medicare
paid for it and that he saw that I've got them in the past and wanted to know if I
want to continue getting these test kits for your charge.
And I said, well, sure, you can send me one.
He said, well, okay, let me just verify your address.
And then he verified my address and he asked me my age and then I started thinking, this
guy's probably going to keep going.
So I said, well, that's all you need.
And so just send me my kit.
And he said, well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
He said, we need some more information.
I thought, no, you don't need any information.
You don't need any more information.
That's right.
If you want to send me a kit, send me that address.
And if you don't, that's fine too.
So I hung up, immediately called me back.
So you know they were fishing.
So you have to be careful on just something that simple.
They know that Medicare pays for these kits to be sent out and they act upon that.
And I've always said, if these people put as much effort and diligence into hacking
people and do it for good, we'd have all kinds of, we wouldn't maybe have the software
problem.
That's right.
We wouldn't have the software problem we have.
Yeah, it just is.
I find it very frustrating that we don't seem to be able to have people do things legally
and socially and in a socially acceptable fashion.
And we don't seem to be able to punish people who do things that we are not happy with.
You know, we have this social, oh, I feel sorry for them, kind of attitude.
But anyway, that's a path we probably don't need to go down.
Yeah, they play it in their sense, I'm pretty sure.
Well this is going to be kind of a short one today.
We have a meeting tomorrow.
Just want to remind everybody about the meeting tomorrow.
That's the 21st in the Veterans Theater.
Every time, 12 to 2, we're going to be doing table exercises again.
And on that note, I just want to implore that we have some more table leaders come forward
because we can never have enough table leaders.
That's right.
And it's not that tough a job.
As you see, the more you go through these exercises, the more clear it's going to become.
It's not that difficult to do.
We've got, let's see, this is March meeting.
We'll have April and May and then we take our break.
We take summer break.
So hopefully this goes well and we continue to have this type of meeting environment.
And I think this is the best environment for our members to actually have some hands-on
learning.
Right.
And I think as we get some more experienced table leaders and get used to this environment
a little bit more, we might even be a little bit more flexible with how those table operations
work.
And we'll have all the tables kind of working on the same thing.
And we might get to the point where they can have different groups trying different things.
And as I put my message last night, be sure to bring your membership card when you check
in.
And if possible, set it to the same table that you set at last meeting with the same table
leader.
I know there might be a few tables short of table leaders, but somebody will take the
table leader, I'm sure, and it all works out.
It always has.
So with that chat, I think we're just going to call it a day.
And we'll enjoy all this scenery from the penthouse here at the 2020 Club.
They cleaned the glass.
It's really fantastic.
Oh, is that what it is?
That's what it is.
They cleaned the glass.
Oh, okay.
Even that are my cataracts that are just working.
Oh, there you go.
So we'll see you next time.
And thank you for listening.
We're just going to call it a day.
Have a great day.
All right, Gary, you too.