So, a very quick introduction into Kafka, then some concepts about Kafka streams, introduction on Google protocol buffers, and what kind of stream processing you can do with that. All right, click over you. Apache Kafka is a message queue system nowadays. It's evolved into a distributed streaming platform, so you can put messages in several queues. Their queues are called Topic in the... Sorry, yeah. All right, so Kafka is a distributed streaming platform. You have message queues several, which are called Topics. Each topic is partitioned and replicated, so it allows you to scale out by putting more servers in your cluster and putting more partitions in your topic, and each topic is... Each partition is usually replicated, so if a machine goes down, you have the data also somewhere else on a different machine. And one important part, especially when it comes to Kafka streams is all of the consumer group logic, so you can have several consumers forming a consumer group and reading from a particular message queue, and this allows you also to scale the reading process, and it works also quite similar. So in this case, we have two different consumer groups which are doing different things each, but within each group you have several threads, and basically they coordinate with each other to distribute the different partitions among each other, so if one of your consumers in that group goes down, the remaining will take over the work that the consumer was doing, and if you add more consumers, then again the consumers will coordinate with each other to distribute the workload again, which allows you also to easily scale the reading, the consuming from your Kafka cluster. All right, so what is Kafka Streams? So there have been a lot of stream processing frameworks out there, and sometimes you might wonder why is there need for another one, why is Kafka Streams different? So one very important feature is that it's a really small library, it's not a huge framework that you get with Spark. It doesn't have any further external dependencies, so when you write a stream processing up in Kafka Streams, you just put a dependency on Kafka Streams in your Gradle, and that's it, and in the end what you get is a very simple small Java application, usually less than 10 megabytes, and you can run that one everywhere, so you can put it on Yarn, on Mesos, Docker, Kubernetes, all that. You can also just copy the char on a server somewhere and start it there, so it's pretty agnostic on how you want to deploy it, while most other stream processing frameworks, they really have very explicit requirements on where you deploy them. The Kafka Streams basically uses this Kafka consumer group logic that I introduced for scaling and fault tolerance, so other stream processing frameworks had to do really invest a lot of work to get elastic scaling and all that working, and Kafka Streams basically got it for free by using the consumer logic, and that consumer logic with Kafka has been already tested in BattleHart for many years by now, so it's also something that by now has proven to be working, and due to its very small footprint, it's ideal for microservice architecture, so you can have your different services all run Kafka Streams applications that basically do the transformations that read from the Kafka cluster and then expose that information back as a Kafka cluster, as a topic in the Kafka cluster. Kafka Streams has two different APIs, both in Java at the moment, high-level DSL, which is very similar to what you would get in Spark with those filter join and map functions that you can use, and a low-level processor API, which is more explicit and at the moment also a bit more powerful, it's similar to what you get in Storm and SAMHSA. It also has the concept of tables and streams that are separate, so streams are basically infinite event logs, so you have all these messages coming in and the assumption is that it goes on forever, and tables are finite with updates, deletes, inserts on the primary key, and both can be represented as message queues, as Kafka topics, by just taking the change log of a table, so we have that here, if a table and each action that modifies its content is a change log entry in a stream, and this allows you to basically have stuff, for example, static lookup tables that you join with incoming data streams, so one classic example is that you have customer events coming in and you want to look up customer information and enrich that. Kafka streams, of course, also allows stateful processing, and it stores its state locally in a ROXDB by default, you can also plug in any other DB if you look like, oh, doesn't skip, yeah, all right, so you have usually a ROXDB as a local state, and this state, this ROXDB is a key value store, it's again some kind of a table, which as we saw before can be seen as a change log, and a change log is a stream, so the way this state store is made available is that it's written back to Kafka as a topic, as a change log topic for your state store, and this is the way that Kafka streams handles rebalancing and fault tolerance, because any other instance of your application can just read the state of your streaming application from that change log and recover it, so instead of these check pointing or lineage that you get another streaming application, you really can recover the full state of your application in case it goes down or in case you want to launch additional instances of it, so this allows you to really scale your streaming applications up very seamlessly, you just launch another application on a different computer or different server for example, it connects to the consumer group, it reads from the change log, recovers the local state and takes over, nowadays in the new version you can actually even query the local state, so depending on your use case you don't even need to worry, okay, now my streaming application writes the data back to Kafka and then from Kafka I need to write it to some other kind of database and from that database my application can finally read it, now with this way you can actually query the state of your streaming application directly, you don't need additional infrastructure in between, which again allows you to build very lightweight applications that don't need a lot of additional infrastructure, a lot of tools and components are on the confluent platform and Kafka make the implicit assumption that you're primarily using Avro, so tools like Kafka Connect which is responsible for connecting Kafka to other systems like relational databases or Hadoop and they usually work with Avro messages, same with the schema registry which at the moment only works for Avro messages, so Avro usually is the natural choice if you start using Kafka, it doesn't require a lot of effort to implement since you already get everything, it's also a great choice and solution but one downside is that you always need to have the correct schema the message was written in in order to be able to read that message reliably and if you don't have the schema available to you for some reason then all your data is just a byte garbage that you can't really do anything with it and this is where Google Protocol buffers come in, it's very similar to Avro in a lot of features, it's a binary message, it has a defined schema, it has a support for lots of languages to read and write protobuf messages but a big difference is that you can also read these protobuf messages with a different version of the schema or even with no schema at all you can get quite some information out of it so for as an example if you're one of the tutorial protobuf messages which is a person and this person message has several fields, a name, an ID, a required fields and an email as a string and then four numbers as an embedded message so you can also have basically hierarchies of protobuf messages and each field basically consists of four parts, identify if it's required, optional or repeated, the type like string or integer, field name and then a field ID so this is one example person, John Doe, you can see here with full schema we get all the information we have the name, the ID, email and phone number and as a binary message it looks like this so you can still see all the strings in that there but everything else is just bytes that you can't as a human really read but now we can also read this message back with a different schema version so let's say we have an old schema that doesn't know about the email field yet we still get all the fields that we know about the name, the ID and the phone but also additionally we get this field that we don't know anything about the email and there we just get a field ID and not the field name but we can still even just by looking at it kind of guess that this is supposed to be an email so even though we haven't even heard of this field before we can still get the information out of there and read it and if we try to read the message here without any schema at all this is what we're gonna get we still have all the fields in the same order we just lose the field names instead of only the IDs of the field so even with knowing nothing at all about the message we can still recover quite a lot of information this is basically output of a protocc decode draw you can put any protobuf message in there and it will tell you what fields are in there and this is a kind of thing that would be very hard to do with AVRO all right another very cool feature are unknown fields so these are the fields that we don't know anything about and not only can you read them as I showed you with your schema you can also pass them on so if you read a message and you've write it create a new one from this one then all the unknown fields that you can find in the original message will be copied over to the new one which allows you to basically do things like decorations or extracting common fields or envelopes without needing to know the schema information of your original message you just put that message inside another message you will take over all the fields and send it on and you don't have to worry about breaking or destroying their original content it will still be fully there so now how can you use those two components together for a stream processing architecture so generally you still have all the usual message producers like logs databases APIs external sources they all write their information in protobuf to your Kafka cluster where you have streaming processors that enrich showing filter aggregate all the usual stuff with your topics and create new topics with the output and that one can go to your various consumers for example databases reports dashboards other applications machine learning or storing it in hadoop for example and you can exchange schema versions through for example a git repository or some other central place where everyone can retrieve these definitions and the developers engineers that write the message they write the input data they provide their protobuf definitions the engineers writing the streaming processors they also provide the definitions for their output while reading the one from the engineers and the consumers they just need to read the schema definitions to be able to parse everything correctly so how would that look like in an example here we have three different systems that emit events to Kafka so for example a web service that writes log events to your to a stream so log events from your website for example in there we have a timestamp field a session ID and a type like okay use a looked at a product or a customer put a product in the shopping card and then we have the optional fields customer ID and product ID then from your customer database you get these customer messages which again have a customer ID a name and an email and your product database provides the product messages and with a product ID a name and a price these then you have a streaming application joining these three topics and emitting a new message which is a very simple message my rich event message basically has three fields one event field one customer field and one product field so I actually don't need to read to write a lot of schema definitions because I can just import the previous ones there and the output of this streaming application is again a stream in my Kafka cluster of these rich events and then in that I can for example plug in another application that does something like sessionization so it takes the session ID out of there and groups by them and my message my session message is also again very simple session message just consists of repeated rich event messages so makes it very easy to define these things of course at this step I can also do further aggregations like include fields for counting how many different products a user has looked at or how many interactions they did with our website and so on but this is basically a very simple version and that one is then something that you can for example read by machine learning algorithms for personalization or recommendation engines you can put it in reports or you can let your analysts read it and do analysts and do their ad hoc reports on it now going now going back to this chart so the skid repository or whatever you're using I mean it's basically just like the avro schema registry that comes with a confluent platform of Kafka so why is this one what's the advantage of this one now it can always happen that not all the protobuf definitions there are actually up to date for example the developer could have forgotten to commit their message or the host of your git repository accidentally deleted their production database and is now trying to recover a backup so it could always happen that this one doesn't quite work and someone doesn't have all the schema versions that they need so what happens in that case let's for example assume that in your product database someone adds a new field for the color of your product and starts writing that to the Kafka product stream now your streaming application is starting to or is processing these events and putting them in the rich event message and all that happens is now that the product contains an unknown field which is the color but everything else will just keep on working and and even further down it causes no trouble at all my session will still contain these rich events and these rich events all will contain a product with unknown fields and even at the end the applications can still read these messages and if the bi analyst or a data scientist at the end looks at the messages he can find that unknown field it can look at the value and might even be able to find to determine that it's a supposed to be color maybe he was even the one that wrote the task to the engineer in the first place to put the field in there so the whole pipeline basically still works the same way and similar if you just delete a field like here the price for a protobuf there's no difference between a field that simply doesn't exist in an empty field with a null value they both are simply not included in the protobuf message so all you're going to have now is a product that contains a null price and since your price since the very beginning was marked as an optional hopefully the engineers writing the stream application is kind of put in logic to handle null prices already so your streaming applications will continue running uninterrupted so in general what does this allow you so means that the different teams that are responsive for data for producing the data for processing the data for consuming the data they can all move at their own speed there's no real strict alignment for releases necessary so if you have a traditional OLTP system that feeds into a data warehouse and you want to do schema changes across the system with several for example my SQL servers involved it's very very painful because you need to make sure that each of the queries takes that into account but here we can really do a hands-off in data engineering the the people in the middle in the middle writing the screening processes they don't need to do anything they just rewrite that read the data and write it to the output and everyone can basically upgrade to a new to a new version schema versions at their own speed and only the actual producers and consumers need to align on including new information in your messages and the pipeline in between just forwards them without needing to know about it of course not everything is great about protobuf there are also some downsides compared to overall so there's no lie you kind of need to handcraft your schema and be very considerate about it so you cannot reuse your field IDs that's the important thing and you really need to stick to them and you need to also think about what you may mark as required and optional because once something is required you basically can never change it there's also less implementations for it around Kafka and Hadoop ecosystem and less people using it so you will find out that you will often have to write the serializer deserializer yourself therefore Avro you basically find enough implementations of that a big issue is that Google kind of wants to remove these unknown fields in protobuf free it's a very long discussion now going on in the related issue on github and one more thing is that protobuf messages usually are one or two bytes larger than Avro messages nowadays I don't think that's a really big deal but for some people that is important factor all right thank you I hope you've learned something about Kafka streams and protobuf and maybe have some inspiration yourself do you have any comments or questions yeah I mean if you have so the question was if I only have two servers in my Kafka cluster and one of them goes down how can I make sure that I don't lose any data and things still keep on running well if you set your topics to all have a replication factor of two it means each of your partitions everything should be existing on both servers so in that case basically they would be identical they both would have the full data set and if one of them goes down the other one still has everything and the producers would then all go to that one running Kafka server and write everything there and the consumers would also start only reading from that one did that answer that question I mean usually the producer sends out the Kafka cluster sends out an act signal back to the producer that it received the message and processed it and you can also define when it does that so you can say only acknowledge a message if it has been replicated on both machines so you can make sure that nothing is going missing that's actually a talk by Gwen Shapira about when messages absolutely have to be there if you want to have a very strong guarantee that your messages are there recommend looking that up it's very helpful in that topic yeah yeah


Russia could be looking to draft 5 million servicemen to fight in Ukraine. Russia could be looking to draft millions of troops to fight in Ukraine. This was stated by Oleksiy Gromov, an official from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to him, Russia could be looking to draft millions of troops to fight in its invasion after hundreds of thousands were called up in its recent partial mobilization. Gromov has said that Russia's political leadership had circulated a document titled Conclusions of the War with NATO in Ukraine. He said the document outlined problems that Russian troops are facing, such as the chain of command shortcomings, a lack of discipline, and out-of-date weapons. The document also states that there has not been such a war for more than 80 years, and for Russia to achieve victory, the numerical composition of its army should be about 5 million servicemen. This may mean that the next wave of mobilization and the introduction of martial law in the country might take place in the near future. The total personnel in Russia's armed forces numbers around 2 million. When asked what Ukraine's response would be to fighting a bigger Russian army, Gromov said, according to a translation, that such work is ongoing and that calculations are being made almost daily. American Newsweek Journal has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment, but there is no result. For this, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected a report that there would be a mobilization of the country after the online publication Pravda said that Putin would be making an appeal by the end of 2022 for a nationwide draft.


This is stock number 9A90. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used SUV headquarters today. We are checking out this super clean 2011 Cadillac Escalade ESV. This vehicle has the 6.2 liter V8 motor From this HD video, you will be able to tell that this Cadillac is extremely clean all the way around No dense dings or cracks on that front bumper the license plate has never even been put in it Nice silver metallic. I believe it's quick silver, but Could be a different Silver we shoot all of our videos in 1080p So if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or a smartphone device turn them on right now Because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. No denser dings down that side comes with the 22-inch chromed alloy rims No major pealing On these rims looks really good for the year Bridgestone Duler 285 45 R 22 tires with the ball I'd say 60% of the tread left just a little bit over half No denser dings on that fender has the projector lamp headlamps the chrome trimmed grill Didn't see any dense or dings on the hood Passengers side fender is in nice shape as well. No denser dings on that and the passenger side rim No chrome peeling or anything like that on that rim As you go down this side of the escalator you can see just how clean the body is how reflective and mirror like that paint is We take these HD videos So if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down You can still see the vehicle hear the vehicle and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here Very clean down this side. It does have the power running boards this back rim Is in pretty nice condition as well And the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires Show you how those power running boards work They work real good on here We want to make sure you get the most accurate representation. So when you get here You'll have Absolutely no surprises does have a full towing package which includes receiver hitch and seven pin wiring The rear gate is in excellent condition as well. This is a power lift gate.  It has the factory floor mat back here Those seats do come out and you do have the cover for the Receiver hitch there and that's in really nice shape as well Let's get that gate down. Press that button It should come on down for you As you go down this side of the vehicle just as clean as I pass on your side and for full disclosure This is the condition of the back rim Not too bad And these doors No dense. No dings has the power Folding mirrors with built-in blind spot indicators and directional signals inside the premium I believe it's a premium package premium package gives you the black leather interior. There are no rips. There are no tears on the seats Both of these seats are heated. Both of these seats are cooled Factory floor mats throughout auto headlamps power tilt on the steering wheel And it comes with memory driver seat and power fold in mirrors like so Power windows power locks And as we hop inside here, you can see that this one has 79,759 miles instrument cluster is very nice and clean Comes with the heated leather wrapped and woodgrain trim steering wheel bluetooth audio controls on the right And cruise controls and heated steering wheel button controls on the left This has a six speed automatic transmission with the manual tap shift and factory navigation system right here This also has a backup camera the Bose sound system dual climate control and all the other climate controls are right here power pedals and AM FM Sirius XM CD player Pass and receipt is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that This vehicle has never been smoked in smells very clean as side current airbags and up here we have the power sunroof You get your Home link buttons and rear gate buttons up there as well and then you get on star in the review mirror We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood First thing to point out as we get to the back here is that it does have the dual dvd player So you got a screen up there and a screen back there And otherwise the seats are in nice condition as well. No rips or tears on these seats Carpetting is nice and clean and we do have factory floor mats back here as well No rips or tears in any of the seats these seats do fold down And the third row seats are in excellent shape as well These seats do fold up to get to that third row like so and they fold down like that And we'll take a quick look under the hood. I'll see these back seats are heated and you have rear air and audio controls right there I'd personally like to thank you for checking out the video today Hopefully from this hd video you'll have been able to tell just how clean this Escalade is all the way around inside and out Under the hood we have the 6.2 liter v8 motor engine base very clean runs very smooth This escalate has been fully safety to end inspected by our service shop Has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off And this vehicle has been gone through mechanically 100% and is 100% ready to go Very clean highly recommended Inside and out And to see more pictures of this escalator one of our other 450 new and used cars trucks suvs minivans wranglers You name what we got to go to our website Full pictures and descriptions from two stores of all the new and used vehicles on our lot videos of every single used vehicle that we have All at summit auto.com if you want to make if you want to check out more videos You can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel on your left A link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this vehicle on our website Click those check us out and we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2011 Cadillac escalate esv. Thanks again


Hello everyone. It went well for Canada, here in Malta, for the Commonwealth. It was a great opportunity to exchange with countries that we don't necessarily see regularly, and it was able to deliver a great preparation for the meeting in Paris in two days. This was a very successful Commonwealth, my most successful Commonwealth meeting ever. A great opportunity to meet with and get to know in exchange with a broad range of leaders from all different types of countries and backgrounds. An opportunity to engage as well on large issues of trade, human rights, terrorism and security, but also a tremendous preparation for the COP 21 conference in two days in Paris, and we're pleased to have achieved consensus around a very strong statement around climate change that really shows a desire by the world to engage substantively on climate change.


Welcome to the RF elements and license podcast. I'm Caleb. I'm here with Tossos. And today we're talking to Josh of Impotter has been in the industry for a really long time doing a lot of consulting work, a lot of different roles currently with this.net. So got a really interesting conversation queued up and we're ready to talk to him here in just a second. So soon as Tossos gives us our call to action for the good people out there. Absolutely.  Josh, my man, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today on our humble little podcast. Really excited to hear about your experiences, your life. Maybe we've got time a little bit of grounding there. You're kind of passionate about that. And that's always a good time. Versational topic to get people worked up about. So yeah, man, just walk us through how you got to where you are today and let's roll with it. Awesome. Thanks for being here. It's quite an honor, really. Telling my story is hard without going way back, but I'll try to go quick in the way back. Depends how far way back we're going. The universe was invented. I'm like, all right, let's fast forward. So we had the big bang and then yeah, I'll go really quick there. I started programming in like in fifth grade. I got introduced. So that was my first introduction and then my parents got me a 386 computer. It was brand new with Windows 11. And I got on that and I started programming with that and I just loved it. So I kind of started with software development, actually. And then I went into networking. So kind of zooming forward to just past college. I did some college with computer networking stuff, but I didn't finish. I was kind of bored, honestly, with liberal arts education. I wanted a technical education and just wasn't the right school for me. I was going to go back, at least I thought I was, but I got married and had kids instead. But I jumped into working for a computer store that was also an ISP. They had a dial-up ISP. And that's where I really started getting deep into networking. And that's where my wireless journey began. We had dial-up. I knew dial-up wasn't going to be forever. We were in really rural area. The areas we served a few towns were like 300 or so people, some of them were 2,000. The capital, not capital, was it called the county seat. It was like 5,000, just a small, rural area like we all know. And I wanted to go be on dial-up. So I got a Cisco 802.11 wireless access point. I got the boss to buy it, really, is what I did. And I got some. Because it was $4,000 back then. Yeah. So I got some some gear and some Tupperware and some truck boxes and some long cables and researched all I could to figure out what all these DBS were and stuff like that. This is before Google. At least I think it was before Google. You maybe was running the Alta Vista time or something like that. I was using that and asked Jeeves as well, you know, like some old stuff. So I was on forums and this is actually how I kind of got popular. I was on forums and asking and answering questions. And I had my signature there with my email. And when I figured stuff out, I didn't want to just stop with receiving information I wanted to give back. So I just became really active in almost like in Facebook, but preface book, you know, in the forums. And then I turned into being active in Facebook as I went along. So let me hop in here real quick. So what forums were really popular, like the DSL reports sort of? I was just going to say that I was on that one. I don't remember all of them, honestly. It was a while ago. Yeah. I have the same thing. I'm like the sepia tones take over everything. And I'm like, I'm kind of fuzzy on the details. Yeah. Who is DSL reports? Definitely for me. And I don't think there was anything before that. So that was pretty much where everything was at. I was a moderator on I think it was everything T1 and everything T3. I think that was the name of those two forums and DSL reports. And there was a handful of other ones. I don't think that everything T1, if that was even the name is still around.  We had dial up stuff and I had to I within two weeks of entering the ISP, the guy hands me a box and he's like here. I'm like, OK, what is this? And he's like, it's a mux. He said, what's a mux? Said, I don't know. But the guy that left that you're replacing said we needed it. So that's how I got introduced to taking a multiplexer to take a T3 line down into T1 lines like I'm 20 years old. And here it's a mux. Fix it. I don't know how he had faith in me. I guess he's just like, you're my only hope or something. But that challenge, it drove me to think I can do anything I need to. I just got to find somebody to talk to to get a clue and manuals to read. And that's kind of how I I got my starts. So I had a passion for helping anybody that would help. I I tried for, I don't know, maybe four years or so. I tried to answer six questions a day that weren't answered yet and kind of in the rank of hardest that I could answer first. And it was just a personal game. It was like how I let steam off. So I would spend 30 minutes or an hour or something doing that. Sometimes I would mock up the problem on the bench and find the solution and send a config or something like that. That and I didn't know it, but that got my Google rank up. And this is a couple of years after the computer store. So I'm kind of skipping ahead quite a bit. But I found out I was the number one search result for a Wisp consultant. And I found that out a while after I was getting calls from India and Turkey and all over. And I'm like, OK, that's kind of weird. I don't mind. I love talking to people from all over the world. And I even got invited to weddings on the other side of the world. And it's awesome. Like the community and the way the Wisps get together and help one another goes international. And I just I absolutely love that. That's a big part of my passions. That's sort of how I got to be an influencer, I guess. And I started up that Wisp back in Michigan and the the boss wasn't hungry enough. So I actually went out and became my own computer store consultant. And I was trying to build something. It was really around the fact that I was making like $12 and 50 cents an hour. And I had a little family and I was like, I need something with more headroom. And he didn't seem to want to go there. So but this is background 2000. So that wasn't terrible income, but it wasn't enough for my family. So I went out and learned the real hard way how to get broke. Starting a business and I'm not greedy at all. So if anybody had a sad story, I helped them basically for free. And that most of the work I've done in like third world areas has been for free or near free. And I still do it. I still do it today. I do a lot of what do you call it? There's a term pro bono. A bono. Yeah. I do a lot of pro bono work just because I love seeing the industry grow and help. I like to teach and help people get past a point that they're they're at. And that's kind of how I got into grounding. So I'm grounding. I was working one of the ISP that I started sold to another ISP and he put together three different wisps helped start to those three. And then he hired me as an engineer to come in and get his system all running smoothly and be his network engineer. And I worked there for probably three or four years. It's on my LinkedIn. That'll be the truth if anybody cares on the duration there. But we had towers that were hit by lightning. And I was like, there's got to be a solution. I got friends that are master electricians and I got friends that that's a radio engineer and another friend that is his friend that goes to my church. Like so I'm pretty closely connected to him, but he goes around fixing AM and FM and UHF tower stations when they're having grounding issues at the big level internationally even. So I sat down with him. I'm like, here's my problem. How can I understand it? And I at first I came away kind of frustrated because I like that's too simple and it's like, we're already doing that. But when I started trying to really learn how to measure it and all these other things, I was like, we really aren't doing what the requirements are there. I thought we were, but he basically turned back and said it's it's grounding issue. And I'm like, how does I mean, these things are all grounded. So how is that again? How's that? How can that be the problem? So my sounds too simple, but my the big thing you got to know to keep your radios from taking a hit is that basically it's the input and output have to have the same ground level. And if they don't, if they're all different, then it's going to zap in between the two. That's the big issue. You got to think on your Ethernet input. You've got you're plugged into the power one way or another. It's being powered and on your radio, you're connected to the tower and the difference between your power ground and your tower ground. If there's any, it's going to fry that radio. That's what all boils down to a differential between the two potentials. Exactly. That's all it can be. So you have to have a nice big pipe between the two. And I'm a big one for saying, yeah, you need to have your ground rods into the earth because that's another system.  And if you can keep those all equalized quickly during a strike event, then you're going to survive. I mean, it's no guarantee. People always want to bring that up. There's no guarantee. Absolutely. There's no guarantee. You can have the best system and it can still be hit. But you can also have 40 towers and you can go five years without damage. And that's the that's difficult to do, but it's realistically possible. And I've helped a lot of wisps get there. Yeah.  Either. Right. So, I mean, you know, I think everybody's response would be like, well, we did ground it, right? But their definition of ground is way different than, you know, what maybe, you know, actually has to be done, right? Because they just assume, well, I take a wire for the thing here. It says, this is the ground icon. Let me put a screw in there and a wire and just, well, this is metal, right? So we're grounded. And I think that's really what needs to be brought to the forefront and maybe better explained, which I know you've done many times, right?  Well, the tool to sit down and study. And I know people don't like to do that, but it's not that bad is the Motorola R 56 book. It's kind of the Bible of grounding. There's one chapter that you got to get. It's a big book, but it's online. It's on PDF. You can Google search it. You can also go to joshubin.com, that's J-O-S-H-A-V-N dot com.  I got a page. I got a number of good free PDFs. There's nothing that you pay for on my website or something. I'm not promoting that. Just saying that I got the book there. There's also a whole other the first link. I'm trying to think of the guy's name, Mike Holt, I think. He's got a really good illustrated guide to basically doing customer side grounding properly. It's more oriented towards doing like satellite installs or something, but it's the same for wisps. And he's actually electrical. He's a trainer for electrical inspectors. So he's coming at it from the side of what the regulations require. And that's another big contested thing. And I say you absolutely do want to be grounding your customer side stuff. There are cable manufacturers that include like a carrier wire that's compliant for ground. So it's a copper wire that's on the outside of the ethernet cable. And you can connect that to the mast that the equipment is done. And then you connect that to your ground system outside the house. And so that connects the environment that the antenna is in. And then the foil on your cable connects the ground connection on your radio. And now the environment and the radio are both well connected to the same net ground wire. And the surge suppressor needs to connect to your electrical ground system outside your house, like your ground rod or your meter box or an intersystem bonding terminal. That wire is really not any more expensive than the way you're already running. The only extra effort or cost is that you got to get that ground wire near your meter. So you basically want to run from your antenna to near your power meter and then into the house. And sometimes that can be kind of wrapping around the house or over. Those get complicated, but life is complicated. You don't want to run a second ground rod because it's not just connecting your equipment to earth. That actually causes more problem than it fixes because you need your ground to be equal to your electrical ground, not just equal to earth. So that's why you wanted to the power meter. Yeah, there's resistance in the earth. So those two ground rods, you can literally go to a field and put a ground rod in, go a few hundred yards, put another ground rod in, run a wire between them and get them to spark in some cases with nothing around. Just because there's you created a lower resistance path than through the earth for a current to go through. And I'm not saying a big spark, but you know, if it's dark, you can see a little bit. And that's essentially what you're causing. If you're driving separate, dedicated rods that are not bonded back to the same system, because grounding is all about having everything at a zero point. That doesn't mean zero electrons. It means the same number of electrons, right? So, I mean, I've heard many debates on this on the, I guess it's on the tower or the CPE side, right? So some people say, well, it's better to have the grounding down at the ground, let's say, where your surge protector is, right, only. And some people say, well, you know, you should really you want the surge, sorry, to kind of exit the system as close to the device as possible. So really you want to ground the radio, you know, to a tower, a mast or whatever. And some people say, well, you need both or some people say you shouldn't. You should have one or the other. Is there any any sort of, you know, light that you can bring to that subject? Is there any, you know, basic methods that people should follow? Does it depend on certain things? Yeah, it's a it depends thing. If you want the cheap, easy solution that works pretty reliably, you can do all your grounding at the bottom and you ground your radio with the foil. I've done this on a lot of towers. If your radios aren't super expensive and you're not afraid to lose them in the event of a strike, then that's perfectly fine and you probably won't be losing them. If you want ideal, you want to ground like every foot, the shield of the cable or not foot, I'm sorry, every 50 foot. That's a lot of grounds. That's a lot of grounds. No, not ground every foot. So like, what's that cable called? It's a ethernet cable on the inside. And then there's another like copper heavy duty shield around it.  But I hate it too, and I don't use it. But if you want like best and you're putting, you know, $10,000 plus radio up there, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. And you put a surge suppressor at the top and one at the bottom and ground that shield every 50 feet. And that keeps the outside of the cable, any energy, like if there's a strike going down the tower is creating a whole bunch of electromagnetic energy going out and it's going to go into that shield. And the quicker it can equalize to the tower, the better. And I'm not saying carry the current of the tower. But if there's a potential difference, then it wants to jump over to it. If it's the same voltage level, not current flow, but voltage level, then there's no potential and it won't jump. So you're not grounding isn't about taking all the current of a strike from one device to another device. It's saying that there's no reason for it to zap over and make that that static shock. So it is nice to have your equipment grounded at the top and bottom. The main difference that that can cause is when you're dealing with like an FM transmitter or something and 10 is get changed, whether you're grounding at one point or two points. You can also create current flows where energy wants to flow through it because maybe your the copper that's in your your cable is better than the painted old rusty tower. And so there's a lot of variables. You got to look at how good your bonds are at each point and copper is a better conductor about 10 times better than like galvanized metal. So but that is a helpful thing to know 10 times is about the number. You can look it up on charts. It's in the Motorola book, but you're you need 10 times the surface volume of like galvanized metal than you need for copper. So if you if your pole is 10 times bigger than the copper wire in your ethernet than they're equal, if it's more than 10 times, then that's the better conductor. And that gets into like, do I run a copper ground wire down the tower and a water tower? I wouldn't because there's so much steel there. And in a tower where there's a lot of corrosion and stuff like that, I would. It's never going to hurt you. It's just a cost factor. So you can just say I want to do it always. It's only now another $300 and I don't want to have customers out because I value the income more than 300 bucks. It's a great argument. So I can go either way on that.  A lot of water towers are not connected to the utility grid until you put your radios on them. And then I had one water tower down south in South Texas. I think half of the radios were coming up at gig. The other half, they would only come up about 100 meg. And within a month, they lost one of those radios and they went out and they replaced it and it was an ethernet. And so they changed their surge protectors and then they talked to some bender that sold them this chemical ground thing. They wanted them to put this plate or something in the ground and add these chemicals to it. And it was kind of expensive. And I said, don't even use it.  I went on site and I looked at it and they're like, no, no, no, that can't be it. They've not lost the radio and everything's working at a gig. It took me two pieces of copper that are about eight foot long. And that's been six years now that they haven't lost any equipment on it. And they lost, I think, three or four radios in the process of trying to figure out how to ground it.  There's too much dark magic like we'll never figure this out. And there's I mean, there's a twinge of that. There's an aspect of that sometimes, especially if you're in a situation where you've got some weird ground loops or you've got 20 different vendors on the different tower and everyone's got everything sort of, you know, piecemeal patch together. But for the most part, you know, there's a handful of simple things that you can do, you know, use a quality cable like don't go cheap on your tower cable. Use a good shielded cable that how many times you pull out a cable and it's a nice expensive shielded cable with a plastic end on it, right? No shield bond, no tide to that. I've seen so many times surge protectors. Oh, hey, we spent all this money on surge protectors, but they won't ground on the surge protectors, right? So at that point, it's just another path like not doing any good. So yeah, or, you know, using a $15 surge protector on a $5,000 radio. Well, you know, maybe the math doesn't really pan out on that, especially when you can get a high quality, you know, Alpu or Alpu fit or the lights or whatever you want for 50 bucks, 100 bucks or whatever it may be. I mean, there's a lot of really good options that are not that bad and you're going to burn that up with a tower climb cost anyway. So, you know, use quality surge protectors, get everything bonded as close as you can. Use good cables, use good ends. Your life is going to be significantly better. I think that's what burns up a lot of people. And it's always tough because you'll you'll, especially the newer whistle, they start up and, you know, they start getting things figured out, start generating revenue. And then about this time of year, their life gets very painful because all the stuff they've built off all fall and winter is now starting to get popped as we entered in the lightning season. So, you know, it's just one of these things where you learn a little bit the hard way sometimes. But, you know, this is something where a little bit of work in advance, a little bit of research and practice and talking to people can save you a lot of pain down the road for sure. The ubiquity tough cable, I'm not sure it's called the tough cable end, whatever that end is, that user guide is great. Um, use that to terminate to and everybody I've talked to about that, they're like, they don't want to do it that way. It's you got to fold the cable back or the foil back. The foil has a blue side. It's non-conductive. Get your multimeter and touch it and see. That's a Teflon coating. I believe it's Teflon could be wrong on that. But it's a it's a coating on there that's non-conductive. Only the inside is conductive, the shiny metal side. Um, you want to fold that back and you want it to be inserted into the inside of that. Um, so your foil connection to the RJ45 is really important. The, um, drain wire, the drain wire. Thank you. Um, that's not the ground wire. That's a drain wire. Um, and you do want to put that through the loop, but that's actually the more optional part. The foil is the primary, uh, ground point and there's ends that don't even have the drain wire loop on it. I like having both, um, but in grounding the point where you're, um, sorry, words escape me sometimes. The point of interconnection is the really important point and all of the surface area that you get in on the foil is good. And I've seen a lot of those ends where you crimp them with a pair of pliers or something like that. And you go back and you look at it and it's all corroded and it's just, it's not solid. And those corrosion points are where you're going to have failure, um, because you didn't get the equalization through it. It doesn't need to carry a bunch of current, but it does need to keep everything at the same potential. So yeah, you're absolutely right on that. Those termination points are, are critical.  Well, the tower's got about an inch and a half of pain on it, right? So day and day and again, uh, a lot of times you need to make sure that if you were renting space, especially from the established carrier, an American tower, SBA or one of those, you know, they, they've all got their own sort of rules too about where your bond points are and aggregating your bonds because they don't want 37 driving wires running up and down the tower. But they, it also comes with their probably maintaining their bond system a lot better too. So it's one of these things where they're like, I don't want to fool with all this. I'm like, dude, these rules were written in blood or, I don't know, radio blood that if radios could bleed, they'd be bleeding all over from getting blown up. So, you know, that's, yeah, capacitor juice, exact worst band name ever.   So, you know, I remember back in the day where it got big as the nano stations or I forget what it was, when it really got popular, people will start losing ports everywhere and couldn't figure it out. And we, we all learned back in the day the hard way about how to do some of those sort of stuff for sure. Yep. Any other, uh, cognizant points, you want to point out while, uh, about what we're talking about grounding here. Like we kind of branched off a bit, but I know this is something we get a lot of questions, especially this time of year. Like it seems like these questions start popping up a lot because they're like, oh, my stuff got blown up. And it's never, you know, in the middle of a day, one of the Tuesday, right? It's invariably like Saturday night, four a.m. And you've got to deal with that. So any more sort of hot ticket things you want to punch on the ground while we're here? I guess I could try to paint a good picture what I liked to see. Like if I was going to go check out an inspection, I want to open the tower box where the equipment's at. And I want to see a bus bar of some sort. You can get the little aluminum strip. There's got the green nuts that you can get from electrical supply. Aluminum and copper aren't really supposed to go together. Also copper and galvanized aren't supposed to go together. But if it's designed to go together, I think that's the purpose of the green screw that's on those bus bars, then it's going to be good. And the reason is you can get corrosion. So you want to be careful that you're, just talk to your electrical supply and they have like a bronze thing that will connect galvanized to copper. And so you want to just make sure that you're using the standards. Make sure all your equipment ground is connected to a ground. If you don't want to run a ground while you're up and down the tower, then I'm okay with that as long as you're not connecting to paint, like you said. But you can put a bus bar up top or just take each radio to the tower leg. If it's a run 45G or something, you can get the same ground connector that's for going to a galvanized pipe. Tower leg is a galvanized pipe. So use that pipe ground connector that the electricians use for building. So I'm perfectly fine with that part. And just connect your grounds properly. Make sure your tower is really well bonded to the bus bar that's in your equipment shack. Make sure it's well bonded to the ground rods and well bonded to the utility grid. You don't want the utility grid bond from your tower and those rods that are in the ground. Because if the pole gets struck, it's gonna spread out through the ground. It's just flowing like water and that's finding the lowest, easiest paths to the most ground.  Well, if the best path between that pole and your tower ground is your equipment, it's gonna come through that path. You don't want that.  Have an electrician upgrade it because the minimum code requirement is at number six. And that's not, that's enough to make human safe. It's not enough to make your radio safe. Take the same size ground wire that's coming in to your meter box and come out with the same size ground wire to go to your rods and your whole system. So it's usually a number two and that's probably a little smaller than my thumb but it's a big wire. It's worth it. It's probably only about 10 and copper prices are way higher than they used to be. Maybe it's 25 bucks to get that piece of wire and that could save your network. So just making sure you got those good points and you can say that everything's coming back to a good connection point.   Yeah, probably wouldn't rely on my network health to rely on that janky piece of Chinese wire, but you know. The ones that you see in those memes on Facebook where there's a little Ziploc bag with the dirt and it's zip tied to it. Yeah, think of it like a road system. You want a freeway going between your tower and your utility grid. All your major systems need to be connected with freeways. And if you got freeways interconnected with the little alley, that alley is going to have a big traffic problem. And when that traffic is lightning, it's going to go all over. You can survive a strike on your tower, no problem. As long as you don't have your equipment hit like the bolt actually enters your equipment which will put a hole in it.  I'm not talking about, you might not find the radio. Vaporize it? Yeah. Your deity of choice has said that the radio gets to go to radio heaven. So yeah. Exactly. Sometimes you can't avoid it, but yeah. If you're just getting black ethernet ports, then it's a problem that you've got it on balance. That's not a direct strike. I've seen holes in radios. I've seen, oh, I found this piece of the radio. It was about that big. You know, like that's a direct strike. So I guess just think of it like a freeway system. Get all your connections really good. Where you can, CAD weld, it's not that complicated. You can get the single units. Talk to somebody that does this. I know there's a number of people in the industry that do that. Tommy does a lot of it. He gets a lot of recommendations.  It's got aluminum and rust, basically. It's an iron oxide in it. It's called thermite. When you get it hot enough to use a little wick, it's a metal, it's a magnesium wick. You light the magnesium, but you can't light the thermite. But when that goes liquid, it'll just turn into liquid metal. So you put that basically like on your ground rod. You put the wires into it and you get it hot and then you break the little pot off of it and you've got that welded. I think those shots are something like 12 bucks or something like that to get the single use. You can go bigger and you can get the clamp and the right gear that's more reusable and stuff and people that do it all the time, they'll have that. Those are expensive, but you know that something that's welded like that is never gonna get the screw a little bit loose and then not be making a good connection.  And a lot of lightning strikes aren't even a lightning strike. It's actually just energy. And then there's the ESD discharge. There was no bolt from the cloud. It's just you got energy built up into two different systems and they weren't well enough bonded and then the potential got high enough and pop.  That will take your radio out. Windy days, dry environments, plastic fiberglass type, radomes and stuff on antennas, just build up a static charge and just pop. Transient currents are induced from nearby strikes too. You're moving a lot of power. If all the strike was only like a quarter mile away. Well, guess what? You're still dealing with a non-trivial amount of power radiating through the year a bit. Yeah, that reminds me of another thing. Say you have a plastic radio and you got your ethernet cable there. Ethernet's grounded, the radio's grounded, but the radio backing is plastic. It's on a metal mount or something and that's not connected anything metal. And they're like, well, how could that be a grounding issue where you need to bond it? Well, Tossos just said it, static buildup from wind and stuff like that with these different materials.  And it just goes right over right through the plastic on your ethernet shield right into your ground unit and freezer radio. Just, and that's where one little piece of copper that goes to a little green screw that's on the mount, on the mast, and it won't be able to build up that current. So with that. I think another common misconception or something I hear people a lot too, they're like, well, the radio still powers up the ethernet didn't work.  And I don't think a lot of people understand how sensitive an ethernet phi is to voltage differentials because I mean, that's how it works, right? Like why aren't ethernet works by flagging around a little bit of voltage differential? So if it's looking for one volt or five or three, I forget what the base voltage and it flops back, but either way, if that turns into 30,000 and it just trickles a little pop across, it doesn't take much to deafen that thing out for sure. Yeah, I could be wrong on this, but I think I'm not. I think radios generally can handle about 2000 volts of a quick ESD discharge. I believe that KMBMs is tested for that. I don't know what ubiquities it's tested for, but I could be wrong on those very specifics. It's worth looking up, like go looking up. But the standard discharge, like walk across the carpet and discharge it, you can be 10,000 plus volts. So that's still way above the range of that 2000. You could be like climbing a fiberglass ladder or something like that and end up building that up yourself and touch and that could be enough to cause a problem. Yeah, it's crazy how many variables there are and when it comes to that as well, I mean, we're talking in voltages and tens of thousands of volts, but we're talking microamps or even picoamps worth of current. But you mentioned it quickly when you said duration, that's something that people don't think about either. I mean, it didn't occur to me until you mentioned it because I knew this, but I had forgotten about it. It also depends on how long that surged last. So there's a lot of things. It's not just, hey, this is good up to 50,000 volts, like you'll see on the spec sheets, 10,000 KVJs or whatever it is, but it's how long that last as well, you know, that it's crazy. A lot of stuff, a lot of stuff to know. Yeah, surge protectors are rated the same way. Surge protectors are also consumable items, you know, just, I think a lot of people don't understand that as, you know, a good one can take quite a few jolts and shunt over the ground, but eventually if it keeps taking it and keeps taking it, you're going to eventually burn the thing up. So all right, well, I think we've talked this one into the ground. Hi, that's a good one. All right, so let's get back to the history thing as we meander through this time. You were planning that, weren't you? You were planning that. No, no, I'm naturally. That came natural? That was my one actual insight for the whole conversation. I was like, no, he must have pre-planned that. He's like, I'm going to stay that. I'm not going to show you where I wrote it on this piece of paper, but all right. So you were, you're at the computer store. You'd started with us.  So then you lost your own and was doing a lot of sort of similar things, but kind of where did it go from there? So I kind of went back into software development, which was my start along passion. I wrote something I was calling succulent and I kind of based it off of cacti because I was really frustrated with cacti trying to figure out how their templates work. It's trying to develop form. I even called a consultant that noted, I think it was Greg, I don't know how he says last time, so well. Yeah. I think I called him up, but I'm not sure as long time ago, but I think he listed that he was a cacti consultant. I had a conversation with him like, I don't really get how their templates are working. I want to do this and that. And he's like, well, what I'm good at doing is finding working examples and modifying them to work cause I kind of don't get it either. I don't want to bash him.  But I had big data problems. I was getting 13 million records a month into my system. I found some ubiquity bugs with it. I posted those on the ubiquity forum and they went away in later firmware versions. I don't know if that was because of my comments or they did it independently. I never heard back, but I started building that but I realized I couldn't release it. I put some posts out on the forums and people were like, where'd you get that information? I want that. I was like, hey, I could build a product here cause it seems to be wanted, but I needed to rebuild the data warehousing side of it so that I could handle the data. But I didn't really have time. And when I was running a computer store cause I was a wisp at this time, but before that, when I was running a computer store, I wrote a software to do billing and workflow management for a company that collected title information for people that were getting loans. Really it was for the title companies and they had a statewide operation and they were thinking about going national. They needed help with their business operating system stuff. So I wrote that forum and they needed another version and some updates to it and I was like, man, this is going to take full time for probably close to a year to reach the scope that you're talking about. And I'm not a great business guy. I didn't think about hiring it out or didn't know how to manage that. So I was like, not sure I could do that. I didn't like to say, no, I was trying to find a solution. I was talking to a friend of mine and he happened to be from Veritas software which I think at the time was the number three software company out there. And that was where he was. He left that and went into being a pastor and he says, I know how to build a company. So I started a boxy software with him and that's where I learned what real financial pain was. It took me a year to get that software written but we ran out of money and I ended up with credit card debt and we didn't get the customers on time. The software is still functioning but it's not got enough to pay my income or anything. So it's basically just kind of like keeping itself alive. And I don't know enough about the title market to really go and make it work well but I had also wrote a billing system for Wisps or started to got about probably a third of the way through it and that's when Sonar came out or at least that's when I noticed Sonar come out. And I said, I don't have the marketing energy to keep up with this. So I kind of like had all these financial burdens and these software projects and I was sort of like discouraged. Like I didn't know how to get off the ground and my partner knew big business, he didn't know startups. And so we were in process of getting some patents on some of our things that we were doing and stuff like that. And that's where some of the money went to. And anyways, that was a lesson learned hard and it taught me a lot about business and the portents. When you start up, you really need to get to cash flow positive right away. Whenever I talk to a Wisps wants startup like you got to get to cash flow positive right away. What's your plan? Can you do this in a month? Because I know you can't, I'll tell people that but you need to believe you can because it's gonna take you at least four times what you think it's gonna take you. So you got to have that runway that you're not in a desperate situation and end up with like $40,000 in credit card debt which is where I got to. One I kind of gave up on writing software because there's too much upfront investment to getting to the money. I went back into Wisp Consulting. That got me down to Texas here. I was in Michigan. I almost basically almost didn't leave the county. I was just like stuck where I was born. But I liked Texas. I mean, friends down here, there was a Wisp that needed some help and I helped him grow a lot bigger than he ever had gotten in a couple of months. He'd only got up to about 400 subs. He had some stiff competition. He had been in business quite a while but there was just a lot of things that he didn't know how to solve that luckily I had figured out how to solve along the way. And we got him up to about 2,000 subs before I kind of stopped working with him so over a couple of years. And I was enjoying learning about the business side of growth because the technical side part I had solved those problems and I could just offer the solution but there's also things like how do you scale your installers and train them well and on board them and how do you make sure your customer tickets are handled well and all that. But the ISP wasn't really, I've got a lot of passion and I felt like I wasn't gonna be able to do all that I wanted to do working for the ISP. A guy come along another one of those things where it didn't work out in the end but he had a relationship with AT&T and he wanted to make it so that we could like white label AT&T services for wisps and just allow wisps when they're up against an area where there's AT&T fiber they can not only use that to build out their own network but they can offer that as services to their people that they wanna manage the customer support for. And so I sat down with AT&T directors with them and everything was promised that there'd be margin. It turned out that there wasn't sufficient margin for us. That got me moved up to Plano but it turned out that I moved up to Plano and shut down all my consulting relationships that I had just built. I was out of debt again but I wasn't ahead yet. And then this thing that I thought we had all the T's crossed and the I's dotted and I thought, wow, we can really bring something of value to the Wisp industry. It just went like that and I'm jobless now and actually I took it really hard because I knew I could go back into consulting but I like, I don't know, three week long panic attack basically to the point where I couldn't taste in half of my mouth. I just didn't know what to do. One time I had a customer, had an outage, I laid on the bed, I put my hands over my eyes like this to get rid of all the light and I talked to my wife through fix an OSPF for a customer because I just couldn't even look at the screen. She's got a computer background. She's not a networking person but she's not totally unaware. That's actually a cute story. I met her at college and she was the one that was gonna train me on how to install the network for the dorms. She was gonna show me how to set up network cards and make sure they're getting on the domain and stuff like that. She didn't need to teach me anything but she thought I was kind of silly because I had a pouch of screwdriver.  So I was kind of that nerd but... Well, that was your mating plume-ish? Yeah, exactly, I have to say. That was him peacocking, you know? It worked. Look at all these bits. Yeah, it worked. So anyways, I was here in Plano and at the bottom, I knew I could pick things up but I didn't know where to go. I was like, do I wanna go talk to a vendor and see if one of my relationships would get me a job? Do I wanna go work for a Wisp? Do I wanna go into software development? I don't really have the money. Like all this stuff, I was talking with some other consultant saying maybe we'll go into consulting as a group because the problem that I had with consulting is if I had enough relationships to make my income stable, then that was fine as long as everybody didn't need me on the same day. And it happened all too often that I had to let people down in order to just like, I can only do this right now and you need me but he needs me and he came first and I don't like that, I don't like it at all. So I was trying to figure out how to partner with some consultants and it was just a big mess and it didn't make perfect sense to me and that's when I met Todd at Wisp. They had a CEO round table, Craig Oliver was a friend of mine, a Wisp that I talked to and he used Wisp and he said, hey, you gotta come to our weekly meeting and meet the CEO. And I'm like, yeah, another relationship that I could start not that there's anything wrong with it but it didn't seem like a solution but the more I met Todd, he's really a problem solver. He likes to know where things are and find the win-win in relationships and he likes to team build and he said, well, cause he saw that I was stressed and he's like, how about I just give you a regular consulting check and you can help my customers that are struggling to onboard get onboarded to my software. And I said, well, that's easy enough, let's try it. So then I got to the point where I wasn't worried about stability of my income, I didn't have but he covered about half of what I needed in one go. So that gave me some hope and then I started looking and I just, I understood the customer and the wisp really well and that's what they needed to improve what they're working on from a software development side. I would, I'd get on with their tech guys and a customer and say, okay, let's fix this MPLS issue together. And I trained up their tech guys on how to do MPLS and OSPF and all the stuff that has nothing to do with the this billing system but now they have people on staff that know how to track it down and figure it out because I had the process of you watch me and then I'll watch you and then you're able to do it. So I trained and created documents in the company and it's kind of worked up and we have a director's team and we don't have particular tops of anything. It's like we just work as a team together but I'm probably the most vocal of the group. So I've worked as high as I can in the company and I really like where I'm at right now. It solved my problem because I've got a real passion to build in the WISP industry, the solution that's needed out there. I grew up in areas where internet was hard to get. I understand that problem. I wanna find solutions for it. I know WISPs have the solutions. Wireless can get out there and I love helping WISPs build everywhere. And so how can I do that as a system that isn't me having? Like I've helped substantially over 200 WISPs solve problems and it's exhausting to have that many relationships. So I wanted something that's scaled and Todd's like, I want something that's scaled. Let's do it together. So I was like, let's do it. And I've been there, I don't know, three or four years and I kind of know all the areas in the company and I meet with customers all the time and it fills my passion to really help WISPs be successful. So that's my whole WISP story from beginning to end there. Yeah, it sounds like you've got a lot of experience, seem a lot of the good things and the bad, but you know, that's where the educational aspect comes from. So, you know, and speaking of education, one of the things that we try to do with this podcast especially for the newer WISPs or even the more established WISPs with these interviews is to say, hey, you know, where did you guys really learn? Where did you guys, where have you learned to like automate and make yourself work more efficiently? And one of the things that we think with like billing systems and stuff too, and a lot of people don't realize that, you know, a well-built, fully sort of integrated billing system is more than just sending out invoices and collecting bills and maybe even turning the counts down. So, you know, these systems especially, maybe 10 years ago, that's what it was.  So, you know, from WISPs perspective, they've gotten to be very popular over the last few years with the tool set that they offer. So, can you kind of go into that? Like what makes you guys stand out? How do you help a WISP be more efficient in their daily operations and help them grow beyond just a pure billing system aspect? Our secret sauce is actually pretty simple. We have our core values and we labeled it right to our name, WISP, Value, Integrity, Synergy and Passion, which train that through our whole staff. And we say, that's who we are, that's what we, like everybody, even the owners accountable to that. We create that with our customers, we create that with our vendor partners. We don't do anything that goes outside of those ropes. And so we have that foundational thing. It also frees us up to make decisions. So, if you get the first person you call when you call our call center, as long as they're acting within those parameters, they have the ability to help you. So, that's sort of like who we are as a person. Like if you think, if you wanted to pick this out of a crowd and we realize that the way we partner with our WISPs and we do consider it a partnership, we see ourselves as an extension of their team is we're helping them provision their clients to get the services that they're paying for. And we wanna, if that means teaching them how to use MicroTik to do this one thing, then we're okay with that. We don't administrate their networks for them. They need to administrate their networks, but we can show them models that work. And we're not afraid to invest in learning a new model or a new element to that because we learn it once, we document it, we train it a little around on our admins, and then we're able to offer that as help. We're not a consulting company. We don't wanna do that. We never wanna get into that business. And there's good reasons to have people do that. But we do know what it looks like to get into a data center and how that might solve your problems. And we're totally okay with talking with you about that if that's what you wanna do. And I just recently recommended somebody reaches out to IPA to talk to them about something I thought they were a good fit for. And we wanna hand off those more complicated things and we're not trying to get into that space because we only have a small team that's capable of answering those questions. But what our total focus is, is we're here for the success of our customers because if they don't add another customer, we can't grow our business bottom line either. So we have to add customers, but more importantly, we have to grow with, our customers have to grow. When we add a customer, it can take us a year or longer before we get any return on that because we have a big upfront investment. When they come over to us, we usually just ask them for the data, whatever form that data, then we figure it out and get it into our system. Then we get on calls with them and work out to make sure that is this properly all connected and everything like that? Now let's bench test it and we just have a lot of upfront investment in that conversion. So what really is best is if our customers grow up large, when we look at our growth, the biggest factor of growth is actually our customers growing. I guess we're just passionate about with success which that's why I work in the company really well because that's been my passion for a couple of decades now. Very cool, very cool. So you're pretty tapped in obviously. What do you think is the most exciting things going on in the Westworld in general right now about new tech, new market trends? You watch the news, it's very big and scary right now. Some people are a little hesitant and especially those that we knew a lot of people who started out in the industry and like 08 and they're like, oh, we're gonna have this whole global janky reception thing and everything else. So what are you looking forward to the most and what do you think are the biggest things that Wests, especially new Wests need to be on the lookout for? Exciting can go two ways and I think- Exciting good and exciting maybe not so good. Yeah, and I think government involvement is the exciting right now that's going on in the industry. I've got customers that are being overbuilt by government funded things that isn't really fair. That's exciting but not the good way. We got technology that's allowing us to get gigabit and your gigabit speeds to the home and that opens up suburban markets. What my expectation is that I think is gonna be a big change and this is kind of exciting to me and how this is gonna work is I think there's gonna be a breakdown in the core business structure of the service provider. It's hard to do well at all aspects. One aspect is sort of financing. Another aspect is your operations. Another aspect is like your sales and customer relations and it's hard to find a company who is just really good with sales and marketing and customer relations. Also really good at operating and also really good at handling their finances so they don't have any bank accounts standing in the way of growing. So that's what rattles around in my brain and how can I solve all these things and I do have some secret sauce solutions on our roadmap. I see myself like who I wanna be in the industry is Henry Ford. He made the assembly line and what that did is it made cars consistent so that now we have scalability of mechanics that know how to work on them. We have companies that know how to invest in it. We kind of have that whole solution together because we sort of simplified and systematized what it means to make own, fix and run cars. And I think the Wisp industry is, that's the big change that's gonna happen in the Wisp industry. Right now, picking up LTE, you gotta like learn things over it, yeah.  You wanna start building your towers yourself now. Oh my goodness, there's all kinds of stuff you gotta learn over again. This is really complicated and I think it can be a whole lot simpler. So I'm working towards systems that I think can revolutionize the market to where I'm talking at a global level we can really reach deep into Africa and India and deep into Indiana and Wyoming and like everywhere because the systems become simpler to operate. So that's my exciting passion. I don't know if that answers your question. Is that a good answer? No, no, for sure. The standardization of things, it's one of the biggest advantages and disadvantages I think in the industry because there's a very low barrier to entry. So you can get started very easily but if you take 10 different Wisp and that are at 10,000 customers and compare them, they've all gone things a completely different way and as you look at customer aggregation as they buy them up, there's just so much just hard to merge all these systems in, right? So if you've got the ability to standardize some of this then just got a lot of potential to do some really interesting things for sure. Software and automation, that's my answer right now. That's the direction we're going. Very interesting. Well, that covers most of the questions I've got and jotted down. I mean, we've covered a pretty wide breadth of information, but it was really interesting. So Tossos, you have any other topics you want to peruse through at this time? No, no, I think we copied, we've gone through all the different topics, so I'm good. Well, cool, cool. So Josh, people that are looking to find you, where are the best place that they can reach out and find you, get in touch with you or Wisp or all of the above? Yeah, I've got a unique first name, which means I could buy the dot com of it. So joshavin.com, it's a personal page. It's got some resources on there, it's got my cell phone number on there and email address. And Wisp.net is where the large, large majority of my focus is at. And even when somebody comes and says, hey, can you help me start a Wisp? I say I can, but really it has to be through Wisp.net. And that's not because I'm trying to force that, it's like I really don't have the capability to do that much work without my whole team helping me. So we do a fair number of startups, that's not our focus. I'm not trying to like attract all the startups, but we do work with startups all the time and I'm happy to have personal calls. And I'm happy to help get the team involved with getting people going. But when it comes to starting a Wisp, the biggest thing I say is like, you gotta understand the taco stand joke because it's very, very real.  So it needs to be that you really, really are committed to that before you wanna start. But we work with Wisp at all sizes. So that's the way that I can impact a lot of Wisp's now. And that's really the way that I work in the industry is through Wisp and making sure those solutions are fit for the market. All right, great. That was really good information. Tasos, where can the good people find us out there? You can find us everywhere on social media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube is another great place. You can always email us at tasosorcalib at rfelements.com. So yeah, definitely find us on social media. If anyone's going to Wisp America, we will be there booth 509, so come find us. And otherwise, until we talk to everyone next time, y'all be good. Be good. Later. Thank you. See y'all.