Good morning, and welcome to Encompass Live. My name is Michael Sowers. I'm dual-hosting today. Krista Burns is still on vacation for the holidays out in New York, and I'm back here in the office with our monthly tech talk. So it will just be me, and I do have one guest who's actually three doors down for me in our offices here at the commission. And welcome to this kind of dead week, as many people call it, not a lot of people at work, not a lot of people in the library, still a lot of people out on vacation, so we've got a small group of you attending this morning. I've got some things to talk about with eBooks and some other security issues that have come out, and maybe some other software and websites you might be interested in taking a look at. So we're going to kind of keep today pretty loose and have a little bit of conversation. As always, if you have any questions and you are attending live, please feel free to submit those into the questions area of the GoToWebinar software. I will be looking at those, and I will do my best to answer any and all questions that you have as we are going along today. And so what I want to start with is talking about eBooks just a little bit, share a little story with you. If you're in a library, chances are you're going to see an increase in patrons coming into the library with eBooks after the Christmas holiday. In fact, I know that will be happening in at least one town back where I grew up, Brockport, New York, because we got my 13-year-old niece a nook for Christmas, and getting that all up and running for my brother was an interesting experience. They didn't want her to be able to just buy books from Barnes & Noble, which is what the nook is connected to, so they didn't do that for her, but they did want her to be able to check books out from the local library, which does have the overdrive eBooks. And so getting that set up was a bit interesting. I spent some time doing some technical support with my brother on the phone. There was software called Adobe Digital Editions that he had to download and install. Then it turns out the account didn't work for that software, and that was because in his case, the clock on his computer was a little too off from actual time, so the software didn't want to work for him. Then once they got that running, the software didn't want to recognize that the nook was an actual device connected to his computer, so he got back on technical support with Adobe again, and it turns out he had to browse the nook as if it was a flash drive and delete a folder off of the device. Then that worked. And then maybe as an insult to injury, they finally got onto the library website. They went to check out a book and my niece's library card had expired. So they ended up in Google Books. She got some classics to read and was happy, but it was kind of a stressful hour or two just getting everything up and working. So I'm sure in his case, luckily, he either called me or he got on chat with Adobe, but in some cases the libraries are going to be calling you for help. Hey, I got this new device. I'm trying to get a book out of the library. Help me out. So who I do have on the line with me here is our own Susan Nicely at the commission. Susan, you there? Yep, I'm here. And I kind of wrote Susan into doing this the last minute this morning because she's the person who deals with overdrive here at the library commission. We are a library too. So Susan, maybe if you could just briefly kind of give us an idea of what overdrive is and how that relates to libraries here in Nebraska. Well, here in Nebraska, we do have an overdrive consortium set up. Omaha Public Library has its own overdrive account and Lincoln City Libraries has its own overdrive account. So they are independent entities as far as their overdrive sites go. But we did work with the smaller libraries in the state that were interested to set up a group. So we actually have, we're up to 63 libraries now. And I was thinking about this when you were talking about increased demand after the holidays, Michael. I just, right before I went for coffee, I had a call from one of our libraries that's not a member of our overdrive group. And she wants to join. They, I think, voted on it last night because all of a sudden after Christmas they've been overwhelmed with demand for e-books. And we actually have to get all of her paperwork into overdrive by tomorrow, I think, to sneak her in during the January setup period. But there's an example of a library who's really scrambling to meet the need right after Christmas. So we've had the overdrive audiobooks for several years now. And then we just got into the e-book business back in July. So we've started dealing with the whole question of what kind of e-book readers can people use with overdrive. And then just in December they introduced a couple of apps that allow people to download both e-books and audiobooks to some of their mobile devices. And so that's also thrown new permutations into the whole mix. Yeah, I know. My wife and I both have droid phones and droid devices. And we both successfully, it took a little work, but successfully have downloaded both e-books and e-audio books onto our phones. So yeah, I know what it can take to get that done. Focusing on, let's focus on the e-books, the text, instead of the audiobooks. And then there are apps for your iPod, iPod, iPhone, iPad, all the i-devices and the droid devices. The e-readers, the kind of e-inc or LCD devices beyond what I just mentioned. Which devices will work with overdrive and maybe more importantly, which won't? Well, the obvious one that won't is the Kindle, which of course is very popular. And I know we knew that the libraries in our overdrive group knew that lots of their patrons were probably going to be getting e-book devices over Christmas. And so overdrive did send out sort of a e-reader device cheat sheet a couple weeks before Christmas. And so we got that out to all of the libraries and they really used that to try to educate their population. That if you want to be able to use the library's e-books and check out e-books from the library, these are the devices that you should consider. And beware of the Kindle if you're planning on checking out. So hopefully, I know our libraries were really working hard to at least get that message out so that people didn't have expectations of checking out books on their Kindle. So that has been the big educational mission of the libraries the last couple weeks. Yeah, that's the one thing I've told people. In fact, when my brother talked to me a few weeks before Christmas, he's like, I know I've heard about all these devices. Which one should she get? And the moment I said, well, if you want to be able to check out library books, don't get a Kindle.   I don't want anybody to think that. But that's what it basically boils down to if you want to use library books through overdrive. And I'll throw in here that's not the library's fault. That's not necessarily even overdrive's fault. The Amazon has just said we don't want to play in that venue. We don't want to play in that sandbox. Well, sure. And that's a business decision for them since they obviously want you to be able to, they want you to buy your books from Amazon. And this is my personal feeling is I ended up getting the Sony Reader because I wanted the option of, I may purchase books in the future, but I also want to be able to check out books from the library just like I do in my real life. I'm a big library user so, you know. Exactly. In our case, my niece, she ended up with a nook because that's kind of what the library was encouraging and she volunteers at the library. And we figured, you know, it'll work and there are people on staff who can help her out. So that was good. It's sometimes technical support from several states away is not as easy as it might sound. So what sort of questions, if any, Susan, I realize, you know, we've obviously seen the demand and enough that at least one library is signing up here at the last minute with the new group. And that's great to hear. What sort of other issues other than we want to participate, have you heard from libraries in, oh, I don't know, the last 72 hours? Well, I think, you know, we haven't actually gotten any tech support calls since Christmas, which surprised me. But we did, we were getting them before Christmas, particularly with the release of some of the new apps. What's becoming clear to me is that there are so many different permutations now in terms of what kind of file are you interested in, what kind of file is the book that you're interested in, what sort of device do you have, what sort of computer do you have. We did have an interesting situation. And this was a matter of all of the PRs. Now you can download eBooks directly from Overdrive to your iPhone or iPad or whatever. So that's the message that you take away. But we had someone contact us and she had checked out a WMA title. She was trying to download a WMA title onto her iPad. And it was a matter of going back and really carefully reading the information on the, you know, they've got Overdrive has a page now that links off of our Overdrive website that talks about their new iPhone apps. And going back and reading it carefully and it specifically said, you can download both ePub, eBooks, and MP3 audio books directly to your device. So what that means then is that you cannot directly download PDF eBooks or WMA audio books to your device. So that was the first clue to the problem she was having. And, you know, we looked at the actual book in our Overdrive catalog. And it did say that the WMA title would play on the iPad. But then we got into the issue of what kind of computer she had. And she had a Mac and you can't download WMAs to a Mac. So, you know, based on her particular situation and her permutation of the kind of file she was interested in and the kind of computer she had, she could not get that WMA file onto her iPad. If she'd had a PC, she could have downloaded it to her PC and then transferred it over. So, you know, there's about two or three different variables in here that, you know, affect the success. So to me it's just really a matter of, you know, each individual situation and really working through all of the different pieces. That's one example. The other example that I guess Katherine here at work bought her husband a look for Christmas. And so he was trying to download books, but there's been so much buzz about download directly to all of these devices that he was thinking, they were thinking naturally that they could download directly from Overdrive to the Nook. And that doesn't work with the reading device. You do need to download it to your computer using the Adobe Digital Editions and then transfer to the Nook. So, you know, again, there's so much buzz right now about download directly to your, you know, portable devices that sort of bleeds over and is now starting to confuse people about their eBook readers. So it's just a time when there's a lot of people getting new devices. There are new capabilities which are good, but it means that we all have to sort of slow down and really read the fine print. Yeah, I went through that exactly with the Nook at Christmas in that. Yes, it has Wi-Fi and yes, you can go to the library's website and you can check out the eBook. But when it comes to the download, I literally tried it. I tried to download it directly to the Nook and it said downloading not supported. And again, we had to set it up with my brother's computer and pull it through that way. So you could get all the way to checking it out, but you need that desktop computer or laptop to get it onto the device. You know, if you want to now download directly from Barnes & Noble and pay for it, hey, that then the Wi-Fi works great. But those library books, you need that PC in between the library's website and the device. Now, I have actually been really impressed with Overdrive tech support. Typically, they don't work with the general public. They work with the librarians. And I know many of our Overdrive librarians contact tech support directly. But some of them contact me and I contact tech support. And tech support is very good. And what I try to tell librarians, because they don't always get, you know, it's hard to get all the information you need from the patron always right up front. I always just counsel them to counsel their patrons to be patient. If they can be patient, you know, it might take a couple back and forths, but tech support is usually able to figure out what's going on. And, you know, if there is a solution, they're able to find it. So I think it's just a situation where everyone's going to be patient and we'll get them set up. Yeah, well, my brother had that with a 13-year-old Christmas night. Right.  And all I think we can do as librarians is try to counsel that and not... If we don't seem stressed out, then that'll calm down people who want things to work right away. Yeah, and he ended up doing online chat with Adobe's technical support because he was having a problem getting even that middle software installed and he said that they really helped him out well.  So Adobe's technical support, I guess, was pretty good, too. We do have a question and a comment that have come in. Stanton Public here in Nebraska has said she's interested and can she call you this afternoon to maybe get in on this? Sure can. I have to get... And again, I'm just hoping everybody's going to be in the overdrive office that needs the paperwork, but we can sure try to get it... You know, in the past they've said if you get it in before the first, they can get you into this next setup period, but we're obviously cutting it pretty close, but yeah, she can call. So, Laura, who asked... Yeah, you may want to, as soon as the show is over, call. Call Susan. Don't wait for this afternoon. It sounds like every little time can help. And someone else here on staff who was listening in says Lincoln City Libraries has developed a tutorial on how to download Overdrive to Inuk. So I'm guessing that would be probably off of Lincoln City Libraries' website. And even though they're running a separate overdrive account, the instruction should be the same. Right, it should be, yeah. The URL of the website you go to to get the material would be a little different depending on the library you're connecting to. And I did want to comment. This was nice to hear. Katherine's husband was actually at Barnes & Noble, and he asked the Barnes & Noble Nook salesperson. And I've heard them promoting the fact that the Nook works with Lincoln City Libraries Overdrive. And he knew the answer. He knew that they had to download the PC first and then transfer. So that was kind of nice. We've got the Barnes & Noble staff doing some library tech support too. Oh, that's good. Well, I guess the bottom line from the sounds of it is be patient. We'll get it to work eventually. It just might take a little time. But everybody I've heard from, including myself in my experiences with this stuff, is once you get over those hurdles, it just works. But you've got to get over the hurdles in the first place. Right. Once you figure out what's going to work for your setup, most people are thrilled with it and love it. And she's not using the eBooks, but my 77-year-old mom is totally addicted to the Lincoln City Library Overdrive audiobook. So she's got quite the system going of holds and books on her MP3 player and figuring out when to delete one so she can move another one over. Great. Yeah, that's my other comment. Everything I want is already checked out. I'm going to put it on hold. Right. Just like the print world, Michael. Yeah. Well, yeah, but they usually have multiple copies. Let's not go there. All right. Anything else you want to throw out there, Susan? I don't think so. It seems like it's been a real positive experience. And I know we had all of our Overdrive libraries were concerned about the demand, and so we just did a big purchase on Christmas Eve of eBooks, and they were available the next morning. So we may not have the most popular eBooks available to check out, but we do still have a good number. All right. We're paying attention. Send your requests. Yep. All right. Well, thank you, Susan. I really appreciate this. You literally were walking back in the office from getting coffee, and I kind of put you on the spot, but like I said, I really appreciate it. And thank you very much for your assistance with this topic. No problem, Michael. Okay, great. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and meet Susan here, and she will probably stay on. So if you've got any other questions, just go ahead and send them through. And if we can't answer them during the show, we'll definitely get you an answer back. Okay. So there is my interview for today, and what I'm going to do next is just talk about some other news, websites, issues I think you all might be either are maybe interested in or should be interested in. And I've got my list of bookmarks here, which we will definitely post with the recording, the URL to that. So let me start out with that last month. I talked a lot about some security issues, specifically Wi-Fi security. And in the past, I've talked about passwords. And guess what, folks? We're going to talk about passwords again. I won't take too long on this, but something happened just a couple of weeks ago, which may have affected some of you. It definitely affected me, and so it's worth having a short conversation again. There is a company out there called Gawker Media, and they run a lot of very popular websites and blogs, Life Hacker, Gizmodo, Consumerist, and a bunch of others, I09, which is related to science fiction, and just those four I read on a daily basis. And to leave comments and actually participate on these sites, you do need to sign up for an account and pick a password. Well, they got hacked, and all of their password files were stolen and posted online. So this kind of just suddenly freaked everybody out, and they sent emails to everybody saying, your password might have been compromised. Please change your password. Well, somebody may think, well, I don't use any of those websites, so why should I care? Well, you may have used those sites once many years ago, and that password is out there. So I want to show you two things that they released based upon this. One is this website called Did I Get Gawker? And literally somebody has taken the password file, and you put in your email address and ask, Did I Get Gawker? And in this case, the answer should come back, yes. In other words, the password I used for any of their websites did get released into the wild, and if I haven't already, which I have, I should change my password. Here's the key. If you use the password in the same place, if they have the password for the Gawker sites, they might have your password for somewhere else. I keep bringing in my niece, but I told her when she got her note that she was going to have to sign up for an account and the words out of her, and she'd have to pick a username and password. And the words out of her mouth were, oh, that's fine. I use the same username and password for everything. And I froze for a second, and unfortunately at the time it was not appropriate to sit her down and try to explain to her why that was a really bad idea. I think I'll be sending her an email or talking to her dad about this, let dad have a conversation with her. But don't use the same password everywhere, because if somebody gets it from one place, then they might be able to use it for another place. The other related website to this, which got to continue that password conversation again, is people went through and actually analyzed what passwords people were using, and here are the top 50 passwords that people were using to log into Gawker websites. And notice that over 3,000 people use the password, one, two, three, four, five, six. Almost 2,000 people use the password, password. Life hack was actually the name of the website. Consumer was the name of another website. Gizmodo was the name of another website. Are any of these your passwords? I love you, Sunshine. Almost 500 people use the same exact password, Sunshine. Not a good password, folks. Hopefully I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but it's a reminder. Pick good passwords. Don't use the same password for everything. And if you are going to use the same password over and over again, please use a different password for your bank account. That's really, I cannot stress that enough. Okay, another big story from the last month is delicious. You'll notice I here am using delicious for my bookmarks. And two or three weeks ago, everybody had a total freakout over delicious because Yahoo had who owns delicious, as you can see right over here in the upper left, had an internal staff meeting and somebody released a PowerPoint slide from that saying, guess what, we're going to get rid of delicious. Instantly, everybody totally went nuts. They thought delicious was going to be deleted, you know, in the next 24 hours. All of the bookmarks that they possibly could have kept in delicious over the years, I have something like 45,000 or 4500 maybe. Bookmarks here in delicious, what are we going to do if delicious goes away? Well, delicious isn't exactly going to go away in the foreseeable future. The page I have link for here is basically Yahoo's official response to the news that they're going to get rid of delicious. And ultimately what they're saying is, yes, we want to get rid of it, but we're looking to sell it. We're not going to just delete everything immediately. This raises several issues. You know, we rely on these third party services to store our information. The question becomes, what happens if that service goes away? So, one of the things you can do, and I will point out and as mentioned in this article, is if you have content in delicious, you can export that content. Log into your account, go into settings, there's an export command, and you can download all of your content. There are then other articles out there, you know, what are the alternatives I've been playing with one called digodeigo.com. I'm not sure I'm completely liking it, I'm still playing around, but I did successfully export all of my content from delicious and imported into Digo, Digo, I don't know how to pronounce it. So, this is just something you want to keep in mind. If you have original content that's stored in the cloud, you might want to keep a local copy of it somewhere. Related to that, speaking of content in the cloud, I want to talk about Flickr for a moment. I upload content, photos to Flickr, photos and some videos. In fact, I've probably got, I think, 26 or 27,000 photos on Flickr. I also have all of those photos on my computer at home. I have them on a backup drive, and I have them backed up to an online backup service in the cloud, so if my house burns down, and all my computers go away, I haven't lost all of that content. Some people, though, I know, have uploaded photos to Flickr and haven't kept local copies, and so this delicious going away content, concept, made me think, well, what about all those folks who have uploaded content to Flickr and haven't kept local copies? Well, something I have found is a way that you can actually back up your content through, or from Flickr. In other words, you've got in Flickr, you want to download it back to your computer. And there's this wonderful utility called Flickr Edit. It allows you to do a lot more things other than actually just downloading content. You can batch edit, you can download parts, you can add tags, do all sorts of things that you can do in Flickr, but you do it kind of through this separate interface. And it's a Java-based program, and there's a launch button here.  You don't have to install anything as long as you have Java installed on your computer. It does take a few seconds to load up because it is a Java application. Excuse me. And let's see here, load up. There we go. And so, for example, I can now... I've already logged into my account. I've connected this to my Flickr account, and I'm going to click on Refresh Sets here. And what this is literally going to do is it's going to go into my account and see what photo sets I have created. I think this worked before. Oh, and all sets. There we go. Okay, so I loaded up my sets, and let's see, I want to see what's in this set. So I click that and click... Show Set. Excuse me. I just literally learned how to use this software two days ago. And it shows me what's in my set there, and I can select all of them. I can back them up, so it will download them to my computer. I can right-click on any one of these, and I can edit the data that's set to it. I can set as my photo. I can comment on photos. One of the things I found really interesting with this software is it can actually go in and I can say, what are all the images that I marked as favorites in Flickr? So these are photos by other people. And I can have it pull all those down, and then I can select them and make backup copies. Okay? Really, really handy software. If you've got a lot of content in Flickr, you want to make local copies of it, you want to make backups, you might want to take a look at Flickr Edit. And shut that down. Back to my bookmarks list here. Okay, some other services. Let's kind of keep talking about the cloud here just a little bit. Another interesting service that I ran into earlier this month is called Spoon. Now, in the past, I've talked about what are called portable applications. The idea is that you can actually install a piece of software, say, on your flash drive here, take that flash drive with you, plug it into a computer, and run the software that's installed on your flash drive. Handy, very useful. I have some utilities. I did some troubleshooting for my folks on their computers, and I actually had some software installed on my flash drive. Didn't want to install it on their computer, just plugged that in, ran it, off I went. Very simple, very easy. But maybe you don't have your flash drive with you. Okay?  Maybe you want to run a piece of software and you aren't allowed to install that software on a particular computer. Well, Spoon gives you a lot of options for this sort of situation. Okay? I'm just amazed at this and this idea of software running from the cloud in this case. In this case, a flash drive isn't even involved. Okay? Now, there are literally hundreds of applications in here. These are just the ones that I've connected to my account already. Okay? I have here Skype, Handbrake, Chrome, okay, the browser that's in there. In fact, let me go ahead and I'm just going to go into the library here real quick and see what's available.  Well, what I can literally do here is, in fact, they even have old versions. Here's Firefox 2. Well, I can go to Firefox version 3.5 here and I'm going to load this up and I'm going to say, okay, do I want to add it to my apps for later or do I want to launch it now? I'm going to go ahead and launch now. Now, normally I would maybe use Chrome as an example, but I'm already running Chrome, so I want to run it multiple times here. I'm going to click that and if you look down here in the bottom right, it says Buffering. It's going to load this up in about 10 seconds, a little bit longer. It's thinking about it. And here we go. Firefox is running. It is a generic installation. It's not going to necessarily remember my bookmarks or my settings, but I've literally run Firefox from the spoon, completely portable. Any computer, run Firefox, no installations, not going to leave anything behind on the computer, it just runs. I go back to my applications. There are games. There are browsers. I have here OpenOffice is available, so let's say you use that. Skype. You want to allow patrons to use Skype in your library, but you don't want to install Skype. You don't want to have to keep it up to date. You can have it running via Spoon. You can tell them to sign up for a Spoon account, add Skype. All they've got to do is log into Spoon, run Skype, runs on the library computer, they close it up, it's gone, hasn't done anything to the machine. This, I think, takes portable apps one step further. You don't even have to bring Flash Drive with you. You can just run it off of the cloud. I'm very impressed with this. Taking this one step further, something else has happened in the last month where I'm kind of jealous. I tried to get a friend of mine online this morning who actually has one of these devices. Unfortunately, he was unavailable at the last minute. This is the CR-48. I don't know if anybody has heard of this. This is the new Chrome notebook. It is a generic black notebook, but it runs the Google Chrome operating system. You can actually apply, if you see here over on the left, to get one of these. I've applied. I haven't received one. I'm jealous of the people who have. It's a testing notebook. This is non-production yet, but it's coming, and the idea is that literally all this computer does is connects to the internet and runs the Chrome browser. That's it. Nothing else. I'm running the Chrome browser now. That's what you see here on the screen. Imagine a computer where all you've done is you turn on the computer, it boots up in about 5 to 10 seconds. You log in, you have complete access to the internet. You don't really install anything else. You just have a browser and anything you can do in the browser is what you have available to you. Think about that for a moment. It's designed to say use Google Docs to do your word processing because that's available on the internet, but you'd rather use OpenOffice. Well, use a notebook like this, connect to Spoon, and run OpenOffice instead. This is a very, very interesting device. It uses Wi-Fi. It uses 3G cell phone connections.  I'm hoping that if they sent me one, I will definitely do a session on this. They don't send me one. I know a couple of people who have actually gotten one. I'll try to get them on a future tech talk and be able to get them to talk about the experience with this device. In case you haven't heard of this yet, I just wanted to go ahead and introduce it to it. The other thing kind of related to Spoon, also related specifically to this Chrome notebook is that now there is a Chrome web app store. A lot of people have been introduced to apps through the iPhone, the iPad, the Android devices that are out there, the idea that you download a program right into the operating system. Well, what this is, is this is the web store for the Chrome operating system, but also the Chrome browser if you're already running it. And again, the idea is that these are all services that run over the Internet through the cloud. You're not actually installing anything on the computer. And if I actually open up a new tab here in my browser, you will actually see I have installed some web applications already into my version of Chrome. And some of these are really interesting. There's a Google Books app. Ceasemic is my Twitter client. Let me just show you the NPR application for a moment, because this is pretty darn slick. This is not going to the NPR website as you would normally go to the website. This is an actual specific application designed to run through Chrome. And as you can see here, we've got a very different sort of interface. You can add things to a playlist. You can play that particular item. We kind of have this scrolling horizontally. We have scrolling vertically. It's just a completely different experience from going to the regular old website. There's an open up particular one. Like I said, I can tweet it. I can email it. I can add it to Facebook. I can add it to my playlist. I can play it now. I can pull up particular stations, pull up particular programs. So I'm like, what are they talking about on all things considered?  And I've added it to my playlist.  And I can start playing my content. So this is all done using HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This is not software you install beyond the browser itself. These are actually web applications that are being used through the Chrome Web Store.  It's pretty slick. And if you can't install Chrome, log into Spoon, run it through Spoon.  Okay, I've got a few more things I want to talk about here on my list. So we might end up ending this one a little early. Let me see here. We're looking down my list. Okay, a few other odds and ends. Just kind of fun things that I found that you might want to take a look at. If you are running Windows 7, there's a login screen that you get when you first boot up the computer. If you have an account set up and it's kind of this bluey, wavy sort of background and you might be thinking to yourself, you know what, that's kind of boring. I'd like to change it. Okay, so there is a piece of software out there I've been playing with on my home computer, which one was Windows 7, called the 7 Logon Changer. What this will do is it will allow you to browse both Flickr and Picasso and your own photographs and change the logon screen image to the photo of your choosing as opposed to the photo that comes with Windows 7. It's just kind of fun. It's interesting, but the reason I kind of throw it out there is, you know, in a library situation you've got maybe a really nice photo of the library or an image that has the rules for using the computer and you want that to be the login screen on the desktops when patrons come in and use the computers. This might be a way to pull that off. So just create a photo, get it to the right size for your desktop and load up the software and change that login screen window. But let me stress, it does not work in Vista. It does only work in Windows 7, so if you aren't running Windows 7 yet, you might want to save this for a later time. Another fun piece of software I've been playing around with, it's just you know, it's both silly and interesting all at the same time. Something called Arrow Weather, this will work both on Windows Vista and Windows 7. You install it and what it will do is it will kind of change the look and feel of your desktop based upon the weather in your location. So the colder it gets, the bluer the interface to Windows gets, the hotter it gets, the colder it gets. You can do this based on weather conditions, you can do it based on temperature and you can even enable what's called a night mode. So at night everything kind of darkens a little bit on your desktop.  You know, I got to have some things in there that you just kind of throw out. So you know, change your desktop based on the temperature outside. Why not? That screenshot there. We've got the time going to show you one more thing that kind of brings us back full circle with the whole tech support thing, especially if you're one of those folks who are the family tech support but can't always get to the computer that needs help. I did literally get this question from another staff member here yesterday in our office and that is we're looking for a piece of software so we can log into Dad's computer and fix it without actually going to Dad's computer. There are lots of things out there. There's Windows remote desktop. There's other services out there. There are things called virtual private networks that you can set up but ultimately what most people want is something that's free and easy to set up. And I found it and I've been using it for about six months now and I figured it's about time to share with everybody else. It's called LogMeIn.com Now there are pay for versions of this. There are different levels where you can get extra services, things like that but basically you can sign up for a free account. I'm going to go ahead and log in. Make sure I remember my password correctly here. And that worked. And it shows me the list of computers I have access to. Here's my Dad's desktop. Here's my laptop which is currently not turned on. Here's my home desktop. Here's the home theater PC in my house. Here's my wife's desktop. Here's my mother's laptop. Another laptop I have here on my desk in the office. Here is Sarah's desktop computer and Sarah's laptop computer. She's my wife's 17-year-old who's currently away at college. And you can see here that some of them are turned on. Some of them are turned off. And literally all I need to do is if they're turned on I click remote control. We'll do this to my home computer. It will connect. It will ask me for the password for that particular computer. And basically I can't do much here because I am using the free version but most importantly what I can do is connect to it. And I've actually used that Windows 7 log-on screen changer so you can see there's my log-on screen with a different background book. I go ahead and click log in because I've already given it the password that I used for this desktop and here I have the desktop for my home computer. And I can completely control this as if I was at my home computer. I can run Windows updates. I can run scanning software. I can surf the internet. I can do anything on this screen that I could do is if I was sitting right there at that computer. When I'm all done I'm just going to go ahead and lock that computer back up and then I click disconnect and it disconnects from that computer and takes me back to my list. Now, how do you get this to work? Well, the very first time you do need to actually have physical access to the computer you want to connect to. So in this case back while I was home for Christmas I went to my dad's desktop I logged into my LogMeIn account. I clicked add computer and what that's going to do is it's going to install a little piece of software to that computer. It's going to connect it to this account, list it here and then when my dad calls and says can't get the computer to work. I can't do whatever it is I need to do.  He has full control. He can prevent me from doing that if he wants to. I can initiate a chat session with him to say I've got some time to work on your computer. Save your work so I can do things. I've run system updates for him. The computer has rebooted. I've waited a couple minutes. I've come back to this screen and I can log back into his machine again. If you do any sort of remote tech support, even at the library I would say you might want to set this up for some computers and it's probably the simplest to install, the simplest to use remote access software that I have found. If they charged for it I might even pay for it. It's completely free so why not take advantage of that. That being said we are a little early but that is my list of stuff that I wanted to talk about today. Some of you are here. I haven't seen any other questions come in but if you've got one I can happily hang around. If you've got any other questions about anything you've heard about technology wise I will do my best to answer those questions. If you've got one, now is your opportunity. You've got me cornered here for a few minutes. Just go ahead and type that into the Q&A area and I will happily help you out to the best I can. While we are waiting to see if anybody has any questions or you can raise your hand too if you want to do that and ask via microphone. Happy to let you do that. Go back to my list here and see if I missed anything that I really want to talk about. Oh, yeah if you have a question go ahead and type it in. While we are waiting for that I will bring this up. This is a blog post from Steven Abram who is very interesting I've met him, I know him well great guy sometimes he's a bit provocative but he and I are in complete agreement on this one and for years now I've been taking photos of signs in libraries and posting them on Flickr and sometimes it's started some discussion but he basically has a plea for early 2007. Basically do an audit of the signage in your library.  Are the signs pleasant? Are the signs full of no's or yes's? Do they say please? Are they signs that say here's what you can do or are they signs that say here's what you can't do? Do a sign audit and if nothing else do you have too many signs? Are the signs in very small print? I've seen rules of conduct signs in libraries that are literally an 8 point type and it's a 2 foot wide by 3 foot high piece of paper. Just take a look at your signs see if you might be able to improve them for 2011. Make that one of your library's New Year's resolutions basically. Alright. Not seeing any other questions except for one from Pam. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed this. How can you get access to this at a later date? Because you are here and registered you will get an email that does link to the recording. We do put all the recordings of all of our sessions up. They are on our website. The simplest thing you can do really is to just type Encompass Live into Google. The very first hit that comes up will be our calendar of forthcoming events and if you see here there will be a link labeled Encompass Live Archive Sessions. Just go ahead and click on that. All of them are available. They will be available in video. We also podcast all of these in audio. We will also provide links to all of the stuff that we talked about in each session and the PowerPoint slides when appropriate although they will not be PowerPoint for this one. See no other questions. I will just also point out that we have a few upcoming events in January. We have a session on January 5th on emergency preparedness for public libraries. I think that would be of interest to anyone, even those of you not here in Nebraska on January 12th. We have a session on internships coming up and then my next tech talk will be on January 26th and the current plan is I do have an interview lined up that has not been finally confirmed so I'm not going to give you a sneak peek but we will put that in the description so watch for that in the next week or two. Once again, I want to thank everybody for attending. Thank you very much. This was really fun and have a great week and have a happy new year and hope to see you again on a future session. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.


She's gonna be a dark horse this season.  She is a business woman business woman is good That's a good word. Oh energy. I love Shangy and But this is gonna be her fourth time trying to get this crown if she don't win it this time girl like like really It was the first person in New York to let me sleep on a floor when I worked Suzanne Barge parties So she's crazy. So I want to see what she's gonna do this time. I'm sharing a dressing room with her right now She's like oh talented incredible in every way.  She's got the most impeccable well-developed unexplainable sense of sense of smell She is like the scariest Barbie ever tricks me tell is hilarious very smart Barbie on acid very Funny and she has produced Out of all the rue girls the only album I'll actually listen to because it doesn't reference being a cross-dresser with hair spray Fingernails makeup in a runway. It's actually a true well-written Album from the heart and sound no one's has ever heard and I love when drag queens and country music mix Did you say one word?


Good evening, and welcome to episode 335 of the Private Property Podcast. I'm your host, Uzaman Tungwa Kumalo. It's the Tuesday edition of the Private Property Podcast, which is one of us for the first time. Welcome to the family. You are tuned into the only daily property podcast in South Africa, and we help you on all your property needs. It doesn't matter where you are on your property journey, whether you're looking to buy, to sell, to build, or of course, you're still a tenant and want to get a better sense of how you can move from being a tenant to being a home owner. This is where you can get all of your property questions answered. And to all our regular viewers on Facebook, on Instagram, as well as on YouTube, welcome back. You know how we do. Every single weekday, you and I have an appointment where I'm always in conversation with a property expert who helps us navigate our property journey. And of course, it's always a great one to also share our own experiences because property is one of those things that's a team sport. If you want to go very, very far, you want to work with people. You want to make sure that you are in the know and certainly engaging with as many people as you can. And talking about engaging, I can already see the great engagement that we're getting on our Facebook page, saying evening Zamaambu, Lema Duna, also saying evening Zama Glaturinda's watching, Gossos Romelu's also watching. And of course, many of you are watching on our Facebook page. Do show us some love down there below. And of course, you know that on our Facebook page, we're running an incredible competition that started off with us setting the ambitious goal of wanting to reach one million followers on our Facebook page, which we have done thanks to you at home. And of course, we also set out to have 10,000 comments and shares in the post that we've pinned on our Facebook page. We've also exceeded that. And we're now taking it up and not want to have 20,000 comments. I don't know we can do this, right? If there are a million of us, now it's over a million of us in this family, we know that we can certainly reach and exceed that 20K target that we have set out for ourselves. And using the chance at home of walking away with 500 grand in cash when you participate. And all you have to do to claim the money is to be watching us live every single day, halfway through the show. We're going to announce who the lucky winner is and you have until the end of the show to raise your hand in order to claim the prize. If the person doesn't claim the prize while we're still on, then it rolls over into the money bag for the following day. Now, yesterday we had two winners. Unfortunately, only one, Semi-Malatze, whose birthday it also was, claimed the prize. So this evening we've got a thousand rands in the money bag. So if you know you've entered, you want to wait to see if we are going to call out your name. That's some of the, so certainly some of what you can look forward to later on on the show. And of course later on this evening, what you can look forward to as it is a Tuesday in Balinuago, bringing you the farming podcast at 8pm. And you can also catch it every single Thursdays with the same show, where she always takes us through all things agriculture. You know, it is now spring, spring is sprung. I'm also doing quite a bit of gardening and growing my own veggie patch, as you've seen on my social media platforms. You can follow me there at Zamanthoma underscore K. So also getting great tips from Mbali's show about how I can do a better job at it, especially because I want to be able to eat some of the food that I grow. So that certainly is a great show that I'm always plugged into. And of course, every Wednesdays is the class in Texas through the first time homebuyers show, which is always in conversation with people who've not only walked that first time homebuying journey, but have gone on to grow their property portfolios from strength to strength. And Mondays and Fridays, Chad hits us with an amazing, amazing preview of incredible properties that you can find on www.privateproperty.co.za. And they're so exquisite. Now, I often say that I wish I could do one of my shows in some of those properties. And I think we'll see. I think we must arrange maybe episode 350, you know, have a small little dunyana in one of the great properties that Chad gets to see. But those are the great shows that you can find every single weekday at 8 p.m. across private property social media pages. And of course, do follow us across our social media pages through on Twitter, on Facebook, we're linked in. We're on Instagram, we're on TikTok. If there's a social media platform, we are certainly there and catering to all of your property needs. And talking about those property needs that actually, you know, leads us to our conversation this evening, which I am very excited about because this is one of those things that I, you know, follow very closely. I, you know, part of my portfolio is some of the businesses I run having interests in this particular topic. So I always love talking about it. And this evening, we're looking at why you should consider investing in student accommodation. And if you're in the student accommodation market, I want to find out from you, you know, are you an investor that's got whether one or more units in student accommodation? And if you don't, is it something that you're interested in? You know, what is it that you still unclear about or wary of when it comes to student accommodation as part of your property portfolio? But to help us better get a good sense of, you know, what we should look out for. And even the state of student accommodation right now, I'm joined this evening by Liesl Brits, who's the head of Broken at Mid-City Property Group. Liesl, good evening, and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Zoma. Zoma, good evening. You know, Liesl, I think one of the big things before we even look at, you know, do's and don'ts and tips for people who are looking to explore getting into student accommodation and some of the great reasons that I know that you're going to share. I think, Liesl, let's just look at an overview of, you know, the state of student accommodation, the state of student accommodation market in South Africa, especially in 2021, given that we're in a pandemic year. I mean, I was even saying to you off air that I've spoken to quite a number of different landlords who have student accommodation units from last year.  So currently, when we're looking at student accommodation markets, certainly from the area that I know that you're primarily in Pretoria, what would you say the state of, you know, the market is this year? Yeah, it's true that last year actually was really bad. And I think the biggest thing, the major damage that were caused to the market was the uncertainty. We were so uncertain on when NASFAS would be paying. We were so uncertain on when students would be returning. So that besides the financial damage that a lot of landlords have incurred due to that. But there are also some of the landlords that actually benefited from that, especially if you had a NASFAS accredited building with your Fundi system installed. Most of those landlords actually collected those Fundi cards from the students and they were actually swiping, while sitting, watching Netflix. So, and they had empty buildings and they actually took the opportunity to upgrade their buildings and to actually take the time to make sure that the buildings are ready for the next intake. And I think what has happened was the academic year that was stretched up until end of March this year. If you didn't have the cash flow at the end of last year, it would have been very difficult for you. But this year, the academic year started in April and it's obviously ending in November.  But it is true that a lot of the landlords have huge cash flow setbacks. But still for you to consider to get back into the market, we are still not very certain on what's gonna happen next year, but what we do know is that the psychological damage for students has not only even just students, but any employee that are actually working from home now, the psychological damage that are caused are actually long-term so bad and all the institutions actually realize that it's impossible for a student to actually study from home without support, without fellow students around them. And if we just look at the circumstances that we have in institutions like TUT, those students are actually from rural backgrounds. They do not have electricity, they don't have Wi-Fi. It's not safe for them to actually sit with the laptop that they've been given granted from government. So they have to return back to campus. They have to come to these off-campus accommodation where they have Wi-Fi, where they have suitable accommodation with furniture and the support with transport to classes and that. So student accommodation will, I think, people ever be very, very popular and in the mall. And you know, one of the big things that, and I love that you've highlighted is that in as much as a lot of the universities have moved to online learning because of COVID, we also know that students need an environment where they're able to learn. So the fact that they're no longer going on campus doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't going to be a demand for student accommodation. It may be slightly different. And if anything, perhaps there might even be an instance where with certain universities, I mean, we haven't seen that yet, we might perhaps see that in the future where student enrollment figures increases because now it's no longer about having students physically come into class because capacity was often not only from a staff perspective, but also from a lecture theater has 500 seats. Therefore, you cannot suddenly enroll, for example, 1,500 students for a particular program. And I think with certain universities, I know they're even exploring some kind of hybrid model for the future where they can also increase the staff compliments so that they're able to deal with the bigger volume of students who are potentially going to access their courses. Meaning that we're still going to have a demand for beds because one of the things that we knew pre-COVID was that there simply weren't enough university beds in South Africa to cater for the number of students who needed them. And this was even with the residences, the university residences, and of course the private residences. So there was still this huge gap that needed to be filled. And I know that for example, the Department of Higher Education always emphasizes those specific numbers when we would have enrollment at the beginning of the year. So it really is one of those pressure issues that was a ticking time bomb in many ways because we always used to see the long queues with students requiring student accommodation and it really is a crisis. I think if anything, what COVID has now allowed us to do is to also just get clear on the kinds of services we need to be providing to students. As you were saying that it's about the environment but it's also making sure that they have the right amenities for them to be able to work in the student accommodation versus for example, if they are at home. I want to find out from you at home if you are in student accommodation, how was your student accommodation unit or units affected during COVID? And how did you recover? Because I think one of the great things is of course learning from each other and seeing what other people were doing. I know that there's some landlords who when students went out, they started taking in young professionals for a shorter period because students said, look, we're going home, we don't know what's happening and with some university school was suspended for a little bit. And as these already pointed out, the academic calendar kept being stretched and stretched and stretched. But we're also now getting used to, I'll say life in COVID and having to adapt to it. And so making the decision around going into student accommodation becomes so crucial. So for people who are considering going into student accommodation because they're seeing the potential, they can see that, look, there's a shortage and there are properties on the market that are closed to universities or in university towns as we call it. I think what would first just be the key thing that they need to bear in mind when it comes to student accommodation that would be different from if they were just doing a normal rental, let's say to a young family or even a young professional. So I think on a smaller scale, and I always, Brucey Timberwyer's video for the chicken farm where he actually coaches people that come to get funding is to stop small. And I see that often when potential investors approach us that they actually wanna jump for the really big boldings immediately. And it's actually very dangerous to start off with a massive building and try and, besides the fact that you, the possibility for you to get funding on a massive building, a commercial building, it's actually good to start with a single residential flat and in a good building close to a university and just rent that out just to get into the industry, to start learning about the behavior of students, the, you know, their needs, your, you know, the big time tables, the fact that you only gonna get income for 11 months. What do you do in your 12 months? And some of the university only pays for 10 months. And there's often the uncertainty about, you know, why do we get 11 months versus 10 months? Like you'd be normally students come in in fifth and they leave in November. So that's a 10 month cycle. Whereas with QUT, they always come in in January because they come from rural areas. So they need time. So NISTAS actually also pays them on a 11 month cycle. So that's actually very beneficial for any investor to be paid over 11 months. So you've just gotta like sacrifice that one month and prep them for the next year's intake. But like I've got my own properties as well and you've got the choice to either finish your properties for your students. The good thing about your single residential flats and taking on students on a small scale is you don't have to adhere to all the red tape. That's a larger building with let's say a hundred and students or beds minimum. The minute you get your building accredited for NISTAS then obviously you've gotta adhere to all the red tape. You've gotta go through the accreditation process. You've gotta pay all those fees. You've gotta get wifi in your building. You've gotta get security on each floor and you have to have laundry, transport, all of that. So I've got clients that actually invest in three bedroom units and they place students like six ladies in a flat. They do pay the body corporate a little bit more for the extra water consumption which I respect a lot because in a sense we see six adults or students occupying a three bedroom flat as overcrowding. So some of these investors are actually very good in terms of collecting an extra hundred grand for the water and pay that for it and pay that over to the body corporate. And then they furnish the properties. They put a washing machine apparently that's a big draw card for the lady, the female students and they collect two and a half thousand grand per bed. So that's pushing the income. You're getting double what a normal in like my properties I'll get six and a half where if you put four students then or six students you get triple that a month which is actually good. So starting on a small scale to just learn about students and how they behave and then specific needs are actually what I would advise people to do and I think banks also like to see a portfolio with students that you can prove yourself as a very responsible investor. Instead of coming in trying to buy a building a housing 50 students or a hundred students and taking a chance because this is not a Takama chance type of industry. You've got to be a very risk free to the banks to consider you as an investor why would the bank take the chance on you if they can maybe finance investor with a lot of experience with specifically student accommodation because it is a risky industry. Just as the investor himself would be a risk but also with Nisfus and everything that has happened with COVID is an extreme risk to the banks now because they have their fingers with certain investors that could not carry themselves throughout this period. So it's as if most investors are actually we are yearning to get our buildings accredited with Nisfus because it's less risky but we see now especially with your UP students that that was not the case. That they've left the buildings, we fled as landlords and the banks do not want to take that risk. So it's commercial properties where we used to be getting finance on a 70% loan to value. Now we are backing to get a 50% to loan to value. I'm this evening in conversation with Liesl Britz who's the head of Broken AdMid City Property Group and we're looking at why you should consider investing in student accommodation. I want to find out from your home if you're investing in student accommodation how was it particularly or rather how is it? Particularly now during COVID and I mean it's the second year of us living in COVID would have had an opportunity to somehow plan for more lockdowns and adjust the way that you're running your business relative to last year when it of course hit us without any warning whatsoever. We're gonna go for a quick break and see who the potential lucky winner of that 1,000 rands this evening for our competition is. I hope they're watching so they can claim their prize and when we come back we'll certainly get to the questions, comments. I see all the love that you're showing us on our Facebook page. We'll get to those in just a moment. And the winner this evening goes to Vyasha Naidu. Vyasha Naidu, if you are watching, I hope you're watching drop us a message down here below to claim your money, 1,000 rands is in the money bag. So you send a chance of walking away with that 1,000 rands. That's Vyasha Naidu. If you are tuned in, then do make sure that you drop us a message in order to claim your prize. Now I saw a few new names that gave us some love on our Facebook page earlier on. Adelaine Bloom-Pelé is watching Megan from Skalvake, is also watching Doomsa Asimanyi is watching and of course showing us love on our Facebook page. Refuelue Malibuana, I see you there on Facebook and of course the regulars, who is a Vyasha Peléchi as well as Colin Janssen, Fatima Simji and Doomsa Pelé are also watching Keep The Love Coming. There on our Facebook page, we absolutely love seeing it. And of course if you are in student accommodation, I want to hear your experience with the student accommodation market, especially this year, have there been any adjustments that you needed to make to be able to essentially plan for the reality of operating in COVID and knowing that perhaps you may not have as much demand because there are still some students who potentially didn't want to come live in student accommodation places or parents who didn't want their kids to live in student accommodation places? Or were you one of those landlords because I've also heard landlords saying, look, my place stayed 100% occupied and if anything, even after full occupancy, I still had students wanting a place and contacting us wanting to get a bed. So if you're one of those, what are you doing right? I think do share with the rest of us so that we can get those notes. Now, I think when we then look at, and I love that you've highlighted this and I want to bring it back, if you're going or when you go into student accommodation, similarly, really to any other kind of property class that you'll go for, you do want to start small. You don't want to start with the building that's suddenly gonna have 50 beds and you're thinking, oh, I'm going to gross 200K if I have 50 beds and I'll maybe net 180, these numbers look amazing in a year. I'll definitely be nearly a millionaire because it doesn't work like that. I think anybody who's managed even one unit understands the value of learning from that one unit and it can be something as pedantic as putting in systems in place for that one unit maintenance for that one unit managing that one unit and so on. So you don't want to bite off more than you can chew. And I think the fact that Lisa has even put out that banks are also now even more wary. So by the time you're wanting to look at 50 units, they do want to get a sense of, have you done this before? And then I'm going to extend that line of credit to somebody who hasn't even managed two students for instance. So you really do want to make sure that as you're navigating wanting to add student accommodation or perhaps start off with student accommodation, you start off in small sizes because you don't want to bite off more than you can chew. And now Lisa, when we even look at biting off more than you can chew, I think one of the big things, of course, there is around finances. And I think people sometimes don't have a sense of how student accommodation can sometimes cost you slightly more in certain areas than perhaps a normal apartment that you might rent out to, or even a normal house that you might rent out to a family or a young professional. Perhaps just take us through what you should be budgeting for and how you should look at budgeting around when you have student accommodation units. Sure. Yeah, I mean, experiences on the one side is something where we just have to bite the bullet because with student accommodation, you've got the red tape and you've got all the list of requirements, especially if you're going to go specifically, and I'm having a lot on QUT specifically. I'm not even looking at UP at this stage because they have a lot of student rates available in the Hatfield specifically in Pretoria. So I wouldn't say, I wouldn't recommend to any newcomer to the industry to specifically go for Hatfield because Hatfield is actually saturated and we've seen a lot of the students or landlords bleeding there because of the fact that only 25% of the students at UP are actually funded by Nespas. So that gives you an idea of 75% of those students actually went home and they're studying from home now. So we're not too sure if they're gonna return next year. We can't have that guarantee. However, due to the psychological damage, we hope that they do return. But one thing that we do know is that 98% of the students of QUT are actually on Nespas accreditation or they get the Nespas grant. So they have to come back to the student accommodation and the rest of campus here in Pretoria. And we're talking about the areas, Arcadia, Sunnyside, Central, Pretoria, West. So we are quite certain that they definitely will return. So as I mentioned, you have to prove to the bank that you can actually, you can sustain the student accommodation and that you will be able to recover and pay your bond. So expenses on the one side is something that we will have to do. So at QUT, it's expected from you as a landlord to provide transport, expected to provide wifi uncapped at a certain speed. It's, you have to finish your apartments and you have to maintain that as well. It's not like you're buying a microwave and it's now there and you don't have to replace it. Students actually break things and students actually use things and they sleep on the beds and you'll have to replace beds. You'll have to pay your insurance. You'll have to, as I mentioned, to transport. So if you're not close to a bus rapid transit route or you can't piggyback on an existing route system, you'll have to get your own buses. You'll have to get insurance on those buses. So it actually accumulates and we've done the calculation on these expenses. You've got to pay yourself for a minimum of 40% on that income. So at the moment, the income is 4,100 per student for 11 months and you have to budget for a minimum of a 40% on that. You have to provide electricity. You've got to provide water. You have to provide the laundry services.  So you've got to have a proper system where you control the access to your building. It's also a nice local system for the university. So if a student is not clocking in at university, they will come back to you as a landlord to check if the student they've actually been to the building, what have they worn, lost. So you've got to have a CCTV system at your building as well for the safety of the students as well. So you've got a budget for at least a 40%. So your expenses on the one side is one thing but you can't afford to have vacancies in your building. So we often walk with investors through our own buildings to show them and we actually tell them exactly what mistakes we've made. So we try and teach investors to not make the same mistakes and what to expect more or less in certain buildings, especially if you've got a mixture of students between different universities, like your UP students don't wanna mix with TUT students. Whereas your TUT students wouldn't mind mixing with any other institution students. So you've got to prepare yourself for things like that as well. But just back to the vacancies, you cannot afford to have vacancies in your building and with any business, like if you think about how many secondhand call dealerships we've got, if you look at all the salons, we actually, the market will never be saturated with salons. But if there's a salon with a better offering of specials or a new product or a new service or whatever, we go for it. I think student accommodation is very sensitive in terms of location. So you'll funny enough find students that don't want to be close to the main TUT campus. They actually wanna be in the bus in sunny side, closer to the clubs and that. So you wouldn't, I would think that I would want to be close to the main campus where I study, however the students actually prefer both. You'll have some students that prefer to go into a building with a lot of rules and regulations and other students actually want buildings where there are no rules and regulations. But you'll also have a failure rate in that specific building. But I think if you think about the needs of a student and I mean, I studied at TUT as well a long time ago and I was fortunate to study on campus. We had a house committee in our building. We had like a house mother and father, like a caretaker in the building. We were close on campus and we had sport activities. We had beauty pageants, we had socials, we had church outreach. Now if you look at the student accommodation rates of campus, the private accommodation, they actually don't provide that. And if you want to stand out as a landlord, a very successful landlord without any vacancies, you have to look at what the students on campus are being offered and try and present that into your off-campus building. So if we just look at the connection with on-campus activities, like your sport activities, you can maybe partner with other off-campus building landlords and say, let's form a soccer team amongst our buildings and we provide transport for those boys to go and compete with the on-campus race soccer teams. Let's create a sobriety ceiling in our buildings where we create this opportunity for them to actually have their odds displayed on the walls. Let's provide a wall for them to take pictures of their social activities so that they create their own alumni so that they can come back in a few years' time and say, this is what we had. There's my picture, I belong to this family. You can actually be so creative because how I see the buildings, you have a building full of clients. Let's say you've got a building with 400 students. Those are actually clients that are potential car buyers. They are potential first-time bank account clients for a bank. They are potentially taking out a cell phone contract. So you can actually invite the service providers to your building, give them a nice space and a spot when the students are coming in with their Kazebo. They can present their products and services, but you want something as a landlord back from them. You're giving them that advertisement so they can maybe for all our graduating students give us free cell phone or open a bank account with a 5,000-rand savings account for the bank that is an amazing opportunity to catch that student at a young age. I've still got my standard bank account that I opened at university. I continually remember I went to a Kazebo and I opened my bank account there. So it's a massive opportunity for service providers to benefit, but it's also for you as a landlord to benefit. Let's say you get VOTACOM in. They can sponsor your students' t-shirts and caps with your building's name printed on the back of the shirt and that's your working advertisement on campus to ensure that the students are actually coming back and they feel that they belong. They've got this pride that they're in a building with a nice name. So that's the first advice I would give as well. If you've got a big student accommodation building is change the name. Some of these buildings have the most boring building names and you can actually give them a nice name like Mazapuka or Majuba or something like that. That's completely more relevant and painting different colors for you to stand out. And if you are planning on buying more than one building, give it a signature. Change your signage and make it your signature like city property, all their buildings have the same signature outside. Mid-Cities buildings all have the name the edge. So we'll have flowers edge and festival edge and campus edge. So that makes you stand out as the landlord and you'll actually attract the students to want to come and stay in your building. And I think, you know, one of the things is definitely clear, Lisa Liz, that we're going to have you back on the show to look at student accommodation best practices and even to share some of the mistakes and learnings, I think, as you know, Mid-City that you've picked up, you're saying earlier that this is something that you even do for investors who are keen on getting in the market because one of the things that we also know about property is we want to all succeed, right? You want the different buildings in the block to also be fully occupied, you run well as opposed to being vacant and potentially end up being run down. And so really it is in everybody's best interest when, especially if you look at the university towns when as different landlords, we are running our respective, you know, buildings or certainly accommodation units while and servicing our students well. I want to share a quick comment here coming through from Usain Mahlantzah on Facebook saying, I'm one of those running private student accommodation and last year and this year it has been tough for us, but with the little number of students we are having it is better to keep our expenses covered till we can go back to normal life. But with the number of COVID-19 declining and people getting vaccinated, we have hope for the next year, even though some TV colleges already saying they will only have two trimesters that is only putting us in a very bad condition. And I think, you know, it is one of those things as I said before that a lot of the landlords are also just wanting to at the very least cover their faces. I think student accommodation it was one of those areas of property where you enjoy very high yields. And then I think for many years landlords have typically have, you know, enjoyed higher yields. And now you're having to say, okay, let me at the very least cover my expenses just so I can stay afloat and weather essentially this COVID storm.  So they're probably obviously going to purchase it for, we'll say for the next year because it will probably only register of course later on in the year. So they've got their eyes set on, you know, owning that first student accommodation unit for the new year. What tip can you give to somebody who is still eyeing? So they're not in yet, but they're still considering getting into the student accommodation market. So I think if you wanna go for the big buildings, if you've got the capacity to go for the big buildings, I think you definitely have to put in a lot of effort in your marketing. Because in the end, the student can still choose where they want to go and stay. And the intake is normally, and we're expecting it to be in Fed next year as well. So you have already got to start now with your marketing campaigns to get your building out there. So if you're gonna go for a missed house accreditation, the TUT is actually starting, they're opening up for accreditation now in October. So you must be prepared to have your building ready and to have your apartment, your mock-up apartment furnished so that when those accreditation team come out to do the accreditation and the inspection, you've got to be ready for that.  Because if you miss it this year, you've got to wait until the next year. So marketing is the major thing. You've got to be out there, you've got to make sure that your gazebos are ready for January, when they sit there at TUT, you've got to have your online exposure, but that's with anything like that. If you don't have an online presence on social media platforms and that, you can't expect the students to actually know about you. Because your building, once it's accredited, will go on, they've got a new website, T-R-E-S. And then there's the TUTechRES website as well, but T-RES, this is a platform where students can actually comment on your building, they can complain about your building and they can actually also compliment you as a landlord. So getting your building ready for that website and your social media platform to get the word of mouth out there, that's certainly one tip that I can give to all landlords out there when you start to get that fixed from the start. And network with people, network with the SRC, network with the different companies out there. If you're going to start in the industry, learn from whoever has done it, learn from their mistakes not to burn your fingers because student accommodation is actually so risky that it can wipe out your complete portfolio if you make mistakes. Because if you've got a big building and your building is not on the T-R-E-S website or something like that, you've got a 100% vacancy and that can floor you as an investor. Start small and do your marketing. And I think that's such a great note to leave it on. Start small, learn, rather, pay your school fees with one or two units, then buy two more than you can chew and then paying the kind of tuition you absolutely might probably not even be able to recover from. Lisa, we're going to leave it there this evening. I'm already calling it, we're definitely going to bring you back on the show later on this year because we want to be able to get a sense later on in the year on what people already are in student accommodation should be doing. I mean, you've already highlighted one is that you want to start marketing early. And I know already towards the tail end of the year, it's already a good place to start marketing as early as then because there's still students who want to confirm their accommodation before they actually go back home over the December period. And so not everybody is going to be searching for accommodation in January. Some actually want to have already viewed and decided before leaving. So later on in the year, we're definitely going to bring you back to get a sense of what we should be doing in the event where we have student accommodation units to get ready for the new financial year. What should we have in place? And if we don't have it in place now, what are some of the systems that we need to put in place? But for now, we're going to leave it there. Lisa, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Thank you, Zama. Thanks for the opportunity, good night. And that is Lisa Brits who's the head of Broken Admit City Property Group, bringing us to the end of this evening's private property podcast with myself, Uzaman Dunwoa Kumalo. Now, the team has let me know that unfortunately, Viesha Naidu has not claimed the price. So it will be rolling over tomorrow to 1,500 rounds. Remember, if you know you've entered, you want to make sure that you're watching us live because if you call your name, you have to drop us a text in order to claim that price. Well, I will state my welcome. You can of course, look forward to Mbali Noir on the farming podcast at 8 p.m. I'll be back on your screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. Until then, hoping you're staying home and staying safe.