Leo [00:00:27]:
Welcome back, Gary. So what most of our listeners don't know, because we didn't say anything before or while you were gone, is that Gary was off on a trip to New Zealand.

Gary [00:00:38]:
Yeah. My second trip there.

Leo [00:00:40]:
I love New Zealand. It's been a while, but absolutely love it down there. And I saw you you shared some some very cool pictures with some of us.

Gary [00:00:48]:
Yeah. I had some great, hikes. Did some great hikes, you know, backpacking in the backcountry, staying in their huts, and stuff like that. But then also touring around some of the cities, got to see a lot of places like Christchurch and, Dunedin and, Inverc Harville, Wellington. It was really good. It was like a, like, a tour of all, like, the great cities and towns of New Zealand and some backpacking thrown in.

Leo [00:01:12]:
I'm curious. Eight years ago. Okay.

Gary [00:01:15]:
And, so it was interesting to compare, like, technology wise. There wasn't too much that it changed in terms of things. I mean, I had an iPhone back then. I have an iPhone now. I brought my MacBook back then. I have a MacBook now. But, eight years ago, Wi Fi was really tough, a tough thing to get, in New Zealand. It felt more like Europe 20 Years ago.

Gary [00:01:36]:
Every restaurant I went to, if they had Wi Fi, they were very concerned as to whether or not you were paying customer, and there were even limits. I'd, like, ran into, like, oh, you you can only use Wi Fi for an hour. You know, that kind of thing. And, this time, that was, like, totally gone. Like, Wi Fi was everywhere. Just, you know, signs on the wall with the with the password, easy to get on. I never ran into anybody that seemed to be concerned about bandwidth use or anything like that. So that was kinda nice.

Gary [00:02:07]:
That was, like, a notable change. Strangely, last time eight years ago when I was in New Zealand was the break first time I ever used Apple Pay because it had just came out. Right. And it you know, The US is like nobody was doing it yet. You know, it was like weeks had gone by. And and I was actually in a gas station in New Zealand eight years ago just before leaving. And I noticed they had the Apple Pay symbol. And I paid with Apple Pay.

Gary [00:02:34]:
And I think they just installed, you know, installed a new little terminal there because I don't even think the person checking me out knew what it was. So this time around, of course, eight years later, and I used Apple Pay, for everything. I saw, you know, Apple, Google, Symbol for, you know, wireless pay. I used it everywhere. I never took cash out, so I never touched cash the entire time. I think I only took my card out a handful of times. Most of the times, I pay for anything. It was just using my phone.

Leo [00:03:05]:
But why'd you grab the card?

Gary [00:03:07]:
I you know, just for places that just didn't have, you know, like, a little

Leo [00:03:10]:
But we didn't have the the reader, basically.

Gary [00:03:12]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo [00:03:12]:
Okay.

Gary [00:03:13]:
And, so it was just a few times that they were like, no. You need to use a card or whatever. So I had those as backup, but I never had to go actually back to cash to get that to work. So that was that was neat. I had free Wi Fi both to and from New Zealand on Air New Zealand, which is interesting because it's the middle of the Pacific. I mean, you're basically yes. You you take off over the Pacific from Los Angeles, and you're over the Pacific until you land, in Auckland. And there's nothing in sight the whole time, but I had Wi Fi the whole time.

Gary [00:03:50]:
And as you can guess, I I didn't know how we got it because they don't say.

Leo [00:03:55]:
They

Gary [00:03:55]:
just say it's just Air New Zealand Wi Fi. But I looked it up when I got back, and it sure enough, as you could guess, it was Starlink. Mhmm.

Leo [00:04:03]:
And

Gary [00:04:03]:
it worked it worked really well. It did work perfect because there were times when I kinda, like, lost the connection a little bit. But usually, if I just, like, okay, I'll take a break and ten minutes later, go back, I it it worked again. So which is a lot better than sometimes the, like, terrestrial, you know, Wi Fi that we get on airplanes. Sometimes it sometimes on some of those systems, like, it goes out and it's like, yeah. Good luck. It's just it's probably gone the rest of the flight.

Leo [00:04:30]:
I've always been impressed, the couple of times that I've been to The Netherlands in recent years. Granted, we're going over land, but it's also the polar route. So years ago, one of the first times I took it, there was a a known dead spot.

Gary [00:04:46]:
Mhmm.

Leo [00:04:47]:
So you're over, like, way Northern Canada, over the top of Greenland. You're not gonna get any coverage there. Yeah. That, of course, has gone away. But it always just I mean, I don't know. I'm still just amazed that there's Internet up there at all. Right? That we're Yeah.

Gary [00:05:01]:
They really

Leo [00:05:01]:
But I was, you know, at one point on one of my trips, I was chatting simultaneously with people on two continents because I was up in the air going from one to the other. So cool. So very cool.

Gary [00:05:11]:
And it even you know, and I should add in that, they use it. So I used it both going and coming back to do the customs immigration stuff.

Leo [00:05:22]:
Oh, right.

Gary [00:05:23]:
Which I guess wasn't there. Yeah. They're eight years ago, but I've experienced it since going to Europe and everything. So, yeah, going there, they instead of handing you a piece of paper, and you fill it out, they tell you to go to this web page. And, actually, there was a there was a, an app, I think, too for New Zealand, and you could just check off a few boxes and have everything ready. And then when you showed your passport, whatever you had done immediately showed up. You were doing it online. You weren't, you know, doing it.

Gary [00:05:51]:
Right. So so they they knew and the same thing coming back to The US, you could have certainly not done it. But there's the I yeah. What is it called? MLS or MNS? I don't know. It's a it's an app that you can get. MCS. That's what it is. And that, they encourage you to fill that use that app and do the stuff while you're on the plane, and then it will speed you through, immigration and customs, when you're back in The US.

Gary [00:06:18]:
And and I did. And so that was kind of neat. I've never had to use a piece of paper, never had to have a figure out where my better pencil was, like in the past, which was nice. And, there there was one weird thing because I was looking yeah. I always own these trips. I look for high-tech, new uses of high-tech while traveling. And then places where low tech is still there. And one place we kept running into that was funny was a majority of the places we stayed, and we stayed always in a hotel or small I guess, in The US, they would call it a motel.

Gary [00:06:53]:
But small places, never Airbnbs. We didn't do any Airbnbs on this trip. It was always a a professional establishment. I think most of them, we got physical metal key for the for the room.

Leo [00:07:06]:
One actual, like, insert into the whole internal key.

Gary [00:07:08]:
Term metal key. Some of them point. Yeah. It was quick. And, you know, some of them could we stayed in these small towns where I guess just I guess crime just isn't that big of a deal. Matter of fact, it seemed to happen more often when our door actually was outside. Like, you stepped out of our door and you were actually outside. That's why it was the mo yeah.

Gary [00:07:28]:
I think it was a hundred percent of the time we actually had a metal key for it. And one of them even had you know, I live in a a condo building now that was once in the nineteen fifties built as a hotel. And in the basement is a there's some of the remnants, and there's actually the keyboard for when it was a hotel. And there's all the little plastic key tags from that bygone era where they used to have, like, the room number written on, you know, like, a plastic tag that went on to the key. And so I've seen those in the in the basement here. And one of the keys actually had that same, you know, tag, type of thing on it. I thought it was just so funny. So that was kind of interesting.

Gary [00:08:03]:
I mean, we did a couple hotels we did stay in, like, in Auckland and stuff. Did have the little magnetic, you know, modern room keys and stuff. But it was funny, that we saw that. The only other technology thing I ran into was, recent years, I've gotten away from using a a digital camera, like a stand alone camera. Has you know, you we should just say DSLR. But it was not a DSLR. It was a mirrorless camera. And I don't really know of, like, a convenient way to say, like, camera that is not a phone camera.

Leo [00:08:33]:
Is it a, what, DLR, I suppose? It no. There's no r. It's just a

Gary [00:08:37]:
heard anybody say DLR. I mean, they could mirrorless. So I don't know. We need a better term for that. But I've been getting away from that using my iPhone camera. And, of course, software does so much for you. It really is just point and shoot. Right? And takes care of a million different things, to give you decent photos.

Gary [00:08:53]:
And, I mean, even, like, night mode on the iPhone. You know? Don't even worry about it. If it's is it dark and you barely see, no problem. Just press the button, and then you end up with a photo that looks good. It's like, you know so, I but I I did get a new mirrorless camera, and I'm I but it is so new to me. And I I switched from using I was a Canon person for years, and now this is Sony. And, you know, everything's a little different and all that. Sure.

Gary [00:09:21]:
And I just did not have enough time to really get to know it very well until before this trip.

Leo [00:09:26]:
Did you use it at all?

Gary [00:09:27]:
Yeah. I used it the entire I used it a lot, but I kept running into issues just because I was not familiar with it, or I've grown used to just just take the picture and it will work itself out.

Leo [00:09:39]:
Right.

Gary [00:09:39]:
And so a lot of times, there were pictures that were darker than they should have been or lighter than they should have been, like, where the sky had nice white fluffy clouds against a a very bright blue sky. And my picture came out where it's just a white sky, you know, because I didn't take the time to actually, you know, work with it and go out of the intelligent auto mode or the p mode and do do proper things.

Leo [00:10:03]:
So I'm in the same situation a lot of the time, not because I've got a new camera, but, yeah, same as you day to day. You need a picture, grab the phone, that kind of thing. But every once in a while, I do want to, grab either my I have a Sony, b one, I think it is, or one of my Nikons. And what I find I've been using the Sony lately because it's much smaller, easy to just throw it in a pocket. While the quality of the pictures is typically better than my phone, admittedly, I've got a a Pixel six, so it's a few years old, but still it's like every time I start to use it, I have to relearn. Okay. To do this on this device, this is what I need to do. To do this, I need to do that.

Leo [00:10:52]:
And, yeah, it's it's kind of sort of unfortunate. The difference is, like you say, are getting smaller enough that, it's sometimes it's just not worth the effort. It's just easier to grab the phone.

Gary [00:11:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, I did just that. My biggest mistake, unfortunately, I caught it after only about a dozen shots, was that, you know, I've, I've got three dials on on top, and they control various things depending upon your mode. And they're really easy, especially if you're hiking and you've got lots of Okay. You know, shove it and you wanna shove the camera back into the bag every moment because to protect it from elements and stuff. And I guess at some point, I had the ISO on auto. Mhmm.

Gary [00:11:34]:
So I something I didn't have to worry about except that going one direction from auto sets it to the lowest, and one direction from auto sets it to the highest. Right? So I guess I pushed you know, that wheel just got pushed a little bit, and it went to 10,000 ISO. Woo hoo. Took about 12 pictures at 10,000 ISO, which is one of the things that shooting in raw will not let you fix. Like, if if it's that, it's gonna be grainy. So and and, you know, what I suppose there are uses for it, and it actually, the picture is being 60 megapixels still looked good as a full photo. But the idea is that I wanna be able to zoom in on birds and stuff and and the eyes. So

Leo [00:12:14]:
Try. I keep and maybe it's just because they're tracking me because I look at them from time to time. But, I have Gigapixel AI. Yeah. And one of the things that it does a reasonably good job with Yeah. Is getting rid of grain. So if you've got a particularly grainy photo,

Gary [00:12:33]:
see what It would work it would work on the photo. But Right. Unfortunately, you know, I was at the time, I was backpacking. Sure. I had a single lens. So I was relying on the 60 megapixels Mhmm. For zoom. Not zoom then, but zoom now.

Gary [00:12:51]:
So I'd see a bird, zoom as much as I could, take the shot. The bird's tiny, but I've got 60 megapixels to work with. Right. And it's just some great shots Right. By just simply cropping, and they're, like, you know, four megapixel shots now or whatever. Right. But they look great. And in this case, the ISO ruined that because it's so grainy when I just cropped to that level.

Gary [00:13:13]:
But, anyway, it's just it was a good example of, like, this would never have happened if I was just shooting it with my iPhone. But I would have only had, you know, technically 48 pixels, but it's really, like, 24 pixels. Like, if you wanna compare the Sony camera to the iPhone, it's 60 megapixels to 24 megapixels, really. The 48 megapixels are not true pixels like the Sony cameras. But it was, you know, it was good, and I got some good shots. And, of course, I was able to get great shots of the night sky at night from middle

Leo [00:13:44]:
of the air. Gorgeous. Yeah.

Gary [00:13:46]:
Like that. Yeah. Oh, it's yeah. It was fantastic. And I got, I got lots of great photos that I'm still I'm still going through, and, then then for the most part. So that's my technology report from my trip to New Zealand. Did anything happen here back in The United States while I was gone?

Leo [00:14:04]:
You know, I was thinking about it, of course, before we got together, and, there's a part of me that wants to say that aside from, you know, the world being on fire Mhmm. It's been there's not been a lot of activity from the players we usually talk about. Apple hasn't made any big releases. Microsoft hasn't made any big announcements, all that kind of stuff. I mean, there's still the rolling of the ongoing, stuff of of, you know, this update for Windows caused problems for these people, and, you know, more people than usual are complaining about this versus that. But, honestly, it's it's been a relatively I don't wanna say quiet because that always encourages things to happen, but it's been a relatively quiet month. Yeah. So it was a it was a good month for you to be away.

Leo [00:14:54]:
Now one of the things that did come up, that actually was an event while you were gone

Gary [00:15:01]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:15:01]:
Builds on something that I had planned to talk about, at our last episode that got canceled at the last minute. Mhmm. I wrote an article about a month and a half ago on using signal and how I am switching to signal as my preferred, not my only, but my preferred messaging platform. And I've had a couple people, you know, that I communicate with switch over as well, and and we're using it. And it's great. It works fine. Of course, one of the things that happened, I think it was only now, like, two or three weeks ago, is, apparently, some individuals in the US government were having a chat, and they accidentally I'll come back to that. Accidentally invited, a reporter into the chat.

Leo [00:15:50]:
Mhmm. And they were chatting about significantly sensitive things. We don't necessarily need to detail what those were, but the point is that this was a chat that should not have been in any way, shape, or form public. And they just invited the press. Now it it it there's a part of me in the back of my mind that says, was that accidentally on purpose? But given the players involved, I just can't see that happening. Just I really do think that this is a case of gross incompetence. I still don't know how you accidentally add someone to a chat. You it's a it's a proactive action.

Leo [00:16:36]:
You either have a contact that you know by name and you're adding them, or you have a phone number that you got from somewhere, that you are entering. And even if you miss type the phone number, the chances of it being, a specific reporter at a specific, publication

Gary [00:16:58]:
That you've talked to before. Yeah.

Leo [00:17:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is kind of kind of improbable. So, honestly, I'm not really sure what happened. But one of the things that, naturally, of course, people come to my article on signal and say, well, here. Look what happened. And indeed, my my comment on that is simply that no technology is going to protect you from incompetence.

Gary [00:17:25]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:17:26]:
You can use the most secure software in the world, whatever that might be, improperly and have exactly this kind of scenario come through. To signal I'm still signal's great.

Gary [00:17:41]:
Yeah. It's really nasty. There's no way to blame signal for this. Not it's not like something didn't work right. It worked exactly did exactly what they It yep. Yep. Yeah. Yep.

Leo [00:17:51]:
One of the very common refrains that I got on the original article before this happened Mhmm. Was that, well, you know, the government's already monitoring everything you're doing on your phone. So since you have to be able to see it on your phone, well, then it's being slurped up by the government, by Apple or Google, by AI companies, by somebody. Right? So there is the reaction that I got to that original article was that, man, there's a lot of paranoia out there right now, which I find kind of interesting in that. They're complaining about how everybody's watching us and slurping up all our data, even the stuff that we're doing with these supposedly secure apps. And yet the tools that they're using to make these complaints are public. They're with the same companies that they're complaining about. I mean, if you're complaining about Google, why do you have a YouTube account? That kind of thing comes to mind.

Gary [00:18:56]:
Yeah. So

Leo [00:18:58]:
it was interesting to just sort of see that reaction kind of surprised me. The level of paranoia and expectation that our devices are, by definition, already compromised the moment we turn them on, is kinda surprising. I don't know if you hear that from from folks or not, but I sure did on this one.

Gary [00:19:18]:
Oh, no. No. I've I yeah. I'm familiar with that. For me, one of the main, things of the story that I think is interesting is that, people are focusing on there's actually three aspects to it. And, you know, the and people are focusing on the two that don't really matter too much. One is that, you know, the reporter was invited by accident

Leo [00:19:40]:
Yep.

Gary [00:19:40]:
Which I think doesn't matter much at all because they shouldn't have been on signal in the first place. Right? But two is at the security, like you're saying, like, how secure is it? It's because it's not I mean, doesn't the Department of Defense have something internal that's way more secure than using, you know, an app by some private company?

Leo [00:19:58]:
It's a public app. I would hope so. Right?

Gary [00:20:00]:
Yeah. I mean, okay. But these things don't these things are simply yeah. They shouldn't have been on signal. Should've been somewhere else. But the third thing is the signal has a particular feature that makes it so that they were actually breaking the law. And that feature is that you could have it automatically erase the messages. They actually had it set to automatically erase the messages in that, that chat after one week.

Gary [00:20:26]:
But there are rules about official government correspondence. Right. And no doubt, there's was a bunch of high profile people talking about, gov government military, you know, activity. And they had it set to basically be, like, we're gonna talk about it, and then in a week, it's gone forever, and it doesn't get saved, and it doesn't go into, you know, the the records and all that stuff.

Leo [00:20:49]:
Right.

Gary [00:20:49]:
Right. That should have been the even if they were, like like, not that smart and thinking that this was secure and that they couldn't possibly accidentally invite somebody they shouldn't have, they still should have been like, oh, we're not supposed to be doing this.

Leo [00:21:04]:
You know, I mean, we're we're verging on on politics here.

Gary [00:21:11]:
But Yeah.

Leo [00:21:12]:
Right now, the sense I get is that we're not supposed to do this Yeah. Is not a phrase that's being paid attention to very much. It's very possible that they understood completely what was going on, and they decided that they were above, having to do that. Fortunately, I'm glad that it was a week because it gave that reporter a week to scrape everything, basically, collect everything, and preserve it for much longer, which, of course, is one of the things that I absolutely say about signal and any app you're communicating with someone else on. If they can see it, they can save it. So if you've got somebody untrustworthy in the conversation, it's no longer a secure conversation.

Gary [00:21:57]:
Yeah. And there is one other there's a benefit to the entire thing. A bright side silver lining, if you will, is that I love emoji because I believe in the evolution of language, and I believe that sometimes text communication can be misconstrued because you don't see, facial expressions and gestures and all that. And, emoji kind of fills a little bit of that in, like, I'm gonna put little colorful pictures to indicate that, oh, I mean this jokingly or I you know, whatever it is. I love emoji. I talk about emoji. I do videos on emoji all the time, and I get comments back saying, why are you bothering with this? This is just for kids. And now I can point to the fact I could say kids and high ranking government officials talking about military operations.

Gary [00:22:44]:
So it gives me a good comeback.

Leo [00:22:46]:
There you go. Yeah. I actually to be honest, I haven't bothered to even look at the conversation, so I have no idea how thoroughly, emojis were being used in the conversation, but it doesn't surprise me in the least. Yeah. It's, man, I'll actually have something to say about emoji a little later on too. Yeah. Okay. So anyway yeah.

Leo [00:23:05]:
So signal, I suppose, would probably be be the single biggest thing that kinda sort of

Gary [00:23:10]:
capture tech wise. Yeah.

Leo [00:23:12]:
While you were while you were out and about. One of the other things we were going to talk about, last episode that didn't happen is, the fact that Apple was pulling their data protection tool after the UK government suggested that they should have access to everybody's encrypted data, even people who aren't in The UK, which I think is one of those things that just seemed like a gross, gross overreach. I'm curious as to what your thoughts on all that were since clearly it affects, you know, your your area of technology dramatically.

Gary [00:23:49]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, Apple and and, The UK have been in kind of a fight over this. You know, Apple is or or The UK definitely, you know, we've both been there. You know, you find security cameras everywhere. Right? Privacy is kind of like a slightly different, level, in The UK than it is in The US. And and their ability to get, like, records and things from people from, you know, the government, it's different. They think about it differently there. Apple, of course, introduced this advanced data protection stuff pretty recently.

Gary [00:24:23]:
I get last year or something like that. Last year or the year before? Yeah. I think it was last year. So the funny thing is, of course, people complaining about the advanced data protection being removed in The UK. Mhmm. It's like, okay. So now as of now, things are just like they they had been for a long time. Right? It's like it's like don't and probably most people complaining about it hadn't even turned it on.

Gary [00:24:48]:
Right.

Leo [00:24:49]:
So something to turn on. To be clear, it is something you have to turn on. Yes. And, it is something that encrypts your data in such a way that Apple can't see. Only you have More

Gary [00:25:02]:
of it. Yeah. Some I mean, some of it already is that way by default, but some of it so more of it becomes that way. When they and the downside is the reason most normal users do not turn it on is if you really screw up and you really you lose your password and and you go you got a new cell phone with a new number and now the two factor it all doesn't work. In the past, there's certain things you can go and work with Apple to get back. Mhmm. And they have other ways to do it. You you usually involve delays.

Gary [00:25:29]:
You know, you'll you you know, you use your credit card, you talk to them, you confirm you're you. There's, like, a seven day wait. There's a lot of back and forth, and you can get your precious photos back. That kind of thing. Right. More stuff goes behind, the complete encryption where Apple can't do it. It just cannot do it. You've turned on advanced data protection.

Gary [00:25:49]:
Now these things, I forget which things they are, photos, notes, other things, now suddenly are to the point where Apple does not have the ability to re to recover those for you. And so a lot of people see that message. You know? It's explaining what's gonna happen, and they check it out. Right? They're like, oh, oh, boy. Oh my goodness. And so yeah. So that's why most people don't have it turned on or whatever. Now, it's it's not gonna end here.

Gary [00:26:17]:
Right? Because UK wants all this,

Leo [00:26:19]:
you

Gary [00:26:19]:
know, access to everything, and Apple's going to have to decide. And Apple now is, like, kind of relying on courts and stuff to be like, you know, they challenge it. UK comes back, and how long can we put this off kind of thing. But eventually, if The UK does win out and says, well, by law, we need to have this access, it'll be interesting to see what Apple does at some point. If it has to roll back to make it easier for there to be a backdoor beyond what was even there previously.

Leo [00:26:48]:
Well, so by by not enabling this feature in The UK right now

Gary [00:26:53]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:26:53]:
Isn't the current situation exactly what the UK government wants?

Gary [00:26:57]:
No. They want more access, I believe. I mean, I think eventually because there's stuff that even without advanced data protection

Leo [00:27:04]:
Okay.

Gary [00:27:05]:
You you Apple can't get. Right? Okay. Apple just cannot get it for you. So if you got a I I don't, again, I don't recall which things between notes, reminders, calendar events, emails, and all that stuff. I don't remember which things are are completely encrypted and owned by you. But if you were to try to recover stuff using Apple as, like, you're only, you know, begging them for for recovery, there are certain things they'd be able to get for you. And certain things they would just say, well, you just don't you don't have that anymore. It's gone.

Gary [00:27:37]:
And they and The UK would probably want Apple to roll that back so that they do have a key Right. So that they can, the government can then go and say, we have a warrant for this person's data, you know, this person's whatever it is, and we can get to that. And Apple's, you know, gonna fight them on it or is probably fighting them on it, and we won't we will never see the end of it. It's gonna be back and forth.

Leo [00:28:01]:
What's frustrating there's two sides to it. One is it is an incredibly strong argument for come on, people. Back up your data yourself. Yeah. Right? If you've got it all in iCloud and your iCloud goes away, make sure you've got a copy somewhere else. Mhmm. That's pretty straightforward. And I always tell people too.

Leo [00:28:21]:
If you've got encrypted data somewhere, back it up in unencrypted form. So you, you know, you're you're not at risk of having your encryption fail on you when you need it most. But the other part of it is that, okay. Great. And what's the phrase? If encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption?

Gary [00:28:39]:
Right. Yeah.

Leo [00:28:39]:
It's it's one of those things where, okay. Great. Apple's not going to encrypt this thing for me in a in a in a way that can't be exposed. I'll encrypt it myself. I you know, for for the for the people that are technical enough to know it, which a lot of, cyber criminals, for lack of a better term, definitely are, Yeah. They're going to encrypt things with with tools that can't be easily cracked, therefore, which there is no backdoor and for which they really don't care. So, yeah, it just it seems like one of those unending battles. You're right.

Leo [00:29:18]:
You know, the government wants something, and they believe that because they're the government, they deserve that something even though it's either technologically not possible, or philosophically from the company's point of view, not the level of privacy we wanna offer to our customers.

Gary [00:29:34]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's the fight between privacy strangely, it's a fight between privacy and security, not computer sec your own personal security. Right. It's like things, anti terrorism, anti crime.

Leo [00:29:45]:
Society. Yep. Yeah. So that'll be interesting. And I I do think that I think the UK government kind of made a mistake because they asked for everything. Right? They asked for your data. Right? Even though you're not in The UK, the way I understand it, what the UK government was asking for would have allowed them to access your data with a warrant Yeah. Which I find just mind numbing.

Leo [00:30:18]:
I mean, I just it's unbelievable that they would go that far. But I think that was a huge mistake, and I think that's a lot of what got a lot of attention on the issue. Yeah. I also think that, other companies are gonna be facing it. Anybody that does cloud storage is gonna be facing it. And, yeah, everybody that knows what they're doing is going to not trust the cloud storage to encrypt things for them and do it themselves. So Right. We'll see.

Gary [00:30:45]:
Yep. Let's see. Another story well, kind of not really a story, but something I noticed even before I left on my trip, was I you know, trying to keep track of news Since the last election, I've kind of sworn off TV news and other kinds of news and and been very focused on news that, you you take in at your own pace as opposed to being fed to you at a steady pace. Mhmm. In other words, reading as opposed to listening or watching. Right?

Leo [00:31:17]:
What a concept.

Gary [00:31:18]:
It it it was just a it's a thing I've I'm I'm trying to do. I thought about it, and I've tried to do it. So reading lots of articles and trying to stay up with the news by reading only. And the interesting thing I discovered was that recently, it seems like, it where previously there had been, you know, different types of news like sports, weather, and all that. There's political news, so one type of news. There's tech news. The interesting thing is just trying to focus on tech news to clear my mind of politics didn't work because the tech news sites and, journalists Right. Were covering lots of politics.

Leo [00:31:56]:
Right.

Gary [00:31:56]:
And it got to be the point I started noticing this and trying to figure out what was going on. And sure enough, a lot of political news has been reported in what had been tech news sources. Places like Wired, places like The Verge, a new place that I discovered like four zero four Media.

Leo [00:32:17]:
Right.

Gary [00:32:18]:
I had noticed that they were covering lots of politics, but it wasn't like they were just covering pure politics. The articles did have a tech aspect to it, and it occurred to me that so much, in politics now is tech related. I I have a degree in journalism, and for a short time, time, I thought I might be like a journalist, like, you know, actually, like, covering politics and stuff instead of getting into technology. And so back when I was really into it, when I when I would read, like, news several newspapers a day and was following everything. You know, political news was political news, and and tech news didn't exist truly. I think it was kinda new. But there wasn't much technology in all this stuff. Right? It was more social issues and, law and all that.

Gary [00:33:03]:
Now so much we have to deal with, is tech oriented. Like, even, you know, the the Doge stuff Right. Which is like a huge political story in The US of Elon Musk and his buddies going around to different departments and laying people off and things like that. I mean, it's very tech based. I mean, he constantly talks about use of AI, about, just taking care of, you know, better technology solutions, replacing people with, you know, with technology and all this. And it's and then accessing databases. Right? Database access and all this. So, of course, those technology journalists are going to be covering all this stuff because that's really it it fits in with them, but it is interesting how, like, how how little political news I saw that was I did not already read after reading my tech news.

Leo [00:33:57]:
Yeah. It's all covered. I ran across an article, and I honestly I I wish I remembered where that was talking about, sources of, accurate information. I don't want to say unbiased, but basically, you know, accurate information. And there were a lot of sources that you would recognize without without hesitation. I think, things like Wired, four zero four, The Verge, and so forth were probably listed on there. I'll talk about four zero four in a second. The one that surprised me, just surprised the heck out of me was Teen Vogue.

Leo [00:34:32]:
And I say that both with a mixture of surprise and almost gratitude because, let's face it, that audience needs good information. So I'm kind of glad to see that as being potentially a source of objective information. Four zero four Media was started, what, I think, just a year or two ago, and they were like a handful. I think there's, like, four, six people Yeah. Behind it. And they set up their own media organization specifically for, doing the independent journalism that they really wanted to do and felt they couldn't at the various places they were. I've been a subscriber since the start, and, yeah, it's been it's been really, really there's really good stuff there. Sometimes they go, you know, deep into politics, which I tend to not pay attention to.

Leo [00:35:22]:
But, of course, like you say, there's a lot of overlap right now between politics and tech, and it's it's it's important.

Gary [00:35:28]:
Yeah. I, it's funny you mentioned Vogue because, you know, having grown up, you know, primarily in the eighties and everything like that, I still when I think of Vogue magazine, I think of fashion a fashion magazine. And, but, you know, it it's it obviously is more than that. And it was more than that a long time ago too because I saw the, recent movie, Lee, which is it was about the World War two, photojournalist Lee Miller

Leo [00:35:58]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:35:58]:
Who, you know, played by Kate Winslet. And it was, you know, it was an interesting movie, of course, because she was a female journalist who was trying to, you know, cover World War two using her camera. And in the end, she photographed some her you know, some of the horrors of war and really wanted to show including holocaust photos and all. And at the at the end of the war, really wanted people to see this stuff. And she was publishing her stuff in in The UK, not The US, but, the mag I think Vogue in The UK was like, no. The war is over. We wanna move on. We're not publishing your photos.

Gary [00:36:36]:
And what saved, everything was the fact that they they sent them on to The US. And US Vogue ran her photos Mhmm. Of the horrors of war in, like, The US version of Vogue in 1945, or I don't know if it was a year or two later. So it was interesting to, you know, to think that, you know, back then, you know, he had a magazine that I always thought of as fashion, but they were put putting news out there that wasn't, being covered by other media. And now suddenly, we have, like, maybe the same thing happening.

Leo [00:37:06]:
The reason that this one got my attention, though, is that this was this wasn't Vogue. This was Team Vogue.

Gary [00:37:11]:
Team Vogue. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo [00:37:12]:
It's actually a subset of exactly what you're about to an audience we normally think of as being even less interested in what's going on politically. So, anyway, I just like I said, it I thought it was kinda cool.

Gary [00:37:25]:
Well, the my one last thought about that was if tech and politics truly are overlapping news, like a news topic now, maybe it's the the thing is a lot of political journalists are having trouble keeping up with the tech in their stories. Whereas maybe the tech journalists are having less of a problem keeping up with the politics. Or maybe they're just less afraid to actually just make assumptions and just go out there and write their stories as tech stories and and hope they get the politics right. I don't know which it is, but maybe that's just another reason why these tech sources are, you know, tech, publications seem to be covering up politics so well now.

Leo [00:38:08]:
Yep.

Gary [00:38:09]:
But I also mentioned the the thing, you know, with Doge going into, you know, going places that's one of the main stories has to do a lot with tech. And one of the stories that came out in the last, few days or week was that, there you know, Doge has been going through US Social Security Administration. And they said that one of the inefficiencies there is the fact that it's a very old code base, massive code base, mostly written in COBOL. Yay. And they were going to basically make things more efficient by over the next few months rewriting the entire code base, which instantly got a reaction from a lot of people including myself because, I mean, I started my first professional job coding would have been in the kind of late eighties. Mhmm. I've seen COBOL code. I have I actually had a job helping business majors at my college write COBOL, in the computing center.

Gary [00:39:10]:
Yep. And so and I didn't know COBOL. I just simply went as a computer science major and looked at their COBOL code and pointed out where things were wrong. That's, so I was very kind of weirdly impressed with COBOL because I didn't know it yet. I could look at it and understand immediately what it was doing. Right. Which kind of when people I know when people, put down COBOL, there are two people types of people that come to this defense. One is old COBOL programmers that say, hey, we we got a lot done with COBOL.

Gary [00:39:43]:
A lot still runs on COBOL. And the other type might be me saying, you know, there's a lot to be said for a computer language that you could just look at and know what it's doing even if you don't know the computer language. I mean, that you know, it it shouldn't look cryptic. Right? It should look pretty good. And some modern languages like the one I'm program in mostly now, Swift, is kind of like that.

Leo [00:40:05]:
Right.

Gary [00:40:05]:
I mean, you I could really look at a lot of Swift code early on and know what it was doing because of the way Swift looks as opposed to say, c or c plus plus. Right. Which a lot of times would be like looking at it. It's like, oh, boy. I I have no idea what's going on here until I have more context. But, but yeah. I also thought it's like this is a this is a a story. I I I relate to this.

Gary [00:40:31]:
I relate to the idea of seeing old code and saying, I could just rewrite this whole thing. And what happens inevitably is you can get 90% of the way through old code, rewrite it, and be like, this is just as easy as I thought. But the last 10%

Leo [00:40:50]:
Yep.

Gary [00:40:51]:
That is what kills you. And I I would predict that if they really wanted to do it, though, which is not this is not gonna happen, they really wanted to do it. I think in two or three months, they could be 90% done rewriting the 60,000,000 lines of COBOL code. But the last 10% would take, like, twenty years.

Leo [00:41:07]:
Right.

Gary [00:41:08]:
Last line of COBOL was really gone, from the code. It just doesn't work like that. It it it's it's much more difficult than you think. And then also I would predict that at some point, mired years in in rewriting it, somebody would come up with the idea that they should create some sort of macro or scripting language that would speak the language of Social Security and finance and people and accounts, and that they would if they created that, they could use the scripting language to then easily script a lot of what they needed to do. And they would craft it to make it work well with what they had, and in the end, they would end up recreating COBOL. And they would have basically, the scripting language that looks a lot like COBOL because they realized that it was easier to do that instead of, like, going and doing in Java or something, which is the COBOL

Leo [00:42:05]:
27 or something like that. Yes.

Gary [00:42:07]:
Yeah. So they would do that. But also, of course, the other thing is that I have to realize that, you know, if it's Elon Musk who's behind this, what he probably envisions is taking 60,000,000 lines of code, feeding it into an AI, and saying rewrite this in Java. And what we get then is a reinterpretation of COBOL code in Java, which would not which would no. That would just it would make things so much worse, because right now there are probably experts at the social security social security administration that know where in the code they can go in to fix things and do things. If they had it rewritten in Java, it probably would work. They probably still have to spend years getting it to work right. But then there would be tons of code that nobody would have any idea how it works.

Leo [00:42:55]:
No human has ever seen it.

Gary [00:42:57]:
No. Yeah. Exactly. So it it's just the kind of thing where it's the whole thing's scary, but I'm not really scared because I'm sure if a project was launched to do it, it would be so mired in disaster. In fact, Social Security Administration actually had that happen. They started in 2017 or something like that with a project to rewrite all their Cobalt code. And they they abandoned it after a while. It's

Leo [00:43:24]:
funny. So my relationship with Cobalt was a little bit more hands on. It's funny. When I started at Microsoft, 1983, I was offered as a classic bait and switch. They offered me three positions. I could work on basic, I could work on basic, or I could work on COBOL. Mhmm. So I said basic, and they said, well, how about COBOL? Says, well, maybe the other basic.

Leo [00:43:46]:
Said, well, how about COBOL? So my first role at Microsoft was working on Microsoft's COBOL compiler and runtime. And, of course, in the process, you end up learning COBOL. Sure. It's the way I like to to click or, classify these things. It's just another programming language. Yeah. Strengths, it has its weaknesses, it has its quirks, whatever. And indeed, I learned to write I wrote code in COBOL.

Leo [00:44:11]:
In fact, I wrote what might have been Microsoft's first bug tracking system in COBOL, because at that time, that COBOL in particular was particularly adept at dealing with databases and none of the other software we were using was. But you're right. Rewriting anything of any significance, regardless of the language, regardless of whether it's COBOL or anything else, it's the sheer size of the thing that gets in the way. It just ain't gonna happen. And I think the the concern I have with the whole scenario is that they might throw out the original before the replacement is done. Yeah. By that, I mean, they'll be just so tired of of, you know, keeping the COBOL based system running while they've got this new thing that's done any day. Any day, it'll be ready, when, of course, that last 10% of the work will take 90% of the actual time.

Leo [00:45:09]:
Interesting times. We shall see what happens. The one thing that actually got me that really made me concerned about the people that are making these decisions is the fact that they were making claims that a 50 year old people were getting missiles. And as it turns out, those were simply people for, I think, which they did not have birth dates for or for which some of the birthday fields were not complete. Because for whatever version of COBOL they're working with, a hundred and fifty years ago is the date time epoch. That's where that's the the COBOL version of year zero. So if you've got, say, zero as your, age, then, yeah, that means you were born a hundred and 50 years ago. It doesn't mean you're a 50 years old.

Leo [00:45:58]:
It just means that the data wasn't entered properly. But they were taking it to mean something entirely different and using that justify, actions.

Gary [00:46:07]:
Well, the thing that scared me too was the fact that there was an early report when they when they first started talking about Social Security that the they looked at the number of people in the database, and it was, like, more than the number of people, like, alive or something like that. So they used to disprove, Social Security sending checks to people that don't exist. Right. And no. It's a it's a database. Once you're in the Social Security database, you should be in the Social Security database forever. Right. Like, they should be able to go back and see, like, what checks were sent out on this day in 1973 and to who.

Gary [00:46:44]:
And you can't do that unless the people are still in the database. You don't delete the person because they've died and you no longer send them a check.

Leo [00:46:54]:
You need literally, it should say, show me the people that are alive. Alright.

Gary [00:46:59]:
They Exactly. Exactly. So they have so, yeah, that's a fundamental misunderstanding, but I could see how saying that was very easy to say as a sound bite. Throw it out there. And have a majority of people say, oh, well, this is proof positive that people are getting social security checks that shouldn't. And it's like, no, that's that's not how it works. You know, you you bought something ten years ago and it has an invoice number in some database and that's still there in the database. Right.

Gary [00:47:27]:
You know, it doesn't disappear because it was shipped to you or whatever. That's how they

Leo [00:47:31]:
that the people making the claims didn't understand what it was they were looking at, and that's probably the scariest part of all. Yep. So let's switch from scary to cool, shall we? Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I had a month's worth of things to choose from. It's been a month. I am pulling out the, I believe it's on Netflix show, Adolescence.

Leo [00:47:55]:
Now Adolescence is remarkable for, many different things. I'm going to pull out two specifically. One is the acting is absolutely phenomenal. The primary character in the show is I think he's a 13 year old boy. He has never acted before. This is his first role, and it was incredible to watch. He nailed it. He absolutely nailed it.

Gary [00:48:25]:
The other thing and the other folks were also similarly awesome, but this guy gets, I guess, extra credit for it being his first role and clearly him being able to do such a good job at it. The other thing that's made more press about this particular show is there are only four episodes, but each episode is a single shot, which means they turn the camera on and an hour later they turn the camera off. And what you see for that hour is all that one recording. And doing that, it's not like it's all taking place in one location, in one set or something like that. There is a tremendous amount of camera and scene movement. The best way I can describe it is that a lot of what they ended up having to do was boil down to choreography between the actors, the support staff, the cameraman, everybody else that was involved in this. There's at least one scenario where I they must have attached the camera to a drone because at one point, the camera after filming for, like, a half an hour, you know, whatever they're doing, they change the scene by having the camera fly over a parking lot and go to a different location where it continues to record the next scene. It's absolutely incredible, from a technological point of view.

Leo [00:49:49]:
And, of course, you know, that's that's the kind of stuff that truly impressed me. So it's a great it's it's an interesting story. It is, it it focuses on teenage, male attitudes towards women is what a lot of the focus is on. There is a murder involved. It's questionable, but then it's not. There's a lot of backstory about what's going on in the school, which for us would be roughly a high school. The reason I made a quick note here because you were talking about emoji earlier. One of the key revelations in the show was that the kids were leaving comments on Instagram photos, and those comments were emojis.

Leo [00:50:38]:
The adults had no idea what those emojis really meant. And in that, there was a bit of revelation about what was really happening between the people that are involved here. So, four episodes, one hour each, adolescence, highly, highly recommended. It would not surprise me if this one walked away with, a few, supposedly BAFTAs, but potentially some some Emmy's as well. Very cool.

Gary [00:51:05]:
Cool. My recommendation is a little lighter, I guess. It's, The Residence. Hope you've heard of that. It's a mystery it's a murder mystery that takes place in the White House. Oh. So somebody is murdered in the White House during an event, and a detective is brought in. It appears to be modern day or close to it.

Gary [00:51:29]:
Mhmm. But the but detective is kind of old fashioned and a lot of this stuff in the and it feels more like an Agatha Christie, or Sherlock Holmes

Leo [00:51:38]:
Right. Even though

Gary [00:51:38]:
it seems to be modern. So, so, yeah, just trying to figure out who murdered this, person that works in the White House during this state event. And, and, yeah, it's it's it's one of those murder mysteries that's, you know, there's a mystery. You're trying to figure out who done it, but also there's a lot of bits of humor, you know, in it too, just the way how unusual the detective is and how people react to her and all that stuff. So it's good. So I am, I'm most of the way through it. Then you get it on Netflix. Cool.

Leo [00:52:10]:
In terms of self promotion, this one's a little bit, different for me as well. One of the things that I, I found myself needing to talk while you were gone, Gary. So I ended up starting this Let's Chat series. The original pair were just me sitting in a recliner here chatting about topics. This most recent one, I went back to my desk because I wanted my microphone and my script in front of me. But it's let's chat about civility. And it's one of those things where in recent years oh, I'll back up. You and I, we signed up for this.

Leo [00:52:48]:
We signed up to be online publishers. And with that comes feedback. And not all feedback is positive, and some of it's downright bad. Right? Uncivil, to use my term. And what I'm finding is that it feels like in the last couple of years, things have been getting a little worse. And, apparently, my skin has been getting a little thinner. So I've been, responding sometimes to some folks that, have been leaving less than complimentary comments, not, you know, the disagreement kind of stuff, but the actual, you know, you're an idiot kind of stuff. And it's just it's an interesting thing to think about.

Leo [00:53:36]:
In some ways, it feels like it's also a reflection of the times, but it's also a reflection of my, you know, I I have the right to respond, and I sometimes I probably should. I've been making fun of some people, but not to them. Right? It's one of those things. I think you've seen them today on YouTube. I'll take a screen grab of somebody's, you know, off the wall inane or stupid comment and then make a comment of my own. But, no, this this is the kind of stuff where people are I had somebody call one of my ideas, asinine is what triggered this. And I didn't wanna let that sit, so I didn't. Anyway, it is on YouTube.

Leo [00:54:21]:
There is a link in the show notes. There's also a copy on askleo.com. But I think, to keep this on brand, I think the YouTube one is the one I want to send people to. So let's chat about civility is the name of the YouTube video. It just released a couple days ago.

Gary [00:54:35]:
Cool. And I I think that's that's definitely a topic that we'll continue to talk about, I think, in future episodes. While I was I have plenty of videos to choose from since it's been a month, but I I had one that I liked myself, and it's called, working on your Mac without distractions in monk mode. It's one of those things where I saw a, some blog post about monk mode, and I didn't read past the headline. I just immediately, you know, went and said, what is that? And came up with my own definition of it. And then I went and read about monk mode. And so I kinda stuck half with my own definition of what it should be and half with, like, what people are talking about when they talk about monk mode. It's basically just just trying to focus on a single task, like meditating.

Gary [00:55:24]:
But it's a meditating, you're writing or you're, you know, drawing, you know, your graphic artist or just editing if you're doing films. And, of course, it is funny how, like, years ago, it was all the thing to talk about how to multitask. Different ways to multitask. I did tons of videos how to multitask. And now I find myself more and more doing videos how to, like, not multitask. Just have one thing on your screen, concentrate on that, and get stuff done. And this I just go throughout just a whole bunch of different tips for kind of being in that monk mode while working on your Mac.

Leo [00:56:00]:
Sounds good. Yeah. I I I'm with you. I'm doing the same thing. I learned that one of the most valuable keystrokes in Windows is Windows key plus m, which, minimizes all of your windows. All of them. And then you pick the the one that you wanna work. So alrighty.

Leo [00:56:19]:
Well, I think that wraps us up for another week and a successful return. As always, we are very grateful for you to listen and for you to have stuck around for a month. As always, we will see you again very soon. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

Gary [00:56:36]:
Bye. Cool. There was one topic that I couldn't figure out how to work in, but I wanted to talk to you about. Okay. Coffee. New Zealand coffee. So I think especially eight years ago, I wasn't much of a coffee drinker. Now I'm a major coffee drinker, and my wife is.

Gary [00:56:54]:
So and we went and being with my wife meant we went to a lot more places for breakfast. Whereas when I was by myself, I was probably, like, driving somewhere, eating a, you know, bar or whatever. And the, the thing about coffee there, it's funny, every place you go, North Island and South Island, you get three items you get two items on the menu, usually three, but always two. Short black

Leo [00:57:16]:
Oh.

Gary [00:57:17]:
Short black, long black. And if you're lucky, Americano.

Leo [00:57:22]:
Oh, really? No flat white.

Gary [00:57:24]:
The

Leo [00:57:25]:
Might be good.

Gary [00:57:25]:
Short black white, short black, long black, but you could ask for it white. And a bigger like, a place that was really dedicated to coffee had a long board, they would say white as well.

Leo [00:57:35]:
K. Okay.

Gary [00:57:36]:
But, so the funny thing is the short black, of course, is espresso. It's a shot of coffee at the bottom of a small cup. The long black is exactly twice the size, meaning it's another part water.

Leo [00:57:50]:
Okay.

Gary [00:57:51]:
Which means it's like four ounces or something of coffee. It was not enough it was it was like two sips of coffee rather than one. It's ridiculous. The Americano, you and I hoped for being like, well, that's the one I want.

Leo [00:58:04]:
Right. Right.

Gary [00:58:05]:
We could not we we actually went several times, and one of us would order Americano. The other would order a long black. We looked at the sizes. We're like, these are the same thing. So, getting a cup of coffee that was a normal size now there are Starbucks there. We never went into one.

Leo [00:58:24]:
Okay. We're

Gary [00:58:24]:
always going to these little cafes. Sure. We should've gone once just to see if Starbucks at least served a decent sized cup of coffee. We could not. And even in the rooms, the the Keurig machines, they were not Keurig. They were other brands. Mhmm. Maybe out of the Keurig there.

Gary [00:58:41]:
They all had a short and long setting. And for us, it was, like, three run it through the through three times along to fill the mug up because they give you a regular mug. So you guys know what a regular mug is.

Leo [00:58:55]:
Right.

Gary [00:58:55]:
You have them. You know? But you just don't put enough you don't fill it up to the normal amount. It it was it was really funny. So we were both, like, just joke by the end. We just thought it was hilarious.

Leo [00:59:09]:
Right.

Gary [00:59:09]:
How we had to start a little thing of coffee, and my wife took to just getting a second long black every time. You know?

Leo [00:59:16]:
It gets too.

Gary [00:59:17]:
It was just not I would usually just have, like, some something else or or or whatever, but I always had a long black. But yeah. It it was just it was just so funny. And we got home, we were, like, we went some was it the airport at in LA or something? We were just the two of us got coffee, and we were like, oh my god. Look at how much liquid is in. This is crazy. No human being could possibly drink this much coffee. How could they you know, we were having fun with that.

Gary [00:59:47]:
But, yeah, it was it was good coffee always. But That's

Leo [00:59:52]:
usually what gets me is that when I'm traveling, a lot of the coffee that I encounter in various places, it's either not good, which is obvious, or it's not a style or grind that appeals to me, a style or whatever that appeals to me. I'm spoiled with, the really dark French roast kind of stuff, and, that's hard to find out in the wild, so to speak.

Gary [01:00:18]:
Yep. Their their cafes were good. Their their cafes their breakfast food was fantastic, and their, desserts or not desserts pastries, I would say, were were great. They their scones, cheese every place had a cheese scone. That was fantastic. And and you only occasionally see cheese scones here, But cheese scones are fantastic. Great to have with breakfast with coffee and a cheese scone. Fantastic.

Gary [01:00:43]:
And they had some other things at coffee shops that were that we saw regularly, and then we would look them up and find out that, like, a what was it? The ten ten slice. You we would find these things and be like, well, is this, like, British thing or what? And we find out a New Zealand pastry that it's, like, Wisconsin, like, they had their own little cafe pastry set that was uniquely used in New Zealand. An Afghan was another thing. Afghan cookie was another New Zealand only thing that you could get anywhere at any cafe, but we've never seen it anywhere else in the world, you know. New Zealand treat, but they were they were really good. And then their breakfast were always everything was on bread, like, you know, British style. So it was eggs on bread, avocado on bread. It was always on bread.

Gary [01:01:29]:
It was always really good bread. We miss it it was like a breakfast were excellent. We we started going out to breakfast here and there, but by the end of the trip, we were just every day, we would go out for breakfast because, like, why would we wanna miss another opportunity to have a New Zealand cafe breakfast?

Leo [01:01:44]:
At some point, you're gonna go home. You're gonna miss it anyway. Yeah.

Gary [01:01:47]:
Yeah. So we just did it every day. Anyway

Leo [01:01:50]:
So the one thing I was gonna ask, you went to through Christchurch. We were in Christchurch. It would be fifteen years ago.

Gary [01:01:57]:
Before times.

Leo [01:01:58]:
Twenty ten. Yeah. And, it was, before the earthquake.

Gary [01:02:04]:
Yeah. That's what I mean. Yeah. Not just the pandemic before times, but they're kind of

Leo [01:02:09]:
A while, of course, since the earthquake. They've had lots of opportunity. Were there any signs, any remnants that you know you could point out and say, oh, yeah. That's because?

Gary [01:02:17]:
Well, though, well, most stuff had been either cleaned up or purposely not cleaned up. Oh. Like, there were things that were there left as kind of memorial, you know, like, we're leaving this is now an art piece. Like, this is now a memorial to that. They had that there. There was a massive, memorial, by the river. The beauty I don't know if you remember. There's, like, a beautiful, They called their botanic gardens, but it's a park with and a river and all that.

Gary [01:02:44]:
There's a point where you go down and there's this wall and it's marble and it's all the engraved names of all the the people that died.

Leo [01:02:52]:
Nice.

Gary [01:02:52]:
And, and that's like a big thing in the city now. I mean, you can't miss it. But definitely lots of new buildings. Like, that's the one thing. It looks like it's like everything is so new. It's like, well, there's a there's a reason because they've rebuilt half the cities since the earthquake. Right. And and then also the type of construction too because they're still building new buildings, and you could see inside.

Gary [01:03:18]:
And, like, this one building had girders that were wood girders.

Leo [01:03:23]:
Oh, cool.

Gary [01:03:24]:
And it's so it like, you look at it, like, why are those steel girders, like, this light tan? And then you go up to it and, like, these are, like they've constructed girders out of, like, these planks of hardwood. And I I suppose they probably work really well Yeah. In earthquake situations. And, of course, the very the lack of any tall buildings. There's only a handful of tall buildings downtown. Right. Because there's no point building them. There's they'll just use their land.

Gary [01:03:52]:
They have plenty of it and build out and keep things down to a few stories. So even they stayed there. We were in a hotel that was across the street from the new, football soccer stadium. Rugby, really, that was being built there. And the entire thing is these pipe like, metals like, metal pipe like lattice work on the outside that ties in to the actual stadium that's inside of it. Mhmm. So you could imagine the entire stadium in an earthquake just being able to swing back and forth. I mean, it's obviously it's a very unique, interesting looking construction that they obviously designed to withstand.

Gary [01:04:36]:
And somebody told me, that they expect at some point, they're gonna get an eight. Like, the next one's gonna be an eight.

Leo [01:04:43]:
Right.

Gary [01:04:43]:
And it's gonna be devastating. And, and so they're trying to build everything as best they can to withstand that whenever it happens.

Leo [01:04:52]:
Funny because we're we're on that same someday kind of timeline. Yeah. You know, we we just refer to it as the big one. At least over a seven, probably something closer to an eight. Unfortunately, we don't have that very recent experience that would motivate people to actually Yeah. Build correctly and prepare I mean, we've got earthquake standards, of course, but are they enough? Who knows? We have fifty, sixty, 70 story buildings downtown. Who knows? Right?

Gary [01:05:21]:
Yeah. I yeah. No. Definitely. The only other thing I I noticed it was interesting. I maybe I should have mentioned on the show was, books are still a thing very much. Books and libraries and bookstores. We sell so many bookstores in different places.

Leo [01:05:37]:
Nice.

Gary [01:05:37]:
Used bookstores, new bookstores, and libraries were not only prominent, but cities like Christchurch made libraries a like a focal point. So Christchurch has one pier that goes out to the ocean that's in the middle of their long beach. Mhmm. And, the pier ends at this big building that's on their library, their main branch, their public library. And it's got a cafe and all that. But it's not a mall. It's not a bunch of stores. It's not a commercial thing.

Gary [01:06:06]:
It is the Christchurch public library. And it's beautiful. There are people in there sitting in these chairs and you look out at the ocean, you know, reading and you could see all these books. In, Auckland across the way, there's, there's Devonport, which is like their little beach community and all. And their big architectural building in the middle of Devonport, right by the water, is the Devonport Public Library. Right. There's so many bookstores, so many libraries, such an emphasis on books. I mean, we noticed in in, Scotland too.

Gary [01:06:37]:
Mhmm. Scotland's got another place where you sell tons of bookstores. But definitely, probably saw more bookstores touring around New Zealand than I've seen in The US, like, anywhere.

Leo [01:06:47]:
Right. Interesting. Interesting.

Gary [01:06:50]:
Yeah. Anyway

Leo [01:06:51]:
Alright. We're on for next week

Gary [01:06:52]:
because you you opened it when you said

Leo [01:06:55]:
My calendar. So today is the first. Yeah. Happy April fools.

Gary [01:07:01]:
I really we didn't work anything into it. Yeah. Yeah. Fine. That's fine. Is well, the years can't even tell.

Leo [01:07:07]:
Yeah. I was gonna say there's there's a bit a couple of jokes about it that, you know, we can't come up with anything that's any April foolier than

Gary [01:07:14]:
I've got a I've got an app on my phone that takes all my RSS feeds and makes them look like Instagram. So you could pretend you look you're doing Instagram, but it's actually, like, four four media and the verge and wired and all that stuff. And I put in the onion there too. And I flipped through it, and it's not you have to look at the top to see the logo. And so many times, I've gone through and looked at the story and been like, really? And I'm like, oh, oh, that's the onion. Oh, thank god. But I bought it. Like, totally.

Gary [01:07:43]:
It was like, that's totally plausible.

Leo [01:07:44]:
Reality is already too close to a farce. Anyway, I'm good for next week.

Gary [01:07:48]:
Good. Yep. Me too. The eighth. So I will talk to you then.

Leo [01:07:52]:
You then.

Gary [01:07:53]:
Toodle. Alright. Bye.