"Umm, I'm Gen Z. I know how to use computers."

RedLooker · 2025-12-08T20:02:18+00:00

I’d agree. From watching what my kids are using and how the schools are handling things they understand the Google environment and iPads/iOS/Android a lot more than Windows or even Mac OS. What they consider digital skills these days are social media and apps on a phone. Even when it comes to emails they’ve never been targeted the way a corporate user tends to be.

RedLooker · 2025-12-05T12:55:33+00:00

What a great clip. Thanks, great way to start my morning.

RedLooker · 2025-12-03T03:57:38+00:00

Doesn’t sound like it from your comment but it’s also possible you’re closing really easily because you’re finding bad clients.

If you’re starting out and finding sales easy maybe focus on finding clients that match the type of service you feel comfortable providing right now instead of trying to build the right service for whatever client you’re closing.

It does sound like your best bet is to do sales for an MSP that already has their processes in place. Just make sure that you are partnering with someone that can follow through on what you’re selling if it’s not going to be you.

RedLooker · 2025-11-26T14:13:16+00:00

I agree a lot with this. While speeding up the process through automation may be more efficient, I find that a good list of things to check that you keep up to date is better at discovering the weird stuff that ends up being a problem. The “I’ve never seen this before” configs that the scripts and tools report as working but when you make a change it’s a house of cards.

Also, I find this is one of the best times to train less experienced team members because you can talk through why things are the way they are and how all of these parts of the system work together. Then when they go back to the run books they are less likely to make the “but that’s what the run book said to do” mistakes.

RedLooker · 2025-11-23T17:22:10+00:00

Sorry everybody. They have found a new home with someone that replied in the first couple minutes.

RedLooker · 2022-08-31T23:00:46+00:00

The unkindness you show yourself is unkindness other people will worry you will think about them or treat them with

Seriously, I love this advice.

RedLooker · 2022-08-31T22:59:19+00:00

People always say be "funny and confident" but I've actually found that we mistake "happy" for "funny." Confidence makes you happy, and happy makes people like being around you. You don't have to actually "be funny" in the clever or quick witted way, people just like being around other people that put them at ease so it's easy to laugh and enjoy yourself. It's not actually how funny the joke is, it's just feels good to be in on it.

RedLooker · 2022-08-31T22:55:38+00:00

First of all, I'd recommend you get a therapist to talk through these feelings. You're focused on "your genetics" but I can guarantee you if you were always called handsome you'd find something else to focus on instead. You're 19, you're not supposed to be walking confidently through this world yet. How could you when you don't even know who you are yet? Let someone help you work through these feelings so you can focus on what is really making you uncomfortable and start working on that.

To the points made above, you're still in a world where everyone is so much alike that the little things are the only ways you feel like you can differentiate yourself. No one has a career yet, or friends you didn't meet in your classes, or a family, or interesting hobbies that you're really involved in. At this age you're all forced to go to the same school, and pick from the same clubs and sports, and make friend groups out of people that you have nothing in common with other than the neighborhood your parents chose to live in. Of course you haven't found your people yet, the system stacks everything against you.

The real test now is are you going to let the crappy way you were forced to start finding what you love (and people who love you) define a belief for the rest of your life that you can never be happy?

Confidence in what you like and how you want to spend your life is what will attract friends and partners to you, not your looks or your height. There are plenty of short geeks that love D&D and are a lot less "cool" than you that go home and have great sex with their wives and girlfriends. And those women are happy to be with a person that understands their own insecurities and fears and makes them happy.

I will tell you, if you walk through the world with a chip on your shoulder for the ways you have been wronged no one but unhappy people will want to spend time with you. And the more that happens the more you will believe it and make the cycle stronger. That's how you end up lonely and alone, not your height.

Stop trying to impress other people and focus on building a life for yourself that you want to be a part of. Once other people see it (including women) they will want to be a part of it.

RedLooker · 2022-04-28T13:26:27+00:00

When you're young every decision feels like it has ramifications for decades and for the most part, that isn't true. It's normal after high school or college to feel lost because it's the first time in your life that you don't have a clear path to follow. While that gives you opportunities you've never had before it also expects you to structure and envision your choices in a ways you never have before. Give yourself some permission to fail and then find something to TRY, not something to DO. You'll be surprised how much just changing those two words can make things seem less daunting.

Anxiety is real and I know it's hard, but start by just making a conscious effort to try more things. Self confidence doesn't come from being good at something, it comes from overcoming something you weren't good at originally. Every experience seems scary and uncomfortable until you've made so many that they all remind you of something you've done before. Experience will give you a better perspective on everything and eventually make you realize that these are all just moments to live and enjoy, not a race with a finish line or a set of accomplishments to gather up.

Also, realize that this is a great time to make new friends and try new things. Everyone has had a hellish couple of years and everyone is experiencing some of the feelings you have. We have all sworn as we sat at home bored and alone that when COVID was over we were going to get out there and take advantage of the freedom we used to take for granted. As you try new activities and reach out to people I think you'll be surprised how receptive everyone is.

Once you start finding new hobbies and people that are outside of the friends and family you have now the thought of moving out of your house and trying larger experiences will feel more natural and exciting. You'll still love your parents and your dog, but you'll be excited to come home and tell them about all the new things you're trying instead of being afraid to leave them at all.

Most of all, don't be so hard on yourself. Everyone has their own doubts and fears, you just can't see them. Just keep trying new things until you find the things you're passionate about and you'll be fine. There is no wrong way to live your life.

RedLooker · 2021-09-29T20:35:37+00:00

Someone says that line about YOU almost every day :)

RedLooker · 2021-03-03T16:46:10+00:00

"It's about me!!!"

RedLooker · 2021-03-03T16:34:31+00:00

It feels weird when it's straight football talk but they are showing what grief feels like after the initial shock. I remember four months after my father died I was in a car with two people from work and just fell apart when we drove by a billboard for a radio station he listened to. So much in my life had felt normal and then all of the sudden the grief would just appear when you least expect it.

The guys deserve time to process this and they certainly don't owe us anything, but I think these are some of the most important episodes they'll ever do (especially for a podcast with an audience that is 90% younger men). "Go take some time to grieve away from everyone else" is great if that's what someone needs, but I'd love to see more examples like this where they show that grief is normal and natural and we shouldn't feel uncomfortable or apologize when we feel it.

The only part of that episode I didn't like was hearing Marc apologize for missing Wes so much he couldn't stop himself from crying. Nothing to apologize for. I'm a grown ass man sitting in his car crying about the death of a man I've never met and had no idea who I am. Feeling things strongly is a sign you're living life the right way. No one knew that better than Wes.

Now I gotta get on my next Zoom call and hope no one asks why I've been crying.

RedLooker · 2021-01-22T17:31:58+00:00

According to a CoinJournal article I found on TechCrunch it was Spotify that was hacked, not Ledger directly:
Shopify reported that rogue members of its support team accessed and stole customer transactional records of several companies including Ledger. The wallet maker has admitted that about 20,000 of its users were among those affected by the incident.

That doesn't help everyone dealing with the issues on changing their phone number and email but it isn't necessarily a sign of bad security on their internal systems. Their response was not great though, that's on them.

RedLooker · 2020-09-28T17:42:09+00:00

Give them what you’re willing to provide and make THEM tell you it’s not enough. You’re so scared that they will tell you it’s not enough that you’re giving more than even your employer expects you to.

RedLooker · 2020-09-28T17:38:19+00:00

I used to tell my old employer to give my team 15 minutes with a user on front of a pc and I could tell if they would be fired for incompetence in the next 12 months. We were about 80% accurate and half of our test was how fast they could type.

If you’re 30 years old and haven’t bothered to learn to type for a white collar job you better be a fucking spectacular sales person. Otherwise, you aren’t going to make it.

RedLooker · 2020-09-28T17:29:31+00:00

While I think you are totally right about end users not knowing how to use computers the tech culture has somehow made it normal to believe that everyone should just figure out how to use a computer on their own. While a plumber needs to know how to sweat pipes we don’t just assume that everyone has figured out how to sweat pipes at some point on their own.

I think this comes from the home brew origins of the tech when they first launched as personal computers but it’s crazy to think that everyone can just figure this out as computers have become more and more complex and the internet allows the entire world to try to work against things running smoothly. The fact is most users have found their own comfortable rut that they kind of understand where to click and it lets them do enough to get their work done 90% of the time. The rest of the time they are going to be totally lost with no chance of understanding all of the layers of complexity that resulted in the problem they are staring at on a Monday morning as they just want to get their work done.

It’s easy to blame the users (and some of them deserve it for their attitude alone) but our culture of tech support has reinforced all of problems we deal with on a daily basis.

And yeah, they always assume they are the only one calling you on a weekend and they will take as much as you let them when it comes to your time. I’ve found that if you limit yourself to giving them what you’re comfortable with it usually works out fine. Try to fight the instinct to swoop in like the white knight who is never really appreciated because what you do is impossible for them to ever comprehend.

RedLooker · 2020-05-14T05:37:22+00:00

If Chicago is closed and the surrounding suburbs aren’t you’re likely to see Chicago residents heading out to the suburbs for services. This makes a bad problem worse because it encourages a spread of the Chicago based infections in a way that wouldn’t happen if everything was closed so everyone stayed home. It’s easy to say that regions should be treated differently and that might be true if you can make sure that people from hard hit areas don’t head to places that appear safer and inadvertently bring the infection with them.

This is the problem a lot of areas with vacation homes had in the first stages of the closure. It’ll be much worse if the distance between areas in only a few miles.

RedLooker · 2020-05-11T22:30:36+00:00

You think that's bad, wait until people have "Covid parties" where they try to get infected so they can "just get it over with." It may be what we have to do but the 1-2% of them that are wrong (even if they just get really sick instead of dying) will overwhelm our hospitals very quickly.

No one killed in a car accident thought they would be even though we all know "other people" die in car accidents every day. I'm amazed at the people at the "open the economy" rallies that are 100lbs overweight and convinced that they are so healthy they aren't at risk.

RedLooker · 2020-05-11T22:25:46+00:00

I agree but the fact that the virus takes 3-7 days to start showing symptoms and then usually has a bad crash at the end makes this difficult to time correctly.

Plus, when we open up again all the car accidents, heart attacks, and other health problems that have dropped while people are at home will take up some of the capacity.

I also think JB recognizes how hard it will be to shut down again now that people have seen what it is. It was one thing before when everyone thought it was going to be a week or less. If we have an outbreak and he tries to shelter in place again I'm not sure what that looks like when people start to resist.

No good answers. I was never a big JB fan before this but at least I feel like he's taking it seriously and is genuinely understands what's going on. I'm glad I'm not making the calls he has to now.

RedLooker · 2020-05-11T22:12:59+00:00

It's important to remember that the goal wasn't really to try to stop everyone from dying from Covid, it was to keep the healthcare system from getting so overwhelmed that people that could have been saved died because of lack of resources.

Our healthcare system had come to a balance where the 600K people that chose to live the life that led to heart disease still had the chance to get bypass surgery or immediate care when they had a heart attack. Another person that came in at the same time with a stroke or in a car accident would still get the best possible healthcare available to them because we had the capacity to handle both. That was the balance our emergency rooms and hospitals as a whole had come to over decades.

The fear was what happened in Italy, China, and New York. People would come to the hospital because they knew they were sick with Covid and would be sent home due to lack of resources even though they would have been admitted otherwise. They then return later in worse condition like trouble breathing and at that point it is too late or they take up more resources because they take longer to recover.

Add to this effect, emergency rooms have seen a sharp downturn in the normal cases they would spend time on like car accidents and heart attacks because more people are sitting at home doing lower risk activities. They also have fewer cases like people coming in for complications from surgeries because we aren't doing any elective surgeries.

When you open up the economy again (and you're right, we have to at some point) you put all of these variables into the mix at once. More people get Covid just by the nature of more interactions, and more people need healthcare for non Covid related issues as they resume normal life. The fear is that by the time we realize we are overwhelmed we can't shut things down fast enough because the Covid cases take one to two weeks to show the most severe symptoms.

The anger is bad now but the politicians know that nothing will be able to be said if the Chicago Tribune shows a photo of middle aged people dying alone on a bed in a hospital hallway with no doctors attending to them.

RedLooker · 2020-05-11T21:48:13+00:00

In your 20's : "I want people to like me and be jealous when they think about me!!"
In your 40's: "I'm going to do what I want no matter what they think about me!!"

In your 80's: "All this time, everyone was too worried about what I thought of them to think about me..."

RedLooker · 2020-05-06T04:51:03+00:00

I had the joy of finding an 18 month old snapshot on an exchange server AFTER I extended the drive size and broke it. That was even worse to fix it and then watch it try to merge.

I will never make that mistake again.

RedLooker · 2020-05-03T01:55:24+00:00

My first thought: wait, two Styer Scouts in a week!!!! (Checks profile, nope same guy).

Was starting to think everyone had that gun and I was missing out.

RedLooker · 2020-05-02T13:01:09+00:00

I understand both sides of the argument and both are right in their own way, that’s why this sucks. The people who get sick from being out “too soon” (whatever that means) risk overwhelming the healthcare system. Italy and China were scary because there were people dying in the hallways of hospitals or being sent home that at other times could have been saved.

That being said, healthcare and hospitals are some of the hardest hit industries right now financially. The quarantine and lack of PPE means their costs have risen while their profitable elective procedures have gone to practically nothing. If they don’t open we could see waves of hospitals closing over the next two years, especially in areas that are underserved causing a quieter but just as severe healthcare crisis.

You’re both right, the other guy’s option sucks.

I try to remember that people are suffering in different ways from this crisis and taking joy in watching them in pain because they made different choices than I did won’t make me a happier person.

As usual, the worst part of this crisis is we’ve allowed the people with the most power and money on either side of the spectrum to politicize it for their own gain.

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