Banking School and Lighting Strikes - A Strange Combination

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, August 9th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of technology as a strategic tool. You can learn more about me, all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI, online at poweredbywsi.com. Jeff Simpkins, I hear you rustling around in the background. My Free Webinar Wednesday co-founder and partner.

Would you like to say hello?

I do. Getting organized.

You hear me making coffee, actually.

Excellent. So would you like to say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world?

Sure. We'll talk about why you hear me so well. I'm actually on a phone with HD voice at the moment.

Fun stuff.

This is Jeff Simpkins, everybody. I am with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and all of the wonderful things that we provide now and over the years to community banks at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Cool. Well, I have a couple of tabs up here that are all banking school related, so I don't want to freak everybody out that are joining or listening that this is going to be just bank-only stuff, but I am currently in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin, which is an awesome place to visit in the summer. I don't know if I've ever been here in the winter. But I attended the banking school program here for 3 years when I was a community banker. And GSB was the first school to bring me on as an official faculty member. And so I'm back here and I get to teach on Thursday and Friday, bankers. in the art of digital marketing and social media and all sorts of other fun stuff. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that and kind of spreading the gospel of technology in an environment where maybe there's a little resistance and kind of culture pushback to change and new stuff. But before we jump into bank school chat, Jeff already alluded to the fact that he's talking on a new device with HD and probably has a few new technology gadgets and gizmos laying around the house now that he didn't have a couple of weeks ago because he had a little bit of an event take place at his home that has caused him to start the process of replacing some of his technology. And I asked him maybe if he could share that story since we like to talk about gadgets and gizmos here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. And I think there might be some interesting lessons learned out of what he had to go through over the last several weeks and kind of the new things that have come into his life as an opportunity as part of this technological reboot thanks to Mother Nature. So with, with, with that, I'll go ahead and turn the mic over to you, Jeffrey.

Yeah, you can You can be the, the hands model and bring up appropriate products as we talk through this.

Absolutely.

So what Eric is making reference to is several weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon about 5 o'clock, we were having a nice quiet weekend, end of weekend day at home. Inside the house because it was raining, and we heard this noise and said, gosh, I don't know that I've ever heard a thunder and lightning storm that close before. And turns out, when we went outside the next morning, we figured out why we had never heard a thunder and lightning storm that close before, because it actually struck the house.

Boom.

Boom. You know, we knew that something had happened because the lights went off in 2 rooms and most of, uh, like the Philips Hue hub wasn't working and things like that. But we absolutely didn't realize that the lightning had hit the house until we went outside and looked back and the, uh, plywood that the shingles are nailed to was lifted off of the, the brick that attaches to the house. And then we looked at the nearby trees and we could see where lightning had run down 2 trees into the ground. And it was, it was different. Um, but the— so what happened is the lightning got into the electrical system in the house and I have a home office and pretty much everything on my desk was fried. My iMac, my Plantronics headset, my Polycom voice over IP phone. This was funny. My, my internet router, the wireless service worked, but it fried all of the Ethernet ports on the internet router. I had a— had an expansion module hooked up to the router. It fried it. It fried speakers. It fried printers. It just— it was a big day for frying electronics here. But I guess you kind of mentioned In the intro, lessons I learned from that. I'm kind of a big advocate of cloud computing, even more so than before, because I didn't miss a beat. I just had to find a device that still worked and logged in, and all of my information was still there. You know, I've talked about the phone system that we use a number of times. RingCentral is the voice over IP service that I use, and I still haven't replaced any of the devices that got fried in terms of phone. Obviously, I've gotten a new router and modem, but for the moment, I'm using the app on my smartphone that works with my RingCentral service, and it's just like having a phone on my desk. So yeah. One of the questions that Eric can— one of the things that Eric and I talked about is when the, uh, when the cable modem got fried, Eric had mentioned a few months back that he was looking Eric? Yep. Okay, we're getting a lot of noise. One of the things Eric had mentioned a few months back was that he's looking at the Google service for— For internet service within the home. Eric, what's that service called? Eric?

Hold on just a second. I think my phone is picking up some background noise, so I'm trying to do something different.

Okay. Yeah, it was. Yep.

So sorry about that. I was trying to interject with a question and you couldn't hear me, and then I saw my name going all wacko in the who's speaking category, so I figured— so ask your question again because technology prevented me from hearing it the first time. Blaming technology, of course.

Are you back with us now? Yep, I am. Okay, so I was talking about the, uh, the Google Home Internet service that you and I talked about.

Well, there was the, the Google Wi-Fi distributed kind of mesh network. Is that what you're referring to?

Yeah, the mesh network. So, yes, one of the things that I've investigated doing is actually using the Google Wi-Fi mesh network, and I've traded some communication with our friend Greg McPherson and He does not have any personal experience with it, but Eric, you have a story from your brother on this product, so why don't you talk about that?

Yeah, well, and before we jump into this, just to kind of give everybody a little bit of an idea of what this is doing, traditional Wi-Fi like the router that you have, and I suspect most people that are listening to the show, you've got a cable modem or some sort of an internet connection coming into your home or your office, and then you plug that into a Wi-Fi router and that broadcasts the signal. And the further away you go from that device or get on other side of walls or other interior obstructions, the weaker that signal becomes. And so there's several different platforms out there that are starting to provide what's known as a mesh platform where instead of getting a single device that is expected to carry the load, what happens is you get multiple devices that you're allowed to kind of push into different areas. So you can see the Google item is certainly able to do kind of a single instance, but when you mesh them together, it increases your coverage area significantly. So my brother was kind of suffering from poor speeds on his internet and, you know, doesn't have a giant house, but a couple different levels with a basement and was noticing in certain areas dead spots. And he invested in, I think he got 2 of them if I'm not mistaken, and was able to get the Google Wi-Fi And the speeds, without making any changes at the ISP, basically tripled. He was not getting close to what his cable modem provider was promising should be part of his internet package. And of course, the only way that you can get absolute best is to plug right directly into the modem itself and get pure connection. But that's not practical, nor is it necessarily the safest thing to do. So when you go through a router, there's always that degradation of service that you kind of run into, but it should be not something that causes a significant amount of an issue with speed. And, you know, you can tolerate a little bit of a dip, but the, the dip that he was getting was huge. So, so his speeds, first and foremost, Jacked considerably, which has made him super happy. He also has 2 kids, our niece and nephew, and as young kids like to get on the internet and explore and do things, there are also some network parental control capabilities where he can eliminate internet connectivity at the device level based off of, you know, the time of day or excessive usage. Even to the extent where he can actually get on the administrative area of his Google Wi-Fi from the office. So he's not even at home and he can dial up through his Google Wi-Fi app and be able to see what activity is going on at home and if his son is supposed to be doing yard work or not supposed to be on the internet or whatever. He can check and make sure that that indeed is or is not taking place. So for me, without having children and dogs, without opposable thumbs and the inability to use mobile devices, it's not a big management issue on my part. But the speed at which the network is able to deliver your information and the consistent coverage, whether you're upstairs, downstairs, outside, in the garage. front porch, whatever, having the ability for a mesh network like that to give you internet connectivity much more consistently is very, very attractive.

So I've done some research on these, and the Google devices, just kind of ballpark, tend to be $100 to $120 each depending on the number of devices that you buy. The things I like About the Google device, which is probably what I'm going to end up going with, is number one, the cost. It appears to be the lowest cost mesh solution of the ones that are available. Some of the research that Greg shared with me that I've looked at, one of the, one of the things you'll find if you explore this is because this is relatively new.

Yeah.

It's just reached the price point that it's hit the consumer marketplace. There, there lack standards. So Google's mesh, you're not going to be able to use someone else's hardware with it. There's no industry standard for mesh networks within a home. The complaints of the Google product, if you're a nerd and you like to be able to go in and fine-tune and tweak and make advanced settings and do things that nerd likes to do. Google is probably not the product for you. It's very much a kind of a plug-and-play, plug it in, take their settings, use their app on, on your smartphone to manage it, and that's it. If you want more, if you want more ability to nerd out, you need a different product than the Google product. Reviews on the Google product are really good. One of the things I like about the Google product and the others that I've looked at. I, as I've indicated a couple times, I use voice over IP phone. I like having an actual voice over IP phone. I use a Polycom. With the mesh networks, you get some ports that you can plug devices into wherever you have one of the mesh devices. So rather than— when I moved to my current house, I didn't install Ethernet cable as I have in previous houses, and because there was not really a point. The only thing that I had that I needed to plug into the— plug into a hard connection was my voice over IP phone. And oddly, these hubs that you use for Philips Hue garage door openers and things like that have to be plugged into a hard connection. So you pick up some additional, some additional Ethernet ports that you can plug directly into with all of these devices. Yeah.

We've got some questions that are lining up, and I was trying to interject, but again, technology was causing my voice connection to not work so well. So I want to go through those here real quick, and I don't think I said it at the beginning, but those of you that are listening live, if you do have a question, please feel free to use the chat. And this show and all shows are recorded and will be posted up to freewebinarwednesdays.com once we're wrapped. First question, go back to the zap effect when Mother Nature struck down with the bolt of lightning. Talk a little bit about your use, or maybe lack thereof, surge protectors, whether at the—

Everything was plugged into a surge protector.

Okay. So, but as far as like a whole house—

yeah.

So one of the questions is a whole house surge protector. And I'm not, I guess, that familiar with whole house versus a surge protector that maybe goes on a UPS unit versus the ones that you can You know, buy at Lowe's that have a little on/off switch with a little circuit breaker on it. So I'm sure you can go up more than that, but did any of those offer any sort of insurance or surge guarantee, or just didn't you have surge protectors of that caliber in play?

I have had surge protectors of that caliber in the the past. I don't currently. The wiring in this house was done in 1977, so it's relatively current in terms of— we don't have fuses, we have a breaker box and things like that. We do not have any type of whole house surge protector in place.

Okay.

Everything that got zapped was plugged into a surge protector from the outlet. Funny thing is, there were devices that I had a— not a high-end surge protector, but I had just a standard, you know, $30 surge protector, surge protected strip plugged into another surge protected strip. And there were devices that were plugged into the second surge-protected strip plugged into another one that got hit. I think because the, the cable modem and router got hit, I actually think the current probably traveled through the Ethernet cable because pretty much all the devices that were directly connected to that cable modem and router were fried. Yeah.

Yep. It wouldn't, wouldn't surprise me. There's another question, and this one actually kind of made me chuckle a little bit if I'm kind of understanding it correctly. But it's asking, or he's asking, not it, he, who is a real person. He's asking, compare and contrast a mesh network with Ethernet through electrical outlet and using several routers throughout the house. And the reason that that made me chuckle Is when we built our house probably 15 years ago, give or take. I can't remember exactly, but we made the decision and spent more money, of course, in putting in bundled cabling at all of our outlets, which included traditional telephone line. It included coax for cable, and it also included Ethernet cable. And while we used it a little bit at the beginning, and we, I think, used maybe one of the several— I think we've got, boy, at least a good dozen and a half lines dropped throughout the house, a giant patch panel with a bunch of big old fat blue cords rolling into it. I think right now the only thing that we use that for is our primary T1 modem is in the basement, and our primary router and Wi-Fi Hub is on the 2nd floor, and so we're using that cabling to distribute it up through there. I would suspect if you had a home that, that was wired with Ethernet and you had the ability to drop routers in different areas, the— that would be an option. I would also suspect you would have some additional configuration requirements. And again, kind of going back to Jeff's comment earlier, if you're comfortable in the geek factor, runs strong in your brain, configuring all those Ethernet ports to broadcast the same SSID and be connected in the same network so you're not hopping from one device to another device to another device when you're going between the different parts of your home is probably an option. But from a web mesh perspective, I think one of the attractive parts of this is booting everything up, having everything using the same device ID or SSID, and then just positioning them in various parts of the house, and they just talk to one another and automatically work. So if your house is wired with Ethernet and you have the ability to buy a handful of routers, you can probably do it less expensively. But my gut tells me it's probably going to be a little bit more of a hands-on project as you look at assigning different gateways and other sorts of IDs within each individual device so that they're all talking to one another. So I don't know if you've got any more geekdom on that topic, but that's kinda my thought.

I'm gonna be honest. I've gone through the, gone through the process of hardwiring Ethernet throughout the house. I've gone through the process of hardwiring surround sound speaker systems. Through the house. And at my current age and with current technology available at the price that it's available, I've gotten lazy. No more hardwiring speakers and no more hardwiring Ethernet through my house anymore unless something changes drastically.

Yeah.

Because I don't feel like I need to anymore. There's some really, really good options available at a really, really cost-effective price that ends up making it less expensive and it meets my needs. But I'm just a nerd. I'm not a super nerd. So.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't, don't feel the need to make all the tweaks and things like that that many people do.

Yep.

So— There is a question that says when we mesh, it looks like the person is asking, can we use devices from different manufacturers? And the answer to that question is absolutely not at this point. There are no standards in the mesh network. So whatever brand you buy, you're gonna be committed to that until you throw that one away and buy a replacement. Hopefully someday there will be standards, but that day is not today. Yeah.

And I don't know whether those standards could be— I don't know if forced upon the devices is the right terminology or upgraded or whatever, but I don't know if those are software fixes where, you know, a standard comes, a patch comes across the cloud that allows you to go ahead and, you know, become compatible. So now you've got the, the Google Wi-Fi is compatible with another option. But yeah, you kind of need to pick one platform and determine that that's going to be your technological choice, at least for the next couple of years, and hope that it works for you.

It's kind of funny, my My parents are starting the process of downsizing, and my mother called yesterday to go through on the phone with me her closet of old gadgets that I had installed— routers and printers and things like that. And everything she said, oh, can I sell this? Do I keep this? What do I do with this? My answer was consistent: throw it away, throw it away. Throw it away. With technology, you kind of got to— I don't know. I can't think of any technology I have here in my house that I guess— and I've heard you say this as well. When I buy something now that's technology-related, I kind of think short-term. I love to get 3 to 5 years out of something, but—

Yeah.

Depending on the price, 1 to 2 years is okay for some things as well. Yeah.

Which, which is unfortunate. And you say that, I think of the closet that's in my office back at the house. I still have my original Palm V aluminum little handheld device with my pen stylus and charging dock and Carrying case for my belt, which other than, other than hanging on that for nostalgic reasons, you know, some of those things just need to be thrown away because, you know, even I have a box full of old routers that had gotten replaced and I'll hang on to that because maybe I'll go back and I want to do an upgrade and push some other stuff and Yeah, it's not really happening either. So, not that we want to turn this into— go ahead.

Yeah, somebody did make a good, a good comment. Don't pitch your, your electronics in the trash, recycle them. Yeah, we've got— some areas have curbside recycle available for electronics. If they don't, places like Staples, I think Best Buy also. We'll take electronics for recycle.

Although if you have a very large tubed television, it will likely cost you money to recycle that. They do not take those, and you can't give them away on Facebook. I tried.

Yeah, I tried to give away, I tried to sell my original HDTV. The tube TV, which by the way still has, considering it was purchased in 2003, still has an amazing picture, but it weighs 1,000 pounds.

Yeah. So, um, we typically, uh, if it's Apple, you'll hear us talk all sorts of goodness. If it's Google, we usually talk all sorts of goodness. Uh, we realize that The world doesn't revolve around Apple and Google. We also tend to give Amazon quite a bit of love, so I don't want to maybe ignore them. Most of what we're talking about today can be purchased on Amazon if you're so inclined. But when you go in and you do a search for Wi-Fi mesh routers or Wi-Fi mesh systems, you're going to see that there's a lot of different options that are out there. And like Jeff said, you know, Take some time, read some reviews. You know, one of the first ones that comes up here is from July, which is a pretty recent review from PC Magazine. So you can pop over and take a look at this, and it's going to give you a nice little breakdown. Best Buy must have heard us talking about them, so they've done a vocal tag on my browser.

Facebook and marketer.

Yep, yep, exactly. So, and they're not Letting me close it, so apparently they really want me to shop. So once there we go, I see once the ad goes away. But you know, this is a pretty comprehensive rundown of a lot of the different items that we have talked about, and certainly the Google one is there, and I think that's probably the one that I'll end up going with likely. But you can see, you know, I hear Linksys being talked about, the Ubiquiti, the Luma system. There's some others that I'm familiar with that don't even appear to be on this roundup list as well. But, you know, kind of take a look and, you know.

So, when you're doing your research, when you're doing your research, go to more than one place.

Yeah.

I can tell you, I was— we had a show a month or two back talking about TV services. And I just looked at 1 or 2 reviews on DirecTV Now and they were okay. And I should have taken more time and looked at more reviews and comments on message boards and things like that. So it's actually worth investing a little bit of time to look at multiple places for reviews on mesh networks and such things.

Yep. Yeah, I think the the time that I reviewed this, you know, and I believe it was Leo Laporte over at the Twit Network This Week in Tech. I'm a big fan of their podcasts. He had talked about how the Netgear Orbi was terrible, and he was going with. The Eero. And so you look at other sites that'll say, you know, one works really good and the other one doesn't. So, you know, you kind of also have to take each of the reviews with a grain of salt and pull out the consistent comments that, you know, because you may have a reviewer that is a little bit of a geek and loves the configurability, and that's why that particular item is getting a great rating. Whereas you might go to another site that is much more consumer-oriented. And I can tell you, my brother is not a geek. He's a financial planner and, you know, does very well in that, but he is not somebody that would want to sit down and hop into an admin panel and do all sorts of configuration, or how do I check on, you know, my son or my daughter's internet utilization. Being that he's very much interested in a plug-and-play The Google ended up working out very, very well for him. And so you kind of have to take what your individual situation is and determine which one's going to be the right one for you. And if it comes up as a poorly rated service because it doesn't give you that, you know, infinite configuration options, but that's not important to you, then look at all the other benefits that come with it, and that might be the best solution.

And honestly, there is a pretty big divide in pricing. I've actually read good things about network— Netgear Orbi, but the pricing is easily a few hundred dollars more than the Google product. So, yep, you know, also have a budget in mind. Yep.

So the, the Plume devices, which are on the screen right now, are the ones that I had actually started looking at. And the individual that asked the question about wired Ethernet connections, Also made me think of the Plume device because that— you basically plug it into an outlet and that serves the power. And then you can see you do have an actual Ethernet port that you can plug into. So you're not really wiring the house with Ethernet per se, but you can get as many of these as you want and plug them into different areas and use your electrical outlet as Wi-Fi spots for distributing content. Now that Takes away an outlet because it looks like it's probably big enough where you're going to lose maybe both, although it looks like maybe they're offset enough where if you plug it into the bottom, you can still get into the top outlet. But, you know, you can kind of pop those in as well. So, yeah, lots of different variables out there.

But—

Well, in addition to, I guess, Wi-Fi connectivity, And I don't want to shortchange this if there's anything else that you want to talk about, but with the lightning strike and the loss of some of your electronics, are there any other elements within your home setup that you are desperately missing? I know that you were at one point an avid user of the scanning service. You had an Epson scanner connected into Evernote and were kind of using that for productivity. Did that get fried? You know, did you lose your printer? And did you find, you know, I'm just not really doing any printing anymore? What else came up as part of this lightning reboot?

I still print. I don't print nearly as much as I once did, but— and this— God, I hate to say this, but this probably has more to do with My age and how I've done things. You know, I'm, I'm a guy that when I really dig into something, I like to have paper that I can write on and draw on and, and do things like that. If I were 20 years younger, that probably wouldn't be the case because I would have grown up looking at things on computers and that would have just been the way I approach things. But I don't print nearly as much as I once did, but when I'm doing heavy research, when I'm researching a presentation, when I am planning for something, I will print and make notes. So printer did get fried, but printer has been replaced. Scanner got fried, scanner's been replaced. Everything— I take kind of a two-pronged approach to document management now. Everything gets converted into a digital format and stored, stored in a secure format using a file service, file storage service such as Google Drive or other similar services. I will— I keep one drawer of paper files that are active files. If there are things that I know I'm going to be accessing, you know, in the next few days, weeks, or months, I'll keep a paper copy of some things just so I can go to the drawer and pull it out and do what I need to do on that. But, um, that's a long answer. The short answer is yes, I replaced the printer immediately. Yes, I replaced the scanner immediately. If I had to choose one over the other, I probably would have replaced the scanner first because literally every piece of paper that comes across my desk gets converted to electronic.

Interesting. Is there, is there any part of your digital process that has changed and you've looked at it and said, I don't really need to be doing that anymore, or did you not really take that much of introspection where you're just like, holy crap, I just got shot by lightning. I need to replace everything and not really reoptimize or, or, or make any interesting modifications.

Well, I had 2 printers that were fried, and I only have 1 printer for the whole house now. My desktop computer was fried, and, you know, I'm just using a smaller computer right now as I haven't replaced that one yet. I will. We've talked about this a few times over the last year or so. I really am in a situation where I'm no longer tied to specific computer. Now, I certainly have a preference for using my own device. Both of my computers that I use on a daily basis were plugged in and got fried. My MacBook Air got fried and my iMac got fried, but it was no big deal. I just had to have a computer that I could log in and access where I had all of my information stored and I was literally up and running and without missing a beat.

God bless the cloud. Right? Absolutely.

Absolutely. I don't— I like having a larger computer on my desktop, and I'm gonna replace that. So, you know, I, I can't say that I'm changing a lot about my process. I, I'm much more open-minded, realizing that as long as I do a good job of keeping everything in a secure online storage format, that life goes on without missing a beat. Pretty much.

Okay, cool. We we've got a couple of other comments that are making me chuckle. Gary seems to either fall into the same line of thought that we do, or he's done a little bit of research and listened to some past shows. But I'm I'm seeing the word live scribe pen in a comment slash question. And for those of you that aren't familiar, one of the tools that we explored several years ago— I actually own a couple of them myself, although admittedly I've kind of fallen out of favor and have migrated to the second comment that he has posted. But they used to use a Livescribe pen, which was a pen with an infrared sensor in the tip that you write on special paper. That recognizes the position of your writing and captures a digital version and then basically pushes it out to an electronic notebook or Evernote. One of the things about the Livescribe pen that's kind of cool from a capturing perspective is it does have synchronization of audio capture. So if you're taking notes and you can't write as fast as the person is talking, you can always go back and re-listen and it will play back the audio that was going on at the time that you were actually writing, so you can kind of go back to that place in time in your notes. For me, the pen just wasn't a comfortable writing experience. I know they've gone through a couple of different versions since I purchased it, but what I have started doing, and this is the second part, you mentioned your scanner, and I think you've got— I think it's an Epson. I can't remember the model, but it's specifically designed—

SnapScan. Fujitsu ScanSnap.

Fujitsu ScanSnap, that's right. Um, what I started doing is I was using a variety of different little apps out of the App Store to scan receipts and store them, but the free versions would only allow you to email stuff to yourself. If you are a user of the Google Drive service, you can go into Google Drive and press the little plus when you open your drive, and it gives you the ability to do a scan You can create multiple-page scans using your phone, and it does an incredibly impressive job of grabbing the image, converting it, optimizing it, aligning it, and you can rename it. You can save it to various folders within your Google Drive environment. And so now when I'm at a conference or a convention and I have receipts or invoices or whatever I need to scan, I no longer wait and until I'm home to put it on the big scanner. I can just snap, snap, snap, and then move it around in Google Drive, and it's super slick. And if you've got Google Drive, which hopefully most of you do, 'cause it's easy and you can even get a free version of it, it's definitely the way to go if you're listing.

I think it includes 15 gigs of storage for the free version. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a ton. So that makes kinda capturing that information pretty easily. And, again, one more cloud-based solution that just makes it a whole lot easier to manage what's going on. So I'm assuming your phone did not get fried. That was not plugged in. Is that correct?

That is correct. My phone is good. We've got 2 questions. One, how to install Google Drive on your phone, just go out to your app store and it's there. Doesn't matter if you have a Google-based phone or if you have an iPhone. I have an iPhone. Eric has— which phone do you have now?

I have the Pixel 1 and they're coming out with a 2, so now that's making me think I need to buy that one when it comes out, but that's all right.

And then another question that was posted is, how do you deal with spreadsheets and things like that. The person that posted the question specifically said they prefer Excel over the Google spreadsheet program.

Yep.

I actually have a subscription to Microsoft Office 365, which includes a bunch of online storage. I, I think a terabyte. I may be overstating, but it's a lot. So I still use Excel and Word and all of the Microsoft Office suite of products. They just get stored on the cloud. And—

Yep.

When I open them on my whatever device I happen to be using, PC, Mac, it'll pull the file in from the cloud. You can store it for offline use. Or, I mean, I even remember Being at a hotel a few years ago and couldn't get my computer on. So I went to the, to the hotel and to the computer in the business center at the hotel and accessed a document that I had stored in PowerPoint there. So, yeah.

Yep.

No problem.

I found—

yeah, I found Google Drive.

Yeah, Google Sheets will do about 80% of what I typically will want an Excel to do. I still rely on Excel quite a bit because oftentimes some of our clients, and I'm sure, Jeff, you can attest to this, prefer to have an Excel document that you're working on, even though once they see how a Google Sheet and the online collaborative nature of that works, they're amazed that they can be in there working at the same time as you. So I have seen some nice aha moments from our clients, but by and large, if it's going to go to a bank, even if I'm working on it in Sheets, I'll export it into an Excel document and send it. But from a recoverability and an availability perspective, unless it's really some hardcore number crunching, a lot of what's in the Google Suite really actually does a pretty good job and is there and available for you to use as part of this, whether you're in the midst of recovering from a lightning strike or some other natural disaster that's causing your, you know, traditional accessibility and programs to become unavailable.

So I have found that I use Google Sheets all the time. There is almost never a time when I don't have a spreadsheet that I've created in Google open on my desktop, and Like you said, I wouldn't use them for highly complex things, but I don't tend to need spreadsheets for highly complex things.

Yep.

This is kind of funny. One thing that I did end up doing, and this wasn't specifically because of the lightning strike, but I, I like to be able, no matter where I am, and I've said this a number of times over the years, when I started this business, I set out to be able to run the business from anywhere I was in the world that there was internet access and I could access my cloud-based services. And I've been very successful at that. One of the things I realized I didn't have within the last few weeks after the lightning strike was I didn't have a record of what I had in the file cabinet. So now I created a Google spreadsheet, and whenever I put a file folder into the file cabinet that I'm for some reason keeping a paper copy of, or take something out and throw it away, I either add it to the spreadsheet with a brief description of what's there, or I take it out of the spreadsheet so that if I'm, you know, anywhere and wonder, huh, do I have a paper copy of that, I can access the spreadsheet and know right away.

Excellent.

Cool.

Well, this show kind of morphed into something different than what I had anticipated, but, you know, I figured you'd have some great stuff to share, but we, as we typically do, went down several rabbit holes and lots of good stuff.

So— So we do have a couple comments just on limitations of Google Sheets and things like that. You got to make your decision based on what's right for you. I think the person that commented said the limitation is 400,000 rows in a Google Sheet, and you got to consider what your internet speed is as well. There is no way that I would run a spreadsheet with 400,000 Lines on Google because I've got one with several hundred and it's kind of painful waiting for it to load.

Yeah.

Even though— and you and I have talked about this before— our expectations change. You know, I want to open something and 2 seconds later have it open. In reality, this spreadsheet I'm complaining about that has a few hundred lines, it probably takes 5 seconds to open, but it's enough that it's noticeable and I'm trying to type.

Yeah, exactly. So same thing. Cool. Well, um, I kind of feel like going back to talking about banking school is a moot point at this point. So suffice to say, I'm excited to be back in Madison. And I guess the one thing—

I've been baking happy hour.

I did. I got over to Wando's last night and I enjoyed some good old Wisconsin deep-fried bacon. And those of you that are friends with me on Facebook will get to see a picture of myself and the education director for the Nebraska Bankers Association enjoying, enjoying one of those little nuggets of pork goodness. So it was pretty darn tasty. I will have— sorry to all the vegetarians that might be listening to the show, but loves me some bacon, so I can't, I can't fight it.

And where is it one goes in Madison to the bacon happy hour?

It's called Wando's, which happens to be right across the street from the Fluno Center, which is where they put the instructors and other faculty members for the 2-week stint for the Graduate School of Banking program. So those of you that haven't heard about it, I guess let me just do kind of a general And I think every industry has their own professional enrichment programs that are available to people that want to climb the corporate ladder, whether you're in the legal industry, the banking industry, investments, whatever the case is. But there are several bank schools around the country that banks will send, you know, budding executives to. Some of them are a week long, some of them are 2 weeks long. Some of them last for a couple of years. The Graduate School of Banking is a program that lasts for 2 weeks over 3 consecutive summers that also requires intersession projects between the first and second and second and third year. And you culminate your third year with what's referred to as a bank sim project, where it's almost like a video game, if you will, where, you know, like SimCity, where you're building cities and population flow and you have to figure out how to put in different hotels and entertainment. You're doing that same thing in the banking world. So it gives bankers a really good cross-section of all the different things that they need to know, because if you've come up in the world of lending, you may not be familiar with marketing and HR and compliance and technology and information security. So it's designed to give attendees a good cross-section of everything. And so I've been fortunate to have been an instructor here for a number of years since graduating from the program in 2003. On digital and social trends. And in the schools that I'm teaching at and the conferences that I'm at now, I'm seeing an increasing number of community banks recognizing that social technology really is more about communication and relationship building than it is about security and threats and using it just purely for advertising. And I guess that's the big thing that I maybe wanted to share during today's discussion is the trend is starting to shift, although it is slow, it is starting to shift. Banking, as everybody I think can suspect, is a pretty regulated, you know, locked-down industry just due to the amount of information we have access to and the type of services that we provide. So Jumping into allowing everybody in the bank to access Facebook is not something that a bank is easily going to do, but very similar to the early days of email, very few banks allowed all employees to have access to email because they were worried about things like viruses and spam and reputational risk and leaking customer data. And those same worries exist in social media, although if you think of any business, banks included, The fact that everybody in the organization has access to email is almost a given these days, and there are technologies and software in place that protect both the customer and the employee from bad things that could happen, and they provide training. So people are starting to recognize, you know, when the phone came around, that was an evil device that just caused everybody to essentially You know, share information and leak data. And so as we continue to see banks accepting the fact that this is a tool that they need to figure out how they can get their employees, especially new ones that they're hiring, that have grown up with this— like you said earlier, Jeff, you and I are digital immigrants. We didn't grow up reading everything on a screen. I still print stuff off. And so this new workforce, you have to be able to support them as well. So it's exciting to be part of that, and it's exciting to see the change taking place. And, you know, I kind of made it my life's little mission here to continue to beat that drum and to try to continue to get those organizations to realize that, you know, this is kind of the next gen of communication. And of course, I might tell some lightning stories during my class this week too, now that I've got that on the brain.

So I appreciate that. If you need me to join you by conference call or something, I would be happy to.

Yep.

It's been a long time since we've actually done that with bankers.

Cool. Good deal. Good, good, good, good. So, well, thanks everybody for your time. I'll give a special shout out to one of our new Attendees. Gary, thank you all for the questions. A lot of the great comments that we shared came from you, and we appreciate you joining us for the first time. And then I also want to give a special shout out. I recognize Chris, although I didn't get an email response from you, Christopher. Maybe you're not paying attention to your chat log, but I see that you are back and have a new email address, and just wanted to welcome you back to Free Webinar Wednesdays. I haven't seen you logged in in a So we do pay attention here on the show, and so we just wanted to acknowledge a few of our live guests. And those of you that are listening on the recording, mark your calendars for Wednesdays at 1 o'clock. So most days we are here, although there are sometimes scheduling conflicts, right, Jeff? Where we will maybe not have a show on Um, but we try really hard to keep these as consistent as possible and just sharing some thoughts and having people join and ask questions and interact makes it that much more enjoyable. So we appreciate that. And, uh, thanks for sharing your story, Jeffrey. That was really good.

You're welcome. Thank you for keeping me engaged.

Absolutely. So cool. Well, that concludes the show. I've got more bacon to eat and, uh, cheese and Wisconsin beer to consume. Because, you know, that's all that we do when we go to bank schools. You know, we just mess around.

Make sure you have cheese curds while you're there. A trip to Wisconsin would not be complete without cheese curds.

And those of you that have never had cheese curds, the true test of cheese curd goodness is when you bite into it, you got to make sure that your teeth squeak. And if you've ever had cheese curds and your teeth have squeaked, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, you need to experience it at least once in your life. So with that, there we go. I was hoping I could work cheese curds into today's presentation. Thank you, Jeff.

You're welcome.

Cool. Good. All right, everybody have a great week. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll look forward to seeing you, uh, on future Free Webinar Wednesday shows. Take care.

Bye-bye.