Join us as we gather around the hedge, where we dig into technology, business, and culture with the finest minds in computer networking.

Well, hello, Tom and Tom's plant.

A couple of the leaves are trying to reach escape velocity, just so you know.

It's quite perky.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a happy little plant.

I I think I think all the attention that's paid to it has been doing well, has been helping its well-being, I mean.

Alright.

Good.

I see no rockets on the whiteboard or anything like that.

So I guess we're we're rocketless this week.

So I guess we'll have to just deal with it.

That's a sad thing.

And we have Yvonne in the she shed with the frog lamp and the grow lamp.

Yes.

And my Dieffenbachia.

And what you can't see is in the window, I have two orchids now that I am reblooming.

So I bought these orchids for $10 a piece on sale at Home Depot for the wedding back in July.

And they flowered and their flowers fell off and that's their life cycle.

And now they've grown new shoots and each of them has new blooms on them.

And if you've never grown orchids, you know that they can be a little finicky, and they're a little demanding.

So I'm incredibly proud that I've got my orchids reblooming.

Cool.

I'm I'm a graduated plant mom.

I'm not just doing the easy Pothos anymore.

Well, we have an we have an orchid in the living room, which, of course, you can't see here because I'm in, like, whatever.

And the air roots are now way outside of the of the pot, and we really don't know what to do with it.

Like, you don't you can't really repot it without cutting all the air roots off.

And so, like, we don't know, like, okay.

If you cut all the air roots off, do you kill it?

No.

Well You don't.

Okay.

Well, alright.

We might try it then because we've been kinda scared about repotting the orchid because you it's like these air roots are sticking out of the the pot by, like, 12 inches.

They're they're huge.

You didn't know that you came to an orchid podcast today, but you wanna be sure you use a really like an orchid like a bark mix because orchids in the wild actually attach to trees, which is why you get all those aerial roots.

So they don't really need to be in dirt.

They just need to be in a bark mix.

And then you water them when the when the roots turn silver.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Be very careful with your orchid part.

Just saying.

Okay.

I'm supposed to get something from that, and I'm I'm not picking up what you're putting down, Russ.

Alright.

That's alright.

So yeah.

Most people don't, so it's okay.

So first thing we're talking about this week was, this survey by TechCe, which I think is a I don't know much about TechCe, but I think they are a research firm for WISP is my guess.

I I could be wrong, but that it seems like that would be the realm they're in.

But anyway, they did a survey on home connectivity, which was interesting because if I were to say what's the problem with home connectivity, I'm almost always going to say it's my upstream because that's where my problems always tend to be is with my upstream.

And I don't know if that speaks more about my upstream or if that speaks more about upstream or if that speaks more about the state of my internal network, my in my house network.

But it's almost always upstream for me.

And yet, they say that what is it?

What's the percentage here?

They sample 3,780 people, blah blah blah, point put plus or minus 1.6%.

68% of households reported Wi Fi problems.

18% daily twelve months.

Yeah.

And 18% daily.

Daily?

Daily.

That is terrible.

Yeah.

18% daily and another 20% weekly.

So thirty eight percent experience problems once a week.

That's that's crazy.

That's just crazy.

I don't know what I would do if I had Wi Fi problems once a week.

Run wires.

That's what I do.

What I would do.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, I do a lot more of.

I I I tend to run a lot more physical connectivity than just Wi Fi.

I try to move I've always tried to move towards it.

When I when I built this last new house I built, not the one I'm in now, but and we're building another one.

But anyway, I had two ethernet jacks in each room.

And so they were, like, a 32 port punch down underneath the stairs.

And the electrical guy was, like, what are you doing?

Have you never heard of Wi Fi?

And I said, yeah.

I've heard of Wi Fi.

That's why I'm doing this.

We gotta love, like, on the the summary of this.

So and and we are telling you about Wi Fi problems, not upstream connectivity problems.

But it says more than a half or 51% of consumers would switch providers if issues aren't resolved quickly.

And then 48 would percent would switch for better whole home coverage, which makes me wonder if this study was sponsored by somebody who's selling in home WiFi.

Oh, it could be.

But, anyway, about one third, so 34% are willing to pay extra, which reinforcing that assurance trumps price.

But, it so in my mind, of course, it's nonnormative for the average home Internet consumer.

The the connectivity to your house is your provider's responsibility, and the connectivity with inside your house is my responsibility.

That comes from years of enterprise networking.

Yeah.

There's a demark That's right.

There's a demark on the outside of my house that demarkate demarkates the point between my network and their network.

Yeah.

That's right.

That's right.

But, clearly, customers don't differentiate the two.

The average Home user.

Homeowner home user does not differentiate between the two.

And so this might underscore the importance for connectivity providers to put a little bit more focus on the, CPE, we would call it, customer premises equipment, to, be sure that folks get good coverage.

But that is actually a really hard problem if you're servicing some customers in multiunit dwellings, and then you got folks in big houses that may have brick walls or stone fireplaces or all of those things.

Like, Wi Fi is, it can be reliable, but it takes a bit of engineering depending on the facility that you're in.

Yeah.

But but what I find interesting about this is it seems like what they're saying is that it's not the upstream that's the problem most of the time for people.

It's their own home Wi Fi.

Right.

And yet they blame it on the upstream.

And they go Yeah.

Some Yeah.

Some some going so far as to change providers thinking that that'll fix it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well and frankly, if you had a five, six, seven, eight year old router and you change providers and you get a newer router Right.

You probably are gonna have better coverage.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you move from something without beamforming that's, you know, on a lower frequency or whatever to something with beamforming.

And beyond all that, people don't think about this.

These home devices, they leak memory.

And they have buffers, and they get buffer bloated, and they get all this other stuff.

And so you might just free stuff up and make it work better by disconnecting it to put the new stuff in.

I mean, it may there may have been nothing wrong with the old equipment at all.

That's my biggest problem in my home network is every now and again, I have to just unplug the switch.

And I keep thinking, I should really just replace the switch, honestly.

You know?

But Mhmm.

Just like once every month or two, I just have to unplug the switch.

Not even the WiFi router and stuff, just the just the switch off the back of the right WiFi router.

It just seems to leak enough memory that it's just like, I'm done.

I'm not sending any more traffic.

Thanks.

One of the, responses that I thought was really interesting is many ISPs market whole home Wi Fi solutions.

Surprisingly, customers of these packages have more problems than average.

That doesn't surprise me at all because if you go for if you have one AP in your house and and that that AP is your router, then that's a certain amount of complexity and a certain amount of, you know but the leap from one to two, now you need a controller.

Now you need, you know, you have to have the correct dynamic frequency selection and all the stuff they've got, like, the leap from one to two is a giant one.

And, you know, two to three and three to four, I don't know exactly.

I'm not a real a Wi Fi person.

But Yeah.

And I almost yeah.

Because of channels.

Yeah.

And, well, it doesn't manage device roaming well.

Like, what happens when you're on one end of the house, you go to the other, and your device needs to switch to a different AP.

If if you've got a poor signal on an on an AP that's on the other side of the house, you're gonna have a a poorer experience, and your device isn't necessarily gonna know when to switch.

Yeah.

So it's, unless you've got some magic, like, reauth going on or reconnect going on in your and and I've got to imagine that CPE equipment that carriers are providing even for those paid services aren't as feature rich as what those of us in the industry are used to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Definitely.

And I wonder too if you end up with more provider managed CPE in higher density housing situations than you do in lower density, and that may also contribute to the provider provider run CPE and coverage is worse or feels worse just because I don't know.

Most people who own a larger piece of property, they go out and they buy a mesh system, they plug it in, and they don't have a lot of signal interfering with what they're doing.

They don't have their neighbors all over the place.

But you pack a 100 apartments in a building, And the the you know, first of all, it's more likely that's gonna be a a full on service that people just buy, I think.

And the second thing is, I would suspect.

And the second thing is, there's a lot of interference.

It's a bad thing.

It's because there's not enough spectrum in the world to, to not have some of that interference It's just channel overlap.

It just is.

Well and I and I think the the eyeball networks, the the ISPs that would be most likely to touch these issues, I I worked for one for a while.

It it's really is a matter the business logic surrounding the quality of the service is really a matter of how expensive is it to how expensive is it to maintain a crappy crappy solution.

Because if it's pretty cheap to maintain a crappy solution, meaning you don't get a lot of customer service complaints, you don't get a lot of technician dispatch calls, then it's like, well, why why would we change it?

It's cheap to operate and the revenue is coming.

You know, but then at some point, somebody sort of snaps and they're like, okay.

I'm done with this.

They switch providers, and then the revenue disappears.

But you have enough if you have enough subscribers, it's gonna be really hard to notice that.

And the, you know, the switching costs are pretty significant for most, you know, unless you've got, like, two or three providers in your area.

But I think it's it's kind of there there's not a lot of incentive to make Wi Fi work well if we're people kind of are conditioned that Wi Fi sucks.

And so I don't know.

Like, this this this thing of 18% of customers have problems daily.

I couldn't tolerate that myself, but I imagine that there's a lot of people who are like, yeah.

Wi Fi is just bad.

Whatever.

Yeah.

Probably.

Well and many, many, many users are now using mobile devices.

Right?

They're not using a they're not sitting at a desk working all day like the rest of us are.

They're using a mobile device.

And if it gets bad enough, they just turn off the wireless on their mobile device and keep browsing over their four g, five g on their mobile device.

And, you know, I I heard somebody say recently that, you know, it it it it used to be that your most reliable connectivity was your home connection, but now it's changed and that often your four g, five g on your phone is more reliable than what you have in your house.

And I think for a lot of people, that's true.

Yeah.

Right.

And certainly based on the survey, that's true.

Yeah.

The other interesting thing to me, like, going back to Tom's point about not maintaining them, is that 39% of the people in the survey had a technician dispatched to fix their internal Wi Fi problems.

So they're on managed Wi Fi, managed CPE of some kind.

But only 20% of those visits no.

20% 80% of those visits made it better.

20% failed to resolve the issue.

Now that is to me, that's insane.

That is crazy.

You work for a provider managing CPE.

It's a truck roll.

I get it.

You go to somebody's house, and you walk away without the problem being fixed.

That 20% of the time.

Wow.

That speaks volumes to the amount of effort these companies put into making this in home connectivity work.

But, I mean, if you think about these in home technicians I know when we built our house a couple years ago and and we had the Internet installed, you know, they had training in, you know, how to run the cable, how to be sure they drill through your wall and not make sure it leaks and to keep the critters out and, you know, how to terminate things.

Lots of physical layer one stuff.

But, most of these techno technicians are not trained on, you know, analyzing wireless signals on on Yeah.

You know, on spectrum and and how all that works.

They're you know, the the closest they may get is, like, hey.

If it doesn't work, look at it and change it from auto to this to a to a specific channel and see if that makes a difference or, you know, like but it's very configuration based training.

We'll try this and try this and try that, not here is how Wi Fi's you know, signal analyzers work and how to actually troubleshoot the issue.

They they may be like, oh, do you have an old 2.4 phone system, you know, or wireless phone?

Like, that could be your problem.

Or is there a microwave close by?

You know?

But it's it's gonna be that kind of very surface level kind of troubleshooting.

And this and this is where an AI system actually could be useful, is you could have the technician walk around the house with their cell phone connected to your WiFi, and they could figure out what the problem is.

Like, there could be a way for them to see.

Alright.

When I walk in this room, that's a problem.

We need to look in that room and see if there's a piece of equipment that's causing this stuff.

Right?

Kind of a thing.

So there are I think there are, ways that you could do this that would make this better.

Another interesting thing here was two thirds said they would use a visual Wi Fi mapping app.

I mean, yes.

I would.

I don't know that I have one today.

Like, I can walk around my house and see where the signal is good and bad.

I mean, I'm pretty scattered.

I just go out and throw a mesh system out in my house and say, well, those are the two farthest points apart or, you know, the two centralized far farthest points apart or whatever.

So yeah.

I mean, I think that's that's valid as well.

The there are some tools out there.

For example, again, when we were building, like, Ubiquiti has a a tool where you can, put in your house plans, be sure that the scale is right, let it know what the scale is, and then it will help you figure out where to deploy access points in your house for optimum school.

I use that.

And, and and so there are tools out there, but there's a certain level of expertise you need to have to be able to use them.

Now, you know, it's not a survey tool.

It's not gonna it's it's it's not a, you know, it's not gonna analyze the signal that's already there, but there are some some planning apps.

But, you've either gotta have expertise or you've gotta have a floor plan.

You've gotta understand, you know, even the the construction of your wall material.

You know, is it you know, are you in a building that's got some concrete in the walls or steel?

Or is it, you know, just a standard wood frame house?

All of those things are gonna make a difference in your Wi Fi coverage.

Yeah.

And, frankly, for 50 to a $100 a month, most providers, the the the the revenue is just not there for them to care.

Yep.

Exactly.

Yep.

That's part of the problem.

So another interesting thing I noticed is he said this report says anyway, that the problems that but the households with problems tend to have more devices connected.

So, Yvonne, that means you need to cool off.

So we were we were we were comparing the number of devices in our homes, and I really didn't think I was quite this bad.

But I have, at this moment, 33 Wi Fi devices connected in my house.

Of course, that includes I mean, that that's that's gonna include wireless speakers.

That includes doorbells.

That includes the kids' video game systems.

That includes a few tablets.

That includes oh gosh.

I have one, light switch that's Wi Fi.

I don't do a lot of that, but I do have one switch that's Wi Fi because I wanna be able to turn the device connected to it off and on on my phone.

You know?

So we've got some of those things.

But I have several APs in my house as well, and I designed a wireless network with Ubiquiti APs and a controller, and a PoE switch and all of those things when we built.

So, again, I'm not the normal user.

No.

Definitely not.

The normal user has has about six, it says.

Six to 10.

Now I run around 17, but that's not just Wi Fi.

That's 17 devices.

If I if I were talking about just Wi Fi, it's probably there's there's probably a dozen, maybe 11 Wi Fi connected and the rest are wired.

Because I like I like my main computer to be wired.

All my network attached storage stuff is wired.

You know?

I don't I don't my lab box is wired.

Yeah.

I, so there's since we're since we're comparing sizes, my, I have 12 in my house, and they're all it's all, like, TVs and that's, like, speakers, like, that sort of thing that you're talking about, Yvonne.

And I don't even have smart appliances.

Like, I don't have smart fridge or washer, dishwasher, anything.

Yeah.

Most higher end appliances come with all that now, and so I hooked mine up just because I could.

But, yeah, I have 43 total devices, including the physically wired ones.

So that includes all the network gear and my son's gaming PC and yeah.

Yeah.

Sad.

I'm sorry.

It's okay.

I don't I don't I try not to attach.

I intentionally do not connect my my washer and dryer to the wife to the home Wi Fi.

I don't know.

It's like a thing with me.

It's probably calling home to China anyway.

Yeah.

Probably.

I'm part of the great bot army.

Yeah.

It it could be.

People make jokes about that, but I actually had that happen.

I got a little PDU, a switch PDU that you could log in and toggle the power, and I decided to, do a packet capture on it.

And I looked at it, and I was like, oh, it really is going to China.

Wow.

That's that's pretty sad.

So yeah.

So I thought that was interesting, and I think it speaks to a realm of play a a realm of things.

It's not just it's I shouldn't say it's just on the providers, the the access providers.

This also speaks to some degree to the level of maturity of Wi Fi equipment in the market.

Like, it's not.

This shouldn't, you shouldn't have to do a site survey for a small building.

You shouldn't need to do a lot of this stuff.

You should be able to plug this stuff in and it should figure out what channel to go on and it should figure out how much power to put on which beam.

I mean, if you can do beam forming in the device, you can control that.

Oh, I'm only five feet from the wall here, and I'm 20 feet from the wall there.

You can control that you don't put that much power towards an exterior wall.

Like, there are I there are things I don't necessarily understand why, we don't do more of.

But then again, maybe it's a money thing.

Maybe it goes back to there's no money in these devices.

So I don't know.

It's where it usually all goes back to, Russ.

I know.

It's sad, man.

So alright.

So the second article is about is on Thinking Sideways, which is a really cool vlog if you don't follow it.

It's about software development.

So it's not network engineering specifically, but, you know, we overlap a lot more now than we used to.

Network engineering and software development are much more overlap.

And it's about apathy.

Alright.

I'm just gonna say, go ahead, Yvonne.

I'll just be apathetic.

So I I I used to work with a with a fellow, and he was, he he was an interesting character, but, he had the the definition of the word despondent memorized.

And it's one of the most fabulous definitions in the English language.

But he would, he would say, despondent is a deep dejection arising from the conviction of the uselessness of further effort.

And I think that's a pretty good summary of what it is to be apathetic.

But the the phrase, the uselessness of further effort.

And and, and and yeah.

And and look.

Like, it's it's very easy to get caught up in a corporate world where everybody seems to get the same rewards whether they, you know, exceed or whether they, you know, barely scrape by in all of those things, or whether they grow and improve and make real substantive changes, or they just kinda hang out and collect a paycheck.

I think the latter of those two things is damaging to us as humans because I think we need to work and feel productive and, like, we're creating things.

Mhmm.

But I also think apathy is a real challenge in our world, especially when organizations don't connect our work to anything meaningful that we're actually producing.

Yeah.

There's there's a couple of interesting things here in the causes of apathy in this article I thought were really good.

Like, the quickest way to cause cultural apathy, so the author differentiates between cultural and personal and leadership or job apathy, whatever, cause cultural apathy is by rejecting or suppressing ideas raised by employees.

I cannot tell you the number of times I've been in jobs and people have come up with absolutely drop dead brilliant ideas.

And everybody on the team of the entire management says, nah.

We're not doing that.

Or, oh, yeah.

Good idea.

Good luck with getting it done in five years.

And that just, like, just totally destroys your willingness to continue fighting to get anything done.

And and yeah.

I mean, the number of times I've been told, it's gonna take five years to develop that.

It's gonna take five years to deploy that.

Well, you don't feel like what's the point of even trying if it's gonna take five years?

You know, there's an old saying in the coding world, it's either two hours, two weeks, or too long.

Well and, you know, I think we have also gotten used to an employment cycle where folks stay in a role two or three years.

And if they can't accomplish an objective within that time frame, it just falls off the list.

It's it's you know, we've lost the sense of long term thinking, you know, the value of planting a tree.

Like, we could we could wax philosophical about it.

But, yeah, that's that's it's and it's very tempting.

It's very tempting in the moment to be like, well, why try?

If there's no, like, obvious reward in it for me that's monetary or accolades or something like that.

And it can't it I was gonna say, actually, a lot of times, just telling people they're doing a good job when they, for themselves, can see that nothing that they're doing has any impact, actually, I think increases the amount of apathy.

Because, like, why am I bothering?

You know?

Yeah.

I'm gonna be told I'm a good boy, but nothing I've done has been deployed in the last two years.

So you can tell me how good I am.

I this that's neither here nor there.

What matters is is my stuff getting done?

Is my stuff my ideas being deployed?

No.

If they're not, they're not.

Then too bad.

Another one that's interesting, I think, the companies handle completely wrong is the wrong job apathy he talks about or she talks about here.

Actually, I never looked at the author to see who this is really this person talks about, the author talks about, is that, you know, some employees have a job that isn't right for them anymore and they're just keeping it out of convenience.

So what I notice a lot of companies do is they take this person and they manage them out rather than trying to put them in any place.

They say, if you don't perform where you are, we're not moving you some other place.

And that just seems so odd to me because it might not be the person.

It might be the job they're in.

And it might be that if you move them to a new job, they could perform 10 times better than what they're doing.

But you just look at them and go, your performance isn't good enough.

You've gotta perform doing the thing that you don't like to do, and it really stinks before we'll put you in a place where you can do the thing that's actually gonna be good for you to do.

And that's just a weird way of looking at things to me.

But Well, the I mean, the other side of that is if you have someone who's not performing and you move them into some other area, what's what evidence do you have that they're going to do any better in the other area?

Mhmm.

Then then you end up just giving a problem to somebody else.

And, like, I I see what you're saying, Russ, but I also I could also see how it's like, well, if we can't if we can't move this person out, then I'll just move them out of my area because having people who are apathetic is also hard for managers to deal with.

Oh, yeah.

Like, it's, you know Well and and while we're talking about apathy for managers, it is significantly easier to move a poor performer on your team to another team than to manage them out in most organizations.

The you know, you you gotta do your documentation.

You've got, you know, you've you've you've gotta have a PIP.

You've gotta demonstrate given them opportunities to improve.

In in most organizations, there's an entire process that you have to go through to manage someone out.

It is in it is much easier to just shuffle them off to another part of the org, and they're no longer your problem, which, again, is just a different type of apathy.

It is it is it is, you know, it's a lack of concern for the people that that report to you and for the organization, because you're willing to allow that person to continue to, frankly, waste corporate resources if if they're not able to perform well.

Right?

And and, also, when you have poor performing employees, that increases the apathy of the folks around them.

Yeah.

Of course.

Yeah.

High performers don't are not interested.

Especially, extremely high performers are not interested in working with people who don't care.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And but what the other thing that companies do that really drives me crazy is instead of going through the process, they just do constructive dismissal, which is make your life miserable until you quit.

And that's that to me is, like, you're actually driving apathy in your team when you do that.

People don't think about this.

But you're actually not only hurting the person you're trying to manage out by playing that game, you're actually causing problems on your team.

Of course.

Because that because that person is especially if the rest of the team respects them in any way, shape, or form, you are generating a situation where everyone can see that you're treating this person unfairly because you wanna get rid of them.

And that is just not a cool place to be, honestly.

Just not a cool place to be.

But it's very common in Silicon Valley in my in my experience.

I know a lot of people it's happened to, so it's very, anyway.

There's a there's a great paragraph here, where the the author says, I also want to point out that employees don't owe intrinsic motivation to their employer.

If anything, they owe it to themselves since they not only will become better at their job, but also will have a much better time doing it.

Over time, it might even get them that promotion that they have always eyed.

And and what I have found in folks that are that are high performers, is that if you're able to focus on a task and continue to grow, even if you're in a situation that might otherwise fuel apathy, that will ultimately have a significantly more positive outcome for you than had you just given into the apathy.

And, again, frankly, I I think we are all intrinsically made to produce and do something that we find meaningful.

Mhmm.

And you'll just be happier if you do that.

Even if it's not acknowledged, even if you never get the raise, even if you never get the promotion.

And I'm not saying you should say stay where you are if you never do.

But, but, like, giving in to that, you know, despondency is not the right course of action.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And and I think there are two other very refrain from trying to fix the apathy of others.

You're probably not gonna be able to do it.

It's okay if you try to fix the culture, improve the culture, but you're not gonna fix your coworker who's in, you know, focus on breaking cultural apathy, not individual.

Although, on the other hand, if the person's going through a hard time, like, you can lift them up.

You should be there.

You should be their friend.

You should reach out and try to figure out what's going on and what you can do to help because that does help improve the cultural apathy problem as well as, you know, just being just being a good person altogether.

The other thing that's interesting is don't be afraid to leave.

The the the author says this a couple of times.

Just don't don't think don't be afraid to leave Because if you're in the wrong job, staying where you are is not doing anybody any favors.

If you're being managed out, staying where you are is you're not gonna beat it eventually.

If you're not having an impact on the culture, believe if you've been in a job for three years or four years and you have had no impact or your impact has been removed, you've been moved into a position where you no longer have what you think should be the power over decisions or the point, whatever that you should, don't think they're gonna move you back in a couple of years.

Like, don't go, well, if I work really hard, then somebody eventually will look on my work and say, well, okay.

I'll I'll bring you back into no.

No.

It's not gonna happen.

Sorry.

It's not the way corporate culture works.

Move on.

Well, and especially for technical people, it doesn't matter.

To some degree, technical excellence is a secondary concern anyway.

Mhmm.

Like, you have to demonstrate to people that the that the success of the business enterprise is a result of you.

And if you just sit and wait for someone to come help you for or, you know, give you a promotion for being a good boy or a good girl, that's depending on them to go find the needle in the haystack of all the people that are contributing and figure out that your needle was important.

People don't do that.

Yep.

That's exactly right.

And and we talk about this a lot in manager circles because I I I work at an organization that that is wanna, you know, very high performing.

People are always clamoring for promotions and for rewards.

And and the folks that are most likely to get those promotions are not the folks chasing them, but the folks out there doing interesting work that they're passionate about.

And so the the more you focus on and and need that, you know, those external motivators, the the actually harder it is to get where you want.

I'm not saying that organizations shouldn't reward people and shouldn't give them, accolades.

They absolutely should.

At the same time, the the most successful path there, even if you wanna be pragmatic about it, is just to go do the work and build something interesting.

And then the the other thing I wanted to just mention is, like, we need a certain degree of self awareness so that we know what fuels our jets.

Because it it may be different for me than it is for Russ than it is for Tom.

And and you have to take control and seek out what it is that that keeps you from becoming apathetic.

And that's not always the day job.

It could be a a side project or, you know, something that you do in your free time that that gives your, you know, your life meaning and energy that may not be the day job, and that will actually impact how you show up and perform at work.

Yeah.

Sure.

So that's all I got.

Anything else, Tom?

No.

On that one?

Anything else, Yvonne, on that one?

Nope.

It's good stuff.

Yep.

It's all good.

I'll try to keep these links and drop them in the show notes or at least this one on the apathy.

I'll stick it over in my pile of things that I need to keep for the moment.

You know, I live my life in OneNote.

So I'll stick it over in OneNote and I'm sorry.

I don't know.

When I was doing my PhD, I needed a place to build outlines of books in an organized way.

And I tried, like, documents and directories, and I just was like, this just doesn't this is not gonna cut the mustard.

So I tried several notebook type programs, and I just couldn't there wasn't any of them with enough levels of organization.

Most of them have, like, three levels of organization.

And I really want, like, notebooks, sections, groups of sections, pages, you know, like, divisions, like, lots of different so, anyway, OneNote seems to work for that.

So, anyway alright.

Cool.

Yvonne, where can people find you if they want to?

Yeah.

A couple of things.

So I am going to be speaking at AutoCon in Austin in mid, November.

So I don't know if this will be out after then.

If it is, sorry.

You missed me.

But, but, yeah, I'll be at AutoCon in Austin in September, just talking about the people side of leading technical projects.

And then you can always find me on LinkedIn at Yvonne Sharp, on, x at Sharp Network, and then, over Packet Pushers.

So the Cloud Gambit podcast, we release biweekly over there.

So give us a listen.

Cool.

Awesome.

Tom.

LinkedIn.

Okay.

So funny.

And I, like Yvonne, will be at AutoCon.

I will not be speaking.

My tickets and everything came in too late.

My ship came in too late for me to do much with speaking at Oticon this year.

But I am going to be at Oticon.

So if you wanna find me, I'll be somewhere around Nokia or just walking the floor or I don't know.

I have no idea what I'm doing yet.

I'm just gonna be hanging out.

So feel free to find me there.

Sorry, Russ, if I could say.

So Austin's my hometown.

So I'm here if anybody wants to go out to lunch or whatever.

I'm I'm not coming to AutoCon, but I'll come to I'll come see you.

So Okay.

Cool.

Yeah.

Might be.

Yeah.

Maybe we could have a hedge lunch.

Yeah.

We could we could find a restaurant that serves hedgehogs.

Tacos.

That's horrible.

Right?

That's horrible.

Why would you cut up to that cute little creature?

They eat the big ones.

They really do.

They eat the big ones.

I don't think they eat the little minis, but they do eat the big ones.

This this one took a turn.

Sure did.

Alright.

And you can find is offended.

Hey.

The plant is offended.

Wow.

Okay.

You can always find me on LinkedIn, on x's routing geek.

Every now and again, I log in over there.

Usually, just to post new stuff is up all I ever do.

I try to stay active every now and again, but it's really hard.

And I don't know.

I show up on packet pushers every now and again and other podcasts.

And so, anyway, I'm pretty easy to find.

Rule11.tech is a good central place to find me.

And thank you for listening all the way to the bitter end of this episode of The Hedge.

We know your attention is important, and we live in this attention driven world.

So, again, thank you, and we will catch you next time.