And Another Look Back

Another fun look back at pop culture and technology topics.

Willian Sikkens, Bill Snodgrass, and Gretchen Winkler

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Welcome to where technology becomesuser friendly.
2.0 with host Bill Sikkens,
technology architect.
And this is user friendly 2.0I am your host.
Bill Sikkens.
Bill, Gretchen. Welcome welcome. Hello.
Well to you and everybody that celebratesthat.

(00:30):
Happy Halloween is coming right up here.
I can't believewe're already to this point.
And, I'll let you know afterwardshow the arcade party went.
That's going to be interesting.
So we're going to have
our last look back episode for the season,
and we're looking back at robotsas they were about a year ago.

(00:51):
Some other things in there too, somegreat interviews and that type of a thing.
But the robots arewhat we're going to be focusing on.
And the idea here is next monthwe're going to be covering what
these different technologiesthis weeks and the last couple of weeks
that we've done this for
have done where they've evolved or haven'tand what direction
they've gone in or haven't,you know, whatever the case may be.

(01:13):
So with that,and with no further ado, let's
set our time machines backapproximately one year.
So we've got a really cool
guest interview coming up againthis week in the second segment,
getting a lot of different perspectivefrom authors.
And this has been really kind of cooland a little bit unexpected.
And it's kind of neatto see the different direction

(01:34):
that different people take for their art,you know, or
as I think he calls it today, the Craft.
I always thought that was doing movies, but I guess that's also writing books. And,
But, you
know, different directionsand a lot of really good stuff.
And, you know, I'm going to want to sit down
and actually read through some ofthese times, but it does take some doing.

(01:56):
The one of the other interviews
that we're going to have ina couple of weeks is an author that's
actually he was going to write a book,and he's written five.
And from what I've seen,but they're actually really good. It's
so I haven't seen any bummers yet,which is kind of cool.
Another set that's going to be coming upin a few weeks as a cyberpunk fantasy,
but where the world gets good,and I try to explain to them,
there's no way that's cyberpunk.

(02:17):
But, at least not with that conclusion that,
but, we shall see, I suppose.
Well, I mean, okay, here's the question.
Has cyberpunk become a genre?
Yeah, it's been on Earth for a while.
Right.
So then, you know, it can go either way.

(02:38):
It doesn't have to be, it can,
and I don't disagree with you on that,but part of what cyberpunk
is, is kind of this post-apocalyptic,everything's horrible idea.
I think if you tried to make it good,it wouldn't really be cyberpunk.
However, I will say thatfrom what I understand, the way they've
put this together, it kind of keeps its, you know, that intact.
So we'll see.

(02:58):
Again, be interestingto see where that goes.
And then for that particular one,since we're talking about it, there are
books are set 100 yearsafter cyberpunk 2077.
So I don't know,maybe good things happen in 100 years.
We shall see.
Already on that cherry note.
What do we have in the newsthis week? Okay.
Oh my God, this term is just, like,really freaking me out.

(03:21):
It's kind of kind of intense
pig butchering scams increasing
what exactly is this?
Okay, first of all, just for everybody,don't worry about it.
From a standpoint, this is not literallywhat the headline says.
This has nothing to do with pigsor animals or anything like that.
It's just a term that they're using.

(03:42):
But what it is, is it's a scam
that has cost over 75 billion in lossover the past four years
and is something that's quite, quite intense.
You know,
so what this basically comes down tois it's a long term situation.
So it's people that are kind of,trying to scam for the long term.

(04:05):
So you get an unsolicited callor email or whatever, you respond to it,
and you talk tosomebody who gets into your confidence
and they'll talk to you.
They'll send personal messagesthroughout the day,
and then later they invite youto join them in a cryptocurrency trade.
Okay. What could go wrong here?
Yeah.

(04:27):
And, they discuss openly with youpersonal finances,
purchases and vacations.
And then finally, your new onlinefriend asks you to send money.
So if this is going on or youget an unsolicited anything, don't do it.
Because there's a lot of differenttechniques out there for these people
to tell you and your moneyand have you apart from each other

(04:49):
and or seeing a lot of different
approaches, this just being another one.
And at the end of the day,
you're not going to make money offcryptocurrency doing this.
I'm still of the opinionthat unless you're very lucky,
you're not going to make money offcryptocurrency, period.
But this is onewhere you almost certainly
you're going to lose anything you put it.
So in other words,the victim becomes the pig.

(05:13):
Yeah.
And that's where that term comes from.
On same note, hackers
infest users of antivirus servicethat deliver updates over Http.
Yeah.
So from a technical perspective,the first thing I had to ask is,
it seems like deliveringor doing your antivirus over your browser
or getting the updates,which is what this would be.

(05:35):
I could see there being a lot of problemswith that.
I mean, you download updates,but it's usually done by the antivirus
software that you're running,not through this type of an interface.
So what's been going on here?
And they think the hackersare tied to North Korea.
So this is a government thingthat's been going on with it.
And they're using somethingcalled a man in the middle attack.

(05:56):
And basically what that meansis they're interfering
with the data transfer,but not on the end of the company.
You're getting it from a not on your end.
So the antivirus company sendsthe correct information.
They replace it with a malicious file.
Wallet's in transit.
And then what you receiveis the malicious file.
So that's how that works.
Yeah.
And these type of thingsit takes a lot to pull off.

(06:19):
And it's very complicatedand the way that they do this.
But this is just to kind ofsum it up a big reason why
you want the Https on your browser.
And I still wouldn't downloadantivirus updates in this way,
but that at least tells youthe website is communicating with you.
And as far as I know,and they have hacked this before.
But the current standard of this doeslock it down.

(06:41):
So if you, you know,or at least you should know and hopefully
that the website you're dealing withis really what it purports to be.
So these kind of attacks, they're not new,but this methodology of doing
it is new or howeverthis has been going on since 2019.
Apparentlythe company by the way, is called E scan.
So if you're using E scan I would suggestgetting different antivirus software.

(07:04):
This has been going on
since 2019, which is five yearsthat they didn't seem to notice.
Wow. You know, soI, I have a hard time with stuff like that
because it's, you know, it's one thing,okay, they hack in
and they get in a way that you didn'texpect that you deal with it and move on.
But a five yearbreach like this is a little weird.
But in any event,if you're using E scan at this point, just

(07:27):
it would be time to upgrade your antivirussoftware, or just simply use
the one that comes with windows.
If you're running Windows 11 or Windows 10is it works well too.
It's going to certainly work better
than something you get throughthe web like that.
Definitely. Okay.
Why vector databases are having a moment
as the AI hype cycle peaks.

(07:49):
What exactly is a vector?
Okay, so vector, why don't you
I was going to say to get startedwith this, maybe you could explain
the difference between SQL, NoSQL,vector databases and things like that.
I could make something. I wouldn't yeah.
I mean in most casesI don't think anybody would know
the difference unless you work within it.

(08:10):
This is a very, very, analytical topic.
But what's going on hereis they're talking about
different styles of databases.
So when you use the internetor many other things for that matter,
you're probably interactingwith a database.
You might not directly know that you are,but most interactive technology
that sends you information of some kindhas to pull it from somewhere.

(08:32):
And usually that's a database.
And there's many different waysto set that up on the back end
to be able to provide this information.
One of the most common onesis something called SQL, SQL.
It stands for Structured Query Language,and it's basically a database
that holds informationthat's in the structure of some kind.
So you want the name, address,phone number or email address to be saved.

(08:54):
That's structure.
And then you havewhatever records go along with it.
This is the very similar systemto some of the old softwares
we used to have, like dBASE and othersthat, FileMaker Pro I think was like this.
Anyway, that keep, MicrosoftAccess is another big one.
Sorry. I'm just trying to think.
And it's, I mean,to get the rust off the brain to go back.

(09:15):
But in any event that modern systemsuse these kind of databases
in a newer way than Microsoft Access,etc., to be able to store information,
and they work prettywell if you have a structure.
Problem is just noteverything works that way.
So if you're storing videos or imagesor something that doesn't know here
to a predefined data model, SQL doesn'twork that well for dealing with it.

(09:37):
So that is where you get thingsthat are commonly called NoSQL.
And vector databases are somethingthat would fall into that category
and really where they're, coming intothis is generative AI
as they're trained to usethis kind of a database
a lot better than SQL and some ofthe other things that are out there.
And one of the things I've been findingis that using this kind of a back end

(09:59):
allows AIS to reducewhat they call hallucinations,
and what that is, is where the AI givesyou completely fictitious information,
or something of that nature,a lot of hallucination.
And one of the reasons for that is becausedepending on how the AI is developed
and what it actually is, it'spulling from a massive database,
but it's not necessarilygoing to know in certain situations

(10:22):
whether the information it hasis real or not.
Some do, some don't.
So at the end of the day,that's where you have had problems
and probably seen in the newswhere there was a lawyer that did this
and some other examplesthat they wrote or stuff using an AI
that didn't have this differentiationcapability.
And the information was written well,but it was completely false.

(10:44):
Three you know, because itit doesn't know if it's
pulling it from reality or from, you know,the Harry Potter book or something.
It's that kind of thing.
So in any event, so what's happening is
AI is startingto really get into everything.
The systems that runit are becoming more and more popular,
and vector databases,which is probably not something

(11:04):
most of us have even heard about before,are coming to the forefront.
So to try and keep this frombeing really deep technical,
it just simply means thatwhen you interact with an AI,
you might not be interacting
with the same kind of databaseyou have on other things,
and whether that is relevant to youis you're in to figure out.

(11:27):
Noncompete are dead
and tech workers are free to roam.
So this came in,this is from wired magazine.
And what this is talking aboutis the Federal Trade Commission
is putting a new ruleand it invalidates non-compete agreements.
So there's two sides of thought on this.

(11:47):
I know in my career I've dealt with this.
Basically what it comes down tois I go work for company A, and company
A has me signed an agreement
that I can't go work for companyB, which would be their competitor.
You're doing the same thingfor three years.
Two years,whatever the term of the non-compete is.
The problem with that is,is when you leave company
A, you're not allowed to practiceyour expertise in certain situations.

(12:09):
So this type of thinghas been controversial to say the least.
And at the end of the day, it's taken,
the Federal Trade Commissionto step in here and deal with this.
They're saying that it's going to createabout 8500 new businesses
annually, not jobs, but actual businesses.

(12:29):
An average annual
pay increase of $524for each worker, lower health costs,
and as many as 29,000 more patentseach year.
Over the next decade.
Now, the one thingthat I do have to footnote
on this from Wired's article isthe non-compete are not dead yet.
There's about a four month processthat this has to go through with the FTC,

(12:50):
and there are some powerful peopleobjecting
to this new rule, saying thatit's an overreach and that kind of thing.
But it may actually end upin front of the Supreme Court.
However, if it does get to that point,we might still see the legislation change.
It's just not going to be tomorrow.
And it's just important to notethat this isn't in effect yet.
All right, TSMC says

(13:13):
A16 Chipmaking Tech
IV in 2026 setting up showdown with Intel.
That was what a lot.
I'm assuming one of you is a company
and the other one is a product.
Yeah.
Taiwan SemiconductorManufacturing Corporation, by the way,

(13:36):
is what that stands for.
And the other partthat was all letters in there,
A16 is a model of a microprocessor.
So that'swhat all that kind of breaks down too.
So, you know, there'sa number of different companies that make
the central processing unitsthat are used in a lot of our lines
and the Intel, AMDor some of the most common ones.

(13:56):
But there are other companies out therethat put these things together,
and this is setting itself up
to be a direct competitor to Inteland AMD, which would be interesting
because you might have a third
kind of computer processorthat you would get someday.
Now, this isn't that unusual, like Apple
uses their own thing and a lot of othersdo, but for the most part,

(14:17):
you're probably if you're not using a mac,you're
probably have a computerthat has either Intel and AMD.
It's not 100%,but it is the most common thing out there.
And that's why this could be a big deal.
And it could actually helpto bring down prices
and that type of thingto have more options out there.
So it'll be interestingto see where this ends up.
But if it does come outand if it is successful,

(14:39):
it, you know,certainly we'll give a third class.
Now, the one thing
not to worry aboutis that doesn't mean you're going
to have a third operating systemor anything like that.
The idea is this would runwhat is on the market now, today,
it just be a different method or adifferent brand, if you will, of doing it.
So whether you have an RCA television or a
LG television, you can watch the sametelevision signal, same idea.

(15:03):
Deadpool and Wolverine trailer released.
Yeah.
So it's in post-production.
This has been talked about for a whileand kind of our next movie like this,
and I, you know,I have to say Wolverine, Deadpool,
or some of the two most violent,characters out there.
So this could be very interestingto see where this ends up.

(15:26):
And if it's something
we're going to be sayingafter you finished watching the movie,
it's expected releasedate is July 26th in post-production now,
so we'll see if they meet that or not,which usually they do at this point,
but you never know what happens.
So, you know,
we'll have to check this one outbecause this is a kind of movie that is,
you have to understand,like Deadpool and Wolverine,

(15:48):
these are two individualsthat are extremely hard to kill
by nature of their superpowers.
Just try. Ever. You want to call it.
These are two people who have a hard timedying.
So, if they were to get in a fightwith each other,
it's probably going to go onfor a long time.

(16:10):
Now, that would be interesting.
I think maybe that's the moviewe don't know.
Instead of Deadpool,
maybe we could have Deadpool versusWolverine back,
I don't know, someone called The Whoand what franchise is this Marvel,
I think yeah, someone call a franchiseand let them know

(16:31):
that they want to fight each otherand then becomes a note.
Yeah, I don't know what the storyline is.
There isn't been a lot of talkabout that yet, but, like you say.
And the other thing is, isthe characters are very different.
I mean, Wolverine is kind of almost,he's he's strange.
I don't know, I think seriously,but I want to be

(16:53):
on the other hand, it's like, yeah,we're going to the camera and wave to you,
you know that,
like a lot of it's nothing seriouslike is a fourth barrier or what is that?
Yes, exactly.
Fourth wall.
Fourth wall.
Fourth wall.
So anyway, the other thingthat's interesting,

(17:14):
I know some of the characters in hereor the actors rather are people.
Patrick Stewart's going to be backas professor X really understand
a array Park is going to be in the movie,so that'll be interesting.
I don't think he'll be read, but,he'll be there.
So we'll see where this ends up going.
This has the potential to be really goodor really bad, I don't know.

(17:37):
And sometimes it's.
In build to limit car speeds.
Tell us about that.
Yeah.
So in a shocking revelation,the state of California
wanted to create a role that by 2029,at least 50% of new vehicles and by 2032,
all new vehicles sold in the statehad a governor installed, it would know

(18:01):
the speed limit of where you wereand would not allow you to exceed it.
I think there was a ten mile per hourvariance in there
and that kind of a thing.
And believe it or not, there werea few people that had a problem with that.
And I can't understand why.
I mean, you know, what's the speed limits?
And for safety or something, you do needto be able to speed up a little bit.
You wouldn't be able to do that.

(18:22):
And the other side of itis this technology does fail sometimes.
What if it has the wrong elementfor where you are?
Yeah.
You know, so.
They have changed this.
Now for anybody that is concerned,
I say that tongue in cheek, because thisis just such a weird thing to think about,
that an outside influence would be ableto have that on your private vehicle.

(18:46):
I know governors and thingslike that exist on commercial vehicles
and some other things, but that's a stilla little bit different than my Nissan.
You know?
And from that standpoint,that's where a lot of people are like,
you know, objecting to this.
So it's been modifiednow that the requirement is still there
to have a thing that will advise youif you exceed the speed limit
in the same capacity or 50% in 2029and so on.

(19:09):
But it just has a wild thing or something.
Is it going to keep your car from
fitting other cars,or are they grandfathered in?
That's good.
No, there doesn't seem to be any kind oflike a backward requirement.
So if you have an older vehicle,you know that doesn't

(19:29):
have this or right now, any vehicle.
And you know, once again, you're goingto be prohibited from using it.
Just anything.
Now people are not going to want inother states.
Yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
But yeah,the adoption of these type of things,
this is a lot like electric vehicles.

(19:50):
There's no rule that you can't havea gasoline powered car,
except that all cars sold I think by 2030,
have to meet such stringent pollutionrequirements
that they could only be an electric car,you know, so.
But you're, you know, my 1970, whatever
it is, a 66 Volkswagenbug is still legal to drive

(20:11):
even after these rules go into effect,without having to change it in some way.
Yeah.
Voyager one is talking again.
Yes. And this has beenan interesting thing
for especially space enthusiasts,which seems to be everybody at NASA.
Imagine that.
So what happened is,

(20:31):
for anybody that doesn't know, Voyagerone and Voyager two
are the only human made objectsthat are in interstellar space.
In other words,have left our solar system,
and they're still both in communicationwith us.
But about six months ago,it was last fall, sometime
there was a problem where Voyager onewas sending back information,
but the information was gobbledygook.

(20:51):
It wasn't able to be used in any way.
And something was scrambling it.
So they were trying to figure it out.
Well,you know, when you're updating software
that is a project debugging,that is its own beast sometimes.
But in this case, everything they did,it's 22.5 hours for their radio signal
to reach Voyager, make the change,and then another 22.5 hours if it worked.

(21:16):
See if you get different information back.
So, and then on top of that,
you're dealing with technologythat was built in the 70s,
and there aren't a lot of people aroundthat can support that anymore, either.
You know, it's,
outside of pinball machines.
We seem to be able to fix them. Okay.
But no, in all seriousness,what they ended up doing
is they figured out that

(21:36):
what was causing the problem is a chip inthe system had failed.
Now, again, these missionswere supposed to be five years.
So the fact that they're even
still running, I can't fault it for thatafter all this time.
But what they ended up doing isthey were able to move the code
and the other partsof the system's memory.
It was too big to fit in any of the otherpieces themselves, so they broke it up.

(21:59):
I mean, whoever programedthis really knew what they were doing,
and then they tested it outand they've been able to do that
in such a way that they've been ableto completely bypass the memory chip.
It went outand they're now getting data back.
That is what they need it to be,which is kind of really cool
to think that, you know, I think it's a do
you think that qualifies as the farthestaway service call ever performed?

(22:20):
Yeah. It's not out
now. Ithink it's cool they were able to fix it.
And I think a lot of peoplekind of had figured,
you know, that was kind of the end of it.
And it wouldn't have really beenthat negative of the thing.
Because again, you're dealing with systemsthat were not meant
to do what they're doing in any capacity.
You know, I mean, when the Voyagers wentup, the Atari system was just brand new.

(22:44):
You got to think about it.That's where we are.
I don't even think we had VCRsand stuff like that yet.
And if we did, it was in a very,very early phases of them.
You know, you listened to music offa record or they did have eight tracks.
So there was at least that. But, you know,
and this thing still works.
And they were not only that,when there was a malfunction,

(23:06):
they were actually able to bring it back.So that's pretty cool.
You know, I don't know, I amin the space stuff I always have been.
So it's kind of fun to seesome of the things that come out here.
One other thing that came too,from one of the Mars orbiter is just
this kind of a topic isthey found spiders on Mars.
I'm sure. Gretchen, you would love that.
Yeah. Not really.
Not at least in what you would think.

(23:27):
What they found onMars, though, is something that
atmosphere looks like spiders.
But what it is, is actuallya geological process that causes
carbon dioxide to bring darker
material up to the surface, to whatthey would consider in their spring.
But when you look at it from orbit, itlooks like there's all these spiders. And
you not

(23:49):
something Ithink that I'd really want to experience.
Although I do understandthe job was to go to Mars,
maybe would race to brokersgo to any sites?
I guess that's importantto find the spiders.

(24:09):
Yeah, evidently.
And, Yeah. Grog.
I think,
I don't know that.
Gretchen, you got to understand,that was a long, long time ago.
Somewhere far, far away.
And on that very bad joke.
We are going to take a break.
Yeah, we will be back with an interview.
They don't see him.
He's from the future.

(24:31):
He's got a really big computer,
and he uses it every day.
And he uses it in every way.
Oh, I see you sure.
You know, I'm not sure because you.
Welcome back.
This is user friendly 2.0.
Check out our website for everything.

(24:52):
User friendly user friendly.
Dot show is the one stop shopfor all of that.
You can play our back episodes,see what's up and coming.
Submit your questions.Give us your comments.
We'd love to hear from you.
You can even read our Tech Wednesdayarticles.
Hey, we might need to write runpretty soon again, but you can read them.
They're there, okay, among other things.
So let us know what you think.
It's how we do our programingand we love to hear from everybody.

(25:15):
So interesting thing last weekwe were at the Career day,
at Sherwood High School.
We had that on the show and,and our guests and everything,
which was reallycool, was a really neat event
and I'm glad we were able to go to it.
But one of the things that I have puttogether, it's really for another purpose
was able to have there was a little robot
and people seem to kind of like it.

(25:37):
The thing looks like a replicator outof, Stargate a little bit.
And, it's a six leg, hexapod.
And, we're using it as a proof of conceptfor something the client's doing.
But it was kind of cool to be ableto have it,
and we've gotten it working,and he died five minutes before me.
So. So my question is, is, did you get itfixed?

(26:00):
Yeah, I've gotten them fixed.
And what had happened wasand this is part of prototyping
is a, there's a logic board in therethat controls things.
And there's a component called a diode,which causes electricity
to only go one way.
And the reason for
that is because the Raspberry Pi circuitthat I'm using to build this thing on
has some functionsthat we won't need in the final product.

(26:21):
And one of them isit tries to recharge the batteries.
But I'm not using rechargeable batteries.
So if you do thatit can be extremely problematic.
So the purpose of a diode is
to make sure the power comesone way and doesn't go back.
Well, it was actually the evening before
I was finalizing some stuffand he just stopped working.
And it was because this ten centdiode popped

(26:42):
and there's no way to really replace it.
I couldn't there's no more RadioShack.
I couldn't go buy a diode.
I didn't have one here.
So unfortunately,these type of things happen.
But yeah, we got him up and runningand he's actually a neat little guy.
He's got a bunch of sensors on themand different things like that.
He can tell distance,he can walk properly,
which is kind of cool, self-leveling,all of that type of thing.

(27:03):
And he has a camera.I don't have any sound
system set up on him,although he does have a buzzer.
So buzzer what's the buzzer for?
Yeah.
To tell us if there's a problem.
And, I don't think that'll beon the final version either, but,
it was something that was there,
but they knowvideos as you're looking at complexity

(27:25):
and any more circuitry you have,especially circuitry you don't need,
takes more batteryand has more that can possibly go wrong.
And a sound cardis something that draws a lot of power.
They have any kind of ability to reproducethat.
You have to have an amplifier circuitin addition to the digital card, a digital
analog converter, and then whateversound you're going to use, plus a speaker.

(27:48):
So there was just no reason to do thatbecause we didn't need it.
And it's what that's going to be usedfor doesn't require sound.
But you know, that's just part of it.
You could have it if you wanted it.
And the Raspberry Pi prototyping boardsdo support that kind of thing.
So it's a matter of really adding in theappropriate circuitry and turning it on.
But again, in this casedidn't have that. Don't need it.

(28:09):
The other stuff that's inthere is kind of cool.
It also has a seismic sensor.
One of the thingsthat we're looking at doing with
it is when you have somethinglike an earthquake,
having the sensor array on it,and the final version being a lot smaller,
you can put them around
and if a building has collapsedor something of that nature,
a little robot can pick up vibrationsand stuff that you couldn't
otherwise hear,

(28:29):
and you can send them into placesthat you wouldn't want to send the human.
Because if the robot gets stuckor squished or something,
you build another robot.
It's not that easy to do with a human,as humans are bigger.
Yeah.
So yeah, you know, from that standpoint,that is,
one of the uses of this kind of a thing,but it's been a lot of fun.
The engineering behindit took some time to put together
and get everything to work.And there's two sides of these things.

(28:51):
There's the hardware side, which areall of the things that make it move.
It's articulated.
So there's three different jointsin each leg, which means 618
servo motors,plus two more on the nexus of 20 servos
and all the transistors and data linesand all the stuff to control all that.
And then on the software side of it,you have to program it.

(29:12):
When these type of circuitsare usually done in either Python or Rust,
this one's done in Pythonbecause it's running on a Raspberry Pi.
And so you have that to set up.
So you're looking at a lot of differentthings, getting the parts built.
You have somebody that actually takesthe models that I drew up
and puts them in and gets the actualphysical stuff cut out.
It was done on a really high quality

(29:33):
3D printer, and the laser printerthat's how they got the parts.
And, you know, just kind of cool.
But a lot went into it. But yes,he is alive again. He is working.
And it was definitely a funproject, was to put a picture of him
up in our social mediaif we haven't done so already.
All right. Well, listen,we got a great interview.
I talked about thisa little bit in the first segment.
This is an author
I am not going to give youany kind of spoilers here

(29:55):
because the interviewis worth listening to.
So with no further ado, let's go.
Joining me now, guests, Pedram ondid I say your name right? Yes.
Yeah.It only took nine tries. That's right.
Hey, you know what? We're making progress.
So tell us a little bit about yourselfand what you're doing.
That.
Well, I, background, I guessI got my degree in music education.

(30:17):
Then I went and I joined the Marine Corps.
Played clarinetfor them for several years.
And I went into cyberspacefor the Marine Corps.
And then I got outafter 12 years on active duty.
And now I am workingon, working on I'm an author.
Like, I've, I've published a book.
If you're watching this video,you can see it behind me, but,

(30:38):
yeah, I, I write epic fantasy,and my first book is out.
I'm shooting for book two to be out laterthis year, and at the end of August.
All right.
Well, first of all, on behalf of userFriendly, thank you for your service and
I yeah, that's a wonderful thingto be able to do.
Before we get into the book, I'm gonnaI just need to ask the question,
what does it meanto go into military cyberspace?

(30:59):
Because I've got several ideas there.
Probably not right.
Well,
So the, let me try to make this short.
The military uses computers.
They're very useful forfor communications.
They run weapons systems.
And those systems are hackable.

(31:21):
And so somebody needs to defend them.
And so my, my second job field,
my first one was in the bandand not secondary, but I switched
my primary job field from musicto, being in cyberspace warfare.
And cyberspace
warfare goes both defense and offense.

(31:42):
Just the, thethe billets that I happens to fill
where I got stationedwere only in defense, but.
Yeah. Okay.
And this thing is so important,
and, it's specifically for cyber defense and
in the military, there's a differencebetween cyber security and cyber defense.
Where cyber security is, is basically

(32:03):
best practices and making sureeverything's configured right.
And, making sure it's,things are updated and, like I said,
configured right so that it's hardto hack into cyber defense
is where you are monitoring systemsand hunting
for signs of malicious action.

(32:23):
And, out in the civilian realm,
that's all just cyber security.
Okay. All right. Now that's interesting.
That's actually a good topic,I think, for another time.
But, I'm glad I asked the questionbecause I wouldn't have known
really kind of where that went. All right.
So let's circleback to what we're here for.
And let's about your book.
And, where did you get the idea to write it?

(32:45):
And, just let us know a little bitabout where this came from, okay.
Yeah. So,
this isnot the first book that I wanted to write.
In fact, the first one I wanted to writewas when I was,
I don't know.
I remember there was onethat I started writing when I was ten,
actually, there were two thatI started writing when I was 10 or 12.

(33:07):
But in my adult life,
when I really wanted to write a book,the first one was was not this.
And I started that 1 in 2010.
And that one I'm calling The Grand HillChronicles.
And, you know, and
in order to run things as,
to, to try to make income as an author,

(33:30):
my wife and I registered a company, and,I have a,
a brand name or what's the word?
An imprint that is Grand Hill Media.
And in fact,I it's on the book here, like,
that's
Grand Hill Media is the the imprint underwhich this book is published.

(33:52):
But I care too much about the Grand Hill
Chronicles,and I needed to get something out.
I needed to, to have somethingthat I could finish,
in some kind of reasonable fashion.
So I'm like, okay, some other idea, what's different?
What hasn't been done that I know of?

(34:12):
How about, a dark unicorn?
What does that mean?
You know, and and
and so I just the, the basis of the ideawas just take something
that is familiarand add my own twist to it.
And, yeah.
So I started playing with the idea,like Dark Unicorn.

(34:32):
Is he, like, outright evil
or is he just sinister or,or just very somber?
So I had to figure those things outand like, what other details might be fun
to add here,I, I played with the idea of there
just being one male unicorn, and,

(34:53):
then he, like, carries a bannerfor a few thousand years or something,
and then he, passes it onto the next male and, you know, so
these were some raw ideasthat I, I played with all this, developing
that, so
the way it, it
is, the way it came out is,

(35:15):
in this world, everybody knows unicorns.
There's no secret that they exist.
Everybody's seen one.
Everybody knows what they're like.
They're they're like,they have a bright disposition,
kind of flighty,and they're intelligent enough.
They they have the ability to speak.
They're not going to carryon a conversation with you and me
because there's they're too flighty and,maybe they don't care about us.

(35:39):
I don't know,but they have the ability to heal
once in a blue moon,somebody will be healed by a unicorn.
Also, unicorn isn't the proper word.
It's like calling us two lakes.
It's an accurate description,but it doesn't do us justice.
Right. And it.
And unicorn doesn't do them justice.
So in this book,the proper word is the Maud.

(36:01):
And if you say unicorn,it's it's just not very polite.
Yeah.
So I actuallyhave, I'll read the little excerpt
from the on the back of the,the dust jacket
says, no, this sounds great.
And, just a quick insert here for anybody
listening on the radiowhere we obviously don't have video.

(36:22):
We're going to go ahead and post picturesof what you've been referring to
on our social media in this there.
So so you didn't miss out.
All right. Let's go for it.
That evilnow comes near to overflowing its bounds.
Then the more it said overflow its bounds.
A larva repeated.
Perhaps you saw the sky split openlast night.

(36:42):
Those are cracks in the prison.
A lover's face went pale.
If those were only cracks,what happens when it breaks?
When the prison
bursts, all the world will feel it.
So that's kind of,
let you know thatthere's there's going to be a big problem
that we have to solve,because it's epic fantasy.

(37:03):
So in a nutshell,
everybody knows what unicorns are like.
Also, everybody knows thatthey're always pure white
and they're all female, except they're allthe legends of the nightshade unicorn.
And maybe there's this drawing, this darkunicorn on the cover of the book.
But all the legends

(37:23):
about the dark unicorn,the nightshade unicorn
say heand some of the stories are preposterous.
Like, is, 30 hands high at the shoulder
and, you know, obviously, ridiculous.
And but everybody also knows,since unicorns are always white
and all female, obviously false.

(37:44):
Right.
Except we meet him in the prolog,so we know that he does exist
right off the bat.
Yeah.
And so the main character, a Lamphere,
and she's, almost 17.
In a fantasy world, time is different.
Like if you've ever read,the Wheel of Time series
by RobertJordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson.

(38:08):
In that world, a year is 500 days.
Okay, so anyway, so
she's almost 17,but she comes of age like she goes her her
she has her village coming of age ceremonythat she participates in.
So she, she is an adult in her society,
but, so she comes of age.

(38:30):
And then there's this Nimrod
that shows up on the doorstepin the middle of the night,
and it's a male Nimrod, like,what's with that?
And he's like,
yeah, there's a problem.
The world has a problem, and we need helpfixing it, and you're the help.
So let's go.
And also, we're in a hurry,so come on, like, let's leave now.

(38:54):
So there's there's a journey and yeah.
So yeah, thethe excerpt here on the back of the dust
jacket is from that conversation.
Okay.
Well I'm already enthusedand I'm a huge fan of fantasy anyway.
So this is right up my, my alley.
How long did it take youto write the book?
I had the idea about two years ago.

(39:17):
And then,
when I, like, actually had
time to sit downand give time to writing it.
It was about two months.
And then there was editing and
and getting reader feedback and,you know, so
the, the whole cycle,

(39:40):
starting from what I was ableto dedicate time to reading it to,
to writing it,until publishing was about six months,
which is okay. Now.
I would consider that to be pretty fast.
I mean, you must have been reallyworking on it to get it done that quickly.
I was I had sleepless nights to be sure,and I can only imagine.

(40:00):
Yeah.
So listener question that comes in a lot.
On the writing and publishingprocess is dealing with things
like illustrations and you kind of touchedon editing and all of that.
What did you have to deal with?
Did you actually bring in outsidepeople to do it?
Did you do it yourself? Ihow does that work?
I hired, I hired an artist for thefor the cover art.
I think she did a great job.

(40:21):
And that came from vivid covers.com.
I'll give her credit.
Because she did a great job,and she deserves that credit
and more business, you know, and,you know, you want your book covers done,
but,
Yeah.
Now I during the, I actually ran a Kickstarter
campaign in January, andI didn't have the cover art for it yet.

(40:44):
And so the images that I use for thatwere I generated,
I know there's a lot of hissingand booing about I image generation.
But it was it,it helped me in, in that it
I was able to have illustrative images
or my Kickstarter campaign. Right.

(41:06):
And then once, once I got the cover art
that I hired an artist for and,and was able to pay for,
I am absolutely glad and proud to use, human generated art.
It's just it feels more natural,
and I guess I art will will get thereand look just as good soon enough. But,

(41:29):
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it's interestingyou touch upon that topic and we've talked
about this in the past on the show,and it seems like people's concern is more
when one uses AI generated art andthen tells you it's human generated art.
That's I think a lot of the controversy.
And like you're saying, I'm seeinga lot of stuff and it's getting better
and it's a lot more realisticthat there still isn't the human touch.

(41:49):
If you will,
that you see when something's doneand actually somebody is putting in time
and care and all of that.
So I do agreecompletely with what you're saying. There.
Yeah. Right. But yeah.
All right.
Now your book is published.
It's going to be published.
It is published. And it's published.
How would you find it?
Is it where do you order it?
You can find it on Amazon.

(42:10):
You can find iton a lot of different places.
If your go to is Amazonand just search for nightshade unicorn.
If your go to is anywhere else,go to Pedro Montcalm
and you can find links there.
If you really want to help me outthen go to Grand Hill Dot media.
That's, that's my direct store. But

(42:31):
Pedro Montcalm has links to
to Amazon, to Apple to Kobo to Google.
So no that's great. Okay.
Well we'll get that also out in oursocial media so everybody can find it.
All right.
Well is there anything elseyou want to tell us?
Yeah.
I was a lot of fun to write, and,it was a lot of work,

(42:51):
but it was a lot of fun and
I'm looking forwardto pushing our book to my.
My daughter was the first readerfor this one.
And although it's,
you know, I, I it's yeah,
it's, it's a young adult,kind of geared toward that.
It is clean.

(43:11):
It's it's
not something you should be worried aboutputting in front of younger children.
My 12 year old daughterwas the first person to read it,
and she came back and ordered meto hurry up and write the second book.
Okay, that's athat's the best response you can get.
Yeah.
You know, yeah, I, I love that and I wishI could have finished it already.

(43:32):
But it's just so much work and,and I, I did publish it
myself, like under,under my own brand, Grant Hill Media.
Right.
And so, like,
I hired out the, the cover art.
I did not hire an editor.
I was going to,but the editor that I was going to hire
got booked for the, for the time frame,and I already had a publication date

(43:55):
go, and,
but I, I used a tool called ProWriting Aid.
That's pretty goodabout catching a lot of things.
It's also pretty goodabout missing a lot of things.
And I'm not to toot my own horn,
but I'm pretty good myself with spelling,grammar, punctuation.
I'm not perfect.

(44:16):
That's why I use pro writing aid.
And I.
I'm not advertising for them.
It was a it was a helpful tool.
I did not accept all the
because it it's an AI based tool
and it it suggests some rewordingif the, if it thinks that,
maybe your sentence is too longor it catches

(44:39):
or sentences in a rowthat you started with the same word.
Those are good catches, but,
I also feel like it's,
it could be a voice eraser.
I know that author Martin Shoemaker
has has called it that,and I, I concur with that.
Like, if you just go through and acceptall the recordings,

(45:01):
you're going to sound kind of manilavanilla and.
Oh yeah.
And it also wouldn't
necessarily be your book, like you say,it's, you know, changing changing a lot.
All right.
So you mentioned that you'reworking on a second book.
So tell us a little bit
about where this is going to goand where you would like to see it end up.
Well it's a sequel.
So this book the series title is Nightshade Unicorn.

(45:21):
The the title for book one is forerunner.
But obviously for search termsyou use Nightshade unicorn,
because if you search for for one,are you going to find a Toyota SUV?
But yeah, book two is going to be calledGuardian.
And it's
going to be at least a three book series.

(45:41):
I, I have been very frustratedwith, with life getting in the way.
I've had so many things getting in my wayand and not letting me
crank out book two yet.
I'm it's I'm I'm almost there.
I have started it, you know,
but, what was I going to say?

(46:02):
It's.
Oh, yeah.
So there's, I know where it's going to go.
And I know, like,there's this big evil that they need to,
stop when it breaks out of its prison.
There is a certain thingthat's going to happen.
I'm going to be.

(46:22):
I'm going to be vague.You'll have to wait and find out.
Absolutely no spoilers here. Right.
Here's there is a certain thingthat's going to happen.
And it won't be the end.
There will have to be another bookafter that.
So bare minimum,even if I like really compress events.
Book two cannot be the end of the series.

(46:43):
It it it it has to have at least one more.
And honestly, I and could
easily see it being five books or beyond.
I'm kind of new at this, you know,this is my first book, and so book one
has basically one POV characterthroughout the whole book.
I say basically becauseit's not completely one purely character.

(47:06):
The prolog and the epilogare from one other characters POV.
So there are twoPOV characters in this book.
The next book is going to have more,
and if you've read epic fantasy, if you've
read Robert Jordan.
Then you know that things can get.
Things can startto, fill the pages pretty well.

(47:29):
When you look at this character'sperspective
and that characters perspective,and then they split apart
and go different ways,and then they come back together. And
along the way you follow this characterand then you follow that character.
So yeah, book twowill definitely be longer than this one.
This one is 94,000 words.
For reference,Harry Potter book one was 80,000 words.

(47:51):
Okay.
So it's a little bit longer than HarryPotter and the Philosopher's Stone.
But, yeah, it could.
It could easily stretch nine, ten books.
I, I don't know yetbecause I'm new at this and,
I know you're going to have
to keep us up to dateas far as how this goes and what happens.

(48:11):
And, I can't wait to see it.
And again,
we're goingto get all of your ordered links
and that kind of thingout on our social media,
which is a user friendly show.
So if you're driving rightnow, don't crash.
Just go to the website laterand you can get it from there.
And I think I'm going to shareyour direct link first.
And the reason for that, it'snothing against Amazon,
but for any small business,Amazon takes a little chunk of the order.

(48:33):
That's how they make their money.So which is fine.
But if you can go directlyit helps everybody out.
So, we'll,
we'll go ahead and share that out firstand have the Amazon link as well.
Yeah.
And I guess something elsethat users, users,
people should know, listeners should know,is I have a newsletter,
so maybe you don't want to buy itright away, but you want to.

(48:56):
You want me to let you know
when book two comes outor when whenever I run promotions.
So you can go to go to Pedro Mi.com.
There's a link for the newsletter.
You can sign up for the newsletter.
It's absolutely free.
And then I'll let you know when when I'm
running a promotion or when,
when book two comes out, you know?
Okay, that sounds great. All right.

(49:17):
And again, we got all this postedso you can check it out.
And if you have any questionson today's interview,
go ahead and send them inalso at the website. User friendly.
Not sure.We'd love to hear from you. And listen.
Thank you so much for joining us todayand the best of luck.
Thank you.
So speaking of books, Gretchen, whereare you with this cyber hack origin story?
Well, we're in the process of gettingthe website ready and the book is ready.

(49:40):
So we're looking at a couple of days.
Yeah, it's almost there.
It's amazing how much stuff goes intowriting a book more than writing a book.
Well, anyway,thank you for being with us this week.
Until next week, this is user friendly2.0 keeping you safe on the cutting edge.
User friendly 2.0 is.
Copyright 2013 to 2025 by User FriendlyMedia Group incorporated.

(50:03):
All rights reserved.
Opinions expressed on this showare those of the hosts
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Please check out user friendlyDot show for air times and podcasts.