09-How To Have A Career For Dummies

Okay, it's confession time. There are a lot of people who were impressed by my accomplishments by the time I retired at the end of twenty twenty one. But the truth is I can't take credit for any of it. If it hadn't been for Google and for the Four Dummies series of books, I would have gone nowhere. I'm jimpulling and this is my view from the middle, So I'm not going to give you a bunch of false modesty here. I'll admit that I'm a pretty smart guy when it comes to most things. I have my dumb ass moments like everyone else, and I openly talked about those moments during this podcast series. But I cringe when accolades come my way for things I had to do or things I had to create out of pure necessity. If you're stranded on an island somewhere, you probably come up with a way to feed and take care of yourself. If you didn't, you wouldn't survive. Well, that's what I did for my entire career. I found a way to survive. In the late nineteen eighties, I bought my first computer for the house. It had a two eighty six processor, with six hundred and forty K memory and a twenty megabyte hard drive. Imagine a twenty meg hard drive that stores twenty million bytes of information. I will never outgrow that. Also, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said six hundred and forty K of memory is all anyone will ever need. Well, now he denies he said that, but there are a lot of people who contend otherwise. What's more, I had a twenty four hundred bod modem that I plugged into my home telephone line against telephone company rules. Yes, I was a little rebel and a little bit ahead of my time. In the nineteen nineties or thereabouts, the use of the Internet and computers was still pretty much in its infancy. Microsoft had launched Windows ninety five with Mick Jagger doing TV commercial singing, started up. The phone companies finally admitted the Internet existed and started providing tenuous, non dial up Internet services. I jumped on that bandwagon pretty fast. I was running the Florida News Network, then called the Florida Radio Network, a service that provided radio programming, newscast, sportscast, et cetera to sixty plus radio stations across the state. There was a local internet provider who was just starting up and wanted to do a radio show on our local station that I was in charge of in addition to the network. He was looking to cut a deal on the rate. So I said I would do that if he would let me have my own website. Wow, a website. How do you get one of those mysterious things? He said he would do it for me and register the domain name FRN dot com for the Florida Radio Network. Now, despite what you may think, the State Radio network business isn't all that lucrative, never was and probably never will be. So our profit margin was pretty slim, and we were always looking for ways to cut costs. So here's some more inside baseball on the business I was in. As part of our business model, every week, all the stations of affiliated with the network had to be sent an affid davit to sign that made them a test to the fact that all the commercials that we played on the network actually played on their station. It was just something that advertisers needed so they could be assured that the commercials they paid for actually were heard by people listening to the FNN affiliated stations. These affidavits or logs if you will. We typed up on paper, folded and sent via US mail to the sixty plus stations. Now it's a lot of postage and a lot of handling. I kept thinking that there had to be more cost efficient ways to do it, and perhaps the Internet could be part of that. So I went and bought a book. You're probably familiar with the line of four Dummies books. They had them on just about every subject, from cooking to sewing to electronics, Cooking for Dummies, Sewing for Dummies, Radio for Dummies. As a casual user of the Internet, I was familiar with online shopping carts. When you order stuff from Amazon these days, you put your items in an online shopping cart, and when you're ready to check out, you go to your cart and you pay and click the order button. It was still a relatively new concept in the late nineties, but I got to thinking that maybe I could use a shopping cart concept to help our stations go online and sign these affidavits. There was no one else doing this that I knew of, No other state network in the country, of which there were many, Not even major networks like CBS, NBC or ABC seemed to be doing anything like it. So in my spare time, I studied four dummies books on website coding and scripting. I found an open source, in other words, free to use shopping cart script. I started messing around with it, and lo and behold, it actually worked. I could put pretend items in my shopping cart and buy them on my own website. This was so cool, so I bought more books, found other websites online that helped me with coding and modifying the open source shopping cart script into an online application that would allow our network stations to take PDF versions of the affidavit or log and electronically sign them, put them in the shopping cart, and check out. No money changed hands, of course, was just a means to do it. I initially came up with the name Affidavits Online, but realize that probably wouldn't work because the acronym AOL was already being used by some other outfit. So I decided on logs Online or LOL for short. It seemed appropriate, and it's memorable because the abbreviation has also become a chat room standard for laugh out loud. Believe it or not, the definition of LOL is listed in websters as laugh out loud now before I go on here. Let me just say that I was goofing around with this thing in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands. It's now some quarter of a century later, and the LOL is still in operation, not only at FNN, but at seven other state radio networks in the country as well. I updated it as much as it could be updated throughout the years, but if if a coder were to examine the online scripts closely, they would still see evidence of the original open source shopping cart program I started with in the late nineteen nineties. Since then, all state networks in the country, as well as the national networks, went to some version of the LOL on their own, but we were the first. When I retired at the end of twenty twenty one, FNN was owned by iHeartMedia, one of the largest broadcasters in the country and huge in the digital market, not only with websites but with the iHeartRadio app. Many of you listening to this podcast are using the iHeartRadio app right now. Before I retired, I pleaded with the digital programming folks to completely retool the LOL. It was written on twenty five year old technology and sorely needed an update. Programmers at iHeart are leaps and bounds beyond my skill level and could come up with a much better application without having to refer to four dummies books. But the problem is the same as it always was. I had to career the application originally because the owners of FNN, of which there were six of them I worked for five, none of them had an interest in the LOL. If I hadn't developed it or been there to maintain it, it probably would have been allowed to die. So it's been twenty five years and the LOL continues on today the same as it has since I stumbled and bumbled and cluged it together. No one, not the parent company of FNN, has an interest in updating it or doing anything for it. It still works, and that's all that matters to them. But I fear that the changing technology is going to overtake the LOL, and one day it will go dark with no one there to do anything about it, and no one will be laughing out loud. In addition to the LOL, I also, out of necessity, developed a couple of other online applications. One is called on demand, which is simply a way for radio stations to download audio material from FNN and the seven other state radio networks for local use. Another application was called news. This was a service FNN offer gestation who wanted us to provide website news for the local sites. That one is no longer in service. I also did a gardening website with how to gardening videos that I produced myself with our local gardening expert. So there's a takeaway from this episode that you may have already figured out. Tenacity and the willingness to experiment with new things, whether you know anything about them or not, can lead you to a grand place. I was never a computer programmer. I had no schooling for it. It also wasn't my chosen career path. All of this stuff started with four dummies books, common Sense, and a lot of web searches. I was on a conference call with the programmers at iHeart before I retired. Now, these guys are no slouches. These are the ones that developed iHeartRadio, and they know what they're doing. But I was showing them how the LOL works in hopes that they would consider retooling it. I was nervous about showing this thing to quote real web programmers, thinking they would out loud at it. But I went through the functions of the application, and they all seemed a bit stunned. Wow, that's impressive, you did this yourself, one of the guys said. My ego was a bit bolstered by the comment, but another part of me was very concerned about the attitude. I tried to explain how it all came about the open source shopping cart for dummies books and all that, but that didn't seem to matter. They were still impressed it works, so why mess with it? Seemed to be their philosophy, and that's the attitude I feared. So here I am in the middle. I can see the technology storm coming and a website application that is surely to get wiped out by it eventually. On the other side, managers and programmers who say, hey, it works right now, why should we mess with it? Well, I tried how to have a career for dummies. Now that's the book I probably should write. Lol. I'm jimpulling And that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, being born and raised a Catholic, you'd think a person would know if the pope died. Not in this case, the pope died and no one called me. Next on my view from the middle,