7: Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit, EmberConf, Next.js, Porsche vs Mustang

Robbie Wagner: [00:36] Hey, everybody. Welcome to another Whiskey Web and Whatnot with Charles W. Carpenter III and Robbie Wagner, your friends from Ship Shape. Not sure that we've actually mentioned where we're from before, honestly, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [00:53] Hopefully, it's on the branding somewhere.

Robbie Wagner: [00:55] Well, it is, yeah. But yeah. Today we have Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit, which is probably the most Kentucky I've seen on a bottle in a while. Kentucky Spirit. Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. Guessing maybe they make it in Kentucky.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:17] Does it mention that anywhere on the bottle?

Robbie Wagner: [01:20] I think it's made in Oklahoma. I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:23] Yeah, definitely. It's Kentucky spirit. Straight from Oklahoma.

Robbie Wagner: [01:27] Yeah. This is, like, seems from the description, like, just your standard bourbon, but single barrel.

Chuck Carpenter: [01:37] Yes, that's one of the things is that it's a Wild Turkey that is selected as a single barrel. I don't know how this mash bill differs from. I would think it would be slight difference from their normal 101, but I didn't really think about that. But it should be kind of similar. It is 101 proof to you, so that's nice. Oh, I guess I should pour. My first comments about this bottle. One, they've changed the bottle from what it used to be. Robbie, I know you haven't tried this before, but it used to be kind of like this shell kind of shape. It's always been a single barrel product, but it used to be this kind of, like, shell shape, and now they've slimmed the bottle down for whatever reasons. Marketing looks a little fancier and modernized, but the plastic on mine, at least, did not have any perforation, was very difficult to remove. So I just want to first.

Robbie Wagner: [02:35] I had the same problem. Yeah. Had to use scissors multiple times.

Chuck Carpenter: [02:39] Yeah, my scissors are called teeth, but still just a matter of not getting back up.

Robbie Wagner: [02:59] Yeah. I mean, tastes like bourbon to me. It's got a lot of woodiness. It feels more like it's got lots of corn than our usual ryes.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:12] Yeah. Wait till we get to the mash bill part. It's very intuitive of you. I'm impressed.

Robbie Wagner: [03:17] I'm going to guess 85% corn.

Chuck Carpenter: [03:23] Well, before we break down the mash bill, let's get all what you are smelling and tasting. I smell a little like lime a little or something like that. I don't know. I don't taste that. But I do get more of, like a caramel, the flavor and a little bit of what was I going to say here? Oh, cinnamon. Yeah, cinnamon on the finish.

Robbie Wagner: [03:56] Yeah. I'm getting just mostly, like, wood and leather. Like very woody leathery. Like, I'm I'm really not able to taste many of the subtle notes.

Chuck Carpenter: [04:08] Interesting. Yeah. I have to say. It's not quite as woody for me as the normal 101 seems to be. I always get a lot of, like, I think there's more corn in this compared to the normal one because that other one, as I may have expressed in a previous podcast episode, but I have toured the Wild Turkey distillery. And the kind gentleman who led our tour, yeah, I mean, whatever. And the kind gentleman who led our tour, his name was Bubba, and he had kind of a catchphrase. He said, here at Wild Turkey, we like our bourbon bold. And then that was kind of like an over and over, and we'd talk about different aspects of the process or their mash bill or whatnot. And then referencing back to bold, we like our bourbon bold.

Robbie Wagner: [05:03] Yeah, I would agree with that. On the back end, you have a lot of alcohol. It feels like you have a lot of wood. They're not doing anything subtly. It's all like. We're making bourbon. You're going to taste it. But that being said, it's pretty good. I still prefer a rye, but if I were drinking normal whiskey, I don't have any complaints, I don't think, with this one.

Chuck Carpenter: [05:31] Yeah. So the Mash bill is 75% corn, 13% rye, 12% malted barley. So if that is helpful, yeah, I went and looked it up this time, at least as much as I can, just to have some sort of info, and let's see what I can find out. Yeah, here we go. Let me find the normal 101, which also has the exact same mash bill. So this is basically just a single barrel pick of the same mash bill as their normal 101 bourbon.

Robbie Wagner: [06:06] Non-blended.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:08] Yeah, no blends. No blends across barrels. So you get some consistency there. It does tell us what day it was bottled, what barrel number, which Rick house. So it's warehouse A rick seven.

Robbie Wagner: [06:23] For my bottle, I am warehouse G rick 33. So nowhere close.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:33] Right. If we were anywhere close to one another and could do the quote-unquote Pepsi Challenge from one to the other, you technically should be able to taste a difference.

Robbie Wagner: [06:43] Well, people can. I might not, but.

Chuck Carpenter: [06:48] Maybe without the ice, you'll get a little we're going to plan a future where we get together with some Glencairns and just taste things in a more natural way and hopefully with glasses that I don't break. For listeners. Recalling a few episodes ago where we talked about our Norland glasses, I broke one of those. So now I've been very careful about using it very often anymore.

Robbie Wagner: [07:15] Did you break it on one of the podcasts, or was it right before?

Chuck Carpenter: [00:07:19] It was right before. Yeah, we were like I was bringing stuff into my office studio bedroom and had a few things in my hand, and just like, it knocked over and broke. I'm going, to be honest, all too easily. Perhaps I should be more careful. But also, it didn't seem like it was pretty much very much to shatter the outside layer.

Robbie Wagner: [07:44] Well, it sounds to me like Norland should send us one so that you can get the full experience when we do our lots of whiskey tasting.

Chuck Carpenter: [07:52] I wouldn't be opposed. Feel free to email me, Chuck, at shipshape.io. I tweet them, but I don't do that. Tweeting, twitting. I don't twit.

Robbie Wagner:[08:08] Anyway. So I would give this, I think, a seven tentacles. It's pretty good. No complaints for me.

Chuck Carpenter: [08:18] Yeah, agree. Yeah. I'm going to go straight seven with this one, too. I would buy this on a regular basis, easily suggest it. The bottle is nice. I bring it to a party and not look like a cheapo. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I like it better than the Russell's Reserve 10-year, to be honest, but I'm not sure if you've tried that one. We can maybe make that a future tester, but yeah, that's another Wild Turkey product, and it's pretty good. And I think the price point is a little bit lower than this one, so food for thought there in the future.

Robbie Wagner: [08:56] Yeah. I had never had anything but the standard cheap Wild Turkey. I didn't really know the extent of their products until today.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:05] Have you had the rye?

Robbie Wagner: [09:07] No.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:08] Or just the bourbon? Wow. Was it the standard? I think the standard is 80 proof, or maybe it's 90, but it's not 101.

Robbie Wagner: [09:16] Yeah, I mean, it's whatever is the equivalent to all the middle-of-the-line whiskeys.

Chuck Carpenter: [09:24] Got you. We will have to take you on an adventure.

Robbie Wagner: [09:31] Yeah. Speaking of adventures, this week has been a lot. On a good note, we had Ember Conf, which was pretty good. Didn't get to watch all the talks yet, but definitely enjoyed the keynote. With the decade of Ember and all the ups and downs and all of that. Did you catch any of that?

Chuck Carpenter: [09:57] I did not this year, unfortunately, just because I've been a bit disconnected from working with Ember recently. I did not jump on and watch any of the things. I would probably watch a few afterwards. I am curious, though, normally at the end of the keynote, there's some big reveal. I wonder, was that a thing this year? And if so, what was it?

Robbie Wagner: [10:25] I don't think so. I mean, there was a lot of stuff. So there was the normal keynote where Yehuda kind of walked through, like, this is how we started with our releases and talked about how Firefox had a certain release cadence that was, like, kept getting pushed back. Right. So they were like, all right, I think it was like 2004 or seven or, I don't know, some long time ago. And he was like, all right, here's the releases. We're going to do code freezes for these releases. And they missed them, and then they kept pushing it down the line and never making it. So kind of chrome. When they came in and released Chrome, they had more of a let's just ship stuff on a defined cadence, and if something's not ready, it doesn't have to go in this release. Like, we're still going to do a release, but we're not going to wait on all the things. So Ember kind of adopted that. And that's really been the emphasis behind having a release every six weeks and stability without stagnation. And no one has to feel forced to get work done or get a feature out or whatever. It can just go in the next one. And that kind of also goes along with deprecations and things. Like, if you miss the, say, 3.0 deprecations, that's okay. You can just say my deprecation will be removed in 4.0. So yeah, they were basically talking about how their process has been around consistency and not working developers too much. All of us work on this in our free time. Well, minus those that are paid, like Yehuda and Robert Jackson and the heavy hitters, they wanted to have it be easier on the community, consistent. One of the big things they talked about was like back in the 1.13 days, all those deprecations piling up that people had to deal with. And then the switch to Glimmer because their rendering was not up to par with React. And then once they got to Glimmer two, it was like faster than React. And they were just taking you, I won't go through every single thing, but they were basically taking you through all the steps up until now, showing that they've been stable the whole time. They've really increased performance, and that people that haven't tried Ember recently should try all the new stuff out. And then they followed all of that stuff up with Godfrey had a thing where he just pulled up like, here's all the new stuff that's been working on. Like, we got Embroider coming out. We got some of the things we did in Ember Inspector this year where you can see components better. You can inspect their arguments easier, you can turn off and on the debug stuff in templates so your production builds are smaller, and you can opt out of it working with Inspector in production and that kind of thing. And then a lot of things that you've seen in other frameworks. I know I'm rambling here, but like slots, I know they have in Vue. I'm not sure what the equivalent is in React, but where you have a template, and you want to yield to a couple of different places in it, which I guess in React, you would just use JavaScript in each spot to pull in stuff. Right, or is there something for that specific?

Chuck Carpenter: [13:57] Well, no, you can. Is it kind of like outlet, or is it different? Okay, yeah, it just has children. So you just have where children go here. Any child component falls at this point.

Robbie Wagner: [14:14] So instead of like outlet or yield, what this is, is like, you say, yield two equals header, yield two equals footer, whatever, you want to put different content in different spots. So they call that slots in Vue. And I think that's an HTML thing that they're working on, or JavaScript or whoever's in charge of the web these days. We got slots, and slots are this thing where you can inject content into a spot. So we have that now. And we got Glimmer everywhere, tracked properties. I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of cool stuff. I think modifiers were heavily mentioned, and I think things with contextual components before you would yield out. Like you would yield out a bunch of components. Right. So you have a hash that's like the example was a table. So you have like a row or column or different things. You may want to have a lot of that. You yield out, and you consume and use that thing that was yielded out. You can also yield out, like, modifiers and helpers now. So they're just trying to make everything really kind of pass everything you want back and forth, do whatever you want. A little more flexible. Yeah. I will pause my rambling here if you want to weigh in on anything.

Chuck Carpenter: [15:50] No, I mean, that sounds cool. Yeah, I recall contextual components, and that was like a real massive hotness back in two. So obviously, doing a little more with the same ideology across other things to make it more straightforward in terms of the ways that you can have an abstracted component but then apply specifics as needed.

Robbie Wagner: [16:17] Yeah, there's also some cool stuff which, again, it's hard to compare with React.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:24] Right.

Robbie Wagner: [16:24] Because React has like straight-up JavaScript in a lot of spots, but Ember has this thing that was released like a week or two ago called Glint, which is lenting for Glimmer, I guess is what Glint came from. But it's more like TypeScript for templates. So you can know if this dot foo is a number or not in your template.

Chuck Carpenter: [16:52] Got you. Right.

Robbie Wagner: [16:53] So that's coming out, and template imports are coming out. So like, really emphasis on making templates the bomb in general.

Chuck Carpenter: [17:03] Interesting. Yeah. Because obviously, in the React world, it's just JSX, which you have TSX, and then there's kind of no boundaries there. You can apply the same rules to lent and enforce types within your templates themselves. But of course, the problems with that getting really overly complex and terse. And then that's where people want to have higher-order components to split some of those up. And then, in the next world, you have pages instead to sort of play that role as both your route and higher-order component. But then, in the wild west, that is React. You can combine all of those strategies potentially.

Robbie Wagner: [17:52] Yeah. Or you can just use Next because it has so much cool stuff, like something I've been doing a lot in Nuxt. Not to be confused with Next is using their image optimization library, and you can do like a query param and say like question mark WebP. Right. And that will convert all of your images to WebP for you so that everything that's shipped out is just WebP format instead of like a JPEG or whatever, which I think I haven't done a ton Next myself, but I know they do image optimization, so I'm guessing things like that happen just magically with Next.

Chuck Carpenter: [18:34] Yeah, so they have like two levels of that. So they have a similar thing just for general image optimization, but they also have kind of on the fly optimization, like at the request level. But you only get all of that for free out of the box if you use Vercel because Vercel turns routes or pages into serverless functions. But I was just reading a thing yesterday, today, one of those very recently, and it was an article about creating a serverless function to serve that same purpose for a Next application that might be server-side generated or rendered on the fly. And then, you can use this serverless function to do your image optimization like one step further.

Robbie Wagner: [19:26] So, is that what they do behind the scenes? If you deploy to Vercel? They just have a function that you don't see that switches the image.

Chuck Carpenter: [19:35] Basically. Absolutely that. Is that their serverless hosting is structured specifically for Next applications? So it splits them in that way for efficiency sake and bundle sizes and all that kind of stuff. And then also when you're doing things like taking advantage of their static site generation, then you'll get some of those, you get access to all those things because they know how to hook into it. As long as you follow the Next way, then you get all that for free.

Robbie Wagner: [20:10] Yeah, that makes sense.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:11] And it's interesting that Netlify recently released Next-specific deployments, but I don't know if they're offering similar feature sets.

Robbie Wagner: [20:23] Yeah, I saw that they were pushing more on serverless functions in general, but I didn't see that they were saying Next was like a first-class citizen there.

Chuck Carpenter: [20:34] Yeah, this is very recently, within the last week or two, I believe they released that. They're embracing that as a framework-specific deployment strategy. But yeah, they have the whole serverless functions as well, which makes those really approachable for a lot of people. And I think like coming from a front-end JavaScript world might find that a lot more approachable than the AWS path, which isn't too crazy once you get into it. The serverless framework is pretty strong and using services like Seed. Run, which we do for our API, that takes some of the guesswork out of it, so shout out to them. But when you have these other services like Netlify kind of like building on top of that and giving you a really friendly interface for that, I think that's going to really help spread serverless computing.

Robbie Wagner: [21:32] Yeah, definitely. I mean, right now, I think it's just, it's not super new, but it's slow to gain traction, I guess. So there isn't really a defined easy way for all the things. So once it gets more mass adoption, there will be a lot more sugar on top, I guess. Make it easier for everybody.

Chuck Carpenter: [21:53] Exactly. I think. And that's the term right there, mass adoption. Right. Like, it's had a strong framework for a while. It's been around for a number of years and had a strong following of people that are digging in and utilizing it in great ways. But, yeah, its mass adoption is now really being seen across a bunch of different industries. I've read a few different articles about serverless adoption and different use cases, and that seems to be growing and growing.

Robbie Wagner: [22:25] Yeah. You know what else has mass adoption? Buying Porsches.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:33] Actually. Yeah, it's interesting. And it's Porsche, by the way. I'm not German.

Robbie Wagner: [22:40] But I don't own one, so Porsche.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:44] Yeah. America, I'm here. What are you trying to make me change the way I say the word for yeah?

Robbie Wagner: [22:53] Kentucky spirit. It's Porsche.

Chuck Carpenter: [22:57] Right. I'm very torn culturally. I am both German, from the Cincinnati area of northern Kentucky. So there's just all these things tugging at me around these, but so I'll try and lean in on one or so. Yeah, the Porsche market, secondary market, is pretty insane. So, spoiler alert. I have one. Had a few of them over the years. Nothing overly fancy. It's called the 996 model. It's 20 years old, but it's fun. And I don't drive very much, so it works. Yeah. And I was kind of I'm part of the Porsche Club of America. I like to look at cars for fun. And I have friends that I discuss that topic with. Perhaps that's in a whole other podcast. I don't know. But yeah, the secondary market for people getting in the barrier to entry is just growing and growing. Like sites like Bringatrailer.com, you're seeing these cars that used to sell for 10, 15, $20,000 going for $10,000 over what they were a year ago. And then, of course, even more, desirable cars, newer models, where specific models are going for, like, double what they were just a couple of years ago. And I have some friends who have been wanting to buy, like, an 80s or 90s air-cooled Porsche. And now their barrier to entry on that has really grown because it's 20 $30,000 over what they would have paid just two years ago. I don't know if this is the result of stonks or crypto growth or whatever else, but there's an excess of cash being flown into the luxuries market or the collector's market, and everything seems to be growing. So that's one facet, and I know that we sort of highlighted this last week, is that you and I have very different ideas of what we enjoy in automobiles, but we have the fact that we like cars together but.

Robbie Wagner: [25:02] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [25:02] Then it starts to go.

Robbie Wagner: [25:04] I mean, I wouldn't say that we enjoy different things, necessarily, just that we're not 100% aligned. Like, we can probably both agree that we like a car with a nice sound, like a good exhaust of some sort, and has some kind of power to it. But I like to be able to open my engine up and just bolt stuff on there. Like, oh, I want to swap out this manifold. Okay, that's fine. I want to swap my gears out or anything that's like a bolt-on improvement. Get a little more horsepower. A little more acceleration is super easy with things like a Mustang or, like, you know, American cars. Whereas a Porsche, you've got to, like, pull the whole, like, seat out. Like, find the engine somewhere. Like you can't, it's not a tinkerer's car. It's more of a, like.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:05] I want to get your point of reference because.

Robbie Wagner: [26:08] Okay.

Chuck Carpenter: [26:09] Like I said, I've had a few of them. And my current one, I actually bought this one because it was inexpensive and because I could do some things myself so I can put an intake on it, already has a custom exhaust. I changed out my shifter to put it in a short shift. I changed the wheels. So I've done some improvements like that myself. On my spring cleaning agenda is actually to pull the front bumper so that I can clean the radiators and touch up some of the plastics and stuff that are sun-faded. So, yeah, I wanted to get into that. I know this has some electronics, but nothing too crazy. I've had in the past like 60s and 70s Porsche. And then my last one that was newer was like a 2008 911 4S, but pre-kids. Of course, that one I probably was more hesitant to do very much with. So I'm wondering, A, when you're talking about going behind seats or whatever else, so are you referencing the Boxster? Because that's a mid-engine car. That does require you to either you could access some things behind the seats. Otherwise, you have to lift the car because there's no engine access other than underneath, for the most part.

Chuck Carpenter: [27:26] I guess I have two questions.

Robbie Wagner: [27:28] Yeah. So I guess I have two answers. One is, yeah, that was kind of my point of reference, was like Rob was talking about to even change the oil in his boxter. You have to take all the seats out. And I don't know a bunch of stuff, but I was kind of like. Obviously, they're all different. There's different models, but the engines are in the back on all of them. Right. So isn't there less space to work in there either way? Or is it still pretty accessible?

Chuck Carpenter: [28:07] No, that's a great question. So 911s, everything's in the back, seven eighteen s or any like, Cayman Boxster would have engines in the middle. It's a mid-engine car. And then Panameras or older ones, like 928, 944s, those are front-engine cars. So there are some models that do the front engine, although there are some purists that don't love that it belongs in the back. I don't know. I'm not didactic around those specifics. Which is, as a side note, why I really want a Taycon. Even though it doesn't have the growl of an internal combustion engine, there's something about the Porsche experience that even when I doubt them, like when I test-drove a Macan, I was like, SUV, Porsche? No way. This is dumb. It was amazing. It was great. So I kind of trust them, like how they're going to go into these other things. But yes, so it is true that a rear engine, and theirs specifically, does have a bit less room. You can get to a lot just with some easy jacks or just like a ramp popping just the top. Like you can do a decent amount of things. Like you don't need a lift necessarily to change the oil on a 911, and it's great, great granddaddy is a Volkswagen Bug. And that's basically how I learned how to work on cars, was in a Volkswagen Bug because if you break something, it costs $15 to replace. So it's not a big deal. But yeah, you can do all of that without lifting, without dropping the engine, without like the Boxster is kind of a unique experience in all those things, and it takes away some of it. I actually had a 914, which is also a mid-engine Porsche from the 70s, and you could access some things over top. It at least had a top hatch that gave you a little bit of room because it wasn't a convertible. It was a target top. So you had some under and some over, but still was a pretty tight space. I don't know. I mean, I guess it just depends. There you go. It depends on the car you pick. Depends on the year, depends on how much you're willing to tinker with. I'm definitely not going to drop and rebuild an engine, no matter whether it's a Mustang or Porsche or whatever.

Robbie Wagner: [30:26] Yeah, fair enough. What year did you say your Porsche was?

Chuck Carpenter: [30:32] My current one is a 2000.

Robbie Wagner: [30:35] Okay. I was going to say 2000 is probably new enough, but do you do much with tuning and actually fiddling with the computers or?

Chuck Carpenter: [30:49] Not yet, but I've done some research. I actually looked into building a Raspberry Pi that you could plug into the OBD two setup and get data, or there are certain ones where you can kind of hack your way in and do some tuning. I'm a little mixed about that. I'm not sure it's interesting to me, but I think there's a time commitment I'm not prepared for with kids this young. But you can do that.

Robbie Wagner: [31:19] You can totally mess everything up.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:21] Yeah, exactly.

Robbie Wagner: [31:22] I had a tuner for my Mustang that Bluetooth to my phone, which sounds cool and easy, right? Until, like, mid-flashing a different tune or whatever, it stops and doesn't connect to the Bluetooth, and your car just doesn't work right.

Chuck Carpenter: [31:41] You had to show it to the dealer and have them reflash it and charge you a bunch of money?

Robbie Wagner: [31:45] Well, no, I just spent many hours fixing it, but it was pretty annoying. So if anyone is looking to tune their car, do not go with Bluetooth, do not recommend. But anyway, it was kind of cool because the idea with it being Bluetooth was you could have your three or four, however many tunes you want, and you could say like, all right, I'm going on a long drive. I want fuel economy so I can swap it, and then I want performance, so I'll put that on. That part was cool because as you're setting your phone up with your music for your drive or whatever, you can also just swap the tune out real fast. But it's better in theory than it is in actual execution.

Chuck Carpenter: [32:29] Yeah, it's sort of how a lot of people will tell you, like WiFi networks in general, they come with a lot of cons because if you just plug into an Ethernet, you don't have interruptions, disconnects, security concerns. You have a closed network at that point versus a potential open network.

Robbie Wagner: [32:49] Yeah. Was there a commercial or just something in like social media recently where people were like, do you guys know you could plug into the internet and a big thing now you know what's really fast and does well? Plugging in. Oh, yeah, that's crazy.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:07] Yeah, I mean, WiFi Six is pretty awesome, and yada, yada, yada. But if you just, it's probably cheaper too to run cat six all over your house.

Robbie Wagner: [33:18] Oh, it definitely is. But yeah, WiFi Six is, like, I just switched to the same router but WiFi Six, and it was like a third faster, so definitely worth it.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:31] Yeah, I got a massive speed bump out of that as well. Highly encouraged by you.

Robbie Wagner: [33:37] Yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [33:37] WiFi six was legit bumped. I'm lucky enough to have fiber in my neighborhood and bumped that up for the same price. Which is so strange how providers do that. They just secretly provide packages to try to lure new people. So unless you're looking on a regular basis, you don't know.

Robbie Wagner: [33:56] Well, they're also not going to give you better things without you asking for it. Right, they're not going to be like, oh, you're paying X, and it now gets like this speed. Why would we give that to you when you would have to look it up first?

Chuck Carpenter: [34:12] Yeah, they're not really incentivized otherwise because you would have to switch to another provider completely may not have the same service options. Yeah, there's if you're lucky enough to even have a second service provider for these things. I have two in my neighborhood, and you have your plain old cable and then happen to have fiber as an alternative. And, of course, I'm going to pick that. It's just apples and oranges. But yeah, I guess they'll collect my money, and I'm sure they did. For quite some time, at whatever previous speed I was at before, I looked and got the free upgrade.

Robbie Wagner: [34:52] Yeah, that's one downside. We've been looking at houses in the country, and they're like, yeah, we have internet, but we also have put an application in for is it Skylink? That's like the thing that Elon's been working on or whatever?

Chuck Carpenter: [35:08] Yes, that's it. That's exactly what I was going to bring up.

Robbie Wagner: [35:10] Yeah. So it's like, yeah, our internet is probably not good because we already have an application in for this.

Chuck Carpenter: [35:17] There's an alternative too. And potentially, if you do end up moving to a rural community, you might be able to get involved with that community and advocate for some technology bumps. So my example is that my wife's aunt and uncle live in Montana, and they were in Bozeman, and they moved out to a more rural community like an hour and a half away. And somehow, through their community, they were able to get federal grants to bring in high-speed fiber all over the place. So they have like 20 acres living right by the mountains, looks like. I mean, I think they have like hardware store and a convenience store, and like two restaurants in town. There's not a lot going on there, but they have high-speed fiber. That was very impressive. And she said that they got it from a federal grant that put it in all over the neighborhood to have them connected to services and society and whatnot. So it goes to show you that. There is potential to upgrade that circumstance.

Robbie Wagner: [36:18] Well, I guess it depends also how much land you have. Some of the places, I mean, they're out of our budget, but they have like 90 acres or like a lot. And once you get past, I think ten is pretty manageable to run lines, but like 90 is pretty high.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:41] Go ahead, you finish yours. I don't want to cut you off.

Robbie Wagner: [36:47] If everyone has like 90 acres, right, then you have a big problem with logistics.

Chuck Carpenter: [36:54] Yeah, but if you can get termination points down the road right here's the main road, and there are fiber termination points right to there, and then it's sort of like it's on you to figure it out from there. You can run your own line all the way down, or you can decide to have an access point there that's point to point, and yeah, while that's over the air and there's probably some loss, you have a lot of control as to what physical impediments are there and all kinds of things. So even just offering that, and maybe that's what they did, I didn't get into the specifics. I can't imagine they ran fiber to everyone's home who could be like 2 miles down off of a normal road or a dirt road even. I doubt they had the resources to bring it all the way to actual termination. But providing that in general and then being able to bring it to an accessible point to all these people. And if you have 90 acres, you probably have the ability to take it the last mile, too, though.

Robbie Wagner: [37:59] Yeah, that's true. I mean, I guess I didn't think about just run it on all the main roads, and then everyone figures it out from there.

Chuck Carpenter: [38:07] Well, let me take you down a little story. I know this is your favorite part, whatever happened in my past life. So after I concluded my career as a blackjack dealer, at least the first round, I did this twice, but I decided like, okay, I'm going to go down a different career path. And I was involved in technology a bunch at that point. I was actually building with some friends of mine. We were just building custom Windows computers for people. Like, first I got involved with them and was building my own custom computers and thought that was really cool. I never actually got, like, what is it, a plus plus certification or something that you're supposed to do. Didn't actually do that, but worked with him, who was and was doing a bunch of hardware work and got involved with a startup here. That was an ISP, and it was an ISP for two use cases. One would be like in the middle of the city where they're not running new internet lines. Lots of places had to still deal with dial-up. And so they would take T1 connections and run point to point over the air internet to startups and then also rural things, similar thing, find a T1 connection that was at a high enough point, put a huge antenna there, and then that signal down provided this wireless internet. It was like very early days, pre-satellite internet kind of setup. Problematic for lots of reasons because weather can cause issues here and whatever else. Yeah. The context here is that's how I have any knowledge whatsoever about creating point-to-point Internet access points or Internet-like access grids is that you can have this line with a really fast connection to it and put a huge antenna out that sends your signal, and then you'll have these directional antennas that are directly pointed at that, which kind of make that connection and give you, actually, a pretty decent, kind of fast connection. But it can be problematic. And I don't know what the technology is now because I think that would have been like 2004 maybe, something like that, I don't know. It's coming up on early days. It was the first company website I ever worked on that was like legit for one company as their internet person making sites.

Robbie Wagner: [40:41] 2004, like DSL days.

Chuck Carpenter: [40:46] Right. Yeah. So DSL was coming along, but not everybody had access to it. And in the inner city, there was a whole bunch of problems there, and then in rural areas. So maybe it was 2003. Trying to think 2003 2004. 2004 Sounds about right about the first time where I decided, no, I'm going to leave the casino for a while and get into more of this technology stuff. I've been doing some websites, like just more one-offs and I call them brochure sites, that kind of thing, like turning Photoshop designs into tables, into HTML.

Robbie Wagner: [41:22] Did you use frames or no frames?

Chuck Carpenter: [41:27] Yeah, that's a good question. I think no frames. I don't think anything. Yeah, I don't know. I can remember dealing with frames, but I don't know if it was like editing an existing one with side projects or the company site had that. But I mean, it's all a nightmare. So yeah, point-to-point internet access is a thing and a possibility. I'm sure modern technology would make it better, but even more so, if somebody brought fiber lines down my street and I had a big farm, I'd probably pay the money to run that to my house.

Robbie Wagner: [42:02] Oh, 100%. We're talking to you Underline. Bring us some fiber in Middleburg, Virginia. Thanks.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:09] That's true. Yeah. You have some connections.

Robbie Wagner: [42:11] What? Yeah, I don't think I have connections to actually get fiber run anywhere, but yeah.

Chuck Carpenter: [42:20] Here's what I envision for you. You have a desire to move to Middleburg. Eventually, you become the mayor of Middleburg.

Robbie Wagner: [42:29] Could be. I mean, I went to get our business license in Middleburg the other day, and everyone was super cool. I thought it was going to have a lot of bureaucracy and take a little bit of time because I got there, and they were like, oh, you're missing this form, and this guy needs to talk to you, or whatever. And it's like, okay, I guess I'll have to figure that out. And they're like, oh, no, we'll just call him, and he'll walk down the hall, and we'll figure it all out. They were all super nice. And then I'm not sure if the guy that came in is the mayor or not, but someone that's like on council, because there's a council room in the back that you can tell, is a council room came in and had a huge Great Dane who was just saying hi to everybody, which was kind of cool. And then he goes in the back, and they close the doors in the council room. So they were like, either he's the mayor or someone on council, or they were doing something but seemed like a pretty cool place to be. I would not be opposed to something like that, but I don't know.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:41] Put a pin in it. You got some time to work on your political career first becoming a resident of said. I call it a very interesting bubble. Virginia bubble.

Robbie Wagner: [43:55] Yeah, it's also.

Chuck Carpenter: [43:55] I enjoy Middleburg.

Robbie Wagner: [43:57] It's tough because some places with a Middleburg address are like 30 minutes from Middleburg, but then places in the plains or somewhere nearby are like five minutes away. So do you prioritize getting that vanity zip code or just somewhere nearby? I don't know. We haven't decided on that yet.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:22] I have opinions, as I do with many things or everything, some might say. Yeah, I would think that everything for me is like quality of life for proximity. So do you want that zip code? I mean, I guess you have to be paying taxes into the system to become mayor. I don't know. I don't know the logistics there, but as your starter pack, you can just be close and get to know people and then eventually opt into the zip code.

Robbie Wagner: [44:50] Yeah, that's true.

Chuck Carpenter: [44:53] I'll be your campaign manager.

Robbie Wagner: [44:57] Okay. Yeah. I don't know. We'll take the business there first and take it one step at a time but seems like real estate is crazy right now, so not going to be anytime soon.

Chuck Carpenter: [45:12] Yeah, it's almost in the realm of the luxury goods market. We've gotten some kind of soft offers here. I don't know, people mailed letters saying they want to be in the neighborhood, and if us or anyone around us that we know wants to sell, you get like the Redfin estimates and offers and whatnot a bunch. So, yeah, it's a very strange place, but the problem that we have is we like our neighborhood, so even if we sold our home at some potential profit, we'd be buying into this market as well. And then you're spending more to get something very similar. So it doesn't really make sense.

Robbie Wagner: [45:55] Yeah, I think the key is just find a place you like at a price that's okay, and it's all you can really ask for because right now it's really hot, but it could crash tomorrow. We don't know what's going to happen. We're just being patient, and we assume it will probably come down at some point because an increase of like 10% to 15% every year is not sustainable. Like houses will be like, oh, you got 50 million for this tiny house? No. So, yeah, it's got to level out, and or I guess inflation will just run rampant, and everyone will make like four times what they do now.

Chuck Carpenter: [46:44] Yeah, well, so, I mean, you've covered two very broad topics that I don't think we'll ever seriously touch in this podcast, which is real estate and economics.

Robbie Wagner: [46:59] We're going to steer away from those. We're already boring and nerdy enough with our car talk and web talk.

Chuck Carpenter: [47:11] Unless you want it to be something that I'm either not knowledgeable or very good at.

Robbie Wagner: [47:18] Okay, yeah, we kind of went off the rails here from our initial talking about cars, so I don't know, we could just wrap it up, I guess. So thanks, everybody. Really appreciate you guys listening. We kind of had a bunch of random stuff this time, so we're definitely interested in some suggestions on what you'd like to hear about, or if there's whiskeys you would like us to try, let us know. Definitely, please subscribe if you've been enjoying this. Subscriptions really help us out, and catch you guys next time.