A Conversation with... William from User Friendly

User Friendly William from User Friendly stops by to discuss how the show started, where it's going, and, of course, various rabbit holes along the way. User Friendly https://youtube.com/live/hY8kANKUteE Bad AI Transcript Hey, everybody, and welcome to this conversation with, would you go by Bill? I have William here. So William from UserFriendly. William or Bill. I mean, either way, people call me worse, so either helps, but usually Bill. But Bill, okay. So Bill from UserFriendly. And I was going to butcher your last name here. Is it, would I say Sickens or Sykens? No, it's Sickens. You got it spot on. Oh, okay. Because sometimes whenever you have the, you know, Sometimes people have a long vowel on their name for whatever reason. So I didn't want to get it wrong. No worries. Spot on. But Bill has a program called User Friendly, which you can find here at userfriendlyshow.com. It's also on the radio in Portland and Seattle. Am I right? That's correct. Yeah.Oh, wow. So that was just out of memory. Go figure. I should have looked that up beforehand, but I didn't. So I was just yanking it out of my head. No worries. You had it right. So why look it up? That's right. So but I've been on Bill's show a few times and I thought, would it be fun to sit down and talk a little bit about his journey to doing these kind of things? So my first question, Bill, would be user friendly. How did it start? Well, you know, it's kind of a fun story. We started back in 2013. So this is our 12th year doing the show. And the funny thing about it is, is this whole thing started in my kitchen. At the time, I lived in Reno, Nevada, and we would have friends over every week to do tabletop role playing. And one night we got done and, you know, somebody said this would make a goodtopic for doing a podcast at the time, but podcasting was really a new thing back in the day. So it's like, well, okay, well, you know, we'll think about it. And then I worked in the, you know, business community and everything like that. And kind of threw the idea around and had one of the local radio stations come back and say, Hey, well, if you want to do technology at the time, that's what it was. We would love to give you a go. So a few weeks later, I end up with a schedule and we're on the air on a very small station. But still, you know, it's where we started. Half hour format at the time. And I think we did eight or nine episodes of that. And that was how we got started. So on the air in Reno? In Reno, yeah. Yeah. At the time. Oh, that's cool. So you were talking about role playing game and then you're saying thatbut how did you get from role-playing games into technology as a general thing? Cause it seems, I mean, there's some connection there, but it's not direct. Oh, it's not even indirect. I mean, I guess today you could argue a connection maybe with some of the tools and stuff, but at the time, no, it was definitely very much two different things. And that's why it's also a little bit odd how that came into being. So a little bit of a background on that. I've since ago, 1998 have run a technology company and, um, as a career as a software engineer and do some things like that in addition to our show. So that's where the technology end of it came from. That's what I was kind of known for in the area. But it was and is a very niche audience. There's a lot of people that are interested in technology, but it is very specific. And in today's world, doing a podcast, it would work a lot better just because anybody around the world that is interested can listen that you're not limited to who happens to tune in on the air that week.Right. But what happened is, is like i say, we're new role-playing games and, uh, on a hobby side, do cosplay and go to the comic cons and all this kind of stuff. And we were at a comic-con that was put on at the time by a steve wozniak in san Jose, California. Um, that was a comic-con that combined pop culture and techn...