iPad Workday, How we're working through COVID & Star Trek

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they'll help you to get to the scripts for the digital Express inner workings.

I had an interesting day is today. So I was very keen to share with you today. So I applied for service before before the laughter and then that I was moved because all the facilities were locked were closed. So so they gave me an option to book it again. When they reopened, so I booked it from  Friday, not realizing that last Friday was a holiday. So they called me on Thursday saying oh, no, you can't do that we have to come in next week. So, simply on any day work for you as well, doesn't really matter to me. So just pick a day and I'll come. So well, we've got your Wednesday, Thursday, and actually we've got Tuesday open as well. That's cool I'll take Tuesday. So I put it in my diary, as you do. And Monday comes along, and I get a phone call about half past four from the guy saying, just reminding you that which appointment tomorrow and please don't be him for nine o'clock because we don't want to have a queue because you're trying to practice social distancing and yadda yadda yadda. So that's fine. Normally I would have put something in my diary, but I didn't. So great nine o'clock. The next day. My wife shouts at me aren't you supposed to take the car in? I'm sure. I haven't. So I grabbed my iPad. That's all I've got it to her and I grab my phone number. I'm running late one way now says no problem come when you can. No Big deal. So I just I just race it, run out the door, get the car and drive it. And it's an hour's drive to get there. And I'm supposed to be on a call at 10. So he hasn't arriving at the facility, I'm starting this phone call, which is fine because I just basically give them the keys and I go, and I found a place that then serves as wiped down where you can work and are seated work the whole day market, which was quite an interesting feeling, because it's all I had, I didn't have a laptop with me. And then I've just got the new or the new ish keyboard, the magic keyboard, which is magic. It's really, really nice. But I was able to do almost everything I needed to an iPad or anything got a bit funky was I was trying to do something on a server using an RDP session. And it does. I don't know if it's the iPad or if it's the app. I don't know what it is but the touch interface in the mouse, don't work. So you almost have to drag the mouse cursor inside the screen to go click on buttons. And there's not exactly always how to, in some cases, you're dragging to the left hand screen because that mouse is on the right and you got to kind of get it to the right position. And the tapping on the side because you can't tap on the button. Because he was confused. I was I was very painful. And then I found someone who said, Listen, I'm struggling to do this. Can you just can you just log in and do it? But other than that, I pretty much was able to do Excel, Word, PowerPoint work, you know, emails, phone calls, usual things on my iPad, and the battery lasted Yeah, I wouldn't say last the day. It lasted a good six hours, seven hours for the keyboard. Which is not too bad. I was quite impressed.

Heather Bicknell  3:45  
Yeah. Do you have a pro or is it just a normal? Yeah.

Ryan Purvis  3:48  
Okay. So, so we're in another story on its own. So when the the first iPad pros came back with a pencil, I was very keen on getting one but I just didn't like that pencil. Were yet To sort of pull the cap off and plug it into your Thunderbolt or whatever is a LAN port or there was a bit silly and I said you know my my sort of clumsiness I'm a snapper thing into I'm going to break the lightning adapter in the power socket you know I can do that kind of stuff very easily so I so plus I didn't really have 1200 pounds of 1500 pounds at the time to splooge device. So what else did I do is I'd wait for the next one to come out and if that if they fix that thing. Then I will I'll do it. So when they came up with the the 2019 yeah 11  inch on the 12.9. I went and had a look at them. And and I'll tell you I still sat there debating it because it was about when you boy once you bought the device and the apple care and the I've just covered on the keyboard He could have sold 12 1300 pounds for the limit inch. And it's another to go for this talk with nine. It's another 200 on top of that, and then also I don't buy this this Fiji with a mobile, the mobile peaceful things that I was just the Wi Fi version because I can hotspot on my phone. So I'm an iframe, good month. And I tell you the thing that is solid for me was I was standing with the apple guy. And he tapped the pencil on the screen and I read straight into notes. But like in three seconds, not even realistic. And I was like, wow, that's exactly what I want. Because I've tried I had the lenovo x one carbon, the tablet as well. And to try and get you the whole point trying to get in or get away from red pen and paper was to interdigital was that it had to be as quick as picking up a piece of paper to write. You needed to be able to pick up the stylus and write on the screen. And that thing was terrible. I mean, you look here in minutes, not even seconds. Yeah So this was you know the thing i mean i don't i wouldn't take notes on my on my iPad all the time I still have posted some and cards and like next to me when I want to write something down and draw something, but there's those days where I just want to draw something quickly into notes and I can just tap and go What am I good at? Like you

say, Oh, that was my story. I was I was so impressed. I was able to do all this work on my bed alone. I'm so impressed.

Heather Bicknell  6:33  
Should I contact apple and they can make a commercial?

Ryan Purvis  6:37  
They could they could, you know, for those guys forget the carpet was literally describing one device running out the door. I mean, yes, there was Wi Fi there which helped them and I was able to be a hotspot and they were pretty killed my phone because I had no charges. That was the only mistake that I made. I in when I was thinking about what this to discuss today was having Their technology go bag. So So having like a little green shoulder bag, which I've now put all the cables in charges etc which is now my go bag, because then easily I can throw in an iPad or laptop into if I need to try just for iPads, iPhones and a Beretta power brick. And it's ready to go. So if I have this problem again, which you don't expect to have in the middle of a lockdown it's the backpacked through these go to these iPad. I mean, I've heard of some guys have six second iPads in the bag. But I think I need a second.

Unknown Speaker  7:42  
Let's see how this very prepared.

Heather Bicknell  7:46  
Yeah, that makes me think of I know, I think it was the the first pro that came out or you know, this whole debate about whether iPads can serve, you know, replace the laptop or kind of serve as a primary user. Advice. You know, it depends on your your work style and what you need to do. But I definitely it sounds like it fulfilled, you know most of what you needed to do and that one day at work.

Ryan Purvis  8:11  
Also, I would almost say this is equivalent to a Chromebook experience or something to that effect. And I do think that the previous iPad Pro, it was probably a smaller set of people that could use it to replace the laptop or desktop. Whereas I think it's now grown to a lot more people. And you only need an iPad Pro, I think you could probably get away with it with the iPad. And I think this is what they've been talking about for a while with this new iOS and fork when I've taken iPads away from the phones in operating system, because you can definitely see things that are better designed for the iPad, that you don't get on the phone and vice versa. And so an example yesterday, it's an updated spreadsheet, and I had to edit some HTML. I was able to put it Side by side and work on them, which I could never have done on my phone, obviously. And previous versions of iPad, you couldn't do that really well either. I mean, salt is not by any means as good as the experience on a Mac or on a Windows desktop. So there's still going to be a lot of more mature, but it was doable. And the choice so it was do does add another thing dimension which which are, which didn't exist, until really, this was the least latest iOS update was the mouse. You can do it kind of as a hack, you can turn on the accessibility features. And then you have this big white.it sits on the corner of the screen until you enable the Bluetooth mouse and then that becomes a pointer and it was this big thick, dotted view here on the screen and you can click around and do stuff. But now that you've gotten out with a keyboard and then mouse over a small dot that looks perfectly typical Apple which is me Are all the gestures you get off automatic trackpad. So your gestures work as you your whatever. I haven't played with this too much. What I liked about the Bluetooth Mouse Mouse in comparison is is yet four buttons on mine. You can program those to do things by taking a screenshot or go back to the homescreen go into your settings, that sort of stuff, which makes it quite quite powerful compared to Windows device, which is I don't really compare them. But those shortcuts are harder to get to sometimes sometimes it's keyboard shortcuts and it's your machine searched for in Windows then you can go directly to your ago, just a weird difference, but I carry particular so you're gonna say something like that? Sure.

Heather Bicknell  10:45  
No, I'd say and I was just gonna say no, from the consumer side that you know, I have members of my own family who don't have, you know, any laptops or desktops anymore. They're all on iPad. Particularly my dad, he's a retired physician. So he got used to using the iPad in the hospital and then he just, he loves it, he got my grandma and one she loves it. I think the touchscreen is really kind of easy for her to navigate, but most of the time, it's fine until they you know, I'm there it contact now. So if they can't manage to print off of the iPad, or you know, neither of them have pros, but you know, there's little quirks here and there that if it becomes your primary device, even as a just normal consumer, there are things that you might expect to be able to do that just aren't there.

Ryan Purvis  11:41  
Yes, weird things. I mean, like I was trying to do to get familiar so and and I looked around and bought Apple app, which was kind of you know, it's good and it's frustrating, as good as the awesome apps but they limited and your challenges because it's it's not a homogeneous environment. muchness like I wanted something that had OneDrive integration, so that I could just work on the files in OneDrive and then tell the developers really or even in teams, let me just work in a day. And that didn't work. So I had to find it out there. Let me work on the files, and I had to copy them to locally to the iPad, to the storage, and then I had to copy that floppy storage back to OneDrive. So that could have been frustrating. And that's not everyone's gonna have that problem. And to be fair, I wasn't gonna spend hours trying to find the best HTML there was it was good enough to kind of in a pinch, which was get the job done.

Heather Bicknell  12:41  
How was your car?

Ryan Purvis  12:43  
Fun. That was the probably that was the most productive days I've had in a while away. Because I wasn't at home there was no distractions. Boring. You know what's up so the wife and they're so magical, quite a lot done. And I was in a little corner The dealership which was no one in so it was quiet so I could do phone calls I could do a pace around was like you don't know how to work harder when you get your hotel room then you got all day yourself you just get stuff done.

Heather Bicknell  13:15  
Yeah Who would have thought being at the car dealership would be a relaxing getaway and 20 honey

Ryan Purvis  13:24  
So yeah, I must admit that none of us sort of be in front of the laptop I'm debating I get her an iPad only with a keyboard and see if that doesn't meet her needs because she just as email and and the odd get a lot of social media stuff but the odd PowerPoint or Word document which you can you can get away with those.

Unknown Speaker  13:46  
Yeah.

Ryan Purvis  13:48  
As the other thing that was on my mind yesterday was obviously there isn't this fine line of welcoming windows virtual been around for a while. I was wondering if you'd seen anything about maybe a Google Cloud or Amazon cloud offering that it was competitive? Was it really earning players in the market at the moment?

Heather Bicknell  14:16  
Isn't there VMware on AWS? I don't know. I know, you know, I think or, you know, I think workspaces, Amazon workspaces. But I mean, I think that, you know, uniqueness of the full windows 10, you know, desktop experience. I don't think that's, you know, no one else can do that. So, from that perspective, you know, I think they're just competing with the existing gas providers.

Ryan Purvis  14:50  
So just something I was wondering about, because it would have been quite a lot of pressure on a Lowe's environments. Some of these companies, not having planned for working from home And not necessarily in the capacity to deliver care that maybe they don't have laptops or they don't have Terminal Services set up so their next best option was good Wi Fi or, or something similar?

Heather Bicknell  15:15  
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people talking about it. I'd be curious to know, you know, actual adoption rates? Hmm. Because I think, you know, I know a lot of these conversations about should you, you know, should you turn to VDI or Dass, to help with this throughout work scenario? I think a lot of it sort of depends on are you doing those things already? Because if you're not the complexity of getting started is is a barrier.

Ryan Purvis  15:45  
Well, yeah, so So, I mean, what I'm saying is, if you wait up to set up a terminal service environment or to go and buy hold on laptops and configure them, that time, cost, knowledge barrier might be just as much as if you said, Look, let's just go spin up a pool, in WD. Let's go and get a machine. But let's give it out to a couple of users and see, I mean, you're probably looking at less time to do that than the other ones. Because the lead time because the lead times and, and building our servers and testing capacity or Lycosa because in theory, the whole web the story well, it's meant to be done for you mince between me in some sense. So yeah.

Heather Bicknell  16:30  
Yeah, the management plane, you know, sort of gets, you know, taken care of by Microsoft on the back end brokers and stuff.

Ryan Purvis  16:39  
So I just wanted to say, well,

Unknown Speaker  16:41  
I've definitely seen it talked about

Heather Bicknell  16:45  
Yeah, I just don't I mean, I there's so many to me, there's so many. You know, I read, I read the analyst research. I read the Gartner I see the projections about you know, by 2023 So I think it's about so like 24% of workers are remote right now, the prediction is that by 2023, that will be 50, closer to 50%. And some are even saying that that's a conservative estimate. I'm assuming that accounts for part time remote work, but I'm not sure. I think there's just a lot that people are, are busy doing the things right now not necessarily reporting on what they're doing, or I'm not seeing, you know, any kind of reflection on it yet. So it'll be interesting kind of when we do a post mortem on this experience to see like what solutions people ended up really turning to.

Ryan Purvis  17:45  
Yeah, we just say, You're right. I think there's a little bit of panic. But it's a lot of pressure to be to keep things going possible. So you're probably finding this loss of interest. Want to step back and look at the boot picture? I mean it was now that's starting to relax some of the lockdowns, it obviously needs you need organizations to change the building's net to compensate and it also drives more pressure on the people that has to do so. Yeah makes you wonder why don't get us off of this when and we're always a moment to sit back and have a pause. can look at this. Oh, no. No, it does no one knows

Unknown Speaker  18:34  
what it I'm glad

Ryan Purvis  18:36  
that I got it. gonna wake ups. I

Heather Bicknell  18:39  
was. I was just wondering what your company you know, you guys did for, you know, enabling remote work?

Ryan Purvis  18:47  
Well, it's always been by design. So when I came on board, it wasn't strategy for us. So I made it and the strategy was we will be able to work at home all the time. If you need to, but if you need to be in the office you can also be in the office so the decision we don't have enough to warrant and maybe didn't didn't exist at that point, but we were big enough to warrant hosted desktops. So it was it was a laptop first policy or mobile office policy. With the we don't really have the risk per se but we we have enough space to hot desk and they asked workstations in the office with screens and keyboards and mice and USB hubs and all that sort of stuff. So that when someone comes in there, you just plug the laptop into the hub and they get the power they get set up. But then at home, they can do the same set up now we didn't fund I working as part of this strategy, because it was necessary. But everything has been good about. We don't have a physical office, even though we have one that we go to every day. So actually, you know, when this stuff started, it was really easy because most of us are working from home that day anyway. We can be seen call in the morning to discuss what we're going to do about it. And then we had sort of a SCO call in the afternoon. So I think we were going to pull the trigger then. And we saw their answer set home from the next day, which was next weekend, which was Monday. So this is all happening on Friday. So it didn't change our lives at all. The hard part was actually more the, the cash flow from. We had to make some tough decisions there, to cut back on expenses to make sure that we didn't run out of money being a small business, so that was a lot harder than being people that to, you know, we had to pass on to our suppliers. So our people had to go to two different contracts for different forms of working with assemble more part time now than they were in the beginning. And some people that has kind of taught us how to go back to the original companies. So that's an essence. Yeah. Which is which has also opened up some information security challenges because we've had to obviously take away access to people that are working that have gone back to the previous companies, while still keeping them in the loop to an extent because if this all blows over, he could say in three months from from the dead started, we go straight back to work, and we don't want to lose time while they get back up to speed. So it's been a bit tricky to navigate some of that stuff because now you don't want to miss a share something with someone that's that's been paying for them or they aren't paying them. But you want him to at least be a little bit warm, as opposed to you know, very cold. So yeah, so that's, that's kind of where we, how we approached it and how it was set up.

Heather Bicknell  21:58  
Yeah, I feel like it's kind of neat to be able to Just It sounds like you know, no one needed to go into the office, you know, no one needed to go and get anything. So yeah,

Ryan Purvis  22:09  
well, because because I always was always working space that I was always at office. But my boss doesn't have an office otherwise do so he had to go to the office to get a chair and to get a screen because he didn't have those things at home and he needed to buy them because he loves to be, you know, for him to be in the office is a 1015 minute commute. For the rest of us, it's an hour plus so somebody you know, would work from home monitored every week anyway. So we've always had the setups, so he had to go get all that stuff. I mean, because we didn't go back in the office, the stuff in the office to go and get like personal things and books and stuff that you would reference when you're in the office. So that's a little bit frustrating. And I haven't really want to risk going into London to get that stuff. But the idea is and like I wish I had that textbook with me because I know on page whatever it is, is the thing. For and I can't get the electronic version of that book because it's, you know, it was written in the, in the 90s or 2000s. When it's, you know, you can find most things online so you typically can find me on Spotify and other little things. I was a few guys.

Heather Bicknell  23:21  
Um, surprisingly, okay. I mean, we don't have a robust remote working culture, there's certainly people who will do it, you know, a few days a week. But, you know, I'm on a laptop. So I you know, I'm most of my colleagues just went into the office and grabbed a monitor and I grabbed all of my office plants. I didn't want to have to keep coming in and you know, watering those and just took it home. We do have people, you know, sir, our dev team. Well, all of our dev team are on desktops. A lot of our teams Our sales team I think is using Citrix, VDI. They kind of have a mix, because of course, we want them in our demo environment. So we do have people using a mixture of things. But um, yeah, the engineers are just, you know, remoting into their systems. And that's work pretty well, except for the odd occasion that someone's turns off, in which case, you know, I think we do still have it, you know, occasionally making visits to the offices just to turn on any machines if that's necessary, or, you know, service anything, but yeah, surprisingly, okay.

Ryan Purvis  24:37  
Yeah, it always makes me laugh for people at desktops. Not that I'm against desktops by any means. But if you want to ever work with them from the remote the most times you need them either off Mm hmm. Not by design or whatever, to some stupid reason. And I'm still surprised anything if you look at the average desktop design, they don't come with a UPS built in yet. bolt on, you know is is by up a separate thing, which just gives you that 10 minutes of mining give you a warning and you know, text message or this or something, just say I'm going offline now because I've lost power. But also ups want to clean up the power. So you don't have an issue with a spike, causing machine to download some of these really simple ones, you can actually use them to restart your machine. Hmm. Sorry, it was assassinated me, but do you still need a person in the office to kind of press the button? Yeah. It was on the screen and what won't work?

Heather Bicknell  25:35  
Yeah, and I think anything in my office is maybe around 50 people. So it's kind of it's kind of doable, and that wouldn't work for, you know, a much larger company. I would think that would be much more challenging.

Ryan Purvis  25:51  
For that switch. You'd still have the same. Don't even illogical you'd have to have security staff there. Yeah. You probably have You know, some support staff working in shifts to go to the building and flush toilets and restock machines if needed, all that kind of stuff. We might need a machine you might have to wait till someone goes in, which could be a day or two. Whatever. Yeah. It's a strange. I haven't experienced any of that recently. So I don't know what the how the ending the

Heather Bicknell  26:23  
Yeah, I've been meaning to sit down with our or have a call with our support team to try to understand our own story a little bit better, because I know they are, you know, doing things behind the scenes. But you know, it often goes as the unsung heroes of a lot of these things.

Ryan Purvis  26:42  
Well, you talked about earlier one of the one of the things that I have noticed that has had to happen is the end users have had to learn a lot more. So even though we have the ability to remote into a laptop, and help them out at something, a lot of the stuff we actually say look, this is what you do. Here's the article No run this fixed do that thing. Because we don't have the automation that we would have normally had 1000, a big bank or whatever. Because I mean some of those basic things like cleaning up the space, or restarting Houdini updates, making sure they restart the machines every week and whatever. That's basic things that they haven't done without being prompted to, or known how to. So now we've been doing a lot of that education stuff. And just using the teams. I mean, that's been fascinating. Teams is actually quite a complicated platform to use. If you're not used to it. You're putting files in there just to work on storing calls having having channels. So it's all those things that are normally separate products that have been thrown together into one product. And they've got some terrible naming lucky, good teams and even teams inside of teams. Yeah. Which is really unnecessarily complicated. Bullet groups, like, I don't know if you guys have had that problem where you already sort of have faith with the products and the technologies.

Heather Bicknell  28:08  
Yeah, I mean, I guess in terms of teams, you know, we've been using it for a while as an organization. So I know, I think the biggest challenge for me has been we've been onboarding people during this time. So it has been, you know, I don't have I'm on a small marketing team, I don't have a ton of experience, helping people onboard. So it's, there's that aspect and then there's also doing it fully remotely. So a lot of video conferencing, a lot of screen sharing. You know, I think the technology makes it possible to kind of do what you need to do, but it's like the, I worry about the human elements and just, you know, not being able to take the new person out for you know, lunch their first day or, you know, see You know, see them in the office and like see, like a frustration or, you know, whatever it is, like get that like human sense of kind of how things are going for them. Because it's all behind the screen now.

Ryan Purvis  29:14  
You know, that's the weird, those are the things. Those first that first day of a new starter. Do those those important steps? All the relationship?

Heather Bicknell  29:26  
Yeah, we've been doing some team happy hours, which is fun. But

yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it helps that my team is small, because I find with some sort of zoom style calls, you know, there's a threshold when you get too many people on that if you're just having a casual conversation, it gets really difficult to kind of share the space but yeah, it's been I mean, it works for you know, keeping us all kind of together. Little bit it's funny because some of us are spread out across offices I've noticed this with just like family and friends too but I'm doing more video calls with people who I normally would just see in person you know a few times a year or so is I'm getting more face contact with some people who I wouldn't you know normally be facetiming with

Ryan Purvis  30:21  
Oh, that's a good thing. We should keep it face to face stuff okay. But I hear what you say is Yeah, it's almost probably not that far away for you in the sense of a couple minutes travel. Like my phone my phone my parents will find my in laws, you know, they're in different countries. So you know, facetiming them is, is quite natural phone one of my mates that lives up the road here, our cell phone in like a normal person phones and, you know, just telephone call. But before COVID-19 now we're doing face to face time because we can't we we used we normally see that once a weekend. For lunch or something like that now so well, anything I can do is face some people because it's quite weird. I think we wouldn't be aliens we go back to the office with each other.

Heather Bicknell  31:15  
Yeah, I know it's gonna be gonna be odd seeing people the first time and

Unknown Speaker  31:22  
still still distancing, you know, so I'm

Heather Bicknell  31:26  
still a little bit just fear of fear of fear of people. You know, it's just such an unusual

Ryan Purvis  31:35  
experience and we had some friends come by this last weekend. I don't know if you've seen the people or not, but almost because they were our friends who were less worried about social distancing. And maybe you know that they've been quite stressful the social isolation and stuff like that. But, you know, keeping the two meter thing was actually quite difficult to do because we're always so casual about it was like, dude, you got to stay away from Whereas when you go to the shopping center like exactly the sort of shopping run in the mornings you know there you literally are giving people the widest berth and you're giving them like I was partially out of Moscow because because the UK has been very clear on that till now. You know, why don't you run them off dude like you should read the literature is that kind of judgmental? back your mind thing this time because you because you're defensive now. Yeah it's fascinating how that so it's gonna be very interesting.

Heather Bicknell  32:40  
Yeah, for sure. Yeah I've only really seen that you know my sister and her boyfriend will come over every now and again just to stand on the other side of the window and I bring my cats over and they say hello through the window and then they they go on the rest of their walks. So that's kind of as of human contact. I mean, we've even been doing grocery delivery or pickup for the most part. So just very, very many, you know, minimizing it as much as possible, which, it's, it's, it's weird for sure.

Ryan Purvis  33:17  
Yeah, so we try to do that, but he just can't get a slot. Yeah. So it's hard to go in and year to be fair, as a stress stressful as it is, probably mean it's stressful in the sense that that you you go in and you like so so we have because it's prevalent, we can go to the vulnerable hour, which is is 730 to 830. So it's algorithmic session. So in order to get into the line, either call it to seven and examine anyway, stay on the line for 45 minutes to go in to shop video and shop for an hour, maybe hour and a half to get all your stuff. You know, shopping for the week in half, so you don't have to come back again. You're running around as you're going around is getting warmer people are coming in so you know when you know the first or second person in so I'll get through the first session quite quickly. Then obviously, the longer you're in the building, the more people come in. And it fascinates me how people get out some good. Not aggressive, but almost forceful. Because they they want the last bag of flour, or whatever it is. It's all of a sudden you can almost see that seven tree. survivalists thing coming through for some people. It's quite strange. there anything that I haven't seen that Apple Soviet is how do you do face recognition with Moscow? Yeah, because that's frustrating.

Heather Bicknell  34:54  
I know. It's like, don't you know the space between my eyes well enough by now.

Ryan Purvis  35:01  
I just read somewhere that they're going to come up with a slight update that would be able to realize that you're wearing a mask and authenticate because why are you taking changes in our policies? My screen locks after 30 seconds on my phone. And because my shopping lists on my phone have a keeper keeping going, and if I forget to for whatever reason left I lock the phone which usually means either tapping in this ridiculous long password or was taking my mask off which which means are in a burning to corner the shop but no one is taking the mask off by locking it and then going back to where it was. Yeah, cuz we said jam didn't work. Thing is so. So we asked you Did you ever go any further on your Star Trek stuff? You would have watched Picard and did you go any further?

Heather Bicknell  35:52  
Oh, I haven't. Thank you. I feel like that was that was pre COVID. Right?

Ryan Purvis  35:57  
That was Yeah, that's because I'm reading is reading the book as I watched all the series The seasons of God all the episodes at least and then I read the book and I really recommend you read the book first and then and then watch the series because it kind of innocence even if you think if you don't know who Picard is and his backstory, it does help you to understand a bit more of when the series starts because I felt like the first season the season first bits of the seasons to try to figure out all this backstory, which tells you very nicely it's actually a good book to get educated on.

Heather Bicknell  36:45  
We another project to work on and in quarantine besides my Animal Crossing Island.

Ryan Purvis  36:53  
We also do this Animal Crossing rocket sort of the rocket podcast Yeah. About. Yeah. So tell me about about.

Heather Bicknell  37:05  
Yeah, so was the first Animal Crossing game that I've played? So it's kind of like kind of like a cutesy version of like the Sims I guess. And I, you know, you are, you know, it's just a game where there's nothing really required of you, like there's you can just do whatever you want. And if you do certain things, you know, to make money, you can expand your house and you can buy different things to put around your island. But, you know, you really don't have you can do whatever you want. So I think for a lot of people, it's been sort of a relaxing getaway, to just like vibe out on their island. And so yeah, I mean, you can so you can chop wood from trees, you can fish and catch bugs. You can collect fruit from your fruit trees and then you can sell those things where you can craft them and to you know tables chairs a bunch of random craftable items and you basically just make your island look nice or or not. And talk to your your animal villagers who are all like reasonably nice to you so it's just kind of

Unknown Speaker  38:28  
yeah a place to go just to chill out i guess

Ryan Purvis  38:34  
is a virus game as a webcam when we when we play it?

Heather Bicknell  38:38  
Yeah, it's um, Nintendo Switch. I think one of them was one of the last animal crossings was mobile.

Ryan Purvis  38:47  
Okay, that makes more sense, because it's a totally different world to me that the Nintendo Switch and being a gamer gamer, my Xbox 360 the last last unit that I had as a gift from my brother Okay, that makes sense why didn't see anywhere else?

Heather Bicknell  39:06  
Yeah, I mean I do I highly recommend it. I love you know, the switch has been a great console for me. Between booger Breath of the Wild was a great game.

Unknown Speaker  39:21  
That's the latest Zelda

Ryan Purvis  39:26  
I think my wife would Lynch be five on the console. So maybe she'll enjoy to go baby all the way between the way she's reading about two books a week.

Unknown Speaker  39:39  
Yeah.

Heather Bicknell  39:41  
Well, that's good too. Yeah, a lot of people will share their Animal Crossing Island. So you know, you can have a few people on it. So we'll have it with their kids. And it's actually a really nice element of it as you can play online with friends so I can invite my sister over to my island and we have my boyfriend's birthday party on the island and just invited Did you know all of our friends who had accounts over and I set up a little scavenger hunt in the game and I wrapped a bunch of gifts for him and you can send mail to people. So it's kind of nice to be able to just share things digitally that way as well.

Ryan Purvis  40:20  
Cool. I'll discuss it with the boss issue. Let's go. Should we call it a day on the recording there?

Unknown Speaker  40:32  
Yeah, I think so.

Ryan Purvis  40:37  
Thanks. Thank you for listening to today's episode. And the big news, our producer editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www digital workspace works. Please also visit our website www digital workspace. works, and subscribe to a newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues

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