Episode: 1317
Title: HPR1317: What's In My 2 Bags
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1317/hpr1317.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:28:43

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Hey everyone, this is C-Prop in North Carolina, or Hacker Public Radio.
I wanted to record my first podcast ever, and Hacker Public Radio actually gives you
a great means to do that.
Get your feet wet, contribute to Hacker Public Community, and get the podcasting.
In my first episode, I wanted to do kind of what some of the others have done recently,
which is what's in my bag.
I know that John Culpa has recently done one, and why Bill had done one recently.
Don't have anything as spectacular as they did, probably, but I do have something a little
bit more, and that I have two bags, and so I wanted to talk about each one of those.
The first bag that I wanted to talk about is my go-to bag for my everyday use, and
then it's a backpack style.
It's a fuel backpack, F-U-L.
It's a very durable backpack, so I actually got a really cheap price, so it's workout
great.
It has two pockets on the outside.
One pocket is just a piece of mesh.
You just slide a water bottle down into, I drink a lot of water during the day, so it's
great for that to carry around and just have a nice water bottle secure on your side.
On the other side, there is another zip, a little pouch, and that's where I keep on the
USB stick.
I don't know about anybody else, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there like that, but
I have to make sure that where my items go in my bag, go to the same place every time, because
when I go somewhere and I need something, I don't want to have to be fishing around for
it.
I get it out and I put it right back to where it came from.
In the other zip pouch on the side, there's where I keep all my USB sticks, and so I keep
all my software that I need for my day-to-day job.
Just to give you a little bit of real quick snobs, this is as quick as possible about what
I do from my position.
Work for a company that sells what we like to call document solution, so that's going
to be anything from mostly the large copiers if you're in an office environment, you see
those large copiers that you have off to the side or in the corner or something.
Usually someone's kicking them, not really happy with them, that's what we sell.
They do a lot, they do copy print scan, so we set them up to do scanning and such to
email network folders.
We also sell software solutions, so think of someone that might be in an HR or an AR,
like in accounts where you see bold types of position, they have a lot of paper flying
around that you need to be able to manage that paper in some form or fashion.
We offer them software solutions to handle that, and that's what my job is to actually
go in and help set up the software, get it running, configured, train, and later on
support.
So, anyway, so that's what I keep on my USB sticks.
I keep patches for the software, so I don't have to download it at the customer's site.
Print drivers in case they get a large machine for us and they want to be able to print
what the print drivers.
Also within my backpack inside the pouches, there is a tone generator, I've had to use
that quite a bit, and it's actually just, you know, you just hook one side to the wall
to where the machine might be plugged into, and you want to make sure that it's actually
going back to a switch or where that is actually a live port.
Sometimes you can't just plug something up, people have security on their networks, you
just can't plug up a network, plug something up to their network like your laptop or whatnot.
So I have a tone generator, kind of tone out things, use it in our branch as well,
so it comes in really handy there.
One thing I do have is pretty cool is called a LAN throwing star, and it's a, it's kind
of like has a four Ethernet ports on it, the Ethernet plugs, so what it will do is I can
put my laptop in between, say the copier that we sell them to large multifunction device,
copier deal, put that between, put my laptop between their machine and the network, and
of course with the permission of the IT department, put my laptop there, and I can actually see
the traffic flowing through to make sure that see what it is, it might be cause an issue.
A lot of my, lot, lot, lot of my job is troubleshooting why the machine is not doing what the
machine is supposed to be doing, so that comes in real handy, real handy.
We could talk about days for some of the things that has gone on in crazy ways that people
have configured the networks, but that's for a totally different episode.
I have a little cable tester, sometimes you just got to make sure that the cable's good,
so just, it's funny, they can call up and say hey, this thing's not working, it's your
machine, and probably 99% of the time it is not the machine, those nicks don't really
go bad that often, they very rarely go bad, so I have a cable tester, just to pull the cable
out real quick, give it a real quick go, hit a button, and these little blinking lights
go by, just to make sure that everything is talking together, it was like five bucks,
so what the hey, I have a cable making kit, sometimes I have to put it in on something
real quick, don't really do that whole lot, I don't like making cables, if you need a
cable just by one, I keep a lot of extra cables in my bag, but six foot, that's it, I have
been in situations where I've been to a client and unfortunately I've had to keep a roll
of cat five cable in my car, another story for another day, but I do have a cable making
kit, which consists of the wire strippers, which is like a little, put it on the end of
the cat five cable and kind of give it a spin, and it pulls off the outer shielding, then
you get the twisted cables on the inside, then I have a crimper in the ends, punch down,
in case you need to punch something down into a 1-10 block, don't really do that on the
customer site, do that at our local branch, so most of that is what we do there, I had
a couple different punch downs, I got a plastic one which I like a lot better, it's just
like a little tiny, maybe an inch, inch long plastic punch down, you just got to press it
in real hard, and I got another one that's a mechanical, it has a cutter side and a punch
downside, so really got to make sure that you look on one side, that sucker is on before
you use it, because you might be cut in the wire that you really don't need to cut.
Like I said, lots of different sides of patch cables, no more than six foot, sometimes I
have like little tiny ones to go into a switch, I've been in lots of situations where someone
doesn't have an on-site IT person, and the port that we need to plug up to is not live,
and it's really easy to trace, so tracing, and I go ahead and pop it live, and I think
I have issues with it, well, they should have been on site, I have a, also along with
my USB sticks, I have a, and actually I never really use this, and I really need to figure
I use it for this time, but it's a laptop hard drive in a enclosure with a USB cable,
so you can just plug it up, and it's a 350 gig hard drive, I might need to do something
with that, anyway, lots of pins, lots of pins, and actually most of them I don't use, except
for one brand, and it's a Sharpie, and it's nice, it's almost like a, I think it is a
felt tip pin, but it's, it's not real fine, but it's just fine enough, and I have a really
bad problem with my hands sweating, and when I write something down, my hands start to
sweat, and man, that ink just goes everywhere, not only on me, but it just smears all over
the paper, and I cannot stand to have ink all over the place, so, it took me a while to
find a pin, but it is a Sharpie pin, that's great, and I have a notebook, notebook to just
take notes when I'm at a customer site, had to jot something down real quick, ran into
an issue with this client, and it was doing this, this, this, and this is how I resolved
it, and I write this down a little notebook, and I get back to the office and I type it up
and store it away for future notes, it's a real nice one, it's got leather bound case
to it, it's a journal's book so you can actually buy refills for the thing, it's, it's, it's
pretty nice, so what else we got? screwdriver, and it has multiple ends, so it has a couple
different sizes of Phillips heads, couple different sizes of flat, flat heads, got some torque
screw, or torque screw drivers, don't really use those, a whole heck of a lot anymore,
that's about it, and I also have a little tiny, intelligent, is the brand name, and it's
a little five port switch, I mean this thing is probably not two inches by an inch and a half,
it's really small, and I just, I keep it in my bag just in case I need it, it's small enough
where I can just throw that in there, along with the, along with the, the power adapter to it,
other than that, typical stuff, business cards, blah, blah, blah,
nothing much else in the, in the backpack, I got the standard issue laptop from our company,
it's an actually, it's a nice 17 inch HP pro book, unfortunately it does run that
nasty operating system that we don't like to talk about too much, but hey, that's what VM
wears for, right? So that's pretty much it for the fuel backpack with all the computer stuff in it,
the other backpack that I have, backpack number two, that I do carry with me pretty much every
single day, after I leave work, I typically go to the gym, so I have a nice gym bag,
and I know that Geekdom and Fitness doesn't really fit together a whole lot, but hey,
when I hit 40, I didn't, didn't feel so hot a lot of times, started having some health issues,
nothing, life threatening or anything like that was just, just aches and pains, and you know,
back hurting, and you know, hard to get out of bed and stuff, and so I wanted to start taking
better care of myself, so a lot of people like to say that I kind of went through mid-life crisis,
but I like to think of it as just trying to be fit, so I have a gym membership of course,
and I carry around my gym bag every day with me, it goes with me in the car,
it's a big normal gym bag style, you know, with a big huge strap and the big center,
it also has two pockets on either end, and on same way with my work backpack, I like to keep
each one of those pouches the same, so what goes in one comes out, it's the same, I mean, I don't,
don't try to mix match the pockets on the sidewalk, it goes in them, so on one side of it,
I have, see, I keep two pairs of socks, and there is a reason for that, and that reason is,
is that some of those days I don't necessarily go to the gym, it might be a really pretty day,
and no one's going to be at the gym that day, and they're all kind of,
and I might not make it, I might be late, and I was like, well, you know what, forget it,
I want to go for a run, so I carry two pairs of socks with me, it makes my shoes feel a lot
tighter on my feet when I run, I don't like to have them flip flopping around, so I carry two pairs
of socks to wear, if I go running, and those socks that I wear, I have two different styles,
one of them is a Thorlo socks, has these really nice padding on the balls and on the heels,
keeps the blisters off, those are great socks, put those on, and then over top of that, I have
these other wick socks that draws the moisture away from your feet, they're by a sock guy,
I've got a few pairs of those, I always carry one of each of those in my backpack,
this one on one side, and I also have, I really haven't used these anymore, because since I got
the Thorlo socks, but I have some bowl skin pads, it's like these little, it's, I guess,
bowl skin that you can buy to just put on the bottoms of your feet to keep the blisters away,
but I still got them there, haven't used them since I started using the Thorlo socks, so they
just might just go away or keep them around for whatever, another thing that I have on that
side of the bag is the 2XU compression leggings, they're for calf, if you're a watch basketball
or something, but you might see some of those basketball players, they wear the compression sleeves
on their arms, I wear those on my legs, mostly just one leg, so it looks kind of strange that
running with one legging on, but it's mostly, well actually the only reason I really use this,
because I have a herniated Diplia, it's actually like this hole in my leg muscle, so whenever that
muscle starts to have a lot of blood flowing to it while I'm running, I get this big huge knot
on the side of my leg, it's not painful or anything, it's just really weird, and it really gives me
the PBGB, so I wear that to keep everything nice and compressed, so I had those, on the inside of
the bag, just typical gym clothes, shorts, dry fit shirt, always wear a dry fit shirt, wear a cotton
shirt, I sweat really bad, so wear a cotton shirt, that thing's just sticking to you and it's just
really annoying, so shorts, dry fit shirt, and I carry two pairs of shoes, one pair in case I go
to the gym, the other pair is in case I go running, my running shoes are just some Asic gel GT2750s
or something like that, if you really care, really comfortable shoes, I've been wearing Asics for a
long time, they've always helped my knees and stuff, which is another problem,
also inside my bag I have these straps, they're like gymnastic straps, they're called
lifestyle XT jungle gym XT straps, what you can do is we at the gym will take them and we'll
wrap them around the chin up bar, and so we can actually hang from them and do exercises and stuff,
that's got body weight exercise, I'll put a link in the show notes of those things, they're so much
fun, and so funny when you're at the gym, you see these really young guys, they're like 20s or
something, they're all huge and muscular and they see us on these jungle gym straps and doing
this stuff, and like, oh hey, can I try that out, and then you see them and they're like,
just about do a header into the gym floor, so it's funny, you know, seeing someone
44 years old or whatever, and get the stomach of your old punk that thinks he knows, anyway,
it's funny, so we got that, something else on the inside, I keep a phone roller,
I guess, you know, being an older muscle will start to hurt and stuff, so I have a phone roller,
it's just a big huge brown piece of phone, maybe three foot long maybe, and you just kind of
lay it on your side and just kind of roll back and forth, just kind of a massager, and works great,
no thing I have that I keep on the other side of my back pack, or my gym bag is the
is a jump rope, and the jump rope is really cool, it's made for CrossFit, I don't know about some
of the other places around the world, but the United States CrossFit's pretty popular,
I don't do CrossFit, I don't know how to CrossFit participant necessarily, but we do a lot of CrossFit
style stuff, and so I have a CrossFit style jump rope, and it's like a metal, the rope is actually
real thin, almost kind of a piece of metal, handles are wooden, and they're connected with
ball bearing almost, so they can spin it really fast, and you're supposed to be able to
help you do what's kind of double under, so the rope goes around twice when you jump up once,
I cannot do that, I might be able to do one or two, but these guys and CrossFit, you know, they do
50 in a row, and they're just beasts, nothing I have on that side of my back pack is my trusty
tunes and headphones, tunes I carry around a little Sansa Clip Plus, and it has a, I think it's
eight gig, I think it might be a four gig actually, and it also has a body 16 gig,
micro SD card to slide in, to keep more music, which a nearing can close to villain up for this
thing, so not to carry around the gym anyway, but I carry that around with me, I have to keep my tunes in
because I've got to have the right tunes when you lift them weights, I guess, so that makes the
time go better. Other than that, the only thing I really have is a little notebook and a pen,
and in the notebook, we keep track of our daily routines, we're pretty strict on what we do,
we have a friend of mine that I work out with, he makes up the workout routines, and they're very
structured, so Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, we do upper lower, upper lower, so I like to keep
track of what we're doing, how many reps we do, how many sets we do, what our weight is we use on
that, so we can kind of see the progression, see if we're moving up, moving down, how we're doing with
it, just something to do, I guess, there's actually a nice little formula to it,
and so we use that to kind of keep track of what we do during our workout periods,
but that's my two bags, like I said, I carry this around with me every day that I go to work
because you never know when I might need to go to the gym, or sometimes I've been in a
cotton situation where it's just like, hey, you know what, it's beautiful day, it's time for a good
run, that's been all I have to talk about from my first episode, if you stuck around this law,
glad you listened, and hope it was entertaining somewhat at least, thanks a lot, look for doing it
again, and keep on hacking, thanks a lot.
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