Audio Transcript
Announcer: Hey everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast! Your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now, your host, MagHub product manager, Tom Bellen.
Tom Bellen: Hello everybody and welcome to the third edition of Tom’s Tips Podcast, my name is Tom Bellen and I am the product manager for MagHub, I am here today with our marketing director Zach Gilbert. Zach, how are you?
Zach Gilbert: I am well, Tom. How are you?
Tom Bellen: I am doing very, very well because we have a special guest in this podcast. One of our developers from the dev team, Dan Thurston. Dan, how are you and welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast.
Dan Thurston: I’m doing great, it’s great to be here Tom.
Tom Bellen: We are very grateful to have you to talk today about our previous release, release 6.5, some of the things you did on it, and just see what’s going on in this summer. The summer months have started. People are active and getting healthier. Unfortunately in today’s Tom’s Tips Cat Fact one of my cats is not getting healthier. Little known fact: did you know that about .5 to 1% of cats are known to have a form of diabetes? And would you guess that young Bentley, the many-toed cat from earlier podcast, also has diabetes? So I have a cat who’s diabetic, doesn’t get out there to eat too much food, and unfortunately now I have to give him two shots a day of insulin, in the morning and in the evening. So that’s fun, to my wife. He stomps on my face and now I get mad.
Tom Bellen: So in an effort to get healthier one of the things I’ve been planning on doing is joining one of those sports leagues. I used to do kickball but that’s actually pretty dangerous. I decided to brush off my soccer shoes, and I’m actually going to be joining an indoor soccer league. Did you guys ever play soccer growing up?
Dan Thurston: Oh yeah, indoor, outdoor, the whole deal.
Tom Bellen: Did you play on your high school team? Did you play in travel teams?
Dan Thurston: I never got that serious with it, I was more like rec and ed level, maybe a little more competitive.
Tom Bellen: What was your sport then, what was your sport of choice?
Dan Thurston: Well, in high school and college it was swimming. I swam through those years.
Tom Bellen: Did you win any? Were you the best on the team?
Dan Thurston: In high school, debatably, maybe. Definitely not in college. We did win a state championship in high school and a national championship in college, so it was some good times, some good years.
Tom Bellen: And you still swim today?
Dan Thurston: I just started again, it’s been about five years, so really out of shape, just like you trying to get back into shape. Trying to get fitness together. This summer I started swimming with a masters team in Ann Arbor, which has been a lot of fun and really been a good kick in the butt to get me back in shape, get on my feet.
Tom Bellen: Now, are you the worst on there? Are you the best or the worst? Are you either extreme?
Dan Thurston: Neither. Right now I’m pretty down the middle.
Tom Bellen: See that’s exactly where I wanna be on my soccer team. I always say, when people ask me to join these sports and I’m immediately like, am I the worst? It’s a pride thing, I just don’t want to bring the team down. You don’t want to be … it’s that thing, if you don’t know who the sucker is at the table, it’s you. I don’t wanna be that guy, it’s a lot easier to know as you’re huffing and puffing on the court. Unfortunately we’re actually playing with a league with a guy who owns, I think, one of the Detroit FC teams, and played in college and professionally. Basically the game plan is, kick the ball to wherever he’s located and be kind of stationary, like a foosball player.
Tom Bellen: Zach are you on any sports things this summer? What was your sports career like?
Zach Gilbert: So high school was golf, without a doubt and track. And after that I kind of stopped and now it’s just golf.
Tom Bellen: As we know, as I tell all the kids on my golf team, when I used to coach, is golfers are not athletes. Especially when they try and run around, you’re just going to hurt yourself. There’s a reason you’re a golfer. It’s a stationary sport, just swing. I am a golfer and I’m also not an athlete. That’s why soccer will not go well.
Tom Bellen: What did go well, look at that transition, is the 6.5 release. We’re very excited about it, again Dan, here, he actually did a lot of work on some of the changes we made to the vendor personnel area, again we’ve been making those changes to the system for a while. Kind of tying those into being able to set up additional agreements that we’ve done before of how you assign someone an editorial and give them 6-12 at a time for the contracted year. Give them a contract to sign. Being able to make easier edits to that from the page. We’re going to be making some additional tweaks to that as well to make it easier for customers to use. Again, Dan’s been very instrumental in changing that.
Tom Bellen: Also, on the subscription side, our man Dan was also part of working on the web forums for back in the previous releases and we just spent a lot of time on cleaning things up under the covers, making it easier for people to access their data, being able to add additional things to the exports, dynamic attributes. Again, continuing the updating of some of the features we already have. One of the other big things was obviously with reporting. Being able to mark a favorite report. Make it easier to find your favorite reports. Also being able to schedule a lot of those reports, so if you wanna receive the daily cash receipts every day it’s right there in your inbox right in the morning. Or each month get an update on the issue sales from the previous year, again, right there. Just trying really what to do is just main focus of this release is really making it easier to do items in the system already there. Really just trying to enhance it.
Tom Bellen: I don’t know, Dan. What are you most proud of over this release, or maybe the last few releases, of what you put into this system?
Dan Thurston: Yeah, well the personnel changes were pretty good, pretty exciting. I think the web forum, the subscription web forum, has really been a big part to add to the system. We did have a web forum previously, but it’s just a big improvement over that. I think the hardest part with that, because it’s really for our customers to use, not being able to make it look like Mag Hub, but make it a little more customizable and making it work for all our customers. We did some things where you can do custom styling, or change the fields you want to show on your forum. Just stuff like that to make it more intuitive and just a better user experience.
Tom Bellen: What do you think, Zach. Is that one of yours or?
Zach Gilbert: Absolutely. I agree.
Tom Bellen: Well, there you go.
Zach Gilbert: Uncontested.
Tom Bellen: Agree, uncontested, plead tested. Well, you know what? I’m a data man. Personally what I’m very excited about is the data warehouse stuff going on there. That was my own thing, not as exciting, ’cause you talk about data and excel sheets. That was one of the other things we released out there, is better access to the data warehouse. This is one of those things of, it’s your data, you wanna be able to explore it, play with it. Sometimes there can be that, even with some of the … what we do is a little, I don’t know, get over the hump, there’s a two program area and there’s all the sequel stuff, and it scares people away. What we tried to do is make it easier of: here’s the information, dump it to excel, do what you want with it. Everyone loves a good pivot table. I know Zach loves pivot tables, he’s a pivot table guy. Dan you’re a sequel man, you guys can go over the pros and cons of both. Maybe I’m wrong on this, are you more of a … I mean?
Dan Thurston: Definitely Sequel.
Tom Bellen: So we’ve got a Sequel. Now here’s a quick question, do you say “Sequel”, “SQL”? Do you care?
Dan Thurston: I don’t particularly care too much. “Sequel” is more broad, my Sequel is a specific type of SQL so I usually say “my Sequel” ’cause it’s a little clearer, but no, I’m not too picky with that terminology.
Tom Bellen: I think there’s some people that can be picky about that. You’re giving me a shake of the head.
Zach Gilbert: There are a lot of people that are picky about that stuff.
Tom Bellen: Is that like a tabs versus spaces type thing?
Zach Gilbert: It’s kind of like gif or jif.
Tom Bellen: Do you have an opinion on gif versus jif?
Dan Thurston: I’ve only said “gif”.
Zach Gilbert: Same here.
Tom Bellen: I’m going to say “jif” now just to be different.
Zach Gilbert: Well I mean, you’re agreeing with the creator. The creator said “jif”.
Tom Bellen: Oh.
Zach Gilbert: Which I don’t think anyone agrees with him. That sucks.
Tom Bellen: The problem is you create something, then it’s out there, it’s everyone’s.
Zach Gilbert: Yeah, it belongs to them, not you anymore.
Tom Bellen: Sad. Well yeah, “Sequel”, “SQL”, tomato, tomatoes. Anyway a very exiting thing. And also was exciting, as we get into our movie fact, ’cause that’s what people come for, is the facts, was this weekend big golfer, as Zach is, obviously. Which we’ve never had, laughing there. I was golfing. I went golfing on Father’s Day, US Open also happened. Brooks Koepka win, after Dustin Johnson choked once again. Hopefully he’s not a listener of this podcast, ’cause then he’ll get mad at me. It makes me think of one of my favorite movies, which is “Tin Cup”, which is also US Open. I always kind of had this dream of, could I somehow make the US Open as some ragtag person and show up there. The answer is no. Unless some sort of Rookie of the Year thing happens and I somehow magically get good.
Tom Bellen: It’s freakishly hard to do that. One evidence of that is there’s a player in the first round. I mean to make it to the US Open, to be clear, first you have to have a one handicap or less to register, even though you can fudge that, that’s fine. People do that all the time. You have to go to a local qualifier, probably shoot like a 66 on a relatively tough course. My home course had a qualifier there before. I can tell you it’s not super easy to shoot a 66 there. Then you have to go to a sectional qualifier and play 36 holes and then shoot probably, again, mid-sixties. This guy did this. He shot a 92 on the first day. That’s a lot more than 65. You don’t need Sequel or a pivot table to figure that out.
Zach Gilbert: True story.
Tom Bellen: But, to the movie fact. In “Tin Cup”, in the famous scene where, I’m forgetting the name, Rory … I want to say Rory McElroy, but that’s not right. Anyway, “Tin Cup”, he is on the final hole and he decides to go for it and he just puts ball after ball after ball in the water. He holes out, spoiler alert, to not win the US Open, but he gets a 12 it’s remarkable, in that case. First of all, by the way, that’s not actually a rule, they say if he hit his last ball in the water he’d be disqualified, that’s not technically true. The point of the question, the question is, who won the fictional US Open in “Tin Cup”? So that is the question for this podcast, so if you can name it, it’s a real PGA tour golfer. Name the person who won the US Open in the movie “Tin Cup”.
Tom Bellen: And with that I want to thank Dan for joining us on the podcast today.
Dan Thurston: You’re very welcome.
Tom Bellen: Thank you Zach, for running this. Again, I look forward to our next podcast here in a month and hopefully everyone enjoys 6.5. Thank you for listening.
Zach Gilbert: Make sure you tweet your answers or put it on Facebook. It is open to everybody, not just MagHub users.
Tom Bellen: I forgot about that part. Yes, tweet the answer, win a prize.
