088: Getting Automated with Dan Caspi

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Dan Caspi
Thanks, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, your credentials are so fascinating, it absolutely gives the impression that you’re a super genius. With a PhD in organic chemistry, which is notoriously one of the hardest classes people hate in college, and you’re running a computer consulting company, which has some sophisticated little coding projects and stuff called Element 26. Can you tell us, how does that even work in real life, that you can do both these things. Are there some synergies in your brain, or what’s going on?

Dan Caspi
Great question. So I’m definitely a busy guy, you’ve got that right. I just love problem solving and puzzles – I always have since I was a little kid. And so it’s really just another expression for me of how to do it. In fact I found computers a lot earlier than I found chemistry. But there’s totally a lot of overlap for me in that way in terms of the space in my brain, because at work I solve really complex puzzles, and I love the same in the computer side of things as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And so I’m just so curious – Element 26 – what does that mean, as the name of your company?

Dan Caspi
Great question. So Element 26 is sort of an allusion there to the periodic table. So the 26th element is iron, and the story for why I chose it goes back a bit, but I mean iron is a really cool element. It’s a very ubiquitous metal, it’s used in the manufacture of steel and it’s also one of the metals that allows us to even breathe. I mean hemoglobin requires iron to bring oxygen into our body, so it’s kind of got a number of really powerful purposes in our world and I thought it was a great choice for a name.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is fun. Yeah, it feels infused with some power when you put it that way. And so now, what are the sorts of computer problems that your company is tackling here? It’s not like your big old enterprise platform integrations for companies, but it’s rather unique and cool – as far as I know, although I’m not in the know – kind of niche that you’re filling when it comes to what you produce with custom software and such. Could you speak a bit about that?

Dan Caspi
Absolutely. So the stuff I do pretty much spans the gamut, I would say, but I prefer to work on really kind of challenging and complex and nuanced problems, which are I would say most of the time, maybe up to the small or even medium-sized business level. Sometimes I have worked on enterprise-level solutions, but typically for large clients but a small division within that large client, so it ends up kind of feeling more again like a small company. Because the types of problems I work on – it could be anything from fixing a pop-up message on someone’s computer. We have a platform going right now with UCLA to basically bring organic chemistry to college students all around the country and get them inspired and motivated to do that. So it just totally spans the gamut between everything in between, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so interesting. And that’s kind of how I found you, was… It’s funny. Part of me thought, “Oh Pete, you just need to chill out. This part of you that loves to optimize the snot out of every little thing, but I sought you out because I was looking for a computer solution in which I had to conduct a little task that takes maybe 30 seconds.” But I have to do it hundreds of times a year, and I thought that’s worth a few hundred bucks to just get that solved and have those minutes of my life back. And you did a heck of a job, so thank you for that. I’ve been enjoying it, it works great.

Dan Caspi
Great, I’m glad to hear that.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of getting some online forms filled out all the faster in a custom application, so that’s pretty cool. So, could you maybe give us an example of sort of other things that your typical professional might appreciate having automated in their life, that maybe they didn’t even think they would need or want automated in their life?

Dan Caspi
Sure. So, let’s take an example that I think a lot of different professionals face. They schedule appointments with clients and then they want to send a reminder to that client of their pending appointment. And this is a process – you’re moving appointments all the time and then you’re reminding clients and then maybe somebody cancels, they want to reschedule. And that’s something that a lot of people face.
And although there are plenty of solutions out there, I think what I have found is that most, especially small businesses, even individual proprietors face is that they don’t want that kind of clunky, big time solution that manages everything. They just need to send their clients a couple of reminders and also they’re managing a lot of their stuff off of their iPhone or off of the Google platform or what have you – something kind of smaller, and that’s how they prefer to keep it.
And so basically finding those… Kind of connecting that for them to make that process easy – to maybe text reminders to people or send them automated emails and take some of the kinks out of that process that works with their business. I’ve definitely done quite a bit of that, and I think it’s one of those areas, like you were saying for the project we worked on together, everyone knows there could be a better way, but to kind of take the next step and talk about it and see what might be involved to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is handy. And so you’ve got something that does that? And that we can get easily?

Dan Caspi
I have implemented it for different clients, but I would say 95% of the work that I do is completely custom. Because I found once again… This is the thing – if you want the out of the box, off the shelf solution, then there’s probably a website out there for you and you’ve probably looked at it and it probably doesn’t exactly fit your needs. And this is a challenge I found time and time again, and even with large businesses actually – many times those large platforms don’t really fit the need, but the thing is they don’t have the resources to invest to basically create that from scratch for 20,000 or 30,000 employees. They just don’t have that kind of kind of ability or desire to specialize in that, because at that point that’s what it would take.
But for, like I said, the small business, or maybe 50-person company, they want something that’s going to give that level of personal appeal to their customer and clients and is going to make their life easier and they probably have some unique parts of their process or unique quirks about them and how they work and how they think about things. And so what I like to do is allow people to keep all of those, and still automate the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So could you maybe give us some extra examples in terms of things that may not even occur to us, that, “Hmm, I’d like that automated.” Or I guess maybe projects that you’ve done or common, repetitive tasks that can cease for folks that you’ve got a chance to intervene with?

Dan Caspi
Okay, sure. It’s funny the different kinds of projects that I’ve gotten. Sometimes there are challenges that I wouldn’t have even necessarily thought are challenges for people. One thing I’ve seen is, let’s say organizing photos – that’s kind of a big one. And so I did a project for a client where they have actually a massive photo library – there’s actually a bunch of photographers, and they have this massive photo library, and there’s duplicates of these photos all over, scattered, because they’re editing the photos, or not editing the photos. Now they have this library of terabytes of photos, and how do I organize this together?
Another common one that I’ve seen is that people are required to upload things to a website in a specific format. So, there was one car dealership I was working with and they have to upload all their pictures of the various cars. And the cars have to have the correct model number and serial number, so they’re basically copying files, renaming them to match the various items, stock numbers and such. And it ends up just taking a lot of time.
And so this kind of repetitive… Like either finding duplicates or renaming files or organizing things automatically, I definitely get that a lot. I’ve also gotten quite a bit of things where, let’s say people are producing reports or letters for people and that’s coming out of some data source. And obviously Word has this Mail Merge feature, which does something like that, but they want something a little bit more sophisticated where for every client they want an official form that’s produced with all the notes from that, and it has their letterhead and everything. And they’re doing dozens of these every day.
Or they have a series of reports and they have 100 clients and every client gets a different subsection of these reports and they have to organize a separate report for every client.
So I definitely see a lot of these kinds of manual tasks that I think many people are just accustomed to going at it the manual way, because there’s not a great way to do that in an automated fashion. There’s not some commercial utility out there that’s going to do that effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, yes. And so you haven’t really plugged yourself, so I will. So for just a couple hundred dollars, Dan and the Element 26 team may well be able to make some frustration disappear from your life. So, you could probably make an easy business case, as I did for myself, in terms of what are my hours worth and how many hours is this going to save me, which you might be able to share with the boss. So that’s one option, is just hire you to make the thing for you.

Dan Caspi
Yes, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what are some maybe do-it-yourself options? I mean are there any kind of flexible tools? You use the Automator for Mac and program, which is kind of cool. What are some other tools or resources or things folks can lean to to get a little bit of automation going for themselves without having to hire someone or dig deep into a programming language?

Dan Caspi
Okay, good question. So, definitely if you’re on a Mac platform, I love Automator. I love AppleScript too, but that’s kind of diving into the realm of programming language. But I think for something simple Automator is a really great tool. I also really love Excel, actually. Excel can be used in a lot of ways that are perhaps, let’s say non-traditional but pretty powerful.
Like a lot of times people might want to prepare a table in a specific way or they have this massive amount of data and they’re like, “I only want to include this subsection of data”, or “I have to rename anybody that starts with an A to a special other code”, and doing this kind of “Find and Replace”, massive kinds of “Find and Replace”. And Excel actually has a lot of features built in that will do that. And so I find a lot of people don’t really take advantage of the power of Excel – they think they need a macro or something when in fact a lot of that can just be done with just a basic Excel formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’ve got to go here ’cause I love Excel. Are there a couple of formulas that are overlooked, but just like “pack a punch”? What are you actually typing in that “Equals” function bar?

Dan Caspi
I see. There are a bunch obviously. There are a lot of lookup functions, so there’s a combination of index and match – that’s a popular combination – and you can use that to sort of find things in another table. There is another nice one, it’s “mid”.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right.

Dan Caspi
I think LEFT and RIGHT work also, yeah. So you can use that to parse a string. So let’s say you wanted to remove a digit or remove a letter – you can extract out a subsection of a string like that. The INDEX function is great too. That just defines if something is in another place. You can actually build a very powerful Excel sheet that can help you automate a lot of your daily tasks, whatever kind of data arrangement that you need for whatever you’re doing. It’s a pretty powerful platform.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So you’re saying that by using some of these fancy script parsing function such as LEFT, RIGHT, MID, I like FIND as well – you put a FIND inside of MID – it’s pretty good. We’re so dorking out, but it’s all good. You can do that here. You can maybe just paste a dirty, raw chunk of info into Excel and then use some of these functions to snag just what you need without doing a lot of navigating, deleting, finding, replacing for the same purpose.

Dan Caspi
Exactly, exactly. Excel is great. I mean there are better ways if you’re comfortable with programming languages for a lot of this, but most people I think are decently comfortable with Excel, so it’s a good place to start.

Pete Mockaitis
And for the listener who thinks, “Wait, INDEX and MATCH as a combination allows me to jump inside and reference another table, but doesn’t my VLOOKUP already do that for me?” What would you say to that skeptic?

Dan Caspi
Yeah, so VLOOKUP does. But there are some kind of interesting Excel quirks, and VLOOKUP is one of them. And so depending on how your table is actually sorted, VLOOKUP might return the wrong row.

Pete Mockaitis
Row?

Dan Caspi
Yes. So let’s say you have 100 entries in a table and you’re searching for a particular entry and let’s say that table is not sorted. And so let’s say you’re looking for a particular price of an item. And let’s say there’s 3 items in that table that have the same price. And when it searches, it will retrieve the first item in the list if there are duplicates, and a lot of times there are. So VLOOKUP can be very good, but there are some kind of idiosyncrasies of it and if you’re not familiar with it, it can be very frustrating.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. And what gets me is if you’re inserting a column, and then the number you’ve put in there for what column you reference is now no longer the column that you want, ’cause it doesn’t auto-update that part.

Dan Caspi
Sure, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. So we went deep, that’s fun. So now I’d love to hear if… So, Excel is a handy tool, Automator is good on the Mac platform. Anything else before we have to start touching code?

Dan Caspi
No, I think a lot of it is… There are these kind of tools and kind of shortcuts that people can make, but I think they’re not going to get you that far, unless you’re going to be comfortable with programming. You can kind of make a few things easier for yourself, but the real power definitely comes with custom code.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so now let’s talk custom code. So now, I think in some ways that intimidates folks, like, “Oh boy, not me.” I’ve seen those little curly braces that just go on and on and on. And I accidentally pushed “View Source” on a website once, and it terrifies me. So maybe some folks are feeling that way. Can you say… Are there any languages you think have a good bang for their buck, in terms of, “You know what? You could learn enough to know some things in 3 hours with this language, and actually be able to pull off some acceleration in your daily work.” What would you point folks to, to start learning?

Dan Caspi
So I’m probably going to be maybe one of the few people that is not going to point people to a specific language right off the bat, and I’m going to say that it really depends… I would start with something that you want to do and then pick the right language for that. But in general in some ways programming languages are no different than verbal languages, so if you want to say something in English or you want to say something in Spanish, there are certain structures that end up being very similar, certain sentence structures that end up being very similar, and even like verb and pronoun – all these kinds of concepts. And programming is no different.
And so there’s sort of a limited subset of common, logical statements that are part of programming. You have the IF statement. If this happens, do this. Otherwise, do this other thing. Or you can have a loop, like, “I want you to do a loop of this set of activities 20 times.” So every programming language offers this kind of logic. And so really I think programming is all about understanding the logic, and if you understand that, then it doesn’t really… I’m not going to say there’s not nuances to a variety of different languages, and some are going to be harder and easier and maybe more useful for what you’re trying to do or less useful, but in general I think it’s all about understanding the logic. So pick something that you are excited to learn, in the same way that if you want to learn to play music, pick an instrument that you want to play. And then once you understand the piano – yes, the flute is totally different but it has a similar subset of notes, so you can kind of put it together that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And I think one of my favorite ways to sort of dip the toe in is if you get inside let’s say Excel or something, and then in the Macro toolbar and push “Record” and then do a few things that you would do yourself, and then end the “Record”. One, you might have a usable macro you can use again and again, so hey, you just automated something already. And two, you can actually sort of peek under the hood a little bit and then see the code. It’s like, “How is that thing I’ve just done represented within this programming language?” And, okay, what if I could say, “Hey, do it not just 5 times, but as many times as there are rows?” Google, how do I get a row count? And then before you know it, you’re bit by bit making some things happen and feeling that gratification of kind of incrementally learning and doing a bit more and a bit more.

Dan Caspi
I think that’s a great point. I think one of the fun parts about programming, Pete, is the ability to basically push the envelope and say, “What can I do with that? How can I do that?” And really, just try it, because that’s the beauty. I mean unless you’re trying to delete your whole hard drive, it shouldn’t be destructive. So you can really just play around until you get to a place that, like you said, everything’s working great.
I will say, one of the cautions about the “Record macro” – which I really like that also – is that sometimes, especially in programming, and many other applications too, there are 20 different ways to accomplish a task. And some of those are going to be really great, and some of those are going to lead to maybe some problems or bugs down the road, and so when you hit “Record”, it’s just going to give you one way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dan Caspi
I think it’s a great way to learn though, and maybe in the course of doing that “Record macro” and you try to play it back another time it doesn’t work and you’re saying, “Well, why doesn’t it work?” And that can be kind of a fun game perhaps, if you’re into that sort of thing and trying to figure out where the problem is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s really handy. And so now I guess I’d like to get your take on… Backing up, maybe a bit more pedestrian computer problem. I think we’ve all been here before – it’s like, “Hey, why is my computer running slow now? It used to run fast but now it’s slow, and I don’t like it. I’m getting the little waiting hour glass or beach ball or what not.” And so, I’m sure, again, there could be dozens or more potential causes for this, but what’s your checklist if someone is like, “Hey, my computer’s slow.” What do you look at first versus second versus third, because they tend to be high probability and high payoff activities of things to accelerate a machine?

Dan Caspi
Sure. So I think you’ve probably nailed the universal complaint – everyone thinks it’s slow. And I’ll definitely give you some tips in a second, but I think what’s really funny about it is there’s this funny thing that happens when you get a new computer – the first thing you say is how fast it is, right? And then on its last legs you can’t believe how slow it is. And I think it’s just part of the world we live in – you get really accustomed to a certain thing and then it becomes normal and then it no longer feels fast, right? And so I think a lot of times if people were to actually do some benchmarking, you might actually find it’s the same speed, but it’s your perception that’s different. I mean I think that’s true of most of our devices. After owning it a couple of years, it just somehow feels slower because the rest of the world is moving faster.
But definitely there are some things I look at. It’s not to say that everyone’s case is totally without warn or cause. A lot of times over the course of owning a computer there’s a lot of security updates and maybe operating system updates end up getting pushed, and sometimes those definitely have an impact on a machine, especially if it’s older. So, operating systems are typically designed to support the newest machines, and so as your machine becomes more dated, you’re definitely going to be in the realm of the world where nobody’s going to be considering your machine as much and what impact is that going to have?
Anyone with, let’s say, an iPhone or an Android, you put a newer operating system on there, sometimes you find that performance really lags. So, I just throw that out there ’cause that’s something that’s always happening in the background, is that everyone’s always updating their applications and they’re no longer being designed for your computer probably. But I think the common things I look for, especially on a Windows machine, are going to be viruses and spyware. Spyware in particular is a real killer of performance.

Pete Mockaitis
And what do you use to clean that up?

Dan Caspi
Malwarebytes makes a nice program, and I like that one – it’s called Anti-Malware, and I like that one. But I will say that most of the time when I work on clients’ machines, I might use a variety of different programs because they all have different strengths and they all might pick up something a little bit different. Actually on both Mac and Windows machines, a lot of times there’s programs running in the background, they run on start up and sometimes they’re running in a hidden mode. And so I like to clear those out.
I also do like to update a lot of browsers to the newest setting and things like that, and I like to remove any existing… I would say review any existing browser extensions. A lot of times all of these little plugins and extensions end up having a big impact on things. And then maybe I’ll add another one, which is maybe it’s something I think that a lot of people might find a little odd, but it’s kind of an interesting flaw that makes things slow ,is your Internet connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me more.

Dan Caspi
So if you live in an area, or you’re on an Internet connection that goes in and out, your computer… All computers in this day and age expect some kind of communication with the Internet. And so not all programmers write their code in such a way to deal with things timing out. And so let’s say there is an Internet drop in the middle – it might freeze your whole screen, because let’s say you’re linked over to Dropbox or you’re linked over to your Google Drive and you’re trying to access that folder and it’s taking it like a minute or two minutes to get access to that folder. Your whole computer is waiting for that sequence to happen. So, it really depends what you’re trying to do, and your Internet connection can really play a big role in those kinds of things.

Pete Mockaitis
So you’re talking about if I have Google Drive, not so much with the website that I’m interacting with, but installed on my computer itself, the client.

Dan Caspi
Right, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good to know. And I’ve also discovered that I guess when your hard drive is full-ish, not 100% full, but like 95% full, that makes a world of a difference on the slowdown.

Dan Caspi
Absolutely, yes. You need some free space on your computer for temporary files and your cache and all of that. So absolutely, that can be a big help. And the other thing I can mention, sort of related to that is that these days a lot of people end up with massive amounts of email and massive amounts of music and photo libraries. And sometimes if you leave those things running in the background – let’s say you have an email client open with 50,000 messages or you have let’s say a Chrome browser open with 25 tabs – all of those things have to be loaded into memory to some degree. And so you’re just chewing up your available resources on that, and that just ends up being in the background.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m intrigued by that concept of loading into memory, because it seems like gigabytes of RAM have just sort of expanded and expanded. And so, is there any way that I can proactively tell a program I want it to run super fast, to be pre-loaded and at the top of the RAM queue or pecking order? I don’t even know if these computer words are sensible, but that’s what I’m thinking, “Hey, it seems like I’ve got way more RAM than I actually need. Can I tell it what I want it to do and this is the program I want locked and loaded for super quickness?”

Dan Caspi
You can do that to some extent, sort of, but the reality is that it comes down to the programmer, and it comes down to the person that wrote that program saying, “Hey, somebody wants to run this in a very high-performance mode. Can you improve the code to basically…” It might take over 90% of their machine, but that’s okay, because let’s say you’re doing some image processing or something and you’re running through dozens and dozens or thousands of files, and you’re like, “I want this thing to just crank.” So the programmer would then have to write the code to specifically do that, and a lot of times programmers may not think of your particular application or they may say, “I don’t want to write a program that might bring somebody’s machine to a grinding halt; that’s not very considerate.”
So, these are the kinds of things. But I will say, a lot of developers these days are online and you can interact with them. Maybe not so much with the big companies as easily, but a lot of the smaller developers are online and if you shoot them a quick note and say, “Hey, I really love your program, but it would be great if it could do this or that.” A lot of people are very responsive. And so that can be like a fun way to get that favorite feature that you wanted or have something loaded a bit faster. Some programs do offer that – I think Adobe Acrobat is an example that offers that kind of pre-loading, or Skype has that too, where it just sits in your taskbar kind of ready to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay, thank you. Now, you tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure that we cover off before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dan Caspi
You know, I think in general, I’ll say that most people out there I think have had probably a bad experience with a program or a piece of software that maybe scarred them a little bit. I hear these kind of stories all the time, and I guess I just encourage people to… Or I guess what I try to do right is bring the value to what technology can really do for people and help them see how really powerful and great it can be, because when everything’s working right, it’s really incredible.
And that’s something I really try to bring to everything that I do, is to have that kind of feeling, that emotion of, that incredible feeling shown when you use it, so you can really experience what technology can do for you. And I just imagine the first person that ever got into a car or ever got into an airplane, like a commercial airplane, the first person that was there. I want that same kind of incredible experience for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah! That’s exciting. Yes, I like that frame. Thank you! Okay. Well then, could you now share with us a favorite quote to kick it off?

Dan Caspi
Sure. So, one of my favorite quotes actually comes from Steve Jobs. And I don’t recall the exact details of the quote, but it’s something along the lines of that, “Simplicity actually is a lot harder to get to than something that’s complex.” And what I love about that is he reduces… He says that simplicity is actually a much harder goal, and I really agree with that. I think that coming up with something really refined and simple is just beautiful in the end, and I know that’s a philosophy that Apple’s taken for many, many years, and it’s one that I love as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Dan Caspi
I’m very fascinated with the Space program. I think there’s a lot of really cool research that’s come out of the Space program and it’s found applications in countless things that we use every day, and I think they’ve produced a lot of great research. I really think, I guess in general, that these kinds of challenges that are maybe not in our existing discipline, like maybe some of us will go to Space in our lifetimes, but the fact is that all of the technology and research to solve those kinds of problems can be used in other areas and other aspects of our lives. And so, those kind of crossover I love, and I think it presents a really interesting and unique set of challenges for scientists to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And how about a favorite book?

Dan Caspi
I tend to go for non-fiction. I’ll share maybe one of the books that I’m reading right now; I guess it perhaps isn’t as related to… Well, I guess it could be related, but I love the Malcolm Gladwell series of books, like Outliers and The Tipping Point. I really like that kind of way of thinking and how he breaks down a lot of things and finds patterns in them. Yeah, so I really like that series.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit? A personal practice of yours that’s been really helpful in your effectiveness?

Dan Caspi
Favorite habit. So, I’ll say that I’ve been working out consistently, like 3 to 4 days a week for years. And I find that no matter what, the first thing I do in my week is I schedule my workouts. And I find that it really brings me a lot of… There’s discipline to it, but I know that I’m kind of putting myself first, and my health always comes first before anything else. And I’ve always fit that in, and so I really love it at this point.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. And could you speak to maybe some of the benefits you notice in your life from exercise, kind of above and beyond just having a physical fitness and good body composition?

Dan Caspi
Sure. I mean, I think it makes me more versatile, even sort of basic things like carrying your luggage through the airport or being able to do things. I mean all of the kind of activities I don’t have any pain from, from any of those activities, and I also find that it brings me a real sense of grounding. A lot of people talk about the pleasure of actually taking an international flight because you’re sort of unplugged from the world, nobody can contact you. Emails are coming in maybe, but you’re not able to access them. And I really find the same about the gym. I mean I turn all that stuff off and I’m just there and I’m working out and I feel like it brings me a lot of peace in that way actually. Despite all the yelling.

Pete Mockaitis
An intense gym! And how about your best way to be contacted if folks want to learn more or check out what you’re up to? Where would you point them?

Dan Caspi
Absolutely. So my website is Element26.net, so they can definitely contact me there. And I’ll give out my email as well – it’s dan@element26.net. And if they want to give me a call – 847-984-0844. I’m available through all of those means. I’m definitely willing and able to speak to folks about their individual automation challenges and kind of the key issues they’re facing and talk further about how I might be able to help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect, thank you. Well, Dan, is there a final challenge or a call to action you’d like to issue forth to those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Dan Caspi
I think really it’s about taking the next step. And I think most people have identified that there’s something that they’re doing repetitively. And these days we depend so much on technology; I mean the speed of your Internet connection, the speed of your computer – all these things are impacting productivity on a day-to-day basis.
And I guess I would challenge people to think about how much time they might save if those things, those activities that they are doing – let’s say waiting for your computer to boot up or like you were doing, Pete – copying in all those names in a form and pasting it. How many times a day are you doing that, and what else would you do with all of that time and what’s that worth to you? And I think there’s a lot of kind of just general frustration that people become accustomed to and I think it would be… Like I said, I would challenge them to take a step back from it and think about what they might really be able to get out of what they’re doing if all of those concerns alleviated.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. Well, Dan, this has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you lots of luck in discovering pharmaceuticals and computer science challenges, and life, and your upcoming wedding. It’s been a great time.

Dan Caspi
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been great for me too.