When we last saw our intrepid integrator, they were working through some hard choices. Their company had fallen victim to a ransomware attack. They were locked out of all of their files, and the attackers were threatening to put all of their sensitive information on the internet if they didn’t pay a hefty ransom. What […]

Unless you’ve been shortlisted for a Nobel prize or you’re waiting on the birth of a baby, early morning phone calls are never a good thing. When Joe (the owner of the company that I just made up in my head) got a call from Kate (his equally made-up service manager) at 6:30 a.m., he […]

It’s a scenario currently playing out at AV integrators all over the world. After a difficult year of pandemic-induced budget cuts, a client accepts a proposal for an install or upgrade. Paperwork gets signed. Purchase orders get cut. Product orders go out. And then … the waiting game begins. Phone calls are made. The waiting […]

As we talked about in my last post about learning how to program, object orientedness is the name of the game when it comes to writing scaleable code that’s easy to update. Break your code up into little chunks that you can reuse. Figure out how to do it once, and you should (hopefully) never […]

InfoComm 2018 is in the rearview mirror, and it’s time to podcast again! Jimmy Vaughan (@jrsyjmy), UC Technical Product Manager at Crestron Electronics, joins host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) to talk about Unified Communication, the future of programming, and why you need to know what a VLAN is. But first! How professional wrestling can prepare you for […]

I just finished up teaching CTS prep for Avixa during the three-day classes before the InfoComm show. Not only was this a fun and a rewarding experience… I also came away with a new challenge. Several of my fellow instructors encouraged me to step up my certification game and get both my CTS-D and my […]

Halfway through a session on Crestron’s upcoming HTML5 touch panels, a friend who works there texted me, “Your excitement is the most entertaining [thing] I’ve seen thus far in a class.” What can I say? I’m looking forward to using the same tools as the rest of the software industry. I will have to brush […]

I recently had the privilege of working with a client who has very real and very serious vision problems. I say it was a privilege because every time I work with someone who wants something beyond my standard touch panel design, I learn from it. Looking at a touch panel through a client’s eyes (in […]

A few weeks ago it came out that in November of 2017, fitness tracking company Strava released a heat map of where its users have logged activity around the world. The map is a pretty nifty picture of where people like to exercise, but it included some data that the U.S. Military would probably rather […]

It’s a very special crossover edition! rAVe’s own Christa Bender (@AVChrista) joins host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) to talk some Super Bowl Smack (stay tuned for the details of our big bet!), New Year’s podcasting resolutions, and why Hope wants to bring more women onto this show. We also announce the AV Book Club (@AVbookclub). We […]

(Full disclosure: I don’t attend CES). My Twitter feed is rife with discussion about this year’s slate of keynote speakers at CES: six captains of industry and not one of them a woman (and only one of them not white). Even mainstream news outlets are talking about this. I mean, there was an article in […]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke “It’s not real, it’s just magic!” — My four-year-old daughter, captivated by the AV at Harry Potter World (Universal Studios) After InfoComm this year, I snuck away with my family for a mini-vacation. From the projector “sprinkling” us with fairy dust as we […]

It’s been a minute… but we’re back! Julia Baillie (@julia_baillie), president of CommuniQuest Consulting joins host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) to talk about market research, the user experience, and the importance of telling a story. Julia is a bona fide people person, and she’s been talking to everyone in our industry. Julia and Hope discuss her […]

Just before Mother’s Day, I wrote a long, passionate post on my personal Facebook feed about how this article stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings. Facebook friends from all walks of life chimed in to say that they, too, struggle with work/life balance and societal expectations. Being a working parent is hard, especially […]

Monday morning, I woke up to the dulcet tones of my smart lock locking itself… over and over (and over!) again. We cleaned the touch screen, we replaced the batteries, we gave it a stern talking to… eventually my husband pulled the radio out and it settled down. My lock is basically working, for now. […]

I recently bought a new vehicle (a VW Alltrack), and it came with all sorts of high tech bells and whistles. Adaptive cruise control has made my #RoadWarrior lifestyle a whole lot easier, but I’m not sure how sold I am on the park pilot system. The basic gist of park pilot is fairly simple… […]

It’s April in New England, which means that it’s been oscillating between snow and 80 degree weather. Floating Point host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) put on a light jacket, braved her hotel WiFi, and then joined Harman’s Paul Zielie (@paulzielie) to talk about large-scale systems (spoiler alert: even huddle rooms can be large-scale if you look […]

At a recent industry event I attended, the facilitator (an outside consultant) expressed some mild surprise that I was the only woman in the room. Me? I hadn’t really noticed. At this point, I’m pretty much used to it. I don’t mind getting a bathroom to myself, but it can still be hard to be […]

I know it’s a pretty odd thing for someone in our industry to say, but I don’t watch that much TV. On any given weeknight, you’re more likely to find me listening to an audiobook or podcast and making something in my craft room than you are to find me scrolling through our TiVo. TV […]

It’s our 10th (or is it second?) episode of the Floating Point! Host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) is joined by Patrick Murray (@controlhauspat) to talk standards, certifications, and to panic slightly about the future. It’s a wild, wild west out there… but we’d like to see some better standards for programmers. How do you go about […]

Last year at InfoComm, a friend from the industry who follows me on various social media platforms came up to me and said something like this, “I hate you! You’re so productive! How do you manage to work a difficult job, raise a kid, run half marathons and make craft projects?” I said something about […]

Last week, I saw the movie Hidden Figures, the story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. These trailblazing women were human “computers” at NASA (they did the math before there were electronic computers), and they all made significant contributions not just to the space race, but to advance women and people of […]

It’s the 9th episode of the Floating Point, and host Hope Roth (@beerandpie) is joined by Hal Dalzell (@MatthewArthur14), a programmer from the Frozen North, aka Canada, aka America’s Hat.  Hal is an honest to goodness engineer, got his start at the Canadian Broadcasting Company (Hope whiffed on her chance to make a Trailer Park […]

For Christmas, my husband gave me a Cricut cutter. It’s a machine that you can use to cut out pretty much any material, from iron-on vinyl to construction paper. It’s mostly a craft tool, but it’s also a fairly impressive piece of gadgetry. To set up your cuts, you hook it up to your computer […]

My last job responsibility before New Years Eve involved some minor updates to a system with slightly older technology. There’s something about working on an older system that puts me in a mood to think about how far we’ve all come together. Add in the transition to a new year, and I was feeling positively […]

Christmas is here, and this year many of my family members are getting the gift of gadgets. My four-year-old daughter has been begging for “her very own Alexa,” so she is getting an Echo Dot and a stern admonishment that she’s not allowed to use it to turn the lights on or off in Mommy’s […]

A couple of years ago, I was on an AV podcast and someone asked me if I would ever put a smart lock onto my house. I said I’d need to think long and hard about the security aspects of it before I considered it. Flash forward to today, and I just put in an […]

“Alexa! Alexxxaaaaaaa!!!” My four-year-old daughter is trying to wake up our Amazon Echo. Alexa gets better at understanding her every day, but she still only wakes up for her about half the time. Once Alexa is awake, however, she has an uncanny ability to figure out what my daughter is asking for. (Alexa wakes up […]

I read this article about the differences between high performers and workaholics a few months ago. It’s stuck with me ever since — mostly because it made me wonder if I’m secretly a workaholic. I like to think of myself as a high performer. I sometimes work long hours, and lord knows I travel a […]

In this age of Hulu, HBO Go and Netflix, it seems like everyone and their grandmother is trading in their DVR for an all-streaming solution. Well, my grandmother still has a cable box, but she also gave up AOL in favor of Gmail years ago, so I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. Neither […]

Recently, my husband had a major service issue with his car. This was a service issue so major, he contemplated leaving his car at the dealership and getting a new one somewhere else. The details will likely be for another post (lawyers might get involved). But I think there is a lot that we can […]

It was my husband’s birthday, and the only thing standing between me and our birthday date was a quick service call. Update some network settings, reboot the equipment so they’d take effect, check to make sure everything was online. Easy peasy, right? Yeah, I was like the AV equivalent of the old cop sitting in […]