Episode 157 features Kevin Freitas who, as you’ll find out, could be who he says he is or he could be 17 hobbies in a trenchcoat.
We discuss his online handheld computer museum, music, programming, photography, 3d modeling, and even go back as far as Geocities, perhaps even further…
Mentioned and Helpful Links from This Episode
Other Links
Breakaway Femmes makes me hope for a three-week women’s Tour de France
Bond and The Beatles have more in common than a theme song and revolvers
Don’t Copy Xerox’s Errors as Told in Fumbling the Future
Music created and provided by Henno Heitur of Monkey Tongue Productions.
–End Show Notes Transmission–
–Begin Transcription–
00:00:00:17 – 00:00:21:13
Agent Palmer
Previously on Agent palmer.com breakaway Femmes makes me hope for a three week women’s tour de France. Bond and the Beatles have more in common than a theme song, and revolvers and Lucy is getting ready for harvest season on the farm. This is The Palmer Files episode 157 with Kevin Freitas, who, well, as you’ll find out, could be who he says he is or he could be 17 Hobbes in a trench coat.
00:00:21:18 – 00:01:04:30
Agent Palmer
It’ll make sense. Later. We discuss his online for now handheld computer, museum, music programing, photography, 3D modeling and even go back as far as GeoCities, perhaps even further. Are you ready? Let’s do the show.
00:01:04:35 – 00:01:25:52
Agent Palmer
Hello, and welcome to The Palmer Files. I’m your host, Jason Stershic, also known as Agent Palmer. And on this 157th episode is Kevin Freitas. Kevin and I connected through the internet at some point, and from that and his website, you’ll come to understand, even in passing, that Kevin wears many hats, has many hobbies and interests, and probably has even more that he doesn’t know about yet.
00:01:25:57 – 00:01:48:09
Agent Palmer
He’s curious and what he’s found he enjoys. He is deeply passionate about. You’ll hear us discuss handheld computers because he has an online, for the time being, handheld computer museum. We also discuss music because the man can play any brass from trumpet to sousaphone, and there’s also programing, geology, photography, 3D design, and much, much more. All of that is coming your way shortly.
00:01:48:09 – 00:02:10:06
Agent Palmer
But first, remember that if you want to discuss the episode as you listen or afterwards, you can find all related ways to contact Kevin and myself in the show notes to catch up with Kevin and his many goings on, you can visit Kevin, Freitas, Dot net, that’s Kevin Freitas dot net and to see the handheld museum. It’s handheld museum.org.
00:02:10:11 – 00:02:24:11
Agent Palmer
Don’t forget you can see all of my writings and rantings on Agent palmer.com. And of course email can be sent to the Palmer files at gmail.com. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
00:02:24:16 – 00:02:31:28
Agent Palmer
Kevin, I looked around your website and it appears to me that you are a man of many, many, many hats.
00:02:31:33 – 00:02:33:43
Kevin Freitas
I would say that’s true. Yes.
00:02:33:48 – 00:03:00:31
Agent Palmer
Is there one in particular that is the one. If you had all the time in the world, you would do that one more than any of the others. And I guess at this point we should say, if you haven’t been to Kevin’s website, it’s like you’re you do the handheld museum. You are you’re a musician. It appears you’re a photographer of some.
00:03:00:35 – 00:03:05:03
Agent Palmer
And, I would assume some technical background as well.
00:03:05:07 – 00:03:05:36
Kevin Freitas
Yes.
00:03:05:36 – 00:03:19:05
Agent Palmer
So with all I mean, those are those are only a few of the many hats. So what would what would be the one like, what would be the, the the go to like money’s no longer an object. You get to wake up and do what you want. Well, what is it?
00:03:19:14 – 00:03:27:14
Kevin Freitas
I it’s always hard to choose, but I think honestly, the. I would love to open a museum of handheld computers.
00:03:27:21 – 00:03:28:28
Agent Palmer
Okay, so to take the.
00:03:28:30 – 00:03:30:23
Kevin Freitas
I just think it would be a total blast.
00:03:30:23 – 00:03:36:18
Agent Palmer
So to take the digital, that you’ve made and make that a physical.
00:03:36:23 – 00:03:38:01
Kevin Freitas
Yes. Okay, absolutely.
00:03:38:01 – 00:04:02:34
Agent Palmer
And let’s start there for sure. How did the handheld museum start? Like did you have a collection? Like what? Where does this where does this begin? Because I mean, I’ve been trying to think all day, right, about the handhelds I have had. And I’m not a I look, I know phones are included, but I’m trying to think before then.
00:04:02:34 – 00:04:18:30
Agent Palmer
So for me, it was there. There were maybe five early ones. Right. Like I had the the baseball stadium and the football stadium, ones that were like, okay, with the dots on the playfield.
00:04:18:34 – 00:04:20:55
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, just big LEDs. Yep.
00:04:21:00 – 00:04:25:56
Agent Palmer
I had, the tiger, John Elway football.
00:04:26:00 – 00:04:26:35
Kevin Freitas
Oh, nice.
00:04:26:38 – 00:04:27:18
Agent Palmer
I had the.
00:04:27:18 – 00:04:29:35
Kevin Freitas
Little preset LCD like guys. Yeah.
00:04:29:36 – 00:04:55:23
Agent Palmer
And I had the oblong shaped green Ninja Turtles one. Which I think was, that one. That wasn’t Tiger. I think that was Konami. And then I go right to the Big Brick original Game Boy. Like, I think that’s, that’s the handhelds for me of them. If I wanted to follow in your footsteps, the. Yeah, the game is the only one I have left.
00:04:55:28 – 00:05:17:12
Agent Palmer
I don’t know what happened to John. I might actually have the football one still, somewhere, but I. Or maybe it’s the baseball one. One of them is somewhere in a box. I mean, that’s the thing. It’s somewhere in a box. But I don’t know what happened to John Elway. Football. I put hours into that thing. I’m sure the turtles one, probably put our, you know, I don’t I wouldn’t know where to begin.
00:05:17:12 – 00:05:20:50
Agent Palmer
How did you where do you start with this?
00:05:20:55 – 00:05:42:51
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, it started pretty organically. So when I mean growing up, same thing kind of growing up in the 80s, handheld things were becoming a thing, you know, so whether it was these kind of LCD games or LED games, but then the Game Boy kind of busted it open. But yeah, so I had a few of those kinds of things growing up and a couple of them just yeah, I had them.
00:05:42:51 – 00:06:04:53
Kevin Freitas
I still had them, you know, like in college and around college in like the late 90s, early 2000, I think. I don’t know if I realized what eBay was, but I was like, oh, I could go look this thing up that I maybe used to have or something like that. Yeah. And at that point I grabbed, I think I grabbed it and, I missed it when in the 90s and I, I didn’t have the money, frankly.
00:06:04:58 – 00:06:24:59
Kevin Freitas
I bought an Apple Newton. So Apple’s weird 90s pre palm Foley handwriting recognition. You know, PDA handheld. And so I had that for years and I didn’t really do anything with it. I had a couple. Then I got a couple of cell phones and things like that. So I had a small bag like a satchel, okay, with a few handhelds in it.
00:06:24:59 – 00:06:44:26
Kevin Freitas
And I was like, these are great. And I can collect them like I’ve done because it’s really cool, because they they don’t take up much space. And then the pandemic hit, you know, fast forward 15 years later or whatever. And it kind of turned into the hobby that I took on, you know, some people made bread, some people, you know, did other things.
00:06:44:26 – 00:07:13:53
Kevin Freitas
And I was like, I’m going to just start collecting these things more. And so that’s kind of where the, the bulk of what I have in the collection has, has come from and, and it’s, you know, it’s really fun to see the devices. But also, you know, I try to I try to clean them up when I can, I try to photograph them when I can like to give them a new life, essentially to say like, yeah, these things are part of this fascinating history, which we can totally get into.
00:07:13:57 – 00:07:14:51
Kevin Freitas
I think it’s worth preserving.
00:07:14:51 – 00:07:46:47
Agent Palmer
It feels like these things are, I don’t know, they’re, for lack of a better word, better than the smartphone. Right? Like these single use entities, which, you know, even and behind me on one of the shelves that no one can see, but you is my favorite mobile phone of all time, which was the original Nokia Razr.
00:07:46:52 – 00:08:22:32
Agent Palmer
Which, yeah, because I have my original one that has been washed three times and still worked at least the last time I charge the battery. Right? And that’s what makes it the best, because it went through the wash and dryer and kept working for sure. But as far as these other single use things, these games we’re talking about and like before we get into the the palms and the iPods and everything beyond that, these single use games, I just look back and go like, how did I spend hours with this thing?
00:08:22:37 – 00:08:22:54
Kevin Freitas
And it’s.
00:08:23:01 – 00:08:26:18
Agent Palmer
And it’s a testament to I was a.
00:08:26:18 – 00:08:26:42
Kevin Freitas
Simpler.
00:08:26:42 – 00:08:49:49
Agent Palmer
Time. You know, part of it is a simpler time. Part of it is that, we were able to lose ourselves in just an LCD screen as opposed to needing full immersive graphics. Right. And and you learned the patterns. Let’s be real. There were patterns.
00:08:49:54 – 00:08:50:26
Kevin Freitas
Oh you bet.
00:08:50:26 – 00:09:20:04
Agent Palmer
And it it it became something more and I, I think that’s beyond that’s all I know about it though like I don’t there’s a history there’s a history to this that is lost on me because like I, we are of similar vintage. I will say so like, you know, my parents bought me a computer or I got a hand-me-down computer in the late 80s when everybody else got in NES, so I never had it any.
00:09:20:13 – 00:09:46:41
Agent Palmer
But. Well, you have a computer. That was the argument. That’s a but I, you know, so I played NES at other people’s houses. My first, my first consoles. Not until college when I bought myself a Gamecube. Okay. So there are a lot. And other than that, then the only real console I had was the Gameboy. But those other handhelds, even though they weren’t flashy and I always wanted a Game Gear like I still remember this is decades later, I still like.
00:09:46:41 – 00:09:47:57
Kevin Freitas
Well, there we go. But I never.
00:09:47:57 – 00:10:02:13
Agent Palmer
Had a Game Gear. Like that would have been amazing. Yeah. Aside from oh, I had that when I was younger. Did you have a fascination with the technical and the history of it, too, or did that come after the.
00:10:02:13 – 00:10:24:25
Kevin Freitas
Technical is almost an afterthought for me. Like, you know, I am a technical guy by kind of trade and, you know, by just kind of curiosity. But the, the thing that I focused in on, even, even then, even after I bought that Newton that came to, to my mind was how really very personal these devices actually are.
00:10:24:30 – 00:10:43:45
Kevin Freitas
Okay, you know, whether it’s a calculator. So, I mean, my collection goes back to the early 1970s. And I think the interesting thing is every single one of these devices, since they’re beaten, you know, they’re handheld, which means they’re portable and take them with you. You can put them anywhere you need them to go. They’re extremely personal.
00:10:43:45 – 00:11:06:24
Kevin Freitas
And you you just alluded to that. You’re like, oh my gosh. Yeah. I think so many hours into this game, you know, there’s memories and there’s there’s experiences, for better or for worse, that are attached to these devices that have gone with us through thick and thin and maybe even still, like, give us the light when we pull them out of a box and they still magically work, which is a thing.
00:11:06:24 – 00:11:28:05
Kevin Freitas
I’d love to talk about that. That’s the story to me, you know, and that’s that’s kind of the hard part about the museum. But also and I say museum by my website, that’s the hard part, is getting people to kind of talk about the story because it isn’t about the device, it’s about what the device kind of connects you to in your memories or in your family or with your friends.
00:11:28:10 – 00:11:49:37
Kevin Freitas
And it sounds cheesy, but that’s kind of it. Well, I, you know, there’s a fascination with the industry. There’s a fascination with I love failures, like I love failed devices. But it’s really just that it’s the stories because I think they’re very unlike other pieces of technology. I think they’re extremely personal. Like even a laptop I don’t think is nearly as personal.
00:11:49:37 – 00:11:54:31
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. No, no. Yeah. Something you slide in your pocket or something you throw in a bag or something.
00:11:54:36 – 00:12:20:32
Agent Palmer
So I will give you a story then. In seventh. No. Couldn’t been seventh, ninth grade, maybe entering high school. I was, it’s, it’s the late 90s. We all had to buy a graphing calculator. Everybody was required to have a graphing calculator.
00:12:20:37 – 00:12:22:23
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. Yeah. 85.
00:12:22:28 – 00:12:58:59
Agent Palmer
Well, here’s the thing. So everybody. Six I had a t I 86, which we just made. It was a slightly more powerful. But for what I’m about to tell for the story, I’m about to tell you, that’s important. But part of it was I’m an only child, so I didn’t get a hand-me-down. A lot of people I know had 80 threes or 80 fours that were from previous older siblings, so mine was going to be new out of the box because, you know, when my parents were in college, they didn’t have they had a calculator, not a not a graphing calculator.
00:12:59:04 – 00:13:21:38
Agent Palmer
I definitely used the graphics part of my graphing calculator. And so when you talk about those personal stories and I have it in my desk, I could grab it. I know the drawer it’s in right now and the batteries aren’t in it because I didn’t want it to corrode and die. And I’m sure the memories completely shot because it’s been off for a very long time.
00:13:21:45 – 00:13:25:57
Agent Palmer
I have to and I and here’s the other thing. I’d have to remember how to use it.
00:13:26:02 – 00:13:26:36
Kevin Freitas
Oh for sure.
00:13:26:36 – 00:13:50:08
Agent Palmer
Yeah, but I remember, some upperclassmen who had a couple same model that were like, well, if you go online and I let you borrow this really expensive cable, you can download some games, right? So the first level of Mario, there was a baseball game.
00:13:50:13 – 00:13:50:47
Kevin Freitas
Tetris.
00:13:50:47 – 00:14:00:14
Agent Palmer
Tetris. There was, it wasn’t breakout. It was called Astrid, or it was, or Astrid. It was a breakout type game.
00:14:00:14 – 00:14:01:07
Kevin Freitas
Breakout clone.
00:14:01:11 – 00:14:33:18
Agent Palmer
Right. And so these were all things that I spent a lot of time instead of paying attention in class doing, however, it is a calculator where you’re using it for, for specific classes and specific maths. And for me as a person who by the time I’m, you know, in high school, I’ve, forgone all of my interest in science as it stands.
00:14:33:23 – 00:14:58:12
Agent Palmer
And I’ve moved to an arts and literature kind of track, which is the way my mind still kind of works. But I know enough to know that I have this powerful tool in my pocket, and I’m allowed to use it in tests. So instead of studying before any math test for like two years, I would stay up programing the functions in.
00:14:58:12 – 00:15:22:37
Agent Palmer
So it would be like, you know, enter X, enter Y, enter Z, and you know, if you don’t, you know, just programing these things where like we know how the functions work, we’re learning how that’s the point of the class is to learn how to get y to get. But why should I do any of that when I can just stay up all night programing it and then put in X?
00:15:22:37 – 00:15:44:21
Agent Palmer
Is this this is the rest of the formula. Hit enter and it’ll it’ll be done and it’ll be done. And so that’s what I did. And absolutely the hard part was programing it to show work because they always wanted you to show your steps. So you couldn’t just go into the computer or calculator and program the thing.
00:15:44:21 – 00:16:15:27
Agent Palmer
You had to program it to show you some of the stuff the, you know, print, along the way for sure. And, this is maybe the most formidable, like, educational memory I have of high school is staying other than staying up late to write a paper. Next in line is staying up late to program this calculator. That was mainly for games and occasionally for test taking, right?
00:16:15:42 – 00:16:29:18
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, yeah. And always a bleak and a an a total pain to work with in any way, shape or form. I, you know, when you talk about modern UI and stuff like that, you’re just like there there’s so difficult to get into.
00:16:29:19 – 00:16:30:17
Agent Palmer
And that it.
00:16:30:18 – 00:16:31:15
Kevin Freitas
Can do what you want.
00:16:31:15 – 00:16:55:54
Agent Palmer
And thankfully they worked on basic, which even though we, you know, the late 90s was the internet era, but not the internet era as people know it. So the fact that there was any kind of basic help without a book online, for me, to, you know, well, nobody was going to kick me off the dial up at 3 a.m..
00:16:55:59 – 00:17:12:21
Agent Palmer
So I, you know, I had the internet all to myself, you know, and so but these are these are the stories you’re talking about that you want to collect along with whatever the gaming ones are. But, that’s very calculator specific, but.
00:17:12:26 – 00:17:34:29
Kevin Freitas
No, but that’s the thing is, and I do have a few memories before, before I left Twitter or something like that, I was able to kind of get a few people to. Yeah, to emote and, and share those memories. And it it is it’s just that desire because I have similar memories. One of my, one of my favorites, I have the exact same calculator, one where I actually programed it, to, to be a reference.
00:17:34:38 – 00:17:50:06
Kevin Freitas
So I had a program in libraries of information. Okay. Because we weren’t allowed to have like real computers. So I was like, well, I’m allowed to have this. And so I was able to look up formulas and stuff. It wasn’t even like I didn’t even go so far as to plug anything into the formulas. I just needed them as a reference.
00:17:50:15 – 00:18:10:29
Kevin Freitas
Sure, it was great. Yeah. But my my earlier one, and this is a weird one, but I, I kind of love it. When I was in, although it’s surrounding the Atari Lynx handheld game. Okay, so this was kind of just post Game Boy, but a little bit pre Game Gear. So they got Game Gear. I saw this thing.
00:18:10:29 – 00:18:27:40
Kevin Freitas
I was like, Holy crap. It’s it’s a color. It’s got all these cool games that I had played in the arcade. You know, arcades were fizzling out by then, but there were still some really decent arcades and stuff. And I was like, I really want this thing, but I can’t afford it. And so what I did was I had a paper route and whatever.
00:18:27:45 – 00:18:50:24
Kevin Freitas
I bought a couple games, I went to toys R us, bought a couple games and basically said, well, I gotta do something to get these games to work, which was to actually save my money to get the full Atari Lynx to play it. Yeah, and I did, I totally did, and I still have that Atari Lynx that it’s absolutely like in the collection, but it was just a weird it’s such a vivid memory that I have.
00:18:50:24 – 00:19:08:46
Kevin Freitas
It’s more than the games themselves. I mean, except for there’s a Batman game that’s horrifically bad. But more than the games themselves, I, I still just remember I’m like, how on earth did I think of that as a kid and actually kind of go through with it? And there’s I think there’s still a pride there associated with that.
00:19:08:52 – 00:19:12:32
Kevin Freitas
Well, and so yeah, they’re also.
00:19:12:37 – 00:19:24:31
Agent Palmer
Talisman and right there, like these touchstones to stories because if we expand it to video games.
00:19:24:36 – 00:19:25:12
Kevin Freitas
00:19:25:17 – 00:20:00:03
Agent Palmer
For myself, between the Gameboy and the Gamecube, there are a lot of years, but I have memories going to friends houses to play the Dreamcast and the Genesis and the Snes and the PlayStation one. And so right for a generation where especially for us, where there was a before there was an after, there was the internet, there was cable and MTV, like all of these things, it is just one more thing that we can not only tell stories with, but mark the passage of time with.
00:20:00:03 – 00:20:17:13
Agent Palmer
Like, I remember being in college when the two came out and it being like, well, at least three people in my dorm went to midnight sales and came back and were playing games like, you know, at 3 a.m.. And so these are touchstones for us.
00:20:17:24 – 00:20:39:08
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. And the timeline. Yeah, they are their time, their touchstones, their timelines. And the timeline itself is fascinating. Like the branching of all these different kinds of devices. And then they’re coalescing to a certain degree. Yeah, more modern era. But we have, you know, there’s there has been a lot of change in this space over the last, you know, 40, 50 years.
00:20:39:08 – 00:21:07:57
Kevin Freitas
And I think it’s how it relates to us as individuals, but also of all these kind of industries that we see, you know, swirling around over time. And now there’s these gargantuan mega and things like that. It’s it’s really fun because I think, like I said, about the failures, it’s fun to not just have those touchstones, but to also see what worked and what didn’t, you know, and certain things had so much longevity that it was, you know, like a, like a Gameboy or like a pawn that it was incredible.
00:21:08:01 – 00:21:29:42
Kevin Freitas
But then you see, when companies try and frankly just fail, like, I love that because having worked at, you know, an Amazon, it’s a it’s a reminder to say that nobody knows what they’re doing. So yeah. So even even though you get to the level of trillion dollar companies like Apple and Amazon and all these companies, I’m like, you know, they still don’t know what they’re doing.
00:21:29:42 – 00:21:46:54
Kevin Freitas
They’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. And these devices, to me are a kind of an, a, representation of that. Because you can say they fail in lots of ways, like Google’s like, oh, you know, Google Meet, it’ll probably, you know, it’ll probably go on in five years because whatever they just they just recycle through all these products.
00:21:46:59 – 00:22:05:02
Kevin Freitas
Those are software products. These are produced manufactured pieces of hardware and software. Yeah. And marketing and all these different things that had to come together. And that’s a that’s a whole heck of a lot bigger of an investment potentially, than just a piece of software. There’s a lot more to software.
00:22:05:16 – 00:22:33:12
Agent Palmer
But it also it also I like the idea of that because I well, I mean as a as a like internet nerd slash, computer geek, you know, Xerox Parc, the biggest failure that there was, I mean, it was a pretty big success, but they didn’t do anything with it. So they saw their success through the eyes of what Apple and Microsoft stole from them, basically.
00:22:33:23 – 00:22:57:47
Agent Palmer
But then you look at the Newton, which is just ahead of its time. That’s the only that’s the only problem with the new is it’s ahead of its time. And then you fast forward to when cell phones are ubiquitous and everybody has one. And I mean this is going to be very specific to maybe I don’t know if this was global, but you can still hear the Nextel direct talk did it in the dang thing.
00:22:57:52 – 00:23:22:36
Agent Palmer
And that was a feature until. Yeah. And you thought like, oh, well, at a certain point, like there were I never had a Nextel, so I never had that function. But you always knew somebody who did. You always heard it when you were out and you were like, well, eventually this will be every everybody will have this. And then Nextel and that feature went completely away.
00:23:22:41 – 00:23:23:57
Kevin Freitas
And it’s like, yeah.
00:23:24:02 – 00:23:44:36
Agent Palmer
In any given space, you know, these things are maybe they’re successful, but maybe they’re not. And part of it is we need museums, not just not just to get back to the, the website, but like, we need museums because some of this stuff you can learn from.
00:23:44:41 – 00:23:45:20
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, I agree.
00:23:45:20 – 00:24:17:28
Agent Palmer
And and the other part is there are because it all happened so fast. Depending on what you’re doing and where you are, you may not realize that anything happened. Like if you were, you know, if you went abroad for a very specific semester, you could have missed any number of the things we’re talking about because they were so fleeting, or it was just a summer or whatever it is.
00:24:17:42 – 00:24:35:00
Agent Palmer
And then without anything else, you know, you could be 20 years down the road at a reunion and two people could be like, hey, remember when we used to use that thing? And then a third person go, I have no idea what you’re talking about, right? But so, yeah, these things are.
00:24:35:09 – 00:24:43:41
Kevin Freitas
Like you’re saying the video game consoles, you know, you just you just miss a wave, you know, and you’re just like, you turn around and you’re like, you’re three generations down or something like that.
00:24:43:41 – 00:25:09:33
Agent Palmer
Yeah. And that’s that’s the other thing. You, you I think a lot of people, you know, in our generation and maybe, ten years either side. So from ages 30 through 50, depending on when you were in college, you know, you probably saved up your money, your allowance, your lawn, mowing your paper out stuff, and you bought whatever console you could as a junior, sophomore, senior in high school.
00:25:09:48 – 00:25:29:31
Agent Palmer
Then you went away to college where money’s a lot tighter. And, you know, then you get out into the real world where money’s even tighter. And then by the time you’re established, whether it’s with a family or without, with a job and income, you turn around and you go the console that you last had in high school. He’s right.
00:25:29:36 – 00:25:36:49
Agent Palmer
He’s three. It’s not that hard to go like, wait, what happened? I can’t get any more games. There’s nothing.
00:25:36:49 – 00:26:03:21
Kevin Freitas
Left. Yeah. What like and the collect, the collection that I’ve kind of amassed is is surprising in and of itself because when I, it takes me a lot of time and admittedly, I have many, many devices that I have not like actually cataloged because at the time it takes metadata and like, you know, even even in the few devices that I kind of have near where I’m sitting right now that I pulled out, I was like, oh, cool, I’ll show these to Jason.
00:26:03:21 – 00:26:19:25
Kevin Freitas
These are really cool. I immediately ran into exactly that thing. I was like, okay, cool. Here’s my here’s the first iPhone, iPhone 2G. Right. Cool. It’s it’s this thing. It’s smart. I feel small now, blah blah blah. But then I pulled out the, a Zune. Oh, you know, Microsoft MP3 player.
00:26:19:25 – 00:26:21:23
Agent Palmer
I still have one of those on my shelf behind me.
00:26:21:23 – 00:26:25:57
Kevin Freitas
And I was just double checking the years. I was like, you know, I don’t have a photographic memory. So I was like, oh, I’ll double check both.
00:26:25:57 – 00:26:28:12
Agent Palmer
2007 wait, seriously?
00:26:28:12 – 00:26:53:23
Kevin Freitas
You’re looking. Yeah, yeah. This this particular model Zune, this is, you know, not the first one, but, probably the second. Second or. Yeah, probably somewhere. The second model, you know, so obviously they were still manufacturing. They’re still going in on it. And then this iPhone came out, you know, so you even right here in my hands, the Zune in one hand and the iPhone in the other, that’s a major, you know, Nexus point.
00:26:53:27 – 00:26:59:28
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. In the world of all these kind of devices. And I just basically happened to pull it out that way today. That’s it.
00:26:59:32 – 00:27:26:56
Agent Palmer
So I and here’s the thing, I know 2007 is a long time ago for some people, longer for others, shorter for others. But when you compare, like, even just the fact that you could get an iPhone like a, I guess the all in one phone that we know now in our pockets and a Zune media player only, you know, not very, I think.
00:27:27:01 – 00:27:27:43
Agent Palmer
I think it had.
00:27:27:46 – 00:27:28:40
Kevin Freitas
We did some video.
00:27:28:40 – 00:27:47:24
Agent Palmer
Yeah, it might be, you know, but like it’s just and those were both developed in the same year, which is like if I were to tell you that, you know, like a it’s kind of mind blowing because if that was a quiz or you have if you would have asked me ahead of time, I’d have been like, well, the the Zune definitely came out well before the iPhone.
00:27:47:24 – 00:27:48:39
Agent Palmer
Like they have. No.
00:27:48:43 – 00:27:48:51
Kevin Freitas
Yeah.
00:27:48:58 – 00:27:52:07
Agent Palmer
No cross or whatever.
00:27:52:12 – 00:27:53:12
Kevin Freitas
Miles of it. Yeah.
00:27:53:17 – 00:28:36:39
Agent Palmer
But I will say there is something in we’ll say the word, it will get overused if we go too far with this. But nostalgia doesn’t have to be from the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, like. Yeah, especially as fast as all these things move. Yeah. I could argue that I have a nostalgia for the original Motorola Droid, because it had the flip out full on keyboard and, as a as someone who really it took a while for me to get used to typing on a flat screen.
00:28:36:44 – 00:28:37:20
Agent Palmer
I was like.
00:28:37:20 – 00:28:37:45
Kevin Freitas
Oh, this.
00:28:37:45 – 00:29:02:20
Agent Palmer
Is amazing. This is going to get an actual keyboard. But that’s, you know, and then I go as a, as a, as a crazy nostalgia, like, there was a, an Android, a Motorola Android phone. I don’t know which one that I thought was the perfect size. I was like, this is the best. Nothing will ever get better than this.
00:29:02:25 – 00:29:13:06
Agent Palmer
And then they all started getting bigger and I went, yeah, nothing has gotten better than this. I want them to be smaller again. Please stop making it big phones.
00:29:13:11 – 00:29:18:09
Kevin Freitas
Here’s here’s the comparison of a iPhone duet 16 or 15 Pro Max.
00:29:18:09 – 00:29:22:30
Agent Palmer
It’s all my I want to say double. It’s not, but it’s it.
00:29:22:44 – 00:29:27:27
Kevin Freitas
If it’s half again, it’s half again I mean easily. Yeah. Like yeah.
00:29:27:32 – 00:29:28:13
Agent Palmer
And so.
00:29:28:15 – 00:29:44:55
Kevin Freitas
Well the if you want to feel really, really, of a certain vintage I’ll say, I just looked it up to double check the original iPhone will be a voting age on June 29th of this year. Oh. All right. So I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah.
00:29:44:57 – 00:30:01:21
Agent Palmer
All right. So, I as we started this, a while ago, I said you wore many hats and the the handheld museum was only one of them. Yeah. But you are also. And I bring this up because it’s close to my heart, a musician.
00:30:01:26 – 00:30:03:18
Kevin Freitas
I am.
00:30:03:23 – 00:30:33:19
Agent Palmer
But you are one of those musicians who has, who does, who plays an instrument. I just cannot I could never play a brass instrument. I have no idea why I can play a read it instrument. I can play a guitar. So strings, reeds and even, you know, percussion. But a brass instrument is somehow. And I tried because I just, I don’t I don’t know why I tried, but I did, and it’s just like, this is just not something I can do.
00:30:33:30 – 00:30:36:16
Agent Palmer
So I want to ask.
00:30:36:21 – 00:30:37:01
Kevin Freitas
Yes.
00:30:37:06 – 00:30:58:52
Agent Palmer
You not only got into, a brass instrument, you appeared to still be playing many, many years later, and most of the people I know who play like, say, trumpet or baritone or whatever stopped playing in college. So. Right. Did you rediscover it?
00:30:58:57 – 00:31:18:22
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. Pretty much. I grew up playing trumpet in school. Okay. And then. And so I played it for college, and after that it wasn’t, you know, I didn’t major in it or anything. I was in a ton of groups in school, and I loved it. My thing. But after college, yeah, there wasn’t really anything out there for me.
00:31:18:27 – 00:31:35:48
Kevin Freitas
And I was in the Tacoma, Washington area, and, you know, it’s not an incredibly vibrant, you know, musical community. Seattle, obviously nearby, it was more so. But again, I that wasn’t even my job. I was just doing doing websites and all that sort of stuff. And, at some point I kind of got a bit of an edge.
00:31:35:48 – 00:31:53:46
Kevin Freitas
So I played in a little bit of community theater. I just played in the pit orchestra. Okay, that was really fulfilling, really fun. But again, that was few and far between. And again, that was just really for fun. But, once I met my current partner, I met her. She lived in Seattle and she’s like, hey, you got to come to this thing.
00:31:53:51 – 00:32:23:16
Kevin Freitas
And it’s called Honk Fest. And I went to this festival, and it’s a it’s basically a festival of kind of street brassy, mostly bands from, from in this area, but also all over the country and world and went to this thing and they, you know, I was standing, you know, a few inches from a guy who had a tuba on his shoulder and he would he would get into his shoulder by like flipping it around a couple times, and then it would land on his shoulder.
00:32:23:20 – 00:32:49:43
Kevin Freitas
And we were in a very small, small bar, way too small for the amount of people in the band. The band was 30, 20, 30 people. Holy moly. Mostly brass, brass and percussion. And I was right here. Melt my face off. And essentially it was like I got to find a band. So that was 2013, I want to say so have have been in or have started brass bands, street kind of brass bands since then and played sousaphone.
00:32:49:43 – 00:33:06:10
Kevin Freitas
Kind of switched the sousaphone for a bit when the, when the need arise and fell in love with that. And currently I’m playing trumpet again in my current band, so yeah, just tons of fun. Just for fun, you know, get out there, show my kid what it’s like to just do a thing for fun and not have to totally obsess over it or.
00:33:06:12 – 00:33:21:36
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I mean, it. It is nice to have a hobby. Like an actual hobby, although I’m talking to you and I think we could probably, go, you know, tit for tat on like, well, this is also a hobby and this is also a hobby.
00:33:21:43 – 00:33:22:19
Kevin Freitas
All hobbies?
00:33:22:19 – 00:33:22:39
Agent Palmer
Yeah.
00:33:22:41 – 00:33:23:47
Kevin Freitas
All hobbies, all the way down.
00:33:23:49 – 00:33:31:43
Agent Palmer
Yeah, yeah. So it’s just kind of like, oh, that’s. Is that Kevin or is that, like, just like 17 hobbies in a trenchcoat? You know, that’s.
00:33:31:47 – 00:33:32:14
Kevin Freitas
Pretty much that.
00:33:32:16 – 00:33:42:28
Agent Palmer
Yeah. Yeah. So what, what else makes up Kevin then. Because obviously, you know, you said your day job is, programing. Is that.
00:33:42:33 – 00:33:43:22
Kevin Freitas
It is.
00:33:43:27 – 00:34:10:32
Agent Palmer
And so, I mean, there’s a lot of steps, but it was it always programing was that was that kind of like the like if I go back to, you know, I, you know, you and I are playing Gamecube or Gameboy, you and I are playing Gameboy way back in the, in the 90s, while we’re waiting for our color handhelds to come out like, hey, Kevin, what do you want to do?
00:34:10:32 – 00:34:20:05
Agent Palmer
Like, is programing in that? Are you did you get the bug that early? Because even even a guy who had an early computer who’s not thinking about programing.
00:34:20:10 – 00:34:35:16
Kevin Freitas
No, no, it was I mean, I had a computer. Same thing with you. My parents got like an Apple TV when I was pretty young, like fourth grade. So that was a pretty big deal. And I, I poked away at it. Same thing a little bit later. But no, like through high school and stuff, I wasn’t programing.
00:34:35:16 – 00:35:00:11
Kevin Freitas
I wanted to be an astronaut. Okay. Straight up. So so definitely like science, space tech, whatever. But no, it was once I was in college that I was coming up when the web was coming up, basically, and started messing around and was like, oh, I can I can hit this key combination and see the code behind this, you know, when web page when I’m on, like Netscape Navigator.
00:35:00:16 – 00:35:20:56
Kevin Freitas
And so I taught myself. So essentially I didn’t go to school for anything technology. I got a geology degree and, while I was at school, kind of took the knowledge that I started to build before doing web related things and started working at that school. And then turned that into doing, you know, working for a web development company and then a couple of those.
00:35:20:56 – 00:35:45:04
Kevin Freitas
And then I was I was a little stuck. I had a lot of side projects that I love doing. So I built a lot of my own little kind of web apps and things like that. But then at some point, I talked to some former kind of, some friends who were former kind of employees and stuff with a company we worked at, and they worked at Amazon, and they told me about a role that’s kind of a was for me, a revelation.
00:35:45:04 – 00:36:05:18
Kevin Freitas
It was a it’s called design technologist. And really what it boils down to is you’re kind of a jack of all trades. Slash I like to call it professional generalist. Okay. So it really echoed a lot of the things that interested me in my life, which was we’re going to you’re going to be in this role and you might be one day prototyping.
00:36:05:18 – 00:36:28:54
Kevin Freitas
The next day you might be hacking some code together to see if something’s going to work. And presenting it to leadership and all these different things. So it was a really fun way to take some of the technical things that I knew how to do and turn it into like, oh, I can do this, and I can be kind of diffused in my professional life, similar to how I am personally.
00:36:28:58 – 00:36:47:46
Kevin Freitas
It’s in my in my passions and that sort of thing. So, so yeah, I’m so I’m still able to do that. I don’t consider myself like a enterprise level developer. But I can jump into whatever I want to jump into and make something work. And, you know, prove it out or hack it together. And and fortunately, I can I can get paid for that, which is great.
00:36:47:51 – 00:37:16:56
Agent Palmer
So does that make it harder for you when you discover a new hobby and you’re like, oh, now I got to build a new website and I can, right? Because I and I, I sit here, I sit here as a guy who, I started coding websites when, you know, the badge of Honor was I use notepad like, I don’t I just, I just, I just code it out by hand from, and then, switching to WordPress.
00:37:17:01 – 00:37:44:14
Agent Palmer
And then I got out of it for long enough that getting back into WordPress was too hard. And so now I’m like, yeah, I, I think I, I think that’s my past and I think I’m, I’m on to other things now. But I do know that at the very beginning, when you’re trying to learn, if anybody discovers that you do websites.
00:37:44:19 – 00:37:57:58
Agent Palmer
Hey, my brothers, sisters, could use a website for whatever, you know, it’s like you are. Yeah. Official. Just, like, never let anyone know you can fix a computer.
00:37:58:03 – 00:37:59:01
Kevin Freitas
Oh, yeah.
00:37:59:06 – 00:38:30:36
Agent Palmer
Yeah, there are hundred percent. And that I fall into. I fell into that category two, and now I’ve. I’ve limited it to family only. Which but but the website stuff. At one point I was like, yeah, I’ll do that. Like, yeah, I’ll do, I’ll, I’ll do, I’ll do that. And a lot of it is, I think the web was exploding after the year 2000, in a way that our little former GeoCities brains never thought possible.
00:38:30:41 – 00:38:35:31
Agent Palmer
Because if I go back, GeoCities is my first coding experience.
00:38:35:36 – 00:38:38:50
Kevin Freitas
Yes. Yeah. I still remember my GeoCities address.
00:38:38:55 – 00:38:57:31
Agent Palmer
I can’t read this is the I. I wanted to I know the Wayback Machine did some really good work as far as like archiving a bunch of GeoCities stuff, and I if I could, if I could go back in time, I would just look up what the GeoCities, what my address used to be because I don’t remember it.
00:38:57:36 – 00:39:02:18
Kevin Freitas
Oh that’s interesting. Yeah, I guess I forgot. I forgot to try the Wayback machine for that one.
00:39:02:18 – 00:39:12:10
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I don’t know what they got. I think they only got certain neighborhoods. Quote unquote. If you remember yours, what was yours?
00:39:12:15 – 00:39:15:58
Kevin Freitas
It was geocities.com/soho/13 36.
00:39:15:58 – 00:39:17:01
Agent Palmer
Okay.
00:39:17:06 – 00:39:26:23
Kevin Freitas
And what? Yeah, I’m on it right now. Oh, there are some hits from 1999 or 2000. Let’s see. I totally check it out.
00:39:26:27 – 00:39:30:23
Agent Palmer
So what was it? What is the site or was the site?
00:39:30:28 – 00:39:53:04
Kevin Freitas
I’m trying to remember what I even put up there at that time. Again, different. Different passions. Different, different. As I was, I was doing some 3D animation and things like that on my, you know, for, for no reason because I wasn’t in art classes, I wasn’t in media classes. I was just like, I’m going to, I’m going to make 3D stuff and make little movies.
00:39:53:08 – 00:40:11:16
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, and things like that. So I think some of that was it. And some of the site eventually morphed into me saying like or designing the site in 3D, which was weird. It wasn’t, it was just graphics that were made from the 3D program. Okay. So some of that probably back then, but yeah, none of the none of the photos or anything.
00:40:11:16 – 00:40:14:51
Kevin Freitas
But at that point in time that came later. But yeah.
00:40:14:51 – 00:40:42:02
Agent Palmer
So where did that go? This, this I’m going to teach myself to 3D animate. Like, is that have you have I mean, look, we’ve talked about a lot of things you’ve rediscovered, you came back to handheld gaming and you came back to, playing, you know, blowing some brass. So is there is, is this a scoop, like, is 3D printing or not even printing, but just 3D design?
00:40:42:02 – 00:40:43:54
Agent Palmer
Is that coming back for you.
00:40:43:59 – 00:41:06:10
Kevin Freitas
Via 3D printing? A little bit? Oh yeah. And so, so having having a basic a very basic we’re talking like the 3D program I use called True Space came on like 2 or 3, 3.5in flat. Okay. You know, so there was no if any like ray tracing and things like that. Like it was it was very basic.
00:41:06:10 – 00:41:25:30
Kevin Freitas
But it’s interesting having at least a little bit of that knowledge because now that 3D printers are more of a thing, I can confidently kind of build very basic stuff like shapes and things like that. I’m like, oh, I know how to play with this, this mesh or the spline or something like that to to get what I want out of the, the printer.
00:41:25:30 – 00:41:39:57
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. So yeah. So nothing big. My, one of my best friends, he, he went on to kind of work in the video game industry and has ever since doing like 3D design and level design. So, so I think all of that, I kind of I made sure that he was the one to get to kind of take that off.
00:41:39:57 – 00:41:49:48
Kevin Freitas
But but I have been flirting with I’m like, oh man, I should I should get into, blender and stuff I’ve heard has gotten really good. Yeah. So it never ends. It never ends. All right.
00:41:49:48 – 00:42:17:23
Agent Palmer
So I and I have to before I don’t want to skip over this, but you got a degree in geology. And so far everything we’ve talked about is an indoor kind of thing. And I mean, you play outdoors, but, you know, like, very much so, I know you said, astronaut at one point, but geology is, well, very grounded.
00:42:17:28 – 00:42:18:19
Kevin Freitas
So.
00:42:18:24 – 00:42:28:55
Agent Palmer
Where, was this, similar to everything else? It was kind of like all along I had a little interest. And so you made the decision or did this evolve?
00:42:29:06 – 00:42:51:25
Kevin Freitas
It was just a way for me to possibly find a path to become an astronaut because, you know, in the 90s, there wasn’t really many paths other than you’re in the military or your potentially a scientist. Okay. Now was does it you know, you’re not there were no space tourists. There were nothing like that. So for me it was a mode of like, okay, I could be a mission specialist.
00:42:51:25 – 00:43:23:17
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. Potentially using something like this. I wasn’t too worried about it. And when I got through college, I was like, yeah, I didn’t really like some of this nitpicky stuff. I like the big picture, you know, things. So. Yeah. So getting getting out in the world, is, as always been super, super huge to me. And that was the part of geology that I think I like the most was seeing, especially the macro, you know, the big stuff out there, whether it’s a volcano or there, it’s a cool valley that was cut by the, you know, Columbia River being in the northwest, things like that.
00:43:23:17 – 00:43:44:07
Kevin Freitas
That’s that’s still cool. And and with like a, you know, my family we we hike a ton. We live we live in the northwest. So it’s like I can I can go down to the water, you know, there’s ocean nearby in the Puget Sound. There’s there’s whales all over the place. There’s, you know, there’s mountains, an hour away, if not less.
00:43:44:12 – 00:44:11:29
Kevin Freitas
And those could be snowy or those could be, you know, just covered in, you know, giant, giant trees that you you can’t help but stand in awe at. So and but even in my garden, you know, things like that, I’m like, I love being in the garden and just, frankly, still hacking things, you know, I’m like, I’ll build the thing if I need it, or I’ll take all these old fence posts and turn those into something because you know, because this is a material, it’s a thing I can do something with.
00:44:11:34 – 00:44:32:31
Kevin Freitas
Yeah. So it’s been a really fun run and ride. Because I think all of it, all of it inner meshes and the thing that I have to think about to and that I realized as an adult that I wouldn’t have known when I was younger and unfortunate, my dad. So with us, realizing that he worked kind of maintenance jobs and like dairies and things like that.
00:44:32:32 – 00:44:54:18
Kevin Freitas
Okay. And my brother went on to be, a mechanical engineer, and I was like, well, I’m not I’m not the I’m not the car guy. I’m not the I’m not the guy who’s going to, you know, fix things around the house necessarily, or, or fix the car. But I realize it’s all just that different facet of the same thing, which is, you know, making fixing DIY or whatever you want to call it.
00:44:54:18 – 00:45:24:42
Kevin Freitas
And so even though I wasn’t doing those specific kind of mechanical things, that gave me a huge appreciation for what I know. My dad did work really hard as I grew up in these dairies because he was he was he was always fixing shit and, you know, making sure that that dairy and then that plant or that, that, that one run of, you know, when they’re making ice cream or something didn’t fail, you know, so it’s really cool to feel that in a lot of what I’ve done as a, as I’ve grown up.
00:45:24:47 – 00:45:47:04
Kevin Freitas
And then also to, just to try to show that to my kid just like, yeah, man, just go get it. Go do go do things like make things whether they’re on a computer. Because obviously he has a lot, a lot more screens in front of him than we ever had when we were kids. Or if it’s just outside, we’re going to, we’re going to go do a blacksmithing class on on Saturday, you know, this weekend because I was just like, yeah, you want to make a knife?
00:45:47:04 – 00:45:58:59
Kevin Freitas
Let’s go make a nice and blacksmithing class. And then, you know, the same part of the same day. He could be back playing Minecraft. You know, I’m like, that’s great. That’s all. That’s all the same thought. That’s all in nature.
00:45:59:04 – 00:46:17:15
Agent Palmer
So where because I, I’ve, I’ve seen it now having been on the website, where does the photography come in and how long has that been going on. Because it feels like I mean, yeah, you know, the technology’s been there the whole time.
00:46:17:15 – 00:46:43:02
Kevin Freitas
So, yeah, I didn’t take a lot of photos when I was a kid with, you know, with film. I did one trip in college to Hawaii, and I think I borrowed my sister’s, my older sister’s camera. Like a dSLR or, sorry, an SLR. Yeah, at the time. And I remember having, like, six rolls of film to deal with, and I, like, had to go somewhere to try to get them, get them developed while I was there.
00:46:43:02 – 00:46:59:01
Kevin Freitas
I think I was worried about bringing them home so the film would get screwed up in an x ray machine or something. So I, like, developed them all. There. But shortly after I got my first digital camera or I used my first digital camera, I remember using one in high school, like there’s an apple and I have one in my collection.
00:46:59:06 – 00:47:00:25
Kevin Freitas
It was a really old apple.
00:47:00:34 – 00:47:04:31
Agent Palmer
That the one with the three and a half floppy storage.
00:47:04:31 – 00:47:25:05
Kevin Freitas
Oh, that’s a Sony. Oh that’s the Sony. Okay. That’s the so the Sony Malvika was the one that in college we had as part of our media lab. And I checked that thing out once. I once I discovered I checked it out all the time. You know I basically I basically used it as more than anybody. And, and I still have all those photos.
00:47:25:05 – 00:47:48:25
Kevin Freitas
They were stored on a floppy disk. They were 640 by 480. So. But the thing had like optical zoom, like ten x optical zoom. It was a little, little, little juggernaut. The battery lasted forever. And that’s kind of where it started. It was just I just took pictures and I think it’s the best way I know to remember life.
00:47:48:25 – 00:48:07:31
Kevin Freitas
Like I love seeing them. And I don’t think there are very few photos that I would look at unless they’re extremely obscure. That I couldn’t again, kind of like I was talking about with handheld computers. I couldn’t tell you a story about every single photo, and I probably have more than half a million photos I haven’t counted recently.
00:48:07:40 – 00:48:31:03
Kevin Freitas
I used to count. I don’t count anymore. And I’ve just. Yeah. And so it’s it’s a blast. And now with with devices and cloud storage that I can kind of curate around my house, it’s really fun for me to share that with my family and to, to do these little curation and to say, like, okay, cool, here’s the here’s the top ones of our family.
00:48:31:08 – 00:49:01:31
Kevin Freitas
And those are going to show up on a, on a 16 inch screen that I have on, you know, in our living room that I have together from a fire TV, you know. So again, we’re another weird project, but I was like, I want this device to fit my needs, and there is nothing like that. And so I, you know, would do these kinds of things with, with my photos or put them on a website, you know, before, before there was image recognition and kind of auto tagging of metadata and stuff like that in, in photos on my website.
00:49:01:31 – 00:49:38:45
Kevin Freitas
I was already tagging things in my photos. Okay. And the power in that for me, even though it wasn’t every photo I took, I wouldn’t put every photo on my website. I was pretty diligent about tagging things and I could go in in interesting situations. Like, unfortunately, sometimes as we grow older, people or friends or acquaintances pass away and I was literally able to type a name into my own website and pull up like I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it and pull up all these photos that again, since I had kind of been taking digital photos since the late 90s, they were, first of all, instant.
00:49:38:45 – 00:49:46:08
Kevin Freitas
And second, people just didn’t have photos of things. Yeah, of these people in especially in certain areas.
00:49:46:12 – 00:50:14:44
Agent Palmer
Not unless you’ve already spent the money to digitize the physical stuff. Right? Because it’s not I, I mean, I, I helped my parents do that. My wife, just recently did some of that. I still have to do some of that. And it’s funny going through it too, because there was a point where you were eligible to get a CD along with the prints, right?
00:50:14:44 – 00:50:14:57
Kevin Freitas
Yeah.
00:50:14:57 – 00:50:45:08
Agent Palmer
And so there’s these things, but at the same time, you know, it’s it’s they’re all on unlike yours, they’re all on curated. They’re numbered. There’s no metadata. Maybe there’s, when it was taken, but sometimes that’s lost depending on when the file was created, which is different depending on who’s paying attention to what. And so, I mean, everybody take a page from Kevin.
00:50:45:13 – 00:51:14:14
Agent Palmer
Ladies and gentlemen, you need to like we say it, but like it is important. Like if you and I know that because I’ve looked and I have at least three folders in my like main archive that are photos from iPhone, like just a dump before I got a new phone, or like photos from this Android before I got the new Android.
00:51:14:14 – 00:51:34:27
Agent Palmer
But they’re all what, 17 characters with like maybe some kind of semblance of order, but there’s only so many things like you don’t know what’s there. So like, oh man, to find an actual photo is right. I don’t think I’d be able to do it well.
00:51:34:27 – 00:51:52:58
Kevin Freitas
And it but again, the technology also changes over time because the archaic way I was doing on, on my website is essentially obsolete. So now it’s like, okay, if it’s in a cloud storage, that’s great. But now I’m like, oh, but I need to get back away from cloud storage, because if I violate some terms of service, they could shut me off and I lose all of this stuff.
00:51:53:02 – 00:52:09:46
Kevin Freitas
Yes. Of, you know. Yeah. So I’m like, okay, I got to have a local backup. But then I’m like, do I look into a local version of tagging and things like that? So it’s it’s kind of nonstop and it’s, it is honestly hard to win. It’s very hard to win in that regard.
00:52:09:51 – 00:52:18:04
Agent Palmer
But.
00:52:18:09 – 00:52:42:35
Agent Palmer
It is always a pleasure to talk to people with many interests. Selfishly, it means that myself and my friends are not the enigmas we appear to be. More and more people are engaging in and enjoying more than a few hobbies, and for their sakes, I hope many of them remain hobbies. I definitely want to root on someone like Kevin, who wants to turn his handheld museum from a.org to a street address.
00:52:42:47 – 00:53:05:22
Agent Palmer
But if and when he turns that into more of a job, a fun job, but a job, he’ll still have his music and his photography. And I’m sure there’s more we didn’t get to in this rush to monetize every small thing. Oh, you enjoy something. Time to monetize. It’s nice to know that people can have more than one hobby, and that they can remain just that.
00:53:05:27 – 00:53:31:28
Agent Palmer
Hobbies. Sure, in the current world, money is tight for almost everyone with rising costs and economic insecurity. But that isn’t a reason to double down and turn everything into a job. We need hobbies. We need constructive escape. Perhaps now more than ever. Thanks for listening to The Palmer Files episode 157. And now for the official business. The Palmer Files releases every two weeks on Tuesdays.
00:53:31:28 – 00:53:52:03
Agent Palmer
If you’re still listening, I encourage you to join the discussion. You can find all related ways to contact us in the show notes. Catch up with Kevin and his many goings on by visiting Kevin Freitas dot net, and to see the handheld museum. It’s just handheld museum.org. The music for this episode was provided by Henno Heitur. Email and comments can be sent to this show at The Palmer Files at gmail.com.
00:53:52:03 – 00:54:07:04
Agent Palmer
And remember your home for all things Agent Palmer is Agent palmer.com.
00:54:07:09 – 00:54:40:53
Agent Palmer
You be.
00:54:40:58 – 00:54:43:11
Agent Palmer
All right, Kevin, do you have one final question for me?
00:54:43:14 – 00:54:51:28
Kevin Freitas
Yes. I would love to know where your passion for talking with people like me comes from.
00:54:51:32 – 00:55:28:27
Agent Palmer
I feel like it probably comes from talking with people, like, period. Like, I, I, I like to think, it was all my own doing, but in, in, in all reality, this probably goes back to my parents. I am an only child, but. And I’m an only child who had parents that were far enough away from other family where I had to not only make my own friends, but I had two working parents.
00:55:28:31 – 00:55:52:07
Agent Palmer
So I would be tagged along to things and, it was something that for a very long time, I took for granted. And I genuinely mean that because, I was, you know, I guess as soon as you can talk and, and converse. Right. So let’s say five, I was a five year old being tagged along to an event, and it wasn’t just, hey, be quiet.
00:55:52:07 – 00:56:12:51
Agent Palmer
It was like, I’ll introduce, you know, talk. You can talk to people. You’re you’re you’re allowed to you’re not. That’s not off limits. But the only other people there are adults. And so I got used to talking to people that weren’t my age or, you know, people straight. I guess the other way is to say strangers to me.
00:56:13:05 – 00:56:35:47
Agent Palmer
You know, my parents, they were strangers to me. And so I that that became a thing I learned that was rare as far as, like cross-generational talk, because, you know, I would I would talk to, like, in college. I got to know not only the president of my university’s small college, but I got to know the president.
00:56:35:47 – 00:56:59:06
Agent Palmer
But I also got to know a bunch of, like, the vice presidents and the board because, that’s not a, like a student to power thing. It’s just like that guy, like, look, when you’re in college, that guy’s 40. He’s ancient now. Now, I am now ancient, by those standards. But how many 20 year olds will just talk to a 40 year old?
00:56:59:06 – 00:57:24:47
Agent Palmer
Because it’s for fun or whatever? And I still I was still doing that kind of stuff to the point now where if you fast forward it like, my friends of my parents have now become friends of mine. So like, my wife and I will invite my parents friends over who have become our friends like they could be our parents, but they just come over as our friends, our equals.
00:57:24:47 – 00:57:59:38
Agent Palmer
And it’s just a thing where I think, my wife is starting to get used to the fact that, like, you know, he’s got friends that are much older than him and they’re just equally friends. And I think it was that was part of it. And then the other part was, I’m just a talker. I missed I, you know, and I enjoy I know it sounds people that have heard this show a lot and my father specifically who listens will say like, oh, you jumped on that thing.
00:57:59:38 – 00:58:24:15
Agent Palmer
You didn’t let him finish his story. And I was like, but that’s the way conversation goes. Like, sometimes you never there are always threads that are left undone. Absolutely. But on a whole, I enjoy hearing your story. And then, you know, usually even if I tell the same story, something you have said tweaks the way I tell my story.
00:58:24:20 – 00:59:05:27
Agent Palmer
Right? So my story’s ever evolving, and in this medium I can get away with that. I don’t have to edit the story. This is just the next iteration of whatever that was. Yeah. And so, you know, there’s that. I would also have to give some credit to the first podcast I was ever on, which I believe this past spring, I had the ten year anniversary of the first podcast I ever guested on, which was well before I launched the show, and that was called The Stranger Conversations with Grant Marcum, and Grant has since become a friend, but the premise of that show was that Grant would invite strangers on and he would talk
00:59:05:27 – 00:59:31:59
Agent Palmer
to them, right? Or strangers or people he didn’t know. They weren’t necessarily like, you know, he knew of me at the time because I, and I think that a little bit of his, I want to say, like strength in being able to just talk to a stranger and having listened to that show and go like, could I do that?
00:59:32:04 – 01:00:00:01
Agent Palmer
And then and then you launch a show like this, which is conversation based, and, you know, without you, this is a very boring conversation, right? Like, you know, so I go like, but I don’t want to just talk to my friends because then you get into inside baseball and inside stories and inside jokes and work and yes, I have my friends on a lot, but I also have I think I found you from a social network, and at this point, who knows which one it really was anyway, right?
01:00:00:01 – 01:00:31:10
Agent Palmer
Because like, you know, eight, five years ago, it would have been while I either met you on Facebook or Twitter and now it’s like, I don’t know, it could be threads, Mastodon, blue Sky, like, who knows? And I think, you know, taking from Grant’s stranger con’s kind of perspective at this point. And so when you take what Grant did with Stranger Conversations, along with the fact that when Twitter went downhill, I was left holding a basket.
01:00:31:10 – 01:00:59:07
Agent Palmer
And what I mean by that is I had you if you were active on any social network, you will always find it. And you’re a podcaster who likes having guests on. You will always find more guests than you could possibly need. But when everybody left Twitter, I was left with a list of just straight Twitter contacts of people who were either no longer on Twitter, had deleted their.
01:00:59:07 – 01:01:25:57
Agent Palmer
I had all these things that like, oh, I don’t need anybody because I’ve got like I always work ahead. So like, you know, the next three months of podcasts are already taken care of. I’ll later later, later, later. And so now I just if if I find you interesting in any capacity, I just invite you on because I don’t want to be stuck with like, well, well threads died and I’m left with 1500 like that.
01:01:26:11 – 01:01:46:21
Agent Palmer
I still I mean Twitter still exists, so I can still show people the list of the 200 plus people I would have had on the show had, direct messages, you know, like all these things. It’s just like, all right, so when you, when you add these things together, it goes, all right, I’m not afraid. And I’ve had amazing coverage.
01:01:46:21 – 01:02:17:09
Agent Palmer
I mean, you know, I’ve made I’ve made friends this way. I’ve reached out to authors whose books I’ve read that I just talk to you. Hey, I read your book, liked it. We had a conversation, and we still text or call each other, you know, every couple of weeks, like, you know, so it’s kind of like all of those things, you know, my parents taking me and learning to talk to people that are older or just a different in a different demographic, which I think helps when I talk to my friends kids now.
01:02:17:13 – 01:02:41:38
Agent Palmer
Yeah. And, you know, Grant going after strangers and then the, the immediacy of like, well, if this platform is not around, you probably should ask and try and get an email before blah, blah, blah, like all these things and so all of that stuff, plus I just it’s I’m, I am a writer, I am a blogger. But if I’m being honest, my favorite form of communication is audio.
01:02:41:43 – 01:02:42:47
Agent Palmer
It’s dialog.
01:02:42:47 – 01:02:43:45
Kevin Freitas
Yeah.
01:02:43:50 – 01:03:08:10
Agent Palmer
And, you can do a lot more. Look, I know you can do a lot of things with writing and you can edit it a lot easier. But you know what? You and I can have a turn of phrase. You and I can insinuate, and we can, yeah, you know, have a lot more fun with the language and just have a much better time, on a whole, talking to each other.
01:03:08:10 – 01:03:22:40
Agent Palmer
So, yeah, I think that might be why. But I do have a question for you. Which is what? Why did you say yes? This stranger asked you on a podcast, and you were like, yeah, that seems sure.
01:03:22:44 – 01:03:43:18
Kevin Freitas
I mean, I think it’s just to me, it’s the dream of of the internet. If I only go just there. Sure. You know, because you do think of the early days of the internet and you’re like, oh my gosh, there’s, there’s these people that are expressing things or doing things that I maybe didn’t really understand or couldn’t feel like I could reach.
01:03:43:18 – 01:04:16:27
Kevin Freitas
Like especially the early days internet, you’re like you, you could follow NASA, you could see the photos from a mars rover come down the day of, you know, that was this taste of connection with passions or things that maybe you you didn’t I didn’t have before. And so I think it’s that same thing where in the world of Twitter and I wasn’t a super early adopter, but I developed communities that, were really important to me, you know, and they were they were based around usually hobbies or.
01:04:16:27 – 01:04:36:37
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, or maybe the city, like I mentioned, you know, if I, if I live in Tacoma, you know, I had there were people there that were really fun to follow and, and converse with and, and just see what was going on in their lives. And so I think that’s kind of what I love about the internet or and I’ll just keep it in internet because it is different.
01:04:36:37 – 01:05:02:07
Kevin Freitas
You know, it’s whether it’s a group text of deaths from my kids school or whether it’s, you know, this kind of an interaction where somebody just takes a chance and says, hey, you want to talk? Yeah. I think that’s really important. You know, I don’t think there’s anything good to come from people, feeling if not afraid, but feeling intimidated by asking or especially asking.
01:05:02:14 – 01:05:17:31
Kevin Freitas
You know, I don’t want to mansplain. I don’t I don’t think people need to just, you know, well, that’s your comment guy or mansplain, but having questions I think is extremely valid in, in, you know, in our world. And, and I think that’s just it’s important, you know. Yeah.
01:05:17:31 – 01:05:30:00
Agent Palmer
I mean if you want any practice in asking have a podcast that relies on having a guest like you just mean, you know, you get used to, no, but you’re right. It is kind of.
01:05:30:01 – 01:05:31:01
Kevin Freitas
Yeah.
01:05:31:06 – 01:05:57:27
Agent Palmer
This show wouldn’t exist without the internet. And I’m not saying that because it’s on the internet. I’m saying, like, without those connections, without happening upon you on, medium of some kind. Like, I could have even happened upon your website for no apparent reason. Right? But, like, yeah, without the internet, this is impossible, because it it is that ease of communication, like actual factual.
01:05:57:32 – 01:06:14:14
Agent Palmer
Hey, Kevin, do you want to hang out like, it’s that simple? It’s not just an echo chamber of people yelling, which is kind of what people assume it is. But on a whole, most of the time it’s not. It’s pretty peaceful and chill.
01:06:14:19 – 01:06:31:33
Kevin Freitas
Yeah, yeah. Well, the access to connect with people, I think some of my favorite moments on like maybe channels I watch on YouTube is like a, I’ll say a small time, you know, movie review channel, and all of a sudden they get to have an interview with, you know, a crew of someone on the crew of a movie.
01:06:31:33 – 01:06:58:19
Kevin Freitas
Maybe it’s not even the star. They got to talk to the director or the, you know, the director of photography or something. And that’s like, that’s a huge deal for kind of both of them. Yeah. Because, you know, those crew members or the stunt people or something like that. They may not they don’t, you know, go on the press junkets, they don’t do any of that stuff, but they get to talk shop with people that are really passionate about it and that they’re making their way, you know, they’re making their way on YouTube and doing whatever they are, you know, whether it’s a side gig or otherwise.
01:06:58:24 – 01:07:16:57
Kevin Freitas
And so I think that’s the other thing too, is there are so many people that are involved in so many of the things like, you know, NASA and things like that that I mentioned that, yeah, they’re they’re happy to talk about their their passion or their work or something like that. Great. So that that’s what the internet is and should always be focused on.
–End Transcription–
This transcription was processed by PalmerTech 3.1 and may contain errors for HUMINT (human intelligence).