[00:00:09.03] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.20] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.09] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.05] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.10] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last 7 days. And welcome back.
[00:00:24.16] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:25.15] - Gordon
It's been a hot week.
[00:00:27.26] - Taylor
It has.
[00:00:28.11] - Gordon
Yeah, too hot for me. In fact, I wrote a little song using AI about how hot it was. I might even link to it in the show notes.
[00:00:38.07] - Taylor
Nice.
[00:00:38.23] - Gordon
I wrote it in June when we had record-breaking heat, and we are getting record-breaking heat again in July. So it's stopping me from doing work, actually. It's a struggle with the heat. Anyway, let's get straight into our topics. Would you like to go first, or shall I?
[00:00:54.15] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:00:55.16] - Gordon
Off you go.
[00:00:56.08] - Taylor
So this week I want to talk about data recovery and historical data. So, as part of rebuilding my website I wanted to backdate a lot of my website with data. And for some of that, it's relatively easy. You kind of— I have a lot of it in my Apple Health, so you can kind of just query and go back and find the data and kind of download it, all good. For things like Strava, other things like that, relatively straightforward, the data is already there. The stuff that I didn't have and I wanted to start tracking, or stuff that I wanted to make a bit more richer and a bit bigger of a data set, was a bit more challenging. So first one was flights. So I had, I think the furthest I had was back was 2006, and a lot of that came down to kind of me being able to find the data in like Apple Calendar, and then also being able to find it on Flightradar24 or any, or like a flight website that kind of had these historical flights on them.
[00:02:03.08] - Taylor
And we actually spent quite a bit of time going back through, or you went back through your emails from, you know, 2000s through to about 2005-ish, finding, you know, flights, emails that you'd sent to your dad about what time you'd be landing. So we kind of had to piece together these flights. I managed to pull some records of, flights, arrivals and departures from Gatwick, which, you know, back, you know, pre-2005-ish, they didn't actually use digital anything. So everything was kind of written down and then kind of digitised and archived. So I had to go looking through these kind of like paper records that people had like, you know, scanned and things like that to see what flights had been logged, and try and match up and piece them together. Some of the flights were with airlines that no longer exist. So you had people like First Choice and Thomas Cook, and so being able to find logos for them and flight numbers, and when you're looking up the flight number, they don't match because they were taken over by another company now. So things like that were, were pretty tricky to put together, and you had to kind of work out, "okay, what, what was this flight number?"
[00:03:19.11] - Taylor
"What was this, this flight code?" And kind of just piece them all.
[00:03:22.25] - Gordon
Where was it going from? Where was it going to? That helped as well.
[00:03:25.21] - Taylor
If you know the arrival time, you can kind of make an assumption of what time the departure most likely was. And again, a lot of this is kind of just— you're kind of just guesstimating. So that was quite interesting. And then the other one was events, and kind of like check-ins and things that I've been to see and do. So things like going to see the Blackpool Magic Convention, which I did 2013 through to 2015 or something like that. All of theatre shows that I'd been to, you know, back to, I think the earliest I had was maybe 2011 that I found. Going to see things like "Shrek" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," going to watch football matches and things like that. And again, a lot of them we could find from the calendar, you know, we'd put in it as an event in the calendar. Some of them we found from emails, and then others I actually found by just going back through the photos. And, you know, you can see when things were published, and a lot of them were on your Facebook because I didn't have Facebook at the time, or I didn't really use it.
[00:04:30.28] - Taylor
And I found these photos with, you know, of the theatre or outside it or inside of the theatre, and I'm kind of going, "oh yeah, I remember going to see that." And obviously, you know, the date it was published or posted and, so you can kind of, you know, go, "okay, well, where was this show back in 2012?" Obviously, you know the dates, and then you kind of figure out what the venue was and things like that.
[00:04:55.05] - Gordon
Yeah, and a lot of things like the Wayback Machine is useful for this sort of thing because that's a snapshot of the past. So you can, if you've got a website and you've sort of, you're in iteration 3 or 4 of it, you can use the Wayback Machine to go back and look at the previous versions. And it sort of, it takes snapshots at that moment of the site and copies all the files over. And it's a really interesting website in fact. We used it a few times, didn't we, to try and get some of the data we needed.
[00:05:26.15] - Taylor
But yeah, I mean, it was an interesting exercise trying to find different ways to find data, historic data, you know, a lot of old ways are also just looking through books, looking through newspapers' archives. You know, it used to be one of the biggest ways. You know, obviously I'm not going back as far, but obviously when you're doing a lot more kind of historic research, you do have to kind of get your helmet on and go deep and trying to find how you can figure out and piece things together. Because you'll find one bit of information from one place and then you won't be able to find another bit from another type of material or another location, and you kind of have to piece everything together.
[00:06:11.01] - Gordon
Yeah, it's very true. And there's probably still more bits that we need to find because you definitely went to the theatre before 2011, because you would have been 11 years old then, or 10 years old. So, yeah, we've still got more to find. And as they come around, we can just add the data to your dataset and it becomes, you know, more complete.
[00:06:35.02] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:06:35.19] - Gordon
Yeah. Very good. Shall I go on to mine?
[00:06:39.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:06:40.05] - Gordon
Okay. So this week I found something called Booked Solid. Now this is an AI connector. I think that's probably what it is. MCP. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing it, but it's a service that you purchase and it runs locally for the most part and helps you to book shows. Okay. Now I've already got my own system for booking shows, my OBA, my Online Booking Assistant, and so I looked at this system to see if it could give me any sort of advantage over what I'm already using. And one of the things it does is it has a load of information about what's working as far as bookings go and sort of the information that you can give people that will, you know, convert them into bookers. It gives you an idea of what other people are charging because it's like a community of people using the system.
[00:07:46.15] - Taylor
Right.
[00:07:46.20] - Gordon
So it's sort of learning from that. So there must be a server somewhere that's collecting this information. And so you can sort of, it can tell you how much you should be charging for a particular event.
[00:08:01.05] - Gordon
It can also check your emails, in my case, iMAP, and triage them. So it can do it autonomously and triage your emails, work out what the intent of the email is. If someone's making an enquiry, make suggestions as to how you can answer them, with suggested, you know, prices and quotes and suggested show type based on what you do. So what it's actually doing is you set it— when you set it up, you tell it a lot. I haven't done the setup yet, but you tell it a lot of information about what you do, like what your act is, who you are, where you're based, what sort of prices you're charging at the moment, what's involved and included in your shows, that sort of thing. And it sort of collates all that information together. So it knows that when it's replying, it's got all that information available to it.
[00:08:54.27] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:08:56.18] - Gordon
But it connects through to Claude. So how it's doing it, I'm not entirely sure. So originally, I purchased it because it was a terminal version of the system. What technology would that be using? You sort of installed it to Claude and then you spoke, you chatted with it through the terminal.
[00:09:20.14] - Taylor
MCP server.
[00:09:21.04] - Gordon
May have been, but I think it's local.
[00:09:23.28] - Taylor
Just a, it can be run on anything.
[00:09:25.26] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:09:26.02] - Taylor
You can create MCP servers, you can create CLI tools with anything.
[00:09:29.18] - Gordon
And there was a one-off cost for that. And you could have 3 different levels. So they sort of had the ability to just reply to emails, the ability to go and search out prospects like venues, for example, and how to talk to venues and get them to book you. And also creating sort of content for social media that's relevant and personalised to you. And then the last one was autonomously dealing with this. So it could look at your emails overnight at sort of 8 o'clock in the morning and then present to you a list of what you need to deal with and what it's already dealt with.
[00:10:13.08] - Taylor
Interesting.
[00:10:13.19] - Gordon
And how you should be replying to them. And you can just go, "yeah, that's fine, that's fine, that's fine, done." And if you bought the system, you would be upgraded the following day because they were having a big push on this for a desktop app.
[00:10:32.09] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:10:32.18] - Gordon
That they were pushing. Now the desktop app has now come out. They've changed it to be a sort of a beta currently because it was it was using up a tonne of tokens and they were trying to figure out why that is.
[00:10:46.27] - Gordon
But you basically get like a console with lots of information and you talk to your Claude account. So you have to have your own Claude account. It's not, that's not part of it. But it knows that you've got a Claude account. It knows that in my case, I'm on Pro and it uses my Claude account through this app to do everything it needs to do, which is very clever because that's not MCP, I don't think, unless it is using the app. I don't know.
[00:11:14.02] - Taylor
Most likely OAuth.
[00:11:15.20] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:11:16.02] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:11:17.04] - Gordon
But it's very interesting because it told me that, you know, I'd run out of tokens because I'd used it for something else earlier in the day.
[00:11:22.23] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:23.00] - Gordon
And therefore I couldn't then set it up ready to go. But it's all very early stages for me. And someone has done a lot of work on this and there's several people who sort of jumped in to do it. The price has now jumped because the desktop app is out to something like £2,500 or dollars as a one-off lifetime or $200 a month. So, you know, I jumped in when I could because I had 30 days to evaluate. And if I don't like it, I can refund.
[00:11:51.17] - Taylor
That's good.
[00:11:51.27] - Gordon
So it didn't seem like I was going to be losing out in any way there. So I'm going to try it out. I'm going to see how it works. And I'll probably get back to you because my next 2 weeks are extremely busy with end of term shows for nurseries, schools, and also my normal birthday parties. So pretty much every day of the week for the next 2 weeks has at least one show on it. So it's going to be mega. And with this heat as well, very, very tiring. So I shall get it up and running as quickly as I can, and I suspect we'll come back to this because I haven't experienced this sort of thing before, and it's possible that we could be building something similar that uses other people's Claude accounts to do other things. So we may need to look at that and see if there's an opportunity there. That is pretty much everything from me.
[00:12:50.02] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:12:50.26] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, we are on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:12:57.28] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:13:02.12] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us and instead of watch us, we're on all the major podcast platforms and on your smart speaker, just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you next Friday at 1pm. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:13:20.07] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:13:22.27] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:13:23.11] - Taylor
Bye.
