A Letter From the Resort Team

Left to right: Jenny Kahn, Beth Mikal, Judie Bricker, Rose Hilgedick, Susan York, Debbie Ramey

It is hard to believe the season is coming to a close. And what a season it was! We hope everyone enjoyed being here at The Resort as much as we have enjoyed being a part of it.

Thank you to the resident volunteers. You are such giving, generous people. We could not do any of the activities without your help.

As we reflect on all the things we got to do this year, we can’t help but focus on the people at The Resort. Social activities help people build connections with others, improve your mood and help with your physical wellness. All the activities and events were made so fun by YOU! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Watch for future events to be announced in the September Resorter.

The Activities Staff                            The Office Staff

Beth, Judie and Rose                        Debbie, Jenny and Susan

Dave and Tom

The Curious Incident of the Internet

A Conversation with Jesse Castro

By Dale Dauten

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes had concluded that if the watchdog didn’t bark it was because the culprit was someone the dog knew, thus creating a narrow list of suspects.

In the case of the park, the silence was the relative lack of issues with the internet. For years, tech issues had bedeviled management and residents, but then along came Jesse Castro and his team. That was four years ago, and when we last wrote about Jesse, two years back, we were able to include this:

Yes, Jesse and his team are park heroes, having succeeded in overcoming the many challenges that thwarted other IT consultants. George Igualt, head of management for the parks, says, “Finding them was like finding a needle in a stack of needles,” by which he meant that there are plenty of companies thinking/saying they could solve the parks’ unique infrastructure problems, but, as George, puts it, “There was no off-the-shelf solution — Jesse had the only outfit I know that could solve our issues.”

We caught up with Jesse recently, on a day when he was visiting the parks with this wife, Christie.

And have speeds progressed further?

“Yes, it’s better now – it’s a hundred.” But Jesse isn’t content, explaining that he has been gathering proposals to make the next jump to higher speeds. “We’re looking at what we need to do right now to make sure that we’re bulletproof in the future.”

Even with all the progress, there are still occasional outages, and we asked what tends to be the biggest cause. Jesse smiled and said, “Our biggest issue is big trucks and not paying attention. We had the American Furniture Warehouse come out here and they just demolished one of our pedestals and didn’t even know.” Speaking of pedestals brought a memory back for Jesse:  “There was one time that Mickey [that’s Mickey Tipton, Jesse’s partner] and I came out and we couldn’t figure out what the heck is going on — why did we lose power all of a sudden? Inside the pedestals there are amplifiers, boosted from one amplifier to the next. It’s a big chain — you start here, you go, say, 100 feet, then you have a booster that pushes the power to the next one, then to the next. But we lost an entire segment and couldn’t figure out why. So, we started going from pedestal to pedestal to try to track it down. I pulled up one pedestal and Mickey opened up the case and it’s on fire, literally on fire. That was one of the craziest outages we’ve seen.”

But now, as the system is improved, Jesse tells us, “Things are running well we don’t get calls like we used to. Mickey and Damian and Stephanie, those three are instrumental in keeping the parks running really, really well. That makes life easy because then I can do the other things that I need to do and keep the businesses going.”

One of those businesses is AI consulting and we took the opportunity to have Jesse weigh in on the changes to society AI will bring. “We don’t need to worry so much,” Jesse commented. “Yes, there are some things they could go crazy. Yes, it could be dangerous. But I just can’t see it being as dramatic as a lot of people see it and believe me, I’m deep in the trenches in it.”

As for it taking all the jobs, he used marketing work as an example: “Marketing is fascinating because you can use AI to help you generate an idea and create the story. But it will never replace a human. This is the one thing that people need to understand: if you’re getting a message out, nobody can talk like you. Nobody can say it the way you do. I can give you a script and it’ll be exactly like I say it, but my stuff will work and yours won’t. Those are my words and that’s how I talk. People know that it’s my authentic self. When you don’t have it, that’s easy to pick up on.”

Speaking of his authentic self, let’s close with some personal background on Jesse, updating our profile from two years ago.

JESSE CASTRO, A Brief Bio

When we sat down with Jesse to talk about internet service, we also wanted to learn something about his background and how he came to be an internet hero while looking nothing like the geeky kid of the tech stereotype.

As a kid growing up in Colorado, he dreamed of being an actor and singer and studied for both, but also dreamed of being a pilot. He started pilot training but discovered he was mostly colorblind, which meant he couldn’t qualify for most flying jobs. On top of all that, he also loved cars and learned auto mechanics and ended up working at AutoZone and other car parts stores. While working with cars, he developed another fascination: computers. (“It was the modems – how cool that people could talk to each other over computers.”) With an interest in IT and an aptitude for it, Jesse found time to do some moonlighting, starting what he called Smart Guys Computing.

Being self-taught, he figured he’d need to start taking IT classes; however, when he took his first class, the teacher soon hired Jesse to help fix his own computer problems. That skill eventually took young Jesse to jobs with Intel and Motorola and then with a software company. It was that last employer that changed his career trajectory, as Jesse was laid off and decided he would never let that happen again.

The decision about the future became easier when Jesse turned his full attention to working for himself fulltime. He recalls his promising start: “I made 4K that first week.” The company grew and soon Jesse had multiple businesses, including AI, cybersecurity and marketing.

Looking back on his life, Jesse says, “I’ve failed more than most, but I don’t like that word ‘fail.’ There’s a quote – Nelson Mandela said it first…

‘You either win or you learn.’”