About

Hi, I'm Tyler Woodward

I dig into digital ownership and tech accountability, usually starting from some old piece of tech — a burned CD, a video store clerk who actually knew movies, a phone that just made calls. Twenty years in broadcast and network engineering taught me how these systems work, but this isn't an industry pitch. It's just someone thinking out loud about what we don't really own anymore.

A few things about me

Driving route map from La Crosse, Wisconsin to Tampa, Florida

Tampa to La Crosse

Beaches to Cheese

Born and raised in Tampa, now settled into actual Wisconsin winters.

Broadcast Engineer

Radio, TV, Oh My

Day job is keeping transmitters, networks, and signals from falling over.

Stereotypical basement PC nerd at a keyboard

Linux Nerd

All Hail Tux

Comfortable in a terminal, and happiest when something's running on Debian.

A tangled server rack full of network cables

Home Lab

Because I Like Torture

A closet of servers doing more work than they probably should.

Dad

It Was a Trap... But I Like It Here

The reason "good enough" stopped being an acceptable answer.

Music

Everything Except Country

Rock and pop punk are home base. Current favorite band: The Warning.

From the host

I usually get to the point through some old piece of tech, and there's a lot about it I miss that I didn't expect to.

Burning a CD for a road trip. The weight of the case in your hand. Renting a movie from a clerk who actually knew what he was talking about, not some algorithm guessing off what you watched last Tuesday. A phone that just made calls, and nothing else, and somehow that was enough.

This show's about what happened after that: things that used to just work now need an app, a login, and a monthly fee to do the same job for free. That's the digital ownership problem I keep coming back to, usually by way of some old piece of tech.

Some weeks it's radio, too, since I've spent enough of my life around it to know exactly why every rock station plays the same seven songs. That started at five years old, when my mom bought me my first AM/FM radio, and it took hold for good growing up locked into Tampa's WFLZ during the Power Pig era, recording myself on a cassette deck and playing radio alone in my bedroom. My first paid gig came years later on WRQT 95.7 The Rock and WKTY in La Crosse, and from there I worked my way from the air studio into engineering, chasing the systems behind the signal instead of just the sound of it.

I've got the industry background, but this isn't an industry show. It's digital ownership and tech accountability without the lecture, just one guy who grew up on dial-up and AM/FM static thinking out loud.

Not because the past was perfect. Just because some of it was good, and it's worth holding onto before it slips away completely.

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