04: How we got our groove

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly podcast where two old internet vets talk about technology, the internet, where it's going to shit and what we do to fix it. I'm Jason. And I'm Brian.

You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks, on Twitter at GOG podcast, or on the web at grumpy old geeks.com. Or you can email us at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com. And now you can also subscribe to us on iTunes. Just search for Grumpy Old Geeks.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to episode four, where the Grumpy Old Geeks are somewhat winging it, because we've had a bit of an interesting week. Yeah, it's been a busy, busy week. It has been that extremely. And you got your eye taken apart today. I did have a chunk cut out of my eyelid today, which was a very interesting experience.

I don't recommend it to anyone. But here I am. And, you know, I'm not drugged out, but I'm definitely having the human body response of trauma at the moment. So a little shaky, but the beer's taking care of it. Yeah, yeah. Self-medicate. Yeah, exactly. I'm a big fan of self-medication.

So I just want to do a little follow-up on the last show. When we were talking about Roger Ebert and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, you'd mentioned Roger Corman. Yes. But it was actually Russ Meyer is what I was thinking of. Yes. And that was, I realized that as soon as I was listening to the bits as I was editing, we got it wrong.

But that's what next episodes are for. Yep. So speaking of next episodes, kind of had the habit of teasing our next subject at the end of our previous podcasts, and that has kind of turned into a bad idea because we never stick with it.

No, we never do. Things change very quickly, and so do our moods and what we want to talk about. So we're probably not going to do that anymore. Plus, we're also working on trying to get some guests in for future episodes. Yeah, we've got a couple people that are going to be pretty stellar, I think. No, the plane, the plane this time?

No, the plane, the plane. No, we do have some people coming up that should be really interesting, and the topics that we're going to want to talk about are obviously going to be based on their particular interests or skills or what they're up to at the moment. Yeah. Mostly old geeks like us, but with different day jobs.

Yes, considerably different. I'm not entirely sure we can call a rock star drummer a geek, but Mike Malinnon from the Goo Goo Dolls, who will hopefully be joining us very soon, is a geek and loves sci-fi and is enamored with Twitter, so we're hoping to have him on to talk about these various topics.

Yeah, so our social media episode will actually have other people that like social media and do it. Yes. Because, yeah, day to day, I don't have to deal with that much anymore, so if I don't have to, I don't want to. Right. Well, I still do.

It's not fun. I got burnout on LiveJournal, man, so that's about as social as it got. Well, no, I mean, you were on Twitter. You were one of the first. I was one of the first 144, whatever the number is that they were using. Yeah. So you can't exactly say you've been ignoring it.

You just get in, quake, and get out. Yeah, yeah. Get in, see what the lay of the land is, if I can make money on it or not, and if I can't, you know. Yeah, then you get out. I'd also like to follow up a little bit on something. One of your loves, Fitbit, you gave me your old one.

Yep. And I've been trying it out for a couple days, and I'm quite fond of it as well. Good. It's nice. It's made me run up and down my stairs a couple more times than I normally would. It's made me aware that I've sat around a little bit too much, and maybe it's time for me to, instead of making an espresso here, walk down to the coffee shop and pay six bucks for one or whatever.

Yeah, and then walk around the block a couple more times to work it off. To work off the espresso I just bought, yeah. Funny how that all works. Circle of life. Yeah, I still love my, the new one I got, the Fitbit 1. It's, for some reason it stopped syncing with my phone, but it still syncs with my Mac.

Someday I'll go read the manual on it, but syncing with a Fitbit and a Mac has just never been easy. I don't know why they can't get it together. It's worked pretty well on the PC the few days I've had it, so. Yeah, that's good, because I basically couldn't use that one anymore because it wouldn't sync. So now that it works on the PC, I'm glad.

Right. Yeah, I've been humping it this week. I'm like 20,000 steps over my goal, so. It's been beautiful out in the valley, so walking the dog a little more often. Write a little code, get up, walk around a bit. Write a little more code, get up, walk around. Yeah, it's, yeah.

I mean, what we end up doing ends up becoming so sedentary that you have to. You have to force yourself to get up and take a break. Not just for health. I mean, for mental health, I think, as well, because you can just go crazy if you sit here all day. Yeah. Yeah, you used to sit here all night, but now that I'm a responsible old adult, I don't do all-nighters anymore.

Yeah, I don't do all-nighters much anymore either. It's, yeah, it's definitely become a job instead of a living, which is, I used to live, breathe, and eat this stuff. And I didn't really have much, anything better to do. Sure, I'd pop out for a while and see some friends, but I'd come back with a buzz and like, ooh, I'm going to try coding now.

Yeah. Those are always fun. The next day when you wake up and you're like, what the hell did I write? Same with anything. I mean, music, because I write music as well. If I knew, you know. It's a bit like pool. There's that, or when you're playing pool. The game itself. Not a pool.

Billiards, yes. There's that sweet spot of drunkenness where you're actually better than you were sober, but then you go over that and then you're shit again. Yeah, yeah. I have that with darts. When I get the right amount of buzz where the board is spinning just at the right amount, so when you're off, it just, you know, you start to fall.

But yeah, I definitely know that. It's just when your brain turns off the critical thinking part. Yeah. Because you're not overthinking your shot or your move. Yeah, you find this nice little sweet spot of optimal kind of disconnectedness, which is great. And that's, well, not to turn anybody to an alcoholic, but I find that to be extremely useful for any creative endeavor.

Yeah. So. No, definitely. And I think also now that we've been doing this for 20 years each, back then it was more of a discovery. You know, you're learning new stuff to, you know, get different things done. And now it's like, I know my language backwards and forwards and can just write it.

There's not a whole lot of real discovery going on anymore. Yeah, nobody wants anything that's too different. I mean, there are certain, I mean, I wouldn't say that there are standards, even though people attempt to apply standards. But certainly there's only so much you can do. Everybody's done websites.

And if you get too innovative, then people are like, they don't even know where to go. They don't know what to do with your site. I mean, I think about Radiohead. I mean, it's an interesting site. I mean, I haven't looked at it recently. Maybe they've updated and it's actually kind of normal. But, you know, you go there and I actually really just kind of want to find out when they're touring or what the new album is.

But it's all this fun, weird stuff. And where's the tour button? Yeah. I just want to see the tour button on the navigation bar. Yeah, I haven't checked out there. So I don't... I haven't looked in a long time, so it may have changed. But for a while it was, like, click through 10 pieces of, like, bizarre, you know, graphics and weird text that mean nothing but is really interesting if you're totally into Radiohead.

I mean, that's the kind of crap we used to do, like, early 90s because we were trying to figure out the medium, you know? Yeah. We'd just play around with it and see what worked and what didn't. Yeah. It was a completely different time. Now it's, you know, every website that we look at kind of looks somewhat similar.

Yeah. And it's not as interesting as it used to be. I mean, certainly the graphics and whatnot is how you define yourself. But the programming end of things, which is what you and I do, it's very similar for a lot of these sites until you find somebody who wants to be innovative.

And then you go, well, nobody's going to understand what you're trying to do there. Although, I mean, like, looking at... Well, since I'm a PHP guy. Yeah. But more and more, it's all about JavaScript. Because you can do some really interesting things, you know, with, you know, real time.

I mean, Ajax has been around for years. Yeah. Nowadays, there's some really cool libraries and people are doing really cool stuff with Node.js. And I've been playing around with AppCelerator and Titanium, which is basically writing iPhone and Android apps with JavaScript. Right.

So, more and more, it's all about JavaScript and learning that crazy syntax. Yeah. I'm still trying to catch up with that myself. I kick myself for not... JavaScript's been around for ages. Oh, yeah. As you and I both know. That's the don't. But I never really bothered to learn it because I was focusing on server side and PHP as well.

You know, I started way back with CGI and Perl and all that sort of stuff. So, I kick myself now because JavaScript has become de facto. That is your basic programming language. Luckily, there are tons of libraries. And if you've got a base in programming, you can kind of figure it out pretty quick.

But I really need to get up on my fundamentals on that. Yeah. Same here. And what was I going to say? I was doing something this week. Oh, that's what I wanted to say. Since we're back in, guys, what I've noticed lately is we're basically getting cloud engineered out of jobs.

I'm finding this a lot. Everybody's like, oh, we don't need a LAMP guy anymore. You know, we're just going to spin up a cloud instance on Amazon, press the little web server thing, and then boom, we have, you know, all the stuff that I used to sit there and compile Apache, find all the, you know, dependencies, try and get PHP to compile.

You know, and now it's just all Yum or AppGet. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of that stuff has just gone away. I mean, that's a lot of our economy now, though, too. It's as these things become kind of settled and standardized and these larger corporations, your Amazons, your Googles, whatever, they're providing pretty much top-notch services for basically next to no money.

Yeah. All of this stuff is just going away. We're seeing, I mean, you know, we're like becoming steel miners in Pennsylvania or something. It's just the jobs are gone. Yeah, I feel like, I was saying this week, I feel like a 65-year-old guy who was a welder for GM for, you know, his whole life, and now it's like, oh, well, what are you going to do now?

Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, I don't really know what to even make of it. I was saying to, I think to you earlier this week when we were talking a little bit about it, it's like we've hit that point in Star Trek where nobody really needs to work anymore because everything has been automized or, you know, we've figured out systems that deal with everything, but we haven't gotten to the point where the food and the shelter and all that stuff is free.

Yeah. So, you know, half in, half out. Yeah. There's not a lot of jobs for certain, a lot of jobs are going away in every industry. We've seen that, but particularly within our industry, if you're a server guy, there's not a lot of jobs left anymore.

If you're a backend programmer guy, a lot of that stuff is solidified and kind of done. And I think we're going to see that even with JavaScript too. Like we're talking about learning it, but then if you Google enough like jQuery libraries and everything, everything that you need to do is kind of in there already. Yeah.

You just have to be adept at finding it. So. Our job will be professional Googlers. Yeah. Well, professional Googling is, is a skill. It's a skill beyond belief. I mean, I watch people trying to search for things and I want to, you know, I go to that Saturday Night Live skit. I'm like, move.

I can do this. I know exactly what terms to put in to get exactly what we're looking for. So that is a good skill, but it's, it's, it's something I'm struggling with and trying to figure out. I don't know where we're going with our economy and with jobs and with what people are going to do for livings anymore.

We have too many people than we actually. And, you know, you look at the creative arts, your music, your writers, your journalists, they're getting paid next to nothing these days too. Yeah. Um, because a lot of people are willing to do it for free or for next to no money, or they're doing it basically to promote some other project that they're hoping to make money on.

So where's the work, where's the work for your average person who has a decent set of skills? Yep. I can't, I can't answer it. Yeah. And I guess even the more disturbing part is no matter what skills you learned earlier in your life, if you don't keep up, you're dead.

Yeah. Because whatever you learned is going to go away and not be valuable anymore. I'm finding that out the hard way right now. I really am. You know, it's, uh, I mean, there's still enough work out there where I can find stuff. It's not like it used to be. It used to be, I would put up on, uh, my blog or LinkedIn or wherever and I'm like available and within 10 minutes I would have 20 job offers.

Right. You know, back in, back in the heyday up in San Francisco, I couldn't, I couldn't go out the door without a job offer. Right. And now it's like, uh, these crickets. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel the same way. I mean, a lot of, a lot of jobs that I would be doing right now within the music industry or with, with clients or whatnot, they're quite willing to just have an intern put up a Tumblr and that's good enough.

Um, is it good enough? No, I would argue it's not. And for about 10 million reasons, which could be a topic at some point, but at the end of the day, it's good enough for the band. It's good enough for the management company. And, and that's all they're willing to allocate to it anyway. So end of story, I'm not going to get a job.

Um, well, the one thing I have noticed is that, okay, so I don't have to set up, you know, my own boxes anymore and I don't have to compile stuff. What I'm getting, what I've gotten really good at over the years is using the cloud-based tools that, you know, took my job away. So like I'm, uh, Amazon, uh, Webster or AWS expert.

I can spin anything up in there, get it tightened up, load balanced, secure across the board in like two hours. Right. You know? So, I mean, there's, there's an upside to that. So you charge more for that. So it's balancing. And with a lot of these things, because there's supposedly so easy and people who have no skills whatsoever, basically go in and set them up and, and use them.

The question always becomes, well, what happens when something breaks? Yeah. Because if you don't know what you're doing, when something breaks, you are fucked. Yep. I get a lot of those calls. Yeah. It broke. What do I do? Yeah, exactly. And so that's when you, what, that's when a good background means something when, when, because you and I actually know this stuff, it means something.

Yeah. So that's when we, I guess, go, oh, well, you want that fixed right away? That would be 10 grand. Yeah. Yeah. It's like being a generalist is kind of frowned upon nowadays. Everybody wants a specialist for certain things, but I think being a generalist still, it's like, when it comes to finding and solving problems, that background is, you know, it's super helpful and you're, it's a great commodity.

People just don't get it. They don't, they don't realize that experience. People don't see the point of it. Yeah. That that experience is worth something. And I agree with that. I've always been proud of being a generalist. I know a little bit about everything. I'm nowhere near a graphic designer. I have a business partner who has a degree in that and is a specialist in graphic design, but I know how to open up Photoshop and resize things and fit banners, profiles and change colors.

And it's a useful skill. So. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think I need another beer. Me too. That was pretty depressing. Let's go.

Today's podcast is fueled by Stella, not a very exciting beer or, well, I mean, I like it.

It's my staple that I go to, but I didn't go to my usual place. And so my beer selection was not as adventurous as usual. Not as exciting. But I hope you're enjoying it, Jason. Of course. It's a lovely day here in Venice under the flight path as usual, sitting out on the balcony in between.

Sunny and warm. So you can't complain. It's nice and refreshing. Um, so since we were just talking a lot about, um, jobs and education and, um, how our industry is working and, and how some jobs are going away and other things are opening up.

And I thought it might be interesting for us to talk about how we learned, how we do what we do. How did we learn? We do what we do. Well, trial and error, trial and error, probably very different from the options that are out there now. But, uh, cause there are a lot of options out there now.

It's, it's actually never been easier for people to learn how to do things, anything in, in the entire history of the world for free than it is right now. So, uh, why don't we talk about, about how we both learned our stuff and then we can start talking about some of the options that are out there for, uh, and anybody that wants to learn.

Yeah. I mean, my, my story is pretty straightforward. I, uh, when there were no HTML books when I started, we only had the spec. So we worked from the spec and view source. Yes. It was also a much simpler, uh, simpler time in browsers. I, there wasn't, wasn't even the center tag when, when I got going, but there was blink not yet.

No, no, no. Blink came, blink was when Netscape came around. We're all very happy. Blink went away. If you don't know what that is, Google it. Yes. And then there was the marquee, I believe in IE. Yes. But it only worked in IE. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So a lot of my stuff was trial and error. I learned Pearl the hard way, um, which there is no other way to learn.

I was about to say, what was the easy way on that one? No, it was hands down the, my least favorite language I've ever learned. Um, yeah. I mean, definitely me too. I, that's, um, I mean, obviously you probably had classes in basic back in school too. I've never taken, I've never taken, I did learn how to do basic back in like a junior high or high school or something like that.

I learned, I learned basic from the manual that came with it. All right. Cause when we got our first IBM XT, it had with our, you know, MS-DOS books and everything. Right. It came with the basic manual and I read that cover to cover. Right. Did some basic stuff. So I did some basic, uh, in, in junior high. And, uh, I think I previously mentioned, I ran a BBS, um, and that was programmed, I believe in Pascal.

So I learned enough, enough Pascal to be able to make modifications to the package that was distributed. So I could add cool things like spinning cursors and, and whatnot. Um, but yeah, I didn't, uh, once I was in college, that's kind of when, you know, your HTML one standard came out and, and all that sort of stuff.

And I, I did the exact same thing. There was no book. There was, there was no resource online to learn it. I learned it by going and seeing the spec and by viewing source. If I found a site that did something I liked, I looked at the code to see how to do it. And, and that's pretty much how I taught myself.

Yeah. So in, in the pro stuff, I found a lot of other, other people's packages and stuff. So it was basically going through and just dissecting and going line by line. What does this do? What does this do? Yeah. And, you know, just reverse engineering a lot of that stuff. Yeah. I mean, personally, I'm an autodidact.

I've don't learn from, it's the, you know, the big 50 cent word. That means you figure shit out by yourself. I think I owe you money or something. Just got to take a drink. Cause yeah. And, uh, I went to college, community college for about a year, took photography classes.

That was it. I took one English class, got a D minus and said, well, I don't need to take any more of these. And then everything that I've learned, I've learned along the way by trial and error and RTFM, you know, like I got a job once and, uh, I had to use CVS, the concurrent versioning system.

It was, it was right when subversion was coming out. I'd never used it. It was, um, and I had literally eight hours to the next day when I started the job to figure it out, to learn it. And I went home and sat down and learned it, you know, it's, I think, I think it really helps to learn stuff when you actually have a, a real need.

You have to have a goal to do something. If you don't have a goal and you're just sitting around and like, oh, I should really figure out how to do this. You're never going to learn it. Um, if you've got a reason as in like tomorrow morning, when I walk into work, I have to be able to know how to do this.

You will fucking learn it and you will stay up all night to learn it. I think that's how you and I learned a lot of stuff. I mean, I remember, you know, well flash, what was the first future, future splash. When that came in, we were, I was working at a company and then, you know, they had somebody come in and teach us it and the basics and all that.

But when they switched over to, you know, flash version one, um, there was no need to really learn it. It wasn't pressured by the company, but I found, I was, I just found a project I wanted to do for myself and that's how I learned it. I built this like spinning fucking, you know, globe in 3d and I put, you know, girl's picture and it was, yeah, it was for pussy, you know, whatever.

But I mean, that's a powerful force to make you learn how to do something. So I built something in it to impress a girl and you need a reason to learn something. If you don't have a reason, you're not going to fucking learn it and you're not going to put in the hours and you're not going to stay up all night like you and I have done multiple times to learn a new technology.

Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that I learned is because I created my, me and my girlfriend created a magazine and most of the cool features were stuff that, you know, were kind of coding projects just to see if I could learn it. Yeah. But I had a, I had a reason for it to be there. You know, it's not like, I think about it like this.

I always wanted to learn how to cook. Yeah. It wasn't until my roommate left and said, okay, here's the kitchen. You're cooking dinner tonight. You know? Yeah. And thrown into the deep end of the pool. Get in the mix. And then, you know, now I'm actually getting to be a pretty good cook.

I enjoy it and I'm learning along the way. But when it was just me sitting around in my apartment by myself. Order a pizza. Not even. I'd go, I'd go to the, I'd go to the, uh, the corner gas station, get one of those little sandwiches and a can of V8. And that was dinner. Oh God. That's disgusting.

I did that for 10 years, man. At least you put vodka in the V8. Some nights. Some nights. No, I agree. You need, you need, um, you need outside pressure to, to do anything. Uh, I consider myself an incredibly disciplined person.

I mean, I've been running my own company and all that sort of stuff and I, I stay on things, but I still need outside pressure. Uh, if you don't have that, you have next, we're humans. We're inherently lazy. Yeah. We'd rather just push our pleasure center buttons as much as possible without having to put in the work to do it.

And you need to be forced to put in the time and learning this stuff takes time. Yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of tools nowadays like code Academy where people can go and learn to code, but I noticed a lot of people are learning to code for the sake of learning to code, not for, they don't have any kind of purpose.

They don't want anything to build. They're just. Yeah. And it's, cause it's, it's kind of a fat cause everybody's making money. Everybody sees Facebook. They see all the money people are making on the internet and they say, Oh, I should learn how to code. Right. And it's like, well, are you going to get a job coding or is this, you know, like instead of going and mowing the lawn, you're going to sit around and learn, you know, JavaScript function overloading, I don't know, I don't know what the ratio is of people that started to learn coding and dropped off.

Cause there was that big code Academy thing that you were talking about. It was like 30 days, the 30 day challenge of coding, which I thought was really interesting. And I even signed up for it because I was like, uh, you, you and I both know you have to keep up and you have to refresh your skills. And I was like, Oh, this will be a great way to do it.

How many days did you get? Uh, three, three, but then I got too busy with my real job, so I couldn't keep up with it. Um, and I didn't need to, there was nothing I needed to learn how to do that. They were teaching me. Now, if there was some version of like the subversions and all that sort of stuff, that was the 30 day challenge.

I need to learn that shit because I'm behind on it that I would do. The coding Academy stuff was relatively basic. I mean, I knew, I know how to do that stuff already. So for me, it was just like, I, what the fuck am I doing this for when I have five client emails coming in every 10 minutes?

So, yeah, it's a different situation than, than, than what the, that site I think is geared for. Yeah. Um, and I do think it's good that every, everybody should have some basic programming, just know how. Yeah. Just because it's going to be more and more handy, you know, it's always going to be useful.

Uh, there's no doubt now. I mean, even with all these free tools that are out there, you have the ability to at least do something special or different if you know some basic skills. Yeah. Just the underlying mechanics of how programs work, I think is even, even useful. Well, it teaches you how computers work, which a lot of people think that they know because they sit there on Facebook or Twitter and you know, they use their apps and on their phones and all, but you don't really understand.

And again, it goes back to what I was saying just a little bit earlier before the break, everything's fine and dandy until something breaks. Yeah. And if you don't know the basics or at least some understanding of the basics, when things break, you're fucked. Where do you think, where do you think a good place for people to go to learn some of this stuff is?

Do you think it's just go buying the manual, sitting at home, reading the manual? Are there like, you know, I mean, I've, I've used, uh, several online sites like lynda.com. Yeah. I've learned, uh, Oh, what, what's that horrible CMS expression engine expression engine?

Like every now and again, when I get a client with expression engine, I have to go dust off my knowledge of that. And I go back and I find, you know, some tutorials I bought or there's like Drupal, which is another horrible CMS and it's just a nightmare, which, but a lot of people, strangely enough, for whatever reason, a lot of people in the music industry seem to be fascinated with Drupal.

It's a huge one and I can't stand it. And I've had to do the same thing. Um, I would, I don't think code Academy is necessarily bad. If you go to their site is completely free and that is, you know, internet one-on-one the absolute basics.

It's, it's your hello world in HTML and you know, some basic CSS stuff and all that sort of stuff. It's a good intro for people who don't have any background whatsoever. I personally love lynda.com. I think that the tutorials on there are high quality, incredibly well done by very good teachers.

Um, the trick with lynda.com is like the google.com search. It's, it's finding the right one for what you need to do. So that, that's a bit different. Um, you and I had a little conversation before I like printed books. Yeah. So for me, I, I would highly recommend going out and getting books.

Go, you know, if you want to learn how to build a webpage, go get your HTML book, go get your basic CSS book, go, or well, you should probably start with the basic, basic of HTML, CSS and all that sort of stuff. I mean, if you want to be a graphic designer, it's a completely different thing.

Um, I don't know, you know, I like books. Yeah, no, books are great, but when I, when I've used a lot of these sites just in my professional life, it's like, I need to know how to create a plugin for this platform. Right. I'm going to go find somebody who's written a, how to make a plugin video.

And it's much faster than me going out, finding the book, certainly, you know, going through the book, finding the relevant parts. I'm like, show me exactly what I want. I'll give you 50 bucks. But you and I are looking basically for surgery learning. Yeah. We're looking for one really specific thing really quick. Cause we need to do it right fucking now.

Yeah. So, and I, I think online is the best for that because if you, again, go back to knowing your Google skills, if you know what to look for, you can find it. Like I just had that instance, uh, two days ago, there was a very specific, problem that I was having was some code about reading in from the API of both YouTube and Vimeo at the same time.

And I was having an issue for something that had worked for two years. And then all of a sudden it stopped working. Then Googling is your best. And I found a resource in a video from the guy that had the same problem talking exactly about how he solved it and boom, done. I fixed it.

So, and, and something else that we, we didn't, uh, talk about before is a stack overflow. Oh, which is great site. If you're, if you're, if you're in a program or learning to program, even, even pros, I use it almost every day for just something really obscure.

I would say 99% of the times that I have a problem, uh, and I Google it, the correct answer is coming from stack overflow. Yeah. And, and if you don't know what stack overflow is, it's basically a place where programmers go, they put up a question, Hey, this doesn't work.

And then other people can, uh, submit replies to it and you vote on the, the best answers. Yeah. It's, it's just a wonderful knowledge repository. Absolutely fantastic. It's, if you kind of know what you're going to do, go there. Yeah, definitely. Cause it's, it's programmers talking to other programmers about things that are going on right now and, uh, real time problems.

Because what the other aspect of it that's changed since you and I started is when we used to build our sites, they were all self-contained. We didn't rely on other people's codes. We didn't reply, rely on APIs. We weren't pulling in things from other people's sites. Now that's part of the gig and we don't control those things.

Right. So all of a sudden something breaks that isn't your fault that broke because something over there that you're pulling in from Google and then the API from this site all of a sudden is not accepting the code that you were using to pull it in. And there's nothing better than Stack Overflow to like find the answer immediately.

Yeah. And one thing I want to point out is, uh, something that I found a lot of people have kind of given up the ghost on is graceful degradation. If something doesn't work right, fail gracefully. Yes. And that's gone as far as I can tell. Yeah. I haven't seen very many good, it's like, oh, can't connect to the database.

Just a little one line attack. You know, it's like, Eric can't connect. He's like, no, put up a nice page and send yourself an email to go fix a damn database. But a lot, you know. Yeah. That's, that's gone. Yeah. A lot of that's gone. So, um, yeah, it's, it's a really different thing. I mean, there are some great resources out there and if somebody really wants to learn this stuff, there are fantastic, fantastic places to go.

So. Yeah. I, I don't think anybody should learn to code anymore at all just because it's too much goddamn competition for us. Well, I mean, that's, that's an even larger question, which is, um, you know, if you're, if you're sitting out there right now going, should I learn PHP?

Uh, no, no. I mean, first off, there are too many people that already know it. Secondly, um, that kid in India who puts up, uh, puts up a little post on the site will fix that problem way cheaper than you're going to. You're not going to be able to make a living doing it.

So that gets into the, you know, crowdsourcing and, uh, global economics, which is way more than we can solve here. Yeah. But I mean, I, I, I don't, I look at companies like Facebook and Yahoo, they're all PHP based. Yeah. You know, and people that work there are making well over a hundred grand a year.

So there are jobs. Yeah. No, no, there are definitely jobs. Yeah. But it's like, you need to be a specialist and a computer scientist for a lot of that stuff. You got to be super high end. Cause the, the economics of scaling to getting to scale, it's a hard pro it's a hard problem and a hard nut to crack.

So these people are like mathematicians, you know, actually explain scaling because I found that to be an incredibly difficult concept. And I don't know if people really even understand what that is. Well, one server can only handle so much traffic, right? So you need more servers to distribute the load across the servers.

And as you get deeper and deeper into the stack, you have specific clusters of servers to do very specific things. Like, you know, whenever I start a project now, it's always two servers and a load balancer. Right. Always. Because even, even a moderately popular thing, you want to be able to add more servers onto it.

And a lot of people don't understand that if you don't have the load balancer there first, that your IP and your domain name point to, when it comes time to add another server, the load balancer is going to have a new IP and you have to change all your DNS and your site's going to be broken for longer than it would be if you didn't do that. That's a little bit of minutiae, but it's adding more servers.

It's not a minutiae anymore because, well, I mean, it is. Let's be honest. But the reality is people get pissed off if things don't come up immediately. Oh, yeah. And if you don't do this, the site's not going to come up. I mean, I've experienced this multiple times with a lot of my clients.

If they premiere a new video, boom, site goes down. Tour announcement, boom, site goes down. Why? Because we didn't do any of this stuff. Yeah. Because they didn't understand it. And when I said that we really needed to do this, they didn't believe me.

So, yeah. And like when you look at the Facebooks and the Googles, you know, Facebook, this was like two years ago, they're doing 10 million MySQL queries a second. Which is insane. And the horsepower that goes into doing that at scale is mind boggling.

And how to just make it all work, it's like, it's above my pay grade. I mean, yeah, I can build you a master slave, a master master slave. You know, I can build, I've had 10 server MySQL setups that I've built and run that work just fine.

Right. But, you know, we were talking about the 100,000 unique visits a day. When you get into the 100 million unique visits a day, it's an order of magnitude harder to scale. And we're talking, you know, server farms. Yeah. No, thousands. Thousands, yes.

Yeah, I mean, the Technorati, I think we peaked out at 600 servers. Yeah. So. Well, I found the most interesting thing about all of that and trying to explain it, it was like somebody said something along the lines of, oh, Facebook had announced they were opening a new server farm in a cold climate because their heating bills, or their cooling bills would be less.

If we put it somewhere fucking freezing because computers generate heat, I don't know if you people have noticed that, then we'll pay less on our bills. Because it's already cold. Yep. Because there's so many fucking servers sitting there to handle all of us putting up our pictures of cats.

Yeah. And I like the Google one where they were basically building server farms inside of shipping containers. Right. So they could pick up and move the servers around. That's pretty damn smart. It was pretty cool looking too. They did a pretty good job. And definitely you should check out the Google Data Center walkthrough video.

It's really amazing what they've done. They've got colored pipes going everywhere. It's something to see. We'll put that in the show notes. And by the way, to get to the show notes for Grumpy Old Geeks, go to www.grumpyoldgeeks.com. Or even better, just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com because we don't use the www anymore.

Thank God. So I kind of want to talk about just general learning now because you went to college. I did. And spent a buttload of money. Well, you did actually because I was on a free ride. But thank you. Oh, you're welcome, ass wife. So I went to community college just for photography.

I mentioned that before. Right. But nowadays, I don't think you even need to go to college because there's so much online that you can learn for free. Between iTunes U and all of the Khan Academy, and those are just free sites.

But when you want to get into paid stuff, you've got Udemy for expert learning. And I mean, I took the Stanford iPhone programming class back in the day. And it was like, it was a pretty good class. And it was free. Yeah. I mean, it's the highest rated or the most viewed class on iTunes U as far as I know.

I tend to agree with you on this one. I mean, I did go, I have a four-year degree. I have a dual degree in psychology and music recording. Both of which I somewhat use. I mean, I edit this podcast. I do music for a living.

Well, not really for a living, for fun. I work within music. So the editing and the whole music recording thing has served me well. The psychology serves me well in terms of dealing with asshole clients. But I paid, well, I didn't pay, but the government paid a lot of money for me to get that education.

A ridiculous amount of money. And that's astronomical amount of money. Well beyond what it ever should be. And there are, there's a big debate going on online right now about this, about free education as a lot of these, a lot of colleges are putting up their courses now for free.

Stanford, UC Berkeley, Duke, MIT, Harvard, UCLA. All of these schools have free courses now. Completely free. But the catch is you get no accreditation. But who cares? What does that matter to you? Yeah. Well, let me, let me posit a theoretical for you.

Because I was thinking about this a little bit earlier. Okay. Um, all right. There are accreditations that are beyond schooling for certain professions. Say a lawyer. Lawyer has to pass the bar. I personally would not care if the lawyer had a degree from a law school.

If they pass the bar, that's good enough for me. If the, if the lawyer is self-taught and pass the bar, I'm cool. I'm actually, I'd be cooler with that. I'd be cooler with it too, just because it's interesting. However, a surgeon, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to trust a self-taught surgeon, even if they have gone and passed through the AMA bars and all that sort of stuff.

Um, there are certain, certain things that I want people to be in a school for. This is true. And not sit at home and learn it by themselves. Of course, you know, in, in a five years when robots are working on us, it won't matter so much. Yeah. I'm, I'm thinking more along the lines of knowledge work. No, knowledge work completely.

I, I agree, but this comes back to something that you and I have talked about a couple of times, which is we get upset about how everything is being offered for free. On one hand, I'm, I think it's amazing that all these courses are online for completely free, but don't you think there should be some sort of middle accreditation that may be charged 10 grand instead of a hundred grand?

And I, I'm looking at also, if I went to Yale and spent, you know, $200,000 on my education and they're giving the classes away to anybody who wants to go, that's a very expensive piece of paper and I'd be kind of pissed. But right now there's still a cachet to have, to, to walk into an interview and say, oh my yes, I have a good degree from Yale.

Um, that's going to go away. So we're in this weird middle period with education even right now. Yeah. Um, I don't necessarily, well, actually let me, let me rephrase this. I think all these courses should be out there for free. There should be no reason why you and I, if you were interested in something, couldn't log on and go, I'm just going to read this because I think this is cool as fuck.

I've been doing that myself, not for free for years. I've been taking UCLA extension courses all the time, just on subject matters that interested me. Nothing that had anything to do with my career. I went and took a course on, um, you know, King Arthur and Merlin and it was fascinating and I loved it.

And it was, you know, adult education and I took it, you know, no credit. So it does, there's no academic record of me taking this course, but it was awesome. Yeah, that's cool. I really enjoyed it. And I love the fact that all these iTunes, iTunes U is stunning.

I can, when I sit and look through that, I go down the rabbit hole for hours. Oh yeah, you can totally get it. And it's funny. I was listening to one of Dr. Drew's podcasts and that's his addiction now is he's just gets all these courses from iTunes U and I do too. I've been taking tons of philosophy courses. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah.

It, it's, you know, some of it's, some of it's a little dense if you haven't taken some of the prerequisites because that's the other thing is you don't need to take prerequisites and you can get a little lost. And you don't necessarily have to go through the reading list. Again, what we were talking about earlier, if there's no reason to do something, you don't do it.

Oh, the other, the other upside is you don't have to do the fucking homework. Yeah, there's no, you don't have to fucking do the homework. So for that aspect of it, I love that all these classes are being put out online for free. It's an amazing thing. But then the other side, you know, the other argument is people are starting to say, well, why would you ever pay for college?

I think there should be a middle ground. If you are a self-starter and if you are that motivated and that disciplined and you can take these online courses for by yourself, there should be some sort of mid-level. You're not paying for the whole university experience.

You're not putting in the $100,000 to go and do the networking. And let's be honest, a lot of these, your Yales and stuff like that, a lot of it isn't even what you get as an education. It's who you met while you were there. It's networking. Yeah. So why not do a middle ground where instead of it being a ridiculously $250,000 four-year education at Yale, there's a $10,000 one for doing the online stuff and passing, not taking

tests for every single thing, but at the, you know, if you completed X amount of courses, then you take a test proving your knowledge on that and you get some sort of online accreditation and then you pay to get that. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, take the courses for free.

Get them out there, yeah. Hell, you don't even charge, you don't even charge people unless they pass. If they pass the test, then you go, all right, well, if you want the official accreditation, that means you have to send us $10,000. I like it. I like that. That's a, that's a, that's a pretty damn good idea. I think so too.

And I just came up with it. Pulled it out of your behind. Pretty much. So, and the other aspect is, of all this, you know, learning online that, because I'm a little bummed because I wanted to build this site, but Udemy, U-D-E-M-Y.

Right. So this isn't a rap class. Exactly. So, but you can go create, create your own class and charge money for it. So if you have domain knowledge in a specific area, you can go in and make a class and I'm looking at those things.

And I think that's going to be my side, my side gig. It's like Kickstarter for education. I'm going to start doing all of the really crazy, esoteric shit that I've learned in the web business and do just a, a masterclass on, on the craziness that it takes to put stuff up, you know?

Right. So I, I, I like that idea that you can, you can actually go out and make money off the things that you know. So in the very near future, you might be able to get your own grumpy old geeks degree. Yeah. From Udemy. Works for me. Not that anybody will pay you for that, but you never know.

My clients pay me. That's enough. Yes, that's true. So yeah, I think that pretty much wraps it up for the learning stuff. I mean, there's so many resources out there right now that anybody can just go dig into and learn whatever you want to learn. Yeah. So if you're motivated, there's no excuse not to, actually, even if you're not motivated, there's no excuse.

So if you're sitting at home, sitting home alone, washing your soaps, can't figure out why you can't get a job, go fucking learn a new skill. No shit. Do a little self-starting, do a little discipline. Don't sit down and watch the fucking, what's that stupid Charlie Sheen show? That isn't even on anymore. Now it's Ashton Kutcher. I've never watched it.

Whatever the hell that damn show is, or whatever hell your favorite stupid ass show is, you've got to fucking DVR. Pause that shit. You're awake. You're alive. Get on iTunes U. Find something that interests you. Or find something that will make you money and learn it. Because you have to keep learning. The world has moved on.

We're no longer in a place where you get your college degree and you have your job for your life and that's all you ever need to know. No. It doesn't work like that anymore. You have to keep learning all the time. Today's show is brought to you by Burner, the mobile app that lets you create disposable phone numbers on your iPhone or Android device.

Insert joke about the wire here. We know there are plenty of geeks in the audience thinking about all the things you could do with an extra phone number or two, Craigslist, prank calls, extra business line or two. Use it just like your regular number and if anything or anyone starts to get weird, you can just hit a button to burn it and move on.

Really? I can call sporting goods stores again and ask them if they have 12 pound balls. I haven't done that since I was like 10. Just like when you were a 10 year old. Awesome. As a gift, Burner is giving away free credits to GOG listeners. You can download the app from Google Play or the App Store by visiting BurnerApp.com.

Once you download, enter the code GRUMPY and you'll get three free credits. This is good for the first 50 users, but once they're gone, they're gone. Have fun, kids.

I've been struggling trying to love the Apple podcast app because I've got 25 podcasts that I listen to religiously, which is a ridiculous amount of... That's a lot. Yeah. And I just can't.

I can't deal with it. It is terrible. I like the real-to-real look. It's gone. They took that out. Really? I guess I haven't updated. Yeah, it's been gone. Okay, I still have the real-to-real look. The new one is better. I mean, it is better, but it is not what I want in a client.

So, I dropped some coin and I bought Downcast. Right. And I've also purchased Instacast, which is another podcast app. But between the two, I have to say, Downcast is my favorite. Instacast keeps updating fairly recently and charging more for every upgrade.

So, I've got like version two. Right. And for version three, they made it a whole new app, so it's another five bucks. And, you know, I'm all about improvements and paying for upgrades, but paying the full fare every time they upgrade, I think is a disservice to the people who supported them during their development previously.

That's a good point. So, I stick with Downcast, and I love it. Okay. So, let me ask a purely, you know, personal question for our own sakes here. If you subscribe to podcasts in these apps, does that work for the podcasters?

Is that showing up on Apple as subscribers? No. Okay. So, that's a down. So, if you do use Downcast, go to iTunes and click the five stars and leave us a lovely review. Please. Yes, we could use that. And I do that for all the podcasts that I listen to. Right.

I actually do go to iTunes. So, you listen to a shit ton of podcasts. Yes. I have a shit ton that I'm subscribed to, which basically I just keep on my desktop computer at home. But when I'm actually on my phone listening to podcasts, it's a very few select numbers that I drag over when I go ride.

So, for me, I understand why you would hate their native app, because it does suck. I can imagine if I had anything more than what I wanted to listen to on my bike ride, I would hate that app. So, what's your question? I thought you had a question.

Well, no, the question was about if you listen to podcasts on these paid other apps, did it still affect iTunes, all that sort of stuff? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like download rates, all the sorts of things that actually Apple never really tells us. No, you don't get download stats, because when you click on download, iTunes just hands you over.

They're just basically parsing the RSS and clicking you out. So, we need to run stats on our side, which we haven't done yet, which we're working on to get very quickly. Yes. Now that we have lovely sponsors, we love you guys, and we want to give them good numbers. Um, but the, yeah, the experience is completely different, but I don't listen to podcasts on my desktop, period.

So, if I'm on my desktop, I'm working, and I cannot have somebody else in my ear when I'm working. That's why I said before, I have the same album that I've listened to for a year on loop, which is actually called Endgame. I went back and looked at my iTunes, and I looked at the picture, and it's called Endgame by Rise Against. Very nice.

So, yeah. And, you know, I like dropping developer's coin. I agree. And actually, my, I don't have an app this week. We've discussed I'm not really an app person, and even though I did apps for the first couple weeks, um, my dislike this week is people that bitch about free services.

So, there we go. Explain. Um, I'm tired of everybody complaining about how they don't like things they're getting for free. I'm tired of the bitching about Facebook. Oh, they're selling our information. Oh, they changed the news feed again. Oh, oh, oh. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.

Fucking shut the fuck up. It's fucking completely free. You don't pay a dime for it. You don't do anything with it, and it's convinced you that you're a master of the internet. Shut the fuck up. Stop bitching. Stop bitching about Tumblr and how you can't do this or that.

Stop bitching about Twitter and how you can't do this or that. Tumblr's got 50 bucks in my money. I can bitch about Tumblr. You paid. You can bitch. Most people don't. Yeah, I bought premium themes from Tumblr, so. There you go. Yeah. If you're not throwing a dime into something, you don't get to bitch about it. End of story.

Okay. So, that's my complaint of the week. I can't stand it. I'm fucking tired of it. We've talked about this stuff for ages. We're developers. We work on this stuff. You get what you pay for. If it's free, you don't have a right to complain. If there's an opportunity for you to chip in money, okay, do it.

Then you can start complaining. Okay, I'm with you on that vein. We were talking about WordPress a bit ago. We were talking about WordPress. Because WordPress is free. It is. And people tend to complain a lot. Yes. But it is free. It's free and it's supposed to be easy.

And it is if you want something really, really, really basic. And what people don't understand about WordPress is if you want to go beyond something really, really, really basic, you're going to have to find somebody who knows how to program in WordPress and modify WordPress and install plugins and create themes and program themes.

And keep it updated. And keep it updated. Because it's a hack target beyond belief. Yes, it's constantly a hack target beyond belief. And that's a never-ending frustration to me because I run some servers and there's WordPress on them. And if I do not religiously follow up with the updates, everything gets fucked up.

Yeah, basically, when you look at WordPress, it is free software, but there are so many hidden costs running a WordPress site. I have used them since, oh, God, forever now. Right. I mean, I moved from movable type over to WordPress.

Yes. And one of the frustrations I have is people who want a quick, dirty site and they say, okay, we're going to do it in WordPress. And then it doesn't do what they think it's supposed to do. Right. And then it just turns into a complete clusterfuck. Yes. So in that vein, talking about paid software, as much as I hate it, Expression Engine, it's $250, I think.

I'd have to look it up again. But it's not cheap. Most of the plugins you have to pay for. Right. So you're going to drop, I think the last site I did, we ended up dropping about $600 out of the gate just on software for it. Right. And get it configured. That's not even counting in my cost. But realistically, I mean, $600, not that expensive.

But compared to free. Compared to free. Very expensive. Yeah. And in looking at things like, you know, you talked about Drupal before. Yeah. Drupal's a nightmare. I know nothing about Drupal. But when it comes to, like, administering a WordPress site for somebody who doesn't know HTML, going with a platform like Expression Engine, where it's a structured platform, you know, you set up everything the way it's supposed to be, and they can't really screw with it.

Right. Comes in pretty handy. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm a proponent of building custom systems for myself, for my clients, but they can afford that. Yeah. And, you know, there's all the benefits of having it be pretty much hack-proof and all that sort of stuff.

But, you know, for cheap and easy, $600 is cheap and easy for me, but then again, I don't have people coming to me and going, can I have a site for $400? Yeah. I can't ever do that. And I can't even do a WordPress site for $400, and I don't think anybody ever could.

The hidden cost is ridiculous. Yeah. Because what you're talking about is everybody just kind of assumes, oh, if I get WordPress, even though I pretty much just know how to do Facebook and Twitter, I'll be able to figure out how to update my own site. No. No. Well, no, I mean, you can figure it out.

It takes time, and it takes their time. No, but you'd have to learn. You'd have to put in some time to actually learn some real skills. It's not plug and play. You can't just, it's not some magical engine that will just let you do whatever you want to do. Yeah. Which is what I tend to get an impression that my clients tend to think it is when they come to me and say, I need WordPress.

So. Yeah. So, yeah, it's, but, hey, it's free. It's free. It's free. I've made a lot of money on WordPress doing those installs, and. Yeah. I just, I do wish that people would realize how much more difficult it is to make something out of WordPress than, you know, beats the eye.

Yeah, it's a lot more difficult. Yeah. You have no understanding. I mean, I have a friend of mine that is trying to learn it right now just because I said, you know, she wants some work. And I was like, well, if we, we do tend to get a lot of WordPress people figure it out. And if you can figure this stuff out, I'll toss those jobs over to you because I hate fucking doing them.

Um, and it's a nightmare. She's, you know, she's relatively skilled and just not familiar with WordPress and trying to figure out the ins and outs and the plugins and how they relate to the CSS and then the master style sheet and then child themes. And, and then if you really wanted to do something complicated or even slightly different from the theme that you got going through and because it's open source, who the fuck knows who wrote this theme and how they wrote it.

And do they follow any standard programming standards? Yeah. Probably not. Not generally. No, it's not. It's a mess. Then you have to deal with caching because it's such a bloated pig that, you know, it's. Yeah. And the hacks. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's like how everybody used to write viruses for PCs.

And if you had a Mac, you were fine. And it was, oh, cool. Well, WordPress is the PC of the internet. Oh, it's a huge target. Yeah. And since it is open source, I mean, we can go into open source versus closed source, but since everybody has it, they can figure out where the holes are.

Exactly. And then they trade those on the black market and everybody's screwed. Yep. So if you do run a WordPress site, kids, keep it up to date. All the time. And that doesn't necessarily mean your theme will still work when you do the update. Good times. Yeah. Oh, wait. Do you remember the Tim Tim?

I think it's Tim, uh, Tim Thumb, the Tim Thumb bug. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That one little library that everybody used for thumbnailing. Yeah. And it had a vulnerability. So every plugin was screwed. Yep. You know, that's kind of one of the dangers of it. So I'm thinking maybe I should go into the business of writing exploits and make my money that way.

Okay, we're going to the black arts and how to make money on the internet now. Sweet. All right, man. I'll see you next week. See you next week. It was a good time. For show notes, go to GrumpyOldGeeks.com, please. And give us a five-star rating on iTunes if you're feeling generous. If you're liking us, please rate us on iTunes.

It does actually matter. And you can get in touch with us at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. See you next week. See you next week. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action.

The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.