09: Tend your own garden

Welcome, my friends, to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly conversation where two internet vets talk about technology, the internet, where it's headed, where we wish it was headed. I'm Jason. And I'm Brian. You can find us on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

Grumpy Old Geeks, episode 9. Start the timer. Here we are. Happy birthday, Brian. Thank you. Thank you. I am officially now a grumpy old geek. I felt like a fraud before being only 39. Now I'm 40. I'm old. Yes, you are. Yes, I am. Welcome to the club. This shit's going to start falling off you now. Things did start breaking. Oh, well, that started last year for me anyways. But it is funny. I've got a lot of welcome to the clubs. Yeah. And 40 is the new 30.

I remember 30, and it didn't feel as bad as this. So I'm not digging the new 30. Yeah, it didn't hurt when I got out of bed when I was 30. Yeah, the original 30 was a lot better. So I want to talk a little bit about last week's epic episode. Yes, your big epiphany episode. Well, yeah, we don't get a whole lot of feedback. In the last episode, we got a ton of feedback from my little whiny, pissy, pussy party about how I couldn't get a job.

Yeah. So when did you get a lot of things are tough all over suck it up bastard? No, I got I got a lot of actual encouragement. People are like, well, you're only 41. So most people don't figure it out till they're a lot older, which is so that was some encouragement. Right. But when I was listening to it, when we were doing the our dry run edits, and you know, checking the levels and all that stuff, I listen. I'm like, who the fuck is this guy? I have never been that pissy and moany and whiny. As far as I can

I can remember. Well, I'll give you not the whiny and the moany, but you've definitely been that pissy. Okay, but I didn't even think I was that pissy. Actually, I was more like, woe is me the pity party. It was a pity party. Right? Well, you know, it's it's been rough. Economy has been rough. The job market has definitely been rough. And there's I was talking to a really good friend of mine that that is a super high, like PhD level psychologist about a lot of this stuff, especially as I was coming up to my 40th birthday.

birthday. And she did mention to me that that age 40 is when people tend to kind of rethink their careers. They look at what they've been doing, because chances are they've been doing it for about 20 years, which is a long time to do anything. And you start to question, well, what the fuck am I doing? Yeah. And do I want to keep doing this or, or various different levels? Am I not making enough money? Is it not making me enough happy? Is it taking up too much of my time? This is a typical period in which people do start to question their lives and buy sports

cars and fuck 20 year olds. Or go back to school. It was funny. I was now that you're mentioning that when I was in photography school, when I was, you know, in my early 20s. Yeah, there were a lot of 40 year old computer programmers that had decided to come become photographers. There's a big burnout in the industry that we're in. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's grueling. It's taxing. And and when you hit 40, you're not willing to put in the time and effort and the hours that that the 20 year olds that are coming fresh out of school are willing to do. And if you're

if you're not in kind of a solid place, and there is no solid place anymore in this world, we all know that there's no job security anywhere. There's no company loyalty. There's no brand loyalty. There's no nothing. What do we do? This got this brings me to my topic, which is self reliance. Yes. On the internet, anybody can make money. We have talked about it. I don't know when I stopped doing it. But I used to have tons of pocket money sites, you know, mailbox money that were just that would run themselves. And I didn't have to work as

much because they took care of it for me. Yeah, you've always done a lot of that, which I was always somewhat envious of. And I let them let them all lapse because I went and got jobs that took over my life, you know, and they were really high paying jobs. I'm like, I don't need that pocket change anymore. I'm making, you know, 14 grand a month, right? Like, I'll take that. Yeah, who needs that 500 bucks rolling in every single month from six different sites? And yeah, that was stupid of me. Yeah, it was ridiculously stupid of me. And the

when I used to do those, I mean, I was self reliant, I would, I was a domainer, I would buy and sell domains, right? I did all sorts of stuff to make money that didn't require anybody else's permission, oversight. I was relying on myself, not somebody else. And when I started moving into the actual job market, I started to become reliant on other people. And I forgot about how I could be self reliant.

Right. And I've just listening to that episode just flipped a switch in my head. I'm like, this is bullshit. Get off your ass, go out and eat your own dog food. Do the things that we tell other people to do, like in episode one. Right. So I'm, well, that's, I mean, perhaps we can make grumpy old geeks enterprises. And I'd be more than willing to chime in and help on this. And I certainly have the free

time throughout the day while I'm waiting for emails to do the five to 10 minutes of work a day required to keep these things going. And maybe we can create a little empire. I think we should. It's grumpy ink. Yeah. Grumpy ink. Nobody take that one. So we're going to be lazy. So I made a blog post, my first blog post in a very long time. I read it. Very interesting. It's a, you can find it at jpd.me. And again, very interesting because I knew you before I even knew you because of your blogging. Yeah. And it stopped.

I've stopped for a couple of years now since I sold met blogs and it just left a big hole. So I filled it with other very bad things and, uh, none of them productive. So I'm going to start a little one man podcast. No offense. No, no. Just to chronicle how things are going. But if we do grumpy ink, then, uh, we can do, do a secondary. We're going to build our own pirate ship, Jason.

I actually stopped listening to his show because it got to be so negative. He is. Dr. Drew has taken him to task recently for that about how negative he's getting. I still enjoy it. Um, I probably need to stop as well because I have a tendency to go negative very easily and it's kind of like reinforcing feedback if I sit here and listen to Adam Carolla all day. But, uh, yeah, I'd still listen to, uh, his show with Dr. Drew because Dr. Drew does kind of keep him in check. And that's what seems to be more of an uplifting show. Yeah. The Adam Carolla show. He just whines the whole

time and, and he, he's like kind of on loop. He's got like six stories that he tells over and over again. Yeah. That's the problem with doing a daily podcast. I don't think he has enough life experiences anymore. All he's doing is repeating the things that have happened to him. Yeah. Um, you can get caught in a trap doing that and he can't go back. So there's some, uh, Kickstarter news. Yeah. Just as you were explaining that there is money to be made on the internet. I know somebody that didn't make any money off the internet. Who would that be? That'd be Melissa Joan

Hart, whose kickstarters failed miserably. How bad? Uh, let's see. Let's take a quick look so I get the facts right. Uh, the crowdfunding campaign for Darcy's walk of shame, which already sounds like a shitty title, uh, had Melissa Joan Hart only attached to it. See, I thought she was spearheading it, but now it appears, well, at least the spin now. Yeah. That's the spin. The spin now is that she's just attached to the project. It wasn't her personal project since it's been canceled, but I thought she wrote it. She only raised 51,000, uh, from 315

people. The hope was to raise 2 million. That's a little shy. Yeah. No, that's didn't even get the ball up the T. Yeah. So that one's dead. Uh, on the other side, though, unfortunately, Zach Braff has made his 2.5 million only asking for two. Uh, there's a, I, the backlash is still there regardless of the fact that he made it, which is kind of interesting. Um, there is a, a something called the left sits letter, which is this guy, Bob left this that, uh, it's a music

industry thing in general, but it's obviously become more tech because everything's become more intertwined over the years. Um, I can't really, I would never put this as like, you can subscribe to it if you want to. I would never say I like it because nine times out of 10, he absolutely infuriates me or I think he's completely absolutely fucking wrong. Uh, the main problem with it is it's a bit like, remember when wired magazine would come out about 10 years ago and we'd know, Oh fuck, we better read this because all the buzzwords in here and the things that don't mean anything

we're going to be, yeah, it's going to be in our next company meeting and the salespeople are going to be telling us that we have to do this. Yes. Okay. You really need to do put, why are we not doing push technology? Wired says this is the hottest thing ever. That's a bit what his emails are like. Everybody in the music industry reads it. So I have to read it because I know I'm going to get calls from management going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's a, it's a talking point bullshit. But in this particular case, he did talk about it. And I just kind of

wanted to quote him because he says, uh, about Zach Braff's Kickstarter film lands full financing. And then here's his, his take on it. The big boys always ruin it for everybody. Then again, that's the nature of the internet. Everybody's a scammer bending the rules to add fake followers, trying to create viral action where there is none. Then the paradigm is burned out and people move on to be Mark's once again. If you don't think Braff is a scumbag, then you haven't seen his bank

account, which is pretty fucking harsh and correct. And then he follows it up with what I knew that was going to happen anyways. Yep. That's what Kickstarter has turned into nothing more than a promotional platform. There you go. That's Kickstarter. All right. I would like to say, I think I nailed that in episode. What was it? Two or three? I thought you did it in one. Maybe it was one. Actually, we did it in our test episodes and I was a little too harsh. That was when we were really grumpy old

geeks and we had to tame it down a bit. This is the nicer version of us. Yeah. We, uh, we don't name clients anymore, which was in numbers. No, no, we don't, but we still name our beer. And right now we're drinking Asahi because I haven't had Asahi super dry in a long time. And it's awesome. It is good stuff.

I'm a Sapporo guy myself. I do like the Sapporo, but, uh, I get, I get one over by this super dry. Cause I just like to say it that way. So that was purely for the podcast. I'll get Sapporo next time. No, don't, don't bother. Okay. I have sushi every week, so I always have it with my sushi. I think that's kind of why I wanted it. Cause I haven't had sushi in like two or three weeks,

I realized. And I'm like, Hmm, sorry, but I actually really wanted sushi. Dr. Drew explained this to me.

So there was an article making its way around Facebook this week, um, called no more sharecropping. Oh, I thought it was about the Kardashian ass. How massive it is now. No, I don't hang out with people to talk about that. Sorry. I know it's Hollywood, but I don't, I don't hang with that crowd. Gotcha. It was called no more sharecropping by this dude, Shane Becker. And it talks about how

he wants to come back to the days where when you own your content and your web servers, they're your web servers, not posting on all these different services and fragmenting your content. Right. The irony is that he posted it on a site called medium, which is basically the guys that did blogger. That's their new thing. Right. So it is ironic or silly tongue in cheek. I don't know.

It was actually a really good article though, because I agree with a lot of the tenants that he's kind of going over in it. I agree with almost every tenant that he was going over. Um, there's a lot of questions about who owns what with these services that, that everybody's using now. Yeah. There's who owns what, but it's also, is it, is it going to survive? Is it, you know, for longevity sake, look at geo cities, look at all these dead services, you know, content goes

away when the company shut down. Lots of companies have shut down and lots of them that like pounce didn't even give you a way to get your content out after they were bought by six apart. Well, one would assume that you always keep backup copies. Pounce was kind of like Twitter though. So you don't really, I mean, yeah, I was, I'm thinking like your independent musician that's putting all their tracks up on SoundCloud. And, and since I don't really see how SoundCloud makes any money, what happens when they go out of business? SoundCloud makes money by charging you an overage. You only get like a bucket a month and then you can put more, more money

over. Okay. Yeah, I get that. But okay. Say, say you're a tangent, say you're a professional musician, right? Yeah. And you can actually, um, you have enough tracks and enough music out there that you're going to go to the point where you need to buy their pro level thing for 59 pounds or whatever. Cause they're an English company at that point. You probably don't need SoundCloud anymore. Why not? Well, why would you at that? If you're making enough money and you're doing that well, you probably have label who doesn't want your stuff on SoundCloud

anymore. Right. Okay. Now I see your argument. Yeah. So it's a weird intro. Although I have seen, uh, and I've done it for a few of my clients as well. We put up our tracks there because you get that interesting ability for people can like tag specific points and songs and all that sort of stuff that I would never ever do because I'm old, but kids these days seem to like, so yeah. You see, I've never, I've never actually used SoundCloud. I've seen it. I kind of peaked at it for hosting this show, but, but still it's a, it's a third party

service. Yeah. Your content somewhere else. Same thing with wordpress.com. Right. And Tumblr. Twitter. If you use their photo feature, Facebook. Yes. For everything. So what we're trying to get at is he's proposing that everybody brings their stuff back in house. You own your web server, your web server stores everything. And then when you want to post something on another site, they link to you, you, yeah, you shoot out, you shoot out the content to them, create

your own short link to your site and boom, Bob's your uncle. You still have control over everything. Right. Um, I'm a huge proponent of that. I mean, I tell everybody that that's what they should do. You should, everybody is, has kind of jumped on this bandwagon of using these, these services. And as we've seen with my space, they don't last. Uh, Facebook will not last at some point in the future. We will not all be on Facebook. We will be on something else. Facebook will go the way of the dodo. It's inevitable. Something else

will come along. And I've always felt that everybody, you should always have your own personal website that everything goes back towards, especially if you're trying to make any money. If you're, if you're any kind of product or service or artist or whatever, you should keep control of your own website. That should be the hub. Everything should feed back to that. I completely agree because I've been saying it for my entire, my entire career.

Me too. Always keep whenever these services came up, I was saying that. And the, the point is though, it's never going to happen. No, never because it's cheaper and easier and quicker to use these free services. Yeah. You don't have to know how to run a server. You don't know how to, I mean, you don't have to know how to manage anything. You don't have the headache of it. Yeah. You don't have to worry about your disc filling up or too much bandwidth or your server crashing or getting hacked. Yeah. Or all those things. Or at least if, if your server, if the server gets hacked, everybody else's has gone down too, because you're all

in the same shit. You're all using WordPress and WordPress just got hacked. Yeah. Or, but then even to that case, there was a big Linux hack for the was, that's been kind of going around basically, you know, root exploitation where anybody, because here's the thing, everybody that is going to go out and try and get their own website, they're not going to get their own server. They're going to be on a shared hosting platform. Right. So you've got multiple users on a machine and all it takes is one low level user to have a, have that crack go through and boom, they own the whole machine. Or what's happened to me a few times over my

years of doing this stuff, a hard drive goes bad. Whoops. Okay. Well, yeah, we got the backup of the hard drives down. So your site's going to go down for a few hours while we swap the shit out. Yeah. And people keep backups on the same drive as everything else. I've been bit by that one thing. Oh, hard drives are solid. They're never going anywhere. Yeah. No, it's, it's, um, it's, it's, it's, it's a mindset that I don't really get. And, and it's so

ephemal and as quick and it's easy and it's, it's wrong. It's, I don't understand why people don't bank on the future and, and, and what might happen and owning your own shit and owning your own server and being the master of your own domain to go Seinfeld style. Um, and I've, I, I sit there and I yell at people about, this is the way you need to be doing things and, and some people get it. Some people don't. And I, I just, uh, I see problems happening

for, for these people if they don't do that. If your entire existence is on Tumblr, you're fucked. Yeah. And I've had companies like major movie companies that want to host movie websites literally on Tumblr. Yeah. They want to do a Tumblog for it. Yeah. Oh, it's quick. It's easy.

It's there. I don't have to pay anybody. Yeah. And we can just do that. Um, I've read through the end user license agreement for Tumblr. Have you not recently, but I'm not even a lawyer and I can tell that there's pretty much no guarantee that of anything. We don't promise that we're going to be up. We don't promise that your stuff is going to be available.

We don't promise that you own your stuff. We're not responsible for anything. If it just goes away, we can decide it. We can just make it go away if we want it to make it go away. If we don't like something about it. Yeah. You don't get an SLA with Tumblr. Yeah. And I've definitely seen, especially with Tumblr cause they were famous for being down all the time. Yeah. Well, and Twitter fail. Well, yeah. Fail. Well Twitter all the time. Yeah. And,

and Tumblr is, is, you know, 99% porn and 16 year old girls. So hopefully not porn of 16 year old girls. Somebody needs to go look at that shit. If it is that go to 4chan for that crap, apparently. Not that I know about any of this stuff. Oh, sure. Never look at 4chan before breakfast. No, don't ever do that. Um, yeah, it's just, um, there used to be such like a,

a hocus pocus about like being involved with porn and stuff and like everybody wants to be on Tumblr and I'm like, Tumblr is porn. 99% of their traffic is porn. They're having a problem with that because they can't sell advertising. Yeah, exactly. They can't sell advertising. But when you get back to the terms of service question, you look at like the blowups with Instagram. Yeah. All they do is, all they need to do is change a word and then they own your stuff in perpetuity. Yeah. And there's a good argument to be made that, that many lawyers

have made this, that they already do. They do own your stuff. Some of the language that they have to use is because of the way that they store the images, share that. Like if you have a share button, they have to legally be able to post that content somewhere else, which means that they need to have the right to do that, which is where it becomes a really gray area. Yeah. Which is if you have the right to do that, that technically kind of means that you own, or at least have rights to

these images. And if you have the right to the image to be able to do that, if an image is sold for any kind of financial compensation, you also have a right to sue for a part of that compensation. That's interesting. Yeah. Or, I mean, they can also just take your images and use them in advertising if they like. But then you get, but you also do get into people's rights in that, because anything that goes into advertising, you have to have a sign off, but a nice picture of a

house, you don't have to get a model release for. No. And well, and as we've seen with TMZ, when you get into the celebrity realm, then it becomes even more unclear. Yeah. If, according to TMZ, and this seems to be the way the law is going, because nobody's really challenging it, if you're a public figure, fuck you, you have no rights. So if you're a public figure using one of these services, will that not extend the same way? If you're in LAX and getting your

fucking luggage and TMZ shows up, you can't say anything about them taping you while you're walking back to your car, but then putting you on the TV show. So if you're using this, if you're using Instagram, why can't Instagram just go, well, fuck you, we're going to use that photo too. That's true if they're celebrities, but for normal people. Yeah. But it, but also if you're at LAX, anybody can film you anyway, because you're in a public place. Yeah. You know, so there's a little

bit of gray area there, but you generally don't get people standing across the street with a zoom lens, taking pictures into your house. Exactly. Okay. There is a gray area there, but, um, you know, yeah, I mean, the problem is that most brands think that if they're using these free services, they're protected and they're not, not at all. Yeah. So sharecropping is a big deal and you know, people really need to start paying attention to this, but nobody wants to, it's too complicated.

It's too much effort and it's too much effort. And I mean, I, I've lost years of content from using other, you know, I used to have archives of everything I've ever written. Um, all my photos, like flicker is all my stuff's up on flicker to get it out is such a pain in the ass. Yeah. And so I stopped using flicker for, for a long time. And then, you know, convenience slips back in community slips back in.

So I want to post my stuff so I can be part of a community and talk with other people about stuff. Yeah. So, you know, it's, that's why I don't see this ever happening for just the general public. No, I probably never will for the general public, but there's a lot to that. I mean, I'd love, uh, not so much the writing I did on my space, but definitely like the photo archives I had in my space. Sure. I have those photos somewhere. I don't know where they were all organized really, really well on my space and in months and everything. I'd love to be, that's the only reason I haven't

actually shut my account off is I got to figure out a way to like pull all those things down in that order because there's a lot of great photos and stuff up there, but I don't use my space anymore. Nobody does. It's fucking dead. They don't give you an exporter. I've never seen one. I got to say, Google is fantastic about their exporter, right? They've got, uh, they've just got a service that bundles everything up for you, puts it in a format that is almost completely indecipherable as far as your posts and stuff. Cause it's at least some crazy XML format,

but at least you have it. So at some point in the future, if somebody, somebody will write an importer for it, you can put it somewhere else on somebody else's service. Right. I mean, I've certainly been better about it now. Like when I, when I put up photos on my Facebook or whatever, I, I, I keep them on my phone. I dump out monthly archives. So I know I'm going to still have everything. Although, you know, a shot of like a, the, the blue cheese dip that I was eating the other night. Do I really need that forever? No, but I mean, there's some great photos mixed in

with all that stuff. So, and yeah, eventually Facebook will be the same thing as my space and I'll be like, Oh God, there's so many great photos and things up there. And I'd love to keep all that stuff and they, they won't build an exporter. You know, they won't. Why would they? They're on their way out at that point. Yeah. We don't want you to take this stuff off. We're trying to get as much money back for our investors as possible. So why are we going to put engineering dollars behind that?

Yeah. And I mean, some of the stuff though, it's, you could say it's ephemeral and doesn't really matter. Do I really care about the tweets and you can't even get all your tweets. You can only get back a 3,000 of them. Oh really? They have a cap on it. Yeah. So if you're at three or two, two or 3,000 as far back as you can go. So if somebody has got 35,000 tweets, sayonara, you can't go back.

So I don't even know why they say they have 35,000 tweets. It's just kind of an ego boosting at that point. Yeah, it's a different thing. I mean, I'm, you know, it makes me kind of wish that I'd never stopped doing my own blog that I hosted on my own server that I kept by myself because I would have access to everything I've written for 15 years now.

Yeah. And the great part about that is I was listening to a podcast the other day and this guy put it really, put it really well. It's like, every time you post content that you've created, you're planting a seed on the internet that's going to be there forever. It's going to lead to traffic and search engines. It's going to, um, you know, give you something to look back on and have a body of work. And by just, you know, spreading all this shit everywhere, you know, like, and I'll get into the cross posting thing in a minute with duplicating,

duplicating everything everywhere. Um, you're not really building a brand anymore. It's like you go to somebody, you used to go to somebody's site, everything about them would be there. Yeah. Now you go to somebody's site, it's a series of links to everything that they've got shit everywhere else. Yeah. Like my about me page about that me slash JPD. It, all it is, is a bunch of links and they pull in little snippets of content, but, but not the whole picture. Yeah. So I do miss, you know, having my, my full branded self, but even my, my, my

new blog, it's on Tumblr. I caved into it too. Well, it's easier. You're going to spin up your own fucking server. You're going to install your own WordPress. You're going to keep up with the updates on WordPress. Are you going to write your own engine? So, you know, it's not going to get hacked. That's all fucking work. It's a lot of work. Yeah. It's a lot of work. So yeah. Uh, yeah. Uh, it's especially for brands, like from my perspective, given, given what I do and the clients that I work

with, that's just a constant argument that I have. It's like everything should be on your website. If everything should be on the website, everything, everything, everything, everything. And every social network post should be blurb linked back to the website. That's it. Drive it there. Keep it all there. Have the archive there.

That's where you, that's, you know, that becomes your hub. That's where all the traffic goes to. And your website is not going to go away. Your website is not going to shut down. Your website is not going to go, Oh, well that whole Justin Timberlake thing didn't work out. Let's just pull the plug on this shit. Yeah. Yeah. So now, now that we're talking about this stuff, I'm definitely thinking about going back and pulling it back off of Tumblr and starting my, starting my site back up again. Yeah. Pull it like digging through all those old archives where I've got just database dumps of WordPress installs, which I doubt will even work

if I import them now. So I'm going to have to probably not. So you'll have to write your own importer. Oh God. This is a pain in the ass. Hmm. It really is, but I don't know. And is it even worth it? I mean, I'd love to, I think about, you know, I think about myself 20 years from now and I think it would be really interesting to go back and read everything that I've written since like 2001. Yeah. And all that sort of stuff. And I think it is, I think it is worth

it. So that's my weekend project, I guess. But I definitely, since I am, you know, kind of going to be reinventing how I make money and how I make a living. Right. I'm still going to be working, but you know, I need to build my own brand back up and my own little empire of sites. It, for me personally, it's going to be, it's key to have a, like a central hub of everything, you know? Yeah. Where you're actually hosting everything. Yeah. Cause I'm

going to start writing a lot more. So it doesn't make any sense to give Tumblr traffic when you could be getting traffic yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, but then you go back to the housewives who just want to post pictures of their cats and their kids. And does it really make sense for them to do it? No, that's where the needle swings in the other direction.

It comes down to, do you have a brand or is it just you as a person? And do you not care if all this goes away? I mean, there's caring as in like, okay, oh, I'm bummed for like a week. And then there's caring. Like, oh my God, I really lost not even just money. I lost a lot of memories. I was dumb enough to like put up photos and, and I lost the drive because I don't back up my drives. And I thought, you know, if I thought in my photo, I thought my

Facebook photo album of my, my first child's birth would be there forever. And that drive like went away and I don't, I lost everything. Or if you get hacked, like Matt Honan did, he lost, he lost the first year of his kid's life. Yeah. You know, he had to go to a forensic data recovery.

And that shit ain't cheap. He, they donated it to him because he got, yeah, yeah. It's at least a thousand bucks. Yeah. Minimum of a grand just to even see if they can recover your drive. Cause I've had to do that once before way back in the day. Yeah. You'd think that'd be getting cheaper now, but it ain't.

So multiple backups are a thing. Offsite backups are a thing, but, and I've still got everything somewhere that I've ever done, but it's so fragmented. It's going to take, it's going to take work to put it back in. Some of the stuff I definitely don't want to see the light of day again. Cause it was a lot of future job opportunities, life organizers come in and go through all your stuff and organize it and figure it out. Oh, shoot me. That sounds like a terrible job. No, it sounds like a horrible job, but no more so than an accountant. And it's the same mindset.

Yeah. Like a digital archeologist putting the 12 year old out there right now. And you're really attracted to accounting. Start thinking about this digital life organizer. Cause it's all like, you can find dates and timestamps and everything in files somewhere. So if you got a drive, you could actually put things together in some sort of chronological order and figure all that stuff out. You need a lot of skills, but I definitely see that being possible future job. A lot of

patience. A lot of patience. Oh, and a lot of money too. Cause I would not expect that service to be cheap. No, no, no, that would not be cheap. That would be a big gig. Interesting. Um, I wanted to talk a little bit more about something that's actually been bothering me and I've been trying to shoehorn it into any of these podcasts and haven't found the right moment yet, but right now I've got it. We are talking about putting things in the cloud. We're talking about basically

putting our lives, our banking, our photos, our writing, our intimate moments out on things that we don't own. The cloud involves bandwidth to be able to get to these things involves. We have to use bandwidth. Nobody thinks about bandwidth right now because right now we're all pretty much on unlimited plans for the most part, especially at least at home.

We've seen all the cell phone companies start to throttle that back. I know when I go get my upgrade for my iPhone five, I'm not going to be able to keep my Verizon unlimited plan anymore because they've phased that out. So I will not have unlimited bandwidth on my phone anymore. Well, guess what's going to eventually happen? Time Warner cable, Fios, whatever fucking services that are out there that we're using at our home are eventually going to get rid of them too. And then what?

We put everything on the cloud, right? And by the way, they don't do this in Canada at all. There is no unlimited. This is how I know this is definitely going to happen here because Time Warner and all these companies are chomping at the bit to get this money that they cannot get right now because they've offered unlimited services. That's going away. We put everything in the cloud. Every movie you want to watch is streaming. Every music that you listen to streaming, you're streaming now. You don't buy it. You don't download it. You don't get the CDs. You don't have the DVD. You don't have the

physical stuff. You're streaming, streaming, streaming, streaming. Unlimited bandwidth is going away. I guarantee you it'll be gone within two to three years. And then think of that soon. That soon. That brings up a lot of interesting points because yeah, it's especially and even with the online backup services that are backing up your entire hard drive. Yep. You're in the hundreds of gigabytes. You're putting hundreds of gigs up every single month. And all of a sudden you're going to find out that, you know, that a hundred bucks or whatever that you're throwing to the

cable company every month, that's going to get you five gigs. And you're going to realize that you're using 135 gigs and your overage every single month is going to be Oh, four or 500 bucks. So that, uh, that one 99 movie that you just rented off of Amazon prime, that's streaming into your thing. It's going to cost you about 1799 when you factor in your overages. It's cheaper to go back to the theater. Yeah. It's going to be a really interesting world. I, I've been screaming about this

to my friends and internally for a while, like as we're moving everything over to just streaming and cloud services. I'm like this unlimited bandwidth stuff doesn't exist in other countries. And there's no fucking way that these companies are going to like keep giving us all that for free. It's fucking blood in the water. They can smell the money they're waiting. And we've the, the test case was the cell phone stuff and they took it away. Like there are no more unlimited packages on any cell phone carrier.

Once you do your upgrade, you can hold onto your iPhone three and keep that shit. But as soon as you do the upgrade, that package is gone. I'm still grandfathered in on AT&T and I I've been dreading doing the upgrade. That's the, as soon as you upgrade, it's gone. And this is the test case and nobody's really screaming about it because nobody realizes what it actually means. It means you're fucked. And then, then you think about a Starbucks and McDonald's with free, free wifi. That's going away too, because they're not going to get it for free anymore. They're going to start charging you

one 99 and they're going to have bandwidth cap offs. But see, this is where I see it being too disruptive to be a reality because you know how much, how much of the, it would screw with in the economy. If just the coffee shop economy, people go to coffee shops to use the, use the bandwidth and buy their food. So is the government going to step in and start regulating what the, uh, high what they can do, a highly unlikely. So basically we're just supposed to wait for Google to come in and give us the free wireless service in every city like they promised.

I don't think that's going to happen. Interesting. So they get more money than God. So it just might, they do have more money than God, but, uh, I just don't see that happening either. Um, we're, we're putting ourselves in this precarious position where we're being pushed to move to everything into the cloud and have everything stream. And we're all just like thinking it's not going to bite us on the ass and it will, it's coming back. It's going to get us. There's no way

we're going to keep free unlimited wireless anywhere. We're going to have to pay for it at home, at Starbucks, at McDonald's. It's going away. So you get your, uh, your Big Mac in two megabytes. Yeah. The Big Mac is up like another 10 bucks. So you get your $15 Big Mac and, uh, then you can download your movie. Okay, great. Dinner and a movie. Dinner and a movie. Okay.

Suppose I accidentally got my shit together. Would I get a medal or a pat on the back and a little feather? I could stick in my cap or pin to my shirt, go out in the yard and poke it in the dirt or leave it in the woods where it couldn't be found. If it fell over, would it make a sound? And if it did, would it be the sound that you like? Or should I do it over until I get it right? You say everything I know is wrong. So do me a favor and play along for a minute as the rusty gears turn. Don't be alarmed

if you smell something burning upstairs. It's a little BB rolling around in a boxcar. See us together. Maybe it wouldn't be hard to explain if I only had a brain. So I was, uh, driving to LAX to pick up some friends that came into town to visit me for my birthday. Um, and I looked over to my right hand side and, and saw something, something that looked very similar to your like last week,

your dots screen. Okay. Um, apparently Jared Leto is a fan of dots as well because the 30 seconds to Mars new album cover is dots. The actual game. It's a screenshot of the fucking game with 30 seconds to Mars and whatever the goddamn album title is. Cause they suck. And I don't know. Oh my God. So, uh, just wanted to let you know that, uh, you and Jared Leto, maybe you can start games against each

other. I don't know. You can become friends. Fuck you. So that was, uh, that was your like last week. And I thought about you as I was driving to LAX. Well, since you brought it up, I, um, I have deleted it from my phone. I have deleted every game I have from my phone, but that didn't stop me from rekindling an old addiction. Oh dear. There was a, there was a time in my life where I was completely 100% addicted to Quake three arena. And I believe I remember playing this with you

and rocket arena was, was my, my, uh, poison of choice. So this week I was kind of bouncing around. I have a, I have an old copy of it somewhere on my computer, but it's, uh, doesn't run that good anymore. Right. So, but now you can play Quake in your browser. Oh really? The same damn game. You can play it straight in your browser. You got to use Firefox. You got to run it in 32 bit mode.

Oh, but I'm looking at screenshots right now and I have fond memories. It plays better than the $4,000 machine I bought just to play Quake. 48 hours in a weekend. 36 of those hours was in game for me. And this is why I always lost when we played at work. You could not. Because I only played at work.

Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. You guys just blew me up every two seconds. I would even have like the grenade launcher thing. And I thought it was a bad-ass and I'd just be dead in two seconds. Railgun. This is why I don't play games. Cause you suck at them. Oh yeah. You kill me right away. It's no fun. Oh. So what do you got for me this week? Um, my like of the week is, is annoying to me because they advertise on every other podcast known to man. And, uh, we have the target audience for

this. Lumosity.com. It purports to be a brain. Well, it's games, which you like, but it purports to be neuroscience based, builds up memory, builds up pattern recognition. They're actually kind of fun games. I've signed up with it. I haven't paid. So, you know, they're very good at upselling because you only get to do three instead of the five things and you can't look at your history unless you pay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, they must not be doing that good of a job of

upselling cause you haven't paid them yet. Well, not yet, but I'm definitely addicted. I carve out 20 minutes a day to do it. I've been doing it for about a week straight. Um, I can't really say that I've noticed any difference, but it's definitely fun and enjoyable and I feel like I'm doing something and apparently they have scientists that back it up and shit. We'll see how real that is.

I don't know. Um, but I am enjoying it. It's fun. It's cool. I I'm going to go ahead and pay and bite the bullet on that and, uh, mess around with it a bit and see if I get smarter. Is it, is it multiplayer? Can I go in and challenge you? Um, no, you can share with when you sign up, you can share with friends and compare results and see how you guys are improving and all that sort of stuff. And you can look at, you don't play against anyone. You just play against the computer. It's, it's basically like it is really like pattern recognition, memory, math, all that

sort of stuff, but done in kind of a cool, interesting way. I've enjoyed every game I've played so far in the last week. Uh, they have a ton of games in there. They really do like, they let you track your scores over time and they show you can pick what areas you want to improve in standard shit, except I've never seen it done quite so well. Okay, cool. I was hoping there was going to be multiplayer so I could have another game I could kick your ass in. We'll see about that. I've

memorized all the answers in Trevi now because there's only like six answers. Yeah. As much as I like that app last week, I'm a week of straight of playing it with seven different people, multiple games per day. We've tapped that entire database. Uh, guys, if you want to keep a grumpy old geeks, like build up your fucking database. Yeah. The, even the, the star Trek captains version was, Oh, there's only like about, I'd say 200 questions in that. I not even man, not

even. Yeah. So that database is pretty weak. Lumosity seems to be pretty cool so far. And the thing I actually like it for even more is it reminded me of something. Um, we had talked a lot two weeks ago about starting your own company and not going crazy and, and doing a bunch of other things.

It, it, because I work from home by myself, it reminded me about the importance of blocking out time to do things and not get distracted by constant emails or instant messages or phone calls or texts from clients, uh, to let things sit for a bit. Um, I'm blocking out 20 minutes every morning to do my Lumosity games. Um, I'm starting to block out time to start playing piano again for 30 minutes, just sit down and practice because I haven't done music for a while. It's reminded me about all of

that and, and the things that I actually want to do for myself and not getting carried away by the wave of bullshit that hits you every single day, especially when you run your own company. Cause it's nonstop bullshit. Cause it's nonstop. Yeah. I had a client that on Monday wrote me an email. Can we have a call? And this is at 1230 at night. Oh Jesus. Right. I text back. Okay.

But not right now, obviously it's 1230. And then I wake up to a Facebook message because nobody can stay on one form of communication anymore. So I wake up to a Facebook message saying, well, what about tomorrow? And I was like, well, what do you mean by tomorrow? Because you've started this conversation last night. So tomorrow would be today. Or do you mean tomorrow tomorrow now? Who's on first? Yeah, exactly. And, and that kind of stuff just happens all the time. And then finally I got an email

saying, well, what about 1230 today? It was supposed to Thursday. Um, and I was about to reply. Yes. And then the assistant called me to ask if 1230 was okay. And I was like, I just got your email. Why are you calling? Can you guys just pick something? So there's this, when you run your own company and you deal with these people, it's just constant and blocking out time and just putting your phone away and

shutting it down and stepping away from the email. Lumosity is helping me do that too. So I like it for that. Hey, anything that can make it like a little more sane. Exactly. You gotta be, gotta be sane somehow.

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