104: 127.0.0.1 is the Loneliest Number

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Good afternoon, Brian. How are you today?

Well, it's actually morning for both of us this time, isn't it? It is nine in the damn morning. I don't know how you do this every week. I really don't. I roll out of bed and stay in my pajamas and come over to my little Skype box here. That's how I do it. Actually, today I'm fully dressed because it's a very busy day and I got to get the hell out of here as soon as we're done.

So let's get the show on the road, man. Yeah, yeah. We were waiting for the helicopters to pass because, of course, I'm in Los Angeles and that's how it happens. I figured because we're going to be doing a lot of surveillance stuff, maybe they were just kind of, you know, flexing their muscles before we got going to say, hey, we're watching you, you little bastards.

A little shot off the bow. Yeah, seriously. So I want to do a little follow up from last week when we were talking about, you know, the shut in economy. There was a great article on The Guardian called The Future of Loneliness. It's a long read, but it's really good.

Yeah, it was a very long read, but I really enjoyed it. I mean, this is this is something that you and I are case studies for, to be honest. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We were one of the first people that, you know, kind of dropped out and just worked from home and we've been doing it for nay on 20 years now.

And yeah, yeah, I think we've we've been through this. I know there was a period of time where I barely ever left the house and, you know, you go a little weird and wonky and I know you did. Oh, God, yes. Well, I mean, I was the bellwether for every single delivery service. I started with Home Grocer. Then I went to Web Van when they changed, got the dumb name Cosmo.

And but but but even before that was Pink Dot here and here in Los Angeles, you know, if you could get it delivered, I would find a way and then just stay in, stay in and, you know, sit in my own juices for 48 hours on the weekend and play Quake 3 Arena. But that was the good old days, the good old days. Oh, yeah, the good old days.

Yeah, I mean, the scary thing about this is just how mainstream it's all gotten, because that's how we're being primed for everything now. Amazon will bring you your clothes to your house and we will stream you your movies and we will stream you your music. And now, you know, I saw, you know, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, but I saw in the news this week when you put this in, it rang a bell.

Taco Bell is going to start doing home delivery next year. Starbucks is already doing it. You've got Uber Fresh bringing you food, E24. I mean, so many of these new new businesses are their business model is don't leave your house. We'll bring everything to you. And this is so, so unhealthy. It's very unhealthy. And you see, here's the thing we've since we've been through this, you know, 15, 10 years ish before everybody else.

We know how it's going to turn out and it's not going to turn out well. It's not anybody. You're going to get pale. You're going to get fat and you're going to start acting a little freaky. And when you are around people, you're going to be massively socially awkward. Oh, completely awkward. You know how hard, you know how long it took me to just be able to have conversations again.

After like I got, I was unemployed for a while, like maybe six months and just lived inside, had everything delivered, never left my, my compound. You know, and then by the time I started to go out and look at the sun again and have to meet people again, it took another six months just to get my social skills back in order where I could actually have a conversation and look somebody in the eye without being awkward.

And this is going to be the norm going forward. You don't need Tinder anymore because nobody's going to leave. You know, we need, this is, this is where teledildonics are going to come in and probably save the day for humanity. If they can just put a tube on it to impregnate the other person so we can still have more people coming, that might work.

But yeah, I think if we get to that point, we let ourselves die off. No, thank you. No, this is, this is a really dangerous trap and this article is a really good overview of why. And if you are one of us and you work from home and you, you find yourself shying away from social interactions or getting out of the house, read this and save yourself some time because we've been there, done that.

Yeah, I just want to, I want to do a quick, just, just read a little thing from here that really kind of hits home. It says, according to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat.

In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyper alert to rejection, growing increasingly inclined to perceive social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result is a vicious circle of withdrawal in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.

So it is a very vicious circle. Well, yeah, I mean, but it's also, it's an incredibly gratifying one. That's, that's why it's a trap. It's, it's really easy and it's comfortable and you feel better doing all this sort of stuff. So, uh, you know, it's, it's an extension of my worry about the internet to begin with, which is, you know, you create this, this circle of just people that agree with you.

You, the internet enables you to basically never, ever see a dissenting viewpoint from your own. You can only visit sites that agree with you. You can only watch shows that agree with you. You can only listen to podcasts that agree with you. And it's, it's very tempting and people do that.

We, I, I, I'm personally convinced that this is why we're so even more stratified as a society these days than we used to be. You are black or white, you are red or you're blue. And it's blown apart because you create these feedback loops around yourself that basically only support the way that you feel about things and you are never challenged anymore.

Now take that even to the further extreme, which what, you know, San Francisco is trying to do to us now, which means you don't even leave the house. So there's no chance of you ever running into anybody that dissents with you and you get paranoid and you just sit there and go, I'm right. I'm right. I'm right. Tinfoil hat. Where's my Taco Bell?

You know what they need now in San Francisco is man poo delivery. They do. They can just get lumps of, of, of craps spread around your house to make you feel like you've gone outside. You need to be challenged and you need to be frustrated and you need things to happen to you that, that you wouldn't choose to have happen.

It's called life and it's what makes us who we are and it makes us people and it makes us able to deal with other people. And, you know, nothing good comes out of, we need conflict. We need conflict. Now, I mean, preferably not armed conflict, like, you know, crap with the police, but anyway. No, I mean, it's, it's, again, it's one of the reasons I even like doing this show because you and I disagree on so many different things and I like that and I need it.

And it's good for me to do this show with you and go, my God, he's totally fucking wrong about everything. And, and likewise, likewise for me. And if you find that useful, why don't you visit our Patreon page? Yeah. Um, so this morning when I was, uh, sitting in bed trying, I'm still on, you know, East coast time.

So my, my days are all screwed up, but I was listening to, um, radio lab this morning and there was an awesome repost that they did, uh, a show called the living room. And I'm just, I'm just throwing this out here because it, there's a little kind of a tie in with isolation, but it was this woman who watched this family.

Across, like, in another building through their living room window. Right. And I, it's hard to explain, but listen to it because it is one of the single best episodes of radio slash podcasting I've heard in a long time. It was so good. Sounds pretty creepy. It's extraordinarily creepy.

It's extraordinarily creepy. But when you live in the big city, you have to understand that this kind of thing goes on all the time. Yeah. Didn't Hitchcock do this in the fifties? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Rear window and all those good ones. Yeah. So yeah. Check it out. Definitely. It's at, uh, notes will be in the show notes at crumpy old geeks.com slash one Oh four.

Yeah. So John Oliver, let's talk about John Oliver this week. First, a quick note. I I'm happy about the fact that everybody seems to be watching John Oliver now, at least in, in my, you know, sphere of influence because, you know, when I run into people before our big show here on Friday, it's always, did you see John Oliver?

And normally I don't watch it on Sunday night. I get to it. I actually watched it last night. I love the fact that everybody's watching. Yeah. I watched it. Well, this week I watched this episode a couple of times, um, because this week he went to Russia and interviewed Edward Snowden. Unbelievable.

Yeah. It was really well done. Unbelievable. And I watched it with, uh, my friend here in, in the Valley and she was like confused halfway through this interview. He was very combative and talking about, you know, the different problems that come with him actually giving those documents away.

But then the entire thing flips at the end. And, and this is what John Oliver's show is genius at. And it's taking complex problems and, and just, you know, boiling them down to what people will be really upset about and getting people to take action.

Yeah. And which it basically came down to, can they see my dick? Can they see my dick? It was very funny. No. Cause if that was, that's always been the problem. People are like, well, I'm not doing anything wrong. Why do I care if they're watching me? But then it's like, oh, they're looking at my balls. Well, shit, that's not cool.

Are they looking at my girlfriend's boobs? That's not cool. And that turns out to be exactly what they can do. So, you know, reframing the conversation to, you know, Dickies, which I still stand by and just Dickies and boobies. And it was, it's a genius, genius watch.

Yeah. I mean, I, you must've been a little bit depressed in the fact that absolutely nobody knew who he was when they did the man on the street type interviews. No, I wasn't because you know why they were in times square, which is like going to Disneyland, which is just the unwashed masses of ignorance of our country. It's not, it's not like, I bet if they went down to, you know, wall street or the financial district in another, another place where people just generally are more educated, that'd be fine.

But they would get at least a few more hits, but going there is, is that's a, you know, that's a softball. That's a total softball. And I'm sure that's exactly what they were looking for. Yeah. Yeah. But it was good. But what really shocked me about this is, and I, I have not delved as far into the Edward Snowden world as you personally have, but I mean, I've seen more than a few interviews with him and I've read a bunch and this is the most engaging I've ever seen him.

He is definitely not one of these shut-ins, at least not at this point. He's, he's been coached. He's got some media going on and, uh, he was really funny. Oh yeah. Well, especially at the very end where John Oliver's like, so until we fix this, we should stop taking pictures of our dick.

And he's like, no, absolutely not. Once you start giving up those liberties and then you, you know, you lose what you're fighting for. So he's like, keep taking pictures of your dick. I'm like, love this guy. I love him. It was very well done. No. And, uh, in related news, the NSA and the CIA analysts are watching a lot of porn.

Porn every day. Of course they are. Um, and this, this actually comes back to something that's really funny. They're like, oh yeah, the, the terrorists are using steganography to hide, you know, messages inside the stream. And I'm like, is this the nineties? Because steganography was like, you know, it was a cool hacker thing in the nineties, but nowadays it's like, you've just got automated tools.

You don't need them to watch the porn. Yeah. Nobody needs to be watching it in real time. And they're just doing it because that's what we as humans like to do. No, I'm, I'm telling you right now. No, um, I had a job where I had to do this day in, day out for months on end. And it, it, it destroys your brain.

It, it melts your brain and they've got, you know, psychologists and psychiatrists on staff to deal with these people. But this is a, I mean, they should get hazard pay for this. And if they're not, they're silly because it's just terrible. It, what it does to your brain, you were just watching people screw all day with, with not with, but not using it for the intent.

You know, it's like, you're watching it when I was doing it. I had to watch for, you know, flaws in the stream, zits on asses that I'd have people Photoshop out and stuff like that. But they're watching for hidden messages and things like that. So they're not even enjoying the porn. It's like, it's, it really screws with your head.

And I feel, I feel bad for these guys. They should, they should quit and go work at Starbucks. Well, they're still a little bit better off than all those poor people in the Philippines that are just watching our, our social network feeds for horrible things. It's, it's, it's almost the exact same job. Honestly, it's almost the exact same job and it's a terrible job.

So after the, um, the John Oliver interview came out, somebody created, can they see my dick.com, which is a little surprised you didn't leap on that. I, I, I didn't even think about it. I was so enamored with the interview itself. I'm like, this is awesome. More people are going to know about it.

More people are going to see it. We'll get it out there. And then somebody just created, can they see my dick.com. And it goes through all of the different executive orders and programs that they talked about in the show and tells you when they can see your dick. There you go. Good times. And a little bit more follow-up.

Um, I got a note from Adam Carolla's camp this week. Remember the old, uh, podcast legal defense fund? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We gave money to, and then he caved and yeah, you know, all that stuff. They still haven't sent out the rewards. Well, why would they?

They, it's done. It's over. They're not going to actually pay anyone to go back and like take care of this or fulfill anything. Oh, they said they're, they're almost there. They're almost there to send out the rewards. It's like, come on guys. In a year, you're going to be bringing this back up on this podcast. And it's still won't have happened. I mean, it's such a joke.

I know. Yeah. Yeah. It's the nature of the beast. It's, it's all of these, you know, we're going to get this up because we want our money and then, Oh, we're all done now. And well, do we really have to go back and do all this? Yeah. Thanks for the money. And why do we care now? Let's put the, let's put the free intern on this.

Mm-hmm. Pretty much. That's exactly what's going to happen. I have had a little experience with Google. I decided that, you know, I have, I have all these knowledges and maybe I should go ahead and go get some of the accreditations for it. Why not? You know, I know how to use all this stuff.

Are you getting a certificate? I am working my way towards getting a certificate. And I thought I'd start with Google analytics because I actually, out of all of Google's products, I feel that one's actually extremely useful and for the most part, well done. And I basically know how to use it. I don't know the ins and outs and I certainly don't know the big buzzwords that they like to call everything, which I'm going to have to make a chart for because I don't know why they have to give everything such weird names.

But nevertheless, did you take, did you take a class on cohort analysis yet? I think that one's tomorrow. Okay. That's just, that's mind blowing, bending, annoying, terrible. I, anyway, I feel for your pain having to go through that. Well, it's actually not bad and it's, it's forcing me to, to use my brain in a slightly different way, which is nice.

And, uh, you know, it's, it's part of my schedule. I've just made it part of my day. Now I I'll take an hour out usually when everybody else in the world is having lunch. Cause that means I'm not going to get any phone calls or emails for about an hour. And I do an hour of the training course per day. And, you know, I figure in about a month I'll be able to take the test and get the little credit and stick it on my useless LinkedIn profile or something like that.

Okay. Real quick, before you keep going, where are you getting the training? Uh, from themselves, from Google, from Google's training Academy. Do you have to pay for this or is it free? It is completely free. Okay. We got to put a link in the show notes because I'd like to take this too. Okay. I will get the link for you. Cool. Yeah. So it's complete free training course.

And then you go back and you do their, their testing and then you get the accreditation and done. Bob's your uncle. Yeah. Woo. Anyways, the funny thing is I'm halfway, I was halfway through the course. I think this was like two days ago and I was at the point where you needed to go then set up like a Google, well, I'd already set up a test Google analytics course.

You had to sign in and blah, blah, blah, do all this sort of stuff to move on to the next stage. And of course I tried to log in and Google broke. Ah, okay. And Google was broke for 12 hours, at least the ability to sign into analytics. So, uh, yeah, thanks a lot.

Little, little bump in the road. When was this again? Uh, three days ago. Was this, uh, timed with the fact that their, uh, security cert kind of broke for Gmail? It, yes, that was the exact time. Okay. We'll talk about this in a minute then. Yeah. So in, uh, in Apple news, I've actually got Apple news.

Wow. This is going to be the shortest Apple news segment on any fucking tech podcast ever. I bought a six plus it's stupid. It's whoever decided to put the volume button and the power button. Uh, opposed with four, you know, they're four supposed buttons.

So you press the volume and you press the power at the same time. It's stupid, ridiculously stupid, amateur mistake. Um, slippery as can be. I dropped it probably 200 times before I got a case for it. And by the way, if you're looking for a good iPhone case, no matter which iPhone you're looking for, probably Android to Magpul, M-A-G-P-U-L.

They make a gun accessories and then they use the extra plastic to make really cheap phone cases. I got a six plus case. That's my favorite case for like 1499 on Amazon. Right. Great cases. Anyway, great camera battery life for days, but a dumb ass phone.

Um, and the 8.3 update came out this week. I didn't pay attention this time if it turned Bluetooth back on because I had Bluetooth on already. Did you notice? I have not actually done the update yet. Okay. Well, next week you can, you can report in on that one. Yeah. But now I've got my, my culturally perfect emojis and I've been sending black thumbs up all week.

I'm sure that's great. Uh, I haven't, I'm not even on a six yet and I'm not happy to hear that you don't like it because, uh, you know, I really. No, no, no. It is a stupid phone. I love it, but it's stupid. I mean, that's the problem. I think it's the best phone I've ever owned, but it's stupid.

Well, I'm up for my renewal next month and it's none too soon because the planned obsolescence has really kicked in and my iPhone five battery basically lasts about an hour now. This thing, the battery on the six plus just won't die. Well, in two years it will. Yeah, of course it will. But I, and the camera is just, I mean, I got it for the camera.

I wanted that camera and it is an amazing camera. Uh, so far I've got, the only complaint is the, the buttons and the size. And now I'm getting used to the size and everybody that got a six plus said the same thing. It takes you a week. Then you're used to it. That's too big.

I'm just going to get a six. Well, here's the thing. I got the six plus for the camera and now I'm going to get the watch. I'm going to order the fucking watch, believe it or not, because I need to be knowledgeable about it. I need to be able to talk to clients about it and it's a write-off. I'm just going to get the cheap big sport one.

It's 400 bucks. I can build clients out for it and I can write it off. So that's going to be coming. And this way I don't have to take this giant fucking phone out of my pocket every time I want to see who texted me. That is true. In the news.

Amazon announces prime stations as a prime member. You now get unlimited access to prime stations and ad free internet radio service. You can enjoy it. No additional cost to your prime membership. Great. Just what I need. You know, they're trying to stay in the music business as much as they can.

Pandora is still doing well. There is a value to ad free internet radio. People seem to really like it. Why not? I'm a prime member. I'm happy to get one other thing. I'll never, ever use it. Yeah. You have to use their app. Do you have their app installed? Because I don't. Yeah. I did when they first launched something or other.

And, but I've no, I'm never going to use it, but I'm not, I don't listen to internet radio anyways. I want to listen to the music. I want to listen to not a radio station. I'm picky that way. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Me too. But a lot of people aren't. So I don't, I'm not surprised by this. Good for them. Good on them. We'll see what happens.

See what happens. You know, we'll see if they, I've heard rumblings that they want to get into the streaming service game as well. So this might be their first step. See how well it goes. Because that's what we need. More streaming music. Well, that's all we've got, man. That battle's already lost.

Move on. Yeah. Speaking of streaming, HBO Now is out now. Okay. I signed up. I use it. Is it the, is it Apple exclusive? I don't know. I thought it was, it's, you could get it on different apps. You could watch it on your, on your, on your desktop.

You can get it through, what the fuck is Optimum? I don't understand this because remember when they did the, when Apple did their last big keynote, they said HBO Now was going to be exclusive to the, to Apple. Could be, could be. I don't know what Optimum is, but you can watch it on any laptop.

Oh, here, how to watch. Let's see. Subscribe from your Apple device or participating broadband provider. So you can get it through different broadband providers, but I don't know. All right. So that, that exclusive announcement was just bullshit wording. Yeah. So I got, I got it on my Apple device.

And yesterday, when we watched John Oliver yesterday, we watched it on HBO Now and the interface is terrible. Yeah. It is ridiculously terrible. Yeah. But, uh, then I watched, I started watching a million ways to die in the West that Seth McFarlane, whatever that was, talk about a terrible movie, but I was watching it on my iPad in the volume that came through.

I had my iPad cranked to max and I couldn't even hear it. So I had to listen through headphones just to even be able to hear it. So they're volume, they've got volume problems big time. Right. Um, but everything that you want is there. So now is this a completely different app than the one that they've had already, which is completely different.

This is not HBO go. This is HBO now. So there's a new app on the Apple TVs. So I had to sign up with that one and then I had to put it on my, my giant eye phablet and I watched it on that. And then I watched it on my iPad. So I watched it on three different devices and it worked. I mean, it worked except for the sound issues on the TV.

It was fine though. One of the things I really like about HBO go because I pay for cable. So I use the HBO go app is that they actually do things like, uh, you can toss it to a Chromecast, which I have, you know, I have a $35 little Chromecast thing on my second TV.

That's here in my office, which isn't connected to cable at all. Uh, did they keep that or is it, I guess probably not since they're trying to be Apple exclusive. And well, I mean, if you're, if you're just throwing it from, what are you throwing from an iPad? Yeah. Yeah. It should be the same. If you, if you had the app on your iPad, you're just probably using like an airplay equivalent to just throw the video to it.

Yeah. Um, I, I just use Apple TVs for that. So I don't have a, I don't have a Chromecast, so I've never fucked around with it. So cool. Cause I don't have to, cause I've got Apple TVs, you know, airplay is built into everything. I just like to, uh, you know, try some different things out and not be completely Apple boy.

Well, I've got Roku. I've got, I've got a Roku on my TV. Okay. So I use that in my personal TV. I've got a Roku with no cable and no Apple TV and the living room, Apple TV, because it's easier. So, so LinkedIn bought Linda.com. What the hell is up with that?

Uh, I didn't know LinkedIn had any money left. I'm a little surprised by that too. I, LinkedIn's got a pivot because everybody, everybody I know just laughs about it. Oh God. And the, the video in the, there's a link that we're going to have in the show notes that has a video talking about the acquisition and LinkedIn's grand plan to build like the economic graph to save the world economy is so ridiculously like farsighted and just have, I mean, it's,

it's mind boggling how insulated they are with what's going on in the real world. Because a nobody I know cares about LinkedIn. Everybody's off of it that actually, you know, works because they're like, well, you know, I've been in there for four or five years. I've never gotten a job offer.

So why? Yeah. And now they're thinking we're just going to map the entire economic sector. Every company is going to have a profile. Every person's going to have a profile. Then you link up your skillsets and then you can go learn new skillsets on Linda that will then go into your profile that then will get you hired somewhere else.

I'm like, dude. Yeah. Not going to happen. No. And I love Linda.com. I'm thrilled that they're getting money and support and all that, but to hell with LinkedIn. Yeah, no. Linda is great. If you want to get 10 free days, go to Linda.com slash GOG and you'll get 10 free days.

Oh, look at you. So, yeah, it's a weird buyout. Okay. Now, this is interesting. Delphi, which is not the old dial-up service. Remember them? I do remember them. I had an account. Yeah. This is a car automation company that's building a lot of stuff for the, you know, the automotive industry.

They basically just had an automated car drive coast to coast. Oh, okay. Pretty nice. I feel like there are news stories like this that come out every week and have been for a year, but I guess this is probably the longest that any robotic car has driven. 3,400 miles. 15 states. 99% of the driving on its own.

Wow. Impressive. It's very impressive. Considering like, what, three or four years ago, they couldn't go like seven miles without, you know, it exploding in the desert. Yeah. So that is going fast. Yeah. Very, very fast. It is being disrupted. Now, speaking of disruption, some guy has figured out how to disrupt the spirits industry.

And I know, I know that between me and you, this is a good disruption. I like this one. Yes. So a guy has figured out a way to create 20 year old liquor in six days. That is pretty awesome. I can't wait to taste it. He figured out how to suck all the juice out of the casks and, and kind of, you know, you got, you've got, you know, freaky faux aging going on.

He uses science. Science. And like I said, this is a disruption I can get behind. If he can do that, because, you know, there was, there was this fake thing that was going around for a while about how we're running out of bourbon because everybody loves bourbon now and we, it takes so long to make.

Well, you know, if it didn't take those, take so long to make, then we'll have more. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with this too. And it's going to create a dual markets. There'll be, you know, traditionally aged. And then, you know, this process and the traditionally aged stuff will be more expensive and we'll do some AB testing and end up just buying the cheaper one.

Yeah. And well, and also it, well, I'll buy the better one, but, um, if it, if it really works and they can get it to the same point, then we just won't have to age stuff anymore and it will completely change the market. But then we have cool real time, you know, spirits that then they can do like crazy experimenting on and, and come up with new blends that don't take 20 years to figure out if they're going to be good or not.

Yeah. You know, so that's what I, that's what I'm excited about. I think that's where it's really going to open up that we can get like, you know, just experimenting in this compressed timeframe, which will be super cool. I agree. It's good news for booze. Good news for booze. Yeah.

Okay. So Facebook, we, you know, we seem to talk about Facebook even more than Apple, which is a bit weird. Facebook has just been rolling things out left, right, and center. I don't know about you, but particularly this morning, ever since they rolled out their on this day feature, my feed is even more useless than normal because everybody's just reposting things that they posted a year ago.

Cannot stand it. I hate that. I wish you could block the entire feature. Yeah. Well, there are many things on Facebook. I wish you could block, but that's true. Uh, you know what they'll do, Brian, they will give you a full refund. No, that's true. Damn good point, Jason. Uh, they rolled out something else called scrapbook, which, uh, basically allows you to create a digital identity for your children that they can then inherit when they're old enough to have their own account.

Welcome to the world, child. You are now part of the human centipede. Exactly. So it's basically putting together a bunch of photos of your kids into these scrapbooks and then they, you can give them a name and then they can be claimed later on when you set up an account and, oh, we're just going to be living on Facebook.

No. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no. I have gone back and found old Polaroids of me as a child and burned them. At least with Facebook, you can delete them. Maybe. But we'll see. Yeah, that is an interesting thing because I don't know too many people that would, especially at the age at which they'd be first getting their Facebook account, which is that tender teenage with the roiling of hormones and all of that, that would want a full page full of just them as a kid.

No, it's, nobody's going to, nobody's going to want this. Although we're also narcissistic now, who knows what these kids are going to be thinking by the time they grow up? I mean, honestly, we don't know what the mindset of somebody that is born now that is going to have their entire life online and on Facebook, what their mindset's going to be.

They could just want to be famous. They're probably going to be going, look, that's a photo of me actually outside. I haven't done that in 20 years. Yeah, this is me on my first Uber ride, this is me on my first drone ride too. So now Time Magazine had a thing that was getting passed around this week where it's, you can now serve divorce papers on Facebook.

This is a, I don't know how time has fallen this far where they're talking about this, but apparently a woman who didn't have a, well, she was getting a divorce, but the husband didn't have a real address. So the only way to get ahold of him was through Facebook.

I don't know how this has turned out, but she had to like follow up with texts and phone calls to make sure he got it. And in the article, like they said that, well, he still hasn't seen it. So who knows how this is going to work out, but. This is a bullshit story. It's a bullshit story. I just wanted to mention it because it was going around and just say, this is a bullshit story.

Yeah. No, you can't serve legal documents through Facebook. Well, no, apparently you can. That's well, it hasn't really worked. So now this is a non bullshit story. Video game publishers are pissed off because people want to archive old games and they, they, they say, no, you cannot archive our old games because all, all hacking is illegal.

So the EFF is going after them, trying to get, um, some holes punched into the copyright law. So we can, you know, put all these old games in museums because the old hardware is discontinued. The publishers don't support the games anymore, but they're part of our collective history and we want to archive them for future generations.

And also people that bought the games and want to want to play them. Uh, they can't because a lot of the stuff is, you know, like the hardware, the hardware dies and you, you know, I can't go buy another, you know, once your Audi Odyssey 2000 busts out, that's it. Yeah. Can't ever play that game anymore, but don't worry.

I don't know why everybody's all worried about this. Google's just going to make them Google doodles. Google doodles. Yeah, that's true. Just play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the map of Manhattan next. Yeah. Um, but yeah, this isn't, this is an interesting ongoing story and I hope the EFF is successful on this one because it is cool to have all this stuff archived for future generations so they can see where we came from.

And, you know, game designers from the past, you know, have a lot to teach on all the things that they figured out on what a good game is because there, there, there's another story that I missed. I can't find the link to it where they saying games nowadays. Games are just too easy and they're no fun and games like old games were actually hard because they were games.

They're not just walking you through, giving you a medal for showing up like, you know, like the entire American education system. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's all participation trophies now. Oh man. But, but you mentioned Google and Google just came up with a new patent where they want to save us from spoilers.

The fact that it took this long to come up with this patent is ridiculous because I, I'm sure that everybody thought that this was an unpatentable idea. So yeah, they, they want to save us from ourselves. Oh, so they're patenting white text.

Yeah. They're, they're, well, actually they're, you know, it's a fuzzies. So it fuzzes it out. If somebody, somebody in your social network posts, what might be a spoiler. Come on, people. We know just to stay the fuck off of Facebook and Twitter until you finish watching the show. It's all a little bit late now anyways, because now, you know, nobody's watching anything in real time anymore.

No one. So that's the thing. It's like, yeah, you know, you know that if you, whatever, you can go online and there's some show that you've been waiting to watch, you just accept it and avert your eyes. I'm off. I'm off. Damn, that would have been a good show.

I was going to say too bad. We already got a show title. This is interesting news. Hackpad, the, the software that we use for our show notes and have for like 50 some episodes now that was bought by Dropbox is going open source. I got an, I got an email yesterday that said that they're going to open source it in the next few weeks.

So apparently that Dropbox still didn't work out too well. I guess not. Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen with that, but I guess we can write some cool plugins. Oh, great. Plugins. That's what I want. Now Hulu. Yes. I don't watch Hulu.

Do you? No. Do you watch the Hulu? I don't because there's just nothing on there that I really want to see. There's a lot of people I know say that there's a lot under Hulu plus, but here's the point though. They've created a new gift search engine to take, to take clips from their shows and use it as a marketing vehicle.

So when somebody wants to post a GIF of something from the office or whatever other shit show that they've got, they can use Hulu's version, which will then pipe back to Hulu where people might watch the show or sign up for Hulu plus. I was originally terribly against this idea when then I just realized that, you know what?

No, this is actually a pretty good marketing move. It's actually really smart for marketing. It's an interesting choice because there will at some point be some discussion about whether or not even a gift from a TV show is copywritten and should be paid for or not. Cause right now they're pushing it's promo.

We'll see how well that works. But since they have rights to the show, this makes sense for them to be able to make these. It's a bit like the sampling thing from the Beastie Boys in the 80s and 90s. We'll see about that. Cause you're sampling bits from the TV show and then you're using it to promote your own service.

I mean, do they have the right to do that? Do they have the right to chop things up? This gets into really weird territories, but I like the concept and I think the idea is great. You know, there was an app, there was a keyboard for Apple, for iOS on Apple that was trying to do this for a while.

They weren't, you know, they weren't going the legal way. They were definitely just, you know, you could upload your own and grab ones from the internet. And it was a funny little concept. I mean, I used it for a little bit. I thought it was, it's a fun way to text answer someone, but it's, it ends up becoming just, you know, too cumbersome and you get over it in about three days.

Yeah. And it's just, yeah, whatever, whatever. Okay. Security. Well, this is interesting. A revenge porn site operator, Mr. Kevin Bolliart.

Yeah. He got 18 years in prison. Yeah. 18 years in prison for just hosting a site that would let people post naked pictures of their exes. And then ran a competing site that charged them to take them down.

And that was the real problem. He was kind of okay until he did that. Because that is extortion. That pretty much is extortion. But 18 years. 18 years is insane. And the thing that was even more insane to me is how much time and effort he put into this when it really only made him about 900 bucks a month in website ad revenue.

And he ended up extorting about $30,000. But that's a, that's a, that's a pretty shady business and a lot of work for basically fuck all. 30 grand for 18 years. I'm sorry. If you robbed like eight 7-Elevens, you'd get 18 years.

Yeah. Choose your crimes better. Seriously. This, yeah, this guy should, he's just in prison for fucking stupidity. That's all it is. I think it's, he's way, yes, he's a scumball. Yes, he did a horrible thing. But 18 years is way over-sentenced for what he actually did. Yeah, this is, this is a problem with cyber crimes.

Yes. That, you know, kids go in for doing stupid shit and then they come out, you know, hardened criminals. Yeah. That's the problem. We need nerd prison. Honestly, we need nerd prison. So these guys don't go in there with rapists and, you know, violent offenders because this guy's going to come out just broken and damaged.

I mean, he, granted, mentally he's broken and damaged already because he was a douchebag from the get-go. Yeah. But now he's going to be, you know, we're just breeding a bigger asshole with this. Yeah, I agree with the geek prison thing. That should probably happen. I thought he was a little bit younger than he actually is, so I have a little bit less respect.

I just realized he's 28. I mean, if this, he's not a kid. He's 28 now. Okay. So, you know, he's mid-20s when he did it and in your 20s you're just an idiot anyway. You are an idiot. I'd hate to see what we were like if we came up with the availability of all this stuff right now.

It's, you know, he's a scumbag, but it's hardly surprising. Yeah, 18 years is crazy. Now, Al Franken, who is just kind of a lunatic already. Really? I like him. But you like him probably because he's a lunatic. Yeah. He's pushing for harder revenge porn laws because, like, there's nobody left in the U.S. to prosecute.

So now he wants to give, like, the FBI, which I don't quite understand because the FBI is domestic, power to go after these people if they're overseas and just doing some really stupid things. It should really work on better problems. That's my only thing.

Just work on better problems. This is not that big of a problem. I agree with you. I think that, and Franken is seemingly taking quite an odd direction with this, particularly since he's one of the more internet savvy people in our lovely political system. I don't know about that after this.

Well. He's backsliding. Let's keep in mind that we do have somebody heading some sort of tech thing that has never even used email and proudly states that. So we're a step better than that guy. But not much. Hello, doggy. Pause for dog.

It looks like DuckDuckGo is actually getting a second wind. Oh, good. I got to admit, I stopped using it. And you reminded me by putting this in the show notes. I'm going to start using it again. I like it. It's a good search engine. That's the thing. A lot of people are going back to it and saying that the results are actually pretty comparable nowadays.

So I will give it a shot. And it really comes down to Apple. Apple put them into iOS and OS X for Safari and also Mozilla has added it. And it's starting to take off again. Yes. And the reason that it is interesting and popular is they promise not to search your or to store your search settings.

They don't track anything. They don't track. Yeah. They're a trackless search engine, which, you know, we just have to take their word for it. We do. And it does scare me when on their settings that you can automatically save things to the cloud. I do not like the cloud cloud automatically means tracking and surveillance to me.

But OK, you like the blue skies. I do. OK, now you got a note in here about Verizon and their super cookie back in the news. You know how I get angry every now and then and something really grabs my my attention and I get pissed off for a week about it.

This is I am so tired of how we've just gone ahead and shifted and it's no longer opt out or you have to actually go and opt out of things all the time. It's ridiculous. The default should be that you're opted out instead of opted in. Verizon super cookie mobile tracking program has finally allowed you to opt out of it because you are automatically opted in.

So if you are on Verizon, check our show notes, follow the link and do it immediately because it's ridiculous. Microsoft is now in the game. They used to actually always be pretty good about about this sort of stuff. But now you have to actually opt out of having third parties track your data if you use Microsoft products now.

Thanks a lot, guys. Well, this goes back. This is do not track and do not track is kind of a failed initiative from the get go. Nobody really pays attention to it. All you're doing is sending a signal to the website that says I would prefer it if you didn't track me, please. Pretty please.

But it doesn't actually do anything because nobody's ignore it yet. Nobody's doing anything with it at this point. I am just frustrated by the cultural shift and how we're all just kind of OK with it. Well, I mean, this cultural shift happened 10 years ago. This is this is new.

Come on, we've been doing this for at least 10 years, probably longer than that, because I think what would cookies came out in 97? Yeah, I think cookies came out in 97. Once cookies hit the market, that gave that gave a state once we had state tracking. And once you could load a cookie with any HTTP request across if I'm sending you a gift for my site, I can send you a cookie.

I got you. I know you. And so this is now 18 years old and whatever I give. It doesn't matter. It honestly doesn't matter. You're becoming me again. I am. So New York officials removed an Edward Snowden statue from Brooklyn Park this week, and it was a really well-made statue.

Yeah, it was funny. I mean, it's such a hipster thing. It's a total hipster thing, but it's it. I mean, this is a full on bronze statue that is not. Oui, it's huge. No, it's gigantic. And it's got the eagle and it's got his name and it's very funny. Yeah. And so now there's a petition to to reinstate the statue.

This is how sad this is. OK, this is a change.org petition for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. They need 200 signatures. Yeah. They've got 110. Yeah. That's not very many. Because nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit.

And by the way, they're not going to do it anyways, because you can't just put anything that you want up in a park. That shit has to go through committee. Yes. It has to go through committees and has to get approved and there has to be meetings. World doesn't work like that. So, you know, neither does change.org for whatever.

Yeah. Has there any? Well, you know what? No, there was the the FCC thing that went through change.org because of John Oliver. If John Oliver had mentioned this on his show, there'd probably be 10 gazillion signatures. Yes, that's true. So Mozilla and Firefox has rolled out opportunistic encryption support to to try and make sites encrypted when they can using using a bunch of different tactics.

And they launched that on April 4th. And then on April 7th, they pulled it back because it was hackable. Yeah, that that that was a a step that was a step on the dick moment. Yeah, thank you, Mozilla. I mean, it's a nice thought. Make sure it works.

That's a great thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just think of thinking shit through, you dumbasses. They didn't. I signed up for a job there and they didn't hire me. So if they would have hired me, then I would have told them that, you know, they should have probably thought it through better. OK, fuck them. Just opportunity. Google let the root certificate for Gmail expire, causing, quote unquote, email hiccups, but also apparently caused some other hiccups because screwed up my training.

You use your Gmail login to probably sign into the training. And that's why things kind of went down. Yeah, there's a 20 year option when you buy a certificate and it probably cost you about 20 or 200 bucks, 200 bucks to do that. I think at this point, Gmail has enough money where they could go for the 20 year option.

But Jason, they had a budget meeting. They're not entirely sure if this Gmail thing is going to be around for 20 years. So they didn't feel comfortable ponying up that much cash up front. They had to talk to their marketing department, which then had to talk to the CFO. The CFO said, I don't know. I mean, we could change it to email.

Who knows? Is it still in beta? Maybe that's why they're like, it's in beta. We don't know if this thing's going to last. That Google wave, though. We bought that one forever. Oh, my God. Google wave. And now we're losing plus.

Google, Google, Google. Oh, well, still better than Yahoo. We'll get to Yahoo in a second. In oh, my God, we've got three Facebook things here. Let's run through these real quick. Facebook has now published a new security settings guide called Facebook Privacy Basics.

You can go to Facebook dot com slash about slash basics. And they made a very pretty scrollable. I don't know how it looks on mobile, probably whatever on the desktop. It's a pain in the ass to go through. But they do have really good information in there. And I think it's not a bad, not a bad little mini site from them.

I looked at it and this is actually one of the first times that it did a really good job of it. What upsets me is that they basically just change their entire security settings every six months. So you'll have to go back in and do it again and again and again. And it's always different. That's the thing. It's like, you know, OK, I can go learn how this works today.

But why? Tomorrow it'll be different. Exactly. Why the fuck am I going to spend the time in six months? They're going to roll out different privacy settings and it's all going to be foobard. So, well, somebody in Chicago or it was Chicago somewhere in Illinois. No, Cook County, Chicago is hitting Facebook with a class action lawsuit over facial recognition data.

Good. This is fine. I am I'm behind this because I never opted in for it. And I go to other people's things when I watch them put in a picture of me and my name already pops up. And I'm like, I did not say that was cool. You rat fuck bastards.

So probably opted out of it. But then they, you know, they rolled out another security thing and they change settings every single time. I swear to God, that is my biggest pet peeve. And somebody needs to do a class action lawsuit against everyone in the tech industry for when they update security or settings or privacy settings that they always default your stuff.

And they don't remember your settings. It's done on purpose. We all know it. We all know it because you and I have done it. Yes, we have. We've done it. We've been there. We're like, who's going to care? Really? Yeah. Well, nowadays, everybody cares. Well, they don't, but we do. We do. Now, finally, this is a fun one.

On Krebs on security, I was just laughing. The FBI is warning that individuals sympathetic to ISIS are mass defacing websites with known vulnerabilities in WordPress. Of course they are. Of course they are.

So the FBI now hates WordPress, too. Good. Good. We agree on something, FBI. Now give me back my dick.

Comment of the week. We'd like to thank our newest Patreon supporters, Jerry Bio and Kurt Busquets. Thank you guys very much. Yeah, thank you very much. We're still posting things on the Patreon and all that sort of stuff, and it's going well.

So I hope everybody's enjoying it. If you have not checked it out yet, please do so. Yes, please do so at patreon.com slash GOG. Or go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and click the big old button in the right sidebar. Yes. Now, this is a fun one. Chris Gehrig gets a shout out for giving me a dollar through my cash tag, go fuck yourself.

Honestly, I got this and I'm like, what? The note read, $1 for why the fuck not? So thank you, Chris. You are the first and probably only person to use my cash tag. I'm guessing the first and last. First and last. But I got a dollar. You got a dollar and it was clever.

Very clever. Yes, we got some new five star iTunes reviews, which we love. Thank you all very much. The first from Bill De La Vega, who said, maybe it's just me, but these guys don't seem grumpy or old. I guess knowledgeable, thoughtful geeks just doesn't roll off the tongue. No, we beta tested that name.

Didn't work. Yeah, no, we. Yeah. A-B testing didn't really kind of fly. And we got another one from Wardito, which I hopefully I don't know this person, but they said great podcast. That's it because I know I know a ward who was a stalker.

That would be scary. That would be scary. Well, that's great. We love that. So thank you very much. The five star ratings really do seem to matter. So please get over there and do that as well. And finally, Beach Mama has returned. Beach Mama. With a vengeance. She left a comment on our Facebook about last week's episode.

Good example of asking garbage to donate their time while you are donating your time. I've had several people ask for my help, photographs, et cetera, and never offered payment. Some of that I'm willing to do at times. Often, though, these are people who have enough money to buy new cars, take trips to Italy, et cetera, but don't want to pay me for my time.

That's bullshit, and I'm not doing it anymore. Next time this is even implied, I will turn it around like you did. There is still a percentage of people who believe they are entitled and that you should be grateful to walk the same ground as they do. Thank you, Beach Mama. I agree with you, and I love the stance. Keep it up. This is what everybody has to do is say no to this crap.

I do want to point out that the garbage story was implied. It was not real. We use that as a case example. Garbage did not personally screw me. No, no, no, no. I think she's referring to me saying if, you know, they should come over and play at your house.

I know. It's just as we're reading this, I realize that that makes it sound like that actually happened. Garbage has never done me any wrong. They always paid me on time, and they were lovely people to me. Okay. Thank you very much, Beach Mama. Good to hear from you. So, yeah, if you like the show, give us a five star on iTunes.

Go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes. It will take you right there. Or throw us a buck or two on Patreon. We appreciate it very much. Preach. Dick.

At the library. Got a bunch of books this week. The first one is We Learned Nothing, Essays by Tim Kreider. Now, I found out about this book because it is part of Tim Ferriss' book club. And he also had a podcast with a rant called Lazy Man of Lazy, A Manifesto.

I love that. Dude, that was so good. And I immediately went out and bought the book. Book's not as good. Damn. Yeah, sadly, the entire book is not as good. There are some really cute stories and essays in there. The guy's smart. I like him, but it was not. That was, I mean, that was the gem.

You know, that was the cream of the crop. The best thing out of the book. I mean, yeah, it's three and a half stars for the book. Okay. Well, I really like the manifesto. I think everybody should definitely listen to that. It was very, very good. I might check out the book, but we'll see.

I haven't read anything new because, as I mentioned, I'm going back and rereading the entire Dune series. I am currently on Children of Dune. And when I think about the Dune series, I think about the first book. And then I think about all the rest of them that were just a great continuation. I forgot how fucking good Children of Dune is.

It is right now. I mean, who knows? Because I'm rereading everything. It's so good. It's way better than the first book. It is so political and so amazing and so awesome. I'm blown away by it right now. I literally cannot get to sleep because I want to just keep plowing through this damn book.

Okay. And Frank Herbert wrote Children of Dune? Oh, yes. I'm only reading the original Frank Herbert series. I'm not bothering anymore with any of the extensions by his son and random sci-fi people. Okay. Which number is this in the series, then? It is number three. Number three. How many did Frank Herbert do? I believe there are seven or eight.

Yeah. Jesus. Fuck. That's too many. No, it's not. No, no, no, no. This is one of the tentpoles of science fiction. It is one of the finest series. It's up there with Asimov's Foundation. Yeah. So it's the Vorkosigan series that I've been trying to get you to read. That was like 15 books, but you haven't gone back and read those.

You haven't even got through the first book yet. Well, the first book is so damn long. Jesus Christ. Okay. Well, here's a short book for you. It's called Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. Read it. Good book. Yeah, I liked it. It's like Catcher in the Rye, but better.

Yeah. Well, Bukowski brings his Bukowski to it. Yeah. No, he's, what was it, Post Office? Yeah. It was the seminal book that everybody sent me. I had like four copies of that book. Great book. And I'm like, I would like to read more just to kind of get to know him.

So I picked up this book. Short read. I thought it was amazing. Yeah. There's so many things. There's just like one-liners in there that are just like mind-bendingly good. He's an amazing, amazing writer. And if you have never read Bukowski, I highly recommend that you do. Sit down on a nice chair and pour yourself some whiskey.

Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah. You got to have some whiskey when you're reading Bukowski. Yes, you do. It's so good. It's so good. So I'm going to keep diving into the classics. I'm trying to balance between like new stuff and classics. Yeah. To round out, you know. I got to get one of those new things because I'm only reading classics right now.

Okay. Now, well, here's a new one. It's called This Idea Must Die. And this is from TheEdge.org. They did a book last year. We talked about it last year. Yeah, exactly. And this one I'm having a problem with.

It's the best-selling editor of This Explains Everything brings together 175 of the world's most brilliant minds to tackle Edge.org's 2014 question, what scientific idea has become a relic blocking human progress? Yes. This is a tough one.

Why? The problem with this one is it's so dense. Yeah. And the people are so smart. And I am so dumb. And it's really hard to get through. Let me just say, Jason, that by the book title, This Idea Must Die, Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress, and then the description of bringing together the world's smartest people, I would be very disappointed if it was a dumb book.

Yes, it is. I don't know if it's just I'm not on my game right now because I love the previous book. I thought the previous book was amazing. This one, though, is just really, really hard to get through. All right. I'm going to pick it up. I mean, to me, this is one of those books that you don't just sit and try to get through.

This is this sits on your nightstand for about seven months and you pick it up and you dip in and then you put it down for a while and you come back. Yeah. Well, this sits in my ear holes because I got the audible version. See? No, no, no. You can't. This one. Yes. This one is stuff. This one is definitely not audible friendly.

No, no, no, no. No. You got to look at this as like a reference book. You know, you don't buy it. Yeah. You don't buy the dictionary on audible. Good point. Very good point. No problem. That's what I'm here for. The Hugo Awards. Now, I never, I mean, I'm a sci-fi guy and I used to always pick up like, you know, at the end of the year, Hugo books for like short fiction.

So you could find really good writers that are just breaking out and all that. I never really paid much attention to the selection process or how these things were done. I just assumed that learned people read all these books and then made learned decisions about them and presented some of the finest works to us. Apparently, this is not the case.

I thought it was just a popularity contest, kind of like the podcast awards. Well, it is. I did not really know that, but apparently it's just done by ballot at a world cons, any convention. So if anybody that shells out the 40 bucks to go to one of these can vote. Yeah. I remember Cory Doctorow with hat in hand when, uh, uh, down and out in the magic kingdom came out and that he was, he was pimping it the same way that people pimped their podcast for the podcast awards.

It's like, please go vote for me. It's like, okay, well, no, yeah, I'm not a learned professional and I'm not going to a, one of those cons. So whatever. Well, apparently it's all being game now by a very right wing activist crowd. You know, I call them the Orson Scott Cardies. Oh, they all got funny underwear on.

Yes. And they hate gays. Okay, fine. No. So we'll just skip the Hugos this year. Yeah. I'm pretty much done with the Hugos now that I know all this. So yeah. Well, the only thing about the Hugos is those compendiums that come out at the end of the year with all the short stories are actually have been really good. Yes. I enjoy them.

Yeah. It's a great way to find up and coming new sci-fi authors. Beats the hell out of Amazon's attempt. Yeah. Just go, go to Boing Boing. They're going to have the good stuff anyway. So skip the Hugos. Go to Boing Boing. This week, we have a special backup episode on software, apps, and gadgets.

I'm going to talk about travel for a second. I have been traveling. And the other day when I got back to Chicago, I thought that I left my external two terabyte drive at the TSA checkpoint in Pennsylvania. And I freaked because I did not encrypt that drive in that.

That's a rookie mistake on my part. I understand that. I own it. So the next day I spent, I did actually have it. I found it next to my socks. Okay. So I would argue is good enough security because ain't nobody touching that shit. Well, they were clean.

Come on. So I use two specific programs to do all my backup stuff besides the built-in time machine on Apple. I've got a two terabyte time machine, you know, extreme gadget in the house.

So I use that. I always back up to that. But I also use ChronoSync and they have a new version called 4.6. I've talked about ChronoSync on the show before. And I've also talked about Carbon Copy Cloner before. And Carbon Copy Cloner is up to version four. Between the two of those, I back up my external drives and I also have a bootable clone of my laptop that I leave at the house.

So if something happens to my laptop, I can have my roommate back at the house in Chicago mail me one and I can plug that into a new laptop that I have to go sell my soul to buy, but it will give me everything and I will only have like a day and a half or two of downtime. All right. But now I have used FileVault or FileVault 2 on OS X to encrypt every damn drive I have.

They're all encrypted and I do not store my password for any of the encrypted drives in my keychain. So when they get plugged in, they have to be completely separate passphrases, very long passphrases. And so if somebody does actually get into my laptop and plugs in the drive, it won't automatically mount.

Yeah. Jason stores those on Dropbox. Yeah, sure. Because Condoleezza Rice, you know, needs to needs to get into my stuff every day. But anyway, between all that stuff, it took me a day to get everything sorted. And now I am, I can sleep at night not having to worry.

I can throw this drive in the middle of Times Square and say, have at it. Nobody can get to it. And I have a backup of it too. So, except the NSA. No, no, no. Good luck. Okay. Good luck with that one. My passphrase is probably about 60 characters long. I'm not joking.

Okay. I believe you. I believe you. You are much more paranoid than I. Well, it's a passphrase. The entire point of a passphrase, it's not Margaret Threather is 110% sexy. But, you know, it's still pretty good. I'm going to start using that one, actually. Oh, great. Yeah. Now that it's in every password database known to man.

Yes, but we all have the, you know, the retention of a fucking spider these days. Nobody's going to remember that in two weeks. Well, that's totally safe. That's why I read literature. And I pick phrases from literature that I adore, that I, you know, have used for years. And then mix and match them.

Bitsy bitsy spider. Yeah, climbed up my dicky snout. Yes, yes. Okay. What do you got? I actually finally got a new desktop, mouse, and keyboard combination. I got the Logitech MK710 because I started to get severely grossed out at how disgusting my keyboard has been since I haven't gotten one in probably five or six years.

It was disgusting. So I got a brand new one, and Jason always used to get mad at me when I would be typing during the show, and I've been typing the entire show, and he hasn't heard me once. This is a very quiet keyboard. I have to get used to the placement. It's a little bit off from where it was before, but so far, I really do like it.

The thing is, I used to have a very, very quiet mouse and a very, very loud keyboard. This time around, the keyboard is very quiet, but the mouse makes this god-awful, incredibly loud click every time I click on it, and I don't understand why it's so damn loud. Yeah, Logitech mice are like that.

I'm looking at it now, and you've got the scroll wheel. Does that have the weighted wheel where you can just hit it, and it'll just go for days? Yeah, which I don't like, but you can disable it. Oh, I like that part. Oh, I don't, but you can disable it, so that's nice for me. Okay. Now, here's the question.

You're using a Logitech keyboard and mouse, which means you're still on your goddamn PC, aren't you? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I got the laptop right next to me, the Mac, and it's recording everything, but I'm using the, you know, whatever. I'll get there eventually. No, you won't.

I'm halfway there. No, you won't. I'll probably not. No, I will. Just, you know, just embrace the fact that you're not going to a Mac. At some point, this desktop will crap out on me, at which point I will switch full to the Mac. Okay. I promise. You're going to come over here and, like...

I'm going to pour a glass of water in it. Yep. Hey, this desktop has survived Dr. Pepper being spilled in it. Okay, well then... I don't know, maybe gasoline and a match. How's that? Okay. Try not to take out my house. I've never been a Justin Bieber fan.

I'd be worried if you were. Exactly. He lives down the street from where I'm at now, or used to live there until they kicked him out and he had to move. And actually, the liquor store down the street was on TMZ one day because his buddy barred his Fisker and backed into the polls. And you can see it every time you go there now.

But I did watch the Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, and I have to say that it was really, really funny. I heard it was very funny. This is one of those things where I so don't care about Justin Bieber, even the idea of him being roasted I don't care about.

I saw the clip with Martha Stewart. Very funny. For me, this is totally like, all right, I'll watch the clips that pop up that people say are the best. See, the funny thing about the Comedy Central roasts are when a comedian gets up, they roast the entire panel. And then at the very end, they do like 30 seconds on the guy that they're roasting.

Right. And that's where the funny parts come in, because, you know, anybody that talks about Jeff Ross, who is usually the roast master general who wasn't this time, which was bizarre. But the new guy was really good. Just them talking about all the other comedians is worth the price of admission because they are so damn funny.

And the uncensored version, I thought, was just excellent. I laughed. I laughed the entire time. There were many times when I was in tears. All right. So if you want something funny, definitely check it out. I do. So maybe I'll take a look. I have bad news. More bad news?

I have very bad news. I was very, very excited about Twin Peaks coming back. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, David Lynch pulled out because he didn't get the money he wanted. David Lynch has now pulled out of the Twin Peaks reboot. And there is no Twin Peaks reboot without David Lynch. Or it's not a reboot. It's a continuation.

Anyways, there's no Twin Peaks without David Lynch. It can't happen. As upset as I thought I was, the cast members made a video begging for Lynch's return in order to hashtag save Twin Peaks. And it is very well done. It's very cute. Yeah, it's very cute. And I don't know if it's going to work.

No. Showtime has enough money. They can shell out another few hundred grand or even another few million. Who cares? Get David Lynch back. Yeah, get David Lynch back. And to be fair, it's not David Lynch's salary. He is demanding money to be able to do it correctly. So it's a production budget. OK, well, still a couple more million.

Throw it at him. Get it in there. We all want to see this done. Yeah, no. I mean, who knows? This whole thing could be manufactured. I probably won't even have a DVD player by the time you're done with this and put out the DVD sets, but I will buy them Showtime. Well, you can get Show Now when that comes out.

Whatever. I will buy Show Now if I can get this. And other things returning. I'm not so thrilled about this one. I finally did listen to Serial, as I mentioned, and I really enjoyed it. So there's going to be a new podcast that will pick up where Serial left off, except it's entirely by the defense team.

So therefore, it's going to be incredibly one sided. Yeah, this is dumb. This is just this is propaganda and it's not journalism. It's nothing. And I will not listen to it. Yeah, it's come comes from the person who brought the story to what's her nuts from Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah Koenig, Sarah Koenig.

Yeah, it was actually a journalist and made the entire thing interesting. Yeah, her delivery and her research and her just sometimes blind naivete really kind of made Serial that much more interesting. This is going to be completely different and has I don't know.

I don't know why. Because, well, publicity, you know, I mean, you know, they're still they're trying to raise money. They're trying to get people in. They know people are interested right now. So, you know, it's understandable that they're doing it, but I'm certainly not going to listen to it. Yeah, it's propaganda for me.

Yes, I agree. Martin Gore from Depeche Mode is putting out an album, which I'm excited about. Depeche Mode being one of my favorite bands of all time. And Martin Gore, I believe, to be one of our generation's finest lyricists. So he was the singer? No. Well, he sings some of the songs. But no, the main singer is David Gahan, who is one of the better showmen out there.

But Martin Gore has written almost all of the songs. And he usually sings like one or two per album. He has put out a solo album. Unfortunately, one of the most brilliant lyricists of all time has released an instrumental album. Sorry, man. I'm sorry.

God, I was so disappointed. I feel for your pain, man. It's good. I mean, I like what he's written, but oh, man, I'm so disappointed. Well, it's like after Danzig left the Misfits and he put out Black Aria, which was which was this really terrible goth instrumental album.

You know, I understand. It's probably the same same feeling. Yeah, it was a bummer. So Paul Feig or Feig, the guy who created Freaks and Geeks. Yeah. I love Freaks and Geeks. Me too. I thought it was great. I actually saw Seth Rogen two days ago on in Hollywood driving a Ferrari.

It was very strange. He has created a show for Yahoo. I did not know Yahoo was doing original programming until I saw this article on The Verge. I did not either. It's called Other Space. And it is quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever seen.

It is so unbelievably unfunny that I was just like, this is this an onion bit? I was actually angry at you for making me watch this. Yeah, I was angry at watching it. And so I had to share it with you because, you know, fuck you. It was it.

It was very, very bad. And I think it stars the guy from the AT&T wireless commercials where they go around and say it's the world's largest wireless network and they're bringing the message to people. OK. Yeah, it stars that guy. This is horrible. It's terrible. There was not one funny joke in the entire thing.

No. So good luck, Yahoo. I'm really glad that you're really trying here. Yeah, good luck with that. So speaking of things that are incredibly unfunny, Late Night with Seth Meyers. Not a fan. No, he's terrible. I've watched it once or twice. It's absolutely horrible.

It's never funny, except for this one skit, which is amazing. So Seth brings Jon Snow to a dinner party and I was rolling on the floor laughing. This is a good intro to Game of Thrones premiere on Sunday. Wait, Game of Thrones is this Sunday?

Sunday, man. Oh, dude, I didn't know. You got HBO Now just in time. Oh, I did. Wow. But anyway, yes, I think Seth Meyers is ridiculously unfunny. Yeah. But this segment, I was crying. I was crying. I was laughing so hard.

Me too. It was so fucking funny. Oh, man. Yeah, it was good. I thought, like I saw it was like five and a half minutes. I'm like, how are they going to do this? And it works through the entire segment. You got to watch the whole thing. Yes, you do. Yeah. Now, going back to unfunny, Lee Min-bok has delivered 80,000 DVDs of the interview via balloon to North Korea.

Well, it's because nobody here wanted them. But I'm sure I want to know what kind of deal he got. Did they just give them to him to get rid of them? Probably. I said, and, you know, full disclosure, I have not seen the movie, but I don't think I will ever see the movie because I think that it's going to be terrible.

And everybody I know that's seen it says it's terrible. Yeah, me too. I'm not going to see it. Oh, yeah. So you haven't seen it. OK. No, I didn't. I didn't even have any interest before it became the hullabaloo. And like, if you wanted to be a good American, you need to go see this. I didn't care. And I still don't care.

And I never will care. Yeah, no. Pass. Pass. And finally, Daredevil is out today on Netflix. Another thing I generally don't care about because Ben Affleck has ruined the Daredevil brand for me forever. All right. I have to tell you, and this is not in my wheelhouse at all.

I will not watch this. I don't really care. I don't. I'm just I'm just not into the comic book hero movies. But having said that, and I know you are and some of my friends on Facebook are and everybody is raving about how good this is.

OK, well, everyone. OK, well, I'll give it a shot. I'll give it a shot. I mean, I watch Green Arrow or Arrow and I watch Flash and Gotham and all that other, you know, useless crap. So I guess I can just stick this in the queue, too. Yes. People are raving and saying that this is the Daredevil that should have been, that it's very, very good.

And I need you to watch this to see if it's any good, because Deborah Ann Wool is on this, who is originally on True Blood. And I think she's gorgeous. So if this is bearable to watch, I get to keep seeing her on TV. OK, I will be your canary in the coal mine. And I do have to say, if you're watching any superhero crap on TV, go with Gotham.

Gotham is the one that wins. The rest of them are arrows. OK, flash me. But Gotham is solid. Not going to watch it. Are you kidding me? Love it.

What the hell happened to Penn Jillette? Uh, I haven't seen him until you put this link in there. And, you know, it's... I just saw this this morning. My roommate's like, did you see what happened to Penn? 105 pounds in 100 days. He lost 105 pounds in 100 days, which means I need to figure out what the hell he did.

Uh, he basically went veggie. Yeah. You know, and... But he's eating several pounds of food a day. Well, no, he didn't start that way. According to the article, anyways, he was doing about a thousand calories per day for three months. Yeah, but you can still eat several pounds of veggies and still be under a thousand calories.

You know, celery is negative calories. So you can eat as much celery as you want. But, uh, the fact that he went from 330 to 225 at age 60 in four months is like, I'm like, you know what? Fucking good on you, man.

Good on you. I did, I did, I did 70 pounds in two months, but I was young. But the fact that he can still do this at 60 is amazing. He looks completely different. Yes, he does. Which always happens. Yeah. It's one of those weird things, especially when you're, when you're a bit older and you were, uh, zafting, as it were, uh, that makes you look a little bit younger because it fills out your face.

Now that he's lost the weight, he looks aged. He looks like a chicken. He's got a gobble, he's got a gobble neck. But good on him. He's healthy. And he's six foot seven. So six foot seven to 225 is, you know, that's a good, good weight for him. Yeah. I am 245.109.

I don't know. I'm six feet tall and I probably am close to like, you know, 240. So I need to drop another 60 pounds. So I'm going to try and follow this. I, I, I think that it's time, you know, I don't want to get to the point where I'm, you know, 60 and saying they're, they're saying that you need all this medicine to stay alive.

And that's what, that's what triggered this. He's like, the doctor said, Hey, if you drop a little bit more weight, you won't have to take any of the medicine to keep you healthy. Cause you'll just be healthy. Yeah. Fucking good on him, man. I love seeing old guys like us.

It will not like, uh, he's, he's got a little, got a little bit on us, but. Yeah. I don't know which age category you're trying to put me into here. Yes. Penn has 20 years on you, but still now, um, and just as an aside, the rocks diet came out this week. 10 pounds of food a day, 10 pounds and mostly cod.

I love cod as long as it's fried. And I bet his is not fried. I'd imagine not. No, maybe he's just having cod sushi. Doesn't really say like how it's prepared, but Jesus. And also the, you know, hour of cardio and 90 minutes of heavy weights.

Yeah. I don't have two and a half hours and I, I'm never going to look like the rock, even though the rock is exactly my age. Oh, okay. Did not know that. Yeah. Me and the rock are the same age, which is scary. Cause he gets better looking every day. And I look like I should be in the morgue.

That's true. It is. I don't know. Try that cod thing up. Oh, God. I went to the world famous Roxy the other night to go see ride a band that has, uh, basically just reformed after 24 odd years.

I talked about it a little bit as closing shout outs last week, but I'm talking about it again, because this is the best show that I have been to easily in 10 plus years. They were beyond good. They sounded better than they did the first time around. They sound just like their album.

It was really, really good. People started to kind of lose their crap in there. Um, if you were ever a fan, you need to go see them one while they're doing their reunion tour. Uh, and if you were not a fan, um, much like my wife who was sitting there and had never heard them before, she has been listening to them all day for the last two days because the show was that damn good.

Like she said, it's the power of live music. Uh, they were unbelievable. We have a link in the show notes to their best of a great, great band. Now you're a huge cure fan and the cure, which I discovered this summer because or last summer, because you told me they put on one of the best live shows of all time and I went and saw them live and it was the single best live show I've ever seen in my life.

Um, how do you compare the two? Uh, very different bands and very different styles. Uh, ride are very shoegazing. And I think it's just because I haven't seen them for so long for me. I almost forget how good the cure is because I've probably seen them about 45 times in my life. Okay.

So yeah, you know, I given the choice between going to see the cure or ride at the Roxy, I would take the cure. But I mean, that's also another big difference. When you go see the cure, it's at the stadium, you know, this was enough of the Roxy's a 500 capacity. Yeah. The Roxy is tiny.

The last, the last thing I saw at the Roxy was white trash wins lotto. I think that was one of the last times I was there too. Yeah. Four times in a row. It took, uh, I got, I took everybody I knew that week and I took a Fabrice from Milli Vanilli with me that one time, which was a very bizarre experience.

I have to say bringing a rock star to a rock show was strange. I've done it many times. I'm sure you have. Yeah. Yeah. You're, but for me, I've done it once. So it was a, it was an experience. So I've got a shout out this week to Roscoe P. Coltrane, James Best, the actor that played Roscoe P.

Coltrane on the Dukes of Hazzard, unfortunately has died. And, uh, I love the Dukes of Hazzard when I was a kid. Uh, we've got a couple of videos in the show notes and, and amazingly, I found it this morning on, they were doing a marathon on TV. So I watched, uh, a couple episodes and, uh, yeah.

Uh, and I've also got a, a family feud with the Dukes of Hazzard versus the Waltons. And it's a, it's a very interesting clip, but not so much for the Dukes of Hazzard or the Waltons, but for Richard Dawson, who used to be the host of the family feud, who was just such a player that you forget about the fact that he was drunk completely every episode and kissed every girl that came on the show on the lips.

Oh, I totally remember that. I was never a huge, uh, uh, Dukes of Hazzard fan, but I do remember Richard Dawson. He was awesome. He was so awesome. So on that note, I think we're going to call this a day, sir. Let's get to work, man. We've got some work to do. You and I both have a ton of crap to get to today, so it's been fun.

And, uh, are you still here next week? I am back to Chicago on Thursday, so I will not, I will not, uh, get to see you unless you want to come out to the lovely land of Hollywood. Yeah, I was just out there two days ago. Yeah, no, nobody wants to go to Hollywood, but that's where my office is, so.

All right, man. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. No, really, it is. Go to our Patreon page or at patreon.com slash GOG and pick your level of awesomeness and we'll love you forever. If you can't spell Patreon or you just pronounce it wrong all the time like I do, go to grumpy oldgeeks.com and follow the links.

The level of love is still the same. We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Please go to grumpy oldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars. Better yet, turn a like-minded friend onto the show so you can make fun of us standing around the water cooler on Mondays. You can also find us at facebook.com slash grumpy oldgeeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast.

Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy oldgeeks.com slash 104. Dear Obama, quit looking at my dick.

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