144: Internet of Poop

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.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for January 22nd, 2016. I am Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are you, Jason? Oh, man. It's been a crazy week. Hot water heater's back in action. But as soon as we turned the water back on, yeah, somewhere in the middle of the yard, a pipe burst.

So flooded the backyard, completely ruined the entire weekend. And we're just totally dug up now because we can't find it. And we can't afford to have anybody come out and properly dig it up. So fun times. All right. Well, you can basically, I would order a hat from Amazon and put on your best Indiana Jones outfit and just go out there and do an archaeological dig.

Yeah. There's things called power lines and gas lines that run through the yard, which I... Details, details. I know. Nobody cares about details as we were just talking about before we started the show. Oh, yeah. I'm really not into that kind of adventure digging. Okay. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Jason.

I've actually, I'm maybe a little bit slow today because I had a friend come into town from Brooklyn. And every time she's here, I might be a little bit hungover this morning. Oh, my God. You went out and got drunk. Hmm. Surprise. Yeah. Good times. And I woke up bright and early this morning and got my tickets to see Lush at the Roxy.

I am so excited. I think that took care of my hangover in two seconds. Awesome. Feeling good. Excellent. I'm glad you got the tickets. Me too. Sold out in like three minutes. Oh, my God. I was sitting here reloading. I fucking hate the process of buying tickets nowadays. I would rather have been up at like five in the morning lined up in front of Tower Records, to be honest.

Yeah, seriously. It's the web sucks. What are you going to do? The web sucks. So say the grumpy old geeks. All right. Wrap up the show. That's it. We're done. So I want to point something out to people who are probably new listeners to the show coming in. On our iTunes page right now, it says that we're a clean lyrics podcast.

We're not. Sorry. Yeah, we're definitely not. So if you are offended, stop listening now. This is one of those pesky detail things that we were talking about that people don't pay attention to. Yeah, yeah. So we are now on Blog Talk Radio, and we've had to port our feed over. So if you had to re-download some old episodes, if they automatically downloaded, apologies.

Chances are, if you're using iTunes, you probably didn't even notice because shit like that happens all the time anyways, and you just throw your hands up in the air and say, I don't know what's happening. Yeah, yeah. I didn't get it on Overcast, but I just didn't even. Really check. So I don't know. I didn't get a notification on my watch that said that there was a new Grumpy Old Geeks when we flipped the feed.

So we'll see. Yeah. But yeah, one of the things that they didn't do is actually respect the fact that every single episode that we've ever done has been marked explicit and that the show itself is marked explicit. Yeah. So we're working on that right now. We hope to have that fixed shortly.

But again, like you just heard me cuss, stop listening if you get offended easily. Yeah. This is your warning. So if we get an email from you saying, oh, my God, you guys are jerks and you soured my life forever, you were warned. Yes, you can fuck right off. Exactly. So we talked about drones quite a bit on the show, and I found a great little spot on Gizmodo.

It's, you know, we've been talking about how those VR races that they're doing, the kids are doing in the woods are so neat when they wear the VR goggles and you get to see it. Well, this is like straight out of Wipeout Excel. It's like this, it's in Vegas, and it's like this Neon Tron course with flames and stuff.

And it just made me think, it's like, man, if they could make a Wipeout Excel recreation that you could fly your drone through, how cool would that be? That would be pretty cool. I do remember Wipeout Excel. It was a fun game. Actually, a mutual colleague of ours is very much involved with this, Lisa Jansen, who I'm sure you remember, Jason.

She is out in Vegas, and I've been seeing posts from her Facebook about this for like the last couple weeks. So she's somewhat involved in some way, shape, or form, so I should probably reach out to her. Okay. Yeah, my drone buddy is Eddie Codell, who does a ton of really good work, but his stuff is more professional than this.

Yeah, so after you posted that in the show notes, I threw in a little gif that I thought perfectly summed up the state of tech. If you are not following us on our socials, you should, because you would see it there or on our Patreon page. So go take a look, because I thought it was hilarious. Yeah, it was pretty good. We're not going to spoil it for you.

Yeah, go take a look, people. Oh, man. So after last week, you know, and the water heater blowing up, and now my roommate's transmission went out on her car, so she's got my car now, so I'm just stuck at home, which is probably the wrong time to do this, but I killed my HBO Go subscription.

Oh, look, you're going to be a target case for my prediction that cord cutting would be a huge topic this year. Yep. Spotify went back to the freebies. Okay. And Netflix is going, too, as soon as I can finish up Jessica Jones. I am loving Jessica Jones. I started it this week. How many are you in?

Five? Oh, you're way ahead of me. I'm only two in, or one and a half. It's excellent. I love it. Okay, cool. Yeah, I checked all the time that I actually spend watching Netflix, HBO Go, and listening to Spotify, and it's almost nil.

I almost never am using these things, so I'm like, why the hell am I paying so much for them? So, bye-bye. I will dare to make another prediction right now. As soon as Game of Thrones comes back, the HBO subscription will return, or you'll just use somebody else's. I'm going to use somebody else's.

There we go. Yeah, because, and honestly, I really don't care that much about Game of Thrones. I don't. I do. I love it. Yeah, it's just sadness porn. Game of Thrones is sadness porn. That's it. It's tits and swords. It's the best thing ever. Go back and watch Spartacus for that. Yeah. Spartacus was great.

Speaking of great things that I think are about to be ruined, we both loved Ready Player One. That was one of our favorite books ever. Warner Brothers is making a movie. Of course they are. And you can go right now to ReadyPlayerOneMovieCasting.com. All right. Because they're looking to cast the characters.

Okay. Thanks, Brian Blondale, friend of the show, who sent that to me and said, I'm sure you're going to be pissed off about this. You're right. And Spielberg is directing it. Well, it's just. Hey, it's better than George Lucas. Come on.

That is true. But it's such a genius book. And after the whole Ender's Game thing, I had Harrison Ford. I had hopes. It was crap. True. True. You know, let's see if Spielberg can pull one out of, pull one out in his old age. We'll see.

We'll see. In related news to this show, and something that we talk about all the time, the World Economic Forum has basically released a study saying that the digital economy is going to kill us all. What, is it going to go rise up and grab a sword and just chop our heads off?

I don't think it'll use a sword. Okay. It will use something. You know, okay. The second machine age is what this is all being called. The Germans refer to it as Industry 4.0 because we're German and that's what we do. We don't give it stupid names. World Economic Forum is calling it the fourth industrial revolution, but there are three major myths about the digital economy, all of which I think we've touched on many, many times.

There's a great article in Recode. Myth number one, a bigger digital economy means greater economic growth. No. No, it does not. Myth number two, all we need is greater technology investment. No, because really all we're investing in are stupid apps that basically make things that weren't that difficult even easier.

And myth number three, the online giants will continue to dominate the digital economy. So this is a, they're saying no to that, but we'll see about that. I don't know. That one I'm not entirely sure I agree with because I think Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, all these massive dominating brands are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Oh, kind of like MySpace was the, it was never going anywhere either. MySpace is always kind of a piece of shit. We talked about this before though. I think there is critical mass now and there's general acceptance. MySpace was still a bit early on for people. Now social networking is entrenched. Your mom and your dads are doing it and yeah, we're not moving anywhere.

Okay. We'll see. We'll see. And in related, US News and World Report ranked the best countries in the world through a variety of metrics. All very interesting. Number one, the Germans. Of course you're going to post a link to this, you kraut. Number two, Canada, which will probably be my future home.

Number three, the United Kingdom. I've, I lived in London. I would love to live there again, except it's too damn expensive. And we're number four. We're number four. Yep. We're fourth. Okay. Well, it's actually better than I thought it was going to be. Me too. I was actually expecting the US to be far further down, but you know, we just make too much money and you have to factor in that the 1% life is a gazillion times better than everybody else's.

So they, they tip the scales. Yeah. They blow the curve. Exactly. In the news. In related news, the World Economic Forum also published the Future of Jobs, a new report on Monday that basically said that robots, automation, and AI will replace up to 5 million human jobs by 2020, which is not that far away.

And when you think about the world population though, that's actually not that many. When you're, when you're dealing with 7 billion, you know, of us, but we're already seeing issues. See every other episode of this podcast. Yes. No lack of no lack of middle class, et cetera, et cetera. I think we did a report a while back that it was talking about the best jobs for longevity and I, and we settled on becoming Pilates instructors.

It was, well, Pilates instructors are robot technician. That's pretty much it. Yeah. One or the other. So related fields, obviously. I think, you know what I, you know what I think we're going to need? I think we're going to need an Uber for drone recovery.

So when you lose your drone, you can just call somebody that will go out and find your drone for you and bring it home. Yeah, that's true. That might be interesting. That might be a good job to have. Yeah. Speaking of that. Yeah. That's also related. There's a lot of news that came out from Amazon about their drone program. A couple links in our show notes.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that they're, they're basically trying to plan for everything. The one thing that they can't do, of course, is they can't weaponize these drones. So the big issue that they have right now is thieves that have guns. Basically, the company is hoping that people will get tired of shooting at its drones once the novelty wears off.

Yes. Get off my lawn. And the funny thing is, it's like, they're saying, you know, it was a David Pogue did the original article, the original interview with the guy. Yeah. And he's like, you know, yeah, they're talking about the people shooting down their drones and they're like, what are you, what are you going to do about that?

He's like, yeah, I suppose they could, but they could shoot at our trucks too, you know? Yeah, fair enough. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You can't plan for everything. You can't. Without weaponizing. No. Then the world is over. Oh, man. WhatsApp, which I never use. I use it a lot.

You do. Did you, so you, you paid the $1 annual fee? No, I did not. Maybe, maybe it's because I had it way earlier. I, I don't know why. Um, I've never paid any money for WhatsApp and I use it a lot. Okay. Cause I saw that they were dropping their $1 annual fee, which I assumed everybody had to pay because, but I've never used WhatsApp.

So I saw that you posted that link and I went, huh, I've never heard about this $1 fee. Interesting. So I don't know what's up with that. Maybe you were grumpy old grandfathered in. Could be. That's, that's the only thing I'm thinking. And I saw this on Bloomberg this morning. Um, Google and Apple, you know, they are, they're very, very rivalrous companies.

Rivalous. I'm making shit up, man. It's early and slept more than three hours in a row in five weeks. So I get to make up some words. Okay. Um, yes. So they're rivals in, in many aspects, but it turns out that Google paid Apple $1 billion to keep the search bar on the iPhone.

That's insane. That's a lot of money. But it totally makes sense. How many people are out there with iPhones and, and most people are just mobile. Now we talked about how last week, last episode that the desktop is dead and people are basically just on their mobile devices all the time now.

Yeah. Yeah. The unwashed masses, you generally stay on their mobile devices. I live on my laptop. I don't know what I would do without it, but yeah, a billion bucks, man. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, I think Amazon might need to start paying off some money over to, uh, Apple as well, because goddamn, if amazon.com does not work great, it works horribly on the iPads.

Yeah. I, I only have to fix that crap. No, it's terrible. I mean, I have two links. I have one for the Amazon app and I have one for amazon.com on my, in my home. And, you know, I kind of toggle between the two, depending on what works that day. If I really need to buy something, it's like, oh, I'd rather just wait till I get home and use my laptop.

Yeah. Yeah. It's generally a lot easier. Uh, title is still around. Really? Yep. And I love, love, love the tagline on this article. One of Jay-Z's 99 problems seems to be billing errors. It's a great tagline. Uh, they accidentally charge X subscribers and reactivated accounts that were shut down.

Well, you know, accidentally is not, we don't know about that. That might've been, I call bull crap on that. Uh, yeah. So if you ever did sign up for that stupid ass service in the first place, uh, you might want to check your credit card. Absolutely.

Cause yeah. And the, just the crazy part was it's like, oh, okay, well, you know, we're sorry we charged you. We're going to refund the money and we're going to give you three free months that auto renew. Yeah. So they fixed, they fixed that part too, but yeah, that's why I'm saying, I don't really know about that.

Yeah. Uh, and the internet as we know it is now officially dead. How so? Well, yeah, Verizon is basically going to hope that advertisers will foot the bill for mobile data. Basically they will pay up to, uh, allow you to surf their sites, uh, and have it not be part of your, your streaming data plan.

Okay. These people are insane. Net neutrality is dead. Uh, this is, you know, this is exactly what we knew was going to happen basically. So if they're, if you're even attempting to. At all to compete with Netflix or Amazon, they're basically just going to go around and pay Verizon and then advertise like no tomorrow saying, Hey, you can surf our site and it's not going to ding you because as we all know, we don't have a unlimited plans anymore.

So stop watching Netflix on your damn phone. Do you tell every kid that that, cause that's all they do. This is how they live. They don't even understand what a TV is. Okay. Damn kids. Welcome to the new world, Jason. No, I've, I've actually been co-opted and bought, brought to you by some sponsor.

My, uh, my, so my roommate works with a lot of 20 somethings and I actually had her go to the office this week and ask every single one of them, uh, do they listen to podcasts and 80% of them go, what's a podcast? Awesome. Yeah. So these are 20 somethings who are the hip tech kids, you know, you know, they're Snapchatting all day and doing stuff like that.

And I'm like, Oh, I actually gotten Snapchats this week. I don't know what's going on. The world is upside down, man. I'm telling you. I did my deep dive on Snapchat last week. It's for kids. Yeah. Man. Talk about a terrible UI. Oh, well, it's not meant for old people.

It's, it's meant for an entire generation that, that have grown up without a standard user interface, without menus, without, uh, you know, any of that stuff. So it makes perfect sense for them. It's all a discovery. It's not, I mean, it makes no goddamn sense. Yeah. Uh, and in the mobile world, again, I I'm somewhat happy about this, except for the fact that I'm on Verizon.

Uh, there are getting to be some really decent mobile options for international travel these days. Uh, T-Mobile offers this fantastic plan called simple choice, uh, which basically lets you get roam around all you want in any country in the world. And they don't charge you very much at all, uh, for unlimited data, unlimited data.

You can get unlimited data in a different country now. See, the funny thing is T-Mobile has always been really good about that. I know a lot of people who do a lot of international travel and they have a separate T-Mobile phone just for travel. Yeah. The problem is it doesn't work well here. Well, that's why they have a separate phone just for international travel.

Yeah. Which is ridiculous. Uh, seems to be that Google's project fee or fi, I'm not sure how they're going with it might be, uh, the solution, but, uh, I don't want to go all in on Google. I'm terrified of that. So, but at least for the time being, apparently, uh, my, my wife actually has T-Mobile, so I just use her phone when we're traveling overseas.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Good times. Uh, and then there's a quick follow-up. We talked a little bit about GM, uh, trying to get into the, uh, the automated driving area self and, and ride sharing. So GM actually just bought a sidecar. They're picking them up.

They already have Lyft. So, so they got sidecar, they got Lyft. They're just running around and picking up all these different, uh, different little companies that, uh, that couldn't against Uber. So we'll see what they ended up doing with it. Yeah. And there was an interesting article on CNET talking about, uh, how the, hold on a second.

There's an interesting article on CNET in and of itself as news. Yeah. It's talking about a blast from the past. CNET still, CNET is still around, but aren't they owned by like ABC or something, somebody now? I don't know. I have not followed.

I, CNET used to be my go-to place when I was going to buy new tech. I would read all the reviews there. And, uh, I haven't been to CNET in probably five, 10 years. Yeah. They got bought a long time ago. I was when I was still up in San Francisco and I had a bunch of friends that work there who left after they got bought, but they got bought by like a TV network or somebody.

I can't remember the, the, the details. And I'm too damn lazy to look it up because it was so long ago. Anyway. Yes. Interesting article on CNET, um, where they're saying that the heart of the world's autonomous and connected car research is actually not Silicon Valley. It's a university of Michigan.

Okay. Surprising. Uh, they've got a, they've got a thing called road show, which I guess is all like auto tech, but, uh, I'm going to, the links in the show notes, but they have like a whole testing facility out there. That's, uh, you know, mimics a city and they're doing all sorts of crazy stuff. It's really cool.

Very cool. I'll have to take a look at that and go to CNET for the first time in years. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's like, okay, Detroit, that's probably the best place for it because there's nobody to run over because it's a ghost town. It's a frigging ghost town. Yeah, exactly. Hey, whatever rebuilds that town.

I'm happy with it. Okay. Speaking of, uh, people in cars, uh, have you seen the carpool karaoke video? Uh, no, I have seen it posted everywhere in the world. It's actually really fun. But the, the entire point of it is that the, uh, it basically broke, uh, every record for late show viral videos.

I looked at it last week and it was like at 44 million views, which is nuts. That's, that's crazy. But it's Adele. Anything that she does is going to be massive these days. And this James Corden guy, I'm telling you, I got to start watching the late, late show. He seems to be. I am not a fan of his. Really? I don't think he's funny. I think he's pretty good so far.

Everything I've seen is pretty decent. All right. To each their own. I mean, I'm just done with late show. Like I, the format has burned me out. I have no interest in it. Uh, we'll see the Colbert show is great now because I just look at the guide and see if there's any good interviews and then I just watch the recording and get up to the interview and then turn it off and delete it.

It's perfect. Excellent. Cause he does great interviews on there. He really does. Yeah. Okay. Well, uh, you know, I, I, I'd lie. I'm lying. If I say I'm going to check it out, I'm not going to. Okay. Might as well start being honest now. Um, I will never watch any of that.

So there's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the music industry yet again, which is not really what we need. Uh, this guy named Heathcliff brew, who is, uh, basically an A and R agent, uh, has been, uh, well, you know, he's been a dick. His name's Heathcliff.

Yeah. And he's an A and R agent. Okay. Double whammy. Now the real problem is he's basically acting like the music industry was about 30 years ago and it's not anymore. So he's been sexually harassing all these female musicians, uh, and it's all blown up in his face. And he's issued the standard, I have a drug and alcohol problem and I'm sorry.

And I'm going to go get help and save my, fuck you. You're just a dick. You're just a dick. That's, that's really what the drugs and alcohol has nothing to do with it. That's just another symptom of you being a dick in the music industry. So fuck you. All right.

Say it how you really feel. That's how I really feel about it. Fuck you, dude. Uh, Deezer still around. What? I guess. Deezer? Deezer. It's a, it's a got $110 million funding round after it's 330 million IPO. Didn't work out so well.

I don't even remember what Deezer is. It's a streaming music service. Oh my God. I do not remember this at all. Yeah. I don't either. It's one of the ones I never really signed up for. It is Paris based. Uh, so it was more popular over in the, over in Europe land. So there'd be Deezer.

Yeah. Deezer is where you go to listen to your Daft Punk. No, I've never even heard of this company. Yeah. Uh, and then there's a really good article that I enjoyed, um, on music cloud.com. Uh, technology didn't kill the music industry.

The fans did. Um, it's a good read. It basically just says what we've been saying all along. We praise an entire generation of people that don't want to pay for money. Uh, they don't want to pay for money. Wow. They don't want to pay for music. Well, they don't want to pay for money either. That's true. We don't want to pay for anything. Uh, for me, how freemiums have basically destroyed the working class musician and independent labels.

That's a hundred percent true. Uh, I think the blame is there's so much blame. It can be evenly spread out amongst everyone. I don't think the industry helped itself at all. The record labels certainly didn't. A lot of the musicians didn't because they signed on for things they didn't understand that had short-term benefits back in the day, but obviously in the long-term had completely fucked them.

And the fans haven't helped. So no, we have, trust me, the fans, the fans were the biggest problem at the beginning. Look at Napster, man. We, we, everybody. Are we coming around to the fact that the, the drummer from Metallica should have sued then? No, but yeah, I don't know.

No, trust me. We've done this all to ourselves. Anyways, it's a fun read. I enjoyed it. And if you have any interest in this sort of thing, go read it. Okay. Yeah. Woo. Uh, and then let's go to the science news because it's fun and interesting. It doesn't make me depressed. Apparently certain scientists have broken the speed of light.

How? They reported particles traveling faster than light. And we'll see. Okay. How do you measure that? That's crazy. I don't know. I don't know how you do any of this stuff. Because we're not scientists. I wish I did because it seems like this is a pretty stable industry and very interesting.

And I'm sure they're going to have jobs until the robots take those over too. All right. And also in crazy science news, Caltech researchers find evidence of a real ninth planet. I feel so bad for Pluto. I know. Damn, that's sad. Damn, that Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now, I saw this news is all over the place.

I haven't really read up on it. How have we missed this? Because its orbit is like really bizarre and far out there. It takes the planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make one orbit around the sun. Ah, so it's a way out past Pluto. Yeah, it's pretty big.

But it has a mass about 10 times of Earth. Wow. So there's this huge thing floating around out there. Yep. That nobody can see. That's amazing. That's amazing. And I would like to just clarify, I know Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn't the guy who was the one that started the Pluto thing, but he gets all the heat for it.

Well, he gets all the heat for all science because we're stupid. So yeah, this is a good article on, and it's got like diagrams of what the orbit looks like and all sorts of stuff. So we'll see if this comes in as our new ninth planet. It'll be interesting.

I wonder how the naming is going to be fantastic. Maybe we should just call it Tyson. Security? Ha! I don't know what's going on with you, Jason.

I'm a little bit worried about this whole dog thing. This is the security segment. Now, normally, if you're new to listening to the show, this is, at this point, I put on a tinfoil hat and I take a nap on the couch because Jason has put about 70,000 links in here and I'm just snoozing through the whole thing. Not a one.

Not one. Not one from Jason this week. In fact, only three from me. They're all me. I know. Turnabout's fair play. It's your turn, damn it. You'd be the paranoid one for a week. All right. Well, I'm not going to be terribly paranoid, but here we go.

So here's my take on security. BitTorrent Sync, which I don't use Sync by BitTorrent, but BitTorrent is my preferred client for speaking to people from Sweden. Okay. But they do have an app called Sync and they are releasing encrypted folders in the new update.

So you can really, you know, this is good slash bad. Okay. Depending on your feelings on encryption and what people may be using these services for. But yeah, so they've released an update that does quite a lot of different things, including running as a Windows service.

But the main thing being that you can now have encrypted shared folders. Interesting. Okay. By the way, I use Transmission for speaking to Sweden on the Macintosh. Yes. Okay. Maybe I should upgrade that. Yeah. Well, as long as you're using the Macintosh. I've used BitTorrent Sync before and it was right when it came out and I used it to sync all my home machines and I stopped using it when I got rid of all my home machines and went down to one machine.

So I didn't need to sync with myself. But when it did work, it worked fairly well, except, you know, every now and again, you'd get some kind of hiccups, but same thing happens with Dropbox too. But the encrypted folders thing is good. That's very good. Yeah, it's pretty cool. The big story that did the rounds everywhere, I always, my barometer for this is, do they talk about it on the Today Show in the morning while I'm having my toast?

And they did. They release Splash Data every year, puts out a list of the stolen passwords made public and then sorts through them in order of popularity and finds that we are all stupid and still use really bad passwords. Do not count, do not say we. Yes, I know. One password people, but I'll get to that in a second.

So they put out their list of the 25 most popular passwords of 2015. Now, everybody leapt on this and that's all they talked about. There's a deeper bit of the data that they don't talk about, which is actually the frequency, the number of stupid passwords is down considerably.

Well, that's good. There are less people using them than ever before, but there are still a lot of dumb passwords. And apparently Star Wars was very popular this year. There's a lot of people using different Star Wars passwords. So, yeah, I actually saw this on my Fox LA because I don't watch whatever morning show you watch.

I put on the dumbest morning show that I can find, which happens to be on Fox. Fox. Shocking. Yes, but they're pretty funny. I got to give them credit. But if you want to find out how easy it is to get on TV when you're in Los Angeles, turn on my Fox LA in the morning and you will see that it does not take much to get on television.

No, it doesn't take much. Yeah, I even heard this on Stern because I have Sirius in my car and every now and then when I'm driving around. Oh, you're the one that has that. Yeah, I'm the one. It comes with a car for like a year and then I just paid for it, got it again because I don't know.

Why not? Anyways, but even he, they talked about it a little bit and it's just a 1Password people solves everything because he was like, I'm never going to remember a long random password. You don't need to. There are programs that do this for you. There's 1Password to rule them all. You just need to remember 1 and it saves everything.

Now, I do understand. Well, first off, people are just too lazy and they never go and do it except for like maybe three of our listeners who have went and got 1Password. We're up to nine. Nine of our thousands of listeners have actually got it. That's not bad. Let us know if you did. So we'd like to update that number. The one issue I will say about it is they still, it's a pain in the ass on mobile.

On your desktop, totally simple. Piece of cake. Unbelievably easy to make your passwords very, very difficult. And get into your sites without any issue. It's still a pain in the ass on the phone. I don't have a problem with it at all. I just want them to build it into things.

Well, it's in the share sheet. So make sure that you have it in your share sheet. Okay. I will. Yeah. Because you can, for most things, I can just, you know, pull that, pull up the share sheet, go over to it off with my thumbprint and it'll just, it'll fill it in for me. Awesome. I will have to do that next step then.

See? So maybe RTFM. Even I learned. Well, there are no F and Ms anymore. There are. Find me an F-ing M. It's on the internet of things. Okay. Oh yes. The internet of things. We talk about this a lot. There is a reason that, well, first off, Jason doesn't even have a water heater.

And when he gets a water heater, it explodes all the fucking lines under his house. So, uh, he's not buying any of these fancy dude ads for the house yet, but I am definitely not getting them. I was a little bummed. I never got the Nest thermostat in, uh, but then not so much anymore. Okay. Even the Nest thermostats are leaking zip codes on the internet.

Well, if you know where the house is, where the Nest thermostat is, you can probably figure out the zip code. So I don't see that as a huge problem. It's just a list on a, on a vast list, uh, that researchers at Princeton came up with. Uh, they basically went through and studied a lot of these different products that are out there and found out that none of them are safe.

No, they're pretty much. And there's no security on any of them. My friend the other day was like, it's so cool. I've got my lights. I can now control by using Siri and okay, great. Good for you. And then at the end of the day, he's like, okay, this is the 10th time I've had to fix my damn lights.

They kept breaking. I'm like, you know what? Mine don't do that. I have a switch. Yeah, I have a switch and that works nice. I have to say though, because I stayed at his house and, uh, he's got those hue lights everywhere in his entire house. I heard those are bad-ass.

It is. I mean, it's like you're on a Virgin America flight all the time because you can have them like cycle through different colors and change during the day and they automatically switch at night to like, you know, so there's not blue in it. So you're not like, you know, staying up later. Right. All in all, it's a cool system, but the whole, the whole thing just creeps me out.

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't mind so much the light bulbs, but, uh, I'm talking like when you get to the point where you're putting a thumbprint or anything on your door, just use a key and a deadbolt, please. We're not there. No. Cause all that is, is just adding layers of penetration ability because yeah, somebody can steal your key, but somebody can also just kick the door in.

But if you have one of these home security systems, like we talked about on last week's show, people can break into your house and you won't even know it. Yeah. You won't even know. They'll get around it. They'll basically, you know, you're supposed to get a notification that somebody has entered your house, but they've hacked that. Yeah. So you won't and you don't know. And yeah.

Yeah. Let's stay away from the internet of things until Zuckerberg fixes it all. Internet of hoodies. Ooh, let's get that domain name.

A big thank you to both Tedford males and Scott Helgeson, who gave us donations via PayPal and Scott said, love your show. So thank you guys so much. You're helping keep the, the internet of things lights on here.

Yes. Um, and this one, next one comes in from a grumpy old geeks.com comes from Rico says the end is nigh. Toss the Holy hand grenade and pass the gravy. He sends us a link to a motherboard article, uh, entitled to sleep tech will widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

Yeah. It's an interesting article. I know the, uh, the, the gist of it basically being that, uh, wealthy people will be able to pay for some sort of technology slash whatever solution to allow them basically to only sleep two hours a night instead of the biologically required, you know, six to eight. So they'll be able to keep doing more and make more money while all us poor people will be fucked.

I need this technology badly. I definitely need this technology. I don't want it. I love sleep. Well, see, the problem is I can't sleep because of the puppy. So I need this technology just so I can actually have a functional day. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

You've been having some issues, but yeah, this is a really interesting article and, and I, you know, it's not surprising and it's an angle of fear that I had not thought of. So thank you so much. Yes. Thank you very, very much. Disrupting everything. Yeah. Uh, also from grumpy old geeks.com, Ted wrote in, uh, I particularly love this comment.

So here we go. First and foremost, I'm a big fan of your show, but I have an issue with Jason crying about not being able to afford a hot water heater. I swear he just took a vacation and probably use his newest model iPhone, Apple watch, or his new laptop or iPad, which I'm almost positive he purchased recently. Maybe he could curb his frivolous spending.

Maybe he should not have adopted a dog if he has no money. Being a member of the blue collar, lower and lower middle class. I try my best. My water heater died and I went over to home Depot and picked one up. I installed it in the dark, upside down in snow, both ways, both ways.

I've never even missed a hot shower. Of course, I am typing this on a gas Dell desktop PC that I bought scratched and dented, or maybe my four year old Samsung tab. As an adult, I'm forced to skip things. I want to afford to, uh, the things I need. I get being mad about having to repair things, but in the end it's nobody's fault.

But his own rant over. Thanks, Ted. All right. Hey, thanks, Ted. You, you brighten my day. Yes. I know I have a problem with frivolous spending, but I also, I've known Jason a very long time, Ted, and, uh, his, his, uh, priorities have always been a bit strange. Really?

You think so? Well, you know, I mean, back in the day we were all kind of like that tech over anything else. Uh, yeah, no, I mean, you know, Jason has different priorities. Uh, shower. He's got a new tablet.

No, I don't. You have a new tablet. I do not. That's true. I'm the one that got the new tablet recently. So, and fortunately for me, most of my gadgets come as business expenses so I can write them off and we have something to talk about on this show. There is a lot of truth to that as well, Ted, uh, being in the industries that we're in, these are basic requirements for us.

Um, but of course I do have a water heater that's working. Uh, some things are just unforeseen and that you don't budget for it and it happens. Uh, I know that I'm probably going to have to buy a new dryer soon because it's making strange noises. So I, uh, you know, instead of getting the iPad air two, uh, for the wife, I just cheaped out and got the iPad air.

There you go. There you go. All right. So, uh, uh, yeah. Okay. So I guess I should read this one. We switch back and forth. So, uh, this came in from Patreon and we love the comments that come in from Patreon because that means you love us and you gave us a buck or two. Uh, this is from egghead games.

Uh, he slash she writes us pretty often. He is a sad face emoticon about your water heater, Jason. Yes. Yeah. And of course the general evisceration of the USA middle class. Maybe you're not here. If you're pointing out the USA, you might be lucky. Are you in country one, two, or three?

Of the best countries to live in. Or five, six, or seven. Yeah. What's to be done? Bail the rat race. I have been following this guy for years and he has a link to Mr. Money Mustache. Uh, that link will be in our show notes. Uh, normal reaction for people is that that's BS. Uh, that's so stupid hackpad as a child of depression era child and hence a natural cheapskate penny pincher.

I find it resonates. Some of it is just sticking it back to the man that anyone can do. Get a better cell phone plan, smart car and housing choices. Gradually gets more exotic by modern consumer standards. Follow the job money versus do what you love. Dump the constant upgrade cycle. Buy with cash, not credit. And yeah, he's a former software guy.

Advice worth exactly what you paid me for it. I continue to love the show. Get off my lawn. Uh, I did read through all this and a lot of it is pretty smart. Um, I take issues with things like you should always be going around and trying to switch plans to something that's slightly cheaper because that doesn't factor in the, your cost and time, uh, because that, uh, time is money.

And you know, when you, when you start to get crazy like that and you're always switching and you're always researching things that just sucks up so much of your time, uh, that I think could be better spent elsewhere. But a lot of this stuff is really, really good advice and everybody can actually, uh, benefit from a quick read of this and, and trying to integrate some of the ideas into your life.

Yeah. Mr. Money Mustache has been around for a couple of years. I've seen, seen many posts by him and, uh, they're usually pretty good. They're common sense. It's just actually getting off your ass and doing it, which, you know, that's always the execution is the, uh, is always the hurdle. Yes. It's the last mile problem. It's the last dollar problem.

Exactly. Uh, always appreciate it. I love, we love it when anybody writes us, we like to talk about it. So, uh, if you want to get in touch with us, you can find us on Twitter. At GOG podcast or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpy old geeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air with a little checkboxy thing.

If you have friends, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out. It'll only take a minute or two. Go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes. And it'll take you right there. At the library.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. So I could finish. I could get that last, last 10 pages problem done. Uh, written in fire by Marcus. Okay. Yeah. I, I, I was also up. No, I, I have that last 10 pages problem. I'm almost there.

Oh man, I'm annoyed with you. Cause I was so tired last night and I was like, I got to finish this. I told Jason I'd finish this. I, yeah, I was so close. And then, you know, uh, sleep issues. And I just, I was almost done. And then I just fell asleep. All right. Well, uh, I liked it so far.

I love it. It was good. I don't, I, I, I, I can't spoil it for you. So I, I don't know what else to say. Yeah. We'll have a much more in-depth review next week, but, uh, for, for the most part, I'm actually enjoying the book quite a bit. Okay. And, uh, you had two other books that you said you were going to have read and be discussing on today's show.

Yeah, that didn't work. That didn't work at all. Interesting. Yeah. That's the way it goes sometimes. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I finished it last night, so I have no idea what I'm going to read next. Um, but I will have something else read by next week, I suppose.

And you're not allowed to start over on Dune again. Oh no, I only do that once a year. Oh, great. Oh wait, it's a new year. It's a new year. Software, apps, and gadgets. Oh, remember the browser wars.

Oh yes, I do. All right. We're getting another new browser. Oh, great. Just what we need. Um, it's called the Brave browser. Okay. Brought to us by Brendan Eich, one of the co-founders of the original Mozilla Foundation and creator of the JavaScript language. Uh, he's announced a new venture called Brave software and, uh, they're going to give us a new browser, which will block ads and speed up the web and save everything and hopefully not make us all redesign everything all over again.

Yeah. I won't be using this one because I know Brendan Eich from way back in the day and, uh, almost got in a fist fight with him. So I'm going to pass on that one. To be fair, it's a short list of people that you didn't almost get in a fist fight with. This is true.

This is true. In my younger, in my younger days, I was a little bit of a douche bag. Shut up. Okay. Moving on. Uh, I have mixed feelings about this because I basically put a media thing, a music thing in software apps and gadgets because it's more software than music.

Massive attack has released an app that uses your iPhone data to give fans unique remixes. I don't know how exactly this works under the player or under the hood. Uh, it's called Phantom. It works with iPhone five S and up. It has original music that they have written in there that does different things depending on what you're doing with your phone.

I hate this crap. I mean, I liked it. I put it on. I've been listening to it. I don't want to interface with my, with my music from massive attack. I want to hear what massive attack wrote. You don't want to, I would like an album for massive attack. I don't want various bits and bobs of music that move in and out depending on how my phone is moving.

I know that this is where everything is going. Um, we talk about this. This is why Snapchat is massive for kids. Everybody wants to be the star of their own story. Everybody wants to be me, me, me. So why shouldn't you be redoing massive attacks music for you? Can you save these remixes?

So it's like not unique every time. Like if you get something that works and you really dig it, can you save it? Apparently you can. I didn't care enough to even try that. Like I said, I just really want to listen to massive attacks music and I love the soundscapes and the different things that they're hearing. I'm hearing in this when I walk around.

I just, I want, I want to download the album. I want to hear what you wrote. That's what I want. Yeah. This is like the musical equivalent. This is the musical equivalent of shabu shabu where you have to go cook your own food. It is a bit that it's, uh, I mean, it's interesting and it's cool and I don't mind the concept and they released it for free.

Okay. Uh, well then you can't complain. It's free. I know, but now put out an album that I will pay you for. And I'd rather listen to that anyways. Well, maybe they've got one in the cannon. This is the precursor like PR push. I am hoping so. Uh, apparently they did an interview with motherboard and they said the idea for the app came about while considering remixes for release.

Why would we put out a pre-mixed album out there when there's all these algorithms that'll mix this for you? Robot revolution. God. Come on people. Write your music. Please. I love massive attack.

Media candy. Adam Ant is one of those guys that was around early eighties, you know, late seventies did crazy ass stuff. In fact, I actually remember I was working with Coldplay and they did the whole Viva La Vida thing. So they had these funky outfits and, uh, the first time that they, I guess, kind of mostly premiered them here in the U S was, uh, I think it was a Jimmy Kimmel.

And they were, I walked backstage and walked into their dressing room and they're all wearing them. And I was like, Hey, wow. You kind of reminded me of Adam and the ants. Uh, they didn't like that very much. Anyways, Adam Ant is an interesting guy. Uh, he has had some serious mental illness.

Um, and he tried to do it like a 2013 musical comeback. Uh, at that time they did a documentary about him and that is currently playing here. In LA. I'm very interested in seeing this. Um, he's an interesting character and he was a huge rock star and it all kind of went away because he had so many problems, uh, mentally and legally.

So I, I'm very curious about this guy's story. No, I'm definitely want to, I want to check this out. I was a huge fan of his back in the day. And, uh, I, for some reason I thought he died a couple of years ago, but that was just his career. Yeah, no, it was just his career. Um, yeah, I think it was 20, yeah, around 2013, when he tried to do a comeback, there was a lot of news about him and then it just went away again.

And I think he's one of those guys that, uh, that the, uh, Facebook, uh, death rumor mill constantly kicks up, but he's not dead. Okay, good. Abe Vigoda though, still alive. Still alive. Still alive. Um, Black Mirror, which we've reviewed several times every season. They come out with new stuff.

We always review it. And it has now been picked up by Netflix for 12 episodes. So hat tip of this one comes from friend of the show, Calbee Monday. And I am just extremely excited about this. Everything is Netflix. I thought you canceled Netflix, Jason. Well, I doesn't mean I have to watch it on Netflix.

Okay. That's true. And in other Netflix news, Pee Wee Herman is coming back. Yay. He doesn't, he, I mean, I know he's caked with makeup, but he does not age. No, they just dip him in, just dip him in the makeup vat. But yeah, he's, he's, he ages well.

Uh, I'll probably watch this. I do. I enjoy me some Pee Wee Herman. I like the, the insane world he's created around himself and, and I'll watch it. I'm sure I'll watch it. Yeah. I'll come over to your house and we'll watch it on Netflix together. All right. You get a ride with large Marge over here. Okay. Uh, Star Trek, the ultimate voyage is a concert tour.

Uh, they've got over a hundred dates and they're going to be playing all the music from Star Trek. I'm actually kind of interested in this. You know, I went to one of these things where they did all the Lord of the Rings music and I was just fantastically bored. I mean, you know, I think the problem is because they didn't give you an app that would let you remix all the music yourself.

Yeah. Could be, but it was, it was at the Hollywood bowl. So, uh, they had a bar that let me remix whatever I wanted to drink. So that kind of got me through it. Right. Right. Yeah. But, you know, it's, it's a cute idea. I haven't done anything like this yet. So apparently you're not a fan, but I, I will go see this because there'll be projecting, you know, things on the, from the different films onto the screen while they're playing it.

And yes, there will be a bar. Yeah. You know, the bar is the saving grace because these things truly are fantastically boring. Now we've all seen people that go to Starbucks or the coffee bean or whatever coffee shop you have and do their work, right?

Uh, yeah, it's pretty edemic here in Los Angeles where people really don't work and they're all just sitting there on their laptops, typing away on their stupid screenplay. Yeah, yeah, pretty much it. Uh, well, I saw this in, uh, LAist a couple of weeks back and it's this dude that goes to Starbucks with a full audio video setup with like a massive, like 40 inch TV and sets up and just, he does it this around town and it's just kind of, uh, I don't know.

What do you think about this? When somebody comes in and does that kind of thing? Cause I've seen people with towers that come in or IMAX, they come in with an IMAX instead of the table, take up a whole table for four. And just plop down and go. I think it's absolutely ridiculous. Uh, this guy's rig is insane. I mean, he's got a multi-track mixer there.

It looks like he's like mixing for TV or something like that. Oh, this is dumb. No, this is wrong. I mean, there are shared spaces all over Los Angeles and all over every major city, next space, things like that. That's where you go. You pay your 27 bucks or whatever for the day and you set up there.

You don't go to Starbucks and do this. I mean, sure, I guess you can, but you're just a douche. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. This guy's a douche bag. So check out the show notes and for a link to this and you can see the pictures of this guy and his, his setup. It's pretty interesting.

Let us know what you think about this. I like the comment from, uh, some guy on Reddit. It's kind of dickish, but I also sort of admire his chutzpah. I know. See, that's, that's where I'm kind of toward with it. I'm like, you got some balls to do that, but it's still kind of a dick move. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a total dick move.

Uh, speaking of morons, I've got one as well. Uh, remember that, uh, big lottery thing, where it was the $1.6 billion prize and people were kind of losing their minds here. Vaguely, I didn't, I didn't pay much attention to it. I'm not a lottery guy. You and I both think lotteries are stupid tax.

Um, this, this, this girl got taxed hard. Uh, her name is cinnamon Nicole, which alone should probably tell you a couple of things. Uh, she had, she had terrible parents. She spent her entire life savings buying as many tickets as she could afford.

So she'd have the best possible chance of winning Wednesday's one or back then $1.6 billion prize. Uh, obviously she lost and if that wasn't dumb enough, then she took to the internet because apparently she still had a computer and access, uh, to, uh, ask people to donate money, not to replenish her life savings.

So she could then try again at the next lottery and spend all that money on tickets. Uh, they took it down, but surprisingly, and just to prove that she's not the only idiot in this story, uh, she had raised up to $800 before it was removed. Oh my God. So there are, you know, man, I just have no words for this one.

Who's more the pool, the fool or the fool who follows him? Yeah, seriously. Wow. Uh, yeah, I got, I pretty much got no words on this. This is a moron of the week for sure. Ooh, fancy. Fancy.

Ooh, fancy. Now I've taken a lot of road trips. Have you? Not since, uh, no, no, not since I was a kid with my parents. Uh, I know something about that has a, I know I I'm not a fan. I want to be on a plane. I mean, I did do one cross country road trip, uh, a couple of years back with Mr.

Resnick of the Goo Goo Dolls who wanted to take a bunch of his studio equipment from here in LA to Buffalo to record an album there. So I did that. That was a fun ish. Fun ish. No, it was reasonably fun, but, uh, you know, you, there, a lot of this country, as you discussed and discovered when you took your stupid train trips is ugly and boring and not good.

It is. It's absolutely boring. It's why they're called the flyover states because there's just nothing there to do. Um, and I've done this cross the cross country trip, you know, eight times now. So, um, so I was very intrigued when I saw this, uh, website come up called losted E minor.

And, uh, the article is why pay for hotel rooms when you can sleep comfortably in your car now. Toilet shower. I'm just spitballing some ideas here. Yeah. Uh, air conditioning, uh, vending machines anyway.

So there's this company out there who, uh, makes a car mattress. Umers is E-U-M-E-R-C-E is the name of the company. I don't even know how to pronounce that, but it's kind of a customized air mattress for your backseat. So it turns your entire backseat into a, you know, a flat air mattress that you can sleep on.

It gives you more space. Now, I don't know about you. I've got a Ford Focus, which is a compact car. So I have a mini. Yeah. So yeah, you're in the same boat there. Now I don't care how much extra space I get in the backseat with this thing. I'm still a little longer than my car is wide.

So comfortably would be a stretch. Yeah, definitely. Um, and the, uh, just, I love the names of why pay for hotel rooms when you can comfortably sleep in your car. Well, because it's, it definitely sucks. Anybody who's going to be spending a, you know, a lot of time in their car sleeping probably is living in their car, which means that almost everything, yeah.

Work for a tech company and are in the parking lot. I think we covered that story a few times. Exactly. And also everything that they own is already going to be in the backseat. So you can't, I don't know, but I, yeah, I don't really see what the target market is for this. Cause if you're really into, you know, camping out and things of that nature, you have tents and you're not going to be in your car.

Um, this just seems pretty silly to me. Yeah. I just wonder if they focus group this before they actually went out and built it. Well, it is neat how it fits in and everything, but yeah, I can't imagine ever wanting to use anything like this. And God, journalism, bade adieu.

You can now bade adieu to achy backs. Isn't it bid? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Just checking. No, no, nobody's spellchecks anymore. That's yeah. Grammar, words, language, emoji. Totes. The web's not dead.

Oh no, it's not. I was bouncing around the internet looking for something to do while my, you know, I think my tea was brewing and I found this great story about the shit pyramids of King Snifferoo. I just love the title.

I know. It's a, it's basically a post about all of the pyramids that came before the great pyramid and how they learned how to make pyramids by making really crappy ones. I, when, when you put the link in, I, I was a little disappointed to find out that these were not pyramids actually made of shit.

I was too. I thought it was going to be, so I started with disappointment, but then I actually went through the whole thing and it's actually a fantastic, great article about, yeah, the history of how they learned to make pyramids. Yeah. It's really fun. I enjoyed it a lot. So thank you, Jason.

You're welcome, Brian. No problem. I also found something of interest. This is a story by Julia Blues and it's on Vox. I asked eight researchers why the science of nutrition is so messy. Here's what they said. For next week, I'm going to ask eight editors from websites why they can't make real titles anymore and see what they say.

But yeah, it was a great run through about how complex all of this nutrition stuff is. You and I have had some discussions based on our buddy, Tim Ferriss, and his book about this sort of thing. So I thought this was a really interesting read into basically it's all so complicated that it's almost impossible to tease out cause and effect to any specific things.

And unless you can really do studies, like you'd have to lock someone away and say, you're just eating fruits and veggies for the next 25 years. You know, we should, yeah, we should actually like outsource this to North Korea because that's probably the only place in the world where you can actually do a study like this.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And basically the study or this article also says that basically everybody lies about not only what they eat, but actually what they do. People lie, not even on purpose. They don't really remember. We all know our memories are fuzzy at best.

We've talked about that more than a few times. But there is some hope that technology may save this as one of the one of the nutritionists says, I want a camera, a stomach implant, a poop implant, and a thing in the toilet that grabs your pee and poop before you flush it away and electronically sends information off of what was in there.

So internet of poop. Yes. The internet of poop is coming probably. Yeah. So it was a great read. And the last thing I caught, which I just love, you and I did the metrics thing for a long time and both kind of said, what the fuck am I doing all this for?

Tracking absolutely everything about me. This guy was wearing a Fitbit and he was wearing it as he got dumped by his girlfriend. This is fantastic. I'm sorry, boyfriend. This is, we live in a non-specific world. So yeah, he got dumped by his boyfriend and you got a, the link is in the show notes.

The charts during the breakup are insane off the scale. He tweeted that he actually, the Fitbit thought he was working out because his heart rate rose so high and, oh, this is just absolutely fantastic. No, you have to, you have to go look at the graphs.

It's, this is what happens when you, uh, when you carry these things around. It's just, you get, you get, sometimes you get erroneous data. Or interesting data. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's very, this is a very fun one. Not for him. I feel bad for the guy, but. Oh yeah. Yeah. But he's, he's made the best of it. You know, he's, he's put all this out there and it's absolutely awesome.

So sorry, guy. Sorry, you got dumped, but I love this. I love it. Are you kidding me? Love it. Speaking of the internet of poop, we found, uh, well, I got this from that, that we, okay.

I, I found this, uh, on boing, boing, actually from a tweet, I think from Shani Jardin, uh, the internet of things in your butt, the smart rectal thermometer and a mother, mother board has an article. The title is this record rectal thermometer is the logical conclusion of the internet of things.

Yeah. Yes. It is a thermometer. You can stick up your butt and pair it with your smartphone. Oh God. I love it. This is, uh, again, we are just inventing things that are not an issue.

Uh, this isn't what, yeah, that's, that's kind of, kind of my reaction to, I know we're supposed to have words because this is a podcast, but sometimes you just kind of don't have any. Just don't. But, uh, in this article, uh, at modus mundi on Twitter has my words for me.

Where is your God now? IOT rectal thermometer, all caps. Now to, to be honest, or just, you can take it, take your temperature orally or your underarm or rectally. So hopefully you don't start sticking it up your butt and then say, oh, I don't feel like sticking it up my butt today and pop it in your mouth.

Or, or if you're a real dick, if you have a roommate and you really want to kind of get back at them, you can, you know, say, oh, you feeling sick here? Use my thermometer today after you've put it up your butt for the past couple of months. You know, there are, uh, there are options for having a good time with it, but it is still pretty funny.

I would like to make it absolutely clear that, uh, the person I'm about to talk about has already passed away. So there's no chance of me bringing on his death, uh, shout out to Michael Hutchinson, who was from NXS. Uh, he would have been 56 today. It's his birthday. And, uh, they'll be playing a lot of his music on Sirius XM today.

Um, NXS is one of those bands that I didn't care much for at the time, but I've grown to appreciate later on in life. And, um, he was, he was a true rock star and a great singer. And a lot of that, a lot of the early music is fucking awesome. So shout out to, shout out to him. Yeah.

I miss them. They were good. Yeah. You know, they're still around sadly, but they, I think they're the band that they took the winner of one of those stupid contests and made him the new singer. That's exactly what they did. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I'm don't listen to any of that crap. People go back. Go back. Go listen to devil inside. That's one of their, Oh, hell yeah.

That's a great album. Yep. Yep. Well, that's all I got for this week. So thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at JPD.me. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. And you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG.

We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to, or can't donate, but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show. Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Apple Music.

Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy. And he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 144.

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