17: There is no spoon

Hello Jason, how are you doing? It is balls hot here. Yes, I hear you're having some really crappy weather actually and you may have to like unplug from your computer in case the

thunderstorms kick up. Yeah, pretty much every day about this time a giant line of thunderstorms comes rolling through with massive lightning and winds and rain and hail. It lasts for about an hour or two but we lose power every day. So I gotta turn my iMac off if the lightning starts. I'm recording on my air so this is the first time I've got this rig up. Interesting. Yeah, well, you know,

it's a it's a 80 degrees and sunny here. It's 90 degrees muggy and miserable here. Yeah, the bugs love it though. I mean, it's I got this big bay window that I'm looking out and these bugs are just trying to get in all day long. Nasty. Yeah, I miss LA for that. Oh, oh, moms. Wow. It's a good thing that we run through the little checklist before we start like turning off our phones because as moms are want to

do as soon as I hit record, my phone started ringing. Hi mom. I'll talk to you later. Mine's upstairs. They were the one day these okay. These people have don't do anything past two o'clock in the afternoon since I've been here. It's pretty much work in the morning then by two o'clock crap out on the couch flip on Netflix have some ice cream and chill really and up until five minutes before we were recording. It was just like a madhouse here. People are slamming doors running around carrying

boxes because you're getting ready to move. Yeah. The one day, you know, is the day that we record. That's a good schedule though. I'd like to be able to do that. I personally get up really early and I like to get my workout in and get a lot of work done and by around this time in the afternoon, it's 1.30 here. I'm kind of like done except for the fact that I'm not because I will continue to get emails until six. Yeah. And I'm on the East Coast now so if I stop at two, you guys haven't

even gone to lunch yet. Yeah. Well, next week let's try to do the podcast recording a bit earlier so we can get on with our days. Okay. So anyways, here we are. It's up to you, lazy boy. I know. I'm so lazy. So have you finished this goddamn Seneca book yet? I have not finished it yet because I finally finished that goddamn stupid artificial intelligence book that I finished reading and he's going to have a third which I of course will now have to read because I feel like I'm in it now. But I did, I finished it

earlier this week and I've been able to spend two nights reading a bit of the Letters from a Stoic and I have to say I really fucking love it. It's fantastic and I can't believe that I hadn't even heard of him until now. Wait, you started with Letters from a Stoic or on the shortness of life?

I'm starting with Letters from a Stoic. Oh, Jesus. I read the other one. Damn it, man. All right. Well, talk about the other one. Well, it's... I'm really enjoying the writing. I mean, I can't imagine that it's all that different, so... No, it's very similar. And it's, the great part about it, it's 2,000 years old and it's evergreen wisdom. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. There's a...

Letters from a Stoic obviously is our letters. So he's writing to a friend of his and, you know, I've read On Saving Time and it reads like it could be, you know, the seven habits of highly effective people. It's obvious where people get these ideas from. Untrue and False Friendship made me think about, you know, my buddies on Main Street and how some of them are crap and some of them aren't. It's pretty straight up. It's awesome stuff. Yeah, I... That's why I said before, I really think

it's the first self-help book. I think it is too. I mean, there's so many principles in there that you can find in Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, any of these guys. I can't even remember any of these other jokers. But the Shortness of Life is very similar, but it covers a couple different topics, about loss and not really caring to... Like, not getting too involved in material things.

Yeah. Things that can be taken away from you. Right. Well, you're super big on that anyways. That's one of your things. Yeah, yeah. And I've actually taken a lot of it to heart lately. I've done a kind of a jihad on my past. Basically, what I've done is I've had these hard drives that I've carried around with me for 20 years. Either... Now they're on hard drives, but I've got CD-ROMs that I burned in 1995

with archives from Spew and all the other stupid projects I did back then. Yeah, I've got stacks of those somewhere, too. I've always wondered, like, if I pop them in, will they even read anymore? Because we've all heard about how CD-ROMs don't really last so long. Yeah, I've actually had a problem with that, with some of mine, on the Mac side, at least, going from, like, OS 7, 8, 9 disks that were burned on OS 7, 8, 9 into OS X.

Sorry. Everything would be there, but it wouldn't show up. So if I went in via command line and just did, like, a touch file and created a new file in the directory, everything would show up in the finder. So the files are there, they're hidden, and it was a nightmare. But I've got, you know, hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of files from movies I've worked on. Basically every project I've

ever worked on, I've been carrying around with me forever. And multiple copies on the same drive, because I'd, like, I'd have a laptop that I was getting a new one, so I would just take the whole thing, shove it in a folder, say, I'll look at it later, I'll look at it later. And now I'd go in there and I'd be like, okay, I've got 15 different copies of the Star Trek website.

Yeah, I've got tons of stuff like that, too. And things that I probably couldn't even access anymore if I wanted to. Like, I don't, you know, I've source files from sites that we built in, like, flash version 3, which probably won't even open in anything anymore. So I've got all the director games, we did a Paramount, you know. So my solution was delete it all. Yeah. I threw it all away.

Well, there you go. I mean, we kind of, I did something similar like that with my company a while back. I still haven't thrown the discs out, but I probably should now. But we kind of decided to do at least somewhat sort of an archive of everything that we've done. And basically what we just did was take screenshots of everything. So we have a shot of what everything looked like. We don't have the actual functioning things anymore, but at least we know, you know what I mean? And now I can get rid of all that other crap, because I'm never going to use it again and never need it. And what's the

point? What's the point in saving all that stuff? Well, I mean, I was a big movie junkie before I got to Paramount. So I kept a lot of movie source files for posters and things like that that we did, and like high res art and shit like that, thinking that, yeah, it might be useful in the future. But turns out I'm the only person that cares about it. So it really didn't turn out to be very useful.

Right. Yeah. So I ended up just saying, screw it and putting it behind me. And yeah, the only time I ever looked at that stuff was when I just accidentally ran across it. And it was just a waste of time. Yeah. It was living in the past. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I have a storage unit just because of our company. And we do have, you know, we have tons of stuff in there, you know, posters and merchandise items that we designed and all that sort of stuff, which I do want to hold on to. But, you know, the other stuff in there,

I could probably just go in there, dump out half of it and stop paying the damn fee I'm paying every month to hold on to a bunch of that stuff. And at some point, I'm going to have to go do it. Because what is the point in keeping all this stuff? Live in the now, man. Yeah, exactly. Seriously. Like I had boxes and boxes of memorabilia and crap like that from stuff I worked on. And somebody had a great idea, like, take a picture of it and throw the thing away.

Yeah, keep a little digital archive on a drive somewhere that, you know, 20 years from now, you're going to be like, why do I have all these screenshots and pictures of all this crap? I'm going to get rid of that now too. Yeah. So I just put the, you know, like pictures of the Howard Stern party buttons we made. Okay. That's up on Flickr. It's fine. You know, it can stay there.

Yeah. And any of the like super important source files, I'll just probably throw on Amazon Glacier and let it sit. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah. And as far as like getting rid of stuff, you can try to eBay stuff now too, I suppose, because there's all, there's always fanboys out there that'll want to buy certain things and whatnot. So maybe you can even make a little bit of money getting rid of that stuff. No, my stuff's all gone. The physical stuff's all gone. Right.

Been gone. I think the last thing that I, I did eBay some of it, but some of it I can't, I couldn't because we had, you know, pre-release posters that we made that, you know, mock-ups that we showed the studio that they picked stuff from. Yeah. I mean, I've got stuff like that too, where I could probably get away with selling it because I may not work with that particular band or management company anymore, but I still, I would feel cause I'm still within the industry. It would feel wrong to do that. So yeah, I'm holding onto it still. And you know, at some point in the far

distant future when I don't really care about blowing up every single bridge known to man, maybe that stuff will make it up. Well, I mean with the movie stuff, the studios come and shut your auctions down. Yeah. Yeah. They're pretty good about that. Uh, because they have a lot more money in the music industry. Not so much. It's, it's, if there's a board manager one day, he'll bring up eBay and take a look at it and go, Oh, what's up with that? Yeah. So I think the mental housekeeping, like house

cleaning has been amazing. So now when I open up my big, uh, main archive drive, it's just clean. It's like, I got my photo archives and a couple like currently active projects in about two and a half, three years worth of recent projects. Anything after that, it's old tech, no need to keep it around. It's gone. Right. It's pretty wise. And Seneca came up with that 2000 years ago.

Yeah. And you definitely have to read, uh, shortness of life. I found that I've got a lot more, uh, quotes from that one. Cause I'm, I'm using a reading it on Kindle now, since I found it's on Kindle. So I went through it and note annotated. I've got like 250, uh, passages marked. Oh, really? Yeah. Is there, I, maybe this already exists. If, if it doesn't exist in the Kindle app, they really should have it. Is there a way to like share those specifically

just with one other person? Like we should be able to become like book friends through the Kindle app. Well, if we're reading the same books, I should be able to see your annotations and things like that. There's definitely some sharing of annotations. Cause when I'm, when I'm reading a book, I'll see a passage that's underlined and I can click on it's like six other people highlighted this passage too. Yeah. Um, I'll get into it though. I would, it would be really smart of them to build out a way to become friends with other people. And so you

only see theirs or there's an option, you know, all annotations, friends, annotations, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. No, yeah. I'm going to look into that because on the, if you're reading it on like an iPad or an iPhone and you're making the annotations, you can't, you can't copy the text.

Yeah. I've noticed that, which is annoying as fuck, but the desktop apps, you can, uh, so I, I, I have a Kindle on my air now and I was going through and looking at all my, the quotes that I highlighted and you can copy and save it out. And it's, it's, it actually puts in the text that it copies where in the book it's at, which is cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I don't know if I can do a group, like a select all copy and paste, but I only tried

it with one item. The sync was a little bit wonky, but it, it definitely worked. I got all of my quotes over to my laptop and I could see them all and, and scroll through them. Yeah. I was trying to do some copying and pasting from the letters from a stoic last night when I was laying in bed. Unfortunately it was after a bottle of wine or whatever. So I was already having problems even just like selecting the text that I wanted, but it didn't go very well. So

yeah, it's, it's not easy when you're sober. So yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Laying in bed, trying not to disturb the, the sleeping wife and a bottle of wine. And it was not, I was not happy. Yeah. But this I'm loving the Kindle app again. I really am. It's a, it's a great app. And like I said, you know, Amazon don't steal this. You know, we came up with the idea here, the idea of having, being able to become friends with your friends through the app and just seeing their annotations and,

even like chatting back and forth with each other while you're reading the same book would be unbelievably cool. Yeah. Book club. Yeah, exactly. Add the book club to your app. All right. And then just send us a couple of checks. We're cool. I just, just make it. I don't care. My life easier.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm down to a stack of physical books now and it's basically the, a book apart stack that I talked about before. Those are my last physical books that I have that aren't collector's items that are being sold. Right. I still have physical books of all my favorite authors.

Some of them are collector's items. Some of them aren't. I just, I'd like the look. You move around way too much, so I get it. But I love the look of just having a gigantic full bookcase in my house wherever I'm at. So I still got that. Seneca covers that in Shortness of Life.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. He covers that exact topic. I'm looking forward to some of the chapter titles just in the Letters of a Stoic and on the reasons for withdrawing from the world, i.e. getting the fuck off Facebook every now and then. Did you see that video that I posted this week?

I did, which is why that came to mind. I need to put that in the show notes. I love that video. It's basically, you know, quit Facebook and what happens to your mind after you aren't burdened by your timeline scrolling all day. Yeah, well, you and I have slightly different opinions on that. I still find Facebook to be pretty valuable and useful for staying in contact with people.

Yeah, I'm just too obsessive. So I actually had to take it off my phone again. So only on the iPad and the desktop. But I can't have it in my phone when I'm out. I'm just always like, took off. The only thing I left is Instagram because I need that when I'm out to take and post pictures.

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, I mean, it's a scourge. I mean, I don't disagree. It's I can't remember the last time that I was sitting around with a group of friends where somebody wasn't actually actively on their phone the entire conversation. So, yeah, and even here and I go in the living room here.

My mom's she's 60 something says my stepdad and I walk in the living room. TV's blaring. Nobody's paying attention. They both have laptops in their lazy chairs and like he's playing poker. She's on Pinterest. I'm like, this is just a bizarre like Twilight Zone world. I live in now. We all live in it now. We all live in it now. We're all pod people. I mean, there's we're just a little bit away from never actually leaving our bed and just being virtual everywhere with everybody all the time.

I don't like it. I like it when the net was might as well just turn it into those batteries, matrix people. That would actually at least be fun. I could wear vinyl and no kung fu. Yeah, that's true. So, OK, lightning's coming. Segment break. All right. Segment break. We'll be back in a bit.

Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. What truth? There is no spoon. There is no spoon.

Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself. Brian, do you know anybody or have you been around anybody that's been homeschooled? I do know one person that was homeschooled, but she grew up in the middle of a buttfuck nowhere.

OK, so she's probably going to be damaged no matter what. Yeah. Yeah. There's some problems there. I met a couple people in the past two, three years who have been homeschooled, and I noticed that they were all really, really socially awkward.

Oh, well, shocking. Like, more awkward than, like, a goth kid. Hey, now you're talking about me. No, so I've met a couple of these people, and they're just a little slightly left to center, you know?

Well, I mean, I was always under the impression that the homeschooling was kind of the purview of the crazy, ridiculously religious, we've got a bunch of guns in our basement when, you know, when the president comes to get us, and all of society breaks down blue, right?

Isn't that basically the only people that do the homeschooling, the Duggars, that sort of thing? No. No, actually not. Yeah, that's a huge proportion. Although the Duggars, I mean, basically, that's a fucking classroom anyways, isn't it? There's how many of them? So, the other people that I met are, who have hyper-smart parents who don't want their kids to go through, like, the crappy public school system.

And don't want to put them through private school either. Okay, I don't get that. Like, okay, if you're concerned about the public school system being crap, then by all means, send them to private school. If you're hyper-smart, you probably have the money to be able to afford that. They're forgetting, at least from my opinion, and I had, I went through the public school system.

It was a different time. It was a very good school system. I got, well, let me rephrase that. You got out of the school system what you put in, even as a young kid, and I wanted to learn. So, I learned a lot. I got really, really smart through public school. There were a bunch of other kids that didn't want to put in any effort.

They probably don't even have a computer to be able to listen to this podcast now. Public schools were fine, but you get the education that you wanted to get out of it. Things may be different now. I'm sure they are. I hear people bitching about it all the time. But my primary point is that school wasn't 100% about an education.

In fact, I would say probably only 30% of it was actually education. The other 70% of it was learning that there are other people on this planet and how you interact with them. I don't disagree. Okay, there we go. These people are idiots for not sending their kids to school.

You need to be able to deal with other people. You need all of that crap that makes us miserable and makes John Hughes such a fantastic director and made him a ton of money and Morrissey sells songs and all of that sort of stuff. You need to be around people, especially at that age. If you are not, you are fucked.

Enter Michaela. Okay. Michaela is this girl that I saw on a commercial here in Pennsylvania, out here in the middle of the woods, for Connections Academy, which is basically a free K-12 homeschooling system.

Yes. And little Michaela, she's in 10th grade. Basically, she wants to spend time on her career, not with the drama of school. So she can dance and sing, apparently by herself, because she's got nobody around.

I did watch that you sent me the video, and I thought that was incredibly curious that they showed every single thing that she was doing, which was supposed to be so wonderful and amazing. She was completely by herself. Yeah. There's not another person in the video. Well, she's not on Facebook because she doesn't know anybody.

You have zero friends. Yeah. Friend recommendations. No one. Well, it makes taking selfies easier because you never have to get them off your phone. But it was just a bizarre commercial that there are people out there that would resonate with this.

It was – it actually – I wasn't sure where you were coming from because when I look at our show notes, like, I didn't know – because we had been talking a lot about e-learning way back in the past. And I was like, oh, well, Jason must have found this great place that does, you know, awesome online learning and didn't even look at the video.

Then I popped the video up, and I was so creeped out. It frightens me. Yeah. This video, it feels like it should be the onion. It's so weird. They basically – it's a free online K through 12 education, so your child does not ever have to leave your house.

And, you know, you put the lotion in the bucket with the iPad and put it down in the hole where you're keeping your kid. It's terrifying. Yeah. There's another commercial that they run. They have hundreds of videos on their channel. And there's one – their new commercial is like a bunch of kids, and their parents are like, hey, come on, time for dinner.

I made your favorite, and they're up there studying and, like, watching the – like, they can't be pulled away because they're learning so much and enjoying it so much. And at least that one is, okay, well, they're learning. This girl just wants to go dance. Yeah, yeah. I just think the social connection is such an important part of growing up.

And we're already having issues, even people our age who were brought up, what we will call in air quotes now, normal, with the whole online thing and not socializing enough and not engaging in the real world. And this whole online public school thing, I just don't see how that can be helpful.

No, I think it's technology gone completely wrong. Well, it's people trying to find and make a buck. I'm not surprised that this is there. It's free. But it can't be free. At some point, they have to do – they probably sell materials.

You probably have to buy these e-books or something like that that they'll sell. There's no way this is completely free. So I'm sure that they have sponsored books that go with their programs that you have to purchase through the app store. There's no way. I'll tell you what. I'll do more research. We'll bring it up next week.

I will tell you exactly where they make their money. I do know that they have private schools that you can enroll in with more one-on-one interaction with the teachers. But I didn't have enough time to do a really deep dive on it. Yeah, because I have questions already like, are they accredited?

You can't just open up a school, can you? Don't you have to – there's got to be some sort of government involvement. I can't just tomorrow decide that my place is going to be Brian's School of Learning and invite, you know, all right, six-year-olds, come on in. Yeah.

I'll tell you what. I'll give you a full rundown on exactly what it is. But there's a site that I found that I thought was just hilarious. It's a sister site apparently. Okay. They're not affiliated, but it's the same vein. It's homeschoolreviews.com. So somebody asked, anyone have any experience with Connections Academy, State Run or Keystone High School, which is private run.

I don't know who Keystone is. I can look into that one too. But this tells you all you need to know. The first reply is, I have an opinion about Connections Academy. I think most homeschoolers would do well to avoid public school programs.

Legally, these programs are not homeschooling. They are public schools, and they are one way for the government to control our children's education in a more covert fashion than trying to pass legislation on homeschooling. How's that for a Monday morning statement?

From Ellie Mae June. Ellie Mae. Well, you know, my thoughts on that go typically the way that my thoughts would go, which is self-selection. Fine. Your kid will not be educated and not be socialized and not be able to deal with the real world.

Therefore, you will eventually leave the gene pool. Thank you. Oh, hey. It's a secular program. No faith-based teaching. Okay. I don't believe that for a second. No, somebody went there. It's a secular program.

Like you've always said about making money on the internet, you have to find the market that hasn't been exploited yet. Most of these things are very religious-based, so they obviously went with, hmm, why don't we do something like this for people that get freaked out by religion? Okay. Well, either way, I'm going to look more into it.

But I just wanted to get the commercial up there so people could see it, and then we can have a bigger discussion about it, because it just creeped the hell out of me. Yeah. The way that the commercial is worded, it's like, this girl is doing this so she can dance and sing instead of going to school.

Again, my other immediate thought after watching the commercial, and it's even better because it's kind of local to your area, was this girl is about to hop on a bus to L.A., and she'll be serving me food. She will be a waitress in Los Angeles soon. I don't think she's going to make it that far.

Maybe. She'd look at her. She's not going to do well in L.A. Well, no, I didn't say she was going to do well. I just said she'd get out here, and she would go on auditions while working at TGI Fridays. Okay. She'll have a lot of flair. 21 pieces.

So, okay, sorry about the crazy aside on homeschooling, but speaking of schooling, do you still have to do a lot of testing in IE? I probably should, but I have kind of unofficially just given up on it, and I don't give a shit if anything works on it or not.

I'm glad your clients let that slide. Yeah. Well, they don't really know, but nobody has IE. Oh, yeah, good point. In the agency world, you had no choice because everybody was on PCs with IE in the studios. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've looked at the Google Analytics stats for even people just viewing all the projects that I work on, and IE is such a small component now.

It's really died. Oh, see, for most of our stuff, the Facebook side was at least 40% IE, 40 to 60. Right. Still IE. Okay. I don't see that often. Unfortunately, IE 6 is dead, so. Yeah, thank God. Yeah. The fact that Microsoft said, no, stop using it.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I still have, you know, the CSS patches and all that stuff built in to deal with IE's weirdness, but I don't test extensively on it. I'll always take a pass and look at it, but I don't test like I used to. Okay. Well, on the Mac, it's a pain in the ass because you've got to run, you know, you've got to add parallels, and there are a couple packages where you can run, like, one version of Windows 7 with all the different versions that you can flip between.

Yeah. But Microsoft did something really cool. They actually will give you VMs with Windows and IE for all of the different virtualization platforms and all the different versions of IE that you can handle. Right. So I've never seen this before.

I wish I'd have had it a couple years ago when I was really, like, intensely doing IE testing. But, yeah, we'll link to the site. It's modern.ie. And you go there, and you pick your operating system, PC, Windows. I hate PC, Windows.

I sound like I fucking Kinko's customers right now. PC, Mac, or Linux, whatever virtualization platform you have, like VMware, Parallels, and they will give you, like, full-blown packages to boot up in your platform and be able to test.

Yeah, it's super fancy. I took a look at it, and it's pretty crazy. I'm impressed that they did it, actually. I'm surprised that Microsoft did this. I'm glad. No, I'm really glad, too. It's great. I mean, for me, again, even on the other side of, like, not really caring too much about what works and what doesn't work on IE, I've always had both sets.

I've always had PCs and Macs around. So, you know, I know a lot of developers have always just been Mac only, but I've always been cross-platform anyways. So, I've never needed to do the VM stuff, although nowadays I do, because I can't have Windows 7 and then Windows 8 and then Windows blah, blah, blah, and all the different versions anymore.

So, this is pretty cool. I'm going to have to take a look at it. Yeah, I think they realize that a lot of content creators are actually working on Macs now, and they just have to deal with it. So, make it easier for them to make a site that's better for their customers, you know? Because that's what comes out of it.

Even though I just kind of, like, praised Microsoft, now I'm going to go ahead and take a dump on them. Content creators have to be working on Macs now, because Windows 8 is not a content creation platform. Anybody that's still doing stuff on a PC is running Windows 7, and they need to fix that with their next version of Windows.

It's ridiculous. Or not. Or not, or just give up on them. To hell with it. Do you see how much money they lost on their Surfaces? Oh, yeah, yeah. Huge amounts of money. I've actually played with the Surface, and it's pretty nice. But iPad, you know, you can't beat the iPad.

It's such an awesome piece of machinery that you're just not going to take the market share away. Yeah, I mean, I thought some of the interface stuff they did on the Surface was really groundbreaking and quite exciting. Oh, better than the iPad.

Oh, hands down, yeah. I hope that Apple steals some of those ideas. And brings it into the next version of their, well, we know it's not coming in iOS 7, maybe 8. Yeah, we know everything that's in 7. Yeah, I was really impressed with the actual UI and Windows Phone 8.

I thought Windows Phone 8 was beautiful. It's just the hardware is cheap. It feels cheap. Yeah, it really does. And that's where it's lacking. Especially considering that your phones and your tablets, those are tactile devices. It's not a desktop thing that's sitting underneath your desk and you're interacting through a keyboard and a mouse.

I mean, those are built to, they need to be beautiful. They need to feel nice in the hand. They need to feel substantive and not shitty piece of plastic, which is what the Surface feels like. That's what it is. That's where they're missing out. Microsoft, if they stepped up their hardware, which they won't do because they don't have their own hardware departments, they outsource everything, that'd be fantastic.

But that's where Apple's still winning. Yeah, embrace glass and metal. Yes. That's what we want to hold. We don't want to hold plastic. No. Agreed 100%. Yeah, if they can get past that, then more power to them because I really liked it. Yeah. It was, you know, I made fun of it just because the little keyboard fold-down thing and they're like, why would you ever want to use it without a keyboard?

I'm like, excuse me. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's nice. So, again, like I said, Windows 8 is fantastic as just a consumerism sort of thing. Sucks for content creation. And Windows 8, I think, is better than iOS 6.

Maybe 7. We'll see when it comes out. I'm actually still enjoying 7. Right. I've got it on the iPad now and the 4S. Really? I haven't taken that leap yet. I'm going to wait. Yeah. Well, the Beta 3 was much faster and far fewer crashes.

It still crashes every now and again, but it's actually really nice. I can't imagine going back. I do have an iPod Touch that is kind of basically my little podcast machine hooked up to a little portable speaker that I can carry around because I don't have a real stereo because who the hell wants a stereo?

And that's still running iOS 6. So, when I'm using that, it just feels like fat and clunky. Right. So, you know, it took a little bit to get used to 7, but it's growing on me. It really is. And the font change, they got rid of the super skinny font.

Yeah. And what was just like a medium skinny font. And it made legibility a lot better. So, I think people are going to like it. They're going to go, what the hell is this for the first two weeks when they get it? And scream and moan and stock price will drop and the sky is falling and somebody go, you know, exhume jobs and get them back on the job.

But I think once they get past it, they'll actually really like it. Cool. Excellent. Now, let me actually ask you a question because I've been thinking about this recently. Have you, you don't have a touchscreen monitor yet, right, for your homework system? Absolutely not.

Okay. There's no reason that we shouldn't have them yet, though, right? And obviously, that was Windows or Microsoft's idea with Windows 8 because that is a touchscreen OS that they've ported to desktops. I have used one.

I have used Windows 8 on a 27-inch touchscreen monitor. It's really dumb. Yeah, it's not practical. No. In theory, you'd think, oh, I would just like a bigger touchscreen.

A, your arm gets tired super fast. It's way slower than using a mouse because you're bouncing around. This guy that I was working with had one. The guy that showed me the Surface, he was a Microsoft fanboy. And he had this giant 27-inch touchscreen.

And every time I'd go in his office and it was off, it was the filthiest screen I'd ever seen. It was like worse than any chick that, like, you know how chicks' computers are. They're disgusting. They're filthy. Cheez-its and everything and hair. Oh, God. God, I never want to use a girl's keyboard.

No. Girls, clean your computers. You guys make fun of us for being dirty? You are filthy. It's disgusting. Yeah, I passed my iPad 2 off to the wife after I got the iPad mini. And I kind of use the iPad mini exclusively now. But every time I pick up my iPad 2, it's fucking disgusting.

Oh, my God. I don't know how you get crumbs in a keyboard on a virtual keyboard. But they figured out how to do it. I don't know how you get crumbs in something that's just basically chrome and glass. Yeah. I'm looking at it right now, and I see this has got to be a potato chip remnant. Whatever. So, anyway, yeah, the problem with a big – it's the same problem, just, you know, expanded.

Amplified, right. Yeah, I brought that up because the next thing I see on our little notes is your seriously want for a treadmill desk. And I was just thinking, you could not have a treadmill desk if you had a touchscreen desktop.

Yeah, you could. That would be even doubly difficult. You'd get used to it probably in two, three days, I think. All right. Because on the touchscreen desktop, you're not typing on it. You still have a keyboard. It's just for gestures and moving things around. So, you know, I'm sure you'd get used to it pretty quick.

I don't see that as a problem. And, I mean, just getting used to a treadmill desk is going to take two, three days no matter what. But you're walking so slow. That looks so beautiful, the one that you put up. It's $1,000, but I think that actually... No, no, no, no, no. The treadmill is $1,000. The desk is $1,500.

So, $2,500 total. Oh. Yeah. Damn it. Oh, I just looked at the little... It's a special treadmill. Oh, you guys with your design. I just saw the optional next desk air shown. I thought that was the whole thing when I looked at it. Damn it.

No, it's just because they have to do the gearing on the treadmills different because regular treadmills aren't meant to go as slow as, you know, a walking pace for extended periods of time because you're supposed to... And the next desk treadmills are rated for six hours a day of continuous walking.

So, a regular treadmill would basically burn up after six hours a day. Yeah, because you're just going all day long. Somebody should get really smart and market it as the Aaron Sorkin desk. Why? Because all they do is walk and talk. That's true.

That's true. Have you watched Newsroom? The new one? I actually watched the first new one last night. I finally caught up on it. Any good? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you didn't like the first season at all, you're not going to like the show.

You're just never going to like it because they're not going to change it that much. But they made changes and some snappier dialogue and they're letting the Sloan character kind of really go into her own and I want to see more of that. And it wasn't so preachy and they're a bit under fire and I'm liking it.

I enjoyed it. Okay. Remind me who Sloan is again because when you say Sloan, I think of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Well, it's the Olivia Munn's character. Oh, okay. Magic Mike Chick. Yeah. Who is smoking hot. Okay.

Well, I'll check it out. I don't want to get too... No, go ahead and don't rush into seeing it. Just watch it some night after you've had a couple glasses and I think you'll enjoy it. It's better than the first season, but again, if you just hated the first season, you're not going to care. I love the first season.

Oh, there you go. And it's not like I'm going to rush to go watch any more True Bloods and Dexter's kind of dumb, but... Uh, I'm still... I'm okay with Dexter still. I'm glad they're wrapping it up because if they tried to keep this storyline and continue, it would be horrible. The fact that I know it's the last season makes it acceptable to me.

True Blood, I don't even know what to do anymore. It's so fucking stupid. Yeah, I think... I saw the first two and I was just like... Because I had nothing, literally nothing to watch and I was just like, oh, if I got it, I don't even know what their exit strategy is anymore.

Like, what do you do? Do you just stop the show? Do you try to reboot it? I mean, nobody cares about the show anymore. They've ruined it. So... Yeah, it's like Heroes. You know, Heroes was great the first season. The first season was amazing. And the writer's strike killed that show. Yeah, it really did.

So, yeah, same thing is going on with True Blood, except there's no writer's strike and they have nobody to blame but themselves. Yeah. And fairies. Fairies. Okay, yeah. So, hopefully someday I'll get that standing desk, but it probably won't be...

Well, actually, no. It probably won't be in my lifetime because it's too much stuff. Yeah, it's... You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get one of those cigarette trays, like the cigarette girls carry at the clubs with the cigarettes, and I'm going to put my iMac on it, and I'm just going to walk around town with that.

Oh, my God. That'll be my walking desk. I think I've just come up with a new idea for, like, workstations. We can do, like, TV lines so that, you know, the fit desk that you love, which is beautiful and I'd love to have, too, but I'm not spending $3,000 on a desk. We call that the Aaron Sorkin. And then we can have the Mad Men desk, which has a bar built into it and an ashtray.

But the bar is just slightly out of reach, so you're always walking towards the bar. No, no, no, to hell with the fitness. That's just for the pure professional alcoholic workers. Comment of the week! Our comment of the week comes from Kevin. I was just thinking you were having production problems, as I hadn't seen a new podcast on my iPhone in a while, and then three showed up today, just telling you so you're aware that I know I now have a backlog to work off.

There you go. So, Jason, can you explain that one? Yes, I can, actually. Oh, fancy. So, when we first started, we talked about this a little bit. We were on Squarespace, and we had to change to our feed-to-feed burner so we could get stats, and then blah, blah, blah.

Then we moved to Libsyn, and moving stuff around. So, now, this week, finally got off my ass, we're on WordPress, we're hosting, we're running everything, and I'm running a plugin called Redirection, so the old links still work, and new links work.

So, for show notes for Grumpy Old Geeks anymore, you can go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 17 for this episode, number 17, or any of the previous episodes or future episodes, just go to the number, and it will take you to the show notes. We're using a plugin called Redirection for this, and what Redirection also does is shows me what's 404-ing that people are trying to get to.

Fantastic. Exactly. And I looked in the logs, and I'm like, why are there 2,700 404s going on? 2,700? 2,700. Thanks, everybody. What the hell? Hey, if there are that many of you people downloading that, how about you go give us a rating on iTunes, please?

Pretty please? Please. It takes two seconds, and really, that's the only way that we're ever going to grow this. Do it. Please. And so, what was happening was, a lot of people were getting, were actually pulling the feed from Squarespace, the old feed that I was still putting links to the media files in, but at 14, we stopped putting media files there and put them on Libsyn.

And we had that redirection going on, where it should have, anybody that was using, like, any kind of modern pod snarfer, it should have flipped the feed automatically, but it didn't. Ah. So, there were still people getting legacy feeds, and I fixed it.

So now, anytime anybody goes to get the legacy feed, we do a rewrite on our side and point them to the proper feed on FeedBurner, so everybody should be getting the same feed now. That also explains why, if you used iTunes and you subscribed, there would be a couple different grumpy old geeks showing up in your podcast list, right?

Exactly. So. Now that's all taken care of, and you don't need to worry about it anymore. Delete the old ones, redownload all the new ones, you're good. You should be just fine at this point. We should have taken care of it on its own on our side. iTunes doesn't sync automatically, though. Like, it'll leave the old ones behind, so you can get rid of the old ones and just keep the new one that showed up.

Okay. Yeah. You tell them. You know what you're talking about. Yeah, I know what I'm talking about. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, for that, though. I mean, if you have a couple different grumpy old geeks podcasts in your podcast list on your iTunes, on your desktop, go ahead and delete all the old ones, redownload them on to your new one, and this should not happen again.

Yeah. This is over. We are now in control. There you go. So that was a nice, that was one of the things we couldn't do at Squarespace was you didn't have fine-grained redirection control. You had some very high-level stuff, so if you posted something one way and you wanted it another, you could kind of throw in one redirect, but.

And then could they get you, get you, get you? Yep. One way or another. Sorry, I had to go for the blondie joke. And now that we're on WordPress, we're going to have more content up there, so check out the website. You can subscribe to the website's RSS feed as well, which is just going to be show notes and the fun stuff that we put up that doesn't make it into the show, or it's not timely, or it's just funny.

You know, cats and, well, we stay away from the cats. Yes. Mostly. Yeah. We like Grumpy Cat. We feel like he's part of our podcast. I love Grumpy Tard. Tard. We should have him sponsor the show. He's rich now. He's a rich cat.

Mm-hmm. We also have launched a newsletter. Ta-da-da. Yeah. Back to 1990. Yeah. As a matter of fact. So if you're too lazy to go to the website to get the show notes and you just want it hand-delivered to you.

Remember, push technology, kids. We will push things to you. We will push things right up your, yeah, e-hole. So we're also going to put in fun stuff, exclusive content. Oh, we are? Yeah. Well, I am, because you don't do shit on that side.

Crap. I'll do more work. It's more work for me. You just sit back and hang out at the beach, you lazy bum beach bastard. All right. So hopefully that answers the question. But you can go to the website, and there's a little thing on the side. Sign up and get goodies.

Right. These goodies. And we'll even start doing some extra stuff on our Facebook, and I've been trying to do the Twitter, so we'll have stuff everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere. And get nothing for it. Yay, internet. In the news.

It's Comic-Con this week. Almost all of my friends seem to be down in San Diego and doing crazy stuff. I'm not particularly that into Comic-Con, and I'm also not that particularly into the horror genre, but there was some interesting news coming out of that that ties directly into some of the stuff that you and I have talked about a lot.

Spider-Baby. Have you heard of horror film blogger Spider-Baby before? No. I have not. I had not either. She is apparently the current girlfriend of Quentin Tarantino. She is fantastically attractive, which is not too shocking.

But, unfortunately, she's made a career for herself being a horror film blogger, writing for multiple different sites, as well as having her own site, her Twitter, blah, blah, blah, blah. She has basically plagiarized the hell out of other people's writing, put in a couple grammatical changes, and added in an introductory sentence, and then basically stole other horror writers'

entire paragraphs wholesale, and made a career out of this. And she thought she could get away with this? She got away with it for an awful long time. How long? She's been doing it for at least four or five years. She was one of the top people in the industry, and, again, bagged Quentin Tarantino.

Wow. So, you know, some people with, you know, horrible senses of irony might say, game well played. Yeah. Wow. That's a long career. Yeah, she's been around for an awful long time. Now, this is basically just blown up in the news in the last week or so, so it's only been relatively recent blogs that people have torn apart and said, hey, that was my writing, and it's all been posted and, you know, fact-checked.

But you don't exactly stumble into stealing people's work. You steal people's work from the beginning, correct? Probably, yeah. She's obviously not a writer, and she's obviously been stealing stuff forever. Now, she's been busted for it.

She's disappeared. She's deleted her Twitter. She's, you know, taken down her site. She offered half-hearted apologies before deleting everything. Apparently, she called a bunch of the people that had posted their blogs saying, here was my writing. Here's her version, which basically stole my entire writing.

Asked them to please take things down, which is really stupid. So, I have two thrusts on this. How stupid are people? We kind of know they are. And then my second... Explain what you mean there. But just, how did she think she was going to get away with this?

Oh, you know why? Because she probably did for four years. She did. Yeah, there you go. Self-selecting, like, reinforcement. I am getting away with it. Why would I stop now? Yeah. And you'd think, though, that somebody that was getting away with it would, at least in that period of time, learn to write, find her own voice, and turn into an actual writer.

So, she wasn't in this to be a writer. She was in this for something else. Yeah. She found Quentin Tarantino. I don't know if that's a prize. I think she might get a boobie prize. Who knows? He got the boobie prize. He got the boobie prize on that one. My second point is just kind of how prevalent this probably is.

I think we all know it's pretty prevalent. Oh, it's... Well, here's the thing. Most of the time, this happens automatically. There are WordPress plugins to do this. I can build a website today, have it go out, put in keywords, get the content, reword it.

Yes. I forget what it's called. It's called spinning. There are programs that you can get to take a piece of copy and do what's called spinning on it, which it'll take it and re-gramaritize it. Slightly reword things. Yes. And spit you out a thousand different copies of it. Well... That you get then put on a thousand different sites.

And then my rant about Huffington Post and sites like that, too, is basically all they do is reappropriate other people's content as well. But, yeah, I mean... But this was different than HuffPo. Yeah. This was slightly different things. This was blatant theft. Yeah. If she'd have had the spinner software, she'd probably still be in business.

Seriously. Well, Spider Baby, I hope you're listening. Yeah. 195 bucks. And I get a... Yeah. 195 bucks. I can get you a coupon code. Coupon. Coupon. Yeah. My other point is just... I mean, the internet has devalued originality to the point that people no longer even recognize plagiarism, because how could you?

I mean, if you're so into the thing, the niche or whatever, then maybe you've probably read everything else. But how do... You know, if you see somebody's Facebook status update and you think it's really, really clever, and instead of sharing it, you just kind of repost it, and most of your friends aren't friends with or didn't like that particular thing, it's almost impossible to find out if people are just stealing things now or if that's actually original.

Okay, well, first, my first point is it's called niche, not niche. Oh, sorry. Yes. I'm just giving you the heads up. Okay. And that was one of the original reasons... Well, that's the way I pronounce it, because I'm original. Just fucking around. In the Twitter heyday, well, I guess now is the heyday, but when I gave a shit about it...

Right. It got to the point where I was following, like, let's say 500 people. Something new would break. One person would post it. Yeah. Then two days later, somebody else would post it. Then three days, somebody else would post it.

And there would be this trickle-down effect of seeing the same news over and over and over again. And you could not... And here's the deal. Like, maybe person number three was hot that day and he got the right timing. Then everybody would retweet him. Yeah. Sometimes it'd be the person number two.

Rarely was it person number one. It was always down the ladder. Down the pipe. So the original person would never get the credit for it. Yeah. And they probably weren't the original person that posted it, because that's only the original person that you followed. You know, nothing is original when you're talking about links and attribution and shit like that.

I mean, you've got to be, like, first mover, like, you know, on it. Yeah. And it doesn't really matter. The whole point of it doesn't really matter. But everything is so muddied with, you know, cross-posting, retweeting and relinking. I'm seeing, you know, posts that are being posted as original that were written in 2010 now about people living under, like, in the sewers of Las Vegas.

It's like, yeah, that's old shit. I have no issue with linking and that kind of meme sort of thing. But, I mean, this chick basically just made a living stealing other people's writing and making it her own. That's, oh, man.

That's just wrong. But there's thousands of people that do that right now. I mean, there were people in print journalism that did that. Yeah. This is not new. But they usually got caught and shamed for it. And I guess she did now. So, except for the fact that she's still Quentin Tarantino's girlfriend. I think you're jealous.

I think you want to be Quentin Tarantino's girlfriend. No, he's not my type at all. Look at that face. I don't know. I like his movies. Hey, hey, hey, you know what they say. When you're stoking the fire, you're not looking at the mantelpiece. Okay.

Another funny point that was actually made in the story is the fact that it's not surprising that they're together, because Quentin Tarantino basically steals other people's films to make his own films. Explain. There are fantastic YouTube mashups where they show where every key sequence from every one of his movies is from a previous movie.

Redone. So, he is basically a mashup filmmaker, and they're calling her a mashup blogger. I don't think she's a mashup blogger. I think she's a thief blogger. But as far as Tarantino's stuff, you could claim homage in his work, because his storylines are so, you know, unique.

Yeah, no, he's got the creative element there that's definitely just him, and it's his thing. But go see one of those YouTube videos, and it's actually really funny. We'll post one in the show notes. I'll find one for you, because they just go like, that one was particularly for Kill Bill.

And it's like, here's where that scene came from. And then he exactly copied that scene from this movie, and then copied this scene from this movie, and then copied this scene from this movie. But, he did make a creative hole out of it that was completely different from all the other movies, as opposed to his girlfriend, who basically just took other people's writing and wrote an intro sentence.

Yeah, for Kill Bill, I can totally understand that, because he's such a Kung Fu fan, and he wants to recreate some of the classic fights. I'm totally fine with that. No, it's not the fights, man. It's not the fights? Yeah, I will get you the link. It's not the fights. Actually, I don't have to get you the link, because it's already in something that we're going to talk about a little bit later.

Well, why don't we talk about it now? Okay, let's talk about it now. I found, this is, I was actually surfing the web for once this week, and looking at things, and I stumbled across a site called Everything is a Remix. And it'll, the link's directly in our show notes.

And it's a four-part series that this guy did, kind of really going through popular culture in the last 20 years, and showing how, much like Seneca, everything's already been done before. We can laugh all we want and pick on things like the mashup, which, if you're not aware of what a mashup is in the music world, it's one person's lyrics laid over another band

or person's music, and bring the two things together, and how, you know, there are actually amazing artists that do amazing jobs of these things. I mean, some of these songs are brilliant. I mean, there's one that's the Beatles and Nine Inch Nails Closer, and it is a completely new song, and it's ridiculously amazing.

But, because of copyright laws, nobody can actually make any money from that. Fair enough. But this guy goes through a lot of, mostly film, film and TV, that's more the music for him. Four-part series, each part is maybe five to ten minutes long.

Incredibly cool to watch. Really interesting. And he does the Tarantino breakdown, where he just goes like, Tarantino took this exact sequence and this shot from this movie. Boom, boom. And he does little side screens, and it's amazing. And, you know, as we know, all of, like, Star Wars and George Lucas goes straight back to mythology and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And Avatars, Pocahontas. Exactly. Well, they talk about Avatar, they talk about Star Wars, they talk about Tarantino, they get a bit into music. They go through kind of like this one bass line that was recorded in 1975 that has been in almost every single rap or R&B or hip-hop song ever since then.

So, it's really fascinating. I mean, nothing is created in a vacuum. No. Right? You have to have source material to work from, and then you take it and make it your own. That is art. That's what art's always been throughout history. Art has always been repurposing, repackaging, and generally adding something new.

And that was the missing element with Spider Baby, except for she did add one new sentence at the beginning. I'm Spider Baby, this is my review. Yes. So, that is the difference. That is the, yeah. I mean, art is never in a vacuum, and everything that you do as an artist in whatever medium that you're working in is going to have elements of things that have come previously that have influenced you, inspired you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. You take what's happened before, and you make it your own, and you put your interpretation from your life experience, and that's what creates art. Yes. And this Everything is a Remix series isn't picking on people for that. It's explaining that that's kind of the process. Cool. And it's showing how, you know, really artistic people are influenced by other things, but you need to see the influence and know that, you know, it's not 100% just them.

Nobody creates in a vacuum. No, they don't. So, I tell you what is a vacuum, though, right now. Trying to get an apartment in San Francisco. Wow, what a segue. I was going to say, it was a fucking segue I've ever made in my life.

Holy crap, that made me laugh. Okay. So, this is why I'm not on the real radio. By all means, go up. Holy shit. Oh, shoot. Oh, okay.

So, I mentioned before that one of the reasons I'm never going back to San Francisco is because it's just gotten too damn expensive with all the new millionaires buying everything. It is crazy expensive. There have been several articles this week, but we're going to link to an interactive map that shows you by neighborhood what the rents are for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco proper.

Right. So, the Soma area of San Francisco, south of Market, which is where all the tech companies are, and when I first got there in 2004, nobody would live there. It was a shithole. If you lived there, you were just like, it was just like, either you're packing heat or just like a total loser.

I'm sitting in Venice Beach, California right now. Tell me about it. I'm sitting in Venice Beach, California right now. 10, 15 years ago, this place was a shithole. Now, this is being called Silicon Beach and rents are through the roof. So, a one-bedroom in Soma, median price, 3,475 bucks.

Wow. Yeah. That's insane. I can buy three 2,500-square-foot houses with an acre of land where I'm at right now for a mortgage for 3,475 bucks. Rents here in Venice aren't much better.

We're looking at $4,000 to $5,000 for some places, which is insane. For a one-bedroom? Not a one-bedroom. Yeah. This is all about a one-bedroom. Well, actually, this is interesting you brought it up because as I was driving around a little bit earlier today doing some errands and I was listening to NPR, I heard a news report that said the average home cost in Los Angeles County right now was $350,000 or something like that.

And then they did the average home cost in San Francisco was $550,000. I thought it was over a million. They're doing averages with suburbs and bad areas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. But, I mean, it's crazy that it's almost $200,000 more to live up in San Fran than it is down here.

Well, it's a seven-mile-by-seven-mile city, whereas Los Angeles is massive. There is that, yes. You know? And it's just, I just can't see why anybody would want to go back to San Francisco because this is, I mean, this is the height of the ridiculousness of the bubble.

I mean, this is like a super bubble. Yeah. It's pretty insane. It's unaffordable. It's why I've never ended up going up there. I mean, I love San Francisco. It's a great place to visit, but I like L.A. more and it's cheaper to live here. Which is saying something because L.A. is so ridiculously expensive.

I know. But it's no Tokyo. It's no London. It's no New York City. So even San Fran and L.A. are still down on the list from places like that. But you know why people go there. People go there, A, because the work is there, and B, because they're young and it's fun.

Yeah. I'm old. Fuck it. I'm not coming back. Yeah. If you've got a couch in your $3,500 place that I can crash on, give me a call. I'll hang out. I'll buy you a beer. I'm down, but I'm not going back there to save my life. Uh-uh. Even the mission, the taint of San Francisco, $2,675 for one bedroom.

That's insane. I mean, the only way that people are still living there is rent control. Yeah. People who have their places. And that's why these new places are so much, because people with rent control aren't moving. I mean, I wouldn't allow – I had a two-story, three-bedroom house in the inner sunset, and it was $1,650.

Right. Which is ridiculous. I couldn't get that anywhere. It was rent controlled, and it was basically hopping roommates to keep the rent low so nobody ever really moved out. Yeah. You know, for years and years and years. Yeah, the way of getting around that. Yeah, the only thing that happened was the fucking landlord set himself on fire and died.

So, the kid sold the house, and the new people said, well, we found a loophole. Get the hell out. So, yeah. Yeah. So, no San Francisco evil. Bad, bad. Bad, bad, bad. Okay. That's about as bad as Spider Baby.

Ooh, bring back the bad segue. Ooh, sure you call that a loophole, do you? Yeah, it's crap. So, one of my favorite apps is back in the App Store. Okay. So, on my Mac to watch all of my ill-gotten movies, I use VLC.

It's, you know, the Swiss Army knife of video. I've been using VLC on both PC and Mac for years for basically everything. It's the best video player out there. Yeah, hands down. Mm-hmm. And a long, long time ago, it was in the App Store, and you could get it for your iPhone and your iPad.

And it played everything. Right. Well, here's the deal. It played MKV files. That's all that mattered. There you go. Anything played it. It was shitty-ass MKV files. And they pulled it. Mm-hmm. There was, you know, some legal issues with licensing and all that crap, and it's been pulled.

I've had my copy forever, and it's barely worked because, you know, the MKV files you get are 1020p, and they just won't play on an iPad. Right. No matter what you do. So you still have to convert them. But I had it. I took solace in the fact that I had code that nobody could have.

But now it's back. 2.0's out. After a 30-month hiatus. That's how long it's been. Wow. Two and a half years it's been gone. Man, that's a long time for me to hold on to an app. What a loser. So the new one's out. It just came out last night, like at 11 p.m. U.S. time.

So it's fresh in the app store. You're going to have to look for... Let me... Actually, I've got to pull this up and say what it is because it's not... There are a bunch of VLC apps out there that aren't this one. That aren't the real one. Yeah. It's free. You don't have to pay for it. You search VideoLan probably?

No. You don't. The old one was called VLC Media Player and it was from AppLidium. So that's gone. The new one is called VLC for iOS from VideoLan. Okay. That's the one to look for. It's basically got the cone thing, like just on a flat orange background.

I just want to say that because it took me a second to figure out which one it was. And some of the other ones are paid. You don't want a paid one. This is free. Oh, it's free. Fantastic. Good. Yeah. Yeah, it is hands down the best media player out there. PC, Mac, iOS, whatever. Get it?

It's awesome. Fantastic. Plays everything and all of your ill-gotten gains. Yes. All your BitTorrents. I'm just happy it's back. I'm so happy it's back. If it works or not, I can't tell you yet. I'm still running iOS 7. So it's a crapshoot if it works for me or not.

But I'll let you know. Yeah, I'll probably download it tonight and take a look at it too. Word. Word. Links in the show notes. And you got something you don't really like. Well, I'm a little torn on this because when I first saw it, I thought this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life.

And I actually wanted to create a new segment called Are You Shitting Me? But I've actually thought about it a little bit and I can see why some people like it. It's called OutboxMail.com. And it's a service that you subscribe to and you pay a monthly fee for.

They come to your house three times a week and they pick up your mail for you and they scan it and they have a nice little app for your iPad or your iPhone. And you get your physical mail kind of like an email now.

It's scanned in and you can look at it there. Which, how fucking lazy can you possibly be is my first thought. I just can't even imagine just going and checking your own mail and tossing things in the trash or opening it up.

Okay, I'm just quiet for a second because I'm flabbergasted. Before the show, we were talking about a similar service called Earth Class Mail, which is you change your mailing address to them. They get all your mail. These guys come and pick it up. These guys come to your house.

No, not only that. In a white Prius. I looked at their FAQ in their support center. The Outbox Unpostman, they call themselves Unpostman. The Unpostman, yes. Again, everybody's getting so good at branding and language. The Unpostman come and collect dales three days per week.

They drive white Toyota Prius cars with big red mail flags on the side. Make sure to honk if you see them. First off, by the way, Prius drivers are the worst drivers known to man. Hands down. I've never been almost run over more times by any other car than a Prius.

So the fact that you're using Prius kind of pisses me off. Yeah. You know what? It used to be BMW and pickup drivers were the worst. Oh, no. It's Prius now. Those people are like angels of the road now. I've almost been killed at least nine times in the last month walking around or biking around Venice by Priuses.

Yeah. Fuck you people. You can't fucking drive for shit. Yeah. Well, just because they're on their high horse, they can't see the little people below them. Yeah. Because they're saving the world. No. So this company will come to your house three days a week and get your physical mail because you're too fucking lazy to go pick it up yourself.

They will scan it in for you. They will send it to you through the app. And then you can actually flag things as junk mail and they'll know then to apparently throw them out. This seems like such a crazy privacy thing to me. Like, I would never let people do this.

I don't know. This just seems insane. Well, in here now, checks. Right? They'll scan your checks like your regular mail and you can say, oh, you can simply request delivery of that check and we'll include it in your delivery packet, which means they send all your mail back to you anyway.

Yeah. They'll send your important mail back to you anyways. This is retarded. Or no, they will charge you to deposit the check for you. What's the check cost? 20 bucks per check or you just up your monthly fee. That was, no, no, no. That's not these guys.

That's Earth Class Mail. Okay. That's the one I was talking about. Oh, sorry. I'm getting confused. Yeah. These guys don't deposit for you. Okay. So they just purely pick up your mail and will throw junk mail out for you and then send your important mail back to you. Okay. So I'm waiting for a check.

Desperately waiting for a check. Some douchebag in a Prius comes to my house, picks up my check. I got to wait how many days for them to take it, scan it, send it back to me. Tell me, tell them, hey, I need that check back. Can you bring it back? Yeah. Then they bring it back. And then I take it to the bank. Yeah. That's like the highlight of inefficiency.

This is like the anti-Cosmo. It's like I call them and I get what I want. These people, it's like they take what I want and they make me wait for it. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. I'm going back to this just being ridiculous. The only reason I would ever want this service is if I was traveling for an extended period of time.

In that case, I could see this being kind of cool. That's fine. Yeah. That's a different story. But for regular... Oh, and they don't do businesses. No businesses. No businesses. You can't get it for your business. Oh, and as far as the check goes, I just looked at their fact again.

They send you a high-quality scan. So if you're using a bank app that lets you do photo scans for check deposits, you could actually just save that and then go to your banking app and send in the picture. Right. But what if the check's over $1,000? Then you can't use your banking app. And those are the checks you want the most.

Any check that shows up at my place better be. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. And okay, credit cards. I get a new credit card in the mail. They take it, then I have to wait for them to send it back to me. Yes. Or do they take it and go shopping? Yeah.

There are massive privacy issues with this. I mean, it is your personal mail. I don't really get a lot of mail. So for me, this is kind of useless anyways. I mean, how many people are really getting super important physical mail anymore? I don't see the market for this.

I am seeing it as kind of ridiculous. See, in Earth Class Mail, their competitor that's been out for years, they've got the same thing. But you just change your mailing address and all your mail goes to them and they scan it same day. Right. Not like, oh, we have to wait.

So I leave mail in my mailbox for three days instead of going downstairs and picking it up. Yeah. And bringing it into my house, this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. But Earth Class Mail, at least I can see the reason for it.

Because if you are just a traveler, like a lifetime traveler, a lifestyle traveler, you just want the same mailing address. You don't want to have to keep changing it back and forth. It's like, just let them handle it. They will deposit your checks. Like you mentioned, $20 per check or $35 a month for all your checks.

Yeah. But honestly, still, who gets checks anymore? PayPal, it, wire transfer. Yeah. Square. There's a million ways to get money without ever getting a physical check. Yeah. So we're kind of agreeing that this is a ridiculous idea.

But they just closed $5 million in Series A financing. And they're on TechCrunch, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, and CNN. Although I think this little press banner comes with every template that looks exactly like this. So they probably might not have been on all of those.

But still. Still. It's a fancy site. They have a great – somebody developed the app, the site. They bought a bunch of Priuses. They're making – they're getting money. Oh, great. They're getting money for a stupid idea.

Okay. Well, Alpux was first developed in Austin, which is surprising. And now they're in San Francisco. Okay. So this isn't going to work in Podung BFE. Oh, no, no. This is purely going to be big cities. Well, this is a turn and burn.

This is to get the – this is so stupid. Oh, my God. These people are fucking retarded. Who invested in this thing? Okay. Looking beyond San Francisco, he's hoping to launch in cities including New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles by the end of the year.

Yeah. Okay. Good luck in L.A. It's big. Well, yeah. The gas cost a lot. New York's small, but Chicago, big. Boston, I've never been there. D.C., they'll get shot. Never been to Boston? Never been to Boston. Eh. No reason.

Not a huge fan. Eh. I don't know. This isn't – what the fuck's in Boston? Why would I go to Boston? Eh, they got good beer. I'll give them that. There are a lot of other places that have beer that aren't Boston. True. Also, just, you know, this is one of my things.

You cannot find a Boston cream pie in Boston. I looked. Okay. I've never had a Boston cream pie either. Oh, dude. Go to Marie Calendars and go get one. Now. Oh, God. You're so white trash. Marie Calendars.

Marie Calendars. What? Fuck no. They got every pie known to man. It's great. Okay. Here's the funny thing. Five bucks a month. Yeah. Five bucks a month for somebody to come over to your place because you're too lazy to walk down to your own mailbox outside of your house, and they'll scan your mail for you and send you nice pictures, and then if you actually need any of it, they'll mail it to you and probably charge you for that.

Yeah, no, and they're sending it back. They'll probably bring it back on the next one. Well, I'd imagine they just, yeah, on their drop-off, they drop it off next time. This is so fucking anti-green. Yeah, you got a Prius, but who cares? It's still gas. You're burning gas for something that people that shouldn't be so fucking lazy and get down to the goddamn post office and pick it up.

Yeah, I don't see how this, I don't get it. Okay, now you're making me angry. You don't like Jason when he's angry. No, it's just ridiculous. People just make the stupidest shit nowadays. And get $5 million of funding for it. That's what I'm saying.

It's a turn and burn. This whole thing isn't made to succeed. They're going to prove some stupid business, bottle and somebody's going to buy it, shutter it, and some kind of acquire. It'll be dead in a while, and somebody will be selling off the Priuses and auctions. Burn them with the founders and the investors.

Security! So, the Sophos blog, Naked Security, put out a post today that says, Facebook, the early years, handing out master password like candy. So, basically, back when the service first started, they would give out a master password so any of their support staff could log in to anybody's account and use it as them.

Thus seeing all your messages, anything. And they weren't doing any due diligence on the support people. Basically, if you're hired for support, you're hired for support. Here's what you need. Here are the keys to the castle. Don't burn it down.

And they're making kind of a big deal out of it that, you know, oh, it's, you know, privacy, blah, blah, blah. I don't see this as non-standard. I was about to say, my immediate impression when I saw this story was like, and we're surprised by that?

Yeah. I mean, you have to, support people have to. I mean, I guess now that they're big, they can have different levels of support. Yeah, we got level three, level two, one, whatever. I don't want 10,000 Facebook employees being able to log into my account. I want people that are specifically doing customer service, high-end tech.

Sure. Of course they're logging into my account. Fine. But yeah, this is not surprising to me at all. I mean, we're talking, this is back in the day when the person that I guess exposed this was employee number 51. Yeah. Duh.

Of course there was a master password. Of course everybody was able, working there at that point, was able to get into anybody's account. That's not surprising. And they've fixed it since then. To me, this is almost a non-story, except for the fact that it educates people that don't think about this stuff, which is, when you sign on to these sites, of course the people that work at these sites have access to your information.

Yeah. Of course they do. They have to. They have to be able to. Same thing goes for sites like Mint.com and your banking. People that work at these places that are in high-level tech positions can access all of your financial information.

This is why the cloud is not necessarily a good idea if you're crazy worried about this stuff. But when you look at it, this is the same thing with Snowden in the NSA. He was a support guy. He had keys to the castle. If you do tech support, you have access to everything.

And you have to. That's how we make this stuff work. I think my favorite part of the article, and this is sourced from The Guardian, which is apparently the only news source left on the planet that gives a shit about security. It actually seems to be, because I've been going to their site more and more often, because that's where the real stories seem to be these days.

Yeah. They seem to actually still hire journalists. Really? Oh, okay. Apparently. I mean, somebody's doing these stories. No, sorry. I was reaching for a beverage. My water was empty, and I didn't get a new water bottle.

So, yeah, they're doing a good job of it, but I think this is a little overreaching. This is not really a story, and I think it's just going to stir up. No, this is feeding the kind of anti-Facebook-y, they're bad people thing that's going on right now.

This is a bullshit story. I'm actually okay with that. No, I know you're okay with that, but even you agree this is a bullshit story. Totally bullshit, because, yeah, nowadays you have audit trails, you have, you know, access logs, and they've been, pardon me, they've been audited.

That didn't sound like the water being opened. The water's next to it. They've been audited, you know, by, was it the Irish Data Protection Commission, which I don't know is a real thing. Yeah, I'm going to trust the Irish. I trust the Irish with a lot.

I mean, don't get pissed off at me, Irish people. I hang out at Irish bars. A lot of my friends are Irish. Not really going to trust you with my security, though. So, well, the MIT is above the Guinness, or they used to be above the Guinness Brewery. That's true. You know, the Media Lab over there was above the Guinness Brewery, which I don't know if it's there anymore, because they may have had some problems.

Some issues. Yeah. But Ireland was a... Creative came out of Ireland. Yeah. Remember Creative back in the day? Yes, I do. Ireland was a hotbed of technology. Yes. Digital Celts, or whatever they called it. Anyway, I just don't want anybody to read this story, and hopefully it won't propagate too far.

And it's just every service in the world that starts out, there's a master password. Yeah. Everybody can see everything. There has to be. And I guarantee there still is a master password for Facebook. Oh, yeah. I promise you there is. There are people that can just log into anybody.

I'm sure at least 100 people, minimum, in that organization have it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. At least. I do like that they called this woman out as a rogue employee when she went back and wrote a book about it. Well, she kind of is.

I mean, this is standard practice for any company like this, any online business that has these sort of databases and user accounts and all that. This is not surprising, and this chick just decided to write a book about it and try to scare us.

Yes, I'm happy that the educational aspect of people realizing that this occurs is coming out of this story, but it's a non-story. This is not a bad on Facebook. If it's a bad on Facebook, it's a bad on every single company on the internet. Okay.

You don't think Amazon has this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Here's the one thing that is kind of the red flag where it says, Facebook has been privy to that data, including our passwords from its infancy, which I would bet is not true.

Yeah, I'd bet they MD5-ed the passwords at least at the very beginning. Well, God, I hope they don't MD5. They had to. Oh, Jesus. No, MD5 is the... At the very least. Well, I need to explain to you about why MD5, you never want to MD5 a password. They're called rainbow tables. You just look it up.

You don't MD5 anything. I'm just saying, back in the day, cheap and easy. At the very least, they did that. Okay. The passwords were never plain text in a database, for sure. Right. That's what I'm saying. I don't think they ever would have done that. If they did, well, then they are more evil than I even gave them credit for it.

But I don't think that was ever the case. I don't think that was the case either. For once, we're actually both kind of somewhat defending Facebook. What the fuck's going on? I don't know. It's a crazy day today. Seriously. Oh, shit. The lightning's coming back. Oh, dear. Okay. So, yeah.

I just want to say, if you see this article propagated in the news and people start talking about it, call bullshit on it. Yeah. Non-story. Non-story. That was a shout-out! We're way over, and we're sorry. We apologize.

Goodbye, and good night. Shame we had the secret to how to actually make money off the internet, but we just don't have time to do it. Nope. Okay. Bye. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook and facebook.com, and snipe Grumpy Old Geeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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