310: Spark Grumpiness

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Weather report from the GOG North studio today is it's 47 degrees. Inside. I have a cold. Again. Oh, great. So, uh, I am, uh, my voice is probably an octave or two lower than normal. I apologize for that. And, um, I have enough day quill in my system to, uh, make me on the show basically channel Jeff Bridges giving his acceptance speech on the Golden Globes.

Okay. Okay. I didn't see that one. Oh, it was good. No, I kind of fell asleep halfway through. It wasn't that exciting. No, no, it wasn't. So the nice thing about some of the stuff we review on the show, like Zane Lamprey's adventure hoodie. Mm-hmm. There are beer koozies made into the ends of the sleeves.

So if you pull them out, they're kind of like little mittens, but you can still type and use your fingers. This is true. Very warm. Now I just need a beer to go with it, but it is 10 after nine in the morning. It's a bit early. It's a bit early. You never stopped me before, but I think today that'll be good.

So we did our, we finally got our Patreon Q&A out. So if you are a Patreon subscriber or a PayPal subscriber, uh, you can hear that, uh, that fun episode we did. And if you haven't emailed us yet and you want to listen to it, just drop me or Brian a line and we'll get you the link. Yeah. For all you PayPal folks or people that donate in non-Patreon ways, just email us and we will send you the link and password so you can listen to it too.

All right. Now more followup. You read Marie Kondo's book when it first came out. She is the woman who talks about paring things down and finding, you know, only keeping items that spark joy. And cause you go through your Spartan phases, Jason, where you, you get rid of everything and then you slowly buy a bunch of shit again and then you get rid of everything again.

I got through the, the Spartan phase, but then I had a three story house and so everything built up, but now I'm back living basically out of one room with like a little bit of stuff. So I got stuff everywhere and it's starting to get a little insane. Yeah. Well, uh, she's got a show now on Netflix and, uh, basically it has taken social media by storm.

I don't know about your feed, but my feed is just full of people, um, that are watching the show and talking about, uh, you know, thanking their items and giving things away and blah, blah, blah. So it made me wonder, of course, obviously if the folks at a Salvation Army and Goodwill are pissed off at, uh, all these people coming and saying thank you to things as they're trying to get offload them.

Um, it's a cute enough show. My wife is really into it and anybody out there that's married knows what that means. It means my wife has moved on from her own things to following me around with my stuff and asking me if it sparks joy in me. And, uh, let me tell you, the show is not spark joy in me at all.

I like my stuff. I did do a big call of books. That was nice. So I do feel a little bit better. Um, and yeah, it's a, it's a cute enough show. You need to watch one episode. That's it. I watched half an episode when they started thanking their underwear. I'm like, no, no, no. Cause I mean, I don't know if you remember my review of the book, but I think she's batshit crazy.

Honestly, that's, that's my, my professional opinion is someone who likes to get rid of stuff. She's crazy, but I got, yeah, I got to the point, uh, with the, there's a, a black family in Venice beach that had moved out from a house to a small, like a studio apartment and had, I mean, they had way too much stuff.

That was even ridiculous for, for anybody. They're kind of hoarders, but yeah, when they started, you know, when the kids got into it, it was, it was so cheesy and overproduced. Oh, it was just unwatchable. However, having said that, I think there's some good tips in there for trying to get your kids to get rid of some things because, uh, I'm starting to notice that, uh, even if, uh, even if the little one doesn't like playing with a toy and has, hasn't touched it for a couple months, if we even consider throwing it out, all of a sudden it's his favorite toy in the world again.

Oh, of course. Of course. That's how that works. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I did do a big culling of books and, uh, clothes last night anyway, because I'm like, you know what? I, I, I can either actually clean my stuff or watch this show. So I actually went and cleaned the stuff and have like a couple of giant garbage bags that are going out today.

Nice. Yeah. And a bit more follow up on how we've talked about, um, the notifications on all the apps and on your phone are completely rigged. Lifehacker. We, we always mention it. We never really get too deep into it. Lifehacker has actually done a fairly decent writeup of it. Uh, so if you never believed us, go read the link in the show notes.

And it is lifehacker though, but to take it with a grain of salt, but, uh, there, you know, there's a couple of good pull quotes in there, like notifications help apps skew your worldview. They make you think that your phone is important and essential is not. Uh, and would you willingly go out and buy a device that grabs your attention randomly throughout the day just to tell you that the computers that run Instagram made your name scroll past an acquaintance screen halfway across the country?

Well, you did. Yeah. No, that's, it's the, it's the world we've wanted all the time. And now we've got it. And now it turns out it sucks. Yep. In the news. This first story in the news this week, Brian, I almost put in moron of the week, but I thought that's, you know, it's, it's got AI and it's Google people making a new company and it's called Humu.

I'm guessing they probably mean Humu or Humu. I don't know. How do you, how would you say that? H-U-M-U. I would just say Humu because that seems to be the way to do it. Not to be confused with Hulu. No. So I don't, it's a little close. Now, what they've done is they've created a new AI that makes a nudge engine.

Which is trademarked. It is trademarked. Nudge engine. Nudge engine. Nudge. It could be just, they could have just called the company Nudge. They should have called the company Nudge. I agree. Yep. Then Ted Nugent would sell, like sue them. So what they do is they scan your emails and try to figure out ways that you can, you know, have a more impactful life at work and making everything better.

On the plus side, we know Google is very good at scanning our emails already. Yes, but this isn't actually Google. It's a team from Google. Three former Google employees. And they want to make, you know, everybody get along better at work because they did a lot of teamwork research at Google.

I mean, that stuff is out there. And the best teams aren't the ones with always the smartest people. It's the best teams that work the best together. The problem I have with this is how does this thing know, well, A, the data that it's training on is going to be your emails, which means they're going to be, you know, people are going to be reading your emails.

Yep. Because if they're training on it, this thing is not going to be ready for primetime yet. This is one of those things where it's like, yeah, it'll be here eventually, you know, like they always do. But none of us wait. We don't wait for things to be ready for primetime anymore. Jason, we release it into the wild before even having any idea what might happen.

Yeah, I'm just, why would you want an artificial intelligence to create behavioral change in your workforce? I don't, I don't, why can't you just do that the old fashioned meat way with meetings? Or the way we kind of discussed last week's episode.

How about some vacation days? Vacation days are nice. You know, even company retreats to get everybody working on the same page. Oh God, not that. I don't think I've ever been on a company retreat. So I don't know the ins and outs of them. You don't play well with others, Jason.

They would not go well. No, it probably wouldn't because everybody gets too drunk. And then there's lots of, you know, regret and shame after the getaways, I'm sure. So yeah, keep an eye out for Humu. If you, if you have a team that you want to work, you know, work better together and are not afraid of artificial intelligence, telling them what to do.

And you, I am, I am looking forward to the Slack plugin that we can install and see how it improves our communication. Oh yes, yes. Wonder twin powers activate. Yeah. All right. So 23andMe, the DNA testing company that Jason has sent his spit to, has signed a $300 million deal with a drug giant.

Shocking. Yep. Knew that was coming. Yeah, we all did. So GlaxoSmithKline has announced it is acquiring a $300 million stake in 23andMe as part of a four-year deal between the two companies. They will comb 23andMe's genetic data to look for new drugs to develop, also referred to as drug targets.

They will also use the genetic data to inform how patients are selected for clinical trials. Whoa. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. As Queen University's professor of bioethics, Udo Shkugugugugugug, told Business Insider via email, the very setup of this venture, which automatically pulls from all customer data and requires individuals to opt out if they don't want to participate, suggests that its initiators are not quite serious about 23andMe's customers' informed consent.

Yep. There you go. Yeah. So this Business Insider article has a bunch of information about how you can remove your spit sample and DNA data from the databases maintained by 23andMe, Ancestry, and Helix, except, as we know, if it's already been shared or distributed or is out there and delete isn't delete, and any of the myriad of fuck-ups that we see all the time with these companies.

Yeah. So good luck. It's out there. I've given up. I'm not even going to bother deleting it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not worth the informed effort to do it. So in other news, over in Germany, hackers have just stolen a vast cache of highly sensitive data on the who's who of the German political establishment.

An anonymous Twitter account has been quietly posting links to information about a thousand leading politicians and broadcasters, including most members of the cabinet and, of course, Angela Merkel. There's a whole bunch of sensitive and potentially embarrassing details, such as addresses and phone numbers, confidential emails, word documents, and even private accounts on social media.

Incredibly, German security services do not know how this might have happened. Well, it turns out they do now. No, they do now. That's right. You have the follow-up. Yes. They caught the guy, a 20-year-old German student. He was basically using weak passwords to hack into the lawmakers' accounts, and they caught him.

And he was working from his parents' house. And that's pretty much it. He just basically walked through all these accounts and shoved a lot of passwords at him and got in and took the data. So he's out on his own recognizance now while he's awaiting trial.

Right. There you go. 20-year-old kid. That's all it takes. One password. We keep recommending it. No doubt. How do you say one password in German? Somebody get on that. Apple is expanding its services. They're going to sell the Apple TV service on Samsung TVs because Apple has realized that people aren't buying their Apple TVs boxes.

And they're also realizing that people aren't upgrading their phones anymore. So now they are deciding to be a bit of a service company and get some more income stream coming that way as well, which makes a lot of sense, except for the fact that, like, you know, Apple TV doesn't really have any good programming on it yet. Unless you want to access your own data or buy stuff from their stores, you can get that any other way that you want to as well.

So I'm not entirely sure what the bonus of this would be. Are you saying Planet of the Apps is not amazing content, Brian? It is not amazing content, Jason. So, yeah. But basically, you know, they're trying to get into the streaming game as well. So they're going to ramp that up.

And, you know, it'll just be Apple will expand and become just yet another service provider and a content provider, which you'll be able to access on all kinds of different devices. Now, this next one, I just had to chuckle at. Rework, what we've called in the past, is one of the biggest, you know, it's basically one of the biggest real estate companies in the world right now.

Yep. Because they lease all of the real estate and then release it back to you. Yes. Little bits at a time. Well, their funding fell through for a very big round. Oops. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were listed at a $50 billion valuation.

$50 billion. And, well, since the stock market tanked, their big deal that was about to go through fell short. So they had to kind of get rid of their deal and they're trying to work through that.

Now, the thing about this is, they changed the name of the company because of this. I want to know how one goes with the other. I guess if something's not working, you just change the name. I think we've, haven't we discussed that before? Yeah.

Yeah. When a company is not doing well, they just rebrand. Just to make us think that, oh, you know, that was a different company. We're this new company now. We're Oath now. Oath, yes. And, yeah, how's that working on? Not so well. Yeah. So, yes, WeWork is now the We Company.

We. We. And, yeah, there are a lot of, it's funny, they have, like, a lot of these sketches in here that were their original, original, like, you know, back of the napkin. Yeah. The back of the napkin brainstorms. And they look like, you know, a kid drew them, but.

I guess 2009, maybe that guy still was a kid. But now they're going to have different things. They're going to have WeWork. We live. We sleep. We give. We connect. The We community. We bank. We sale. We connect. We out of business. Yeah, well, we talked about We Grow, which is the schooling thing a while back in a coding academy, which had absolutely no oversight or plan or anything.

Good on them. Good luck. I would never live in a We Live unit. I say that, but I'll probably end up retiring into one. Yeah. It's going to be the We Box that we live in. We fucked.

Media Candy. Brian, did you get a chance to finish watching, or have you even started watching Travelers yet? I have not even started watching Travelers, but, you know, this is our first Media Candy segment after the big break. I watched a lot of crap, but you can tell me if Travelers is worth watching.

It's still worth watching. The ending was a little weird and disappointing. I think they're going to reboot it with a whole new cast. That's the kind of way it looked like. Maybe keep like one or two people. Right. Because they wrapped up a lot of the storylines. But the way it works is, I can't explain it without, you know, spoiling it.

But I liked it for the most part. There's time travel involved, right? Lots of it. Yes. There you go. So you can basically do anything. Mm-hmm. Kind of. Yeah. And there's AI involved, too. Oh, joy. I still like the show. I thought it was a fun popcorn watch.

All right. Fair enough. I watched an awful lot of media over the break, so we have a couple segments here. This is the Drunk with a Screener app movie reviews. All right. I got access to a screener app, and I was able to watch some movies from the comfort of my own home instead of having to go to a theater for them.

The first I watched was Aquaman. All right. How was Aquaman? Everybody was been raving about Aquaman. I don't understand why. It's okay. I suppose this could have been okay. The special effects weren't really good enough, and I spent way too much time in what I'm going to call for this movie, The Uncanny Ocean.

A lot of weird effects and floaty, floaty. And as I pointed out to my wife, there's no way to do this movie since it's mostly underwater without having a bunch of these special effects. But they just didn't feel right yet. Now, did you watch this on your TV? Yes, but a very large TV.

Okay. I was just wondering if you were watching it on your iPad or your iPad mini. No, no, no, no. That would be a waste of time. All you would see was glittery, floaty bits. You wouldn't even see a real character then. It did feel very like in The Phantom Menace when they go underwater and go find Jar Jar Binks people.

Oh, yeah. A lot of that was like, oh, I'm waiting for Obi-Wan Kenobi to show up. Anyways, it also attempted to be funny, but it wasn't Thor funny at all. Okay. So DC continues to swing and miss, in my opinion. But everybody else seems to like it.

So whatever. I've never liked Aquaman, so I can't see myself wasting two hours on this movie. Yeah. Well, you know, it is what it is. I also watched A Star Is Born. Well, no, actually, I didn't watch A Star Is Born. My wife watched A Star Is Born.

She loved it. I'm not entirely sure if she actually enjoyed it or just saw her bonus for the year going up since the soundtrack and all that is done on Universal. I drank a bottle of wine and finished a book. All right. That's the way to do it. Yeah. That's what you should have done every time she made you watch The Notebook.

Actually, I came around with The Notebook. It's not a bad movie. Oh, no. I mean, I don't need to watch it 20,000 times, but it's not bad. Moving on, the kid is much better on an airplane now, so I have some slightly buzzed on a plane movie reviews. Okay. I watched Ocean's 8.

It was just as stylish as all the other ones, but did we really need a female remake slash sequel slash continuation, particularly after Ghostbusters failed so badly? It was fine, but given the phenomenal cast they put together and really wonderful actresses and everything, couldn't they have done something original and better instead of this?

I don't know. I kind of liked it. You know, I think I was slightly more buzzed in a living room movie review, but it was fine. Yeah, I would have rather seen something more original than basically another remake. I watched The Predator. Okay.

I have no idea why this movie was made. Money. I don't know who it was supposed to appeal to. If you're into The Predator, it was pretty boring, and there wasn't a lot of Predator stuff going on, and it was kind of silly, and the acting wasn't all that great, and the only thing that made any of it worthwhile was Olivia Munn, and that's about that.

All right. I'll skip that one, too. And then there's a really funny article about what I learned from watching others watch movies on the plane, which is the completely unavoidable desire and need to watch other people's movies on their screens instead of yours. I just thought it was funny because I watched a good enough portion of Venom on the screen of the person in the row in front of me to know that I don't need to see any more of it.

Okay, good. I have that movie, and I was going to watch it, but you've said that it's not good, and Seth Miranda also said, no, no, don't watch that movie. To be fair, I didn't hear any of it. I was just seeing it, and I just didn't seem to care that much. All right. And finally, while at the in-laws' house using the wonderful Amazon app, I was able to see all of The Marvelous Miss Maisel season two.

It was absolutely fantastic, maybe even better than the first season. It's on my list. I just can't find the time. I just cannot find the time. It's well worth it. It's a good release, man. Just funny, well-written, well-acted, worth it. Now, I saw a movie this weekend called A Simple Favor.

One of the best movies I've seen in a while. My roommate and I just loved it. It's kind of a thriller, but it's funny. It's actually like, when you watch the trailer, you don't think it's going to be funny. Because it's got Anna Kendrick. She's a mommy vlogger, and then she's got her rich best friend, played by Blake Lively.

You know you're getting old when the female actresses that were way too young for you to begin with are now playing mommy roles? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, all in all, I loved it. I can't recommend it enough. It was really fun. All right.

And, of course, the Orville season two is back. I've seen two episodes of that. Solid. Solid. Okay. All right. I'm still digging it. Yeah. I watched three episodes of the first season and just kind of haven't gotten back to it, but it was okay. The show gets better as it goes.

It gets a lot better as it goes. That's what I hear. People keep saying that. Yeah. I mean, they're just getting their feet under them in the first season. It's just like, look at the first season of Star Trek Next Gen. Push your mouth. That was perfect. Oh, it was. Go back and watch it. It was not anywhere near perfect.

Yeah. Well, while I was scrolling around on Netflix, I found a movie called 2036 Origin Unknown, starring Katie Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica fame. I just went, well, how bad could it be? Okay. It was acceptable.

It was kind of an attempt to remake 2001 A Space Odyssey with a bit of contact in there with some dystopia and end of the world, but then a bit of hope at the end of it and a lot of AI. So, you know, if you want to see the AI thing, it was mostly worth it to see Starbuck back in something sci-fi, even though they made her wear what looked like a high school janitor's outfit for the whole damn thing.

Well, that's a bummer. Which is a definite bummer, but there is good news coming in the Katie Sackhoff world. Netflix has ordered a sci-fi drama series called Another Life that will be starring her. So hopefully they'll give her some kick-ass sci-fi outfits in this one. Nice, nice. Yeah, her Starbuck outfits were usually pretty nice, I gotta say.

But yeah, it's worth, the Origin Unknown is, if you got to kill an hour and a half, it's not too bad. Okay. Disney's new Star Wars themed land will be opening bi-coastally in June. I'm so excited about this. It's called Star Wars Galaxy's Edge. I did not know that they were also building one over in Florida, but apparently they're doing that as well.

So, um, I'm a kid should be just about old enough for a first trip and daddy's going to get some fun too, apparently. All right. Yeah. I bet the one in Orlando is going to be much bigger. I know. It's so annoying. Yeah. They just got more, they got more space. They got more space and bet you have to go to Florida.

Yeah. That's, that's unfortunate. I'm actually going to Orlando in March, so it's too bad. I'll miss it by a month or two months. By a little bit. Yeah, three, three months. I can't count today. One, two, three. I knew I should have had caffeine this morning. Now, remember when Kylie and Kendall Jenner made their, uh, t-shirts that basically ripped off Tupac Shakur and just kind of figured that they could put them out there and, you know, to hell with intellectual property rights.

Oh yeah. Well, there's a new one for this year. All right. Uh, this time around it's Nirvana and Mark Jacobs with a band suing the designer over a smiley face image. Uh, it's basically a t-shirt that uses the Nirvana and smiley face and replaces the X's in the eyes with M and J.

So, you know, they change things. Yeah. Not really. Not enough. I do like the, uh, the title in this, or not the title, but the tagline in this vulture, uh, article smells like litigation. Uh, Woodstock is coming back once more, uh, for the 50th anniversary, even though, uh, the Woodstock 99 was just a complete mess and disgusting, horrible situation, but, uh, they're going to do it one more time.

No, I didn't go. I watched it on TV. Okay. I didn't know if you were working with any of the bands that played there. Uh, yeah, I was, but I just, uh, I knew it was going to be disgusting and I didn't want to camp. So, uh, you know, yeah, especially with that last green day mud fest set and nine inch nails, but, uh, yeah, that was a good lineup, but, uh, yeah, it did not go well.

Anyways, they're doing a new one and theoretically they've learned something, so there's no lineup yet, but, um, I'm assuming it'll be a bunch of old boomer bands because, you know, 50th anniversary, but to appeal to the kids, there will be Ted style talks from leading futurists and retro tech experts. Oh, yay.

Yay. Why would I want to go to a concert to see a Ted talk? I don't know, but if you wanted to see by Beyonce's concert and you were blind, you'd be screwed. Apparently. Okay. I like this article because it's just a weird thing. Cause it's something that it struck me.

Okay. So Beyonce's company Parkwood entertainment is facing a class action lawsuit, which claims that Beyonce.com denies equal access to visually impaired users. The lawsuit was filed by a New York woman named Mary Connor, who is blind and argues that the website violates the Americans with disabilities act by being an exclusively visual interface without any coated, coated alt text behind the images.

Okay. She's apparently never seen a flashlight before either. Well, that's what I was, that's kind of where I was going with this because when you and I were doing all this sort of stuff, they, we never even really thought about this. Yeah. We did all text images, but then flash came along and then everything got so visual and crazy that any kind of like this sort of stuff was for the most part forgotten about, but we're now in a completely different world where the web is so everything that designers

have to go back and think about this stuff now, or at least have secondary sites or something. Right. Right. Yeah. We'll see what happens with the lawsuit. Yeah. I mean, you should have, you know, text only interfaces for a lot of things and alt tags are good for SEO. At least they used to be back in the day. That's why we did them, you know?

Yep. That's the only reason we did them. We weren't thinking disabilities. Yeah. You know, these keywords stuff the hell out of those things. But, uh, I've done some, uh, Americans with disabilities act work on websites before and it's a pain in the ass. It really is.

But especially when you're dealing with things that are built on the fly with JavaScript. Yeah. It can get really, really tricky. So, but, uh, yeah, you know, I can see this being an issue going forward, but Hey, it'll give a web developers more work.

So I'm all for that. All for that. I'm not going back though. Don't, don't, don't call me. As long as we don't have to do it. Don't call me up. I am not going back. Yeah. And finally for in the media candy stuff, cause I just thought this was brilliant and you and I are both fans of the good place. Uh, the best joke with the golden globes was made by a Chiron writer over at E, uh, when the actress Jamila Jamil from the good place came on screen, uh, she walked down the red carpet.

Uh, they wrote a Chiron called Camilla al-Jamil. Okay. Which is great because that's the fictional character she plays except her name is Tahani. It's Camilla is the sister. So they were trolling her because remember she has all the issues with the sister. Oh, gotcha.

Oh, that is funny. Now I get it. It's a great joke. So hats off to the, to the writer over at E that, uh, did all that in there. So very nice work. Well done. Well done. Now, now I get the joke. I was like, I'm like trying to figure out what the joke is here, but now I get it. Ah, well done.

Yes. At the library. I finished both 2061 and 3001 Space Odyssey's book three and book four by Arthur C.

Clark over the break. So I'm done with those for at least another 10 years, I'd say. Okay. That's it. So that's it. There are four books in the series. There's four books in the series. And, uh, since he has passed, there will never be any more, which is a bit sad because once I got to the end of 3001, I was like, well, what happens next?

But, uh, luckily the estate has decided not to continue on with other authors. Unlike many other estates, which going back to the very beginning of the show, most of those books are the ones that got called. And I said, thank you. Goodbye. I got rid of all the Dune series books that were written by the sun and the coauthors.

I got rid of all the foundation series that were continued on by other authors. I only kept the originals. All the other books went away. So I guess I'm glad that nobody has carried on the 3001 story. Um, but I, again, they're, they're all great books. Technologically, scientifically, they haven't aged very well, but the human story and the experience and the discovery and all of that, that's, they were master books, uh, by a master writer.

So you can't go wrong with them. Okay. That's good. I don't know if I'm ever going to pick them up. Cause, uh, I don't know. I just, they just don't, they don't call to me for some reason and I can't even get into the foundation series. I've tried. I don't know. I sometimes, sometimes, yeah, maybe when I retire, I'll sit down and read them.

But for now, since retirement doesn't look like it's ever going to come and I'll be working till I die, I think I'll, uh, just, uh, go, go by you. I read, uh, can't hurt me, master your mind and defy the odds by David Goggins. Okay. He's, uh, you know, he's an ex military guy and just an insane human being.

He, this guy is just like some kind of super athlete and it's an, it's an interesting story about, you know, his time in the military is, uh, his growing up and all that stuff. And like how, how broken he was by his childhood to like try and do all of this crazy stuff.

And, uh, it was really interesting. It was really interesting. But what I really liked about this one was I got the audio book, of course. And what they did was they had his coauthor with him and in the coauthor read the book, but in between the chapters, they basically did like a little podcast style roundup where you got a lot more info that was not in the book and you got some behind the scenes stuff.

Oh, nice. And, uh, it was really fun. I really enjoyed that part. Cause it really kind of brought it to life because, you know, David would sit there and talk about what was in the previous chapter and explain stuff and maybe go into a little bit more detail that wasn't in the actual book. So as far as audio books go, this was a really fun format and I really, really enjoyed it.

It's not for every book, you know, but for this type of book, for this like biography type, if the, you know, if the person the book is about is still alive and you can get your, you know, coauthor in there because all these biographies always have, you know, the ghost writers with them or coauthors, it's, it's, it's a really fun format.

I hope they do more of them. Very cool. And it was a good book. It was just a really good book. All right. Excellent. Uh, this isn't a book, but it is in the New Yorker and that's pretty literary. And I didn't want to wait until, uh, another segment to do this. So a, I have a link in the show to show notes to a millennial in the year 2050, which is a cartoon drawing by Evan Ehlers.

And it's exceedingly funny. Okay. I'll definitely check that out. Yeah. Check that out. I'm not going to step on any of the jokes. It's, it's quite amusing. So it's in the show notes. Take a look at it. And I got a notification from Amazon over the break that there is a new Neil Stevenson book coming June 4th, 2019 called fall or dodge in hell.

Now I've talked a lot on the show about how Neil Stevenson lost me for quite a long time, but firmly got me back with seven eves. Uh, the description of this book sounds right up my alley. So I'm very much looking forward to this. What was the description again? Because I looked at it and it didn't catch me. Oh, really? Yeah.

It's a, it's a guy that starts up a date, a gaming company that made him a multi-billionaire and he ends up having in his life, uh, or in his thing, he wants to be, uh, chirogenically frozen and they were able to bring him back much later on where there's an eternal afterlife called the bit world where humans continue to exist as digital souls, but it's not quite the utopia that it first seems and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It sounds pretty good. Yeah. They just basically make you mine Bitcoin in the afterlife. Yeah. 880 pages. Wow. Uh, dude cannot write a short book. No, he cannot. And his last one was definitely not, not up there for me.

That was a weird one. Which one? The last one I read was the rise and fall of Dodo. Oh, I forgot that came out. Yeah. It was a book between him and Nicole Galland and didn't care for that. No, that was not a good book. I didn't think so at all, but I mean, I still go back.

My favorite book that he ever wrote was diamond age. Yeah. Snow crash classic, obviously. Yeah. Snow crash doesn't have legs. I tried to read it again. Same with Cryptonomicon. I love that book when it came out, but it doesn't have the legs. Right. As if we hadn't had enough with shared bikes and shared scooters and shared everything else.

There's a new company on the block called Walnut. They want to share electric skateboards. What? Yep. Because we don't have enough stuff out there already. However, they are doing a slightly different business model. They're more Airbnb than Bird because they're actually going to let individual owners of their skateboards rent them out through an app instead of just dropping a whole bunch of skateboards on the block.

You will have to find someone through the app that actually owns one who's willing to let you take it out for a while. Oh, God. And these things cost $1,400. And I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not going to loan some Yahoo my $1,400 skateboard, which skateboards take a lot of beating when you're out there.

And this thing can go up to 22 miles an hour. I don't know. You were never a skateboarder. No. I've been on a skateboard going about 22 miles an hour, sometimes faster. It's terrifying. And you have to be really good. I'm sorry. You have to be really good. I want to know what the business model here is for damage for skateboards that never come back, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. Insurance. Who's carrying the insurance on these things? Well, I mean, Bird doesn't bother worrying about that. So why should they? True. True. So these are going to come out in China first. So we'll see. We'll see if it makes it out of China. Yeah, we'll see. I seriously doubt it.

Most of these are kind of silly things that are coming out of CES, obviously. So here's another one. A stat tracking smart condom. Just what we all needed. Okay. Is it reusable? Well, it's actually not really a condom.

It's called the Icon, of course. And it's more like a cock ring that you then put a condom on and it holds the condom in place. But the ring is packed with a nano chip and sensors that track everything from your girth to velocity to calories burned. Then it sends it all to an app on your phone, adding to the reasons you may want to throw your phone in a river.

It also has antibodies filters that alert your phone when Icon detects proteins or antigens found in STIs. Okay. Wow. Yeah. No. No.

I know what Brian's getting for Christmas. Well, I'm a married man with a child, Jason. I don't necessarily know I need that anymore. It'll sit in the drawer for quite some time. Exactly. And in Everybody is a Moron News, human waste, champagne bottles, even a prom dress, Joshua Tree and Yosemite get trashed as the government shutdown continues.

So if you ever wondered why we can't have nice things, the partial federal government shutdown is giving us a real view of that. Basically, Joshua Tree National Park is getting destroyed. Yosemite is getting destroyed. There's vandalism, illegal camping, off-road driving.

All kinds of crap is going on because people are horrible. Campgrounds at Joshua Tree have closed as of Wednesday at noon, citing health and safety concerns over vault toilets that are near capacity. People are now just shitting out in the open as well because of that.

Yay. Yeah. Yeah. Garbage people. Garbage in, garbage out. Welcome to America. Yep. And speaking of human waste, I have not watched this, but apparently you should. Surviving R. Kelly, which argues and proves really that we have made an unforgivable pact with Kelly, a musical genius who was able to hide his evil behavior in plain sight for decades because he committed his crimes against black girls.

We chose to ignore his deeds, downplay them, and remain willfully ignorant of them so we could go on enjoying his music. Speaking of someone who has never enjoyed his music, suck this dude. I watched the first episode last night and my roommate used to work in the music business and she was just like, that's what everybody did.

Everybody did that. Eh, not really. Well, they have a lot of examples in there. Yes, yes. Stuff like this has been going on for quite some time, but we're in a different era now and the musicians, I know, do not do this sort of stuff anymore.

That's good. Anymore. You said anymore. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. All right. And look at it. One last example, though, that they brought out. Elvis. Even Elvis was guilty of this. So people turn the other way when people have talent.

Yep. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, that is extremely true and we need to stop that. So somebody stop playing R. Kelly on stations at some point. And we have a hero of the week, Snoop Dogg. All right. Snoop Dogg wants unpaid government workers to remember the motherfucker who caused the shutdown. And he put up a wonderful video saying, all you federal government people that's not being paid, that's being treated fucking unfairly right now, Snoop says.

That's so terrible. And this punk motherfucker don't care. Way to go, Snoop. Go, Snoop. Feedback loop. We have a lot of new Patreon subscribers. Thank you very much. Thomas, Larry, Trafton, Gabriel, Alex, Patrick, Dan, Cynthia, Flavio, James, Ben, and Andrew.

And Andrew says, canceled my NPR donation to donate to you guys. Keep up the amazing work. Down with Rad. All it will do is make the Echo Chamber podcast even more polarized. It does society a major disservice. Profits over people. And rad is the new, basically, podcast tracking crap that NPR is trying to get people to adopt.

And it, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And Dino writes this interesting paper that attempts to determine the worth of Facebook based on what it would cost to pay users to give up using the platform. The study used willingness to accept auctions to assess how much would be needed to compensate users to deactivate their Facebook accounts.

I get it, but it's not just a financial consideration, right? Like Facebook, unfortunately, does serve a purpose, and you'd need to replace the functions that you do like with Facebook and not just a monetary concern, at least in my opinion.

I disabled it for free. You did it for free. I did it for free. I know a lot of people that have done it for free. Yes, very cool. And over at PayPal, we got donations from David, Richard, David C., Ivor, David F., and Joseph. Thank you all so much. And, again, if you guys want to hear the Patreon-only Q&A that we did, we're opening that up to, obviously, anybody that's donated to the show, so just drop us a message.

And over on Facebook, Brian writes in, I'm a little behind on episodes, so I'm listening to episode 306. So let me get this straight. You can't afford insurance, but you're willing to pay $1,000 for a domain. Wait until you get to episode 309 and you hear what he paid for for a drone. That's right. The domain thing is just, that's my legacy.

I built that thing and it's getting hijacked. And, you know, it really chaps my dazzle that that's out there. Because I'm still associated with that in a lot of places and I don't want people to, you know, just say, go check it out and see what's there. And then I'm associated with all this malware getting, you know, with redirections and all this crap.

So that was just self-preservation. And as far as insurance goes, yeah, it's too expensive and I couldn't get enough stuff together before I got through the, there was like a week where I could get in. It's so hard, it's so hard to even just buy it now because you have to wait for one of these little tiny windows.

And this enrollment period sucks. So next time, hopefully. But it was just too expensive and I didn't have enough time when the window came around this time. So don't, don't, don't hit me with the bus. Try to avoid that. Over at Twitter, MC Walter 33 writes us, but you said they investigate in research.

Huh. And this is the link to an article over at the Intercept. Five weeks after the Guardian's viral blockbuster about Assange and Manafort scoop, no evidence has emerged. Just stonewalling, which I only replied. Journalism is hard. And sometimes it's bad. Look at, uh, sometimes it's bad, but this is the jury is actually still out on this one.

If you read through a lot of the comments on the Twitter, uh, posting that he sent us, it's, uh, um, it is still an active investigation of maybe they just got one little bit of information. The rest is being clamped down upon until the investigation is concluded. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Cause they're, they're dribbling out the Manafort stuff, you know, little here, little there, little here, little there.

Stuff came out today actually, but, uh, we won't talk. Nope. We're not going to talk about that. Maggie Snow writes in, you know, you are a loyal GOG podcast listener. When a dev tells you delete is delete. And you immediately hear slender fungus and JP def in your head say set visibility to zero. What does delete mean?

Exactly. Uh, one track seven, five, one nine says I owe you spit take. No one trying backdoor entry on Pornhub tears. I guess you made a good joke, Jason. All right. Every now and again, I'll get one in. Kevin writes in, I'm listening to the GOG podcast via Spotify through my Alexa.

Perfect listener. Um, yeah, I wish we got better stats from Spotify. They, they just take it and never tell us anything. So I know it kind of sucks. Maybe we should sign up with rad. Yeah. They could probably fix that. And Brandon writes us just read Martha Wells piece in the latest issue of wired.

It was labeled as a prequel to her murder bot diaries novella series. I think I remember, uh, you guys talking about that series, but I can't remember the verdict. Did you guys read this? Any good. I looked at the article. I dug it up on, on wired and it's actually just the first few pages from the first novel. That's all it is.

Yeah. So, okay, good. I don't have to go find it. No. Yeah. That's why I wanted to see if it was a prequel and I'd be, I'd be in, but I'm like, I've read this already. This is in the first book. Yeah. So, uh, we did, uh, we did enjoy the books. Uh, uh, the recommendation is do not read them all in a row though. Yeah. Cause you will get burned out. Yeah. Yeah. Read one, go read some other stuff, come back, read the next one, et cetera.

And the first one is still the best. And over at GOG.show Maximilian writes in happy belated new year. I'm currently in Mexico city on vacation and your beloved scooters are everywhere. Even my wife who had not seen them before got annoyed at all the obstacles on the sidewalk. Yes, sir.

Re Maximilian. Yes. And Rick writes us upon your recommendation. Now it's Firefox. No opera. Yes. But VPN on or off. He also says, saw the orb last month. Boring. They were awesome. 15 years ago. Cheers. Uh, VPN on or off. If you are out and about, uh, on other people's wifi and whatnot, uh, VPN on always.

If you were at home on your own shutdown, uh, hopefully, you know, secure connection. That's up to you depending on what you're doing, I suppose. Yeah. If you're trying to pretend you're in another country, then VPN on. If you're just browsing the web, no need. And Ivor Davies writes in, Hey guys, a trusted friend of mine posted this article from privacy international yesterday.

And it's an article investigating apps, interactions with Facebook on Android. And, um, this is a crazy article. Did you check this one out? I did. Yeah. Yeah. We found that at least 61% of apps we tested automatically transfer data to Facebook.

The moment a user opens the app, this happens whether people have a Facebook account or not, or whether they are logged into a face into Facebook or not. So this actually might be, you know, one of those things where we're getting some more data on where Facebook is getting data on people that don't actually use Facebook and tying it together.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's one thing that this tells me is I'm never switching to Android. Yeah, no doubt. And he says, when I started reading it, I rather smugly thought, Oh yeah, another Facebook data vacuuming scandal. I'm glad I quit Facebook six months ago. Otherwise I might be getting upset about this.

Then I read the key findings in a strange red misdescended. Yeah. It's kind of. Yeah. And he ends, uh, he ends his very funny, funny letter to us with fuck you, you fucking Facebook motherfuckers. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a tough one. Uh, Gabe writes us. Hey guys, love the show. Been listening for about six months now and thought you might be able to give me some advice. I've just started contributing small articles to a brand new website called sustainable pioneers. It's a project meant to be somewhat of an online magazine about environmental sustainability. The admin made it in WordPress and it looks pretty clean cut.

My question is, aside from getting a dreaded social media presence, what's a good way to expand a newborn like this one? Here's a link. If you have the time, check it out and tell me what you think. Stay grumpy. And the link is in the show notes. Um, we're out of the game of trying to promote things anymore because it's almost impossible online. Yeah. If you're trying to do it for free, you can buy ads.

Exactly. You can buy ads. That's about the best way to do it nowadays because you know, they are so well targeted now. You can probably get down granularly to the people who want to check out your website. But yeah, that's the only thing that I could think of right now is just go buy some ads.

Write good content. Promote it all the time. Everywhere that you go. Buy ads. Start a podcast. Cross post a medium. Yep. Geeks. My family got my now fiance as of 01 January 19th. Congratulations. A set of filament lights, which connect wirelessly over the internet.

When you touch it, the light changes color on both ends to let your loved ones know you're thinking about them. They're pretty cool, but I'm slightly worried that I may be opening my network up to intrusion. They come with a wireless puck that you plug directly into your router. I asked the company and they gave me a link to a security article, but I'm still worried that this may provide a backdoor to my network, much like an unsecured printer.

I was wondering what your guys or Dave Bittner's take might be on this. And I looked at them. They're interesting. Yeah. I don't really understand the point. Well, if you, you know, have a long distance relationship or you want, you tell your mom you're thinking about her, then you tap the light.

And if she's somewhere in the vicinity of the light, it will change colors or text them, call them, call them, get a Facebook portal. Not that. I looked over the security stuff. It looks pretty straightforward, cut and dry, but you never know.

Honestly, you never know. Yeah. That's the real problem. I mean, if you really want to test it, then you just get a packet sniffer and you see what's going on. And when you click on things, see where things are going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Decompile the code. See. Decompile the code. You can get, you can get really crazy with it, but, uh, yeah, I don't know.

I, I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal from what they say in their security article. It looks pretty straightforward. You're probably okay. Uh, Neil Reds is Hey Grumps. Couple shows behind at the moment, but want to throw my two cents in. Hopefully literally at some point I heard your bit about antivirus and felt like a knife went through my heart when I heard you say Norton was an antivirus you use.

I used to work for geek squad. Now a knife went through my heart, Neil, and I've done a lot of tech work on the side, building computers, fixing, et cetera, and have always found Norton to be closer to malware than most actual malware is. I personally use WebRoot as it's an incredibly lightweight antivirus and extremely effective.

It also includes a lot of useful tools for cleaning and optimization available without the harassing pop-ups some others give you. Also a personal thing coming from the gamer side. Love the hate on Razer. Always had issues with their software and lots of games recognize them as cheat engines and multiple antivirus programs recognize their software as malicious.

Never trusted it, but that's my two cents. Jason, check out Corsair's Polaris mouse pad. If you want some awesome lighting, it's like 60 bucks or less. If you catch a sale, love the show. Stay grumpy. Neil, yeah, I get it. Everybody has their preferences with antivirus stuff, but I don't think WebRoot would work for my parents.

Norton does. Yeah. And well, Norton for me was free because it came with my Comcast account, but I have had like computers that I bought brand new, open the box up and they blue screened and I had to repair them fresh out of the box until I could get Norton uninstalled.

So sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. You throw in the dice, but it's my, my, uh, my level of use of my PC is very low. So free is what I'm going for. Neil writes in. Hi, this is how you deal with scooters. Lime scooters halts a gold coast rollout a day after a day as the council confiscates them.

So basically they hit the streets and then the gold coast, the city council just said, Nope, we're taking them back. You can't have them in over in Brisbane. They're actually working, uh, without issues after having proper agreements and helmets so far. So how about that? All right. There you go. Uh, Patrick writes us, uh, I recommend you both check out the deadly class pilot eighties high school movie vibe, darker than Heather's excellent soundtrack.

I clicked on the link and it says a video unavailable. So I will have to search for that later. And he also asks, uh, is the book you're thinking about with people buying oxygen, total recall? No. Okay. Yeah. We got to stop asking people questions. It's never going to go away.

I know, but maybe someday you'll figure it out. Cyber illusion writes in. Hey guys, just want to say thanks for mentioning basic a couple of shows back. It was my first language and playing with it recently brought back fond memories of how fun programming used to be. I even found a kid's book at the thrift store on Q basic. There'll be a link in the show notes.

My son is a toddler now, but I will introduce this to him when he gets older. And PS just listened to an episode where yet another person seemed butthurt about the criticism of Trump. Although I lean right sometimes, I am not one of those people. I like your show because you give honest opinions about things. And even if sometimes I don't 100% agree, I still like to hear your opinion.

Every sitting president is criticized, made fun of, and that's the American way. And it's especially true for the train wreck that is Trump. I truly hope Santa brings these snowflakes a spine for Christmas. Keep up the great work. Grump on guys. Thank you very much. Over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Flavio Mello.

My favorite podcast. I have a really long commute and you guys make it bearable. I can learn and laugh along the way. Keep it up. I strongly recommend it. We shall. And we got a five-star from Sourpuss McGee. It's pretty good. Not too bad. That's how you do a snarky comment.

Love it. I love it, too. And another five-star rating from RPWOA. Smarter and grumpier. As a tech idiot, this podcast makes me smarter. As a curmudgeon, this podcast makes me grumpier. Keep up the surly work. We shall. We shall. It's a balance. It's push and pull.

If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and a snarky review. And if you're listening to this on Overcast, please press the little star button next to the episode so we can get a little boost in the visibility.

We'd appreciate it. Thank you. Closing shout outs. Just want to give a shout out to all of our listeners for a fantastic 2018 and all the support we got and our returning sponsors. Show them some love. We really only take on sponsors for products we mostly like.

Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Support the show and keep us on the air. Go to patreon.com slash GOG. Pass us a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 310. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.