32: Big butts, statistics, and hot sauce!

Happy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Happy Halloween, Brian. Happy Halloween, Jason. It is a lovely, rainy, crappy, cold, shitty day here in Chicagoland. For Halloween. It's quite nice, lovely, and warm here in lovely Venice, California for Halloween.

But I'm not actually doing anything tonight anyways. I suppose my costume is flying out to London in the morning, Guy. Are you up to anything tonight? Sitting at home, drinking, and yelling at children. Okay, that'll work. That's about it. Yes, I have my Guy Fawkes mask, my V for Vendetta.

Anonymous mask, that's the only costume I have. My brother's out today, it's Clark Kent. He's got, oh, Jesus, what the hell is that? Apparently, the spiders are coming to get me. There's a spider that's just going to climb down from the microphone. Ooh, it is Halloween.

Yes. Sorry about that, that boom. Yeah, so I'm just kind of doing my thing. Yeah, I've actually got my mask as well, and I might, the only thing I was going to do is there's a craft Halloween beer, you know, kind of seasonal beer, pumpkin beers, all that sort of thing, tasting down at the Library Ale House down here tonight.

So maybe I'll throw on the mask and walk down there for that. A friend of mine told me his costume, which I thought was really hilarious. I'm dressed as an eligible bachelor with an 800-plus credit score. Ladies. Does he put that on the shirt, or is that it? He just goes up as himself.

No, so far, that's just his funny Facebook update of the day. But I quite think he should write that on a T-shirt or something. Yeah, that'd be a good T-shirt. Since it's Halloween, let's talk about Clients from Hell. Yeah, I ran across this site this week, and I'd had a pretty crappy week with some Clients from Hell this week myself, so I totally lost myself in this site for almost like two hours.

This would be at clientsfromhell.net. Yes, clientsfromhell.net. It's all submitted stories from real people and their real clients, and I've had at least half of these things happened exactly to me. They're all as absolutely ridiculous as you'd expect them to be.

If you're in any kind of industry where you serve as clients, but particularly anywhere in the internet industry, because this seems to be 90% of the stories, you will die laughing. Yeah, or just cry because it has happened to you. Yeah, I read it, and yeah, had it been there, done that.

Yeah, there's just a lot of fantastic ones. Although the one thing that really stood out for me, because I thought it was really just my personal bad luck, I can't believe how many people out there just want things for free, that really just don't expect to have to pay for anything, because half these stories involve the clients just not wanting to pay at all.

Oh, yeah, that's standard. Yeah. I was really happy. I got a couple new clients. I've got more clients now than I've had in probably five years that all just kind of came into existence this week. But they're all super pro, and I'm like, look, I don't type until the check clears.

Yeah. And they're like, yeah, we wouldn't expect it. They've all signed all the agreements. I was just like, what the hell's happening? I've got professional clients. This is new. I don't understand how this works. So I'm going to be busy through Christmas like nobody's business.

But hopefully they will not show up on this website. Yeah, there's some good, good stuff in there. Did you hear about that horrible site that came out of, I believe it came out of England, when TechCrunch, the new TechCrunch Disrupt for Europe, it's a site for client shaming to get freelancers paid faster.

Do you see that thing? No, I didn't see that. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but OK. Yeah, they put up the clients, and they have average time to pay. So you can see if they pay on time or not. Right. And the funny part was, the guy that was doing the presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt was wearing a Mike Montero, fuck you, pay me shirt.

Yeah. And here's the funny part. Mike hates it. He's like, no. Look, if you've got a problem, if you hate clients, don't be in client services. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're fucking it up for the rest of us. There's a certain amount of shit that you're just going to have to deal with. It's called cost of doing business.

But some things get egregious. And actually, I think clientsfromhell.net, that site exists. It's perfect for what it is. It's a way for us to vent about stupid shit that we deal with. That isn't, you know, no clients are named. Nobody's ever named. There's no shaming going on.

There's no, because everybody screws up now and then. But, yeah, this stuff just can be so frustrating. I was tearing my hair out this week over a particular client. I think you saw my Facebook update about that and laughed. Yeah. I got a completely, you know, malformed text message at 9 p.m. at night asking me why I hadn't updated.

I mean, screaming at me, basically, about why I haven't updated the site with information that no one has ever mentioned to me, ever. I'm just like, because nobody's ever told me this? Yeah. And then I didn't actually get the information for two more days. So it must not have been that important.

Apparently not, yes. Yeah. See, I mean, you have to have those, like, pressure release valves. That's what these are good for. Yeah. And beer. And when I was in the ad agency biz, when I was at BLT, there was a whole set of Tumblr blogs about, you know, what were these?

Project managers. Like, project manager hell type of thing. So it would be what the client says to the project managers, and they'd pass them around. And it was good fun, and it was scarily true, because there's some really dumb fucking people out there. So, clients from hell.

Check it out, for sure. Clients from hell. Spooky. So, I also saw a thing about how Kentucky has the best Obamacare website. Yeah, I saw that as well, which is, again, we talked about this a bit last week, and it's still going on. People apologizing for a website, the president apologizing for a website, which is absolutely insane.

But yeah, Kentucky did their own. They didn't use the government framework. And they did it the right way. They made it simple. Probably, since it's Kentucky, it's probably a good thing. They did it at a sixth grade reading level. Probably a bit ambitious.

Ouch. Somebody call the fire department. You got burned. Oh, shit. No, wait. Hold on a second. I take that back. There are people that download us in Kentucky. What's the state that we don't have yet? Wyoming. We should have changed the story. Yeah, be nice to the people in Kentucky. And I actually lived in Kentucky for a while, so I've been there, done that.

So here's the thing. It's like, yeah, they did heavy testing from the get-go. It was a test-driven development cycle. Perfect. All right. We're good with that. Yeah, we like that. Here's the problem I have with their website. It's called Kynect, K-Y-N-E-C-T. It is very weird.

Yeah. If they got rid of the E, I'd think it's another crazy startup. That's not the problem. Okay. I'm cool with the name. That's perfect. They're trying to be hip and all that. I got no problem with that. Right. When I first went there, yes, it is simplistic. It's got terrible design. But they hired an illustrator.

Yeah. The illustrator that they hired, I don't know how this happened. When you go to the front page, there's this cornucopia of people. They've got people in wheelchairs. You've got people with family, business owners, whatever. Yeah. A bunch of different types of people. When you go to the individual section, you have a black family.

When you go to the small business, you have all white people and one Indian in what looks to be a convenience store outfit. When you go to the insurance, you have a white douchebag in a suit.

And it's just the stereotypes that came out on – just go check it out and look at it and tell me if I'm wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong. You're not wrong. I don't necessarily think that it was intentional. They obviously really tried to show diversity.

But it is very funny how they managed to do that. And, hey, you know, on the plus side, the black family, they're together. Well, I think they were – aren't they standing apart? I suppose, yeah. I've got to take a look here. No. No. Yeah.

Isn't the dad, like, off on his own? No, no, no, no. The dad's off with the son and off to the side. It's the mom and the girl and the dad and the son. There's no malt liquor in the background. Come on. Give the guy some props here. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Don't push it there. I'm not – I don't go in for those sort of shenanigans.

One thing that – I mean, I fucking hate racists. So this is why it kind of – Oh, I do too. But if you're going to go for the whole stereotype, I don't think this is intentional. I see the polarity in it, but I don't think it was intentional. They're probably going from statistics sheets saying that the most people that are uninsured in the state of Kentucky are probably black families.

Yeah, and they put everybody together on that opening graphic, which is kind of nice. I see what they did there. So didn't even do that many illustrations, just kind of split them up over the different tabs there. Apparently no Asians in Kentucky, just one Indian dude. One Indian dude in a gas station-like serviceman outfit.

Yeah, yeah. He does seem to be some sort of gas station dude. I'm like, seriously, people, seriously, we've got to go there. It's 2013, Jesus. They threw somebody in a wheelchair. That's not bad. You know, there you go. Roll a cripple. Yeah, and they went with soccer as the only sports thing in there, which is kind of nice. Go Kentucky.

Oh, man. So I've been hanging out with old, uninitiated people when it comes to technology recently. Okay. I call them clients. I call them parents. We were watching the World Series.

Sorry about that. Oh, well, you know. Go Boston. And my dad just finally gets so frustrated. He goes, what's a goddamn hashtag? It is amazing how the phrase hashtag, and you just can't see an ad anymore.

There's no commercial where they don't go, go to hashtag dumb shit. It's ridiculous. And in a month before, my mother, we were watching some stupid sports. Oh, no. We were watching ABC. I think it's ABC or CBS, where it used to be called TV Worth Watching.

Right. And now their tagline is TV Worth Tweeting. And I was like, what? And she goes, what's a goddamn hashtag? So I had to explain it to them both times. And how is this not communicated at this point that, you know, what a hashtag is?

I mean, I know that it's, for us, it's ubiquitous. We know about it. Shit, I'm friends with the guy that invented the damn thing. I remember when it came to be. But, you know, everybody else is just like, what the fuck is that thing? Well, I mean, you know, I think even my parents, my parents aren't, they kind of have a vague idea of what Twitter is, but they don't really know.

But, you know, hashtag, oh, that's just some internet thing. Yeah. That, so. I don't know. It just drives me nuts. And I tried to get what's a hashtag.com and what is a hashtag.com, but some dipshit at GoDaddy is sitting on it, so I can't get it.

But the Wikipedia entry is fairly, fairly cohesive. Yes, it is. And I do, you know, it reminded me of the site that we talked about last week where they were talking about what an A drive and a B drive is. I wonder how many people do, I mean, I recall that hashtags were used for IRC. Yeah, and I just said cohesive.

I meant to say comprehensive. I'd be staying up nights thinking about that until this episode came out if I didn't get it off my chest right now. You'd call me for a last minute edit. Yeah, I'm like, comprehensive. I'm on a plane, Jason. Too bad. Edit it yourself.

So, yeah. I did see that Twitter has actually finally rolled out embedding photos and videos in the feed now, not just a link, thus making it even more like Facebook's timeline. But they've been doing that for a while with the cards, haven't they? I think so. Why is this different? This is inline photos and videos.

I don't know. It made the news. They made some sort of adjustment. Although I haven't noticed on my accounts, it seems to be only rolling out on specific accounts because I just put up a photo on the Grumpy Old Geeks Twitter and it's still a link. It's not embedded.

That's interesting because, yeah, you had to use cards before. There's a certain syntax that you do in the HTML for your site when you link to something that will get it to pop the picture in. Like if you're on a Twitter client, you can say view photo or view media and it will expand and show you what it is.

Those are called Twitter cards. So I'm not sure exactly what the difference is here. I have to take a look at it. I didn't really give a shit enough to really care about reading this. Yeah, I'm like, okay, Twitter put some shit in its timeline. Yeah, okay, great.

The main thrust of the article isn't so much about the technology aspect as it's just like, all right, we're completely done with words. Even the last kind of word-based social network is now just about shoving pictures and videos in your face. Yeah, no, no. Yeah, which is fine, whatever.

I don't care. I've given up. I've given up. Well, it is multimedia. Jesus. It's just words. It's just media. It's monomedia. Monomedia? Monomania? Monomania. Monomania. So we can...

Monomanon. Oh, man. Yeah, what was that? That was the Muppets thing. Yeah, with Sandra Bullock. It's fantastic. Good old stuff. We might have to drop that video in the show notes for anybody that hasn't seen it before. And we did a couple...

We did a thing for Minion Mayhems where we ripped that off where it was a dancing thing instead of people going, Monomania. It was pervasive. And I didn't know what it was when they told me about the project. I started working on the Minion Mayhem for Despicable Me, the ride in Orlando.

Yeah. I started working on this thing. And they're like, yeah, it's like Monomania. And I'm like, what the hell is that? So I had gone my whole life without knowing about what this thing was. And once they played it, for a month, I couldn't get it out of my head. That's awesome. So we can take shit on planes now.

Yes. Well, not yet. Which really bums me out because I am getting on a flight tomorrow. The FAA is going to finally roll out new rules over time that will let passengers use their tablets, their iPads, their e-book devices during takeoff and landing as well as during the flight.

Okay. Because we talked about this already. Yeah. So this is them finally saying, okay, we're going to do it? Yeah. This is them saying we're going to do it but without really giving a specific point in time yet. But they finally announced that it is definitely going to happen and they'll start rolling it out. And as we discussed, an iPad shooting across at 500 miles an hour, I might start wearing a helmet for takeoff and landing.

I think TSA might have an issue with you coming through with a helmet. Do you remember there was a guy that came on who was wearing one of those squirrel suits, you know, the flying squirrels? Yeah, yeah. And he got taken off. Like, we're not letting you on. Because you're not going to get on a plane with a parachute, you know?

Because they think, well, why do you have a parachute and not everybody else? Because you're going to do something and jump out and whatever. So don't bring a helmet. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, don't bring a helmet and don't bring a parachute. I'm pretty sure that the Mythbusters did something about, like, getting off – trying to jump off a commercial airliner going at those speeds that you would die anyways.

Really? I don't remember that one. I had to check that out. I think so. Well, yeah. Especially 500 miles an hour. Yeah. Knowing where the tail is, you would probably cut the tail fin in half or break your back as soon as the wind hits you. Pretty much, yeah.

It's probably not safe. But, yeah, not in time for my gargantuan 12-hour flight tomorrow. So, bummer. But that's okay. I'm hoping that – well, I'm actually flying a new airline. I've never flown Air New Zealand before, which is what I happen to be taking.

Nice, nice. I hear they're quite nice, and if they're anywhere near as civilized as Air Canada, they will turn on the movies system and everything before you get going. And they've been allowing us to watch movies with headphones during takeoff and landing on Air Canada for quite some while. So I'm hoping that will be the case.

Well, headphones have always been legal. You can always wear headphones. Yeah. You just couldn't listen to anything on them except for their in-built services. Yeah, and international flights have different rules because when I flew to Hong Kong, I flew Cathay Pacific.

And as soon as we hit – I mean, it was like 30 seconds after takeoff. Right. Everything's out. Everything's off. Their stewardess is coming down the aisle with jugs of wine. Everybody's up and moving around. It is not like it is here. I mean, it's like we're going to China, motherfuckers.

It's like who cares? It's a long-ass flight. Get that wine going. Yeah, it was a 20-some hour – oh, God. That flight was ridiculous. But I had an airbag in my – because I was in a bulkhead seat. Right. So there was no seat in front of us. But my seat had a – or my seat belt had an airbag in it, which I thought was just the coolest thing.

That is pretty damn cool. Yeah. I was wondering when they were going to start rolling those out for everybody. But, yeah, if you've got to do international travel as far as going to Asia or whatnot, Cathay Pacific was awesome. I heard they are amazing. Nothing with good stuff, yeah. And they were cheap, too.

They were the cheapest and the best, as I can tell. So I hope that you have a nice little tiny 12-hour flight. That's nothing. Yeah, it's not too bad. I'll survive. I used to do it all the time back when I was living over there. So it'll be okay. It's just been a while since I've done it, and I still won't be able to, unfortunately, read my e-book yet.

Unless they've rolled it out by tomorrow on Air New Zealand. Somehow I doubt it. So I noticed in our little notes thing that you're pissing and moaning about Upworthy. What's the problem? I'm just so sick of it. I can't stand it anymore, and you can't get away from it.

Like, I unlike the page and all that. Now it just shows up in ads, and everybody that, you know, every friend has to like the same stupid crap. And, ah, I just can't stand it anymore. I'm too grumpy, and I'm too old to give a shit about these stories. At first, I liked them, because some of them were really inspiring when they first started out.

But like anything else, like your Huffington Post, et cetera, as soon as you start getting a little bit successful, you start to feel the need for content. And now the stuff is just getting more and more ridiculous, and I can't stand it. Okay, I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never seen – I may have seen one article come across.

I don't know how you can – I don't understand how, like, this website is following you around and haunting you. I'm like, how does that work? Because I want to figure it out, because that'd be great if I could figure out how to make a website follow somebody and haunt them. And that's good marketing.

I don't know how it happens. I have a feeling I just have a bunch of my friends that are into these kind of stories, and they're always liking it or commenting on it. So it's just constantly in my feed. Yeah, I've never seen anything – I mean, I've seen, like, literally one or two articles from them. And, I mean, I think the name is good, Upworthy.

That's – It's a good name, and it's a nice thought. Yeah. So I've actually been on Reddit a lot recently, which is scaring me. I was really good friends with Kevin Rose way back when he – right when he first started Dig. I was – I interviewed for the first programmer position after Owen, the guy that built it.

I was going to be, like, the first hire, but I was a tech neurotic, and I liked it. Right. But so I felt this weird kinship with Kevin. So when Reddit came out, I'm like, oh, fuck those guys. They're just ripping off Dig, you know? Yeah. Well, Dig's dead. It's trying to make a comeback. But, you know, my allegiance was broken when Kevin left the company.

So I can look at competitors now and not feel this pang of guilt. And god damn, what a rabbit hole that is. Oh, yeah. I could spend four or five hours in there just finding the most useless crap. Yeah, I got really into Reddit a couple months ago, and then I realized that, like, three or four hours would go by, and I hadn't, like, found what I initially was going there to look for anyways and hadn't done anything else with my life all day.

It was a hell of a rabbit hole to get sucked down. Yeah. My trick now is I use FreshBooks for all my contracting work. All my work. I'm a contractor, so all my work is contracting work. So in FreshBooks, there's a timer section.

So you go there, and it pops up a small little vertical window. That is your timer. Right. That you use to track time that you then assign to a client. I keep that open all the time now. And if that's not running, I feel crappy.

Right. That's the whole point of me being in front of the computer is to make that timer go. So if I'm in front of the computer and that's not running, then I don't need to be in front of the computer. That's the point. Exactly. So that's how I'm getting around these time sucks.

It's like, look, I have wasted enough time in front on the fucking internet. I don't need to do it anymore. I know it's just – it's empty calories. It is. The internet is empty calories if you're not doing something for a reason. So that's how I'm getting around it now.

I've got my little timer, and if that's not running, I can go for a walk. You know? Period. No, I agree. And the internet is empty calories, and Reddit in particular is like the hometown buffet. I have – I've got to say, though, I found a subreddit on podcasting because we are podcasters.

And since I now have two shows in the works, I'm trying to kind of connect with more of the guys who are doing it to find the tips and tricks to make it more fun and make it easier and all that stuff. So I did find a really cool subreddit on podcasting that did bear some fruit.

Excellent. But beyond that, I found just a bunch of really stupid pictures with captions. That's it. Yeah. At least it's not all cats. Just a lot of it. Yesterday was – or is it today? It was a National Cat Day. Who the hell came up with that? Was that yesterday?

It was yesterday because there were even more cats than normal on Instagram, I noticed. Oh, do we really need a cat day? Seriously? We don't need a day for anything. That's actually one of the few things that I enjoy on Twitter is I follow. I follow Captain Kirk, William Shatner, and he always posts what national day it is.

It's always ridiculous. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. It's like National Peach Pie Day. Oh, great. All right. Go Shatner. Mm-hmm. Go Shat. Hashtag Shat. I think that's not how it's supposed to go. Command of the Week.

So, in our effort to actually post more on our social media, I saw something that drove me a little crazy during the week while I was working. I took a little snapshot of an ad on Facebook for Hootsuite, which a lot of us are aware of and some people use. I personally am not a big fan.

Wait. What do they do? Hootsuite is a social networking platform. So, you can punch all your clients' Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, all that sort of stuff into it and basically schedule and do all your updates through this application.

Okay. This platform. So, that's what Hootsuite is. So, they had an ad that's been popping up on my Facebook feed basically constantly. You know, it's your standard Hootsuite suggested post. There are two kinds of social media managers. One, ones who use Hootsuite Pro and ones who need to try it.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 30-day free-of-charge trial. And then they use some really horrible clip art of two guys that are obviously meant to be young, hip, social media professionals. And I just found the photo to be really bad. It's just horrible. And it's really funny. So, I said, hey, let's have someone give us a good quote for that.

And thank you, Miller, who came up with a good one. Man, that was a great morning's thought leading. Let's hit Grindr and get some immersive experiences lined up. Very funny. Very good. Ding, ding, ding. Mr. Miller wins the internet for the day.

Yes. Good stuff. So, I have a comment, which is actually from – this comes from Kenny in London. It says, the GOG podcast makes my commute much more tolerable. Here's a small contribution for beer and bandwidth.

Keep it up. Cheers, Kenny. And you can find Kenny on Twitter at SKHXS. Hashtag thanks, man. Dude, serious thanks. That was not a small contribution, by the way. That was a major contribution. Yes, thank you very much. To keep us in beer and bandwidth.

I mean, granted, we'll probably spend that much on beer in an episode or two. But the bandwidth side, yes, that's great. Thank you very much. Our bandwidth sponsor is Kenny from London for this show. Kenny from London. And actually, Miller himself is also from London. So, there's a London connection going on.

And I'm going to be spending some of your contribution on a logger in London this weekend. Thanks, Kenny. Yeah. I mean, you should have a meetup over there. Sounds like we have a London contingency – a contingent, as it were. Maybe we'll do a grumpy old geeks pub meetup. We'll see.

Yeah. Might be posting that. Check out. Look out for that on the Facebook or the Twitter. Or I'll let you guys know where I'm going to be at. Yeah, that'd be fun. I wish I could do it. I wish I could be there. Because I'd much rather be in London than rainy Chicago for the next couple weeks. Because it is about to get nasty. So, thank you, Kenny.

Seriously. Thank you, Kenny. And well done, Miller. Very funny. But, Kenny, you're awesome. Thank you so much. You kept the lights on a little bit longer. Amen.

In the news. I got the flu. I got the flu. It's flu season. So, io9 came out with an article this week. It just flat out said, let's just debunk every flu vaccine myth out there in one fell swoop, shall we?

Yes. And they have – it's a listicle. I give them that. It is a listicle. But it is a listicle with scientific backup. Yes, it is. It's a science listicle. Yes. Sighticle? Slysticle. Slysticle.

Oh, God. Trademark Grumpy Old Geeks 2013. Hashtag, Slysticle. So, if you were on the fence about getting a flu vaccine, which I have been for my entire life. I've never gotten one. Not one. Every year, I get the fucking flu and I'm out for two weeks.

So, this year, I think I might go spend five bucks at Walgreens and get a shot. Really? You're going to do it? I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm still not. Okay. So, if we have to skip an episode because you have the flu and I don't, then I win the internet for the day.

That's true. I mean, to be fair, I think the reason I don't ever have to really worry about this is, first off, I'm living in Southern California. Warm. I'm not going in and out. I'm not getting rained on all the time. I'm not going from cold outside to warm inside back to cold outside to warm inside.

That has no bearing whatsoever. Cold and warmth has no bearing whatsoever on a bacteria or a virus transmitted. Like, the parents, like, screaming at the kids, you're going to catch the death of you going out with wet air.

That has nothing to do with a fucking virus. It has nothing to do with it. Okay. Well, point number two. You stay at home and you don't sleep. I've worked from home for 15 years. And I'm not in any office. I'm not around a bunch of people that have kids. You don't do public transportation, you know.

I don't do public transportation and I liberally drown my entire system in alcohol. I thought that you were going to say, like, antibacterial cream or whatever, but alcohol is better, yes. Alcohol and the massive amounts of supplements I take every single morning, yes.

So, I'm good. But, yeah, I mean, this is a great list. All this stuff we all hear all the time and this solves all your problems for you. Bookmark this and every time you hear something stupid, you can bust it out. Yeah. And fuck you, Jenny McCarthy. Damn right.

So, I'm going to be traveling a lot in the next couple months. I should have been back in California by now, but life has its ups and downs and sideways turns. So, I'm going to be up and down the East Coast apparently for the next two weeks through two, three weeks. So, I'm going to be traveling.

It is going to be the beginning of flu season and shopping – and here's the deal. It's also shopping season. So, everybody is out shopping and in this nasty, filth-infested Walmarts and Targets and whatever. So, it is the transmission season.

So, I'm going to get a shot just because I've never done it and I always get sick. So, if this year I get sick and I have a flu shot, well, then fuck you, flu shot. But I'm going to try it. All right. Give it a shot. Yeah. I'm still – I'm not getting in but for obvious reasons. And if I get a flu and I have to actually miss an episode, I'll owe you a case of beer.

All right. And I am going to be leading a revolutionary charge to Southern California very soon. I'm loading up on guns and bullets because I'm in the Midwest and we're going to come down there and we are going to kill some motherfuckers because you know what?

The Sriracha factory has been shut down because of whiny little bastard neighbors. Yes. This is big news here in Southern California, obviously, because it's relatively close by. I love this stuff. I've always got at least two of them in my fridge.

I put it – to steal the line from Frank's Red Hot, I put the shit on everything. It's awesome. And Frank's Red Hot sauce is crap. It is with the exception of making true buffalo wings. That is its only use.

It's very good because it's very vinegary and it's very watery. But as far as the Sriracha thing goes – and I have to apologize for all of the adult language, but this pisses me off. I love this stuff. And 30 people – OK, 30 neighbors.

How long has this factory been there? Forever. A long time. A long time. So these are people looking for a paycheck. So I don't – you know what? They'll get paid off and they'll go away. And I don't – it just – it irks me. I'm like, come on, guys. This is like – should be our national food source, OK?

I know. It's a Thai recipe. It's Thai hot sauce. But I don't give a shit because this is an American product. The guy came to America. He's a businessman. This is the American dream. Exactly. Even though we said the American dream is dead, the American dream is still alive in hot sauce. And you're shitting on the American dream.

Yes. It pisses me off. It's not good, but I do have a backup plan just in case we do end up having a shortage of the sauce. I don't know if you've heard of this restaurant yet that's just started to open up. It's called Shop House. And it's basically an Asian take on Chipotle.

You pick your rice or noodles or brown rice. You pick your meat. You pick your whatever. But they have lined the restaurants and basically decorate the restaurants with bottles of siriatcha sauce. So if we run out, I'm fucking going to that place and I'm stealing half their decorations. Well, the upside for me is I'm in Chicago.

Nobody buys this stuff here. So I can go to Dominic's or Jewel and buy the whole lot of it for pennies on the dollar. So I'm good for a while. And I literally did buy a bottle the day before this article came out in the L.A. Times saying that they shut it down.

So to do an awesome transition, I see that you noted Amazon Fresh has opened up. In L.A. and Seattle. And they can also deliver this sauce to you. Yeah. Yeah. I was very surprised. I mean, it's same day delivery on shit they got in stock.

It's the new Cosmo. Yeah. You know. It's $35. Was it a year? I think. But yeah, it's Amazon delivering you stuff faster. And it's kind of reminiscent of Home Grocer and Webvan.

Yeah. Home Grocer, which I used for a while. I actually don't use these services anymore because, as we mentioned, I work from home. So getting out of the house is actually kind of nice. But it was super convenient. And a lot of people are using Amazon Fresh here already. I see the green trucks driving around everywhere.

Okay. That's cool. Yeah. Back in the day when I was – because I was – we talked about my Cosmo, my addictive Cosmo use for porn and ice cream. Yes. I used Home Grocer every week because I had a ridiculously small, stupid-ass sports car back then.

I had a two-seater 300ZX, which I could put a bag of ramen in and a gallon of milk. So for me, having them come deliver my groceries was fantastic. And the great part about Home Grocer was they wouldn't – you couldn't tip them.

Even if you tried to tip them, they wouldn't take it. They wouldn't take it. And one guy took it and turned out that he wasn't allowed to and he got fired. It was crazy because they sent out surveys after – they sent out surveys.

But here's the thing that – Home Grocer would have lived on forever I think. But they took – when Webvan consumed them, the Home Grocer brand went away. And it became Webvan, which was the dumbest name for a company ever. Home Grocer, you knew what it was.

Exactly. That was great. But Webvan? What the fuck is Webvan? Jesus. So Amazon Fresh at least. It's got its own brand. It's good. We've got stuff. I can't try it. So tell me how it is. Sign up and let me know. Yeah. I'll give it a shot when I come back.

So I might as well. I mean it's nice just to have things delivered. And it's the name of Grumpy Old Geeks Research. Absolutely, you know. Let's burn some fossil fuels so you don't have to. Exactly. I'll report on it on Facebook. Well, you'll also note that the Grumpy Old Geeks icon is not a giraffe.

The fucking giraffe, yes. So if you haven't seen it, you're probably not on Facebook. The riddle, the giraffe riddle. It's – okay. Now we're going to spoil something here. So here's a spoiler alert.

You can fast forward 10, 30 seconds if you want. It's the eyes. It's not the door. It's the fucking eyes. There are so many articles all across the internet about this and about arguments for the door and how if you're already awake, your eyes are open.

And I disagree. It's the eyes. It's the eyes. It's the eyes. I'll accept door because I don't want to fucking argue about it anymore. And I'm so over this. I won't accept the one. I know. I saw. You did a rebuttal to a couple people. That was awesome. Yeah.

No, it's – even – look, I'm not going to get into this. I know my riddles. I'm good with riddles. This is – it's the eyes. Period. Send your complaints to Brian at grumpyoldgeeks.com. So speaking of the eyes, apparently Facebook is going to start doing cursor and eyeball tracking.

Yeah, I saw that. I don't care. I don't care. If they want to see that my mouse hovered over an ad for a couple seconds while I wasn't actually paying attention to anything on my browser, fine. Good for them. I know. This is a Fast Company article.

The fact that they don't do this already surprises me. Yeah, I'm a little surprised as well. I just want to make sure that they can do it in a way that doesn't actually affect the browser and cause things to slow down and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's simple JavaScript. It's literally simple DOM calls to see on stop, like on cursor stop.

Tell me what DOM element it's hovering over. It's really easy to do that stuff. They're not doing – they are not doing eye tracking. I just – that was my crappy segue. Not yet. But we'll see. There are services that you can sign up to that do eye tracking so you can see like how people read a page and so you can see what that deal is.

It's webcam and JavaScript based. It's easy stuff. So, yeah, it's stupid. I really don't – they're tracking everything. They're going to keep tracking everything. What really gets me is now there's this whole thing about cookie tracking. Yeah. It came out in the Wall Street Journal and they're talking about how Google and Microsoft are going to start like shifting down third-party cookie data to advertisers.

And the problem with the article is they're talking about how since everything is going to mobile, how cookie tracking is – there are so many technical errors in this Wall Street Journal article. Yeah, I was reading through it as well and I was like, that can't be right.

No, they're saying they're storing all of this shit in cookies. I'm like, no, they're not, you people. Here's the deal. For people who are – even if you think you know what a cookie is, here's what a cookie is and the reason that we have cookies. The web is run on HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol.

It is what we call a stateless protocol. Every request does not know what any other request does. Now, to create a stateful system so we can have things like shopping carts and logging in, you have to have a persistent bit of information and they put that in the cookie.

The cookie is just an ID. It's a simple ID. Yeah, you can put up to I think 4K worth of data into a cookie but that doesn't behoove anybody. All it is is a marker to a database on the back end of the website to see who's coming back and what data is in there.

So cookies are inherently benign. I mean there's – it is about knowing who you are so they can give you – it creates a state. So they know who you are. So now they're talking about, oh, well, with the advent of apps, we don't need cookies anymore.

I'm like, well, that's like saying because I have a car, I don't need a propeller anymore. They're – They're apples and oranges. Mutually exclusive. Apples and oranges. Yes. Because apps are – they contain state because you're doing different protocols. You're not doing HTTP.

Yeah. Cookies are very necessary to websites. End of story. You can't get rid of them. If there were no cookies, there would be no web. Period. Period. So anything that you read about this stuff is almost always going to be wrong unless it's written by a developer.

Period. So don't believe this shit. Seriously. Now, when we get into third-party cookies, which means that I have a web page and I put, let's say, a graphic from your server. With that graphic, I can then set a cookie and know that you're visiting different sites.

And that's called a third-party cookie because it's not coming from the domain that you're visiting. Now, that is where advertisers come in and that's how they track you. So if you're going from site to site to site and if all these different sites have ads from provider A, then they can track you along the scale.

So if you're in Facebook and – so this is where it gets nefarious. I'm at Facebook and I have my likes. Well, Facebook shares my like history with ad company A. Once I like something, then ad company A knows I like it and then I go to another site that ad company A is in affiliation with.

Then they show me an ad for something that I liked on Facebook. Yeah. You know, that's where it gets to be. Which is how something like, you know, if you had looked at something on, say, Bed, Bath & Beyond, that you just find Bed, Bath & Beyond ads on every site that you go to that has ads. It happens. Yes. Yeah, and if Google for something, like if I do a search for a friend, I like Google for women's orthopedic shoes.

And then for three days, every website I go to is showing me ads for women's orthopedic shoes even though I have – it's like sometimes it fails like that. But in every browser, you can turn off third-party cookies. So it's only for the site that you visit, which I recommend.

And there's also this new thing called Do Not Track, which is another switch that some – I mean, it's totally optional and most people aren't following it at this point. But turn on Do Not Track. I believe that Chrome has it enabled by default. Safari does not.

Who cares about Firefox? They do not have it enabled by default. Yeah. But it's just one of those simple privacy settings. So sorry about the rant, but that's all it is. Just cookies are fine. Get over it. Get over it. You need them. You would not like it without cookies, people.

No, no. The web would not work without cookies. So – and the web would not work without commerce. So we talked about how to make money on the internet before. I do believe Pinterest has found a way. By not making money on the internet. By not making any money.

Make a lot of money. Yeah. This article blew my mind. I mean, originally, this is why we started talking about stuff. This is how this podcast started. It's like, let's explore how the hell people make money on the internet. Pinterest is now valued at $3.8 billion.

Billion. Billion for a site that I've never even been on, to be honest. I think I've looked at it twice, and I don't care. And I get the concept. Whatever. It's fine. But $3.8 billion with no revenue whatsoever.

There's no profit. There's nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They make no money at all. There's not even advertising on the site. There is nothing. And it's worth $3.8 billion. I don't understand this world, Jason.

I'm speechless. I'm speechless. Because I've said before that it is the greatest infringer of copyright on the internet. So why they're not getting sued every day. Exactly. All they do is steal other people's content, and they're worth $3.8 billion. And they don't make a cent. Not a fucking cent. How do they?

I don't understand this world. I'm a grumpy old geek. Yeah. They put their value on, okay, we have people visiting the site. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know what you have? You don't own anything. You have costs. You have server costs.

You have employees. Bandwidth. All this shit. But you don't have revenue. How is it worth anything? And there's no content that they own. Everything that is on Pinterest is owned by other people. Well, that's where the value proposition is. Is there a traffic driver to other people's stuff?

But that's the same value as a search engine. It's the same value as a search engine. I go to Google. I put in a term, and then Google sends me where I need to go. So they're a connector. I get that part where they're a connector, but Google at least is smart enough to have ads, starters, self-driving cars, stupid shit you put on your glasses that gets you banned at a health club.

Or gets you a ticket driving. You saw that, right? Yeah, yeah. Perfect. So at least Google is smart enough to figure out avenues of monetization, whereas Pinterest just makes my mom look at fucking curtains all day. That's what it does.

The only good thing that ever comes out of Pinterest is hopefully your wife or significant other will find some recipes. That's about it. Yeah. I don't get it. No. And here's the problem. We're dudes. It's not a dude thing. Well, that's the other thing. How can it be worth $3.8 billion when it already only appeals to one half of the population?

Well, there are no dudes on Pinterest. Not a one. There are a couple, but they're – I don't know. I just don't – I don't understand. And I – this is one of those things that just – somebody is getting rich off of this.

It ain't me. Yeah. Because it – this is where logic fails me and why I wish I wasn't so goddamn logical because then I could make it up and say, this is why we're worth this. Because I fart money. You know what makes this even worse, Jason, as we're contemplating this and slowly being driven mad?

There's a global wine shortage. I know. I'm so bummed about this. Oh, the wine shortage thing is it – here's the funny part. My old professor from – my old photo professor posted this on Facebook and I saw it and I literally – as R. Kelly would say, a tear fell up out of my eye.

It saddens me that we are in a global wine deficit right now. It's a little frightening but it's apparently a lot to do with a massive increase in wine consumption in China. Well, also we're – now two-buck chuck is three-buck chuck.

God damn. What the hell happened there, you know? That Trader Joe is a bastard. Trader Jose. If it was Trader Jose, it would only be a buck fifty. Well, no. The Trader Jose is the – if you're in the Mexican section and you're buying burritos, that's sold from Trader Jose, not Trader Joe.

But man, yeah, the two-buck chuck thing is not two-buck chuck anymore. That just ruined my worldview. Ruined my worldview. So – Yeah. And I do have to say if you do get the Charles Shaw is what it's called, the Shiraz is actually not bad.

That's kind of my go-to wine with my dad at night is the Shiraz. Right. The three-buck chuck Shiraz. The rest of the stuff is crap. I mean it's just – it's god-awful. You cannot drink their Cabernet. But the Shiraz is actually quite good, I found.

I mean and I'm a $20 bottle of wine guy. I like my J-Lore. I like my Coppola. I'm a wine snob and I can drink the three-buck chuck Shiraz. So I'm going to stick with that since there is a shortage and probably everything else is going up in price.

Most likely, I'd expect to see a lot of prices going up. So get your wine. Stock up now. Enjoy. And you know what? If you get really upset about the fact that you don't have any wine, don't kill your wife and post a photo. Look at how I'm doing with the segues today. I'm on fire.

I think even the dog is rolling her eyes at this point. Sophia is over here going, Jesus, did he really? Hey, you said let's run through all these news stories really quickly and I've been working hard on the connections. OK. So yeah, some asshole martial arts guy got beat up by his wife so he claims and shot her to death and says, I'm going to jail for the rest of my life.

Here's a picture of her dead body. OK. Fry this motherfucker. That's all I got to say. Fry him. But it shows that – I mean the connections between social media and real life, how this is kind of forming and accumulating and all of just this weird shit is just – I don't know.

We're just lost at this point. And this is not the first person to post the photo of a victim of a murder on Facebook. That's the part that really got me. It's like this is now a thing. There's post pictures of the people they just killed and wait for the police.

It's like – yeah. OK. I'm lost at that point. Yeah. People are dumb. Shocking. News at 10. I'm trying to kind of come with some kind of correlation with John Wayne Gacy and the clown shit but I can't.

I can't put the two together. Clowns are evil. That's all I got out of that. So speaking of evil. Yes. I'm doing my best for a segue here. I know. I didn't really have one for what we had left. So good job. Now, there are areas of the government that are trying to tax people for the amount that they drive to pay for the roads that they're driving on.

They want to put a black box in your car that tells the government how many miles you drive and then you get the appropriate tax bill for – so, you know, pay per use kind of thing. Pay as you use, which as a concept I'm totally fine with.

I like it. I always thought that the entire, you know, car insurance stuff should be based on gas. The more you drive, the more you pay. The problem is this is government and they are, you know, chronically inept. Well, yes.

And they also want – some of these boxes have location. Yeah, that is also an issue. If they're just tracking pure mileage, that's fine. As soon as they have an entire map of where I've gone for the last five months, no. And what time I was there and what I was parked in front of, yeah, that gets – that's some scary-ass shit.

Although all of our phones are doing that already to us. The phones are doing it. If you've got an E-ZPass or an iPass or one of those automatic toll-paying devices, which I don't think you guys have that much in California because there are freeways. Here, there are tollways. We pay for everything. My trip – I just literally drove 1,100 miles this weekend and every toll booth I went through, I'm tagged.

I'm tracked. They take pictures of my license plate. They take an RFID snapshot from the device itself and charge a credit card. They know where I'm at from that. So you can't – I mean driving anywhere, you're going to be – there was a great Art Technica article.

There are license plate scanners everywhere. All those weird cameras you see that have no labeling on it, just on light poles, all that stuff is just gathering data on who's going where, when. So this is just another avenue for it. It's nothing – it's not new and it's legal.

It's legal for them to track where – because you're in public. They can put up a camera and track you, period. All this stuff is out there already. But when you want to talk about government ineptitude, this stuff all exists already, yet every time there's a manhunt, we can never find anyone. That's true.

That's true. Like there was that guy, the cop guy here in California that ran up to Big Bear like six months ago or whatever. They couldn't find the dude. All this stuff is out there. Still couldn't find him. Yeah. Yeah. And then you look at London as the prime example of the camera state.

Yeah, the most watched city in the world. And they say that, yeah, it doesn't stop crime and they try and go back later to figure out from whatever. I mean, granted, you look at the Boston bombings, we caught those dudes because of like a liquor store camera, not Reddit, not Reddit, a private camera.

Yeah. Not one of the ones that the taxpayers pay for. So what the fuck are the taxpayers paying for them for? Let's let everybody else do it. I don't know. In theory, I'm OK with this. Yeah. Because I when I drive, I mean, I'm already paying tolls, you know, because in the eastern part of the United States, we pay tolls everywhere.

In California, you don't. So this comes out of California for the most part. Yeah. You know what? Put up toll booths. Period. That's an option, too. I mean, I would be totally fine with the concept of let's get rid of auto insurance and let's get rid of all the provisions in our state and federal taxes for road maintenance and all that stuff.

And simply tack, add it on to the gas tax and then it becomes a complete usage thing. I'm even fine with the idea of tracking mileage, but there has to be oversight. And yeah, they can't be collecting everywhere that you go. No location, just strict mileage.

And then I'm OK with it. So. OK, so there it is. It's out there. It's coming around. Well, it'll be something. I don't know. Now, our our final our final news item of the day, I'm going to I'm dumping the health care gov one because they had a they had an outage at a data center.

It gives a shit. How did just happen, people? Yeah, it's the Internet. And these people are obviously inept enough to put everything in one data center. So I just don't even start. The health care dot gov thing is just a fuster cluck. Yeah. Now, this one, this comes out of Elite Daily dot com.

I don't know where the original story came from, but somebody passed it along to me and says a big butt is a healthy butt. Women with big butts are smarter and healthier. Well, I had an interesting. OK, my first my first reaction was, yes, go ahead.

If this was true, Kim Kardashian would be running NASA and she's not. So ergo logic dictates this is bullshit. Yes, this is complete and utter bullshit. It's a stupid article. It's funny. It's obvious why it's popular.

My funny reaction throughout the day was seeing my female friends that decided to post it versus those that didn't. And some of them I was like, you don't have a big butt. Why'd you post that? Anyways, it's a weird article. There's no correlation, as we'll talk about later, because I found a nice article about statistics and how they can be twisted to prove anything that you want them to prove.

And yes, Kim Kardashian is a prime example of somebody that is neither smart nor healthy. So. So, sir, mix a lot. Suck it. I like big butts and I cannot lie, but they aren't smarter than I. Cut.

No, seriously? Are you shitting me? So the aforementioned statistics article I was talking about, which is in our show notes, came from Boing Boing. I mean, this is this is old news, but it's a really great wrap up article.

It basically tells you how you can go from the size of Kim Kardashian's ass to her being smart, which we all know is incredibly wrong. Statistics can be used to prove just about anything. I'm sure that many of you that made it through statistics in college or whatnot know this.

It's a good little wrap up article. Go check it out. It's a primer one on one in how you can understand things on the Internet and know that they're not true. We had we had we had we had a saying at Technorati. Yeah. Eighty five percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

And that number always changed, too, because that was a statistic that was made up on the spot. So it's a, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy there. So, yeah, Boing Boing gives you a quick little breakdown and a link to some larger articles like Alex Reinhardt's statistics done wrong.

The woefully complete guide and the other classic how to lie with statistics, which people like Pinterest probably use all the time. Yeah, I think that's their Bible. It's got to be in a golden case on the wall. Pretty much. Yeah. So my my other article that I came across for for are you shitting me was something that I mean, it's just all these companies start out with such great intentions and they're such good ideas.

Yelp is a fantastic idea. You know, you go out and you get you review things that you like and other people can read it and comment on it. But then there was this poor guy. And, you know, because the Internet gets run over by trolls and horrible things. Great article on Salon about a guy that was trying to buy kind of an upscale suit from an online retailer, got the shaft, got ignored, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Finally decided to write a Yelp article about it and then basically got cyber harassed by the owners of the company. Yeah, I mean, this guy was an author. He had a book coming out and the guy who who was going to sell him the suit was like, good luck with that book launch. You know, it totally just was like, you want to you want to come at me?

I'm going to come at you, you know, and Yelp is Yelp has always been very nefarious. I mean, like five years ago, it came out that they were bullying store owners. And, you know, Yelp is a mess. So if there was if there was and that's the crazy thing about Yelp is it's not hard to do.

I mean, it's why are there no no competitors to Yelp? I don't understand that. I mean, I got critical mass. You know that. I mean, yeah, that's what it comes down to. Because I mean, you and I literally could rewrite Yelp in a day. Yeah, exactly. This is not hard tech. The problem isn't the tech and the problem isn't even the concept.

The problem is humanity. People. Yeah, there are trolls. There will always be trolls. People are stupid. People are dumb. People get angry. People lash out. We are seeing the Internet. The Internet does nothing but reflect back our own nature to us.

It does. It is a very giant, obnoxious mirror. Yes. With a lot of pimples. So, yeah, I mean, my biggest problem with this article was just that it was very long and this guy's got a book coming out. Well, I'm not going to read his book because his article is just too goddamn long.

It was a long article. He definitely needs an editor. I'll write that on his Amazon dot com reviews and then he'll probably go on to grumpy old geeks and give us a one star rating. And thus the cycle continues. The cycle continues. So stay just it's a war games that, you know, the best way to the best way is just not to play.

Exactly. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. Talking to people who listen to the show, it turns out that one of their favorite sections is when we talk about the apps. Oh, man, I hate apps. I know.

And I've been trying to check out less of them. But now I find that that's the part people like a lot. So I have made a concerted effort to go out and spend my hard earned money on apps every week. OK. I have a budget now.

I will spend up to twenty dollars a week. Wow. Which is it's when you think about it, it's not a lot because some of the apps that I buy are like seven or eight bucks. This week I only spent three bucks.

Yeah, I spent three bucks this week. So I've got I've got a surplus in weight and I have a list of apps for next episode. So the first thing that I checked out was remember when I talked about Studio Neat before they made the Cosmonaut and the Glyph. They were a Kickstarter group, but they also make iPhone apps.

OK. And this week we have a new one from them called Slow Fast Slow, which is an easier way when you have an iPhone that is capable of doing high speed video taking to do more fine grained manipulation of the slow motion versus fast motion.

And you can actually speed it up and slow it down. It gives you just a little graph that you can move pointers on. Works great. Works perfect. I am a fan of this app because in the slow-mo stuff with the iPhone 5S that I have, you can manipulate the slow period versus the normal period, but you can't speed it up.

So this lets you actually speed up the frame rate. So and it goes back to I think the 4S because the 4S can do 60 frames per second. Right. And the 5 can do 60 and the 5S can do 120, I believe. I think that's the numbers. I could be wrong, but, you know, sue me.

So if you're slowly building your Vine empire, this is probably the app for you. Or your Instagram. Or your Instagram video empire. That's true. Fuck Vine. It's still around. I can't understand. I don't get it. Whatever. Anyway, it's a cool little video app.

I mean, it's amazing to think that you can do all this on your phone now. Yeah, and the 5S camera is just amazing. I mean, I just spent $1,500 on a new SLR. Kind of an SLR. It's one of those mirrorless cameras.

I bought it actually from Kent Nichols, the guy who is one of the great minds behind Ask a Ninja. Great site. That was a great site. Yeah. Favorite web series of all time. One of the best. It's up there with Tiki Bar TV from the old days. So I bought this Fuji camera from him.

And it does great photos and video. But like day to day, my 5S is pretty damn comparable. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about that for London. I was like, do I take a kind of more high-end camera? Do I bring a dedicated video camera? And I was like, I got the 5.

It's fine. That will take everything that we want. Absolutely, yeah. You just don't need it anymore. They're doing such a good job. So my next one, I was checking out this Web Summit video yesterday because I was talking about Kevin Rose before. He was interviewing Tony Hawk on stage at the Web Summit conference in London.

So I hopped on and watched the live stream, and the guy that was on before him talked about a site that they did called Calm.com, which is a meditation site. Very pretty. Yeah, it's cool. And it's got a free app that goes along with it with paid upgrades.

I haven't done the paid upgrades. I just played with it for a minute. But it's very promising because my whole attempt to go Buddhist. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I've been doing this too. And I remember a bunch of episodes ago I pimped the app Buddhify, and I still love that app, but I have discovered I have hit the limits.

Like I've done every single one of their meditations, so I'm looking for another one right now. Yeah, actually, I'm going to pull up my phone right now because I've got another one that I want to pimp that I forgot about it. Let me pull it up here. It's this guy, Andrew Johnson, who's a Scottish guy. I can't imagine listening to a meditation done in Scottish accents.

I know, but I tell you what, it's awesome. It's awesome. So he's got one called Infinite Relaxation, and he's got one called Relax, but he's also got a bunch of other ones on positivity, stop drinking, don't panic, social phobia, all this other stuff.

But enough about you, Jason. That's why I like the guy. He's Scottish. A Scottish meditator telling me to stop drinking? Come on. Oh, the irony. I know. This is like some serious Mike Myers stuff going on here.

Head down. Oh, how I married her. So I married an ex-murder. So I married an ex-murder. If you have not seen that movie yet, you've got to fucking go see it now. Yeah, it's amazing. But yeah, his relaxation video or audio programs, they cost a couple bucks.

Well worth it. His Infinite Relaxation is kind of like Paziz where it's modifiable and they generate a program on the fly. Right. But just his standard Relax one has like two or three options. It's amazing. I love it. I can – this guy puts me to sleep every time.

You know, Andrew Johnson is his name and just look for – the app is literally called Relax. That's the first one that I got. Okay. Check it out. Well worth the money. And I tell you, you're going to laugh your ass off the first time you listen to it.

I'm sure. Because he's like, you're looking at some stands. Oh, God. It's going to feel like Bob is talking to me. You're going to start walking down the stairs and every time you go take a step, you're going to feel 10% more relaxed.

So by the time you're at the bottom of the stairs, you're going to be completely relaxed. Even talking about it is – Oh, God. Yeah, I'm going to download it just for shits and giggles. Yeah, but I tell you what. You're going to love it. All right. You're going to love this guy.

The last one I got is actually a new thing called Codio, which is an in-browser IDE, Integrated Development Environment. So if you're trying to write code, you can do basically – it's more built for HTML5 JavaScript stuff.

Right. It is very pretty. It's in beta, so they're still working it out. And I got – here's the cool part. I got an email from the guy who founded it. It was probably a 17-year-old kid because everybody is so damn young with literally his Skype address.

And he's like, hey, check it out. And if you got anything, give me a call. Talk to me. Whatever. It's like very cool customer service. He's like reaching out and doing all – ticking all the boxes on the customer service chain at this point. So kudos to him. And it's cool.

It doesn't support PHP previewing. Boo. Which I completely understand because you run an eval in there and I own the box. Yeah. So for me, it's kind of useless. From an enterprise standpoint, it's very useless because I'm not going to run – it's – let me step back a second.

It's more built for people who are doing open source development because it ties in with Git. You can pull in your GitHub projects into it. So it's more built for people who are doing open source development. But as a closed source development provider like myself, I'm not going to give out my source code to anybody.

And there are legalities involved with that. And I cannot, under law, open a lot of my source code to a third-party developer who it's passing through. So for that stuff, it's a no-go. But if you're just doing like HTML and JavaScript stuff, check it out. It's fun. It looks super pretty.

But yeah, I've got the same concerns as you. I don't think I would ever use it. But it looks great. Yeah, I give him a total heads up. And I might actually – I might hit him up on Skype sometime and just say, hey, dude, I think you're doing a good job. We can Skype him in on the next episode.

You can talk about it a bit. There we go. I don't think he's old though. I think he'd be a grumpy – I think he'd be a positive young geek, which would be our competition. We don't like those positive young geeks. Fuck them. Little shit. This weekend, false advertising.

It's Halloween. War of the Worlds. Not the crappy Tom Cruise movie. I like that movie. I didn't care for it at all. The original War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' infamous 1938 radio program, 75 years ago as of this last Wednesday, since this will come out on Saturday or whatever, is when he first broadcast it.

And I think we all know, in the back of our minds, we've heard that there was panic in the streets of the United States. People were losing their minds and going completely apeshit when this was first broadcast, right? You've heard that too. Well, yeah. In high school, this was a case study in my media class.

Literally, in high school, I used to take media along with my radio class. And this was a case study on how media manipulation can work. Right. So people – there was mass hysteria, the likes, that has never been seen before in the United States when this went out on the radio and everybody heard it.

People thought that aliens were actually attacking. Yeah. You know? It's like, oh, cats and dogs living together. Yes. Except for one problem. Didn't happen. Never happened. It's complete and utter bullshit. And here's the great part.

I mean this is – I think this story is better than the actual story. No, this is amazing now. This is even better. Because, I mean, PBS is – when you posted this link, I checked it out and I'm like, oh my god. Because my stepmom was talking about how she was going to tape the PBS special about War of the Worlds and then you sent this to me and I sent it to my dad.

And he's like, wow, nice to see a counterpoint. So back in time, newspapers were losing ad revenue to radio. And so newspapers come out saying – they created this story saying how radio is bullshit.

But it was – it completely backfired, I guess. I don't know. It's – tell me your take on it. My take on this is HuffPo's been around even longer than we think. Yeah. It was a completely fabricated bullshit news story made to sell papers. Yeah.

That's all it was. And it's never been challenged and it's become part of popular culture. And now we all just believe that this happened when the reality is nobody panicked. There was – everybody knew that this was a story being broadcast on the radio.

Maybe there was like five or six people that freaked out and called the station. But that's it. There were not people running through the streets. There was – nobody was looting to pick up a – god, I don't even know – a 1940s product. Brill cream? I don't know.

Yeah, but it did not happen is the long and the short of it. And it is a great story of media manipulation and it's almost like the Yelp thing. It's a story of media manipulation about media manipulation. Yeah, and it's almost like the Yelp thing.

It's like, oh, well, you want to say something about us? Well, we're going to say something about you and then nobody knows what the truth is. And for 75 years, it's – we've had this, you know, this bullshit permeating the lexicon of what media is capable of.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a fantastic story. I mean I just like this like little part where they talk about how the legend of the panic was solidified like in 1940, relying heavily on a skewed report compiled six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion by Princeton's Hadley Cantrell, he estimated that about one million people were frightened by War of the Worlds.

But by the AIPO survey, as Cantrell himself admitted, offered an audience rating over 100% higher than any other known measure of this audience. So it's all bullshit. It was completely wrong reports, completely wrong studies using bad statistics that set off this entire story that now all of us, every single one of us believe to be true, and it's completely wrong.

It's awesome. I mean I was just pissed off because I always believed the War of the Worlds, you know, tale. Yeah, which is a great tale, but this is even better now. It is. Yeah, it's good stuff. So there you go. Apparently this is the Don't Believe a Damn Thing episode of Grumpy Old Geeks.

Believe us though because – Yeah, but believe us because we very rarely bullshit. I mentioned before I had to do 1,100 miles in my car this weekend.

So I picked up two books by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Now, Terry Pratchett is known for his Discworld novels and the fact that he's got Alzheimer's and is a big proponent of assisted suicide. So one day we're going to read in the newspaper that he killed himself and that bums me out greatly because I want Discworld novels until the day I die.

I love the Discworld series. I'm 100 percent with you on those. I look forward to every single release and I was shattered when I heard about his conditions. I know. It's just – it's terrible. And I was originally introduced to him through – I was a fan of Neil Gaiman and he did a book with Neil Gaiman called Good Omens, which is one of my favorite books of all time.

I take it – anytime I do international travel, I read it because it's like my – it's my nervous tick thing. I read Good Omens whenever I do international travel. I just reread it. And I have my original first printing of the paper back that I carry with me. I have a first edition hardcover and it's one of my favorite books of all time as well.

It is right up my alley in terms of humor and picking on religion and it is one of the funniest books I've ever read in my life. And here's a bit of trivia. Remember when Borders still existed? Barely. Borders – well, I remember when they started because it was right across the street from the mall I used to work at and they had a bargain table.

And on the bargain table, they would have dollar books and one day I walked in with Mr. Fogarty who does our VO and there was a stack of Good Omens for a dollar each and I bought them all and they were my go-to gifts. I would just give them out to people that I thought would get it and were cool.

So when I saw that Terry Pratchett did this book series called – it's the Long Earth series with Stephen Baxter who I don't know. I don't know what else he's done and I haven't researched it. He's more of a hard sci-fi guy. OK. That makes sense because these are very hard sci-fi books. Exactly.

They're not humorous. I don't know what Terry Pratchett actually contributed to these books because I can almost not sense any Pratchett in these at all. The premise is from the first book, there's a – they talk about multiple universes and how anytime that there's a decision, a new universe is created.

This is kind of string theory. Yeah, string theory 101. Yeah. And the scientist figures out how to step between these worlds. So you can go from – I'm on Earth. They call it – East and west.

No. What do they call the datum? The datum is – The datum is Earth 1, us. Earth 1. That's us. And then you can go either side of the Earth. Yeah. And there's infinite numbers of Earths that are kind of on a timeline about probability and – like they're all a little bit different because there were different things that happened to the Earth over time with different decision trees basically.

And they create a device that lets people go back and forth between these worlds. And there are some people who can do it without the device and they're called quote-unquote natural steppers. And as I'm – I got it on Audible.

Great read on Audible. The narrator is fantastic. British guy. And if you go to grumpyoldgeeks.com, there's an Audible link in the sidebar where you can get a free copy of this book if you would like. So the sci-fi part of this book, I loved.

The concept. The concept of it's right as the Earth is hitting – it's like – it's set in 2025. So a little over 10 years from now and we're hitting peak population growth and the Earth isn't big enough for everybody and there's the same standard stuff.

But the fact that, OK, we're out of land. We've got too many people and now we have an infinite amount of Earths to populate. So it's this really cool story about what happens when humanity is given an infinite amount of land.

Yeah, we solve every issue that there is in terms of resources, space, et cetera. Basically, we took away all the problems that made us all fight. Yeah, and when you go from one world to the next, it's the same time of day, the same spot on the planet. There's no time travel involved.

It's just literally I'm in Earth 1. I'm just going to go to Earth 2. And then they come up with all the problems around things like law enforcement and nationalities and governments. And like each government claims that they're still the same government in all of the worlds if they're in that same space, which I was just like, really?

But how are you going to – I mean the government can't get taxes on Earth 1. How are they going to do it on Earth 2,025? But they explore all those ideas, which I really enjoyed. I did. I definitely enjoyed it. The second book is called The Long War and where we – where it explores that there are other types of sentient life forms out there.

And they call them the trolls, the elves and all these different things and how like some of our mythology was influenced by these creatures who can step between the worlds naturally coming to visit our world. And there's a bunch of different things that are pretty cool about it.

I just thought the second book was very – it lost me in the middle because it was just a little bit too long-winded. I agree. I thought it was good but it wasn't great. I thought the first book was amazing and I loved it. The second book, by the time it wrapped up, I kind of got back into it but the middle part dragged.

It was a bit of a drag. One of the things that I found really interesting is in addition to already throwing out all the concepts, fantastic concepts that you've already talked about, they also brought in the idea of an actual artificial intelligence, a real one. Yes, yes, that's true because they created this gel that could sustain human consciousness and the character Lobsang was the first one.

Who could be an artificial intelligence, could be a reincarnated Buddhist. We don't really know. He's a fascinating character. I was a little disappointed that they didn't explore that more in the second book. This is kind of why when I first saw that you put that up there, I was like, I am beyond interested in there being a third one.

Yeah, in the second book they did kind of cover it because they reincarnated a nun to basically be his conscience because he was omnipotent and omniscient and he needed somebody to kind of keep him in check. Yeah. So they brought in another character and resurrected her after she died, which was the main characters like Protector and Nun from this orphanage that he grew up in.

It was a cool concept. But yeah, I think they could have just really focused on him. There's a lot more for them to explore with this world, worlds that they've created. I really enjoyed it. I totally agree with you 100%. If you come into this as a Terry Pratchett fan, you're going to be disappointed because there's none of the Terry Pratchett that you've come to know and love through all of his other work.

And I don't... Yeah, I agree with you. I don't know where his contribution is. But this isn't as hard sci-fi as Stephen Baxter's other stuff. I just Googled it really quick because I knew I remembered the name. Stephen Baxter was the guy that they tapped to move on with Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 books.

So he's the one that's been kind of carrying that and co-writing with Arthur C. Clarke. So he's a very hard sci-fi guy. Okay. So all of the humanity stuff, the priest, you know, the lobsing, that whole idea, all of that must be Pratchett. And Baxter does kind of the more science-y stuff.

I love both these books. I really do hope that there's another one coming. Yeah, me too. Me too. Well, I hope there's another Discworld before that. Me too. Because I can't get into Pratchett's, like, young adult novels. Well, no, because they're for young adults and we're grumpy old geeks.

Well, here's the thing. Like, Cory Doctorow writes some amazing young adult novels. His stuff... Oh, what was it called? The two that he wrote about the kids in San Francisco were amazing. Big Brother. Big Brother was an unbelievably great book.

I haven't read the follow-up yet. But, like... And Neil Gaiman's young adult stuff is also fantastic. So... But I just... The Terry Pratchett stuff, it might be too young, young adult. It's for kids. It really is for kids. So... And if you haven't seen the TV recreations of the Pratchett stuff, oh my god, they're so good.

They are so good. I have not seen them. Oh, you got to check those out. I think they're on Netflix. I'll see if I can dig it up for the notes. But they've done three of them so far. Or at least two. I know two. Maybe three. I think they did The Hogfather, Going Postal, and another one.

I love Going Postal. I'll tell you what, you're going to love the TV version of it because they nailed it. They nailed it. Vetinari, I was always worried about how they were going to portray Vetinari. Yeah. And they got it so right. They took the time. And it's weird. I think they're Hallmark. I think Hallmark did them.

Wow, that's pretty crazy. I'm a little hesitant to actually have some faces attached to these characters because the Discworld series for the uninitiated, there's a lot of them. There's almost... There might be over 30 of them. There's probably over 30, and they're fantastic, fun, little, great books.

Very humorous. But a whole world is created, and all these characters exist in my mind very strongly. And here's the thing. I was not disappointed by any of the... I mean, yeah, they're different than what I had in my head, and they're always going to be different. But the way that they treated these characters with the care that they deserved, I mean, I was not disappointed by a single one.

I have to say that. And I am a... I've read every single Discworld novel multiple times. So you cannot find a bigger Discworld fan than me. So I would definitely recommend giving it a try. Start with Going Postal. If you can find it, go with Going Postal.

But as far as these books go, I think as far... I'm a hard sci-fi fan. I like... You know, I'm cool with people who delve into the science, and I really do recommend these books. And like I said, the second one kind of drags in the middle, but it has a good, solid ending.

Yeah. I'm firmly on the side of recommending them. I think, you know, if you enjoy the first one, you'll enjoy the second one. Yeah, it meandered a bit. And the third one, there's just so many interesting ideas in there, and so many to be continued. They really didn't wrap it up, so... Well, they've got millions of worlds.

I mean, they could go with this series forever. Well, obviously, yeah. So, all of my bitching in the past has now been rendered moot.

WordPress has finally come up with self-automatic updates. It will patch itself as it goes. I woke up this morning, and I had three emails that it had updated itself to 3.71. So, the 3.7 version, which is the Count Basie version, also called just Basie, has the ability to update the core by itself.

It does not do it for themes, which is good. I don't want it to update my themes, because I hacked my themes. And plugins is still a bit out, but... And I don't want it to do plugins, because there are problems with self-updating plugins that might...

Also, I have to hack a lot of plugins, because there are really terrible developers. Out there. Yes. So, but the fact that the core updates by itself now is huge. It's huge, huge, huge. It's very, very, very, very good for anybody that's stuck having to run a WordPress site.

Yeah. Like me, and you. Yeah, I also got my emails about the updates, which I really loved. My only concern is, you know... I mean, I'm hoping any major update that they do that really would affect a ton of themes or plugins or anything like that will not automatically happen, because I don't want to wake up to having a bunch of my clients yell at me about their sites being completely broken.

Yeah, hopefully this is for point releases. Hopefully. I'm going to do some more research, because for the next 20 days, one of my new clients is just a pure WordPress play, and I'm going to be balls deep in WordPress for the next, you know, two and a half, three weeks. So I'm going to be doing some serious looking into this.

And I'll report as we go. I'll try to keep it a little bit for the non-technicals. But, you know, I like to play with my technicals sometimes. Well, this is a big deal, especially for internet security. So many sites out there are WordPress. WordPress is the old-school PC of viruses.

It's open source. People know how to hack it. I've had problems with it. You've had problems with it. I've had even more problems with it, because a lot of my clients won't pay me to ever do updates on their sites. So I'm stuck running some older versions of WordPress, which I'm trying to get rid of. It's a nightmare, and this is a huge step in the right direction.

Absolutely. So the next on the news is the NSA infiltrates the – I mean, this is just crazy. NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo and Google data centers. But did we think that they didn't? I had already assumed this. I had no idea, because if you look at the documents, the Washington Post put this out.

There is a document with a smiley face draw that says, this is where we decrypt and re-encrypt the data. It's just like, say what? I also like the fact they went with girlfriend experience for Google front end server. GFE.

Oh, my God. Girlfriend experience. Hey, it was a movie. It's also – I dealt with some guys in L.A. who ran brothels who – like, we are not an escort service anymore. Now we provide the girlfriend experience.

The NSA is just trying to give you a happy ending, people. The fact that they showed these documents to Google engineers and the Google engineer says, Jesus, I hope you publish this, shows the fact that they were not complicit. And that they were stunned as anybody else.

And I personally think that this one is great because now it shows that the NSA is buggering the providers without even asking them. And it's going to be an arms race now.

It's going to be a total arms race. Google said that they're going to work on their encryption and make sure everything is encrypted from data center to data center. Yahoo, being Yahoo, says, eh, whatever. Like I said, I mean, I already assumed this.

I really did. Well, now we know the truth. Now we know. Yeah. And it was interesting. In the articles – in the comments in the article, somebody says, can we the people officially agree that Snowden gets a presidential pardon? And I was like – No.

I was – yes. Oh, well, we the people can agree that, but it's just not going to happen. It's not going to happen. No. I hope you like borscht or whatever. Whatever the Russian food, caviar, whatever. Whatever. Yeah. I – every time these come out now, I'm just more happy.

It's pretty amazing. I mean – and then it brings up the whole like, you know, Germany and France are pissed off because we're spying on them, even though they spy on us. They just aren't mentioning that part right now. This is all just a circle jerk. It's the game. It's what happens. It's not surprising.

Will it change? God, I hope so. Do I think it will? No, I don't. Okay. Moving on. Well, I mean it changed after Watergate, so – but then it changed back. Yeah, but then it changed back, yes. So we'll see what happens. It's going to play out, but I'm just glad that it's playing out.

So the other article I have is from the Wall Street Journal saying that departing employees are a security horror. Duh. The problem with having a job is – the problem with having a job is that you need security clearance to do your job for a lot of jobs.

You know, I had crazy security clearance when I worked at my previous agency, BLT. I had – I was nuts deep into everything from movie studios to TV studios, the whole nine yards. And when I left, they never turned off my access.

I didn't exploit it obviously because I would never do that. But you can walk out of there with tons of confidential information. You can – this is just the state of the industry. Once you have access to something, you can put it on a hard drive, a thumb drive and take it home and you still have it.

You know? There's not – they don't do – most companies don't do like forensic document analysis when you're copying something or anything like that because it's just too – it's cost prohibitive. So once you have access to something as an employee, you can probably still have access to it after you leave.

Yeah, they shut you out of the systems, but you're still going to have access to anything that you copy while you're there that you take home because everybody has got a home computer. So it's just – this is one of those issues that is kind of unaddressed because it's unaddressable almost.

It is kind of unaddressable. And the interesting thing for me is like I'm just thinking back in my mind now to clients from hell.net and some of the stories there. These clients and these companies don't realize like a person like you or I, when we get involved with them, we have access to everything.

Not only do we have access to everything and you might forget to stop giving us that access by not getting rid of our accounts or whatnot. We're so deep in the code. We could write our own backends anyways. So you really shouldn't piss us off and like not pay us. We're good people. I've never done this to a client.

I've wanted to many, many times where I've just been given the keys to the kingdom and they've decided to do really stupid crap to me. And I'm just finally like, you know what? Here, make sure your new guy turns off my account. Make sure all these passwords are changed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And don't forget, I actually own your domain name, so I'm not going to charge you anything, but you need to take this back over. Yeah. I went through this when I left JPEG magazine because they hired some really terrible engineers. And when I left, I said, these are all the systems you need to take me off of and these are the steps that you need to eradicate me from your system.

Because if something bad happens, I don't want you looking at me. You know, it was very important and it's always very important for me to tell people exactly how I've gotten into their systems and what I do. Because I, you know, every time I work with a client, I have root access to their server, period.

Yeah, it's a requirement to do our job. We have to. Now, here's the deal. They change the root password after I leave. Okay, guess what? I still have access to your system because I install SSH keys that let me walk through your passwords. That hasn't, you change a password, it has no bearing on it.

And if you're dealing with something like EC2, there are, in the databases for RDS, all that stuff, there are IP checks that you put in the dashboard that you have to go remove. There's a ton of ways that we can get into this stuff. And, you know, I literally could probably open up my computer and go back and find, you know, a hundred servers I can get into for clients that I don't even speak to anymore because they didn't pay me, you know?

And you're actually dealing with some way more technically sophisticated clients than I've dealt with in the past. I mean, I just, as a test, after I was thinking about this stuff, like two or three nights ago, I brought up my FTP and I have, I've got like 20 to 30 logins to just random old clients that I probably haven't even dealt with in five to 10 years.

I've got a lot of times that I've got to do this stuff, I've got a lot of times that I've dealt with in five to 10 years later.

It's one of those crazy things and, like, if I was malicious, I could fire up an EC2 instance and create an IP on it, use that as an SSH tunnel to do anything I want, then, you know, go wipe their servers, backtrack out, clear the EC2 instance, clear the IP, delete it so there was never any trace that I was in there.

You know, there's – people need to think about these things when they're dealing with people. So hire good moral people is what I was going to say. Hire good moral people and actually pay them well for what they do. Exactly. Yeah. It's just – it comes down to just being good to people and not hiring people that are going to screw you because the only thing that I've – like the statute of limitations has run out.

The only thing that I've ever done that I feel kind of bad about was I – on the Epson site, on Epson America, the first one, I created an Easter egg that if you went to EpsonAmerica.com slash Cornholio, that there was a picture of Beavis with his shirt over his head and it said, I am Cornholio.

Okay. That's just funny. There's absolutely nothing really malicious about that. It wasn't malicious, but it stayed there for – It would still upset them. It stayed there for seven years. Yeah. It was great. Every time I would go in and just say, is Cornholio still alive? That's awesome.

No, I mean – but I mean really, people, you got to think about this. It's like I actually can't think of a major album that's come out in probably the last seven years that I couldn't have leaked because I somehow have access to it because I've worked for every major label at some point. And all my accounts still work to get into their systems.

Yep. Even though I'm not currently hired by any of them. Yeah. I mean it's poor IT at that point. But they don't – and even the companies that I work at, I always do – and I've been hired to do penetration testing and security analysis on many companies.

Penetration testing? Is that the full BFE, the boyfriend experience? It is. It is just the – but it's just the tip. Just the tip. And the crazy part is every time I do these things, they ignore it. I can give them all the advice in the world.

They always ignore it. They just – they turn a blind eye and pretend it doesn't exist and it's ridiculous. So this is going to be an ongoing problem for a long time. They don't pay attention until they get burned. So, you know, and shit, another company I worked for, they were audited by the Motion Picture Association of America every year because any company that works on films is audited.

They are required to do security audits from the Motion Picture Association of America, which in itself is fucking hilarious, OK? A movie company is doing security audits on third-party vendors for their security. And this company I worked for, all the passwords for the company were five-digit numerics.

That was it. Yeah. And here's the deal. They got dinged every year on their security audit. But guess what? It didn't stop them from doing their job. It's like, OK, it was a checkmark on a box that said, you need to change your passwords. They're like, nah, we're going to keep it this way.

And there was no punishment for it. So, you know, when this happens, it's you got to punish the people. You got to find them or make them do it, you know, or you're not going to get the job. And you have to change your protocols. You just have to.

End of story. Yeah. So, yeah, this is a thing. It's going to be a thing. Here, candy, candy, candy, candy. So I'm a huge music guy. I'm also I love history and I'm geeky and educated and all that sort of stuff.

And you never think about the fact that, like, do you know what the music of ancient Greece sounds like? No. Neither does anyone else until now. That was my good radio voice there. What do you think? Well, thank you very much. No.

So this guy, Armand de Ajour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University, has been researching this for a long time. And he found a song, some stone inscriptions from ancient Greece, and he kind of, like, went back over all the information that we have from this time period, which really isn't that much.

It's amazing to think how little we actually know about the world back then. But he was able to kind of reconstruct the music, rediscover the kind of instruments that they had back then that used them. And he started to actually start to record some of the stuff so we can hear what 2,500 years ago music sounded like.

That's pretty awesome. That is so fucking fascinating to me. It's ridiculous. It doesn't sound great, especially not to our ears. It's no Katy Perry. But then what is? You know, and then the Archimedes brothers were doing really well, but then they split up.

That's a Jonas Brothers splitting up joke, people. Stick with me. No. Damn it. Anyways, it's just a one-two thing. It's really interesting. I'm definitely going to be following this. I hope this guy puts out an album or throws everything up on SoundCloud or whatever the hell he's going to do with his music. Go read the article if you're interested at all in Greek society, antiquities, and music.

You will be fascinated. That's cool. Yeah, this reminds me of, like, how we just rediscovered how Romans made concrete. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that, too. That's amazing, right? Yeah. And the fact that we've lost all this stuff and are finally getting back to discovering some of it, some of the stuff that worked for thousands of years, it's cool.

I mean, granted, the music might not be great, but I can't wait to hear it. The music is definitely interesting, and they do have a fragment of a lyric, which, I mean, I just found this fascinating because, you know, it's a bit more wordy than one would expect from anything from, say, you know, your Rihanas or whatever. But maybe Dead Can Dance might do this.

Maybe Dead Can Dance can do a whole cover album. That'd be fantastic. Oh, I love Dead Can Dance. Wouldn't that be amazing if they, like, covered all this stuff? Oh, it'd be so sweet. But here's, like, four lines from a song. While you're alive, shine. Never let your mood decline. We have a brief span of life to spend.

Time necessitates an end. That's great. Wow, that's some deep shit there. That's some fucking Beatles shit right there. Fuck the Beatles. Most overrated band in history. All right. Anyways, really cool, really interesting. Go read the article. Go listen to it.

It's fun stuff. It's cool. I love this shit. Yeah, this is seriously good fun, man. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Who's this asshole? I came across an article, and I immediately thought of you, Jason, because you've spent some time dealing with the San Francisco whole, you know, startup scene in Silicon Valley and all that.

And I kind of hate all those guys up there. And, you know, we both were reading that Lanier book for a while, and he talked about basically like the godhead complex that everybody has up there. Yep. Yep. This article is about a dude who's got his own startup, of course, who dreams of Silicon Valley seceding from the union because fuck it, we don't need America.

Oh, yeah. This guy, what's his name? Let me find his name here. I believe it's Mr. Douchey McDoucheerson. McDoucheerson. So Balaji Srinivasan. You guys give tech a bad name, you fuckers.

This guy was giving a speech at, what was it? It was probably one of those goddamn Yahoo things. But, okay, let's get down to the brass tacks. He says that Silicon Valley needs to secede from the world because they are the driver of everything that is good and wholesome in the universe.

Like the $3.8 billion valuation companies that make no profit whatsoever? Yeah. So this guy made a 16 and a half minute rant, basically. Oh, Y Combinator. That was it. Y Combinator. Yeah. Which are the biggest group of people with their heads up their own asses that I've ever seen.

This guy seems to think that they are so much better than the rest of the world that they don't need the rest of the world. Well, let me tell you, little brother. You are so fucking dumb and wrong that it's just – it's mind-boggling how stupid you are because guess what?

That internet connection that you're talking to everybody on, that happens to go through the rest of the world by people who dug ditches and put up line poles and the hamburgers that you eat at In-N-Out are made by people that have no idea what a command-alt-delete is.

I don't know. I mean I can't even – I can't even go into the breadth of ignorance that this guy – I mean it's just mind-boggling how stupid this little shit is. This speech, all 16 minutes of it, I forced myself to sit through the whole damn thing. It – I felt it in my gut.

I was offended. I was disgusted. I was horrified that these are the people that are basically pushing our technology forward. This guy is such an asshole. I can't even stand it. I mean he really truly believes that once he gets his 3D printer to make his burgers and his chicks, he will not need anybody and they're all going to be fine.

The point of having the intelligence that you have, sir, and the luck that you've had to be born in this place and in this time, to have the chances that you have to make the money that you do and pursue the dreams that you are pursuing is a gift.

It does not make you overlord of the fucking planet. Use it to serve other people, not yourself. You fuck. Yeah, I mean even Newton, who came up with the greatest quote, you know, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. That's because the people who came before you – No, this guy thinks he's done it all himself.

Yeah. This is the same thing that drove me crazy. This is the same attitude when Barack Obama – and I don't want to get too political on this show because obviously we have people on both sides. But Barack Obama did that speech about the fact that you didn't do this. You built – everything that you and I do, that everybody does, is built on other people and their help and what they've done and what contributions that they've made to society.

And the crazy-ass fucking way-far Republican right were like, fuck that. I did this. This guy takes that to the extreme that's ridiculous. He thinks he's in his own world where he's done everything off his own little brain. We have a word for that. Douche nozzle.

Yeah. I agree. I'm glad you're on the same page with me about this. I mean it really – like it viscerally affected me. Me too. Me too. And I couldn't actually watch the video because I read the article and I read the talking points. I did the TLDR version. Right. And I knew that if I watched it, I would probably get on a plane and go find this guy and throat punch him.

This guy needs a good kick in the sack, which is probably the first time it's been touched. Oh, snap. Yeah, it's – this is – his company I'm sure is built – this goes back to – The thing is he's not – he does good stuff.

He's smart. Good. I know. Well, obviously not that fucking smart. I mean I – all my stuff is built on open source software. So I am viscerally aware of the fact that there are smarter people in the world than I that have made amazing things that let me do my job.

Yeah. You know? And the fact that I can go to the grocery store and buy a head of cauliflower right there. That's not even open source. That's just the world working because it needs to work. And this guy is just – I mean it's just – the disconnect with reality is beyond belief.

It's an arrogance that you would never have seen in our generation. Yeah. This guy is going to just starve alone masturbating to films of himself listening to a 16-minute talk. That's – fuck this guy. I'm glad you agreed with me on that. Now let's move on to something you hate.

Oh, geez. Oh, God. I actually like this guy. So, yeah. We're talking about this interview in Scratch Magazine with Jonathan Franzen. Franzen, yeah. Who's an author who's apparently a very well-known author that I've never heard of.

I actually don't like his books, to be fair. But I do – like I've read a bunch of his op-eds and things like that. And he's a smart guy. I'm just never into his books personally. But let's see why you despise him right now. I don't. Oh, okay. I don't. This guy is a counterpoint to the previous douche nozzle.

Oh, okay. I actually like everything this guy has to say. I mean we're agreed again then. I totally – everything that I've read from him outside of his books, I enjoy. So the quote – one of the quote – there's a couple things in this article which is an interview from a childhood friend who met him when he was – she was a kid and is now a journalist.

The beginning part of the interview is kind of pedantic and boring. But near the end, he really picks up steam and starts talking about how the internet culture is kind of ruining a lot of things. But this one really hit home with me because it talks about – talks to me about how we get to up our own asses with too much information and goes back to Tim Ferriss, the information diet and all this other stuff.

But here's the quote. I worry that the ease – hang on. Let me get my – let me get my radio voice on. I worry that the ease and incessancy of communication with electronic media short-circuits the process whereby you go into deep isolation with yourself.

You withdraw from the world so as to be able to hear the world better and know yourself better. And you produce something unique which you send out into the world and let communicate in a non-discursive way for you. Amen, brother. Amen. That's all I agree. Amen. You know, silence is – silence is golden.

Well, it's – you know, the internet is all sound and fury signifying nothing these days. I mean, that's something I've been screaming about. I don't need an art. On the internet. On the internet. Well, where else are we going to do it now? That's the only problem, right? You're going to get snake eating your own tail. Yeah, well, kind of are. I mean, this podcast wouldn't exist if it wasn't for some of this stuff.

So I thought this interview was fantastic. It's a very long read. Yeah. And I recommend reading the whole thing because the beginning part sets you up to get the end part, which there are a couple other quotes in there that I didn't quote here.

But it's well worth the read. And I like this guy. I don't think I'm going to pick up his books because you just said that they weren't that good. Yeah, they're not. They're not. Well, you and I both kind of bend towards sci-fi and stuff like that. And he is very not sci-fi. I don't think that you would like his writing style because you and I have a lot of writing style stuff in common.

But a lot of people really like his books. So, yeah, I mean, his big kerfuffle came with Oprah because he didn't want to be on her thing. And yeah, well, fuck Oprah. We will definitely fuck. I'm in Chicago. I wonder who's on the cover of Oprah magazine this month.

Let me guess. Oprah. Oh, it's Oprah again. Fuck. How the hell did that happen? That's crazy. No, my dad did meet her and said she was very nice. Very nice. I'm sure she's nice, but whatever. Anyway, I recommend this. If you're going to watch the douchebag, Srinivasan and his world of a utopian nerd culture, read this article right after just so you can get a palate cleanse.

It's a palate cleanse. Yes. Yeah, I agree with that. Because this guy needs to be taken out back and shot behind the fucking shed. Yeah. And he's got a really like near near the end of the article. He starts talking a little bit about what's wrong with the Internet culture and especially like news and how it's disseminated.

And the interviewer says, but nobody seems to have an answer. And he goes, well, I've got an answer. She goes, I'm listening. Pay the fucking journalists. Yep. There you go. Pay. There you go. So. Yeah. And silence is golden. Yep. All right.

Enough of assholes. Holy goats out! I want to give a big birthday shout out to my awesome sister, Laura. Happy damn birthday. I don't even know if you listen to this podcast or not. I don't care. Love my sister. Don't see her enough. Don't talk to her enough. Happy, happy, happy birthday. Born on Halloween.

She's always been my little witch. Yeah, that's cool. I've never met your sister, actually. Another shout out to, I have to say this, my former business partner, Sean Bonner, and his wife, Tara.

Happy fifth anniversary because they are also married on Halloween. I was there. I was a signatory. I was a witness to the marriage and I wish them all the best in the world and I hope they're having an awesome anniversary. Very cool. I've met both of them. Lovely people. Happy anniversary, guys.

And I would like to do a shout out to David Geller who gave us the article about cookie tracking. We had a little round and round. I felt like a troll this week on Facebook because I pissed on everybody's articles that they posted. I pissed on Jonas Luster's, Liz Lawley's, everybody's.

Oh, there's a bug in my mouth. Karma, man. Karma. I know. I know. I have obviously come back. I've been reincarnated as a bug to crap in my own mouth. That's how it works. Fucking Buddhism. So thanks to David Geller. I knew him from years ago.

He runs an awesome enterprise email service called WhatCounts. WhatCounts.com. Check him out. I don't believe he's there anymore, but he has saved my ass on many occasions. So he was completely wrong about the cookie thing, and I stand by that.

And I would also like to point out, I missed this for Ear Candy, but Dan Carlin, one of my all-time favorite podcasters, has finally got out a new hardcore history episode. I haven't checked it out yet, but it's three hours long. Wow. He does these multi-part epics on history.

He goes deep into the history of a topic. Oh, man. I should go grab these, because I've got a 12-hour flight tomorrow. Okay. Go get the Mongols. The Mongols. Do you think that's the one to start with? Okay. Well, there's Thor's Angels, which is really good. There's the History of the Romans, which is really good. Everything he does is good.

So check out whichever one peaks your fancy. The Genghis Khan stuff is really good. He pronounces it Genghis, which kind of drives me up a wall after 12 hours of it. But the Roman stuff is especially amazing. Just all of his stuff is off the chart good.

If you're into history, check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. And the new one is out. So I'm happier than the clam. And I would like to also say that Circa, the app that we kind of have been going back and forth on, has been amazing this week. It has kept me up to date on all these stories that I follow.

I've been getting updates to old stories that I completely forgot about. And there's new stuff out. And it just pings me when there's new stuff. It's great. I've got to take a look at it. I've seen it actually pop up in my little announcements and stuff like that. But I haven't opened up the app in a while. So I will get back on that.

Do they have an iPad version yet? I don't know. I don't know. All right. We'll have to look into that. Follow up for next week. Or just install the iPhone version and double to exit. You know? It's got built in – I mean, the text is system text, so it should look just as good.

It should look just fine. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And my final shout-outs, shout-out to Carl Wallinger, a.k.a. World Party. Go listen to some of his music. He's got great stuff. Also Coldplay. Go listen to their music if you want to or not. Whatever. They don't really care because everybody else does already.

But I'm heading off to London to go hang out with both those groups, both those chaps, and it's going to be a good time. Looking forward to being in London in general. If you are a listener and you live in London and you would like to pay it forward and buy me a pint, feel free. Just leave us a comment on the Grumpy Old Geeks Facebook.

And I think that's it, Jason. We've been nattering on for two hours now. Yeah. This is the longest episode ever. So we should cut it short. Fly safe, dude. Fly safe. And hopefully we can get an episode in while you're across the pond, as the kids say. We'll figure out a way to do one while I'm over there, one way or another.

Hopefully we'll get Carl in as a guest. If not, I'll do one from a pub and we'll figure it out. And Carl will join us at some point later on. Okay. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening again. Thanks for listening again. And if you feel the need for speed, go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating, please.

And that's about it. So peace. Peace out. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcastandfrumpyoldgeeks.com.

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