320: Thanks, I Hate It

This episode is brought to you by Hover, the best place to buy domains. Go to Hover.com slash GOG to get 10% off your first purchase. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I've got a bit of follow-up. Cashmere Hill finished her series about cutting out the big five of tech giants. We fell a little bit behind, so she did her one with Apple, which was interesting because like any techie person, they tend to use Apple products.

So iPhones, iPads, Macintoshes, all that sort of stuff. Macintoshes. Doesn't make me sound old if I say Macintosh. Max. Max, yes. Yeah, and as she says, like, Apple is my gateway to almost all things digital. I'm physically touching an Apple device for the majority of any given day.

Being asked to remove Apple from my life was like being asked to remove a part of my body that was incredibly useful, but that I could live without, like a finger or an eyeball. And she went through it and basically discovered that of all the tech giants, because she did this one last, Apple is the only one that she could actually get by without.

Now, she did it a little bit. She knew that the next week she was going to cut out all five. So instead of going from Apple to, say, an Android or to, you know, a Mac to a PC using Microsoft Windows, she tried to find alternatives to those systems to use.

Now, I personally would have liked to hear a Mac user's experience with Android, living on Android and Windows for a week. So I didn't get that I was a bit bummed out by that, but I understand why she did it, because if you read the week, the next one, I cut the big five tech giants for my life. It was hell.

You understand why she did it, because she needed to basically have a lot of prep time to be able to not use either Android or Apple, because basically they have a lock on cell phones. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, so she needed a lot of prep time. So basically, you can live without Apple.

You just wouldn't want to. Yeah, why? Yeah, because it's actually one of the five tech companies. It's the best in terms of privacy, in terms of security, in terms of everything, ethics, et cetera. Usability, design. Usability, design. Yes.

So, you know, you can survive. So then the next week, she cut out all five and tried to live without five, and basically couldn't, is what she discovered. And she says, critics of the big tech companies are often told, if you don't like the company, don't use its products. I did this experiment to find out that it is possible, and I found out that it's not, with the exception of Apple.

These companies are unavoidable because they control internet infrastructure, online commerce, and information flows. Many of them specialize in tracking you around the web. And whether you use their products or not, these companies started out selling books, offering search results, or showcasing college hotties. But they have expanded enormously and now touch almost every online interaction.

These companies look a lot like modern monopolies. I would argue that they don't just look like it. Yeah. They are. Yeah. So, yeah. And then there's a follow-up from the super techie guy that helped her. So if you want to really block the tech giants, here's how. And it's how he built the custom VPN for each one and for, you know, and then combine all of them so you can give this a go yourself.

I thought that this article was fascinating, and we're kind of just doing the TLDRs on it because I think everybody that listens to the show should go read all these articles. It's pretty eye-opening about how we're really locked by five different companies. The entire world is. Oh, yeah. No, it's pretty much done.

So, I mean, the only comment I have about this whole series is it's great that she did it, but she's super into the tech world, right? She's a tech writer. She works online. I would love to see follow-ups on this from people of different walks of life, different economic levels, different lifestyles, different jobs.

I would love to see how these five companies really affect a wider swath of Americans and even people in the world. So, I hope she does continued follow-ups and does something like that because I think it would be really interesting. I don't think it'll change much because, again, everything is digital now.

This is the arguments that we get in with our listeners who don't like us talking politics or whatever. Everything is digital now. So, I don't think it's going to change much whether you're a farmer or an office bee or whatever, but I would be interested to see. Anyways, just me. There you go.

I think that, yeah, it was a fun experiment. I really like the follow-up on how the guy built all the tools to block them. I mean, I understood almost all of it, which is surprising. Very surprising. Because, yeah, my IT chops have kind of atrophied over the years.

Thank God. Kind of glad for that. Now, I found an article over at e-flux.com, a site that I'd never heard of before. And it's a site about architecture, and it's by Molly Sauter. It's called City Planning Heaven Sent.

And it's kind of a follow-up on the sidewalk project in Toronto. And I thought I'd put this in here because you might be moving to Toronto at some point and have to interact with this thing. Now, I don't know if you read the entire thing. It's a very long read. She uses lots of 50-cent words.

And as you get to the bottom, my favorite part, though, is, thanks, I hate it. And she gives basically a rundown of Toronto's problems as far as just the politics in Toronto goes. But also the fact that, you know, at Google, and not Google per se, because now it's sidewalk, you know, the whole alphabet thing.

How they've just kind of come in, gotten free real estate for the most part, and are running this experiment. And it's not so much a, you know, this benevolence that they're doing. They're trying to figure out how to get this going and then take it away and replicate it elsewhere.

Oh, yeah. But they're just using Toronto as the test bed. And it's interesting how the story has changed when they were, like, somebody went to sidewalk and asked them to come be part of the project. But over time, sidewalk has flipped the script and said, oh, we chose Toronto because of A, B, C, and D, when that is, in fact, not the truth at all.

And it's a really interesting read. And I think this is going to be a debacle. I really do. It already is. I mean, it's a mess. And, you know, people don't really don't want it. Seeing some pushback about this sort of stuff, which is nice.

It's kind of like, no, we don't really want Google coming in and redoing our cities, actually. So, yeah. Yeah. It's going to be interesting how this plays out in the real world is with all of the backlash that we've had with, you know, just everything right now.

Everything tech in general. So it's funny that, you know, this thing has finally come full circle. It's only taken us six years to get people to understand what's been going on. We should have started sooner. In the news.

Getting back to a conversation we have all the time. What does delete mean? There's an article over at Salon. You just deleted Facebook. Can you trust Facebook to delete your data? And we all know what the answer to questions and headlines is. Yeah. So it's a really good article.

And it just gets into some interesting statistics, too. It says, thanks to social media, the data collected on the most mundane details of daily life is unprecedented. Experts estimate that there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, a figure that just continues to grow. As a writer for The Guardian explained, when he downloaded his Facebook data, his data download was nearly 600 megabytes, equivalent to nearly 400,000 word documents.

Which is a stupid fucking metric. Yes, because it really depends on the word document, doesn't it? It really does. It could be 600 gazillion word documents. That's the dumbest metric I've ever heard. I know. As soon as you put that in there, I was like, yep, that is. So he goes through. The article continues on as scandals sweep through the social media of Facebook.

Many people are realizing the intimate nature of the personal data that Facebook possesses and elite Facebook movement has everyday users deleting and or deactivating their accounts, which I would argue they did for a while, but I haven't seen recently. That kind of behavior may seem freeing, a way of telling off a social media site that has lost the trust of many, but given Facebook's track record on both privacy and telling the truth, it's worth asking if we can really trust them to delete our data when we ask them.

Now, the problem with this article is it basically doesn't do a very deep dive. It just goes to Facebook's website, which says that it takes 90 days to delete data stored in backup systems. And then, you know, this means that some information such as messaging history isn't stored in your account because friends have access to messages after you sent them and your account is deleted.

And there are log records, which may remain in Facebook's database, but are disassociated from personal identifiers, which we also know is bullshit. So, yes, there is still a paper trail. Now, what they don't do is actually contact Facebook and say, do you really do this?

Do you really delete it or is everything in there just disassociated from your profile and you've kept everything? Because what we think is its visibility is zero, not delete. Right, right. And these are complex systems. We know that, you know, there's going to be stuff everywhere because just of the nature of the distributed system that they have built, you know, you've got data centers everywhere.

So time to delete. Backups and backups and backups and backups and copies and copies and copies everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the 90 days to delete data stored and backup systems is completely disingenuous because, you know, they're keeping backups for a lot longer than 90 days. Are you still getting emails from Facebook? No, I don't get emails from Facebook because I've disabled my account.

I have not deleted it yet, though. It is still disabled. So you're just sitting out there. Oh, yeah. It's still definitely there. Just in case I find that one website that I forgot that I used the, you know, sign in Facebook. Sign in. Yes. Yeah. Just in case.

But most of the places that I've had to switch over have been fairly straightforward because I used a very specific email address for Facebook. And it's easy to, you know, backtrack and call support and say, hey, guys. Yeah, I'm not going to do this anymore. Can I still have my account? Can you just put a password on it so I can log in with email?

And everybody said yes so far. Yeah. Which is good. But I was thinking about this as I read this article. You know, back in the good old days, we knew all of this was possible. All of it. As soon as we discovered the tracking pixel for tracking stats, we saw the wealth of information you can get from everywhere.

And I found it even more because I ran a site that put a JavaScript embed on the page, which was just incredible when I saw how much stuff I could get and how much stuff I could do. And now, the difference between us and the people who do these shenanigans.

I would only collect the data that we actually needed. Well, that. But we also, we had an ethical understanding between, you know, us web devs that the shit was evil and we didn't want it happening to us. We didn't want these systems to exist because we knew that if we built it, it would get abused.

So we completely had this, we had this understanding between ourselves back then. And also, remember when sites were publicly shamed by when they did something nefarious? Because there was the first time when some site said, import your address book and, you know, we can use it to find your friends.

And then they emailed everybody in your address book and then they got more and more and more people that, like, everybody got pissed off. And then they had to walk it back because we basically said, this is ridiculous. That was a thing that we did. But, you know, now there's the web is filled with so many unethical assholes that it's just expected that it's going to happen.

Yeah, we've all thrown our hands up in the air. It's kind of what we've done with privacy. We've just said, well, we expect that this is going to happen. What are we going to do about it? Nothing we can do. Yeah. We just need a no asshole rule on the web. Good luck. Yeah, definitely. All right. Well, let's have some AI news.

Yes, yes, yes. Trump has signed an executive order on maintaining American leadership in artificial intelligence. Oh, God. I'll start with just some regular old intelligence. That'd be all right with me. That's true. That's true. Now, the plan aims to achieve five key things.

The order will direct federal funding agencies to prioritize investments in artificial intelligence. It will seek to make federal data, computer models, and computing resources available to AI researchers. It will direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards that foster the development of reliable, robust, trustworthy, secure, portable, and interoperable AI systems.

It will ask agencies to prioritize preparing workers for the changes brought about by AI through apprenticeships, skills programs, and fellowships. And finally, it will call for a strategy for international collaboration that ensures AI is developed in a way consistent with American values and interests.

Okay. You know what is glaringly missing for me here? What? Absolutely anything about ethics. Oh, yes. No, this is consistent with American values and interests. We don't have ethics. Exactly.

This is what is extremely concerning. The fact that you could have this broad plan where you're trying to get a bunch of funding and you're trying to push everything forward. And not one of the points really has anything to do with being careful and being ethical about how we push forward with this.

Not one. No, not at all. And we're just finding out that like 15 years of Facebook, we're just seeing what it has done to society now. How long is it going to take for the AI stuff to come in and figure out, oh, well, yeah, that was even worse. Oops.

Oops. Can we walk this back? Nope. Too late. Too late. Too late. Hello, Skynet. Nice to meet you. And there's a Wired Opinion piece that I came across, which I loved. It's by Yale Eisenstadt, who I've never heard of, but used to work at Facebook. Also used to work at the CIA, which is pretty cool.

And he wrote a piece called The Real Reason Tech Struggles with Algorithmic Bias. And it's talking about how basically our brains don't work the way that we think they do, because we all know about cognitive biases who listen to some of the podcasts that we listen to. And the people who are building this crap up in Silicon Valley do the barest of minimum to try and take out bias.

Because they don't understand bias. Right. And it's a great piece because he talks about, as a CIA and intelligence officer, they went through rigorous training to figure out biases and how to spot them and how to think around them and make sure that you're making the right decision.

And he's just like, yeah, this is never going to work. These people are untrained. They have no idea what they're doing. And to be able to spot cognitive bias, you have to slow down, think, ask questions, you know, take your time. Wait, you mean don't move fast and break things?

Exactly. He's like, oh, OK, interesting. Yeah. He's like, that's why it's never going to work until these people slow down and just think about things. They just do not have the critical thinking skills to make it possible. So without that, it ain't never going to happen.

And it's all it's going to be biased all the way down. Great. Yep. Well worth the read, though. Yep. Well worth the read. Some more pushback happening over against Airbnb. I figured this was fitting for a show that will be coming out on Valentine's Day. The City of Light and Love.

Paris has warned Airbnb. Airbnb did not listen. And now Paris is taking action. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, told the JDD that the city is suing the company for 1,010 illegal listings. The fine could be worth as much as $14.2 million.

Based on current legislation, you can't rent an apartment for more than 120 days a year. If you want to rent an apartment on Airbnb in Paris, you have to register your apartment with the city. The city then gives you an ID number so they can track how many nights you're listing your apartment on Airbnb, which makes sense to all of us.

We're fine with this. That's great. Except many listings don't have that ID number. They flagged around, well, 1,000 apartments back in December 2017 and said Airbnb was shockingly dragging its feet and not doing much about it. They have no incentive to comply as hosts are responsible for their own listings.

The we're just a platform excuse. Yep. Here it goes again. Here it goes again. Now, thanks to a new law, the responsibility is now shared between the hosts and the platform. So you are not just a platform anymore. The city of Paris can now find Airbnb for all those illegal listings up to 12,500 pounds per listing or euros per listing.

Jesus. I'm so behind still with money. Airbnb has been putting too much pressure on the housing market. According to the mayor, she thinks that 6,500, 65,000 apartments are now reserved for Airbnb in Paris alone, which is staggering.

In some areas, it has become quite hard to find an apartment because of that. Local shops also suffer. This is the trickle down effect. Unintended consequences because tourists have completely different needs than people that live in the neighborhood. So here we go. Go Paris. All right. Good luck.

Good luck. Yeah. I haven't been to Paris in 20 years, and I don't think I ever want to go back. Oh, it's quite lovely. I was just there four years ago. It's still a beautiful city. It's pretty, but man, people are just not very nice. They're French. That's true.

I think it says it right there on the tin. Yeah. You get what you... It's right there on the tin. That's exactly right. And in not surprising news, Mars One is dead. Mars One was the... That was the project... The company that was doing basically the reality TV show to put people on Mars.

Yeah. And who is surprised by that? Absolutely no one. So it is over. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a court on January 15th. It was at one time valued at almost $100 million. And according to listings right now, they have less than 20,000 euros in their account.

So that's going to be hard to send six to 10 people to Mars on 20,000 euros. Yep. Definitely. I don't even think you'd get them to Florida. That's true. For that price. Speaking of Florida, we have a Fort Lauderdale woman who is in a coma following an electric scooter accident.

Ashanti Jordan has not woken up since the day six weeks ago when she hopped on a lime green scooter and took off onto a downtown Fort Lauderdale street and a car hit her. And the family is suing lime right now because they are saying that lime's instructions are not right.

And they're having people break the law. So it's, it's a interesting case to watch because we'll see, we're going to see how this pans out. And I, I mean, I'm obviously on the side of the family on this one, but it's really interesting that I went to just do a quick check, just a quick check.

I hopped over to Instagram and checked out the, the lime account about 6% of their photos have people with helmets. Yeah. I mean, we talked about this initially, like it's all of them, you know, the homepages had, you know, beautiful looking people riding along the boardwalk in Santa Monica, which is illegal without, without a helmet on, which is illegal.

It's insane. My favorite was, uh, there was a woman in high heels on a scooter with no helmet headed for a massive bump in the sidewalk, which I think is pretty much what these companies are headed for. If these lawsuits keep going, because I told you before I bought my, my Google alert for scooters and every day it's just accident after accident, after accident, people are just getting so severely hurt by these things.

It's just criminal. Yeah. It's criminal. I'm out. I try to do a bike ride every day and I try to go on a path, which is theoretically illegal for scooters. And I see scooters every day on them, of course, and no, no helmets every other day, at least for the 45 minutes to an hour that I'm out there, I see an accident.

You know, somebody falls, somebody does something. So, yeah. Yeah. It's the way it's going to be. Um, well, here's the thing. Culling the herd, I guess, is what we should call that. I'm okay with that. But speaking of other things that are criminal, I saw this this morning and I just shook my head.

Reddit is now valued at $3 billion. Hey, it's the front page of the internet, Jason. Oh, my God. I, I, I, I'm almost. It's a glorified message board. That's it. That's it. It's a fucking message board. Yeah. But they're just a platform.

So, you know. Just a platform. Yeah. They just raised $300 million. Why do you need $300 million for a message board? Uh, I don't know. Well, I mean, I'm sure they have a lot of operating costs. And, and Reddit makes attempts at, at, uh, at actually, you know, self-policing themselves and, and kicking off stuff that shouldn't be there.

Yeah. The, the fun part about this is the, the funding round was led by Tencent Holdings, uh, which is a Chinese company and Reddit's banned in China. Yeah. Well, you know, we can't use it, but we still want to make money off of it. That's true. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Hover, our favorite domain registrar in the world.

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Media Candy. A friend of the show, Mike, sent me a text saying, I need to go watch this documentary right now. It's called Generation Wealth, and it is on Amazon Prime. It's by a woman, Lauren Greenfield, who is a photographer who kind of grew up in L.A.

And she kind of niched herself. She shot the super wealthy. Like when you see some of her early work, she's got like the Kardashians before they became famous. There's like all these famous now famous actresses when they were just teenagers. So she was shooting like surf culture here in Santa Monica and Venice and these parties that these incredibly rich and wealthy kids were going to.

So she's now made a documentary, and I'm just going to read the actual blurb about it. Lauren Greenfield's postcard from the edge of the American empire captures a portrait of a materialistic, workaholic, image-obsessed culture. Simultaneously autobiographical and historical essay, this film bears witness to the global boom-bust economy, the corrupted American dream, and the personal costs of late-stage capitalism, narcissism, and greed.

And talk about doing what it says on the tin. Boy, this is really good. I really recommend that everybody watch this. It is depressing as all fuck. I figured that was coming. Yeah, it is. And what's weird about it is because she's been doing this for so long, you kind of see Instagram culture before there was even Instagram.

She definitely shoots all this stuff, and you can just see where we're headed and how we all became these incredibly narcissistic, rich, little shit kids. And now all of our society is that. And she kind of gets into that a little bit, too, because it gets into how the keeping up with the Joneses is happening now with Instagram and social media life and how we're all trying to be these people that we can't be and we can't afford to be.

And we're, you know, people are just blowing out savings and not saving any money and going crazy and spending money on shit that doesn't matter and not taking care of the shit that does. And it's just sad. It really is. But it's it's it makes you think and, you know, pour yourself a glass of wine, watch this and weep.

I watched the trailer last night and I was like, oh, if it wasn't because I was up till 11 prepping the show, which means because I usually go to bed at eight. So I was way past my bedtime already. And I was like, man, I really want to watch this. But no, couldn't do it.

But yeah, the trailer alone is like, oh, crap. This is not like look like it's going to be a happy, fun show. It is not. But, you know, there are glimmers of hope and you kind of see how she's dealt with that in her own life and she's got her kids and how she's trying to deal with it with her kids.

And it's it's interesting. It is definitely very, very thought provoking, especially for the life that we have currently set for ourselves right now. All right. Well, check it out. It's in the queue. It's in the queue. And then taking a step backwards, this also made me feel sad, but in a different way.

I've been listening to the Clear and Vivid with Alan Alda podcast, and he had the actors from MASH on talking about how MASH changed our lives. So it was Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Jamie Farr, Mike Farrell and Gary Berghoff that were on because sadly, that's all that's left. Oh, man.

Yeah. From the cast. Yeah. From at least the major players. So it was it was a wonderful discussion. My gosh, they're just still funny and get along. And the reminiscing was amazing. It was if you were a fan of MASH, you need to listen to this podcast.

And it is probably honestly the last time that they'll all be together in a public forum. They're all friends with each other, but I don't see them doing anything like this ever again. So I'm definitely going to check that one out. I was a huge MASH fan. I still watch it. It was coming on when I was back in Chicago.

It would come on at like 10 at night and I'd just be sitting there with a glass of wine and watch the old episodes. And it was a fantastic show. So well written. Yeah. And actually, I really kind of wanted to go back and start watching it from the very beginning. But it's only on Hulu. And that's the one service I don't have. Oh, yeah.

So I can grab bits and pieces here and there. Obviously, it's I mean, it's on every channel known to man. But, you know, they're never shown in order in syndication, which sucks. Yeah. That's that was really the crappy part. I like, you know, you'd be watching one time and it would have, you know, one cast and then you'd watch it the next night. It would have a completely different cast.

It's like, oh, man. Yeah. So there you go. We have some news in the podcasting world. Current and former Adam Carolla Newsgirls Gina Grad and Teresa Strasser are launching their own podcast together, which I'm kind of excited about. I love Teresa Strasser when she was on the show and I like Gina Grad on the show now.

In fact, I'm actually happy that Carolla split his podcast into two parts because I basically skip the first hour unless there's a guest I like and only listen to the beginning of the second hour because it's the news of Gina Grad. So there you go. So they're going to start, of course, on podcast one pod soup with Gina and Teresa.

And it's kind of unclear as to what exactly they're going to be talking about. But I don't care because I like both of them and I think it'll be funny. Cool. I'll definitely check that out. And if you're missing out on the news girl in the middle, Allison Rosen, she does have her own podcast, which I never really got into. But she has started up a second podcast called Childish with comedian Greg Fitzsimmons.

Greg has some older kids and Allison Rosen has a, I believe, two year old and is pregnant again. So not for you, Jason. But if you've got kids, I've enjoyed it. It's quite funny. OK. Yeah, I'll be passing on that one. Yeah, I figured. And we got some feedback last week on Deadly Class from I can't remember who wrote in and run to the show.

Patrick. All right. Patrick said, oh, man, it kind of went to shit in episode two. I wholeheartedly disagree. I finally went back and I could watch it when the volume was normal, like not late at night. And because I was sick and I had all this stuff that was piled up on the DVR.

So I powered through it and I watched up to episode four. And I like the show. I really got no problem with it. I think it's fun. It's popcorn. It's like, you know, assassin popcorn. Right. All in all, I think it's I think it's actually a pretty enjoyable watch.

It's one of my, you know, it's just on at night. And if I've got time, I'll watch it. I'm not going to go super far out of my way. But it was nice to see that it was on the DVR. And I checked it out. I liked it. Excellent. And since I was sick, I had to break my rule because I I'm just stuck in bed with, you know, piles of Kleenex everywhere.

So I I powered through the rest of the Punisher season two. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Excellent. I have not been watching that because while I have not been sick, my my kid has been. And that just means he ends up having to come out of his room at night. And I don't want the ultraviolence on the TV when he's coming.

Oh, yeah, I will get to it when he's feeling better and sleeping through the night again. Yeah, because it's it's interesting because they have two parallel storylines going on and it was I think they wrapped it up pretty well. I think they did a pretty good job because, you know, we're not getting Punisher season three.

No, it's not Netflix. It's not coming back. So I think we're just going to have to, you know, wait for the next Jessica Jones. And then that's pretty much going to be the last of the Marvel on Netflix. So, yep. And hopefully I'll get rebooted eventually. I doubt they'll come back with the same cast. That would be silly if they didn't.

Disney has a gold mine right there. So hopefully they can make the deal and get these things back on track on Disney's platform, which then we will, you know, have to go steal for. Yeah, well, you could pay for it. Although, you know, Disney's streaming channel is probably going to be not bad.

It might be worth it for sure. Look, they're going to have a ton of content. They've got all the Star Wars stuff. They've got all the Marvel stuff. They've got their own properties, which Pixar, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, kids programming, you can't beat it. So for me, paying for Disney is going to be a no-brainer, sadly.

Yep. I wholeheartedly agree there. So just tell me how it goes. I'll give you my password. Thanks. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Star Trek Discovery has been killing it, too. I'm really digging the show. Yeah. And now that I have my CBS all-access pass, there's some good stuff on there that I've actually found.

I've been going back to watching old episodes of Survivor every now and again, just to put it in the background to have noise. I remember when that show was fun. Sadly, it's not anymore. He's never a fan. Oh, I've seen almost every season. It's crazy. At the library.

So the other week, I finished John 12 Hawk's Traveler, the first book. In the Trilogy. And as I was getting ready to get the second one, I found that he had written a basically a short essay called How to Free Your Mind in the Trump Era. Oh, OK. So if you've been having issues with Trump, best thing is it's completely free for Kindle.

It is zero dollars and zero cents. Nice. I will download that now. It's practical suggestions for anyone feeling angry or overwhelmed by America's toxic political landscape. It's not too much that you wouldn't already think, but it's just nice to have somebody kind of laid out there. It was fairly intelligent. So good read.

That made me feel better for approximately three minutes. All right. And last night, I finished book two of the Shri Logy, The Dark River, book two of the fourth realm trilogy by John 12 Hawks. I enjoyed it. Not as much as I enjoyed the first one.

It wasn't quite as deep and, you know, cerebral as I was hoping for. It veered dangerously into the dashing professor falling in love with the, you know, the girl territory. Oh, no. But it did lay. It still went well.

I liked it. It set up. It set it up enough for me to want to finish the trilogy and see what book three is all about. So we shall see. All right. You got to take a break, man. I know I can't read it. I can't read it next, even though I've already know that. So I've got to find something else. All right. Well, I've sent you some books you can check out.

Yes, I recommend Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. That was a yes, I should get on that on my read that on my Kindle digitally. Moron of the week. Moron of the week. Oh, gosh. How long have we been talking about distributed shared Excel spreadsheets?

Quite a while. The blockchain. Yeah, I think pretty much since we started. Yes. So there's this great article over on Slate by Kevin Werbach, who apparently is your friend. Yeah. As you put in the show notes. I've known Kevin for years, like well over a decade. Yeah. OK, so he's written a book called The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust.

And this is basically, you know, snippets from it to get you to read the book. But I thought it was fantastic because, as he says here, blockchain technology isn't as widely used as it could be, largely because blockchain users don't trust one another as research. Business leaders and regular people are also slow to adapt blockchain based systems because they fear potential government regulations might require them to make expensive or difficult changes in the future.

Good bet, because, you know, we need regulations. Mistrust and regulatory uncertainty are strange problems for blockchain technology to have, though. The first widely adopted blockchain, Bitcoin, was expressly created to allow financial transactions without relying on trust or on governments overseeing the currency, which we found out people don't trust because we want someone regulating and tracking and overseeing things because people suck and we don't trust other people.

Correctamundo. Yeah. So blockchain, as it turns out, doesn't herald the end of the need for trust. Most people will want laws and regulations to help make blockchain based systems trustworthy. If people trust blockchain systems, they'll use them. That's the only way they'll see mass market adoption. I think we've been saying that since day one.

Pretty much, pretty much. Now, the thing about this use of blockchain is just specifically for cryptocurrency, right? Not just for the tracking of other things. Basically any, you know, but I mean, anything, you know, obviously, if it's an internal business to business thing, that's a completely different story. But any public facing blockchain, I suppose.

OK, that's what that's that was the distinction I was going to make there, because it still seems like, you know, supply chain management with blockchain is a really good idea. Oh, yeah, of course it is. That sort of stuff makes complete sense. But when we're talking about, you know, the layperson and, you know, anybody putting public facing, putting your trust in some weird blockchain system.

In fact, I forgot to put the story in here because it was going to go with it to some idiot has put child porn in the blockchain and nobody can figure out how to get it out. I was just about to mention that. Yeah, that's that's been around for a while because you can you can have additions on to, you know, the actual transactions and people are putting, yes, there's there's child porn inside of Bitcoin because people suck.

So that was that was, you know, I thought we had this conversation about this exact thing because it's like anybody who is trading in Bitcoin now is also trading in child pornography. So can you just arrest everyone? And how does that how do you fix that? Can you fix that?

Can you fix it? Yeah, I'm thinking no. I think I'm thinking no. So even a hard fork isn't going to fix that. Nope. Nope. You're forked. Feedback loop. We've got some new Patreon subscribers, Ivan and Kevin and Derek, who also writes in, hey, Grumps, I run a page on Facebook for editors to find work, find help and sell hardware.

I have 13,588 members right now, and I don't want to lose the page and what the page represents. I've used PHP, BB and other message boards in the past. But is there a better solution? Well, PHPB is not a solution for anything unless you want to get hacked.

That was always a horrible one. Oh, that's so many holes. You know, I haven't done anything with a message board online for a client in ages, but there are tons out there and some of them are pretty secure. You might even want to look at just using one of the Facebook replacement things out there and set up your own.

What was the really good one called or at least the decent one? I can't remember. Well, I mean, there's nothing really that great. Diaspora was out there. Diaspora, yeah. But I'm not sure anymore. I have not used bulletin board software in so long. There was one called SMF that I really liked.

That was the last one that I used. I don't know. Simple Machines is what it was basically called. And they were great at the time. I can't vouch for if they've kept up with stuff, but they were always really good at releasing patches and making it as secure as possible. So I really liked that one back in the day. So you might want to do your research and due diligence on that one.

Also, tell your 13,588 people to listen to our show. Yeah, definitely. Seriously. There was also BuddyPress for WordPress that I've used. Yes. Yes. I've used that as well. It's okay. It's okay. It's kind of a pain to set up and customize, but it does work.

It does what it says it's going to do. It can just be problematic to get set up. As with anything with WordPress. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. And Tim also wrote in, why the fuck doesn't anybody put any care into their craft anymore? I'm a senior software architect developer, and the amount of absolute utter garbage I have to review from other supposedly senior developers hurts me physically.

Oh, yes. Yes. And Tim has upped his Patreon thing and wants us to pimp something for him, so we shall. It's called the Precipice Foundation, and the whole idea is to prevent homelessness before it happens as opposed to trying to resolve it once they've lost everything. It's dedicated to good, hardworking people who've lost their jobs, hit a rough patch, or their car broke down, or whatever unexpected bill hits, but are living paycheck to paycheck to begin with, so they can't absorb that hit.

As you can see from the GoFundMe page, we've generated a grand total of $617. So I've been funding almost the entire thing myself out of pocket to the tune of about $30,000 so far. I don't honestly know how to drum up donations, but I think the first thing is to raise awareness, so if you feel inclined to mention the Precipice Foundation on your fantastically hilarious podcast, I think it would go a long way towards that goal.

And we checked it out. So it's a very cool and worthy cause, and we do recommend all of our listeners go take a look and donate if you can. Link will be in the show notes, and if you want to just type it in right now, it's at theprecipice.foundation. It's a good URL. I didn't know they had .foundations.

Isaac Asimov's people need to get on that. Yes, seriously. And we have a new recurring subscription from Christopher over on PayPal. Thank you very much, Christopher. Thank you very much. And Seth over on Twitter says, okay, I know Eero is a sponsor, but I hope you cover the clusterfuck of this acquisition.

So did Eric and Kiefer42 and about 7,000 other people through every other venue possible. Yes, we've heard Amazon is acquiring Eero. Yeah, that's called business, sadly. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.

I mean, it was obvious that Eero was heading that way. They were spending a lot of money on promotion, and they want to take over the market. And what better way than to partner with someone? It is what it is. We'll see what happens. I mean, you know, Nest and Amazon did okay. No, no, no.

Ring and Amazon, not so much. No, Nest went to Google. Nest is Google. Oh, that's right. Nest went to Google. Sorry, that's my bad. Ring is on Amazon. I've got several Ring devices. I like them. They're coming out with a slew of new ones that are extraordinarily overpriced flashlights.

They've got these new connected smart lights that don't have cameras in them, but that you can turn on with your, you know, your Echo. And they're like a hundred bucks for a packet, too. I have, like, battery-operated floodlights around my house that cost about $7 each, and they work really well.

So I can't see spending 50 bucks on those things. But anyway, as far as, you know, this goes, I'm not too concerned about it. The only thing I'm concerned about is Eero has basically booked the rest of the year in advertising for us. So if they quit, I am going to be extremely pissed off.

Yeah. Yeah. We haven't gotten all those checks yet. You know, it's keep an eye on it. We'll see what happens. I know the concern is that they'll be phoning home to Amazon all the time, and that's a concern for all of us. So we'll see what happens. As of right now, it's still a great product. Yeah, it's fantastic. So I'm not giving mine up because it works.

I mean, what's the other option right now is, like, you know, the Google Wi-Fi. It's like, okay. Yeah, we're getting right back to the Cashmere Hill article. How do we avoid the top five giants? You know, you go and you use something for a while that's individual, but we all know the game. The game right now is to sell to one of the big ones, and that's what everyone's doing, sadly.

Yeah. And there was a really interesting article on Stratechery this morning where he was talking about how they're looking for these all-in-one solutions. So once they get everything in-house and they can create this all-in-one solution, it'll be like, click to buy your smart home, and then you just get, you know, you get your Eero, you get your rings, you get your Echos, and all that other stuff.

You get in the ecosystem, just like we are with Apple and other things. And there was a very interesting point that he made that I thought would be interesting is putting the Eero hardware inside the Echos. So then they become the wireless bridges around your house, so you don't actually have two devices, which I thought was very clever.

So that would be a very good thing. I would be into that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because I've got four Eero beacons around my house right now because I have to cover a very large swath of area. And, you know, they just take up a, they basically take up an outlet. So if that was just another Echo, I would have to get a new roommate because she won't let me put Echos in the house.

But I think that would be pretty cool. Just tell her, tell her it's just a beacon. Yeah, it's just a beacon. Instead, when it, you know, just randomly starts talking to her, which is what the problem was. Well, there's that. Yeah. Oh, man. So I think it's interesting.

I'm not too, too upset about it or worried about it. You know, the Eero is just such a solid product. As long as they get to keep making it and improving it. I'm down. I'm down. In Right Film Sleeper Pete writes in, more child protection failure. Tinder, Grindr, and other dating services failed to protect children from sexual exploitation in a UK report.

Yeah, I read through this. You know, they're just a platform, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, the reality is all these companies and all these services need to spend more money policing their own backyards. And they aren't. So, you know, automatic detection and AI is not going to solve this problem.

Eyeballs is going to solve the problem. Or more eyeballs. Yep. And Barrett writes this. Does this mean the White House will lose its internet connection to, smiley face? Russia to disconnect from the internet as part of a planned test. Okay. I wonder if anybody can find out how to gum up the switch so they can't switch it back on.

Yeah, can we just keep it off? That'd be great. Seriously. And third in command writes in, Alexa turned up the heat and buys 500,000 toilet rolls. Yeah, this is an article. I guess it's been posted on Reddit.

It's where they get their money, but it's very funny. Okay. We'll definitely check that one out. Link will be in the show notes. Yes. And Barbantuan writes, you can skip Russian Doll episode two and go directly to three. And yes, there is a big twist on it. I watched episode two and then three because I figured I'd give it a go.

Not a big enough twist for me to keep watching the show. It's a twist I saw coming from about 10,000 miles away. Okay. So I'm not impressed by that one. I know a lot of people that like that, though. I've seen a lot of positive reviews, but you say no. I'm saying no. You can give it a go. Maybe it's just me.

It's just not jiving right with me. I'm not in the mood for it. It's kind of the same issue I often have with Black Mirror. I'm just... It's dark and I'm not... If I were in a happy-go-lucky world right now, I'd be more into it. But when shit's already bad, I want to watch The Good Place.

Okay. Oh, man. Yeah. Sadly, that's off the air right now. So it'll be back soon. And over at GOG.show, Phil writes in, Hey, geeks. First off, love the show. Always great to have you two going back and forth in my head during the workday. Love it. If you guys could erase one internet or tech oopsie from history, what would it be?

What do you got, Brian? Oh, I've got one that'll solve almost every single problem. Let's go back. And not base everything on the ad model. Yeah. That could be good. That could be good. Yeah. Let's do micropayments for everything. Let's not do...

It gets rid of the tracking. It gets rid of the privacy. It gets rid of all of that. Pay as you go. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Mine would be, just because this was such a bane in my existence for so many years, Microsoft never inventing Internet Explorer.

Well, imagine a world where you had independent browser companies that you paid for. Remember, you used to have to... It was 50 bucks to buy Navigator. Right. It was a paid browser. Imagine that nobody made a browser for free. Well, it looks like we're kind of coming from the same point where maybe everything shouldn't have been free.

Yeah. I really think... I really am down with that. Yeah. The other thing would be cross-site scripting. Not being allowed to put somebody else's images or JavaScript on your site. Everything has to come from your server. That would be another big one. If you could lock that down, that would stop all the tracking.

Period. That would be it. No cross-site link. I mean, you can link, but you cannot embed something in a page that comes from a domain that is not one that you own from the top level down. Right. That's it. Okay. Two good ones there. Donovan writes us, you guys talked about Slack going public and that maybe it's time to think about other options, anticipating that eventually things will go to shit.

If you like Slack, there's an open source alternative called Mattermost that should feel very familiar. It's self-hosted, and I'm kind of just assuming one of you would be able to set that up. Well, we're both trying to get rid of servers, so... But if you would rather someone else do it, I'm happy to help. Well, thank you, Donovan. Okay.

And the next one comes from Yohannes. Hi, Grumps. If you want to jump off the Slack wagon before they go public, check out Zulip Chat. It's essentially a Slack clone with some extra features. You can either get it as a service on their platform, or you can self-host it. I've tested it for a while, and its persistent thread feature is a clear improvement over Slack.

Cheers from Boston. So I looked both of these up since they're open source, and I figured, oh, got to be on GitHub, right? Sure enough. And the difference between the two is Zulip Chat actually looks better. It's got just cooler features, which I really like. And it's also got about 10 times the commits on GitHub that does matter most.

Right. So I'm going to go with the commit numbers, personally. I'm going to actually spin up Zulip Chat because I am kind of getting sick of Slack cutting us off at 10,000 messages and killing all the old stuff until you have to pay for it.

And also the file size limits because we've basically filled up my personal Slack channels, and we can't actually trade files there anymore, even though we're putting stuff on Dropbox and all that stuff. But either way, I'm going to give Zulip Chat a shot. I'm going to spin up a Node Host instance because I am finding that Node Host is the easiest software or basically hosting platform that I've almost ever used.

I spun up a couple of WordPress instances the other day in under five minutes, and it was fantastic. It was really easy. Those guys are killing it up there. So I'll have a link to the Node Host stuff in the show notes as well. But this looks like a pretty easy install. So I think we'll give it a shot because, yeah, Slack is already kind of going to shit.

It was such a nice thing to not have to use email all the time, but now it's like I'm just tethered to another service. Yeah. So might as well get tethered to Zulip Chat too. But I can have it at least then if it's self-hosted, I can spend like, you know, 10 bucks a month on a Node Host instance, like a decent-sized Node Host instance, own everything instead of paying per user, which is the problem with Slack.

It's like, okay, I can't go half paid. You either have to pay for everybody in your team or nobody, and then you get cut off, you know? So I think that's going to be in my future. All right. And Holly writes us, first Apple, now Fitbit, and sends us an article over on Engadget.

Fitbit's latest tracker is only available through your work or insurance. Yeah, we saw this coming. So it's called the Inspire, and they are not releasing it to the general pop. Basically, it's a mass amount that you purchase as a company if you want to track your employees and give them incentives, or, you know, insurance providers can buy them and give them to people.

So here we go. Here we go, people. Yep. I wonder if it comes with a microphone too so they can listen in. It'll be coming. Trust me. It'll be coming. It will. And Bill sent us a very funny image, and it says, the difference between machine learning and AI.

If it's written in Python, it's probably machine learning. If it's written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI. Very funny. Ross writes us, I tried to download the Calm app, Apple's app of the year. It took me to a page that asked me to create an account and offered SSO by Facebook, then told me that it was all free till the seven-day trial ended.

Then it was 50 bucks. This did not help. It did not make him calmer. It did not do what it said on the tin. No. And Ivor writes in, I think this has to be at least a contender for best headline of 2019. National Enquirer's Big Pecker tried to shaft me, but I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat.

So many dick jokes last week. I know. I know. So many. Ben writes us, I just have a quick question for Jason as it pertains to podcasting. I just edited my first podcast episode. It runs about 40 minutes and rings in about 300 or 37 megabytes in MP3 format. Does that sound right?

It seems large. That's about right. No. Here's the thing that you want to do. This is kind of like, you know, the Mac PC fight. 44.1 kilohertz, 64 kilobits per second. Mono. Do it.

That's it. There you go. That'll take care of it. Yep. And Mike McNeil writes in, I've heard you talk about your podcasting setup here and there, and I was looking for a specific episode where you maybe went over your setup in detail. I'm trying to help a friend with some proven but not crazy expensive solutions so she can record her radio show and not sound like she's doing it in the bathroom.

Do you have a specific episode or link to a page that has your current equipment set up and or any recommendations on what to buy? So and she's got three people in a room talking and most people would say, just get a blue Yeti and put it in the middle of the room. Well, no, that doesn't work.

You are going to have to spend money. It's not going to be crazy expensive, but it is going to be expensive because you need three XLR mics. You need basically an interface to those mics and you need a computer to basically record everything. But I will drop some I'll drop some knowledge in the show notes and a bunch of links to different solutions that I've used in the past for people who are starting out.

But yeah, it's not it's not easy when you go to three people. It's really kind of a pain in the ass and you have to spend more money. And, you know, for most people, for a three person set up a decent one where it doesn't sound like you're in the bathroom and you want to sound like a professional, you're probably you know, you're coming in close to seven or eight hundred bucks.

Yeah, sounds about right. All right. YME writes in, I know I know you guys are all down with AI websites built with AI and this is Mopro dot com AI powered websites and social media solutions. Mopro is the first intelligent website platform that deconstructs and analyzes every pixel block and action on your website to learn from your users.

It's a smart site. I like their website tagline right here. We build the million dollar website of your dreams for you. Start with a trial. No, no, no. And Jeff writes in Grumps, I have two quick issues I would like to bring up.

First up, this is going to be for you, Brian. Why is your solution to everything regulation? Your podcast continues. Because there is none. There's none right now. I'm not saying the solution to everything is regulation, but there is zero fucking regulation right now. OK, sorry. Your podcast continually mentions government usually doesn't get things right.

How do you think that regulation would be any different? The third party ideas are good, but anything short of that is not going to meet even your expectations. So he also says also age limits for those in office. Just use your brain and your own sensibility when voting for a candidate. Yeah, we covered that last week.

So, but yeah, as far as regulation goes, you know, every time regulation gets rolled back and we see that the market is supposed to sort it out for itself, it doesn't work. It doesn't. We have tried no regulation and that's why we're at where we're at now.

So let's try some regulation. It may be shit. It may be inefficient, but it's better than what we got now. My roommate works in real estate and it is one of the most highly regulated industries out there because there are so many shady people in real estate. And, you know, you have to go by the letter of the law.

There are people who are looking at this stuff day in, day out. There are lawyers that are looking at all of these deals to make sure that people are going by the letter of the law. And you know what it does? It keeps people safe from getting the shaft. So, you know, I this whole free market will sort it out.

Yeah. How's that working with your ISP? How's that working with your ISP? It's not working with anything. Let's let's be real. We've been deregulating for years and it's just things are not good. So anyways, and he also says, also, why even mention the Ted Bundy Netflix show?

I know it's pop culture, but to popularize someone who committed atrocious acts is very misguided. No, it's not misguided. It was a very good show and it was very informative. And I learned a lot about sociopaths and how to actually look out for them. No, it's a fantastic show. I'm not going to apologize for watching something and saying that I liked it.

You know, it's not like it's like saying, oh, hey, you talked about saving private Ryan. That means you love Hitler. No, it doesn't. It doesn't mean I like Ted Bundy. I like the show. That's all. OK, fair enough. Over at iTunes, we got a five star rating from Strez Technoid.

My meager payment and my meager payment and indignant review. So smile would have rated the show at six stars, less one star as I had to leave a snarky remark comment. Consider a five of six next gen and a meatspace score of four point seven five five. Guess I will just have to go to the website.

What is the address again? You do. Knowing you both sci fi buffs and fanboys, I guess I am older than both of you as I predate your cultural linkage by way of lost in space. Ginger was hot. Sorry, I couldn't feed the collective kitty or Jason's dogs as I'm snowed in this year and NASA won't fly me out. Well, thank you very much for those five stars and whatever the math is on the other.

Yeah. And Grumpy Designer writes in, keep up the grumpy. It's refreshing to catch up with you guys twice a week on the absurd events that unfold. There's never a shortage of stupidness in our society today. Highly recommended show. Well, that that, you know, never having a lack of stupidness is pretty much what keeps us on the air.

So appreciate it. Preach is Hidkov writes from the Russian Federation. Thank you from Mother Russia. You probably won't be hearing this since Russia shut off their Internet, right? So we'll see. I'm from Russia and listen to you since last summer. So great podcast with clear, honest, pessimistic view on present and future of tech.

P.S. Interesting. If I start supporting you on Patreon, can it trigger some investigation like Russian support these grumpy guys? Why? Because they are demonizing Facebook and it helps hiding intervention. Looks like part of a big game. Nice. Well, thank you. How about we try it? Let's see. Yeah. Let's try it.

Go for it. Give us some rubles. Give us some rubles on Patreon and we'll let you know if we if we're having to do shows from Gitmo Rushify writes in five stars. A great start to my Monday. You guys are the best. I usually get a good laugh from Brian and Jason. You are the best tech podcast since the old Maximum PC No BS podcast from back in 2007 and 2008.

Wow. That was a long time ago. You really opened my eyes about security and the whole Facebook fiasco and have even inspired me to do my very own podcast, albeit on a completely different subject, cars. Thanks, guys. And keep it up. Well, good luck with the podcast, man. Yep. And Randy to Quilo writes in funny, informative and grumpy.

I've been listening for years now and I figured I'd leave a review. I guess I like the show. They help me catch up with the news and give me a chuckle. Keep up the good work. Thank you. I'm glad we can give you a chuckle. And Faithful Heretic writes in with another five stars aerobics replacement between cheering them on for being brilliant and screaming that they're idiots.

I certainly get a workout each week, but through it all, they never fail to make me think. So thank you. Now, get off my lawn. Just stay grumpy while you do. Well, I mean, see, you know. See, that's part of our charm is that we don't always have to be right. And so people are entertained. Yes.

If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarker review. And if you have a huge user base that you're looking to transition off Facebook, tell them all to listen to our show, too.

Pretty please. Closing shout outs. So my first closing shout out is to Finn McCool's, my beloved local. Unfortunately, yesterday was the last day with the old owner. I would say that's actually a good thing because she really stopped putting money into the place about 10 years ago and it desperately needs an overhaul.

But there's a lot of concern for the staff and the locals about how it's going to change. And it's just a big transition. Like 20 years I've been going to that place and it will no longer have the name Finn McCool's. But what change will happen. No, it will still be an Irish themed bar.

We know that as and we know that most of the staff isn't staying on, at least at the beginning. They will be sad to see people go because that just happens. I mean, it always does. So we'll see what happens. But a fond farewell to Finn's and related.

Hang on. That makes me. I got some follow up on that real quick. That makes me sad. Our show was born at Finn McCool's. It started with me and you sitting around getting hammered, just bitching about the world. And then we decided to do the show, sitting at the back, having a sandwich, drinking a beer at Finn's.

And we even did some meetups for show fans at Finn's. This makes me very sad. Yeah, it is definitely the end of an era. And continuing with that theme, my ex-business partner, well, I guess still current, but we haven't really done any work together in a while. Wendy Marvel has left Santa Monica and Venice.

She's been living in the place that we moved into 20 years ago when we first came out here and started our company. And that has ended as well. So some big transitions happened just yesterday. Wendy actually turned over her keys and her and her boyfriend, Mark, got in the car and are headed to upstate New York.

So 20 years ago, I moved to this area, started the company and started going to Finn's. And as of yesterday, the place that I moved into, the person I moved here with, has left and my bar has gone away. Oh, man. Geez. Oh, Wendy didn't even say goodbye.

It's Wendy. That's true. She couldn't organize anything. That's true. It was all too scattered. So she'll be back and forth anyways. She always is. And she's still got a storage unit full of shit here that I have to go deal with. So she'll be back. Oh, man. I did see that they used pods to move, which I highly recommend.

Pods is fantastic. They were the greatest thing when I had to move to California. But I didn't know she was still in that place. I missed that place. It was. Yeah. Many a party we had there. Yeah. Yes. I remember waking up one day and I couldn't find a sock. Where'd my sock go?

It's probably in the pod. Yeah, it could be in the pod. Well, until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one-time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 320. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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