44: 68 Minutes You Totally Have to Hear To Believe!

The End.

No, no. I finally went to the doctor last Sunday. So it turns out I've been walking around with a spiral fractured fibula and a possible – this is just a possible – what do they call that?

Some ligament down in my ankle has been possibly ruptured, the big triangular one that keeps your foot from sliding side to side, whatever. I don't know what it's called but it sounds important. Yeah, yeah. So they put a half cast on me and gave me some generic Vicodin and it's kind of been it trying to find an orthopedic surgeon that I can stomach to actually give me a good prognosis.

So that's it. They got those on Yelp? I don't know. No. Well, actually they do but I still haven't found anybody I like yet because the first guy I went to sounded like a Ukrainian war criminal. I couldn't understand him. He didn't even say hello before. He said, we put you in surgery now.

You need two screws and a plate. I'm just like, dude, lube me up with dinner before you try and screw me. Ha, ha, ha. I know but I'm jank. But yeah, it's been fun. Well, if there's anybody out there in Jason's neck of the woods that happened to have a good recommendation, you should write him and quickly please because he's been stubborn long enough and he should probably get this taken care of.

I'm trying to get it taken care of now. So here's the side effects of this. Good drugs? No crappy drugs but no drinking. None whatsoever because you can't drink with these. You can but it's really terrible for your liver and you might die. I haven't had caffeine in probably three weeks now.

Oh my god. I would die. Well, I told you I was having so many sleep problems because of the pain in the leg. I figured let's cut everything out. The Viking didn't fix that by the way. So I'm crystal clear now, which is fantastic. But yeah, so I'm hydrated as can be because all I drink now is water and decaffeinated green tea.

Right. And I have re-embraced meditation like you would not believe because you know what a cast does? A cast itches a lot. Yeah, I vaguely remember. I haven't broken anything in ages but the last time I had anything like that on, I was a kid but it drove me insane.

Yeah, and it drives you insane even in humid clients. Here where there is no humidity because of the winter, oh my god. So I reached out to the guys at Bootify and I'm like, give me some tips. And they gave me some pretty good Twitter tips on how to power through the pain as it were.

Yeah, those guys are – they seem pretty cool. I mean they're definitely very active on Twitter. They're not one of those companies that just kind of has it up there and responds when they want to or if somebody is yelling at them, unlike maybe some other apps that we could talk about later. But yeah, they're cool and I still love the app.

Yeah, and we've got another app that we'll talk about when we get to the app segment that I've been trying. And I'll just mention it right now anyway. Still no response from Get Jelly. And I feel compelled to not delete the app now until I know they're going to remove my data. So this is like what, week four of this app just sitting on my stupid phone?

Have you written them back yet? Like again? No, I haven't written a second email. I guess I should. Yeah, read them again. I figured using their own app to ask if I could remove data would have been enough, but apparently not. Well, keep going with it because soon you'll be the only person on it because I don't know anybody that uses it anymore.

Right. That was supreme shark fin. The one thing that I did notice, I loaded it up again just a couple days ago just because it was sitting there and I was like, what the hell? See if anybody else responded to my how do I get rid of my data on this app question. The corporations have moved in. They have come on in.

There's a lot of people promoting themselves, people asking, would you listen to my podcast and all that sort of stuff. So people have just kind of taken it on as a little promo tool, figuring why not. Kind of the Hail Mary passes. Kind of the same thing with Vine. Yeah, if people still use Vine, anybody other than a corporation, I don't think so.

Or the people that get on the Today Show for doing their awesome, cool viral videos. Not really. You know what happened? Instagram actually, they kicked them in the nuts. They put out the video and everybody I know just still uses that. Since they already had an Instagram account and it works. Exactly what we said on one of our podcasts when Instagram first announced it.

Vine is dead. See you later. Coming back to talking to companies on Twitter, we had a little kerfuffle with Get Secret this week, didn't we? They were not pleased with us. A lot of massive kudos to Sean Bonner for chiming in and actually coming through with the hard facts as opposed to us just going, it's not secure.

And in one of the tweets, the guy that wrote back, one of the founders, he's like, yeah, we use the Google app infrastructure, which means our app is as secure as email and Gmail. And we just, I mean, I could just collectively see all of us at the same time reading this in different parts of the country just busting up laughing.

And, yeah, and it comes back a little, we kind of kicked him in the nuts with that later. It was like, oh, yeah, the fact that the NSA has been in your Gmails and your Yahoo emails for years. It's like, oh, yep, safe as email. That's about how we look at it. Well, I have no problem with the app idea itself.

It's nice. It's existed forever. It's on the web. It's been in whatever. It's a cool concept, but the claims of security that they make are ridiculous. And I'm sorry, guys, you know, it was really nice of them to up their password quotient number after we suggested that.

Oh, they did? That's nice. Yeah, they wrote back immediately saying they're pushing an update that will up their passwords. So that's good. That's a little bit more secure. But don't claim it's secure. It's just, it's not campy. It won't be. End of story. Yeah. Excuse me. Gesundheit.

Yeah. I've had my own kind of crazy week over here. So I've got to, I'm actually an escrow at the moment, which is amazing. I'm actually getting a place here in Santa Monica. Talk about an industry that I wouldn't mind being disrupted. What a fucking process this is.

Now, you know, all of you people out there disrupting things like taxi industries, which don't really need help. Get involved with this whole process of banking and mortgage loans and all of this stupid, useless paperwork. Disrupt that, fuckers.

Never going to happen. Too regulated, too regulated. And too much money to be made. Oh, yes. You can't cut people. Everybody needs to get their $20 fee and their $55 fee and their $43 fee here and there. Oh, no. And their $10,000 fees. Yes. There's big money at play in that market. And you do not, those people will kill you.

Yeah. They do not fuck around. Yeah. So that's been my week. I also had one other thing come up. And I just want to talk about this briefly because this just, you know, when you work for yourself or it doesn't even matter if you work for yourself. It does always tend to be the people that do not understand any process whatsoever that make the decisions regarding said process.

This is just an axiom of life. How long, Jason, you're a super server guy. You're really good at back-end stuff. You know this stuff backwards and forwards. If you were migrating a live site that's reasonably complicated, lots of databases, lots of user-generated content, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, full CMS admin areas, multiple people working on the site at all times, and you need to migrate a large site like that, how much time would you give for it?

Well, I mean, it depends on, I mean, how much prep time you put into it because you need preparation time. You need to make sure everything's going. I mean, honestly, I would just spitball it in a week just to make sure everything's in place, and then you flip the switch over the weekend to make sure that it'll ebb traffic time.

That's kind of how I would, you know, that's just a ballpark. I mean, it's more complicated than that, but about a week. Now, a week sounds reasonable, especially if you're hands-on the one doing it, right? Absolutely. Okay, what if, just say, for instance, that your current environment is managed by a company in the U.K., but actually hosted and outsourced to a server farm in India,

and they're moving to a new environment that is managed by a company in the U.S., moving to a new third-party hosting environment also in India, and the time zones are all over the place. You don't find out that the move is going to happen until, say, Thursday.

It absolutely has to be dropped and be completed by Tuesday. It's just I've been in this crazy nightmare, and I kind of almost know how this stuff works. I'm willing to bet – I would probably bet $10,000 that it's the same building in India. And I kind of – at one point on one of the conference calls, I just screamed, can't you just get somebody to pick up the box, walk it down the hall, and plug it into the new room?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, in that case, I would have quit. Yeah, it's been a bit of a nightmare, but amazingly enough, it seems to be coming along, and we're going to make the deadlines, which is good. So between that and just the at least 600 pages of PDF documents I've had to print, sign, scan, email, send everywhere, I'm ready to drop this week.

I feel like shit. I just – and I want to point out because you're working – I'm assuming since you work in the rock and roll industry that this is for an artist website, right? There is no reason on earth that it should be that complicated to deal with a website for a musical artist.

I can just tell you right now they don't get enough traffic to warrant that kind of oversight and complication. I know. I'm just throwing it out there. No, I don't disagree. I'm amazed at how complicated the entire process has been as well. And I have – I did work for a short time at Warner Brothers Records, so I do know that it is difficult, and there is a lot of process in place, and it's a lot of really bad corporate policy.

The problem is not with the actual technical aspects whatsoever. It's with middle management and conference calls and checklets and action items that need to be reviewed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, same old, same old. Same old, same old. Corporate. Okay. All right.

Cool, man. Well, good luck with your house. I can't wait to come see it sometime even though I should have been there by now except I can't fly because I got a broken paw. Yeah. You ain't going anywhere for a little while, but maybe by the time you get out here I'll actually be set up and we'll have a little podcast room. Woo-hoo. All right. Command of the Week.

Previously mentioned friend of the show, Sean Bonner, who's been on guest with us I think twice now, hasn't he? No, just once. Just once. Feels like it because we're always chatting around with him on Twitter. And host of his own Viva Riot show at VivaRiot.com.

Pitched in a few bones to grumpy old geeks via tugboatyards.com slash GOG this week. So thank you very much, Sean. Awesome. And he also asked us to pimp, what is this, truenorthconf.org, a one-time only conference about what guides us and motivates us and why we do the things we do, which we all need help figuring out.

No doubt. It's in Stockholm, Sweden, June 26th through the 29th this year. The guests look really cool. Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity, which is still my favorite game in the world right now. Derek Sievers of Sievers.org. Is it Sivers or Sievers? Did I get it right? I think it's – I call him Sivers.

Actually, Sivers I think is what he says. Whatever. Previously of CD Baby, which – you know, CD Baby. I think everybody was on that at some point. And some guy named Michael Lopp whom we've never heard of. So thanks, Sean. Yeah, he's done something. Yes. Thanks, Sean, a lot.

And you should follow Sean on Twitter at Sean Bonner. He ends up chatting with us quite a bit and we like to yell at people. Yes, yes. And Sean is my old business partner, by the way. So I've known him for 10 years now. So he's a good guy. Cool. Now, here's one that kind of blew me away and I almost – I almost deleted this because I saw the snippet that came in the email app where it said Africa.

And we get so many Nigerian scam emails. I threw it away and then it just – because it was like 6 in the morning and I was on my iPad. I just swiped it away and I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me see if that was real or not because it said, hi, Jason. So here's the email I got. You ready for this?

I am ready. OK. Hi, Jason. I'm actually British and motorbiking solo around southern Africa, downloading your podcast whenever Africa's crappy internet allows it. Wait. Is this Ewan McGregor by any chance? No, it's not. No, it's not. This will probably explain your Namibia and Botswana downloads.

I'm traveling for nine months total next through Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho, and finally South Africa. I know it's not proper Africans tuning in, but at least it makes your stats look pretty. Stay grumpy, James.

Yes, it does make our stats look pretty. Thank you very much, man. That's awesome. It is so awesome. And it's really cool to think that you're actually listening to us fucking idiots shitting around and just sitting here talking bullshit while you're doing something fun. I know. And I'm super jealous because, as you mentioned, Ewan McGregor, Long Way Round and Long Way Down, I've seen both of those probably ten times each.

Yeah, fantastic shows. I love those shows. So, yeah, definitely thanks for the heads up, James. And really, we don't care who's listening as long as they're listening. So, have a great ride. Stay safe. And he's posting his ride reports at whereisjames.com, which I love because I used to have whereisjason.com when I was traveling.

Right. So, we'll put it in the show notes. He's got some really cool pictures up and stuff about his ride. And I love his handle on the site is technomaticjim. So, write a kindred spirit in all senses of the word.

Well, there's been no avoiding Facebook this week. Not at all, not a little bit. It turned 10 and all we got was a shitty movie. Yes, they are pretty shitty. Yeah. I'm actually – it makes me feel very old that Facebook is now already 10 years old, which is insane.

It was on February 4th in 2004 in his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com. And since then, it's pretty much taken over the world. And it's 10 years ago today. Not today, but close enough. If you check out slate.com, we'll have the article in our show notes.

It's kind of a fun little look back and look through their timeline that they posted themselves on their page of the massive changes that have occurred since 2004 and how they've all basically just been trying to screw us since then. It's just a picture of Mark Zuckerberg swimming naked in a sea of gold. That's all it is.

Yeah. There was actually – there was one little quote in that article where the – I guess he did an interview with the Harvard newspaper at the time. He said, maybe someday I'll make a little bit of money off of this. Asshole. Yeah. So along with their 10th anniversary and the crappy movie that we've all not watched from our friends' feeds, and I have no understanding why everybody decided to post it on their own feed.

Oh, it was so great. I've seen two of them, and that was enough. Yeah. It's just all – it's a cute, clever little concept of bringing in your top updates and your most liked photos and things like that set to free classical music because God knows they wouldn't license anything for it. But why would you ever want to see that from someone else?

I mean, I don't get it. Yeah. Why do I want to watch all of your pictures out of context? Exactly, and comments and quotes out of context as well. Yeah, with the same – It's the worst part of old social media posts. Which is why it should be ephemeral and always be deleted within 72 hours.

Yes, yes, yes. I know. Broken record, broken record. Broken record. But along with that, we got basically what Facebook wants the future to be. And mark my words, people. This is exactly what Facebook.com will eventually start to look like as well. Facebook launched Paper. Of course, they didn't bother checking the fact that there are already a bunch of apps called Paper, some of which – Well, there's one specifically – one specific app called Paper, which is the drawing app.

And they sent them a note saying, would you please stop using our trademarked name? And they go, nah. So we'll see how that plays out. Hopefully, the Paper drawing app will make gazillions of dollars off of Facebook for this. I'm sure Facebook will just pay them off to get them shut up.

Because this app is Facebook's future. It is what they want to be. I urge everyone to download it and try it once so you can see what the future of Facebook will be. And immediately delete it. Immediately delete it because it is just a vehicle for serving you sponsored content and ads.

That is all. Because, I mean, I've been saying this from the beginning. Once they stopped letting you set the news feed or most recent and let it retain its settings, that was the tip that down the line, they're going to force you to just see what they want you to see.

And Paper is the biggest step towards that. Oh, totally. It's actually somewhat offensive. Although I will go out on a limb and say it's beautiful. It is a beautiful piece of programming. It's a beautiful app. But it ruins the entire concept of what we're all currently using Facebook for and shows you exactly what their master plan is.

Now, speaking of the resetting thing, there is also another article that's exactly about that. Because this is something that you and I were bitching about. I, in fact, I even remember on one of our earliest podcasts, I said, does anybody else have this problem? Every single time I install the mobile app, all my settings get reset, et cetera, et cetera.

This is a long system of Facebook doing this, trying to control the way that we see information, removing our systems, removing our preferences, et cetera. Another article on Salon, Facebook's Fatal Weakness, Why the Social Network is Losing to Amazon, Apple, and Google. It's a much more involved article, but he starts with, God damn it, how come I always have to keep resetting it to most recent?

Yeah. I mean, like he said, he's going through everything that we've been bitching about since we started this show. And he does it with more words, I guess. A lot more words. A lot more thought out. But he makes it, I think the very good point in there is things like Amazon and Apple and even to an extent Google, when you use them, you actually kind of like them.

When I get something from Amazon, I'm like, great, I got something from Amazon. When I get my new iPhone, I just like, you know, crap my pants and go, whee, thank you, Steve Jobs. Well, I feel that way with Google as well because Google search, when you get exactly what you were looking for right away, that's like, awesome, man.

This is great. Yep. Or when they send me a check from ad revenue, you know, even then, great. I like that as well. Facebook, you know what I get out of that? Pain, suffering, anguish, and hatred. That's about it. Yeah, I agree with a lot of this. I mean, I do, I don't have the hatred towards Facebook.

I do get a sense of, I like Facebook now and then. Again, it's just about being in contact with people that if it were not for Facebook or any similar technology, because it could have been anything else, that would not be in my life actively anymore just because of whatever reason, moving on.

Yeah, how many, yeah, how many, but how many Facebook apps have you actually built? I used to do them back in the day and then I completely gave up on it because it became so convoluted and useless. That's why, that's where the hatred comes from. If you're a Facebook app developer for any length of time, that will give you an insight into how terrible they actually are.

I mean, and the fact that they pulled the rug out from, you know, businesses and advertisers who put so much money into them in the beginning, you know, to build them up and get the traffic because brand advertisers were saying, go check out our brand on Facebook. And now Facebook's like, hey, we got all the people. Screw you. That develops a little bit of animosity.

Yeah. No, and I agree 100%. I think that Facebook is really at a crossroads. Paper shows us that they're heading in the wrong direction. There's no other way to state it. They're just, they have an opportunity to be an amazingly useful and profitable bit of everyone's lives and they're really screwing the pooch on it.

Yep. And, you know, Twitter did the same thing and their numbers are going down too. Like, as soon as they started pissing off the API developers, the people that made them famous, you know, and now they've kind of plateaued. And I guess their recent numbers haven't been that good with the Q4 numbers.

And it's, you know, I do believe this market may be ripe for disruption. Yes, I do believe that the disruptors can be disrupted at this point. I totally agree with that. There is an opportunity for somebody to come in with a new platform that isn't Snapchat, for God's sake, and do something right and make a shit ton of money.

We'll see if that happens. Should be us, but I'm too damn tired. We're tired, man. We're too tired. I need a minion of 12-year-olds to teach the program and say, go make this for me. Go disrupt my little creatures. Go. And speaking of upsetting and disrupting people, this is my favorite thing that has happened this week.

Cheers and cheers erupt for Jeopardy player Arthur Chu. I don't know if you watch Jeopardy religiously. That's part of my nightly ritual. So I've been following this entire thing happen. This guy basically is disrupting Jeopardy. How so?

He is not playing the game the way that people play the game. His entire strategy, and this is really starting to upset a lot of people, but other people are, you know, people are divided on this that are really into Jeopardy, like me. Some people say that he's gaming the system. Other people are saying he's exploiting a weakness, and he's playing psychological warfare with the other contestants.

He just jumps around the board randomly. He starts, he bets really odd amounts so nobody can do math based on his, what his particular dollar amount is at any time, because it's always bizarre numbers. And, yeah, he'll do final wagers to tie, not to win.

And all he's doing is he's basically doing game theory on Jeopardy and doing everything he can to screw with his opponents, and it is working. I love that. It's amazing. I think that's cool. Yeah, and it's actually, the article that we've got linked to in the show notes discusses that this isn't even, he didn't come up with a plan.

It's called The Forest Bounce after contestant Chuck Forrest, who used it in 1985. The more unpredictable you are, the more you put your opponents off balance, the longer you can keep an initial advantage. It's great. I love this guy. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. It's been a joy to watch. Right now they're doing their Battle of the Decades on Jeopardy, so he won't be back until February 24th.

They left him off on a win and went off to do this thing, which is also kind of fun, because you get to see these guys and gals from that one in the 80s come back and play again. It's been fantastic. You know, I used to like Jeopardy, but I haven't watched it in years, so maybe I'll just stick it on the DVR and catch up.

It's still fun. You can actually go back and watch a lot of the older episodes, like online and various different places. It was a lot harder. The game has definitely been dumbed down, but it's still fun. It beats the hell out of watching Entertainment Tonight or something. Oh, I can't watch that yet.

But now that I'm home all day and I can't move, I need a few extra things to put on in the background. So that will definitely help. Get back into Jeopardy. It's a lot of fun. You can't do a victory lap around your living room when you get final Jeopardy like I do, at least not yet. But you can do a victory hobble.

Oh, no. I got my bat crutches. I'm good to go. All right, man. So they get springs in them. Now, I want to talk about something real quick, because when you sent me this article, I went and looked at it. And there's this trend on news sites and blogs that have – like when you get to the end of the article, there's this quote-unquote slide-out recommendation.

Well, first off, there are no news sites anymore. They are all just blogs. Okay, okay. But I agree. That's just some semantics there in my opinion. Yeah, the slide-outs, the recommendations, half the time, again, it's sponsored push content that they want you to go to, not necessarily anything that's related to what you're looking at.

Yeah, I'm more curious about the mechanism here. Just this comes from – I don't remember where I first saw it. I don't know who quote-unquote pioneered it. It's an interesting UX convention. I don't know – I'm having a hard time getting my head around why it works and why it doesn't work, because it works on many levels, because when you get to the end of the article, you need something to do.

Yeah, you're done. What are you going to do next? So you start to either look up at your bookmarks or whatever, and then you've got a little animation that catches your eye. Yeah, in the bottom corner, same reason that they use the crawls and the moving people on TV now. Like you're watching The Big Bang Theory and some other NBC star will walk out really small in the corner.

Well, yeah. I mean they've had that for quite some time, and you used to have just the recommended stuff at the bottom. You have the giant footer. The giant footer came into Vogue probably six or seven years ago where you have basically a replication of the header in the footer. So when they get to the bottom, it's like kind of the same content mirrored.

So you know you can go to the same place instead of having to go all the way back up to the top. Because it's so hard to scroll. Well, for a long article, it can be. But even if you look on Grumpy Old Geeks, as soon as you get past the fold, we have a little arrow that takes you back to the top. There's tricks that you can do to get around that stuff.

But I'm just wondering why this works so well, and it always has kind of really random content in it. Like the USA Today one, it literally said, recommended for you, Justin Bieber, blah, blah, blah. Right. You know?

Yeah. Like something about arson or whatever he did this week. I like as a side note that you actually typed in Justine Bieber. Oh, well. On the show notes. Oh, Freudian slip there. Whoopsies. So, yeah, if anybody listening knows the origin of the slide-out recommendation tile, I haven't been able to find the foundations of it.

Right. I'm curious because I'd kind of like to deconstruct it and maybe come up with something that's a little less obnoxious. Right. Now that I've got some time and I'm playing around with just novelty things, just UX-wise, that's one of those things that just catches my eye that I think could be done better.

And there's an opportunity there for disruption. Let's disrupt the sliders. It's something. I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if this started out as some sort of WordPress plug-in. That would be my first guess. No. I bet this started on a mainstream news site.

All right. I bet. All right. I bet it. Okay. Anyway, that's all I guess. That's about it for the news this week because the Olympics are coming and all my favorite TV shows are going off the air for three weeks. Well, I'm excited about the Olympics and I don't know.

I think it's going to be a shit show over there. I can't wait. No, seriously? Are you shitting me? So speaking of like the weird little recommendation slider pop-out-y things, I stumbled across this article in that very manner.

And I just thought it was a little bit interesting. Six offensively overpriced products we can do without. Yeah, I know it's a listicle, but this is actually a good one. Justin Bieber? Justine Bieber. So it's basically a list of a couple of items that are really, really expensive and do we really need them?

Number one is a no-brainer. Movie theater popcorn. We all know the markup is ridiculous. And it smells like feet. And it smells like feet and it's not tasty. But there's not – I mean, well, I mean the way around it is what we all do. We sneak shit in in our pockets or you eat before. Yeah.

So way around that. College textbooks. I think we've already seen that's been disrupted. There are different ways to get around that. There's e-books. There's secondary, tertiary markets for books, et cetera, et cetera. You're basically an idiot and you shouldn't be going to college if you're buying your textbook at full price. Well, you shouldn't be going to college anyway, but that's a religious debate.

It's a religious debate we can skip for another time. Exactly. Inkjet printers. Now, this is something that we've all known for a long time, but I think we all have inkjet printers anyways. Upfront cost of an inkjet printer is way cheaper than a laser jet or whatever the other fucking kinds are that they have.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. I want to put a little spin on this real quick. Yes, inkjet printers are somewhat cheaper, but then they come with like half or a quarter tank of gas with the ink in them. Sitting behind me is a Samsung color laser printer, which costs I think about $220 new.

Right. Way better than an inkjet printer. I mean granted it's not like super photographic quality, but if you need to do any kind of just regular color printing and you're not doing color photography stuff. Yeah. Dude, get one of these color inkjet or color laser printers. They are so much nicer.

They last longer. The toner lasts longer. It's more per like refill cartridge. It'll cost you like $100 to refill the ink on them. Yeah. But it lasts forever and they're fast as can be. I totally would – in the future, I'm never getting another inkjet printer.

I am totally getting a laser. Exactly what this article says is basically a laser printer is way more bang for your buck. You're going to spend a ton more money on an inkjet over the long run. The only downside, of course, being photographs, but then you just take them down to CVS or wherever and you have them printed out outstandingly cheap for you anyways.

Yeah, and the quality has gotten so good at those places. And they're printing them on inkjet printers too, but they're like archive quality inkjet printers for pennies on the dollar what you do to print at home. So another offensively overpriced thing that we never think about, and I do have an issue with this, SMS text messaging.

Text messaging is incredibly overpriced. What carriers charge you for them is ridiculous and usually the costs are buried, especially if you have the all-in plans like most of us do, which we won't have for much longer, normal rants, et cetera, et cetera. So text messaging is incredibly overexpensive.

There are ways to opt out, which I agree about. People are using Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, if you're doing iPhone to iPhone, you're using iMessage. So eventually I think that these prices are going to have to come down when people realize what they're paying for it and when carriers realize that people will go out of their way not to use it and do something else instead.

But having said all that, I don't know anybody under my age that likes to talk on the phone. All communication occurs via text messaging or its equivalent. It's not going away. People can't do without it. Yeah, I pay $20 a month for unlimited text, so I don't see how this is overpriced.

What's overpriced is the voice part. If I could just get rid of the voice on my phone and just have data and text, I'd be happy as can be. I know. I think about how much I actually use the voice on my phone and it's next to nothing. I've got 5,000 rollover minutes and that's as many as they'll give me. I can't get any more. Right. I wish I could use them like airline miles.

That's very true. Next on the list is multivitamins and I think we've all also known that as well. Basically, you go to the bathroom after you've had your multivitamin and you watch yourself pissing your money away. I highly disagree with this because I take vitamins every day and I take a specific set.

But it did not say vitamins. It said multivitamins. This is specifically about multivitamins. There are studies for specific types of vitamins that are beneficial to you that do make sense and consult your doctor. Go on a plan. Find the right things. Take those.

Multivitamins, you're pissing your money away. Yeah, yeah. Definitely skip the multivitamins. Just go – just eat well and find out what you're deficient in, especially in the winter. Vitamin D. Take lots of vitamin D. Trust me. You need that if you're not getting a lot of sun. Yeah. As one that's locked in a dark room for the next six weeks, take lots of vitamin D.

Yeah. Individual vitamins by themselves, specifically in general, all the letters, if you're deficient in it, you take it. If you're not, you don't need it. That's it. End of story. Extended warranties. We've all known that's the biggest ripoff of all time. There's no point. Oh, yeah. So there you go. Especially nowadays when things are built to break right after your warranty ends.

Planned obsolescence. Exactly. So I just thought that was a cool little list. Yeah, it is. It's very cool. As a listicle, I would generally put that away and not look at it again. But thank you for filtering and curating the listicle for us.

Anytime. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So in the realm of meditation, like I was talking about with the itching of the cast, my friend Jordan Harbinger, who from the Art of Charm podcast, who was on our show two weeks ago, gave me a recommendation for another meditation app called Headspace.

And it's kind of a meditation starter kit almost for somebody who hasn't really gotten into meditation. You do it every day, simple 10-minute meditation every day for 10 days to kind of force the habit to kind of get into it. Yeah. I'm on day five.

Right. And I do it specifically at the same time every day, right before I get out of bed. Every morning I do it. Yeah. You meditate first thing in the morning. I would think you'd want it later on after the stresses have built up and you just kind of want to recharge your batteries. Actually, I like it first thing in the morning because when I wake up in the morning, I'm always just kind of like manic about what I have to do for the day.

Right. Well, not so much now that I'm a gimp and I can't walk anywhere, but still, it actually helps me start the day. I like it better first thing in the morning. I use other meditation during the day when I get stressed. I'll bust out some Buddhify or some Andrew Johnson later in the day if I have a specific stress or.

But for starting the day, so far, this one has been amazingly good. I've used it. I've got it four days ago. I used it the first three days. Yesterday, I just kind of lost the plot completely and didn't get a chance to do it. I enjoy it for the same reasons I enjoy Buddhify, nice, calming British accent, good basic meditations, 10 minutes long, really nice, easy to do throughout the day.

I'm naturally drawn to these guys anyways because I look them up online, based basically here in Venice and in London, my two favorite places in the world. Oh, there you go. So I might have to swing by and see where they're at. Yeah, it wouldn't hurt.

It's not like they're going to beat you up or anything. Well, no, there should be meditation people, yeah. So my next one, and by the way, all the links for these apps will be in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 44, since this is the 44th episode. Now, this one I saw, I'm a huge fan of Shark Tank, the TV show Shark Tank.

Yes, I'm aware of it. Love it. This one, this was an app that was on there that I thought was just, when they first started showing it, I thought this is just going to be a steaming pile. Right. And it's called Cycloramic. Okay. Have you seen this? I have not. So here's the demo the guy walks out.

He comes out with his iPhone 5, puts it on a little round pedestal, presses the button, and then the phone moves around in a 360 and makes a panoramic. Right? Right. Thinking, okay, no big deal. Everybody's got those little gadgets. You plug it in and it spins and takes a panoramic.

Turns out that little disc, that was a piece of marble that he just sat there. The phone moves on its own. It uses like the vibrate function somehow to move the phone. They have a patented algorithm to use the vibration of the phone to spin it in a circle and take a panoramic.

And keep the phone steady enough to take a nice panoramic. That is impressive. Yep. Dude. That's some serious math. It is magic. I tried because I've got a glass kitchen table or a glass table downstairs and I put it on there the first time. I went and bought it immediately. I'm like, screw this. I'll tell you some problems with that in a second.

But I bought it, put it on the glass table, pressed the button, and my jaw dropped. It just takes a picture and it angles everything, lines it up, and it's so much better than if you did it by hand with the built-in Apple one. Oh, my God. It's so cool. Hands down.

The coolest thing I've seen in a long time. How much is it? The downside – here's the downside. They've got two – they've got Cycloramic and then they've got Cycloramic Pro. Right. At the time, I just picked the first one, which was Cycloramic and it was 99 cents and then to get everything – it has a bunch of in-app upsells.

Of course. Which just sucked because I didn't – I figured I was just buying the app. Nope. And so I got two of them and then I'm like, what the hell? This is ridiculous. And I was like, did I get the right one? And I went back and I found Cycloramic Pro for $2, which has about $6 of unlocked extras in it that you would get on the other app.

They totally screwed the pooch and they're screwing you if you just get the regular one. So I went with Cycloramic – I had them both and I still had some credit. So I just bought Cycloramic Pro and threw the other one away. Okay. And so far, it's really cool. You just need to have a – I mean honestly, it works good on marble and glass.

I haven't tried anything else. Just something smooth that it can spin on. But man, it's nifty. Well worth checking out. I will have to take a look at that. I mean I personally don't do a lot of photos anyways, much less panoramas. But I know a couple of people that do and it's – they're always doing just the built-in thing and they look silly turning around and snapping pictures.

So this just sounds like fun. I just want to try it out, not even for the photos. I just want to watch it spin. It's worth it. It's worth the money just to see it in action. Right. Honestly. It is like how the hell did they figure that out? It is so cool. Awesome. So now I talked before about an app called Kennedy, which is one of the – kind of like a life journaling.

Yeah. One where you just basically – it kind of stores your day. You just go around, press a button and it takes a snapshot of where you're at, time, what's in the news and all that stuff. Now there's another one out called Saga, which has a lot more in it.

It's got – like it records a lot more, uses your – the M7 processor for step data, location data. It's got a lot more into it. It's a free app. I believe it was free. I can't remember what I paid for it. I may have bought it. Well, we'll figure it out.

Put that in the show notes. So it's kind of another story building one. The problem with both of these is I'm stuck at the house. I haven't been able to try them. In living room again. Yeah. Seriously. Pooping. Okay.

Great. I mean normally I would hop on the grenade and help you out here but I don't like these journaling apps so I just – I'm not into it. I get – I've understood. You've told me why you're into it and I'm sure a lot of people are not for me. Yeah, I think it would be more fun if I was traveling again.

Yeah, yeah. I mean definitely like if you were – if I were doing my motorbiking tour across South Africa, I'd be using something like that. Yeah, definitely. That would be way fun or even just any kind of trip. Any trip where you're doing a lot of sightseeing and walking. I really wish I had this when I was in Hong Kong and Bangkok to just remember place by place where I was like because there's an Indian place in Bangkok that I just adored and would love to be able to send my friends there.

Yeah, and just don't remember where it is. Yeah. So here's the funny thing. I found this app because I was listening to the new Back to Work podcast on 5x5, the Merlin Man, Dan Benjamin one. Now, it's Back to Work number 157, the non-dominant hand.

Now, the non-dominant hand reference is – this is Merlin. Honestly, they're doing a show which has covered stuff that we've been covering for a year. They talk about sleep and they talk about quantified self and they talk about tracking. That's most of the show. So listening to the show, I'm like, wow, deja vu.

And the non-dominant hand reference is Merlin said, yeah, I can probably rub one out and walk a half a mile because that's what I always used to joke about with the Nike one when I had that on the early days of the show. So this was a very deja vu episode of Back to Work.

Kind of like whenever I bring up Lifehacker. Exactly. So I'm sure they'll get all the credit for it. But granted, we steal from other people too, so it's okay. But anyway, I got Saga from them. So that was the one app that they gave to us. So I'm giving back to our audience.

Speaking of travel though, if you do travel and you have a Macintosh, you need to get undercover. I do travel and I do have a Macintosh, Jason. Why? Well, it's by a company called Orbicule. It installs some really cool like basically covert spy tracking software on your machine.

So if it's ever stolen, you log into the Orbicule system and press a button and say, my Mac's been stolen. Right. Immediately, as soon as the Mac comes back on and hits any Wi-Fi, it starts transmitting its location back to the control panel. It starts taking screenshots, key logging, and snapshots from the camera.

It sends them all back so you can trace to where your computer is and hopefully get it back. So it's locate my iPad, iPhone, i-whatever on steroids. Yeah, yeah. Like I said, it runs – it's undercover.

It's hard to find it. That's really cool. Speaking of that, I mean I actually just saw this on the news here, local news. So I don't know if this is made – if anybody else is even doing this or not. And at first I thought it was kind of silly because it's kind of built into phones here or the Apple stuff or the iOS.

But there's a – California state legislature here is trying to pass a law requiring that all tablets and cell phone devices have basically a kill switch built into them now to make them less valuable and to make people stop stealing them. Yeah, that's been on the books for a little while now.

Has it passed? Because it was just talked before. No, they're just – they're actually writing up a bill to take up and see if they'll get it passed. So I think that's a great idea. I mean all this problem of people stealing your devices now goes away immediately if you know they can just be shut off instantly and basically bricked.

Yeah, you have to – it has to be brick so it can't come back. I don't know if that's going to work or not. Yeah. There's another really strange one. In the EU, I believe they're working to pass legislation to make – that every mobile device uses the same standard USB connector, which would just piss Apple off to know it because they've got the snazzy new connector.

As annoying and frustrating as it is when Apple did that and will do it again to us probably with the iPhone 7 or something like that, yeah, I don't agree with legislating that sort of stuff. The government should stay out of it. I actually – completely surprisingly, I have an app too.

I saw you put this in just now. I just had it because you asked me before we went into the segment. I was like, no, I don't have an app. I didn't do anything this week. I totally forgot friends of the show, Matt Quinn and a friend of the show, Ted, both Canadians, challenged me to a Flappy Bird match. I'm sorry.

And, yeah, well, you know how I feel about games. They don't last very long on my phone. But I've got to say if you're a gamer and you just want the twitchy stuff, it's fun. It's awesome, like 8-bit old school graphics and all you have to do is tap the screen to keep this bird moving and move it through obstacles and it's really fucking hard.

Yeah, this has been in the news recently because – I mean it's over – it's about a year old. I think it came out in April last year. They were making like $50,000 a day in advertising off this app. So that's what's been getting the press on. It's got a huge – like 500,000 reviews.

So it's not a new app. I mean it's not like an unpopular app. The problem I have with it is it just sucks. I hate the game. It started to drive me crazy. I played it for about 45 seconds and I was ready to throw my phone across the room. Yeah, my high score is 6.

That's what Matt got. So that was his high score this far as well. So if anybody can beat that, good luck. It's quite hard. I think my buddy Bobby got to 7. But it's – yeah, it's so hard it's not even fun. If you want a fun game that you have to play with birds, go get Tiny Wings.

That's the best bird game. And it's twitchy like that and it's a hell of a lot more fun. I think I ran out with my birds when Star Wars Angry Birds came out and I played that for a couple of weeks and that's it. I'm done with all bird games. It's for the birds. We usually have books to read but we've been kind of busy to say the least.

All I've been reading this week is endless PDFs of banking statements and mortgage loan applications. That is not a very good novel. No, but I hope it has a happy ending. I was going to say, I hope the ending doesn't suck. So instead of going to the library, we're going to the museum this week.

I saw an article come out this morning I believe. It's 14,000 free images from the French Revolution now available online. Vive la France. So I mean the French Revolution was like an interesting war with – it was interesting because of the propaganda that was used.

And this archive is really interesting because it's just got a ton of stuff in it. I don't read French though, which kind of sucks. It would help. Yeah, it's a collaboration. But the pictures are really pretty and I love that style of art. Yeah, it's a collaboration between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale des Français.

I'm guessing it's Francais. France? Oh, oui, oui. Avant-garde! Okay, moving on. I could do this all day. I know. Check it out though. Some of the images aren't super high-res but some of them are like spectacularly high-res and it's just fun to go through.

And it's open – it's a copyright-free public domain. So if you want to do some funny images with them, feel free. You can make all kinds of your own sum e-cards. Yeah, totally. Yes. Oh, man. Those guys have to be – They have to be all over these libraries right now.

Yeah, sporting some e-wood for their e-cards right now. And another one that I found actually while I was researching this one is the British Library put a million images into the public domain. So you can – and they're totally free to remix and reuse. Every single one of them happens to be a Princess Di, unfortunately.

Oh, God. No, from the – and here's the crazy part. I'm just going to read you a little blurb here. Pardon me. Let me get my reading voice on. We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix, and repurpose.

These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th, and 19th century books digitized by Microsoft, who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the public domain. That's great. I'll stop it from there. It keeps going on, but there's tons of stuff, maps, geological diagrams, illustrations, comics, satire, illuminated letters, all sorts of stuff.

And it's on Flickr, which is kind of cool. Yeah, it is actually. It's nice to see Flickr actually has something of use now again. Exactly. That's pretty cool. I thought Google was all over trying to get everything into the public domain, but go Microsoft. Quick punch to the gut. No doubt. Giving it away.

Giving it away now. Oh, God. I'll stop right there. Security! Ha! Olympics in Russia have spawned some interesting things along with the journalists have been documenting their terrible conditions.

And I think my favorite picture so far is the side-by-side toilet in the bathroom, the double shitter, as it were. The double shitter, yes. That was good. I don't know if you saw the bit that made the news today about the one journalist that was complaining about the shower and then the Sochi security chief said something along the lines of, we had a surveillance camera on the shower and we saw somebody just left it on all day to create the puddles.

Hold on a second. You guys have surveillance cameras on showers now? I'm pretty sure you can't do that. It's Russia. They can do whatever they want. Unless it's Aaron Andrews' room. Then it's completely acceptable. So there's an NBC put out a little piece.

It says, all visitors to Sochi Olympics immediately hacked. I'm like, okay, that sounds a little ridiculous. Let me dig in a little more. And there's a video, which, okay, we'll take the video. Now, I'm just going to preface this with the piece is, you know, they bought a couple laptops and a new smartphone.

They get there and then they get hacked. Pretty straightforward. They don't talk about what kind of protections they use or anything like that. They're just like out of the box laptops got hacked. Surprising. Okay. Here's the part that invalidated the entire piece for me. At one minute and 21 seconds into this video, the security expert that they hired, I do believe his name was Kyle Wilholt.

Will Hoyt. Will Hoyt. Whatever. He gets a brand new MacBook Air. Immediately starts tearing the box apart from the end and rips it to shreds to pull out the air. Now, anybody who has bought an iPhone, bought an iPod, bought a Mac, whatever, knows that the packaging on an Apple is, besides being drop dead stupid simple, is gorgeous for a reason and it's easy to open.

And there is why people have unboxings. This guy, like a drunken badger, starts tearing into the end of it, like looking for kernels of nuts or I don't know what. So at that point, they call him a security expert and a computer expert and I'm like, uh-uh.

Nope. Any 12-year-old that has an IQ over 15 can figure out how to open a box of Apple is all I'm saying. It was very funny. I was dying laughing when I saw it. Yeah, he does look like an idiot. So we'll be putting the full video in the show notes.

So just scrub to 121 and just – it's a forehead slap moment, seriously. Now, I'm just going to leave the Olympics there and we'll go with it. Once this is over, we'll have some follow-up on the Olympics because I'm sure it's going to be fun.

Yeah, it's going to be a shit show. There's going to be a lot of security stuff to talk about that we're going to find out about, I'm sure. Yeah, and I'm trying to kind of keep this down to a minimum because there is so much. But this week, one of the things that came out that I want to talk about is NBC News put out another article called British Spies Used Sex and Dirty Tricks.

OK, well, they're spies. That's what they're supposed to do. That's James Bond movies, man. Exactly. But what they did that was kind of nefarious, illegal, and just downright nasty, they were like DDoSing anonymous, like the anonymous chat rooms where they would get together and have their chats.

The British government, the GCHQ, was DDoSing the IRC servers. Which now, if you're a member of Anonymous and you're part of a DDoS, you go to jail. If the government does it. So if the government does it, then, well, I guess nothing, which is kind of – The way it's always been, Jason.

I do believe it's still illegal if they do it. But there were a lot of – we'll link this in the show notes too, the article where they do have people saying that there's no reasonable explanation that the GCHQ should be doing this whatsoever.

Right. Does it have any bearing on if they will keep doing it? Probably not. Will they keep doing it? Probably. How do we stop them? We don't. Who knows? Who knows? Now, the other part of this is all of these articles that – quote, unquote, the Snowden – I'm using my air quotes – Snowden revelations, which I can't – they're driving me nuts when they say Snowden revelations.

All these articles – all these articles, quote, using quotes, any type of jargon that they expect a layperson wouldn't understand. This one – in this article, they talk about, quote, unquote, honey traps.

Spies have long used sexual, quote, honey traps, unquote, to snare blackmail and influence targets. So now I went through the rest of the article. Now, here's a challenge to the Grumpy Old Geek listeners. When you read this article, every time you see a quoted piece of jargon, do a shot.

See if you can make it to the end of the article still standing. That's all I'm saying. You will be so drunk. It's ridiculous. No. And once this has been seen, it cannot be unseen. You will see this everywhere. Anytime you see an article that talks about the, quote, unquote, Snowden revelations or anything to do with the NSA or the GCHQ or whichever acronym is getting screwed over this week.

A lot of quotes. And we're going to put the slides in the show notes too because the way NBC News builds their websites, which apparently they've never done one before, their hyperlinks are the same color as the body text and are not underlined. So when you try and find something, it's very hard to find a link.

So I have gone through the trouble. I have found the links to the PDF documents that have the slides that the article pulls from. And these slides are also just as offensive because one of the – oh, God. I have to pull this one up because these people who are supposed to be security, cyber experts and all this stuff, here's one of them.

To discredit a target, A, set up a honey trap. And it's hyphenated here but it's not hyphenated in the NBC piece. Well, that's a special type. That actually signifies that she's blonde. OK. Honey dash trap. OK. Change their photos on social networking sites.

OK. Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims. Boom. Right there. Done. It's a blog post. You're not going to create a whole new blog. And then the fourth one is email text. Email slash text their colleagues, neighbors, and friends, et cetera. And you know it's British because in neighbors they use the U.

They got the U, yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, people write a blog post. God damn it. Do we have any more? Oh, I guess we do have one more which is – oh. We talked about this a long time ago. We did. We did talk about this. And I actually do find this terrifying.

So back in April of last year, there was an assault on a power station in California right outside of Silicon Valley where somebody literally cut the AT&T… Telephone cables. Yeah, they cut the phone cables, the fiber optics.

That's what I'm trying to think of. They cut the fiber optics and then proceeded to shoot over 100 rounds of AK-47 ammunition into the Transformers, knocking out 17 of them. And they shot for 19 minutes before the cops showed up. Yeah. And it's crazy that people can get this close to this stuff to be able to do it.

It's not terribly shocking. I don't know. Well, no. It's actually terribly shocking because the fact that all of the video cameras were pointed inside the gate, not outside. Yeah. And it didn't really garner that much news. That's why I'm really glad to see that the Wall Street Journal is picking this back up.

And it's a very good article talking about what can happen with very few people doing this because this seemed like a test run to me. And that's what it looks like to me as well. It's how easy is this for us to do? How much time does it take? Will we get caught? Yeah.

And I'm really surprised they used an AK-47, but they also – they targeted specific systems on the Transformers, the oil pumps. So the oil basically – the oil cooling system. So once they shot out the oil tanks, I think it was like 50,000 gallons of oil drained out and then they just overheated and seized up.

Which is crazy that they knew exactly what they were going for. That's why it seems like a very concerted attack with a clear goal to check out infrastructure, how long it takes to knock them out, how long it takes for response times, the whole nine yards. It's like a dry run for hitting – to make a blueprint for knocking them out.

Exactly, how to knock out power. It's terrifying. It's scary. And it does seem that way. But then again, it is the Bay Area. Maybe they're just hunters. With an AK-47. Well, apparently that's what most people seem to think that – in the NRA seem to think we need.

Don't start now. Don't start. All right. I agree with all your points, but I still just think it might just be a bunch of crazy Techno's Duck Dynasty run amok. I would say no, but we'll find out. We'll find out. But just check out the Art of – because it is a – the Art of – I sound like Bill Cosby after he got out of the dentist.

Oh, Batabe. Oh, Batabe. Okay. Go check out the article. We'll leave it at that. Oh, Batabe.

The web's not dead. One of my biggest pet peeves about the internet and what companies are doing these days, beyond the Kickstarter thing, but very related, is crowdsourcing.

I hate it when I see, like, blog posts from people that are supposed to be creative saying, we want to know what you think. What should I do here? Or when artists, like, crowdsource their artwork or things like that. It's just, oh, it's annoying and it's just cheap and horrible. And I can't stand it. And something happened this week that's been doing the rounds that just kills me.

I have been rolling in the aisles since I've seen this. Lay's – in 2012, Lay's ran a do-us-a-flavor contest. You see what they did there? It's very clever, right? I'm sure they made a lot – whoever came up with this made a lot of money. So they did this way back then.

The exceedingly boring cheesy garlic bread won out over chicken and waffles because we just can't have nice things, according to the article. Very funny. Ah, ha, ha. They relaunched the contest again on January 13th, and this time they created a cute little web app so you could make, you know, your suggestions and do, you know, little bags and have it printed out.

These are awesome. The things that people did are hilarious. They're just so good. Anthrax Ripple is one of my personal favorites. It's the first one that pops up. That's a good one. That's a good one. My personal favorite is Bag of Dicks. Bag of Dicks. Very, very nice.

Catford Aluminum Foil. Band-Aid in a public pool. I'm surprised nobody made a Honey Trap one, though, now. Or there should be another one. Vaginosis. Vaginosis. Yeah, so this is just great. People just really went to town using this app and just made so many funny, funny things.

Well worth a look. A lot of good jokes. And, God, I hate cross-sourcing. I know, but this actually turned out pretty funny for us. This turned out really funny for us, not so much for Lay's. Although they are getting a lot of publicity even from this, going to show that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Well, anyway, yeah, I do – I was kind of pissed that they didn't go with the sriracha flavor last year.

I agree. I agree. That was the really good one. So the one thing I do want to pimp is Bruce Sterling, one of my favorite authors. He's got a blog on Wired that he's been running forever called Beyond the Beyond. All I'm going to say is check it out. He's got this crazy eclectic mix of stuff all day long.

Some stuff you'll get, some stuff you won't, but I just like it because I'm always introduced to new weird things that I would have never, ever heard of or clicked on. It's just really fun. I mean he's just a fantastic futurist. His novels, not so much, but his writing, his speeches – oh, my god, his classic speeches are great.

He's just a really cool guy. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I like all of his writings. I've never gotten too into his actual fiction. And the one thing I'm really sad is I never went to South by Southwest when he had the after party at his house. When it was small enough, yeah.

Everybody says that that was the best party of South by Southwest. And I've always wanted to meet him. I've always admired him, and I still haven't got to meet him yet. So someday we'll see. Someday it'll happen. And we've also talked about just continuing things that really annoy me.

We've talked about BuzzFeed continuously and how annoying it can be and how they're doing all these quizzes now to find out what kind of rock are you, what kind of honey badger are you, what kind of honey trap are you, et cetera, et cetera. They've taken over Facebook. Everybody has to take it and tell you, you know, if I were a city, I'd be Los Angeles and all that sort of crap.

What caught my eye and cracked me up this week is they've had this which 90s alt-rock girl are you for quite a while. You know, it's all the 90s girl bands that I love. PJ Harvey's in there. You know, Courtney Love, Bjork, Shirley Manson from Garbage.

Shirley Manson took it and posted on Facebook that she didn't end up being her. So the person herself took the quiz to find out if she was her and wasn't her. Can we be done with these now? No, because she has grown up since the 90s.

So she is not the Shirley Manson she used to be. I don't know. If you listen to that last Garbage album, it is pretty similar. So I would argue that point. But, yeah, maybe she needs a time machine. She needs one of Bruce Sterling's time machines to be able to go back and take the quiz back in the 90s. And then she would get herself.

I don't think Bruce Sterling ever did time travel. He didn't? I thought he did when it was about that. No, he did the Shaper Mechanist stuff and some cyberpunk stuff with William Gibson. He's more of a futurist instead of a future travelist. But, anyway, yeah. Stop talking about BuzzFeed.

Quit feeding the trolls. I'm going to lay down a decree. No more BuzzFeed. But I'm on BuzzFeed right now creating a what science fiction writer are you one. Exactly.

Here, Kenny, Kenny, Kenny, Kenny. So the Super Bowl came and went and it was really boring. One-sided. And I didn't even get a barbecue out of it, which bummed me out. I did get just crappy food and beer. Chili Peppers played. Everybody knows I can't fucking stand the red hot Chili Peppers.

Immediately, next morning after the Super Bowl performance, there was an incredibly long blog slash journal slash news whatever the fuck we exist in now where a blog is a news post or something that went on for about 500 pages painstakingly pointing out the fact that their guitars weren't plugged in.

Yeah, it was a fairly long-winded piece. You posted it and I read it, sadly, and wasted my time with it. It's a bit of a waste of time, but it got picked up by national media to the point where Flea actually took to the Red Hot Chili Peppers blog to post a rebuttal. My point, even at the time, was actually I hated the journalistic aspect of that and that being called journalism.

I have nothing against the Chili Peppers not performing live at the Super Bowl. Nobody fucking does. You can't. There's no way to do it. You have, like, 10 minutes. There's no sound check. There's no nothing. Everybody always prerecords live and then mimes to it. I'm not offended.

Nobody should be surprised. And the fact that they actually didn't plug their instruments in was kind of a nod, nod, nod, nudge, wink, wink to everybody saying, obviously, we're not performing live. Yeah, and, yeah, who cares? Honestly, who cares? It's the fucking Chili Peppers and who cares? I think the bigger story is actually that I remember when the Super Bowl was announced and the halftime show was announced, the Chili Peppers were the big stars.

Somehow they got downgraded to special guests somewhere along the way, which I thought was hilarious, and fuck the Chili Peppers. Yeah, whatever. And, you know, bring back the wardrobe malfunction. Get rid of the Chili Peppers is all I got to say. Wardrobe malfunction in this Super Bowl would have been an awful lot of penis. Oh, that's true.

Sausage fest. So, Skinny Puppy got in the news this week, which is very strange. It's really weird to see their name in any kind of press whatsoever. Skinny Puppy, one of my all-time favorite bands. Who are on tour now, so check them out if you can.

They sent a bill to the government after a guarded Gitmo, who was a fan, told them that they tortured prisoners by playing Skinny Puppy, which I don't know if I'd be thrilled or offended or whatever by that. It's very strange. Well, for those not in the know, Skinny Puppy is an early kind of semi-abrasive industrial band.

The music is quite harsh. I quite like it. I can see how it would be used for torture. But Skinny Puppy, as people, and a lot of their songs actually, they're very pro-human rights. They're very pro-animal rights. A lot of their songs are against vivisection, things of that nature.

So the fact that they'd be offended is not at all surprising. The part I really liked is that they sent a bill for $666,000. To the United States government. To the United States government for the use of their music. Now, how awesome would it be if it got paid?

Then I'm thinking, wait a minute. No. That's our tax dollars. That's our tax dollars. Don't pay them. And by the way, Skinny Puppy, no offense. I want you to have as much money as possible. But I've already bought every single one of your albums. You have enough of my money. Exactly. And you're from Canada. So you don't get any more of our money. All righty.

Closing shout-outs! All right, Jason. Well, that's another one in the can. A little bit shorter because we're both a little busy and a little stressed out. Well, at least I am. And you're all knocked up and hobbling around a house. Not knocked up in the pregnant sense, of course. Yeah, thank God.

No. Just because I look pregnant doesn't mean I am. You know what I mean? So for a closing shout-out, I'd just like to say go Team USA. I'm happy about the Olympics being on. It's going to be fun to watch. And hopefully nothing gets blown up. But we shall see. And my other closing shout-out, Jay Leno, I never thought you were funny.

Bye. Yeah, good riddance. Bye, Chin. This time, stay the fuck away. Yeah, yeah. No coming back. Seriously. I do not want to see him ever again. Nope. He was not funny in the beginning. It was not funny in the end.

And all that time in between was just something I had to skip over while I was trying to get to Craig Ferguson. So, yeah, until next week, hopefully I'll be on the mend. The crutches killed me because I'm old and sitting in the computer. And I'm going to be ripped when this thing is over with because I'm doing like 100 push-ups a day now walking around.

It will be interesting. I'll be very buff with one very skinny leg. That will be a fun visual. Can't wait. Yep. All right. And definitely check out GrumpyOldGeeks.com this week. I'm going to be posting some of our reviews and kind of trying to get the website back up to snuff since I've got all this time on my hands to hobble and write.

Very nice. And, yeah, make sure that you become – you like us on Facebook. We're going to start posting some of the stories that we talk about throughout the week on there. And you can follow us on Twitter and watch when we get in big Twitter wars with stupid apps. Yeah, the Twitter that you just said that you don't use because you hate Twitter. Yeah, that was my big brush that night.

Okay. All right. All right, everybody. Have a good week. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. On Facebook at Facebook.com slash GrumpyOldGeeks. Or email them at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

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