45: Quantified Non-Ferrous Mind Boner

Episode 45. Can you believe it? Nope. Coming up on a year, man. I know. What are we going to do? We're going to have a party?

I suppose we should. If I'm out of the woods, I might still be in bed. Yeah, it depends on if you're up and about. If not, we'll figure something out. We can have a virtual party. Ooh, we can have a Google Hangout. Yeah, like all the kids do. Wait, they don't, do they?

No, they don't. So basically what we're talking about is I'm going in for surgery on Monday to get my leg Frankensteined back together. After all the chit-chat and, yes, not going to the doctor was a dumb idea and, yes, they're going to have to open me up and scrape out a bunch of scar tissue before they literally run bolts and plates through my leg so I'll be able to walk again.

But on the plus side, you're becoming so super tech now. You're going to have metal in you and shit. It's awesome. Yeah, but my friend pointed out it's non-Ferris, so I won't be able to put magnets on my legs and walk around like that, which would be kind of cool. Can you request that they use Ferris? Tim Ferris?

Can you have Tim Ferris involved, please? Yeah, I think I'll stick with titanium and go with that. Okay, well, that's very Wolverine of you. Yes, well, it's not adamantium. It's just, you know. So I want to talk real quick. Yes. Our buddy, Dr. Teeter, was giving me crap about the audio quality of our show being so bad he couldn't listen to it.

And I'm like, wait, what? What are you talking about, Willis? And fortunately, his much smarter girlfriend, Chen, said, no, it sounds great. It's you. You are the problem here. And it turned out it was him. Well, it was his app. There's an app called Podcruncher, which I'd never heard of.

Just by the name, it sounds like that would actually make bad audio. Yeah, really. So, I mean, by default, I use Downcast. I used to use Instacast. I will never use the built-in podcast app that Apple puts out because it's so damn terrible. I'm the idiot that uses that one. Yes, it's god-awful.

And I don't know what the Android folk are using, but apparently this app is – it tweaks our audio so badly for some reason. I don't know what it is. So if you're listening to this on Podcruncher and you think we sound like crap, go get a different app.

That's all I can say. That seems to be the situation because our podcast actually sounds pretty damn good. Admittedly, we crunch it down like everybody does, and me being the audio freak I am, that annoys the hell out of me. But we really dialed this in. Our audio is good. We sound good. Levels are good.

Trap is clean. The trap is clean. All right. So now after we did the stuff on the secret app, I went and just did a little more research. All of this anonymous inner feelings bullshit app thing that was going around, it just reminded me like of the old days, like from text from last night.

Remember that? It's the same kind of thing. People post their crazy anonymous text. There's another one called whisper, which is the same thing but global. Now there's a new one called confide where it's almost like Snapchat meets – well, actually, I guess it's more like Snapchat. It's like you send messages that disappear.

All this ephemeral crap that I've always wanted. But now that I see it in action, it kind of annoys me. So maybe I was – my whole ephemeral social network ploy was kind of – Well, the problem is that this stuff really isn't ephemeral. It is kept on a server somewhere. These are all stored somewhere and even Snapchat guys admitted the fact that all these things are kept.

Yeah, yeah, and I'm kind of mixing apps here. I think this might be a little bit confusing. Yeah, I really wanted to start talking about secret and for some reason – I don't know why I put confide in there. That threw us off the rails. But yes, it's – the secret stuff is – or the Snapchat type stuff and the ephemeral will-deleted stuff, no, that's never going to be – it's never going to be true.

It's never going to happen. If it's on a computer, it's there. It can be intercepted. It's not secure. Forget about it. As far as the tell everybody your deep dark secrets app, GetSecret is not doing anything new is what I wanted to say. It's been done before and the fact that they just confide it to your own social network is the creepy part.

That's – and somebody will find out who you are even if you don't want them to. I think we pretty much established that and they never bothered even getting back in touch with us after that initial little attack that we had on them. So that's that. Oh, yeah. Well, I think all three of us put the smackdown on them in different ways but Bonner had the last laugh with the – it's secure his email, that comment.

And I did find a link that I wanted you to comment on about the YouTube stars and how you can make six figures and still be broke. Did you read the article I posted? I scanned through it. I'm not surprised at all. It's – yeah, famous but not that rich.

Yeah. This is a Business Insider article that will be in the show notes, grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 45. And it runs through the math on how you can actually make – you can pull in, in advertising, six figures. But after the breakdowns and all the splits, you can walk away below the poverty line.

Yeah. It's interesting math. I mean I would never say – I would never have said that I made $300,000 because that's not what you're actually making. That's – there's the difference between gross and net and all those sorts of things which people kind of forget about. Yep. So, you know, she did really, really well, sort of, until you actually did the breakdown, the amount of time that was involved, YouTube's cut, taxes, editing costs.

Oh, that pesky little thing, you know, called the IRS that comes after you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is not – and again, as we discussed, like the number of people who try to make money being on YouTube – being a YouTube star versus those who actually succeed, this is not a viable career option, people.

This is as much a career option as saying I'm going to become a musician and make a living doing it. It's the same thing. It's a fucking crapshoot. You're very lucky if you get there. Even if you do get there, as this article breaks down, you're really not making that much money. Yep.

Have a backup plan. Have a backup plan. Get a job. Go to school. Get off my lawn. Stay in school, kids. This is your brain on YouTube. Yeah. I mean this is just another really good breakdown on it, on the same sort of thing that we've been talking about quite a bit. So good article find. Now, this has kind of been done to death, but I want to kind of have a quick Flappy Bird post-mortem.

Well, I just think it's funny that I actually brought it up the other week because I actually had downloaded an app and played with it and you were just like, oh, that's been out forever. And then as soon as we did it, it exploded. Like you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about Flappy Bird. Which is – I'm still – I mean this is kind of – I want to see the breakdown from like a psychological perspective of mob mentality with this thing.

The game sucked. It was terrible. There's nothing about this game that was good, period, except for the fact that it became this cult hit because everybody was playing it. And everybody I know that tried to play it, played it for like 30 seconds and deleted it, except for a few diehards.

Yeah, except for a few diehards. And it just – it got this snowball effect and then the big number thing came out when he was making $50,000 a day on ads. Yeah. Which – and here's my secret and I don't believe I've talked about this before.

The secret to getting good advertising revenue is to have high traffic on a shitty product. Yeah. Because the wallpaper site that I used to run that used to make a few thousand dollars a month for me, I had the worst wallpapers known to man.

But it was SEOed out the wazoo. So I got a ton of traffic in and I ran ads for other wallpaper sites. So people would come to my site. I didn't have anything decent to give them. And they're like, man, these suck. I'm going to click on an ad to go find some better wallpaper. It makes sense psychologically. I mean it totally makes sense.

You make a site that brings people in. They click through a couple times, find out that there's absolutely nothing that they want there, and you have an ad to a related site. Boom. Click. You know what? I've just broken the code on why journalism is so shitty now. Page view journalism. Everybody's trying to find some journalism. Everybody's trying to find something, and everybody's just making shittier content because they want people to click on the ads.

That's it. That's it. Okay. I've cracked the code. We understand journalism now except for the fact that you just can't find anything. You click and you click and you click, and it's just not there. Anyways. Have you seen the new trend in advertising on these listicle sites where the ad block looks just like the relevant content or related content blocks?

Yeah. And it's all listicle ads. They're like listicle titles for ads. I mean everything is a fucking listicle now. Everything is a listicle now. And you have to pay very close attention because they'll say this block is a sponsored block, but it looks exactly like the content on the website. Yeah.

Which, you know, as a website owner, I would never let that pass. No, I wouldn't either. I think it's horrible. It eludes your brand and just makes you look like a douchebag. There's no two ways around it. Yeah. It definitely does. Let's flap back to Flappy Bird really quickly, though, since you mentioned crappy journalism.

Like I said, Flappy Bird has been everywhere this week, and Jason's got a couple articles here that actually have some interesting takes on it. I just got annoyed by an article. This is, I shit you not, from the Daily Beast. This may have been, and this is one of the dumbest articles I've ever read, comparing addiction and fame and how Flappy Bird is the App Store's grunge moment.

And kind of comparing and contrasting Kurt Cobain and what happened with him to Flappy Bird. It's lazy journalism. It's stupid. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But it's news, and it's journalism. It's not either. I'm sorry. It is neither.

I honestly felt like my IQ dropped 10 points by the time I was done reading this article. It was so terrible. We'll put it in the show notes, but I'm almost like, don't give him the page view. Just honestly. It's not worth your time to read this. And all you need to know is the last sentence is, still, it's better to burn out than to fade away as they say, oh, God, I want to smack this author.

I know. It's terrible. Oh, man. I could go on forever with the creator on also giving up because it ruined his life. I'm like, 50 grand a day ruined your life? Well, can you ruin my life for like three days so I can get out of debt? Yeah, I wouldn't mind having my life ruined for a few days.

And I'm not buying his story about now he's altruistic and he feels that the product is too addictive and he doesn't want to unleash such a thing on society and he's blah, blah, blah. I think it was I just made a shit ton of cash. I pretty much ripped off Nintendo.

At some point, they're going to come after me with a cease and desist and get to some of this money. So I'm just going to pull it down and run to the bank laughing. I don't think he's – I don't believe that one bit. Nintendo said they weren't going to go after him. And the only thing that he did was take the pipes from the Nintendo. He didn't take any game mechanics really.

It's kind of a different type of thing. They weren't going to come after him. I think he's just – he's probably a kid and it doesn't have the mental faculties and the thick enough skin to deal with what it takes to be famous on the internet and deal with the trolls and the criticism. It probably just broke him.

No, that's true. I mean that is – that's a definite thing. It's like as soon as you get noticed by anyone, you get a couple people saying, hey, this is amazing, awesome, and you feel good for five seconds. But then you just get trolled and flamed within an inch of your life. Yeah, and you got to – if you've had any modicum of internet fame, you will know that you just have to let it go, let it go.

Ignore, ignore, ignore, never respond, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my comeback to all those people would be, I'm rich, bitch, 50 grand a day. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it for Flappy Bird. Thus endeth the tale of the Flappy Bird.

Oh, and the idiots who were trying to sell their phone with Flappy Birds on it since he took it off the App Store. That's amazing. I'm actually leaving – I've just left it on my phone anyways in case. You never know. You've got it in iTunes. You can always get it back. Once you bought it, you got it. Yeah. So I would like to say we are recording this on Valentine's Day.

This is my least favorite holiday just because people won't shut up about it. Yes, I'm going to sit at home and do nothing and have a Swanson's single-serving die-alone dinner. And I just want to say thank you, Netflix, because they have saved the day for so many single people today with the launch of House of Cards 2.

I am not going to give a rat's ass about you happy couples for the rest of the day because I'm going to go downstairs, get like a bag of popcorn that smells like feet and just nosh on that and watch the next like – well, 11 hours because I've already watched two hours today because I'm that crazy about it.

I just – I got to say thank you, Netflix. You have saved the day. Well, thank you, Netflix, for making Jason somewhat bearable today. I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day even though I am in a couple situation. You know, it is what – I've always said it's the ultimate hallmark holiday. This is invented for nothing.

My Facebook feed was an explosion of disgusting this morning. To hell with Valentine's Day. I'm not doing anything. Okay. Have you mentioned this to your wife? Yes, it's been mentioned. Actually, you know, we're flying early tomorrow morning.

As I talked about last week as well, we're also, you know, mid-process of basically buying a condo here. So we have paperwork stacked up to the sky that has to be signed. We have suitcases to pack. There will be some wine, but I do that most nights.

So nothing different. All right. So how are you going to fit in any house of cards in between packing and signing papers? There will be no house of cards. I will be taking the iPad mini and the iPad with me to Toronto. So I might be watching it through that when we get there because it's snowing and fucking freezing there.

So a lot of inside watching house of cards, I believe, is on the cards, as it were. Nice. Nice. So we have a new feature on the website that we kind of talked about last week that we hinted that we were going to start doing. And we actually did. Yeah, it was amazing.

We followed through. I'm really impressed with us. I'm more impressed with you because I haven't been able to because I've been dealing with doctors, but you've been carrying the torch. Yeah. So tell the folks about our new segment. We added a section to our site, Grumpworthy.

So instead of just listing our podcast episodes and kind of doing the occasional post on Facebook or Twitter, as we have been doing, we've decided to actually unify our approach and put our money where our mouth is because we always tell people that this is what they should do, and we weren't doing it ourselves. So we've added Grumpworthy as a category on our site, and both Jason and myself will be going on as often as possible, posting little stories that come up throughout the week, sometimes follow up on things we've talked about on the podcast.

Most of the time it will be things that we're about to talk about on the podcast that week, stories, a couple of opinions, blah, blah, blah, and there you go. Yeah, there's lots of stuff because we come by so much stuff during the week that we can't talk about it all on the show. So it's a nice place for us to put stuff, as it were.

And we're also unifying the Grumpy Old Geeks brand, so the Does It Have Legs podcast is now officially under Grumpy Old Geeks. So we'll be posting new episodes on GrumpyOldGeeks.com. You can look for those there if you're into the Does It Have Legs podcast, which from what I can tell from the feedback, a lot of people are.

Awesome. So you're going to be continuing and doing more of those? Currently, yeah. I'm laid up for six weeks. So might as well. It'll pass the time. So my buddies are still into doing the show, and we're having a blast. We've got two more in the can that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks, and we're just going to keep on going.

There will be no new one this week because I will be drugged up and laying in bed going, why does my goddamn leg hurt so much? Yeah. So cool. So check it out. Go to GrumpyOldGeeks.com and check out the new goodies. Yeah. Friend of the show, Hannah Ward, sent us a recommendation link on our Facebook page.

The link is WhereTheFuckShouldIGoForDrinks.com. It's quite amusing. I'd suggest bringing it up. I did it here locally, and I typed in Venice, California. And unfortunately, it told me that, why don't you fucking go to the Circle Bar, which, if anybody is around here knows, that is the worst fucking place you could possibly go.

So I clicked on, no, that place looks like shit. And then I got, why don't you go to O'Brien's Irish Pub? Winner. So there you go. It works. Yeah, it works quite well. So I enjoyed it. It's a good little site. You know, I'm going to try that out. I'm going to walk around when I'm traveling and keep that punched up and see where I should fucking go.

Yeah, this might be the most genius way to do bar reviews. It's like, yeah, no, yes, no, yes. Forget stars. Forget Yelp reviews. Just yes or no. I wonder if they're collecting that or if that's – probably not, actually, but they should. Yeah, I don't know if it's that complicated because they can't find anything where I'm at in Downers Grove, Illinois.

This could be because there isn't anything. I think you may actually be right. As far as I can tell, I can't – I don't know of a single bar around here. Excellent. Yeah, there you go. Well, thanks, Hannah. It was a cool little link. Everybody should check it out. It's in the show notes or just type it in.

Use the F word. If you've listened to our podcast for any length of time, you know that we have a somewhat complicated relationship with San Francisco.

Slightly complicated, yes. Jason himself has lived there, is quite fond of the city. I enjoy visiting the city. I would rather have my eyeballs scraped out than actually live there. But the one thing that I think we both agree on is that the San Francisco tech community is a bunch of arrogant, pig-headed fucknuts.

Well, do we? Okay. Well, I mean, basically, we've gone from the heady days of your Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who were somewhat humanistic, whatever you say about Steve Jobs and his arrogance and his ego and whatnot. He actually, you know, liked the human race and felt good about them and genuinely believed that what they both believed that what they were doing was actually for the good of humanity.

I think that that has changed. I think that, you know, we're very much into Gordon Gekko, 80s style, fuck everyone, let's get the money, we're better than everyone attitude that's up there right now. We've seen that, we've talked about it numerous times on this podcast, particular speeches that some of the CEOs have made and just how annoying they all are.

They asked John Oliver, former Daily Show correspondent, I believe he has his own show now, I'm not entirely sure about that. Yes, it starts pretty soon on HBO. That's why he left the Daily Show. Yeah, super funny guy, very funny. Loved him. They had him come and do the opening monologue at San Francisco's Crunchies Awards, which is a ceremony for the best and brightest in tech.

And he tore them a new asshole. And I love it. We have the link to the whole speech in our show notes. Let me just read one snippet. You already have all the money in the world. Why do you need awards after that? It's absolutely ridiculous. You're no longer the underdogs. It's very important that you realize that.

You're not the scrappy people that people get behind. It used to be the people who worked in the tech industry were emotional shut-ins who you could root for. Now those days are gone. You're pissing off an entire city. His delivery was a little better, but the sentiment stands. I was in tears.

I loved this speech. It was a great bit. It was a total great bit. But the best part of all really, really good comedy is he's only kind of kidding. There's a lot of anger and truth in there. Absolutely. I didn't know he did them previously because I don't follow the crunchies.

TechCrunch was one of those love-hate. It was kind of part of your job when you were in the startup business. You had to read it, unfortunately. And it kind of always bummed me out. And I stopped reading it. So I just couldn't believe they're still doing the awards now that they're owned by AOL, which is even weirder.

Yes, that is a bit. So good on you, John Oliver. And the tech industry is the tech industry. And there are good people. There are bad people. But there's definitely a sentiment that it's just not good up there right now. Yeah, and I would like to point out that I just posted a link on Grumpy Old Geeks this morning that has kind of a different take on it.

It's kind of an infographic-y type of thing. I'll put it in the show notes. Check it out. I can't even remember the name of it right now because my painkiller killers are kicking in. But, oh, yeah, it's like San Francisco by the numbers where it has a different take on how terrible things we think are.

It kind of balances it a bit. All right, I'll take a look at that. But the thing that I think we can all agree on that is the elephant on the Internet this week is the Comcast and Time Warner merger. There is no bigger news to be had.

This is a $45 billion acquisition all the time. All stock. All stock. All stock, yeah. I mean, there's all this talk. There's always been talk about how we can't have a monopoly. This is a true monopoly. It already was anyways. It's not like you have options in cable service anywhere.

But this is bad. No, it's terrible. This is going to be horrible for – I mean, even though we are kind of already known net neutrality is dead, this is a big nail in that coffin and pushes it down more than six feet under halfway to China as far as I'm concerned. Yeah.

This is bad news, everyone. Well, I mean, the issues that bug me – I mean, yeah, it's the two of the most hated companies in America because they've got the worst customer service, the crappiest products. But once these – and I think it's going to go through.

In a normal, sane world, the Federal Trade Commission would step in and go, no, you cannot do that because what do we have left then? We've got Verizon and we've got Comcast. Two choices. Oh, Google Fiber if you live in one fucking city. And some of the – yeah, some of the reasons that they're saying that this merger should go through are just ridiculous.

I've got about 15 links to all the great stories. There are some terrible stories, but GigaOM has been knocking it out of the park. Yeah, GigaOM has one of the best ones, and the most important take on it, which is people just automatically think this is about TV and about cable. No, this is about the internet.

This is about broadband. This is about everything that we've talked about with net neutrality. This basically gives one company the ability to throttle your internet to give – to basically allow people access over other people to control the information that you see. And it's one company for the entire country pretty much.

Yeah, no choice. So there's no competition. So they can set the price. What are you going to do? They can tell you how few or how many bits you can have. What are you going to do? Go back to dial-up? I mean that's – what are you going to – nowadays, you can get a T1 run to your home.

And a T1 is like my phone has more bandwidth than a T1. Yeah, I know. In the old days, that used to be it. So you're kind of – it's terrible. And what I'm worried about is I do believe that the – unless there's a huge uproar, the Federal Trade Commission is going to let this through because they're all bought and paid for already.

These guys are – it's just a sham. The whole – the way that – even with the FCC and the net neutrality stuff, it's so bad for business. But these people are bought and sold every day. And as soon as they leave the FCC or the FTC, they get jobs working for the people who they just ran legislation through for.

The game is rigged as we see in House of Cards. It's totally rigged. And hopefully you'll be able to still see House of Cards once this happens because it will really matter if they watch you to see it because maybe they'll throttle Netflix because they don't want – they don't like a guy over at Netflix.

I mean that's basically what it's going to be coming down to. What they'll probably do, they'll probably buy Netflix and give you all the videos for free to placate you to not notice how you're getting fisted on everything else. They'll just give you free entertainment so you can just sit there and, like me, drooling your oatmeal watching 14 episodes of House of Cards in a row.

Yeah, it's a super bad thing. And unless we all kind of stand up and say something, even that probably won't really do anything. In fact, I found a little interesting infographic. Maybe it isn't really us that needs to stand up. I think maybe the bots need to get involved here and start protesting this sort of thing because global web traffic is now more than 60% of it is bots.

Less than 40% of global web traffic is actual human beings now. You see, this doesn't surprise me. I actually thought by now it would be at least 75%. I'm not surprised either because, well, you and I work in this industry and we look at our server stats and see Google hitting and scrapers hitting and pulling all our content constantly.

I just think it's really interesting to people that are out there that don't really know how this stuff works. Almost, you know, hardly any of the traffic is actual real people anymore and hardly any of the traffic on your site is either. Oh, definitely, yeah. Any of your traffic numbers nowadays, you need to have bot versus human in your Google Analytics.

But, you know, half the code that I write are bots and content scrapers to get stuff off the social media networks to aggregate them into single locations for brands to, you know, pimp their shit. So that's kind of what it is, APIs, open the door for that.

You know, and you also have spam bots and crap like that and, you know, content farms and there's, oh, God, it goes on forever. But, yeah, there's tons of stuff. That's why I'm surprised that it's actually that low. I thought it would be higher. Yeah, 31% search engines and other good bots.

I love the 20.5% other bad non-human traffic, whatever that might be. I guess that's all the Nigeria emails. Oh, no. Oh, no. So I found one article that we should have actually talked about when we were talking about the YouTube not making money.

And this is some royalty checks from the music industry that I thought you would get a kick out of. It made me cry a little. I'm not going to lie. It's a sad, sad state of affairs. To be fair, I actually only know of offhand from this list one of the bands.

And they are, of course, one of the ones that made the most money. They made the biggest amount of money, $16. Who is that? Kamper van Beethoven? Yes, it is. Okay. I know ISIS. I've heard of ISIS. And they made three cents. Right. Yeah, well, Kamper van Beethoven had a big hit with Lowe back in the 90s.

But still, streamed more than 1.1 million times on Pandora. Full payment, $16.89. Why be a musician anymore? Seriously. It's absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I get upset with my clients because I work within the music industry and I want to get paid.

But I really do understand the struggle that's taking place right now. Artists are just not making any money. I'm sorry. All these streaming services, they are bullshit for artists. Well, you might want to get out of the music industry is what I'm saying. I am making every attempt.

If anybody is out there that works in any other industry, my skills are easily convertible. Please hire me for your shoe site. I don't care. As long as you don't have to go on tour. Exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the only place people really make money anymore. And these checks are just sad.

Sad but true. It is. Oh, well. Shit. No, seriously? Are you shitting me? Okay, so we got rid of the Kickstarter in the ball segment, but I feel like this should go in the are you shitting me because I am pissed.

The one and only Kickstarter that I ever funded was for the show Chug by Zane Lamprey. Zane Lamprey used to have very funny TV shows on cable networks about drinking. They were great. The first one got canceled. He got signed on to do a second one called Drinking Made Easy.

That one was okay. It was on some niche cable network. Ended up getting dropped as well. So, he went with his great idea. Why don't I Kickstarter it and I'll just do it and release it digitally to all the people that paid for it. I was behind that idea. I loved it. Great. He got enough money to make the show.

Great. We already talked on our show about how crappy our t-shirt was as our incentive. And he went at great lengths to explain why they were late and he was making sure that he was getting the best possible quality. They were crap. They never showed up. We are now on backer update number 43, which just arrived yesterday.

There was still no digital episodes to watch and it infuriated me and showcases everything that's wrong with fucking Kickstarter and these people doing that. Let me just read the first line. The good news is that we've sent the Kuala Lumpur episode to several networks. What? What? And several of them have expressed interest in adding the show to their lineup.

Okay, but I haven't – I paid you already and I haven't seen a single episode yet. Interesting. Dot, dot, dot. The interest from the networks has nothing to do with the delay in getting the episodes to you. Putting together six-hour episodes is like making three feature films. There are a lot of moving parts. In the end, you're all bearing witness to my fastidious attention to detail.

Bullshit. Bullshit. I'm sorry, Zane. I like you. I fucking love your show, but this is bullshit. This is a lie. This is a complete lie. Your fastidious attention to detail, much like those wonderful T-shirts that were delayed for quality reasons, but I'm already using as a rag for dusting because it's not a T-shirt because the quality is so bad.

And you're focusing on editing and cutting those episodes to notes from the networks so you can get paid more money that you've already been paid to do this show. Admit it, move on, and give us our damn episodes. Thank you. Yeah, seriously. They're putting it on delay saying, well, we don't want to give you one and then have to wait two weeks for the next one and then maybe two weeks for the one after that.

We want to give them to you one a week as we're done with them. And it's like, well, first off, they're supposed to be half-hour episodes. And they turned them into hour-long episodes. Okay, well, you changed the terms of the deal there. We didn't want an hour episode. We wanted a half-hour show because that's what Three Sheets was.

Three Sheets was a half-hour show. It was to the point, perfect show. Edited down to the meets, just the funny bits and the good bits. I don't want an hour. I want a half-hour quick, funny, go. And just the constant pushing and pushing. And I'm listening to his podcast and he's doing all sorts of other stuff.

It's like, get in the goddamn edit bay, finish what you promised, and get it out the door. Yeah, I have no issues with him running around and trying to make sure that he's getting money and has a career and a life and all of that. But you've already been paid for this one. You've got all the money.

Finish it. Deliver what you said you were going to deliver that you've already been paid for. And it's not just Zane. I mean, we're using Zane as kind of just like a bellwether here. It happens on almost every damn Kickstarter project that gets funded that I've ever seen or even been a part of.

It's like everything is late. Nothing goes according to plan. The quality almost always is shittier than you think. And it's a waste of time. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. This week I found a new mail app for OSX, or Mavericks, as it were.

Because if you don't know, mail app, after they launched Mavericks, the interoperability with Gmail has been just atrocious. Utterly, unbelievably atrocious. It actually has a lot of other issues as well. Like, for instance, depending on what your mail servers are and whether it likes it or not, you'll always have to click.

You have to accept connections and all this stuff every single time you launch. It's not good. It's not pretty good. No. It's a mess. And, I mean, I've had a bunch of other apps that I used to use. Most of my mail goes through Gmail, and I've got a couple off-brand, like, straight-up SMTP servers and one unfortunate Outlook.com account or Office.com, whatever the hell the Microsoft one is.

So I need something that can run all of them or something that I can switch between. I've tried Mailplane. That was a good one for just Gmail. My favorite was Sparrow, which Google bought and killed. You can still get it, and they've done some maintenance releases, but it's not good enough for day-to-day use.

So this week I found a new one called Unibox, which, you know, Universal Inbox is pretty much what they're saying. And it runs all of the different types of accounts, like all different types of mail accounts. Every kind of account I have, it works with it.

The cool thing about it, though, is the way that it does the sorting. It's not a standard inbox. You have a timeline on the left, but it's by person. So that's the novelty bit. So you can see, you know, it's ordered chronologically, but not by thread.

It's by person. So if I see, like, an email from, like, you're at the top, but then I click on the email, and I can get the thread with the other people. It takes a little getting used to, for sure. But, man, so far, it has been amazing. I love it. It's very pretty.

It's very pretty. One window. There's not multiple windows. You're not going to have, like, ten email windows open at any given time. It's a single window app, which is actually pretty cool once you get the hang of it. Some things took a little getting used to, and there's some things that are still missing that I'm just used to in other apps.

Just, like, easily viewing the header source for a message because I'm a super nerd, and I need email headers a lot for some of the things that I do. And here you have to, like, go find it and view the whole message source, which can just be nasty. And just a few little UI tweaks.

But so far, it's been a solid app. I'm using it on both my Macs in production day-to-day. I've actually removed the mail app. It took about two hours the first time I launched it to get all my data in, which I – across all my email accounts, I've got anywhere between four and six gigabytes with attachments.

But it took two hours to get all that stuff down. Your mileage may vary based on your data caps and which shitty ISP you have and what part of the country you're in. That would be Time Warner. Yeah, I'm on Comcast. Oh, wait. Same. Same, same. So when I got it, I got lucky.

I got it on $2 Tuesday, so it was $1.99. It is now selling for $9.99. Yeah. I would still buy this at $19.99. Really? I love this thing. Wow. I might have to check it out because, as you know, I'm not a fan of Mac Mail. I've been trying to use it since I've made my switch over to the Mac, and I just don't like it.

Yes. We technically just call that mail.app. Whatever. Just letting you know. Hey, man. You want to be in the club, I've got to teach you the lingo. I do not want to be in the club. Don't say San Fran. Frisco. Oh, don't say Frisco either. I'll fry you in Crisco when you say Frisco.

Dear Lord. Yeah, I know. All right. On to your games. On to your games. Oh, my God. Threes. Threes is what it's called. It's going gangbusters. Most people have probably heard of it by now, but my God, is it fun.

I hope the guy who built it can handle the pressure. I hope so, too. He's not going to flip out and, you know, commit Harry Carey. Actually, this looks like the kind of game I would play. It's like Tetris with math. It's like 4D Tetris with math, plus a sliding puzzle.

It is fun as can be, and it's – I mean, it just escalates, too. Once you start to get the hang of it, then you can – it just keeps going, and then you learn strategies. You figure out things. I mean, it's hard, but it's fun, and it's quick, too.

And the cool part about it, there's an article that we're going to put in the show notes from Polygon.com, and it took them a year to make this game, to make this very simple game because they started out with a very complex idea and whittled it down to just the very basic simplicity of this little matching game.

And I just – I'm in love with this game. And here's the great part. It's $1.99. You pay for it. No ads. Nothing. You spend your money. You get a good game. Period. I love that. No freemium, no upsells, no in-game purchases, which like the last game that I really liked was Dots, and they kept adding on in-game purchases and all that crap just to get more of your money, and they had power-ups and all that stuff.

None of that crap. This is just a straight-up strategy game that you can play and enjoy. Very nice. That's what I got this week. You got anything? I do not have anything, but I do – I have a call to action, as it were. Oh, Jesus. Well, I've been using Lumosity for almost a year now.

They've got the commercials everywhere. They've definitely got a ton of funding, the science of neuroplasticity and all of that. Yeah, they have ramped up their ad campaign massively. Yeah. Massively. And it's been fun. I've enjoyed it. I don't really know if it's really made me any smarter or more adeptable or faster or anything like that.

What it has made me do is get really, really good at the 15 to 20 games that they have. So I'm quite good at those now. I've basically maxed out. Like, I am at the top of the top on every single level for my age range and even for the age range one below me.

And I'm bored with the games at this point. I'm definitely not going to re-up. I was like 69 or 79 bucks for the year or something like that. Ow. Yeah, it wasn't cheap, but I did enjoy it, and I'd like to find something similar. So if anybody knows of any kind of competitors to Lumosity, where it's a nice little package that tracks you and tracks your progress and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'd love to hear about it because I don't regret doing Lumosity for a year, but I think that I've tapped out on it.

I'm done. Okay. Interesting. Interesting that it only has that much runway. Yeah, yeah. I was really surprised by it, too. They were adding games for a little while, but I think that they've kind of stopped doing that as well. They're definitely focusing on building the company, not necessarily the games.

See, that just makes no sense. Why would you do that? You've got the money. You've just got the people. That was the same thing. We were just talking about this offline, JibJab. I pay those games every year for $10, but it's the same stuff every year. Like, they put out two new cards a year, but amazingly enough, those two cards come in exactly at the right time when I need a card that I forgot to send.

Somebody, they're cute. I got everybody's head in there, and it just comes in handy. But it's like these companies that have been around for so long, they just stagnate and don't add content. It makes me wonder if anybody that's actually at Lumosity is doing Lumosity because they've got to realize that a year in, unless they could easily shake this up, they could create new programs, add in different games, add in different ways to kind of test yourself and something like that.

But if you've done it for a year straight like I have, there's just nothing else for me to do. I'm just playing the same games over and over again, and my score is basically just hovering at the top, and it goes up or down by five points. That's about it. So there's no reason for me to continue.

I've beaten Lumosity. Rock on. Level up. Level up. If anybody out there knows of any competitors, any sort of kind of just brain-challenging type games out there that come in some sort of package. So it gives, you know, every day I log on, and I play a hand set of things, and you track progress, and you can see what's actually happening.

Love to hear about it. Okay. So you want a gamified learning package that keeps you sharp and young. Exactly. At the library. At the library. So I've been buried with work and other things, but I did manage to find some time to read today, this last week.

I finished up a book and was searching around for a new one and stumbled across the Millennium Falcon owner's workshop manual, which I'm not probably going to purchase, but I love it, and I just wanted to link to it in the show notes. I think it's hilarious, and the Millennium Falcon is the best vehicle ever conceived.

So it's just a funny takeaway just, like, based on the car manuals and things like that, except it's for the Millennium Falcon. They also have the Death Star, by the way, which is cool. Oh, nice. Yeah, and they've done a whole series, of course, so you have the USS Enterprise, Klingon Bird of Prey. You can get these kind of funny, you know, tongue-in-cheek manuals for all these spaceships and whatnot.

Okay, there's only one that matters to me, Serenity. Is there a Serenity manual? I do not know. I do not see it in the Customers Also Bought section there, but, you know, Death Star Manual DS-1 and DS-2.

It's nice. Good stuff. So very funny. Take a look at it. Check it out. You know, it would not be remiss if you were a geek to have that on your bookshelf, I would say. I have been looking around for a new kind of sci-fi author, because I've basically read through almost everything known to man.

And I'm a sucker for any kind of near-current fiction that involves biology or history or the genesis of the human race. And this book called The Atlantis Gene, The Origin Mystery Book 1, by Mr. A.J. Riddle, A.G. Riddle, my apologies there, seemed to check off all the boxes.

It's going to, you know, 70,000 years ago, the human race almost went extinct. We survived, but no one knows why until now. The countdown to the next stage of human evolution is about to begin, and humanity might not survive this time. Instant boner, in my mind. This is exactly the kind of stuff I love to read.

TMI, TMI. So I bought it, and I read through it, and yeah. Not good? It's passable. The story itself is really interesting, relatively well-researched.

The problem is, as an author, and he just got started, by the way, so fair enough. He's got a really good author's note that kind of explains he used to be in the tech world. He quit to pursue his dream of writing a novel. It's his first novel. It's self-published, all that sort of stuff.

So I like those stories as well. But you can kind of tell he just, it's formulaic. He's got, you know, of course, the dashing, attractive kind of guy that was in the military who runs into the very good-looking younger female scientist, and they, of course, start a romance while this is all going on.

The romance didn't have to happen. None of that had to happen. It really detracted from the actual story, and the romantic writing was kind of cheese. So if you've got some time to burn, you need a new book, and you're interested in the sort of things that I just talked about having, giving me bonafide, then you'll enjoy it.

It's a fun, quick enough, easy read. I'm actually, he's already written a sequel to it, so I'm going to keep going with the story and hope the love interest stuff goes away a little bit. I liked his author's note, too. It was worth it just for that. He talks a lot about his experiences trying to get started as a writer, self-publishing, getting feedback, you know, how he's going to move forward, and he wants, you know, setting up his own website and interacting with people directly and doing all the sorts of things that authors have to do these days to get started.

Good luck to you, man. Keep at it. Interesting. Get rid of the love stories. Love does tend to ruin everything, doesn't it? Perfect for Valentine's Day. Yeah. Did you ever check out the Vorkosigan series that I recommended? I did not. I totally forgot about that one, and it was on a list.

It was on my listicle of lists, but I did not have that handy when I was laying in bed looking for a new book. I tell you what, I will, since I am now an Amazon Prime head of household, I will e-loan you a couple of those. Oh, perfect. So you can try them as well.

That would be awesome. Yes, please do that. I will be needing a book for my plane flight tomorrow. Yeah, because I need other people out there banging the drum for the Vorkosigan series, so she will write more of them, because she's getting to the end of the line of these characters, and I think there's like two more books that she needs to write to round out the entire thing, and I just need her to do that before she croaks.

So we need to get her on that. Well, I will read the book this weekend if you send it to me. All righty. Okay. Security! Ha! This week in security, we're not actually going to talk about anything security related except for the big protest.

The day we fought back, which was on Tuesday, and where everybody was supposed to get together, you know, put up their banners and call their peoples. Supposed to turn our websites black or something like that, too? I can't. No, that was the last one. Oh, okay. You know what the difference was? The last one, that one worked.

Yeah. Okay? Right. This one, this one was so amorphous because there was nothing, there's nothing really that, there's, I don't know, there's a kind of an amorphous goal with, okay, we want the NSA to stop being so douchey, right?

Stop looking at us. Stop looking at us. Look at everybody else. Hey, world, be cool. Yeah. Be excellent to each other. I mean, that's the problem with these kind of general protests. I don't think that you can be that nonspecific. Yeah, it's nonspecific.

I mean, there were a couple things about, you know, different bills that are going through to, you know, before or against those, but calling your senators and your representatives to say, vote for this, don't vote for that kind of thing. So basically at the end of the day, was it 37 million people saw the banner that you could put on your site with a little piece of JavaScript.

37 million. Yeah. That's, that's pathetic. And most of that was bots. No, yeah, but whatever. But it's still, that's fucking pathetic. When you look at the people who are behind the, uh, the protest. Yeah. Okay. Google, if Google would have put it on its own page, it'd have been in the billions.

Nope, they didn't. Okay. If Google's behind it, then how come they didn't participate? Well, yeah. Google might, so many, so many different companies that are quote unquote behind it. What they did this time was they made another website and posted people, shuffled people over to that. It wasn't a big enough protest apparently to actually do something to their homepage beside add a banner.

You know, it's, it was, it's half-assed. I did the whole thing was half-assed. You know, it was a 301,000 signatures, um, 84,000 tweets. Like who gives a fuck about a tweet? Who cares about a Facebook share? Yes. Visitors. The, where the rubber meets the road is okay.

89,000 completed calls to the, the representatives. That's a, that's a number, you know, that's a number that actually has meaning to it. Um, the signatures number has meaning. Email sent to representatives has meaning. People that saw the banner, who gives a fuck? You know, how many tweets?

Who gives a fuck? And all the other metrics doesn't. Yeah, because all of, all the tweets and the Facebooks and the banners, all of that was meant to make you do something else. So just seeing that or tweeting about it didn't, doesn't matter. That it does not matter at all. That was just to get you to look at information to make you do something.

Yes. As internet do the something, it don't matter. As internet marketers would say, it was a step in the funnel once you're trying to close the deal is, but that's the point here is that it, it, the whole thing came off is just like it. And honestly, I didn't participate. Did you participate?

No, I did not. I don't know anybody that really did a couple of people. Oh, here, here's the, you know, one of my favorites. Remember, uh, support a cons, um, from I think our first episode when we used to give advice on how to fix the world. Um, yeah, like a bunch of people change their icons on Twitter by, woo.

Great. Yeah. That's going to change the world. Uh huh. So there's, uh, and, uh, the New York times has a, has a great piece of the day. The internet didn't fight back is the, the piece of the, that they put out. And both of those will be in the show notes. You can check it out. But this was a, uh, this was a sad, sad attempt because there was, there's really no, you know, you're fighting fog.

There's no dragon to slay this time before there was Sopa. There's, there's no Sopa here. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. No Sopa on the Ropa. No Sopa on the Ropa. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, it's, uh, again, I, I heard about it, which is well done.

I mean, I heard about it even just not from doing like my own online research or anything. Uh, but again, I was like, what? So wait, we do what for, and we're fighting what? And I'm supposed to say, huh? I mean, they, the one thing, well, the smart thing they did was they did have a script.

So all you had to do was honestly dial your phone and read from a piece of paper. Yeah. But if, if, honestly, if that's just a bunch of people calling and reading from the piece of paper, how many people do you, I mean, how many others are going to be listened to more than like half a sentence in. So, and with the thousands of them granted, yeah, they probably just, you know, had a little counter going how many people called pro against whatever, and then completely ignored it because it doesn't matter because they're being paid by other people to ignore what we want.

I like how security has just become our total, like a category where we just, we start off strong and by the end of it, we're just like, fuck it. Uh, there was some good stuff this week that maybe I'll throw in, uh, in, uh, uh, grump worthy and riff a bit on that.

But yeah, so far it's just, I'm, I'm, I'm beat from security this week that I, I just look at this and I'm like, nobody gives a shit. And the funny thing is I found an old sticker from 1990, like the late nineties. Uh, it was, it was meant to go on the back of a pay phone.

It, it, like the black, you know, the old school black handsets on a pay phone. It was perfectly sized for that. And it just said, this phone is tapped because all, all, you know, public pay telephones were tapped. You, they could listen into them because it's, you know, it's a public telephone and, you know, even going back that far, we knew everything was tapped and they were listening into it and it still never changed a goddamn thing.

So I wish I still had some of those stickers. I think I got them from 2600. Should dig them up. Very cool. I bet they're on eBay. Try to look them up. Oh yeah. There's not much we can do about it. This was an unfocused, uh, uh, nebulous thing. And I, you know, it's, it sucks that nothing really happened, but, uh, it's also not surprising.

Yeah. When, until we have like a real dragon to slay, nothing's going to happen. We've got to put a face on this. And when that happens, then, then we can do something. Well, the fact that the only face that we have is Snowden and that's a good face. So we've got Clapper. Clapper is the, the evil face who lied to Congress and still has not been punished for it.

So when you see people, you know, committing a felony on national television and international television with no consequence whatsoever, how can you not just throw your hands up in the air and say, nobody's doing anything. We're fucked. You know? Yeah. I wish it, I wish it was different, but it's not.

So let's talk about something fun. Fuck this noise. Bumming me out, man. Bumming me out. Yeah, candy, candy, candy, candy. Speaking of being all bummed out, I was doing my usual listening to Adam Carolla's podcast, which typically bums me out and makes me angry and makes me want to rant.

And he had on a comedian who I've only, the name's been bouncing around. I've seen skits here and there, but I've never really gotten too into him. His name is Jim Jeffries and he was incredibly funny on the Carolla show. And so as soon as that was done, I was a little bit bored and I needed something to, something funny to listen to.

I went over to his website trying to, just like almost all comedians have podcasts now. I'm like, surely this guy has a podcast, no podcast. He does have a ton of funny videos on his site though. So you can enjoy the humor, watch a bunch of his videos, take a look at him.

Very funny, very funny guy, Australian. Not that that matters for anything, but the thing that I was most enjoyed, most enjoyed about going to his site, and I think you'll get a kick out of Jason. He has a Ning site still. Oh my God. You remember Ning? I do remember Ning.

So he's got that up and running. So that gave me a little extra chuckle. Really funny guy worth checking out. He's got some shows, which I believe may be on Netflix. So I might be checking that out as well over this next week. Cool. I'll check them out. I like comedians. Yeah. And I've actually got two ear candies here.

I forgot to put one in the notes. The first one, since we were talking about John Oliver and how much I love John Oliver, he has a podcast called The Bugle with Andy Saltzman. He's been doing this forever. I think they're on, I mean, they're in the 250s, I believe, in episodes. Hilarious.

Andy's in England. John's in New York or maybe L.A. now because he's all famous and getting his own HBO show. But yeah, it's a really, really solid show. I mean, these guys are top-notch comedians and they do a great show. The only problem that I ever had with it is Andy Saltzman every week has this section of puns that just drives me.

I always reach for the 30-second skip when he starts in on his pun rant. Other than that, he's hilarious. John's hilarious. And it's a great show. I highly recommend it. It's just at thebuglepodcast.com. Excellent. I mean, this totally illustrates the problem with podcasts right now.

There's just so many. I love John Oliver. No idea that he's been doing a podcast. For years. Yeah. No idea. Yep. Yeah. And, well, actually, I want to tell you about one more podcast. And then let's talk about this for a little bit. The next one is our previous guest, Felicia Michaels, has a new show.

She's doing The Wine, W-H-I-N-E, and Cheese Party. It's a new podcast she's doing with Gene Pompa and Sean Latham and Big Juicy Carl. Does it get like two episodes out so far? It's funny. I like it. Okay, cool.

I haven't actually listened. I know she was doing a new one. I haven't listened to it yet, but it's been on my to-do list. So go, Felicia. Congratulations. Yeah. I just happened to catch a random tweet from her that a new episode was out. But it doesn't seem like she pimps it very much. She needs to get on that pimpin' bandwagon.

Yeah. Well, I mean, like most comedians, I think she's more interested in promoting and pimping her events and shows that she's out and about doing, but the podcast kind of falls second fiddle to that. But it is unfortunate because there is no better way for you as a comedian to kind of get people into you than your podcast.

Well, yeah. I mean, it gives them a, you know, it's kind of like a trailer for the show. And she's funny as hell. Yeah. She's really funny. Dirty as hell, too. Man, that chick is filthy. So, yeah, just talking real quick about, you know, you not knowing that John Oliver had a podcast.

The podcast discovery, discoverability is so fractured right now. Nobody goes to iTunes to find anything anymore. All the other sites out there are just so half-assed. And they're at odds with each other because you look at like something like Stitcher and they're, you know, they've got their own kind of thing going.

But then you look at SoundCloud, they've got their own kind of thing going. There's nobody that's trying to do any kind of unified, like, Google for podcasting. Even Google sucks at it, you know? I think what we almost need is, like, to bring back the Yahoo directory type of thing. Oh, totally. Just do a hand-picked directory.

Because, like, on iTunes, I got a buddy that's on, he got featured on the front page for podcasts of iTunes and almost no discernible uptick in traffic. Nobody's looking at it, you know? And, like, for Does It Have Legs? When we were on the front page for eight weeks, I think we got, like, maybe five new listeners a day at the most.

We had to do all the rest of the promotion by hand. So if there was a really good, you know, really good directory, like, that was curated, well, I think there's a definite hole in the market for that right now, big time. I'm not going to do it.

I just hope somebody else does it. No, I totally see that. I mean, definitely. Podcasts are kind of hard to find. You just, I don't actively ever go out and seek a podcast. Like, I need to find a new podcast. But it's just like, I'll follow a comedian on Twitter and they'll mention it. Or you'll tell me.

Or somebody else will mention, oh, did you know that this person has a podcast? And then I'll go check it out and take a listen. There isn't anything like that. That's something like, I'm a little surprised, well, not surprised because podcasts are free and there's no sales to be made, but apps like Spotify or Beats Music, which has that algorithm, plugging podcasts into that kind of system or having an app that just did that with podcasts.

Oh, you listen to Grumpy Old Geeks and you listen to, you know, The Bugle. You'll also like this podcast. Would be cool. Yeah, I mean, iTunes has a really half-assed algorithm that does that. But you have to be on there, on the site, through iTunes, which nobody likes using iTunes as, you know, they hate iTunes.

So, you know, I don't know. There's something out there that needs to be, there's a hole in that market big time. Dear Liza, dear Liza. This week in false advertising. Making the rounds on Facebook this week, ironically, were a series of videos about Facebook by To Veritasium, an isotope of truth, according to the YouTube channel.

I couldn't find the guy's name. It's been posted all over the place right now. He actually goes in and gives you some honest case studies about Facebook and how the like system works and buying advertising on Facebook, or not advertising, but paying for it to promote posts and get likes.

And how about how the entire system is gamed and it's a complete fraud and it doesn't work and actually makes things worse for you? Yeah, this is the interesting thing. I watched both of these videos. They were, I watched the newer one first and then I went back and watched the older one. The older video, which is called The Problem with Facebook, covers in detail exactly what we've been talking about pretty much the entire time with how the structure of Facebook not

showing everything that people post and being the arbiter of what you get to see and only getting to see more of people like it. He does a really good job of it, of basically saying in like six minutes what it's taken us a year to do and much more, he says it much more eloquently. It's a really good, it's a really good explanation.

The second one, which I, which I found fascinating and he even brought up some points that I totally glossed over was when you buy Facebook ads, you can buy, you can buy likes and ads, you know, so you can buy likes from a third party site, which has basically a click farm where people are out there just liking shit all day long.

They've got tons of accounts and they like stuff. Yeah. So you can buy likes from farms like that and you get, you know, your likes go up, you don't get any real traffic out of it, you don't get any real engagement out of it and it actually hurts you in the long run. Yeah. But the interesting part was he got almost exactly the same results when he paid Facebook for advertising.

Yeah. And it's, it's, it's, I mean, if you ever think even remotely thinking about paying Facebook for advertising, you have to watch this video because you will, you will run screaming to the hills and say never because it hurts your brand more than helps it.

It totally hurts your brand more than it helps it. It decreases your scope. It decreases engagement. Facebook is just useless for brands now. It started ages ago when they got rid of tabs and things like that. And then, and then all of a sudden it was, it was metered updates and, and all the people that went out of their way to like your page that actually really did want to like your page, weren't getting your updates.

And now they've gamed it even worse to make you try to pay for things. And when you pay for things, it actually decreases the amount of engagement you're getting with the real people. So it's a game and it's a fraud and it's useless. Yeah. It's a for, it's a win-win for them. It's a lose-lose for anybody that's trying to actually get their message out.

Nowadays, I'm telling you, take your money, put it back into the web, put it back into your web presence, build your website, build your email list, build your engagement on social networks, but do it as, as an aside. Social networks should be doing nothing but driving you to your website. Yeah, exactly.

You know, don't spend money on a Facebook game ever again. Just seriously, don't. It's, and I make a lot of money on people that make Facebook games. I'm telling them not to do it. It's, I'd rather you give me money to make you an awesome website that is going to have staying power that's going to last.

You know, that, that brands just have to get that through their thick fucking skulls. The thing is that none of them will ever watch this video. But not even bit major brands. I'm talking even mom and pop shops. The guy, the guy that does shoe repair down the street. Yeah. Go, you know, drop some money and get a Squarespace site even.

Yeah. But don't put all your money on Facebook. Don't put any money on Facebook. Don't even spend the fucking time to get a Facebook account. Well, I disagree with you there. I do think you need to be there, but I agree completely with everything else. And I, I've run into so many clients, uh, and so many people, well, not clients, because if they were clients, they would listen to me and not do this.

But people who try to engage me as a, as a provider for them who has said, well, why would we do a website? We'll just do a Facebook page. That's good enough. No, no, no, no, no, no, it's not. And now we have a video to send you to tell you why. Yeah. And in the, the second worst is, uh, people who try and put their brands on Tumblr.

That's even, that's, it's, it's almost as bad, but not as bad because you can at least have a custom URL that you can take with you. I mean, it's, it's still a sin, but it's not a mortal sin. It's not a mortal sin. And Tumblr has its uses for certain applications that maybe you want to keep slightly off brand couldn't be a little more risque or whatever.

Uh, but again, main site, no, no. Yeah. Subdomains. You can use it for subdomains and experiments and different engagement, you know, playing, playing around with different engagement types. Yeah. But man, yeah. Don't put your whole fucking brand on Tumblr. Okay. So there it is.

Go watch these videos. Seriously. No, really. Just go, just go watch them. They're really good. It's interesting and it's well-researched. And again, because there is no transparency coming from Facebook for obvious reasons. Once you see this video, the only way to find this stuff out is to basically take test case yourself. And that's exactly what this guy did.

And that's good. All right. Who's this asshole? This week's asshole is Lottie Dexter. She is the director of an initiative in the UK that's getting almost a million dollars called the Year of the Code, which is a education initiative to promote interest in programming and to train teachers.

It's a lofty enough goal. You're training teachers and coding. We've talked at great length on this podcast about whether everybody needs to learn how to code or not. The answer is no. Not everybody does. But if you are into it, you can make a good living and it's a valuable skill set. So yay.

Okay, cool. Put some money into it. Good use of government money. Awesome. Let's get together this initiative and let's make this happen. And then the director was on Newsnight. It's a BBC current event show, kind of like NewsHour here. And basically told her that, or was interviewed and basically said that she does not know how to code at all.

Not one bit. Not a line. Not an idea. Doesn't really understand it. Never did it. No experience whatsoever. Not even a hello world in BASIC. Nada. Zippo. Zero. Did we spot? Not a fucking thing.

I got you. I got you. Jesus fuck. Okay, so. Which, you know, I get it. That's fine. I just, I'm sick of that just being the way that things are run everywhere in the world. At least have a passing glance at what you're involved in.

Don't just be middle management, or in this case, upper management, without even slightly having any experience in what you're managing. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. No, this, I mean, it pretty much says it all for itself. You know. All right, asshole.

Closing shout outs. I want to come back to your Lumosity bit. Okay. One thing that we used to have when we were kids was the IQ test. Yeah. Which I believe has been invalidated and people don't use IQ anymore for anything. Is that true?

My understanding is that it's not considered real science anymore. It's not an appropriate gauge. There's too many different factors that go into it, including upbringing and kind of, you know, just a whole list of things that invalidate it. But the very popular online still, people take them all the time.

Do you know of any replacements that people are using for any type of, you know, intelligence measurement? I do not, actually. I have been outside, out of the psychology field for a long time now. So I do not have any current knowledge of anything like that. But I will be happily researching that for the next show.

Yeah, I'd appreciate that because, I mean, long ago, I tested very high when I was in school back way when and passed all my crazy, like, Mensa exams and all that stuff. And I just, I haven't paid attention to it in a long time.

Yeah. And your Lumosity thing kind of got me thinking about it again. And also just, I've got all this spare time with being down with the leg thing. I'm just going to be, you know, stuck in bed writing a lot. And I thought, oh, if there's anything cool that I could do to kind of get back into that kind of, you know, nerdy brain world, as it were.

Yeah, you know, train in the brain. I mean, I'm a big fan of that sort of stuff. I mean, as lame as it sounds, and yes, it's a large part of it is the beer. I love my weekly pub trivia quiz. I mean, it's just trivia, but some of it is quite involved. And I just like anything that makes my brain work.

But you have beer at the same time, which, fighting an uphill battle there. You know, I consider it training. You know, it's like adding weights to your legs when you're jogging. You're just making it that much harder and training that much more. That's true, I guess, to an extent.

That's the crazy bit. I haven't had a drink at all for, well, 11 days until yesterday. And then I thought I was going to be free and clear of my narcotics for a while. So I had some wine. Unfortunately, I could have one glass before they put me back on them. So I have to whine in 12 days now.

And I'm not going to be able to drink for another probably two months because I'm going to be on all the meds recovering. So I'm going to take this time to kind of get my brain back in shape. Because it definitely, I can tell that I have gotten a lot sharper and a lot faster this past two weeks from being free and clear.

So I'm going to take the time. So by the time I'm done with the healing from this injury, I should be smart enough to start drinking again. And that will last me another 10 years before I have to do it again. Yeah, well, hopefully you won't twist your leg up again in 10 years. You've got to fill up the intelligence tank like once a decade, I think.

I like that, filling up the intelligence tank. Well, I've been sipping off Lumosity, but I don't think I've filled it up. So, yeah, let's both do a little research and see if we can find some good stuff out there. That just kind of makes your brain feel useful and gives it a nice little workout. Word.

Cool. So, speaking of that, I do wish that there were more of these tools out there and that I could force a lot of people around me to use them. I'm just wondering, as a personal level, I've had a hellish week and I'm really grumpy and cranky about it.

Does anyone at all check their fucking work anymore? I do. I do, too? I would never send something to anyone that I haven't double-checked to make sure actually works properly. This entire week has been emails with missing passwords or incorrect passwords or mistypings in URLs or incorrect instructions or do this.

Okay, do X exactly. I did X. I'm sorry. My colleague meant Y. I've had a nightmare of this. No one gives a fuck anymore. No one. General half-assitude. There's been an insane amount of it and I'm putting my foot down and saying, God damn it, people.

Try it before you send it off to someone else. Make sure it fucking works. Yep. I'm with you 110%. Rant of the week. Because I spent the entire week basically fixing problems that – anyways, I'm done. I need a fucking drink.

So I'm testing – there's one thing I wanted to shout out before that I'm testing a new site called Exposure.so. It kind of looks like Medium but just from the design with the big photo editor. But what it actually is, it's a way to do kind of photo essays.

It's what it's meant for. It's basically – what do they call it? The photo narratives. It's pretty new. It's paid, which I like. They do have a free option, which is fairly useless. But I bought an account so I could test it out and I actually bit the bullet and pointed my main domain to it.

So jpd.me, which is my own personal domain, goes to this now. And I'm starting to kind of play around with it and putting some photo essays up there, just old stuff I had lying around. And I'm just going to keep doing that. And I think I'm going to use – this is kind of my blogging platform and just do more visual blogging because it's more fun.

I think it's more fun because I used to be a photographer and I used to be a writer. So merging those two is kind of fun because just writing a blog post nowadays, I can't get behind it. I can't do it anymore. It's boring. Be sure to check out Grumpworthy at Grump.

No, for my personal – I'm talking about my personal blog. Business stuff and tech stuff, I still love to do that stuff. I'm talking about personal stuff. Yeah. It's a big difference there. No, I agree. And I mean I think that's happened to a lot of people in general. We've also just kind of gotten used to Twitter or Facebook where we used to write – blogs used to be blogs.

I mean I used to blog too and I would write 500, 600 words and put together these thoughts and really think about it. But we're just trained not to do that anymore because we don't. Social media is quick. Yeah, and a good training for that is busterbenson750words.com is a great thing.

I've talked about that before. That is a ton of fun. If you can get into it, do it every day. Wait. Oh, yeah. Coming up on March. I think I'll do that for March. That will be fun. And any listener who wants to join in, we'll get a little pool going and see if anybody wants to jump in on our 750 words challenge.

Cool. Just to get the juices flowing, you know? It's fun to write. It is fun to write. But writing a personal blog anymore, I did it for 20 years almost. It's not – or 15 years at least I've been writing blogs. And this is a cool tool. It's pretty.

It's very easy to use. And any tech stuff, I talked to the guys who created it through email support. Cool guys. Yeah. So just check it out. If you're a photographer or even just remotely into photography, they've got like an explore section on their main site so you can find other people who do this kind of thing.

It's fun. I dig it. So I'll have more next week because they're rolling out new tools. Pretty much they've had a couple new tools come out this week. It's just kind of my new fun thing. That's pretty much it. That's all I got this week. All right, man. Sounds good. So, well, you're going under the knife next week, so we'll see if we have a show or not.

Yeah, I think I'm going to my dad's house to recuperate, so I'll take a portable mic with me. I've got it with me. So I think I'll be able to do a show next week unless I don't wake up and then fuck the show. Sorry.

If I'm dead, I really don't care. Then the answer to does it have legs will be no. Yeah, nope. Yeah, well, hopefully I'll come out of this with two legs. Well, best of luck to you, Jason. We'll be talking. Thanks, man. I'll see you next 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. Have a good week. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer.

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