47: Too big to goto fail

Hey Stumpy, how's it going?

Oh, lovely. Good to hear that your leg is finally sort of mostly on the mend. So they say, so they say, so they say, uh, and you should be happy that you are not in sunny California today because, you know, I don't know if you guys get the insane, uh, news that we, what happens here when it rains, it's storm watch 2014. Oh my God, we're all going to die because a little bit of water has fallen from the sky. Not even enough to really wash our cars, but, uh, everybody's freaking out here.

I lived there for 12 years. I know the drill. People are, people are ridiculous there. It's either, oh my God, we've got no rain. We're going to, you know, we're going to die in a drought or, oh my God, there's waterfall falling from the sky. We're going to die. Um, so yeah, whatever you guys are idiots. I've got eight, eight inches of snow on the horizon for the next day and a half. So I'll trade you. How's that? Gotcha. Fair enough. So yeah, the legs coming along at, uh, they took the stitches out yesterday. So it looked like, you know, kind of seen out of misery was pretty much

it. Yeah. I saw the pictures that you posted. It was pretty nasty stuff. Gnarly. And I had the most inept blind, uh, nurse taking out my stitches. She was terrible. I'm like, just give me the, give me the tweezers, please. Yeah. Fortunately, there's a lot of nerve damage. So I can't feel half of my foot. So one half was fine. The other half, not so much. So not fun, not fun at all.

Nope. So this week I was been kind of, I'm in this, this weird zone. Now I've got like a thing that I do every morning when I wake up at, uh, like the ass crack at dawn and can't go back to sleep because of these pain meds. I do my, my, uh, my social media browsing, like first thing in the morning before the sun comes up, I send a bunch of stuff to Instapaper. I send a bunch of stuff to pinboard and I've got my collection done for the day. Right. With every bit of, um, you know, planning to go back later in the

day, all the intention of, you know, reading everything, scanning through it and making a show note list for us. Um, yeah, that part hasn't happened yet. I'm getting really good at collection and marking stuff. The, the, the follow through. Yeah. Not so much. Yeah. I I've kind of been doing the same thing. I mean, uh, I've been just insanely busy as we've been discussing the past couple of weeks. I've got a big project deadline on, uh, well, it was on Tuesday. Then it got moved to

Monday and then it got moved to Sunday night. Um, so it's just been a little bit insane. I've been really good at collecting stories throughout the day. You know, when I, when I have a few minutes here and there, I'm browsing around and I'm like, Ooh, I like this. And you know, I'll bookmark it, read it later. Uh, getting it into the show notes, massive fail this week. Yeah. Like I said, I'm getting really, really good. My, my workflow for finding cool stuff and marking it to read later and getting it into the proper channels, either it's pinboard, Instapaper, or just, you know,

the, the new board that we'll talk about later that we're using for show notes. Um, that's just really good. It's yeah. It's that going back and reading the, you know, half a novel of stuff that I've collected before breakfast every day is, is problematic. So I need to learn how to read faster. I think that's it. Yeah. Well, I think there's a, there's definitely some online courses for that, whether they're any good or not, who knows? So yeah, there's that velocity app that, uh, we reviewed a while ago and it's, uh, unfortunately to use it with Instapaper,

you have to pay for a subscription to Instapaper. Right. It's kind of, kind of BS. Otherwise you have to like manually copy the links in to, to read it quickly. So yeah, we're not using that app anymore. One of the things I, uh, I found this week though, was a great article from the Purge. And this was one of the very few ones because the, the, the headline pretty much, uh, you know, it, it grabbed me, uh, the internet is fucked, you know, it says, but we can fix

it. But the internet in, in, in general is pretty much fucked. Uh, and it is, uh, that's been, I've had kind of this overall just kind of sense of, uh, it's almost kind of an internet depression all week. Uh, mostly because of this story and a number of other related ones. So, you know, this is going to be another feel good, happy, grumpy old geeks episode where we just talk about, uh, how everything is colossally and massively fucked.

Well, I wouldn't go down that road. I, I, I, I think there's hope. I think that we're, it needs to get worse before it's going to get better. Um, we've seen this, we've seen this, this is a train wreck happening in slow motion that we've been watching and we've talked about, and we've seen it coming at least you and I have, and we've talked about it for months now, all of the, you know, the cable companies, the lobbyists, everybody is trying to get rid of net neutrality so they can make more money and do whatever the hell they want and control basically

the internet. Yeah. And they did it basically this week. It is, it is started. They did it. But if, if you read some of the stuff, if you can read in between the lines with the rulings that, uh, kind of knocked down net neutrality, if you, there, there's a way to interpret that ruling that says, Hey, look guys, the FCC's stance on this was very weak. We're, we're, we're going to, you know, we're basically going to nullify all the common carrier stuff. Come back to us with a better

argument and a, and a more well, you know, well-worded argument that's going to stand up, you know, stand up better with the test of time. So there, there's some hope then if we get a really good like coalition or in group of lawyers on the net neutrality side of things in there to, to kind of argue this stuff, let's just quickly list off just a few of the things that, that have happened, which hang on. I'm not done with the point though. Okay. The way that the judge, like I said, worded this is to, to, you know,

shoot down net neutrality to come back with a better argument, but also in that timeframe, gives the cable companies and the network providers time to hang themselves. It gives them the rope to go out and do the terrible things that we always say, Oh, you know, this is what's going to happen when net neutrality dies. This gives them the opportunity to go do those things. So when the FCC comes back and says, see what happens when we don't have regular regulation, right? This is what

happens when net neutrality dies. It is, it is worse for the consumer because I tell you what, either Netflix is going to go up or your Comcast bill is going to go. Well, your Netflix bill is going to go up. Comcast bill is not going to go up. Yeah. Well, here's what's already happened. In January, AT&T announced a sponsored data plan. So that's coming. Uh, earlier this month, obviously we've been talking about Comcast and time Warner cable are merging, basically creating one internet service provider for the entire country. As far as I can tell, except for some

small, tiny areas. Uh, so that's not good. And then just, uh, just a couple of days ago, Comcast and Netflix have now announced a new paid peering arrangement. Which we'll see Netflix pay Comcast to give better access to, to the subscribers.

Yep. So Netflix has been fighting the whole time, but now that, you know, since the ruling came down, they've got no choice now. Now that's like, yeah, this is like, uh, you know, this is the eighties on the sunset strip. You know, you're, you're poison walking down the street and you're like, I'm not going to pay to play. Well now you have to. So they're doing it. I don't blame Netflix. They're, they're playing the game as it's given to them. Well, yeah, they have, they, they've got no choice. Now they lost. So now they have to do it. You know, they have to pay, they have to pay or their customers are going

to get shitty service. Um, because the, the Netflix users aren't obviously, you know, standing their ground and saying, Hey, Comcast. Cause honestly, the Netflix users don't know any better. They don't really know any better. They don't know what the hell's going on. Most people don't. I mean, that's, that's been the extent of the outrage that I've seen so far as, as a post on Facebook going, boy, this sucks guys. We should stop this kind of stuff from happening. Okay. Well, that's useful. Uh, you know, it, it is what it is.

And, and I agree that, that there is going to be hopefully some severe backlash to these companies for doing this. It's, it's not right. It's not fair. Uh, we were having discussions just recently, uh, in our own podcast about how there's no, you know, we were talking about how there's no editing system anymore for almost anything or, you know, a curated list. What, what's good. Comcast is now going to be our curated list. What they decide we want to see is what we're going to see. And that's that end of story. Uh, you're never going to be able to,

you know, come from nowhere and make mass market anything anymore, unless you play this game. Yeah. It's very, it's very bad for, for startups and, you know, and anybody trying to build something in the garage because you have to come out of it with the capital to pay off, to basically bribe your way onto the internet now with any, with any sense of, you know, uh, fairness because it, well, the fairness is gone. That's the whole problem. And I dug up, um, I dug up a great

video that, uh, our good old friends at, uh, ask a ninja did way back in the day. When, when, do you remember save the internet.com when we had to run through the net neutrality fights the first time? Yes, I do. They made the best net neutrality video, which I can't believe nobody is, is still playing anymore because it is fantastic. It will be in the show notes. And, uh, I miss those guys so much. I really do. Um, but check it out. It, I think it was Robin Williams,

brother, Harry brother making lemonade. And that was the, it was very funny. Um, but I think save the internet.com needs to be resurrected. I mean, it's still around, but it needs to be resurrected and used again as the, the rallying point for, for this fight, because we were going to have to start fighting back big time. And it's going to, it's going to be an awareness campaign to people who use Netflix and who use these services that are going to be impacted the most. Exactly. I mean, I hope that Netflix, uh, even though they're playing the game, you know, they could, they could

throw a little 10 second thing at the beginning of every movie for a while, just saying why this is bad and how you can fight it. Um, if the NPA can make you watch those shitty, like, you know, you're a thief for downloading our movie, uh, videos at the beginning of every film, you go pay 20 bucks to see, then why the hell can't Netflix drop 10 seconds of saying you're being railroaded by the, the cable, uh, robber barons now. So, you know, exactly. So get on that Netflix. I know you're

listening. Yeah. So Reed Hastings is the first thing he listens to every Friday. Exactly. Yeah. So in between that and, uh, you know, the kind of the internet is screwed in general and hopefully it'll get better. Um, I'm obviously very involved in the music industry and another big article came out about, uh, how musicians are getting screwed as well. And it's kind of the same deal. It's, it's Spotify, you know, Spotify makes all the profits and the little dribs and drabs that we've

talked about, uh, on the show a couple of times that comes down to musicians is just pitiful and painful. Um, so they actually have started a new coalition to kind of, uh, musicians to fight against, uh, all this stuff that's happening with the streaming services and the complete lack of money. Uh, David Burns on board, RMS, Mike Mills, cakes, John McCree, a couple other people all, uh, getting out there and actually fighting, fighting the power, man. And, uh, good for them. And I hope

that, uh, I've signed up for it. Um, I, if you like music, I suggest you do it too. Uh, the content creators coalition is the new group and, uh, we'll see what they can do. Who are they fighting against here? They're fighting against, well, consumers that want to get cheaper music, or are they fighting against bad deals that they made with the record industries? Who's the, who's the dragon that they're trying to slay? That is the real problem. Cause, cause it's really unknown. I mean, it's,

it's, uh, there's so much, uh, it's basically record labels. I mean, it's certainly for, for these guys, cause they are all locked into record contracts and they don't make their own deals with Spotify. The record label goes out and makes a deal with Spotify, makes a deal with beats, makes a deal with RDO, um, Pandora, all these streaming services, uh, the record labels negotiate their own deals. So, uh, I mean, if you've ever seen record label accounting and I guarantee you haven't because you just start laughing right now at my use of the word accounting,

it's so bizarre and Byzantine anyways, that it's almost impossible to tease anything out. I mean, all we kind of get are just rough ideas of what the rates, um, that Spotify pays and, and other people. And it's, so the dragon is kind of this amorphous cloud of bullshit, but, uh, but it's the same thing with, you know, Comcast and all that sort of stuff. What is the dragon? Who knows? We all know it's just wrong. And can we do something to fix it is kind of where we're at. Yeah. Cause it

sounds to me like just being an outsider to the music side of it. It sounds like the, what they're, what you're dealing with is 50 years of bad decisions from artists being railroaded by the record labels who had all the money because it used to cost so much because the, you know, the old days, the record labels were loan sharks. And now that everybody can do it themselves. It's just, this is a transition period, you know, heavily for music for sure. Um, it's extremely, and I, again, I don't think that they have any solution. They're, they're not,

they're not standing up to present. Here's what we should do people. It's more just, Holy crap. What the fuck is wrong with this? Can we please start looking at this? Let's get awareness. Can we get some lawyers on board? Can we start talking about this? Can we remove the, you know, the basically pull the accounting out of the dark and sudden sunlight clause, you know, let's, let's see what's going on here and let's make sure that we're actually getting paid appropriately for our stuff. Yeah. Good luck.

I mean, I hope they figure it out. Yeah, me too. Because like you were saying, I mean, I think the music industry is much the same way. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, but it's got to get better. Labels can't afford to do what they can't afford business as usual. I mean, what we're seeing is a dying industry. Oh, it's, it's over. I mean, we are basically, no offense to Warner brothers, but really we're, we're down to one music label at this point, which is universal.

Uh, that's it. They're the only ones making any money. They're the only ones that are going to survive. Uh, they've bought up all the other ones. I mean, we're, we're heading to the same sort of monopoly that we are in so many aspects of the world right now. It's all power is getting coalesced into one or two hands. But here's the thing about that monopoly. That's, this is like, they're, they're holding together for warmth. Well, well, you know, the sun is going down by the, by the time the sun rises again, they'll all be dead and there'll just be a new, new dawn with a new business

model with, you know, artists doing their own thing, I think. And I think it's going to take another 10 to 15 years. Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, a lot of that infrastructure isn't in place and you also have to keep in mind, uh, there's artists are never really going to be able to do it all by themselves because they are artists. They're, they're not businessmen and lawyers and, uh, promoters, you know, their, their job is to write the music and that that's how all this originally got started in the first place before it all got evil and fucked up. You had a manager

who kind of took care of your interests. You had the record label who took care of distribution and promotion. Um, you know, and, and because artists really, as much as you say, you can do anything you want with a laptop. Now the temperament of the artist isn't there to ever be able to get their stuff out there because they're fucking crazy artists. That's why they write awesome songs. They're insane.

They're not capable of, of approaching the world in a rational business-like manner. So there will always be something there. I just, you know, hope it's better. Yeah. And you know, you've got services like topspin and other people that are going to step in and take the place of the label and, you know, provide services for them. So, I mean, we've talked about that before. It's, it's, it's a change, it's a changing environment. So I'm glad somebody is still trying to fight the good fight because, you know, you know, the fact that they're getting nothing for their music is kind of shitty. So, yeah,

I totally agree. So, uh, it's in the show notes, check them out, uh, go to their website. I think they have a little like, you know, sign up for their mailing list so you can keep informed about what's going on. And, and hopefully that will become something. I, I, I really do hope so because I love this industry as much as I hate it. And I'd like to see some changes happen.

So speaking of things that are not doing so well, like the music industry, Bitcoin is not having the best, uh, week that it's ever had. Well, there's a lot of people out there gloating about this too. Uh, um, you know, certainly old school financial people and everybody that kind of didn't want to get on board with the, with the whole concept. It's not dead. Well, here's the, let's, let's just back up for a second. So Mount Gox, which was the biggest, um, exchange has taken a shit and is

nowhere to be seen. They've kind of left the building with what I don't think they've left the building with any money because they've been, everything has been stolen. They had terrible security and somebody came in the back door, cut a hole in the wall and drove, backed up a pickup truck and took all the money. And, and, uh, and you know, Bitcoin value has tanked again, again, which is, you know, the problem is here's the thing. This is, this is what happens when you don't have government oversight. When it is the wild West, guess what? People will steal your

shit and there's no recourse. Uh, you know, your shit got stolen. Sorry. That's what happens when you, you know, you play around with something that is not federally mandated by any government, um, with no, uh, how was it with no, um, oversight? Oh, no, not, not oversight. Just, uh, repercussions for theft. You know, there's no laws. Yeah. There's no laws about it, which is, was kind of the appeal.

Um, so the idea is definitely not going to go away of, of, of these kinds of digital currencies that, that don't have nations attached to them. I don't think that they should. I think it's a great idea. Um, so what do you think will be next? I mean, I, and how can the concept be approached somewhat differently? I would love to see a currency that has a hundred percent transparency. I know Bitcoin was, you know, kind of used for more nefarious things and so is the American hundred dollar bill

that most more crime is done with a Benjamin than is done with the Bitcoin. Oh, very true. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that can't go away, but I mean, like I said, I would, I would love to see a digital currency that is a hundred percent transparent. Now it, you know, you don't have to be the only one and it would only be used for certain things, but wouldn't it be great?

No, it would be. So I could, I could just look online to see what you bought this week and see where your money went. Yeah. Like I said, it's not the only form you have cash, you have credit cards, you, you have this kind of digital currency just to kind of get the ball rolling and get people comfortable with it. So what? It's a hundred percent transparent.

Don't buy your porn with it. Okay. We'll call it NSA coin then. Use it, use it only for your titties to your church. I don't care what you use it for, but it would, it's a cool idea and it would be a cool option. And it certainly would, you know, get around a lot of these fears for digital currencies as they start up.

Yeah. Sounds like a terrible idea to me. Okay. No, no. The whole, I mean, the whole point of Bitcoin is it's anonymous. It's not supposed to be transparent. Fuck the, fuck the transparency. Yeah. I mean, that is, that's the point of Bitcoin. And it's also why it's having so many problems right now. I'm just talking about digital currency in general. So.

Let's go back to pelts and skins. Give me a coon skin hat any day of the week. It is cold here. I could use a coon skin. I was about to say, aren't you wearing one anyways? I do have a nice mossy mo, uh, fake fur hat that does look very, uh, Daniel Boone. Uh, man. So I don't know. It's, I stopped, stopped kind of following this a couple of weeks ago after we had Bonner on and talked about it because it's not something I'm going to play with. Yeah. I don't really have that kind

of cash to just play around with something that I just don't know what's going to happen with yet. Although if I did, I'd be buying it right now. Yeah. Not that it's down because it'll go back up. Then it'll go back down. It'll go back up. Then it'll go back down. That's what's going to happen. And it'll, it, I don't know. I don't know what the future is, what the future is going to be.

All I know is that this is a major hit for a lot of people and there's a lot of money that just, you know, vanished. Poof. Yeah. This is far worse than that guy who threw away his drive that had like a million bitcoins on it or whatever. Yeah. This is, this is some big money. And these, it's funny watching these people that are going to where the, um, the exchange was and sitting outside and with their little signs going, could I have my, my bitcoins back? Like, uh, I don't think anybody's in that building anymore, buddy. I think they left.

Yeah. They're gone. Um, so, so sad that the rich people are dumb. Rich people are getting bilked. Um, speaking of dumb, well, it isn't dumb, rich people. This is dead, rich people. Um, there's a, there was a story going around about Steve jobs getting his own stamp this year.

And to me, this is like, why, why is, why the hell would you give Steve jobs a stamp? It's like, you're not going to give Rupert Murdoch a stamp. You're not going to give Ted Turner a sample. I don't know. Maybe they have already. And I have, I've missed it, but I was about to say, I probably should have Googled famous people that have stamps for no reason before we got onto this story. Cause I'm sure there's just, I mean, there's stamps for, there's so many stupid stamps.

Why not jobs? I don't have a problem with that. I think that they should do a, they should do a whole line of like the great tech innovators. Why not? Let's, let's have a Bill Gates stamp. Let's have a job stamp. Well, if you're going to do the job stamp, then it needs to be the was stamp too. That's the whole point of the article that we found is that somebody brought it up, which is a very good point. Steve jobs was the front guy. He, he was the, he was a head and a turtleneck. The guys who made the shit, you're talking to your Johnny Ive, you're talking to your Wozniak, you're talking about everybody else. Those are the guys that made

the shit. They had the brains to come up with the goods. You know, he was jobs as a talking head who liked calligraphy and to drop acid and be a dick to everybody. Why would you, you know, why, why do you, why does he deserve a stamp? He doesn't. He's a visionary. He was the face. I mean, that's, yeah, I totally agree with the argument. That's the same argument for, for a great many things. It's always like, it's the quarterback. It's quarterback syndrome. It's always the quarterback that gets the attention when it's the entire defensive line that really saved your

asses that whole season. Or the lead singer of the band. Or the lead singer of the band. God knows that, you know, I can name about 35 different bands in which the, you know, the most amazing musician, the guy that drives the entire band and writes even most of the songs is not the lead singer. But I, you know, everybody just knows lead singer. He's the lead singer.

Stuart Copeland. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, I, I don't know if you've heard Sting's latest loot album, but it's a fucking piece of shit. Every time I hear like a new album that he comes out with, all I can picture is the Star Trek episode where Spock played that, that weird instrument. And it reminds me of, that's like going to be the next Sting album. I'm like, let's get him in the whole like Star Trek get up and just do that.

I always see him like sitting on a couch naked with like a small like loot, just strumming because it's like, all he's become to me in my mind is a loot playing tantric sex idiot. Damn, Sting used to be so cool. I need brain soap now. Please brain soap.

Not good. So I just, it, the whole thing with the stamp bothered me because it comes back to attribution, you know? Yeah. Jobs is getting credit for the things that other people built all along the way. And as a, as an engineer and a programmer, my whole, my whole career, basically, you know, I'm used to being marginalized and not getting a lot of the credit for the, the stuff that, you know, our teams build, even though, you know, you, you have the manager and

the project manager who get to go on the, the great retreats and get the big lunches with the clients. Well, you know, us, uh, gnomes are stuck in the office for 20 hours a day for three months on end, uh, building the project while they're out, you know, sipping martinis and you know, we're, it's great. We give, we give the programmers free jolt.

Well, okay. No, I like caviar motherfucker. Give me some, give me some kettle, one, some caviar in a, in a window and we'll talk. But yeah, I totally remember that. I mean, that's even the case even now. Like I'm just a two person company right now, but like, I'm kind of, I'm the programmer and my partner, Wendy is the designer and who gets all the praise for everything. Oh, it's all about the design.

Sorry, Wendy. Most people don't understand the parts that we generally do. Like they see the, they see the Photoshop doc and they're like, Oh, it's done. Like, Oh no, not quite. Not quite. Anyways, sorry to rant about that, but I completely agree with you a hundred percent. But then again, I don't actually give a fuck who's on a stamp. The post office is on its way out anyways.

Well, that's the funny thing. This is the point where I wish we would be on, on board with every other fucking podcast advertiser in the planet, because this is the perfect time to do a stamp.com. Yes. A big thank you this week to Robin Bota, who donated through our PayPal link on the website and they keep us in bandwidth this week. So thank you very much, Robin. We appreciate it.

Surprised that you didn't use any of the other means that we talked about, which was surprising, I guess. Yeah. Like a tugboat yards, uh, all that sort of stuff. Uh, but I mean, you know, if you're already signed up with PayPal, I guess that is a piece of cake. I actually forgot. We still have that up on the site. I thought we were just using a tugboat yards. Oh, hell no. I want everybody. Hey, if people want to give us money, I'm going to give them every opportunity. Feel free to send us bitcoins. No, every other opportunity. Okay. No, we still haven't run through, uh, that

other one that we talked about last week. Um, cause it has been a crazy week, but thank you, Robin. Uh, we do appreciate it very, very much. You are our bandwidth sponsor for the month of what month are we in? March coming up on March. That's damn. That's right. Wow. It's March already. Anyways, talk about the time passing our comments. Another comment of the week came from a day tripper over on Twitter, which you, uh, you should follow us there at, at dog podcast. Uh, day tripper wants to know how you and I met

Jason. How did we meet Brian? Well, way back in the day in the way back machine, there was a small internet company called box top. It was the second place I went to work after college. And, uh, you were the surly head programmer in charge over there. You were there before I was.

Oh, that's right. I was there a little bit before you were there when I walked in the door. So basically box top was my third internet company. I worked for a little joint, uh, in Santa Monica. Then I worked for this company called rock tropolis cause we were doing the future of rock and roll on the internet, believe it or not. And, uh, then I, uh, got hooked up with box top because of the paramount thing with star Trek and all that. But when I came in, when I came in the door, you were one of the first people I met and, uh, you, you were the surly programmer. You were the grumpy

motherfucker. I was the, I was the arrogant, you know, prick, but, uh, you were surly. Okay. I totally forgot. I, in my mind, you were there first because, uh, you know, Jason's got quite the big personality. So, but what about the spew stuff, which I wrote for a while?

Yeah. I mean, the first thing I ever did on the internet was like early in, uh, it's actually coming up on 20 years. And, uh, my girlfriend and I started in May of 1984. Uh, we did, uh, this little zine called spew, uh, which was, it was kind of 94, 94. Yeah. Would I say 84?

Yeah. I was about to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. And sorry. And there in, uh, yeah, in early 94, um, it was called spew. It actually, when we started, it wasn't called anything. It was like Molina and Thor's amazing bookmark, whatever site, because her handle was Molina because she played a lot of mortal combat too. And I was Thor because of a long story. Um, and we started this thing. We didn't actually come up with the name spew until, uh, a wired

issue came out years later with Neil Stevenson's short story called spew. And it kind of, it kind of resonated with what our goal with our website was. And that's where spew started and kind of got me on the road to what I did. Uh, people saw that. And, uh, I was known for 10 years for being the guy who came up with that. Cause we did a bunch of stuff that nobody had ever seen before. Yeah. I was, uh, I was, uh, regularly visiting the site back when I, I was still in college over at USC and I was actually kind of, uh, I was working

for an academic relations department. And then I actually thought I was going to get a job there when I graduated because I was starting to build out kind of their first website. I was actually even doing a gopher site for them at the time because people actually use gopher, which was insane. Um, and yeah, I remember seeing spew and I was checking it out all the time, both for, uh, the writing and, and seeing what you were doing with programming.

Cause I was teaching myself at that point too. Uh, but, oh, and the naked chicks. Cause you guys used to post a lot of that too. Yeah, we did post a lot of naked chicks. We were, we were actually in 1997 after we'd, we'd stopped doing the site. Uh, we were up for a, uh, you remember the webbies they're still around in the first year that they did the webbies. Uh, they had the best sex site category only the first for the first year. And we were up for that. I think, I think I've talked about that on a previous episode, but we got beaten

by, uh, Bianca's smut shack. Yeah, that's right. So you came into boxed up. I was already there. Uh, I found out you had done spew. I actually, you were still kind of running that for a bit, weren't you? Cause I ended up writing six or seven or something like that early 97. We quit. And then we got the nod for, uh, the webbies. Cause we, it was like right, right after we quit that we got the things like, Oh, you're up for an award. We're like, Oh shit. Oh, that's great. Thanks.

Appreciate it. Yeah. So, uh, we worked together pretty briefly actually. And, uh, then we both went our separate ways and started to work in different places, but, uh, we've always stayed in contact. Yeah. And we, we both like industrial music back then. We'd always go to the club together, wearing our vinyl pants and dancing and drinking and, you know, that kind of craziness. I think that was the main reason we kept in touch is because we did like the nightlife in Hollywood back then a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, to be, uh, to be young, to be back in our early twenties,

coding, coding cowboys. I miss it. I really do. I wish I could go back and do it again because I would have been rich by now. Oh God, we'd be so fucking rich. Feel the rich. Anyways, there you go. Daytripper. That's, that's how we met. I actually managed to finish another book in this last week with, uh, with my deadlines looming

and all of that. Sometimes you just need to stop coding and read something. Uh, I'd read the followup. Uh, I talked about the Atlantis gene, uh, I think two podcasts ago and I read the followup, the Atlantis plague, a thriller. I don't know why he has to add the thriller part to the title, but, uh, he did. Oh, that's for the ladies in the, uh, the line at the checkout at the grocery store. So they know what they're getting. I suppose so. Um, it was really good.

This, this one will blow your dress up ladies. Pick it up. Yeah. I actually enjoyed it. Uh, the writing he's definitely improved since, since the first book, it was a lot tighter, a lot more interesting. Uh, he won't let go of the ridiculous love story, but that's what I was going to say. Is this the one with the stupid love story that you, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's your standard, it's your standard. Like, uh, you can, you can always tell when like a professor is writing a book because it's always like, you know, the, the gorgeous young girl falls in love with the dashing kind of older professor type. It's just in every

fucking book known to man. And he of course did that as well. Uh, but he scaled it back a little bit. It takes a definite backseat to the actual real story that's going on here, which, uh, again, it's, you know, it's boner candy for me. It's, you know, all kinds of crazy sci-fi stuff. It's just, it's, it's, it's good. I really liked the story. Um, he's going to, there's a third book coming, which hopefully we'll wrap it up because it's starting to get spread a little thin. Um, uh, you know, after the first one, I can now say, I, I, I'd

say, go ahead, read it. I'd recommend it now. I am so sad that I've already picked a title for this episode because boner candy is right up there. Well, we can save that for, for next week. I'll try to throw that in every, it's my new catchphrase. Oh, that is total boner candy, dude. No, we sound like we're back in our twenties. Mind boner candy. I think mind boner. Oh yeah. I was a mind boner last time. Cause we're still getting, if you look at the search, uh, the search traffic we get for our main website, there's, there's a lot

about big butts and, uh, lady boys. Yeah. Fat chicks, lady boys, and big butts. Yeah. I'm not sure what kind of site we're running these days. Well, I should check it out too at grumpy old geeks.com. I can guarantee the people, the people who are searching for that and find us are fairly disappointed. Very disappointed. Sorry folks. Um, so this week I finally got the new Daniel Suarez book. Ooh, it's out influx. Yes, it is out. It came out

on the 20th. I'm excited. Here's the thing. I, I pre-ordered this at amazon.com and audible.com hoping to try out the whisper sync, uh, stuff, which is, I don't know if you know about whisper sync, but what whisper sync is, if you're reading the, if you're reading one medium or listening to one medium, when you stop on one, you can pick it up on the other and they know exactly where they're at. So I can be reading in bed or on the crapper from the, uh, the ebook.

Then I hop in the car and I put on the audio book and it was exactly where to pick up, which is pretty damn groovy. I, I would love to have tried it, but apparently this one does not support it. So I, I paid a bunch of money and I got two copies of a book that I only need one medium for. Uh, so I got on the, got on the horn with the boys at audible and said, Hey, yeah, yeah, this doesn't work. Can I have my money back? And we've talked about the return policy

and how awesome it is at audible. Uh, there's a, there's a new caveat. You can only do it through the web interface without any, you know, people interaction three times. This is a new thing, uh, because I've probably returned 10 books at this point. Right. Oh, excuse me.

That mountain dude getting into system. Um, so I, I hopped on the, uh, the chat, the online chat to figure if I could talk to somebody in Mumbai at six in the morning. Um, hello, my name is Steve. Yes. And, uh, they ran me through it. It took them 30 seconds and I had my credit back and I'm like, why I tried to get through this on the interface. And it was like, Oh yeah, yeah, no. Uh, just after three books now you have to either make a phone call or do an online chat. I'm gonna tell you right now, do the online chat takes no time at all.

Yeah. I told him what happened. I'm like, look, I just wanted to try whisper sync. I'm going to keep my Kindle version. I'll just read it that way. And they're like, yeah, no problem. So onto the actual book. Yes. Oh my God. I was so upset with Daniel Suarez's last book that I thought was okay. It was me here. The problem is the first two books were so close to possible future fiction. Yes. That I was, I was so excited because I could see

the first two books, uh, freedom or I mean, uh, demon and freedom TM were so close to something that could actually happen probably in about two years. I can see that actually coming to pass. The, the third one was just like, it could have been done already. And it was drones and bad writing. They didn't even, I don't think he hired an editor for that one. The, this, the copy was terrible. This one, it's also a future. It's a kind of a future, uh, techno book,

but this is complete 100% shit ain't never going to happen. Fiction. Okay. Okay. But what's really fun is, uh, um, spoiler alert, uh, you might want to fast forward for the next two minutes. If you haven't read the book yet, or Brian, you can close your ears. Uh, the book deals with a, a society that has a police department that stifles disruptive technologies. So the humans

cannot get too, uh, advanced without this, uh, like police force letting it get advanced. It's really fun. It's too bad. We don't have that for San Francisco right now. Um, and it's just, it's the whole story is, is it's, I'm not, I don't want to really talk about too much about the story besides that. Uh, you'll find that out in the first, you know, chapter, um, well-written character developments really well done. There is a love story that is a non love story, which is great.

You don't, you don't even know it's a love story until the last, last chapter. Fetching young girl and attractive older professor type. Nail on the head. Nail on the head. What is up with you guys? Can't you write any other sort of romance? I swear to God, but all in all, all in all, I have to say, I was very happy with the book.

Um, and even though I returned the audible version and kept the Kindle version, I listened to the audible version. And sometime I'll go back and read the Kindle version. I read the Kindle version of the other two. Um, but the, and I, and bought the audio version. So I've, I've actually bought like a ton of his books on both mediums. This time I'm like, eh, give me one. Um, the, the guy who reads his books is really, really good at it. It, it two acts. I've never listened to him at one exit two acts.

He's good. Um, so now next week I'm going to check out with my credit that I got back. I actually got two other books I got. I checked out your recommendation on Dr. Sleep. So that's my book this week, but also, um, there's a series of books called Metatropolis, which are, um, this is the third one that's, that's just come out. It's a series of books. They're all short stories based around a, uh, um, a world that is, it's kind of like a, uh, I don't know what you'd describe it as. Um,

basically it's a, it's a shared world between authors. So everybody writes different short stories about different aspects of the world. And there's usually about seven or eight authors per book. And there's new authors, every book, and this is, there's the new ones out. And the first two were really good. Some of the stories are hit or miss. Um, some are better than others, but it's, it's good enough to keep going. Only the first book you can buy in print.

The second and third book are, um, all their audio only, but they're done by the sci-fi channel whose audio book department is exquisitely good. So very cool. Yeah. And I mean, they're full cast and great, uh, like super pro readers, lots of, uh, uh, you know, sci-fi superstars get in there like LeVar Burton and basically has been from, uh, sci-fi series past. Will Wheaton's in there and all that kind of stuff. So very, very cool.

Yeah. I definitely check, recommend checking that out since it's audio only. We'll put a link to the audible stuff and you can get it there. Perfect. And I'm actually just started up based on your recommendation. Uh, the Lewis, uh, McMaster. Finally. Yes. Uh, yes, I am. I just started up on young miles. Uh, I may finish it before the next podcast so I can finally talk about it. But just the fact that the Daniel Suarez influx is out now might get that pushed back a little bit.

Cause I'm, I'll be buying that as soon as we're done with our podcast and probably reading that first. So we'll see. I'm hoping, hopefully cause, uh, some of the stuff that I gave you was, was anthology based. Hopefully I think, uh, I kind of go, uh, you also provided me with the list of, uh, probably the way I should go through and read them and a young miles was first and that's where I started with. Okay, good, good. I think that's the warrior's apprentice is the actual first novel.

That's part of that. That's how I read it. Um, so we can talk about that another time. We'll talk about that when I, when I get through at least one of the books, you should get them, get through two of them cause they're fucking good. Okay. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So, uh, one of my previous recommendations was Unibox, which is the new, uh, mail system that I'm using on, uh, the desktop for the Mac. It's,

uh, so far so good. It crashes kind of a lot, but it doesn't really, it doesn't really break anything. It's just like a quick reboot and it works again. Um, my biggest complaint is that in the compose window for some reason, I mean, these guys have done a lot to, you know, spin the email paradigm on its head, but what they've done is they put the subject first, then the to, then the from, then the body. Okay. Have you ever had an email client that did that that had anything but to

from subject body? No. And it would drive me absolutely insane. I, I, I've basically made my transition to Mac. I hate mail. I hate it. Yep. Everybody, but I'm not ready to make the switch to Unibox because there's just too many tweaky things like that. That would just drive me insane.

Um, I'll, I'll tell you what I'll, I'll look through there. There are a couple other alternatives that we can, we can talk about Sparrow still, I think works, but yeah, the mail app is just a steaming pile of poo-poo. Um, I just, things like this drive me nuts where people are trying to disrupt the UX for no fucking reason whatsoever. Yeah. Don't do that. Don't do that. Give me two from subject, please fix that. You can make it a toggle. We've been doing this for 25 to 30 years

now. We've got email down. Don't fuck with it. I mean, even, I mean, yeah, from the old days, my Eudora client, you know, I did too. I use that religiously for ages. I actually, I, when I was going through some old files the other day, I found old Eudora mailbox files. I'm trying to import those into something. I think one of the reasons I actually, I use Thunderbird on, on my PCs is I like that so much as it reminds me so much of Eudora. I know you've crapped on Thunderbird a million

times, but I like it. If you like it and it works, the, I just want, here's, here's the deal that I've got right now. Mailbox app on iOS, Unibox on the Mac. The first person or the first company, I should say, to come up with an app on both platforms wins. They're both completely different ways of doing email. Yep. They're both, you know, they're both completely valid to me. The first one that shows up on both platforms gets my business forever. Well, until the next shiny thing comes

along. Until something else comes along. Exactly. Forever being, could be till Tuesday, who knows? Um, cause I'm just, I'm tired of having two paradigms of mail management. You know, I've got the inbox zero on one and I've got the person based, you know, weird one on the other, but it's like, come on guys, get it together. The only problem with mailbox app is that it doesn't work on standard, um, uh, IMAP email. Yeah. So they're getting there. They're, they're getting there

fast. Next one though. Unibox, uh, Hackpad. Hackpad. I love Hackpad. So we've finally found our solution for our show notes. I know. So nice. What we're, what we've had a problem with since the beginning is, uh, we're using a shared document to do our show notes every week to do collaboration for the show. And this also, this goes into anybody that's doing any kind of, you know, collaborative writing or note-taking or anything like that. We started with Google

Docs. Yep. Didn't really, it wasn't that great. It's fine. It's serviceable. Yeah. It gets the job done. Then Mammoth came along and we've talked about those guys forever and we liked them. They were great for what we needed. And then they kept changing things and became not so great for what we needed. So we went back to Google Docs, but now we have a thing called how I just hit myself in the fucking ear with my hand. Uh, Hackpad. Hackpad is the same type

of, uh, collaborative note-taking, uh, crazy JavaScript real-time interface. You know, so you can see what the other person's typing. It's got little circles with our faces in it. Exactly. It shows you right where the cursor. I can see when Jason's fucking around with our show notes. Exactly. And it gives you an email with who touched what. And on the left, it tells you like who's writing what, um, my favorite feature that this has been the bane of my existence

with Google Docs and Mammoth and almost anything on the Mac. Now, whenever you copy a text that has formatting, uh, attached to it, when you paste it, that formatting goes with it. And that is the biggest pain in the ass. So what I find is. Yeah. Every time that we would copy basically an article title and paste it into any of our show notes, it would always come in with stupid fucking formatting. Yeah. So since the beginning of the show and I do this for everything else anyway, I keep a BB, like an empty BB edit document open all the time. It's just like a,

it's a, it's a paste bin. So I copy it, put it in BB edit, paste it, copy it, put it back in something else just to, just to turn it to plain text and hack pad. Thank you so much. What they do is they just remove all the formatting period. No matter what you paste in the formatting is removed and just it's plain. It's perfect. So that, that alone has been amazing. Yeah. It's, it's been

really, really nice. And the, I mean, the, I, as I say this, my, my app just crashed on my, my iPad, but the iPad app has been fantastic for the most part. It took me a little bit to figure out there because they've got a weird document layout strategy. Yeah. So once we figured that out, I had to, yeah, I had to force quit the app and then have it reload everything. But the app has been fine for me on, on the iPad and the iPhone. Um, is it a little, little bit of formatting differences? Like if I paste a link from the iOS device, it has an underline in the web device.

It doesn't, or the web view. It doesn't do that. I don't know. Little things like that, that are not deal breakers. Let's just say that. Yeah. The other great thing is, um, any of your hack pads, you can, uh, tie to your Dropbox account. So, and it just exports HTML. So when we're done with this show, I just copy, I just opened Dropbox, pull out the HTML and paste it into the, um, our shitty WordPress, uh, install and boom, our show notes are done straight from, you know, cradle to

grave right there as it is. Exactly. It's going to save me so much time and it's free for like, you know, smaller accounts and then you pay for bigger accounts. Yeah. I, I highly recommend it. If you're doing any kind of group documentation or, or editing or anything like that, it's by far the best thing. And we've tried them all now. Yeah. I mean, we've tried so many of them. This to date, this is the best one so far. So, uh, thank you hack pad. Yes. Thank you very much.

Uh, my last bit is, uh, this little thing called status board by panic. It's been out for a while. It got really terrible reviews when it first came out as being buggy and it's, it's, you know, drag and drop status monitor that they use actually at panic to track, you know, sales and, um, incoming support emails. What, you know, what's what you can put in a, you know, a couple of prebuilt widgets, like your Twitter feed or your email and some RSS feeds weather.

And then there's some, there's, you know, you can pull in a custom Jason objects that you have to write, you know, um, pass throughs for yourself. Right. Cause I've got one for our, our stats for grumpy old geeks that I can just flip up and see, see how our downloads are doing and things like that. It's, uh, it's 10 bucks. It's not worth 10 cents. I would, I would not recommend anybody buy it. Uh, the, the way the drag and drop, uh, stuff lays

out from portrait to landscape does not translate. Well, you cannot do like, uh, it's, it's trying to do like a responsive type of layout. So when you, when you turn it, it, it auto kind of adjusts the fields doesn't work. I'd rather it just give me two, two, uh, layout options like, okay, so I'm going to create my status, uh, board in my landscape format. And then one of my portrait format and stick to those, but don't try and be smart. Uh, cause it's not

right. There's a, the other downside is if you want to display it on an HDTV, uh, through like a plug type of thing, you know, with the, the HDTV out, uh, to $20 upsell in the app store, twice the cost of the app to be able to project it onto your, your HDTV, which, uh, I think you can pretty much do with airplay and pass through now. Don't, don't, don't quote me on that. I'd have to go try it. But, um, either way, 20, 30 bucks for an app

that is really not worth, you know, a buck. So sorry, panic. I love you guys. You, you give me so much joy with everything else you do, but this is just terrible. I actually, um, I've had a number of failed app experiences this last week as well. I'm actually not even going to mention basically anything by name. I might mention one. Uh, if you've been listening to the podcast, you know that, uh, I'm currently an escrow on a house. So I've been dealing into the world of home improvement apps. Uh, specifically

I'm trying to figure out paint colors and things of that sort. Um, frustration, uh, inevitable. Uh, a lot of these apps are really bad. They crash a lot colors, you know, they didn't do a good job of, of the photography or getting the colors, right. So they're not true. Uh, that's kind of to be expected. Um, what really surprised me is how many of these companies are charging for an app that basically lets you pick paint colors that you then go purchase.

They should, these apps should be free because they are basically selling you a product. Uh, I was shocked by that. Uh, some of the fancier apps out there, I refuse to pay for them because I'm just not going to pay for something that's just selling me something. Um, you know, you can like take photos of your, of your actual room and then it'll digitally add in the color to the wall. So you can supposedly see it, but it doesn't really work because it's lighting and things like that. Whatever. All these apps are kind of crap. So there you go.

Can't you just go to the paint shop and get swatches like you used to in the old days? If that, you know, I thought that perhaps this would have disrupted that industry, but that is still the best way to do it by far. That is exactly what I ended up doing. I ended up going down to home Depot, grabbing a shit ton of swatches, coming back and putting them up against the wall. Hey man, if it, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Exactly. So all those apps are horrible. If you're thinking about painting your house, do not even bother.

Just go down to your local paint store. Sweet. That's pretty much all I got this week. I've got a couple on deck that, uh, didn't quite make the cut this time, but, uh, yeah, if you've got any, any apps that you're thinking about buying that you don't want to spend money on yourself, uh, drop me a note. I'll pick them up and give them a roll for you because, uh, it's part of the grumpy old geeks budget. I do. I've got my $20 a week budget for buying apps that hopefully don't suck. So, uh, info at grumpy old geeks.com.

So I've been having a little fun with Photoshop this week. I've been doing some of the stuff that we do for our new, uh, geek word or grump worthy, uh, segments on the website. But yesterday I saw a piece on how the GCHQ is watching people masturbate through their Yahoo, uh, Yahoo webcams, which I do believe is vindication for me putting black tape over my, uh, my webcams

for the past 10 years. You were right. So I had to bring out ceiling cat and, uh, ceiling cat is back. Oh, check all GHQ cat, but a GCHQ cat, but it'll be on the, it'll be actually on the website. And I think you should check it out because it is one of my, my, uh, uh, Photoshop masterpieces.

I do believe it is quite well done. It's very funny, but, uh, yeah, I mean, that's, uh, I saw a couple of tweets, uh, along the lines of, uh, basically if you have any device that has a camera on it, you should just assume that somebody is watching you at all times. Absolutely. And we've talked about that. And when there is a tip though, if you have a Mac, um, go grab that CIA, uh, Macintosh hardening manual that they use. You can actually turn off that camera at the system level. So even if somebody hacks into your machine, they they'll still have to have root to re-enable

it. Right. But yeah, that little green light don't mean shit. So don't worry about that. So yeah, they've got, uh, Oh God, well, how much was it? It was like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of images or million. It was it? Yeah. Six months that they just kind of 1.8 million.

That's it. 1.8 million people were, uh, spied upon. Yeah. Which is just insane. And the funny thing is that like the GCHQ doesn't have the, uh, GCHQ is the, uh, England's version of, you know, the NSA for those now just tuning in. Um, they don't have the skills to do that kind of thing. So they basically piggybacked off all of our intercepts. So we gave them, we gave them the images. They just got to play with them and store them. Yeah. Good times. Oh yes. Apparently Yahoo is, they're livid,

but you notice that Yahoo keeps coming up as the first people that are hacked the most in all of these stories. So it seems to be like, seriously, if you still have a Yahoo email address and are still using Yahoo for anything, like period, anything, this, this, this goes with flicker, the, you know, you can roll flicker into this too. Um, why, why just move on? I mean, granted, you're moving on to somebody else who's probably getting hacked as well, but Yahoo as is at the

forefront of not knowing what the hell they're doing. Yeah. Yahoo always just, uh, they're always the worst. And, uh, yeah, what the fuck are you still doing on there? Get Google mail for God's sake. At least you'll be stuck with everyone else. Yeah. I mean, the problem with Yahoo is that there's nobody left in that they're trying to rebuild, you know, their, their brain trust, but you know, a couple of years ago, everybody just bailed. So they got nobody. Now we come to go to here's the,

here's the, here's the biggie of the week. All right, everybody sit back, relax, and imagine Jason wearing a tinfoil hat. Cause here it comes. I don't think I'm wearing a tinfoil hat on this one. I honestly don't. I've, I've made my, I made my, you were right about the camera. So, so here we go. I see. Here's, here's the deal. I made my plea on the website this week. I posted an alternate theory on the story behind how this bug came to be. Now the bug is one extra line of code in the, uh, SSL

TSL, uh, implementation in OS X and iOS that bypasses all of the security certificates that we use to verify identity on the internet. Okay. Now this is a simple one line break that just says, okay, anything that gets to this next line fail, just go to it. Everything's fine. Just move along.

Nothing to see here. Everything's all right. Do not panic. Now my theory was going back to something that I posited early in the years of grumpy old geeks. It was that there will be programmers that get jobs at Google, at Apple, at all these main, you know, um, software providers who will purposely put in holes and hacks and bugs and then leave and sell them. You know, that's, that is a, a viable

business model that is going to happen. And if it's, I mean, I'm sure it's already happening. And I think this might be one of them. You know why? Because it is elegant as far as, as far as where it's placed, how it's placed, it looks innocuous and it is too, it is too perfect to be a random screw up.

It honestly is that it hasn't been caught by anything, you know, along the way that there are no unit tests that have caught this, that nobody else has seen it that, I mean, this is, this is, it's too fucking, it's too good to be true. It is too good to be random. To your point, Jason, but, uh, you and I have also worked in, in massive projects with, with tons of people and we know how easy it is for things to fall through the cracks and just get ignored and not

caught. Um, yeah, but this is, this is too good. This is such a juicy target that breaks all of the security of an entire platform. It, come on, give me a break, give me a break on the planet at the moment. Yeah. So, uh, if you have not updated your iOS or your Mac yet, do so immediately. Uh, as in like, stop, pause, go do it right now. Yeah, seriously. Um, and backup first though, you should

always backup first because the, uh, the 10, nine, two update can be a little wonky. I've heard it worked fine for mine on both of them. But, uh, what I did though, is keep around a, uh, I have a copy of install Mavericks that has the bugs in it. So in future, if I ever want to go back and try and, uh, do a man in the middle attack on myself to try and get through any of the, uh, Mac software I can because it, it, it, uh, affected almost all the built-in stuff, even software update. The,

the built-in Apple software updater was prone to a bug that let, you know, that let anybody do a man in the middle attack and pretend to be Apple. Yeah. I mean, this is base level. I mean, it, it, it could not have gone more catastrophically wrong for Apple. This is as bad as it gets. And this is why I think it's, it's, it's too good to be a real bug. It really is because it is, it's, I mean, well, if we could track those Bitcoins, we could see if anybody bought

it. No, I can tell you right now, there's a witch hunt going on inside of Apple right now. They're trying to, they know who did it, who put that line of code in. So they're not, they're not going to tell anybody outside, but I would be really curious if anybody who works at Apple can, you know, shed some light under the table on what happened. If, if that person is still there, if they're gone, you know, there's, there's all sorts of things that could have happened with that, but they know

who, who, who made that check-in. Um, that they do. So we'll, we'll either hear more about it or we won't. I, my money is on, we won't cause Apple will keep it internal. Uh, Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, and somebody posted that, uh, that this was Apple trying to, uh, you know, knock their stock price down because they're going to do this, you know, this big internal buyback that they've been doing because they're going to be launching something amazing, uh, soon. And I'm like, nah, ain't good. That, that is totally out of the realm because they put

this in the Friday news, which if you ever watch the West wing, that's garbage day. That's where you bury things. Yep. So they didn't want this to be news and it turned out to be big news because a lot of people went, what? And we already know what the new Apple thing's going to be. We talked about it last week. It's the watch. So it's not going to be groundbreaking. We'll see. We'll see if the TV comes out first.

Oh yeah, that's true. I forgot about that. Yeah. That's still, that's somewhere in the books. Well, I still love Apple. Good job guys on fixing it relatively quickly. Yeah. Yeah. It was a couple of days for that. Uh, OS that was the big thing. It's like, okay, Apple just released an O day and told everybody about it for the desktop line. That was the bullshit part about it. It's like, okay, we found this thing for iOS. That's fine. And, and any security people who know, it's like, that's the same code base for the same bit of, bit of code that we're running on all of the desktops. It's like, why did you do that?

Why the fuck did you do that? Couldn't you have waited three days or five days? It was five days. With a fix. Yeah. Wait for the fix. So something happened. Somebody, somebody found it and was going to release it and they were probably pressured into it. Or there's some, there's some, there's some more stuff going on behind the scenes that we'll probably ever, than we'll ever know.

But guaranteed, guaranteed that something, something major went down there. And, uh, I still, I, I'm in my gut, I'm telling you, this does not feel right. It's not this, this bug does not feel right. Anybody that's written code knows that if then else statements, if you don't bracket them, you've got one line to do the, you know, what's going to happen after the if or the else and the then. And if you, if you do two lines or even a space between the lines, it breaks. So you bracket those things, you bracket those statements and these, this didn't. And that's why it's fishy.

That's why it's such a perfect, perfect way to, to break it without being suspicious. By not being suspicious to me, it's really suspicious. So that's my rant. Okay. Well done. And, uh, Jason actually wrote a really great article about it on grumpy old geeks.com. So if that intrigued you at all, by all means, go read it in its full entirety.

It's, it is all in its tinfoiliness. So I've spent the last two weeks, uh, working on this project that I'm about to, that's going to basically launch, uh, after some point after this podcast, um, which has been fine, but, uh, it's been a bit of a weird project in that there are people all over the world involved.

Um, there are people in the UK, there's people on the East coast, uh, and there's been a lot of needs for, well, I don't think we have ever needed a conference call, but they've decided we've needed a couple. So there's been a lot of emails thrown about from different people saying different times because nobody can ever get anything straight. And they can't just say it's at noon Pacific time.

Uh, they just say noon and I have to go off to some site and start doing calculations and figure out what the fuck time it is in the world. As I was doing all this, I was, uh, I randomly went to, uh, XKCD, which is a great site that I don't, uh, look at enough. And they just came up with a, uh, cool little comic that is a kind of illustrates the time zones of the world. Um, it's a lot of fun.

It's really neat. I printed it out and stapled it to my desk and somehow managed to, uh, squash the impulse to email it to every single person working on this project. This is actually a very cool, a very cool graphic. I mean, I love, I love XKCD and this is just genius level. I want to turn this into one of those. I want to put this on, you know, some cardboard with a spinner, you know, and have a little slider, like a slide rule, like a circular slide rule.

It's exactly what it's made for. So at some point I probably will do it. It's a, it's a beautiful little graphic. So check it out. Uh, it's in our show notes and I love rude to call because that's when most of my calls come. So it's quite interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great little graphic. Really cool. Uh, one other thing I stumbled upon this week, which I love, and it'll give you about 15 to 15 minutes, maybe a worth of fun. Holy stomping. Now this is a Monty Python based web game. I don't think that they were actually involved. They just kind of, you know,

inspired it. You get to play the big foot that comes down and squashes things in, in the Monty Python animations, uh, makes a big farting noise when you squash things and you get to basically knock out a bunch of characters from, um, you know, Holy Grail and things like that. So it's a, if you're a Monty Python fan, it's quite the hoot. Nice. I'll check that out for sure. Yeah. I actually pitched on the first Monty Python, uh, website. Did you really? That is one of those dream jobs. Like I, they have never done anything amazing with

python.com and it could be like just the most fun thing ever. Yeah. It was called Python line when we were first pitching. I think that's what they ended up going with, but it was, it was mired for years in, uh, infighting and stuff like that. But we did, uh, this like 48 hour overnight craziness, um, just pitch to pull something up.

I remember doing, I mean, this is when we were doing like video capture to still frame and I hand cut out John Cleese doing the silly walk and made like animated gifts that we've brought into director and did all this shit. And when we did the pitch, this is, this is me being crazy stalker. Remember the Connectix quick cams, those old 16 color or 16 grayscale cameras. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. This is just when they came out and I set one up in the office because I, I was the one that got to do the pitch. And I, so I got a picture of me pitching to Eric idol and I still have it to this day. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. It was so cool. I was, I was shitting bricks. That was my first celebrity that I met when I got to LA was Eric idol. So nice. That brought back the memories. Thank you. Um, gotta love money Python. Yeah. That was so

definitely one of those dream projects. I never got to pitch on one. Another one for me, which, uh, I don't think we ended up getting either was, uh, the Muppets, which, which would be a lot of fun to build a site out for that. But I remember the politics that gets involved on this stuff is just insane. Yeah. And the Muppets have changed hands so many times I did. I came in at the last minute on a Muppets Facebook game that was, uh, that turned out, they said it was a nightmare to deal with them.

Right. So, cause you're dealing with multiple studios, the family, and sometimes there's Germans involved, you know, man. Oh God, the Germans. Yes. Um, so, uh, let's talk about the Brits. There's a, there's this English company called Thabto. Thabto designs. They make this really weird kind of kooky stuff. The first product that they ever made was a, uh, mug that had a handle that was brass knuckles. That was the first thing that I ever saw them make. Now they've got tons of crazy

stuff that they make that, uh, it's, it's just, it's kind of novelty stuff. You cannot get the, the brass knuckle mug that I have anymore, which saddens me because it was, I have just a white ceramic mug. Now it's like they've got white and gold and black and silver or whatever. I don't like them as much. They actually did a Halloween one though, that looked like it had blood stains on the cup. Like after you hit somebody with a cup, it was very cute, but, uh, none of the ladies liked it. It kind of grossed them out. So I got rid of that one. Um, right. Yeah. They

got some fun stuff in here. It's, it's definitely a UK company cause they've got the Sabuto stuff, which is great. Um, nobody in the U S has ever heard of that. It's just a, it's like a fun little table soccer game that you play. Um, I was wondering what the hell that was. I played it when I was a kid, but it's, it's not popular over here at all. Uh, I like their JPEG hooks, which are basically, uh, uh, coat hooks with a, uh, a clothes pin at the top. So you can put pictures of whose coat

goes, where, which I thought was kind of cute. Yeah. There's some fun stuff. A little bit too much of the mustache, uh, line of hipster things going on here. Yeah. No mustaches. Um, they have this thing called the Wong key, which is kind of a wedge that you stick on your key chain. So when you go to a restaurant and the tables, uneven, you kind of wedge the key underneath it. That is genius. It is genius. But why do you want to carry that thing around for the 0.00001% of the time of your life that you're going to be carrying this, that you'll actually use it. That's the

problem. Plus you've, you've now put this on the floor in a restaurant and it's all gross and disgusting. And then you're sticking it in your pocket or your purse or wherever. Yeah. It's like, no, no, you know what they have. They have coasters that you can fold in half and shove under the table. And those are, those are free. Very true. But I recommend checking them out. They've got cute stuff, a little overpriced, but, uh, I, I hope they come back with the mugs again, because everybody

should have that brass knuckle mug. It's good stuff. Closing shout outs. For my closing shout out, I'm going to actually give a shout out to Coldplay, uh, which is, you know, one of my clients and, uh, they just put out a new song called midnight with a gloomy kind of atmospheric video as well. Uh, as much as they can drive me insane just because they're a client, uh, I'm really impressed with them. Uh, the song is kind of almost a low tempo EDM style thing. It's a very not Coldplay. Um,

I can't imagine any of the other kind of, you know, bands that are up for biggest rock band in the world, like you two or green day or the fucking red hot chili peppers, uh, putting out anything this far into their career that is just so different and, and taking such a risk. It's a great song.

Check it out. Coldplay.com. What is EDM? Electronic dance music. Oh, I see. There is nary a piano or a guitar on this track. So it's all beepity boppity boopity. No, it's, it's more low key. Like it could have turned into like this massive kind of a dance track and, but they didn't go that direction with it. So it's, it's just like five, six minutes of atmospheric, uh, ghoul background noise. It's, it's really nice.

I it's, it's definitely my favorite Coldplay song. Speaking of Loki, I saw the Thor two movie. Ooh, that was bad. Oh, the first one was horrible. I liked the first one after, after he got to earth and you got past it. Just this damn space Vikings pissed me off. Yeah. I want to not get on that tangent. I don't know how you can take Natalie Portman and put her in something and have it be miserable, but they managed. So, uh, 750 words last time, uh, 750 words.com. Uh, last time we did a

show, I talked about doing a, uh, uh, March challenge for this to do 750 words a day for the entire month. I, uh, have been practicing. I've got, uh, I've been using the site with my iPad air and my zag folio keyboard, which I've noticed you've been doing this because you've been filling up grumpy old geeks.com. I tell you what, this is what I'm loving this, this combo. I love it. Um, the keyboard is fantastic. I mean, I know I pimped it on the show before, but I'm just having a blast

writing on this thing. Uh, it's like an old netbook, but the keyboard is better. The, I've got the retina display on the iPad and with 750 words, the, the editor works perfectly flawlessly because it's just a web editor. Problem is, uh, 750 words used to be free and now you have to pay after 30 days. So I didn't want to throw out a challenge to the listeners for something that you actually had to pay for. Um, so I might still do it, but what I'm finding is that every word processor I own,

which is, I think I probably have 10 or 15 different, uh, iOS and, and, uh, macOS word processors, they all have this thing called word count. So I kind of set, uh, 25 minutes on the, the old timer and, uh, start typing and I can hit 25 words. I actually hit 25 words in about 15 minutes.

I mean, uh, 750 words in 15 minutes, um, up to 25, but you know, it's, uh, it's free. It's free. I can put together an HTML page for you with about 10 lines of JavaScript that'll count words too. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I actually have to, I have to put out 200 bucks this, this week, which, okay.

This is one of those things that pisses me off. There's a, uh, a really nice, um, editor like JavaScript text editor that you can have a drop in for called redactor. Um, because there's one out there called tiny MCE that's free that most people use. It's just terrible, but this one's called redactor. And I was looking at it the other night. I'm like, Oh, $99 for a developer. I'm going to go to the bathroom real quick and then get my credit card and come back and I'm going to buy it so I can use

it on these projects. I come back, I refresh the page and it's $199 in between going to the bathroom and coming back. They had released a new version and changed their pricing model. But if you had had the $99 version, you were grandfathered in. I'm like, Oh, damn you. The lesson learned, never refresh the page. Oh man. Well, I, I, I had to refresh it because when I had, uh, add to cart, it broke.

Ah, right. Cause the, the, the, the skew was not more, not available anymore. I was like, damn it. So I'm thinking if I buy redactor and literally, yeah, with a little JavaScript and some, some jQuery and PHP, I can probably rewrite 750 words in, uh, in the span of about an hour and a half. Um, maybe, maybe I'll do that and I'll just put it on grumpy old geeks and let people play with it.

But yeah, it's, uh, the thing with, with 750 words is you get badges, you know? Yeah, it's gamified. It is. It is gamified writing, which is, was the fun part, but now it's, it, it almost is too stressful as one of the reasons I left is like, if, uh, something happens, cause I was always like getting the, you know, the road runner badge and all the badges for writing fast because I could knock out 750 words, like no, nobody's business. And, uh, I would get frustrated because I was like trying to

think of something and like do a deeper dive on a topic and would end up just typing gibberish, like, you know, just, you know, stream of consciousness. So the timer wouldn't run out so I can get my words then going back. And I'm like, why don't I, that's silly. Why don't you just have a cup of coffee, take a walk and think about it, then finish your thought, you know?

Yeah. But so I think, yeah, now that I've talked it through, I think I'm just going to open up BB editor, any of these other things and write because writing has been, it has been a ton of fun writing on the site. I know you've been going crazy with it. I got to catch up, but yeah, because you've been, uh, slacking. I've been busy with day job. Like I haven't. Jeez. Well, I'm never going to write a daily like you've been, but, uh, grumpy old geeks.com. Check it out. Jason's been on Jason's

been on fire. Fire. That's what's what I got this week. Um, next week is going to be a little difficult because there's going to be some, uh, disruption going on in, uh, where my ass is sitting in front of a computer literally, uh, cause there's a very good chance that I will be on the road. So we'll see what happens. And, uh, we will, yeah, we will get a show out next week. We don't know where it will be from or when, or how long it'll be or what we'll talk about. But, uh, yeah, we're going to be a show. We will make it. Yeah. I'm just

mainly saying that because we've moved to the, uh, same day delivery, like hopefully doing it on Friday. So it may be a day, day off on either side. So if you're a pod slurfer, slarper, whatever the hell you call them nowadays, uh, doesn't update right away. I apologize. It'll be my fault, but you can, you can email Brian. Yes. Feel free to email me, uh, particularly at any time zone you'd like. All right, man. Have a good week. Have a good week.

Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook and facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com. Have a good week. Okay. Last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida at QVC. Fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home,

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