48: Clear Your F'in Cache

Hello Jason, I'm reporting live from the Ukraine today. Well, not really, but there's a lot of

construction going on next door, so if you hear loud bangs and crashes, I'm hopefully still here. Okay, you're not getting bombed or? Not currently, no. The hipster revolt has not begun yet. I wonder what that would look like. I don't know. Lots of mustaches and guys riding bicycles at you.

How does one disrupt a disruption? By normalcy. Normalcy. Okay. That's the anti-disruption. Right. Well, I feel bad for your construction. I'm getting ready to get on a train, so we're doing this a day early because while you have the Ukraine, I will have the clickety-clack of the open rails, which would probably be really annoying to rely on. Right. I'm actually very jealous. I've always wanted to do a cross-country train trip. That sounds amazing to me.

Well, it's not that big a deal for the one I'm doing. It's literally, you know, it's kind of like Greyhound Plus Plus. Right. My room is six and a half feet long by three and a half feet wide, so it's going to be, it's not really like I'm going on, it's not a palace on wheels. It's not classy. It's not the Orient Express, for God's sake. No, it is not like the caboose they had in the Wild Wild West.

Oh, yeah. That's very fancy and very geeky. Yeah. Not the horrible movie remake, but the classic television show. Oh, right, right. Well, you know, the movie remake did have Salma Hayek's butt. A giant spider. And that. Oh, man. So you mentioned something on Facebook yesterday, and it really kind of, it really struck a nerve with me. This is the thing that we have to say several times a day when

we're dealing with clients, and it's clear your cache and reload. Yeah. And you'd think at this point that people would get it, especially clients that I've worked with for years and years and years, but it's not, it's, the problem isn't, it's just clear your cache and reload. Then it becomes the email back. How do I do that? But they don't provide any information as to which browser they're using. So then you have to respond with, okay, what operating system and what browser? And then

you go from there. And then you go from there again. Well, and to be, to be clear on here, when we talk about clear your cache and reload, we talk about the web browser because we're dealing in the web and the browser caches everything. It keeps a copy because it doesn't, it's lazy. It does not want to have to go to the store and get the website again and come back. And it just says, copy of it. Well, when we make changes, it still doesn't know. And yeah, it saves the cash and

serves you the cash. But we're in this business dealing with supposed professionals every day. And every goddamn time that we do a change, you have to do this dance. And it's like, I don't know how hard it is to get it through these people's heads that, oh, I have to do this every time.

They don't, they don't, the, the, the nerds don't magically make my browser work differently today than it did for the past 10 to 20 years that I've used one. And I don't know, I don't know how we're going to fix this, but in here's, here's what I've done. Um, I, you, you can, you can adopt this if you like, uh, I call it the, my bad, uh, ticket. Right. So anytime they, as you were saying, you send back and forth and you have to do the browser thing.

And, uh, if they ever send you back an email that says, oh my bad, 50 bucks, dude, I'd be rich. I would not be sitting here recording this. I would be on an Island somewhere. Uh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's an insane thing to have to do all the time. It's like at first, you know, 99% of the time, the changes that they want are stupid anyways. And then you just go, fine, whatever. I'll change the shade of blue slightly. And then you upload it all up to the server. And then, you know, I check it locally. I check it on three different

browsers and I go send the email saying done. And then it's like, well, it looks the same. Yeah. Here we go again. The dance begins. I mean, he used to be able to tell the force reload, but sometimes that isn't even enough. And force reload was kind of easy. Then it was just like, all right, shift F5. Come on. Yeah. Well, and a max shift reload, just, you know, shift and press the button, uh, which sometimes still works. But what I've, I've done now is literally, I have to, we can't just say done. We used to just be able to

say done. Saves us all a bunch of time. They go shift, reload, whatever, clear the cache, reload, whatever. We're done. They're like, Oh, it looks great. Nope. Not anymore. Because we're dealing with these people who have no background in computer science or the web history. I mean, granted, neither, neither of us have computer science.

That's true. But we know it, but we know it. And we've said the thing that gets me frustrated is when I explain it and then it's magically forgotten a day or two later. Uh, that afternoon. Yeah. That afternoon. Yeah. Well, what are you gonna, I mean, partially it is a lot of people that it's that thing that we've talked about many to many times, which is everybody because they, they have their phone and they can do Twitter themselves and Facebook themselves.

They think they understand the internet. They think they, they get how everything works and how could it possibly be this hard or anything like that. Another thing is just, you know, in this day and age and the way that we do business now and, and instant messages and emails flying around constantly, nobody reads, nobody pays attention. Nobody has time. It's all just, and then that's that. And that's about as deep into anything that anyone will ever look.

I think we, I think we nailed it on the head, like probably an episode to, uh, the internification of the internet. Yes. Because we do have the interns running the show. But what I was, what I was saying before was that now, um, I have a cut and paste, uh, reply instead of done. I just, I have like a list of replies in Evernote that I deal with when I deal with clients day in, day out with them. If I know that I'm going to have one of those email days or IM days where you're going back and forth, I open up my, my Evernote template, uh, note and literally copy

and paste things over. I should, there's that key command thing that everybody uses. Uh, I can't remember the name of it. Um, where you can do like, you know, shortcuts and keys and all that stuff. It used to be called quick keys, right? Yeah, there was quick keys. And there's another one that's out now that everybody talks about all the Mac nerds talk about. Um, but I copy and paste, I'm too damn lazy and I'm cheap. Right. Well, I'm going to have to clear your cash or, you know, the change is done. Please clear your cash, reload the page and let me know if that, that works for you.

Right. Uh, yeah, I think I'm going to have to write that and I'm actually going to put the addendum on the bottom with, if you are using Chrome, do this. If you are using Firefox, do this. If you are using Safari, do this. If you're using internet Explorer, get the fuck out of my life. Yeah, seriously. And then the quick key command, the quick key command will be command FU.

Send. There you go. Yes. Uh, if you thrice. Um, and you know, you can actually, since we're, we have our own websites for our, you know, our companies, we can actually have a, a fuck you on how to do that. You know, this is very true. And just link to the fuck you and be done with it.

Excellent. So we've solved that problem. No, we haven't. No, no, we haven't. Let's, uh, let's skip ahead to something that right ahead, um, about stupidity and gullibility, because this is kind of all the same sort of thing. And, uh, you mentioned this a bit earlier and I saw it flying around the internet at first. I thought it was the, uh, everybody reposting the back to the future graphic again, saying today is the day, uh, because somebody has redone it about 7,000 times and it still hasn't been the right date or the actual date that he went to the future

in, in back to the future. Right. No, this was, yes, this was, I got this through Tony. I follow Tony Hawk and it was a video of the, the hoverboard company releasing, saying that hoverboards now exist. And they did, you know, a cheesy video of hoverboards coming back. They had the DeLorean, they had the doc, you know, doc from back to the future in the video and some musicians. And it was a very well done video that was supposed to be like, look, we've invented hoverboard technology.

It's here, which, and they were showing the boards and they were obviously the stupid boards from back to the future too. Okay. This was, this was, this could not have been any more blatant if it said, this is a joke at the beginning of it. And Tony Hawk had to come out with a special video saying, I am sorry to my fans who thought that this was real. What? Well, let's be honest. Come on. This

is that's Tony Hawk's fan base. Probably not way up on the IQ point. Shut the hell up. I am one. I'm saying in general, man, if you looked at the bell curve of his fan base, it would be kind of a shark fin actually. I think it'd be transitioned to vert. Um, so I don't know this. It made me sad.

It made me very sad. The video was cute. I mean, it wasn't particularly funny, but it was cute. Yeah, it was cute. It was done nicely. Uh, I'd have to say I'm actually somewhat impressed with, with my personal self-selection of friends in that nobody on my Facebook feed seemed to think it was real. Although I did see an awful lot on Twitter. I didn't see anybody that thought it was real on mine. I just saw one person. I saw the Tony Hawk reply. And then I traced it back and then it's

like, Oh dude. Then I went back and saw some of my friends on Facebook that shared it. And they have really not bright friends. Sorry to my friends on Facebook that have not bright friends, but you know who you are. Um, yeah, it was, it was, it's just, Oh man, it ruined my day.

Well, you know what helps when you ruin, when your day's ruined, man, meditation, a little bit of meditation, but just 10 minutes to make the world seem like a much better place. Unless of course you happen to be up in San Francisco, uh, apparently where they're getting all pissed off about this. Uh, I don't need, is this a real story? I ran across the story on salon called gentrifying the Dharma, how the 1% is hijacking mindfulness. And the byline being as big corporations embrace

meditation. Some Buddhists fear that the religions being co-opted by elites. First off, uh, if you're a Buddhist and you're getting pissed off or you're fearing something, you're not, you're doing it wrong. You are not a Buddhist. You're supposed to be accepting of everything. And you should be actually quite happy that the greater world is embracing some of the principles of your religion and something that actually helps the brain. You should be happy about this. Apparently not.

Uh, it's a huge thing. I mean, we've heard about this for a while where corporations are starting to take in these things and getting their employees involved and everybody take a break and, you know, clear your mind and relax and calm down. Uh, and apparently there was a big thing going on in San Francisco where they put on some corporate event about it. And then a bunch of people came to disrupt the mindfulness presentation. Oh, that was kind of, that was a dick move. That's a total dick move.

I don't get this at all. Protesters walked on stage, unfurled their banners and began chanting. Wisdom means stop displacement. Wisdom means stop surveillance. San Francisco, not for sale. All right. So this is just San Francisco class war going on using religion and, and Buddhism and mindfulness and meditation as, uh, as a cloak basically.

Yeah. That's a, that's a mixed message shit going on there. I wouldn't even. Yeah. Yeah. I chalked that up to idiots. Yeah. I just found it funny. And I mean, I'm still such a big fan of those, those apps, um, and, and doing little bits of meditation every day. The main takeaway that I got from this story is how do all these people have so much fucking time?

Well, I can barely do the 10 minute meditations on, on Buddhify at two and all that sort of stuff. And, and these guys are putting on conventions and then other people are organizing to disrupt them and get a fucking job. People. Oh, it's flex time, man. Have you, this is what happens when you, when you work in San Francisco, everything is flex time because you're working until three in the morning, most of the time.

And you come in at noon, but you know, you can take a four hour lunch if you like, as long as your TPS reports are filed and ready to go by Tuesday afternoon at 3 PM. Exactly. And you've logged your 10 minutes on headspace every day, which is now being tracked by HR. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Comment of the week.

So recently I've found a new tool that lets me go through all of our comments from our readers from the different countries, uh, iTunes stores, because apparently there are more than one, um, which we'll get to in a little bit, but surely not. There's only America. Marca. Uh, so I did want to pull these out because we asked for comments before and we never, never read any of the ones from jolly old as it were. So we've got a bunch of comments from the UK and, uh, I'll run through these pretty quick and you can join in.

All right. So SDZZ123 from the UK says cynical rambling and it's great. Interesting uncensored spiel from two grumpy old geeks. I really enjoy the show and find myself agreeing often. So please keep up the great work. We shall. Thank you. SDZ123.

Yes. Thank you, Zed. I'll just call you that for short because it's fun. Uh, you need this in your life. Five stars from Phil the Birch. I just like saying it that way. I'm assuming it's Phil B. Birch also from the UK. If you've ever burst a blood vessel in your face when dealing with clients who think they know more than you WordPress or working in the digital slash social world of the developer designer or community manager, you need this in your life. Great tips on every area of the industry from two veterans without the buzzword spam. Loving your work guys. Keep it up. Thank you,

man. So podcast junkie 72 also from the UK gave us four stars. Dick asshole snappy thought provoking and worth a listen. This is a promising podcast put together by a couple of guys who clearly know their stuff and would be discussing it whether or not the mics were on. It's generally centered around the internet around internet culture and the tech world, but places what's happening right now in

context with what's gone before and the effects things may have on the future or recommended. So apparently not recommended enough for five stars, you dick, but okay, we'll take four. We'll take four. We'll take four. We're glad you did it. And everybody else, please, if you haven't already, give us a comment or at least rate us on iTunes because I maybe it matters who the fuck knows.

I hate it. It just makes us feel good. It makes us feel good. It does make us feel good, but this is like, I had no idea that comments are geolocated and that makes for podcasts that on iTunes, that makes no sense whatsoever. It's fucking ridiculous, especially since you can't access other stores unless you have credit cards in that country, et cetera, et cetera. I should have probably known this because I do have a UK iTunes account and, but I just never thought to look at the podcast because

surely it's the same thing. And surely comments would be coming from wherever. Apparently not. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Yeah. Yeah. Same here. I was at when I, when I got this tool, I was like, Oh, why are there? Wait, what are those? And I read them and I'm just like, wow, those are new. So are likes segregated too? Like, do we have separate numbers of likes?

If somebody in the UK likes it, do we see the like, there are no likes on, there are no fucking likes the stars. Yes. The stars apparently seem to be aggregated into a star pool, but the star pool. Sounds like some shitty seventies sci-fi show. Um, and the comments are not. So this is the first time I've read these. So I feel bad because we asked people to comment and we never read these. So these are probably like rabid fans who have now gone away because thinking that we're just total assholes

because we ignored them. And, uh, so thanks iTunes, a whole fucking lot. Appreciate it. Preach. Yeah. iTunes is just, I don't, you know, this is, this is the only tool that we really have to, well, there are other tools, but this is the big one. This is the major one where people find the majority of podcasts. We went on a great length about how there's really no tracking or statistics that you can get from Apple. Now to find out that actually comments are all separated by country and you can't see them depending on what country account do you personally have with iTunes.

This is just so frustrating. I mean, obviously Apple doesn't really give a shit. They make absolutely no money from podcasts. It's just a lost leader to sell more apps and, and, uh, you know, physical products. Yeah. In the old days, it was a lost leader to sell iPods because that's, that was, I mean, podcast iPod, there were no iPhones. Um, and it turns out that I have a friend who's dealing with the, the team over there at Apple in the podcast division. And there are the podcast division at Apple is two people.

One of which is fully dedicated to Adam Carilla. It could be. Um, but I mean, it said everybody's cool, but it's just, it's a two person team since they aren't, aren't making any money and they're overwhelmed and you know, they do what they can, but yeah, but the, the, the cross country thing is a technical, you know, kerfuffle because it's all just kind of, I'm sure it's all slapped together and you know, nobody, they don't care about the podcast. They just have it now and they're stuck with it. So they're

running with it. I'm sure if somebody came and disrupted it, like I talked about, then they're good to go. Exactly. So I, uh, we have a comment from a, uh, a fan of the show and a previous guest. We, since we have cut the, uh, Kickstarter in the balls segment, uh, which seems to keep coming back for some reason. Uh, he sent me a thing this morning. Uh, Shaquille O'Neal,

also known as Shaq, um, is Indiegogo-ing, sorry, crowdfunding his, uh, his new video game, Shaq-Fu, A Legend Reborn. Oh boy. Now Shaq-Fu, if you don't know this, was regarded in the past 20 years as the worst video game ever made.

So, uh, uh, this comes from MXV, our video game, uh, expert who was on the show. He's like, uh, the proper thing to do would be to use any money raised in this ridiculous campaign to reimburse anyone who got duped into buying Shaq-Fu is a long overdue apology.

I thought that was pretty funny. So that is pretty funny. Um, I, I know next to nothing about the gaming industry, so I don't know. Did it sell well back in the day? Probably is. I don't know why he would be using a crowd funding thing to do it other than, you know, none of the big gaming companies want to make this damn thing.

Well, and it's a, this comes from a, uh, you know, a smaller shop. I'll put the links in the show notes to the Indiegogo and they've made a trailer that probably they're looking for $450,000. This trailer probably cost more than $450,000. It's well done. Uh, so who the hell knows what's going on here? It still seems like a, a, a sham. I was trying to work in Shaq and Sham somehow, but I couldn't quite get there.

Shaq. Wow. In the news. So apparently we, along with almost everybody else in the media, got something pretty wrong about the Netflix and Comcast deal. Uh, you mean everything wrong? Uh, pretty much. Yeah.

Yeah. But, uh, to be fair, you know, we read, we read everybody else's recaps on this and this was the prevailing thought process at the time, but it's wrong. So let's re let's, uh, let's correct this. And, uh, thanks to a friend of the show, Kevin, for sending us the first link that said, Hey, read this, you dumb ass.

Um, yeah, yeah. Okay. We're wrong. I mean, this stuff is now there's kind of an idiot's guy that we'll, we'll throw in the show notes that slate put together with a couple of quick points. Uh, first content companies are already globally connected to interacts internet access providers and they are already paying for that connection. This is all, this is the famous a hundred yards or a hundred feet problem or whatever the hell they call it. It's called the last mile problem, last mile problem, whatever. So, so this has already existed. This is not

new. Almost all major players either have connected themselves directly or they're using a third party, uh, content delivery network, which is connected directly and pays. So that actually that was point one and two, because number two is paid interconnection is already the norm. This all exists. Number three, this is not a death knell for net neutrality. I mean, I'm sort of not really. It's not because once, once we, once I reread the article that was sent over on strip from streaming media.com and went through it, I'm like, I knew

this, I know how pairing works. I know how, cause everybody's got their network and everybody wants to, you know, traverse each other's network. So they kind of do have these agreements where it's like, Hey, you can come across my bridge. I can come across your bridge kind of thing. If you want to think about it in the physical world. Yeah. And that's always been the norm. And somebody may have a bigger bridge and somebody may have a smaller bridge.

Somebody may have a bridge closer to where you want to go. And then you just set up agreements to use their bridge and give them some coin, you know, it's, it's, it, you can almost think of it as a, as a freeway or highway system almost or a series of the inter tubes series of tubes. Yes. Yes. You can think of it that way. So, so all of this is already there. Uh, it was a lot of, uh, huff and puff about nothing really, uh, nothing new has happened. It's just, uh, the fourth and fifth points in this, in this article are the things that I'm focusing

on, which is that we should be paying attention to these interconnections. And it's good that we're actually starting to hear about them because they have not been very transparent in the past. Well, they're not transparent because it doesn't matter. They're backdoor or backroom, you know, uh, business deals. It's, it's really boring. It's like trucking routes.

Honestly, the only reason that this got any traction is because Netflix, Netflix is in there and they've been, you know, shitty service lately. And the net neutrality stuff has been big news recently. Yeah. So a journalist got ahold of it thinking, Oh, this is, you know, them paying off Comcast and you know, the end is nigh, the end is nigh, the sky is falling. And turns out it's just business as usual. Um, and yeah.

So we got it wrong. So shit happens. Um, speaking of shit happening, I, why, why is LA, uh, banning e-cigarettes? I, I, this is, I don't know if this really kind of comes into the tech world, but it's, it's, it's really bizarre. No one understands. And it does, the, the attraction to me for it as a story for us to talk about here. Um, and we'll kind of get into it again a little bit later with another. LA is not the first city to ban it like New York and Chicago

abandoned as well. Right. I don't think so. I think LA is the first to, to do this, this level of a ban on it. Um, we'd have to look into that a little bit. What I find interesting about this is the fact that it's, it is a physical new technology and the law hasn't caught up to it and they don't really understand it. This kind of drives me insane. Uh, there's a huge, we're spending millions of taxpayer dollars on, on anti-smoking campaigns and getting people to stop smoking. We have legislated it to the point where you're used to only be

able to smoke in your own house under the covers, hidden away from everyone. And then we tried to get even rid of that. You can't smoke anywhere anymore. So technology comes in to disrupt the industry and solve a problem and come up with something that yes, hasn't been proven either way yet. There's all these studies that are still going on. Are you know, is it safe?

Is it not? What we do know, what all doctors know already is it's certainly much better for you than real cigarettes are. And it also has no second or third hand effects. It is basically vapor that comes out of these things. That's it. The only person being affected by them is the person actually taking them in directly. So there's no issue with this. People should be able to smoke it anywhere they fucking want to.

Well, it's not even quote unquote smoking. You're inhaling. Yeah, you're inhaling. And so L.A. has decided, well, first off, I knew we were in trouble as soon as they said, no, you can't have these on planes. Like, why the hell not? But it's a plane and people freak out. Got it. There are the stinky ones. I don't want to.

Yeah, the stinky ones suck. There are those. So I can understand that. God forbid somebody makes a patchouli flavored e-cigarette. But to be fair, you know, nobody bans anybody from taking their food onto the plane that stinks. Oh, that's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, that's not the point. Point Brian. Okay.

I mean, I could be sitting next to somebody with their homemade goddamn chicken Kiev and it's fucking sticking up the whole plane. Oh, that sounds tasty. I'm hungry now. Actually, I am kind of hungry too. We're recording a bit earlier and it's like, I usually have lunch before. Now I'm like, hmm. Anyways, what they've done in L.A. is basically banned e-cigarettes the same way as normal cigarettes. You can't have it on the beach. You can't have it within 20 feet of a doorway. You can't have it anywhere, basically. So e-cigarettes have

been completely banned. And I wonder, well, and to get back, Chicago did ban them. They banned them in January. Okay. So we are ahead of you in stupidity in Chicago here. Yeah. 45 to 4 is what it passed. So it, same as regular cigarettes, you can't smoke indoors. Yeah.

Or suck indoors or whatever. Inhale indoors. Yeah. I'm wondering if this comes back to taxation, if they're trying to classify these in a certain category so they can make more tax money off of it. If this isn't just, has nothing to do with health, nothing about anything else. If this is more about money, because people are going to switch to e-cigarettes and the city and states are going to lose more money in tax revenue from people that are quitting smoking. You might be right with that. I don't really know. I didn't read the entire

story or the regulation on it. I just know that, you know. I haven't seen anything about taxes. I'm just wondering if that's what they're thinking ahead for. And like, that's why they're trying to maneuver this into place. That would be impressive and would require actual thought. And this is, we are talking about our government here. When it comes to, when it comes to greed and money, I believe they're pretty good at that part. Not California. We seem to screw everything up.

Well, Chicago did it first. So maybe, and, and Chicago, we're pretty ruthless when it comes to making money. Right. Rahm Emanuel's our mayor now. So that's true. Oh, speaking of money, I saw that, uh, this is a strange one. Since you're in the music business, you probably saw this before me, but Top Spin, that, that, um, was it, it's kind of like a third party services for musicians where they can do mailing labels and fulfillment for, uh, e-songs and

kind of stuff. They, they, um, and, uh, my friend Tara used to work there actually, um, over in Santa Monica. They got bought by Beats this week. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. Was there any, any, uh, word on how much they got bought for? No, no, the Beats is being really quiet about, uh, all money at the moment. Uh, understandably so, because my, my personal thought on it is that's not going well over there. At Beats or at Top Spin? At Beats. I thought they were raking it in with

all the, um, the headphone stuff. Well, the headphones, but, uh, the music service itself is not going well. Um, Top Spin has not been doing well for a while. I have a long and complicated history with, with Top Spin. And, and you're right. They did. They had a really interesting business model when they started. I mean, they wanted to basically disrupt the, the music industry as it were.

They, they came on board and launched with a series of tools that were really good at the time, uh, that they basically just gave to independent musicians. If you didn't have a music label promoting you and you didn't have deals with like concert promoters, so you could suck up to live nation and get, and sell tickets, et cetera, et cetera. They gave independent musicians, these tools. And that was cool. But what they quickly discovered, and because they wanted to become a big company and a major player, there's no money in that at all. You know, there is

absolutely no money in Joe Schmo, your neighbor down the hall who plays his acoustic guitar, giving him tools to help him build a small fan base. None. So what they had to do is change their model, kind of, and start chasing after major acts, which meant getting into bed with and playing the game with the major labels. That's where topspin started to spin basically out of control to spin out of control, lose the wheels. I'm surprised they've been around as long as they have. My personal feeling on this deal is, uh, somebody over at beats is good buddies with somebody over at

topspin. And this was the hail Mary get out to pass. Yeah. Well, probably like a fire sale type of thing. It's a fire sale type of thing. They're going to get a couple of the people that are over there. To be honest, again, another, uh, the big problems with topspin is when they tried to make their change to, to switching over to the major labels, they kind of gave up on their actual technology. They never kind of went back and built better tools or modified their tools to update with the time. Like, and that was a big mistake on their part. They kind of just went, Hey, we built

this and we're going to try and run for it as long as we possibly can without ever doing an update. Yeah. I played with their tools cause I actually went over there to, um, I think I interviewed there for something. I did. I did too, a long time ago. And, uh, their tools were really kind of janky. It was all Java based and nothing that tickled my fancy.

They were, they were clunky. Very cool. Yeah. It was very much, it was a lot of, you know, duct tape keep and spit, keeping all that stuff together. And they never bothered to update it, but they went after bigger and bigger clients and tried to make bigger and bigger deals. To me, it just felt like an ego play. And I think, you know, it was dead a long time ago. So somebody over at beats is just, Oh, somebody a favor.

Yeah. Well, let's keep on with the music stuff. Cause there's some pretty interesting music things that, uh, this happened this week, but this is a technology one that I am so looking forward to. And, uh, two, two things happened this week. First Ford announced that, uh, they were dumping Microsoft, uh, for their in-car entertainment system, the sync system, which I have in my Ford.

I've got the original sync version, terrible, fucking terrible. Um, so I'm very glad that that's gone, but they replaced it with Blackberry, which everybody's kind of scratching their head about. Yeah. That one makes no sense at all. Um, well, it's Ford. They're not actually the brightest. The cars are great. The cars will run forever, but yeah, if you want like swank, you're not getting it, but if you want swank, go buy a Ferrari because they're going to have the Apple, uh, in-car system now. So, which looks pretty cool. You know, it does. It does look

pretty cool. I like it a lot. It's, um, I have some interesting thoughts on this though, because I've, I've had a, I got a mini a couple, almost two years ago now. And minis are made by BMW, right? Yes. Minis are made by BMW. So it has the full BMW iPhone interface built into it. So all I'd have to do is connect my iPhone with a little USB cable. And basically I've got the mini connect app and, uh, it's built into the car already. So I've got, I've got that been, that's been going on great and it's been fine. I can do music and

I can do podcasts and I can do directions and I can do all that sort of stuff. When they launched all that back or back when I first got the car, you could also basically connect online. You could, you could have your Facebook update feed kind of show up on your dashboard and things like that. There must've been lawsuits or something because all of a sudden when there was an update, that functionality went away. So I'm thinking they're bringing this back, but I wonder how much of this is actually going to be allowed

because if you're not allowed to pick up a cell phone when you're driving and read a text message, why should you be able to read one off your dash? Um, what's the difference? Well, you're not looking, your, your point of vision is still in front of you and not looking at your hand. Um, it's, it's a, it's a weird thing to try and try and legislate because somebody just won, uh, their case against, uh, maps like physical maps versus looking at maps on your

phone or a guy got pulled over and said, I know I was looking at my phone for directions, not making a text because if he had a physical map and he reached over and leaned down and looked at the physical map, that's not against the law. So why is reaching over, looking at a map on your phone any different? Again, this is my, my point about the e-cigarettes. It's like, we don't know how to handle technology with our laws yet. Yes. Um, the problem with text messaging and any,

you know, uh, uh, change in attention is that, or even talking on the damn phone in the car, any of the, any of those things does diminish your ability to drive the vehicle period. Um, it's been proven over and over again, you don't believe this, just go out and do it, you know, talk on your phone and try and remember, uh, like the last 30 seconds of where you've been. You can't because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. Yeah. You're on muscle memory when you're driving and talking on the phone. You're, you are literally like a lizard while you're driving.

If something jumps out in front of you, Oh shit, sore, you know, you can't think. Yeah. Um, so the, the part with the Facebook updates, I'm glad they're gone. I, I don't know how this is going to play out. A lot of people are going to die in the interim from people fucking with their phones. That's pretty much how it's going to boil down to pretty much. Yeah. Just, you know, I don't, I don't talk on the phone when I'm in the car. I don't even, I, I did use sync to

play like a song. That's it. Right. Um, because it was so bad. The, the, the, uh, libraries and the iPhone are too big for sync to even handle. So hopefully the, the, this Apple integration into the nicer cars will be, be decent because of what it's, it's Ferrari, Volvo, and Mercedes three types.

Well, Ferrari and Mercedes, I can't afford and who the fuck wants a Volvo? A lot of people like it. I, the, the, the concept, the concept art for it looks great. It's only been a matter of time since this is going to happen anyways. I'm really looking forward to it. Um, sucks that, you know, if I use that, I'm going to be stuck with just, uh, Apple maps instead of Google maps, but Hey, whatever. You're the one that said they were getting better. So they are getting better, but I still prefer Google. I do too. Yeah. Oh man. I, I, I just want a crappy

old, like, you know, pre OJ Bronco at this point. I want something that doesn't have any electronics that I can, you know, whack with a wrench and make go. But back on the music, uh, what's the, what's going on? There was a, uh, some kerfuffle about a band who Lawrence Lessig was talking about this week. I just kind of caught this on the periphery. Um, yeah. Lawrence Lessig is, is one of our great, uh, lawyers who came up with creative commons and now works to uncorrupt the government.

And, uh, now he's got caught up in some, some crappy band's music. Uh, actually quite, I like the band. It's a French band, Phoenix. Uh, they've had a couple of big hits. They're French. Uh, if they're French, their name is Fonet. Sorry. We're from France. Your name is Fonet. Fonet. Yeah. So it's, uh, we like you, we like your American actor, River Fonet. He's dead now. He dead. Anyways,

uh, they've got quite a number of good songs. Uh, they've got a couple really good albums out there. There, there's a lot of remixes of their work. Um, you know, there's been a lot of, uh, just kind of like here, here to download a bunch of our, our tracks, go ahead, remix it yourself, throw it up there. So he was doing, Larry was doing, uh, a lecture about remix culture and used, uh, some of the clips from Listomania, one of Phoenix's bigger songs that

has an awful lot of remixes out there. And as soon as he put that up on YouTube, uh, Phoenix's music, uh, label Phoenix music sent a series of copyright notices and threats to YouTube and Lessig and said, you cannot do this. Now this is fair use. It's a lecture and it's from a band that has embraced remix culture and series and things like this anyways. So it was looking like it was going to be a really big deal until the band itself actually found out about

it, contacted their label, said, what the fuck are you doing? And then released a statement saying, we love this idea. We support fair use of our music. End of story. Yay. Yay, Phoenix. Okay. Well, they should have a little better communication with their label or fire their label. And we've been doing this podcast. How long? And I've talked to you about music label stuff. This is true. So yeah. So it's a good little story. Good for the band. Good

for the band and good for fair use. Now when it comes to rules around fair use, we were, uh, I mean, we've talked about this a bunch, but there's this interesting article that was going around this week that you sent me and I'm going to, I'm going to put it in the show notes and I'm going to warn the listeners to not read it because I read it and it took me 10 minutes. I want my 10 minutes back. So we're going to, we're going to encapsulate this in about four sentences. Somebody had a, a, uh, somebody who saw the Oscars

saw Bradley Cooper take the picture of Ellen's famous, you know, big selfie with the group and said, wait a minute. Ellen is giving away rights to that photo, but Bradley Cooper is the one that took the photo. He is the photographer. Ergo, she does not have the right to give it away. Who cares? But it's funny. Go ahead, Brian, take us away.

Well, again, my, my, my theme this, this week for this podcast seems to be how, how law has not caught up with technology and this fits in perfectly with that. And yes, this, this person has obviously been paid by the words for this article because it fucking rambles and it goes on and it repeats points and it's way too long. I just love the fact that I had no idea that the actual copyright owner of a photo is the person who physically pushes the button that takes the photo. As a photographer, as a photographer, I knew that, which is why

I thought this was silly, but many, many, many people are not photographers. And there's been all the kerfuffle about like, does YouTube own the video? Does Instagram own your photo? Does Flickr own your photo? Does the person who owns the phone own the photo? Does the person? Well, now we know we have an answer. Unless it's a work for hire and I'm paying Bradley Cooper to take that, to press that button. And if I am paying him to press that button, then that picture is mine. So, I mean, but this was a, a here, hold, you know, hold my phone, take a picture

type of thing. Right. Again, not being a photographer, I was not aware of that. So to me, it was really interesting. Um, good. It was not to me, but, uh, yeah, go, uh, go read this people. There's and there, there actually are some interesting points in there at the end where other lawyers who should have better things to do than read this article. And no, nevermind, forget it.

They just came back from protesting, uh, uh, Buddhism things. And then they came back and wrote about this stuff. Yeah. Um, this, this happened last night. Uh, this one thing that kind of surprised me as talking about photography, the Getty, uh, the Getty is one of the largest, you know, uh, image libraries in the world. Yeah. Um, they have been fighting online copyright forever because everybody steals their stuff. And, uh, I've been in that fight. I know what

it's like. It's, it's a hard road and it's a pain in the ass. Um, so they said, screw it. We're done. Take our images. The only thing you have to do is use a, use our tool and make, put them in an iframe. Here's a widget. You can widgetify. So you can, if you have your crappy WordPress, you know, blog and you want to put some pictures on it here, sure. Take our, take our iframe and put it on your, in your post. Yeah. Now thinking about how they're going to make

money off of it is the first thing that came to mind. And fortunately the, uh, one of the guys from Getty has come up, has come out and said, yeah, we don't really know, but, uh, we can do several things. We can implant ads. We can sell tracking information based on the people who are loading that iframe. Because as, as we all know, once you have an iframe in somebody's page, you, as the person who is serving the iframe, get all of the information on the IP, the user,

the browser, everything. So you can correlate that. Exactly like when you embed a YouTube video, same thing. They can put in roll ads and they can do whatever they want. So it makes sense. And this work, and same as, same as ad networks. So they can track you across multiple websites. So, and as being Getty with giving away this many images has, has the opportunity to have a fairly wide reaching network in a couple of years of, uh, you know, browser surfing statistics.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is really interesting. I mean, what's Getty going to do with that? Sell it. Yeah. And it's like an ad network that I can't opt out of because I'm going to read like, you know, journalist A's website, but he's using Getty images. Yeah. You know, and so do I have to opt out? It's, it's, it's, you know, one of those gray areas that's just kind of annoying that we have to deal with. So I'm hoping Getty just doesn't sell the info and can just, you know, sell prints and make money that way. But nobody buys prints anymore.

Yeah. No, they don't. So yeah, that's pretty much what I got this week. I'm just, uh, I'm glad that the photography stuff is getting out there a little more because it's been a while since we've heard of anything, uh, anything photo related because. Well, photography is pretty much dead. Yes, it's a dying art. But again, like I said, I thought that was fascinating, but I'm not a photographer.

I didn't get a chance to finish any of the books I was working on this week, but, uh, when, uh, again, I back to slate.com and you're going to laugh at me about this stuff later. Uh, they do this kind of fun little series of articles where they kind of explore, uh, works of art and ask if how things would be different if, if we change them. And, uh, this one caught my eye for a number of reasons. And it's a fun little read. Would Lord of the Rings be more satisfying with a different

ending. I mean, this is geek candy for sure. This is the kind of discussion that will probably spawn 10,000 comments with people going crazy about it. My favorite part of it was the word that I had never heard before. You catastrophe, you catastrophe, the sudden, unbelievable, positive turn of events.

Okay. I need more of those in my life because basically the, the article is talking about what if the Eagles hadn't rescued Frodo and Sam wise from after the destruction of the one ring. So basically they would have died at the end. And, um, J.R.R. Tolkien was a firm believer in you catastrophe. So it had to end well and fun and he wanted it to be happy. And for a not so simple reason, because we have to have these things happen. We need joys of happy endings. We want

good ends to stories. Otherwise it's not as satisfying. Okay. It's a fun little read. They really, I mean, again, it's like, it's the internet and people with way too much time on their hands, they get into it. And if you start reading through the comments, you will go down a rabbit hole that cannot be believed. Fun read. You catastrophe. Word of the day.

Every week or so I go through the, uh, iTunes new and noteworthy section on the podcast app. We were the iTunes podcast section that we were just railing on to see, uh, the new kids on the block. See who's out there. See if there's anything decent that I should be, uh, checking out this week.

So this week I found the internet history podcast at internet history, podcast.com. There are a couple episodes in, and it's one dude basically going through the history of, um, so far like the history of Mozilla and, uh, what was it? Netscape. Okay. The, the old browser. Yeah. Not so much Mozilla is it's mosaic and Netscape was what I was thinking of.

Um, because I was like, that's when I got into it. When mosaic came out and, uh, back in the day. So, uh, I checked it out. I listened to an episode and a half. Um, I'm going to say, if you see this on iTunes, skip it. Uh, the, the host is, uh, almost impossible to listen to. He's very, very slow and pedantic and the story actually isn't that great. The telling of the story isn't

that great. Right. Which, which really bummed me out because I was really interested in hearing more about that time because, you know, I was there and I like to hear the other sides of the story and see what was going on that I didn't, I wasn't privy to. And everything that, um, this podcast is talking about, you could get from old, uh, magazine articles and you could piece it together. There's no real inside knowledge or interviews with the people who were there. Okay. So yeah, that's

unfortunate because I'm just looking through the titles and the different subjects that he's done. And I, yeah, I would totally listen to this podcast, but, uh, Nope. Feel free to give it a try. You might, you might have a different opinion than I do. I just, I couldn't get into it. I mean, like if he had got Andreessen on to talk about the old days of mosaic, then that would have been something. Right. But otherwise it's just, you know, it's putting together things from stories that were, that have already been told. Yeah. Um, you can find out yourself. There's nothing

really, it was really nothing new to that was brought to the table. Yeah. Hopefully next week I'll come up with something new, but, uh, I've been getting ready for this trip and busy recovering from, you know, giant holes in my leg. That happens. Yeah. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. I actually have an app this week, believe it or not. Uh, I was, I know, but it involves drinking. So shocking. I was at, uh, my local for my, for my regular pub

trivia night. And, uh, you'd lo and behold, there was all these fancy new screens about the place and a little new things on the desk where, uh, or on the bar where we stand for our trivia. Um, and you know, the bartenders come by and I'm like, what the hell is that? And some perky little young kid who's down visiting from San Francisco ran over to explain to us this new, awesome disruption of the bar industry app that's out there now. And we should all try it because God damn it. It's so damn hard

to go to a bar and order a drink. Didn't you? Anyways, they're there. The, this genius app called tray, use tray.com. Uh, basically just, you sign up with them and you put in all your credit card information and you can now order beer and booze and whatever else the place serves from your phone and it will print out and they will either bring it to your trip to your table. If you're sitting at a table or you just go up to the bar, flash your phone and then they hand you your beverage and

it's paid for. And then you walk away. Bartenders are not happy about this. No shit. Uh, basically the, my favorite bartender over at Finn's who always serves us a trivia night was like, we're never going to get fucking tipped by anybody that uses this. And she's right. Why would you? You don't have money on you anymore. You're just using your phone. Boom. Done. Supposedly you are able to add tip into your order, but, uh, I doubt anybody's really going to do that. I also haven't seen it

yet because I had some issues. These guys are not ready for prime time at all. Uh, they had the signs up in the bar with the promo code, with the bar's name on it. I downloaded the app. It took forever to do the signup process to begin with. Um, there's a simple UI fail. This is an app for booze. Correct. You have to be 21 in most States to drink booze. So if you, so of course they have to require a birth date on the app. Fine. Got it. Why do you auto set the year to 2014?

So we have to scroll all the way back. I can tell you exactly why. Okay. Because they have to have the option for anybody that's under 21 to put in their birth date and tell them, no, you cannot do it. No, that's fine. That is a legal requirement. I'm not arguing with it being in there, but can't you just set it to automatically go say 21 years. So start at that year. So you can scroll up if you're bored in 2014 or down if you're older than 21, that would require somebody to give a

shit. Exactly. But that's, that's, that's attention to detail that most people don't have UI thing that I would think of. And obviously did anyways, that's not a big, too big of a deal. The main fail that I had is you've got the TVs up. You've got the promo code. When I sign up promo code fail, that promo code doesn't exist. So I'm at the bar and I'm like to hell with it. I'm just going to finish my trivia game. Maybe I'll check this out later since what the hell it's an app. And Jason always gets on my ass about not having apps. I go home. I try again. Doesn't work. I go to their

website. They have a customer service email address. I'm like, Hey guys, want to try out your app? Got a promo code said that there were specials and deals that we would get. If we sign up with the promo code, it's not working. Wait five minutes, uh, delivery mail send failure. The email address doesn't exist. They listed on their own website. I'm like, oops, this is fantastic. Um, do a little more, look a little bit further. Oh, they're on Twitter. Okay, fine. They have like 10 followers

and they've not tweeted once. All right. I'll try this anyways. So I write them, uh, looking forward to checking it out. Uh, your promo code isn't working. Your customer service email address is a mail delivery failure. Address doesn't exist. Uh, seven or eight hours later, I get thanks for discovering trade, bringing to our attention, even though we're still in stealth mode, smiley face email and promo code fixed. I write back. No problem. Thank you. Although I'd argue TV screens

and bars with all the info isn't stealth mode. No shit. Yeah. If you have, if you have the app and they have given you a promo code, that is not stealth mode. That is, that is time. That is beta. Yes. If the people that are not in the company have access to it, that's beta. Yeah. So there you go.

I mean, I will try it out once and use it for real. Uh, I've signed up, I've put in my credit card and all of that. What I do like about this. Uh, I was a little worried because if you remember a long time ago, I talked about an app called touch tunes, which was kind of, which was kind of fun until the bar took out the jukebox that did it. So all of a sudden I couldn't control the music from my app anymore. The problem with touch tones is they made you buy credits. Oh, you got, you got built on your credit. I've got $20 worth of credits in that fucking app still. And there's

no place around me that has the jukebox in it. So I was a little leery of that happening with a, luckily they did not go with that model. It charges you per drink when you make your orders. Oh, that sucks. They get rid of all those jukeboxes. I loved the thought of having my own, uh, theme song when I came to the bar. Oh, it was amazing. It was, I was so disappointed when it went away. We had so much fun with that. I wonder what left. Gee, I wonder how much money do you think they were making anyways? So I don't think this, this stuff is going to last very

long either. Bartenders are going to hate it. Um, if the bar is super busy, it's not going to help. What are you going to elbow your way past everyone to go get, show your phone and get your drink? This is not something that needed to be disrupted. No, this is, this is not something. Yeah, absolutely. Bars work. Bars have worked for a very long time. They work well.

Oh, and by the way, the point of being at a bar is to actually interact and talk to people, including the bartenders. It's not just to sit there on your phone and fucking tweet about your beer. It's yeah, it's do not. It's anything social like this. Oh man, there was one on, um, on shark tank this week. I should, I should try and find it where this girl had a dating company where you would, you had a card that you would go up to somebody who you thought was cute, give them the card. And then they could go back to their home on their computer and look

you up and could talk to you. It's like, if you've got enough balls to walk up to somebody and give them a card to say you're cute, you should have enough balls to say, hi, how you doing? Exactly. Yeah. So they pretty much laughter off the show and which is good. It was fun.

Yeah. And what I see people doing now anyways, I mean, I've witnessed this being with some of my friends, um, they'll pull out their phone, pull up Tinder and just scroll through until they see the person and like, Oh, okay, there she is. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Oh man. So I've got one that, uh, I talked about before. This is just a little followup. It's called exposure.so and, uh, so was so, so I used it for a bit to, I was going to try and do, uh, photo essays

as my blogging platform because, you know, as we mentioned before, I was a photographer in a previous life, um, and use all my old photos and create, you know, stuff with photography. Um, yeah, I use it for a month. I made two of them to, uh, uh, new photo essays. Didn't touch it. It was too much of a pain for nine bucks a month. Uh, experiments over. Let's just say that, um, retooling my personal website. So if you go to it now, it's just a link that says nothing because I would like my $9 back.

Um, if you are into photo essays, this might be something that you can use, but for the most part, little overpriced, a lot under featured and, uh, will crash every single time. If you load it on Chrome on an iPad. So since I use Chrome on an iPad is my main go-to on my iPad, it was a problem.

Yeah, that is problematic. And I wasn't really that, uh, into it to actually go and deal with the guys who made it to go fix it. Cause that's not my job. Um, if I'm paying them, they should fix it and I shouldn't have to tell them. So agreed. Uh, one that I did try out of my, uh, app budget this week was fantastical too. Okay. Still trying to get my, my, you know, my workflow down with reminders and calendars and all that stuff. And this kind of is, it groups, my reminders and my

calendars together, and you can use different calendars. It's kind of like a, it's kind of like glue, um, for your calendars and your reminders apps. The cool thing about it is it's got a really nice natural language processor that I use with the voice recognition button on the, on the, you know, on the five S I just said, I just, I just basically press the button, speak what I need to do. And it, it breaks apart the sentence, you know, and contextually knows how to create the, uh, entry

in my calendar. Works great. Works great. Love it so far. No complaints. Fantastic. I mean, that's it. I got, I got nothing. It works the way it's supposed to work. It's a, it's a calendar and a reminder app that does what it's supposed to do. I love it. I have, I have, I have so rare these days. I know seriously, it is, it's like four bucks. So it's worth four bucks. Um, I don't

know what else to say about it besides yay. You know, uh, all right. I'm kind of flabbergasted by how, how much, how easy I rolled into using it. I spent 15 minutes reading the instructions. Whoa. Okay. I, I did, I did this. I'm getting old, man. I'm telling you, I'm long in the tooth.

I read the instructions and once I followed the instructions that I had just read, it worked like they said it was going to work and it was perfect. Well, good. Excellent. I might have to try it out. I mean, I've, I'm pretty much kind of just used to using the notes, uh, that are built into iOS and, uh, I have my calendar synced with Google calendar, which works for me, but it'll, it'll sync with both. That's perfect. Okay. Oh yeah. That's great. Yeah. Give it a,

give it a swing. Will do. Um, and this is the, we talked about velocity before it was, it was, it was a speed reading app that I found right now that I was reading one of Sean Bonner's tweets, uh, and he turned me onto this thing called spritz. Spritz is like velocity, but with science.

Ooh, science. It's it highlights letters in between the two words that it's flashing at you to make it easier to comprehend the words. Oh my God. Game changer. As far as speed reading goes, I could read pretty quick with, with velocity, but when I tried out spritz, yeah, I read it was, it was even faster and I could, I could understand and comprehend more. I mean, I, you're, you're a

crazy freak. You're freakish when it comes to reading. So this is for people like me who are slow. Right. I mean, I, I went to, I found a link or a friend of mine actually sent it to me as well. And they have the little kind of demo where you look at it at like 250 words per minute, 350 and 500. It definitely helps. It is pretty damn cool. I'm shocked by that actually. Cause I have just even noticing, wow, that, that does kind of change things. It is a game changer.

The problem I have is, is, uh, whoever wrote their press release, because I, I just cannot handle the stuff anymore. It started, it makes me not want to look at articles. It makes me not want to go look at apps or products anymore. Here is just a few lines, this insane new app.

The reading game is about to change forever. Stealth mode for three years. Disruption of the reading industry. Oh God. Can anybody write a press release anymore without all this done? No, apparently not. They probably hired an agency to, to write that for them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a cool, I mean, it seems really cool. It really does. I cannot wait till it's built into the Kindle app. I will be, you know what? Cause the great thing about it, if Amazon builds that into the Kindle app, I will read more novels, which means I will buy more novels. So make it happen.

You know what? It won't get built into windows XP. No, no, it won't. Uh, I love this article and it, you know, it's not a new app or anything, but it seems to fit this article. What are you talking about? There is an article. Microsoft wants to kill windows XP, but it just won't die. Of course it won't die. It's windows XP. It's the cockroach of the computer computing world. You know why? Cause it still works. It still works. Uh, you know, I've got to say, I love windows seven. Uh, I've, we've gone

off a great length about windows eight and how much it sucks. And we all know that windows Vista was a failed experiment. So it's not really surprising that XP is still kicking around. What I was surprised by though, was that it's still 30% of total operating system market share worldwide. 30% and this OS is 13 years old. See, that's the thing. I, I'm not surprised by that. For some reason, I'm not

surprised if I had to use a PC again, I would just, I want an XP machine, you know, they were genius. Yeah. What was, it was Vista's code code name. Longhorn was Vista, right? Yeah, that was Vista. Longhorn. Okay. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Vista was crap. Bob, I can always go back to Microsoft Bob. Um, uh, yeah, XP window was windows 95 was okay. And windows 95 was decent. Yeah. Yeah. But XP built

out of 95. Um, XP was the workhorse. They nailed it. They got it right. But unfortunately in 33 more days, they're going to end service to it. Bullshit. They can't, they can't, I know they won't be able to, they're going to have to keep on in a whole core team of people just to deal with XP.

Yeah. What are all the virus writers going to, you know, do if they use no, I, I mean, I abhor using windows machines and if I had to, I give me an XP machine, I know how to, I know how to use that and it works. So the fact that, you know, Google, I mean, Google, Microsoft is backpedaled on eight, you know, all of the Metro stuff on eight has backpedaled on that. And they're going back to the start menu. I think they'll backpedal on this too. I think public outcry will be so great

that they will have no choice, but to, uh, support XP for the foreseeable future. So Brian, I noticed something about, uh, your day-to-day, uh, reading habits. Really? Do you have a tracker or do you see my eyes and all the things I'm going to?

I just noticed that most of your news happens to come from slate or salon. And, uh, I, I'm going to throw a challenge at you to, uh, get out of your comfort zone and, uh, see if, uh, next week you can, uh, uh, have, I have a no slate slash salon challenge. And I will open up, I will open up the floor to say if, Hey, if you want me to go out and try something new, I'm, I'm up for it. But I would like you to get out of your shell a little and, uh, try and bring something to the show that is not

slate or salon based. I have two rebuttals for that. Actually. Uh, the first is, uh, whatever. I figured that would be number one. Uh, they're, they're actually really both. They're great sites. They have really good writers and they do a really good job of capturing tech and entertainment, which is two of the main topics that we talk about all the time. Um, I get it. I get what you're saying. I started to notice that a few weeks ago as well. I was

like, huh, half my stories are coming from here. The way around that. And what I will use next week is proper attribution because 99% of the stories on slate or salon are actually write-ups about stories that are somewhere else. So I will grab the story that is somewhere else and post that in instead of slate or salon. Absolutely. Absolutely fair. That is 100% fair. So the one reason I do like the slate and salon articles and tend to use those as the

links that we put up on our show notes is they tend to basically kind of take it down. If the story is fantastically tech heavy or complicated, they, the writers over at those two sites actually do a really good job of kind of breaking the story down and making it palatable to the masses. Okay. I'm just, there you go. But I will do my best to try to do the proper attribution as we're always screaming about that anyways, and moving beyond those sites. Uh, you know, it's a, you and I both pull stories from boing boing all the time. I do some tech

stuff from a gadget. We just have our sites that we go to all the time, but yes, it is time to shake it up a little bit. Yeah. And I use those sites as filters. Like I say, I always go back and find some, find the original story and kind of parse out from it and do the legwork of trying to understand the article is something I'm haven't been as, as handy with lately. I will say that as, as, as our recent failure into the Netflix Comcast debacle, we'll, uh, show for both of us. Um, okay. Yeah. And, uh, like I said, I mean, my stuff comes usually from, you know,

different sources like Twitter and all that stuff. I, I don't have a, I don't have websites I go to on a daily basis, which is probably why I'm such. Yeah. You tend to get more stuff. That's like, you know, people have found and it's being shared socially. Well, I tend to like when I'm, when I'm waiting for my, please clear your cash email to be responded to, I'm, I'm loading up salon or slate or boing boing or, or Huffington post. Oh, huff. Oh, huff. No, huff. No,

we really need Bob to do a voiceover for us there. Uh, we've been toying with the idea of doing this segment for, for a while. Um, and it's almost too easy and I've felt almost lazy about it. But then this morning when, when I loaded up HuffPo, I just saw a story that I'm like, we have to fucking do this segment. Huff. No, this is really on the Huffington post on the sidebar. This Cheeto looks suspiciously like a masturbating man. And then they have the photo crop. So you can't really see what

they're talking about. Well, yes. Until you go to the full article and then it actually looks like a photo of a dude spanking it. Yes. But this is a, you know, this, the Huffington post was a news site at one point in time. Well, this is news for if you're like, if you're an idiot, if you're in the Doritos crowd or the, you know, um, you like masturbating with Cheetos and they made a right up your alley. They made a gif. Oh, it comes from Gawker though. So this isn't even, you didn't even get

the right attribution. Yeah, but the segment's called Huff No, not Gawker No. And you know, they, they made it a headline. And, uh, and an animated gif. If you just, if, if your imagination wasn't good enough. So yeah, you sent this, you put this on our little doohickey and I, I scrolled down and the first thing I saw was, uh, oh, they changed it before. It was, you may like, um,

uh, why more college students are having anal sex. Okay. Uh, honestly, no, that's not something I would like. Uh, well, I wouldn't, I'd like to hear about, um, I mean like, Hey, if you're in college, man, go for it, uh, ride that Hershey highway. So I don't, uh, I just have no idea what it has to do with me with anything or life or news or anything resembling news. But if you're a big

fan of those kinds of stories and you still use Yahoo as your homepage, you're in luck. Why? Uh, Lisa Belkin. Who the hell still uses Yahoo for anything? I don't know, but we, we've talked a lot of times that we don't, no idea what Yahoo is trying to do as a company. And I don't see this as a good sign. Uh, Lisa Belkin, who is the editor over at the Huffington post for, I believe the family and relationships and kind of whatever areas is leaving the Huffington post and going

over to Yahoo to go fuck them up. Excellent. So more of those stories. Expect your Yahoo to get Huffpode. Side boob at Yahoo. Yeah. Oh, that's well done. Too bad. We don't already have a title for the show. That would be a good one. Yeah. Uh, and finally, I want to give a shout out to a band called information society who I've been huge fans of forever and ever. And we actually kind of maybe

not so fair use, uh, their song on, on the opening of our grumpy old geeks podcast. Uh, they're putting out their first new track in years and years and years called land of the blind. And it's actually pretty good. So give it a listen. Yeah. I, when you, uh, sent this over, I went and checked it out. It is actually a really good song. Yeah, it's great. I'm really happy to have them back. I'm looking forward to them touring. It's, uh, it's the first time. And I believe something like 15 years that the original lineup of the band, except for one member, but they kind of do a little revisionist

history on her. She's been all deleted out of the band. Uh, so it's the original lineup of the band is back together and recording again. It's quite good. Love it. Love those guys. She has been de-rezzed. Ooh, nice. I'm looking at the graphic on the, their video and it is very Tron like. So I had to bust out some de-resolution. So to do a little follow-up on my, uh, March

writing challenge, I'm like six days in, haven't missed a day, like almost 5,000 words so far. I had to go with 750 words.com. I know I said, uh, I was going to thinking about the, uh, just using a text editor and rocking it old school. They got pretty badges. They send me emails every day that reminded me to get off my ass and write. And it also has a nice little thing that when I've hit

750 words, it goes, Oh, you can stop now. Go back to work. Nice. Um, no, I mean, I think that was something like this where it is, you, you need the motivation. Gamifying it makes total sense. It's a lot easier if you're getting the reminders and you're getting the silly badges than just sitting in front of a blank piece of paper every day. Yeah. And it's fun. I mean, that's I, and I had like 15 days to go on my trial and I'm like, ah, screw it. I'm, I know I'm going to keep it. So I signed

up. I'm a member now I can, uh, and the thing about having a membership there and trying to do anything social or gamification with other people there, all my writing's private. I don't want to share any of it. So there's really no kind of like, you know, no, uh, intersection points for social to kind of happen. Um, I can post the stats to like Twitter or something, which is boring after a day or two and only in the actually is only exciting for me. So I don't know if there's anything

social to be done with it, but otherwise it's just, it's a, it's a nice way to remind me that I need to get off my ass every morning and go write something. And it's been, it's been just helpful, you know, just to get, get your brain going in the morning. I've, uh, I, instead of doing my, uh, headspace meditation, I stopped doing that and just right now. Right, right. That makes total sense. Cause yeah, the headspace thing didn't, it was okay. And then I got to the point where it's

like I had to pay for it and I, I didn't see the money really kind of worth it. I liked the app a lot. Uh, but I've kind of felt the same way. I prefer Budify too. So I just kind of, I lost headspace. Also as a followup, I finally just went ahead and deleted jelly off my phone. I gave up waiting for them to tell me about how I could get rid of my data and all that. And I just went, fuck it, delete. I did take one more look before then. Like maybe everybody's off that damn thing.

It's dead. So yeah, that's gone. I could, yeah, I killed jelly ages ago. I think when we were still trying to figure out how to get our info off, I'm like, fuck it. No, yeah, it was, that was a flash in the pan. Secrets of flash in the pan. Nobody's really using that still. Right. Um, it's shark fins, shark fins, shark fins everywhere. Speaking of some shark fin soup, guess what's coming up next week? Um, I don't know. South by Southwest. Yeah, actually I saw an update.

earlier today from someone saying South by Southwest, uh, uh, interactive conference. Is that, has that shark finned yet? They actually said that? Yeah. Well, see the problem with South by is it's, uh, well, shark fin is a rapid rise to fame and then a quick drop off. Yeah. South by has been around for God knows how long now, over a decade. So you can't really call that a shark fin. No, no, but it does appear to be dead. People don't seem to be all that

excited about it anymore. I mean, it's, I don't know how you can call something dead when they have record turnouts, you know, that they're, they're, there in lies the, the, the linguistical problem of calling a conference dead when there are, there are tens of thousands more people that go every year.

Yeah. I mean, it might be dead to us. Okay. Well, it may no longer be influential. Now it's just for the masses or that sort of thing. Who the hell knows? All I know is nobody that I know or care about really gives a shit about it anymore. Yeah. I don't know anybody that's going this year. Um, yeah, I'm not, I've only gone once. It was, it was a great drinking party, but no, no business came out of it. I think it, that was the year that Twitter kind of blew up. So, I mean, if I had the time and the money, I would, I would go out and, but I probably,

to be honest at this point, I probably wouldn't go to any of those conferences. I'd just go for the music, uh, you know, shout out again, Coldplay is, uh, playing the iTunes festival there along with Soundgarden and a couple other bands. And you know, it's, it's Austin. It's a great place to be. So yeah, good food. I like Austin. I hear it's gotten really crowded though. I, yeah, you know, it's just a mess now, which is, which is too bad. Cause that's where I was thinking of leaving to, or going to after I left Chicago, but it looks like it's back to LA for me.

So, so be it since San Francisco, since San Francisco is screwed, Seattle, it rains too much. Austin was the next one where everybody was going and apparently everybody's already there. So what's, yeah, but what's after Austin? What is post Austin? Austin's only big for like two weeks though.

No, no. It's for tech. It's huge now. Uh, I guess it's huge. Yeah. Well, it's a Texas, Texas man. You can't beat the laws. Yeah. For business. It's great. You know, taxes are great. Barbecue is great. This is the problem is traffic is not so great. Now they've got the traffic problems because it was a nice little place and now it's got all these, but wait a minute. Tech is there. Doesn't everybody ride a bicycle? Shouldn't they be disrupting the traffic problem? Exactly. They should be, they should be riding their fixies. I don't know what's,

what's going on here. Oh dear. Oh dear. I won't be going to South by. So if you're in San Francisco next week, enjoy it. It's the only time out of the year besides burning man where you can find street parking anywhere. It's, it's amazing. You'll love it. Yep. Have fun, man. Have fun with your cross country trip, by the way. I am. I'm actually got to go now cause I got to go finish packing and get the hell out of here so I can get to the train station and, uh, make some reports from

the road. I will be editing and posting this with, uh, internet technology from my iPad and all this other stuff. Cause there is no wifi on the train. Yeah. So if, if this is late, that means I'm going through a part of the country with no LTE for my, from Verizon on my iPad, which is the only way that this thing's ever going to get posted. So, well, thankfully you, you are on Verizon and the coverage is pretty good. So if you're on, if you're on AT&T, I'd say, all right, see the post on Monday.

Yeah. And hopefully you're not going to die when they knock your building down by mistake. Cause it sounds like you're, uh, yeah. The war zone's in full effect over there. So why don't we sign off and say goodbye? You, you get packing and I'm going to get the hell out of my house for a while. All right, man. And hopefully next week you can come by and we can do this in person.

Sounds good, man. All right, man. Later. Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com. Have a good week.

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