50: Over the Hill

This sucks. I could have told you that. Shut up.

A microphone and the internet. What could go wrong? So you moved. Yes, I am completely 100% in the new place, still having a lot of work done, which may be happening now.

So if you hear any big bangs or crashes or whatnot, there's some contractors outside scurrying about doing things. Yes, hence us recording very late and very quickly today. Exactly. I kept waiting for them to kind of be done, and they just keep going. But they're here, and I don't want them to stop because God knows when they'll come back again.

Okay. After this, after you got your three-day blinds, too, you had to go through your six months of three-day blinds, and I bet you couldn't take them with you. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, the landlord at the old place played for that anyway, so whatever. It's fine. This place gets a—I'm a lot happier with it anyways. It's a lot—it doesn't—I'm not on the surface of the sun anymore like I was in my previous place.

So let's get some nice shade, some decent natural light. It's—you know, once I have all these little improvements and fixes done, it's going to be very wonderful. Nice little place. How's your internet connection in the new place? Are you lightning fast? I am lightning fast so far, so we shall see. I, you know, got that new Time Warner because you don't really have a choice here because, oh, no, it's not a monopoly.

Got the Time Warner going, and it seems to be pretty quick right now, so I'm sure it'll drop off as the months move on. So when I go back to Chicago on Monday, I'm going—I'm going back to a house that has a 105 megabit downstream now. That's impressive. Yeah, and they—and here you go. Comcast upgraded for free.

Wow. Just like, here you go. We're going to take you from your 50 megabit connection, and we're just going to juice you to 105. So my buddy John Chevron did it, ran a speed test from speedtest.net on his. He's got the same connection, and he's got an effective connection of 85 megabits down.

That's pretty impressive. Yeah, that's amazing. So we finally—you know, the U.S. might not be the—one of the worst in terms of internet connectivity one day if Comcast actually comes through with all this sort of stuff. Yeah. You know, if they're going to keep it up like that, go for it. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm on the 50 here, so feel free to upgrade me, guys.

Yeah, I think I'm on the—I'm on the cheap—the cheapest you can get, Time Warner, here at the place I'm staying in the valley. Right. So, how about them earthquakes this week? Wasn't that fun? Oh, you know, I grew up here. I'm fine with it. I swear this winter's trying to kill me. After the leg—breaking the leg, having surgery, then coming all the way out here to recover and recuperate, waking up at—actually, I was reviewing a podcast for the show at 6 in the morning when the whole house just kind of went cattywampus.

Yeah, I was upstairs at my old place kind of starting to—it was actually the day before my big moving day, so I was kind of really just kind of surveying the landscape and seeing what still needed to be done at 6 a.m., like I do, when all of a sudden things just started shaking. But you remember at my old place, they had knocked down the building next to me, and we're starting construction.

So, at first, I was just like, oh, they must have, like, backed the fucking tank truck into the building or something, and then it kept going. I was like, ooh, this is a biggie. And it definitely was. I mean, that's the biggest earthquake I have felt since Northridge about 20 years ago. And then, of course, as soon as I said that, you know, because this is the internet and we can't—we all have to be snarky.

I got immediate comments like, that was 900 times stronger, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, whatever. You guys were all whining about it at 6 in the morning. I didn't. Well, I think I got the first tweet in it, which was—my first tweet was a—actually, it said obligatory earthquake tweet. Before the—you know, I think, like, the first two shakes of the house, I'm like, oh, got to hit Twitter.

Just because I'm in California, what the hell else are you going to do? You got to run with the crowd. Exactly. I did want to punch everybody that called it the shamrock shake since it was St. Patrick's Day. Oh, that was a bit amusing. For the first, like, 10 seconds. Yeah, it was a good shake. It was pretty cool.

You know, again, I'm used to it. I've grown up here. I've felt earthquakes all my life. I say that, and then the big one hits, and, like, my house falls off into the ocean, and I'll be a little bit pissed. But overall, I mean, I'll take earthquakes any day. I'd rather have earthquakes than any other possible natural disaster. I'm just used to them.

They don't really bother me that much. They can actually be a tad bit fun. Yeah, after that was over, and, like, the house was still here, and the adrenaline kind of wore off, I'm like, okay, I'm ready to go again. Bring it on. What I like about it, it's the communal nature of it. I have no truck with these tornadoes that might miss the neighbor's house and just destroy yours.

You know, I want us all in this together. Yeah, really. Yeah, tornadoes terrify. I mean, how much you want to bet one's going to hit my train on the way home? Actually, I'd take that bet because I'm thinking no. Okay. Oh, man. So, I was going through and reading XKCD this week, you know, because we talked about it last week, and I've just been trying to get caught up.

And one of the things that really you can't quite grasp when you're reading, the difference between reading XKCD on a desktop versus a, like, an iOS tablet or a touch device is that half the joke is on mouse over.

Right. So, there could actually be, you know, a huge amount of dialogue that's in the mouse over that you just never get to see on mobile. Yeah. So, I just, I don't know, it just, it strikes me as, you know, losing something on mobile. And I don't know why I put that in the show notes to talk about, but I had a whole thing to go with it.

Well, it is a strange thing in terms of doing design like we both do. And these days having to design knowing that a lot of people are going to be looking at it on your phone or on an iPad where there are no mouse over or hover states. I mean, you know, that's a major part of navigation that we've all done for years, rollovers, things of that nature.

And you can't do any of that stuff. So, I am wondering, is, you know, especially for, like, XKCD, is this just a conscious decision that they said, you know, fuck it, we're not going to go back and redesign because how are we going to make this work? Or did they just get lazy and just, you know, whatever.

I'm sure he's just going with the flow. Yeah. Yeah, you do. I mean, it's like, what kind of cool Easter eggs are we going to be able to do anymore than we used to be able to do? You just can't, really. I mean, a lot of it, you just, you know, you basically just have to realize that if somebody's looking at your site on a pad or a phone, they're, you know, they get half the experience, basically.

All the fun stuff still has to be on desktop. Now, I haven't played with, like, jQuery Touch or jQuery Mobile stuff. I haven't played with it a bit. It's not, it's just not there yet. It's not solid enough for me to actually deploy it on anything real. Because what I'm, what I'm wondering is if we can do some kind of, like, web kit or some kind of, you know, Java, JavaScript hack to do, like, draw, like, a symbol or something on the web page to open up something cool, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Where you could use, like, some of the multi-touch gestures instead of a, instead of a hover state to bring something up. That would be the way around it. But, but that also requires, like, training the idiot user to know that they can do that. Yeah, but I'm thinking for more, like, the cool factor. Like, you come to Grumpy Old Geeks and you, like, you draw a smiley face and then it opens up a whole new, like, kind of cool experience.

I used to build movie websites. We always try to think of fun stuff like that, so. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Oh, the other thing I wanted to bring up this week was, we've had, we've talked about Malcolm Gladwell a ton when we talked about his last books. And finally, people are coming back with the 10,000 hours thing is a myth.

And it's, it's just, people can stop talking about it now. Well, see, I always feel that he's massively misinterpreted by mainstream media and people. He doesn't write these books saying, this is writ law. This is the way that the world works.

He says, this is something that I notice and see and this is, I've come to this conclusion and I don't think that it's any less valid if, to, his books aren't any less valid when somebody comes out and goes, well, we've done studies and that isn't necessarily true in all cases.

Well, nothing's necessarily true in all cases except for physics and even that gets kind of hokey around black holes. That's the end of, that's the world. I mean, he, he comes up with these theories. They're really interesting reads. He does case studies on them. He finds interesting people. Don't base your entire life on this book.

And the people that did that are idiots. Yeah, I think there, there are a lot of people though, that did kind of take it as gospel. If you wanted to really try something and, you know, as you get older, you don't have that many 10,000 hours left in you, you know, and, and people were put off by it and it was an excuse for people not to do something.

Well, the key word there is excuse. Yeah. And that's, that's bullshit. And you can't pin that on Gladwell. I mean, that's, that's the attitude that I can't stand. You know, I read a book that says I need to do X and Y and Z to be successful and I can't do Z. So fuck it. I'm just not even going to bother anymore. You got to Yoda this shit you do, or you do not end of story.

Don't don't, you can't get put off by this kind of stuff and people that do you're morons. And I can't believe that you read Gladwell anyways, don't find an excuse. It's like all these people who want to be writers and all they do is read books about writing and they never actually do any fucking writing. We, we, we, we don't know, you know, we, we read about all the stuff about how to do a successful podcast and we knew that we probably couldn't do one and we aren't, but we're doing it anyways.

God damn it. Yeah, but if we didn't do it, we never would have known. So, but we did it. Yeah, exactly. The key is, the key is to do it no matter what. And again, like I, all Gladwell was really saying in that book is that 10,000 hours seems to be some sort of kind of mythical number of amount of time that somebody puts into something to become extremely skilled at something.

Becoming extremely skilled at something does not mean you're going to become successful at something. Success is luck, circumstance. The skill is just making sure that you have the fucking skills when those things come together and all of a sudden you can become a fucking famous rock star or a fucking grand concert pianist or whatever.

You have to have the skills first, but that doesn't, that's no guarantee of success. Never was, never, never will be. And Gladwell never said it was either. Oh yeah. Success is definitely 99% luck in my experience. Yeah. So I, I don't, you know, I'm, the Gladwell suffered on both ends of this because he got blown up in the press when he first came out with a theory and now he's being torn down.

It's the truth is in the middle as always. Yeah, definitely. Um, but speaking of doing things, I, you know, practice, practice. Yeah. I'm still kicking on my, my 750 words. Only missed a couple of days. Excellent. I blame Verizon for the first laps because I couldn't get on from the train, but.

You could still just, you could still written in a notepad. Yeah, but it doesn't count it on the, the doohickey. I see. That's where I have problems with gamification of things. Well, half the reason was by the time I got around to writing it, my time zone had changed because I was trying to get close to midnight.

Right. And I forgot that I was kind of, uh, gone. Cause like on, on my, on my phone, it still said I had an extra hour, but like I'd already had the thing set for another one. Anyway, time zone failure, big time. Gotcha. Um, and in talking about doing things is this, there's an article that came out on medium about medium and one of their insane CSS people.

And like all the work that they took undertook to fix underlining of links on their website. Now, now, hang on before you go, before you go, um, you just, you had yours, my turn. The first time I look at this, I was just in awe of like, wow, that is, that is, you know, attention to detail.

That's craftsmanship. And then as I get through the article, I'm like, he's talking about, we spent weeks on, on this problem. I'm like, wait, weeks on this problem. That means that a, you've got nothing better to do. You've got too much money because if somebody is paying you to work on a goddamn underline for weeks, it's, you know, it's just, it's mind boggling the waste involved with this for something that honestly, nobody's going to notice.

So, uh, it was, it was an interesting take on, you know, for me, for craftsmanship and seeing his notes with the math and all this other shit. And then the other point of me is like, it's an underline. Seriously. No point in me even, even ranting. I feel exactly the same way.

I started reading the article and I was like, this is really interesting and intriguing. About halfway through, I hated the author. And I basically went about another couple paragraphs and went, you fucking idiots. How much time do you have? Who is spending this money? They're underlines. They're not, it's not really even a problem.

Exactly. And I mean, I didn't hate the author. I thought I, you know, I had no problem with them. It's just, you know, that was his thing. And then you get to the, get to the end of it. Spoiler alert here. Uh, and it's like the, the other guys are looking at it. Yeah. It looks good enough. Yeah. And that's it.

Good enough. Good enough as is. Oh, well. Well, thanks for wasting three weeks. Yeah. Well, no, they did change. They did change it. We, we haven't seen it yet, but, uh, or maybe they did change it. We have seen it. And we just can't tell the difference. We just don't fucking care. You know? Yeah.

Uh, I did get the, the new medium app, which just came out by the way. I thought you were, you were not a medium fan. I'm not going to write on medium for damn sure. But, uh, some of the stuff that's on medium for people who are dumb enough to put it up there, I think it's great. There's some really good writing going on up there, but hopefully they're cross posting to their own sites and keeping a copy of themselves.

And, uh, one other quick thing I found, I don't, I'm not going to talk about the article that much, but, uh, I'm going to put it in the show notes. The article I was reading was, uh, drug dealers aren't to blame for the heroin boom. Doctors are right. Great. Actually a really good article because I'm fairly, uh, adamant that we're all being over prescribed shit.

Um, speaking as somebody who's actually on, uh, hydrocodone right now for my, my foot pain. But, um, as I'm reading this article, I noticed as I'm scrolling down, there's a progress indicator bar on the top. I just saw that. I was about to bring that up.

It is. That's why I put it in here because it's really nice. I thought it was mobile only, but it actually works on the desktop too. When you're about halfway down the article, it was, it's really nice. I really liked how they did it. That is a super fancy little widget. Yep. All right. That's impressive. Everybody should take a look at that.

That, that is good UI people. And that is better time spent than spending three weeks on an underline. Yeah. Cause it probably took this guy two days to whip this up. But you know, since you don't have, and what's really nice about it is cause you're losing scroll bars on everything. Like Safari, you can't even see them anymore.

Half the time or any like iOS. I mean, OS X. Yeah. Mac app. You can no longer tell, tell your progress on anything. So you have to like jiggle the page to like have your scroll bar show back up. And I think this is a much more elegant solution. And then I've seen that a lot of sites are starting to use the, this article takes approximately five minutes to read or four minutes to read or whatever.

This is, this is way cooler. Well, I like that. I like, I actually would like both of those, you know, so when I start an article, I know how big it's going to be, you know, cause, but it's nice to know how far you've got. Like if you've got to run, you can bookmark it and come back later. It's just a really nice UI touch. Kudos, kudos to new Republic for that one.

Well done. Comment of the week. Our first comment of the week is from Charlie H. Hey guys, still listening. And you guys are still disrupting. All right with the world. Hey, we're not disruptors. Damn it. No, not, not, not by any stretch. Uh, I sent an email a while back about the collusion app.

Never heard any replies about it. Can't blame you. It's kind of like, um, and so what? LOL. Just completed episode 48. You guys were discussing phone apps that you use while driving. I've been using Waze for a year or so now and find that it isn't all that, that it isn't all that great for navigation, but I can't not use it.

Hook. I tell you hooked. I am. I realized that perhaps a driving app isn't really in your wheelhouses. Still give it a chance if you dare. Um, well, if it's not that great for navigation, I have to wonder why you're using it because that is the point of the app. Nope. Gamification points, badges. Oh, right, right, right.

See, I just do not have that gene in me. Uh, I actually like Waze, uh, Waze. It's just, I've got a GPS built into my car and I can't beat that. It's, it's right there. It's in my dashboard and it gets me where I need to go and I don't get little bleeps and bloops. Uh, yeah, we, we covered Waze before and I still have friends that use it, um, mainly in the Midwest.

Right. And they talk about their points and their, their stuff. But, um, yeah, the, the power drain on it's massive. It fries your phone. Um, I'm sure it shortens the life of the phone by, you know, just by being so hot all the damn time. Well, like we've discussed a little bit last week about how iPhone, um, Apple is making the, and Google are both making their push directly into dashboards and cars.

And I'm sure it's only a matter of time before one of them buys out Waze and it's just built into the car directly. Well, you know who owns Waze, don't you? No. Google. Oh, there you go. So it's going to be built into all the Google, uh, you know, car apps that'll, that'll be coming out soon. And so, um, if I end up with one of those, which I won't because I'm on the BMW mini side, which will be iPhone, uh, then I would start using it.

You elitist bastard. Yeah. Waze, Waze was bought by Google quite a while ago. And I don't know what the collusion app is. I actually didn't look that up and I don't remember seeing your email. So sorry, Charlie. Uh, I saw it, sorry, my, my bad. Probably. Um, I, the collusion app was one of the ones kind of, uh, in the hiding, uh, your trace for advertisers.

Oh, I'm pretty sure that's what, what it was. It doubled up on some of the stuff that I was already using. Okay. So I, I just, and I just spaced on it. Um, I, I would have put it in the show notes before, but yeah, sorry about that. Forgot. So our next comment is from Brett B.

I was inspired by the podcast and went back to school for electrical engineering. Good, good man. Impressive. One of the classes is intro to C plus programming. Is this even still something that needs to be learned or is it outdated? Keep up the good work. Um, I'd say totally worth learning.

It's a, it's a staple in the programming world. Objective C has kind of gotten the limelight now because it's the darling of the iOS world. Um, but just as a, you know, fundamental programming language, I don't even know it, but I'd love to. Um, I have tons of books on it, but, um, I think if you don't know any programming language, it's, it's good.

Uh, take it for sure. Cause a lot of the, um, especially in electrical engineering, you're going to be dealing with the, you know, um, embedded devices and C plus plus is a great, uh, language for that. And it's used all over the place. Yeah, I agree a hundred percent.

And it's, it's, it's the second language I learned after Pascal, um, which I, I, I don't use C plus or C plus plus or objective C at all anymore. Uh, just cause I don't build, uh, apps because nobody will pay me to do that. Um, and I have, I probably couldn't tell you how I couldn't probably write hello world and C plus plus anymore, but it did, you know, it was a massive foundation language.

And back when I did know it is when I started to pick up things like PHP and JavaScript. And if you know, C plus plus that's a, those are easy leaps. So it's, it's a great language to learn. It's, it's the basis for all modern languages. Um, I don't know about that, but yeah, it's a, but still, it's a good Rosetta stone.

It's good. It's good to know. Um, so yeah, take it for sure. Agreed. Thanks guys. So, uh, if anybody has a comment, you know how to get ahold of us. In the news. So, uh, speaking of programming languages, keep this ball rolling.

Uh, there's been some, uh, talk recently about this new Wolfram language by, uh, Stephen Wolfram, who was the, uh, was it Mathematica guy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I, I never was really a big math guy, so I didn't really play with it. I do remember when Wolfram Alpha came out the app that was a big deal and, uh, every now and again, I pop it open and I use it.

Uh, but this new language is, uh, it's interesting to say the least. I went and watched the, uh, he's got like a 12 to 13 minute video on the site itself. Yeah. And I'm still like trying to figure out how it would work into a workflow type of thing for whatever I need to do.

But I, I, I'm a web guy, so everything looks like a website to me. Um, it's neat as hell. I'll say, I'll tell you that. I mean, if you watch that video, it is neat as can be. Oh yeah. Um, I was blown away. I mean, it feels like we were just talking about, you know, C plus plus and basis is for a lot of other languages.

This is wiping the slate clean. This is trying to start completely over with, uh, and ditching all the past and just like, okay, how do we actually do things now? Let's write a program that's based on that. So if you, um, and it's, it's, I don't know.

It's really hard to tell. Cause he spent 30 years putting this thing together, you know? Yeah. Which is a really long time, but I think maybe he's getting a little bug nutty because of the things that I think he thinks it can do. It might be not able to do. I don't know. I, I, I don't know if it's ever actually good to work, but I love the concept.

That's where I'm at. Yeah. It's completely neat. Um, and I am going to play with it because there are some things where you can build like mobile apps to go out and do all sorts of crazy stuff on the web with, you know, fetching data and parsing and building, um, you know, friend graphs and all this other type of stuff that it might be able to pull something out of and make, make a novel novelty app out of it.

Right. Uh, some of the cloud stuff looks like it's very Skynet-y if it actually does what it says it's going to do. Yeah. Um, but it's deep as hell. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, if you're into, if you're a programmer at all, you should, you should check this out. At least watch his video. It's pretty awesome.

Yeah, definitely. Now it got brought to my attention mainly because there's a guy at Slate that you pointed at that, uh, basically crapped all over it. He did. He did shit all over it. Um, I, I, but I, like I said, I mean, I don't think it's ready for prime time.

I don't think, uh, it's just really interesting and I'm not going to walk away from something that is so, uh, so novel. It's so rare. I mean, we, we talk a lot on this podcast about, you know, the cowboy years when we got into this and everything was new and we were figuring it out as we go.

That's what this feels like to me. This excited me. When was the last time you got excited about a programming language? When's the last time you went, Ooh, right. Ruby on rails. Isn't that cool? Yeah. It's been a long goddamn time and this is fucking cool. Yeah. I was, I, I did get that feeling.

I'm like, damn, this is, you know, something I have never seen before. If this works, it's a game changer. I don't think it's going to, but we'll see. So the points that the, uh, the guy at slate made were that were valid, were almost everything is dependent on this Wolfram cloud where all of these data sets sit and the people that are going out and doing all that stuff.

So it's almost kind of like everything that we bitch about saying, don't do, cause it's, you're building a business on somebody else's technology, infrastructure, you know, how many people are using Google's libraries now for JavaScript or things like that? No, no, no. But he's got the data sets.

Like when he's talking about it's, you know, look up a country, find the flags, the population and all that stuff. That's all data that's in his data set. Right. So you're going to get charged for that somewhere along the way. And cause he's got to pay the people to keep it updated and all the other stuff and the hardware it's running on.

It's, you know, there, there are hidden costs there, but it also leaves it open that, you know, where does the ownership lie to the actual, you know, application. Yeah. So digging into that would be smart, I think. Yeah. And one hack would, would ruin them all.

So. Yeah. I don't think that's going to happen. I think these guys kind of are, they're probably pretty damn locked down. Yeah. Well, and the fact that it's all like, um, it's not like a low level language where you can get to the machines, you know, as you can't, you're not like, you know, exacting, you know, code that's going to dump var password files and all the other shit.

But it's like, no, here's your, it's, it's almost like, you know, um, Legos, you know, you plug the pieces together and you make something cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely interesting. I mean, I like it. So, um, we'll see, we'll see what happens. Now there was another article this week that was making the rounds about, uh, a band that has finally figured out how to hack Spotify to make a few bucks.

And it, it, it, it, you know, it's, they made a song called sleep, which is just a 30 minutes or 30 second songs or 31 seconds. Just, just enough to beat the ping time to get paid and just ask people to put it on and loop it while they sleep at night.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I thought this was genius. I actually, this, this is for whatever reason, because I'm pretty plugged into the, to the music industry and you'd think this would have crossed my eyes balls, but it didn't until you posted it. I love this. I think it's hilarious. Um, it's very funny if you've got, uh, they did the math on it in the article.

So, you know, if they had like two to 300 fans that put it on every single night, they'd be making about five to six bucks per person that, you know, they figured out about 840 plays, uh, would occur throughout the evening. Uh, so that worked out to about, yeah, about six bucks per person. So you get a couple hundred of your fans to just put that on when they go to bed at night and let it run on their computer.

You actually start to make a little bit of money. Yep. You've just financed a new album or a tour. Yeah. I mean, I guarantee you Spotify will shut this down at some point, but they did have a, to Spotify's eternal credit. They had an amazing response and an admittedly amusing response to the story. Spotify said, it seems derivative of John Cage's work, which is hilarious.

You know, John Cage. So yeah. So they know about it. They're aware of it. And, uh, for now they're letting it go. But obviously if they start to see it getting, getting game too much, they're going to shut down that loophole. How? If they're playing, it's, it's somebody playing a song, you know, you write a term of service that says that you can't have silence.

They're, they're in charge. They can write, they can put whatever they want into the terms of service, but I thought they don't, they don't have actual, are they silent songs? Cause I thought, okay, I thought there were actual, there was actual music in there, but no, no, no. It's complete silence. Oh, excellent. Even better. Um, but you know, but I mean, the way around that is, is Brian Eno's album.

I mean, come on, you just, you know, music for airports. You just fart on a keyboard for 10 minutes or you just, or you hit play and turn your volume down and let it go all night. You know, exactly. I mean, that's just, it's, it's kind of a non-story because you can do that for real albums. It doesn't have to be silence. It was just clever and it got them publicity.

Yep. And hopefully a few bucks. Exactly. I hope they make a few bucks off of it too. Oh, speaking of interesting hacks, uh, we were talking about the earthquake before we were, and I actually meant to put this story up because I ran across my, uh, uh, my news desk about the LA times using a, a rope, basically software robot to write the earthquake story before anybody else.

It's called the quake bot. Quake bot. Well, I used to play quake and it never wrote stories. Um, would you like to take on this one? Because I think that it's, I, I didn't even, I read the headline and I'm like, okay, that's enough. I get it. You know, uh, the, yeah, I mean, basically it's a, basically a four to five, uh, paragraph, uh, report, uh, basic, you know, straight up facts, the kind of journalism that we don't actually have anymore.

This, this bot is better at being a journalist than a journalist, uh, was basically, uh, they set up a system that grabbed in all the relevant information that came from, you know, all the automated systems that we have out there that, that monitor quakes. Yeah. It's the USGS.

Yeah. Put together a quick little report and posted it all by itself without a human. And it's more information than, uh, you need. It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I don't actually have a problem with it. Me either. I think this is completely fine. Um, I'd like to see more of these kinds of bots doing, doing, you know, day to day basic events and just quick, uh, I'd rather have this than everybody's, you know, quick tweets.

Earthquake. Oh my God. Yeah. And everybody trying to figure out where it was, even though clearly on the map, it showed exactly where it was. Yes. I didn't quite understand why people were all confused by that either. It's like, Oh, it's just a little bit. It's right by the Getty people. It's not in Westwood. Yep. Getty is not Westwood.

Yeah. Now we've talked a lot about, you know, how tech is really, you know, disrupting. Yes. Uh, crap. Now you post, you sent me an article right before we started and it's an economist or economy type article, but the old, there's a line in this article called, uh, it said technology induced unemployment, which is, which sums it up perfectly.

I think. I agree. Um, I actually haven't had the chance to read this entire article either because it's because it just came to my attention right before we were starting to record. I was just completely struck by the first paragraph, which I'm going to read verbatim right now. Technological change is not a tide that lifts all boats in our economy.

The truth is that it's more like a tsunami. It threatens to overturn all the boats and drown their occupants, sparing only the lucky few who have already reached safety in the hills. Hello, San Francisco. Well, it is kind of hilly. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I, it's, uh, it's a good article.

I got, like I said, I got through it. We'll post it in the show notes. It's called the missing middle class jobs in the second machine age. And it does, it does take the side of, you know, Oh, maybe all this stuff that we're doing isn't actually that good. It's, you know, it is separating the classes and it is causing, you know.

Oh, who's got the plan this time? Oh my God. I think, uh, I think apparently a plane has landed on my street somewhere and, uh, no, you know, those little planes go down all the time, but apparently in my neighborhood. Yeah. It seems to be a really good article.

I got about halfway through it. It's a lot of the stuff that we talk about. Uh, it's, you know, disruption is not necessarily a good thing and, uh, we don't really know how to deal with it yet because we have, there's a lot of people on this planet and they need jobs. We haven't gotten rid of money yet. This isn't Star Trek. Not yet. So.

Bitcoin. The latest disc world series book number 40 raising steam just came out and I'm so pissed that I've been so fucking frazzled with work and buying a house that I've only gotten in two chapters.

All I want to do is sit and read it because this is one of my favorite series of all time and one of my favorite authors and he's only got a few more books in him. In fact, this may even be the last one because unfortunately in December of 2007, Terry Pratchett announced he was suffering from early onset Alzheimer's disease.

So we're not going to get too many more of these. I know it's, it's, it's such a bummer. And, uh, I got it to the same day. I got it on audible and got about two chapters in and I was going on two acts trying to get through it so I could review it for the show. And then I'm like, no, wait, you know what? Since there aren't very good, aren't going to be many left and this might be the last one.

I'm going to take my time and I'm going to enjoy it. Yes, this is to be savored. Um, if you've never read any of the disc world series and you're listening to this podcast and you like technology and you like the stuff that we've talked about, you will love these books. And if you've never read any of them, you've got 40 to read. So lucky you. And they're so good.

And especially on audible, they've, they've had gone through two different readers, but the second one has been around for the bulk of the series. And which is great because there's so many characters in there that he gets the characters, you know, really right. Um, and also you've got the, got a couple of the TV series too, or TV, uh, there are mini series that are really well worth, uh, checking out.

Those were, those were all amazingly well done. I can't bring myself to watch them just because I, I, I have created this entire world in my head. They got, I mean, they nailed it. Well, they nailed my vision of it. Right. So I, I don't know how close yours is to mine, but I, everybody in the series was just spot on.

It's like, they went into my head and pulled them out. Well, like I said, I mean, I think both Jason and I cannot recommend this world enough. If you've never read it, um, start with, start with number one and work yourself through. It's quite a treat. Um, it's fantasy sort of it's science fiction, sort of it's modern day commentary all the time.

It's hilariously funny. It is, um, planes back to the plane. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So I got a bunch of stuff this week. I'm going to try and, uh, not bore you with too much of it here.

Yeah. Uh, first up skill crush, skill crush is actually a learning service to learn how to program or design. Uh, except there's a little, little problem there. I discovered a problem last night while I was going through the show notes and brought it up.

Um, their skills need a little crushing because it's not a responsive site at all. It schools off on iPads. No, it's responsive, but it's, it's not. Not well done. It's not correct. It's broken on my, yeah. On my, on my, on my phone, the, the nav is off to the left and there's some spots that are, you can't read there, get to the links.

So they might want to take their own course. Yeah. Take, take your own courses. Uh, you know, normally I wouldn't say much about anything because I, we, Jason and I both understand the world and we understand the budgets that we're given and clients not listening to us and priorities and, and us telling them things like, well, you really need to make sure that your site works on an iPad and they go, fuck it.

I don't care. I'm not going to pay for it. So we build sites that don't, but the whole point of this site is about your programming skills. Yeah. This is, and this is a, this is a product site. This is them selling you on their skills. And yes, it, uh, it's not, it's not working correctly.

Oops. Now to their defense, I signed up for their quote unquote bootcamp, uh, which is a series of like seven emails that you get over the course of the week that gives you basic knowledge. Right. And, uh, they were really well done. I gave them, I gave them props for it. They, they were for newbies.

They were, the writing was well done. Uh, nice graphics. It was very pretty. So, and, uh, the courses are like, you actually have to sign up for a, a time slot cause they're apparently run by humans. So you can't just like take it at your own pace. That's a bit of a drag, but also I do like the real human aspect.

That is kind of cool. There's not enough, enough of that these days. Yeah, definitely. Another, uh, app I found this week is that's making the, the, uh, press circuit is called air P and P commence the lawsuits. Um, air P and P is in no way affiliated with Airbnb.

They've already put that up to try to stem off any lawsuit, but what's the lawsuit? How are they making any money in this site? It's so stupid. Uh, well, uh, you can rent out your, your, your crapper if you want to have a nice wee, which, you know, is a problem sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah. It can be, um, not very useful as right now, there are only two places to be in all of Canada. Whoa. I guess you got to hold it, eh? Uh, I guess there's a lot of snow. So yellow snow is totally acceptable. Surprisingly, 56 places to be in Mexico, but I think most of them are just street corners. In, in the back of your taxi.

Yeah. Okay. So, um, yeah, that's funny, but it was cute. It was cute. I thought I'd throw it in there. It's cute. It's big red button cute. But yeah, if somebody actually is trying to make a business out of this, I want to strangle them. This is not the first time this has been out there. When, when apps first came out, there were, there were a slew of, I got to go apps, you know?

Yeah. And people that would, uh, like geolocate bathroom, you know, like a pedestrian friendly bathroom. So if you're in San Francisco and you really had to go, like would tell you how close the nearest Starbucks that didn't charge you to go was and all that stuff. Right. And all that crap, literally. So, um, getting to something that's actually useful this week is Nuzzle.

It's a, it's a new app from, uh, the Friendster dude and a couple other people, but, uh, it's another news aggregator that takes your, your new streams, you know, your, your Twitter, your Twitter stream, your Facebook stream, takes all the links that your friends post and sucks those in and gives you a newspaper basically out of it, but it's, or just like, it's basically a webpage and sends you a daily email roundup of what all your friends were, um, posting

about that day and how many of them didn't, which ones did. Right. So it's, uh, I'll put the link to the, the, um, the actual site, but I'll also put a link to my nuzzle. So you can see. I can't wait to nuzzle you, Jason. Yeah, baby. Bring it on. Um, I actually, I like this concept because I've been toying with the idea of taking carrying myself off of social networks as often as I am on them and to have something like this where I could just look at it maybe two to three times a day.

Um, it might be kind of nice. It actually is. It's, uh, it saves a bunch of time if you just care to see what people are linking to and not what they're saying, which, you know, honestly, that's, it saves you a lot more time. Right. Um, works great. It really works great. And the daily emails are, I, cause I get them in the morning the same, about the same time I dig emails come in so I can just sit there and, and sort through all the cool stuff for the day, put it in, in a pin board and Instapaper and never look at it again.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I definitely like it more than, than Facebook's paper. So, um, now, oh, go ahead. No, no. It's okay. Okay. You bastard. I was going to, well, I was going to shit on Facebook and then I realized I didn't want to shit on Facebook because in other news this week, uh, there was a Facebook update and for the first time ever, it didn't change all my settings.

So I'm going to give him full on props for that. I almost totally forgot because you were making fun of me yesterday for about the fact that I wanted to give Facebook props. Yeah. Yeah, it was. And, uh, the new app actually looks nice. Yeah, it actually does. It's really nice. So, uh, well done Facebook for once. So there's another app out that I was trying called Kimono, uh, kimonolabs.com.

It's a, um, it's a kind of a drag and drop, uh, web scraper tool, kind of like almost like, uh, uh, the Wolfram language with their drag and drop widgets and all that shit for scraping other people's web content. Right. So basically stealing. Um, and, uh, in, in their FAQ, it says, uh, the question, isn't web scraping illegal?

Am I going to get in trouble? And their reply is clear the pipes here. Actually, web data extraction from public websites is very common. And in most cases, 100% legal, actually web data extraction from public websites is very common. And I'm reading the same sentence again.

So I'll cut that out. No, um, it goes on to just say that, uh, yeah, you can do it. And, uh, it, it, what they don't say is, uh, scraping is generally legal. It's what you do with the data after you scrape it. That is illegal because what are you going to do with it when you get it?

Well, you're going to republish it on your own website. Ergo theft. Yeah. You're stealing it. Um, and again, I mean, you're leaving out a little bit that I was hoping that you're going to read because a lot of people that may listen to this podcast probably don't know that there is a file that we put up on sites called robots.txt. It's a basic text file, which we use to provide guidelines on what pages within the sites are allowed or disallowed for people to basically take the data and do what they will with it.

Um, it's a fucking incredibly flimsy form of copyright control and it doesn't really work and it's ignored. Um, these guys are basically kind of doing the, we just built the tools, man. It's up to you to make sure that you use them legally. Yeah. Use it for good. We just, we just put the syringes and the rubber hosing in a box together and sell it to you.

What you do with that is totally up to you, man. Yes. And free spoons. Although there's absolutely no other reason to use this other than to steal people's data. Or, I mean, if you want to use it for personal use, you know, to get your set up, uh, email alert systems or things like that, or dashboards.

Um, I can see that maybe being a use case for internal company data type of things, but that's not where these people are going to make money. So actually, I don't know where they're going to make money yet. I don't know where they're going to make money either, except for maybe selling it to the HuffPo. And it, I mean, we've both built scrapers like this for years and years.

I mean, I was writing scrapers like this in Pearl in, in 95. So this is not something that's new. It's just making it very easy for people to do it on their own. Yeah. Now I want to get to doing things on your own. There's a new app called impossible. And I'm going to preface this by saying it is, it's called impossible.

The free giving network. I never would have got this app except that it was featured and I was bored. It's featured on the front page of the app store. Now you, you make a wish and, and other people can fulfill your wish.

That's it. Right. Right. And, uh, so you get things on here. Like I wish I would discover my hidden superpower already. Okay. Can't help you there. You retard. Um, I wish people, I wish people do not use their subjective bias to judge before they truly see what is real.

Whatever. Um, I wish people would stop building these kinds of apps. I wish there was no asthma. Yes. I wish you would die. Oh, I, here's my, I wish you would die in a fire. Um, it's, this is the most, I wish I had the kind of free time that these people have. Uh, it's Jesus Christ.

What the fuck is wrong with all you people? And, and the way they do this thing, they, they, uh, you put in your wish and they auto extract, um, hashtags that, you know, you might like, they have suggested, suggested hashtags. So every, I would thought I was going crazy or all these people were just really stupid because every, um, wish has like four hashtags in the middle of it as random words.

And it makes it look like, like a five-year-old is writing this shit on Twitter at four in the morning after having a cup of Robitussin. It makes no sense. And there are, it is like 99% women on here. So that I'm not going to say anything else about that, but, um, take it, take it, take it, maybe the Pinterest crowd has moved over to here.

Um, but yeah, man, avoid this at all costs. Oh yeah. I would never would have downloaded it in the first place. Kudos to you for, uh, for fouling your phone. Hey man, I take one for the team. I'm actually deleting it right now. Press the X goodbye. Yes. Delete impossible with extreme fucking prejudice.

So there's an app that I used to have. I bought it a long time ago and used it and it kind of just kind of destroyed my, my iTunes collection. It's called tune up. Uh, the concept is it's supposed to go through and, uh, kind of clean up all your MP3 tags and, and all your music and organize them correctly.

And if you're like me and you were an early adopter and you ripped in all your CDs years and years ago, and that tried to keep your music collection in iTunes since then, and have suffered through multiple iTunes crashes where you lose your entire library and everything gets destroyed and it all gets fucked up beyond belief.

Um, thank God Apple is much better at that now. And I haven't had anything catastrophic happen in years, but it used to happen a lot. Trust me on this one. Uh, my, my iTunes collection has never recovered. I've never found the time to sit there and go through and get it back into the immaculate shape that it once was.

Uh, and tune up just got a write-up on boing, boing, and boing, boing is usually pretty good about this sort of stuff. And I guess they have a new version out. So I'm thinking about investigating this again, because I just don't know if I'm ever going to get my iTunes library in shape manually ever again.

Yeah. Problem is I have so many bootlegs. I have so many, you know, European release. I, I, back when I was doing this, you know, I, I labeled things as, you know, single dash, single name. So it would be separate from the album titles and all that sort of stuff. And I just don't think it's ever going to do what I want it to do.

Probably not. And I've, I've had, uh, uh, I had a chunk of your library for a good bit of time and, uh, yeah, you had quite a mess in there. Um, the, I've used, I used to use tune up way back in the day. I got the email when, uh, they released the new version.

I, uh, don't remember it really worth the money because it's like 30 bucks. It's not cheap. Yeah. It's not cheap for an app, but, uh, I would, I would happily pay a hundred bucks for an app that could do it. See, I just use iTunes match now and it, it resorted everything. And I, my library is absolutely perfect now because I don't actually, I actually threw everything away as soon as they took it.

I've got like maybe five gig of bootlegs and stuff that I keep for myself and everything else is just taken care of. Yeah. Well, we've discussed that. I exceed the, uh, iTunes match, uh, totals that are allowed, so I can't use them. They should seriously have like an iTunes match pro account for people.

It's like a hundred thousand. Yeah. It's such a small amount of music. I mean, I just, I have a shit ton of music, all of which was paid for. 25,000 is not a small amount. You're just excessive. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Um, all right. So I'm going to probably take a pass on that.

I'd love if anybody out there is listening and has had experience with any of these sorts of things. Uh, please write us, let us know, let us know which ones are good. Yeah. And check it out. Cause they might have a free trial. That's true. That's true. And I could just always dupe off a copy of the library, let it run free and see what it does.

I know. I know this is, this is hard to believe because, um, it's, uh, you know, something that you would never do, but I just made two mouse clicks, which, you know, I had to expend calories on, but the first big giant button on the tune up website is download free trial. So I'm not saying that you're like lazy or anything, but, uh.

Well, that part is easy. It's the, it's the duping the entire library and then running through it part. That's scaring me and kept me away a little bit. Okay. Besides, I don't have fucking time right now. I've got like, I've got copper piping being sawed outside my house. Poor baby, Mr. Homeowner, Scrooge or Richie McDuck or whatever the fuck you are over there now.

I international real estate mogul. Thank you. I have properties in two countries now. There you go. Okay. Well then hire one of your people to go try this out and report back next week if it's worth it. Unfortunately, my people are me. That sucks. Oh, well, anyway, I got, uh, I found this right when we were checking out the Wolfram stuff.

Wolfram has a ton of course assistant apps for all types of math subjects. Yeah. It's funny because I've been recently thinking about just going and retaking math and just getting good at math, you know, starting from, starting from pre-algebra to physics, you know?

Are you sure you don't have a blank brain or brain clot or something going on? Why, why would you want to do math? I've always wanted to get good at math. I love geometry. I was always good at geometry, but then I forgot everything. And well, the Wolfram is the go-to. Oh my gosh. She has a music theory class. All right.

I'm going to take that one. See, there's tons of stuff in there that's really fun. And I'm just like, I didn't know these existed. I always thought that it was just the Wolfram alpha app and that was it. But signals and systems. Nice. Yeah. All right. I might have to try some of these. Yeah. And they're cheap. They're like two bucks. Awesome. Well worth it.

So there's this dude that started following me on Twitter named Jordan Cooper. Okay. He's a standup comedian kind of dude. He calls himself a standup comedian, web marketer, tech douchebag. But he said some nice things about the show.

So I went to go try and find out if what his podcast was like or if he even had one. Because it's very hard to find because he doesn't have his fucking URL in his Twitter bio. So for a web marketer, you might want to work on that. Maybe he's beta. He's on episode 102.

That's not beta. Episode 102. If it is, we're an alpha. Yeah. The approval whore in me. So I was listening to his podcast when the earthquake hit. So I blame him. Check it out. It's actually really funny. I was laughing out loud quite a few times. The next podcast I found this week is from Moises Chuan.

He's been around a lot. He was on the 5x5 network doing a couple shows. And I think he has broken off from 5x5 and has started the ESN network. I don't know what ESN stands for. But it's apparently a trend to get on 5x5, get a show, and then...

Build up an audience and bail? Yep. Bugger off and go someplace else. The entire Mule radio network is based on that, I think. We cleverly decided not to do that and not build up an audience. Yes. We're absolutely not building an audience, and we're not having sponsors, and we're not making money, and we are not going to leave the 5x5 network.

So one of his new shows is called Thank You for Calling, which is a podcast about tech support. Oh, God. It's actually really good. I can't do it. Okay. I haven't listened to all of them. There are like four episodes. The fourth episode had really bad audio, which he apologized for, but it was like outside at South by, so I couldn't listen to it.

The second and third episode, though, or it's like a two-parter, about the airline industry, and they got John Roderick on there from the Long Winters and a couple other good people on there, but they actually got somebody who worked in the airline industry, and there's some really good tips in there. And it was well done.

It was very funny. Recommended it. I haven't listened to the first one, so your mileage may vary. But, I mean, for a podcast about tech support, pretty good. All right. I mean, there's a lot of fucking comedy to mine there. That's for sure. Tons, and a lot of frustration, too.

Oh, my God. Yes. So that's where the comedy gold comes from. And I talked before about the You Are Not So Smart podcast. Episode 20 this week, though, made my day because it has James Burke. James Burke got famous way go long ago in the 80s, I think, for a TV series called Connections.

It was the 80s because you sent me the link to this, and I was like, what the fuck is it? Did you watch any of them? I have not watched it. I've got it, so I'm ready to watch it. And I did read the Wikipedia page about it, and I'm all in. I just haven't had the time. Yeah, he basically takes, you know, this is a rock, and then he'll take it through the technological chain that comes out with a refrigerator, you know, all the way through history.

So good. And I thought he was dead. I could have sworn this guy croaked. So when I heard he was alive, it made my day. So check out Connections and check out this podcast if you want to hear how awesome he is, because he's really good in it. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah, some good stuff.

I ran across something. There is a new documentary coming out, and the trailers are out right now. It's about the best film that never was, and I agree with this 100%. I'm a massive fan of Frank Herbert's Dune series. They're by far the best, most awesomely realized universe that's ever been written, relevant in so many ridiculous ways.

If you've not read the Dune series, the original Dune series by Frank Herbert, you need to. You need to do it immediately. Stunning. Now, there was that crappy movie, which basically all people really remember about it is staying in flying underwear. I love that movie. I don't mind it.

You know, David Lynch is such an interesting director, and he made very interesting choices. But if you watch that movie having not read the book, you would have no fucking idea what was going on. Now, here, this is where there's two different versions of Dune. There's the extended version. I've seen both. I've never read the book, and the first time I saw it, I saw the extended version, not the short version.

And if you saw the short version, I 100% agree you would not know what the hell happened, but I watched it with the extended version. And I was in, I knew the whole story. So when I went back and read the book, I thought it was good. I mean, I thought the movie did pretty well. He made up some stuff.

It wasn't, you know, if you're a purist, Dune purist like I am, there were some things that really upset you about it. Regardless, David Lynch's version aside, even the miniseries aside, which actually was well done for the very small budget they had. It was okay.

It wasn't bad at all. Nobody's ever going to be able to do, unfortunately, the entire series. It's just not possible. But this concept art of the original attempt at making Dune into a movie by this guy, I can't even say his name.

Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky. They tried to make this basically in the late 70s, is what it looks like. Probably actually mid-70s. It was after Alien, so... No, it was before. It was before Alien? It was before. They tried to get this together before. He found Geiger. Okay. And Geiger had not done any movies yet.

And so Geiger, who did all the Alien for Alien and Aliens, did all that artwork. He did all the concept art for this take on Dune. And if you watch the trailer, you start to see how beautiful this was and how insane it was. And he had Mick Jagger cast. He had, like, crazy...

He had Dali as the emperor. I mean, if this movie would have gotten made, it would have blown people's minds. Instead, all we get is this documentary about the greatest movie that was never made. But it looks fucking fascinating. I am so in. I am so going to see this movie. I'm going to go see this movie in a theater.

I'm not even going to wait. I'm going to go. And I hope that... The impression I'm getting is this guy still wants to make the movie. Oh, man. And they're putting out this documentary to get people interested. He should, you know... Kickstarter it. I know. Kickstarter this fucker.

This is something I'd pay for. It looks... Yeah, it looks amazing. I hope they get it. It's a beautiful take on it. And I really... It's worth... If you love Dune or you saw the movie and went, it should have been better. God damn. Just watch this trailer. It's two minutes of awesomeness. It really is. Yeah.

And we've got... And a little spoiler alert. Sometime in the near future, when we get around to doing another Does It Have Legs, Dune is on the... On the list. I will be on that episode, then. Okay. We'll get you in on that one. Yeah, I'll be on that one. Although, I don't know.

You know, Mike and I are fighting a lot online. Yeah, well... Grow up. Grow up? He's the one that left five comments without me responding. I wasn't talking to you. Obviously, I've been doing a lot of searching online for home items, all kinds of stuff.

And I stumbled across something that is so fucking amazing, but I just can't... I don't have it in me as a 40-year-old, grumpy old geek to actually have this sort of stuff anymore. I probably would if I were single. So, anyways, you should check out The Retro Ink.

I can't believe I'm actually pointing anybody towards Etsy because Etsy is so often just shit jewelry and stuff like this. Knitted caps. Lots of knitted caps. But these guys are amazing. They basically focus on the Muppets and Star Wars. And they do polygon decor takes on characters.

There are printable... In the show notes, we'll do a direct link to the printable wall posters. They do pillow covers. They are gorgeous. And they are artsy. And they are cool as fuck. I think you need a man cave so you can get some of these and put them in your new man cave.

These will be going in the temporary office. And actually, you know, should there be a future child or whatever, the Muppets ones will work right. And they also do superheroes. They run through quite a few things. I mean, these things are actually beautiful. I can't speak for the quality because I haven't ordered anything yet.

And, again, I'm very anti-Etsy. But these things are amazing. Check out The Retro Ink on Etsy. This stuff is stunning. It is. I agree. Check it out. Security! Ha! So, Mr. Edward Snowden this week showed up in Vancouver via his own little R2-D2 setup.

Okay. I don't know if you've seen it yet. He was a little telepresence robot that he had. He was, like, controlling from a laptop somewhere hidden in Russia. And they did a half an hour interview with him. Right. Well worth taking a look at. It was pretty good.

He talks about the fact that even, like, some of the best stuff hasn't even been put out yet. So, we've got more to come, apparently. What? Come on. Say it. Say it. Well, we talked a little bit about this last week.

And I love Ed Snowden for what he did. He's a fucking hero. I mean, he really is. He brought things to light. But he's really just a figurehead now. And there's only so many more times I can listen to another fucking interview where he says, I've got more stuff coming. I'm over it now.

Stop. Stop. Just stop. Well, until it's fixed. Keep it coming. I didn't see this TED Talk. And I actually didn't see the other TED Talk either. So, I'm just going to drop this on you because it isn't in our show notes. But apparently there was a response. Yes. I watched it last night from the NSA. From the NSA. What did they have to say?

They basically gave, Ted gave them equal airtime. Which they should. I love Ted for that. Yep. I was honestly falling asleep when I started to watch it last night. And I got like halfway through it. And, you know, he made some actual good points. If you're going to watch Snowden, watch the NSA side.

Some of the NSA stuff is a little bit, you know, you're full of shit. The way that the guy came off on camera was terrible. So, that didn't help his case. Well, that's Nixon JFK. Yeah. It's exactly that. That sort of thing. But if you're going to put somebody in front of this audience, you find the best speaker that you can get.

Or at least give him some media training. Because he did not. They probably should have had a more measured response. I mean, I read the bullet points on it. And like all things, they have some extremely valid points. Yes. You know, so the truth is always, as per usual, somewhere in the middle. Yep.

And just check them out, though. It's an hour, so you're going to spend some time. Yeah. It's some big weeks for security for this stuff. But I'm a little tired of Ed Snowden being trotted out everywhere now. I kind of feel that it's more like people are just trying to have him on to bump up their page views. Definitely.

And I don't know what's going to happen to him because his visa is going to run out soon, if he's going to get an extension or not. So, that's going to be interesting to see. Yeah. And there's some big news in license plate tracking this week, too. It's funny. As I was talking about this with some friends over drinks last weekend, and they're just like, yeah, we know.

We don't care anymore that everybody's watching and tracking and keeping it. I've been saying that to you since day one of this podcast. But it's just, you know, I'm talking to civilians now and just getting their read on it. And they're like, yeah, we know they're watching. We don't care. We don't want to spend any time to it.

So, the sheep, you know, that's what you're going to get. Nobody's going to care. Nobody's going to fix it. So, what are you going to do? What are you going to do when they come for you? That's the problem. Yeah. It's just, I know, it's just people don't care.

It's a little insane. It's disgusting to think about. But, I mean, I've always assumed that, well, that's the point of having a license plate frame is, you know, so people can follow you and track you. I know, but tracking all the time with historical data. So, if they ever need to go back and. But they're tracking you without, you know, proof of a crime being committed.

That's the whole point. There was another story that came out this week, which I'm just pulling out of my ass right now. And I'll have to find it and get it to you for the show links. But I'm more disturbed about the fact that all of these new cars have trackers built into them automatically that report back to the maker of the car.

I would rather the government track my license plate than GM or fucking Mini Cooper or whatever get my information. What the fuck do they need my information for? They're getting it, too. So, there was a story about how people are, there's going to be a class action lawsuit against a lot of these car auto manufacturers saying we should be able to switch off the data being sent back to you.

Yeah, that's true. Totally. I didn't see that one at all. I'll definitely have to find it because I saw it on a news story. I actually read through an article and it was like on, it was on NBC Nightly News or something like that. But basically, the manufacturers are collecting all our data and where we're driving to and all that as well.

And there's a push being made to be able to, for the consumers to be able to shut that off. And I would much rather have the state or the government know by my license plate what's going on. Mini Cooper does not need to know how often I go to Ralph's. Well, here's what this is.

This is the next step in what we were talking about before with automated tollway billing and having – I'm sure somewhere in the government, they're pushing these manufacturers to put these gizmos in your car. Did I really just call it a gizmo?

You did. Jesus Christ, I'm old. Just don't feed it after midnight. Yeah, these trackers into your cars so they can at some point track, and it goes to the government, and it goes to law enforcement because it is more efficient than a license plate reader, which is stone age technology compared to what we have.

License plate trackers are taking a picture, OCRing it, and then, you know, it's – so, yeah, I can see that as the next step. But the fact that they're doing – the manufacturers are doing it, and I don't know why they need the data. They don't. No. I mean, but you've already got – you know, you've got GPS in your car someday.

I know a lot of people that have Wi-Fi built into their car already, so you've got that. Yeah, we don't have them in planes. Oh, most of the planes I fly, I got Wi-Fi. Oh, you're talking about – yeah. The GPS trackers. You know, that's the big story. I almost kind of feel like the entire internet right now should just be one big update.

Where the fuck is that fucking plane? Yeah, everybody's like – Because that's all I see. People are fucking obsessed. I know. I know. This is one of those, like, Salem mass hysteria moments where, like, just – nobody will let this go. All people do is talk about it. I'm so fucking tired. You know how big our ocean is?

Yeah. We need one of those infographics right now to be able to pull up on command that just shows, like, sheer mass size of the ocean. We are not going to find this plane. It's gone, people. Yeah. It's, you know, fucking four years from now we're going to find it. Not even. The way those things break up on impact, if it is in the water, there's so many – you'll find it – somebody will find a tennis shoe in 20 years.

It'll be from the flight. But, I mean, everybody wants it to be, you know, the hijacking. It's been kidnapped. They've landed in a secret base. They want it to be a movie, you know? Totally. Anyways. I just don't think so. Sorry. I just hijacked security segment. Let's go. Ooh, hijacked. Ah-ha. See what I did there? You put this one in.

Google is now using HTTPS for all your connections, which you could have done anyway if you just went in and checked the button. Exactly. But now it's kind of – the way the article was written, it was Google's, like, F you to the government. But who knows? They definitely switched it on, so it's no longer an option.

Your Gmail is now using HTTPS, which I'm sure the government can crack anyways. Which, oh, by the way, and Gmail has been so bad lately. I think that's how – I can't even go into how bad Gmail is anymore. They're just so terrible. Yeah. And another story came out about email, so I thought this was appropriate.

So Gmail switched on their connection to supposedly keep you secure, but it still won't. Microsoft readily admits that they search emails. Oops. On Hotmail. Shocking. Oh, that's not good. I have to go read that one. I didn't get any time for that.

No, basically it came to light because a blogger discovered a bunch of Windows 8 – basically leaked a bunch of Windows 8 information posted on his blog, which was connected to a Hotmail address, and Microsoft started looking through his mail. Okay, pro tip. Sorry.

If you're going to be leaking information about a company, don't pass your private communications through them. Yeah, that falls under I'm stupid, but, you know. And it's not shocking. Again, this comes back to it's free, people. Now, if I had a paid pro account with Microsoft for an email account, then I'd be pissed off that they were looking through my email.

No, seriously? Are you shitting me? So, I found a listicle, and it's a fucking awesome listicle. It's the most awesome listicle ever. But instead of doing just the list, because there are like 152 of them, I want to do a small little segment each week, and I think this fits in perfectly for are you shitting me?

So, this is going to be one fact that you're not going to believe is true, or to use current internet marketing parlance, you are not going to believe this mind-numbing, life-changing fact if you click here right now and watch this video. Excellent. Except we don't have a video. Anyways, today's fact.

Blow my mind. Bring it on. Here it goes. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. What? Are you shitting me? How could that be true, Brian? It's fucking true. Dig it. Cleopatra, born 69 B.C.

The Great Pyramids, built 2,560 B.C. The iPhone released 2007 A.D. She's closer to the iPhone by approximately 500 years than the building of the Great Pyramids. Mind is blown. It is a cool fact.

I had no idea. That's unbelievable, right? I've got a ton of these gems, and I'm not sharing the link because I'm busting one of these out a week. So you're just going to steal their content and bring it to us. I appreciate that. I like your... I'm scraping. I like your chutzpah. I check their robots.txt file.

Closing shout outs! Sometimes you feel really bad about people that have passed, gone on to whatever other place, which there is none, because we just kind of died because I'm an atheist. Because of that, because I don't believe in a god or an afterlife, I know somebody isn't suffering right now, so I'm just going to say this.

Fuck you, Fred Phelps. Go fuck yourself. The world is a more nicer place now. This is one of the only times I actually wish there was an afterlife, and I wish you were hanging upside down, burning in hell. For a very, very long time.

So good riddance, dickhead. On to better news. I stumbled across an article. Who would have guessed? Again, this is one of these mind-blowing facts. Did you realize that we actually know the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie? I have no idea.

I had no idea. No. We do. So a big shout out to the inventor of the most delicious cookie of all cookies. There actually was one. We know who it was. Her name was Ruth Wakefield, and she is awesome. Is she still with us, or is she gone? I don't. No, I believe she's gone.

We'll have the link into the show notes. I didn't get through the entire article, but I was just, my mind was blown. We know the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. That is pretty cool. It's one of those things that's so ubiquitous. I bet, you know what? I bet James Burke covered it on Connections. We can go back and find that episode.

That could be. That just actually, I mean, really, literally did blow my mind. I crossed the article, and I was just like, we actually know who made this? And I'm sure she's not getting royalties. I would tend to doubt it. Unless she patented it. I do want to say one quick shout out.

There's a new service for listening to podcasts called Short Orange, and they've added our shows, so we'll have some links in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 50 for our 50th episode. If you are looking for a new podcast player, it's a desktop player, so, you know, you can check out a new podcast while you're sitting at work.

Yeah, very cool. Thanks, Short Orange. Yeah, so you go back and deal with your house. I'm going to go get my shit together and packing because I got to hit the train. Oh, yeah, you're back to Chicago for a little bit. I assume we're doing a show next Friday? Yes, yes.

Hopefully, I will not be blogging or podcasting from a cast. I should have full use of my limbs by then. Well, fantastic. Knock on wood, please. Dear God, I'm so fucking sick of this. Don't break your legs, kid. It sucks. Agreed.

And as far as I'm feeling right now, don't buy a house either. This sucks. I could have told you that. Shut up. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at GrumpyOldGeeks.com, on Facebook at Facebook.com, slash Grumpy Old Geeks, or email them at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

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