52: Money is the Fruit of Sin

Hey Brian. How's the week?

It's freezing here and I'm in the middle of a hurricane again. So if it gets loud and wispy and whooshy, apologies. Okay. I didn't know that, you know, typical hurricanes in Chicago, but sure. Well, it's like 50 mile an hour winds right now. It's actually been quite cold in LA this week as well, but you'd just laugh at what I say is cold. But I love how we keep starting off with the weather. Like we are a bunch of fucking old men. It's ridiculous. Well, we're grumpy old

geeks, man. So what's going on in tech with you this week, man? Fuck the weather. Let's just forget about it. Fuck the weather. What's going on in tech with me? Well, a lot of low tech. I mean, I finally have a working bathroom, so things in the house are finally starting to come along a little bit, which has been fantastic. But as is all things in life, life is a seesaw. As the house has gotten better, I have had the worst fucking work week known to man. I hate people.

No, this is not news. This is not news at all. It's not news. I mean, I totally, I have railed again and again on this podcast about how nobody reads and nobody reads on the internet, which is fine. But what if it's your fucking job? What is, you need to read the emails if it's your job to read my emails and provide me with information. This is like, emails should be such a beautiful, wonderful thing in theory, assuming people actually use it, which people don't. 99% of my business communication is done

via email. And a lot of it involves me making painstakingly crafted emails with bullet point layouts, showcasing specific bits of information that I require in order to do my job for you, my client. And I just need these little bits of information. And I've gone out of my way to tell you why and make it as easy as possible. And I wait and I wait. And then I finally get a response.

And out of the six things that I said I absolutely 100% positively needed, I will get a response to two of them. Then I have to write back. And about these four other things. And then I wait. And then I'll get a response to one of them. What is wrong with you fucking people? How hard is this?

Okay, okay. Calm down, Skippy. Calm down, Skippy. Okay. First question. Do you bill hourly? No. There's your first problem. I know. I know. Start billing hourly. I'm going to start. I'm going to switch over some clients to hourly. Yes, because this is obviously not working. There's no incentive for them to be judicious or speedy, you know, whatever.

What about just common human decency? Dude, you're in LA. You're working in the entertainment industry. There's no such thing as A, human, or B, decency. You work with a bunch of bottom-feeding, scum-sucking trolls. You got me there. So, what are you going to do there?

Yeah, what are you going to do? Anyways, that has been my week in a nutshell. And it's been slowly driving me insane. I am so happy that it's actually Friday, which normally doesn't mean much of anything. But for once, I actually don't have any work to do this weekend. Woo-hoo! So, my little thing that I want to reel about for a second here, because I talked about this on a show, like, maybe 25 episodes ago. Remember when Chrome started doing desktop notifications?

Oh, yeah. That was so annoying. Yeah. Guess what? They're back. Oh, God. It just updated while we were doing the show notes for this. I'm like, where are these notifications coming from telling me everything's going on with my doohickey here? You get the doohickey report, do you? Now we're sounding like old men.

Yes, I'm getting it. Well, you know, if you click on the what's it. The whatchamacallit. Do you remember those? Man, those are tasty. I miss those. Whatchamacallit bars? I think they still meet them, don't they? I haven't seen the whatchamacallit in 20 years. I haven't looked, but now I will. But yeah, my gizmo, I'm going to do hickamajigger, is popping up telling me you keep editing things, and our soon-to-be contributor who's coming on in a bit is editing things, and all these windows are popping up. Like, literally, eight of them popping up at one time. I'm just

like, okay, now I have to go back and listen to our own show to figure out how I did the trick to make it go away. Yeah, yeah. I'll have to go back and see that, too. It must be only on Mac, because I just had an update for Chrome for PC, and it's not doing it.

Yeah, I can't remember if it was Mac or PC that you had to actually go in and do some low-level dip switch flipping. I'm guessing it was probably the Mac side, because it took me forever to figure it out. Okay. By forever, I mean two Google searches and three pages of results, but I found it.

Well, excellent. That's, well, not good news. I don't understand why they keep that. That should be an optional feature, not set to on, because that is annoying. If you do any amount of time actually using your browser and doing anything with it, you do not want constant notifications. I don't like notifications. I hate growl. Whoever came up with growl needs a cock punch, and OSX notifications just drive me batty, too. There's nothing that is important enough to interrupt

me. I'm sorry. Unless it's a check from the dude from the publisher's clearinghouse at the door, just get the fuck out of my screen. All right. Money notifications. I could use those as well. Those would be nice. Yeah, you spent some cash this week. I guess you were Butterfingers? Did you drop something?

I'd like to blame it on the earthquakes that we've been having here in LA. What are you blaming on the earthquakes? Or at least the move. But at some point, I picked up my iPad mini in the morning with my coffee, and I flipped open the little cover, and I looked down to see a nice spider's web shatter screen.

Oh, you don't even know how it cracked? No idea. None whatsoever. I don't know what the hell happened to it. I hadn't been drinking that evening. I don't know. It fell at some point, or maybe during the move. It had actually been a couple days since I had used the mini, but I did pick it up, and I was like, oh, shit.

I don't blame the wife. I'm blaming the wife and the earthquake, or both, or all of them. I don't care. Anyways, it was busted, and this is not something I normally deal with, because I am very conscientious of my tech, and I keep very good care of things. As such, I don't get the extended Apple care plans ever, because I know I'm not going to break it, but I broke it.

I'll tell you about that in a second. Go ahead. Keep talking. Anyway, so I decided to look it up to see what my options were, basically, and obviously, I am one of those people who would prefer to go to Apple, since they can probably do things best, one would assume. Basically, they don't do repair at all. They will send you a refurbished unit for the lovely price of $220, which is a bit steep for just a cracked screen. I've got a couple companies that have opened up just in this area here in Santa Monica and Venice. Obviously,

it's a booming business, because there are two places within three miles of each other that basically just fix screens on phones, on tablets, whatever. I figured, well, let's take a look at this. Let's give it a shot. Good Yelp reviews. A lot of people, no complaints whatsoever with the replaced screens. Looks great. Works perfect. It was $140 total. Completely new screen. They did a 24-hour turnaround. Well, what would have been 24-hour turnaround? This is the one place that they did fail. They were going to call me when it was done, and they

never called. So I picked it up the day after instead of within 24 hours. Great job. I mean, I would totally do this again if I ever break another screen rather than go get a replacement from Apple. Okay. The suspense is killing me. What's the name of the place? Oh, I went with DropSmashFix.com.

Nice name. I like it. They've got some really nice artwork. Check out their website. Yeah, they're perfectly located right here in Santa Monica. I biked down, dropped it off, biked back the next day. Yeah, see, I really couldn't give a flying fuck less where they're located because I'm not in Santa Monica. But I did check the website, and they do take mail-ins.

They do take mail-ins as well, and they have a couple different locations. So there's another place around here also, and I think that they're also in a bunch of different locations as well called You Break It, I Fix It or something like that. I can't remember. I didn't go with them. I went DropSmashFix. They did a wonderful job. Small little company. One guy running it kicked ass.

Oh, man. You know what? I got an idea. How about starting a business that is a mobile phone – not mobile phone, but mobile, as in you are mobile with a fix-it van and you can drive around and just swing over. You're like, oh, shit, I just broke my iPad and I need it for a meeting. I'll be right there. Drive up. You come out. You hand it to me.

I sit in the back of my truck for 20 minutes. I fix it. I hand it back to you. That is a genius idea. I'm surprised that somebody has not done that yet, particularly in this area. Because you could charge a super premium for that. You could charge a massive premium. I mean, you've still got to be under – I'd still want to – I wouldn't pay more than the Apple replacement price even for an immediate fix, but you could probably even out, $220 instead of $140, and all you got to do is buy a van.

And know how to fix an iPad screen. Well, and that, yeah. I did notice that they also – they do sell do-it-yourself repair kits, and I figured, well, that can't really be too difficult. So should this ever happen again, I might give that a shot as a project just to see what it would be like to do it myself. Yeah, I know a lot of people that have actually done that on their iPhones, the self-replace, because they like to put it in their back pocket for some unknown reason. Why would you ever put a phone in your back pocket?

Because you're stupid. And always sit on it. And you talk out of your ass. Hey, these are my friends. I just – I don't know why they keep sitting on their phones. And so they learned to fix it themselves. Yeah. So I had a very good experience with that, even though it's a horrible feeling when you look down. You see a very expensive piece of equipment is busted. But they did a great job and really quickly. So good stuff.

So I got an email right before we started. I want to make this brief because we beat this horse to death. But it has been a year since we have kick-started Zane Lamprey's new television show. And we finally got noticed today that May 6th will be the day that it launches.

Yeah. That's a year. I put that in our show notes earlier this week before – his email literally came out right before we were about to start the show. And I didn't really want to talk about it either. But I was in one of those moods where I was really frustrated. And every – you know when you're in that mood and you just start focusing on every little thing that is way back in the corners of your mind that is frustrating?

And I hadn't thought about Chug for a while. But I was in a pissy mood. And I was like, and what the fuck is up with that stupid Kickstarter I did? Especially since he's out and about promoting his fucking podcast. And all I see on his stream of fucking social stream is just promote things, promote things, promote things, all of which have nothing to do with what I already gave him money for.

Yeah, well. It's coming, finally. We will give it a fair review. I really hope I enjoy it. I do too. I mean, granted, we are getting twice the footage that we paid for because it was going to be six, 30 minutes. Now it's six hour shows. But – or 21 and 42. Whatever.

Well, good. That will make up for that piece of shit t-shirt I got as premium. I'm in a mood today. Sorry. I can tell. So just calm down. Don't wave your arms around or you might turn off your fire alarm. Okay? That is a hell of a segue. Because you're Mr. Nest guy now and you want one and apparently just by waving your arms around, gesticulating wildly as it were, you can turn off your Nest. And so they're all being recalled.

I mean, this is – this was one of – well, they're not being recalled, I believe. They're taking them off the shelves. Oh, that's unfortunate. Because this was hailed as one of the features of the Nest smoke alarm would be the fact that if it were to go off and you want to shut it down, you don't have to get on a ladder. You don't have to pull out the battery. You don't have to push a button. You would just wave your arms around and it would shut itself off.

Have you ever had a fire in your kitchen? Yeah. You fucking wave your arms trying to get – help. Wave it. You freak out. But it is just an alarm. At the point where you're waving your arms and freaking out, you are aware of the fire and no longer need the alarm. But if you need help from the neighbors, it really doesn't – it doesn't behoove you to turn the alarm off.

God damn. You have spent a lot of time in small towns. No, I've spent a lot of time in apartment buildings. There ain't nobody in L.A. that's going to come running over when an alarm is on. In Hollywood, they sure as shit came running when my alarm went off every time. And when their alarm went off – because I was in a building that just was fire prone.

I swear Firestarter lived there. She was just like, mind if you smoke, poof, there goes the flames. And no, I think it's a dumbass feature. Put a big button on it that you can press or put it – you know, and have a stick like we do with all the fire alarms. Or yeah, just get rid of that feature and use the major other selling point of the Nest, which is you can turn it off with your damn phone.

There you go. Unless your phone is already melted and it's in the fire. That's true. Anyways, I guess I won't be getting that anytime soon. So I'll be holding off on my Nest purchases. Well, they're fixing them and then they'll put them back on the market.

And if you already have one, they will send you an over-the-air update apparently. Well, there you go. But the last time they did the over-the-air update with the Nest thermostat, it broke a ton of them and I guess old people froze to death in the winter and it was not a good scene. So beware. Internet of things is coming to get you.

Well, that's only if you're lucky enough to afford all these gadgets. Oh, hey, you're getting good at this. Nice segue. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is another article that I stumbled across when I was in my mood. So once I was done kicking Zane Lamprey up the ass, I found an article about the, well, we all know the middle class is gone.

A really good review of the shocking rise of wealth inequality. Is it worse than we thought? Guess what the answer is. Yes. But of course. Yes, it is. This is, you know, they follow the new set of a new set of findings. It's done by the London School of Economics, which is basically just showing that in the U.S. the gap between the rich and poor is widening at a very fast rate.

The middle class is basically gone. 0.01% has now replaced the 1%. So basically almost all the money in the entire world is collected by 0.01% of the population. And soon it will just be Scrooge McDuck in his pool of gold.

All that will be left and will be on the street. And just laughing, laughing, laughing. So it's got some really pretty graphics that show how our life is basically over as we know it and totally sucks and basically can never go back to what it once was. Yay! Boo-fucking-ew. Whatever. Hey, we all got our iPhones and we all got our toys.

Every time I do, I mean, it's a really bad thing that the middle class is going away. I mean, there's a lot of super tragic things that can occur with this. It's good to be aware of it. I like that these articles keep coming out and we need to do something about this gap between the rich and the poor. But I always do like to remember that if you're poor now, you still have probably a gigantic plasma TV.

You've got cable television. You've got an iPhone. I don't know anybody that doesn't. Well, that's why they're poor. Exactly. They're spending money on stuff. But I – this doom and gloom about the loss of the middle class, I still don't believe it because I'm in the middle of the – I'm in the Chicago suburbs right now.

I look around me. I am in the middle of the middle class and it's doing just fine. Honestly, here there's really – it doesn't seem to be affected very much by the wealth inequality. There are people that are in the same spot as they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, making a living, doing fine, feeding their kids, sending them off to school, sending them off to college.

I don't know. I just don't see it where I'm at. Now, taking the train across the country, the United States is giant – basically a giant junkyard lot if you take it from the view of being on a train because all the way here, if you own a home that is by the train tracks, apparently you must have by law six scrapped cars, some of which are Volkswagen Beetles or Chevelles, sitting in your backyard in different states of disrepair.

It's surprising how crappy most of the U.S. is that live at least along the train tracks. So that was kind of a weird observation. I took a lot of pictures of that stuff so maybe I'll do a book. I'll kickstarter it. Oh, great. But for the most part, from what I can tell, just being in middle America and even when I was in Pennsylvania, the middle class seems to be doing just fine.

This might actually just be a lot of bullshit media hoopla. So I don't know. I just can't imagine that journalists would fabricate stories. Well, hey, man, you're the one that's talking about it so you bought it. I don't know. I mean I personally do see it a lot around L.A. but again, it's L.A.

L.A. is this strange bubble that isn't the rest of the country and the rest of the world. See, that's the thing. When being on the train and getting to look at how big this damn country is, there's a lot of it and I've been to L.A. There's not a lot compared to the rest of it and L.A. is basically full of batshit crazy insane people.

Fair enough. And a lot of them who are there to make their fortune who are waiters and waitresses and who come from the middle class and give up the middle class to go be minimum wage employees in the hopes of getting famous. So I think there's a weird mental shift that goes on for people in your part of the world.

So I think you might be subject to that insanity a little bit. All right. That's my two cents. Maybe I should hop on a train and I'll go take a look at the rest of the country and get back to you. Do it, man. Get the fuck out of town. You need a vacation anyway. That's true.

And what the hell are you talking about? No middle class. You just bought a fucking house. You entitled little shit.

So I hear the FBI is doing something in San Francisco, Dr. Teeter. They did something in San Francisco. Last week, they arrested our state senator, Leland Yee, and a whole bunch of other well-known local people in San Francisco.

There was a major FBI sting into the Chinese triad, Chinese mafia here, and involved prostitution, drugs, murder for hire, and rocket launchers. Ooh, all the fun stuff.

And our state senator was supposedly indicted. Not supposedly that. It was indicted for arms dealing, and I haven't read every part of the indictment, but I've been told it involved shoulder-fired missiles.

Wow. Yeah, that he was getting from Russians. Filipinos. I don't remember. The one that I saw that he was getting from the Russians. But it's kind of interesting in that I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, and all the places and the indictment, I know fairly well.

Are they still open? Yeah. I don't know about New Asia Restaurant, but it was interesting to ask some of my local friends, did you know Shrimp Boy? And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. He sits at that bar right there when he drinks. I'm sorry, at that seat right here when he drinks.

I'm just like, oh, wow. So it'll just be interesting to see how far this goes and who else gets pulled into it, because San Francisco's mayor is Chinese-American, and some of the major power brokers in the city are, too, and they're connected to Shrimp Boy.

Oh, my. Wow. So it's been interesting times here. And you can find and download the 137-page indictment. I swear to God, this reads like a movie script. It sounds like a wire already. I've got to tell you, man.

Toronto, Rob Ford, you've got to step it up a little bit. This is way more interesting than what you've been doing. Yeah, this makes Rob Ford look like a – Yeah, it's like Cheech and Chong versus Rambo. Yes. Oh, my goodness. OK. Well, that's good. That's what's going on in San Francisco right now.

Awesome. Sweet. Oh, man. You know what else is going on? I'm working on this whole segue thing. I don't know if it's going to work for me now. This one is not going to go very well. I can tell. So this dude, Brendan Eich, who I met I think in 1996 when my first – when I was working at Paramount, they sent me to a – I think it was Netscape convention up in San Jose.

My first trip up to San Jose and we go to – Microsoft was basically buying us beers at the convention. Anybody that had a badge could come down to this brew house as like craft brew place after the conference and they'd buy us beers. And they would show us Internet Explorer and like the active scripting that they had just developed for Internet Explorer.

And when I was there, I met Brendan Eich, the now ex-CEO of Mozilla and inventor of JavaScript. And I just got to say we were so close to fisticuffs that our friends were pulling us apart and now since he has come out in favor of Prop 8, the anti-gay legislation in California, I'm kind of wishing they'd have let me beat the crap out of him.

But yeah. Now, now. This has been a crazy week for Mozilla and those poor folks over at Firefox. Yeah, it's a – well, I mean I'm just – I'm sad about Firefox in general because it was always my go-to browser and I loved it and I abandoned it recently because it basically just sucks.

It's sad to see, again, these CEOs are – it's just a bad move always for them to bring out their own personal beliefs and make them so public and involve their companies in it. Who was that other – who was that guy just a while back that was like shooting animals and it was a CEO for some other major company?

GoDaddy. No, wait a second. Wait a second, Brian. You just – hold on one sec. Yes. He didn't come out and say anything publicly. My understanding is all he did was he contributed money. Yep. Right. Yeah. That's it. That's it.

He didn't enforce his beliefs on the employees, the company. He – as far as I know, if someone hadn't gotten a hold of the donor list, no one would even know his feelings on Prop 8. Right. It's apparently been known inside of Mozilla since 2012 from the inside, but it hasn't been public.

Yeah, and one of Mozilla's board members resigned over the donation a while back. Actually, no, three of them resigned. Three. Okay. But none of them cited that Brendan Eich was the reason they were resigning. One was staying on for – until the end of the CEO search and the other two had other different reasons.

Right. So there's no proof that they left because he was the one that was brought on as CEO. I think the most interesting aspect of this entire story seems to be that the main reason that this came to light was because of OKCupid. Yeah, that was kind of the – Which is kind of shocking.

I mean, yeah. So somebody over at OKCupid does not like this guy either. Basically, what they did is they served a message for Firefox users asking them to please change their browser because Firefox's CEO does not support equal rights. And then it became a huge story and got this guy in quite a bit of trouble.

Which that could just be OKCupid trying to get some media – doing some media whoring itself. Oh, of course it is. I mean, that's the stories that are starting to come out now, which is like OKCupid wasn't being quite so cavalier about this. Look at all the press that they're getting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know who owns OKCupid?

I do not. OK. The company that owns OKCupid – remember the lovely girl who was the white girl going to South Africa and wasn't going to get AIDS? Oh, yes. The company that she worked for and they fired her publicly, they're the company that owns OKCupid. So there is some crossover there with them doing this kind of media witch hunt in public.

So I don't know if that ties into it. I have got no proof of it. But there's a strange correlation there. Honestly, we have freedom of speech in this country for a reason. Yes, he kind of – he deserves the backlash just because of what he did.

I mean that's just my personal belief. But he should be able to hold his position. Why should he deserve any backlash for donating to Yes on Prop 8? Well, because it's a stupid thing to donate to. Well, that's – I mean that's your opinion.

No, but that's exactly it. It's my opinion. It's my opinion. Well, now we are – OK. He definitely has every right to do whatever he does. But I'm going to go with a Bill Maher-ism here in that we don't have to pretend that every position is noble. There is a right position here, which is equality for all.

End of story. I don't care what you say. Of course you're allowed to and entitled to your own opinion, but it's wrong. His opinion is wrong. No, I'm going to disagree with you, Brian. My opinion is – god, this damn Prop 8 thing always screws me up because it's – no on Prop 8, right?

That's the right one? I believe it's no on hate is the way that it goes. And I mean I wasn't a Californian citizen at the time, so I couldn't vote, but I donated to several organizations to fight that. But that's my opinion and I do respect other people's opinions on that.

But I do think it was a very scary witch hunt. I still don't know whether this might have just been an excuse. There's other political stuff going on with this guy inside the organization. But if it really was about that, that's scary to me because it's like – it just means things are becoming unstable and it's just like it could just be the other way.

It could be – you know what I mean. No, I agree with you as well. I just – I don't think this is obviously the full story. Mozilla is in a bit of a mess recently, so there's probably internal politics that were at play as well. I wouldn't surprise me at all to learn at some point that somebody from Mozilla is the one that actually gave this information directly to somebody over at OKCupid.

Who the hell knows? It's just – it's messy. It is messy. It is messy. But it – And it's dirty. It's really kind of a – it's a tough one to figure out because, yeah, what does it open up going forward with CES? I mean these people aren't running for Congress. It's a guy at a company that gives you a free browser, seriously.

So anyway, we've got other witch hunts to deal with because Stephen Colbert was – in talking about the Chinese mafia. This is another one of the stories that just usually – Stephen Colbert was basically brought to task for a joke about Asian-Americans that – from a – what's it, 21, 23-year-old comedian named Suey Park?

Well, she's a comedian slash activist slash performer slash whatever. Yeah. Yeah, 23-year-old comedian, writer, activist named Suey Park who immediately took to Twitter because that's what one does when one wants to make a serious point.

To cancel Colbert and made the hashtag cancel Colbert go viral or whatever the hell people call these things these days that don't actually do anything. Over a skit that she freely admits she didn't even watch. She just used this as a springboard to – I'm not really entirely sure what she has even attempted to do.

Yes. Besides promote herself. She took a joke out of context and she's trying to bring awareness about – well, what she's talked about. She said, I'm talking about whiteness at large. Yes. So she has a problem with white people in general and anything that she can latch on to at this point as far as I can tell.

I read the article from Salon that was published a couple of days ago. Oh, no, today. Yesterday. And I thought this was already over with and it should have been over with because it was a non-issue because anybody that goes after Colbert for a joke doesn't get the joke.

That Colbert is the joke. He's satire. The skit is purposefully pointing out the exact type of thing that she is supposedly fighting for by fighting against him. So it just becomes this fucking stupid story of – and as far as I can tell, again, her only real activity here is promoting herself as an activist.

So I don't really get it and I think – I find her annoying and she needs to go away. The most annoying aspect of the entire thing. Here's the deal. We should stop talking about her then. We should stop talking about her. OK. Moving on.

Dropbox this week came out with a – they kind of got in some hot water this week with posting DMCA takedown notices to people's private folders and people were screenshotting them and posting them.

And by people, I mean as far as I can tell, one person that made the rounds is like, OK, your file has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice. Now, when you originally think about a DMCA takedown notice, it means that somebody saw the file and then sent the notice to Dropbox and then Dropbox then replied to it.

What happens though, what happened here was, well, that's not always the case apparently because one person that wasn't this person had shared a file that was the same file that this person had posted. And through the magic of technology, Dropbox knew that this person that was unrelated to the first person had the same file in their folder and said, no, you can't do that.

We've already – we've been through this with the copyright holder so we're taking it down. OK. So it turned into a big kerfuffle and I don't know how to kind of react to it but what I've done so far this week is I've canceled my premium Dropbox account and moved over to another technology we'll talk about shortly.

But the fact that they are doing hashes on private accounts is – for stuff that you have not shared is kind of – in sharing that, it's kind of creepy. I don't – yeah. I thought that this only comes into play if you actually try and share the file.

See, that's what – I'm still kind of on the fence about that does that happen because it didn't say that this guy tried to share the file. At least from what I read about what Dropbox said, this only happens when you try and share. Yeah, that's what they said. It triggers on share because once you share it, then it does a hash on the file that you're trying to share and matches it against a blacklist.

Gotcha. Yeah, I'm OK with that. I actually understand that. That makes total sense to me. What would bother me extremely is – I mean the whole point of these sort of – these services is basically it's a storage container. It's a holder. I should be able to throw up a big chunk of my music collection onto a Dropbox thing that I am paying for to just keep it there.

And as long as I don't share it, leave me alone. Yeah, so that's where it comes into it. Does it trigger on share? I think it does. But it's something where who knows? Who knows what else they might be doing? I mean it's something where – if I get something from my friends in Sweden, I'm not really going to want to put it up there and say that it's there and have all these people getting it.

Right. If I was going to do it, maybe I would want to run it through Handbrake. Yeah, Handbrake it or throw some Stego in there just to kind of throw the hash off. Throw the hash off. Right. Yeah. And if anything, don't use the name that it was on Pirate Bay.

Call it something different. Well, I mean even if the file name was the same, you still get the hash from the actual file itself. Right. But still, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, you don't do Game of Thrones stolen season premiere. Or just don't steal, kids.

Bye. Bye. Right. I think that ship has sailed. Bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye. Yes. I would like Dropbox to put out some sort of comprehensive statement about what exactly has happened. Well, they did. Okay. But it obviously didn't make it clear or not as to whether it's triggered only on share or not.

I'd like to have that question answered definitively by them. But I doubt we'll get that answer. Well, here's the thing. Once they have the hashes, so the hash is triggered by a share, DMCA or copyright holder swoops in. That hash is added to the blacklist. Don't you think that they run that against the current hash list and have a list of people that have that file and, you know, can do anything they want?

Then you're then added to a watch list of people who have known copyright infringed files. Right. There are some evil things that can be done here. Yeah. Is Dropbox doing it? I have no proof. I have no idea. So I don't want to be, like, pointing fingers. But there is – the fact that this is happening is kind of – you know, it's enough to make me go, let's just not deal with it.

Well, I don't even put anything up there that's copyrighted. It's copyrighted by me, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we use Dropbox for a grumpy old geek stuff to shuffle it around. So, you know, but we own that and it's free anyway, so no big deal. Yeah, go ahead, David. I use Dropbox for my consulting practice.

I love it. I mean, Dropbox is wonderful. I wish it was cheaper. Maybe it will be cheaper with all the cloud storage prices going down. But, I mean, I've got all of my research, all of my client stuff up there.

I'm not going to put that at risk by putting copyright other people's stuff up there, too. Right. But it's – you know, I see what they're doing. They don't want to become, like, the mega upload thing.

Yeah. But it's something where – I mean, not just them. I wonder who else might be doing this kind of stuff and, like, Apple. Is Apple doing this with their – iCloud, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I bet they – well, here's the problem. Nobody uses iCloud.

In trying to get a two-gigabyte movie to upload to iCloud, if you can get that up there, then you could probably post, you know, Titanic and whatever movie you want to. It will be fun. I'm sorry. I meant, like, with Match. With iTunes Match? Yeah. How so? Well, I don't know.

I mean, what if you got music from your friends in Sweden and then uploaded it to Match? I can guarantee you 99% of the people I know do that. I can guarantee you that, too. Yeah. No, you get the lowest bitrate version you can from the friends in Sweden. You put it in your iTunes library.

It syncs to iTunes Match. You delete the crappy versions. Then you download the pristine versions. And then you're done. It's a loophole. It is their biggest loophole with iTunes Match. And it's probably why you can't – or why you can only have 25,000 songs.

Exactly. It's why I'm excluded from being able to use it. If that was unlimited, then we would have their entire library pulled down, re-encoded, and sent up to our friends in Sweden. You know, I mean, it's going to come down to money. It's not really worth it yet to chase after a lot of these copyrights.

These services, I'm not surprised that they're doing this. I think a lot of them should be. I mean, everybody is trying to avoid kind of being the next big pirate Dropbox hangout. My concern is going to be more are the Time Warners of the Worlds and the Comcast going to get into this business and monitor traffic?

That's where it gets really scary to me. Okay. You lost me on why the ISPs would be monitoring our traffic with our file sharing with just like Dropbox stuff. Well, why not? I mean, why not if they decide that that's the next step is, you know, instead of just waiting for you to put it up somewhere, then your ISP is basically looking for hashtags and going, hmm, okay, well, you're doing this now, so we're just going to shut you off.

Well, I mean, I don't see that happening. The problem that I see is the fact that there are content creators that now own the pipe, so it is in their best interest to look for their properties that you might be sharing. You know, since Comcast is a – they own Universal – they still own Universal, right?

Or did they sell it off? Yeah. Well, either way, they own content creation. Time Warner obviously owns content creation. You know, when you have that kind of crossover with the people who own the distribution and the creation, that's – this is why this whole like merger with Comcast and Time Warner drives me nuts because it's just getting worse.

It's focusing the problem into a single point of failure of everybody's internet access and – whatever. Okay. I can't talk about it anymore. No more Dropbox. No. Okay. Now, this one I had to bring up because Brian is always talking about how narcissistic everybody is and how blah, blah, blah.

There's a study out that selfies are linked to narcissism, addiction, and mental illness. I told you. Now, I put this one because I'm just laughing my ass off. I'm like, okay, selfies are linked to narcissism. Well, check. That's kind of like a definition.

I'm taking a picture of myself to send to you. No, not just to you. To the world. Because the entire world needs to see this photo I took of me. Exactly. Now, when it comes to addiction and mental illness, there are some pretty interesting points that this study makes.

For me, it was worth it for the one line. It says, few things are more self-destructive than a combination of high entitlement and a lazy work ethic. Or basically what they call the entire current generation. Exactly. So I just – I mean I don't care what the rest of the article says.

I love that line. I'm going to have it stamped on every fucking 20-something's forehead. It was just – so anyway. Do you have any thoughts on this, Brian? Besides, oh, duh, I'm right. No, that's pretty much it. I mean I'm right.

I knew it. I actually – the article is really good. My favorite particular part of the article, which is linked to in the show notes, is the breakdown of specific types of selfies. Oh, yeah. That's really good. Yeah, that's really good. There are 15 or 17 of them at the end that are – They're pretending to be a sleep selfie.

We know you're not asleep, asshole. You took the damn picture. Yeah, there's some good stuff in there. No, I mean this is – I've been railing about this for a while. It's just – the selfie is kind of the pinpoint of the entire social media, me, me, me, me.

I'm all that matters and to fucking hell with everybody else's world. So this is where we're at and it's just not good to be so self-absorbed. Orbed people. It's the me, me, me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I agree with this 100%. I hate selfies.

I'm not surprised at all. And I think we'll be seeing more and more studies coming out that say very similar things. There you go. There you go in a nutshell. So let's talk about boxes again. Amazon Fire TV just announced.

Who gives a shit? Yeah. I know. Well, are you – I'm not surprised. Obviously, they're battling it out with Apple over every product that they possibly can. I've got an Apple TV already. I've got a Google Chromecast.

I still have traditional cable TV. None of these products have been able to let me completely cut the cord to traditional cable unless I really kind of invested in our friends from Sweden, which I haven't done yet. And I've got Amazon Prime streaming, so do I – and there's a Roku, which I've never had.

There are so many options, but none of them are all in one. None of them really solved the problem. And none of them can get us away from Time Warner Cable. Well, you still have to have your cable internet connection. Yeah. As far as it goes for television, you can cut the cord right now and you probably wouldn't miss anything.

We have Comcast. I don't think we've actually turned on the cable box in two years. Well, I don't seem to be able to do that, but I guess I'm lame. There's just too many weird things that I like to watch. So I can't get – none of them have like all the options. None of them have – Hulu doesn't have all the channels that I would want.

I mean I suppose I could cut the cord, but I would have to subscribe to so many different things that it basically works out to the same cost. Oh, no, it doesn't, my friend. No, it does not. You'll save $100 a month easily if you cut the cord. Guaranteed. If you cut cable out, you will save $1,200 a year.

I've done it. I've done it. I can guarantee it. I will have to attempt that then. Anyways, I find the Amazon box interesting. I was kind of going off the whole point of why I wanted to talk about it, which is I see this is definitely a play for them to be able to start doing while watching TV Amazon shopping.

Yeah. Which I assume they will get to at some point. I'm actually somewhat surprised that Apple hasn't done it yet, but Apple always just kind of – Apple always screws the pooch on these things. They get a product 99% there and just never go that last 1%. Yeah. The one thing I just – I saw this and I was just like scratching my head.

I'm like, why would I want this? I don't want this. But if they basically made it where if you buy this, you get free Prime or if you have Prime, you get a free box, that would be brilliant. They'd lock you in. Yeah. Yeah, they would totally lock you in, but they are not doing that. That is one of the other interesting things about this is this is the first time that they've put out a product like this and not undervalued or underpriced it to try to drive the market.

It's actually priced the same as Apple TV. It's probably – well, they're probably losing money on it. It's a loss leader. In some way, anything that Amazon does is a loss leader for you to go buy stuff. Right. Yeah. Now, like if they could tie in movies with like in-product placements, that would be genius.

Like the suit that the star is wearing and the Bourne identity. Click, buy. Send me – get my size for my thing. Send me that suit or that T-shirt that the star is wearing. Whatever. That would be cool. I only believe that Google has the smarts to do that. I don't think Amazon does but if somebody can figure that out, that would be genius because I swear to God, every time I watch Unbreakable, there's that scene where the kid pulls out the Tropicana orange juice and puts it right in the middle of the table and points it at the screen.

It just sits there for like three seconds and I'm just like, shit, now I want some orange juice. So if they can figure that out, how to get you to buy from a movie, that's it. That's the game right there. Yeah.

Again, I mean like I said, I'm surprised that Apple isn't doing that yet or Netflix hasn't made a deal or it's got to be any of these companies that are starting to create their own shows. I mean I'm also a little surprised that Amazon hasn't started creating their own original shows yet. I'm sure that that will be coming. Yeah, they have.

Have they? What are they doing? Dude, they had the whole – we talked about this. What do you call it? Pilot season. They made six shows. Oh, that's right. That was them. Yeah. Okay, so they're doing it already. There you go. Yeah. So that's a natural thing for them to develop the technology that through their box on their own shows, they can just boop, sell stuff.

Exactly. Everybody's trying to get their – they're trying to be content creation and distribution at the same time. Yes. Antitrust. Yeah, right. Speaking of dicks on the internet, the title for this episode is Really Bad Transition.

Okay. Yelp has finally hit the shitters, which I just saw. The FTC says it has received more than 2,000 complaints about the site. That's it? Well, I would have expected a lot more. See, here's the thing.

I don't know what the timeframe is. Right. It doesn't say what the timeframe is. It could be this month, which would be more in line with what I hear because it has been – for years, everybody has been saying that they're extortionists. Not surprised. Yeah, they are.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm a fan of Yelp. I use the site often whenever I'm checking out some new service I've never heard of. Again, I used them when I looked at getting my iPad mini screen fixed. They had reviews up there. It was great.

But I can definitely see how – I've read nightmare horror stories about what happens when a business is unfairly targeted or there are horrible reviews that aren't true. Yeah, it's a definite point of failure for a business. You can live or die by these sorts of reviews and these sorts of sites.

Yeah, I mean, it's – I think it's really well known that they – that's their business model, extort or we bury you. So with that said, why are they losing $10 million a year? I mean, how are these guys losing that much money?

Because it said it was $10 million in 2013 and a total of $57.5 million in losses in the past five years. Where is that money going? It's being funneled out into something because it can't just be salary and overhead. Something is going on there.

Rocket launchers in San Francisco perhaps? Well, their old office was in the same building as the Scientologist. So there is a crossover there. Yeah, I don't – again, you see these big internet companies. And first off, I'm amazed that they're even making that much money.

I would have been surprised to find out that Yelp made $57.5 million, much less lost it. I have no idea where this money goes. It boggles the mind. It really does. You and I, we work on the internet for a living. We worked on the internet before there was an internet and I look at these numbers and I go, what the fuck?

$10 million a year is a lot of money. Yeah, it's a shit ton. For a site that should be most of the point automated besides sales. You should have an IT staff and you should have sales. What else do they need? Apparently, they need leg breakers and arm breakers to go out and to get Joe Schmoe, the plumber, to buy some ads or pay for a nice review.

But I have no idea how they can lose that much money. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, and again, it's like what do they actually – they pay for server spaces and they haven't done a redesign in years. So I don't get it. Okay. Well, speaking of losing money, my god, I'm just checking this right now.

They lost a lot more than just that in market capitalization just today. They're down almost 7% just today. Yeah, that's the whole point of the article is that the stock tanked. They have gone through the floor.

Yeah. I mean I was even surprised to find out that they were public. That's just funny to me. I mean who would – I'm going to buy Yelp stock. You're an idiot. I don't know if people bought pets.com or whatever. Yeah, how will that work out for people?

Yeah. I threw this one in because it fascinates me. Aging successfully reversed in mice. Human trials to begin next. Sign me up. Please sign me up. All right. When they say reversed aging, does that mean the mice live forever?

It says – Or they just look younger and still die at whatever age mice died. It deals with like internals and muscle tone. It said that basically the muscle tone of the mice had returned from what was equivalent to a 60-year-old human back to a 20-year-old human, which being 40, I'm thinking, OK, well, maybe a 10-year-old isn't the muscle tone I want.

But if you could give me a half a dose and get me back to 20, I'm cool with that. What it doesn't say – what it doesn't talk about is anything external. So you're going to have grandmas running around that are fit as a fiddle, horny as can be and still look like grandma. But that's a whole different pill that they need to take for that.

But trials are going to begin soon. Check out the article. It's guardianlv.com. I don't know who they are. But I don't know. A trusted source on Twitter posted this link. So I think it was the science porn on Twitter. The phrase trusted source on Twitter is just – Exactly.

Hey, I got to cover my bases. I got to cover my bases. No, I mean I read through this whole thing. I'll totally sign up for it too. I love this stuff. I mean but I just – it was only a couple of years ago. There was all the stories about the – that substance that they found in red wine that they were distilling.

Resveratrol. Yes, that was going to be the miracle drug and then all of a sudden we found out it doesn't actually do shit. No, they're still working on it. They're still working on it. Yeah, they'll be working on it forever. Well, it does slow down the telomere degradation. Right. I'm into the same thing.

It's cool. The last one I found was what do you do if you find a lost drone? We've gotten to the point where people are losing drones. It's not like a puppy. It's not like you go to work and you come home and the puppy got out the sliding glass door and you're like, where's my puppy?

When you lose a drone, you kind of know that you lost a drone and you can probably see where it went. So it's a funny article. The only thing that I really enjoyed about it is drone owners are now called droners. Oh, God.

The droner. Yep. Oh, that's funny. I love the San Francisco Craigslist ad that was posted. I found your stupid drone. I found it squirming around in the middle of Fulton Street. Nice.

Yeah, this is going to be, I guess, an issue. I don't know. I mean there's a whole area of law that has not even been dealt with that we're going to find out about really soon regarding drones and airspace and who owns what and what happens next. So it's going to, as per usual in all things in the world, it will be the lawyers that make the most money out of all this.

Well, the big problem is the FAA is going to basically ban drones. So – and by drones, I'm not talking about high-flying planes with Predator missiles that they can shoot and kill, whatever. I'm talking about the little quadcopters that you can buy at Toys R Us.

So that's what they're going to be banning, which – and they've already done it in L.A. Like if – there was actually a business I wanted to get into, which was real estate photography. And when I was down there, there were people that were starting to get into this and doing like really nice drone flybys of the houses and posting videos of them.

It's illegal now, which is just bullshit. So what are you going to do? Yeah. What are you going to do? Okay. All right. Oh, God. Drones, old people, and mice, and what a day.

What a day. Andrologs. That was a hell of a good segment. I was going to say I was out at Ocean Beach last week going for a walk and saw three drones on my walk. The quadcopters are even more than quad now, people out playing with them.

And it's just – it made me want to go home and buy like one of these high-end laser pointers. You know the ones I'm talking about, like the green – like the ones that will make things smoke. Yeah. Yep. And just go sit out there. Yeah. Just – yeah.

Right. I'm surprised that – There's some dazzling. I knew for a while you could make – well, you could buy, but you can still definitely make those little kind of box remote controls that you could take with you to, say, the airport that would actually switch off all the TVs. I'm surprised that there isn't – somebody hasn't put together a little I'm going to shut your drone down box yet.

Drone be gone. Drone be gone. Yeah. Drone be gone. You can do that. Yeah. And it's something where it's just like you can take the old telephones, which I think are on the same wireless frequency. Yeah. And there's cycle through. I mean people have talked about doing that as like a portable Google Glass jammer because Google Glass uses wireless scope to go between the glass and the phone.

Yeah. But I mean that's – you do that kind of stuff and you're playing with some – you're violating some laws you don't want to be violating. Yeah. You're in the FCC territory. Yeah, that's bad stuff. Bad stuff. Yeah. Yes. The government does not take kindly to that.

Yeah. You'd be better off just taking a – BB gun. A 12-gauge. I was going to go with BB gun to be socially responsible but a 12-gauge works too. Or have your own drone with a BB gun on it. Ooh, drone wars. Well, I was just thinking when you were saying get a laser pointer and sit at the beach, I'm like just go get a pellet gun at Sports Chalet and take it out there and you're fine.

Yeah. And you could also shoot hippies with that. So it's double duty. Oh, god. No, but it's – someone out there had a drone. It was – either I had six or eight motors.

Yeah, there's hexacopters, noctocopters now. Okay. So they were out there flying around with a big DSLR underneath that thing. And I'm just – I look at this. I'm just going, wow. I mean it's – part of it, it's really cool, really good technology, neat technology.

But it's just like – I can just see one of those things failing and not like losing signal and like failing gracefully. But like basically the power system goes and it just falls hundreds of feet with a camera and just basically takes out someone.

If you look at behind the scenes for the Yukon Gold Show on Discovery, there was – some of their hero shots, like most of their hero shots, are on an octocopter that they brought up with I think a Canon DSLR doing full motion video and they lost two of them.

And those things go down hard. But the other thing that they don't tell you is most of those blades are carbon fiber blades and they will – if you're close enough, they'll cut your throat. Like the kid that got killed with the remote-controlled helicopter. You get close enough to that thing, that's a swinging guillotine right there.

Yeah, again, like I was saying, there's going to be a lot of laws coming out about this stuff pretty soon. And as – well, there should be. I mean, again, I didn't – I'd assume there's a lot more going up in San Francisco. But even down here in Venice Beach when I went for a bike ride the other day, there were three different people out there with drones flying them around.

And it gets a little creepy because you know what they're taking pictures of on the beach. Well, no, here's the thing. The problem I had, like I said before, I don't like using the word drone with these things. They're quadcopters. They're hexacopters. They're octocopters. They are remote-controlled toys at this point.

Drones are the things that the military use for surveillance and whatever they're using it for. They're weapons platforms for the most part. But like civilian use for these things, the word drone just does not sit right with me.

I'm sorry. It doesn't. Well, you're going to have to get used to it because I don't think anybody is going to be changing that. That is the word du jour. Well, they're fucknuggets then. Security. Ha! In a not-too-shocking-to-me study, exclusive NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought.

Well, not by us. That's all I got for this story. I'm not surprised by this at all. No, I'm not either. Well, kind of, but not really. I think this was kind of a slow news day when they came up with this one because this was like – this was talking about something which never even really got any traction.

Right. Which about the random number generator or – No, the extended random. Dual elliptic curve, they used that. But this other one, the extended random, that no – everyone's kind of scratching their heads about. But there was one quote in that article I did.

It had me giggling and I thought it was really well said. It says, John Hopkins professor Matthew Green said it was hard to take the official explanation for extended random at face value, especially since it appeared soon after dual elliptic curves acceptance as a U.S. standard. So dual elliptic curve – I'm sorry.

It was the dual elliptic curve deterministic random bit generator. That was the one that NSA kind of had their little back door in. Yeah. And then extended random was this other algorithm which basically made it so much easier to crack. And this guy's quote was, if using dual elliptic curve is like playing with matches, then adding extended random is like dowsing yourself with gasoline.

Yeah. Which is like – this is something where once it came out what NSA had done with RSA, fuck RSA. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Yeah. Yeah. That seems to be the prevailing. It's just they're a joke and it's over. Like a little further along in the article, they talk about how quickly they were able to crack versions of the software. Three seconds. Jesus. That's like why bother? You know, once RSA got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, you can't trust them.

So you can't trust any of – since they are a security company that is built on trust. Once they have shown that they are untrustworthy, then why are they still in business? It's shocking to me why they're still in business. And then the thing reading this just has me scratching my head because, I mean, we don't know what really went down.

But if you – if the story which was put out there is true that they did – they accepted – was it Dually C for $10 million? Really, you're going to ruin your reputation for $10 million?

That's it? You know, you're going to do something like that, jeopardize – that company was valued in the billions. Yeah. It should have been a 10B in front of – yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Or it should have been done, you know, for no money at all.

Yeah. Yeah. So that makes me think that there was probably somebody on the inside that got that 10 million and walked away with it and opened the door. You know, they kind of like – it's like a janitor. You give them 50 bucks and they leave the door open for you kind of thing. Like that kind of deal. I don't know. Yeah, but I don't think there was – $10 million is nothing for a billion-dollar company or multibillion-dollar company.

No, one person pocketed a lot of that and left the premises quickly. I'm reasonably sure that's probably what happened. Who knows? Yeah, who knows? It's a problem. Who knows? But the thing that just shocks me about all of this is this company is still alive and kicking.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. They just had a huge conference in San Francisco. Yeah. Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. A lot of people pulled out of it, but they still had the show. No, and it could be something also where, I mean, companies will put stuff in because they're being patriots.

It's something – the assumption would be like, you know, we're going to put this backdoor in and we're going to use this to keep an eye on our friends in Sweden or China or Russia. Then why take the money though? Right, and a lot of them don't.

I mean, there's a lot of companies that have worked with the intelligence community for decades by technology stuff, by letting intelligence community people under non-official cover be part of Boeing, Lockheed, whatever, so they actually have a cover to go work someplace.

Oh, the knock. Yeah, the knock. But it's something where this kind of stuff, you know, once we kind of found out that they're using this stuff on us, fuck off. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Now, besides using it on us, I want to talk about the other article in Der Spiegel that came out where they're talking – the NSA put Merkel and 122 leaders of the other countries that are – some of them are friends, some of them are not.

But we spy on them and there's a list of them, OK? Yeah. Now, correct me if I'm wrong. That's the NSA's job is to spy on other countries. Am I wrong there somehow? No, that's their job. That's what I thought their job is.

That is their job. So now by Snowden leaking documents that say we do their – the NSA is doing their job, that kind of sours the whole thing for me a little bit. And this is what we talked about. Like has he gone too far at this point with the documents that he has given these people?

And now are the people that he's given the documents to taking them and kind of going their own way with it and releasing stories that they kind of maybe shouldn't? I don't know about the maybe shouldn't. It's just something where it's – this is something where it was released by Der Spiegel.

So, you know, they're just – Well, yeah. They're allowed to do that. We – you know, the USA Today would publish a story of outrage if it was released. That Russia was caught spying on Barack Obama. I mean a German magazine is of course going to say what the fuck. But I do kind of see Jason's point and somewhat agree because the initial impulse from Snowden was the I'm doing this for holier-than-thou reasons about how the government is overstepping its boundaries with the American people.

Releasing this document that just talks about spying on foreign governments, which is what our government should be doing and I'd be pissed if they weren't, is kind of going against that. There was no point in releasing this. Brian, how many documents were there? Not a lot. Right.

So it's like I don't think that Mr. Snowden actually had time to read through every one of the documents that he took and released. Okay. So this is a blowback from just not being able to look at everything that he gave away. Or this is just – I mean I looked at – if I was to look at this slide, I'd be like, so what?

I mean I wouldn't even – I would like flip past this slide, which is talking about what – it's basically a target list. I'd be like, so what? I mean these people should be on their list.

And if you actually look at the slide, it says top secret comments. So comments, communications intelligence, releasable to USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand. Yeah. So we've shared it with some of our good friends. Yeah. It's the five eyes. Yeah. Right.

So it's not like that we considered collecting on Merkel to be so sensitive that we weren't telling her neighbors. This is not an issue. No. But we are ignoring the best part of this entire story.

The name of the search system is Nimrod. I mean come on. That is awesome. The NST search system named Nimrod. Well, they did use a Y instead of an I. So it could be like a feminist kind of thing. Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah.

So again, I agree. Yeah. It's a non-story. And yeah, I agree with what you said. No, I don't think it's a non-story. No, no, no. I don't think it's a non-story. I just think it's – I mean what drew me to this story was the fact that these types of things are coming out that we're seeing foreign newspapers talking about what the NSA should be doing,

which means that there's leakage around the edge of the entire point of the leaks because the leaks are supposed to bring the American people in line with saying, look, our government is overstepping their bounds. And that's what it's supposed to be. It's like, no, the NSA is spying on Germans, Venezuelans, whoever.

You look. If they're outside the US, they're free reign for the NSA as far as I'm concerned. That's their job. Find out who doesn't like us and let's go with it. But once you start telling people exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it to the extent that we are doing their job, they are doing their job, then that's where it becomes problematic and that's where – there's the problem because it blurs the line between the problem that we have with the NSA, which is spying on us and spying on them.

And it takes away from the actual – From their actual job. No, no, no. It takes away from the issue of them spying on us. Once we see that they're getting exposed for spying on other countries, which is their job, and we go, oh, wait, no, no, you're not supposed to talk about that, we lose the anger against them for spying on us.

That's where it dilutes – it just dilutes the whole problem in my book. Gotcha. Eh. Oh, that was – okay, fine. Yeah. Fine. So then we won't talk about the Guardian article.

Okay, well. No. No. So again, this Guardian article is exactly the type of things that should be pointed out and are being pointed out. It's the NSA performed warrantless searches on Americans' calls and emails, as we've known for a long time.

Yeah, they're using loopholes in the terminology of the laws with the courts to be able to hoover everything up. Yeah. And then search it later. Which includes the program Prism, which allows the agency to collect data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and other tech companies, of course.

And the upstream program, which is a huge network of the upstream program, which is a huge network of actual direct cable taps. Fun stuff. All on Americans. Yeah. You sound bored. You sound bored, doctor. I am kind of bored with this. It's something where it's kind of had enough of it.

It's something where the whole thing makes me just kind of sick. And it's time to let your representatives know how you feel. And if they're not going to make changes to it, you're not going to vote for them.

I think this is also a time to recognize who's out there who I think has actually been doing a good job looking out for us, like the EFF. Write them a check. Right. Good idea. There's so much about this that just pisses me off.

I mean it's not just what they did. It's our elected representatives and their angles – I'm sorry, their attitudes about this. Like Dianne Feinstein, my senator. That – I want to use the C word. She has not been very helpful.

She authorized so much of this and stood behind it. And then now when it kind of comes back that the CIA might have been doing some futzing around with them, you know about what I'm talking about, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Now she gets angry because she was being spied on.

Fuck you. Yep. That's so arrogant. That is so elitist. It's just like, no, you're not – I will not vote for that C. Oh, dearie me. Yes.

I was wondering if you were going to bring her up because she has – was she the head of the Senate Intelligence? Yes. Yeah. And she's like, oh, well, I let a viper out of a cage but I'm still in the room with it and it bit me. Hmm. Yeah, now I'm mad at the viper. Well, geez.

Sorry. What is it? The snake and the turtle or – The scorpion. The scorpion and the – what the hell is the allegory? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, got it. Whatever – yeah, the dumb animal taking the vicious viper across the lake or the river.

Anyway, so I'm glad that you are on board with us but just being tired of it but – No, I'm tired of it but it's something where it's – we now know – have an idea of what our government has been up to.

We have more than an idea. We have very specific ideas. Yeah. We know more than we did before. Yeah. But it's something where it's – some of it is good job. Some of it's – no, that's not right.

That's wrong. And it's time to – as opposed to keep bitching about it or wringing our hands over it or look at another PowerPoint presentation that we're not cleared to look at. It's time to basically say, hey, elected representative, I want to come talk to you.

And you either change this or I'm going to organize against you. This is vote. Yeah. Here's the issue that we don't – do we have anybody to replace them with that's going to be any better? You know, that's kind of the issue.

It's like once you're in politics, can they be trusted? But – I mean, OK. Let's stop there. We could go down this road for hours. Yeah, let's not talk about the Supreme Court's ruling the other day. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was getting ready to say, look, there's a fundraiser I know right now that's going to send the Supreme Court justices their robes with sponsor patches on them because that's exactly what the Supreme Court ruling was.

If you were under any assumption that we're in a plutocracy right now, forget about it. So let's go back to – we've got to finish this up because it just keeps getting better because now the NSA is coming out saying, don't listen to Google and Facebook, they know what's going on.

Of course they do. I didn't doubt that at all. It's been publicity plays on their part to say that they're not on board with this. Yeah. The Atlantic posted an article saying, like, look, everybody's on – everybody's compliant here.

And the only reason that I'm bringing this article up because it's Bruce Schneier who is the stalwart security guy who has been – he's been doing this for – his whole damn life as far as I can tell. He came out of the womb with a firewall. But he's our go-to guy.

He tells it like it is. He's seen the documents. And since he's seen the documents, I believe what he says. And he's saying, like, look, these guys know what's going on. This is just a ruse. Everybody's fighting in public. But behind the scenes, they're all kumbaya.

Yeah. What do you think? Who knows? Well, there's something definitive. OK. Well, you're not going to know. That's the problem. Yeah. You're not going to know. And the thing is still, even if Google and Facebook and Yahoo were totally serious about doubling the keys to 2048 bits and doing all this stuff, you never know.

You never know what back doors are in there, what pipes are being played with. I would always assume if everything you do, there's a trail. Except for that one email I tried to find that I sent to a client three weeks ago that I couldn't find.

It's like I just want to be able to call up the NSA and go, guys, can you send that back to me? Because I lost it. Yeah. You can't trust any of it because you don't know. This is such a black box. And now that Yahoo unveils encryption measures to protect users' data, which is – it's another Guardian article.

But Jake Applebaum talked about the guy who Yahoo just hired, who is a – he goes against the NSA in public quite often. And they hired him to be the face of Yahoo's security policies. Jason? Again, could be a ruse. Does anyone actually use Yahoo?

Apparently. I'm not sure who. All right. All right. I'm so bored with the NSA right now. I know. That's the problem. Let's move on to a story I've got right here that involves normal humans doing this to each other instead of big government.

A study just came out that spyware is increasingly becoming a part of domestic violence. So basically creepy people are spying on their significant others, are reading – going through their email, cracking into their computers, finding things that they shouldn't find, and getting really, really upset about it and then beating the crap out of them.

Here's the issue with this. The only reason that this is becoming increasingly part of domestic violence is because – It's because it's easier. No, no, no. Yeah, because people are becoming increasingly technologically savvy. Yeah. You know, honestly, my girlfriend used to crack into my email and berate me for stupid shit.

I mean this is – this comes along with technological savvy being widely – becoming widely distributed. That's all it is. Technological savvy being widely distributed and an increasingly inability of any human being to actually recognize human nature and we all still think that we're perfect and aren't going to do stupid shit.

Well, no, I mean you laugh and it can be tossed out as a bit of a joke. But really where we're headed with technology is going to force us to realize as humans that we are not the perfect people that we like to pretend we are because this stuff is coming out. It's coming out all the time.

We're being spied on all the time. This entire segment is about how every aspect of what we do as humans that we like to try to keep hidden is not staying hidden anymore. So we have two options. We shut everything down or we fucking grow up as humans and go, all right, yeah, I did that.

What's the big deal? Well, part B is not going to happen. Then we are fucked. You can't change human nature. No. No, but at least you should be with someone that you don't want to spy on. Yeah, I agree with that too. I think there's something insanely wrong with your relationship if you're at the point where you have to do that.

But these people are screwed up anyway. Yeah, and you never – I mean you just never want to go there. No. You just don't. You have to be able to keep some aspect of life that is private from everyone and that's that. Email to me has always been sacrosanct. You do not look at somebody else's email ever.

No matter what. It's like – and it's something where I'm really, really, really happy to be in such a good relationship where literally – my computer is unlocked usually. My girlfriend knows the lock.

She could look at everything she wants to. I could do the same. Have no desire to. Don't want to know. Yeah. None of my business. None of my business. I'm glad you guys are so happy. Jason, if it will make you feel any better, I'll look through your email.

Oh, me too, Jason. Be my guest. Be my guest. OK. And I promise not to laugh. Much. Bullshit. The doctor and I are going to have our own podcast just about your email. Be my guest. OK. Now, forget your fucking – Can you believe you said that?

Nice selfie, Jason. That explains the mental illness. I get it now. Yeah. That explains that jpd.me address. OK. OK. Yeah. Last time we have guests on the show ever.

That's about it. All right. On the wrap. What else we got here in security? Yeah. We got fuck you. There was that one thing you – you did this link to – so you think you're smarter than a CIA agent? Oh, yeah. I saw that one. Yeah, so this is an NPR story that they did the other day where they take – I think it was like 3,000 people and give them some scenarios and let them basically figure out what they think is going to happen, predicting the future.

And there are some civilians that don't have access to classified data who are actually more accurate than the people who do have access to the classified data. And my favorite is the woman who basically says, well, I just Google it and she's more accurate than the CIA.

So what do we take from that, that she's just amazingly intuitive and can put the pieces together? She's got like this amazing apophenia where she can see the disparate links in unrelated bits of information and pull it into a hole?

Or is she just lucky and knows how to Google professionally? The part that I thought was funny was in this whole NPR article, it never states this is actually a program funded by the intelligence community. It's funded by IARPA, like the intelligence DARPA, Advanced Research Programs Agency.

So it's like, OK. Wait, wait, what? They're the ones that ran Lost, aren't they? Wait, no, no, no. Go back. Explain to me what you said about the funding. This is a program that's funded by IARPA.

I did not notice that. OK. It's not in that article. That's why I'm laughing at it. Ah, OK. Well, there we go. It's what's called the Aggregative Contingent Estimation Program, ACE Program. That's a horrible acronym.

No doubt. Yeah. No, it's an intelligence program thing. Yeah. And it, well, you know, it makes... OK. Well, no. Why are they releasing the results that the public is, you know, better at this than the professionals if it is an intelligence program?

Because it's actually a smart thing to do. I mean, it's one thing from working... Analysts many times are told what the answer is supposed to be before they do the analysis. Oh, so they make a bias before they go into the process. Bias with a big capital B.

Yeah. There's some serious and really significant psychological aspects that come into play when you do have basically a foregone conclusion that you are supposed to be getting towards. Plus you... You find WMD in Iraq. Exactly. And, you know, you're kind of biased anyways to that degree.

And then you also have the bias of having what you think is special information. And you tend... Humans tend to give extra weight to information that they consider to be more important, whether or not it is more important. That's true. There's a good degree of that that occurs when you have these kind of analysts, as opposed to just somebody sitting at their kitchen table who Googles a lot.

And, you know, the person sitting at the kitchen table that's just Googling does not have the secret information that may be super very important, but could be wrong. And when you're that analyst, you go, well, I have this and I have to take this into account. But it could be misinformation. It could be wrong.

It could be outdated. So there's a degree of that that occurs. So it's this basic psychology. Yeah. I mean, it's something where as a former expert in some of these things, I personally would not read these people's things just because I don't think they know some of the things I knew.

So this is actually this is green with kind of what you just said. But it's there are a lot of like ignorant whack jobs out there, too. No, really? Yeah. Two of them host this show, actually. No. You're good.

I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we are. All right. Let's wrap this up with a Windows XP day. I just want to say. Yeah. So we have a few more days. This is going to come out this afternoon, which is April 4th, 2014.

On April 8th, 2014, Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. Which means 30 days after that is when it would, because the way they release XP patches, you'd still be 30 days after that. So 8th is the cutoff.

Yeah. The month after is when it really cuts off. But because you won't get a new update. Stu Showerman from KnowBefore Security did a nice 10 Things You Must Do blog post on XP. So it will be in the show notes, which will be grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 52.

So check that out. And if you're still running an XP box, well, shame on you. I totally agree because XP actually is the best version of Windows ever. It was very solid. It was great. But I do have to say, if you have the ability and the interest and inclination and the know-how to do these 10 steps, you are not running XP anymore.

Actually, no. This is not true. No, not true. Not true at all. There's still quite a lot of software out there, which is legacy software, which will probably only run on an XP box. Yes. Absolutely. And it's going to be running on that box for a long time. I mean, there's still stuff out there running on Vaxes.

There's stuff running out there on PDP-11s. There's- AS400s. Lots of AS400s. Yep. Yep. I just hit my broken ankle on a chair. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I tried not to scream there. So yes, go check out and knowbefore.com. Those guys, they're pretty cool.

They do some security stuff with Kevin Mitnick and the guys, so we hope they don't hack us. So go check them out. And if you've got an XP box, definitely check it out. And maybe, you know, just reformat it and put Linux on it.

That's all I got to say. That's a good idea. By the way, I read Ghost in the Wires two weeks ago. And? You know, it's something where I found it fascinating, but at the same time, I found it really hard to have any sympathy at all.

Because it's just more like you, why are you, do you keep doing this to yourself? And your family. And your family. You're right. It's just like, it's something where it's just, I can understand it being an addiction, but it's something where it's just like, it's, it, it replaced hacking with, I don't know, heroin or beating the shit out of someone.

And it's just like, oh man, it's just like, don't you see that this is going to not end well? Absolutely. Absolutely. And that was the hardest part for me. I thought in the first part of the book was really slow and pedantic. But when he got into the part where he was like hacking against the people in the telephone company, if you take apart the damage he did to his family and the pain and suffering he

caused his poor mother and his aunt and grandmother, the grandmother was the really, the one. And if you check out the 2600 documentary on it, you get to see her and she was, she's a man, that woman is a rock. Yeah. I want to, I want to see the doc, that documentary.

I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you. I've got a copy of it. I bought it. And it's, it's amazing. And you, and my ex-girlfriend's in there. Put that up on your Dropbox. Put that Dropbox for me. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. I, and, uh, well, actually I'll call my friends in Sweden and have it put it on your Dropbox and then we'll just call 2600 and have them, uh, you know, put in the hash.

Okay. Anyway. I watched takedown too, just for laughs. Oh Jesus. You're an idiot. You can't get that two hours of your life back. I can't get this hour and 15 minutes back. All right.

Oh geez. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you. Yeah. You guys take care. All right, man. I'll talk to you soon. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. Uh, I finally finished In Flux. It was very, very good. Um, thank God that plucky professor type saved the world and got the girl. Exactly. Or whatever she was.

Kind of a girl. Yeah, that goes back to the one book that you were talking about that I never read that you were just bitching about the love story. The same thing. Um, it was good though. I, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed this. I enjoyed this book because it was enough out of the realm of current, you know, science possibility that it was fiction.

Right. You know, because the other stuff could have been with, with the proper technical talent nonfiction. Right. You know, that's the thing I loved about Demon and Freedom TM, which were just amazing books. It, it, they were so close to plausible and they could still be plausible, especially when you get into the internet of things and, and, you know, self-replicating robots and, and self-driving motorcycles and shit like that.

I just, I can't wait for that. So yes, as you said, uh, influx is nerd porn. Yeah. Yeah. I was, it was a highly enjoyable. Um, I, I agree with you. I kind of wish he was sticking with the more realistic kind of semi-plausible near future rather than just straight out total sci-fi, but still really liked it.

Because that, that was the problem I had with this third book was it was, it was, he was trying to be near future, but he was past future. He was like talking about drones and, and swarms of drones and that stuff has already, it's, it's like, okay, that's blasé, you know?

Yeah. He kind of went backwards on that. Oh, great. So anyway, let's talk about Mr. Terry Pratchett. Oh, very happy to have a new book from him. Very happy indeed. I haven't quite finished it yet, but it is, it is straight up traditional disc world. It's been three weeks since we said we're going to finish this book.

I finally finished it by the way, but you still are, are chugging along. I'm still chugging along. I did have, you know, I was down an iPad for a little while and, um, I've just been passing out way too early cause I've been dealing with house shit, but it's a good read. Um, if you like disc world, you're going to like this. It's, um, it's had a few bits that were a bit tough to get through.

It's a, it's not, I wouldn't call it the best disc world book I've ever read, but, uh, it's nice to have the world and it's funny to read a lot about trains. Here's the thing about it. It's, it is, I think like in the past, like three or four books, he's gotten to be very formulaic.

Yeah. Like extremely formulaic. You know, when we're talking about the banks, we're talking about the newspapers. Now we're talking about the railroads. He's, he's gotten to the point where he is like, you know, just taking new technology, putting in this form, putting it in this like formula mill in almost just spitting out a book, you know?

Cause if you look at them, the pacing is the same. The timing is the same. The struggles are the same for the characters and it's, it's that main character. It's, uh, moist von Lipvig. Yes. Yes. Uh, which is one of the best names ever. Yes.

Moist, moist is one of the best characters, which is why you've got to watch the damn TV series because they go, he did going postal and moist is fucking perfect in, in going postal. Um, but the thing is this, this book is, I, I can't, I actually don't want to spoil the ending because I, I just saying a few words would spoil the ending, but it's really good.

Um, yeah, I, I can't, I can't, I can't talk about the ending. God damn it. All right. All right. Let's, let's, anyway, go, go check it out. If you like this world, it's a great book. My favorite is still pyramids. Uh, when rinse wind is, is first introduced and he goes and, oh man.

And pyramids is my favorite disc world novel, but this is, this is good. It's a, it's a good, good book. Check it out. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So after all the kerfuffle with Dropbox this week, I tried out the new beta of BitTorrent Sync, which is, you know, it basically creates a swarm for all your files, for all your devices.

I use it on both my, uh, Macs and I use it on both my iOS devices. And so far for being free and being in beta, amazing. Really? Perfect. Perfect syncing. The only thing that it doesn't do that Dropbox will do, uh, Dropbox will do a LAN sync.

So it will detect if one of the other computers is on your LAN and not go to the internet to come back. Right. You know, it won't lob the ball outside of the house. It will go straight through the router to the other machine. Right. That's the one really good thing about, uh, that. But if you're on the same network and you're in the house, well then just sync the directories before you turn on BitTorrent Sync and you're done.

Um, uh, so far it has been amazing and it's actually given me a ton of ideas for, uh, some web apps that I've always wanted to do with decentralization and, uh, the Facebook effect and all that good stuff. Because I think there's, using this kind of technology to, uh, distribute updates for websites across a, a mesh is probably going to, I, I, I give it like two years.

I think there's going to be something about how BitTorrent is used. Like, you know, RSS right now, you have to keep pinging the servers to find out if there's an update and all that stuff. Yeah. So you've got a, you've got a hundred thousand people checking one RSS file. Yeah. And, and okay, what if you made a mesh and everybody's checking if the RSS file is updated in the mesh?

You know, there's, there's a ton of stuff that can be done with this that, that got me really excited by this technology. And so far it is fantastic. It syncs perfectly every time and, uh, check it out. It'll be in the show notes. Cool. I tried an app and it sucked. So I'm glad that you had some luck.

Um, there's this app called RoomScan. Um, I've got to say that this company has excellent PR because they're, they're, articles were everywhere about it. It even had, you know, your standard, uh, type of type of Facebook headlines that I can't stand, such as, you know, you have to see this amazing new app and how it completely changes your life and that sort of shit.

There was a lot of that going around. So this is the app was getting a lot of buzz and I just moved into a new house and I was like, well, I could really use a cool app that just easily draws out a floor plan for me just by putting my iPhone up against the walls. It doesn't fucking work. It's a, it is a pile of crap.

The user interface is disgusting. The design is horrible. The only thing it's got going for it is it's free. Um, it's not ready for prime time. And this is a perfect example of a bunch of smart kids sitting around in a room figuring out how to do something, but then not having the experience to realize that user interface matters, design matters.

Hmm, maybe we should, maybe, maybe we should fucking test the thing a couple of times before we release it into the wild. No, they just did. And it's kind of funny because you start reading some of the reviews after I tried it myself just blindly to see what happened. And I just ended up with this horrible squiggle that didn't even resemble a room.

Um, then you start reading some of the reviews on it and people are talking about how there's some instructions on how to use it and you actually have to do the exact opposite of the instructions. They say, you know, go really slowly and it actually works better if you move quickly throughout the room and it's just not ready for prime time.

It does not change your life. There's nothing absolutely amazing about this. So this is not disruptive. No, no. I mean, the concept is it would, this would be absolutely fantastic if it actually worked, but it does not. So do not bother. Okay. So you can, you can get a, get a room faster with a tape measure and a piece of paper and a pencil.

Much faster. Okay. And much more accurate. So I picked up reader two, R E E D E R, which is a news reader. Uh, reader, uh, died a long time ago when Google reader died because everybody used Google reader for sync.

Well, reader, I used to own on the, on the Mac and on the iOS and it just kind of vanished because it's one guy and he just kind of went off and said, I can't do this. And he's, he's Italian. I think he's like, I got nothing to do this and no more.

Yeah. Muncha, muncha, muncha. I'm Italian too. So I can say that. He must turn off his nest all the time. Um, yes, exactly. Uh, but reader two is out. It's five bucks and it's a universal app. I only wanted to be able to read news on my iPad because that's what I do in the morning because I'll, I'll tell you a little bit more about my workflow later in the, in the segment.

But, um, exciting. It's great. It's great. It works. It's perfect. It actually syncs with a bunch of different accounts. I synced it with my Feedly account and that's all I need. All I need is Feedly for some place to put my, my, you know, OPML and it works. A bottle of wine and thou.

That's all I need. So next up, Fantastical 2, which, uh, was the app that I talked about that I use for my iPhone. Yeah. I have been using that every day. The voice recognition and the, uh, just basically everything. I'm sorry.

What, this is exactly what I said about Fantastical when I first reviewed it. It fucking works. Okay. Out of the gate. Perfectly. That, that is all I ask. I mean, I mean, seriously, I cannot, I can, there's nothing wrong with that app except for the fact that I can't make the calendar part black because at night when I look at my calendar, it's white, it's got a dark theme and it only does the bottom part of the screen, which is, I'm like, what the fucking point idiot.

Um, but anyway, they came out with Fantastical 2 for the iPad. It's 10 bucks. And what they're saying is that that's a 30% discount right now. So if you want to get it, get it now because it's going to be a $30 app and I don't know if it's worth 30 bucks for the iPad.

If it was the only version, I'd pay 30 bucks for it, but you know, I, I, 10 bucks was even a stretch. Here's the deal though. Works exactly the same, syncs with the same stuff because it syncs with your, uh, regular calendar and your reminders from iOS or I mean from, uh, OS X.

Uh, so you gotta be a Mac guy to use this either way. Fantastic. I love it. That's why it's called Fantastical. Cool. Well, that's it. I got you. I mean, uh, again, like I, like I said, when he reviewed a take one, uh, I'm perfectly happy with the built-in calendar app and syncing it to Google calendar.

Trust me, just use this thing. It's, it's amazing because I just, I, I pressed the voice button and I'm like, uh, podcast with Brian at 2am tomorrow or 2pm tomorrow. It's like 2am. Did it respond with fuck you? No, it, it, it, it, it literally parses all of the words and puts it in the perfect thing and you just hit add.

It's great. All right. I'll try. So anyway, next up, reporter. Reporter is one of those, uh, quantified self apps. I, hey, fuck you. You are the guy, Mr. Moves for years here since we've been doing this. So reporter is kind of an ambient tracker where you, well, not, not actually ambient.

It's, uh, it will ping you as many times as you want a day and it will give you, you know, ask certain questions. You can modify the questions yourself. It will gather ambient data is what I meant. Like it'll, it'll actually ping the microphone and see like what the noise level is, how many photos you've taken since the last update, where you're at, who you're with kind of thing.

Um, I'm still not sold on it. It's four bucks. Right. But it's all private. It just syncs to your Dropbox or locally and you can pull it out of iTunes. But Buster Benson, uh, the guy who wrote 750 words that I use every day, um, has a great article and unfortunately it's on medium.

Um, but I'll post it in the show notes on why he's using reporter. But the most, the more important thing about that article is why he's doing, uh, self tracking. This is the most important part about this article because he's like, self tracking is tedious.

It's stupid. It is, there's, there's no reward for it. I'm looking to find ways to make my life better. And he, he, he, he, he goes through a series of steps that he uses to say like, look, this is what I want to track. This is, these are the only parts that are important to me. And, and if I can follow these points and these points might change, but like, you know, this is an experiment, but this is what's going to make me happier.

So if I can follow this and find out what makes me miserable and what makes me happy, then, then it's a win. And that's the smart way to do the quantified self shit, you know? Yeah. Honestly, it really is. Well, I mean, that's always been the thing for me is, is why am I collecting all this data?

Like for me, it's, it's made sense to do my steps because I, I care about my fitness and I want to make sure I get off my ass a certain amount every single day. Yeah. Steps are, steps are key because you know what, if you don't track your steps, when I lost my Fitbit for two months, I didn't walk. Yeah. So that right there, you know, you go to the Peter Drucker, what gets measured, gets managed type of shit.

When it comes to steps, steps are a key like daily marker that you need to hit a certain number if you're going to be healthy, period. Right. It's not, it's not subjective. It is completely objective. You're like, you have to hit this number every day. So this is, that's why I like this.

It's like he's taking the objective side and saying, or the subjective side and saying what, what really is going to make me happy? Right. Yeah. That's a good use of it. So I can see that point. And I read through the article and it was interesting and it did kind of make me think that maybe I should start doing more of this tracking stuff that I've kind of not done because it's, it makes you aware of the patterns that you fall into unconsciously throughout, throughout your, your life.

You're like, oh boy, gee, I can't, I went. I opened up a bottle of wine at 3am again. What the hell's wrong with me? That sort of thing. I mean, it's really funny. That's just the everyday stuff that, that you do. It allows you to sit back and analyze it with a bit of, of, of separation and distance from it and go, huh?

Okay. Well, I would like to change this about me. And now that I'm aware of what I'm doing, you can change it. Yeah. And that's why I like this app actually, because you can, you can tune it for yourself because one of the, the first question I added to, uh, to my, you know, cause like I said, you can set how many times it just reminds you randomly throughout the day.

Yeah. I've got mine set for eight. And the first question it asks me is, are you procrastinating? Funny. I have found that, uh, 80% of the time I press yes. So, and, and once I press yes, then I stopped procrastinating.

Right. And I get, you get back to work. So, so far I'm, I'm digging this app and it's beautiful. It's well-designed. It's, I mean, for four bucks, it's good. I mean, I, I have definitely, I, between reader, fantastical and reporter, I hit my $20 mark this week.

So, um, I'll let you know next week if I say yes or no to reporter. I wouldn't buy it yet. Just give me a week. Yeah, candy, candy, candy, candy. First off, the internet of things podcast. Uh, new, uh, show I came across cause I told you I'd pick something up for this week.

It's amazing. I love it. It's a podcast about the internet of things. That's a very well researched and is accessible for beginning techies. The hosts are well-spoken and know what they're talking about. All in all, it's very enjoyable. And the latest episode is about personal trackers, which we just talked about, which you know, I love, uh, they gave almost zero time to Nike's fuel band, which for me shows that they have great taste.

Nice. I'll have to check that one out. And, uh, sounds like very complimentary to the sort of stuff that we talk about. Uh, I absolutely, if you are a fan of podcasts, you are probably familiar with what the fuck by Mark Maron, um, Marin, Marin, whatever, you got me on the Italian thing earlier and I just can't stop it.

Um, Louis black was his most recent guest. I am a huge fan of Louis black. He is one of my favorite comedians of all time. He's angry, he's political and he hates stupid people. And, uh, it's a good combo, a great conversation that those two guys had. I cannot recommend listening to that one enough.

Uh, very funny. And, uh, you know, Louis black is just a God. I love, I love Louis black. And that's the thing about Mark Maron is I, um, I don't listen to his show very often. I keep it in my thing and I look at the list and when he gets a good guest on, I'll, I'll listen to it. That's exactly what I do with him as well.

I'm, I only listened to the occasional episodes. And when I saw that, uh, there's just some people he gets on with so well, well, not necessarily get on with, I mean, they aren't like buddies, but he just, they brought the best out of each other in this podcast. It was very good. I'm going to, I'm actually going to throw one in here.

Um, Chris Cooper, the artist known as Coop. Right. Um, uh, there's a, uh, what the fuck, uh, episode with Chris that is amazing. I mean, if you've seen Coop's work, you know, he does like the devil girls and the hot rods and all that stuff. Yeah. It was one of the best podcasts I've ever listened to.

It's probably in the 300s at this point, but go back and check it out. It's I'll dig it up for the show notes. It was amazing because I didn't, I mean, I, I've known, uh, Coop for probably three or four years just through friends and had no idea he was that cool. Right. You know, so I'll put that in the show notes.

Cool. There's another article that's been doing these social rounds and this is just going to become a recurring thing on, on this podcast. I cannot stand the way everything is promoted on social networks anymore because the taglines are things like Dave Grohl tells aspiring musicians, musicians what to do and he doesn't hold back.

Exclamation point. Exclamation point. This made me wanted to, this made me wanted to punch the, the writer in the throat. Yeah. I can't fucking stand the way that people, because I watched the video. You sent me the video. I watched it. Yeah. And the fact that in the quote unquote, and he doesn't hold back means he says the word fuck a few times. Yeah. That's it.

And he's a musician. So they're supposed to, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a huge Dave Grohl fan. I do not like the Foo Fighters, um, but Dave Grohl is basically the nicest man in rock. As the saying goes, uh, he's been anointed the, the God of rock and roll these days because there's nobody else out there.

Um, and he basically just got, he was put on the show and they asked him, well, what do you think that aspiring musicians should do? And much like everybody else in the music industry, he doesn't have a fucking idea. None of us have an idea anymore. So here's the thing. He's okay. Granted. He says, I have no idea.

He's like, go play out. Yeah. Go play. Yeah. Go play. And he said, go play your fucking instruments really fucking well. Yeah. And that's it. That's great. You want to be a musician? Be a musician. Go play. And everything else will either work out or it won't. End of story. So that was it. So there was no real camera, off camera advice to aspiring musicians.

And he certainly wasn't a not holding back or holding back or there, there was just no reason for the viral plugging on this, but Dave Grohl is a great guy. It was a decent enough interview. Uh, will we, Hey, no, no, no, hang on. I got, I got one last thing to say about Dave Grohl here. Okay. Um, tenacious D.

Yes. The pick of destiny. Yes. Dave Grohl played Satan. Yes. And he was fantastic. Yes. That's it. That's all I got. Okay. Let's talk about, let's talk about Wesley. Wesley Crusher. Yes. Wesley Crusher has a new TV show and hopefully he won't be wearing any of those stupid sweaters.

I like, look, look, I like Will Wheaton. Will Wheaton is, is, is basically our generation, uh, the internet, uh, I mean, he's Mr. Internet. Don't suck his dick too hard. Cause he's, I don't like him that much, but I like, Oh, I'm not. I'm the one that actually put something negative in this little, uh, show bit. So, uh, I am a fan of the guy.

He does great jobs. Uh, you know, he goes around and he does the, the convention circuits and he makes young girls feel very good about themselves, about being geeky. He is a champion for all things geek. He does a great recurring character on the big bang theory. Um, and he was in star Trek and he doesn't get much cooler than that.

So he's going to have, actually, he played a villain on the guild too, which was a, uh, his best role as far as I'm concerned. Never saw that. So, oh, well, I'll put that in the show notes too. Uh, he's got a book out that I haven't read yet. That, uh, was tossed. He's got three, at least three books. I've read at least three books. Uh, yeah, he's going to have it basically a TV show called the Wil Wheaton project on sci-fi.

Uh, the one downside is I had to read through a 10,000 page blog entry of his about the TV show to find out what the TV show was. So, well, here's the, here's, here's where you, where you're bitching about having to read through the 10,000 pages of his blog entry. I rather enjoyed his blog entry because it talked about the process of how to build a show that's going to be successful to pitch to a network.

Oh, I didn't say it was a bad. No, no. And all the work that went into it, unlike, you know, you and I who sit around every day and put shit on a napkin and crap it out and talk to the peoples. Um, I loved, I loved like hearing how much work went into the show. Uh, what the show is, we, we're still not going to know till May 6th, I believe.

What was it? May 6th. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. No, the premiere is May 27th. Oh, okay. And I don't disagree with you. I like his writing. I, I usually have gone and read some of his various blog entries and they're always very good. But when I'm trying to get together the synopsis for our announcement of his show on this podcast, scrolling through the 10,000 pages to find the one paragraph that says, sci-fi is greenlit the 12 episode summer series, the Wil Wheaton Project working title, a weekly topical comedy show hosted by actor and champion of geek culture, Wil Wheaton.

That's all I wanted to find. I would like to, I would like to point out that you opened this show this week. Yes. It's saying that people who don't read things on the internet are fucking useless. So I would like you to just look in a mirror right now while you're telling me that you did not read the post. Jason, you are not getting the fucking point.

I'm saying all I was, if it's a post that is an announcement of your TV show, have a fucking synopsis up top. I'm definitely interested in the 10,000 page thoughts on the show. I just wanted to know what the fucking show was right away. It's called suspense. If you read a mystery novel, you're not going to find out who died at the beginning just so you can not read the novel.

First new Monty Python material surfaced. And I'm very happy and excited about that. And I'm trying to prove, this is my happy voice. No, seriously. Okay. Moving on from Wil Wheaton. I'm really happy about a show. Can't wait to watch it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Monty Python has a new song.

Blah, it's good. It's very funny. It's in the show notes. No new actual video was shot for this. It's mostly a compilation of previous Monty Python bits. But the song is completely new. And Eric Idle hits another one out of the park. Absolutely. I loved it. We could have written it.

I know. It should basically become our new theme song. Actually, it should. But we'd get sued because those guys have lawyers like you would not believe. Yes. And I posted a quick note about every Game of Thrones murder in under three minutes. You can watch this. I actually watched about seven seconds of it and I was going to start to get depressed so I couldn't watch it anymore.

But if you want to see every murder that has happened in Game of Thrones so far, they can do it in under three minutes. But the fact that they can do it in under three minutes means that it's almost three minutes of murder. It might kind of make you upset. It is a little brutal. But I'm very excited it's back and I can't wait for Sunday. Now, HBO's Silicon Valley is coming out this week.

And Elon Musk is very upset about it because they made fun of him. And he didn't get it. Mike Judge, who I love and adore, he did Office Space, which is quite possibly the best movie of all time besides Idiocracy, which the first like ten minutes of that movie just shows how we're going as a species.

He was on point. I have no idea if this is going to be any good, but it's coming with mixed reviews from the people up there. The techies, half of them are like, oh, we're deeper than that. And the other half are going, I feel like I'm looking in a mirror. So this week, check it out on HBO.

I think it's going to be a must watch for me just because it's so much of the stuff that we're talking about. And Elon Musk, get over it. Jesus Christ. Yeah, Jesus. You're smarter than everybody and you have all the money. What's with all these baby billionaires now, all these fucking whiny-ass bitches? You've got all the fucking money in the world.

You've got all the luck in the world. Shut the fuck up. At least Bill Gates has grit. Yeah, he's got grit, man. Bill Gates should be the icon for all these people, really. That's the irony. The weeniest, wimpiest guy who is like, you know, the guy you'd think would just get like flicked and just turn into dust.

Turns out to be the strongest motherfucker in tech. Yep. Yo, seriously? Are you shitting me? France was still executing people with a guillotine when the first Star Wars film came out. That is no bullshit.

I'm sorry. That's scary. Isn't it? I mean, the last guillotine in France took place in September of 1977. Star Wars released in May 1977. I was sitting in the back of my dad's Cadillac Eldorado in Des Plaines, Illinois, in a drive-in, watching Star Wars.

And in like a couple of weeks later, a couple of months later, some dude got his head cut off in France legally. That's creepy. Isn't that crazy? Anyways, I got some follow-up from last week because you bitched at me for not being prepared because I just gave the fact. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Humpty Dumpty referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the 17th century, and it also became slang for a drunk person of either sex, hence the teeter-totter falling down bits.

Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yes, and then I finally Googled it to find out actually the origin of the egg showing up because, as we mentioned, it never mentioned the word egg in the Humpty Dumpty tale. It was originally a riddle, and the answer was an egg, hence all the depictions being eggs.

Oh. So now it's just become – it's become not a riddle, just a tale over time, and illustrations always use an egg. And the first specific depiction as an egg that I could find was in Alice in Wonderland. Okay. Well, cool. Well, thanks for doing the research on that. No problem. I have not gotten couches yet, and I finally got so fed up with that, I went on Amazon and ordered a beanbag because with Amazon Prime, I'll get delivery in one day.

And the World Cup is coming, so I got a big soccer ball beanbag that I can sit in and watch all my World Cup games, and I'm very excited about it. We bitched a little bit – well, I bitched a lot bit about NBC and their horrible coverage of the Olympics, a major world sporting event. Here's how you broadcast a major world sporting event.

ESPN will present all 64 matches of the 2014 FIFA World Cup live and in high definition on the ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC, all of them live. That's how you do it, idiots. Well, I mean, just judging NBC on their Olympics coverage for the past like 15 years, I mean, that's just fish in a barrel.

It really is. They are so terrible. Stupid Americans talking about international sports, trying to talk to stupid Americans about illusion. Okay. Here we go. My favorite, amplitude. Amplitude. Yes. Height. Yes.

Just say fucking height. Just say height. I agree. Well, don't get me started on the American commentators that ESPN will have on for the World Cup games. I'm just not even going to be able to deal with that. Here's the deal. Yeah. The games will be on. You turn the game on TV, and you watch the game.

You turn the sound down, and then you turn the Spanish channel on on your radio. You taught me this trick when we watched World Cup, was it, Jesus Christ, like 15 years ago now? It would be 16, I'd imagine. 16 or 12, one of those. Yeah.

It's a multiple of four. When I lived, oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, God, it's been so long. Yeah, I believe that was the one that was in Japan, so we were up at like 3 in the morning watching the games or something like that. Yep, we were up at – and we had – I had a Connectix Quick Cam, so we were in 16-bit black and white, 16-bit, 16-shade of – 16 shades of gray.

16 shades of gray, as it were, yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay, I'm going to let you go this week because we had a little long run with our contributor, Dr. David Teeter. Yes. Thank you for joining us, by the way. Yes, thank you, David. Hopefully, we'll have you on again at some point.

And next week, we are going to have on my friend Jay Goldman of ClickHealth, and he's going to talk to us about his new book, The Decoded Company, which is Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers. It's interesting. It's a way that they take data about all the employees and make life better for the people who make their company.

I'm assuming I'm only halfway through, but I'm guessing that's the way it's going because it's a New York Times bestseller, and Jay is going to come and talk to us about it. Yeah, and it's sitting right in front of me right now, so I best get reading. Get you better. All right, man, I'll talk to you later. All right, now. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

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