54: Belfie Marketing Secrets of the Rich and Famous

Psycho, Psycho, Psycho, Psycho. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Hey Jason, how's it going? Oh my god, what a terrible day yesterday was. I cannot explain to you how bad a day yesterday was.

Well, actually I can. Let me try. Okay. I've been complaining about Media Temple since we started this show, right? Worst ISP I've probably ever had to deal with. I finally got fed up and at the same time their grid service went down, somebody had posted an article about Linode or Linode.

This thing is Linode. It's a VPS hosting platform. I think Marco Arment uses it for Instapaper and a bunch of people. I've heard of it before. But they just like went through the roof with their resources and the price is like super cheap. I could pay exactly the same as what I was paying at Media Temple with all the add-ons.

So I'm like, pull the trigger. I tell you what, fantastic. It was the – I mean it's a VPS so you have to know how to do your own IT stuff. So fortunately that stuff is ingrained in me for doing it for 20 years. So I spun it up, got all my packages installed running Cent 6.5, Apache 2, PHP 5.3, I think.

5.3, 5.4. But anyway, I got everything loaded, moved. It took me about eight hours to move everything. But just to give you an example, we were running with caching the Grumpy Old Geek site on Media Temple. Yeah. Anywhere from 4 to 12 seconds to load with caching.

Which is quite a lot considering there's basically text. Well, it's WordPress. Yeah. It's WordPress. That's it, you know. And – but we're running – we were running WP Super Cache. We tried some of the other ones. They weren't compatible with Media Temple's like weird shit. And so moved it over to everything, my Linode server with a bunch of other sites that weren't running on the same instance.

Yeah, we went from 4 to 12 seconds with caching to about 0.4 seconds with nothing – with no caching. Right. So at the same price. Well done. So – Although I got to say that moving servers is one of the biggest fucking headaches.

I would rather chew off my own leg than do that. Man, I got it down to a science now. And Linode's – their DNS interface, so easy, so nice. And here's the thing. Responsive and fast. I got all my DNS moved.

Everything's propagated. It was the easiest server move I think I've ever done in my life. It was definitely the fastest that I've ever experienced because I actually own the grumpy old geeks.com domain name. And you had me switch the DNS on it and name servers. And it was almost instantaneous for me as well.

Everything went totally smooth. And so far, I'm happy as can be. I'm going to be upping it a little bit, the resources a little bit, because I do need a little bit more RAM. But, I mean, actually, I'm running everything right now on the cheapest instance. It's $20 a month.

And I've got everything running on it. So I'm going to splurge and go for $40. You know? Ooh. But, I mean, all I can say is this is the end of a quest. And hopefully I can stop bitching about it. Oh, you know how this goes. Two or three years down the line, they're going to start to suck.

You're going to get all pissed off again. And then you'll have to switch again. Yeah. You just assume we're going to be doing this show in two to three years. But, yeah. Who knows? Hey. A few people's hands. I'm not ready. Yeah. So, yeah. I am – so far, it was the smoothest move I've ever had.

I am happy as can be now. But yesterday was pretty miserable. And get this. I'm almost done. It's like almost midnight. I've been typing all day and moving, shucking and jiving. And I'm on my last sight to move. Halfway through it, Media Temple goes down again.

It's like you're just – just like poking me in the eye with a sharp stick at that point. Yeah. Well, congratulations, man. Like I said, that is one of my least favorite things to do in the world. So, I'm sure that your day, even though you're super good at this and way better than anybody I know, was still kind of a bitch.

It is what it is, man. It is. You got to do it. You bite the bullet to let the pain go. Speaking of pain, I had a little trolley incident this week with Mark Cuban. I saw you were busy making friends on Twitter again.

I never noticed that Mark Cuban tweeted, live tweeted, Shark Tank. I think everybody does for their shows now. Well, here's the thing. I don't – I'm never on Twitter when Shark Tank is on, on the East Coast. I'm always doing something else. But for some reason last weekend or last Friday, I'm like, what the fuck?

You just told me who got funded. I'm like, that was a dick move. I told him that and I called him and the company out that whatever – and he replied. And this is where Twitter gets fun because he replied saying, we've been – we were the first show to live tweet and we've been live tweeting like ever since 2011 or something.

Right. And this is where knowing people in Hollywood comes in handy. I posted this on Facebook. I'm like, can you just – did he just do this? Do I have to like bust prior art out on his ass? And my friend came to my rescue. He's like, oh, you don't have to. My wife was actually the first person to live tweet for ABC.

Here's a link to it. Here's a link to the news and the whole nine yards. So I sent it back to Mark. He didn't really say anything after that. So suck it, Cuban. OK. And this is why I don't like Twitter. But I ended up with more followers than when I started, which was very funny because I was being very trollish.

Yeah, you were. I was totally trolling. I was like, oh, boy. Here we go. He's breaking rule number one. He's engaging. He's engaging. And yeah, Cuban was. So fuck it. I'm going to have some fun with it. And yeah, probably 100 replies to me from his army later calling me all sorts of names.

But it was fun. I was having a blast. The company who got funded the next day tweeted back at me. He's like, hey, sorry your show got spoiled. But you got us a ton of attention. So we really appreciate it. So I wrote back. I'm like, hey, man, no problem. I'm glad you got funded or whatever.

And they ended up following me. So there you go. There you go. Lesson learned. Have fun with it. It's all a joke. I just don't have the patience for it. I mean, I've, you know, back in the earlier days of Twitter when I was definitely, there's one particular band that I worked for.

I no longer work for them. And I'm not going to call them out or their fans. But their fans are, oh, God, they're fans. They're just fucking nightmares. And yeah, they would always, they would find everybody involved with the organization on Twitter. There were some super crazy ones that would just bait you as much as possible to engage.

And the one or two times I did engage just made me, and I think it's probably why I hate Twitter to this day. I had such a bad taste in my mouth from that, those experiences that I just, I don't care. Don't feed the trolls. Don't feed the trolls. Exactly. Don't feed the trolls unless you're Jason and you're bored and you want to. Hey, I mean, I got a thick skin.

I can have fun with it. I really couldn't care less. I'm trying to figure out which artist was the one you're talking about because there were so many with crazy fans. I thought they all had crazy fans. All bands have crazy fans. But this one in particular was just, I mean, everybody that worked with them was just like, what is up with this fan base?

They are fucking insane. I'll tell you off the air. All right. Speaking of fans, I am like a super fan of like old sci-fi crazy shows. So I mentioned before I did the website for Gigi Edgley who used to play Chiana on Farscape.

Yeah. And she posted on Facebook that she was down in Australia doing a signing and she asked me to update her site. And I'm like, okay, cool. And I looked at her thing and I noticed that she posted a picture of her pens that she had was picking up to do her signing. Next to her pens were Lucy Lawless. And I'm like, holy shit, she signed with Xena.

So I have a habit, not a habit, but a penchant for collecting celebrity autographs that say, Jason, your Kung Fu is the best. Which, you know, you've seen them. Yes, I have. I'm actually surprised that you have not posted them up on grumpyoldgeeks.com yet. I'll post a link to them.

I actually got them on my site now. There you go. My favorite, of course, is Fabrice Morvan, my old friend from Milli Vanilli who could not spell Kung Fu properly. So I'm sending a person that I'm a fan of to go find another TV star. And sure as shit, she did it.

She got me one. Nice. It should be in the mail here today. I can't wait. Very exciting. I had to put that out with the crazy fans because I'm a crazy fan too sometimes. Yes, you are. Remember, I can't remember how long ago it was. We were talking about the government putting devices in your car to track where you drive and how far you drive for the purpose of taxing you for tolls.

Yes, yes. Well, apparently there's a company that will let you do it to yourself. It's called Metro Mile. A friend of mine just signed up for it and he was excited. He's like, oh my God, this is going to be great. You know, I get it's a quantified car, you know, and all this shit. And I'm like, and they have an insurance package that you just pay by the mile.

Yes. It's an interesting concept, but, you know, it wouldn't work for most people. I guess if you don't drive very much, maybe it'll work. I love this concept for you. You put the link in and I was checking it out and I'm very disappointed to find out that actually we cannot get the insurance in California yet. Right now it's just Illinois, Oregon and Washington.

This is obviously going to be a bureaucratic and legal nightmare for these guys, but I love this idea. For me, it's great because I barely drive at all. Like my, what I have to pay for, for car insurance. I mean, I still, I would prefer something like pay at the pump, which is just as effective without getting all this weirdness involved.

But for me, this would be absolutely fantastic. My, my, my car insurance would, would drop significantly if I had something like this. Unfortunately, you still also have to change the entire rest of the insurance industry because I get a massive drop on my rates because I bundle my, my homeowner's insurance and my car insurance are bundled.

And I don't know if it would actually save me enough to disconnect them. Yeah. Yeah. I know a lot of people that have that. So probably not, but someone like me, maybe it would, but I spend so much time in my car anyway. I don't think it would pan out. Yeah. I mean, I like the whole, this whole concept anyways. I mean, we're big on this, this whole quantified thing.

The only issue I have with it is for me, I basically have all this already. BMW and, and many have apps that connect directly into the, you know, the entire diagnostic system. So I'm already getting all this information if I really wanted it. Hmm. Interesting.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I got an old Ford. Mine doesn't do shit. I mean, I've got, well, you've got, I've got sync. Yeah. Sync version one. It also got a USB port and the thing wouldn't even take more than a 20 gig, uh, library in my iPad or iPod. Yeah. And that's a pretty cool idea though.

I'm saying, you know, it plugs directly into the diagnostic port on, on newer cars and, uh, yeah, it's got a little app with your iPhone and you can track everywhere. It'll, they're going to start obviously trying to roll out things in cities where, you know, they'll give you advice or, you know, whatever, you know, gas station, it'll, you know, if you're low on gas, it'll find the cheapest gas for you and within five miles or whatever your, your radius left drive is that sort of thing, which will, which would all be pretty cool if they get there.

But definitely the insurance is, is kind of the big thing that they're going to hopefully be able to offer. I mean, this kind of stuff just makes a lot of sense. Yeah. As soon as I get to see my buddy after he's had it for a while, I'll, uh, report back and see if he's digging it or not. Cool. Very cool. Well, with all that money that you're saving, if you're using something like that, Jason and I had a bit of an argument, uh, kind of an ongoing argument where, where you said that you haven't really seen this erosion of the middle class thing that I've been beating the drum about since we started this podcast.

Um, another article this time in the New York times in many cities, rent is rising out of reach of the middle class. Uh, this is something I have experienced here firsthand, uh, in Silicon beach. Um, and I thought it was maybe just, just kind of a local thing, um, that was just affecting us here.

No, no, no, this is all over the place. Uh, rents have skyrocketed. I don't understand how people can afford to rent here in, in Venice anymore. Uh, it's actually why I ended up kind of buying a place as I started to do the math and the rented skyrocketed so high, it's cheaper for me to buy a place.

I can literally turn around and walk out of this place and rent it for more, almost double my mortgage. Holy shit. That's how insane it's starting to get around here. Um, and we're just lucky that, you know, I found a place that was really cheap at the time. I'm sure the house prices are going up astronomically as well.

So it's not just rent. It's also buying, uh, this New York times article basically just goes through that a ton of cities and found that over 90 of the major U S cities where the median rents, not including utilities was more than 30% of the median income. So middle-class people are basically being pushed out of the cities where all the work is.

Yeah. I looked at this, uh, looked at the graphs on this article and by the way, um, I can't get to the New York times because it won't let me and I don't have a paid subscription. So if you're on Chrome people, uh, shift, shift command N or shift control. And if you're on one of those PC buckets, uh, we'll give you the incognito window and you can browse the New York times at will.

Um, so nice little hack there. Good little trick. So I, I looked at the graphs and I was surprised that Los Angeles is actually higher than San Francisco. As much as we bitch about San Francisco, Los Angeles is actually more expensive. Yeah. I thought that was a little bit odd as well. But I mean, I think if you go, when you, when you, when you include Los Angeles proper, it's so massive.

And that's the thing. Yeah. You've got, you've got like, I mean, literally you've got like Watts and Compton and you've got Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Exactly. Yeah. Well, when you try to average that out. Yeah. The San Francisco core doesn't really correlate to Los Angeles as a proper city quite so well. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's, there's a little bit of a discrepancy there, but it's, uh, yeah. I mean, when I was just searching for places, when I was just back there a couple of weeks ago, it's ridiculous how expensive it is. So the rent is, is unbelievable. And I, again, like I said, I thought it was just kind of Silicon beach here with the Googles and all the stuff, fucking startups and all those hipsters coming in, um, you know, getting their three, $4,000 a month salaries or whatever the hell they're getting in, which still wouldn't even be enough to pay rent.

Rents around rents in Silicon beach here are around four to $5,000 for anything decently sized, which is stunning. Like, yeah, that's ridiculous. I'm, I'm a two income household. Both of us are, I'd say upper middle class professionals.

We make good livings and we can, we couldn't find a place to rent around here. That was affordable. That would allow us to actually have a decent life. I mean, all of our money would have been going to rent. Yeah, no, it's changed. I mean, when I first moved to Hollywood, uh, I think it was in 97 when I got my first house in the Hollywood Hills, it was 1700 bucks a month.

That same house will cost you $5,000 a month now. So, so you're coming around to my way of thinking that the middle class is getting squeezed now. Absolutely. Because I, I have done a little bit more, uh, on the ground research, just talking to people. And, uh, yeah, things are definitely not the way they used to be. Small businesses are just shrinking.

Getting hammered. Getting hammered. I used to know so many people. Yeah. Yeah. I used to know people with, uh, t-shirt shops and print shops and all this stuff and they're just gone now. I mean, everybody's like just eking by. And it's funny, I keep talking about it, but I was doing the math this year. I'm going to make this year as much as I made my second year as a, as a web programmer.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, my, my income has taken a real hit as well. My, my small business has been basically on the verge of just eking by for the past two years at least. And, uh, I mean, on the plus side, I just did my taxes and I have considerably less tax to pay because I've made considerably less money.

So, uh, it's, it's hard, it's hard out there for a pimp. It really is, man. And, and I just got hit with this, this broken ankle. It's basically going to wipe me out. The insurance they're refusing to pay in California cause I broke it here in Illinois. Yeah. They're not paying. I'm probably going to get stuck with a $25,000 bill, which basically that's it.

You know, they just, they just forced me to chapter 11 right there. So yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, um, it's, uh, I, I'm in agreement with you right now. It's a, it's a rough world out there right now and it ain't getting better. And, uh, I don't even know what there is to do about it anymore. One idea would be just to burn the hell down San Francisco.

At least that seems to be a recurring theme everywhere in the media. And I wanted to ask you because you're a San Fran guy. You lived there for a while. You're, you're really kind of in touch with everything that's going on there. We've talked about this a lot on this podcast. Another article on salon, the bay is burning Google glass, techno rage in the battle for San Francisco soul.

I'm seeing this so often now I'm starting to wonder, is this manufactured journalism? I think this might, I think this might be a little bit of media hype. I'm sorry. Maybe a lot of media hype. Okay. Okay. Some, some dude gets his glass, his Google glass snatched off of him because he's walking in the mission. Yeah. Um, yeah.

Uh, well you deserve it because you're in the fucking mission and you're wearing a pair of $1,500 thing on your, on your face. Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago when I was there, people would steal your laptop if you left it out. It's nothing new. That part at least when you have something expensive that you're not paying attention to people that don't have much money will steal it from you.

Yeah. And you're trying to go into the edgier, i.e. lower income areas. Yeah. That's, that's, which, which is where people are pissed off because they are getting pushed out. The mission is, you know, getting hit hard and people there are just pissed off. So you go around, you know, flashing your wad, expect to, you know, kick in the teeth. That's, that's pretty much all that you're going to get.

Um, so I think a lot of this is definitely starting to get to the point where it's ridiculous. Uh, and people are just, it's just escalating for no reason, especially with the, the bus thing. Yeah. The buses should pay more. Okay. Given that, granted that, but, and there is, there is a lot of, you know, people that aren't making a good living being in these kids are like 20 that are coming in and becoming millionaires and flaunting it because they don't know any better because they're stupid kids.

I think that's, that's the real issue. It's the flaunting thing. Um, and I'm seeing that again here as well because we're, we're Silicon beach. So anything that happens up in San Fran is now happening here. We've got Google here. We've got, you know, the Snapchat fucks and all those guys are all in this area. Um, and you see these kids running around with just crazy money and you know, you're, we also, this is Venice beach, man.

We got, we got 60, 70 year old hippies that have lived here all their lives that, you know, are, are, did all right for themselves. But like we've been talking about middle-class squeeze, they're starting to notice that it's getting harder and harder to pay their bills. And you got these kids tooling around in their Teslas. And, uh, you know, two weeks ago, some, one of these dudes had a, had a drone out over the beach and some, some 50 year old hippie chick grabbed a beer from the, from the place that she was sitting at, hucked it at it and knocked it out of the sky.

Oh man, see if you would have, if you were been taking your YouTube video to get famous and got that. I know. You'd have been, you'd have been done. That was the one time I wish I was actually recording something that did not happen. But yeah, I'm seeing, I'm seeing that kind of, that clash is happening because it is, it's a bunch of, of really entitled little fucks that don't know how to behave themselves.

And here's, here's the, the irony that, and we're bitching about this. This is exactly what happened to me and you when we first got into the business. We were starting to make stupid money. We were young, we were stupid and we're doing the same thing. I never made that kind of money. No, no, no. I don't think either of us were that stupid. Well, I was, I mean, I went from making, I went from making 20 grand a year working, working, you know, 60 hour weeks at Kinko's and within a year and a half, I was in six figures working at a movie studio.

I had, I, I hadn't, I had no like skills to deal with that change, you know, none whatsoever. Well, I mean, that's a, that's the thing that we always talk about with these young, you know, basketball players and things like that. When they go basically literally from the ghetto to here's $50 million.

Yeah. It was a biebering. Yeah. Yeah. It's biebering. So, all right. Well, there you go. You were right. I was wrong. We're all fucked. That seems to be, you know, I don't, we'll see what happens with elections this time around.

Not that anybody pays attention or cares. No, forget it. Don't even go there. All right. You posted an interesting TED talk this, in the notes, because it's funny. Over the past two weeks, I, in my little morning schedule now, I have a very regimented morning. In the morning while I have my breakfast, I turn everything off except for my iPad and I watch a TED talk because I haven't watched them in so long.

Yeah. It's been a while for me too. It's funny that you posted, this was one by this guy, Russell Foster on why do we sleep? Yeah. And I saw this when it came out and it was an excellent talk. It's definitely got legs. It's, I think it's from 2013. So, it's not like super old. No. But it's, it's an interesting, you know, he's got good theories about why we sleep and all that good stuff.

So, it's a really good one. It'll be in the show notes for sure. What did you, how did you find this? Uh, I don't even know how I found it. This is just one of those, I stumbled upon it. Um, I saw the, the, his, his, his, uh, title is circadian neuroscientist. And I was just like, huh, that sounds cool.

And I mean, we've talked about sleep a lot and I've been dealing with, with kind of, I've moved and I'm in different light at different times of the day. Now I'm in a different bedroom and I've noticed that kind of my sleep patterns have been a bit jacked. I'm not, it takes a while to make those sorts of transitions and kind of get used to them.

So, I was just, sleep was on the mind and, uh, I really enjoyed it. I mean, no answers. Um, the amazement at the fact that this is something that we do with one third of our lives and we really don't understand it that well. And, uh, some good theories. I, I like to talk a lot. It was really enjoyable. So, I just thought we'd throw it in there.

Yeah. And this doesn't have the newest talk where it's where, um, or the newest, uh, research where they're talking about how it was garbage collection, you know, how like your brain is flushed every night so all the dead cells can come out. Yeah. You know, I think trying to nail down why we sleep to one theory, I think is, I think is where they're missing the boat.

There's so many things that it does while we sleep with memory retention, um, you know, and just rejuvenation and house, house cleaning. You know, it's the most, it's the most important muscle in your body, which is not a muscle I know, but still it's like, I, and, and, you know, I'm fine with a good nap. I've been having really a terrible time sleeping after I got off of all the pain meds from the leg.

Oh yeah. That stuff will fuck you up too. And, uh, yeah, I haven't had any, any luck, but I tell you what man, Zequil has come to my rescue. That shit is great. Oh my God. That shit is great. I just, you know, I just, you know, I just use wine. That works. No, see, that's the problem. I can't do that. That makes it worse for me.

It makes it, it makes it worse worse the next day. Um, but I, and here I have turned into a coffee hipster asshole now. Oh no, you're not, you haven't joined the Sean Bonners of the world. You're not tweeting about it constantly. I'm not, I'm not that bad. Don't do it. Don't even think, don't even go there.

No, no, no. I'm not, I'm not that bad yet. I don't, I was wondering if a fixie was going to come with my AeroPress, which I just bought. I got a, I got an AeroPress and one of those, um, I can't remember a handjo, handjob, a little Japanese, uh, twirly grinders. Like a, like a manual grinder.

Oh, handjob. Yeah. Hey, as soon as you added Japanese, I wouldn't have been surprised. It does both, you know, it's multi-talented. Um, just, just. Be careful with the beans. Be careful with the beans. Just don't put it in, put it in the wrong end. Is that what you gotta do there? That could be a bad morning. Wake you up better than the coffee would.

But, uh, yeah, I bought an AeroPress and this little grinder thing. It was like 50 bucks. Cause I, I needed coffee again. Tea, tea in the morning just wasn't cutting the mustard. I love tea, but just wasn't doing it. I need to. Tea is my afternoon thing. I need coffee in the morning. Oh, I want espresso. Cause I, I don't like the volume of coffee.

Just, you know, send you to the crapper right away. I like, I like a nice good espresso. And I tell you what, I, I was, I was floored. I, I mean, I'm just using crappy Pete's major Dickinson's like beans that I grind up myself and then just make a, an espresso with the AeroPress. Right. Holy Jesus. Is it good?

Yeah. It is, it is better than any machine I've ever used. The trick is the water and all that. I mean, I've still got, I've just got my Nespresso, espresso thing and it's good enough for me. I'm just not a connoisseur and I don't want to become one because the shit gets crazy, addictive and expensive. Sean Bonner, I'm looking at you. Well, you're lucky because you have an intelligentsia like three blocks away from you.

I will not go within 500 feet of that hipster shithole. Dude, no, you go and you buy the beans and you go home. Don't buy anything there. Although I tell you what, their espresso there is pretty off the charts. Like it's not even like coffee. It's otherworldly good. But, um, yeah, I'm, I'm trying not to turn into a coffee snob now that I have my, my little AeroPress and grinder thingy.

But I tell you what, man, it's, it's well worth the money because it's cheaper than buying like a, even a semi decent machine for 50 bucks. Right. And, um, it's one shot and, you know, one and done little make it yourself. I love it. Cool. All right. I guess I, I don't know why I got into it, but I, I, my mornings are now.

That's why I'm probably talking so damn fast. I've had four shots of espresso. I know. You just seem to be a little up and about and alert. Yes. Yeah. I am, I am. Oh, man. Okay. Now let's come down. Come down.

Um, so we talked about the droner, the drones and the drowners or what? Droners. Drone. Drown. Yeah. Yeah. Or dronies. Droners and taking their dronies because that's what they're calling drone selfies now. Dronies. Too close to bronies, but you know. Way too close.

About the same and creepy factor. Not even close, dude. Did you watch the brony movie? Come on. You have to watch the brony movie. It'll, it is life changing. You thought that there was creepy in the world before? Yeah. And it's got, and it's got Q, John DeLancey in it, who is, uh, well worth watching.

Yeah. Now, yeah, now we have the, we have the, uh, the dronies and now we have got the Belfies too, which I just, I, for some reason I came across a USA Today thing that they had a news piece on Belfies, which are like booty selfies. I, we're just making shit up now.

I mean, we really are, but I, first off, I have no problem with the Belfie. I think that this is what the culmination of all technology has been for. So I can have an Instagram of Rihanna's ass. I'm okay with that. What I did mind, and I, we should put, definitely put this link in, in the US or in our show notes for the USA Today piece.

This reporter is so smug, annoying, and stupid. I, I, I just couldn't, I had to mute it actually. I couldn't, I couldn't, I'm now, I'm going to make a little joke. Oh, I was just like, I want to fucking kill you. Who are you? How'd you get this job? And are you, if you're making a lot of money, I just want to die.

I don't think anybody's making any money on USA Today's website at all, so that's okay. Good point. Okay. Yes, there were very many big butts. And I cannot lie. Now, here's, now, this is what I want to know. Why, why are, why isn't it, why is it called a dick pic and not a dickie?

It should be a dickie. Not that I want to start a trend. I know, because I love the band, the Dickies. And I don't want them to like lose their, their Google juice because they still play out. And they're, they're a great band to go see. And, and when I go see the Dickies, I don't want like bros coming in and showing their, their slongs thinking that they're in a different type of show.

No dronies or belfies at Dickies. Comment of the week. So real quick, before we jump into the comments, I do want to clarify that the, it wasn't the handjob grinder.

It was the, it was the Hario grinder, the coffee mill slim grinder mini. So you can get like two cups out of it. Now I do, I will state though, that the AeroPress does look kind of like a penis pump. So if you are taking it in your luggage, going through, going through the, the airport at TSA, you might want to check it instead of taking it through carry on.

You might get some funny looks because it is a little pervy looking. Okay. Wow. Great. Just wanted to clear that up. Handjobs and penis pumps. Who knew coffee was so bizarre? That's why all the hipsters are into it, I guess. Just found that out. They had told us at the beginning, shit, been in a long time ago.

So, all right. So comment of the week comes from March Digital from Australia, our first Australian commenter who gave us a five star. Thank you very much, mate. All right. Humorous and entertaining banter. Five stars. If you, like me, have been working on the web for some years, you'll find the verbal exchanges between these two 40 something year old web developers refreshing and entertaining.

Jason and Brian share their opinions on everything tech related while not getting too highbrow. A great podcast to listen to while driving to work. Highly recommended. Well, thank you, March Digital. Thank you. We very much appreciate it. While not getting too highbrow, as we just proved. Mm-hmm. No shit. Yeah. Thank you very much, man.

I'd like to also state for the record, 40, not 40 something, this guy. I don't know about Jason. 42. Going on 43. Oh, yeah. And we also got tweeted. Thank you very much, Rohan. The Budaphy Grumpy Old Geeks Love Fest continues as he is the founder, I believe, of Budaphy.

I believe so. I think so. Super GOG podcast this week featuring Jay Goldman. Fave new podcast, not only because the chaps are Budaphy fans. Thank you very much. That's awesome. We love your product still. I'm still using it. It's been fantastic. And I'm glad that you guys are all listening over there.

Absolutely. We're still waiting for the beer you said you were going to send us, though. Yeah, yeah, that beer. We do not forget. No, we do not forget. So if you guys are enjoying it, anybody out there, you got a question, you got a comment, by all means, please do tweet us.

Please write to us on our website. Please write to us on our Facebook page. And if you like the show, do that one extra step further, like March Digital did, and go onto the iTunes page and leave us a five-star and a comment there, because for whatever reason, it does seem to matter.

And at some point, we'd like to get some ads. Absolutely. We appreciate it very, very much. Thank you.

In the news. I stumbled across a video of a story that I think we've talked about. It's definitely been around, kicking around for a little while. There are glow-in-the-dark roads in the Netherlands, where they basically have painted these stripes on the roads with this awesome, cool, funky sci-fi material that basically glows in the dark, thus getting rid of the need for the little bumpy things.

Actually, those are pretty good, because they wake you up when you're falling asleep. Yeah, the bumpy things are there for a reason. Bumpy things are good, so I'll take that back. But it does look absolutely beautiful. And I know there was a news story a while back. We've linked in the show notes to a video, so you can actually see what they really look like on a real road.

It looks beautiful. It's very Tron. It's very Tron. It's very Tron. I would love to see these things coast-to-coast. I'm sure it doesn't cost that freaking much, and our entire government, as they redo roads and repaint things, should be doing it with this, because it's pretty fucking kick-ass. Well, the cool thing about it is you don't need – there's no electricity involved.

No electricity. They glow-in-the-dark, so there's your savings right there. And they look cool. They're waiting – or they're going to do a safety study next, which will be interesting to find out, because you can't really see the animals on the road. But then again, if the road's dark anyway, you can't see them.

You can't really see them anyways. I mean, you want to talk about starting to save money and cutting some of the fat in government. Every single time that we redo any bit of highway, do this. And if it's an area where you think you still need additional lights, put up the damn LED bulbs already.

Yeah, with some solar batteries. Yeah, with some solar batteries. Those things will cost nothing. They'll run forever. And put some rat poison on the side of the road so Bambi can go fuck off. There you go. Solving the world's problems one step at a time. GrumpyOldGeeks.com. Please send your emails to Brian at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

Nobody asks us, man. We've got answers for everything. So FCC has set up an incentive auction that will lead to faster wireless internet for everyone, in theory. Basically, they're trying to open up areas of bandwidth and the sphere that have not been opened before to commercial use.

Or I think they're stealing some of it away from other cable and things like that. The upshot basically being that we will get faster wireless Wi-Fi connections, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, okay. Cool. I didn't read this one. I'm sure it's just another spectrum auction type of thing.

Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's a three-stage spectrum auction that's going to basically – it should open things up and actually make things better for us. I'd imagine that will also involve some pass-down costs, of course. Okay, so this is for home Wi-Fi. Yeah. I see. Okay.

Man, I tell you, that new Airport Extreme I got is kicking ass. Well worth the $300. Yeah, I'm almost due for an upgrade on that as well. So at some point, I'm going to do that. And do you have one of the old Extremes? Because, man, they pair perfectly. If you have an old Extreme and a new Extreme – I do.

I got Wi-Fi for days now. And it's gotten really simple now. You used to have to bend over backwards to pair those things to extend the network. Now it's just like two clicks. It's great. I don't really – I mean, my place is – it's actually worked out really perfectly just with the one that I have now.

I have no dead zones whatsoever, so I don't really need to be doing anything like that. I have to say, though, they have really made it – made these things fantastically easy to set up as well. I literally unplugged it from my old place, moved into my new place, plugged it back in. Nothing else was required. It was just up and running instantly.

It was awesome. Yeah, but I tell you, I mean, the new ones, just the antenna is better. The speed is better. I told you the speed is like three times what it used to be. Yeah, yeah. At least. So, I mean, even if you just get the base one that doesn't have the time capsule in it, that's $199. Yeah. Over the course of the next year, you're going to save at least $199 in time just moving files around your house.

That is billable time that you can reclaim. Exactly. If you only had enough clients to bill anymore because we're all dying. Yeah. And even if you do send a bill, it's – who knows if they're ever actually going to pay it. Okay. Well, it's Friday and it's Force Friday. My friend Mike was going off to work today and he had his Doctor – not Doctor Who.

His Darth Vader shirt on. I'm like, oh, it's Force Friday. It is Force Friday and the May the 4th is coming up as well. So, Star Wars is in the news. This one actually made me – well, I don't know. It made me sad but also – it got the little lump in the throat but a big smile on my face as well.

And this is definitely the only time the Grumpy Old Geeks will ever link to People.com. There's a link in the show notes. Parents hold Star Wars funeral for four-year-old son who died of cancer. Yeah. It's a bummer. It's a bummer but the pictures, you know, again, like I said, kind of almost ready to cry but the pictures also made me smile quite – I mean, the stormtroopers alongside the R2-D2 by the priest.

It was – it's quite touching. It was. Very much so. Speaking of getting touched, Yahoo spends $58 million to fire its chief operating officer. Yes. I was so angry.

Well, here's the deal. I don't pay for Yahoo. I've never been a shareholder at Yahoo. Somebody should be pissed off but it doesn't come out of my tax money. This guy basically made – where was the number? It was ridiculous. It's like $200 and some odd thousand dollars a day. Yeah.

And here's the thing. He got paid that much money for being shitty at his job. God, I would – That's why they fired him. I want someone to fire me. Wait. No, I get fired. I just don't get $58 million in cash. I don't get 58 cents at a bus ticket. Oh, man. It's all rigged.

Oh, well. Again, Yahoo has absolutely no idea what they're doing. Neither does this guy. Whatever. Well, this guy knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah, he did it right. You can go buy that island and say, fuck the rest of you guys. Yeah. You can go buy his new Google Glass now.

So TED, TED Talks. We were talking about TED Talks before. And now there's a new, I'm sorry, XPRIZE for AI. And they're trying to figure out if you can build an AI that will give an XPRIZE talk that will get a standing ovation.

Okay. It's silly as hell. Yeah, I don't know. I watch TED Talks all the time. And even the good ones from humans don't get standing ovations. That's like the gold standard, you know? The gold standard is when you get a standing O, you have made it.

Yeah, I'll put the link in the show notes. It's just silly. They're like, it might even take up to 20 years. Who knows? I'm like, well. Yeah. Can you give us like some kind of ballpark? No, apparently not. This is, I don't know. It's like a non-story. They've tried to make a story.

But whatever. Good for them. Okay. Sorry to waste your time. Yes. And I don't know if you've ever, do you do arts and crafts, Jason? Occasionally. Yes. Have you been to a Michaels recently? My stepmom used to be the craft coordinator at Michaels.

Wow. A Michaels, not for all of Michaels. Oh, okay. Have you used your credit card there? Hell no. Okay, good. You don't have to change your credit card. Another one. Another big leak like the Target one. Michael Storrs, confirm payment credit card data breach. Up to three million credit cards have been stolen.

Every soccer mom in the United States of America is now screwed. This one should be pretty easy for the credit card companies to catch. Bought a minivan. Bought cleats. Ferrari. Huh. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, as we've been saying, get used to this, people. I mean, every couple of weeks we're going to hear about this until people get their shit together. I mean, especially with these big box stores who are all running like out-of-the-box POS systems. Not a piece of shit. Point of sale. Which are a POS that is a POS. Basically POS, yeah.

And it's hard to do security on a corporate scale like that. And all it takes is one hole, and then you can suck the whole company dry. Yeah. And you're basically the people manning the POSs don't know what they're doing. The people in between don't know what they're doing. Usually the POS is self-outsourced.

And there you go. This is what happens. Oh, I wonder if they were running XP. Ooh. Okay. There you go. Don't go to Michael's. Security! Ha! Last week on the show, I mentioned the Heartbleed bug.

Yeah. Because it's, you know, everywhere in the news. And if you don't know what it is by now, it's where servers that run SSL are susceptible to getting data pulled from RAM. And I said that it was, you know, nobody had really done a major proof of concept.

Well, the guys at Cloudflare, who's one of the big CDNs who host a lot of stuff for WordPress blogs, surprisingly. They put up a server, and they're like, have at it. See if you can pull our private keys out. And last time I checked, yeah, yeah, about four.

It might even be up to that now. Oh, I think they killed it. Yeah, last time I checked, at least four people had done it in like the first 48 hours. So, it is doable, but I mean, the least amount of attempts it took was 100,000, and that was after a reboot.

Another one, it took three million accesses to get all the keys. So, it's still a non-trivial attack, but once they, you know, figure out how to put it in a wrapper and pull it out, it'll, you know, they'll get it. So, it is out there, and it's in the wild, and people are starting to be arrested for using this attack.

I think someone in Canada was already arrested for attempting to pull the keys out or some other thing. And there's a lot of social engineering, Heartbleed emails that are going out there, too. Oh, yeah. I've already seen a bunch of those myself. On the plus side, though, every time I see the word Heartbleed, I start singing Heartbreak Beat by the Sacred Furs in my head, and I love that song.

I, oh, man, there's a Heartbeat is a Love Beat type of that song. Yeah. But I hear the Vindictives version of it. It's really not the same. Or maybe Heartbreaker. So, there was somebody who did not agree with all the hype, don't believe the hype on the Heartbleed bug, and posted his passwords and everything to the Washington Post.

Jackass. No, he's just a dumb shit, and he got owned. Yeah. So, that's what you get. I mean, this is a story of instant karma. I agree. This guy needs to start listening to the Grumpy Old Geeks, because we tell you when you should actually worry. Yeah, and, well, here's the other thing.

Don't post your fucking password, you idiot. Don't ever do that, you idiot. Here's my master. I use one password, and here's my master password. Good luck. Okay. Sure. Gotcha. I mean, you just can't protect against stupid. No, you can't protect against stupid.

And I actually saw this story, Google Ways Boosting Encrypted Sites and Its Search Algorithm. It actually came in under the headline, you know, this might really affect the way security and these breaches won't happen so often. No, no, because any reputable site is already encrypted and knows what they're doing.

Well, the whole, the problem with Heartbleed is it was an infrastructure issue. It doesn't matter if you were encrypted. The fact that you were using encryption made your site hackable. You know, that was the whole point. If your site is just a content site, you don't require logins, passwords, all that shit, then you were safe anyway.

It didn't matter. Yeah, it didn't matter at all. But if you were secure, that's when you were vulnerable. So, I mean, yeah, I guess this might be something to get a boost. But, like, my blog is, I'm not going to, you know, SSL my blog with a $50 a year certificate just so I can get a boost for a keyword.

That makes no sense. Yeah, that makes no sense at all. I mean, it's not, it doesn't make sense for search results in that sense because there are a lot of sites that don't need to be encrypted at all. Fine, if you're talking about, like, if you go through, like, the Google sales stuff where it's all, like, things that you're going to go purchase. Okay, I get that. But a content search, you shouldn't get a boost based on encryption.

Yeah, anything that requires a login, sure. Anything that's storing personal data, sure. But just content sites? Yeah. Yeah. And here's the thing. Those are the ones that are really going after the search. So, you know. Totally agreed. So, I've got another story in security that I know you are a big fan of this company, Jason.

This is a no daddy story. GoDaddy did something really stupid. It must be, oh, a day. Something every day that's really stupid. I don't get how this company is still around.

It's unbelievable. Tits. They put tits in their ads and then they got all these people who think, they have become synonymous with domain. That's how they did it. Yeah. If you need a domain, you go to GoDaddy. Yes. They just spent an ungodly amount of money teaching the rubes how to get a domain.

So, if you're one of those people that think you need a domain and you need to go to GoDaddy, don't. Go to Hover.com. Agreed. And we didn't get paid for that. So, Ross Rader, you hear me? Call me. Okay. You got me on that? Okay. Go ahead. Sorry. So, this woman who writes for a site called Skepchick, which has a nice little funky graphic.

I haven't looked at the site too much because one of the tags on this story is feminism and I try to avoid those things. Not because I'm not a feminist, people, but because I don't like the rhetoric. Anyways. Is she a woman with a Y? She is. God, I hope not. If so, I want to undo this story.

Edit. Edit. Cut it out. No, she is not a woman with a Y. It is Jamie. She got a spam email and did something that we never do, any of us, and actually reported it to the domain, to the registered domain people, GoDaddy. And basically, GoDaddy, somebody over there wasn't a fan of that, apparently, and basically just started to release her personal information and started a smear campaign against her online.

Okay. So, all that GoDaddy basically released her personal information to a spammer troll. Good on you, GoDaddy. Sweet. At least they didn't have the CEO go out and shoot her. Yeah. Look on the bright side, Jamie.

And since GoDaddy now owns Media Temple, I can say that I am extricated from that incestuous relationship as well. So, you know, just stay the fuck away from GoDaddy. Stay away from VeriSign. Stay away from, oh, who else do we hate? Oh, Dropbox.

Dropbox. But we'll get to that later. Yeah, we've got to think about Dropbox in a bit. Fucking Christ, what a week. It's the library. Woo! I was in the middle of trying to find something new to read as I had just finished up the Terry Pratchett book.

And, you know, there are two. I was thrilled to find out that first off, we're getting a brand new Christopher Moore book, which is already in the mail, signed first edition, on its way to me. How did you do that? Oh, you know, I have my ways. Where the fuck's mine? Okay, there's a couple.

Well, I'll tell you, and you can probably still get it. There's booksamillion.com. Check out booksamillion.com if you're interested in getting first editions and autograph signed copies of many books by many authors. But they are selling the Christopher Moore one signed and first edition.

So it is on its way to me right now. We're also getting a new Tom, Tom, God, I always screw this up, Tom Robbins book, which I'm very excited about because he hardly ever releases anything. That is coming next month. So very excited about that. Unfortunately, neither of them are out now, and this is when I stumbled across a book that has my name all over it.

It's called Assholes, A Theory by Aaron James. I have not gotten it yet. Apparently, this intrigued you so much, Jason. You're already halfway through. Well, I'm about 10% through. Okay. I got the audio book version, and I started listening to it last night, and it is intriguing.

I don't know where it's going, but it pretty much is – it's almost a – I see this as like the – as a grumpy old geek's version of like management training. Well, no. This is more like kind of a highbrow, educated look at what an asshole is.

What is – like is an asshole morally bankrupt? Right. And is Hitler an asshole? No, not really because he was much more than that. Where does the asshole – where does the asshole define so far? That's the theory. So I'm still working through – they're still talking through what actually defines an asshole.

I'm beyond intrigued. So I'm actually going to get it right after we're done with the podcast. I'm going to start reading it tonight, especially since I just got my couches, and I can sit on a couch and read a book like a civilized human being. But here is the paragraph that made me decide I must get this book. Asshole management begins with asshole understanding.

Finally giving us the concepts to discern why assholes disturb us so, philosopher Aaron James presents a provocative theory of the asshole to explain why such people exist, especially in an age of raging narcissism and unbridled capitalism. Oh, this is going to be great. Actually, yeah.

That's kind of it so far. That's where we're at. Okay. I don't know where – how we got onto that. But so I read Homeland by Cory Doctorow. I read the audio book read by Will Wheaton.

I listened to the audio book because I got it in that humble bundle. The humble bundle. Yeah, I picked that up. Meh. Yeah, sadly. I wasn't impressed. Yeah. Okay. I was really bummed. I'm surprised because you love his books. I loved Little Brother.

I thought it was fantastic. I just don't know what happened with this one. I think his formula is maybe just getting a little stale for me because he does have a formula, which is basically read the news and then write a news report about two months into the future about what happened in the news.

It's very near future stuff. Super near future. Right. Yeah, which kind of gets a little old after a while, especially if you're like us and you read a lot of – Yeah, I was about to say it kind of sounds more like work than entertainment to read it. That's kind of the issue. Yeah, and a lot of the stuff that he talked about, it's like – it's old hat now because it was – he wrote it like probably over a year ago.

Right. So that's the real danger of writing near fiction is because it can come to pass before your book actually hits the damn shelves. So a lot of it was – it almost felt out of date and I can't remember when the book came out.

It's not that old. That's the thing. Yeah. It's really not that old. Will Wheaton's performance I thought was fairly not good and uninspired. There were a lot of times when I really didn't know which actual voice – which character's voice he was using.

Right. Which was a real problem. He would like – there's like the main boy and girl character in the book and he would toggle between them and I did not actually know which one was speaking. Right. Because he forgot to change his voice which is like – I mean I could – you can blame that one on the producer I think.

So yeah. So far it was just a – it was a meh. I mean like B minus, maybe C plus which was a bummer. Like I said, I really loved Little Brother and I had high hopes for this but it was just not there for me. Right. Okay. Unfortunately, I did pick up another book.

Speaking of asshole philosophy, I just got philosophy. I got the philosophy book, Big Ideas Simply Explained. Okay. Which is – I found out about this from – Mark Frauenfelder tweeted about this series, the Big Ideas Simply Explained series and they've got a bunch of them.

They've got psychology, economics, I forget the other – politics, religion, business, all these Simply Explained books. The thing is huge. It's 352 pages. Right. So it's not we. And it was like – it was less than – it was 14 bucks. So I'm like, well, 14 bucks for a giant hardcover like this is beautiful.

I got it. I'm just like – I'm starting to go through the intro. I mean, this is a cool book. It really is cool. Great. I mean, I'm looking at the whole – like they've got the business book, the religions book, the politics book, the economics book. I mean, if one of these is good, I'd get the whole damn series. That's what I'm thinking.

Because they look like they're really well designed and if you've got kids, yeah. That's exactly what I was going to say. If you've got kids, these are like – this is like the new Encyclopedia Britannica of just cool, you know? Very cool. I'm going to have to check these out. Most definitely. And if you have friends with kids, like turn them on to it. Mm-hmm.

That's what I got this week. I'm actually in the middle of moonwalking with Einstein right now too. So hopefully I'll have that for next week. Oh, and if you are a big fan of Christopher Moore, again, do the books a million things so you can get yourself an autographed first edition. But their sample chapters are now up on the Amazon for your Kindle and everything like that.

I did read the first chapter that they put up and I was basically pissed myself in bed laughing. It's going to be a good one. It's going to be a really good one. Is it The Serpent of Venice? Yes. The Serpent of Venice. Oh, man. When's it? I'm going to ship on April 22nd.

Oh, four more days. Mine is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. How did you get it so early? I don't know. Books a million. I guess they're shipping them early apparently. Well, I'm going to have to get on that before the show posts to make sure I get one. Welcome to This Week in Shit We Put on Our Computers.

So this week I'm going to talk about shit that we don't put on our computer, at least for the first one. It's Lightroom Mobile. I'm a huge Lightroom fan as a photographer for, Jesus Christ, almost 30 years now. Lightroom is my go-to. I've got over a terabyte of Lightroom photos and catalogs and all this stuff on my main drive.

Right. And I was like, oh, cool, Lightroom Mobile. I can edit RAWs and sync and all this stuff. And no, can't. Not unless you have a Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Even though I pay for standalone Lightroom, they're like, no, sorry. You've got to buy our subscription bullshit, even though you're not going to use anything because you've already paid for the software.

That's just so annoying to me. All the software companies are moving that way for the mobile stuff. It's like you've got to buy a subscription. Why? Why? I already own your product. Well, because they can. That's why. I know. And Adobe. I mean, everything. You can't get boxed Adobe software anymore.

I mean, Lightroom is about it. Yeah. There's not going to be much left. And probably after this next round of Lightroom, they're going to say, sorry, you've got to move into the cloud stuff. Yeah. And it's not cheap. It's like, you know, 40 bucks a month. Yeah. Yeah. It's not cheap at all. I mean, granted, then you get everything. So there is an upside there.

But I mean, I've had a longstanding tradition of stealing Photoshop. So this is going to fuck my whole thing up. Totally. Or you just stick with the last version that you've got. Yeah. I mean, really, how often do you use the new things that they build in these days? Pretty much all the damn time. Damn it. Yeah.

Sorry. Way to step up my point, man. I've been using Photoshop since version two. Okay. Yeah. So if you want to talk about one piece of software I'm actually pretty fucking still terrible at, that's Photoshop. I know I can do the same things I did probably in 1995. Hey, but at least I can still do my channel ops if you gave me an old copy in System 7.

Oh, fancy. Yeah. So here's one. The next one, though. I am unbelievably floored by. This is my new favorite piece of software. And everybody's going to look at me and be like, yeah, that's been around for, oh, two years now or three or four years.

Sublime Text 2. Yes. It's been around. I never used it. I am kicking myself for not using it because it is quite possibly the single best code editor I've ever seen. I've looked at the tutorials, and I tend to agree just off that.

I haven't actually downloaded it or used it on a project yet, but I was pretty blown away. It brings in a lot of the stuff that I was actually missing from my old, now defunct, best editor ever that I used on PC called HomeSite. A lot of the functionalities in this are very reminiscent of that, which is why I held on to it even after they stopped supporting it and stopped releasing new versions for so long.

Man, I don't remember any of this shit in HomeSite, but the thing you need to do is go download it. You can get a version that will run forever, I think. The unregistered version will just run. And go through – like pull in – what I did was I pulled in source – like I made a project of one of the projects I'm working on and just started hacking on it with the tutorials just to learn the key commands and kind of get comfortable with them.

As I went, you'll learn it way faster that way. And the multiple cursors just – I was just like, whoa, what? Like that right there was – that sold me. So I'm dropping the coin on it and I'm going to put some links in the show notes for the tutorial we're talking about on TootsPlus, which is a free one.

They made that tutorial free. So you don't even have to pay for it. So that's super cool. And another one that is 10 Crucial Sublime Text 2 plug-ins for the PHP Craftsman. Even though I'm not a PHP Craftsman, I'm a crapman, some of these are really going to come in handy. So it is just super cool.

I can pretty much say Coda is going to go by the wayside unless I need to do some like visual stuff with CSS. But I think the CSS stuff in here is probably pretty good too, but you don't get like the visuals. And even Coda like stripped a lot of the good stuff that made the CSS portions good from 1 to 2.

When they launched Coda 2, they stripped a lot of the stuff that I loved. Yeah. But what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Yeah, this looks really good. I'm definitely going to give it a shot. For $70? Yeah, it can't be it. Yeah. And like I said, for free as long as you want to. But I pay for something like this.

It's a one-man operation. I'm going to pay the guy because from everything I've seen, this guy deserves it. Yeah. Seems to be too. So yeah, good stuff. Well, I mean, if I have any money left over from fixing my cell phone issues, I have moved, as I've talked about many, many times.

And I was really lucky. I know a lot of people in the LA area, for whatever reason, once you get inside your house, your cell phones just don't work or you get a super weak signal. The place I was at for the last two years, I did not have that issue, and it was wonderful. I haven't had a landline in probably seven years now.

I don't want one, but I do have cell phone signal issues in my house now. So I hopped on the internets, and I did the crowdsourcing, and I tried to figure out what the options are in terms of extending or boosting signals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And eventually it came down to the fact that I basically have to pay Verizon a crap ton of money again to get a little booster to stick in a corner, and supposedly it will fix my problem.

Are you going to get a femtocell? It is a femtocell, which the providers are able to lock to their specific signals, and so you're stuck paying just for them. But supposedly they actually really work. No, they don't. I've had one. We'll see. I spent $200 on an AT&T femtocell.

I put it because in San Francisco all the houses are made of chicken wire from the old days, which means when you go inside, it's a Faraday cage, and you cannot get signal outside of the room you're in. So I bought an AT&T femtocell, or actually my mom bought it for me for my birthday. Thanks, Mom.

And sadly I ended up throwing it away after three years of banging my head against the wall with it. It was one of the most crappy, finicky pieces of hardware ever. It had to be by a window because it needed GPS lock to do all this shit. It was a nightmare because I was in a shitty apartment under a house with maybe a two-degree vision of the sky in a window through a fence, and it could never get GPS lock.

And once it got it, it kept it. Everything was fine. And if I moved like half an inch closer to the outer boundary, it would just drop. It was a nightmare. Here's the other fun part with AT&T. If you are on your femtocell and you're getting data through your femtocell, which goes through the high-speed internet connection that you have to pay for, they charge it against your cellular bill.

They take it out of your cellular data plan. Bullshit. I think that's bullshit. I'm not with AT&T, so we'll see how Verizon approaches that. I'm hoping the technology has moved on a little bit since you've had it, and I'm hoping that my house situation isn't quite as bad as your house underneath the house covered in chicken wire under another house.

We'll see. That was it. Yeah, that was it. But I did express my concerns to Verizon prior to ordering, and I was informed that many customers have not had any issues whatsoever, and at least there is a 14-day no money-back guarantee on it. So I will be reporting back on whether this thing works or not very quickly.

Did you just say a 14-day no money-back guarantee? 14-day money-back guarantee. Okay. I was like, no money-back? Well, hey, they snuck that in there. I didn't even notice. So, yeah, I'll let you know if it works or not very quickly because, yeah, I don't want to get a landline, but I'm trying to run a business out of my house.

So not being able to take a call or getting dropped calls or not even noticing that I got a call and getting a voice message an hour later is not acceptable. Yeah, honestly, for me, if I had to do it again, I'd just get it through my cable provider and just get one of those bundled lines and run that.

Since you're going to have cable coming in anyway with your Time Warner, your Comcast bullshit, just get one of their bundled phone packages, which will cost you an extra $10 a month, and then you have a backup line. Yeah. You know, at least that way you've got some kind of, you know, solid backup. True, true. But that's just me. And it's a business write-off, you know.

Well, so is my FemteCell, so we should see. It just reminds me of Fembot. I know. It's such a strange term. I was like, I felt dirty looking it up. So I got a new iOS app here. It's called Breeze from the makers of Runkeeper.

I'm going to put this in the show notes because you just have to see the commercial that they made for this app. I don't want to spoil it, but I am going to just say it's really gay. That's all I can say. Yeah, it's another app, yet another app that uses the M8 chip in your iPhone 5S.

It won't work on anything else, which apparently nobody read that downloaded it in the comments. There's a lot of complaining. Because there's a lot of one-stars that goes, why won't this work on my 5? Because it says in the fucking documents that it only works on the 5S because you need the M8 chip, which is all the motion shit.

Because this is just another front end on the M8 data. You get really annoying alerts and, of course, badges and achievements as the day goes on. This one gives you a spirit animal because it looks at your behavior and says, you're a morseless. So I'm apparently a fox because I move quick and then stop.

And then I move quick and then stop. This sounds so annoying. I love that as a society, we've gotten to the point where we've had to gamify walking. Hey, well, I'm sorry, dude, but I've been doing that since I bought my first Fitbit. I'm fine with gamifying walking. This is just – it's cheesy, like breezy and wheezy.

It's bad. But it's pretty. It's very pretty. I just wish it did something else than just be a front end to the data that's already on your phone. Because I don't like having – I've said it on many a show. I do not like trackers that are just tied to the phone because it's – for fitness-based goals because it doesn't – it's not an end-to-end thing.

Like my Fitbit is on me all the time. My phone is charging. I get up. I leave it for an hour or two at a time. It's never always with me. So just as a fitness tracker, I don't care for these. It's pretty, but I say useless. But it's free.

So if you want to, give it a shot. But you have to watch the commercial. That's the whole fucking point of this. Watch the commercial. Okay. Everybody go watch the commercial. Okay. Are you done? I'm done. See? And I didn't get a badge for that because that was some cardio right there.

That was. That was pretty good. So I finally installed something on both my Macs and my PCs. It's something we actually talked about on the show ages ago. And this goes back to I was doing that looking into my sleep stuff. I installed Flux or F.Lux.

Welcome to 2007. I know. I'm a little bit behind. I've only been telling you how long. I know. I'm a bit behind the ball on this one. But in case you're like me and you ignore Jason all the time and didn't listen to him when he first talked about this, I'm telling you, go ahead and get it. Go to justgetflux.com.

Install it on your computers. It's pretty cool. I've been using it the last week since I've moved because I was dealing with all my kind of not breaking my sleep habits and all that sort of stuff. I've definitely noticed less eye strain. I think I'm settling into better sleep patterns. I just kind of enjoy how it dims the monitor with me and kind of the colors and brightness changes throughout the day.

It just sucks that you can't use it on your iPad. Yeah. Well, you can. You have to jailbreak it. You have to jailbreak it, which I won't do. Me either. But, yeah, when you install Flux, you have to make sure that you geolocate it so it knows when because it's smart enough to know as the year progresses when sunset happens exactly where you are.

So as soon as the sunset goes down, it starts to change colors. It's awesome. I love it. I've been using it for years. I don't know. I can't understand why anybody would not use it, and I swear it should be built into every device that has a screen on it. I agree. You get really used to it really quickly, and your eyes will thank you.

So do go install this if you're one of the people like us who basically is on your computer pretty much the entire time you're awake on and off. Yeah, and if you work at Apple, I don't think this is patented technology, so please build it into everything that you make. Yes. Now, finally today, this is a post-mortem on our lovely Hackpad that we've been using for our show notes for the past four or no, six episodes, I think.

I've come to love Hackpad. It has been fantastic. Hackpad.com, collaborative note-taking and all that good stuff. Got bought by Dropbox yesterday. I'm not giving it up. I'm not either.

We're going to keep using Hackpad. You can't blame the parents. You can't. You really can't. I can't give it up. Fuck Dropbox, but I love Hackpad. And it's not like – I don't need any security with Hackpad. We're good. We're good. Yeah, everything that we write on Hackpad, we're going to post as soon as we're done anyway.

Yeah, this all gets posted and – yeah. So you NSA fucks, you can come read our show notes a day early. I'm not too worried about it. But I understand the trepidation and the frustration. It's – I got really upset when I found out Chipotle was actually owned by McDonald's. But what are you going to do?

I'm not going to stop eating Chipotle. Chipotle because it gives me the squirts. I hate that shit. Oh, God. It's so good. Oh, it's good. But the problems, the problems. And so I'm sad that – I'm sad. I'm not really that sad. I'm just pissed off because I don't know what the future of Hackpad is going to be now.

I just wish they would have made it a pay product. Although here's the funny part. It's probably actually going to get better because Dropbox does have a tendency to make decent stuff. That's true. So we'll see. And I have been syncing with it forever with Dropbox. So I don't know. Here's the hope. Yeah. We'll see what happens.

When have we ever said that on this show? Well, we hope for a lot. We just don't expect it. Wishing one hand shit in the other. Exactly. I stumbled across something so painful.

It's actually just a spoof. And I think the point was to say how horrible this is. But I love it. And I've listened to this multiple times now. In our show notes, you will find a journalofmusicalthings.com linked to. Microsoft wrote a music software package a long time ago.

It's called Microsoft SongSmith, an application that automatically creates an instrumental accompaniment to whatever vocals you throw at it. Now, with all the popularization of mashups and things like that, there's a lot of isolated vocal tracks that are out there. And some guy threw in Nirvana's InBloom and let Microsoft have at it.

And the results are awesome. Unbelievably, geniusly awesome. It is great. I love it. This is why we've got kittens and we've got this. This is why the internet was invented. Exactly. It was amazing because I remember the commercials when this thing came out.

The family sitting around the table in the kitchen, humming along, singing, and then it would make the background track for it. Write a little ditty. Yeah, about Jack and Diane. And this is genius. Why this isn't everywhere that everybody hasn't seen it yet, I don't know, but they should.

Send it to your friends. This is a thousand times better than the Trent Reznor ripoff that everybody in the world saw and listened to. You need to go listen to this. Go to GrumpyOldGeeks.com. Find it in the show notes. Listen and let us know what you think because I love it. I almost wish I had a PC now so I could get this software and just start running everything through it just to see what comes out.

No shit. It would be great. I'd put out a whole album that nobody will ever buy and, well, just like normal musicians. Exactly. So this was a total earworm for me. I literally was walking around the next day just kind of humming the melody that Microsoft came up with.

And as part of that, I stumbled across an article in Psychology Today, earworms, a suggestion for treatment. So this guy kind of took a really scientific approach to it and said that basically the best way to clear an earworm out of your head is to listen to the entire song to completion.

Quickly. Quickly, yes. Like when you're thinking about it. Like as soon as you're thinking about it, you've got to pull it up on Spotify or your chosen paid music service. Oh, I thought he meant play it in your head. No, no, no. He meant listen to it the whole way. Like go find it and actually listen to it. Listen to that song.

Oh, I missed that part. Okay. I should maybe read what's on the internet. Read? Okay. Well, that changes everything. Yes. So anyways, I have not actually tried it yet because I have not really had the earworm except for the Nirvana through Microsoft Music.

And it did not clear it. It just made me start singing and laughing again. So yeah, I mean, I don't know about if that theory works. It's like, you know, sometimes I crave an In-N-Out burger and then I go get one and then I eat it all the way through and then I just want another one. So I don't know if that's what this works. My earworm cure is – I forget who taught me this a long time ago.

It's start humming the theme to the Andy Griffith show. But I would just end up with the Andy Griffith show then. It doesn't work that way. Huh? It's a meta-worm. It basically goes in and eats it. Is that your spiritual animal, a meta-worm? Yes. It goes in and it eats the song that's in your head and then dissipates.

Okay. I don't – I'm telling you, trust me. All right. I'm putting in the show notes. Okay. So for – Whoops. I just – what the hell was that? Oh, you know, laptops falling, whatever. Cats and dogs living together.

Oh, my. So I've got actual music suggestions this week. What? Yes. Sorry. I've had like a rough week coding and I usually listen to, you know, like Rammstein or punk rock or something loud and everything.

But on the flip side, I like cellos. I'm a cello nut for some reason. I don't know. One of my favorite albums is from this woman, Oofra Harnoy. Okay. She's a cellist. And there's a set of Vivaldi that she does. It's Vivaldi cello sonatas.

I don't even know if you can get it anymore. You can go search your Spotify's or your RDO's to see if you can find it. They have the disc for sale used on Amazon. I'm going to put the links in. I love it. It's one of my favorite albums to work to. Okay. And going with the cello theme, the first two albums from Rasputina, How We Quit the Forest and Thanks for the Eaters.

Also, two of the best cello albums ever made. I can listen to that stuff in the background on loop for like weeks on end. Yeah. I love Vivaldi. I love Rasputina. Good choices all around. Rasputina is actually still around and still recording, I believe. I have not followed them in years.

Here's the weird part. I've seen them more times than any other band live. I've seen Rasputina well over 20 times live. That's pretty impressive. Yep. And they do little tours. They're micro tours on the East Coast. They're actually playing in L.A. or in San Francisco pretty soon, I think.

Just a quick one. But either way, it's the head person, Melora Krieger. She's Rasputina and the band always changes. But yeah, they're fantastic. She's fantastic. And definitely check them out. The old stuff, you're going to have to find streaming or I think they might have some used copies.

But it's hard to find, which is surprising because they were major label releases back in the day. Yeah. Yeah, they were. I think they actually opened up for Marilyn Manson a couple times as well. Actually, Nirvana too. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I know Melora toured with Kurt Cobain for sure.

Okay. Next up, I've got a podcast. This is going to be real quick because we're running out of time. Yep. This is the Marketing Mavericks podcast on the Twit Network. I listened to two episodes of this and I'm just going to make this short and sweet. It made my skin crawl and I wanted to tear my ear balls out. Okay. It's marketing spiel and from a technology perspective, if you know anything about tech, it is painful to listen to.

And I swear, I think I'm going to change my major and I'm going to go into marketing because with the things that I and you and us technology guys know. Oh, I know. If we go into the marketing side of things. We'd actually make money. We're going to clean up. And I am so fucking sick of writing code at this point.

I probably got six more months of code in me before I either fall over dead or kill myself. I think I'm just going to go into marketing. That's it. Let's start up Grumpy Old Geeks Marketing. Yep. We're going to become marketing douchebags. Yes. And speaking, we would be completely remiss if we did not mention Silicon Valley.

Wow. I've never had a show that has infuriated me so much and also had me bent over double laughing. Cannot recommend this enough. If you are listening to this podcast, you need to watch this show. I hated the first episode. You were supposed to. I loved the second episode.

Yeah. It's great. And I love where they're going with it. And I think that this is going to be a must watch for anybody that is listening right now. You're going to love it. You're just going to love it. Once I got past the first episode and got it out of my system, you had to figure out which angle they were going to come at it with.

Yeah. Now that I know the angle and I had a couple weeks to chill. I didn't watch it right away this week because Game of Thrones was so fucking good. Then I finally watched it this morning after you put this up on the notes. I'm like, shit, I've got to watch it before the show. I was laughing my ass off. It was really good. It's good.

It is good. That's all we'll say. We'll wait to talk about it more. I think we'll probably not talk about it until the first season is done. Yes. But go watch it. Your mileage may vary, but stick it out a couple episodes for sure. Yeah. All right. Who's this asshole?

It was tax day on Tuesday, April 15th, as we have mentioned. I had a very big surprise this year because I made less money and I seemed to have dropped down a tax bracket. So it was a pretty good day for me all around. But this is the Who's This Asshole segment.

And Donald Rumsfeld is a fucking asshole. Well, there are knowns. There are unknowns. And the one known is that Donald Rumsfeld is an asshole. Yes. I think we're all agreed. But he did something surprisingly unassholish on tax day. And apparently he's done it every tax day for a long, long time.

This year, his open letter to the IRS was published. And it is quite lovely. And he is not an asshole. And all he does is go, nobody can understand this tax code. I cannot reasonably sign off as you've asked me to do, saying that I understand everything because I can't.

My wife can't understand any of this. I'm 81 years old. I would like to have a decent tax code before I die. You don't have a lot of time. Can you please figure this out? Thank you very much. Well, I think the good news in there is that Donald Rumsfeld is going to be dead soon. Wow.

Hey, man. Thumbs up to that one. Can you take Cheney with him? Even an asshole can do something good every now and then. You can support that part. This isn't how the Grinch stole Christmas. His heart did not grow three times that day because he couldn't read a fucking book and figure out the tax code. I'm sorry.

It's funny. I'm glad he does it. But it has caused nothing as far as change goes. It's given us some fodder for our really little show here. So that's all I got for it. But my takeaway is Donald Rumsfeld will be dead soon. Ooh, fantasy.

So Adam Savage from the Mythbusters fame does a thing on this site called Tested.com. I guess they're partners on it. It's one of his content creation things. I don't know. But they did a review of this crazy robotic spider from Robugtix.

Great name, I think. Yeah, I like it. I hate spiders more than anything in the world. Hate spiders. And you watch this. It's like a 12-minute YouTube video. Being the show notes, you've got to go watch it because as far as like robotics go and like the way he describes it, he built a case for it.

I mean, Adam Savage is just one of the coolest guys ever. So watching this bug thing move, it's like a $500 remote-controlled bug, okay? Yeah. But it is so cool. I watched the video. It was really cool. It's cool looking.

And yeah, that's all I really got. I mean, it's fucking cool. Yeah. They need to put a camera on it, too, so you can. Oh, of course. So you can take your dronies. Exactly. Spydronies. Spronies.

Oh, stop it, stop it, stop it. This always happens when we're about this long into the podcast. This is why we can't go long. I know. Okay. Next segment. Next. I found a site through a friend.

I can't remember where it came from. But it's called Coloring Book Corruptions, where someone who is very talented at art takes a blank coloring book page and then just makes it filthy. Very, very filthy and very, very funny. Very funny. They do take guest posts on the site, which aren't generally as good because for some reason the guests can't figure out that you need a before and an after because that's where the funny comes from.

But the posts by the author, whoever he, she may be, are just genius. It's a, you know, time waster, but it's fun. Check them out. Yeah, it's very funny. Worth a look. Otterruptions.com. Yo, seriously?

Are you shitting me? Jason's a huge photography fan. It's been brought up a couple times, so I'm gearing the are you shitting me to Jason. Ooh, thank you. No problem. Every two minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century combined. Hmm.

There's a math backup on this in the show notes. Okay, so this time you have actually come showing your work. I have come showing my work, and it is conveniently linked. It is very, yeah, he's done the math. He's kind of done it based on things like, okay, well, there was this kind of chemical was used in real physical film back from this year to this year.

This much of this chemical was used, so we're estimating this many pictures were taken, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just basically comes down to the selfies and the bronies and the dronies and the fucking fat asses and the celeb utards at Coachella. All those photos on Instagram, every two minutes, more than the entire 19th century.

It doesn't surprise me because, yeah, the silver halide, there was Culloden, I think. I don't know if they talk about that one. Yeah, because I used to do all that, like the actual physical silver stuff. I believe it. I believe it. There you go. Especially now with the iPhone 5S where you can just press the button and get 100 pictures before you can blink.

Yeah, no. Cool. That's neat. I'm glad that this guy did the work, so check it out. I wish he'd have picked a different color than pink to do his work in, but you take it where you can get it. Closing shout-outs! For the closing shout-out, my business partner, friend, etc., Wendy Marvel, is part of a company called Flipbookit.

We've had them on the show talking about it before. They have a show, an opening in Los Angeles at Giant Robot 2 on April 26th from 6.30 to 10 p.m. Or just go to Flipbookit.com for details. I will be there sucking down some free wine, so drop by and say hi.

Cool. I won't, but enjoy. I didn't think you'd be flying in just for it. I still can't. I got a month before I can fly. I'm hobbling around like, yeah, I'm not going to even say it. So you mentioned Celebutards in Coachella. Second weekend is this weekend, right?

As of this morning, I was outside taking a little walk, and up and down my neighborhood here in Venice, there were girls and dudes in their sun gear and their floppy hats packing up in their cars and their Priuses to drive out to Indio. So the mass exodus has begun again this morning for weekend two of Coachella.

Why aren't you going? What happened? I thought you had tickets. I had tickets. I bought a house. My tickets were basically going for two grand on the open market. And I said, hmm, well, I just bought a house. I could use that two grand and the time to put my place together. I'm still somewhat upset that I'm not out there.

I'm a Coachella-ite from the very first year. I've been a huge fan of it, one of my favorite weekends. Usually it doesn't even matter to me who's playing because it's just a fun experience, and I would just hang out in the dance tent anyways for most of the time. Lineup wasn't that great this year.

There's definitely a feeling that Coachella has kind of jumped the shark. I haven't gone three years running now. I'm starting to miss it less and less, particularly with all the news reports that are out there about it. I'm tired of – it started off and it was kind of alternative bands, and now it's rap.

Well, hey, the Toy Dolls are playing there this year, which really bummed me out because that was the only band I wanted to see. I'm missing the replacements. That would have been pretty awesome too. I mean there's always some good bands, and there's always a reason to go until I start looking at Instagram and Twitter and see all the dudes and the chicks out there. That used to be – here's the deal.

That used to be you. You've gotten old. I know. You don't – forget it, man. You're never going back. It's over. No, but okay. To be fair, when I used to go to Coachella, celebrities were not paid to show up as they are now. Well, they may have been. You just didn't know about it because we didn't have Twitter back then, and we didn't have Instagram and all that shit.

They could have been paid just as much, but you just never knew. Anyways, Coachella is this weekend. And the upside of me not being there and all of L.A. being there is I'm going to have an awesome empty Sunday fun day. It's going to be great. I'm going to enjoy Sunday walking up and down Main Street, hitting the bars without douchebags.

Sans douche. Yeah, sans douche. Now you know what San Francisco is like when Burning Man is going on. There you go. That's it. There you go. That's exactly what it's like. Yeah, there's been a remarkable lack of mustache. Mustache. Mustache, la douche.

All right. So, everybody, if you haven't already, please leave us an honest review for us in iTunes, and that's about it. I guess we'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week, everyone. And later. Later. 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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