58: A Podcast of Biblical Proportions

Psycho, Psycho, Psycho, Psycho. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Last time I think I talked about Squarespace and how I was done and left and then came back and then left again. Yeah, I'm basically waiting for you to tell me you've gone back to them.

No, no, no. This was an interesting thing that happened to me last week. I got an exit interview from them in the emails, as it were. And I'm thinking, okay, they're like, it's a one-question exit interview. What could we do better? Or what did we do wrong? So I filled it out. That was a mistake.

It always is. Because apparently by telling them that I no longer wanted to be their customer, they thought it was okay to then put me into their support system, open up a support ticket, and then put me in front of one of their retention experts, who then sends me emails saying, here, check out these videos, because apparently we're not doing anything wrong. You are.

So that's wrong on like every account known to man. That's no different. I mean, at least you actively did something that made them want to get back in touch with you. Anytime I do a service call with anyone, say a cable company or an internet provider or whatever, anytime I do a service call, within an hour and a half, my phone will ring, and it's the automated, how did your call go?

We're just checking in. I hate that shit. I just always just hang up on it. But I don't know when this like bugging you every time that you interact with a major company became just the standard. It's so fucking annoying. Once they figured out that they could make more money, you buy it. Yeah, I guess.

I mean, it will never happen for me. I don't think it will happen for you. Who are these idiots that like then get these calls and go, oh, well, perhaps I'll re-sign up with you then. I've seen the error of my ways. The only thing that will ever get me back is if you go, well, we've decided that because we really want to keep your business, we're going to charge you half the cost that we were charging you before.

That might get me to come back. Well, that always, yes. A discount. And I found with Media Temple, by the way, if you quit Media Temple, you will magically be eligible for their premier partner program and can get 15% off. So if you want to save some money on your Media Temple hosting, quit.

That also goes for your cable company or DirecTV or anybody else. As long as you quit, you get sent to what we call now the retention specialist. Hang on real quick. I want to tell you – the thing that pisses me off about the Squarespace thing so we can put it to bed, they just told me that I was wrong, that I told them that their system was unusable for my client and it was just – I forget what we called it.

It was an unintuitive clusterfuck. That's what we named an episode after because it was so bad. What I would have preferred was where did we go wrong, where was our system unintuitive, and how can we make it better? Please tell us where we went wrong, not you are wrong. That's the difference.

That's what pisses me off and – well, besides the other part where it doesn't fucking work. But yeah, so there. Well, fair enough. I totally agree with that. And just to go back on the point about these retention specialists and if you're basically willing to live without a service for a month or two, they will come back and give you a hefty discount to keep you.

This is something that my dad who is in his early 80s has just been really grumpy old geeking about for years. He's just like, why do they not give discounts to people that stick with your company? Why is it – I get a flyer in the newspaper every week saying I can get 15% off DirecTV.

I've had DirecTV for seven years. How come I don't get the 15% off? I didn't know your dad was Jerry Seinfeld. I was kind of more going for like an Eastern European thing, but I have a cold, so. Okay. Oh, speaking of which, fair, full disclosure, I am on some DayQuil at the moment.

So if this goes off the rails, there you go. I'll try and reel you back in. Yeah. No, if you want to – squeaky wool gets the grease. So. Yeah. I'm sorry to go into the whole thing. Oh, by the way, speaking of customer service, you see Zendesk went public today?

Yeah, I did see that. I've never really used them. I used them when I did my last startup. We actually went over to their offices a couple of times. Really cool people. I really enjoyed my time working with them, and they had a really good crew there. I don't really need to use them on a day-to-day basis because I don't have a company that needs to do that anymore.

But I just think it's good for them. I'm glad that some good companies are actually getting out there and going public. Yeah, yeah. I agree with that. I've never heard a bad thing about them, but just never really ran into them. Yeah. I dealt with – man, I dealt with some of their API specialists and some of their sales specialists.

It was cool. They gave me a little meditation box when we came in for the first meeting. It was like a little battery-operated meditator. It was cool. I like those guys. I'm glad for them. All right. Awesome. Sorry. Cold. I'm like, where do you go?

Where do you go? Brain is not functioning very well. Maybe you were knocking back a beer because you've been watching Chug. Nice segue. Actually, I was just going to segue in that way with customer service because first, we'll talk about the show itself in a second. But on the customer service tangent, because the show is in our show notes and I just brought up their website, I see that episode two has been available for two days, but I haven't gotten an email with a redemption code yet.

Oh, that's not good because I watched it two days ago. I still haven't gotten an email. Oh, well. Goddamn. Sucks to be you. So, the continuing problems with Chug. But the show itself – Yeah, the show is great. I'm pissed off. Zane actually pulled it out.

The show is great. It will be on National Geographic this fall for everybody to watch for free and see what we've been bitching about. But it's a fantastic show. It's very well put together. It's – for those who aren't particularly aware of his past, he had this amazing show called Three Sheets to the Wind, which is – No, it was just Three Sheets.

Oh, Three Sheets. Sorry. Where he just went drinking in great locations and it was very edgy and funny and focused on the drinking. And then he came back with – that got canceled eventually. He came back with a new show, which I can't remember the name of. It was Drinking Made Easy and Mark Cuban actually picked that one up.

Drinking Made Easy. Yeah, which was on some network that nobody ever got. But that one was really kind of watered down and boring and not funny. Well, the funny part was he had a stand-up comedian come on as his third. Right. It was him, his buddy Steve McKenna, who I cannot – who nobody can stand.

But he keeps bringing him back. And in episode two, there's a little montage, like a little bromance montage about it that you're going to hate. But we're getting way too deep into this. But anyway, yes, it's a good show. Yeah, he did a very good job. As much as we bitched about it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure if the hour-long format was where he should have went.

I felt a half an hour and some stronger editing would have done him some favors and kept the show really tight and very funny. There were bits and pieces where I was just like, okay, let's move it along here. Actually, yeah, I disagree because I love the hour format on this one now.

I think he does a great job with it. It's getting closer to being the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown caliber, which is the best travel show on TV, bar none. So he's getting there. He's got a long way to go. But he's edging up to it. But anyway, enough. Enough Chug.

Enough Chug for now. For something we've bitched about enough, we've given him enough free press. True. So let's keep with drinking. You had your crazy teledildonic approach to coffee making. What was that called? It's not teledildonic. It was just a penis pump. That's analog.

That's as analog as you can get. All right. An analog sex toy coffee machine. I've been doing drip coffee forever just because I'm stupid and lazy. But my machine, which was pretty high end and made some decent coffee, has been on the fritz recently. And I've had a Bodum or a French press sitting around forever, which I used to do my Pooer tees.

And I've switched to doing that for coffee in the morning, and I'm throwing out the drip machine. It is so much better. Who knew? Yeah, you should throw out the drip machine for sure. I just hate French presses because they're such a bitch to clean up. I don't think it's not that difficult. Well, trust me.

If you ever try an AeroPress, you'll be like, holy shit, what was I missing? I'm not sure I can have that thing at my house without snickering every time I try to use it. Well, you keep it compressed. Or put it next to your sink in the bathroom for when guests come over. Or the nightstand. You know, whatever.

Yeah, but I'm sold on the French press right now. I'm loving it. The Bodum Chayboard 8 Cup is awesome. It's what I've had forever. And I find that, I mean, first off, the coffee tastes way better. And secondly, I'm drinking less of it because I have less of it, which is good. Because I was definitely, like, way up on the high end of drinking a ton of coffee every day.

So I'm scaling back. And if I really, really do feel I need an extra kick, which I might have to do when we take our first break because I feel my nose starting to stuff up again, I've still got my beloved Nespresso Espresso machine, which those things are just awesome. If you like a good espresso and you don't want to spend seven bucks a pop over at Starbucks.

Or get an AeroPress and it's the same damn thing. You just make espresso with it. And then if you want coffee, then you just add water, which I do this morning. And I got to say, the black cat from Intelligentsia, hand ground in my little whatever that grinder was that I can't remember the name of.

Oh, spot on. Anyway, I don't want to turn into coffee nerds. I really don't. Yeah, I know. There's too much of that going on. It does fit our demo, though. I don't know about that. So I saw that you posted a Boing Boing article about going broke in Los Angeles.

And I wanted to check it out just because I've been hearing about this Boing Boing redesign. Everybody's been bitching about it. Either they love it or they hate it, and I really couldn't care less. But I wanted to go check it out. And this is an interesting article about some writer who apparently can't get a job. Yeah.

That's – I mean that's the gist of it for sure. As far as the Boing Boing redesign goes, I also don't care either. It's fine. It doesn't really bother me. I love this article. I think it touches on many of the things that we've been talking about, particularly with the – how tough it is as a creative person to make a living these days.

And this guy is – he's 50. He's a bit older than us, highly educated, extremely employable. He's got more than two decades of work as a professional writer, and he's barely surviving. And the same is true for his wife. They're older.

They're – but they went the independent path as you and I have both done. And they're finding it impossible to make a living anymore. OK. They're finding it hard to make a living in L.A. He says in his article that he's getting work from other places, from other cities, and it goes great.

But in L.A., everything falls apart because it's bound by the terms of the entertainment industry where everybody will give you the soft no that will be dragged out for years. Yeah. That was the thing that really resonated with me because that's been my experience. It's – I am still – I have like my – we've talked about how we make our lists before.

I have a sheet of paper that has the people that I have met that have promised or really, really want to do work with me. And there are people on there that have been on that list for years where they've said, yes, they want to do a project. And you check in with them every now and then, and they're like, still just waiting for the money.

And you check in and you check in and you check in, and the work never comes, and you never hear about it again. And it just kind of eventually drifts away. I know that your impression of this is just L.A. I see this and hear this from people in other cities as well. It may just be entertainment industry because the people I hear about it from are New York or Toronto or London, other major entertainment centers.

But this article I thought was well-written, as it should be because he's a professional writer. I was going to say, I fucking hope it is. If it's not well-written, then we know why he can't get a job. Exactly. So I think it's a good read for anybody that's starting to feel a little bit weirded out about work and a little bit scared.

It hit a nerve with me, and I love the last paragraph, which I'm going to read, because it's something that I think I've said, you've said, and many of my other friends have said as well. Most of all, and I'm just going to change – well, I'll just read it as it is. Most of all, I want to write, to work and be paid for my work, to narrate my own evolution through this crazy time using the power of words.

They are all I know. The boat is leaking badly, and words are what I've relied on to keep me high in the water. Great sentence to paraphrase what I've been saying, what my friends have been saying. We just want to do good work, and we want to be paid fairly for it. I'm hearing this from so many people in the creative industries right now.

Yeah. Well, why doesn't he go write a novel or write short stories or e-books or something? There's a lot of stuff you can write that you aren't reliant upon a master to give you your shekels at the end of the day. That doesn't mean you're going to make any money. Just last week, we did that article about the Amazon guy who wrote his book. Right. It doesn't mean it, but at least he's not sitting around waiting.

He should be out trying. I don't think he said anything about sitting around doing nothing. He doesn't talk about that. He's out there chasing work. Who knows what he's doing? He wrote this article for Boing Boing, obviously, on his own dime. He's got time, apparently, to write the freebies. Yeah. But, you know, it's hard to tell.

I just find you so. We don't have enough information about this, dude. I'm just noticing a little something about you, Jason. You're so quick to shit on any person that's complaining about the lack of work out there. Your immediate response is, well, obviously, he's not a good enough writer or he's doing it wrong.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I just think you should have some more hustle. I think you should have some more hustle. Hustle doesn't fucking mean shit, man. I mean, it helps. There are a couple things in life. You need to be prepared for when the work comes. You need to be able to do the job. You need to be able to go out there and hustle to try to get the work.

But that's not everything. I know plenty of people that are eminently talented and all they do is hustle and it still doesn't work out. It's not a magical formula that's going to deliver success to your door. No, no. There's a lot of luck involved. There's definitely a lot of luck involved, especially in Los Angeles when you're dealing with so many writers.

And that was my initial point was like, why doesn't he go – if he knows that there's jobs in other cities where he can go work, why not go to where the work is? I mean that's what my dad originally told me when I first got out of college or when I first dropped out of college.

He's like, go where the thing is that you want to do where they do it. So that's when I got in my car and went to California. Now, fortunately, we can do that everywhere. And for a writer, a writer can write anywhere. No, I agree with that. And one thing that maybe he should think about doing is saving what little money he has and go on trips to these cities where he already has connections, spend two weeks, do the FaceTime because FaceTime matters.

We're all like – it's a big misconception that we're in this world where we can just sit in our rooms at home in our underwear and we'll get jobs and make connections and be successful. You can to a certain extent, but we're still connected by FaceTime. Pressing the flesh, going out to dinner with people, that solidifies relationships.

So get on a plane, dude. Go to San Francisco. Spend two weeks there with your wife. Wine and dine every single night. Meet people. Then you can come back home, do your projects, and go up there once a month just to keep the relationships alive. You can do that without having to pick up and move. Yeah, that's true.

And it's interesting. My friend of mine, Eric, he lives in Boulder, and what he does is he travels and meets the people that are going to be his investors in the long term, and he takes them to concerts. And that is like the best bonding experience. You take somebody that you want to get to know to a concert, and you spend the evening with them.

You have like that intimate FaceTime and that shared experience, and that's like how he does his networking. And he took me to a concert one time. It was fucking great. I loved it. Yeah. I mean that's a big reason why I go to Toronto as often as I do, and I just went for Canadian Music Week.

I have a lot of contacts there. They're in the music industry, and they're not all Canadian. People come in from all over, and I hook up with a friend. And then all of a sudden, a dinner is put together, and I'm having dinner with eight people I've never met before, and we're changing business cards and bullshitting, and that's how you still make work.

Yep. Okay, well, let's move on because you want to talk about some other music industry stuff here. I'll try not to shit on it immediately out of the gate. Well, you put immediately in our show notes, do we really need to fucking talk about this? It's been beat to death already, and I kind of came around to it.

So I'm just going to say Apple bought Beats. Nobody knows why. It doesn't make any sense. There we go. I think Apple's out of ideas, and for the first time in probably 15 years, I'm actually considering selling Apple stock because I don't think this bodes well for them.

Beats is a piece of crap. They're not buying it for subscribers because there aren't any, and they're not buying it for their headphones because I was really happy with the Huffington Post article that the title was Beats Headphones Are Extraordinarily Bad. You heard it here first, people. I was saying that months ago. You heard it here on Grumpy Old Geeks first.

Yeah. So it's a big story, but let's wait and see what shakes out of it before we talk about it anymore because I think everybody's talking about it, and nobody really knows what the fuck is going on. And I've got zero interest at all. And you don't care at all. I really have nothing to say.

That said, let's talk about Comcast. And another thing that you've been talking about, which is they want to put data caps on all their customers within five years. Since we started this podcast, I've been beating this drum so much so that you've told me to shut up about it. But here's the first salvo.

Told you this was coming. Everybody's been pushing us into streaming and get your stuff up on the cloud and, oh, bandwidth, bandwidth sucking, bandwidth sucking, bandwidth sucking your entire life away. Article came out, TechCrunch. Comcast has fired the first salvo that is designed to kind of piss off people and get some outrage out of the way early.

So in two years from now when they actually push it through instead of waiting for the five years, everybody will be tired of it already. Comcast is going to put data caps on all customers. End of story. Yeah. I mean they're toying around with it, and they're toying around with it, and they're looking at the number to piss off the least amount of people.

Yeah. And that's how they run it. And here's the interesting thing about it. If they're trying to piss off the least amount of people, why piss off anybody? Why piss off anybody? If that cap is going to be the 99th percentile, can't they absorb that 1% power user base?

It doesn't seem like the math is there if that statement is true, which I believe it is not true at all. Well, at the end of the day, they don't really care because it's a monopoly. They don't mind if they piss off people at the end of the day. It's just kind of PR to let's do it as gently as possible, and it's just money.

So I don't believe the five years. I think it will be way less than five years. I don't believe the 99 percent cap. I think it's going to be more settling in around 70 percent. I was going to say 40 percent. Yeah, maybe even 40. They'll probably take it that low. This is going to drastically change all of your lives out there because you're all stuck on your cloud services and your Netflixes.

Everything is bandwidth sucking, and you're going to start watching everything. It's going to change drastically how people use all this stuff. Yeah, and today's – we're recording this on Thursday, the 15th of May, and the big FCC hearing is going on right now.

So we don't know what's going to happen with the net neutrality stuff. So hopefully we'll be subdued by the time this comes out tomorrow. So we're not going to go in on that. Talk about a double whammy in a worst-case scenario, which is you have to pay extra to Comcast to get Netflix, and then you're still getting – to get the Netflix experience.

So you get decent transmission, and then you're still getting charged the bandwidth overages. Well, then you know what happens? Fuck the internet. We just all become farmers. Amen. And I felt that way yesterday. It might just be the cold in combination with 100-plus degree heat here in Southern California.

But when Facebook pushed out their latest app yesterday, I fucking lost my mind, and I was ready to throw my phone in the ocean and just go find a nice cave somewhere. And that lasted 13 hours. That is not entirely true. And while I'm flattered that my friend Mike has been monitoring my stuff so closely on the internet – Okay, okay.

Hang on. Let me back up for a second. So as soon as this app came out, this is the version 10 of the Facebook app, and it – as predicted, every release pulls us users farther and farther. It's farther away from the most recent feed, and it makes it more – it's buried deeper and deeper and deeper.

So you had a little hissy fit and said, I quit. I quit. That's not entirely what I said. Now, Facebook is only useful to me, especially on the mobile app, with the most recent. Like, top stories I don't need. I just want to see most recent because I'm on it all the time anyways.

It's part of my work. It's been completely removed. It's shoved way down in the menu system. They don't even tell you which feed you're actually getting. They've gotten rid of that header completely, so you're not really sure which feed you're getting. I did make a post about it because I find it frustrating. Let me quote you here.

Unless you have a lot of friends that like everything you post, you pay to promote your post, or the mystical hooded knights of Zuckerberg deem your posts worthy, I shall not see them again. Been fun and been nice knowing you, but I'm done with this crap. Yeah.

That sounds like a – I'm out. Well, I'm looking at it more as we're removing our troops from Afghanistan approach. Over time, I'm gently pulling out of Facebook. Okay. This is a troop reduction. Okay. Well, at the end of the day, I have to be on it still for work regardless.

But I'm not going to use it the way I have been using it. It's been great for me. I look at it as a quality of life level. For a long time, Facebook increased my quality of life. I was having meaningful interactions with other people. I had an outlet for my little bits of – my funny rants, my little jokes.

I get likes that make me feel good. Increasingly, over the past couple of months, my quality of life with Facebook has dropped. It's becoming more annoying. Every time I use it, I get frustrated. And this is the final straw for me, really. It's just I'm not going to be the power – I was a Facebook power user.

You okay there? Oh, I'm sorry. Am I boring you, Jason? Well, a little bit. I did kind of tune out there. No, I was going through and trying to get a little bit more info on this app thing. And then one of the videos auto-played.

Yeah, that's fun too. I think I was what you'd consider a Facebook power user. I mean I was really into it. I interacted with a lot of people. I posted often. I'm not entirely quitting Facebook. I'm not going to shut down my account because basically you can't. No, you can't. You can't. You've got so many tied-in logins for people who didn't listen to us when we said, never build your web service based on somebody else's login system.

Well, they didn't and then we had to sign up with it and now we're fucked. Yeah. Plus there's also the critical mass factor, which is all my friends are on it and they're nowhere else. So I can't leave. But I am rethinking my level of engagement with it. Well, here's the trick.

Don't have any friends. Sorry. I kind of like that. People seem to like me. Gosh darn it. Oh, yeah. You're just so lovable and huggable. I think so. So, yeah. And I would say if you want to keep your most recent feed at the forefront, just check it out on the iPad app because they seem to have left that fairly intact with the one switch.

Works fine on the desktop. Works fine on the iPad app. It's just the iPhone app for now. Well, I'm going to tell you right now. They are more interested in people who look at it on the iPhone because that's the majority of their users now. Exactly. And I check it all the time on the iPhone. But rest assured, eventually on the desktop version and the tablet app, it's going to be going the same direction.

Because this is where they're pushing us to paper, as we talked about when paper launched. Oh, yeah. It was like physical paper, like I'm going to write you letters? No. The Facebook paper app where they basically control what – they decide what you see. End of story. That's why I deleted it right away because also it didn't talk to me when I didn't want it to talk to me.

Yeah. So I'm going to call this segment This Week in Hypocrisy. Okay. I made a post on Medium today. You know, that one thing where I said nobody should ever post to? Yeah. You made fun of everybody that used it? Yeah. I've made fun of people who use it as their primary posting medium, right?

So I wrote a blog post about a week ago on my blog and it went out there. And I thought this morning, I'm like, hmm, I got pretty decent traffic on that. I got pretty decent uptake on it. Here's an experiment opportunity. Let me take that post, which got really good feedback from the Twitterverse.

Didn't get shit on Facebook because nobody can read my posts anymore because when I post something, nobody gets it. Anyway, on Twitter, a lot of people read it and I got a lot of great feedback and a lot of emails. And it got a couple hundred hits on my blog from just a couple tweets. No, no, just a single tweet.

Sorry. And several retweets. So I said, ah, fuck it. Let's put it on Medium and just to see. And with the top, it said this post was originally posted here so I can get some traffic back to my blog. Right. So I'm just putting it out there.

Next week we'll have the results of this experiment. But the link will be in the show notes if you would like to go read the post on Medium so we can get the stats on it and see. There you go. That's it. I like the post, by the way. Oh, yeah.

I've gotten some interesting feedback on that. It's very, very odd. If you're interested in the mind of Jason DeFillippo, you should probably go read this. Yeah. And I don't want to put any spoiler alerts out there and say anything about what it's about. So just go check it out. Comments are off.

Probably was. And you can email me if you want, jhapd.me. But there you go. There you go. There's my Hippocratic. None of. Yeah. I'll tell you what, though, man. Their writing platform is actually pretty nice.

I've got to give it to them. All right. Squarespace sucks. I'm leaving. Hi, Squarespace. I'm back. Don't over-fucking-post on Medium. Hey, read my posts on Medium. Fuck you. Comment of the week. Our comment of the week comes from Canadialand.

Best Tech Podcast, five stars, from Hodor, Hodor, Hodor. Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo. Brian and Jason provide weekly dose of their unique and entertaining cynicism on the world of tech. The view from the trenches is battle-weary and totally on point. They review the tech highlights of the week and parse out the PR BS while sharing the key observations relevant to what we all deal with from social networks and tech giants.

They also recommend useful applications to provide various security tips and tricks that you wouldn't be thinking about as an average user. Thank you very much. And what else can I say but Hodor? I don't get the Hodor thing. Do you not watch Game of Thrones? I do, but I don't get the Hodor thing.

I mean, did I miss something? I don't think you missed anything. I actually think I know who this commenter is. One of the people I actually went to Canadaland for Canadian Music Week to see. And before I went and apparently when Facebook was still working and people would see my posts, it was the previous episode of Game of Thrones and I made a comment such as, I think my Facebook post was, for the next week I will respond to all emails in the voice of Hodor.

And then I exchanged a few emails with quite a few clients where I just went, Hodor. Well, that says something that they changed their username on iTunes to be Hodor, Hodor, Hodor, just so they could comment on our show. So thank you. Because people keep track of your username on iTunes and there's such a community going on there.

Oh, God. What was the name of that fucking name? Remember when they did Ping? Ping. It was iTunes. It was an iTunes built-in social network. That was the Apple social network. That nobody ever fucking used. That was awesome. All right. I was on it. I was on it for 30 seconds like everybody else. Well, thank you very much, Hodor.

Hodor. Hodor. Hodor. I don't know if you noticed, but remember all the bees were dying? They still are as far as I know.

Yeah, they still are. But I have seen there's been quite a few articles where they have figured out what it is that is killing them. So we might be able to reverse that one. Isn't it Monsanto? Well, pretty much. It's a specific chemical being used. But science, you know, that whole science thing.

So they might have solved this one. So we might be able to come back from the brink of not having any food. However, we're going to have a lot less land to grow that food on pretty soon. You're going to have to learn to swim because the sharks are coming for you now. Yeah, apparently. This week, Arctic ice really is collapsing.

Antarctic. Not Arctic. Antarctic ice really is collapsing, and the ocean's rise is unstoppable. This is definitely happening. There's no way for us to stop it. We're fucked. Well, no, they're talking about four feet in the next century. Maybe up to 12 feet in the next century.

Have you seen those maps, though? Oh, yeah, yeah. Granted, we've lost a lot of the Arctic ice as well. You only mentioned Antarctic here. But, yes, it's talking about the western side of Antarctica is basically melting, and it's going to continue melting. And it's hit a tipping point. Yeah. And it's going.

So if you've got beachfront property right now, move. Well, I'm up on a hill, so I'm hoping this will actually increase my property value at the moment. I'll figure out what your elevation is above sea level because they're saying 12 to 16 feet. Yeah, I'm good. Okay, cool.

Sweet. Your parking is going to be drastically reduced. Well, I was very close to Venice, so I will just pretend it's actually Venice, Italy and get a gondola. There you go. Yeah, it'll be Fen Mick Underwaters pretty soon. Fins will be gone. Oh, that is sad. Actually, it could use a cleaning.

Yeah. Yeah, it should. After all those damn flies the last time we were there. I know. Good lord. Okay, next. So we just finished bitching about Facebook, and an article in The Atlantic, which is known for quite good writing, has basically decided and determined that Twitter is now also on its way out.

Nah, I don't buy it. A eulogy for Twitter. The beloved social publishing platform enters its twilight. I actually found this really interesting as a non-active and definitely not power Twitter user. The argument that they're making is power users are getting sick of it, and also they don't have anywhere else to go, but they're not interacting as much anymore.

It doesn't have the shiny, happy feeling it once did, and maybe Twitter is on its way out. I don't buy it. I think what happened with a lot of power Twitter users is they're actually pretty powerful in the media, and they have jobs.

So they've actually used Twitter as a springboard to go on to do other things. That's kind of my take on at least some of the power users. When it comes to celebrities who gives a flying fuck, that was always a flash-in-the-pan thing. I think Twitter is going to normalize into a useful platform going forward because you know what they don't do?

Require you to pay them money for people to see your shit. Yeah. I think they are going to be the beneficiaries of the Facebook greed. Yeah, I think that they're – I really – I think that's the way it's going to move. And if you look at – one of the things we didn't actually cover this week is the demise of App.net.

App.net has basically gone under. Yeah, unfortunately. They didn't make enough money to basically keep the engineers around, so they're in maintenance mode, and it's going to be going away at some point. They've got enough money from subscriptions to keep the – basically keep the servers going, but they've got no on-site staff anymore.

But they learned a lot of things, and hopefully Twitter can take some of the lessons from App.net on what worked and what didn't work. And what really worked on App.net was the 256-character limit. Hopefully we'll see – as Facebook goes on the downward trend, we'll see more characters on Twitter and more characters putting in more characters because there are a lot of characters on Twitter.

I hope they stick around because I just – from the choices that we have in the ecosystem for social right now, I think they're our best hope for something that's at least going to be decent. Even though they've fucked over all the developers with the API shit, but at least they have a decent API, whereas Facebook, they don't.

I mean I agree with you in that I hope that Twitter is watching everything going on with Facebook very closely and going – Oh, you know they are. Let's do the exact opposite. For me, Twitter is just never really attracted. Also, it's – most of the people that I engage with, my social sphere isn't on Twitter.

I like Twitter for certain things. You know, when I was having my Facebook blowout this week, I was like, do I just start posting on Twitter? And then I realized, well, my friends are the only ones I want to see my posts. I don't want it out to the general public. There is definitely a gaping hole that could have been filled by an App.net, and it's sad to see that they didn't make it.

But I'm partially to blame. I could have signed up for them and paid the money, and I didn't. Yeah, you shit on them from day one. Yeah. I mean – And partially my fault, so my bad. But we'll see what happens. I like the article. I thought that they had a lot of interesting posts.

A lot of the things that I find frustrating about Twitter, he discusses. I believe it was he. Sorry. Good read. But I see your points as well. Yeah. My problem with it is I've been on Twitter since the beginning, and I've seen everything that happened with Twitter.

And people who weren't on since the beginning, I don't think that they have the breadth of vision to see how it's evolved over time. I mean, yeah, they can go back a couple of years here. I mean, if you weren't there in the beginning, it's really hard, I think, to really kind of have that depth of knowledge.

And I'm not saying I'm like some fucking Twitter academic. I'm just saying I've seen every fucking trend that happened on Twitter just from being there. And I think he missed the point on a couple of bits. But here's my deal with them. I hope they make it. I hope it's not a eulogy for Twitter.

I hope it sticks around because out of all of the MMO SNs, I think it's the best one for what we need it to be. I don't think we need pages and pages of dialogue.

Get your own fucking website if you want that. I think what we need is just short discourse, fart jokes, dick jokes, and where the police are coming around the corner to get your granny. I'm down with that. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. And the last article that I got for In the News this week, because I'm big on transparency, and we've talked a lot about the government with Snowden and all that sort of stuff.

I found this interesting. The U.S. government, because there's a recently signed act called the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which is… Data. Data. Yeah, data. How clever of them. I wonder if Brent Spiner is. If they spent as much time actually on the details of the acts as they did on the fucking name, then maybe we'd be somewhere.

But continue. Sorry. The basic concept is basically a no-brainer and kind of what the internet was made for. The government is going to publish all financial material on usaspending.gov in an easily readable software-independent format. Or at least that's what the law requires.

And God knows how long it will take them to actually implement that and what it might look like. I just hope they didn't hire the same people that did the Obamacare website is all I got to say. Yeah, I have a feeling that this is just going to be a nightmare and disgusting. But the one hope is there are a lot of fucking really smart people out there that wear tinfoil hats and have a lot of time on their hands.

So if all this data is up there, I can't wait to see what people do with it and how they scour through it and the crazy theories that come out of it. So if nothing else, it's going to provide a lot of laughs. I don't think – I'm not in the laugh category. I look at this as like the next generation of Freedom of Information Act.

Agreed. Total sunshine clause stuff. I'm hopeful. I'm very hopeful. I'm also pessimistic. That's just my nature. Go read the blog post on Medium. So I really hope that this comes to fruition and that what I really hope is that interagency data transfer gets an overhaul so they standardize on – fuck.

Even if it's JSON, go for that. Just pick one. Not fucking XMLers. Not XML is all I got to say. Not XML. So there we go. I'm hopeful. I hope it works. In three years, we'll come back – Maybe.

On episode 264, we'll come back to this and we'll talk about it again. I'll put it in my iCal. It's the library. Woo. I've got two books this week, one that I am halfway through and one that I've read twice.

OK. So I figure that balances out in the grand scheme of things. Right. First book I want to talk about is Anti-Fragile, Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is the guy who wrote The Black Swan. Sounds like one of them Taliban.

He's not Taliban. He is from Awesome Stan as it were. He – this book is almost completely out of my intellectual league. OK. But I love it. I love reading this kind of stuff.

He's talking about how systems that gain from disorder and become stronger are preferable, obviously, to things that are fragile. And he talks at the beginning of the book about when – actually, let's do a live test. If I asked you, what is the opposite of fragile?

Strong. OK. Most people say robust. But strong, robust. Same kind of thing. This is something that gains from disorder. And it's an interesting concept. It's a very long book. But so far, I am loving every second of it and I'm learning so much.

And I'm taking every little thing with a grain of salt. But there's a lot of stuff in here that you can – I don't even know how to explain it yet because I'm still processing it. Like I said, I'm halfway through this book and I'm still processing it and I'm going to go back and read it probably three or four times just to get everything out of it.

And this is kind of – it's kind of a wrap-up with all of his other books that talk about disruption type of events in unordered systems that you – that try to predict the future but can't. I mean it's crazy heady stuff.

I love it. Sounds good. I fucking love it. And if you go read it and your head explodes, don't blame me. OK. Fair enough. It sounds right up my alley. Have you read The Black Swan? I have not. OK. You got to start with The Black Swan.

OK. Because The Black Swan is the – basically his big book, his coming out book. He's written a bunch of books. But The Black Swan is the one that talks about those crazy random occurrences. That nobody predicts for. Right. You know, people that have prediction models like – like take, for instance, Fukushima.

They predict for the biggest thing that they've ever seen plus like 5 percent. But they don't predict for it plus 200 percent. Whatever. That's The Black Swan event. Gotcha. You know, the perfect storm as it would be. So I recommend starting with The Black Swan. Then read this book because you'll have a better understanding of the concepts that he's talking about.

Cool. The next book I've got is – remember that book I talked about before called Trust Me, I'm Lying? How to Manipulate the Media? Yeah. By Ryan Holiday, the guy who was the – basically the head marketer for American Apparel, which is – he should have been CDO, chief douchebag officer.

Yeah, I was about to say – or maybe in jail. I mean some of their advertising campaigns were borderline pedophilia bait. So he's got a new book called The Obstacle is the Way, The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. Now, he's been a big Stoic fan since – I guess Dr. Drew turned him on to Stoicism with – I don't know if it was Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or – what's his name?

Letters from Stoic Dude. Yeah, I can't remember offhand. Seneca. Seneca the Younger. Seneca the Younger. So he's taken a book and he's kind of done a Robert Greene on it where Robert Greene wrote The 48 Laws of Power and all these other listicle books as it were, but – which is – which makes sense because Ryan interned for Robert Greene in the early days.

And I love Robert Greene's books but I have to say that I felt really like I needed a shower after Trust Me, I'm Lying and he did too. That's why he wrote the book. So when I read this book – I mean it's a short book. It's a very brief read.

Fan-fucking-tastic. He distills everything down to its salient points and gives them – it wraps everything in stories that have a coherent – or a cogent meaning across the breadth of the book. I love it. I cannot recommend it enough.

I will say that you do not get the Audible version because what they did was this is an Audible production by Timothy Ferris. Uh-huh. Well, Timothy Ferris decided to tack on an hour-and-a-half-long interview that he did with Ryan Holiday at the end of the audio book to pump it up to about six hours.

Right. Right? Uh-huh. Well, the audio book is about four-and-a-half hours and the interview is episode four or five of the Tim Ferriss podcast, which you can get for free. So it pissed me off because I had six hours that I really needed to fill, and then I got an hour-and-a-half of shit that I've already heard.

Bastards. And it's read by the author, never a good thing unless you're Neil Gaiman, period. Period. Period. Okay. So it's – I recommend the book. I recommend buying the physical copy of the book or the Kindle version.

Do not buy the Audible version. I love it. I cannot recommend it enough. It has actually transformed some of my daily life at this point. Wow. All right. So then I got to say, next week on deck is I Have No Place to Hide, the Edward Snowden – or Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald.

His book that just came out. I have a feeling I'm probably going to rip this one a fourth asshole. Like the fourth estate, it will have a fourth asshole. All right. Fantastic. I'm kind of pissed off about this book, that there is a book. Okay. Excellent. Well, next week, I actually will – I've been a little too crazed running around and being in different cities to get any reading done.

But I've read both the Atlantis books by A.G. Riddle and reviewed them so far here on this podcast. The third and final wrap-up book is finally out, and I downloaded it last night and started in on it. So I've liked the story, as I've mentioned.

I didn't care for some of the plot developments. It's the third book, so we'll see how he wraps it up and whether I think it's a big steaming pile of shit or he actually did a decent job of it. Is this the one where he has to keep getting rid of the love – or where he should dump the love story? That's all of them, right?

It's the slightly older professor and the young hot chick that have to band together to save the world. That's every Indiana Jones movie too. So, you know, I mean sometimes that formula can work. Anyways. I was going to say the Big Bang Theory pretty much blew the Indiana Jones Theory out of the water because he doesn't even need to be in the movies and the outcome would be the same.

I know. I love that part. That was really funny. I'm actually just taking a look at the Amazon page for the Atlantis World books right now and just something I find a little interesting about these suggestion engines and categories. The new one, The Atlantis World, which is book three, is the number one bestseller in – get this category – Galactic Empire Science Fiction e-books.

Galactic Empire Science Fiction e-books. But the first book – or no, the second book. I like that. I like that. The Atlantis Plague is the number one bestseller in medical thrillers. Hmm. Hmm. The first one doesn't seem to be a bestseller anymore. Anyways, that will be next week.

It's a pretty good pickup line for the author though. I was like, hey, I'm the first in the medical space genre or whatever. I actually like the category of Galactic Empire Science Fiction e-books, but shouldn't Foundation be the Godhead in there and Dune? I mean, those both are. So apparently I really like those books.

I'm going to have to check out that category. I think – yeah, definitely. See you next week. Put that in the show notes. I want to see that. I will. Welcome to This Week in Shit We Put on Our Computers. This week I found that Audible is still my friend.

Okay. I have bitched about the audible.com app for so long. Like – I mean like four or five times. This was unfortunately a year – over a year ago when we started this idiot project that we do. I tried it out again because I was – shit, I can't even remember why I tried it out again.

But there was a reason for it. And what I found is the Audible app for the iPhone is awesome now. It works. It totally works. It will download in one go. Like if you have to download from the website, you have a book that's like 800 meg.

It will download in chunks. Not anymore. It will download straight to the app. And once it hits like 5 percent, it will let you just start listening while it downloads in the background. Perfect. Nice. I have to go – I'm getting badges for some reason still and I don't care about badges because I'm reading my books.

I originally cared about the badges because in the old Audible app, I had them all and now I'm getting them again and I just couldn't give a shit less because now I'm older. But it's perfect. It is a perfect app now. So if you like audiobooks and hate that damn shuffle that we had to do with like you go to Audible, you download it, you put it in iTunes, you sync it to your phone.

And you're dealing with all this like wasted disk space on your computer. No need anymore. You can pull them down. You can pull your entire Audible library. You can just like cherry pick. Love it. Nice. Good on you, Audible slash Amazon. Now let's talk about an app that used to be good and its latest update, Shit the Preak.

Facebook. We're going back to Facebook? No. This is my beloved Argus which has kept me from getting a Fitbit for so long. I didn't know Argus got to beloved status. Well, I use it every day. I track all my steps. It tracks my bike rides. It lets me know when I'm hitting my targets.

I did nothing else. That is all. I do believe that there's going to be a Brian comes around adjacent side of thinking moment here in a second. But go ahead. Well, that is all it did. And if I had the option to roll back to a previous version, I wouldn't. I would just keep using it.

But they decided that they had to make the app better. I fucking hate it. I fucking hate it. I fucking hate it. I doubt, as I do in most mornings, because I do not do the auto update, you know, I'll take a look and see what apps have updates.

I actually find that not doing auto update is good for me getting apps off my phones, because when an update comes up, I go, do I actually even use this anymore? And I'll just delete it if I don't. But the Argus update came up, and this is an app I love. It's been great for just tracking my activity and making sure I hit my targets and get on my bike and get on my bike and ride.

But they pushed an update. I installed it. I didn't even take a look at it. I just, you know, I fired up the app, said I was going to start cycling, got on my bike, ignored my phone. I just listened to a podcast. I get to the halfway point on my ride where I stop and have a little water, and I look at my phone, and I have seven friend requests.

Five people following me, and comments. Comments. I don't want my – I don't want social features on a fucking activity tracker. I don't want – You had comments on your bike ride.

Yeah. Well, let me read them to you. Obviously, this guy must work – I'm going to fucking say his name. He must work for the company, because I don't understand why anybody would do this for somebody they don't even know. Tom Zhu, went on a bike ride myself today after seeing your post. Keep it up. Reza Panahi.

Hey, buddy. Needed motivation for more biking. Good work. And then Tom Zhu comes back with, that must have been a great run, even though it was a bike ride. Santa Monica Beach is beautiful. I don't know who the fuck you are. Who are you people? Oh, my God. And by the way, there was a setting for like social stuff, which I had off before the update.

So all of a sudden, when I did the update, it turned it on. I have requests from all these people. I can't – I was able to deny the friend request, obviously. But I still have five people following me. And I don't – there's no way to delete the followers. All I can do is hope that I set the privacy settings correctly so they are no longer seeing – so that only friends can see it and not followers.

I don't want any of this stuff. And also, even worse, even worse, I kind of – I guess worse? It gets worse because now every time – it used to be start bike ride. Okay, go on my bike ride, get back, stop bike ride. It tells me the distance, gives me all this really interesting stats about my ride.

And it does steps automatically, but if I do rides or workouts or things of that nature, you start and stop them. Now, when you stop an activity, they've made deals instead of doing advertising. So if I stop an activity, I have to hit four different buttons now to stop the activity instead of just the one.

And it throws up a, congratulations on completing said activity. Here's your free gift. And it's some bullshit, like, you know, free subscription for one month to some dumbass website I have no fucking interest in. Thanks a lot, Argus. You fucked it up. It's so annoying now.

That's awesome. And I really – I understand no aspect. I'm sorry. I love it. I love everything about everything that just happened to you because that is just what happens to every app when they don't have a business plan going into it. I know. I mean, that's it. It's like, let's throw some shit at the wall and see what happens.

And again, here is the deal, Argus. If you gave me an option to buy for $4.99, the old version of the app that didn't do all this shit, I would have. Too late now. Too late. Too late now. Too late. Too late. Yeah. So, yeah.

See, here's what they did. They followed that time-old tradition where it says, you know, okay, if we have a web service or a service and we've given it away for free. Yeah. But in the future, we want to charge for it. Yeah. And nobody will pay for it and we will be pariahs.

Yes. Okay? But instead, let's just, let's slide in these features that people still don't have to pay for. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Yeah. That people don't have to pay for and we'll make, we'll quote unquote profit without them knowing about it.

You know, it's like, no, it doesn't work that way anymore. No. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like we had a lot of experiments in the early days of interaction or interactive, as it were, as a, you know, category. Yeah.

Interactive. And it was like, oh, shit, if we gave something away for free and then we asked money for it, people wouldn't pay for it. Yeah. And they would get mad at us and call our moms silly names. Well, one thing that people don't take into account is that people are not the same fucking people anymore.

Okay? It's an entirely different paradigm. So if you have new features that you want to give us and say, look, we need a few bucks because food, you know, food, electricity, toilet paper, because we like toilet paper because otherwise the office is a very unbearable place to live to make your app.

So let's go with the toilet paper model and give us a few bucks instead of giving all your information to whoever wants to, you know, sell you a coffee where they – when you hit done workout and some little Mexican kid runs up and hands you a Gatorade and goes, you know, $2, por favor.

So – which actually is a pretty fucking genius business model, by the way. I just – I'd like to patent that. So, yeah, Argus screwed the pooch. But here's just a wider issue that I just don't really understand about human nature either. These things that Argus is considering features, this social element.

I don't understand – No. I don't understand friending somebody you don't know about activity tracking and then commenting on it. Why am I going to – No. Why am I – why would I tell – why would I tell a random person I don't know, hey, man, cool bike ride?

I don't get it, Jason. Here's the deal. The people that are coming up with these features at Argus don't know what the fuck they're doing. It's simple. That's very simple. But obviously people do it. Look, I got friended. No, no, no. I got friend requests from a woman in Norway.

Why? We assume that people in this business are just as smart if not smarter than we are. I always assume that everybody is smarter than I am because I'm a fucking dumbass. But guess what? Sometimes they're not and they come up with this stupid fucking shit where they say everybody wants to be social.

Like I go to the gym, dude. I want to be social, brah. Let's let everybody talk about how many fucking LBs I'm pulling. Yeah, let's go. I don't want anybody to know when I'm out on a bike ride. I just don't. If I could wear a fucking burka over me and my bike like a goddamn Muslim woman, I would because I don't want anybody seeing my fat ass going up and down the beach.

I want my own private beach. I want to sit in – that's why I sit in a room with a treadmill. I go up and down the stairs alone. Leave me the fuck alone. That's why I'm just like amazed when people come up with these features. Yeah. So not everything needs to be social.

Thanks, Argus, for destroying a good thing. And Jason, please recommend the best Fitbit for me to have that's small and does a decent job of tracking my cycling. Well, you can't get one that tracks your cycling. They just don't do that. So now that I'm hyperventilating – thank you very much, brah.

Anytime, man. Hey, man. Great hyperventilation. Makes me want to hyperventilate later. You can get a Fitbit. It will track what you're doing. But it just doesn't do – it doesn't do cycling because it's not geolocation encoding and doing all that shit. I mean you can put in stuff via the web interface and say this is an activity that I've done.

Right. But what it doesn't do since it's not – It's not tracking the distance. Yes. Since it's not tracked by the device itself, it doesn't really count towards badges. And for me, Fitbit badges are sacrosanct because I want my goddamn 5,000 mile badge soon.

I'm close. I'm close. I just got my 8,000 step badge. But anyway, anyways, the biking thing is different. Just, you know what? Walk. Fuck the bikes. No. So I've got something that's a little more lighthearted now that I have to calm down.

Whew. Breathe. It's an app called Duet. Right. It's a game actually. It's yin and yang. Yin and yang where you – it's like a fucked up version of Tetris on speed where you have two balls that you have to kind of maneuver around things that are falling on your head.

Right. It's extraordinarily difficult and – which is very funny because all of the in-between game stuff is very soothing. It's like become one. Become calm. It's zen. It's very zen-like and then the game starts and you just want to throw the fucking thing against the wall.

But it's got a great soundtrack. It's really fun. It's expensive. It's like four bucks, which is silly that we say that's expensive. I know. That's expensive. Well, anything that isn't free is expensive. Exactly. So it's – so far, it's worth it.

I've gotten extremely mad at it. But you know what it's also caused me to do? Calm the fuck down. When I play it now, when I play it, it's like – honestly, it's forced meditation because you start to learn the patterns and then it's like when you get anxious, the more anxious you are when you play this game, the worse you do.

When you relax, you can get through just about anything. So it almost reminds me of that time when I was in Hawaii and I was like out in the surf snorkeling for the first time and like we're in 20 feet of water and the waves are knocking me around and I'm just like panicking and I'm starting to sink like a rock.

And then I just said, stop. Relax. And then I floated. And it was – I mean that was a transformational experience for me. It's almost exactly the same but not quite because I'm not in Hawaii and snorkeling. Not quite the same. I'm sitting on a couch playing a fucking iPhone game.

But the feeling was the same where once you relax, then you can get into kind of a flows any state to finish the game. So I like it. I really, really like it. OK. You have something about songs.

Well, this isn't so much an app. This is a new attempt at monetizing YouTube videos for musicians. I thought YouTube did that already. Well, YouTube does. This is true. So is this company trying to double dip?

This is called Songstress. Songstress, which I read as Songstress, but I'm sure they didn't intend that. Oh my god. Yes, it is Songstress. That's how I've started to read it because I actually attempted to look into this so I could talk intelligently about it because I know quite a big deal about monetization of music on the internet.

It's a bit of my wheelhouse. When you guys build – developers out there, people with a new business concept, when you launch your site to explain how everything works, don't make people fucking sign up to find out anything. I refuse to give these people my email address.

I would like to know exactly what they're doing and how it works. I can find out absolutely nothing about it except for their bullshit PR unless I sign up. So fuck you. Well, there we have that. It says – it's something about if you have videos up on YouTube, you can put it in your Songstress cloud and people will be able to buy music.

It doesn't tell you what format the music comes in. I have no idea how it actually works. I'm aware of their – they take 15% off sales generated and you get the rest. And Brian, by the way, it says our pricing is 100% transparent. Yes. Tama, actually quite elementary.

Yeah. But – Can you show me an example? No. It says sure. There are no examples. I cannot find an example of what this looks like. I cannot find an example of how it actually works. I cannot find an example of a song that's available through their system. Nor can I find an example of any artists that are available through their system.

I have no idea. I can't find out – I can't find out anything more about it. They're out in Connecticut, so I don't know how to go get in touch with them. Big music business hub there. Yeah. Yeah. So I have no idea. Oh, wait, wait. If you're a fan, you still got to join now.

Support your favorite artist directly. Buy music you connect with right on YouTube. How? Fuck yeah. I'll do that. And then it goes straight to a sign-up. So fuck you. Yeah, I'll do it. Next week, we'll report on this. I'll sign up for it. What the hell? Okay.

Well, one other quick thing though because under the recommendation presents music that other users like you have downloaded, they mention a specific artist that I actually happen to work for and I know that they're not signed up with this. So that's interesting. Anyway.

Well, send me the deets and then I'll log in and I'll be your covert spy. Okay. Speaking of spy shit, The Walk, that app that I was talking about last time that I got that I could listen to. And it's a spy story and – Yeah. Well, now that I've played with it for a while, the game mechanics on that are really, really flawed.

Okay. It will not play the next part of the story as I get to the milestones while I'm walking. There are things that you have to do in-game to like pinpoint these like hidden treasures and stuff. Which if I'm walking, I shouldn't be looking at my phone.

I'm just saying. I should not be trying to scroll around the map trying to find little points to get points. Yeah. It's – basically it's kind of a fail on almost every level except for the fact that it's got a really good story.

Okay. From a technological standpoint, it fails because it will not autoplay. It's like I turn it on. I should be able to be listening to like say a book or an album and then once I hit a certain spot, it should cut in with the next story point.

You know? Yeah. I walk for about 80 minutes a day to get through the chapter and there's about 14 minutes of story. So that's a lot of dead air, right? Yeah. So even if they had like good background noise, that would fix it. But they don't – there's just a lot of problems with it.

But for a Gen 1, it's good. The recordings are amazing. The voice actors are amazing. The story is amazing. The problem is it just doesn't work from a technologically integration standpoint.

It just doesn't work. So save your money I guess unless you've already bought it and then you can just cockpunch me next time you see me. Whatever works for you. Yeah. It's all I got to offer. I'm broke. It's a – yeah, cockpunch. And I will say the other app that I do love, Dark Sky, now that I live in the Midwest.

Yeah. Dark Sky is that app that does like real-time weather. It's like it's an hour out. It's – you know, it's very temporal. And it's worked great. It really works great. There are a couple times where I got a little spritzed on and then I just went in the app and I'm like, no, no, no.

It's raining. It's raining. And then they said, oh, OK. Well, thank you. It's raining. Glad you told us. For the most part, the visualizations are just so goddamn gorgeous. I think it's like three or four bucks worth every penny. Unless you live here. Yeah.

That's what I'm saying. It works everywhere in the world except where you live. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know what they need? They need Fire Sky for you because your shit is burning up. Yeah. We're on fire everywhere in L.A. right now apparently. Everything you have is – this is an app about water and you have none.

Just the big ocean-y thing. Which is useless. Here, caddy, caddy, caddy, caddy. I like Crazy Russian Hacker. It's this dude on YouTube who I've seen around who does kind of random life hackery tips.

Right. He is the life hacker of Russia. I found this beautiful video on Vimeo about how to peel garlic by putting it in two bowls that are sealed together and just shaking the shit out of it. Well, that made the rounds a little while ago. Yeah. And then I saw it in the recommended videos was the Crazy Russian Hacker.

Crazy Ruckin Shacker. Crazy Russian Hacker version of it, which is him and his mom with like Tupperware bowls trying to make it work. And I loved it. I was cracking up. And then I checked out some of his other videos and I'm going to tell you right now, his bacon method for cooking bacon in the oven for a sandwich is genius.

Genius. Okay. You kind of braid the bacon and put it into a little square and then you bake it and then boom, you're done. It's awesome. I cannot wait to do it. Seriously, check it out. Getting hungry. But all the other videos I've seen of this guy, I could literally spend the entire day just watching this guy.

He's silly and he's – but he's got good tips that are – there's nothing new about the tips that he's doing. They've been around but his presentation makes it much more enjoyable. Cool. So, I mean, I just – I got to say Crazy Russian Hacker, whatever thank you is.

Not dos bidanya. I don't know. Go ahead. Dos bidanya. Okay. So, from a Crazy Russian Hacker to a Crazy English Musician, I'm super excited about an album for the first time in a long time. I was aware that this was occurring but it actually just came out this week. Brian Eno, who started with Roxy Music and has since become crazy studio boffin producing albums from everybody from U2 to Coldplay to tons and tons of people.

I mean, just every major album that's come out recently. He's also the guy that made those cards that you and I have talked about, Jason, a couple times. Oh, definitely. And he's done the music for The Walkway at O'Hare Airport when you go under the – from Terminal B to C. Yeah, and he's put out a lot of great like ambient music albums and he's also got a bunch of apps which I've talked about as well on the show before that are – they're kind of music production creation apps but you don't – you're not really a musician.

It's fun if you're not a musician. You can just basically play with these – It's kind of like musicality, serendipity type things. Yeah, and it creates these really nice, interesting atmospherics. So he's just crazy studio boffin guy and he partnered up with Carl Hyde who is the lead singer of the band Underworld which is one of my favorite bands of all time.

Oh, yeah. Nice. Okay. So, and they put out an album together. It's fucking great. I mean, I'm a huge fan of both of them anyways so there was no chance I wasn't going to like this. I understand it's not everybody's cup of tea but if you are a fan of kind of interesting electronica slash meets real world music, it's really good.

I've been listening to it nonstop. They've got two tracks up on most of the streaming services, Spotify, RDO, et cetera, so you can get a taste of it. But they're kind of doing that dip our toe in the water here, have it listen. But if you like it, please go buy it. Oh, good.

Good for them. I did and I can't recommend the album enough. Link is in the show notes. You can check out the site enohide.com. I think they're also trying – they must have outsourced this because Eno's apps always work. There's some sort of app that you could do for the album. Because the apps actually work.

But that doesn't work and if you click on it on the website, it brings up a great blank page. So I don't know what's going on with there. But who cares anyways? You don't need a fucking app if you've got a good album. It's a great album. There you go. That's all you need. So check it out. Hey, quote of the show, you don't need an app if you have a great fucking album.

Yeah, damn right. Or Twitter. I do want to do an internal shout-out as an internal promotion. The Crow celebrated its 20th anniversary on May 11th this year. So we did a special version of Does It Have Legs about The Crow.

So we can find that. You can find that in the show notes or go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 58 because this is the 58th episode we've done, believe it or fucking not. Believe it or not. The Crow is a great fucking movie. Dude, I miss Brandon Lee so much.

He would have been the greatest fucking action star in the history of the fucking world. But sadly, some dumb fuck did not do his job. Basically. And we cover it all on the show. So if you want to know all about that and anything else about The Crow, check it out.

It was my favorite episode that we've done so far on that show. Cool. Will do. Ooh, fancy. I'm changing up my EDC knife after that. Wait. What? Electronic Daisy Carnival?

You're not supposed to take knives to raves. What the fuck is an EDC knife? We call that everyday carry. Who calls it everyday? It's a nerd thing. And I want to clarify this. Ted Nugent? No.

I want to clarify this. EDC is not just a dude thing. It's not a nerd. It is a nerd thing. It's not a survivalist thing. It's just what people who give a shit about – How many nerds are packing heat? More than you know. More than you know.

Remind me not to fucking go off on the Google Plus guys next time I'm hanging out with them. Yeah, yeah. EDC is pretty much what you carry in your – I mean EDC is a standard term for everyday carry. OK. It doesn't have to be a knife. It doesn't have to be a gun.

I know people who have guns as EDCs because they live in states where they can carry a concealed weapon. All right. Let's get out of the politics. Yes. Well, no. That wasn't politics. That was a fact. I have friends in states where you can carry a gun. So for many years, I've carried my Kershaw Ken Onion leak knife with the serrated edge.

And unfortunately, one day in the morning after I was at a party up in San Francisco, I showed it to Tim Ferriss. He was at the party and we hung out and we stayed over and we were having breakfast and I pulled out my knife and he's like, what the hell is that?

I'm like, oh, this is my Kershaw and whatever. And ever since then, he's showed every – he got one and then showed everybody that knife and it's like the nerd go-to knife. OK. OK. Well, I was watching back – or not watching. I was listening to the Back to Work podcast, the Merlin Man podcast this week and he had kind of a joke EDC photo, which was kind of like a blender, a bottle of gin and a bunch of other stuff.

And in the middle of it was that knife, the knife that I've carried for all these years. And I'm just like, Jesus Christ, I can't do this anymore. So I put away – I put away childish things as it were and I picked up a knife that I've had around for a while because I always have a knife on me.

I've had it – I've had it 20 years. I've always carried a knife because they come in handy. It's not about killing people. It's about opening Amazon boxes and cutting tape and slicing lettuce or getting a rabbit. There are days I miss doing the podcast in the same room.

Today is one of those where I'm really happy you're far away. Well, give me a fucking pussy. Jesus Christ. So I went back to my old Sog Trident, which was a beautiful knife. It's – I mean it's got a – it's even got a seat belt cutter on it.

So if you get trapped in your car, like you hit the river and then the seat belt won't go, it's got a seat belt cutter on it. It's even that cool. But I was going back to think – I just love my Kershaw. So I ordered a new one called the Cryo Blackwash.

It's cool as shit is all I got to say. It's tiny. It looks very much – it's very tactical I have to say. There will be links and videos and pictures in the show notes. It's Wii. Right. It's got a interchangeable bracket, speed safe, sharp blade and it's black.

That's all I got to say. And it's cheap. It's cheap. But if you have a Kershaw Ken Onion leak knife serrated or not serrated, I recommend you change it up a bit because every fucking nerd in the world has one of those. And I'm sorry.

It's probably my fault. Okay. Well, I mean as a child, I had a fascination with the Swiss Army knife as I think all young boys do. And I remember painstakingly researching them because there was no online then at the store.

Getting one, loving it to death, never actually using it for anything. And to this day, I actually do still have a Swiss Army knife – well, not a Swiss Army knife, but I have a Chrome Hearts, super fancy looking, very beautiful and probably extremely expensive Swiss Army knife type thing sitting on my desk that was given to me as a birthday gift many years ago.

But I never take it with me. I don't carry a knife with me. There you go. And I just heard the snap. Do you still have a finger? That's what it sounds like. Yeah. I'm playing with my knife. What can I say? Swiss Army knives are for fucking pussies. Jesus Christ.

If you're – Just for all true listeners, that is probably the 742nd time that Jason has called me a pussy on this podcast. Absolutely. Jesus. What the hell are you thinking? So I'll have links to all of the knives we've talked about plus the video and a link to Merlin's everyday carry.

But this thing is cute. I mean it's heavy as shit. But for $40, I think – I'm hoping it's going to be good. It doesn't have a serrated edge like the Kershaw did. But the blade is sharp. It's short and probably gets through the things that I need it to get through. So there we go.

There you go. That's all I'm saying. Pussy. Pussy. The whip's not dead. It's almost impossible now to do a podcast and not have at least one listicle in your podcast when you're talking about the whip.

Didn't Hitler have one listicle? It was a syphilitic listicle. There's a title. Sorry about that. There's the title of the podcast. Anyways. So The Chive, which is an interesting site that a couple of friends of mine always send me articles from.

Usually it involves scantily clad but still safe for work women from a nerdy perspective. But they had a great article. As you know, I am now a homeowner and been doing a lot of do-it-yourself projects around the house. I just really like this one. It's 20 ways to hide those monstrosities around the house and there's 29 different photos of various things.

Some of them just like really simple things like gut a book and stick your router in the book so you don't have an ugly router sitting around. Some of them quite funny. If you're really into reggae, I love the turn your cords into Bob Marley's hair concept. That was a cute one.

Some of them – yeah, just some really basic stuff. Some of them are no-brainers. Like I've always put – I've always hung a piece of art over the – what is this called? Thermostat. Well, they said thermostat here. I always put it over my circuit breaker box. I make it really easy to take off but you don't have an ugly box circuit breaker just sitting there.

I just put a piece of art over it. I've never had a circuit breaker in public areas. So I don't know about that one. A lot of the places. Those are usually in the closet. Now, getting to this list, I went and looked at it and I was reading the comments and it was hilarious because some of their tips will basically burn your home down and kill your children.

My favorite is the chalkboard over – a chalkboard with a to-do list over the air conditioner. Yeah, that was kind of stupid. Yeah, that was a pretty bad one. And the painting over the thermostat which means it can't regulate the heat which will kind of overheat it and burn your house down with your children inside of it.

Some of these were cute. Some of them required major architectural redos like the stairs or the drawers under the stairs. That was genius. It is. If I ever did have a place with stairs, I would have that done. But that would require Contra unless you are – And there are two versions.

There's the ones that pulled out from the side and the ones that pulled out from the front. But both of them had the same comment, but where the fuck will Harry Potter live? Which was great. Very funny. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just some funky stuff in there. I got a kick out of it. And yes, do know what you're doing before you try any of these.

Maybe the only totally safe one would be using the paper towel rolls to store your wires tangle-free, which is also genius. That's an old one. There's like 100 home hacks that go around. Yeah. That one. That was from that one. Yeah. There's tons of shit you can do.

Here's the deal. Nobody does this stuff ever. It's fun to look at and go, oh, that's cute. And then you forget about it because our short-term memory is fried. Yeah, I know. Because we're all fried and dumb now. Yeah. So, yeah. It's cute. It's a cute read. Definitely check it out. It's a decent testicle.

No, seriously? Are you shitting me? The Are You Shitting Me for this week is specifically for Jason and his current hometown. You are sitting around Chicago at the moment, correct? I'm in Downers Grove, but Chicago's close enough. Yeah, close enough. The last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, the Ottoman Empire still existed.

Nice. Oh, that's awesome. That's unbelievable, right? You're just like, you know, I love time facts like that. So, the Chicago Cubs, their last win in the World Series was 1908. The Ottoman Empire technically existed until 1922, although 1908 marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

Wikipedia link in the show notes. Go Cubs! Well, here's another fun one. The last time the Cubs won the World Series, the Titanic was still afloat. Ottoman Empire sounds way further away, though.

I know, but the Titanic sank in 1914. There you go. The Titanic actually wasn't even built. Oh, no, it was 1912. Sorry, 1912. But the Titanic wasn't even built the last time the Cubs won the World Series. But, yes, the Ottoman Empire, that's a good one.

Well, thank you. Closing shout outs! We are getting old, my friend. Well, duh. I was complaining to you before the show started that my ankle hurts because it's raining. Okay? Okay, but beyond our physical ailments, the people that we've kind of grown up with are starting to pass away.

Sad news for sci-fi geeks everywhere, and I certainly grew up. In wonderment at this man's artwork, H.R. Geiger died this week at 74. He was a fucking badass, and his sci-fi stuff, scary, creepy, sexy, weird.

I will never – I still have gigantic coffee table books of his sitting around that it's weird to pull out every now and then. Great stuff will be missed. So this is actually the first time I'm actually telling anybody this fact. I learned more about Photoshop and Photoshop 2 and channel operations.

And the most I learned about Photoshop was because I wanted to take a scan of Geiger's photographs and merge them with my ex-girlfriends. I wanted to put their heads in Geiger's photos, and I did.

So I learned the most – that was my inspiration for learning just art and Photoshop and all that stuff. And I would print them out, these giant things, because I worked at Kinko's at the time. So I had the most beautiful printers. So I would put out these giant vindictive posters of my ex-girlfriends with alien cocks in their mouths.

And you'll be able to see those scans at grumpyoldgeeks.com. No, no, no. Unfortunately, they're gone. I've lost them all to the privileges of time. That's probably fortunate, actually. Yes, thanks to – because it's a litigious society we live in today. Yes. But I appreciate Geiger's work so much.

And I do have many a friend that was grounded from the penis landscape poster in Frankenchrist that they put on their door. And their mothers would put them away because most of them were in – they were fans of Tipper Gore back in the day. Back in the day.

Because I'm from – I was living in Chicago in the Midwest. I was actually living where I am now when Frankenchrist came out, and it was a big deal. Yeah. The penis landscape – and it is a pretty damn interesting poster if you haven't seen it. It's what I would call fucked up.

It's on – and you can go get the high res on Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia. It's cockopedia, as it were. Yeah, it's kind of messed up. Yeah, but he brought a really great tinge to sci-fi design.

There was nothing like that before him. No, not at all. He definitely defined a genre. And I still haven't seen that Dune documentary yet, but I can only imagine what would have happened if that had come to fruition.

Yeah, yeah. I can't wait to watch that. I haven't watched it yet either, but I'd love to see – there's supposedly a ton of his concept art in there, so it's going to be great. Oh, yeah. There's tons and tons. He designed the whole damn thing. Yeah. So, now, we talked about you and Coachella quite a bit. Yes. And you ended up not going to Coachella.

I ended up not going. I ended up selling my tickets. Now, how fucked up is it that I am the one of the two of us that's going to a musical festival this year? Well – Because I'm going to Riot Fest in Chicago because it is the single best fucking lineup of any band setup I've ever seen.

If this lineup would have been playing Coachella, there's no way I would have not been there at all. Because – You've got The Cure headlining. You've got Jane's Addiction. Those two acts alone. Unbelievable. OK. Well, here's the deal. I just got word today that – so, these are the bands that are going to be doing just full album sets.

Naked Ray Gun is going to be doing Throb Throb. The Descendants are going to be playing Myla Goes to College. And Slayer is going to be playing Rain and Blood. And Jane's Addiction is going to be doing Nothing Shocking. Oh, that's the – You don't even have to listen to the crap new songs by Jane's.

Well, see, here's the thing. I don't like Jane's Addiction. That was just in the text I got. But I actually – I don't like Jane's Addiction. So, whatever you say about that. And I'm going to go see The Cure because I've never seen them. Oh, you're in for a treat, dude. They are fucking phenomenal live. That's what I heard.

So, I had no expectations. I was bummed that I'm not going to get to see The Violent Femmes because they're playing in Denver and not here. Yeah, I did notice different lineups for the three different cities, which is a bit unfortunate. There's still 19 bands. I've got 19 bands that I've never seen that I want to see that are going to be playing on the same three days.

Yeah. I am – I have to get in shape because it's going to be outside. It might be raining. I don't care. I'm going to have to be running between stages. I'm not taking a camera. I'm putting it all in my mind palace. It is going to be the greatest show in the fucking history of the world, which means I'll probably get killed in a car accident on the way to the first day.

But I don't care. It's going to be good. This is a great lineup. I've not even really – I've vaguely heard of the festival before, but I've never attended. That's 10 years old. It's been going on here in Chicago for 10 years. And now it's turned into Lollapalooza.

Okay. There you go. Because it used to be distributed amongst different clubs around the city. Right. And you just go see different bands. And my roommate, Mike, who has been shooting them from the first year, he would go – he would just – he would be texting me. He's like, I've been to eight clubs in four days. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do.

But now it's all in one area in one park. It's Humboldt Park in Chicago. And I bought a VIP pass. It was like 300 bucks. But – and here's the trick, people. If you're in Chicago and you're going to go to Riot Fest, regular tickets are about 160 bucks.

With the VIP pass, you get 12 drink tickets. Which is probably about 160 bucks. Exactly. And you get in and out privileges and air-conditioned bathrooms. It is stupid not to buy the VIP ticket if you're going for all three days.

I mean it – just from an economic standpoint, it makes zero sense to not just pay for it because you're going to make it back in drinks alone. Yeah. Because I'm sure drinks are eight bucks a piece. So that's – yeah, right there. That's 96 bucks in drinks that you get for the price plus in and out privileges and peeing in comfort.

Yeah, that's a no-brainer. And this looks like a great festival. They're also going to be doing Toronto and Denver. Mm-hmm. Lineup – see, I would initially go to Toronto, but I don't care much for the lineup. They're definitely heavy on the Canadian bands. Metric gets way top billing. Billy Talent, who just couldn't even sell a bathroom in the U.S., is also headlining.

The Denver lineup is pretty good too. But the Chicago one is definitely my favorite because you got the Cure and James headlining. It's pretty kick-ass. Hey, you know, MXV, my roommate, said if you want to give up that medicine record, he might leave a place open for you to come crash on the couch. Of course.

I'll think about it. I've got to see if I can get a VIP pass, and September is just so far away. This is the one thing that has killed me at being old again about shows these days. It's like you're buying tickets six months ahead of time. We never used to do that when we were younger. It was like a show would be announced.

Tickets would go on sale a couple weeks ahead of time. Now it's just like, ugh. As an example, Coachella wrapped up, what, two weeks ago? Yeah. Pre-sales for next year? This weekend. Yeah, well, you know, because they can. Because they can. Because if they can prove that they've got that many people coming, then they can pay for the better bands.

Yeah, exactly. Plus, they make all the interest of your money sitting in their bank account for a year. Exactly. Yeah, now you're thinking. Now you're thinking. Yep. So I'm excited. I have not been to a festival show probably ever. I don't know. I've never been to a festival show.

So like I said, I'm going to be training, and I'm going to put my theme song in the show notes, which is I'm listening to the theme from Orgasmo, which is the best training song ever. Okay. So I'm going to have to get going because I'm going to go see Godzilla in a little bit.

All right. It's happening tonight. And what happened with the midnight showings? Like you'd go on a Thursday for a midnight showing, but now I'm going on a Thursday, and the show's at 730. Because they just gave up and just like, ah, fuck it. We'll just let people in early.

They sell more tickets. Because nobody goes to the movie. Exactly. And it's surprising because they're doing three showings. They're doing an IMAX 3D. They're doing a real 3D. And they're doing a 2D, the 2D, which is what I'm going to because fuck 3D. Agreed. None of them are sold out.

Yeah. It takes an awful lot to get people off their ass and out somewhere in public these days. You know what I think fucked it up? Matthew Broderick. Well, that first Godzilla remake was here. Oh, that was bad. I am not attending tonight because I'll wait to see if people seem to like it or not first.

I tell you what. I will put this on the Facebook page for Grumpy Old Geeks after this episode goes live tomorrow. Excellent. Yes. And by the way, where the fuck are my maple cookies? I was a little busy. Did you buy them? Did you bring them back?

Or did you leave them in Canada? Maybe I might have ate them. You motherfucker. Don't worry. I'm having some shipped out. Go get your cookies. I can't trust anybody. You can trust me. I bought them. I just got hungry. I ate them, you fuck.

I got hungry, man. Those things are good. Well, I'm going to go have some pot bellies and so fuck you. Okay, man. See you next week. See you next week. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at GrumpyOldGeeks.com, on Facebook and Facebook.com, slash Grumpy Old Geeks, or email them at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

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