62: Quantified Laziness

The Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Olé, olé, olé, olé. Welcome to Hot Soccer Chat with the Grumpy Old Geeks. No, I'm just fucking around. Over my dead body. Well, that's about all you're going to get from me on this particular episode. I have paid no attention to tech whatsoever. All I've been doing is looking at sports statistics and reading about countries I didn't even know existed. You are such a... Who are you?

You know, you've known me a long time, Jason. Once every four years, I go batshit crazy for sports. I build all that testosterone male bullshitness up for four years, and it explodes in a month-long orgy of balls. That's what she said. So, yeah, I've been going apeshit. The first World Cup game was played yesterday. To show my dedication to my craft, I'm actually missing Mexico versus Cameroon right now. Well, sort of. It's on the TV in the corner. Anyways.

Great. I guess I'll be carrying this show then. You can carry this on your capable shoulders. So, I want to start off a little bit with talking about our quantified self-ranty shit that we've done before. Yes. Here's the problem with it. If you don't get off your ass, it doesn't do anything.

This is very true. I woke up. I've been kind of – it's been raining here, and I've been lazy the past week or so. And I woke up this morning in my Fitbit ARIA, which is my Wi-Fi-enabled scale, which talks to my Fitbit on my hip and my phone and all that jazz. Well, it kicked me in the nuts saying, yeah, you're pretty much the fattest you've ever been. You should go outside now.

So, quantified self doesn't do a goddamn thing if you don't put in the work. Well, that's the point of the whole quantification is to force you to get off your ass because you're realizing you're not doing the work. What gets measured gets managed. That is very true. And the funny thing is I knew I was feeling crappy, and I've been avoiding getting on the scale.

And I got on it this morning just out of – I'm like, okay, I'm at the end of my rope. It's a beautiful day. Let's see how bad it is. Damage control. I was just like, holy shit. I'm going to break this thing. I got to get going. Yeah. Yeah. I've actually been doing relatively well. I mean, thanks to the tracking and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I haven't had a day under 10,000 steps since I started using that app.

I'm doing a bike ride every day. I started doing the P90X3 program in addition to the bike rides. You're a monster. I've finally been dropping a little weight. But what I've really – again, what the quantified stuff really seems to do is I was doing all that stuff for ages and not really losing weight. It's only when I started tracking what I was actually eating as well because I don't care what every fitness guru in the world is going to tell you.

Losing weight is 90% diet, 10% exercise. Oh, absolutely. So it's all about what you eat and that's what it really comes down to, which is going to be a problem for the next 30 days because I like beer with my World Cup games and even the salads in pubs are not particularly healthy.

Oh, God, no. So I've given up any thoughts of actually monitoring or keeping my beer drinkage down. But I know I can do better with food. So I plan on – I'm scheduling in meals before I go to the pub. Yeah, it's a good idea. Like I said, I like walking and I've been using that app, The Walk.

I'm still with it. I stuck with it. It's a drag to use just because the UX sucks. The gameplay mechanics are crappy, but I like the story actually. The story has been pretty fun. So I think it's got 68 missions and I'm on episode 28.

So I've still got 40 days worth of story left to go. So for the purchase price, it definitely has gotten – I've gotten my money worth out of it. Well, that's good. But you did send me a link that made me very depressed since we just finished talking about all this weight loss. Yeah, I ran across this on Boing Boing.

It's just like a kick in the nuts. Basically, long-term weight loss isn't possible. Right. Just you're fucked. Yeah, I mean – Unless you're an outlier. Unless you're an outlier or unless you really fucking work it for the entire rest of your life.

I mean I've been aware of this personally. It's a bit sad, but the body does what the body does. This is why it's super important, like kids' nutrition and all that. I don't want to get too political and get into that whole realm of stuff that we shouldn't really be talking about as grumpy old geeks. But if you become a fat kid, you're screwed for life.

So avoid ever getting your kid fat. It's a bad thing. I mean I was a relatively thin kid. I did – I played sports constantly. A lot of it is genetic. I'm just built to be bigger. That's in my genes. End of story. But when I was a kid, I was soccer.

I was baseball. I was always on my bike. It's when I stopped doing all that sort of stuff that I just started to gain weight and gain weight and gain weight. And by the time I got out of college, I was pushing like – I was like around 250, if not even bigger than that. And it took me a long time to drop down. But my body wants to be fat now.

End of story. And it's a constant struggle for me to even stay what I consider to be somewhat chunky. Use nut fat. Use fluffy. More to love. You know. But yeah, this article is – and we see this with celebrities and stuff like that all the time too.

It's all these celebs that like do the – you know, get the Jenny Craig sponsorships and deals or even go in and do the fucking, you know, cut out half your stomach and all that stuff. They thin down for a while but gradually over time, you know, Christy Alley happens and Jessica Simpson is going to be a chunker again.

It's just – man, the body is a bitch. It is. It definitely is. But, you know, tracking, it helps. It just keeps me on track as long as I actually get on the scale and then do the work. You know, I just – I can't not walk because I sit all day or now I stand all day in front of a computer, which is helping.

I swear by the standing desk. If nothing else, it makes your back stronger. My back is – I have sitting problems with the back. So typing all day at a standing desk is – does wonders. I know people are like sick of hearing about standing desks but I've been using them since 1996.

And I would – yeah, I swear to God, I would be like 400 pounds if I didn't have this thing. Yeah, and I've been wanting to do that switch a long time. I was actually supposed to do it way back in like December of last year and I still haven't gotten around to it. So I'm going to ask you for a favor, Jason. I want you to drop in our show notes on grumpyoldgeeks.com after we're done with this episode and it goes live.

Can you just throw in what you're actually using right now? Absolutely. Yeah, I'll put in links. I mean I got this through Amazon and with Prime. This thing weighs like 30 pounds. So with free shipping, bonus. And I've tried a bunch of different ones and this one was under 300 bucks.

It works great. I've got a 21-inch iMac on it and I use my laptop in display mode through the iMac and it's got room for a bunch of stuff. I dig it. Yeah, yeah. Throw up all the stuff and toss up a picture of your setup too because I'd love to see what it looks like. Yeah, we'll definitely do.

And one thing that I always tell people don't do is get one of those giant, big, wide-ass standing desks because all you do is just clutter it up with stuff. Keep it small. Keep it Spartan. And that way you just – you don't have – you don't do everything there. You just – it's for computing. You don't do your bills there.

You have a separate place to do your bills. Just do them at the kitchen table or whatever. But just keep it Spartan and minimalist and you'll find that it just clears your head better when you're trying to get your work done. Nice. Definitely have to try that out. So I – speaking of the last time you were on a train and you were out here and you had screwed up your entire leg, which is part of the reason you're just getting back into walking now, I ran across an article.

Did you take Amtrak? Yes, I did. And I remember you were talking about how crappy your reception was and all that sort of stuff. Did they have Wi-Fi on the train? Absolutely not. No. I took the – yeah, I took the Southwest Chief from Chicago to L.A. and there was no onboard Wi-Fi.

And 99 percent of that trip, you're in the middle of nowhere. So you don't even have signal. I actually edited and posted our show from the Wi-Fi on my Verizon iPad. Right. So after two hours or three hours on the phone with them, which was not fun.

But, yeah, once I got that done and you hit the spots and then you can get some 4G action, but it's few and far between. And it's such a long, long stretch of track. I can't see them putting Wi-Fi in there, especially since they rent the track from the freight liners. Yeah, yeah. Well, the article I stumbled across was more specifically talking about the short hauls for the people that are computers – commuters, not computers.

Well, we'll get there. Maybe another 50 years. Soon. Yeah, you're talking about like that northeast corridor up by New York. Yeah, so a lot of the commuters, I guess, Amtrak is really going to beef up their Wi-Fi stuff on the trains, which is great for people because, I mean, that's one of the definite pluses of taking public transport is the ability to do other things while you're on it.

Yeah, you can – if you take Amtrak on the west coast, they've got really nice trains with Wi-Fi out there too. Cool. So you should check that out. If you go down to San Diego, just take the train. Yeah, I was actually thinking about that. A buddy of mine is super into the American football, a.k.a. the crappy one.

And he's a huge Jets fan and they're playing San Diego later this year and he wants us all to go down and I was like, I don't want to drive. Let's try the train. Yeah, party train. Yeah, party train down. Bud lights for everyone. American football. Yeah. Yeah, you can take the Amtrak from San Diego all the way up the coast up to like northern California, Oregon, Washington.

Yeah. It might even go all the way up to Vancouver. That would be pretty sweet. Yeah. But a friend of the show, Fogarty, who does all of our voiceover intro-y things, he takes that trip every year and always posts beautiful pictures having wine with the sunset out the window right up my alley.

Yeah, that's the way to do it. Now, one last thing on the football. John Oliver this week has another knocked-it-out-of-the-park rant. He's on a hot streak with these rants, I've got to say. Every episode, they pretty much go viral.

This one was a great one, especially as a World Cup fan myself. FIFA, the international basically overriding organization for the World Cup, well-known to be extremely corrupt and complete pieces of crap. And he does a great, great rant about them and showcasing everything that's wrong with them and then ending in the same position that all of us do.

But we love the game. And my God, the World Cup is amazing. Yeah. I had never known anything about the corruption or the organization. It was a fun watch. It was like 13 or 14 minutes, so it's not short. No. Which is crazy because his show is only a half hour long. So he's doing these epic rants now.

So hopefully he'll keep that up and that'll be his mark because he's kicking Jon Stewart's ass with these epic ones. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, he's got the ability to do that because it's on HBO and he doesn't have to do commercial breaks and he doesn't have to cut into two specific time delineated segments. So that helps. Yeah. And he also doesn't do four shows a week.

He's only doing one. So his staff can put together some amazing content. No, it was a great rant and if you have any interest at all in this sort of stuff and if you think everything going on with the NBA and all the scandals we've had with Major League Baseball and all that, Americans, again, got nothing on the world.

Man, they beat us hands down. These people are destroying countries. These guys are like supervillains. They really are. They really are. The only light at the end of the tunnel is basically the head of FIFA who Oliver rants about a bit after he had done this. I mean basically just in the last couple of days has announced that he's going to step down.

Oh, so we get a new supervillain to take his place. We'll get a new supervillain to take his place and the other pluses is in theory the 2022, I believe, World Cup, which was given to Cutter and everybody went, what the fuck, is probably going to get taken away because it's starting – all the documentation is starting to come out about how it's basically just payola and corruption that got him in the first place.

Oh, Qatar. Okay. Cutter. Cutter. I've heard it pronounced Cutter. I know it's supposed to be Qatar. I know it's definitely not K-tar. Q-tar. Q-tip. Q-tip. No, definitely because in the John Oliver piece, they were saying it's like 140 in the shade there when the games are going to be played.

Yeah. It's physically impossible to play soccer in that kind of weather. So – and besides, I mean they're still like ultra-conservative and I just – one of the best parts about the World Cup is watching the female Brazilian fans and there's – we're not putting them in beekeeper suits, damn it.

No doubt, no doubt. No doubt, no doubt. Yeah. So more World Cup stuff. I just can't avoid it right now, Jason. Sorry. I know. I think that's it for the rest of the show. So listening to us talk about World Cup is like when other people bitch about Merlin Mann talking about comics on Back to Work or Marco Armit talking about headphones on ATP.

It's just – it's not what the peoples want. So we'll move on. We'll move on. I do have a small rant. I've actually been in a buoyant, actually cheerful mood because of the World Cup this week. But I did get really frustrated with – the problem with Facebook is – well, there's lots of problems with Facebook.

But let's just go with the basic one, which is – The basic one. Yeah. All these people are supposed to be your friends and we all just kind of pick up people in our Facebook as we move through life and we never really go wean them out because it feels weird and whatever. So I have quite a few people that I've just kind of picked up over the years as friends on Facebook and some of them have decided to adopt – now, you've discussed yourself, Jason.

You're kind of a digital vagabond, as it were. Yes. You like to travel around. You like to roam. You don't really want to be tied to anything. But you are also still connected to society and that's part of the plus for you is you are part of the world and you can be active in it and do your job and keep friendships all over the world.

And you're connected and plugged in as you are a vagabond. Absolutely. That's the best way to be a vagabond. Well, unfortunately, there's an entire another subsect of people that are starting to pop up now. And surprisingly, I would have thought that most of them would be kind of the younger generation, but a lot of them seem to be about our age.

And they've decided that they want to be proto-hippies. They have a bit of money and they want – they buy the hipstery type flashy silver Winnebagos and they head out to join – to roam the country and see the people. And I'm all down with that.

But you can't post a photo from your iPhone onto Facebook and caption it, I'm totally off the grid. Yeah. Posting a photo onto Facebook is the very definition of being on the grid. Yeah. No shit. So know what you're talking about and don't be an asshole.

Yeah. It's a little contradictory. Don't romanticize what you're doing and make it sound like it's all super cool and hipster when you're not doing it. If you want to be off the grid, get the fuck off the grid. Yep. Get off my grid. End rant. Get off my grid, you stupid kids.

End the news. Well, it was only a matter of time before people started making all kinds of weird documentaries about this kind of weird world that we live in. First up – well, actually, there's – no, I don't think there's been like full-fledged documentaries.

There's been like weird little things about Facebook and social media and all that sort of stuff. But this is a full-fledged, massive, huge, funded documentary about Twitter. Well, there was also the really good documentary called Downloaded on Napster that the dude from Bill and Ted's made.

That was really good. Yeah, yeah. There's been a couple WikiLeaks ones. I don't think any of those were quite as mainstream as this one's going to be. Twitter. Why do we need a documentary about Twitter? I hope it's only 140 characters long. Yeah.

Hopefully not 140 minutes. I saw the trailer on Salon after much finagling to get it to work because Salon is so overloaded now. I know. With ads and third-party content. I couldn't get the damn video to load. I know. It's a problem. And it's unfortunate because as you have made fun of me many times for on the show, I pull a lot of stories from there because they actually have really good writing and really good journalism.

But this is the way that we pay for those things nowadays. It's just slammed with bullshit. It's getting to be a hard site to surf and want to pull things from these days, unfortunately. Even with ad blockers on, it was terrible. Oh, I know. I know. It's really bad. The ad blockers have actually fallen way behind in terms of technology these days.

They used to keep up really well, and I would have really clean surfing experiences. But now I keep them up to date, and I check out which ones are supposedly doing the best. But none of the ad blockers keep up anymore. Yeah, the salon bastards are crafty. They are.

But, yeah, they have some pretty good people. They're Patrick Stewart, Aaron Paul, a bunch of these celebrities that have kind of done some really fun stuff on Twitter are all kind of being interviewed. But it does look horrible. Yeah, it's – I think they should just name it to hashtag douche because it did make me kind of throw up in my mouth a little when I watched it.

It wasn't – it was just bits of it that just seemed so douchey, the media people. And I forget the guy's name, but he was just first talking about brands. As soon as you start a sentence with brands will, I'm gone. Just like, okay, I don't care.

But, I mean, that is the evolution of Twitter, and that's what we've all seen happen. And I think we've talked about that a couple times. It's – the heyday of Twitter being the wild, wild west is kind of almost over already, and it is a brand paradise. And it is. That's why people are leaving in droves.

Yes. Yeah. So breaking news as of last night, or I guess yesterday, Tesla and Musk, he just basically said, we've got all these great patents about all this amazing technology for our engines. Eh, have them.

Have at it. You can have them. How about it? So good move, bad move? What do you think? I think it's a great move. Fantastic move. I think it's a massively amazing humanitarian move. It's one of the things that I personally would do if I had more money than God and didn't really care about my intellectual properties.

I do wonder what his employees think. I do wonder what his employees think that have mortgages and kids, and certainly you could never get away with this if he was a public company because the shareholders would be up in arms about this. But it's one of the pluses of – this is the ultimate I've got fuck me money.

Not fuck you money. Fuck me money. I have so much money I'm going to fuck myself just to do something cool. I think it's great because he lays it out in his blog post, which does have a fantastic title. All your patents belong to you, which is clever for 1990 internet humor.

To have someone at that level that is referencing something from 1990 internet humor is great. Yeah, it's good. So he puts it out there that we're a niche car company and we're not going to push the ball forward with getting non-fossil fuel burning cars out there at this rate.

And we become the gatekeepers if we hold these patents and enforce them. And he's more about giving back and saying, hey, we want more cars like this on the road. We don't want less. And by stifling innovation, by holding the patents, we're part of the problems. Let's not be part of the problem.

Here you go. Which is great. Yeah, I mean I'm all for it. I think it's a fucking fantastic thing. I just do like – there are a certain number of variables that have to fall into play to be able to do something like that. And luckily he's done them all. So I think the history books are going to go back and look at Musk and he's just going to be huge chapters.

Absolutely. And everybody I know that has a Tesla loves it. I mean they swear by it. Shane Nickerson, a previous guest on the show, just got one this week. He's been posting his pictures on Instagram about it and it looks like a nice car. They're beautiful and they're really cool. I mean they're certainly – they're geek cars.

I mean it's all computerized and you can hack them. And I did see – they did a road test against an Aston Martin in one and it beat the Aston on several metrics. The guy said it was just fantastic. That's great. Yeah. I won't ever get one but – I would like one but I don't see it in any time in the near future.

That's – I mean they're prohibitively priced right now certainly for anybody that's kind of fiscally conscious, especially a homeowner such as myself. So no Tesla in my near future. I'm quite happy still with my souped-up Mini but I would love to have one of these.

And the best thing about this is hopefully we're going to have a lot more of these electronic cars, I hope, mass-produced by Ford and GM and all those guys. So get on it, people. And they'll all drive themselves and you never have to worry about it again. Or there's that, yes. And you can't get one right now anyway because the waiting list is so long.

Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty crazy. There's quite a lot of them here in Santa Monica. Now the big bullshit story of the week was the touring test winner. Yeah. It exploded across the internet, which is when I put it in our show notes right away when everybody was still buying it.

And then two days later, I posted another article about how we're actually just getting dumber. And that's the only reason it passed. And now we've gotten to the point where everybody knows this is complete and utter bullshit and it was just a chatbot and it was just a really stupid people. Yeah. I wanted to pull it up and try it before the show because I can – generally my first question to these things is what does the color blue taste like?

Right. Right there. If it comes back with, huh, what are you talking about? People would never answer the question like a computer would just because it's two mixed messages. I've never seen any chatbot answer that question in any way that would make you think that it was a person on the other side.

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I didn't try it out. But I mean all the articles are just like, nope, not even close. Give it a rest. Yeah. Yeah. We're just getting dumber. Yeah. Uber back in the news.

$17 billion. $17 billion in funding this week. Wow. If they're making so much money, why do they need $17 billion more? I don't know. I don't get the – there's a lot – actually Uber has been in the news tons because I don't know if – there were the protests all over the place.

I mean – Hang on. Let me go back a second here. Okay. They didn't raise $17 billion. They raised on a valuation of $17 billion. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. So they raised $1.2 billion, but $17 billion valuation for – A taxi company.

Yeah. Well, they're going to be much more than that. They're going to be much, much more than that if they can get past the regulators and all these places that are trying to shut them down. And I don't know if they will because you can get away with it here in the good old USA where we actually just don't seem to give a shit about much.

But I don't see how this is – I mean the protests and especially in places like London where you have to spend years learning and pass rigorous tests called the knowledge about London streets and granted technology.

Okay, GPS. But what if your GPS goes down? And all these places that you have to basically buy into a license to get taxis and all these things are there for a reason. And Uber is just kind of saying, fuck that shit, which is – I don't know. This is such a weird thing to me because on the one hand, you know, taxi company – the main plus for Uber has been we have an app.

It tracks everything and your credit card is in there so you never have to use cash. It's kind of taxi company's fault for not emulating that or getting on board with it as quickly. I don't know. Weird one. Yeah. Well, I mean you were talking about other countries. They are in 37 different countries at this point.

So they are making inroads into other countries. But the – I don't know. Like I'm an Uber fan. I'm a huge Uber fan. I love it every time I use them. I've never had a bad trip. And I can see how – just the regulation side of it where they're going up all these – they need that much money.

They need these billions of dollars just to pay for the damn lawyers. Yeah. And bribe the officials in the third world countries just to get their shit through. I'm sure there's – I'm sure they've got a bribery division somewhere in the bowels of their corporate lair. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know.

$17 billion based on what they're doing. If those last numbers are any – have any truth to them, how much money they're making with all the new employees, it might be close to it. So we'll see. It seems a bit unbelievably huge. But then almost all of these companies do.

Same with Airbnb, which is – I want to tie this in because we had a story about that that popped up. Airbnb is now planning on offering – to expand beyond their original offerings to dinner sharing plans, which is a bit weird. And again, it's – all right, good enough for them and I'm sure a lot of people are going to find that really fascinating.

But they're stepping past all these regulations. They're bypassing food safety regulations and all of these companies are kind of doing this to get a step ahead. There are rules. We step outside of them and now we're doing great. But shit, that's not right. This Airbnb dinner sharing thing is one step away from – I mean as soon as they get their first food poisoning case, boom, problem solved there.

I mean that's kind of how I feel about Uber as well. I mean we've had a couple stories here about bad Uber drivers but none of them have completely checked out because it's always a weird thing when people are drinking heavily. But all it's going to take is one Uber driver to fucking disappear with some chick and find her in the river dead three weeks later.

Uber and Uber's plan is shot to shit. I'm sure they'll come up with a software solution. And it's interesting like when you look at places like B&Bs. B&Bs get licensed and they serve food. And some of the states – I was researching this a little bit when you sent the article.

A lot of states only have food regulations if you have like five or more rooms for rent. If it's four and under, you can get by with just grandma in the kitchen cooking up your eggs. So it would be interesting to see if – I mean it's like this whole B&B licensing thing. It seems like it would be not too hard to get that kind of licensing on the statewide level for Airbnb people who want to do Airbnb stuff.

So the tax money goes back into the system, not just basically a big tax hole like it is now. It's like, oh, somebody stay at my place. Here's – somebody makes like $7,000 a year. They don't get taxed on that, which I'm sure is what a lot of the fight is about at the base level.

So give them a licensing strategy. Let them rent these rooms out. And if they want to serve food, yeah, I don't know. I mean that's caveat emptor. You look in the kitchen. You see a cockroach. You don't want to eat there anyway. But for a lot of people, if you're eating the same food as the people that live there literally, it's like, OK, here's $10.

Can I sit down to dinner with you? Yeah. I don't see it as that big of a problem because nobody is going to be cooking stuff that they're not going to eat. That's very true. I agree with that. But the tax point is super huge. And I have no problem with any of these companies except for the fact that they seem to be skating by all these regulations and they're finding tax loopholes and all that.

It's just disrupt the industry but play by the rules. All these rules were there for a good reason. Yeah. Look what happened when we deregulated the financial sector. How did that work out? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Amazon's in the news this week.

When aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the big news was their fight with Warner Brothers now. I can see how this plays out with like a little book company that they were strong arming. Yeah. This is Warner Brothers we're talking about. So we'll see how this one plays out. If Amazon wins over Warner Brothers, that's saying something about the power of Amazon.

Well, I mean, they also just launched a streaming music service starting for Prime members. So they've made a deal at least to a certain extent with Warner Brothers on the music side of things. Who knows? I mean, this is just – last week we spent a lot of time basically just talking about what we see as the big three, the Clash of the Titans, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

They're all entering each other's spaces. They're all battling it out to see who's going to be the winner, and that's a big money. Unfortunately, it's also the one thing that we hate about the internet. We do not want consolidation into one company or even the three that we have now, which is why the internet kind of sucks these days.

Who knows? Yep. I mean, but you'll be able to get a babysitter soon. Yeah. I mean, you know, great, I guess. Don't we already have things like Angie's List? There's a bunch of kid-based sites that – parent-based sites that exist already for this sort of stuff.

But all right. Fine. As long as they bring the babysitter and the drone, I'm in. Yeah. Drone drop. Have you tried the new Prime streaming service yet, the music? I have not tried it yet. I think they just announced it yesterday.

I'm not even sure if it's up and running, but it's on my to-do list today since I am a Prime member. I figured I might as well check it out. Yeah, definitely. Let me know what you think. As soon as it pops up, I'll give it a shot too. Yeah. Because I don't pay for RDO or Spotify anymore. So if I can get some music free with my Prime membership, which I'm already paying for.

Yeah. And still, I can't recommend Prime enough. It saves me so much money every year. It's ridiculous. Yeah, considering how much I order from Amazon, it makes sense. Of course, I am contributing to the very problem I complain about, which is Amazon taking over the world. I'm fine with Amazon taking over the world.

I really couldn't care less. As long as I can order my toilet paper and have it here in 24 hours, I'm in. All right. If we can wait that long. Yeah, you've got to pinch those cheeks. So I saw an article this morning that came through the pipes or the tubes. The internet is apparently full.

Again? Well, it's full of shit most of the time. But no, there was a two years ago that we talked about this. We didn't talk about it on the show. We talked about it at the bar. We ran out of IPv4 addresses. We were running out very rapidly.

And now it's like next stage running out where there's like just a few million left. Right. And the switch to IPv6 is just glacial. I think we're at 10% of the U.S. or 10% to 15% of U.S. ISPs support IPv6 now, which is not nearly enough.

Nope. Not nearly enough. And the problem is like everybody's got to make the switch at the same time. Good luck. Somebody needs to get on that. Yeah. Well, maybe with Google, Facebook, and Amazon, I'll step in. You can move to Africa because Africa apparently still has a ton of their allocated addresses open because there's nobody there to care.

This is one of the weird – I mean this is like people always complain, you know, why does the U.S. have some of the slowest streaming rates and all that sort of stuff. If you're a third world country and you're starting without old infrastructure, it's a lot easier to skip ahead real quick on this stuff. Yeah. You either go straight wireless or fiber.

You can skip the generations of copper that we had to go through. Exactly. So you're welcome, third world countries. We suffer so you don't have to. Security. Apologies if there's any weird audio artifacts this time around.

We both did speed tests but we're still getting the occasional chunk for no particular reason. I blame Microsoft and Skype. Yeah, because I just checked my bandwidth and Comcast, like the good drug dealers they are, have upped my bandwidth to 117 megabits per second download. Upload is 23 megabits per second.

Absolutely insane. That must be wonderful. It is. It really is. So we're in security and we have a hack of the week because these things will be happening. All the time now. But this is a bit of an odd one. P.F. Chang's is investigating a possible credit card hack. I think they should investigate better chefs.

I actually like the P.F. Chang's. It's not bad. The last couple of times I've eaten there, it was terrible. Okay. Well, apparently thousands of credit card numbers are for sale online after hackers targeted the chain restaurant P.F. Chang's. So, you know, if you've had the Mongolian beef recently, you might want to check your bank statements.

Yes. Get your freecreditreport.com, whatever. Which they're not freecreditreport.com because they got sued by everybody and it was basically a scam and they said, you're not allowed to do that anymore. Yeah. So it's not really freecreditreport.com. So what are you going to do there?

So the CIA has decided to join Twitter. And they were funny. Their first tweet was, we can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet. Which is very, very funny. Yeah. It is. They've gotten less funny. And they've started actually doing an awful lot of updates.

So there's some eager beaver over there that is a social media genius apparently. But worth following. Very funny. Very interesting. Yeah. It's, you know, it's a lot of ego stroking going on over there. And they just had a speech or something. So it's a lot of quotes from their speech, which are very bland and dry.

But it was funny to see them on. It was a good start. It was. They got hammered by a ton of people, obviously. Yeah. The second tweet as well was quite amusing. Thank you for the Twitter welcome. We look forward to sharing great hashtag unclassified content with you. See, that shit's funny.

It is. It is. They should have kept with that. Now, this one was pretty funny too. Facebook stupidity leads to the largest gang bust in New York City history. Can't feel bad about that one. No. You know, don't post what you're doing.

Especially if it's, you know, murder. Yeah. You're going to kill someone. Don't post about it. Yeah. Don't update your status to currently murdering. Yeah. Don't put that into Foursquare. Now, how long till Facebook can tell that the gunshots that are in the background when you're posting are real and not a movie and then, you know, call the police for you.

That's actually a good point. And funnily enough, have you heard anything about that? Had that rolled out in the latest Facebook update? The listening to everything that's going on bit? Because I've seen no scuttlebutt about that online. Yeah. I think the only thing that I heard about it was from our show.

Yeah. So I haven't checked anything because I don't use the Facebook app on my phone. That's right. So I don't know. I'm doing that. Yeah. Yeah. So if you find it, you let me know. I will look into it. So maybe after, you know, Germany has won the World Cup. But we'll see. Well, see if it'll update and see if you're watching the German game.

That's true. I should just, I will check that. I will get back to the next. Because that would be interesting if it knows, if it's smart enough to know live television, which I highly doubt it is. Yeah. That would be interesting. Yeah. Because I'm sure like their back catalog, the way they do the, you know, the pattern matching is they just have waveforms of all the audio from every movie.

And then it just does a pattern match against that. So, and that's, that probably takes time. You know, they have to digitize it and I'm sure they have some processing on it to be able to put it into a searchable form. The technology on it has got to be off the hook. Yeah. Pretty intense. So to do that with live TV, I think would be, if they can do that, fuck it.

They can, they've taken over the world. Forget it. They pretty much have anyways. But yeah. Yeah. So this was, it was a fun story. I found it on the Naked Security blog, which I think I pimped last week. But they're just a good source. It's a very good source. And also this week, Al Gore comes out saying Snowden is a whistleblower.

Which is pretty big news. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not that Al Gore is involved in politics anymore and in any way, shape or form, but he's a very well-respected gentleman about town, as it were. For him to come out and basically make this statement, pretty big and pretty tough for the administration, which is still kind of towing the hard line that he's a criminal to deal with.

Yeah. Jimmy Carter came out as well. Bill Clinton was a little hard on him still. Well, he has to be because his wife is about to run for president. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. See, you always got to look at the reasons behind these things.

Clinton cannot go off chart. He's got to kind of toe the line as much as possible. I'm surprised they haven't locked him in a room so he can't talk to anybody. I am shocked that they haven't tackled him and taken him into a corner. No more appearances for you for a while. Yeah, really?

Yeah, I forgot about that old billery. That's about it for security this week. It's been a nice slow week. I like that. It has been a nice slow week. And just on the security note, I'd like to so far give Brazil a high five.

I was expecting a lot more. I mean, there was no lack of protests, and rightfully so, going on in Brazil right now. But I was half expecting some major events as of yesterday, and they're keeping their security tight. Well, it is day one of a 30-day event, so there's plenty of time to blow some shit up.

This is true. And they couldn't even keep the lights on in the stadium, so. Hey, we couldn't keep them on for our biggest sporting event, so I'm not going to – I cannot shit on Brazil at all for that because during the – what the hell do they call that? The Super Bowl. The Super Bowl, we lost lights.

And we – on the plus side, and again, why soccer is way better than football, those fuckers kept playing. We didn't stop for a fucking two hours. Well, to their credit, they did keep the lights in the field on. It was just in the stands that it went out. That's true. Yeah. When the Super Bowl went, like half the field went dark, so.

But it made it more fun. I think I got some glow sticks and taped them to the ball, you know. I agree. Adapt, people. Adapt. This week, I finished a book called The Rise of Superman, decoding the science of ultimate human performance.

It's a book by Stephen Kotler, who has written a bunch of other books that I've never read or even heard of. Okay. He's a New York Times bestselling author apparently, but this book basically is – you've read the book Flow, right?

We've talked about that book before. We've talked about it, yes. I've skimmed it. Okay. This is like a next-level book about flow, more about the research that's happened since the original work was published. Right. With a lot of examples and a lot of extreme sports athlete examples.

Right. And all in all, it was a fantastic read. I loved it. Okay. Cool. And as an ex-athlete, a lot of the stuff I can totally relate to being a skateboarder back in the day and knowing exactly what these guys are talking about. Flow, when you're doing like crazy fast-ass sports like that, just comes naturally and is part of the reason I love the sport so much.

Right, right, yeah. So do they get into kind of just normal human genetics at all or human performance and quantifying and all that sort of stuff or is this basically outliers and extreme? No, no. They talk about how to get into a flow state being normal people. Oh, okay.

That's very good. So, yeah, and it outlines the stages of what constitutes the factors that you need to kind of manufacture to get into the state. So it's a good book if you are looking to get into flow more often. Absolutely.

All right. I highly recommend it. I've been working on a book for like three months now, so I haven't really had a new at-the-library bit for a little while. I took a break to read that one about the squawking chicken, which I don't know if you ever read the sample chapter on that, but I still recommend it.

It's very funny. I'm actually reading one of the books that you recommended. I'm reading Lois McMaster Bulde's Young Miles. Bujold. Bujold. The problem with this book and why I haven't gotten to be able to say anything yet, and you'll tell me that it's broken into three or four separate books, which is why it's so good to happen long.

It's 924 pages, and I'm only at 443 right now. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It is three books. It's an anthology. Yeah. I think I kind of finished up what was one – with the e-book itself, it's not really clearly delineated as to when one book might be done, and it does all flow together relatively well.

So I haven't really felt like there was any kind of particular stopping point. I think I might have hit one just a little bit ago. I'm actually really enjoying this, and one of the interesting things about reading a recommendation from you – and I basically went and did no research whatsoever on this.

I just started reading it, which is a weird way to go into sci-fi. I can't really tell when this was written. I'm assuming it's somewhat older because it has tinges of being kind of older sci-fi. There's just certain feels to it, but it's still just really good sci-fi and really interesting, and I love the character Miles.

He's unbelievable. Yeah. Okay, good. Good. I'm glad. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it, and I'm glad that there's like 10,000 other books to read in this particular series. Yeah, there's a lot of them, and it's funny. I actually did just finish the – there's a prequel to the series called Falling Free, and I'd never – I'd read the actual physical book, but I'd never picked it up on Audible because I've got the same reader for the entire series.

And I had an extra credit, and I finally went through and bought it. So now I have everything that she's written about Miles on Audible, and I can just marathon it one more time when I want to get into it. But I love the characters. I love the universe, the whole shebang. And Miles is just fantastic. Yeah. Now, since I've gone ahead and talked about it a little bit, when were these written?

These are a little bit older, correct? I think they started in the 80s, like late 80s is when she started, and she's still writing them. I mean, there was one – the latest one was out two years ago, I believe. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, because it does – it just does have that twinge of kind of older sci-fi, but still really, really enjoyable.

It's very fun, and I liked – I actually really liked going into this without knowing anything about the universe or the time period or anything about the author even. So it's been fun. Yeah, that's how I found it too. It was a recommendation on Audible like years and years and years ago, and I picked one up.

And I picked one up that was a couple like series ahead in the – or books ahead in the series. And then I went back and just – I devoured the whole thing, and I've just been just waiting and waiting for the next books to come out. And it's taken a long time because she apparently doesn't like writing these books. She has another couple series that are more fantasy, like dragons and princesses and shit like that.

Right. But the sci-fi stuff, she keeps putting it off. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. Oh, I know. I'll just throw in one other thing for people to read in keeping with the World Cup theme because I'll have something about it in almost every segment. If you are into the World Cup and the whole soccer thing but you don't like crazy-ass statistics and ESPN-type reporting, Slate has a great blog called The Spot, which is all about soccer.

And they don't get all that into it, and it's actually – the writers are very funny, and they write from a very kind of – we know you're American. We're American too. Here's why we like it. Here's why you should like it. It's very amusing. So check that out if you want to dip your toe into what's going on in the biggest – basically the biggest thing that ever happens in the entire world.

And I do have one other thing. I was a huge fan of the Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn. And unfortunately, Vince Flynn died not too long ago. Right. Yeah, June of last year actually. He died of cancer, unfortunately. And he made a huge series of these books.

It's basically – it's modern-day spy action hero drama. It's popcorn. They're popcorn books. It's like our version of the romance novel. And I was looking for something to kind of fill that void since there's never going to be any more Mitch Rapp books. And I just – on a whim, I picked up the series, the John Wells series by Alex Berenson.

And I read the first two books, The Faithful Spy and the Ghost War, and they were pretty good. The big problem I have is the first book in the series was narrated by Robinson Dean, who's a fantastic reader who I mentioned last time. The rest of the books are read by George Waddell, who read the Mitch Rapp books.

So now I'm getting all the characters confused in my head because all I hear is the other books with this one. So I might actually just have to pick up the paperbacks and read them. But if you're into that modern spy stuff, these books are a little older, but like 90s. But they're good.

They're good popcorn, spy, CIA shit, if you're into that kind of thing. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So I mentioned last week that I put Yosemite on my iMac.

Yeah. Yeah, oops. You're a brave man. Actually, you're a stupid man because we've gone through this every time. Yeah. It took me 24 hours to get my iMac back from the dead because Yosemite was just not ready for anywhere near prime time.

So I found a version of my Mac that I backed up to hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Saved my bacon. So all it does is literally it clones the whole drive to an external, and it's bootable.

So I could actually boot from the external hard drive and run my Mac just like it was, unfortunately, in January. So everything was old. But then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to just basically merge it back to the iMac, and I got everything back the way it was and then just had to go through the update cycle.

But now I'm smart. Cloner lets you do timed backups. So at night, I keep the hard drive just plugged in, and it will clone itself every night. So couple of that with the time machine backups.

The problem with the time machine backups is they're on the Wi-Fi network, and this is a 500-gig drive that had like maybe 30 gig open. So 470 gig over Wi-Fi. Even though I've got the fastest Wi-Fi hotspot that they've got with the AN or whatever, yeah, it still takes forever.

And isn't it hilarious how people are trying to push us to do even our backups into the cloud? Yeah, no thanks. It's just stupid. No, I've got multiple hard drives now with fireproof boxes around the house and off-site. So that's the way to do it.

So yeah, Carbon Copy Cloner saved my bacon. Definitely check it out if you want to do any kind of Mac backup stuff, which you should. Yes. Also a little recommendation, which is something that – again, this just goes to prove to you that even the most seasoned and experienced and knowledgeable people fuck up every now and then.

I fuck up daily. How did you not do a backup before installing – right before installing Yosemite? Because I've been moving away from using my iMac as a production computer but not realizing that there are like four or five things that I need it for because this is – my Air only has 4 gig of RAM and my iMac has 13 gig.

And there are a lot of like processing intensive things like handbrake that can be done on the Air but generally not recommended. Yeah. I mean I learned the hard way even now. Like even if there's – I don't even go crazy and install any betas. Even if there's just an update for my iPhone or my iPad, I do a backup right before I do it.

Yeah. Well, fortunately, I do the – definitely do the iPhone backups because I rolled back from 8 pretty easily. That one was an easy one but this one was a nightmare. So – but it's back in action and I'm actually talking to you from it right now. There you go. So I got a follow-up on two dots from the makers of dots.

God, that game is annoying. It is so hard. I've got the level 75 but the problem is it's one of those ones where you can get up to five lives and it takes 20 minutes for each life to regenerate. Which makes some of the harder levels just almost impossible to get through.

I have broken down twice and I have paid a dollar each time to bypass a level with one of their enhancements. And I got tired of it and I put the gate – deleted the game, got it off my devices. And then I was sitting around, I got nothing to do for 10 minutes, pulled it back down because if you sync with Facebook, it remembers your spot.

So I came back. Everything was where it was. But there was this level I just could not get past. I'm on level 75 now out of 85 and I'm thinking, oh, now I wonder what happens if I just force quit the app before I run out of moves to save a life.

Sure enough, if you know you're not going to make it through that level, you don't have enough moves. You can just force quit the app, open it back up and boom, your life is back. Bob's your uncle. I just saved somebody a lot of trouble. So just remember that. If you're playing two dots and you don't feel like sitting around and you want to waste more time, you can waste as much time as you like now because you don't have to wait for the lives to regenerate.

You are welcome, internet. Ooh, fancy. A long time ago, you told me about Touch of Modern, which is one of those curated sites where you have to become a member and you get emails with all the fancy stuff. And weird-ass Japanese sex toys and very expensive watches and the like.

Yeah, cool stuff. Cool stuff. Yeah. I found – Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I just kind of – you kind of just go like – it's one of those shark fin things with all those sorts of sites where like I look at them obsessively for like a couple of weeks and maybe order one or two things. And then kind of still look at it again every now and then for a couple of months and then I completely forget about it.

Yeah, I still get the emails from them and I glance through the products and nothing in there I can afford. Yeah, that's the problem too. So I found one through an email newsletter about cool facts that I'm on and this one is called The Gromit. Right. And it's the same kind of thing but a little more – Cheaper.

Yeah, cheaper and just kind of more weird little stuff. I got a thing on there called The Pocket Monkey which is a credit card-sized multi-tool that you can stick in your wallet. It's FAA-approved so you won't lose it going through TSA check. Oh, that's nice. And it's got a bunch of screwdrivers and bottle openers and shit like that but it also doubles as an iPhone holder.

So if you stick a credit card through it, you can stick your iPhone on it which I thought was perfect because you can just keep it in your wallet then and when you want to sit it up to watch a movie or something. And it was like $20 and you get two of them. I have not used it once. Okay. But I got it. You got it. Well, I want to give – I'm prepared.

I want to give these guys a high five for not making you sign up to browse your catalog. I'm sure there are great statistics on stickability and returnability and making sure that people come back by forcing you to sign up for a site. But I like this the old-fashioned way and I'm very happy about that.

You should always be able to browse somebody's catalog without giving any information. Yeah, that is the big problem with Touch of Modern because if I'm on my phone and I get the email and I want to look at something, it makes me try and sign in. And no. So I close the browser, delete the email, and off on my merry way.

Don't make it harder for somebody to buy something from. You make it easier. Amazon doesn't require you to sign up to look. No, they don't. Audible does, I think, but they're a subsidiary. Subsidiary. Subsidiary. Yeah. A wholly owned subsidiary of Fly By Night Industries. So yeah, check out the Gromit.

There's fun stuff on there. There's a couple things I might actually pick up. Yeah, they seem to have a lot of the stuff that you see popping up on kind of viral ads as well. Just like the cool little things like, you know, chord organizers that are all funky looking. And they've got a lot of good stuff in here. Yeah.

Thumbs up. Candy, candy, candy, candy. Just in case you're missing the sounds from the 2010 World Cup, we'll have a nice little link in our YouTube with a nice clip of the Vuvuzuelas.

Because they were kind of fun, but I don't miss them. Turn it off. Oh, God, I hate those things so much. It was beyond annoying. I mean, it was very funny, and we can all laugh about it now, but at the time, it sucked. So, no Vuvuzuelas at the current World Cup.

Although, we do seem to have a breaking news theme, bad reffing. Apparently, Mexico has had some very questionable calls, much like the callers. No spoilers. No spoilers. Hey, I'm not saying the score. And by the time that this is up there, all three of today's games will have been played. Well, I haven't got to see it yet, so don't be a ruinous bastard.

I will not. So, speaking of annoying, I just got word from a buddy of mine that Eben Pagan, also known as David D'Angelo, the godfather of the pickup artist community with Double Your Dating and his really scammy info product business, has joined the world of the podcast.

Oh, boy. Yep. You actually going to listen? I'm going to listen to it because, you know, I like to arm myself against these people and be able to tell other people how to avoid them. Yeah, and unfortunately, he's listed at number 25 in the top 100 audio podcasts now. He's got six episodes out.

He's been publishing since June 5th, it looks like. But here's the thing. He just doesn't even know. The title of the podcast, which makes it impossible to find, is a domain name. He titled it GetAltitude.com. GetAltitude is his crappy e-product line.

And it's – you can't search for it. I mean, you can search in the titles, but you can't – you ruin half of your SEO visibility. So, I'm going to tell you, right there, that's a dumb move. So, don't listen to what he's selling.

So, I will listen to it all this week and then come back with an actual report on it since I just found out about it. So, this is breaking news. So, we're going to have a great rant next week. Oh, you betcha. You betcha. Yo, seriously? Are you shitting me?

Shockingly, I did not go for a World Cup statistic for Are You Shitting Me? Although, there were plenty to choose from. And actually, I will send a link to pop into our show notes at GrumpyOldGeeks.com, which had a great kind of – another – it came from the spot, which I talked about earlier, which is Slate's soccer blog.

It was a nicely well-produced video that just kind of goes through all the crazy statistics involved with the World Cup. So, I'll pop that up in the show notes. But, my shitting me for the week, there are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos. This doesn't really surprise me. No. Well, actually, it kind of does surprise me a little bit because I remember fake flamingos being quite the big thing when I was younger.

But, I can't tell you the last time I've seen one anywhere. Oh, dude. Welcome to the Midwest. Drive through every trailer park out here. You'll see a ton of them. You'll see flocks and herds of them. There you go. And it's not like they decompose. So, everybody – every fake flamingo that's ever sold is still probably in circulation in somebody's garage.

I know my mom literally has three or four of them in her garage mainly because we save them as gag gifts and send them around at Christmas. And then two years later, they get sent back. So, there is an underground market for the fake flamingo. Well, who knew? Who knew that? But another interesting fact about the fake flamingo, the species was endangered and stopped replicating when the manufacturer went out of business in 2006.

However, within three years, somebody else had bought the rights and started remanufacturing them. So, for three years, you couldn't get a fake flamingo. Wow. I didn't know that you needed rights to make a fake plastic bird. Well, I mean – oh, see? We can start up a disrupt company where people can order fake flamingos.

Then we'll just infringe on their copyright from their phones. But it's a bird. You can't just sculpt another one and make it in plastic and sell it? I'm sure you can. But these guys were famous. They cornered the market. Oh, okay. And I guess nobody decided it was worth starting up one. Capitalism is a strange place.

Isn't it? Closing shout-outs! A big shout-out to one of my comedy heroes who passed away this week, actually quite young at 56, Rick Mael. He was the star of The Young Ones, which is a very influential show on, I believe, both myself and Jason.

We love that damn show. He also played Drop Dead Fred, which you might know him from. More famous in the UK than here, obviously, but a very, very funny man. Yeah, he's very sad. Very sad. He was very funny. And if you've never seen The Young Ones, go out and get it.

It's hilarious. It is very, very good stuff. Yeah, it was a bummer. Yeah, sad news, sad news. So my shout-out for the week is Resistance Pro Wrestling. It's Billy Corgan's little pet project. I'm going to see them tonight, and they just got a show deal on AMC, so you can watch them soon on their own reality TV show.

Oh, joy. Hey, it's fun. This is my third time, I think, going, and I have a blast every time I go. They do one show a month here in Chicago. And it's in an Arabian horse farm, so there's animals around. It's very cool, very cool. And the wrestling's really good. So who knew that you could – Is it real or is it all showy, WWF style?

Well, yeah. It's professional wrestling. Real wrestling. Okay. It's real, real professional entertainment, as they say it was. Does Billy Corgan ever show up? He's there every week or every month. Yeah. No, he's a major contributor to the show.

He's part of the company, and he's around all the time. He generally gets on the mic every show. He gets up and does a bit. So it's cool. All right. Well, tell him to write a decent album, for God's sake. I think I'll pass on that. I like his stuff, though. I liked his stuff.

I haven't heard anything recently. Yeah, you don't want to. Keep your memories, man. Keep them. Oh, man. It's cool. I dig the show. Everything there is fun. All right. If you're in the Chicagoland area at some point, check him out, and we'll put a link in the show notes.

And come say hi, because I'll be hanging out in the front row. All right. And if you're anywhere in the Santa Monica area, I will most likely be at Finn McCool's for every single World Cup game, except when I'm podcasting. Then you'll be there for pub trivia, so. That's it. You might as well just move in and get a room.

You know, I moved about as close as I could to the place anyways, so. Yeah, so you can go home and shower, hopefully, every day. But for the rest of the month, yeah, go see Brian at Finn's. They have great fish and chips. Yeah, I have been walking home to shower to take the stink of the bad refereeing off me. Okay.

I'll talk to you next week, and we can talk about more fun soccer. Well, okay. And we can talk about wrestling. Woo-hoo! All right. I'll see you later, man. See you, man. 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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