66: German Potato Salad

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. Hey Brian, how are you? How are you up there in Toronto with your Germans and stuff?

It's been a very good trip so far. It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of Germans around here and people are well into the World Cup here as opposed to LA. So the last couple days has been a blast. Well, 7 to 1, Jesus. We try to be a little bit humble about that because there's one more game to play here.

Okay, okay. Don't want to jinx it. Exactly. So last week, we talked about some interesting things at the beginning of the show. And I want to just say if you're listening to this show and you haven't heard last week's show, I encourage you to go back and grab it. It was a holiday weekend here in the States and people were doing other stuff elsewhere.

But – so a lot of people didn't hear our last episode compared to all the other ones. So check it out because this story directly impacts – it is directly a follow-up from last week's episode. Now, I've talked about the crazy domains I have on this show before and one of them I have is called twatbot.com.

It was a joke against Hotbot, which was a search engine way back in the day when – I mean search engines were – it was actually a business that you could get into and maybe be successful. Yeah, there were things other than Google. And Bing. Well, who uses Bing?

I don't know. So we finished the show. You send it to me. I post it. And about an hour later, I get an email from somebody that wants to buy it. And I go back and forth with him. He had an ad blocker on so he couldn't see the buy it now button on the page.

So I'm like, yeah, well, hey, genius, there's a big button there that says buy it now. He's like, oh, ad blocker. So he went and did it and we haggled a bit and settled on a price and he just PayPal'd me the money. He's like, no escrow, forget it. It's not worth the escrow and the hassle and the time.

And I look at his name and I'm like, Brian Sloan. That sounds familiar. And I just did a little Googling around and actually I didn't even have to Google around. I went to our show notes. You didn't Bing around?

Nope. I didn't Hotbot around. I didn't Ulta Vista around. And yeah, he's the guy that invented the Autoblow 2, which we covered in the show last time. Spooky. So I asked him, I'm like, hey, dude, how did you find this domain?

How did you get in touch with me? He's like, I'm just sitting in my hotel room in Beijing. It's like two in the morning. I'm browsing domains. I'm like, you realize I just posted a podcast that you featured heavily in like an hour ago. And he's like, no, that's really creepy.

I said back and forth to him and he's like, holy crap, man. That is the weirdest story. And I mean, just even telling it now, I'm like, man, that was bizarre. Just out of the blue, you know, two intersecting points. Turns out he's as cool as we thought he was in the show. And yeah, he sent me a demo unit.

Oh, wow. A freebie, as it were. Put your, well, money where your mouth is, Jason. So yeah, it showed up yesterday, true to his word. And I looked at this thing and I'm just like, okay, now what?

Well, I think it's probably pretty simple, Jason. Insert A into B. Yep. Sure did. Okay. Works is advertised. Wow. Utterly works is advertised. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but let's just say if you're used to the real thing, I'd say eight times out of 10, if you close your eyes and pretend you're in a factory, you can't tell the difference.

Well, you know, Bjork had that video where she was all roboted up and looked pretty hot. So I guess you could go there. Yeah, yeah, you close your eyes and pretend it's Bjork in the room. But I got to say for a Christmas present for single guys, I think this is it.

I'm pretty sure that every single guy should have one of these. Actually, every guy should probably have one of these. That's a stunning straight up endorsement. It really is. I really don't want to go into too much more detail, but I'm just going to say it works as advertised quite well.

Well, I mean, just in case you happen to be going for some kind of level of perfection with your new toy, please note that studies have again shown that 10,000 hours of practice is not the magic number, Jason. Thank God. And pull back a nub. Yeah, another study has now come out.

Business Insider has the direct link. I found it off Lifehacker, which kind of goes into the background a little bit more. But 10,000 hours of practice isn't going to do anything for you. But we covered that on our show ages ago. And even when the studies weren't there, it's kind of like, well, you'd still need a little bit of talent.

You sit there and do 10,000 hours of something you're crap at, you're still going to suck. Yeah, look at me in web design. There you go. Yeah, we covered this in Gladwell's, you know, being debunked again. And same thing with the David and Goliath book. His books are fun reads, but, you know, they're stretching the facts quite a bit.

Yeah, it presents a scientific hypothesis, and he runs through a bunch of case examples, which don't necessarily mean that works for everyone. Shocking. You know, here's one thing about being human. Nothing works for everyone. Yep, that's true. I think we should probably, you know, this applies to diets.

This applies to exercise. This applies to the 10,000 hours of practice. It's just, we're all over the map. Yeah, I mean, there's some common rules, like you do have to practice a lot to become a master. But, you know, some people can become a master at something in two years versus 10.

I'd rather not. I just remember this from skateboarding. There were a lot of us who started, and when we started, we sucked, and it took us years and years to get anywhere near, like, decent at it. And there were some kids, you would just give them a board, and they knew what to do. Yeah. You know, there are naturals, and there are unnaturals.

Yeah. And if you're really trying to make it in something, particularly something either creative or athletic, if you don't have the natural ability, no amount of practice is going to make you that 1% that's out there for a living astounding everyone and making millions. Right. The one thing that will keep you going, though, is persistence.

Persistence is probably the biggest factor in becoming really good at anything. It's just keep doing it. Yep. Practice, practice, practice. Agreed. Now, some twat's going to be practicing making his potato salad. I don't want to spend too much time on this because it's covered to death, and honestly, I don't want to give this guy that much more press.

I disagree. I think this is fantastic. I love this. I think we should talk about it the entire show. But then how will we cover your blessed World Cup? Well, nobody wants to hear my World Cup stuff on this podcast. Olé, olé, olé, olé, seven to one, Germany.

You can have a World Cup of potato salad. So this was started by this guy, Zach Danger Brown, but he's in our business. He's one of us. He's a developer. He's a co-founder of a web shop out in Columbus, Ohio. He didn't come out of nowhere.

This is a guy who's just like us. I'm looking at it. He got as frustrated with this whole Kickstarter thing as we did, hence this prank. By the way, a lot of people are calling it art. That is really stretching the definition of art. This is a practical joke. This is a let's see if I can get away with it and expose how stupid this concept really is.

It's not art. Yeah, the Bob Lefshitz whatever. I can't pronounce his name. I'm just calling him Lefshitz all the time. That's fine. You know my feelings on him. He's spot on sometimes, but his entire career is based on him extrapolating about shit he knows nothing about.

Yeah, he's kind of like an ignorant troll. Yes. Because I re-signed up. He finally fixed his mailing list so a .me address can be considered a proper domain name now. So I re-signed up and I re-signed up just in time to get his potato salad rant where he was comparing it to great art.

And I'm just like, yeah, I should probably unsubscribe right now before I throw something. Yeah. Well, just in case you've been living under a potato, this is a Kickstarter that is – he's going to make potato salad. He's not giving it to you. He's making it for him. He's going to make a lot of it depending on how much you – if you donate up to $100, he'll try two different recipes.

He's working on a new mayonnaise. That's if you pay even more money. And he's made almost 50 grand now. Well, no, it says receive a bite of the potato salad for $3 or more. So I guess that covers postage. Oh, he's going to ship some out now. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got all sorts of things. But he's made $46,439 off of a goal of $10. So it will be interesting to see how Kickstarter reacts to this if they actually pull it. I think the press would probably be just all over him for that.

Well, I think at this point they would have pulled it if they were going to. And, yeah, they realize that they cannot anymore, that this has to play out as it is. And I'm sure that they will be changing their terms of service shortly thereafter. Yeah, honestly, this can't be good for Kickstarter. It makes them really kind of look foolish. Good. So remember I talked about my Misfit Shine and how I liked the sleep tracking that it did for me?

Yes. Yeah, well, it's gone bye-bye. Okay. The chintzy little rubber bracelet that it comes with has the side effect of it just the shine popping out of it randomly. And fortunately, for the most part, it's always popped out in my house. This last one, it popped out while I was on a walk at night with the dog.

That's not good. No, it's gone. A hundred bucks down the crapper. So on the upside, I get to delete the app. Well, I've got a bit of breaking news in the same realm then as well. A friend of the show, Ted, out here who I just saw the other day, he got one of those Pebble watches a while ago, which was supposed to be one of the newfangled, best possible fitness trackers out there.

He was still wearing it. I said, well, what do you think, man? You've been using it for a couple months now. He's like, it sucks. It hardly – it hardly – it always – the syncing between the watch and the phone breaks all the time. He can probably – he's had to like debug it seven different times. The last time it went out, he stopped giving a crap.

They're just not there yet. Okay. This is not breaking news. It has been known since the Pebble came out that it has sucked. Well, breaking news for me. Okay. And I'm just trying to report it because I just had the conversation yesterday. Okay. Now, so if you've seen the Flintstones for the first time, are you – is that now breaking news?

Breaking news! Something happened in Bedrock today. Wait, that was a cartoon? Ah, yes. Comment of the week. So, speaking of friend of the show, Ted, as I was sitting around with him yesterday and we were having a bit of lunch, he kindly informed us that he's keeping up with all the shows.

He's just a little bit behind, but he did have a question because in a previous episode where we were talking a lot about music, Jason, you decided and declared that the Beatles were the most overrated band of all time. He would like some clarification on this issue. Okay. This is very straightforward.

A lot of people give the Beatles a lot of credit for modern music and rock and roll, which – Rightfully so. Here's the deal. I don't like the Beatles. That's it. Okay. They could be the biggest geniuses in the world. I have to listen to them all the time because my roommate loves the Beatles and, yeah, I don't get it.

They don't do anything for me. That's all it is. I just don't like the Beatles. So, Ted, to clarify the statement, it is the Beatles are the most overrated band of all time for Jason. Yes. Although, I have to say, probably 50 percent of my friends feel the same way. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's just one of those things that as the generations go on, they start to become less meaningful and you start to care a little bit less about the history. I mean, all the things that the Beatles did. And so much of it actually, excuse me, in my opinion, that make the Beatles what they are and just gods was a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff.

Not so much their songs as the production, which kind of heralded the modern age of music recording. More about that later. So, that's what really makes it for the Beatles for me. I mean, I love the later stuff that they did, the really experimental stuff. Oh, that's the stuff I hate the most. Oh, I love that stuff.

If I hear, I want to hold your hand one more time, I'm going to shoot myself. Don't come over here then. And I've become, in my later years, I've become much more into the Rolling Stones than the Beatles, actually, because they're just a bit more rock and roll, a bit more dangerous. Yeah, yeah.

As far as like the old classic bands, there's a lot more stuff that I like a lot more than the Beatles. I've actually been getting into Led Zeppelin, surprisingly. I've never listened to them and my roommate decided to fix that and he's been playing a lot of Led Zeppelin for me. It's actually pretty good. You know, I might need your top ten Zeppelin tracks because there's somebody I've never gotten that into either.

Okay. I will dig that up. But yeah, I just think the Beatles suck. That's all. I'm an Elvis guy myself.

In the news. I don't want to become a sports show, but I am leading with LeBron James, who is all over the news. Well, you're not taking a sports tack with him. This is a website tack.

There's a very funny takedown of his website because he did, I believe, either he or his people announced that his choice of whatever crappy overpriced team, he's going to go crappily overpricedly paid some crappy game that you only have to watch the last two minutes for, will be announced on his website.

So one of the writers over at Slate went to his website and basically – I love the tagline, which is why it's on our show right now. LeBron James' website is the HTML apocalypse. Yep. I went and checked out – I read the story and I went and checked out the website and I was amazed that it wasn't Flash.

When I first saw it, I was just like, okay, it's just going to be a Flash monstrosity and whatever. And it's HTML with CSS transitions and the whole nine yards of animations. Modern coding. Yeah, it's just fucking hideous. It's just hideous. Now, yeah, I'm someone who basically builds – I call these vanity sites.

I build vanity sites for a living, but this one is truly revolting. Yeah, they obviously did not hire anybody with any UX experience whatsoever. I don't necessarily agree with that because having been in this process and when you build a vanity website, there is either a massive ego at the helm of it who overrides all of your decisions or a team, which is even worse.

And I wouldn't be surprised whatsoever if whatever firm that built this also has a number of stunning, well-done websites but just got overrode by the egos involved that know nothing. That's true. This could be just a failure of the team. Because, yeah, when it's somebody who doesn't know anything and says, can you make that blink?

You know, the old blink issue. I would like my name bigger. Yeah. It's pretty big. So it could just be, yeah, a failure of the crowd as it were. I'm just – I was kind of sad that they didn't name the firm. I'm sure somebody could do some research and find out who did it, although they may be distancing themselves from it.

Yeah, yeah. I did take a quick look at the source code and they did not put themselves in there anywhere, which is what I do on sites that I'm not particularly thrilled with that I've done either. Absolutely. And so speaking of vanity sites that people aren't thrilled of, my old company, 65 Media, because they put this proudly on their website, but I think they went out of business for a variety of nefarious reasons, did the site for Jim Carrey, which is historically one of the worst websites ever made.

He's never had a good one. There's never been an iteration of JimCarrey.com that's been decent. This one, though, with the – I mean, this is the crazy Flash one that's – his head's on everything. A million-dollar website, a million bucks. Jeez. And I've got to say, from a Flash perspective, it's gorgeous.

From a usability perspective, it's atrocious. I left that company right when they got this project, so I didn't really have anything to do with it. Thank God. Because they were just going all Flash, and I'm like, look, this is going to be your project for the next year. I'm out of here. There's no back end on it.

It's just some JavaScript if you need some Twitter stuff pulled in. So I'm going to hit the road, and good luck with Jim Carrey there. So, I mean, it's pretty. And finally, I have a computer that it can run on because back in the day, you couldn't even run this thing. Even on my high-powered MacBooks back then, it barely ran.

And on the – I was talking to the guy who built it, who did all the animation. He's like, yeah, even on all the massive PC towers in the office, you could tell when somebody looked at it because all the fans just went to Macs. Yeah, again, how do you even launch that? I don't understand how that happens. But I do because I deal with insane clients.

I was going to say this is how it ties into what we were talking about with LeBron James. The mind behind that website is the person whose name is on the front page, and he knew nothing about how the web works or the internet. And he just – that was his vision. Right. And that's what he got. And he got summarily just taken apart in the media when it launched.

So, you know, it is a failure sometimes of the talent or the talent's team, not the actual producers of the project. Yeah, that happens way more often than you'd like. But God bless people having visions. Well, sometimes.

I found a – I forget how I found this link, but it was on Reason.com. And it talks about Sergey and Larry doing a joint interview, which they rarely do. It's a 45-minute interview. I didn't really kind of go through the – I didn't watch the whole thing because it's 45 minutes of Sergey and Larry, which would make me want to punch something.

But it had a nice link-baity title, which is Google's Larry Page. I think the government is likely to collapse under its own weight. And he makes some very salient points about healthcare, the healthcare system and why they don't even want to touch it because, like, the regulations are so bad. And, you know, he just kind of extrapolated that out and they pulled that point out.

I recommend checking out the article. He's got some actually pretty good points. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is about, you know, just how insane regulations are and government rules and regulations. And then these companies are all – you know, they're multinational companies, so they have to deal with every government's rules and regulations.

And it just starts to get insane. We've built these colossal walls around everything now. And some of them make sense, which is, you know, I don't want to get off on too hypocritical of a rant here where we get called out for it because I've spent a lot of time saying that the problem that we have with things like Kickstarter and stuff, and stuff like that is lack of regulation.

Yeah, it seems like there's either no regulation or too much. Yeah, there's no middle ground. There's a sweet spot, and we've completely lost control of that. So, I don't know. Check it out. It's a good read. But the best news of the week is Homestar Runner is coming back.

Homestar Runner was my favorite thing about the internet about 10 years ago. There was nothing better. Well, and it wasn't even so much Homestar Runner or all the other characters. It's about Strongbed checking the email. That was it. Yeah, that's very true. It's all Strongbed. Yeah, I couldn't care less about any of his other characters at all.

The only time that those characters were funny was when they were in a Strongbed piece. Yeah. I mean, talk about too soon because if this guy would have done this stuff four or five years ago, Strongbed would have its own TV show. Yeah. There would be movies. Yeah.

He missed the sweet spot of the entire explosion. He was there too early, and he might even be coming back too late. Yeah, I think so too because, I mean, there would have been Strongbed. Like you walk into a store now and there's Angry Birds stuff everywhere. There would have been Strongbed stuff right next to it if his timing would have been a bit better or if he would have kept with it just a little bit longer.

Yeah, this kind of reminds me of Zay Frank because Zay Frank had the show, which was his year-long project, and it made him just massively famous to nerds on the internet. And then he took a break from it because it was so much work and took too long of a break.

And he came back and he kick-started his comeback, but it wasn't what it once was just from getting an audience standpoint until he started doing those facts about videos, which is basically all it is now, curious facts about some kind of owl or whatever.

Those things are getting in the tens of millions of hits, and he made a Friskies commercial based on some of the stuff. I mean, he's making his way back, but he could have been a household name years before if he wouldn't have taken that break. Yeah, exactly. So hopefully Homestar Runner guy here is going to be able to pull it out.

As it were. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So I'm going to briefly go back to soccer, but in a different way as well. This is from the Take That Jesus Faults, which is a segment that I lobbied to have on our show, but when we decided, yeah, some people out there like the God and stuff, so we didn't do that.

But there's a great article on Slade. It's actually a pretty much basic kind of just general run-through of the demolition that Germany did against Brazil, the 7-1 game that was just a few days ago that caused me to basically collapse in a beer-stained, apathetic fit of joy.

Because for those of you that aren't into soccer, Brazil is this totem of magicalness that just they're the best team in the world. They've always been the best team in the world. Even if they're not the best team in the world, everybody treats them like they're the best team in the world. And the title of this article is, Brazil thought magical thinking would win them the World Cup.

They were wrong. And it's a good breakdown of the game, but it is like Brazil hosting the World Cup in Brazil, playing the semifinal. The amount of belief that they were completely unstoppable, both by the team itself and the fans, the prayers to Jesus, all of that meant nothing when you collapse and get destroyed.

My favorite quote of the piece was, Germany was like a 10-year-old playing PlayStation against his grandfather. And it was true. I actually watched the entire game in about 20 minutes because I had it taped. So I was just flipping through. And then every time I saw the score go up, I'd like go back 15 seconds and watch the goal.

And then I would just wait a little bit after. Like the pictures of the four-year-olds in tears was iconic. And somebody did one of the, you know, the pictures of the woman crying and it looked just like the World Cup logo with their face balming. Yeah, the memes that exploded the next day after the game were like just hilarious.

The statue of Jesus weeping. It was just good, good stuff. Although it does bring up an interesting thing because you forget like how young the kids are. They're not even kids anymore. I mean just the 20-year-olds that are out there creating and passing these memes around.

They are so far removed from history. And I don't know if it's a lack of education thing that's occurring now or if it's just the passage of time like I talked about a bit earlier with the Beatles. But they throw Hitler into these memes so easily. And I look at those and I'm still like, no, you don't do that.

Yeah, a little. Too soon. Well, here's the thing. It's never going to be, you know, late enough. I think it is now because they just – it's so removed from their life now. It's so like far in the past for them that it's just a thing that they can play with.

We've all laughed at the various – what's that movie that they take the Hitler bit from? Yeah, Downfall. L.A. Freeways and whatever. The whole angry Hitler thing was such a meme for so long. The movie was Downfall I believe, which I've still never seen. It's been in my Netflix queue since the meme started.

But yeah, I mean Hitler is – I mean what's the – you know, any sufficiently long argue on the internet will eventually get to Hitler or whatever it was. Yeah, that's very true. Godwin's Law I believe it is. But still, it's – yeah, they go to Hitler pretty quick.

Well, and I mean you've got Germany so it's an open – it's an open invitation. It's kind of an open invitation. But specifically that quote that you like so much, Germany was like a 10-year-old playing PlayStation against his grandfather. They put an image of Hitler sitting with a PlayStation controller in his hand. I thought this was a good article except it didn't get to the magical thinking part until page three at the very end, the last two paragraphs.

So it was a fun read but it just broke down the game, which was – I mean I'm not a massive World Cup fan. I eventually skipped most of the games and that one was just amazing to watch. You just watched them melt in front of your eyes.

It was so bad. As a German fan, it was just beautiful. I did. I felt bad for the Brazil fans. I really did and I'm like, I hope they have like a helicopter waiting for that Brazilian team because they are not safe tonight. And the German teams likewise.

But I don't know. Enough, enough, enough, sucker. Enough, enough, sucker. So Google Maps, they finally added the one feature that I've been wanting them to add since they came out, which is you can now measure the exact distance between two points on a map without having to do like a complicated route and drag the points around or whatever.

You can get a beeline, bird's eye distance between as many points as you want. Just right-click on the map and it will say mark distance and then you can measure distance between as many points as you like. I believe they've never had that. I mean, I've never tried it. I've had to write implementations like, you know, map API implementations to find that out.

So I'm well aware that this has been lacking. So it's really nice that they finally put this in. So if you're going to like do it, this is my use case for it. If you're going to do a pub crawl and you want to figure out the most efficient route without having to sit there and type in all the addresses of the places and move them around and all that stuff, now you can just go to the map and find all your pubs and plot the most efficient route.

That's a very good usage. Yes, I think so. So that makes me happy. Security? Ha! The LAPD. Yes. When you think of them, you think of things like Rodney King.

Useless. Yeah, tickets for no reason, jaywalking bastards. Stopping to give you a parking ticket while somebody runs by with a stolen TV. Disappearing, different witnesses, all the different things that you love with the LAPD. You don't think of them as data security specialists.

I don't think of them as specialists in anything. Being a pain in the ass, that's about it. So it was very interesting when during an interview with CNN while they were talking about how the great lengths they go to protect the data, they actually put in the username and password on the whiteboard. So you can just see the login.

It's a great story on TechDirt that talks about basically their history of failures with protecting all of the data that they collect, which is not insubstantial. No, I mean all the cameras they've got around with license plates and stop signs and things like that.

I'm sure there's quite a bit. Oh, there's got to be a ton. Yeah. So. Good times. Now, we've talked about the ways for hackers to have fun with the up-and-coming smart homes.

Yes. So, yeah, there's some weaknesses in some of the new smart light bulbs, which who the hell knew that there were smart light bulbs? I did. I looked into a lot of this stuff because I had just purchased a place in Santa Monica. So when I was around shopping around, I was like, well, wouldn't that be neat?

And then I went, well, it's pretty expensive and kind of lame. Well, some of the ones that do like the LED lighting where you can change color, temperature, and brightness and all that stuff, that's kind of neat. I got to say. It is. I mean, I've read some interesting, like, cool use cases where you can use if this, then that to, like, you know, if you double tap the light switch, it'll, like, turn everything into going to bed mode and brings everything down.

I mean, it's neat. But, you know, now we see things like this Kickstarter light has – that basically will give up your Wi-Fi passwords to anyone that's around your house. Not good. No. No. But Kickstarter. I mean, again, for me, I would love the idea of a smart house, but I am kind of really waiting for someone to take control.

I want it to be built into my existing environment, which in this case is all Apple, and I want to know it's secure. Yeah. I mean, it's not that difficult. And here's something that I didn't think we'd ever be talking about. There's a lovely Flash exploit out in the wild.

People see – oh, yeah. That's why I never – Jim Carrey. Don't visit JimCarrey.com. Well, people were posting these things on eBay and Tumblr and a bunch of places. I guess who fixed it? Google and Twitter, they patched it, and Adobe has released another update for Flash security.

But this was a pretty big one. Right. Yeah. I'm just – I can't believe I don't have Flash enabled on any of my browsers. I have to go in and manually turn it on for any particular use for it, which is not very many anymore. Thank you, Steve Jobs, the ghost of Steve Jobs, for pushing along the death of Flash.

Flash was a really great concept when it started, but like most things, it just started to get bloated and unmanageable, unfortunately, and people just did horrible things with their websites. But this is coming from a guy who built a lot of Flash websites. I have always – I learned it all the way back in the day. Were you back with Future Splash?

Yes, version one. I mean I remember when the Future Splash guys came to our office to give us tutorials and a couple of us in the office had downloaded it and just played with it for weeks before. They came to us and said, we didn't know you could do that with our stuff. I'm like, yeah, we've been hacking this since day one.

I think the first movie that we ever used Flash on was Hard Rain, which was Christian Slater. Town gets flooded. Continuing on, we should have a section title for this, just our Android screw-up of the week.

A security company basically got 20 phones that had been wiped by the factory, reset to factory settings. The company is called Avast, but they sell tools to do this, so it's kind of in their best interest to say that these things are easily hackable. But out of the 20, I think they got four user identities, but 40,000 photos off of them.

They could find out who the people were from the data that they got off of them. Yeah, that's not good. But, I mean, again, I think it's just because you and I have been in this sphere for so long. I would never assume that a factory reset is going to take care of anything. What other choice do you have with a phone, though?

I don't really have much of a choice with a phone, I mean, other than the big magnet. That doesn't even work because they use flash drives. I don't know what you would do with a phone. I've never even gotten rid of mine. I have a box in my house that has my old phones because I'm too paranoid just to get rid of them. Well, I mean, it's in the smartphone. With all my Apple stuff, I keep them just for nostalgia.

I have no nostalgia. The Apple ones have always been pretty good about killing your data. Now, when you kick it, they take off the encryption key, which all of your user data is encrypted with. So even if they can pull the data off the drive, it's all encrypted and the key is gone.

And the old ones used to do the old security arrays with overwriting the data with ones and zeros, like random ones and zeros, to basically kill any recovery attempt. I'm sure they didn't do 128 pass wipe like the CIA would do, but something is better than nothing.

Yeah, I just usually take the big hammer to the drives. Drill. Take a drill. Yeah, a drill. Yeah, that's what I didn't have a drill before, and I was getting rid of some really old drives. But then again, it was just work stuff, so I didn't care too much. But yeah, I just smashed the crap out of them until you could hear the rattling. Yeah, that works too, sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, you've got to be pretty into trying to get the data off that drive to do it at that point. It sure could be done, but hey, you get to see all my old flash source code. Ooh. Exciting. Maybe not. No, no, not very exciting.

So I have a double whammy from Cory Doctorow over at, who writes a lot on Boing Boing. The first one, Big Data Should Not Be a Faith-Based Initiative, which is an interesting little article about sensitive personal information and how it can be removed responsibly from big data, which a lot of people are saying you can do, and computer scientists are pretty much saying that's impossible.

Well, look at what we talked about before with all the search records, a couple million search records. These people were backtraced. It was anonymized. They were backtraced within hours, if not minutes, of the data being released, put back together, and boom. Because even trying to anonymize location data is really hard.

Even if you take your usage in a certain location and then just change your origin point to someplace in, say, the Sahara, you still have a pattern there of data locations that you can then probably fairly easily, if you're really good and have a really big computer, map against other locations in the world that match points of interest that, I would say, correlate to points that you've been.

Once you get a couple matches, then you can kind of hone in on freeways and road systems. Yeah, you can come up with an exact match with a decent data set and overlay that to another point. There's a lot of things in there that de-anonymized or anonymized information is almost impossible if you have enough information.

Exactly, yeah. And this kind of brings me back to like these people are – they remind me a lot of our salespeople in the old client service business who would go out and say, our guys can do anything. Yeah. It's like, well, of course they can anonymize it. They're computer geniuses. They can do anything we want because they have computers.

And I think these people are on the same line and not doing any kind of homework. And then they get back to the office and then we go, we can't do that. Yeah. I mean the moral of the story is don't believe anything about how big data can be made safe. It just can't. It's big data.

And if you want to make any kind of assertion, bring a computer expert or here, bring a couple of them with you. Yeah. So even they – because even if you get a bad one, then chances are you'll get a good one in a bunch. Yeah. But still, you want expert opinions before you start making blanket statements that policy is going to be written against.

Agreed. Agreed 100 percent. And the second article from Corey that I popped up, and this is actually kind of all over the place now. A study – or a report has come out that the NSA trove shows a nine-to-one ratio of innocence to suspicious people in, air quotes, targeted surveillance.

And, of course, the question is what does targeted mean? Yeah. Yeah. And that's what the article gets into. And I'm kind of on the fence on this. I mean, obviously, I expect – I want our government to be doing surveillance like this, and I expect that there's going to be a lot of false positives. Of course, you're going to be looking at people that are connected to other people, and they're going to be completely 100 percent innocent.

The ratio feels a little bit high to me. Something does feel a little bit wrong. And as I read through the article, the concept of targeted that they're using isn't necessarily the same one that I would use. But I don't know. Like I said, I'm on the fence with this. I expect this to happen.

I kind of want it to happen. I'm just not sure about how high it's getting. I think that ratio is low, honestly. I would expect it to be 9,000 to 1, 900,000 to 1, not just 9 to 1. But either way, yeah. They're slurping. They're keeping everything with some exceptions.

It's the nth degree of separation that they were using. And once you get – Once you end up on a list, you're on a list, and they're going to collect everything from you. And I'm sure I'm on that list because I leave the country as often as I do. I've been out about that. And I've searched for tour. And you married a Canadian.

Yeah. So good times. I hope they enjoy all my check-ins at Tim Burton's. At the library. Robogenesis. It's a novel. It is. I'm still working my way through it.

I think I might not even finish it. I finished it two nights ago. I enjoyed it. You seem to not be so keen on it so far. No. The plot line between the little girl and the side plot with the robot just is not holding my attention at all.

So I don't know. I might just have to let this one go. I suggest you power through it. You think so? It's worth it? Yeah. Okay. They don't touch on that. It starts with that. They move away from it. I'm not 100% crazy about where he went with it, but it's good enough to make me wonder where he's going to take it in a third book.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. I mean, it just felt to me – here's the thing. In our original version of the show notes, I called it a sophomoric attempt. And even when I wrote that, I knew that because I knew he had written other books. But it feels like just the second book in a series, but it also feels like the second book in his career because I can't – it's disjointed like my sentence just was.

It's completely disjointed. You know, it's an interesting thing because we've started dealing with a lot of authors that are kind of writing on basically, you know, very cutting-edge tech topics and extrapolating them. And a lot of these writers come from the same fields as us, you know, the computer scientists and technology guys that have just kind of decided to take a stab at creative writing and don't really have the background for it.

So we're reading a lot of books by people that aren't really writers, but they're finding their way. I think the problem that Daniel H. Wilson, the guy that wrote this book, is having is that his first book – well, not his first book, but the first book in the series – what was it called?

Robo-pocalypse? Robo-pocalypse. It was so strong. But it's a bit of a – it's – it was hard for it not to be because that was basically a straightforward war novel. And in this, he's trying to bring in kind of bigger concepts. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'll finish it. I would suggest you do because I did really like where he went at the end of it.

And they do get away from that storyline that's bothering you quite so much. Okay, good. Hopefully, I'm getting close to that. So I still recommend both. And I'm definitely looking forward to – there's no doubt in my mind there's going to be a third, and I want to see where he takes it because he ended on a kind of grand concept of what could happen, which I like.

Because I finished it and I just – I tear through authors, I went back to go read his sophomore effort, which is called Amped. I've just begun it. I may be five, six chapters in so far, and it is definitely – the writing is much worse.

He's learned quite a bit. But again, he's got some great big concepts. And I like the big concept of this book as well. So as of right now, I would say if you've read both of his books and are kind of liking where he goes with them, go back and get this one.

But I'll have more on this one next week. Excellent, excellent. And I would like to point out that one of the best people in this genre, who is basically an IT guy who moved into creative writing, is Daniel Suarez, who we've talked about ad nauseum. And I found out one of my friends who read Robopocalypse had not read Demon and Freedom TM, which is just a travesty.

Yeah, those are probably the best books in these kind of geeky guys going off to become creative guys. Yeah. Yeah. And that one is more like something that actually could happen if Google – it might be Google in 10 years. Very easily beyond. I wouldn't even say 10.

I'd say five. Yeah. Now that they have all the military robotics companies, it's even closer for Demon, for sure. I found a link on Fastco Labs, a little article about the music industry's next big disruption.

It says – the title is, Why the Music Industry's Next Big Disruption is in the Recording Studio. So that obviously caught my attention right away. And I was like, Recording Studio, people still use those? Because that – in my opinion, that entire industry has already been disrupted. We've seen them shut down left, right, and center because everybody is just doing their stuff on their laptop in their home with some acoustic tiling, unless you're doing big drums anymore or you're a big, crazy, huge rock band with lots of money.

Nobody's in the recording studio anymore. But then I read a little bit further, and what they're actually talking about is this is a new music creation software system. They're not calling it just software. It's a system, and it's called Lander, which is a horrible name, L-A-N-D-R.

And it's an online system where they are basically crunching big data on music, because music is basically just math at the end of the day. This is basically targeting music engineers, those geeky little beloved guys with big beards that sit in the studio and basically take all your tracks and kind of mix them and put little effects on them to make them sound good or whatever.

At the end of the day, different genres of music is just big data. It's algorithms that these guys just learn over the years. You know, a rock song is going to have certain frequencies and certain instruments highlighted, and other ones are going to be brought back in the mix a little bit more.

That's the genre of rock. Country music, slightly different. R&B, slightly different. Again, it's just big data being applied to kind of these types of sounds. Now, obviously, if you're a radio head and you're doing crazy experimental stuff, or the Beatles back in the day, hence my love of the Beatles to do a callback to that, they did really weird, interesting things that were not the norm, which made them stand out.

But if you're just, if you're, say, I don't want to, oh, what the hell, I don't like country music anyways, I'll just say some names. You know, if you're Brad Paisley, 99% of the time, your songs have a very specific set of things applied to them in the studio. This entire system basically is automated, getting rid of the engineer.

It just uses big data and algorithms to apply. So instead of hiring an engineer, you record all your tracks, you upload it to the system, and boom, it gives you a professionally mixed result. No engineer required. So it's kind of like presets in Photoshop. Exactly. It's applying a set of different presets.

So it'll analyze your track, figure out what kind of sound it is, and apply the presets it thinks best. You get a certain level of tweaking involved. But basically, it's just gotten rid of the entire engineering process. Okay. So more people out of a job. Well, we'll see.

We'll see if it works. But again, it does come down to the creative aspect. Now, if you're super creative, and some of the engineers I've worked with in the past, they might as well be a band member. They're that creative with the sound in general. So this is obviously in its infancy. But say you've got kids.

They're like 13, 14 years old, and they're recording in your garage all the time and practicing. And they can hire an engineer. But the service will probably be relatively cheap. You want to put together a little album for them. Boom. Record them up. Throw it up there. Bob's your uncle. You got something mixed.

Add your Ramones filter, and you're on your way. Drop the Ramones filter. You're ready to go. Yeah. When you're talking about the people who are creative in a certain way, all I can think of is Steve Albini. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I don't think he's going to be out of a job for this. But he's always been a bit more than an engineer.

He's that nebulous producer slash engineer region where all the good engineers actually are. People like the garbage guy, gosh, why can't I remember his name right now? Beardy guy from Garbage who produced the other Nirvana album. So guys like that are just, they're geniuses in the studio.

But for your bog standard engineering purposes, and all you crazy engineers out there, don't write me. I know. I know it's way more than just pushing buttons and levers and applying different algorithms. But again, basic entry level, serviceable. And it was only a matter of time. It is just math.

So, yeah, I'd be interested to hear, you know, hear how it works. I'd probably try it out, actually. Well, yeah, give it a shot. You've got enough tracks where you can probably just... Yeah, I've got some of my old Among Us stuff that's all just in its basic tracks, pre-mixed format. And I've got the, our really good friend did the engineering job on it.

So I'd love to throw this up there and just see what they come up with and do A-B comparisons. Yeah, if you can do an A-B test and bring that on the show, that would be kind of fun, actually. Yeah, I'll look into doing that. So my software pick of the week is a free little tool called Disc Maker. It was originally Lion Disc Maker because it started with OSX Lion.

It's been around that long. Never made your software after a specific OS. So especially on Apple. So all it does is you download an installer. I did it for Mavericks. So I went to the App Store on my Mac, downloaded the installer, and plugged in my thumb drive and ran this little tool.

And it gave me an installable version of Mavericks that I can plug into any Mac and reinstall the system or do a recovery on it. It's just really handy to have one of those. If you're a Mac guy, have a USB drive, a thumb drive with Mavericks or whatever the OS du jour is, Yosemite coming up.

Have that in your bag. So I needed it because I'm selling one of my old laptops, which I'll talk about in a little bit. And I needed to wipe it. And it's an Air. Obviously, no CD drive. And Mavericks, no CD anymore. So I had to go dig this up. And I haven't used it since Lion.

But man, it works like a charm. Free is the best price. And Bob's your uncle, you just need at least an 8-gig thumb drive. So check it out if you've got a Mac and you're ever on the road. Get one of these and just stick it in your bag. Because it will, at some point, when you most need it, come in handy.

I think I'm going to have to do that. I do not have that ready to go now that I am using my Mac for every time I travel. You were the one person I was thinking of when I was putting this in the show notes. Okay. I'm downloading it now. Media Candy. This one is for all the Star Trek geeks out there.

And I imagine that's almost all of us. Slate has this thing called Quora where people kind of – it's kind of more like an edited version of Reddit. People put in their questions. A lot of people talk about it. Okay. Real quick. Slate does not have Quora. Quora is a standalone company. Okay.

Well, they bring in whatever. Yeah. Quora is founded by some guys from Facebook. It's got a couple hundred million in funding. It's a big deal on its own. But this is a question from Quora. Yeah. They do this series where they basically end up taking questions from Quora and then they do – they find a guy that actually knows something about this stuff and then they write a real professional article about the question.

That's pretty cool, actually. I like that. Yeah. So it's really cool. So this is Why Did Starfleet Allow Families Aboard the Enterprise in Star Trek The Next Generation? It's a fun little read. I don't necessarily agree entirely with his premise on the answer. But what I found really interesting was the behind the scenes that happened there, the battle between Roddenberry's original vision and Berman and the guys that took it over.

So interesting stuff. I will have to read this because I remember in the first episode of Next Gen where there – was it Farpoint Station? Yeah. Where Picard is actually talking about families on the Enterprise. And I think he's talking to – he's either talking to Troy or the doctor about it as they're walking through the halls explaining the new Enterprise.

Yeah. Exactly. A lot of it was Roddenberry's big vision of what the Federation was going to be at that point so far removed from Kirk and the warships. And then the quick realization that that wouldn't necessarily make for a great TV show if they were just peaceful and going around. So Berman and Braga changed it drastically, quickly.

Yeah. Rick Berman, man. He was – between Berman – yeah. I could go anyway with Berman and Braga. We had to deal with them a lot at Paramount back in the day because I had my stint with the Star Trek folks. Exactly, yes. But yeah, the – I got to say though, if you're ever in the mood to binge something, Deep Space Nine is still my favorite of all the TV reboots.

I love Deep Space Nine. I still love Next Generation but I basically loved all of them. So probably the weakest for me was Enterprise, the last one. Yeah. I watched three episodes of that and I was done. I still made my way all the way through it but it was all right. And then in continual sci-fi news, apparently Bill Murray made a sci-fi comedy back in 1984 that has never been released and it is online now.

It's called Nothing Lasts Forever, an off-kilter sci-fi film directed by Saturday Night Live writing alum Tom Schiller. Never released but it is up and online and available to watch and apparently he plays some sort of conductor of a bus that's going to the moon. Did you watch it?

He said you haven't watched it yet? No, I just found this last night so I figure I'm going to – this is in my queue of things to watch. It's done in black and white and who the hell knows. It should be interesting. Oh, I'm definitely going to pick that up and check it out. I'm guessing it's on YouTube? Of course. It's on the tube of the U. Where everything is.

Yes. So a while ago I saw a trailer for this movie called Transcendence with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman and a pretty good cast. And I saw it and I'm like, man, I want to see that movie and now I finally can. So I did. Yeah, that was on and gone in theaters really quick.

I remember seeing the trailers for it going, this is definitely something I'm going to watch and never did. And it's one of those movies that – it's got a 6.4 on IMDb, which it generally isn't that spot on. It's usually a little low for me. And yeah, I think it is on this one. I give it like a seven and a half. The first time I watched it, it was – when I was done with it, I was just like, eh, that sucked.

But I thought about it for an entire day. I just couldn't get it out of my head because it's got a really great ending to it. The worst part about the movie is – remember the reporter chick from House of Cards that had an interesting first episode in season two? I don't want to give away any spoilers. Yes, I do remember her.

She's – I miss her character already on House of Cards actually. She had this – it had to be a wig or like proto-dreads but blonde hair and she just looked ridiculous and I couldn't get that out of my head when I was watching this. But as far as a tech movie goes, it goes into like the realm of the impossible for a while near the end.

But a lot of it at the beginning is really good. I mean I really enjoyed it. I thought Johnny Depp was actually pretty fantastic in it. Morgan Freeman was OK in it. I liked it. If you're into the coming of the singularity, that's why the name is Transcendence because I guess singularity is probably trademarked.

But they do a callback to the singularity in the beginning of the movie. Like some people will call it the singularity. We're going to call it Transcendence. OK. Liked it. I actually quite enjoyed this movie. All right. Well, that's good. I'm hoping it's on my plane flight on the way back.

It should be at this point. Well, it can be on your iPad on the way back. Or there's that. I think it's for sale. I'm pretty sure it's for sale. Where are our friends from Sweden? Well, it's definitely on Blu-ray from our friends from Sweden. Another thing that I saw this week that just kind of made me really upset was in the realm of the remake.

Yeah. Did you ever see the British show Broadchurch? I had seen episodes of it, and it's always kind of been on my list to go and watch it all. But I have not done that yet. I'm a huge mark for David Tennant. I love that guy. I love everything he's in. And I really like Broadchurch.

And it's one of those ones that just leaves you feeling kind of depressed at the end. But, you know, it's a detective show about a dead kid. So there's really kind of no way that it's not going to – Not a lot of hilarity at the end. They're remaking it on Fox almost point for point.

Tennant's going to be in it with then an American cast, and it's called Grace Point. They just changed the name, same story, kept Tennant, and put a bunch of Americans in it. And just looking at the trailer and seeing some of the cast, there's a lot of the cast that are actors that I just don't care for.

So I think that might be twisting it. I would say if you see this coming on, skip DVDs – I mean skip DVRing it and just go get Broadchurch and watch that because it's much – I haven't seen Grace Point, but I'm going to tell you right now Broadchurch is going to be better. There's no way that they can improve on it.

So speaking of really depressing TV shows, Netflix picked up season four of The Killing to finish out the story because there were three seasons of it before, and I'd never heard of it. I'm like, OK, well, maybe that's why they got canceled because it's crappy marketing.

So over last weekend, I binge-watched the first two seasons of it. It was really good. It was really good. OK. I'm just going to – it will be interesting because they're going to do a half season on Netflix to wrap up the – Just going to wrap it all up. Yeah, wrap the series up because I was left kind of spent after watching the first two seasons.

It's a lot like Twin Peaks without the weird. But the weird is what made Twin Peaks. No, this has really good – this has really good acting, a pretty solid story, and a really good cast. I really enjoyed it. I recommend it if you're into the cop drama murder mystery thing.

All right. I will have to take a look at that as well. You're filling up my days, man. I'm doing my best. Well, since you have obviously given up on Lois McMaster Bujold, I'm going to fill it up with other stuff that I think is good. No, no. I'll get back there. You know, I've got this whole World Cup thing. Once it's over, I'll have a big yawning hole in my life to fill with other things.

Okay. Good luck. The web's not dead.

In the listicle of the week category, I found this one this morning. My friend posted on Facebook called 35 Genius Travel Tips That Will Change Your Life Forever. Yes. It's actually a really good list because I would say 21 of those I know and use.

I use quite a lot of these as well. Well, some of these I'm – well, I didn't know but I'm not very surprised by. Number one is pretty genius. That was the first – that's the one that hooked me on the list which is when you go to book your flight, use an incognito window so it doesn't have your history.

So it can't tell that you've already been looking for that flight and you want it because they know if you want it, they're going to charge you more. Yeah, exactly. So they just pull in the cookies. They know you've been there before. Their prices go up. Number two, keep loose chargers and cables organized with a glasses case. I've been doing this for years.

It's genius. I don't use a glasses case. I use one of those – I think they're called Amazon Basics. That's the line. They've got a great case line over at Amazon. My roommate has a camera backpack by them. It's fantastic but I got a little – it's actually not little.

It's pretty decent size because it holds a USB drive but it holds all my cables and everything. It's hard cased and it's just for cables, for cable management and it's great. It was like $12, $13. I'll try and dig it up and put it in the show notes. But in a pinch of glasses case, it works great too.

Yeah, it works great. Number eight blew my mind. I mean I never personally forget my wall plugs for my chargers or things like that. But if you ever do, almost every TV in a hotel room at this point has a USB slot. You can use that to charge back up. Yeah, as long as you don't forget the cable at home.

If you just forgot the brick, that's fine. Yeah, exactly. But how often are you in a hotel or at somebody's place where you have the cable and don't have your laptop? Yeah, not very often. That's the thing. It's a cool trick but I think from a practicality standpoint, you're going to have a laptop around or somebody with you is going to have something.

If you want to charge overnight and you don't want to keep your laptop up. That's true. Yeah. So it will work for that. By the way, number one tip which is on here, which we've talked about on the show before. But as I'm out and about traveling, you find that you have very little time to actually have your phone plugged in because you're up and going.

Airplane mode, your phone charges like five times faster, if not even more than that. That is a genius lifesaver for me just every time I travel. Yeah, it works like a charm. Number 12, scan important documents before leaving your trip and it shows an idiot on his actual iPad.

Do not put it on any of your devices. Throw it up in a secure cloud environment, Dropbox, whatever it may be. I keep them on a thumb drive actually. That's actually good too. Thumb drive is smart but don't have it on your iPad or any device that is easily stolen. Yeah, the other thing that I do is I make Xeroxes of them and then in my suitcase, I'll unzip the liner and place the documents inside the liner and close the liner back up.

So if you're out and your passport gets stolen and your hotel room is still secure and your luggage is there, you can get back and get to your copy of your passport. So you have your passport numbers and your credit cards. So you have the number on the back to call with the credit card number. You know, yeah, it might be – it's a little dicey if you're worried about your luggage ever getting stolen but that's why I put it in the liner because most people are going to dump the contents and ditch the luggage right away.

So chances of it being found before you can, you know, cancel your cards and everything is pretty low. Yeah, exactly. And I would like everyone in the world to not read number 23. That's all I'm going to say because I've been using this for years and if other people cotton on to it, I'm screwed. Oh, that is a good – yeah.

When reserving airline seats for two people like – Don't tell them. No, it's in the article. Yeah, get the aisle in the window. So it increases your chances of luck. Nine times out of ten, I've ended up with an empty seat in between and it's fantastic. Now, my favorite is number nine, which I've been doing for probably five years, which is you roll instead of fold your clothes.

Yeah, I do that as well. Yeah, that's a must-have. To be fair, we don't travel in suits but – Well, no, no. It works well for suits but – Well, the suit one is in number 24 where you pack your suit coat inside out. Yeah, that's a good one. There's a lot of really cool – Well, this is actually a really decent listicle.

Yeah, a lot of stuff in here that I do all the time. So, it's good. Yep. So, there's my listicle of the week. Are you kidding me? We all know the first words said via phone because that was by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, when he made the first call on March 10th, 1876 to his assistant, Mr. Watson.

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. But do you know what the first text message sent was? I have absolutely no idea. And this is – I was surprised at how long ago this was. We have a link in the show notes so you can see the massive attempt of the cell phone that they actually sent it on. And since I'm in Canada, this is appropriate.

On December 3rd, 1992, Canadian test engineer Neil Papworth sent a text from one of Vodafone's massive computers to Richard Jarvis, a Vodafone director, and the very first ever text message said, Merry Christmas. Do they have Christmas in Canada? They do. And, of course, we all know what the first ever Snapchat sent was.

It was a dick. No, it's a dickie. It's a dickie. Come on, man. Got to use our show jargon here. It's a dickie. It's a dickie. So this one this week for me is just a little bit, let's say, stupid.

And it's making the rounds. It's the rocket skates that let you strap these hideous contraptions on and get up to 12 miles an hour, even though none of them go for more than an hour. So you can't even get 12 miles out of it. They look really, really stupid. They look stupid.

Yeah. What was that? Xanadu or something like that, especially they got these incredibly good looking models to wear these things in outrageous outfits and shoot around in them. This is dumb. This is as dumb. This is dumber than the Segway, which is pretty dumb to begin with.

This is dumber than the, you know, the gas powered bicycles that we see particularly a lot in Venice and Santa Monica. Isn't, aren't we getting fatter as a nation? Pretty much, yeah. So if we don't need to get somewhere in an actual car, which is far away and need to, you know, put things in said car and go back, shouldn't we either be walking or regular biking and not using all these powered things to get us these short distances at very slow speeds?

I believe you are correct, sir. Okay, just checking. So I know one person that will probably get these, and that's Tontek Celleck, one of the founders behind Microformats. And he actually wrote Internet Explorer for Mac, an entire version, like basically by himself. Smart guy. I used to know him up in the old San Francisco.

And remember those kids' shoes that you would like click and roller skates would pop out of the bottom? Yes, yes. Those are actually, you know, for kids, that's pretty cool. Yeah, he was a 30-some-year-old grown-ass man, and he would zip around with those things. So I think this, hopefully he's changed his ways now that he's a fitness guru.

But yeah, I think this might be up his alley. They look like they'd fit. But yeah, man. You'd think they would have learned from the regulations that Segway had to go through where you can't ride them on the sidewalk.

So somebody will complain and say, yeah, you can't ride these because they're powered and they don't have brakes. So I guess the brake is you start walking on your tippy-toes. Well, yeah. And then you get in a bike lane, but you can only go 12 miles an hour, so you're going to be slowing down all us bikers. Get out of the way. Don't fund this. No. That's a new segment.

Don't fund this. Don't fund this. Well, we should have done that. Closing shout-outs. I want to give a shout-out to a friend of the show, Ted, who's already been mentioned twice, and he gets his hat trick today. He's the Willy Wonka of Reed's Chocolates, which I'm about to go eat a big, huge pile of.

Reed'sChocolates.com. Check it out. They do amazing, amazing, tasty stuff. And that would be Reed Chocolate. Oh, Reed Chocolates. Not Reed's. Sorry. My bad. And to Miroslav Klose on taking the all-time World Cup goal-scoring crown away from Ronaldo, the Brazilian, in Brazil, against Brazil.

Go, Germany. Viva Deutschland. So my anti-shout-out this week is don't jinx yourself when you think you have new business and start talking about it and living life like the business has already arrived. One should wait until the checks show up.

Yeah, or at least the contract is signed. I made a terminal error this week, at least terminal to my finances. I went out and bought a shiny new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, like $2,700 for this thing. It is hands down the best computer I've ever owned.

It is fast as can be. It's a little bulky, but for the size, it weighs pretty nice. It feels sturdy. I love it. I love this thing to death, which is why I'm not going to take it back. But I had two big jobs that were lined up, and they were guaranteed in the bag from what everybody was saying, and then poof, in the blink of an eye, not going to happen.

That is an extremely good tip for you self-employed people out there or your contractors, much like Jason and I are. I have been spending basically the last two years chasing down a ton of projects, and every phone call basically assured me that, yes, we're going to do this.

We're going to start. We're ready to go. We'll talk next week. We'll touch base. Let's do lunch. And the job just doesn't come, and you really have to be careful with your finances and plan accordingly for such things and not do what Jason just did.

Like I said, the last two years has been us chasing, me and my company, just chasing after these gigs that were 100% in the bag, and they still haven't shown up. Thankfully, they're finally starting to come together now, so I can go buy a nice new Mac, but you've got to be careful.

I mean, this is ancient wisdom. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. I did not. But to be fair, Jason, you buy any new Mac thing that comes out anyways, regardless. I mean, well, here's the deal. My mom bought a bunch of Apple stock, and now she wants an Apple or a Mac.

But she says she wants an Apple. I'm like, you want a Mac? So this whole thing kind of played into it because I have to go back there this weekend to bury my grandmother, so I'm going back to Pittsburgh. And I'm thinking, oh, I'll just take my air with me, and then I've got this business coming in. So it should all come together in one giant ball of happiness, and everybody walks away happy.

Well, yeah, that's how it goes. Yeah, so kids, if you have a business, wait until the check's clear, and then still wait some more before you do anything stupid. That's all I've got to say. Good call, Jason. Thanks. Appreciate it.

Got any work for me? Not at the moment. Got a couch I can crash on? No. Some friends. I'll see. Okay. Let's wrap it up. All right. Anyways, well, I hope you have a decent travel.

I'm sorry about the circumstances, but you will have a shiny new Mac to play around with for a bit, so that'll be fun. It is fun. It is fun until I break down in a wall of tears. Way to end on a high note. Way to end on a high note. We are the grumpy old geeks. What the hell?

That is very true. All right, well, I am heading back to L.A., so we will be back again soon. And we've got guests. And we're going to have some guests coming up, which will be fun. Yep, we've got guests for at least the next two weeks, possibly three, so we should have some new blood. Excellent.

All right, man. Good talking to you. Good talking to you. Music for our show is provided by Among Us, which our lovely co-host Brian Schulmeister is a part of. Find a link to them in the show notes. And we are hosted by the good people at Libsyn, if you are a podcaster.

And would like to get up to two months free hosting, use the coupon GOG while signing up. And you can keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. On Facebook at Facebook.com slash GrumpyOldGeeks. On Twitter, we're at Twitter.com slash GOGpodcast. Or simply email us at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 66. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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