75: Applesauce Bitch

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. Morning, Jason.

Happy September 11th. It is September 11th today, which we'll talk about at great length a little bit later on in the podcast. We're recording a day early just in case anything amazing or bad or newsworthy happens today and you're wondering why it isn't in our podcast because Jason is off to Riot Fest tomorrow and I'm heading off to San Francisco.

Wee-hoo. I'm so excited. I am looking forward to it, but I'm dreading it because three days standing outside with my bum leg. I don't know how this is going to go down. Well, and we are grumpy old geeks and the festivals are not quite as appealing as they used to be. Something about standing around eating crappy food and having to crap at a port-a-potty isn't that appealing these days?

Well, I heard the food's pretty good at Riot Fest and I got VIP tickets so I can have the nice port-a-potty. That's the only way to do it. That is the only way I go to Coachella in style. Sadly, I'm the only friend of mine who has VIP tickets, so I'll be sitting there by myself. More booze and pooping for you.

Woo-hoo. So yesterday, when you were on the internet, did you happen to notice that things slowed down? No. No, I didn't either. So yesterday was another big online protest, Go Slow Day, which was organized to protest FCC and net neutrality, which I 100% agree with, but I noticed fuck all.

I saw it once or twice and when the little thing pops up, I'm so trained now because people use those for, you know, sign up for our mailing list and get coupons that I just immediately close it. So a lot of people just put up a pop-up window to slow things down?

I thought they were actually going to throttle their servers and things like that. Nah. Of course not. So nobody really played in. Apparently, big companies like Mozilla, Reddit, more about them later. Kickstarter, more about them later as well. Foursquare, which doesn't even exist anymore, Vimeo and BeatUp all did this and a bunch of porn sites hopped on the bandwagon just for fun, but didn't notice a goddamn thing.

So that's that. Yep. Flash in the pan. Well, speaking of Reddit. Yes. They made some money. Yeah, of course they did. They made a ton of money off of the hack celeb pics that they didn't host themselves. It should be noted that it was just links and they had a whole sub-edit or whatever the hell they call those things.

Sub-Reddit. Sub-Reddit, of course. And they made enough money to run their servers for a month, which is not an insignificant amount of change. Basically, they made more money on the three to four weeks that that sub-Reddit was up than they do from donations or any other revenue sources that they have ever.

Shocking. So here's the thing that I want to point out as far as Reddit saying we don't host the images. That is somewhat untrue. Right. Because when people create a link to an image, they create a thumbnail. That thumbnail is hosted on their servers.

So itty-bitty little boobs were hosted by them. Exactly. Little tiny kitty porn. Yeah. But anyway, the article in Wired that calls them out, this is one of those things. Yes, they made money because people did give donations.

They bought Reddit gold or whatever the crap is called. And they ended up shutting it down, which was back and forth with them. And their response to it is somewhat ingenuine and bizarre. But yeah, they're going to make money while it's still up.

But I mean they're in business to make money. So they're going to make money. But even if that money was their only goal, then they would have kept it up. So they had some kind of come-to-Jesus moment. Oh, well. But it's – here's the thing. Yeah. It's – there's no right answer here.

No. Unless they're going to give all the money back, which they're not. So what are you going to do? And who cares? You know, in related news, since we need some cash, I figured we should change our new Grumpy Old Geeks logo to J Law's Breasts. Is that cool? No. Okay. Damn. No, the whole Reddit thing is kind of a load of shit.

They're going to have to actually come down on the side of either being for free speech or not at some point. I'm not a big Reddit guy. I got into it for a little while because it was funny and it passed the time when I was bored waiting for emails to show up. But there's a whole culture there and there are people that take their Redditing very seriously and they basically live on the site.

And Reddit has always kind of stood for complete free and utter speech – free and utter speech, whatever I'm trying to say there. But you know my point. And this is a bit weird because they do – I mean there are some very shady parts of Reddit that involve some child porn that they try to quickly scrub away.

But they haven't gotten rid of those subreddits. They got rid of this one because a bunch of lawyers came after them. And that seems to be what defines their definition of free speech or not. You know, we'll give you free speech until somebody yells at us. Well, and is it free speech if you're posting stolen graphics?

Is that free speech? Granted, you could just say that they are links to. Yeah. And the burden is on the site that's actually hosting the images. Yeah. And that gets back to the Pirate Bay argument. Did they actually do anything wrong by posting links to the movies? Right. Yeah. They're just links, right?

But I don't know. It's a weird world that we're living in right now. It's a sticky, slippery slope. But people are still making money. Making money off of all this stuff. Pirate Bay is making money or else they wouldn't still be there. That's true. And other people that are making money are not Home Depot right now because they did finally confirm that, yes, the credit card data has been stolen.

Yeah. And the banks, the issuing banks are seeing a giant upswing in PIN number fraud. Like people actually being able to log in to the bank's phone system with the bits of information that they got from the hack and changing the PIN numbers on the cards and then going out and getting as much money as they can.

Right. Yeah. And one clever one, they said, oh, we're going on vacation to Italy, which bumps up the daily withdrawal limit. So they got – I think they got a hundred and – I'm going to have to look. They got a ton of money in a short amount of time. But it was like $300,000 in 120 minutes I think.

That's pretty damn impressive. Yeah. A lot of kids running around on their Vespas hitting all the ATMs. Yeah. Well, Home Depot, you handled it wrong for sure. I mean we all kind of knew this was happening. You guys were denying it, denying it, denying it. Thank you for finally confirming it.

Yeah. Muchos gracias. But in the future, all you companies out there, come out immediately as soon as possible. Don't do the deny thing. Yeah. And put out a statement right away that says, look, we are investigating this. This is big possibly. Plus, it's not exactly a new hack.

This is the same exact hack that's been used countless times already on many different companies. So there's no shame in this. Everybody is vulnerable to this. So just come out. Knowledge is power. Let's go. Yeah. And why aren't they shaming the software vendor for the crappy software that they're using?

Nobody is talking about that. Everybody is just picking on the company. But all these companies are using the same damn systems. Yeah. It's the same POS. POS. Yeah. Exactly. Speaking of POSs. I got a little bit of annoyance here. You know, I always talk about how shitty WordPress is.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, there's this other thing about WordPress called BuddyPress that a lot of people use. BuddyPress would be the basic en suite set of plugins that allows you to turn your WordPress site into a community site. A social network of sorts.

Yes. And one of the projects I'm working on is to take a BuddyPress site, which is a membership site, and transfer that into a completely custom standalone entity that I'm just writing from scratch. They're actually spending some money on it, which is the way you should do it if you're going to do this. Yeah.

They want a community that's not tied to WordPress because they've been using it for years, and it's a pain. Nobody likes it. The UI sucks, and every time you try and update something, then there's a plugin update, and it blows everything away. You know, the standard mess. Yeah, the standard mess. I mean, I ran a BuddyPress site for quite a while against my will.

It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I fought against it, and I fought against it. But at the end of the day, when somebody comes to you and says, we are only spending this much money, and we want this, there's not much else you can do. But yeah, and that led to tons of problems, all the same stuff we've always talked about with WordPress, which is I could not update WordPress because it would then break the entire site, and then I started to get hacked because I had an old version of WordPress, and nobody would listen to me.

Yep. So in going through all this code and trying to figure out how to pull everything out, I've been writing custom importers to get everything out of WordPress into its own custom database formats that makes sense because nothing makes sense in there. And also taking out BVPress and like writing a custom form that takes BVPress stuff.

It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of code. Yeah. And I finally got to the point where with BuddyPress, I'm like, okay, where the hell are the avatar images? And I found them like where they're on the server. But then I went and looked at the code. The code is what I want to bitch about here because nowhere in the database – this is going to get a little nerdy.

I'll try and keep it short. Nowhere in the database is a pointer to the avatar image anywhere. Every time that you load an avatar, it has to like generate all this custom key stuff, and then it pings the drive to say, hey, is there a file here? Oh, there's a file here. Okay, we'll use that.

Every time that you see a graphic on a BuddyPress site that's an avatar image, it's got to go through this whole dance instead of just putting a little record in the database going, this is the avatar image and a flag that says, yes, user has avatar or, you know, B, use Gravatar. That's it. And they go through – it is one of the – I just don't know what the thinking is behind it because it's so terrible.

There's almost more security on your avatar for a BuddyPress site than there is on, say, your iCloud with your naked photos. My God, it's not even security. It's just – well, yeah, it's security not even through obscurity but just bad programming. I mean, it's – Rudy Jashan, who was on our show when we were talking about it, he pretty much summed it up.

He was like, yeah, they just take a handful of shit, throw it at the wall, and see what sticks. And, man, this is just some terrible code. Yeah, it was always just hacked together. But, again, it's the only cheap solution out there. Cheap. I mean, hell, it's free. Oh, yeah, free. So, yeah.

So, yeah, if you run BuddyPress, think again. It's a mess. Yeah, I would never, ever do it. If you have a client that wants a community site built from scratch or use some of the very expensive pay solutions out there, this is just going to cause you headaches and cause problems in the long run. Yeah. I mean, they're just slapping lipstick on a pig to try and make it do something that it's not supposed to do.

Sweet. We don't really have a comment this week, but we do have a new section on the website called Ask the Geeks. And our buddy Mike Tamal sent in a few questions. So, to get the ball rolling, we're going to go with these.

Okay. Take it away, Brian. First question he asks is, how come you guys are web developers instead of application slash program developers? That's an easy one. When we both started, there was no such thing as apps. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I mean, we're old dogs and we hate computers. So, to even start to write apps, we'd have to scrap everything we've done.

And why bother? Because people pay us to do that. Yeah. And as we've said since day one on this podcast, nobody has paid us to build an app, really. So, we're not doing that. And we're good at the web stuff. We've been doing it forever. Yeah, everybody jumped on the app bandwagon. So, there were more than enough people that we could slide that work off to.

And now, we can get it even cheaper than what it would cost to build websites. Yeah. I did actually a ton. When apps were kind of a big deal, I was doing a ton of actual web development to port the web stuff directly into the app anyways. I mean, 99% of apps out there are just portals to web data. Yeah.

I did a lot of that, too. I wrote APIs so the app could get to the data that we used on the website. So, question number two, which we just answered a little bit. Are there any advantages to being a web developer? Well, everything that we just said. Plus, also, we talked a little bit last week about an article that I had found, which showcased the average number of apps downloaded per week these days.

Zero. Yeah. So, this is why we're still doing web work. The web is still around. It's going to be around for a long time. It's not going anywhere. This is the basis. This is what we base everything on. And as we're starting to see more and more, people aren't using apps. They're just firing up their browser on their mobile.

And as long as you build your site so it works, you're done. Yep. Responsive is the way. Mm-hmm. Question number three, how's the Arduino microcontroller exploration coming along? Well, I haven't even gotten around to ordering one yet because I personally had a toilet explode and had to go to the Home Depot and put in my credit card so it could be stolen by Italians.

So, I replaced a toilet. I'm still looking to do a custom bookcase built in here so I can actually clean up one of my rooms. I'm still trying to sort out my standing desk and figure out where I'm going to put my in-home office. And I've got a few other household-related projects that are taking up my spare time. So, I'll get to it at some point.

Okay. Well, I got the basic kit. I got it attached to the wood and got everything ready to go, got the little switchy things all lined up. And the interesting part is in the book, they actually have a diagram wrong. So, if you're not smart enough to actually notice beforehand, you'll actually put this thing on backwards, which is not really giving me a lot of confidence for the rest of the book and the projects.

Hey, it's IKEA style. So, we'll see how it goes. And now that it's put together, I'm waiting for the first snowfall, which is going to probably be very soon because it's 51 degrees here today. And we're having the biggest heat wave ever here in LA. Okay. So, Brian, do you still make music on the side?

Not really. Among Us never really kind of ended. We just kind of went on hiatus. But I'll go ahead and say, state categorically now that Among Us as a project is over. You know, Robbie, my partner in Among Us, who's the bass player for the Goo Goo Dolls, about two years ago, we kind of just left it as is and figured we'd pick up.

We released an EP of five tracks. We probably had another 20 that are finished, all of which are really good. But at the end of the day, we put it out. Nothing really happened. And we kind of left it at that. He also then picked up and moved back to Buffalo. He and his wife had a kid.

He's kind of focused on the Goo Goo Dolls because that actually still makes him money. And he's kind of turned his label, which we were on, into basically just a signing and distributing Japanese J-pop bands in the U.S. So I think Among Us is pretty much over as a project.

That doesn't mean I don't want to write music. I think I was a little burned out from that whole process and just not getting promotion and nothing really happening from it. So I took some time off. But I've been talking to the erstwhile roadie number 42 from Team Coldplay, and he and I share some similar tastes in music.

And we've been talking for a long time about just kind of messing about and doing some just obscure ambient electronica stuff. So now that we're actually making that – I'm actually stating it out loud, and I know he listens to this podcast. We actually have to finally do it. So as soon as I find some time, I'll get Ableton Live and Max installed on the laptop and pour myself a big bottle of wine and sit down and start writing again because I have missed it.

It's very relaxing for me. Excellent. So, yeah, music soon maybe, hopefully. OK, final question. Jason, any word on your solo podcast? Well, yes and no. So in the initial stages of it, I had an idea for the show that I wanted to do, and it kind of morphed after I had to change the name.

And then I wanted to do another type of podcast, and as I was kind of laying out the stories, I did a couple demo ones, sent them out to some friends, got some feedback. And what I kind of realized is I don't have kind of a cohesive story yet because a lot of it was like past experiences, all the fun stuff from the early web days and hacking stuff and not even so much life hacks but just mind hacks as kind of a theme.

So in thinking all this stuff through, I really kind of figured out that my life wasn't in a place where I wanted it to be, which is kind of a problem when you're trying to write stories that are based around your life. So it was like almost a come-to-Jesus moment in here where I will not be going to Jesus. That's the second time you've mentioned the Jesus for being an atheist.

That's a bit odd. Well, I was in the Mexican aisle at the local grocery store yesterday. I saw the candles, and it's been on my mind. You know, pro tip, those are actually way cheaper than regular candles, by the way. I used to outfit my room in college with all those because they were super cheap. Yeah, there you go.

So anyway, I'm kind of moving back into some things, and I'll be writing about it on my blog. But for now, it's on hold until I can kind of get some things in order. That's about it. Okay. Well, there you go. So if you've got a question for the geeks, us, go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash askageek.

Is that the URL? It's in the header. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and click the header. Yeah, we're happy to answer anything you've got.

In the news. Well, Apple had their big day, so let's toss it over to our resident Apple fanboy to give us a quick overview before I start talking about all the shit that scared the hell out of me. Well, it was kind of hard to watch with the Chinese interpreter talking over it and it not working until about an hour in when my Apple TV finally picked up.

I think a couple of producers might be getting fired. I think a lot of people are going to get fired. There was a good write-up about what happened, and it wasn't actually – it was the website that pretty much caused the problem is what it shows up. They did that thing where they tried to live blog their own event to make up for the fact that you can't play the video on all sorts of devices that aren't Apple.

It's just silly. Come on, guys. Stop it with that. Just play it for everybody. Yeah. I mean, obviously, at the end of the day, you're trying to sell your products to the people that don't have them already, not just preach to the converted. Yeah, and it looks like it was just some JSON that kept pinging the servers that made the video uncashable so it couldn't get to the CDN and blah, blah, blah.

They fucked up big time. They fucked up. But – So when we got back into it, we got two phones and a watch is what basically came out of it. You know, that's it. Two phones and a watch. A skinny – or a bigger phone and then the Lane Bryant plus-sized phone. The chunky phone. It is, yes.

More cushion for the pushing. The Huskies. Huskies phone. I don't know. They look very nice. I'm not on track for my upgrade for this particular model so I will not be getting it right away. But I'll be getting the later S version or whatever they decide to call it.

I will not be getting a watch. I will – I got to check out the watch when it comes out and see what it's like in person, what it can do. Right. But I like the fitness aspect of it because then I can lose the Fitbit and have like a unified system for everything. I do like that as well. And the heartbeat monitoring is nice.

You get more stuff. Everything that they're building in, even just into the phone, is basically going to kill all the other companies that are out there doing any kind of fitness apps or whatever because Apple is just going to do it better. And it's all built in and baked into the next version. So that's all gone.

There's a really interesting article on Salon that came out the day after, which is the scary Apple Watch future. You think your smartphone is a privacy-destroying tracking device. You ain't seen nothing yet, which terrifies me because it could very easily go this way. It's a good quick read. We're already having a lot of issues with this stuff, and the watch just makes it a ton easier for basically Apple to know everything that you ever do ever.

I mean it already knows most of it. All they're going to get out of it now is your heartbeat. I mean they've already got your steps and everything with the M chip. Yep, and your location, and now they'll get your elevation. I don't see how the watch is going to expand their capability by any leaps and bounds.

True. I guess the phone is about the same thing. I just don't care to have a watch. I mean my entire – I've never really been a watch guy. When I was a kid, I was happy to have a watch that had calculators on it and all that sort of stuff. But I was a kid, and I was a nerd. And ever since I got a pager, which was a device that I had on me at all times that had the time on it anyways, I have not worn a watch, and I'm not going back to it.

See, I still wear watches. I like watches. I have fancy, expensive watches that actually cost more than the Apple Watch. So the Apple Watch is cheaper than getting another top-of-the-line fossil or whatever. And for me, the watch just is a natural extension because I like wearing a watch.

I just do. I've always worn them. I've been a watch nerd. What can I say? So will you be getting the watch? That's what I said. I've got to go look at it in the store and see what the – because they have different versions and casings. If you want the blingy one, you want the sporty one, or you want the classy one. Right. So when they come out, I'll take a look. I'll see.

All right. I mean I used to have the Casio camera watch in like 2000. Do you remember that thing? I've actually got pictures of you on it. Oh, geez. When I got this thing, I went to one of Wendy's, your partner's, art openings with Fogarty. We came out, and I was snapping pictures with my watch.

They were like 320 by 240 in color. You should pop one of those up on the site. I'll see if I can find them. All right. But, yeah, I go back a long way with watch technology. So I'm looking forward to it. I like what they did with it as far as the UI goes. I thought it was fairly clever. All right. So we'll see.

And, yeah, I'm out of the upgrade loop too. I wouldn't mind having one of the six pluses. I did the Ars Technica thing where I printed out the PDF and cut it out so you can check the size because we wanted to see if it would fit in the pocket because it's pretty big. But after holding it, the form factor on it is actually pretty nice.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's a good size. I'm not thrilled about that. But when they're actually out in the stores, I will go and check it out and hold one in my hand and see what I think. But, again, I'm not upgrading anytime soon. So it'll be the second time around when they do their new releases.

So we'll see what happens. Yeah. And somebody posted a comparison to one of the Android phones that came out in 2012 that has, like, almost the exact same specs. Well, and Samsung is having a field day. Their ad agency went into production overdrive and just made a bunch of new ads that make fun of the Apple phone just being a recap of theirs that they've had for a while now.

So, of course, it doesn't really matter because everybody has Apple and they don't have Samsung. So you lose anyways. Yeah. It was interesting that some companies who had some embarrassing news used the keynote to cover up, you know, taking out the trash, as they called it on the West Wing.

They dumped their bad news during the Apple event? Yeah. You've got the Snapchat. There's a Snapchat. Snapchat. That's a good name. You had the Snapchat kerfuffle with the sexual harassment thing that got swept under.

No, wait, that was Tinder. Which one? No, Tinder had the sexual harassment. Tinder had sexual harassment, so they settled with him. Oh, Snapchat had the co-founder that they ousted, and they finally brought him back in and said, yes, we now acknowledge that he was one of the founders and was crucial in developing the technology.

Forced to gunpoint. Say what? They were forced to gunpoint to bring him back in. Yes. Yes. So this was not a Zuckerberg type of situation. These guys actually acknowledged that they were dicks. Right.

Well, and the biggest news for me, because I'm in the music industry, is that basically underneath all the rapturous applause, you could hear the final nails of the coffin of the music industry being banged in during this announcement. In an interesting move, U2 basically released an entire album, and Apple gave it away for free to everyone, which has a couple of different implications that I want to talk about really quickly.

First off, they basically admit that music has absolutely no value whatsoever, and strangely enough, even though they bought Beats and everybody knows that streaming is the only future of music, they decided to do it through iTunes, which is a bit odd. I would have just put it up on Beats and said, we're streaming it to everybody on Beats for free, but whatever.

They know all 12 people there probably don't listen to U2, so. That's true as well, yeah. And then the tweet of the day, which I saw happening in real time, comes from Miles Hunt from the band The Wonder Stuff, which is a fantastic band, and Miles Hunt is a really, really intelligent, funny guy. He tweeted, finally, you two admit their music isn't worth paying for.

I've been saying it for years. Very funny. But the more interesting thing for me was actually how creepy it was that an album just appeared in my library. We are starting to deal with real issues about what we own and what is actually just being kind of gifted to us by these technology companies.

I was under the silly impression that I owned my iTunes library, and it was my library. Apple basically just said, nope, we're going to drop things in there when we feel like it. It's not yours. It's ours. Now, do you use iTunes Match? I do not. Okay, because I didn't get it.

Everybody else got it. I didn't get it. My library is too big. Apparently, there is a switch for turning the iCloud on and off in iTunes, and if you have that off, you do not get it. If you have it on, you do. I think I must have switched it on when I was trying to see if I could use Match, or I think it comes on.

This is another issue. Again, it's about when they push updates, they change settings, and they switch things on or off that you may not necessarily want or didn't have on or off in your previous versions. Again, it comes down to ownership. We're all starting to feel like we don't have any control over the things that we are using anymore.

And the YouTube album being pushed in a fit of generosity, here, have this album by this band that most of you don't care for or don't like, and we're just going to put it into your library for you. It just rubs me the wrong way. I think it rubs a lot of the people the wrong way.

I've seen a lot of tweets about it. I don't think it's a good precedent, and I don't see any reason why this is going to stop. I mean, this is now promotion for the music industry. It's one of the few things left. I don't see any reason why Kanye West and his label won't make a deal with Apple, and next month I'm going to find out that I have the Kanye West album in my library.

I don't want these things. It's my library, and it feels fucking creepy to have a company go ahead and put things into it. Well, it is a violation of your digital anus. I have been violated by Bono, and I'm not fucking ashamed to admit it.

And the one thing that I'm thinking of right now is your disk space is a finite resource, and they are using it up without your permission. Although, I'm sure you signed your permission away a long time ago when you signed the URL. First off, I'm sure you signed that away. Secondly, it is just in the cloud in that you actually have to then download it.

It just appears there, and you have to draw it down. But still, I don't want it in there, and I deleted it immediately. And I think it's a misstep. I think there's a lot of missteps going on with these tech companies who just feel that they own these things when actually we do. And I think we need to take our ownership back.

It's not right. Well, stop using iTunes. Yeah, that is the solution, right? That's the solution for all these tech things is stop using them. Except you can't because it's tied to your phone, which you've got a couple thousand dollars worth of digital media that you rented from them. Yes.

So what are you going to do? You're kind of screwed. We're screwed. You signed up for it. Yep. We all did. Oh, God. Yeah. Anyways, I found it painfully creepy, and the music isn't that good. Yeah. I mean, your option is now go get a flip phone or start using letters again.

Oh, wait. They take pictures of all your letters, too. Yeah. There's nothing you can do. Get over it. Wow. That's fun. Oh, God. And I'm the biggest proponent of that is the worst argument in the world. Just get over it and don't do stupid things.

I spent the first 40 episodes of this show saying, no, it's not right. And now I'm just like. I know. What can you do? You've come around to my way of thinking about it, which is this ain't changing. We're not going to turn around and stop using all the tech. So what are we going to do? And you're the one that's getting butthurt by it now like I used to be.

Hey, when they mess with my music library, that's where I draw the line. It's curated. It's perfect. I do not want that in there. Anyway, speaking of companies just going ahead and doing whatever the hell they want, regardless of any senses of decency or fairness, GoFundMe, which is a Kickstarter desk type company, has banned all content.

And this gets political, so ignore the political. Pretend when I say abortion, I'm say kittens. Okay. So GoFundMe has banned all content relating to kittens, leaving anti-kitten campaigns active. So they took a stand saying, we're not going to allow any GoFundMe campaigns related to abortion, but all those anti-abortion campaigns.

Oh, kittens. Sorry, kittens. Totally fine. Yeah. It's their website. It's their website. It's their prerogative. Yeah. I mean, if you don't like it, don't use it. Don't go to Chick-fil-A if you don't like them, but they make a damn tasty sandwich. So what are you going to do about this?

It's a private company and it's their policy. And now to get to the nitty gritty of it, there is a fine line between saying I'm trying to get money to get a kitten versus I want to protest about people owning kittens.

So I can then still raise money for pro-kitten purchasing, but I cannot use it to actually get money to go get a kitten. No, I totally get what you're saying. Again, it's just, it's an interesting precedent that they're setting and it's not something I agree with.

I think, well, again, being a libertarian at the end of the day, it's your company. You can do whatever the hell you want, but it just feels wrong. And there are a myriad other competitors out there that you can go use. That is very true.

Now you posted a little article about Mr. Stephen Hawking saying that we're all going to die. What's up? Well, this will solve all our problems. Apparently, Stephen Hawking is becoming really cranky as he gets older. He wrote, I think he wrote an intro to a new book that's coming out, which talks about a various, the new book will be called Starmus, a collection of lectures given by famous scientists and astronomers.

So he wrote the preface to it, and he is worried that the Higgs boson might become unstable. Basically, that is the quote unquote God particle that has recently been somewhat discovered, but is still mostly theoretical. I don't know. Do they really find it for sure? I can't. Pretty much. Pretty much. So they think they found it.

They're pretty sure they found it. At the end of the day, he's worried that if there was a big enough, and here's where it gets kind of interesting, at least with current technology, the size of the accelerator that would cause this instability of the Higgs boson that would then destroy the entire universe would have to be basically a Death Star, the size of the planet.

So we're kind of okay for a while, but there you go. Yeah, that's with current technology. Exactly. But in a few years, it's just going to be a little box that some fucking Kickstarter from San Francisco will start up that will destroy the entire universe. How good we get what we deserve. Exactly. And the interesting thing is his other views that are coming out about we're going to be destroyed by aliens or AI, he's definitely starting to get a little wonky.

He's getting a little cranky, I'd say. He's getting a little cranky, but still got to love him. And it turns out we're probably just going to kill ourselves anyway, because Pricewaterhouse has released a statement saying that, yeah, we've got about 20 years left before the bad stuff really starts to happen.

Unless we make drastic changes immediately, we are totally fucked, is basically what the accounting firm came up with. And they're good with numbers. Yeah, they seem to know what they're talking about with their numbers. Yeah. And it's kind of odd to see an accounting firm spewing doom and gloom. So I might want to listen to that one.

Here's the thing, we're not going to change. Nothing's going to change, because everybody's got their thing. That's not going to change until it's too late, and then we're going to have to go all Mad Max on everybody and start siphoning gas and shooting people with Tina Turner playing in the background. Well, at the end of the day, there's a little bit, there's a ray of hope in my mind on this one, because it's mostly the crazy-ass Republicans that are denying climate change and going, no, no, no, no, no, it's not happening.

But they care about money, and they care about numbers. And this is an accounting firm. So if an accounting firm, rather than those scientists, those pesky, stupid scientists, say this is real, maybe they'll listen. We'll see. I doubt it. Recycle and start saving up canned food.

And I just wanted to talk about one other article that you threw in, that Andrew Sullivan, speaking of kind of somewhat Republican-type people, but one I really like, and he's a very good writer. He didn't, just before you get started, he didn't write the article. This is on his site. It's on his site. Yes, it's on his site.

Second look at the giant garbage pile that is online media 2014. This is a great, funny little article. I really enjoyed it, even though I cried a bit at the end. Yeah, they basically lay out the fact that there are just news-alike sites. So everybody gets one piece of news, and a thousand different websites publish that same piece of news with their own spin on it.

And their own crappy headline. Yeah, and it's just useless. It's a useless echo chamber with no use to humanity whatsoever. And he's pretty much thought on it. Yeah, that we call the internet. Yeah, and podcasts. And podcasts, like us, because we're just doing the same shit.

And did you see the thing about Google and their discouragement of using older browsers? I did see that. I thought this was clever. So if you've got an old browser and you go to Google, they give you old Google. Yeah. I thought it was genius. I think that's very funny. People are outraged.

Outraged. Just update your damn... Don't most browsers auto-update these days anyways? Haven't we taken care of this problem? Not if your browser's so old that it doesn't have the auto-update feature. Well, then you should get an old internet. And the thing about it is people are saying, well, I'd like to... I want to keep my old browser because it has features in it that new browsers don't have that have been removed.

And I'm like, I'm trying to wrap my head around what features that could possibly be. Spinning cursor plugin? Yeah. Beach balls? I don't know. Update your damn browsers, people. Flash. Maybe they still want their Flash. Oh, God. Security.

Ha! In addition to the Home Depot mea culpa about getting hacked, we have two new hacks of the week. It's a double. It's a doozy, too. Healthcare.gov got hacked, unfortunately. This is a bit sad because my liberal heart wants to scream from the top of the rooftops right now that the healthcare program, Obamacare, is actually doing quite well.

Unfortunately, they did get hacked. Yeah, it was one machine. No user data was taken out. Yeah. It wasn't a big hack. But there was a very big hack. Oopsies. Gmail accidentally leaked five million Gmail passwords. Whoops-a-daisies. Whoops-a-daisy.

And that's not good because people are – a lot of companies are using Gmail. Gmail is a big, big, big deal these days. So there's a lot of people on there and a lot of important stuff, and it's all been leaked on a Russian Bitcoin forum. Yeah. The interesting thing is when you look at how many people use Gmail, five million is like 0.001%.

It is a very small percentage, and they did conveniently – there's a link out there to check to see if your particular email got leaked. Yes. That is at isleaked.com. And I checked. Mine was not leaked. Neither were the seven or eight that I used for various different companies.

Oh, man. So we've got an article on VentureBeat about Instagram, Grindr, and several other apps. Wait. Let me guess. They're not private. No. Not at all. They're sending everything in the open, not encrypted, back and forth with the server, and people can pick it up.

You know? Yeah. But I'm sure that secret app is doing it just right. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah. They still haven't really put that much of a response out from that, have they? No, they have not. Yeah. So this company, Cyber Forensics Research and Education Group, put out a list of all these apps, and they've been making videos for each one.

They did five videos. You can check them out. They'll be in the show notes, or the links to them will be in the show notes where they just demonstrate the hacks on all of them, or a bunch of them. So nothing's secure with these guys. And that's the stupid thing. It's really not that hard. You just use SSL. Yeah.

But even then, it's not going to be secure. It's just not. People just have to get this through their brain, that if you put things out there, they can get hacked, and they probably will at some point. Well, I mean, I did a back-end for an app not too long ago, and it's all API-based.

And from the get-go, the first thing we did was went out and bought security certificates and made sure everything that was going back and forth from the phones to the server was secure. It cost us $12. Yeah. It's not hard. It's not that hard. I guess when you have thousands of servers, it can get hard.

Then you have to spend $50 for a wild card certificate. Grindr is the alternative lifestyle Tinder, the kitten Tinder, as it were. Is that correct? The kitten Tinder? Well, Grindr's for straight people. Oh, it is? No, Tinder's for straight people.

Grindr's for gay people. Okay, Grindr's for gay people. Yes. A, Grindr G, that'll be the mnemonic. I don't use any of them. I don't know. I don't know either, but you'd think they would market their own version of Instagram. Call it Instagrind. Oh, that's good. That's good. That one's free, guys.

So in most of these, like Instagram, you're posting photos to share. So that's probably why they didn't think that they would ever need it. And I don't know if they had private accounts when Instagram first launched. Because if there were no private accounts, there was really no reason for security except for your tokens for your login.

And if those are encrypted well enough, but they probably weren't either. You don't do the fire sheep man-in-the-middle attack on that. Well, and all these apps are trying to be everything that they aren't as well. So they've all introduced things like direct messaging and private messaging. So they need the privacy now.

They need the plugs. They need the security. So last week when we were actually doing the show, the U.S. was under one of the – not one of – the largest cyber attack in history. Now, did you see any mainstream media coverage of this? None whatsoever. I didn't either.

I thought that was very interesting. And there's this great company called – is it Norse? Norse Run. They make security basically appliances. And they've got a network of real-time data on where attacks are coming from and where they're going to.

And they put up this map. And it's beautiful. It is unbelievably beautiful. And it looks like war games in real time. I was mesmerized that entire night because it was an intense attack. And it was like – it was watching – it was like they redid war games today. It was unbelievable.

I know. And I'm looking at it now. I just pulled it up. And here's the fun part. That's HTML5. Yep. It is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. This is one of the most well-designed things that I've seen in HTML5 for sure. And unfortunately, it's terrifyingly real.

Oh, absolutely. That attack was huge. I really can't believe there's no mainstream media about it. It was the biggest cyber attack in history. Well, maybe we fended it off with great aplomb and nobody was hurt. Still, news, people. It is news for sure.

I mean most of my news now is coming from anonymous people on Twitter. I know. Anonymous accounts. I follow them. Then I unfollow them. Then I follow them. Then I unfollow them. And right now I'm on the follow them track. And yeah, a lot of really depressing but great news that you don't hear anywhere else. The plane.

The plane that basically flew to Cuba and crashed or Jamaica and crashed. They had real-time intel on that before it hit any news station. So that's crazy. Craziness, people. So another thing that's crazy I saw from Telstar Logistics was an article about ships without skippers automating the high seas.

Right. This is cool. I mean they just want to take people off the ships, make them go slower, save fuel, lower costs. Save money, less work for people, less jobs. The problem now is they don't have enough – they can't find enough people who want that job because it's a terrible job.

Yeah, it is. It's very boring. Yeah. Two weeks on a ship with like seven other dudes looking at a porthole at – just the blank seas making the engine go. That's the job. That's the – I don't even know how to characterize that as any kind of job.

It just sounds like, yeah, we can send prisoners. How about that? We just put the prisoners on the ship. So is Google on this one? Is it Google Boats? No, no, it's the big shipping companies that are putting millions of dollars into it, which is one of those things where these guys are putting the amount of money into this project that's less than a crappy startup would get in San Francisco.

So I think there's an idea for a startup. Go figure out how to make autonomous ships. And the thing that got me was they don't talk about security. So it's like a pirate's wet dream unless they're going to put automated counterinsurgency weapons on there.

So if you drive your boat by, you just get shot up. Well, no. You remember Disney? They had like the Hall of Presidents with the robotic people. They're going to put a robotic Tom Hanks on every boat. Oh, they should put a robotic Tom Cruise. That would be more of a deterrent.

Oh, that's true. And in other news, in Bitcoin news, I don't know if I believe this one or not, but somebody is holding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the suggest – or the – The reporter creator of Bitcoin.

Yeah. Who some people say doesn't even exist. But this guy's got hacked emails and says that I'm going to release them unless you give me 25 Bitcoin and – which is, you know, ironic. Yeah. Actually, no, no, no. Not that much money.

I think it was – I think I had that backwards. He's going to release it when he gets 25 Bitcoin. Oh, OK. He's waiting to go. Right. So I'm taking this one with a grain of salt. I just ran across it this morning. It looked interesting. So we'll see how this one plays out next week. At some point, probably in about 10, 15, maybe 20 years, there's going to be a really interesting book about how all this actually really went down.

And that is going to be fascinating. And we'll be very, very old geeks in reviewing the book. That'll be a good read. We would be remiss if we didn't talk about Apple Pay in the security segment, you know, the new near-field communication setup that they're going to be using with the iPhone 6.

Which is a genius idea. It is time to update the way that we pay for things with the outdated credit card models, et cetera. And NFC is not new. It's been in Android phones for years, as everybody will say. As all the Android people are screaming about. But so what? Because nobody's using it. So the thing that they're doing, which makes sense, is after you put your credit card number in, nobody's got it.

Yeah. They're one-time tokens. The explanation they gave on how the security works actually was a good one. It really kind of made me feel like they kind of know what they're doing with it. I think so, too. They spent a lot of time both on the tech side, and they did what the Android side could never do, which is they actually went out to all the companies, not just the retailers.

But they went to the credit card companies, and they worked with both sides to make something that will work. Yeah. So I'm actually kind of excited for that. I won't be able to use it for a year. But by then, it might actually be where I need it to be. That is the one thing I'm bummed out about, about not getting the phone right away, too.

Because I love this idea of just kind of basically using my phone to pay for everything and have it be really, in theory, secure. I'm sure it will get hacked, and we'll talk about it at some point in this segment. Yeah. I'm sure it will come up later in the future. But the way that they're – like I said, they're tokenizing everything, and it's all encrypted, and nobody gets – that's the other nice thing is that the merchants don't get to see your credit card number.

Nope. So that's the real interesting part. Now, once somebody does reverse engineer the encryption on it and figures out how to create the hashes and creates credit card generators that you can use, yeah, maybe then we'll have a problem. But until then, I'm hopeful. I've been burnt before, but I'm hopeful.

This does actually seem like a real, workable, secure system of payments, and I'm excited about it, too. Keep your eyes peeled. We'll see what happens. I just want to quickly mention that I finally finished the Margaret Atwood Matt Adam series with the last book being called Matt Adam.

Very good. I'm really happy I went back and read it. I'm actually going to look into some of her other books, although I think those are probably the most sci-fi books that she ever wrote. Can't recommend the series enough. Good, strong ending. I don't want to talk about it because spoilers and all that.

So go read it. I'm trying. I've been busy. Yeah, me too. I didn't get to anything else. I'm in the process of a new book right now, which I'm not sure about yet, so stay tuned. But I did run across a nice little article on Slate of the Culture Box.

It's called Reading Insecurity. Has the Internet killed thoughtful, prolonged engagement with a text, or are we nostalgic for a reading Eden that never existed? It's a great read. It talks about how the current generation basically cannot read books and aren't interested in reading books and talk about failing at reading books. I will say, though, that the answer is this has always been around.

There are readers and there are people that don't read. And I've always been a reader and I've always been surrounded by a lot of other people that don't read and have made the same excuses and the same bullshit forever. So it's not the Internet. Yeah, I skimmed this. It looked – at the beginning, it's like most people probably won't finish this.

I'm like, OK, if that's a challenge, accept it. Challenge accepted. I skimmed it and, yeah, some of it rings true. But I still love to read. The thing is I just don't have the time. Yeah. If I had the time like I used to as a kid and I could sit there for an entire weekend with just a book and my cup of cocoa and enjoy it, that would be great.

But as you grow up, you lose that time. It becomes harder and harder to do. In fact, some of the best weekends I've had in probably the last 10 years are the weekends where I finally just have nothing to really do and I do just curl up with a book for an entire weekend. Those are the absolute best.

I miss that. I haven't had one in a while. So I came across something this week that is kind of side-related to books. It's a book trailer slash commercial slash social engagement dealio called EndgameIsComing.com.

Right. And first I thought it was for a video game. It's a thing where you plug in your Facebook credentials and it gives you this spiel movie about the world is ending, meteoroids are coming or whatever, asteroids are coming with shit in them. I don't know. And then at the end it gives you a percentage of survivability rating, which has – I have no idea from where it gathers the data when it only has your Facebook login.

But I am 69% likely to survive. It's completely made up, I'm sure. It is definitely the highest tech promo I've ever seen for a book ever. So they're definitely putting some money behind this. It was very cool. Totally reminded me of Nine Chenails' year zero viral campaign that they did about 10 years ago.

Very similar kind of look and feel aesthetically. End of the world type thing. It was cool. I enjoyed it. Yeah. A couple of years ago when I was working for an ad agency in Hollywood, we did a bunch of things like this. We put in your Facebook credentials and then it builds a movie with your face and your friends' faces and text from all that stuff.

That was fun. But it was always for TV and never really for a book. So this was kind of cool to see it for a book because it took me a minute to figure out who it was. And I scrolled down and I saw HarperCollins. I'm like, oh. And then again, it took me even longer to find the actual book that it's based on. So it's for a book called Endgame, The Calling by James Fry and Niels Johnson Shelton.

Well, and this is where as soon as I discovered that, I started to lose a bit of interest. I'm not a big fan of James. I believe it's Frey. He is the author of A Million Little Pieces, which was basically written as if it were a memoir. And it was then discovered that it was completely fabricated and he had to do a massive mea culpa about it.

Oprah had him on and everything at first because she loved the book. And he basically went on a massive PR campaign where he said that this is a memoir and this is what really happened to him, except it wasn't. And he had to come out and say that. So he has misrepresented himself, which is something you do not do as a writer.

And if you take writing seriously, as per the previous article, you are not pleased with this man. I don't know if his sci-fi is any good or if his other book was any good because I didn't read it. Yeah. And I don't think that the promo came. I'm sure HarperCollins probably kicked in some money from it.

But he is also the founder and CEO of Full Fathom 5, a transmedia production company. So I'm sure it was his own company that came up with this concept. Bingo. There you go. There's a little background on all of that. Still, it was cool. And the book sounds interesting.

But I'll wait and see. I'm not too thrilled with this guy as an author. Then don't buy it. I won't. Software, apps, and gadgets.

So as part of the new promotion of Grumpy Old Geeks because our podcast needs new listeners, as we all do, because we want to at least make our money back from putting on our time to do this, I messed around a bit with doing scheduled releases and tweets and Facebook updates about specific things that we talk about in the podcast.

And one of them was about your Bajango rant last week, and they took a little umbrage to it. Yeah. Well, they did, and they came out and tweeted at us, which, you know, as people do nowadays. Yes. And I engaged with them, and I went back to them, and I'm like, look, you guys did this wrong.

And they're like, yeah, we take all of your points to heart, and we probably could have done a better job, and next time we will. So there you go, and they're like, we're a small shop. We really try and engage with people, and we're sorry that it was, you know, not clear. And they showed me the screenshot of what it would look like when I – If you were to hit the button.

That I apparently had seen, and the way that it was laid out, the way the UX is laid out, all you saw was iStat 5 upgrade, you know, in big letters. And then underneath it in a thinner font, it says, you know, 999. Right. But all you see is the name and the button that says install.

So my point was that in between there, they needed some kind of interstitial or modal saying, by clicking this button in 14 days, you will be charged, or you need to get charged. Right. Or ask me for my money right then. Yeah. I hadn't given it to them right then. Or even just throw up a big dollar sign so we know.

Which is what they did 14 days later on my entire menu. There were $5 signs up there. Yeah. So to their credit, they handled it well. And you still love their product, as do I. I enjoy it. I just haven't updated. It's a great update. It's much better, and it's going to work much nicer when Yosemite comes out with the dark mode, for sure.

Excellent. Cool. So you did it again, Jason. Well, kind of. Kind of. Sort of. Kind of. Sort of. Actually, I was even tempted because this one's very stable and ready to go, right? I installed iOS 8. I have not done it yet. I'm just going to go ahead and wait for the masses. But tell me about it.

So this is the GM. It's the final release, which you're going to get in, well, this has come out on the 12th. So it comes out on the 17th is when everybody can get it. I can wait five days. It's worth it. So far, it's been fantastic. I've had no complaints for it.

I'll get to the one complaint. But it works great. There's not a whole lot different because a lot of the stuff is under the sheets that you need apps to work with. So I did get time-lapse mode in my photos, which is cool. I can reply to messages in line, like straight from whatever app I'm in, which is nice.

And a bunch of other stuff that really it's just a nice update. Okay. What I'm waiting for really is one password so I can use my thumbprint recognition to log into stuff in other apps. That would be nice. I'm really waiting for that. Right. So the new keyboard is a little bit tough because it gives you like three boxes with words it thinks you might be ready to type next.

It's pretty good. It saved me some time. But getting the hang of it and not tapping that instead of the keys on the top row is a little tough because it's just the targets for your thumb are pretty small already. And if you just slide a little bit and if you're going fast, you can really junk up your message and have to just go back and you wasted time.

Okay. One other thing that bothers me though is when you delete photos, it doesn't delete them anymore. It puts them in a trash bin that will be emptied in 30 days and I haven't found a way to turn that off. So if you delete something, you have to delete it twice if you want it really gone, which in light of what's just happened with people's photos that they thought they deleted probably isn't a good move.

No, it's probably not a good move. And this is something that's kind of creeping into everything now where delete doesn't delete. Delete should be delete, people. They're doing it for your own good. Yeah, yeah. Because some people want to, you know, they accidentally delete a photo even though there's a confirmation that says, would you like to delete this?

And people are dumb and say yes. Now the last thing is you now have the option when your phone is plugged in to use the feature called Hey Siri. It's funny because I think you almost subconsciously used the wording that they would have used, the opportunity. Yes.

And I turned it on and last night I was doing the Does It Have Legs podcast with MXV and he was going on a rant about how crappy Independence Day was and he was swearing up a storm. And my phone, out of nowhere, even though it was on do not disturb, mute, and the volume was down, Siri goes, Jason, language.

And I'm like, what? That is, well, funny, but wrong. Wrong. She was listening the whole time. How do you, well, first off, the listening is creepy. But again, if you have everything off, why, why, why the sound? The whole point is to turn it all off. Yeah, the sound, the fact that it didn't start with the words Hey Siri in the message.

Because when you do it correctly and you go, Hey Siri, it pops up and the first words are, Hey Siri. So this one was not that. I'm going to pull it up here because it was, I mean, I was kind of stunned and then I was laughing and then we were like, Oh my God, what was that?

So the first words are big steamy pile of shit. And then under, you know, a couple other things. And then underneath it goes, Jason, your language. So I'm going to put a, I'm going to put a screen grab of this in the show notes so everybody can see it. That is funny and bad. I hope they, I hope they rectify that and make sure you can have things off when they're off.

Yeah. And I mean, I know it has to listen all the time if you're going to use Hey Siri because it's got to listen for the words Hey Siri. Yes. And I'm looking forward to this for people like my dad who, you know, has a little clip in his car so he can drive hands free and not have to reach over and touch the thing to make it work. So being able to voice activate it is cool in that regard for some people.

But why was it listening in? I mean, I know I was listening, but why did it pick those words to trigger? So I don't know. I don't know what's going on with that, but I have since turned it off. Stop being creepy, Siri. Go away, Siri.

Media Candy. Going back to what I was talking about in the question and answer segment about not doing my show anymore. Part of the reason that I kind of had this come to Jesus moment was I found my old friend Jeff Curto's Camera Position podcast, which I think I pimped in the show a long, long time ago.

Sounds familiar. He's my old professor, my old photography professor, and he taught me so much about like art, life, so many different things. And his podcast is fantastic. It's a podcast about the creative side of photography. And it just really gets you into it.

And it's an enhanced podcast. So when he's talking about photographs, you can actually see them in your pod player. Whatever the kids call them nowadays. There's a ton of episodes. He doesn't do it that often, but there's like, I mean, tons to go back to, like hours and hours.

I was binge listening to it last weekend, and it's amazing. I highly recommend it. Even if you're not that into photography, just the thinking that goes into making a good photograph can be transferred to many other areas of life. Gotcha. Cool. So I listen to Adam Carolla.

I've listened to his podcast a lot. I've scaled back because I was getting angry, and it was making me an angry person because the entire gist of the podcast is Carolla bitches about stuff. But I kind of – there was a guest on that I wanted to hear, Rob Zombie. Rob Zombie is one of those people where I don't really like anything that he does.

I don't like his music. I don't like his films. But I like him as a person. I think he's really interesting. He's got the motor, and he goes out there, and he's made a life doing things that he wants to do, and I totally respect that. So I respect him while not really liking his product, but I was intrigued enough.

I wanted to hear what he had to say. Then I got really pissed off. Okay. I want to agree with you on everything you just said with Rob Zombie. I heard him on the Nerdist podcast. He's a fascinating guy. I really liked him. But, yeah, I don't like his music, and I don't like his films. Yeah. He's just one of those guys that I've always been aware of.

I don't care for what he does, but I respect him because every time I hear anything about him, I like this dude, and I like what he's done with his life. It's really cool, and it's really inspiring. However, they got on to talking about the crowdfunding that they've both done for their own movies and their own projects, and then I started to get really upset because instead of talking about the process of it, they started bitching about all the rewards that they have to do to get the money out of people.

So, basically, they were complaining about the fact that they want to do it themselves. They don't want to go and have some big media company fund them because then they can't control anything. So, let's just go to our fans and take their money. And then they started complaining about all the things that they have to do to get the money out of the fans to fund their stuff.

That's sketchy. That made me so angry, I almost lost all respect for both of them completely. Look, if you want the money, you've got to fucking do the stuff. You've got to do the rewards. Look, we all know crowdfunding rewards suck anyways. They're never going to be as good as you say they're going to be.

They're always going to suck, but at least have the fucking poise and dignity not to bitch about it publicly. By the way, Adam Carolla, net worth, $15 million. Rob Zombie, $40 million. Shut the fuck up. I agree. I'm still mad. I know.

I can tell. It was disrespectful. I mean, you're on a podcast talking to your fans who paid you money to do these things, and all you're doing is bitching about the shit that you have to do now. Yeah, he kind of lost a little perspective there, I think. The fact that the people that he's talking to right then are the people that did give him the money, and he should stop bitching about them.

Yeah, I guess you guys just want money for free from all of us to fund your lives. Awesome. Anyways. Talk about something a little bit happier. Let's talk about something that's really good. The Cure basically put out a video of a performance of their first bit of new real music that they've done since almost 2008.

It's for an upcoming compilation tribute album, The Art of McCartney, and it's a cover of the Beatles' Hello Goodbye with McCartney's son, James McCartney, actually playing keyboards. It is fantastic. It's beautiful. It's giddy. It's a lovely little track. It's great to see Fat Bob is only chubby Bob these days.

He slimmed down a bit. And there's talk about new music and another trilogy tour, and I'm very excited, and I loved every second of it. I'm not a Beatles fan, which I've stated before, but this was a great song. Yeah. It was lovely. Yes. It was very lovely. It was great to listen to. James McCartney looks so much like Paul McCartney that's gone bald and a little chubby.

It's unbelievable. There's this great shot where he kind of looks up, and you just see the eyes, and he has Paul McCartney's eyes. It's ridiculous. But the song sounds beautiful, and I can't wait to hear it. And even one of the biggest Beatles fans of all time, a friend of the show and personal friend of mine, Carl Wallinger from World Party, gave me a little comment when I posted it on Facebook.

He said, yeah, that was pretty good. What was not good is this Courtney Love video that's going around where she's had her vocal and guitar tracks pulled out, isolated as they call it, for a live show. And it is terrible. It is terrible.

She's unintelligent. I mean, it sounds nothing like what the song should be. Well, all things considered, I actually didn't find it that shocking or even that bad, to be honest. It's live, and there's a reason that a lot of bands have backup musicians on tours.

The star has to be the star. You're interacting with the audience. You are emoting. You are performing. And you can't always play Note Perfect, which she certainly didn't. Counter-argument, a couple of friends did point out that she could have at least tuned the damn guitar.

It wasn't in tune. It's not an isolated studio take. It's live. And again, same thing with the singing. She was being Courtney Love, punk rock, screaming. And yeah, it sounds horrible, isolated. I'm sure it didn't sound anywhere near that bad in the mix, in the hall, watching the performance.

Courtney Love is not punk rock. You can hold on to your outdated definition of what punk rock is. Neither is Green Day, but everybody says Green Day is punk rock. I don't even want to talk to you anymore. Okay. No. Courtney Love is not punk rock.

She's commercial rock, she's commercial rock, and she's shit. And it was terrible. But the funny part is if you listen to the isolated version, then you listen to the mixed version. The mixed version does sound a lot better because a lot of the backing musicians cover up for her inadequacies.

Which is exactly why bands take out backing musicians. That's a fact of live performance. I know that this is a big eye-opener to people that aren't in the biz, but this is de rigueur. This is normal. This is what it is. Yes, it's a lot worse because it's Courtney Love and she sucks, but this is not all that surprising or shocking.

And I can't believe I just offended Courtney Love. When I originally envisioned this segment, there was always just going to be one moron of the week because I figured, how often is this going to happen? It's going to be a stretch to even find one person that's a complete and utter idiot every single week.

This has not turned out to be a problem at all. Not one bit. So, number one, number one is, his name is Mark Driscoll. He's the founder of the Mars Hill Church, which is an evangelical megachurch. They are closing branches all over the place because he called women penis homes.

In related news, the founder of Tinder is starting a new app called Penis Home. Penis Homes. So, there you go. Awesome. And people wonder why I'm an atheist. I can't tell you. I don't know. Number two, DiGiorno pizza.

Oh, God. This is where I start to lose my mind because of social media and what people do on it. So, there was the football player, Ray Rice, who was caught on tape beating the crap out of his now wife, Janae Rice.

Yeah, they're married now. Yes, they're married now. And this is a big, weird story, and it's unfortunate, and it gets into a lot of sociopolitical issues. And one wonders why the NFL waited so long to get rid of him as a player. Probably because they waited to make sure that they had a decent team without him first because, really, it's all about money.

And speaking of it being about money, DiGiorno then started to use the hashtag why I stayed and hashtag why I left as part of their promotional campaign for their fucking pizza in the middle of this controversy when these hashtags were used to be discussing the actual issue.

Yeah. Yeah, that was kind of a fuck up there. You really? Yeah. And it's interesting because I had a 30-minute call with an SEO company yesterday about how they have a division that just manufactures rage about a brand to get more traffic and then pulls back and then the traffic still stays.

You know, it's one of those things where, was this an accident or not? Probably not. Isn't it the always, you know, any news is good news? No, there's no such thing as bad PR, et cetera, et cetera. It gets eyeballs on it, and that's all that matters. And you aren't going to think about some football player beating the crap out of his wife.

Next time you're hungry, you'll go, oh, DiGiorno, it's in my mind. And what they'll do is they'll, you know, put out a press release with a sacrificial lamb intern who then gets quote-unquote fired who probably just doesn't. Didn't exist. Yeah, exactly. Doesn't exist. Yeah. And moves on, and you just remember DiGiorno.

Yeah, and this is the world that we live in today. So, and speaking of today specifically, it is 9-11. So I woke up this morning and fired up Twitter. I don't really know why. And 9-11 tweets are absolutely insane. So I do wonder if it's an attempt at getting attention or just plain stupid people.

A friend of the show, Sean Bonner, is doing an amazing job today. He's retweeting nothing but brands 9-11 tweets. And some of these brands, you know, okay, fine. They spent some money. They did a nice graphic. It's very tasteful. I don't know why Doritos is reminding me about 9-11 and making sure that I never forget.

But whatever. At least they did it somewhat tastefully. Unfortunately. Oh, but they did it tasty-fully. Oh, tasty-fully. Ooh, hashtag tasty-fully. Let's get that going. Then there was the small, tiny company. And I'm sorry to pick on you guys, but it's just bad.

A Bikram yoga place in Arlington, Virginia. So it's a small, probably mom-and-pop little shop. No big deal. They decided to tweet, 9 plus 11 equals 20% off. Patriot Day sale on Bikram yoga. Wow.

I give it to them for clever, but yeah. Yeah, I'll give it to them for clever, but no taste whatsoever. And this is when you get into that, yeah, you're a small mom-and-pop shop and you probably don't need to have any social media professionals or anybody running your promotional campaigns, except for when shit like this happens.

You're a local shop, but Twitter is not local. People find it, and it sparked a lot of outrage, and people were writing them and saying, this is the dumbest thing you've ever done. I can't believe how distasteful this was. A follow-up tweet from them. The goal was to point out what date it was and associate to patriotism and to remember it.

It's a shame some of you go to the negative. So at first, they battled back and tried to hang on. Never a good idea. Never a good idea. Then they got hammered. Another tweet a little bit later, our apologies to anyone who was upset by it. So, Blake, an apology. That was one minute later. Yeah, one minute later.

And then they hammered back again. If you want to be upset, research the term 9-11 Building 7 and check the news because they are hearing, quote, chatter about us getting hit again. So now went for the fear, and I'm a patriot, and we're about to be attacked again, so how dare you piss on my attempt at patriotism when they're out there trying to get us?

Not a good idea. And then much later on – well, not even that much later. This is all within the span of probably about three hours. It's 20 minutes. No, it's all 20 minutes. 20 minutes. Yeah. Oh, two hours. Two hours. Yeah, about two hours. So then the final one that I saw, I'm sure there have been many more because obviously this person cannot walk away from his Twitter and doesn't understand how this works.

I wrote that stupid post at 1 a.m. with Yoga Brain. I'm sure some of you know what I mean. Now, let me just end that with this is not exactly a sterling defense of yoga because I thought yoga was supposed to clear your mind and make things more transparent and relax you and create this awesome – this yoga makes you do stupid shit like this?

I'm never doing yoga again. Well, it's cheaper than getting a bottle of scotch because that sounds like – that would be a better excuse. Yeah, I drank too much last night and thought it was a good idea as the way to go. Don't throw yoga under the bus, man. Yeah. Everything that's wrong about why you should never do social media yourself is right here in this thread.

And this is why you hire professionals. Three morons this week. Good catches. Yeah, thanks, man. I'll keep it up. There's a lot of you out there. This is my ironic Webs Not Dead entries.

For some reason, Lifehacker really started to attract my attention this week and really started to annoy me. So there are two specific articles that I've thrown in the show notes that I just loved. And if you wonder where we're at as a society right now, title number one, create a cubicle exit plan for a quick job change.

I can't believe this even exists. That's standard operating procedure for me. Well, you have been known to leave companies under dubious circumstances. Well, as soon as I get into a cubicle, it's like game over. But either way, whenever I start a new job, I never put anything personal there.

Right. And if it's like tchotchkes or something, it's always something that I can leave. Nothing really that I would feel bad about losing. Okay. I learned that the hard way. But now I don't. Well, we all now have a nice little plan courtesy of Lifehacker about how to do this well.

The second one, how to keep going when you're demotivated at work. Yeah, I got an answer for this one too. Quit your damn job. Rage quit and blow up the building. Just kidding. Just kidding. No, just leave. Yeah, leave. This is just the headlines in the article.

Stop blaming yourself, but take responsibility. Ditch the ideal scenario and appreciate what you have. Vent, assess, then communicate to find and solve your demotivation. What if your job just sucks? Yeah, and it's funny. There's a picture under that last headline with a guy just like rage screaming with his hands up.

And that's pretty much how I felt when I got to that point in the article. Also, I would just like to state for the record that this is definitely a current first world problem. I don't think the miners 45 years ago or the people working on the railways really worried too much about this stuff. Yeah, they didn't get that worried about demotivation when they're 2,000 feet down and pitch black like, you know, pulling coal out of the ground.

Yeah, I think your motivation was you had to make money for your family. Lifehackers, I think the well has run dry over there. I think so too. They're really kind of pushing it with these articles these days. But I did find one thing that I found interesting and useful to grumpy old geeks that like to tip back a few, like us.

On Slate.com, they had the, what's the best value at a bar where they did an interview with some bartenders and found out what basically gets the most upsell. Yeah, what the margins are in different types of drinks. Yes, and it's interesting to me that the most expensive option is always the best value, meaning the higher quality stuff that you get is the stuff that's marked up the least.

Yep, if you drink crappy American beer, you're paying way too much. Yes, the best option for beer is not a draft. You should get an imported bottle that is marked up the least. High-end, high-top-shelf liquors are marked up the least. And you should always buy the more expensive bottle of wine, not get by the glass.

Good, good advice. Thanks, Slate. Let's go get a drink. Yeah, no shit. Are you kidding me? I've always been a big Anglophile. I love Stonehenge.

I love Glastonbury. I love going to that whole area. There are archaeologists that are now doing really detailed maps. They're tearing up the grounds. They're using all this kind of awesome technology to see what's going on down below. And they're basically coming up with a completely new map of the entire area, saying, basically finding out that Stonehenge is not a single monument.

There are 17 or so neighboring shrines around it. It didn't stand by itself. So there's this whole Superhenge all around the area. That's what they're calling it right now. Superhenge. Superhenge, which completely changes the song by Spinal Tap, which is plugged into our show notes. And if you haven't seen it yet, it's awesome.

So expect a Superhenge remix from Spinal Tap anytime soon. Read the BBC article if you're interested in this sort of stuff. It's really kind of awesome, cool, are you kidding me stuff. One question, do they still have – do they have any idea what it was for yet? No, of course not. They have no idea.

I mean there's a lot of theories about how it was basically doing sun orientations and seasons and all that sort of stuff. They don't really know. But hopefully they'll be able to kind of figure it out a bit more now that we know that it's a much bigger location than we thought it was before, that there's a lot more stuff going on.

We'll see. I love this sort of stuff, so it's really interesting. Cool. But now I want to get pissed off. This is new? Go ahead. This is doing the rounds, so I'd be remiss not to mention it in this segment. There is a – you buy a condo in New York City right now.

You don't get a parking spot, but you can add one for a million dollars. Okay. There is a million-dollar parking spot up for sale now in Soho in New York City. We are spending a million dollars to park in New York City when people are starving. Yeah.

Case for Uber. Point Uber. Closing shoutouts. So I want to do a quick post-mortem on the short-lived segment, Knowing is Half the Battle. Putting those pieces together, I couldn't find a thread to really kind of make them entertaining enough.

There's a lot of stuff to go over, and it's all kind of bits and bobbles and pieces. And I also didn't get any feedback from anybody who listened to the first ones that said, yeah, keep going with these. They're great. So we're going to table that one for now and just work on a better show. All right.

Maybe that's something to keep in mind for your own podcast if you go back to it. Yeah, it could be. It could be. And it's also something that I'm sure we're going to be mentioning all the time because as we find things, it will pop up. Yeah, most of that stuff I always weave into security anyway. Yeah, most of it goes in there anyways. I want to give a shoutout to Dr. David Teeter, friend of the show and previous multiple guests, and I'm sure he'll be on again.

And Chen, who actually drove all the way down from San Francisco and had a couple beers with me the other weekend. And now that I'm heading up there, I should be seeing them on Saturday night and looking forward to it. Cool. And next weekend I'll be up there seeing them doing the same thing. So hopefully I'll be able to hook up with some listeners up in San Francisco.

We'll be hanging out with Dr. Teeter and Chen and Jordan Harbinger, who was also a guest. I'll be seeing him while I'm up there. But there will be a couple nights where we're just hanging out and inviting people out. So keep an eye on our Twitter if you would like some heads up for that. Excellent. All right, man.

Good to talk to you. Yep. I'll talk to you next week. Go enjoy the Cure at Riot Fest. I'm jealous. I will. I will.

Music for the show is by the now-defunct Among Us. You can find us on iTunes. Give it a listen anyways. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. Keep up with us 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. You can get our iPhone app at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash iPhone. Show notes for the episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 75. Applesauce, bitch.

Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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