76: Preferably, Without You...

Okay, I'm going to have to fix that shit. 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.

So I want to do a little thought experiment to open up the show, Jason. Awesome. Alright, so I want you to close your eyes. Eyes are closed. Follow me on this. Following. So you're sitting there in Chicago, right? And let's say you own a nice little condo there. Okay. It's a nice two-bedroom.

You've got a nice little setup. One of the bedrooms, that's your office slash podcast empire studio. A nice little bedroom where you have all your blue light gizmos that help you sleep. And you've got your auto blow two in the drawer there, kind of hidden away. But let's focus on your living room, okay?

Okay. Do I get a view of the lake? You have a view of the lake. Of course you do. Okay, just making sure. And you've spent a lot of time on your living room. A lot of effort and, frankly, a lot of money. I mean, you've made your living room your damn living room. You love your living room. It's tasteful. It's super comfortable furniture.

You've got tchotchkes from all your travels in there. Let's say you've got your signed, your Kung Fu is the Best posters from all the various celebrities you've worked for. You've got your old school camera equipment sitting around. Your living room is almost a near-perfect reflection of you. Okay. You may own one or two pieces of Ikea stuff, but still, they're ones that you picked out and they perfectly work, like the Flingle Bangle ottoman that you've got sitting in the corner there.

It works with your overall aesthetic, right? Okay, I'm with you. People that see a photo of your living room, they'd go, that's got to be Jason's. Look at it. It's Jason. You take pride in it and you're comfortable. You're with me so far? I am totally with you. Okay, great. So let's say it's the third day of Riot Fest and you're pissed off the cure isn't giving a photo passes, so you text me incessantly about it, but you finally decide to listen to me and you just go and enjoy the show.

You're getting ready to leave. You grab your keys. You take one last look at your living room and you're like, wow, God, I really love this room. Now, this is where weird shit starts to happen. You're out at Riot Fest, but you've also installed the Ikea Stopping from Getting Indoor Lock, right? Yep. And while you're out at Riot Fest, Sven from Ikea comes over to your place and he uses the Ikea master key to let himself in.

I bet you didn't know he could do that, but you didn't read Ikea's EULA or the EULA as it were. The EULA. Because if you had read that, you would have seen the little bit of code in there that says Ikea actually owns everything. So it gets even a little weirder now. Not only did Sven let himself in, he also decided to put in an Ikea Billy bookcase.

And he left you a little note saying, hey, I hope you enjoy the bookcase. It's a free gift from Ikea. The problem with the bookcase is it doesn't fit in with your living room at all. You've got nothing against Ikea. You have no real strong opinions about the Billy bookcase other than it doesn't really work with your living room.

It was nice of them to give you a gift, but frankly, you don't want it. It doesn't work. It breaks the harmony. It's an eyesore. Now you actually have to burn some calories to get rid of this damn unwanted thing. Now maybe people can understand how creepy it is for Apple, I mean Ikea, to break into your private areas and install you too. I mean a Billy bookcase.

I'm with you on that. I do feel violated. I feel extraordinarily violated. It's been amazing how many people I've gotten into arguments about this with and how the arguments basically break down to it's a free gift. What's the big deal?

Or just delete it. But I think it's more than that. And yes, they have the right to do it, as we'll discuss in a little bit, but I think it's still pretty fucked up. I have to agree with you. Yeah, it was a very good thought experiment. Bravo. Well, thank you very much. Now I need to go get a condo because I really like my new living room.

Yeah, no, I just – I've been thinking about it endlessly as I've gotten in more and more arguments with people about it. And I was trying to like – I had to really take it to the physical to explain the level of things that's going on. Now, obviously, that's in no way, shape, or form a perfect analogy.

A better one would be like say you've got your DVR from Time Warner Cable or Comcast or whatever, and don't think for a second this isn't going to happen, people. Because now that this has gone out there and kind of – it's happened, it's out in the universe now, don't think for a second that like something on your DVR isn't just going to pop up as a promotion now.

So you've got your DVR recordings, all the shows that you record, and pretty soon there's going to be a little starred recording of The New Girl because ABC decided to pay for it and pop it in through Time Warner or whatever. Yeah, I can see that happening. It's a reverse situation though because Apple actually paid $100 million to the band instead of – Comcast would not pay for a program.

But I can see it working in reverse. Yeah, exactly. So I just wanted to play that little thought experiment because people are just telling me to shut up and stop whining about it. But I think it's actually – I think it's an important thing that that's happened and needs to be discussed. And I'm really happy to see that there is a lot of backlash that's coming out about it now.

Yeah, very good point, sir. Very good point. Well, thank you very much. I felt it was creepy from day one, gotten a lot of arguments about it, and apparently the tide has turned in the last week. I don't want to spend more than 7,000 minutes on this thing, but I do want to talk about it a lot because I think it is kind of a watershed event.

And I think that with any luck, just because there is such a backlash, we won't see too many more of these things happening. I saw that U2's manager replied to the backlash, if you don't like the damn album, just delete it. Yeah, he missed the point that we didn't need it to begin with.

Yeah, and just a quick point there. U2's manager is now Guy Ossiri. It's not the old manager that had been managing them for ages and ages. And Guy Ossiri is a big deal in the music industry, and he's certainly trying to make his mark. And I think this is something that he thought was going to be his big, big thing, his calling card moving forward.

And I think he's more than a little pissed off that people didn't share his joy. Well, he will be remembered for it. Yes, he will be remembered, not in the way that he intended to, I'm sure. But Guy Ossiri will land on his feet, as he always does. Apple then came out with a tool to remove the U2 album, because deleting apparently is too hard for a lot of people.

But they made it easier. So this is very interesting. Yeah, it's over now. It's done. We can take it off. I never got it. That's the funny part. I have my settings set up so well that I never saw a damn thing.

The only albums that I have of U2's are the ones that I want. Yeah, me too, as well. I've got a number of U2 albums. When I was doing these arguments with people, it was like, well, why are you picking on U2? I'm like, I'm not. I have some U2 albums. I just don't want this one. Yeah.

For Apple, this was basically a $100 million foo bar. Yeah, it was a big foo bar. There were a few other articles. Most of them will be in our show notes. I just want to share a title. Apple will allow in great public to return the sacred gift of U2. That was my personal favorite title of an article about it.

And again, I just think in that particular article, there was one line that I agree with, and that was my feeling from day one. It's a creepy precedent. That's what I worry about. And thankfully, there was this backlash because I don't want this to become a precedent.

I don't want the upcoming gifts of One Direction and Kanye showing up in my library either. Kanye. You adorable little scamp, you. Yeah. So it's come and gone. It was a big blunder. And there we are. Yeah. And yesterday, I spent a couple hours going through every damn Apple EULA to pull out the offending paragraphs.

Yeah. And, you know, in the end of the day, yes, we have agreed to it. They can do it. They shouldn't do it, but they can. That was, again, the last remaining argument from everybody that I was talking about, which is read the EULA, dude. And, yeah, of course. I mean, all EULAs have this in it, but we shouldn't.

And maybe this will bring more light to that as well because you and I did kind of go over both the iTunes Store EULA and the iTunes EULA. And there isn't anything specific that says we are allowed to give you content, but there is the blanket, you know, Apple reserves the right to modify, suspend, discontinue, blah, blah, blah, basically to do whatever the hell they want.

And it's in there and we all agree to it. Yeah. The right to modify, change, anything that we want is their exclusive right. But that doesn't make it okay. And we know that, you know, this stuff, all this stuff ended up in EULAs because nobody wants to get sued.

We just kind of have an unspoken agreement that they're not going to act upon these sorts of things. Okay. So I want to know, does Apple always fail in threes because they screwed up the keynote completely? Yeah. The U2 giveaway was an unprecedented failure.

Yeah. And the pre-sale launch of the iPhone 6 was one of the worst things that ever happened for, I mean, they sold out. But the website never updated. My roommate was there until 3 o'clock and, of course, he didn't follow my advice that I said a week before is get the app.

That's what everybody seems to say. If you ever want to do a pre-order when Apple is having one of these massive events, you should use the app, correct? Always use the app. And now, since we've told everybody to use the app, the website will work again. So, I mean, this is, you know, I think an unprecedented failure on three major counts for one of their biggest launches.

So are they just like – are they getting incompetent? Right. Or are they trying to set the bar low enough that when the iPhone 6 comes out, if there's anything wrong like antenna gate, that people just expect it now because they're screwing up so much? Well, I think there's a certain element of that in that, you know, if you come off as perfect and then people just start to expect perfection all the time and then they start to pick apart things when they don't work.

But I also just think there's just a shit ton more people now that are into this. You know, the first time around with the iPhone, yeah, a lot of nerds were into it. But now everyone is into it. And the bar of getting on to this and doing a pre-order is much lower.

They make it a lot easier now. I think they were just overwhelmed and nothing would have helped with that. Yeah, we'll see. I didn't get one. I am saving my money. Did you? No, no, I'm, you know, I'm locked into the stupid American way of doing things, which is, you know, your service provider basically funds your phones so you don't have to buy them outright.

And I'm on a different track. I'm not up for an upgrade for another year. So, and my iPhone 5 is working fine and, you know, and iOS 8 installed great and it actually seems to even be running a little bit faster and the battery life seems to be a little bit better. My phone is completely fine.

And I'm sure I'll be a little bit bummed out that I won't be able to try out Apple Pay when that starts to roll out. But in a year, they'll have sorted out all the kinks, one would hope, and I'll be ready to go. Yeah, I like the S track. I think I'm going to stay on the S track. Right. Yeah, I do too. I think it's nice.

So I don't want to have the first iterations of things anymore. And, yeah, it's so weird. I ran across this when I was, you know, looking at the page and I'm like, oh, I got to get it, got to get it. And then I'm like, wait a minute. I have done this so many times now and I know exactly what's going to happen.

I'm going to spend a ton of money. It would have cost me $675 to get the phone that I wanted to buy out my subsidy. And then I would have been on the regular track. It would have been another two years where I had to pay again. And I just don't have the – I don't have that techno lust like I used to have when I was a kid because I've done this so many times.

And I know that in a week after I get that phone, it's just going to be normal again. And it's – you know, everything will wear off. The joy of having the new phone will wear off because everybody is going to have it. Now, like you said, everybody is on the Apple bandwagon and I'm like, eh, it's not special to me anymore.

So I don't feel the need to shell out that money, which I could go spend on something more fun, an experience instead of a phone that does the same shit that my phone does now. Well, I'm very proud of you, Jason. I'm shocked and proud of you. Are you – maybe we'll both get Androids.

No, don't go that far. Don't go that far. Yeah, no. That, you know, $1,200 I have invested in the app ecosystem of apps that I don't use at all anymore. But it's that sunk cost, you know, that you can't get rid of. And, you know, I do like my – I've got an iPad, so I don't need the, you know, the Jenny Craig phone or the Lane Bryant phone, sorry, the plus-sized.

So I'm sticking with my little phone and my big iPad and my big computer. All right. Well, there we are. That's what I want to think about that. So I wanted to follow up a little bit. We talked about Bikram Arlington last week and their massive 9-11 social media faux pas.

I went back to kind of take a look to see if they had done any correct damage control, which I think you and I both agree would be to apologize, move on as nothing happened. They didn't. They completely nuked their entire Twitter account. Downward-facing step on your own dick.

Yes, but they did keep their Facebook page, and they turned off the ability to post there, so somebody kind of knows what they're doing. But they do have a review option on their page, and there's more than a few you're fucking idiot reviews. Oopsies. Yeah, well, you know, this is not new.

People are stupid. People are stupid on social media. Oh, newsflash. I know. Again, everyone, you're going to fuck up at some point on social media, even if you're just you, like not a business. You're going to post something stupid because you were drunk or you just had one of those moments. We all have them.

And the way that you get past it is you apologize and move on business as usual. You do not delete your account. You do not get off Facebook. You do not do any of that. You just move on. Yeah, mea culpa, move on. Exactly. Yes. You made it to San Francisco, I take it.

I did go up to San Francisco. And, yes, did you do the Uber? Did you do the Uber? I left my Uber cherry in San Francisco. And how was it? It was fine. You know, whatever. I got picked up by a Prius the first time.

Oh, I'm sorry. That was a little disappointing. The second time I had to deal with surge pricing, which I'm not a fan of, but it was a nicer car. He did take me to the wrong hotel. Oops. So I wasn't too thrilled about that. And then he took me to then the correct hotel because there are two by the airport.

And I said south of airport and he took me to north of airport. But we got there eventually. Pluses for Uber, I love not talking. They don't talk. No, they don't. That's the best part. Which is fantastic. And I love the complete lack of interaction that's required.

You know, they show up. They pick you up. You see it on your app. And then you just get out of the car. No tipping, no nothing. I hate not knowing what I'm paying. I hate the company. I hate their philosophies. I hate what they're doing as a business. And I find it – this is, again, as much as I argued with folks about the U2 thing and iPhone, I've been in a lot of arguments about Uber as well.

And, you know, I have problems philosophically with them. Luckily, here in L.A. and the part of L.A. that I live in, I don't need cabs very often. So I will not be continuing to support Uber. I just think it's – the arguments come down to, you know, they're cheaper.

Well, they're only cheaper because it's a business practice to try to drive up market share and drive other people out of business. And once they have achieved that market share, they will not be cheaper anymore. Their prices will range. It is a short-term strategy that you are employing to defend your use of Uber.

Well, here's the deal. Uber has always been more expensive. Always. Not currently. Okay. Yeah, when they first started in San Francisco, they were like 10% more than a cab fare. And the tip was integrated into it. And you get your free bottle of water all the time.

But the thing about it in San Francisco when it started was it was so damn hard to get a cab, they came as a godsend. It's like, okay, I can press a button and I get a cab that will show up. No cab company in San Francisco ever showed up when they said they were going to. The only one that came close was Luxor.

And even they started to get overwhelmed because there's just too many people, too few cabs, you know? Yeah. No, I mean, I get that. By the way, I didn't know I was supposed to get a free bottle of water. I didn't get water on either of my cabs. Oh, that's bullshit. If they took away the free bottle of water, I'm going to be pissed.

Maybe you have to ask for it now. I don't know. But I did not get a bottle of water. I have issues with Uber's business practices. I have issues with the way they treat their no longer employees. Now they're just contractors. I think it's predatory pricing that they're doing to run other people out of business. We know there's a lot of regulatory issues.

I love the concept. And I agree. I argued about this with a really good, very smart friend of mine. And I love the fact that they're bringing in competition and they're making taxi companies, which are absolutely horrible, step up their game a little bit. But really the only plus for Uber for me is the app and any transportation company can mimic that.

Yep. Well, I'm going to try them first thing tomorrow when I land in San Francisco and see if they're as good as they used to be. You let me know if you get that water because I'm going to be retroactively pissed. I will, definitely. So since we recorded a little bit early last week, which we actually are doing again this week, we missed the finale of TechCrunch Disrupt.

Oh, no. I thought I saw that on Silicon Valley's last episode. Oh, wait. That wasn't real? Not quite. So a hat tip to Andreas Krohn who pointed this out to us. The winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt was basically Uber for butlers.

Yeah. Which is just so stupid. I was reading this basically as I was flying into San Fran and I was just like, I'm going to land in the most stuck up their own ass city in the world. This is ridiculous. This is – I can't – oh, my God.

They got 50 grand for this. Well, yeah, they got 50 grand, which is not a particularly large amount of money. So there's only – at least they're not being funded at the millions and valued at the billions for this. Yet. Yeah, yet. All it does is connect you to – it's basically Ubering people.

It's getting you servants that you don't have to speak to or tip. Here's the thing though. It is 1,000 percent more functional than Yo. Well, what is it? At least you get something out of it. Yeah, that's true. But Yo is valued more. Actually, what this is like, it's like, yo, bitch, clean my room.

Pretty much. Pretty much. It's a dumb, dumb, dumb concept. But hey, they got some money. So I saw a cool article from my man Clay Shirky who posted on Medium why I just asked my students to put their laptops away.

Okay. Have you read this article? No, I saw that you put it in there. I meant to read it and then I laughed at the fact that it was on Medium and then I forgot to read it. Okay. So he makes the case that it's unfair to other students who want to pay attention because people using their laptop, there is splash damage of attention deficit.

That was like the key tipping point. There are a bunch of other reasons that he states that are really good and well thought out because he is Clay Shirky and one of the best thinkers when it comes to this stuff. And the one that tipped him over the edge really was it's like, okay, if I'm sitting next to you in a class, you have your laptop open.

I'm distracted by it, which means I'm not getting as much out of the class as I could be. Right. So it's like secondhand – it's secondhand distraction. Yeah. I totally get that and understand that. I mean just even like I was sitting on BART or I was sitting on the plane and people that had their phones out or things like that, your eye is drawn to it even if you don't intend to be.

I was just sitting there and I wanted to just relax. And I'm looking at what people are texting and I'm looking at their Snapchats and things like that just because it's there. And that's even for the people that are actual human beings and do things that like turn off their sound as opposed to the animals that are out there that leave their phones on high volume so you hear bing, bing, bing the whole time.

I know. People that leave the sound on on their phones and their computers for notifications. When you're in public. Even at home. Even at home. Even at home. Turn that shit off. I don't care if you've got a Facebook message or somebody IM'd you.

I don't care. It's just the obliviousness and just the I'm the only person in the world that matters attitude that that engenders. Sitting at the airport there was a guy whose phone – I mean the volume level on the notifications was so loud it distorted coming out of the phone.

It was ridiculous and I'm just like you can hear that from the other terminal guy. Fucking turn it off. Jesus. Yeah. I had a friend that like almost got in a fist fight on a plane because somebody's kid left their iPad like on full volume and was playing games or watching movies or something. It was – it's not a good thing.

Turn that shit off. Buy some headphones. That's what they're for. They come with headphones. They're free. Shove them in your goddamn ear holes. They're free just like the U2 album. Put on the headphones and listen to the damn album. God. Yeah. So I've been – I got a little upset about social media this week too as – I'm not upset.

As you do every week. As I do every week. But I want to make a modest proposal for something that I'd like to refer to as category-based filtering. Now, this is mostly probably for Facebook. I don't see a way that you could really do it with – sure, you could do it on Twitter as well. But wouldn't it be wonderful if posts could be tagged with categories and we could ignore certain types?

Because there are people out there who I do want to see their updates about their normal life or whatever. But I don't want to see the endless pimping of the new job that they got or whatever. So I want to respectfully suggest a couple of categories like wacky shit my pets do.

You could tag your posts with that. And then I can set to ignore all of those so I never see a picture of your puppy because I like you. I just don't care much for your puppy. I just got a new job and my boss wants me to pimp it endlessly so I don't have to see the new updates for the new Botox place that you work at.

I can just see your posts. That would actually be my job at Warner Brothers Records. That's all they wanted me to do. I know. It's ridiculous. I can always tell when somebody gets a new job and they're working for one of these socially forward companies because then it just becomes, hey, check out this album.

Hey, check out this. Hey, check out that. Yeah, especially if you walk in the door with more followers than they have. Then they're like, ooh. Their eyes get big. They're like a wolf in the old cartoons. They're like, give me your followers. Yeah. A side note on that. I always thought it was hilarious that record labels thought that they should get traffic and followers.

I'm like, you're a collection of bands that make no sense. Nobody is interested in you as a product. They are interested in the bands that you may have, but not all of them. So nobody really cares about your label Twitter. Anyways. No. And the last category I wanted to suggest is, of course, another photo of my cute kid.

I would like to throw in a couple of categories here. Okay. Why I should eat vegan. I've been getting a lot of those. Or paleo. The exact opposite. Yep. Yeah. And anything – they should just categorize it as sandwich or food or something.

Anything that has to do with what goes down your pie hole, I don't want. Yeah. What should go down mine? The humble braggy, I'm doing this slash you should as well. Yeah. Yeah. And any animal cruelty whatsoever. Yeah. No, I agree with that.

I agree with all those categories. And before – if everybody is thinking that we're just picking on them, I would even do it on my own Facebook. So the I've got a podcast and won't you please, God, please listen to it. You'd be able to filter out those posts for me as well. I wholly agree with your filtering idea.

It will never happen. I'd like to. So I saw another article from our buddy Rowan from Budapai 2. Yeah. He has a great little article on how technology is – should be – how it's basically broken and needs to be redesigned.

Instead of retreating from technology, we should just have like a fundamental redesign of a lot of core technologies. It's a really fun read. It's actually on a talk that he gave. And hopefully by the time this goes up, he'll have the video up and we can put it in. I'd love to get this guy on the show sometime.

Yeah. I still use my Budapai. I love it. And he's a smart dude. I definitely dig this article. Yeah. I'm a fan as well. I really enjoyed the article. And I think it's – he's got a great point. It's well thought out. And I'd love to see something like this happen.

It won't. But I'd love to see something like this happen. I'm still using Budapai as well. Not as much because I've been super angry recently. So I've got to crank that back up because it did keep me relaxed. Yeah. Really great article. I highly recommend everybody read it. Yeah. I mean just – even if you go through and just scan his slides because nobody reads.

But it's short. It's short. Check it out. Now, I want to do a final wrap-up on that experiment I did about a month ago, a month and a half ago now. It's been over for two weeks. I did my 30 days of silence. Basically, I didn't share anything. I read on Facebook and Twitter and Google+.

Yes, I still use Google+. Somebody has to. And – well, the nice thing about Google is it's just all photos. The only thing that I shared was things that I created, not, you know, quippy thoughts or – there were no thoughts. It was, hey, I did this thing or I made this thing. Go check it out.

Here's a link. That's it. Man, was it nice. It was so nice because it forced me. Every time I was going to say, god damn stupid thing, I'm like, oh, can't do it. Not allowed. Yeah. And I just took a deep breath and then just was able to think about things a little deeper.

It was fun. I recommend everybody try it, even for a week. You'll see how it changes you. You don't just spurt off this, you know, mouth diarrhea or brain diarrhea for 140 characters. And it kind of makes you a little nicer. Yeah, I think I've got to try this.

Oh, you definitely have to. Oh, I definitely have to because 99% of my social media updates are me being snarky about something. So maybe I'll be happier. And I also actually, in basically following up to the Apple not getting the phone, I actually added the word Apple to my Twitter mute list.

I still have iPhone and iOS, you know, I still get all that stuff. But just the word Apple gets rid of so much crap that people just say, Apple did this wrong. Apple did this, you know, all of the speculative bullshit that people post is just gone. It's great.

So I recommend adding Apple. I keep the iOS stuff because, you know, somebody posts tips and tricks or links to things that I find interesting. But I just find that the word Apple cuts through so much noise. Give it a shot.

Our Ask a Geek question this week comes from my buddy Thomas Knoll from – he runs a company called Prime Loop. Check him out. The link for them will be in the show notes. Thomas' question is, now that Twitter is just going to become another Facebook with quote-unquote optimized feeds and 100% focus on advertising, is there room for something like ello.com to actually fill the gap?

Hello? Hello? Hello. I had not heard of ello.com, so I went to it. And apparently it's nutritional products. No, it's actually ello.co, I believe. Yes. So then I Googled ello and then I got to ello.co, which is a very poorly designed attempt at some sort of social media thing.

It's very hipstery using the typewriter font for most of it, which we gave up on in 1997. Yeah. Retro. Let's see. My short answer is no or to do it in the style of internet headlines, as you always point out, Jason.

If the headline is a question, the answer is no. No, I don't think that ello is going to take it over. I think there's still critical mass issues at play. And we haven't dealt with critical mass to this level before, I don't think, that both Twitter and Facebook have.

It's going to take an awful lot to get people off. The problem isn't – it's never the medium itself. It's if you're farting in the wind if you go to another service. You have to get all of your people to go with you. Or you have to get the most important people. Or that, yes. And then it will go.

So, yeah. I don't think it's going to be ello.com because I don't like their business model. I had seen it before. Sean Bonner was posting some links and a couple of my other friends had invites that you could get to because it's – once you're in the club, then you get a few invites to send out like everything nowadays.

But, yeah, I think something will eventually tip the balance. I definitely don't think it's going to be ello. It's going to be something I think we've never seen. Yeah, I agree. Something that's going to be – that's going to come out of left field that's going to have been brewing for a couple of years, just off to the side, slow roll.

Like look at Pinterest. Pinterest was around for years before it popped. And I think to replace something like Facebook or Twitter, it's going to need that same kind of like just ground shift and just a new type of communication. Right now, everybody is derivative of everybody else.

That's the big problem. Yeah. I mean, yo might just keep adding features and who knows. We'll get a couple more letters out of them and we'll go for that. But, I mean, if you look at things like Friendster and MySpace, everybody gets supplanted at some point. Everything is cyclical.

Yes, we haven't seen this kind of mass usage of services like this before because every day there's more people online. And when they get there, they just go there. Look at AOL. In the old days, AOL was the only thing. Then the internet happened and AOL was put out to pasture.

Something else will come along. I think it's going to be at least about three or four years. But my gut is telling me something will come along. It's not going to be something that people just say, here's a Twitter replacement. And I don't think that it's anything that's out there right now. This will be something new or something that we haven't even heard of.

It's so, like, way in the background at the moment.

Add one to the Deadpool. Macworld is no longer in print. Really? Yep. They're shutting it down and going online only. Well, makes sense. But I used to actually pick that up occasionally when I was standing at an airport.

Yeah, PC World did this about a year ago, I think. They've been gone for a while. I honestly didn't remember Macworld still being in print. I haven't picked up Macintosh Magazine in 15 years. Right. Yeah. I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. Well, in continuing death, Apple has finally killed off the old iPod.

I know. This makes me sad. It makes me sad, too, because there was the one thing about the iPod that was great, which was the storage capacity. Storage capacity. And you were the only one that put your shit on it. Nobody else could. Exactly. It was not network enabled, and nobody could touch it but you.

It was your own little private Idaho. Yeah. I love that damn thing. I still have one sitting around somewhere. We've got a couple classics here around the house, and I wish they would have said that they were going to kill them, because I'd have picked up one or two of them just for nostalgia, just to have in the box, you know? Well, there's going to be a big secondary market on eBay, I'm sure.

I know, but I don't want to pay rapey prices. Well, wait a couple weeks. Well, it'll chill out. So Facebook had some news this week. They launched an open source initiative called To Do, Talk Openly, Develop Openly, and Share Openly, because our privacy sucks.

But Facebook's entire thing is to don't. So they've got a bunch of members on there already, Box, Dropbox, GitHub, Google, Con Academy, Stripe, Square, Twitter, and surprisingly, Walmart Labs. Okay. I had a friend that worked at Walmart online.

He said it was interesting. They were forward thinkers over at Walmart. Oh, who knew? They also released a new router, which is very interesting. This is for routing requests to basically farms of Memcache servers.

And Memcache is a protocol that lets you store things in RAM so you don't have to hit the database. It was actually invented by LiveJournal, if you can believe it, back in the day. Wow. Well, it makes sense, actually. And the thing about this, though, it's called the MC router or the McRouter.

So cue the lawsuits. That's awesome. I love that. So in other news, Germany. I've been a big fan of Germany the past couple months because they just seem to be the most progressive government on the planet in terms of dealing with tech privacy and regulatory issues.

They stopped Uber a few weeks ago and basically said, no Uber in Germany. And now they've gone to Google and said, hey, give us your secret search algorithm because we want to know what the hell is going on. Never going to happen. It's never going to happen. But hey, I'm giving the entire country props for saying, we prefer to know what you're doing here.

Why don't you let us know? Wasn't Germany the one that went after them for the street view? Yes. Collecting all the Wi-Fi info? Yes, Germany said that you can't do that either. They're being very, very progressive about human rights in this tech age where nobody seems to give a shit. So go Germany.

And it's interesting because I think they got to know that Google's never going to give that up. So this could just be a way for their lawyers to get something else out of Google, say, as a concession. I think so too. Let's swing big and hope we get a double. Yeah, I think so. Not that Germany plays baseball, but it should have been a soccer analogy, but I couldn't come up with one.

News from Microsoft. Microsoft is building a mobile keyboard for iOS, Android, and Windows. So it'll work on all three. It's a Bluetooth keyboard. Bluetooth keyboards work on all of them already. It's a very nice looking one, though. And I don't really expect nice looking functions from Microsoft.

Now, here's where I disagree. Microsoft hardware in the old days, keyboards and mice were my favorites. I would always throw away my Apple mice and get a Microsoft mouse. And this keyboard actually looks pretty solid. The only problem I have with this article is it's like, well, there's no trackpad.

Well, duh. It's because you're attaching it to a touch device that doesn't have any kind of SDK for mouse interaction. You have a finger. That's what your finger's for. The Surface doesn't come with a trackpad. You know, it comes with a finger. Your finger. So I give it the finger.

But I'm going to check it out, though. Yeah, it looks really nice. It really does. I might grab something like that just to have in the backpack when traveling. Yeah, I tried using the standard Bluetooth keyboard that I use on my laptop, you know, for my iPad. And it's just too big.

So hopefully this is smaller, more compact, but it has a good feel to it. It looks like it's going to be solid. Yeah, it does look solid. And it's $80. For that, I'll go to the store and try it before I buy it. Oh, totally. Yeah. And Facebook is coming out with another app that is being what they call dog fooded, which is the worst term.

I've never heard that term before, and it's absolutely horrible. I think we need to ban that immediately, people. Well, the thing is, we used to use it like 10 years ago. Like, yeah, we're dog food, and that's when we're just using it to see if it works. And we stopped using it because it is such a horrible term. Nobody wants to eat dog food.

Yeah. And this is called Moments, a super private sharing app. Now, this is Facebook. Outside of the fact that we have a bunch of these apps already that we know aren't that private. The thing that Facebook is banking on is they've got your social graph, another term that should be shot in the head and taken out back and buried.

But they've got your graph. So for them, it's easy to build these things where you say, okay, bring this group of people with me. Bring this group of people with me. That's why you can't have – that's why they stopped sharing your graph with other people like Twitter and Google.

You can't get your graph information out of Facebook anymore because that's their – that's one of their keys to retention. So they can try this stuff, but I wouldn't use it. I mean, hell, I only have to use Messenger when I know that I'm going to be talking to somebody like at Riot Fest. And then I delete it.

It's just – in this one, I'll never install. This one may never even see the light of day. I mean, I'm not surprised at all that they're pursuing this sort of avenue because they're losing market share to Snapchats and things like that. So why not have something very similar?

What was the name of that photo app from Facebook that we installed and tried out and then just kind of slowly died? I can't even remember. I can't even remember. It was so short-lived. It lasted on my phone for about seven minutes. Yeah. So this is just – if this even sees the light of day, I see it going the same way as that.

Props to Facebook for playing around though. I love the fact that they actually do this in the company and they just kind of let people develop a concept and play around and build out an app and use it internally and see what sticks. I got an idea though. Why don't they put some of this brain trust on making their app actually work, their flagship app, which is the biggest piece of shit in the app store, on any app store.

It is horrible. It's a battery drain. It's clunky. I don't know if you've noticed, but since I updated to iOS 8 yesterday and then the 27 app updates that I had to download this morning, including one for Facebook, Facebook is crashing basically one out of every ten launches for me now.

Yeah. I don't use it. So I had it on there and I forgot to delete it. So when I turned it on, it did have a really nice explanation of the privacy settings in iOS 8. And now you can actually set – instead it used to just be on or off, but now it can be on, off, or when the app is open for getting location data.

And I didn't actually know that until I saw it in the Facebook app, which I then promptly deleted. Security. Ha! This week in Android, which is going to be our new segment, a major, major bug has been found in one of the built-in browsers that comes with the older versions, which can affect up to three quarters of Android phones.

Which is quite a lot. I mean there's a lot of Android phones out there. Yeah. It basically lets you side skirt the same domain issues when loading JavaScript. So I can put an iframe and a page that can load JavaScript from another site that they can then have access to another site.

So I can put my web page that has an iframe that goes to, say, eBay, and I can get your eBay login credentials or your secure login cookie, pull that back, and then use that cookie to log in to your site. It's kind of a foster cluck. And the Sophos Chit Chat podcast, which I really dig, I listen to every week, they have a great fix for it, which is disable the browser that came with your Android phone and go download a different one.

That's about it. Yeah, that'll do. So I don't know. I'm surprised at this. I'm sure they'll fix it. Android has actually been relatively quick about these sorts of things, but it's bad. There is a fix, yeah. But the issue is that a lot of these phones can't get updated fast enough.

Yeah. Because of the version skew and the carriers, and that's always the big problem with Android is the fact that it's so broken apart and fractured. It's very convoluted. So now on Apple security news, I knew you were going to laugh at me for that.

Yes. On iOS 8, they no longer have the keys to the castle for you. So if law enforcement goes to them and says, hey, I need to get the data off this phone, please give me the encryption key so I can decrypt what's on the phone, they can't. Good. Not anymore.

It's like, sorry, guys. We can't do that for you. Go fuck yourself. That is a very good move, and I hope that that is a precedent that takes hold. Now, if you store things on iCloud or use them for storage of anything, they are still required by law to give that up.

So don't use iCloud if you don't want John Q. Law to get a hold of it, you know. Well, the grumpy old geeks since day one have been saying the iCloud or any cloud is probably not a good idea for sensitive data. Absolutely not. And I'm going to put a link to the Apple's Legal Process Guidelines for U.S. Law Enforcement in the show notes because it was an interesting read.

They definitely are very combative against law enforcement in some cases. The process you have to go through to get your subpoenas to Apple is fairly strict, and they require at least 10 days unless there is an imminent threat to life.

Yes. Life or bodily injury. Yeah. I fully support this. This is good. Now, I want to talk about the story that never was. This will be a quickie. This one just cracked me up because this is the 24-hour always-on news cycle in effect. Yes.

The headline, Comcast declares war on tour, question mark? No. Yep. The answer to that one is no. Comcast came out the next day saying this is bullshit. Yeah. That was it. That was the entire story. I never saw another article about it after that.

Yeah, that was it. I mean, this was a story that would have been really, really, really interesting, but it's not really a story. Because it never happened. Exactly. We just wanted to touch on it because it was out there. And the other interesting one was the feds, when they were trying to get data out of Yahoo for Prism, basically threatened them with a $250,000 a day fine for not complying.

Right. Which is, you know, a little strong arm. It's a little strong arm, but not terribly surprising. Hit them where it hurts with the money. Props to Yahoo for not doing it originally. Yeah. They fought as long as they could. And then they're like, oh, we don't have $250,000. Yeah.

We've screwed up everything. We don't have any money. Well, they had that big stake in Alibaba, so they're flush. Right. The FBI just finished building its facial recognition system, and that is the headline, but the actual headline should have been just implemented and deployed its facial recognition system.

It didn't just finish building it. This is called the Interstate Photo System, or IPS, and it's an image-searching capability of photographs associated with criminal identities, which is nice in theory, except for the fact that they also pulled in about 52 million faces in total, of which a lot of them are not bad people.

They're not criminals. They're not anything. They're just non-criminal faces pulled in from employment records or background-check databases. And it's got a really dismal hit rate. Yeah. It's not good. But they say that there are a lot of checks and controls built in so that if you get a hit right away, they don't exactly show up at the door guns blazing with their massive amounts of war equipment that they all have now.

But if you're in Nepal and you're a pedophile, watch out. Yeah. They will get you. The last one I saw is in the Washington Post. For sale, systems that can secretly track where cell phone users go around the globe. This one is – it's taking big data, buying data from the cell phone companies and just sniffing all those secret boxes you see on the street to just ping all these cell phones, putting it all into a package and selling it.

Right. And anybody can buy it. Yeah. If you've got enough money, you can buy it. And then you can track everybody. Of course, most people have their phones set to a setting where you can track them where they are anyways all the time. This is true.

But for the people that are smart enough to turn it off and don't want to be found, you can now find them as well. Yep. Get your Faraday cages out, kiddies. At the library. We talked a bit last week about the awesomely cool promo site that you had found for James Frey's new book.

I ran across an article in the Chicago Tribune. James Frey, first a liar, now a copycat. So, apparently this guy has gotten a hold of at least the one cheater for the new book and it's basically a ripoff of all these sort of young adult things that are out there at the moment.

And he just basically says James Frey is an idiot who's rewritten The Hunger Games after he was the liar that sold a bunch of books. Which is funny because The Hunger Games was a ripoff too. So, we've gotten to the meta ripoff, you know, singularity now. Yeah, everybody's ripping everybody off.

We've ripped off the ripoff of the ripoff of the ripoff. So, there you go. But the one bit of information that I wasn't aware of until I read this article is that James Frey's new book is going to be a young adult novel. I may have potentially read it at one point if people told me it was interesting.

But now I'm definitely not going to because I just can't deal with any more young adult books. I have issues with young adult novels. When I was a young adult, I didn't read young adult novels. I read big boy books. I think the whole young adult tag is just a way to mask crappy writing.

And to talk about that a little bit, I just finished reading a book called Mind's Eye by Douglas E. Richards. We've talked about Douglas Richards on the podcast before because he had a series of books. The first one was called Wired and then the follow-up was called Amped that I actually really enjoyed.

Even then I thought the writing was meh, but I was like this guy's got potential and the concepts were great. And Mind's Eye was written post those books. And it's rare to see an author actually get worse with subsequent efforts. This book was bad. There's just no way around it.

Just flat out bad. It was just bad. The idea, great. I mean, fantastic concept. And I'm not going to get too into it, but it's great real near future ideas in it. But the writing is so horrific. Everything is projected so far ahead of time.

The love story is sophomorically presented. It was actually excruciating. The writing about the way that he, the way he wrote these two characters' feelings for each other and how they longingly glanced at each other from across the room, but still secretly knew what each other was thinking.

Horrible. I wanted to fucking, I was like, nobody, no young adult would even think this was good. This was not, by the way, a young adult novel. One of the things I found out after I finished reading it, and I was like, what happened to this guy? Is I went and I Googled him. And after Wired and Amped, he discovered that he could make a lot more money writing young adult novels and is probably more geared to it because his writing is so bad.

So he did a whole bunch of young adult novels in between these, and he tried to step back into writing a big boy book and a big girl book with mine's eye and failed miserably because it's just bad. Now, as far as the young adult stuff goes, there are a couple young adult novels that I actually liked, but they were written by people who kind of know how to write.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, young adult novel, pushing young adult novel because there is sex in it. Well, I would even say the Hunger Games series, those were fine. I read all of them. They were great. Yeah, except the last two books were shit. Well, yeah, she tried to do big ideas there.

That didn't work. Fortunately, they fixed that in post in the movie. The movies are getting better as they go, and Neil Gaiman did a couple young adult novels, and it's Neil Gaiman. He takes a dump in the morning, and it's a bestseller, but I just like his books a lot. So there are cases for it.

When real authors who really know what they're doing write something geared towards young adults, that's fine, but you know what I'm talking about in terms of kind of just the generic young adult just masks crappy writing. So Fifty Shades of Grey is young adult? Basically.

I mean, Da Vinci Code, I would even put in the same category. Oh, Jesus. What a terrible book. Those books are horrific. They're horrifically written. And I mean, I'm really sorry, Mr. Richards. I loved Wired and Amped.

And Mind's Eye, again, you've got the ideas. It's just you're writing. Oh, God. You're writing. Software Apps and Gadgets. So there's a new app out this week called Tiny, T-I-I-N-Y.

It's from Kevin Rose's new company. And all it is is a little app that lets you take pictures. Okay. And they're tiny. You can't do anything with them. You can do photos or video, little looping videos and whatnot. Right. And it's getting a little bit of traction. Tony Hawk's on there.

And, of course, Ashton Kutcher. Of course. They're all buddies. Yeah. And I tried it out. You know, I gave it a whirl. And that's all it is, honestly. And the photos all delete after 24 hours. Uh-huh. Now, there's another app that does almost exactly the same thing. Called, I believe it's called Cap.

Exactly the same thing. Grid, whatnot. And so TechCrunch picked up on this. And there's an article called A Tale of Two Apps. And these things are, they're almost identical. But they're also by buddies. It's like Danny Tren and Kevin Rose. They know each other. They talk to each other. Kevin gives him ideas.

He gives Kevin ideas. And they just ended up making the same damn app. I was like, come on, guys. Seriously, try a little harder. Well, I've made a big experiment with apps this week. Because, you know, throughout this podcast, it was always kind of a joke that I never downloaded apps.

And you always did. And you've kind of stopped as well. Because we both realized it's a bit useless. I went through the top Apple free charts. And tried to find two apps that I didn't have or hadn't ever used before. And downloaded them. And figured I'll load them once a day throughout the week and see what's going on.

So, I tried this out. And I downloaded Yik Yak first. Which is, let me read the little description here. Yik Yak acts like a local bulletin board for your area by showing the most recent posts from other users around you. It allows anyone to connect and share information with others without having to know them.

Interesting enough concept, kind of local area, just blasting of whatever. It's kind of like a localized Craigslist. Yeah, like a localized Craigslist or something like that. So, I've loaded it once a day just to kind of read what's going on. And this literally makes me weep for the future.

Let's see. Let me load it right now. No glove, no love. Fuck watermelon. Where's the sour apple? All the Swedish girls at SMC be looking bomb. Haven't had sex since May and I promise I'm not ugly. I'm just in sober living.

Late night math class with a girl with no bra. This is it. Okay. I got it. Yeah. I don't – it's completely and utterly useless and stupid. I tried it a long time ago and it was just a wasteland. There was nobody there yet.

So, it sounds like it's picked up a bit but in the direction that I – I'm kind of glad I deleted it when I did. It's – yeah. It's – I mean a lot of these – the other app I got was Kik because I've actually heard a little bit about Kik and I thought I'd try that out as well. Both of these apps and all of these kind of newfangled things that allow you to communicate with other people that nobody's ever heard of seem to be exclusively used by college kids or younger kids.

Nobody our age and Kik seems to be no exception to that rule. Let's see. Let's read the description for this one. 150 million people love Kik. Only Kik lets you connect with all your friends no matter how you meet them at school, on your favorite social app, or in an online game. Just ask them, what's your Kik?

So, I launched this once and then I did it again earlier today. Apparently, this is only useful if you actually know someone else on it and as I don't interact socially with under 20-year-olds, I don't. So, I've not used it at all. Also, I'm not entirely sure how Only Kik lets you connect with all your friends as you can tell them your contact info on any messaging system, not just for Kik.

So does email, you know? Yeah. So, the claim that Only Kik lets you do this is a complete and utter load of shit. This is a – it's a clone. It's a clone of all these other ones. They're all – like I said before, you know, everybody's got – had the one idea.

Let's be able to communicate. Okay. Well, let's communicate, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. This is just another channel and it's kind of useless. Yes. So, Kik and Yik Yak are going – actually, I might leave Yik Yak on because I have to say I've gotten a chuckle out of loading it every day. Yeah, if you're not talking to children, which you shouldn't be because it's bad, then dump Kik.

But, you know, going back to my other point, it's we need something that's new. This is all just rehashing the same shit over and over and over again. It's so easy to build this kind of stuff that everybody can do it. You know, you get a Lynda.com course on basic database and networking and boom, you're done.

I don't know. Yep, yep, yep. But I applaud your science for actually going out and getting some apps and trying them. I will do it again maybe – well, not next week because I'm a little burned out on it. But every other week I'm going to go ahead and go in and try this out and try out some of the funky new things that are popular with the kids.

So last night once I got my iPad – because I waited to get my iPad up to iOS 8. I got like a swanky air like loaded and I grabbed all of the games in the new metal, quote-unquote metal section. Not heavy metal unfortunately. There were no Judas Priest or Iron Maiden apps.

Damn. It was just games. And I got to say, they are pretty. They are very, very pretty. They do a good job with it. The thing is it's like these are launch games, so they're not that deep. Everything is built with in-app purchase, so I skipped most.

I mean I played each one for like five or so minutes. The driving one is really good. It's pretty. It's hard to control. But like I said, as far as the technology goes, I think it's a huge leap forward and it is – on my air, it is gorgeous and fast. Nice. Yeah, I haven't tried any on the phone because why would you play a game on the phone when you got the big old screen?

Now, let me ask a quick question. I think I already know the answer to this, but in all the hoopla surrounding the Apple announcement, is there any rumors, word, et cetera, about iPads and the next gen? Not that I've heard. Yeah, I haven't heard anything either because I've really been considering doing an upgrade because I've just got an iPad 2 and an iPad mini and an old – yeah.

No, those are the only two I have to – I was like, what else do I have? Nope, that's it. And I've been thinking about getting an air, but I was like, hmm, there's something new coming. Yeah, I would actually hold off until the spring. Okay, good idea. Yeah, just keep that on the back burner. Yeah. If it's not a pressing need, keep it off to the spring because I tell you what, the air that I've got is amazing.

I got the Verizon 4G LTE iPad Air loaded. It is sweet. I see no reason to upgrade that, and most of the time I even take the cover off because it's so light. But I would wait, honestly. Yeah, I'm going to hold off on it.

Moron of the Week. I doubled down on morons again because I just can't seem to help myself. Plus, there's just a lot of stupid people out there. So, first moron of the week, Urban Outfitters. This one was bad. This one was really bad, and I – okay. I don't know.

I think we need to get a little quick history. Yeah, a little quick history. In 1970, there was something called the Kent State Massacre that left four people dead, and a lot of people got shot on the grounds of Kent State. Not good. And some idiot decided to design a bloodstained T-shirt that says Kent State University, and they sold it at Urban Outfitters.

Yeah, Urban Outfitters, their excuse was, no, this is what it looks like after it's been aged for all this time. It was a real sweatshirt, and this is what it looks like after all the red has run out. Which, okay, yeah, it looks vaguely like a tie-dyed red T-shirt, except there are very obvious bloodstains.

It looks – link is in the show notes. Go look at it. They are bloodstains. Yeah. This was just ridiculous. Yeah. And get it or regret it, read the description, for the vintage one-of-a-kind Kent State sweatshirt sold by Urban Outfitters for $129, by the way.

Which is ridiculous. Yeah, they quickly had to issue an apology, and you guys – god damn. I mean, I really do start to wonder, are these done on purpose at this point just to get the attention? I told you the conversation I had with the SEO guy.

It's manufactured outrage to get the page views. If your page views are going down, you're going to get a ton of inbound links that are going to last way after the outrage dies down and your SEO is going to go up. So I don't put it past anybody, especially anybody that's selling something, to do this kind of shit.

I mean, especially after the – yeah, the Jewish pajamas or whatever, the concentration camp pajamas. Yes. Yeah. God damn, people. Just smarten up and let's have a better society. This is why we can't have nice things. It really is. All right. Let's move on to the second moron, Robin Thicke, who I thought was a moron before, but he's definitely a moron now.

He's had a busy week in the news. His big hit, Blurred Lines, was that the hit of the summer last summer, I believe? It's been a year, right? I don't even – I don't listen to the radio. Well, that was a song you couldn't get away from at all. It was everywhere. About Blurred Lines specifically, there was a case being made, I believe, by the Marvin Gaye estate that the song was a blatant ripoff of one of his tracks.

So that's in the courts right now, and he had to go and go talk to people. He was basically just copping to it or whatever. He didn't actually write the song.

He threw Feral under the bus. He said he was high on Vicodin the entire time. He only wanted to take songwriting credit because he wanted to look good and et cetera, et cetera. I'm like, God, this story is just – anyways. I start to get really depressed halfway through talking about these things.

I can tell you got a little tongue-tied. I thought maybe you were knocking some Vicodin back. No, I just started to get really depressed. Anyways, go read about it. He's an idiot. The web's not dead.

I'm starting to feel a little sad, Jason. Make me happy. I will make you very happy. I don't generally buy things from ThinkGeek anymore because they've also hit critical mass and everybody has their stuff. Yeah. I used to be able to wear their shirts out and, like, fellow geeks would see it and, like, I'd get a wink and a nod, you know.

I spent an obscene amount of money with them, like, 10 years ago. They were awesome. But, yeah, you're right. Everybody has their gear now. Now, there's one that I might have to flip on, the Battlestar Galactica bomber jacket. This is a cool-ass-looking jacket. It is beautiful.

It is really cool. And it's $230, which is, you know, a decent price for a good bomber jacket. Yeah, and this is a bomber jacket that not only would I wear, you know, for Halloween because I think that would be an awesome outfit to wear, but I would wear this regularly. Absolutely.

Yeah, it's awesome. It's officially licensed, you know, and it's a replica of one of the jackets that Apollo wore. So, you know, you might not be able to forgive the ending, but they did have cool outfits. You've got to give them that. Yeah. No, you know, I've gotten over my rage at the last episode, and I'm still able to say that it is one of the best TV shows that's ever aired.

It really is. Absolutely. And this is one of the better jackets I've ever seen. It is beautiful. Are you kidding me? This is one of those, I saw this fact, and I was like, that is awesome. A typical microwave oven often uses more electricity, keeping its digital clock on standby than it does heating food.

Now, at first, I was like, ooh, really? Does it really take that little energy to create all those microwaves that heat everything up? No, it's a factored over time sort of thing. Ah, because your clock is always on, and you're not always microwaving. Exactly. So you actually rarely use the microwave for its actual function, but it is constantly drawing power for its little clock.

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. In related news, I just got a new microwave. It came pre-programmed with U2's favorite recipes. Stop. We're here all week, folks. Try the veal. Stop. Just stop. Closing shout-outs.

I want to give a heartfelt shout-out to all the folks that heard me be a bit downcast about my whole Among Us experience last week and reached out to me on Twitter and a few other vaguely stalkerish ways and told me how much they enjoyed the music. Thank you very much. It really did mean a lot. Now, get off my lawn.

Speaking of music, I did survive Riot Fest. Good. And The Cure? The Cure was amazing. It was the single best live show I've ever seen. Yes, they are stunning. Stunning, stunning live. I mean, I had to skip one day because the rain and the mud killed my ankle, so I missed my second day, which had most of my bands that I wanted to see, but I did stick it out for The Cure.

So, you know, props to Riot Fest. It was a fun show. I don't think I'm ever going back because now I know why I haven't gone to music festivals my entire life because there are way too many people and way too many stupid people. But the music was fantastic. Awesome. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

I also want to shout-out to Dr. David Teeter and Chen for hosting me up in San Fran last weekend. It was a blast. Thank you very much. And I'm glad you didn't, like, you know, crapping their Cheerios because I'll be there tomorrow. I did not. I think they're still accepting guests of the Grumpy Old Geek variety. Excellent.

And I'm going to be cruising around San Francisco probably Friday night, the night that this show comes out. So keep an eye on my Twitter if you'd like some heads up and maybe come grab a drink. We'll be hitting some dive bars in the Tenderloin, I'm sure. Yes, now that you're sharing again on Twitter, you'll be able to find out where Jason is.

But we will be in the Tenderloin, so it's bring your own weapon. And I do want to give a final shout-out to us, the Grumpy Old Geeks. Yay. If you like the show and would like to help us keep the lights on, pop over to GrumpyOldGeeks.com and click the little donate button in the upper right and throw us a few shekels if you don't mind.

It's, you know, not putting any pressure on you. But if you want to, feel free. It makes us happy. We got bills to pay. And, you know, we like doing the show. Absolutely. All right, man. I will catch you next week. Talk to you next week, man. Enjoy San Fran. I will. Try not to disrupt anything.

Music for Grumpy Old Geeks is provided by Among Us. Check them out at iTunes, where you will not get a free version, but you will have to pay for it. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive two months free.

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Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 76. Yuck, yuck, paddywhack. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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