81: Congratulations... Now Get Off My Internet!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. Hey, Jason.

Hey, Brian. How's it going? Oh, it's going all right. How are you? Oh, peachy keen. I'll tell you all about that in a minute. Excellent. If you have listened to this show at all, you know that two things occur every single time there's an iOS update. One, if there's a beta, Jason will say he's not going to install it, then install it, then have his system completely down forever and then bitch about it incessantly and say he's never going to install a beta again. And number two, every time I wait and then just install it, fucking Bluetooth will go back on.

Now it didn't happen for 8.0. I hallelujahed it when it didn't happen for 8.0 on this very show. And then the 8.1 update, it's back. Yes, it is. Fucking idiots. Yeah, my roommate was bitching about it, too. So I knew that you were going to bring it up.

I have to. It's a tradition. It's a Grumpy Old Geeks tradition now. Yeah, so the switch that they unswitched has been re-switched. Yeah, every time Bluetooth gets turned on, take a drink. Man, I thought I was an alcoholic already.

Anyways. But you got your photo rollback now. I am very happy. Well, sort of. They halfway rolled back the photo app. They got rid of that stupid thing where they hid basically all of your photos and just had a recent photos in your main thing. But they still have the need to quadruple delete, basically.

Oh, I know. I hate that. I do not want a safety net. I want delete to delete. Yeah, I know. I don't like the safety net either. I'm happy that they kind of listened to people complaining about how the photo app started to work. And they did one change to go back to the old way, which was fine. But let's also get rid of that stupid double delete, people.

So annoying. I also updated my laptop to Yosemite. Ooh, how did that go for you? It went, well, like things do go for me very easily. It was no problem. It took forever, obviously. It does take a long time to do the update.

But it worked swimmingly. No problems whatsoever, unlike all of you people. And it looks like a Fisher-Price toy now. I feel like I have a child's laptop. I know. It is really very, very – Fisher-Price kind of – yeah, that kind of sums it up.

I can't stand that they changed the iTunes icon to red. Yeah, they did that everywhere. It's red on my PC as well. And it's like brain memory, basically. I'm so used to that blue icon. I look for it all the time. And now there's this weird red thing. And it's very frustrating.

I don't like it. I don't like the look of Yosemite. But then again, this is just the way it goes, right? Something new comes out. We all bitch about it for a while, like every single Facebook tweak that they've ever done. And within two weeks, we're used to it. And we never think about it again. Yeah, that's pretty much the cycle.

But I don't like it. Just in a design sense, I do not like Yosemite. I miss bevels. I miss shadows. I miss the feel of 3D. I don't like the flatness. I don't like the primary colors. I'm not impressed. I don't like the translucency because the window colors change.

Yeah. Yeah, they do do that as well. Depending on what's behind it. And it's like when I see that happening, I'm just thinking, man, they're wasting compute cycles for nothing. Yeah. That could be used elsewhere for something better. But I have to say that Yosemite is a lot faster, which will, over time, make up for the 36-hour install that I had to do.

At some point, maybe I'll get ahead of the curve. But I think it's smoking fast now. But that could just be that I had so much crap on my old installs that it was killing me. Yeah, that's definitely possible. It is a little bit faster. I mean, I have an older laptop, so I'm not seeing too much of a speed increase.

But, you know, it is what it is. Let's talk about the iTunes update for a quick hot second. Not only is it the Icon Red, which is annoying, they seem to be – they have like an anti-UI crowd over there.

They seem to be going out of their way to make it less intuitive and more fucked up and more bizarre. I hate it. You know, Squarespace before had its own episode titled Unintuitive Clusterfuck – or Fuster Cluck, sorry. Right. And I think we just need to have that as an award because the new version of iTunes wins that award in spades.

It is almost unusable if you're even trying to change metadata on files or move things around. It is so hard to figure out where anything is, and it doesn't tell you if it's editable or not. You have to click on everything to figure out if you can edit it or not. There's no visual cues as to whether it's a field that you can modify or not when you're in like the Get Info section on any kind of file.

Because I use it to – when we post this podcast, I go in and I change it, add the artwork, do all the stuff to it. And now it is so difficult. It's ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. It's just – it's really bad. I'm just starting to wonder, are they even trying? I mean, are they trying to compete with things like Spotify or anything like that?

Because at this point, it's – I've had issues with iTunes for years. iTunes has crashed multiple times. I've lost my carefully curated library and all my tags many, many, many, many times to the point which I know half my library is a complete and utter mess, and I've never gone back and cleaned it up again because I just got so frustrated with it.

But now I don't even want to use the damn program anymore. It really – are they even trying anymore? No. Well, they're trying to frustrate the hell out of us. That's for sure. And I have to say that being on the Mac versus PC side, on the Mac, it's always been a lot more stable because it's just ported over to Windows.

And I've had to use it on Windows recently quite a bit. Right. And it is almost unusable on a PC. I don't know how anybody gets anything done with it. It's a fantastic piece of crap. And it's really sad because it's kind of the last holdout of real ownership of music that I have anymore, and my library is just complete and utter shit, and I find myself going to Spotify instead.

Yeah. I mean, it's completely – I think that's apples and oranges, but there is no good media manager anymore. No, there really isn't. There was some competition for a while. Most of them are gone or out of business, and that's that really.

Yeah. We really need a light room for music. That would be fantastic, but then again, everybody is going to streaming, and nobody gives a shit about having a library anymore, so it would be a program that you and I would enjoy quite a bit, but nobody else. We talked a bit about the Iggy Pop speech last week, and we kind of beat the curve on that one because over the weekend and the beginning of this week, there was a lot of articles about it.

I just wanted to touch base on that really quick as a follow-up. The Globe and Mail did a really good write-up about it, and they basically just kind of talked about when Iggy Pop can't live off his art, what chance do the rest of us have? Again, let's point out the fact that Iggy Pop is actually worth $15 million, but the point being anything that he puts out now makes zero money.

So he's living off his previous riches, but when – yeah, he literally – it's a perfect example. It's anybody that puts out anything now, you can't live off of it. You can't live off the proceeds anymore. And then there was also an article on Salon that basically just kind of went through his entire speech and pulled out some of the key points on it.

So if you have not listened to the whole speech yet, these links are in the show notes, and it's rather interesting if you want to see how our industry has been destroyed. Has the actual speech been put online? Because I haven't been able to find it yet. Actually, I know it was because I watched it.

It might have been a shitty handheld thing that was on YouTube and may have gotten taken down. So I'll do a search for it later, and if I find one, I'll pop it up there. The Salon Bart – the bit that I found really interesting is his quote about how we're exchanging corporate ripoff for the public one.

So he kind of tastes – which is true. What we did was we used to get screwed by record labels who charged us outrageous sums for CDs. And now instead of that, it's the public just taking music for free. So musicians get screwed either way around. Yeah, the musicians get screwed for sure.

I think this is just label karma coming back for the labels. Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's as bad as it is for the labels. It's even worse for the musicians, which is unfortunate. Yeah, they kind of got caught in the crossfire even though it's their product. Exactly. Hey, but hey, you can put it out there for yourself for free.

Oh, wait. Hold on. That doesn't help at all. And one of my other pet peeves or pet topics I guess is I've been screaming for years about how the middle class is shrinking, how they're working harder for less money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There was a really good short podcast, again, through Slate.

Link is in the show notes called We Work Hard for Less Money. And they talked to some real economists and they said, yes, as a matter of fact, in terms of, quote, real wages, end quote, which is amount of time put in for amount of money taken out, we are making less than our grandparents did.

Okay, here we go. This is an issue I have with this podcast and the title here. It says, in terms of real wages, we make less than our grandparents did. At least we have air conditioning. Nowhere in the podcast did they mention grandparents or the wages our grandparents made.

This tagline comes out of the blue. It comes from the related articles that they somewhat touched upon, which I then went and read. Okay, because, yeah, it was nowhere in that show. And they did have the founder of Planet Money on there who was a pretty knowledgeable guy by any stretch, Adam Davidson.

And it's funny because Adam Blumberg is another podcaster from Planet Money that we'll talk about later in the show. They sound almost identical. Yeah, they do. They really do. That was kind of funny. Yeah, it's that NPR voice, I guess. Well, yeah, it was a very NPR-y type podcast.

And you're right. They did a really poor job of titling it because they referenced something that they didn't discuss specifically in the short podcast. But it was part of a larger discussion that I followed through on. Yeah, and the podcast itself, the gist, I had to fast forward the other parts because they were really terrible.

It wasn't – it's not a good show. Okay, fair enough. But it does – I just like to bring out things that hammer home my point. Of course you do. Yeah, of course I do. Okay, a little follow-up on the standing desk sagas. I still haven't gotten mine.

I still have not done that. I've got to figure out my whole situation. But you found something, and it looks perfect for me. Yeah, Ikea is finally jumping on the sit-stand bandwagon. Is it called the Schittenstander? Yeah. Or the Flippenfloggen? So they've got a $499 desk.

That's the base price. I don't know what the other versions are. But base price of $499 for a sit-stander that's mechanical – not mechanical. It's electrical. So it raises and lowers for you, which is a pretty good price, and it looks like a decent desk. It does, and it's actually – it's called the Becant for folks that actually do want to look it up.

So it's not too crazy of a name. It's affordable. It looks great. I don't know the next time I'm going to be at Ikea, but the next time I am there, I'm going to check it out and get myself some meatballs. I've never had the meatballs. Neither have I. It feels weird to eat there. Yeah.

And who wants a lingonberry? So I've got some business advice for the small business owner. Okay. Now, we used to give some business advice when we first started the show, and we kind of stood off a bit, mainly because everything has been kind of working.

About a year and a half ago, I hired a business manager because I'm terrible at paying my bills on time. I get stressed when I have to deal with that stuff, and I can't sleep. It's terrible. You're a pretty bad CFO. Oh, terrible. Unfortunately, when you run your own business, you have to be CEO, CFO, and CIO.

Yeah, so I hired somebody to take on the financial side of it and deal with my corporations, setting up all the bank accounts, doing all that stuff. And for 16 of those 18 months that I've had, life has been beautiful. I've been able to sleep at night. I don't have to worry about my bills getting paid.

Everything has been going great. And in the spirit of geo-arbitrage, they jumped on the bandwagon, fired their staff, outsourced everything, and my life has gone to shit because of it. Have you been able to get in touch with your friend Steve?

Hi, I'm Steve. I am happy to help you. Yeah. No, I haven't. Oh, okay. So I finally got access to all my accounts and had to sit there and audit everything, and I found so many discrepancies because when they gave everything over to their outsourcers, the outsourcers obviously don't know the clients.

They don't know our specific needs. They're little notes that they have on things, and they screwed everything up, screwed my life completely up. I've literally been living on ramen for two months. That's unfortunate. It's been very unfortunate. And I tell you what, ramen, you can't lose weight when you're eating ramen every day. Not the crap stuff, that's for sure.

So my advice is if you do outsource anything financial, audit them yourself every day. What, you can't outsource auditing? Well, you can, but you know. You outsource the auditing to Pakistan, and then they'll audit the Indians.

And then we'll get it back to the U.S. The problem obviously came in when they outsourced. It's just this is our culture now, and it doesn't work. We wonder why everything is so fucked up, and it's because we're constantly outsourcing stuff to people that don't give a fuck. You get what you pay for. Yeah, for the important stuff, you just have to do it yourself.

That's what I learned the hard way. Yeah, I mean I've never outsourced any of my money, but I'm like super anal about that stuff. So they would give me the heebie-jeebies if I did, and I would be doing exactly what you said. I would be logging in once a day. Okay, what was that?

Okay, but then you might as well be doing it yourself because you're spending the time to do it. Yeah, and if they're saving you money, which is what a good business manager should do, and what they did for a very long time, they saved me a lot of money. So the fees that I paid them was nothing compared to what they were saving me. And as soon as that happened, then the whole game flipped.

And that's the funny thing about the outsourcing angle is I don't know anybody who has had a smooth transition or a good time dealing with outsourcing. I know people that have virtual assistants. I know people that outsource editing for their shows, video editing, audio editing, and it never works right, ever.

It's a fucking scam. I mean it's sold as it's going to be easier, and it's going to save you time, and it's going to save you money. And the reality is for some things, okay, maybe. Yeah, I could see outsourcing. It would be great to have like a personal assistant to outsource, but I would never trust them with anything important.

It would just be like, can you go pick up the dry cleaning because you can't fuck that up. Yeah, well, then you use TaskRabbit. Whatever. I mean, and not to be too hypocritical about it because people outsource their websites to us. And sometimes that is a bad idea too. Yeah, I mean I get it, but it's – you know what I'm saying.

It's almost like it's the double pass-off that's the problem. It's when – it would be if we then turned around and outsourced the websites that have been basically – we're offering our services to take care of their client's website. And then if we turn around and outsource it, that's when the problem comes in. The one handoff is fine.

It's when you're getting into the double, triple, quadruple handoffs that everything goes to shit. Yeah, and I've tried to do that before. I've had clients come in. I take the job and then I spec everything out and give it to somebody else who works for less than I do and try and make my margin off the middle there like any good agency would do.

I've done that many times and it's never gone very well. No, I end up spending twice as much time because the work I get back is substandard and then I have to go do it myself the way that I need it done to my exacting standards because I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to stuff that I give to clients.

Yeah, me too. So agreed. Anyways, fuck outsourcing. Yeah, no doubt. Fuck ramen. I am so sick of that. Today was the first – since I found like $2,000 worth of erroneous bills that I got refunded, I could actually go to the store and buy nice vegetables today. It was so nice.

I bought an eggplant. And a little bit of sales advice too. I have been visited upon today by roving bands of Jehovah's Witnesses. Offer them some ramen. I should have. The first crew that came – now you've seen Poltergeist 2, right?

I'm sure I did. Okay. Well, just – do you remember the creepy preacher that comes to the door with a big old grin and scary as can be? I do remember that. Well, that guy showed up along with Nurse Ratchet for the first crew and no smiles. They looked like I had just killed their puppy and had it for lunch and were trying to hand me pamphlets and like there were no smiles.

And they were wearing black and it was just like the morticians just showed up. I'm like, listen, if you're selling something, I don't care if it's physical or metaphysical, smile. First thing you do when you're trying to sell something, smile. It's a good start. Yes. That's it. I mean, that's it.

Just smile. Okay. A little bit of smile goes a long, long way. Yeah. Well, as far as sales advice goes, I mean, I've got another pet peeve that happened again this week. I love my soccer and I love the LA Galaxy. They're my team and they're looking to win another championship this year, which I'm really thrilled about.

But every time I've gone to a game, I've gotten a call a week later asking me about, you know, am I interested in getting season tickets and all that sort of stuff? And I've repeatedly said, can you please remove me from your call list? I like to go to the games. I'm not interested in season tickets.

I will never be interested in season tickets. Stop calling me. And they either do not remove from a call list or every single fucking time I buy tickets, they put me right back on it and it's getting annoying. Stop it, people. This is how you lose people. Yeah. And there is the handy feature of block call on iOS 8 and 7 and 6.

Yes, but – Avail yourself of it. But, you know, again, good business advice is when you're running your own company and the phone rings and you don't recognize the number, you answer the call because it could be a $10 million account. Not that it ever is. No, definitely not. Comment of the week.

Simon left us a comment on the Grumpy Old Geeks website this week. And Simon says the no platinum album section will probably irrelevant – I'm guessing you meant to say probably be irrelevant – when Taylor Swift releases her new album on October 27th, Grumble.

Also, albums don't need to sell a million in their first year to get that platinum certificate. There have been albums getting platinum certs this year but from albums released in 2013. Example, Beyonce went 1X in early February and 2X a week later. The industry is fucked, for sure, but that article is – dot, dot, dot – somewhat misleading.

Well, thank you for your comment, Simon, but you're wrong. Okay. Way to build fan relationships. No, no. Thank you for your comment. And, yeah, that is a valid point. But that wasn't the point of the article. The article wasn't saying that there were zero platinum albums in 2014.

The article was saying that there were zero platinum albums from albums released in 2014 in 2014, which has never happened before at this point. There's always been at least a platinum album at this point in the year from an artist that released an album in that year.

So it is showcasing the decline of sales, which is exactly the point of the article. Yeah, I think Beyonce did, and I think Timberlake finally hit it, but those albums came out last year. So we are definitely seeing a massive decline in sales, and that was the point of the article.

It's a total bellwether, so there you go. The best part about this whole thing is the day after that Simon posted this comment, there was an oopsie in iTunes Canada, and Taylor Swift accidentally released Eight Seconds of White Noise as a new track, which then immediately topped the Canadian iTunes chart.

There's a link in the show notes to the CBC, which discusses it, and it has some of the most hilarious tweets that I've ever seen in my life, people writing Taylor Swift going, what is it? Is it Waves? This is an interesting track. Very funny stuff.

So you are also – you are definitely right, Simon. I have a feeling that the Taylor Swift album will be the only platinum album that will have come out in 2014, that hits it in 2014, and she'll probably do it – well, she's going to have to do it within two months, which is insane. So basically, as far as the music industry goes, we have Taylor Swift.

Isn't that awesome? Taylor Swift and White Noise. Yeah. That is hilarious. I mean, there was a total glitch. Now, to be completely and utterly fair, because this article is also somewhat misleading, and this one is really misleading, it's not that a bunch of people found out that all of a sudden there was a new track on there, and then they clicked to purchase it and download it.

They do that pre-order thing. So as soon as – everybody that had pre-ordered the album got that track automatically. So that's why it ended up topping the charts. Ah, okay. So. It's still funny. Oh, it's unbelievably hilarious, and I do urge everybody to go click on that link and read those tweets, because they're very funny.

People are stupid. Anyways, this is all very sad, and we've spent the better part of this podcast already talking about the destroyed music industry. So since it is Flashback Friday, I did find an article on Betanews.com. Let's go back to Happier Days.

Ten music releases that brought down entire websites. I just thought I'd mention this really quickly. Let's run through them. Chris Webby, Webster's Laboratory, which I've never heard of, apparently. Never heard of it. When it came out, knocked down his website. Boards of Canada. Go Canada. Tomorrow's Harvest. This was in 2013, so it was pretty, I guess, knocked down their website as well.

Who knew? Ellie Goulding and Tiny Tempa hanging on. That's not surprising, actually, because they're quite big in England, and when that came out, big deal. My Bloody Valentine, Loveless. I personally was caught up in that, because I was trying to get that album, and I was unable to. Kylie Minogue, All the Lovers.

Big artist again. There you go. Coldplay, Violet Hill. I'm intimately familiar with this one, because I built all of it, and I screamed, screamed, screamed to the record label, saying, there's no way we're going to be able to do this. We're not going to be able to accommodate the traffic.

We need to do a lot more, and we didn't, but everybody ended up getting it just a day or so later. So Five Seconds of Summer, never heard of them, but it's a tween band, so that explains it. Radiohead and Rainbows, also one of the ones I went and purchased, but I didn't have a problem, but apparently a lot of people did.

Lady Gaga, Born This Way. I'm sure everybody was super depressed when they finally got it, because the album sucks. And Beyonce's Beyonce. So there you go, back when the music industry actually was interesting, and people cared. And people actually paid for things.

Okay. Yes. Eight seconds of silence. Okay. Well, thank you, Simon, for your comment. Yes, and we'll now play that Taylor track in full. There it was, folks.

It's become such a meme that Facebook is dead and nobody uses it anymore that even when there are articles about good things that Facebook is doing, they have to open with it, which is kind of a weird thing to do.

I stumbled across this link. This is something – somebody actually has something good to say about Facebook. Safety check is a new thing that they are rolling out. And according to Will Oremus, who writes a lot of tech stuff, and I read him quite often, it's a great example of how Facebook can make itself useful.

And I kind of agree with this. The idea behind this thing is if there's a disaster in the area that Facebook knows you happen to be in at the time, they will ping you with a little thing on your phone saying, are you okay? And you can just click yes or no. That way you don't have all your friends freaking out at you or all your mom and your aunt and uncle posting.

There was an earthquake in Oakland while you're living in San Diego. Are you okay? No. Why can't you just go to Facebook and type, I'm okay? Well, you can do this, but this kind of – it automates the process and maybe you're dealing with stuff, but you are just kind of okay. And it's a quick and easy way to let people know.

It's actually – it's not a bad idea, so I don't mind it. Here's the thing, okay? Yes. In the beginning of Twitter, I said that that would be a good use for what Twitter is. But now, every time there's an earthquake, everybody types – they try to be the first one to type, earthquake! So if they're typing earthquake, you know they're okay.

That's also true. Just look at – the functionality already exists for this kind of thing. This is just ridiculous. Hey, look. Look, you know what? It's ridiculous. Since day one, I've been the Facebook apologist on this podcast. And, you know, the reality is we're all still fucking on it.

So I'm right. It's just you guys won't admit it. So I'm just trying to bring up some cool things about Facebook every now and then so you guys can get over your Facebook hate while you're on Facebook. So there. Oh, man. And speaking of that, Lifehacker has apparently found the first way to try to game the Facebook algorithm.

Apparently, if you put congratulations in your Facebook post, more people will see it. We're going to try this out and see if it works. Yes, we will. Congratulations will be in our title. But the fact that we already know this news means that they've probably already fixed it. Yes, that's exactly it. As soon as it was probably posted, end of story, they fixed it and changed the algorithm.

But we can try congratulations in Mandarin because, you know, Mark Zuckerberg speaks it now. So I did actually try it yesterday and I saw a little bit extra uptick, but not much. Right. Well, you're not going to get a lot anyways, right?

It's just going to be it's going to be pretty subtle. So we'll give it a shot. We'll see what happens. We'll report back next week. All right. Yeah. Big data. Big data is something that I'm terrified by and I think everybody should be. There is an awesome article called the United States of Reddit. It's a little bit.

It's a horrible title for the article because it's not about Reddit. Well, not specifically. It's about a bunch of sites and about mining big data from them. These are they use Reddit. They use OKCupid. They use Twitter. They used they even used IP addresses from Pirate Bay, a whole bunch of stuff.

And it's basically a big sell for a book called Dataclasm, Who We Are by Christian Reuter, who I am definitely going to be reading this book because this is a main huge point of interest for me. The article is fascinating in terms of they just kind of go through all these different little bits of data taken from these various sites and put it on a map.

One of the more interesting ones is they literally did Google IP addresses from downloads of gay porn from the Pirate Bay. And you can basically see that there are gay people everywhere in the country. Yeah, of course. Yeah. 10% of the population.

It's not like they're all in San Francisco. Yeah. Well, West Hollywood. Again, it's a bunch of really interesting things like that. You know, apparently, OKCupid runs stupid things like, you know, just random queries to people like they ask people, should burning the flag be illegal?

So there's a map of that where you can see that people feel that it should be legal or illegal. All this sort of stuff is really interesting to me. And I think it's a great but very long article. And if you're into it, you should probably get the book as well, which I will be doing and reviewing shortly. OK, after you get the book, I want you to tell me when data became big and what the parameters are for something to be big data versus just data.

Well, data became big when the internet came into play, when all of a sudden we could, when everything was basically not just national, but international, when all of a sudden we could pull together things from everywhere, from everyone. Well, this, like, you know, the name big data has only been out for a few years.

That's true. I thought it was also very funny. I was watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. the other day and they had a, they showed a screen cap of some agent stealing, cloning or stealing somebody's phone. Or maybe it was Homeland, but it said, downloading big data. Are you kidding me? Somebody that had a sense of humor over there and just snuck that in.

I actually like watching for that now because there's quite a lot of it, of that sort of stuff going on. You know, the wife watches Scandal, which I can't stand, but they have an IT guy on Scandal and every time that he does anything, it's hilarious. I'm almost positive they're throwing in jokes all the time. In Ello news, a phrase I thought I'd never be saying again.

What news? Ello raised $5.5 million on top of its previous raise, which they never mentioned and then got called out for. And they're growing their ad-free social network. And on the same vein, came out with a very weird PDF that they published saying, this is our type of business.

We are never going to sell your ads. This is our promise to you that we will never sell you ads, sell your data. And if the company gets sold, that the new owners have to abide by these rules. All right, well, okay, point number one, who gives a shit? I know they say they're growing the site, but it's tumbleweeds for me, has been for two weeks now.

Nobody I know is even posting anything on it anymore. It's dead. It's over. It's done. Remember that shark fin shark that we talked about a long time ago? This thing has finned and sharked. It's too little, too late. Sayonara. Nail in the coffin. Dead, dead, dead. Well, here's my rebuttal to that.

They've got one million users on the site, which isn't a lot, and they've got two million in the waiting list already. So I'm not – just here's the deal. It's not dead yet. It's dead. I'm calling it. It's dead. These two million people that are in the waiting queue will arrive, see there's nothing there, make a couple posts, do what we did, hang around for a week, and then never go back again.

It's dead. It is dead. Ello is over. End of story. Nobody is going to convince me otherwise. A bunch of techies are going to scream at me. They're going to say everybody's leaving Facebook like they've been doing for the year and a half we've been doing this podcast, and we'll all still talk about it on Facebook and not on Ello because we'll never sign into it again.

It's over. Okay. The problem with an outright dismissal of new things is that nothing will ever have a fighting chance to achieve anything. I don't think that any new social network will right now. We've talked about this multiple times. There is not going to be a new viable social network until there's a massive shift in the way that we actually do this stuff.

We don't need another site that looks exactly the same. We're already fucking sick of having to do Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, and we don't want another one. End of story. I'm sticking to it. But what I do like about this is their weird story.

They call themselves a public benefit corporation or a PBC. I like this concept. I love this concept, and I think somebody else will come along and do this and actually do it so the timing is right with some sort of new technology and shift in the way that we do these things, and we will all love it.

But it ain't going to be Ello. I can't believe you actually said you liked something. Who are you? I like many things, but I don't like Ello, and I said it at the time. So now let's talk about something else I don't like. Okay. Okay. Now, okay.

This is good. This is good. Okay. Now, another new social network named, they say it's a social network named Sue, but it's spelled like Tissue, or Tissue, or Tissue, or Tissue. Here, I'm going to do it.

We never really do reenactments on this podcast, but I'm going to do it right now. Here's what happened when Jason sent me the email telling me I needed to sign up to another social network. Oh, for fuck's sake. There you go. Love it. Love it.

So I did, and it looks exactly like Facebook with a slightly kind of aqua color scheme. Yes, it is very aqua. Yeah, and I signed on, and then I went, yeah, mm-hmm. Okay. Back to Facebook.

Okay. Here's, bitchin' bitchin' moan about companies that take our data, use our shit, never give anything back. This is the first one to actually try it, and before it even has a chance to do anything. I mean, just out of the gate, you're knee-jerk shittin' on it, without even giving, I made a penny so far.

I've made money. Okay. Now, after all, after all of the goddamn talk that we've had back and forth over the year and a half that we've been doing this, where we say somebody needs to come along and do this, somebody finally is trying. Okay, run, run.

So you can't shit on it just yet. It's been out for, what, three days? Run me through how the monetization works. You, ads get clicked on, you get a piece of the share based on your traffic and engagement. So if somebody's on your page and they click on an ad, then you get a bit of the share from that.

Well, the algorithm isn't public, and I doubt they're going to make it public because then it's gameable. And people are trying to game it already, which is what's going to happen. So they're going to have to figure out anti-gaming techniques. Well, isn't that kind of the problem with the site right now is everybody that has signed up for this is scammers and people desperately trying to make money, which is the downside to something like this.

That is the downside. And that's where the hard part comes in, where you have to figure out the algorithms to stop the gaming and have people that are on staff that are looking at these things and saying, no, you're not, you can't. It's like Google Analytics, I mean, Google AdSense. If you put on your page, please click my ad, they take your account down, you know, and that's a proven system.

It works. So they're going to have to come up with something like that. But, you know, just dismissing them out of the gate before there's any chance, why even bother making anything anymore if you're not going to give anything a chance? Otherwise, it's the same old shit. And you go back to bitching about the fact that we don't have something new on the services that you want to be usurped from the beginning.

Okay, flawed logic, because first off, I don't want Facebook to be usurped, and I don't bitch about Facebook. I'm well aware of the fact that it's a completely free service, that they're going to take my data and they're going to serve me ads. I have no problems with that whatsoever. I think Facebook is the best system out there currently.

I don't think that it's a bad thing. In fact, I like some of the ideas. We've talked about this forever, about how micropayment systems would be game changers, how we could add donate buttons to places where people are actually at. I don't see Sue getting a bunch of people for the same reason that Ello didn't.

I don't think the timing is right. I like the concept that they're trying to do some sort of monetization. What I actually thought about this as soon as I saw it was I don't understand why Facebook hasn't implemented something like this for brands. If there was a way to do, say, monetized content for brands on Facebook where everybody is at already, I think that would be a game changer.

I think Facebook made a massive mistake by going the route of trying to actually get money out of brands. What they should be doing is they should be encouraging brands to post content and maybe charge 25 cents to watch a video from a band, per se. Facebook exclusive.

We're going to premiere the video on Facebook and you have to hit this little button that gives us 25% and Facebook takes their fucking pound of flesh off that. That would have been a better way for them to make money than to charge brands to try to promote themselves. I think that if you implemented something like this on Facebook for brands, it would be a game changer.

Have they ever experimented with that as far as you know? Well, they tried to do that gift bullshit, which was never just for brands. It was for everyone. And the real problem with that right now is Facebook has such a fucking brand problem themselves is nobody's going to put in their credit cards. If Facebook had everybody's credit cards and could do a micropayment system, it would totally work.

But Facebook has totally screwed the pooch on that and everybody is terrified of giving any information to Facebook, even though they do it constantly. Oh, I know. You can use Apple Pay. Yeah, that would be great. They should make a deal with them. I mean, again, like I said, I think it's a great idea what they're trying to do. I don't think that they're going to get people over there.

I don't think they're going to get a lot of people to sign up for it, except for all these people that you and I bitch about all the time who are desperately trying to make a buck. But I think that there's a great idea in there that I want to see implemented in places where people are. Right. But that's what I'm saying. It's a proof of concept.

Yeah. So, you know, I want to see how it works. I want to get people there so we can see how this type of mechanism can work and if it can't work. I mean, there might – this might just be a pie in the sky. You know, it was a Jaron Larnier, whatever – I can't – never pronounce his last name.

He just might be completely wrong. He might be, yeah. The thing that I don't like about this is it's advertising-based and I'd like to see a model that is basically donations, tips, whatever, small payments for actual content, not just based on ads. Well, that's why I love Flatter.

Yeah. No, I agree. And that was – I wish that would have taken off. That would have been fantastic. I want to see small payments for actual work produced as opposed to payments for ads on the side of complete and utter shit. Because when you're getting paid purely on ads, the whole point is gaming the system and it's how we ended up with listicles fucking everywhere and shitty headlines because we're not paying for the content.

We're creating a system where it's in the content provider's best interest to create reams and reams and reams of utter shit to get us to look at it. So I totally agree with you there. Now, man, I wish we could get Flatter just into Facebook and Twitter and, I mean, there are ways that you can favorite tweets and favorite Twitterers and people with Flatter, but there's no, like, deep integration.

So – and I agree with the ad-based model. I mean, yeah, if everybody just put in a pool of money and said, here, here's 20 bucks a month, split it up to everybody and then you're still going to have people gaming the system. You're going to have packs of people, but that's manageable. Well, I don't even – Even for the most part, you're going to have – I mean, because if you look at like – go back to DIG, like the DIG whole power users club.

Yeah. There was like 0.5 percent or 0.05 percent of the people who used DIG controlled everything that was on there and that's when they cracked down on it. That's when DIG fell apart because they stopped gaming the system and putting all the good stuff at the top.

Yeah. And there was no financial model there. That was just all bragging rights. But, yeah, when you throw money into the mix, then it gets a little bit more complicated. But I think there's a way to do this and I'm glad that somebody is at least trying it. Let's get people trying it because if you don't try, you're never going to know. That's fine.

But I'm still pissed off I had to sign up for it. You didn't have to do a goddamn thing. Well, of course I had to. I've got to look and see what's going on and you would have been pissed off at me if I didn't and then we couldn't have had this conversation so it all worked out. Let me get back to the flatter thing and that's something else that I've never been crazy about and I think it's – I think a lot of people feel the same way that I do which is why it didn't take off.

I don't like the idea of the pool of money that gets dispersed through some algorithm to people that I don't know and you give you $20 and at the end of the month, that $20 goes away and it goes to people that mostly you kind of browsed and read about or whatever. Well, the way that flatter works is your money goes to people that you flatter.

So it only goes to the people that you flatter. But it still divides up by some percentage every month which is the thing that I think people would have a problem with and I find a little bit creepy. I don't want a $20 pool that just gets divvied up by the people I've clicked – to the people I've clicked on over the period of a month.

I want an exact accounting. I want to say if I click this – I have – let's say I have $40 in an account. I don't want that going away at the end of the month if I haven't decided – if I've only clicked on two people. I want to say I am giving this specific person $3 and that's it.

And I think you need that direct accounting and I think that the idea of a pool and an algorithm is – it freaks people out because it bothers me. I wonder about that. I mean I could be wrong. There are a lot of things that really, really bother me that nobody else seems to give a shit about.

Yeah, because you're adding in just a level of complexity that I don't think most people will care about. I don't think it's complexity. It's direct one-to-one transactions. Well, you get the option of just giving them a straight flatter or giving them a tip. Right. Because that's – what you're talking about is just a tip. Yeah. I like the tip jar. I don't like the flatter jar.

I still like flatter. I still contribute and I still flatter every month to the people I like, the very few people that are left that still have the button up. Peter needs to get out of jail and get back on that thing. Yeah. Well, I will give you your point that I am happy that somebody is out there and trying a different method out.

So good for Sioux. Sioux. Good to see you. Now, we had kicked this around a bit in our show notes and you were giving me crap because all I do is complain about things and I never give any ideas how to fix things.

And we went off on a little bit of a tangent that we didn't get into in this particular discussion. But I think we do have to mention this really quickly. One of the reasons that I find it difficult to come up with ideas to fix things is because everybody is now on the internet. And now that everyone is on the internet, it's a reflection of our society.

And our society ain't so great. It's utter shit. I mean, look at when AOL came onto the internet. It was the same thing. No, exactly. But now it's – You get the unwashed masses coming to the party and stinking the joint up. And it makes it more difficult.

Back when you and I started, it was – the internet was not quite so widespread and most of the people that were on it were trying to do something, trying to accomplish a goal. Now the internet is relaxation and fun for people and it's full of comment trolls, opportunistic scum, and that's – they've taken over everything.

So it's really difficult to come up with a better way. I mean, you and I both know this. We've run sites for people. We don't even bother putting up message boards anymore because it just gets filled with either spam or hate. Or Hitler. Or Hitler. It's amazing how often he pops up on the internet.

That rascally bastard keeps popping up. Yeah. So what – yeah. I mean, the internet basically is a mirror for the rest of the real world now. It's not our tribe anymore. Yeah. Exactly. And it's never going to be again. No. Just get over that. No, it never will be. How do we live in the system?

And before, it was a nice little utopia that we had. But now it's cutthroat. You have to be ruthless. Like, you have to do it in the real world. Yeah. And I think that's part of the problem when you roll out these things that you hopefully – that you want to see be game changers because when you roll out a zoo, everybody's rushing into – everybody's doing their land grab because that's the way that we deal with things now.

So I don't know. I don't have an answer for that. Do you start something like this and you do it in a totally walled garden and you let it grow organically that way for a year, two years before it ever becomes public? I think that might be one of the only ways to really effectively test out a new system.

I think you're right. So who knows? These are deep thoughts for me to do at 9 a.m. without any beer. This stuff is much better with beer. Well, it's better for us with beer. It might not be better for anybody who's listening. That's true. That's true.

But I find it very difficult to be optimistic without the buzz. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I know you. Yeah. We need to get you some optimism juice. Cold sobriety just makes me go, oh, this is all shit. And I mean, gamer game. What else do you need?

Yeah. The fact that this even exists and not only does it exist, it's big. It's a big story. It's everywhere. It's not a small amount of people. Well, here's the thing. The people who are perpetrating it, it is a small amount of people.

It is the news cycle that's glomming onto it and making it worse. Because we have an advertising model and we have to have pages and pages and pages and pages. Yes, I understand that. But the Gamergate thing itself, I'm not going to get into it. I mean, like I said in our show notes, this is the horrible-ification of the internet.

Yeah. But these people get more press than they deserve, which is no press. They're feeding the fucking trolls. That's all it's doing. I'm not a gamer, so I don't want to get into it either. If you don't know what Gamergate is, you probably – well, if you're listening to this podcast, you know.

These guys are fucking assholes and this is everything that's wrong with not only the internet but the society. These people need to die. Yeah. Go read Felicia Day's comments on it and who got doxed right after she said it. Yeah. Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I want to find these guys and just disappear them.

All right. Anyway, let's talk about happier things. Okay. Up to Sue. Up to Sue? Oh. I can't do happy, so it's up to Sue. No. You put in some links about cyborgs, which I found fascinating. This is on The Telegraph and it's a bunch of case studies about people who are doing body-ogs.

Yeah. It's really cool and I like it. It's scary as shit though. These people have balls. Cybernetic balls even. Exactly. Well, yeah, one guy's working on that. Yep. No, I do love this stuff. I mean, this for me is – people are terrified of this.

I'm not. I think this is our future. This is evolution. We've taken over the handle. Now it's up to us. I'm on board with this stuff. Not at the moment. The link is in the show notes. If you go, everybody looks all quite odd and it's early stages.

But once this stuff is good to go, I'm in. Yeah, I mean this goes back if you've ever read the old Bruce Sterling Shaper Mechanist series. These guys are mechanists. Yeah. And a lot of them are overcoming physical handicaps. Like one guy lost an eye so he put in a camera in his eyeball, which is really disturbing.

It looks so weird, but it's so cool. Yeah. I mean obviously the first things that I think are going to roll out, it's going to be a little chip in your hand or whatever. That's basically your key cards from now on and I'm all about that. I love that idea.

And even on Radiolab this week, they brought back an old story about this blind girl who had a pair of glasses with cameras in it and she had a sensor on her tongue and basically learned to see through her tongue, which was so cool. That's totally awesome. I mean the only thing that depresses me about this is I think we were born about 20 years too early.

Well, not if you read Kurzweil and you believe him. We're going to live forever. We've got to make it to 2040 first. Dude, I can totally do that. I'm not. I've got to get the ramen out of my system and eat some veggies if that's going to make it. You better go buy some more veggies, dude. Okay.

I'm going to go cook up some squash. I'll talk to you in a bit. Security. Ha! I sadly have no hacks of the week this week. Is that because none happened? I didn't see any come across my feed but I've also not been on the social medias very much dealing with the aforementioned business manager issues and actual work.

So I've been a bad security boy this week. So hopefully nobody got hacked and it's a banner week. That would be amazing. Wow. That's newsworthy. It is and probably completely untrue. Probably, yes. So you found some cool stuff though.

I did. I mean if you're a Photoshop – if you're reasonably skilled at Photoshop like both of us are, we've known this for years. But again, because this is the theme apparently. Everybody is on the internets now. Blurring information in a photograph, not so secure.

Well, there are different ways to blur stuff. In the old days, people used that really stupid twirl tool to do faces. It was just a Photoshop plug-in. Yeah. Not realizing that you can use the twirl tool in reverse. Untwirl. Well, it has a positive value and it has a negative value.

So if you go in and you use the negative value and the face comes back into crystal clarity. Yes. And this article then, it's on Lifehacker. It's in our show notes. It also discusses various other methods that people always use like the blur function and shows you basically how to unblur.

And he uses a lot of math and it's a cool technique because basically you're making your own rainbow tables. Yeah. If you kind of know what the information is supposed to look like, especially if it's numbers like on a checking account, which is his example. Yes. You can make your own rainbow tables and figure out what those values are supposed to look like and then you can just run an algorithm against it to see what the account numbers are on a check.

Exactly. And the great part about it is it's this massive article and then at the end he's like, you could just put black over it instead of going through all this shit. That is the foolproof method. It's the reason the government has been using it since time began.

If you really want to keep information in a photograph sensitive, black it out. Don't blur it. Don't use any of the Photoshop plugins. Security tip of the week. And also don't redact stuff in Adobe Acrobat because in the old days, that's what they were doing with government stuff.

They'd redact it by putting a black box over it, not realizing that it's a PDF and there's layers and you can just go in and turn off the black boxes and see what was underneath. Delete black box. Oh, hi, Snowden. There was another fun one too. Kat, that girl Kat from Tech TV, she had some noobs leaked a long time ago because she was posting JPEGs of herself, like sitting there smoking a cigarette, not realizing that in Photoshop there are previews.

So you can save previews along with your images and it will save the larger version of the preview sometimes. So somebody figured out, like in the JPEG, they just deconstructed it and it's like, oh, there's a picture of her naked. Sweet. Let's post it on the internet. Yeah. Beware of your preview saving too.

Yes, definitely. So yeah, there you go. Read the article if you're posting a lot of stuff that you're trying to hide certain bits in your photos. So in good news, I think, the president has signed an executive order to improve payment security like things that other countries have had for a decade now.

Yeah, I saw that you posted this article and I went through and read it and I was like, oh, it's always nice to catch up to cutting edge countries like Canada because they've had that for as long as I've been going there regularly, which is seven plus years. Yeah, every time I tried to pay for anything in Canada, they'd go, what's your pain?

And I'm like, I'm a stupid American. I don't have that. One of the reasons we don't have a lot of breaking news about Canadian companies getting hacked. No, we have breaking news about Canadian hackers stealing our credit cards and using them. Yes. The chip and pin technology we should have had years ago.

There's no reason not to have it. It's much more secure. Assuming this whole Apple Pay thing doesn't take over the world, we need this. Let's go. No, definitely. The biggest hurdle since the introduction of it in Europe to here is that we've got a lot more POS stations.

So the cost of changing the infrastructure has been too great. But now cost of fraud is becoming too great. So now replacing the antiquated hardware and systems has become the way that we need to go. We're losing more to fraud than it costs to just replace everything. Yeah, and at least definitely across Canada and Europe as well.

There's just these little handheld units that they bring to your table if you're at a restaurant or whatever. It's super easy. Those things can't possibly cost that much money. Let's get on board, people. Man, I feel bad for those guys that kick-started the little credit card that you can put all your cards in. Oh, yeah. Whatever happens. Oh, I have to have a talk with friend of the show, Fergal, about that because we got in a very heated argument about how I thought that was a stupid idea.

Yeah, I got to talk to my friend Jordan, too, because he ordered a couple beta versions, and I don't think he's gotten them yet. You know, I know Fergal ordered them as well, and I certainly haven't seen him pull it out at the bar yet. Oh, Kickstarter, you little scamp. We miss you. Every time I hear the fucking word Kickstarter, my field of vision goes red.

Okay. So a friend of the show, Sean Bonner, posted a cool link in his newsletter that I found called How to Stop Apple from Snooping on Your OS X Yosemite Searches. Okay, I'm not surprised that they do that. Well, they have to send it to the servers because you're getting web recommendations.

Now, Apple replied to this article saying, look, this is how we get the data from you. We don't store your IP address. Right. Your geolocation is fuzzed within 500 meters, so we need your geolocation because it's doing location-specific recommendations on the searches.

But they basically don't store anything that is personally identifiable with the search. All right. I'm okay with that, though. Yeah, I'm fine with it. I know super paranoid people are going to be like, I don't want them to know a damn thing. I'm like, well, get a pen and paper because they know everything already if you have a computer.

That's true. Okay, so hopefully next week we'll have some more hacks and fun stuff. Wow, that's it for security. Who knew? That's all I got. I haven't seen the Snowden movie yet because it's not out yet. And that's it, man. It's been a nice quiet week for me. I haven't been stressed worrying about how bad my shit's going to get hacked because my shit didn't work.

Thank you, Apple. So I've been listening to a bunch of really cool podcasts this week while I've been working. And there's a couple of new ones. Well, it's sort of new. There's one called The Startup Podcast from Alex Blumberg from NPR, who we talked about before, who comes from Planet Money.

And he decided to quit his job and start a podcast network. I'm going to save my comment. I think both of us cracking up kind of just nails that point, doesn't it? Yeah, it's his story of trying to get VC funding for the whole shebang.

And so far, they're up to five episodes. They're really sporadic and spread out. But you can go back and listen to all five now, and it's pretty fascinating. It's interesting, his take on it and what the entrepreneurs and people that he's meeting with have to say about it. And half the time, I'm just, like, scratching my head going, you people are idiots.

Anyway, it's still fun to read. The other one – Having said all that, though, in the future, if he wants us on the network, hey, we're in. Yeah, we're in. We're in. I like the show. We're in. We're in. The next one is Serial, which if you go to the iTunes store, you can't miss it.

It's been on the front page for weeks in big, blocky banners. And it's another NPR-based show. Oh, boy. This American Life, folks. Well, Jason. I can't wait for another episode of this thing. It is so good. It is so good.

Tell us what you really feel about that, Jason. I'm using my calm NPR voice. Well, this one has a little more spunk to it. I like it. Can you imagine the folksy music in the background? Yes, I can, actually. Since I've been listening to a lot of those shows, yes, I can.

I think I NPR – I burned out on NPR when I was – I was basically just listening to it in my car for two years straight. And just as soon as I hear the soothing voices and the little bit of music in the background, I start to fucking lose my mind. Well, I'm surprised you're still alive. Listen to NPR in the car.

You're going to drive into a tree and fall asleep. But this story is really good. It's, you know, a crime – basically a crime reporter trying to piece together a 15-year-old murder and try and figure out if this guy is innocent or not. Cool.

It's really compelling stuff. It's well done. How long are they since it is long-form storytelling? Half hour. About half hour. That's not bad at all. Okay. Yeah, it's like the entire story breaks out over the season. Nice. So it's really good and, you know, really well done.

This is the kind of stuff you can do when people give you money to go make content. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Wow. Amazing how that works. You get good content when you get paid for it. That's fascinating. I wonder if anybody's thought of that before. And I went back and checked out Marc Maron's show just to get some old episodes because I can't listen to a show that often because it's the same – it's the Corolla problem.

Yeah. It's just too depressing most of the time. I'm burnt out on him too. It's been really – there's got to be an amazing guest for me to listen to it anymore. And the fun part is now I know the format. I just skip the beginning and just get to the interview and just listen to the interview. I checked out the Nick Frost interview and the Shepard Fairey interview and both of those were good.

I listened to the Nick Frost one. It was fantastic. I haven't listened to the Shepard Fairey one. I did want to punch Mark in the mouth about seven or eight times when he just kept alluding to Simon Pegg and like how Nick – it's like the only reason Nick's there is because he's friends with Simon. And it's just like – no, Nick Frost is funny as hell on his own and stands on his own as an actor and a comedian.

So just back off the Simon shit because you could tell Nick was getting pissed about it. Yeah. Well, it's – he doesn't have that issue in the UK because it's pretty much well known that he's just as talented and a big star in his own right. But over here, I can see that. Simon Pegg is the one that broke out and Nick Frost is on a bunch of comedies but they're only on in the UK.

So it's going to happen. Yeah. He'll get there sometime but he's a super cool guy. Yeah. Yeah. Very funny. And Shepard Fairey is – Shepard Fairey, he was extremely eloquent in the interview which surprised me how good of a speaker he was. He talked good.

He talked good someday. Artists talk good. And the last cool thing, the new Smashing Pumpkins album is coming out soon and they released one of the songs and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I listened to it. But the thing is you didn't like the last album and I went back and I listened to the last album and it's on my playlist now.

I love it. I thought it was great. I think that for me, the Smashing Pumpkins suffer from Jane's Addiction Syndrome which is no original lineup. I don't care. There's Billy. It's all that matters. Yeah. Billy Pumpkins. Smooshy Pumpkins. Smooshy Pumpkins.

Breaking news. Apparently last night – and this is something I have not listened to yet but it's immediately caused me to Britgasm and there's no way it can't be good. Noel Gallagher from Oasis joined Johnny Marr from the Smiths on stage the other night in London and they covered Iggy Pop, Lust for Life and the Smiths How Soon Is Now.

As soon as we are done with this podcast, I will be listening to this link in the show notes. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, me too. I'm going. And I ran across a great article that cracked me up, more big data. This is at labnoll.org. It's music that makes you dumb.

Your taste in music can reveal how smart or dumb you are and they – big data again. They charted people and they're listening – what bands they listen to against their SAT scores. See, this is – it's a really fun read. It is. You know, I'm not dumb but I flunked the SATs because I suck at standardized tests and I take – Well, you would be what they call an outlier, Jason.

I'm an outlier because Rage Against the Machine should not be that high on the list. Well, it's a very fun read. It's kind of amusing and it allows you to be very snobby when you see the band that you like is way up on the SAT scores. But then I look and go, how the fuck are the Red Hot Chili Peppers that far up?

No way. Yeah, and System of a Down is – listen to buy smarter people than Queen. I don't know about that. Yeah, there's a lot of arguments to be made in here and I'm not sure why Billy Joel is so far up on the list. But there are – I've sent this off to some current and past clients who will feel very proud of themselves because they're quite far up on the charts.

Yeah, I see the Goo Goo Dolls are pretty far up there. I don't know. It's a little shocking, isn't it? Yeah. Sorry, John. You know I love you. Moron of the Week. I was browsing domains this week looking for some cheapies for a one-off project and I ran across the most absurd thing I've ever seen in my life.

Really? You now can buy a .rich domain. Okay. And you have to be .rich because they're almost $2,800 a year. For a domain name. And I hope they throw in a .fuckingmoron domain for free because talk about pissing good money after bad.

But you can also go low rent and buy a .luxury domain and that's only $550 a year. Oh, God. People do realize that domains are worth nothing these days. More money than cents these people have. $8 a year for a domain at this point? I go hover for $15 because they're much better and I don't have to deal with them killing any elephants.

And they're Canadian, so they're nice and they pick up the phone. And they got that PIN credit card system too. Yeah, that's good. Did you see this made the rounds? Virgin America and some insane advertising agency that really screwed Virgin America out of a lot of money.

They made a six-hour-long ad about basically a real-time flight using these bizarre things. I don't even know what they are. They're puppets, I guess? They're kind of rejects from Team America, it looks like. Yeah, they look like Team America-type puppets.

And it's six hours long and it's insane and I don't understand why it got made, how it got made, who approved it, and who came up with the idea in the first place. It is so terrible. It's horrible. It's absolutely – it's a total what-the-fuck moment.

Like, what the fuck? Yeah. I said, as I was scrubbing through it because I'm not about to waste more than 30 seconds of my life on this thing. And it was – I scratched my head. I mean, I've been on some bad acid trips and this is right up there with them. Right. Now, there's one other thing that happened this week and this is – I was a huge, huge, huge Breaking Bad fan and it turned me into a huge fan of both Bryan Cranston and Jesse Pinkman.

I thought you were going to say crystal meth. It turned me into a huge crystal meth fan. You know, Bakersfield is but two hours away. No. They came out with toys and they put them in Toys R Us. But they put them in the adult section. Got to give them that.

There's an adult section in Toys R Us? Yes, there is. Are you fucking shitting me? No, I am not. OK. Well, fair enough then. But I still think it's a little bit ridiculous. I mean, this is a show that no child should have watched.

I can understand this being in comic book stores because that's like the adult Toys R Us, right? But I just can't imagine anybody would want a Jesse Pinkman doll or whatever. It's like what – why? Why? It makes absolutely no sense and when these things happen, some concerned mom somewhere has to raise a stink and it never should have happened in the first place.

But then she raised a stink about it and Toys R Us is now pulling the Breaking Bad dolls. Making them three times as valuable as they were. Increasing the value greatly, yes. And this is where I differ with Bryan Cranston and Jesse Pinkman because they've both been tweeting about it now and they're very angry about the fact that it got pulled and they're very angry at this mom who would complain about this sort of stuff.

And he even got a retweet – or Aaron Paul got a retweet from Barack Obama about this. What? Yeah. Now, Aaron Paul does make a valid point. Toys R Us sells violent video games. Toys R Us sells a bunch of things that are really bad. And so why can't they sell these toys that are based on a show about cooking crystal meth?

And murder and betrayal and nothing good of the human condition is what Breaking Bad was about. No. So, yes, I do agree with Aaron Paul that there are a lot of things in Toys R Us that probably shouldn't be there. But that doesn't mean that these should be there either. None of this stuff should be there. It's toys and it should be fun.

Oh, man. I can see them being pissed because I'm sure they got a rev share deal with it. But this is great press for them. They should be happy. Yeah. I don't know what they're bitching about. I don't know what they're bitching about either. It's great press that it's getting pulled out of the stores and it wasn't – nobody was going to go to Toys R Us to buy these things anyways.

Comic book stores, there you go. Online, end of story. Don't have crystal meth dolls in Toys R Us. I just smell the fake outrage machine at work here. Yeah, it's one of those. The web's not dead.

I found two things that are unbelievably awesome and actually probably should have been in Media Candy. But they're on the web, so – and the web's not dead. Number one. Link in the show notes.

YouTube clip of a cover of Star Wars' Imperial March played on eight floppy disk drives. For you kids that don't know what those are, that – that's – you know, don't worry about it. They don't listen to this show. It's okay. That's true. It's pretty awesome. It's well worth a listen. I found it utterly mesmerizing.

I listened to the entire thing twice. Yeah, well, it's also fun to watch. But, yeah, it definitely sounds amazing. And the other unbelievably cool thing that I found, even though I'm not a fan of SoundCloud, and as Jason pointed out just a few seconds ago off air, it'll be amazing if they make it through the month because they have no fucking business plan whatsoever.

But NASA opened up a SoundCloud account, and they have so much amazing stuff in there. What is it? Just, like, rocket noises? Rocket noises, communications that – back and forth between Houston. They even have the Houston We Have a Problem clip on there. It's awesome.

It's really, really cool. And as far as I know, it's all general use, so expect to start hearing a lot of this stuff pop up. Yeah, I think Trent Reznor will probably use some in his next album. Oh, hell, I can do a whole new Trent Reznor soundtrack cheaper using just this stuff. Get on it. And this is where we get into the real difficulties of actually trying to find out and prove facts online.

I ran into this one, which I think is awesome. The Inca measurement of time was based on how long it took to boil a potato. Okay. Now, I found this on PBS.org from a documentary that they did on the conquistadors in Peru, and if it's on PBS, you'd think it's probably true.

It's not like they're the History Channel or Discovery that, you know, just air complete and utter bullshit these days to get eyeballs. It's PBS. But I tried to Google this and do a deep search to get some other links and some real facts to go with it, and no, can't find any.

Nothing that outright discredits it, just a lot of people going, surely not. Oh, balderdash. Balderdash. You can't be serious. There were some valid points about how they were, you know, the Incas were sophisticated enough to do star charts and things like that. So why would they possibly base their time on how long it took to boil a potato and was there a potato one that set the standard because not all potatoes are alike?

A lot of interesting commentary, no real other proof, but PBS said so. Yeah, I can find so many holes in that story. It's like, okay, you got your average humidity. You've got, yeah, size of potato. Is the potato ripe? What's your elevation?

What time of year is it? It makes no sense. In defense of the History Channel, Henry Rollins' show on H2, the 10 Things You Don't Know About series, is awesome. You've got to check that out. I might have to check that one out. I did have one other thought about this. Given the vagaries of anybody showing up on time or even near time here in Los Angeles, I was thinking maybe Los Angeles time is based on how long it takes to boil a potato.

Yes, but it has to be an organic potato. Only and locally grown. Closing shoutouts. As goes the music industry, so do many of the subsidiary things involved with it. I would like to say a fond farewell to Hollywood's Cat and Fiddle, which will officially be turning off the patio lights on December 15th.

Unfortunately, they can no longer make their rent. Rents have gone up. And the Cat and Fiddle, for those of you who don't live in Los Angeles and aren't in the music industry, it's where we tend to spend an awful lot of time. I haven't been there for years because I've moved to the west side, but I have very many fond memories of hanging out there with a lot of very drunk musicians.

Yeah, this makes me extremely sad. I spent a lot of time at the Cat and Fiddle. And even recently, though, because I worked in the CNN building when I was at BLT, you'd go there for lunch once or twice a week, every week. And their food was awesome. The drinks were great. And you'd always see somebody, usually Gene Simmons, hanging out there.

That's true. And a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, I think he met Ray Bradbury in the bathroom. Nice. I believe that was true. We could have been drinking a lot because it wasn't the Cat and Fiddle, and that's what you did there. I got in a fist fight out in front because some guy parked the wrong way.

So many great, terrible stories of the Cat and Fiddle, and I am very sad that it's going away. Yeah, yeah. I was sitting right next to Paul Oakenfold when he kind of discreetly turned around and puked into the bushes. Nice. Great place. Great place. Going to miss it.

Yeah, that's a pretty standard Cat and Fiddle night. Yep. Oh, man. That really bums me out. Yeah, it's sad. Okay. Speaking of things dying, I just want to do a quick post-mortem on my very short-lived Jason.com show. When I started it, it was at the wrong time, and I didn't have the right format, and it was basically me just bitching about stuff, which is not what I wanted it to be.

Isn't that this podcast? It's exactly. I didn't want to take away from this masterpiece of grumpdom and be spent for the show. You know, I got to keep some in the tank. But it'll come back in another format. I've got a lot of stuff written for it. It's just been dealing with the hell that I mentioned in the beginning.

Once that's over and I have some time, and once it starts snowing outside, which will be any minute now, I'll have a lot of time to do actually well-produced shows. So that's coming, and sorry about the false start on it. It wasn't very good. Well, you know, get your personal shit together, and Bob's your uncle. Bob is your uncle.

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Hopefully you hit record this time. Yes, I did. Oops. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida. We're driving to Florida.

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