82: I Can Haz Ubercorn?

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. Hashtag good morning, hashtag Brian. How are hashtag you today?

Oh, shut up, Jason. I'm hashtag fucking fine. Actually, I'm starting to have almost a Pavlovian response to when we do this podcast and I feel like my nose plugs up immediately. I think you're making me sick, Jason. It happens. Hashtag bastard.

Many people have said that in the past. No, the only reason the hashtag thing, it's really started to annoy me the past couple days. I think it's gotten out of hand or I just have following the wrong people. It seems to be particularly for people trying to get out there and make their mark without naming names.

I do have a friend that's attempting to kickstart a – not really kickstart, kickstart in the old school sense of the word, a music career. And I have another friend that has a product here, trying to start a new beer. And both of their – I don't know if they do their social media themselves or not, but every single time they post, it's seven lines of – or seven words of actual information and then about 75 hashtags per post.

Well, you see, hashtag overload is not new. It's been around for a while now and it's silly because people just don't understand what they're for. Yeah, and there's no real benefit to this. I mean if you're promoting yourself and then you're hashtagging things that really have no relation whatsoever and it's just a ton of them, it does nothing, right?

Absolutely nothing. It just washes out. Okay, just making sure. All it does really is annoy the fuck out of me. Because the whole point of it is to group information between like tweets or now Facebook because Facebook has hashtags. Yes. Thieving bastards. Yeah, so I mean it came out from – was it Foo Camp, Chris Messina and Foo Camp and the organization.

So multiple people could tweet different things and then that was the way that you could search and get all of the stuff. It was an identifier. So if you're sitting there doing hashtag my cool new beer, nobody is going to be looking at that because nobody cares about it. It's not a trending topic. It has no bearing on the conversation whatsoever and it's a waste of time and a waste of space.

Well, I threw my two friends under the bus with this one because I'm seeing it a lot from a lot of people these days. So when we do post our grumpy old geeks for this episode, I'll do hashtag Chicago, hashtag Venice, hashtag Santa Monica, hashtag idiots, hashtag stupid and about 20,000 other things.

You really don't have to do that. As far as I'm concerned, the only appropriate use for hashtagging anymore is the ironic hashtag. Yeah, or if you're on – if you're a fan of that goddamn show At Midnight and everybody posts crappy wannabe funny comic like one-line replies every day.

Hey, I give kudos for that. They're one of the few shows that actually kind of figured out how to really tie in social media. They did well with it. Yeah, they did. They did a good job of it but it's like, come on. I'm just – I've got At Midnight burnout. Well, you can At Midnight block. Yeah, that's true. So we just missed this story like literally as we went off the air.

It came through my queue last week and I'm like, goddammit. We missed this one and it was – it's the story on Wired about content moderation farms in the Philippines. Yeah. And it's an interesting story because I've been on that side of it doing content moderation before we could, you know, jarbitrage the shit out of everything.

I've been on the other side of that thing and it's interesting and I also know some people at Flickr that did it and we are collectively outsourcing creating mental illness in these populations of other countries now.

Because if you sit there and are looking at dick pics, which I still, you know, prefer the term dickies, beheadings, things up the snooch all day long, it messes with you in terrible ways and you never forget it.

Look, I mean – This is a cool – this is an interesting article because it just like, you know, brings to light that side of the business and how many people are doing it. You know, in the early days, you know, we did everything. So I did content moderation as well. You know, every time that I would build any kind of like, you know, user engagement feature on a website, that meant I had to sit there and create a content moderation system for it.

And inevitably, it would fall down to me to go through and make sure that nobody was uploading a picture of their Johnson & Johnson. But it is depressing and, you know, we've been talking on this podcast about burnout just from social media in general. Can you imagine if all you were seeing was the worst of the worst on the internet?

You would – you'd go insane. You would burn out. This article depressed the fuck out of me. Yeah, I don't have to imagine it. I've been there. I've done it, you know. And it was interesting when we were doing JPEG magazine. One time we got featured in MySpace and the hordes of MySpaceians came in and just started posting the nastiest pictures.

And everybody in the company was on junk duty to try and like squash these photos that were coming through. And my friend Jason, by the end of like the first couple of days, he was just glazed over. He's like, I have never seen so many dicks and snatches in my life and I never want to see him again.

Yeah, well, and then when you start to read this article, it's – that's the tame stuff. Oh, yeah. The things – the dark aspect of human nature is constantly shocking to me when you read this article and you read about – most of the things that they're screening out, it's – these people should be found and shot.

But it is what it is and that's us I guess. That was – and that's just kind of the main thrust of the article. There are so many more other depressing aspects in this article. First, the outsourcing, the tiny amount of money that they're actually being paid to do this.

It's just bad. This is bad all the way through. No, it is not a good one. This was just the start of the depression for the day because I had to go through all of the gazillion articles that you sent me. So this was the beginning of the morning was the Dickies and Beheadings article.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie. I went a little bit crazy this week. This intro segment is going to be a little bit long because I found a lot of articles about things that we've been talking about a lot. And not to mention my one-man mission against Uber came to a head this week as the tide has turned, I feel.

And I'm finally getting a lot of people that are starting to agree with me a little bit. But let's backtrack a little bit. You didn't like the Britgasm from last week. Meh. It really didn't do anything for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I mean, obviously, it's never going to be as good as the actual, you know, Smiths themselves doing the songs.

But, you know, I was a Noel Gallagher fan and it was great to see him up there with Johnny Marr and doing some of the old Brit classics. Yeah, just apparently not my cup of tea. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Elo made the news again. A little bit.

A little bit. It's kind of a follow-up on their bold promise of doing this whole new, what do they call it again, the name of their, what they're doing, their corporation, some sort of non-profit. Snow job. I call it snow job. Well, that does seem the point because the articles that came out as a follow-up basically say that they're making a big promise but there's no legality to back it up and they haven't filed any of the paperwork that would make it legally binding for them to be a public benefit corporation.

Yeah, Jeff Roberts over on GigaOM did a really nice recap saying that, okay, this is great what they're saying but it has no teeth. You know, a public benefit corporation really is not a whole lot of stuff behind it. I mean, yes, you can have shareholder lawsuits.

You know, if the shareholders – if you have to have like 2 percent of the actual stock to be able to file a shareholder lawsuit against them. So if all of the people that own the stock are for selling stuff, then, you know, you're kind of screwed.

They did have an interesting suggestion that maybe we could take – or ELO, not we. ELO could take 2 percent of their stock and put it into a public trust who could then keep an eye on them. Yeah. But I don't know if they'll ever do that. Well, I mean I think I've made my opinion beyond clear last week on the show about ELO, which is it's dead, gone, done, over, and none of this really matters.

The only thing that I could see them going through with is actually kind of trying to implement this and do it in a good way that would lead to future companies trying to do so. But ELO is over. Well, here's the thing. They're on the hook now. So I think they're going to be trying their damnedest to figure out a way to make this work, which is a good thing because then future companies can take that blueprint if ELO can actually pull it off and make it so they can get in hot water for giving up user data.

If they can figure that out and put the safeguards in place so the users are protected, that will be a blueprint that other companies in the future can take and run with. So I hope that they can figure it out because that would be kind of cool if they take their VC. They're unfortunately going to spend most of their VC money on lawyers to figure out how to just run their business.

Yeah, that's very true. But it's something that I said last week. That is the one thing that I'm really intrigued by them at this point. So we'll see what happens. Just another quick follow-up on the other social network we talked about last week. I have now made two cents on tissue.

Oh, I already gave up on that one. I just log in to see how much money I've made. But I haven't posted anything because I've been busy all week. Have you seen any uptick in terms of people joining? Is there more movement there? When I go in, the feed is a lot more stuff that's not click on this or share this so I can make $10 on two.

There's more actual, more content up, actually more content up there. Right. And in the literally quick glance I take, even though I use the word literally, which I shouldn't have. Literally. Literally. It looks like people are actually posting a lot of regular content now.

But same could be said for Google+. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what I figure. And in a very related note, apparently this guy, Will Orimus, is becoming one of my favorite tech writers because he wrote a very nice, well-thought-out article for the future tense area on Slate called The Search for the Anti-Facebook.

Why Rival Social Networks Keep Emerging and Keep Failing. And he did in about 2,000 words what I said in about 10. Well, would you like to give us the TLDR? Sure. Critical Mass on Facebook. Everything is pretty much the same. Nobody's moving over.

It's all nice. We all hate Facebook, but we're all there because that's where everybody is. And innovation will come in the side door where you least expect it. Exactly. So we've been spot on as far as I'm concerned. And, you know, all these other social networks, yeah, that's fine. Everybody gets in a tizzy for a day or two, but then we all go back to Facebook and bitch about Facebook.

Because they're not doing anything revolutionary. It's evolutionary. It's actually backtracking for most of them. I agree. What I'm noticing, because if I look at Sue or Elo, it's the same exact functionality, just in a generally uglier package. Yeah, they're reverse engineering Facebook and basically representing it.

That's it. But he did have some good tips for the next social network. Like when you want to gain market share, like do what Facebook did. They went to school, so they had smaller, insular networks that were already in place and used that to springboard to bigger ones and bigger ones and bigger ones.

Yeah. So that's, you know, it was a decent read. Yeah, I liked it. I enjoyed it. Let's get to the Uber. Uber, Uber, Uber, which I have been fighting with my friends about for months now. And I have been, like I said, kind of a one-man anti-Uber campaign. Now, before we start, before we start this, are you ever going to take an Uber again?

No, actually, I'm not at this point. Okay. Yeah, after all the news that we're about to discuss, I think I have to put my money where my mouth is and not take Uber. And I'm okay with that. Good. I'm just making sure you're backing it up. Yeah, I am going to back it up now.

I'm never – you will never see me in an Uber. No free water for you. Well, I didn't get a free water on my two Uber rides that I did anyway. So let's start with article number one by Alison Griswold, who is a Slate staff writer covering business and economics and I believe lives in New York City. One of the big battles that I was fighting with Uber was I was saying that their employees don't get paid well and it doesn't – again, it's like Airbnb and all these other services.

All it's doing is nickel and diming people who want to use their car to make some money and they're not really making any money. And Uber published this whole report about we are paying our drivers. Look, this was in late May on Uber's blog.

They cited $90,000 as the median annual income of a driver for UberX in New York City and this was a number that was thrown at me constantly by people that I would be arguing this with. They're saying $90,000 is a great salary and I agree it is, not necessarily in downtown Manhattan, no thing, but it is a great salary.

The only problem is she went out to try to find a driver who's making that much. Yes, the Uber corn. They do not exist. Apparently not because you figure if that's the median, 50% should be making $90,000 and they can't find a single one that's making that.

No, no. If that's the median, there should be a number of drivers that are making well above that if that's the median. So – And there aren't any. So that number is complete and utter bullshit. Yeah, if they can't – if Uber can't produce one, then that says something.

The interesting thing that I thought was – that came out of this article was one of the spokespeople for Uber basically said that the drivers for Uber are their customers. And I just – that take on it was like, OK, interesting.

It's an interesting take just from the economic standpoint. It was like, OK, we're going to make our customers less money by reducing the amount that they can resell the service that we're putting them in touch for. Because the economics that they state in here and the quotes they get from some of the drivers are like, we can't make any money with this reduced rate.

Even though they say, oh, we should be able to get more rides in, just the physics of time don't work out that way. Well, it's – yeah, it's – it's – it's cut – it's this whole sharing economy concept is trying to create this trickle down at the lower level where nothing trickles down from the top.

They're going to make all their money, but they're encouraging us all to basically take a hit in terms of – and that will increase the amount of money that you'll make in the long run. That's not true. It's completely false. It doesn't make any sense. And if you want proof about that, the best article and most depressing article I read all week, Silicon Valley Will Destroy Your Job, Amazon, Facebook, and Our Sick New Economy.

This is by Richard Esco. It's on Slate. We have the link in the show notes. I beg of you all to read this article because this just goes – the sharing economy is complete and utter bullshit and it's destroying our economy and any vestige of the middle class, gone.

So when I finished reading this one, I – the great line from War Games came into my head. It's like the only winning move is not to play. Yeah. This is the article that convinced me 100 percent to stop using Uber. A hundred percent.

Now, what about Amazon or the other ones that he rails off in here? I have issues with Amazon. I do. I don't know how to stop using them except to not play and that's a problem because we have to play. Why do you have to play?

What does Amazon have that you can't find anywhere else by just getting in the car and going to buy it? We are running very short of bookstores. In fact, some authors are starting to only publish digitally because they can't get a deal anymore. No, I agree with that.

But books are what they started out as. Do you really need to have a subscription for toilet paper come to your house every week? Well, no. I don't do that anyways. I don't. So I don't – I haven't moved and off-shifted my entire life to Amazon. There are some things that I do get on Amazon that are convenient which I'm going to have to start thinking about and just go, maybe I can suck it up and wait and go to the store and not have it just delivered to my door because I don't agree with their policies.

That's a really good point. Now, one thing that I didn't even realize and I just started to think about this week is that I need to put my money where my mouth is in a number of different ways because one of the things that I'm railing about about Uber is it's – my friends will say, but it's so convenient.

And I say, but you're screwing yourself in the long term because this is really bad for economy. There's no difference between Uber and Spotify. Spotify – we talk about the music industry a lot on this show and we've talked about how the Spotify and other streaming medias are not paying artists anywhere near what they used to be paid or anywhere near for them to make a decent living even if they're massive.

They're just not making enough money from Spotify or streaming services. I'm just going to say Spotify because whatever. It's the one I have and I pay for. I pay $9.95 for it a month. So much like my friends who say that Uber is convenient, Spotify is very convenient, but I know that I'm paying into a system that cannot hold and is bad in the long term.

So I need to start putting my money where my mouth is and going back and buying the music instead of just paying for the streaming because we already know Spotify can't – Spotify is charging so little, they can't even pay their own bills much less pay the artist. This is non-sustainable.

It comes into the whole VC we'll figure out how to make money later model. Which I hate. Well, yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. It all comes back to the same thing. It's like, oh, here's a bunch of money. We'll figure out how to make money later or we'll flip it and sell it to somebody else. Yeah. You know, the flip and sell model.

But I don't know enough about the history of Spotify to tag that label on them, but it just feels like it's one of those services that started with the same type of manifesto. It's like, OK, we've got VC. We'll figure it out as we go. Well, what Spotify managed to do is because they started in, oh, God, I think Sweden, one of the Nordic countries.

I'm sorry. I don't have that at my fingertip. But it started in a place where bandwidth was cheap and people had disposable income and there was a culture of we're going to pay for things. So where they started, the actual subscription rate versus the, you know, we're just going to listen for free and take the ads was astronomical.

Now, when they brought it here where people are cheap, it didn't go that way. So now they're finding themselves in a financial situation that they probably didn't suspect. Yeah, they actually started in Sweden, you are correct. Yeah, that's what I thought. So, you know, they had a very high subscription rate there that made it a profitable company that worked.

I mean, still not for the artists, but whatever. But when they brought it to the rest of the world where we're all just taking, you know, we'll take whatever we can for free and not think about the consequences, that's when that whole model fell apart. So now they're stuck in the let's just make as much money as we possibly can and hope that it all works out in the wash, which we know it won't.

Yeah, they took another round of $100 million of funding to support the U.S. launch. So they've got some money in the bank. Well, I think they've burned through almost all of that. Yeah, that was in 2011. So that was all long gone. Anyway, so yeah, it comes back to sticking to your guns, putting your money where your mouth is.

So I will be curious to see what you do. I know I'm really – this has really affected me and I just want to mention quickly one more article. It's an op-ed piece that came from philly.com, which is kind of interesting. It's doing the rounds particularly amongst some of my friends that are in the music industry because they talk specifically about Spotify along with Uber.

And the slow devaluation of work, which is another thing that we've talked about a lot. It's a good read. It's true. He's definitely coming from the I got hit really hard personally area of this because he is a journalist and he would look around his newsroom and realize that there's nobody there anymore.

Yeah. No shit. Yeah, so it talks a lot about how these – all these sharing economy companies are really devaluing not only work but creative work, everything, all that sort of stuff. So it's a good kind of wrap-up article that talks about things that I really truly believe in.

And yeah, I've got to look at changing my lifestyle because the convenience has made me fall into this. And I know it's not right and I know it's not sustainable and I know it's bad. Yeah, here's the be-all end-all of it is we're doing it to ourselves. We are. We are doing it to ourselves.

So that ended my list of extreme depression articles that I had been reading all this week and my thoughts. Speaking of doing it to yourselves though, I did run across one other thing that really frustrated me and it does tie in a little bit. Are you aware of the site PopSugar?

I've heard of it but I thought it was a chick thing. I never check them out. Who are they? What do they do? Being married to a chick, this is a big part of my iPad's life apparently because this site is always up there. It's a lifestyle slash gossip slash blah, blah, blah kind of site.

You can find out about Chris Martin and whoever he's dating along with some nice recipes and, oh, aren't those cute boots? It's that kind of place. And it's very popular and it makes an awful lot of money. And there was an article with the couple that started it and they basically talk about how they have absolutely no work-life balance whatsoever.

All they do is work 24-7. That's unsustainable. They're proud of it. Yeah, that is a bad thing to tell your employees. Honestly, we all know that it's unsustainable. People burn out.

Employees burn out. The quality of work turns to shit or you just have higher turnover. People need rest. Yeah. Well, we've been talking about that quite a lot and you and I have walked the walk and lived that life. We know it doesn't work. We know you burn out. That's how you end up doing a podcast called Grumpy Old Geeks. For no money.

For no money. No. I am definitely an advocate of the work-life balance even though it is hard because we make half as much as we used to make because of all this other shit that we talk about. Exactly. Working hard for less. So then you just consume less and then you don't have any money to spend on Amazon and then the whole system will just collapse on itself because it's eventually going to anyway.

And then you'll laugh at me because you have a gun and I don't. Well, see, I mean, all of this stuff is just my – this is the roadmap to my slow decline in denialism. So if you wonder why I'm so damn grumpy half the time, just read the shit that we post.

So let's move on and try and find something happy.

In the news. So an interesting article came out of MacRumors. And it was – I find it interesting because it's been a long time coming. But the FTC is suing AT&T over, quote, unquote, misleading unlimited data throttling practices.

Now – Well, we know they've been through this. Well, yeah. Here's the thing. AT&T – well, what the FTC is saying, it's like, OK, well, it's not unlimited. After you hit a certain cap, then you're throttled down by like 80 or 90 percent of the speed that you could get.

This is not a new thing. AT&T went out of their way many times to say, well, it is unlimited, but you can only go so fast if you go too fast, which means it's not unlimited. So it is a deceptive marketing practice.

It always has been. But we've been bitching about it since the unlimited came on the scene. So I don't know why it took them so long to actually do this. Well, this should be an open and shut case. This should go – it should last about 30 seconds. The FTC should walk in there and say, have you heard about the tortoise and the hare?

OK, we're done here. This is over. AT&T loses. They have to pay everybody a lot of money. Thank you. Bye. Yeah. I mean anybody that has an – or has ever had an unlimited data package should get reparations for it because it was always a lie.

It was either – back in the old days, it was like 2 gig, but now it's like 5 gig on LTE and 3 gig on 3G. Yeah. But it's not unlimited. So by saying it's unlimited, it should be unlimited by the capacity of the device in the network, not by the throttling because once they throttle you, then there is a finite amount of data.

Well, there's a finite amount of data no matter what, but you get into semantics. Anyway, yeah, it's always been bullshit. AT&T has been up front saying it's bullshit, but it's still not unlimited, so they should have changed it a long time ago. So we'll see how that one shakes out. Yeah, it will be interesting because, I mean, basically every major carrier here, at least here in the U.S., is doing this.

They won't admit it. They don't like to talk about it, but it's happening. So. Yeah. I hope they win. I just wanted to bring this one up because it goes back to your previous rants on episodes. One through 80. One through 80. About how there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth and we are eventually all going to be paying per bit.

Yes. And again, as we've all been moved into this, you know, let's stream everything. Let's not own anything. Let's not have it down here. Stream, stream, stream. Unlimited bandwidth goes away. Prices are going to start to rise. We're going to be paying through the nose for it, which means we're going to have to double up on our Uber duties and, you know, Airbnb our bed and share our bed as well as our extra room to pay for all this stuff because we're all fucked.

Now, I got I got a sciencey article. I love this. So Harvard cracks DNA storage crams 700 terabytes of data on a single gram. That's absolutely amazing. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that makes me think that maybe, you know, what's his face wasn't so wrong about the whole what's it called again?

The not synchronicity, the whatever. Singularity. Singularity. Yes, shit. Although that is a fine album by the police. Yeah, one of their best, actually. Yep. The interesting about the interesting thing about this, I mean, they're using DNA to store this.

And I mean, I don't know how feasible it's going to be because you have to, like, resequence the genome and all this shit. But I just think it's cool as hell that they're trying this. And I'm sure that this is funded by the NSA has to be because they want to store everything anywhere. So they're just going to start creating these, like, proto-humans that are just walking hard drives.

Yeah, there's just going to be a little glob of goo somewhere in some, you know, Indiana Jones-esque hangar that's going to be, you know, basically one little glob of goo for every single person living in the United States with every single thing they've ever done their entire lives recorded. Oh, yeah. And cue the X-Files. So every time you get a, you know, get an immunization, they're transferring all this data into you.

So everybody's got a copy of everything. Whatever. That is cool. I like that stuff. Have some fun with that. Just check out the article. I mean, it's science-y, but it's fun. Hey, we're big on science here. Now, this one, this came in, like, right after we finished wrapping last time, too.

And it's Parachutists' Record-Breaking Fall 26 Miles 15 Minutes by an Executive from Google. They must be working real hard over there. Man, I'm telling you, this is what you can do with fuck you money on your days off. Let's go build a thing and just go jump.

Yeah, well, let me tell you, if I was sitting in the Philippines doing content moderation for Google Plus right now, making below living wage, I'd be pretty pissed off at this dude. Well, I just, yeah, I'd be jumping without the parachute. Aren't we all? No, it's an interesting article.

Well, the gizmo that he rigged up was kind of cool. He just basically went up in a space suit, in a space suit and a balloon, whereas, you know, the dude from Red Bull went up in this whole crazy space capsule. And this guy went up in a suit with a GoPro strapped on him and jumped. Yeah, well, he didn't need to have Red Bull plastered all over his outfit, so.

That's true. He didn't really, yeah, that's why they had the capsule, because it was more room for advertising on the outside. Exactly. But, man, the dude was cooking. I've got to give him that. Yeah. It was fun to watch. I enjoyed it. Yeah, it is very cool.

I wish they had a little bit more video in there of just the, you know, the thing, but it's cool. But, yeah, this is where, this is what happens when you click on, click on, this is where your money goes when you click on an ad. It says Golden Parachute. Oh, security, ha.

Hack of the week already, because, I say already, because I hadn't even heard of this thing. Walmart's answer to Apple Pay has already been hacked. It's called Currency, which is cute. Yeah, I first found out about this listening to This Week in Tech last week.

I'd never heard of Currency either. I've been out of the, you know, giant big box payment scheme news for a while. Right, right. Now, you know, this was the beta. Some emails were taken. But this whole thing with Currency is all of these retailers who are already making gazillions of dollars trying to eke out even more money by bypassing the credit card companies.

Right, which I'm on the fence about because I do think that the credit card companies are blocking micropayments, which I think would have a significant impact on our economy in a good way because of their fees. So they're trying to get around that but not in a way that actually helps us, in a way that helps Walmart.

Yeah, I mean you have to use your debit card with it instead of a credit card. Right. So that's how you bypass the fees. But I think that they forget that a lot of people that shop at Walmart can't get a bank account. So they might have a problem there. Or certainly they probably don't have a lot of cash in it and they're using their credit card as basically, you know, a credit card.

Yeah, and they have to have a smartphone to do it. I mean there's a whole lot of issues. Everybody has a smartphone. You can have no money in the bank and you have a fucking smartphone these days. That's true. The weird – you're fucking broke and you have a 60-inch TV and a smartphone. I don't know how that works. I've seen a lot of homeless people with smartphones too.

So I'm not joking. Nice shoes and a smartphone and no place to live. Yeah. Go figure. But anyway, the interesting thing about it is, for me at least, how horrible the implementation is. It uses QR codes and cameras to go back and forth to get the payment token.

There's no NFC. It's all with cameras and QR codes. Well, let's face it. If we were going to go to Walmart to come up with something, it would be the lowest tech solution, wouldn't it? Yeah, seriously. But one of the things I did pick up on this week in tech was that Alibaba, the big giant Chinese company.

The Chinese Amazon basically. Yeah, they can't use QR codes because the government said it was too insecure because people were basically taking the QR codes and you can just modify the data in a QR code to do all sorts of funky things. Yeah, yeah. I thought QR codes were 100 percent dead, which is hilarious.

Well, I mean they work for what they are. They just – from a marketing standpoint, they were supposed to be the cool, hip marketing thing for a couple of years and just nobody used them because no camera phones came with built-in readers. You always had to go download another app, which is never a built-in QR code reader. I mean there might have been on Android, but still, it was just a pain in the ass to do anything with QR codes and it still is to this date.

I don't have a QR code reader on my phone. I had one for a long time, but – I had one too and I killed it because I never, ever used it. And every time I would see a big QR code, it was just a cute attempt at marketing. Yeah, I mean I had one on my bumper forever that took you to blogging.la.

And I actually did have kids like when I'd be stuck in traffic, they would sometimes get out of the car and run up to my car and take a picture of it. Yeah. I thought that was cool. But that happened three times. So for keeping a sticker on there for seven years, that really – the ROI wasn't there. Yeah, yeah.

Three visits for the cost of printing up 100 stickers really didn't work out. So currency got hacked and have you seen anyone actually use Apple Pay yet? No. No, I haven't yet either, but the commercials make it look damn cool. And to be honest though, I haven't left the house since 8.1 has come out, so – and I don't know where to go because CVS has put the kibosh on it.

They shut down their NFC processing. So the only – I mean the only place I know right next to me I could go over and see it happen. You can't do it there, so – Nope, and I don't know anybody that's got an iPhone 6 that's done it yet. Yeah, me either. But I'm looking forward to it.

I still think – I think that's going to be a big deal and I think it's going to be pretty cool and it's going to be a big win for Apple. Yeah, and I'm looking forward to it because just to make the process move faster, it's – you got to have quick payment. Get in, get out.

Every time I go to the grocery store now and somebody pulls out a checkbook, I just want to pull out an Uzi and mow the whole fucking place down. Well, it's not even the people with the checkbook. I mean we talked about that too. All this technology but then the undereducated people that are running the tills, everything takes way longer than it ever used to before we had all this crazy tech.

This will hopefully be a pushback in let's speed it up, people. Okay. Speaking of crazy tech, you know the self-service checkout lines at your local grocery stores? The ones that you can't go to if you have booze for no reason whatsoever? Well, in California, yeah. Well, there was a big – California had the big switch where they have to come and see your ID now which is a pain in the ass and kind of negated it.

What they've done here recently at the local Jewel down the street, they took them all out. Okay. One of the great reasons to go shop there is I can get my stuff, check out, go. They replaced them with three or four express lanes and they manned those express lanes with 97-year-old blue-haired women who could barely see like to the cash register.

I was in line for 20 minutes yesterday just laughing to myself because I'm like you took out the technology and replaced it with, you know, people again. How is this progress? Well, it's not progress but it does kind of tie in with some of the things that I was bitching about in the intro segment.

You know, let's get some jobs back to the people. I will at least hire some people that can, you know, count. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I'll agree with you on that. Anyway, sorry for the tangent. Anyway, did you see that Delicious and Bitly were flagged as malicious by Google this week?

I did see that Bitly was because I use Bitly for a couple of client things and all of a sudden I was getting a lot of problems. Same with Delicious. Delicious was down longer than Bitly. Bitly came back pretty quick. But, yeah, Delicious was down for a little while longer. It was just – it had to be one of those strange automated, you know, like flag catchers.

It's like, okay, well, we found a couple of Bitly links that had malware, which is going to happen. Yeah. Because since it's a URL shortening service, anything can go through there. And Delicious, another link sharing service. So same thing. Yeah. Well, you know, the Google net catches things which aren't necessarily bad quite often.

I've had issues with a couple of my client sites in the past where they were flagged as being whatever. And then I would pour through the site, you know, see that there was absolutely nothing wrong, resubmit, and then they'd go, oops, sorry. Yeah, I've had a couple of them, though, that when your WordPress site gets hacked – Yeah.

And I say when, not if. Yeah, when. When. There are a couple of different services that will blacklist you and then people like Facebook and Google check against those services. Like the one that is – causes me the biggest problems is fucking McAfee. The McAfee setup – I had a blog get listed for a client and everybody else like took it off the same day.

I'm like, okay, we found it. We killed it. McAfee, we've been on the phone with them like five or six times, sent tons of emails, even offered to pay to get, you know, their strong-armed service to get it up there. And we still can't get it off of there. Yeah. And the trickle-down is, okay, now nobody can share any of the articles that are on that blog on Facebook, which – who cares anyway?

But still, it's – from my perspective in client services, I need to make the client happy. And these people just – they have this automated system that you can't get out of. Well, even if you're blackmailing me, let me pay you and they wouldn't even do that.

Like they apparently just really fucking hate that site. I don't know. Oh, well. What are you going to do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You apologize to the client and then move about your business. Yep. Exactly. So there was an article in Wired about Laura Poitras because she made the new movie Citizen Four and the crypto tools that made the film possible.

I scanned it just looking to see if there were any tools listed and I couldn't really find a whole lot. So I kind of skipped the article. But the interesting thing about when I was going to do this article was in the news, in Google, in Google News, there was a little section for in the news. And it had all the reviews for Citizen Four and one of them was by Roger Ebert.

And I'm like, damn, that guy's got one hell of a work ethic. He's still doing movie reviews from beyond the grave. Yeah, that's – you'd think they probably would have – they should probably change the author to like RogerEbert.com so you know it's just going to the site rather than he actually wrote it.

Yeah, because the actual review is written by Godfrey Chisholile. And he gives it a four-star. That's good. But yeah, it threw me off. I'm like, wait a minute. That's not right. Very funny. So another article I found on Business Insider was how the Pirate Bay arranges its servers so they can't basically be found.

And they've done a pretty cool job of it. It's all through proxies and they have no physical hardware anymore. Everything is just spun up instances on cloud computing services like EC2 or Rackspace or Linode, things like that.

So they're all distributed around the world. They've got the web servers here. They've got the database servers over here and proxy servers, load balancers. Everything is somewhere else. Right, right. Which is the way to go. So remember a little while back when you, me, and a friend of the show, Bonner, got in a big fight with Secret on Twitter about how they're not really a secret and there's no security there whatsoever and it's complete and utter crap?

Yeah, they use industry standard email level security like Google uses. Yes, exactly. So, you know, they are not secret. There's a really great article on VentureBeat about how Whisper, Secret, and Snapchat leaks show that fake privacy is almost worse than no privacy at all.

And I agree with that because these companies are selling themselves as being private apps and, you know, they're not. And people trust them and do stupid things that they will then much, much, much, much, much, muchly regret. So the Guardian actually revealed that the anonymous social feed Whisper is collecting user locations based on geolocation and IP addresses.

So it's not that anonymous there. So, you know, we know Secret is screwed up. And even their response to it is basically to outsource their bugs. So they have a bug bounty program. So they've given up on security and said, hey, if you find it, we'll fix it.

Well, the bug bounty program for any company is a good idea just to let people make some money off of the bugs. If they find them, send them in and, you know, get paid and then we fix them. That's a fine program and it goes on with everybody. Everybody's got a bug bounty program that's worth their salt. Okay.

Fair enough. So that's not a bad thing. Yeah. Whisper, on the other hand, comes back to our original article where they outsource all of their dick pic looking. Yes. So this is just a big, long article about how all these apps are complete and utter crap. And in the midst of all that, Facebook decides to launch an app that does the same thing.

I know. Facebook Rooms. What the hell? I don't really know. I mean, obviously, this is a good move on their part in terms of people don't trust Facebook and are concerned about privacy issues with Facebook. So let's release an app that lets you be completely anonymous to talk about different topics.

Okay. Fine. I get that. But is it really? I can guarantee you that it's not because if you have the Facebook app running on your phone and then you put on the Facebook Rooms app, they can totally tell that you're going to be the same person. Yeah. You have a connection there.

So no matter what they say, it's not going to be anonymous. I mean, for the room, you might be anonymous, but to Facebook, you're never anonymous. Yeah, you're anonymous to the other people that you're talking with at the time, but Facebook is collecting all of this. So, you know, don't believe that you're anonymous.

You never are. If you could truly be anonymous, then we would never catch members of Anonymous, which we catch all the damn time. That is very true. And then another story came out, and actually a friend of the show, Tara, is the one that cued me off to this. I saw her talking about it on Twitter.

Basically, almost all the mobile carriers here in the U.S., if you're out and about browsing the web through their connection, not through Wi-Fi, they don't do it then, they are tracking you. Yeah, they have a permacookie. They have a permacookie that lets people know where you're at, that does all that sort of thing.

So that kind of freaked me out a little bit, and I did a little test. There's a link that will let you see if you can see the identifier, and they tell you what it is. And I went out and about, and I was like, oh, Verizon is telling everybody where I am. That's great. So I'm seriously considering doing one of these VPNs.

Okay. Now, the VPN stuff. I knew you would have a thought on this. That's why I dropped it. Well, I do, because I use one. I use one every day. Okay. This Fruit VPN, which is kind of the new kid on the block, it looks like they've added some more stuff to their page now. But before that, I couldn't find any information on who they are.

And they're at version .1, which always is never a good idea to use a .1. And I just would kind of like to know a little bit more about who is behind it, because honestly, it could be the NSA. Who knows? That's defeating the entire purpose, yes. Exactly, exactly.

But look, again, this is one of those things where you'll disagree with me completely. I think that there's no way to get around the NSA anyways. I'm more concerned about the corporations. The government's going to do what the government's going to do, and they're probably going to beat anything that we use anyways. I just don't want Walmart to know everything.

Well, honestly, this could be run by Comcast. That's true, yes. That's what I'm saying. Since you don't know who's running it, then you're kind of shit out of luck. The VPN that I recommend, if you go to grumpyoldgeeks.com, there's an ad for them in the sidebar. Click on that link.

Check them out. They're my favorite. They're my go-to. It lets you change location on the fly, which most of them don't. So I can pick, you know, let me see here. I've got, yeah, I've got like eight in the U.S., a couple of U.K., Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Romania, Hong Kong, and Israel.

So I can be anywhere. All right. I've got to get on that. I'm behind the curve on this. It costs like $25 a year. There's no reason not to. And you can set it up on five devices. So your phone and your tablet, so when you go to Starbucks, whip up your tablet, connect the VPN, you're safe. So you can check your email at Starbucks without getting fisted by a hacker.

Done and done. At the library. I finished the Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregellis last week. I didn't really talk about it last week because we didn't do an at-the-library section.

The third in the series is called Necessary Evil. I really enjoyed it. As I mentioned, I really enjoyed the whole series. I can't recommend it enough to anyone that's kind of into alternative history. You know, he went to the old standby of time travel to kind of wrap things up.

But he did it in a decent way, so I didn't mind it so much, unlike Star Trek Episode IV. Okay. After that, I had read another recommendation from a friend. I had never read The Iger Sanction by Trevanian, nor had I ever seen the movie.

So I went into it as kind of like, all right, let's give this a shot. It's completely out of the usual wheelhouse of things that I read as it's kind of a – it's almost a tongue-in-cheeky James Bond sort of thing. It was a good enough read, but it is so of its time, particularly given all the news stories going on right now.

Thundergate, Xi'an, all this sort of stuff about misogyny and whatever. The casual racism and misogyny in this book, because it was written in the 70s, is unbelievable and almost hard to get past. Beyond that, it was pretty interesting and exciting. That's a good caveat emptor there.

If you don't mind misogyny, racism, and anything else you probably hate, then pick up this book. It's pretty good. Well, again, it's an interesting commentary on the Times because that – I don't – he wasn't being too crazy. That is how people talked and kind of act back to then, and it is insane.

It was like – there were a few chapters that I was reading, and I was like, are you – you can't fucking say that. Well, not anymore. No, not anymore. But so there you go. I might try another one of his books just because I think he's a really good writer, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to get past the just complete, you know, 70s-ish of it.

So speaking of the 70s, I ran across a great article on Salon. Actually, this was almost a week and a half ago now. There's a never-before-published Isaac Asimov essay that talks about how he feels that creativity comes about, and I thought it was a really good read and really interesting. And he was pretty ahead of his time, as with most things, even with this, where he talked about the need to have kind of isolation for creativity, which is something we've completely lost in this culture.

We are never isolated anymore. And he talked a lot about how, you know, there's a perfect number of people to have around and a mindset if you're going to do kind of group thinking and all that sort of stuff. I thought it was a great article. Yeah, it's in my Instapaper queue. I'll get to it at some point. Okay.

I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. You know, Asimov was always one of those big brains. He was so far ahead of his time in so many things, and to have his thoughts on writing is kind of interesting, or creativity in general, really. No, definitely. So I started off reading The Devil in the White City, Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.

It's kind of a murder mystery, a true story murder mystery about the building of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, plus this serial killer who was killing a bunch of people. I got about halfway through it. I was loving it, but unfortunately, William Gibson came out with a new book, so I had to drop it and go get that right away.

I saw that he had a new book because there was a few articles that he's got doing the rounds, the promo rounds, and I was like, I bet Jason's already read this. Well, here's the thing. I saw a tweet saying, Dear people who are writing reviews about this book, stop giving away the plot. Because there's something that happens midway through the book that kind of changes, apparently.

I haven't gotten there yet. I'm halfway through because I would spend all my time reading all your damn Uber articles. Or I'd have been finished by now. So far, like I said, I'm about halfway at this point. Unbelievably cool. It is an awesome book. I'm not going to spoil any of it.

I'm not going to say a damn thing about what it is because it's like nothing he's written before. Really? It is so good. I'm loving every second of it. Is it like nothing he's ever written before, like when Neil Stevenson went off on that crazy tangent and wrote those gigantically long books that I could never slog my way through because it was all about alchemists in the 14th century instead of being sci-fi?

Oh, the Baroque cycle. God, I hate those things. I read them all, believe it or not, and it took forever. And when I was done, I was happy that I had read them but never again. Yeah, I gave up. No, this is a normal-sized book and it moves really well.

I just can't tell you anything about it because I don't want to ruin it because as it goes through, there's just so much that's happening that's like, damn, that's neat. Oh, wow, that's cool. There's many an, oh, shit, that's neat moment. Well, maybe we'll do a spoiler cast because, you know, if Gibson puts it out, I read it.

So I'll be reading it shortly. And once we're both done, maybe we'll have a little spoiler cast and talk about it. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, get on it right away because since people are posting reviews, they're going to be giving stuff away. I'm on it. Software apps and gadgets.

I have never had a Kindle. I have the Kindle app and I read on my iPad mini for the most part when I'm reading e-books. Actually, funnily enough, a book I'll talk about next week due to various vague publishing weirdness.

I couldn't get through Amazon for the Kindle app. So I actually read it on the Apple e-book app or whatever the hell it's called. iBooks. iBooks, yes. The iBook app. And they do something a little funky, which I – well, let me preface this with the book is actually the kind of autobiography of David Jay from the band Bauhaus, which is a goth band.

As I was reading the book during the day as the sun was starting to set, the Apple iBooks app switched over to night setting, which is – it inversed the text. So it was, you know, black background, white text. And I thought it was – for a moment there, I was like, is this a feature of the book?

Is this just the goth reading chapter? Like as he starts to talk about Bauhaus, it flipped over in colors? So that was just a little funny thing that happened. Interesting. Anyways, I've never had a Kindle. People I know swear by them and say that it's a much better way to read.

And apparently they've put out a new version called the Kindle Voyage with Farad Manjoo, a tech writer that I've followed for a long time. And I actually put a lot of stock into what he thinks. He thinks that this is the best e-reader that has ever been invented. And to hell with hardcovers. Okay.

Here's the deal. I've had probably six Kindles at this point. I bought the first Kindle the day it came out. I watched the Bezos thing and I bought the big white one with the, you know, the built-in 3G radio in it. Yeah.

Loved it. I loved it just because I'm an e-book nerd. I used to have a rocket e-book reader back in the day. I've always been on the cutting edge tech of e-book readers. You even made me get the Oyster app too. Yeah. I read a bunch of stuff from there still.

So the thing about the Kindles are they were expensive in the beginning and then they kept getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And I still got one. I use it pretty often. I've got – I don't have one of the paper white ones though because the first paper whites, there were some issues with the backlighting and stuff that my friends had said.

So I waited to see what the next gen was going to be like. And this is the one that I probably would buy except for the fact that it's $200. Is that too expensive? Yes. Okay. For me, for $200 when I do have – I've got an iPhone, I've got a Kindle, and I've got an iPad.

And also I read Kindle books on my laptop because it's easier to annotate them. Right. So it's – well, it's $199 if you get the basic Wi-Fi version with ads. To dump the ads, it's $219, and if you want to get the full shebang, it's $289.

So that's Wi-Fi, 3G, and no ads. It's $289. Right. That's a lot of books, dude. Why would you need 3G? Because then you can just get books wherever you're at. It just has the built-in radio and always just downloads the book straight from Amazon.

Yeah, that just seems like a – So you can shop and buy on your phone. Seems like a silly expense. But you could do that anyways. You could buy from Amazon on your cell phone and then just send it to your device through whatever. Anyways. Well, here's the deal. In the old days, you couldn't do that. Yeah, right.

When the Kindle first came out, you could not pair. You could not have your phone broadcast a Wi-Fi signal. It was magic. I'd be sitting in an airport right before I got on a plane and I would go to the store and I would buy a book and it would be on my Kindle right when I got on the plane. That was magic. Yeah.

It was flat out voodoo and I loved it and I ended up giving it to my mom and she still uses the first gen. She's got it and she still – and the 3G still works on it and that's what she loves about it. I tried to give her one of my Wi-Fi ones. She's like, can I get a book when I'm anywhere? I'm like, no, no. You got to be on Wi-Fi.

She's like, I don't want that. Well, the interesting thing that I found about this one is the resolution because the resolution is now high enough that they could be doing the interactive e-books that like Apple has been trying to do, which I think are genius. And I would like to see that format come to Amazon because I think it would really blow it out.

The problem is, of course, that they'll do a completely different format than Apple is doing and then you have to do two different authorings for everything. But I want to see that start to happen. Yeah, it's not going to happen on this. It's not going to happen on a Kindle because it's e-ink technology, which is basically very small balls.

They're black on one side and white on the other and they just – they change. That's why you get like that page flip animation because they're literally wiping the screen and then flipping it over. It's like an Etch-a-Sketch. I was about to say. It's a really fast Etch-a-Sketch. It's a super cool Etch-a-Sketch. Gotcha. But that's why the battery life is so high because when it's – once you set a page, then it's not pulling any power.

Gotcha. It just sits there. It's not a true screen. Gotcha. And I mean now it pulls more power because it's got front lighting on it so you can actually see it in the dark. All the Kindles I have, they've never had any type of lighting so you actually have to keep the light on in your bedroom while you're reading the book.

Right. Just like you would have to do with a paper book. Yeah. I mean I would like to get one of these but I'm not going to pay that kind of money for it. Even Wi-Fi only without is $220. The resolution doesn't do anything for me because I got an iPad. I've got an iPad Air which has the most beautiful display in the world.

Gotcha. It makes me sad because I would really like to get one. If it was $79 like the other ones, I'd be on it no problem. I'd sell my old one, get this one because I do love the – reading on a Kindle is a really nice experience because there is no light involved. It's just like reading on a page.

Well, I'm sure the price will drop in a year. Yeah, if they go along with the Fire Phone model, they'll be giving them away for free. So I have an app this week. Oh, boy. Believe it or not. And I have a game. Oh, boy.

Well, it's a freebie with in-app purchase, of course. Of course. But do you remember the old train yard games that were out like a year or two ago where you'd like – you'd have trains that you'd have to get to one spot or the other and you'd have to lay track and so they didn't run into each other type of thing? No. I reviewed one on the show a while back.

But this one – this was a new take on it where you're running delivery trucks and you have to pick up cargo and get them to the factories. You got to remember with this sort of stuff that you're talking to a guy who, when he heard about Gamergate, first thought it had something to do with like football. Yeah. You're a bad nerd.

Just in the one area. I'm good everywhere else. So it's a really good like just brain puzzle game. You have a route. You set the routes and then you hit play and try to make your trucks work and they've got bridges and switches and all this kind of stuff. I'm having a blast with it.

I'm almost done with it though, sadly. But for free, it's a great like two-minute game where you can sit there and play around and come back to it later. I think I've done like 120 levels so far and it's great. I've only used the hints like twice and that's just because I had to go somewhere and I'm like, I want to get this level done.

Give me a hint. So, yeah, if you want just a quick, free, fun app, go for that one. RGB Express.

I talked about Freakonomics Radio a little while back and as Jason rightly pointed out, it's kind of, you know, nicely packaged NPR style versions of the stories in their books for the most part. They did do some follow-ups and some original stuff, which made it interesting enough.

But they have now debuted a new basically game show, which called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it too. I thought it was a great, great little spinoff. I wonder if they're just going to turn this into its own podcast, which would be nice.

I think they should, yeah. So the thing that I loved about this the most is Malcolm Gladwell is on the panel. And spoiler alert, if you don't want to hear how this ends, skip ahead about 60 seconds. Wait. Okay. So Gladwell's on the panel and the best part about this whole thing is he gets called out for basically making up a story about how, when focaccia was invented.

And just totally outright made it up. I'm like, okay, well, hey, at least he's consistent. So I thought that was pretty fun. Yeah, it was definitely very funny. Gladwell was a good choice to have on there and that was hilarious. But I'd like to see this become a regular thing and I hope it does well because I really, really did enjoy it.

There's a whole list of these kind of like up your own ass, you're a smarty, smarty boy game shows that NPR and various people have produced. And listening to this actually reminded me of two of the other ones that I've always really enjoyed and kind of went by the wayside for a couple years now.

I haven't listened to either one of them. Luckily, there is a podcast for one of them from NPR. It's called Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. It's also, it's a once a week about an hour long game show that, you know, does popular culture and super snooty things and has interesting guests.

One of the most recent ones had Jeff Goldblum on, which was great because he's a hoot. It's definitely worth listening to once a week and makes you feel all smart and stuff. Very funny. And my favorite one of all time, which I still love, is called Says You. Unfortunately, they do not do a free podcast.

They create awesome content and make you buy it. What a concept. Bastards. To be completely fair, I did go back and I bought the entire last season and I'm working my way through them. And I love this show. This is actually my favorite of all of them.

The tagline is a radio game show of bluff and bluster, words and whimsy. And it is that. And, you know, if you want to be cool and you're having people around, I would never play this because people just make fun of you because this is definitely, you know, professorial type education slash humor.

Okay, I'll definitely have to check that out. That reminds me, too. I, speaking of paying for stuff, I bought the entire back catalog of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Did you? And I'd completely forgotten about it. Now I have to put it on my iPhone. Oops. Yeah, I'm definitely, I'm still up there with Dan Carlin.

And I have not gone back to go buy his entire catalog, but I will at some point. The problem is I'm still trying to catch up on just listening to the free ones that are out there. Yeah, it was one of those things where I just wanted to support him because the show is so good. So I just went and spent a hundred bucks on everything that he's ever made. Yeah, there you go.

Listicle time. Bring it on. We love a good listicle. This is, this came out about, I think I'd mentioned that the Geeks and Beats podcast a few weeks ago that I listen to regularly because it's, you know, it's basically a sister show of ours almost. They've got one guy that's in the music industry and one guy that's in the tech industry and they do a podcast.

So it's pretty good. They ran across the supposedly a list of the greatest albums of all time, according to Ranker.com. That would be the hundred greatest because it's a listicle. Sorry, the hundred greatest albums of all time. And, you know, I'm a music geek, so I had to go check this out and figure out how many.

And they make it, how many I actually have. And they make it convenient because you can click on the albums as you go through the list and then they'll give you a total at the end. I had 75 of the hundred of all time. My main problem with this is, as we've discussed in the podcast before, I'm very late to the game with Led Zeppelin.

And there's an awful lot of Led Zeppelin albums in here. Well, I would like to point out that my biggest problem with listicles is that a lot of times they say one number and then it's another. So this is the hundred greatest albums of all time. And there's 101. I did notice that. That was interesting. And there's no text about why that one extra album got on there.

Yes. And honestly, for the site, I don't want to rag on them too much. I'm just going to rag on you because the actual title is the greatest albums of all time. Okay. It is not the greatest 100. You put that in by yourself. So that just makes my entire point totally moot.

Well, actually, the original link from Geeks and Beats, which was because we have had many an argument about correct sourcing, did say the title of that was 100 greatest albums of all time. And then I actually went to the original source, which has a different title, and put that link in. So I screwed up by mixing and matching title and link.

But I didn't want to have an incorrect source. Okay. Just saying. Yes. Even on Ranker.com, which I think is where it came from, it just has the greatest. But anyway, moving on. Moving on. And finally, because it's Halloween, and I actually should have probably Google searched this.

There's a new Marilyn Manson track. I have a feeling that his releases have tended to cluster around this particular holiday over the years, but I have no facts to actually back that up at the moment. Somebody can do some research on that and let us know. There is a new track. It came out, I believe, two days ago, so just in time for Halloween.

Third day of a seven-day binge. It is not bad. It's almost kind of a step forward for him in terms of music, as it's not all just boomy, boomy, scary, scary. There's some almost David Bowie-esque kind of arrangements done to it. So it's enjoyable, and it's always nice to have something out there that's dark and sleazy, because basically the only other thing we get is Taylor Swift anymore.

Yeah, I'll check it out. You hit or miss with Marilyn Manson. I think Mechanical Animals was my favorite one that he put out, and most of the stuff I can just leave. But, you know, yeah, I like me some dark, broody music, so I'll give it a shot. Yeah, I've always felt that there's one or two tracks on every album he puts out that's pretty good, but the rest of it, not so great.

Was it Mechanical Animals? I think that was when I worked for him. I did one campaign with him. I can't remember which album it was anymore. And when I say with him, it meant with the record label, because he could never be bothered. Yeah, you obviously can't be bothered to write good music either, so. Ooh, snap. Burn!

Burn! The web's not dead.

Uh, we've been somewhat Luddite-y on our podcast recently, railing against technology and how annoying a lot of it can be. So, uh, here's the, you know, there's a link in our show notes. I urge you to click on it, and we can watch a bunch of videos of birds attacking drones. Go nature.

Actually, some of these videos are amazing. They're really, really cool and very funny. So, yeah. Nothing wrong with nature fighting back. No, nature fighting back. And that eagle, man, he really went for it. It was some good stuff. And because it's Halloween, uh, 10 mysterious photos that are sure to creep you out.

The funny thing about this link is that you can't actually see any photos, because it's a video that has photos in it with spooky music and commentary. Well, there you have it. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween, everyone. It was good, though. I really did enjoy it.

And there's some stuff in there that I would like to have explained, but nobody can. And I still want to buy a drone. And I still want to train an eagle to take it down.

Are you kidding me? I really can't believe I did not know this. But here comes this week's Are You Kidding Me? Because the movie Halloween, back in 1978, was on such a tight budget, they had to use the cheapest mask they could find for the character Michael Myers, which turned out to be a William Shatner Star Trek mask.

I didn't know this, and neither did Shatner initially, but he did find out later, and he said he was honored. Yes, it was actually painted white, and they changed the hair a bit on it. But yes, it was a William Shatner mask. And if you care to listen to the last episode of Does It Have Legs, and the new one that will be coming out tomorrow, you can find out more about Halloween and Halloween 2, because we reviewed both of those movies.

There you go. And some might say that they were actually psychic, because the changes they made to the hair kind of probably match what his hair actually really looks like now. Could be. Just saying. And I just have to throw this in. This is another subject that we will technically stay away from on our podcast.

But this is a big Are You Kidding Me? One that I'm very impressed with. Pope Francis has declared evolution and the Big Bang Theory real, and said God isn't a magician with a magic wand. Holy shit. You know, I'm starting to really like this guy.

I like this guy a lot. You know, Pope Francis, a pope even an atheist can love. Seriously. I love this guy. Unbelievable. Shoutouts. I'd like to give a shoutout to San Francisco. I like to pick on you a lot.

I'm not a big fan of your city. And I was supporting the Royals for the World Series, which ended last night with a San Francisco win, unfortunately. You know, if you're a Dodger fan, you don't like the San Francisco Giants much. And, you know, I wanted the Royals to win just out of principle. But, you know, post the win, because you've got to stay classy.

Giants fans trashed the entire city. Two people were shot. Not surprising. Not surprising at all. Because they won. Because they won. Because they won. So. Yes. I had to do a walk to work the next day after one of these previous, I think it was a loss, though.

Yeah, everything was turned over. Stuff was, you know, set on fire. It was generally a mess. So, sports ball fans tend to not be the classiest folk when they either win or lose the big game. Yeah, unfortunately. But I also want to give a shout-out to the Chevy social media team, because I think they had a massive win, post the post-World Series win.

You know, what basically happens is they basically gave a Chevy truck to the World Series MVP. They've done this before. It's good promotion for them. So they sent up the Chevrolet regional zone manager, who probably has not done much public speaking, because as he was doing this on TV, presenting the truck to the Madison Bumgarner, who was the MVP, he kept stumbling over his lines, and he ended it up with, it combines class winning and leading, you know, technology and stuff.

Okay. Now, rather than just kind of let that go and just chalk it up as a loss and move on, the Chevy social media team basically turned it into a hashtag. So, hashtag technology and stuff. Good move. That was great.

That is pretty good. Take the piss out of yourself before anybody else can. Exactly. That's the best way to get over something like that. Make fun of yourself. So, well done. And to circle back, that is how you use a hashtag. Yes. There. So, my only shout out this week is to Alex Blumberg, who we talked about last week as the founder of the Startup Podcast and ex-Planet Money Guy.

I took his class on Creative Live on Power Your Podcast Storytelling, which – because I just wanted to hear, like, the ins and outs of how these guys at NPR really put these stories together. Because they're – I mean, they're just owning iTunes right now. Everything is fucking NPR this, NPR that.

I'm like, Jesus Christ. Give me some secrets. I don't have any secrets that will help this podcast in any way, shape, or form because we don't tell stories. No, we are not storytellers. And NPR deserves this. This is, again, going back to a recurring topic on the show.

NPR invests money in their talents and in their products. So, good. Yes, and time. Lots of time, which requires the money. So, anyway, if you're curious about just storytelling in general or if you're trying to do a new type of podcast where storytelling is required, it's only $100.

It's two full days' worth of content, so it will take you a good long time to get through it. I'm still actually not even finished yet because it's really good, though. Check it out. Link will be in the show notes. Hashtag cool. All right, man. Hashtag see you next week. You will see me next week.

And a shout-out to Toronto. I'm heading out there this weekend, and I'll be there through the early next week. So, if there are any Torontonian Grumpy Old Geeks out there, hit me up. See you soon. Music for Grumpy Old Geeks is provided by Among Us.

You can find them at iTunes and Spotify. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. If you'd like to help support the show and keep the lights on, you can donate on our website at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

You can also leave us voicemail comments or questions by using the SpeakPipe widget in the sidebar. On social media, you can find us at Facebook.com slash GrumpyOldGeeks or Twitter.com slash GOG Podcast. You can also get our iPhone app at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash iPhone.

And, as always, we appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 82. Hashtag technology and stuff. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida!

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