87: A Reasonably Sized Poo

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. So Brian, I hear you're a corporate stooge now.

I wouldn't go that far, but I've been talking about making a transition for quite a while, trying to get out of the music industry as much as possible, and a very nice opportunity presented itself, and I'm heading down that path. It's a little bit too early to announce much of anything. There'll be a big announcement in January, but let's just say I safely managed to pivot.

You've disrupted your own business. I have disrupted my own business. It's a good thing. I'm pretty happy. I've been running my own ship for a long time, and it was very much tied to the seas of the music industry, and those seas have gone very bad and flat and horrible.

I still have a few clients that I'm working with on a regular basis, but I've picked up a nice big corporate account that is actually something that I'm happy about, and I'm interested in working in this particular field, more of which I will talk about in January.

Well, I can't wait to hear the announcement. Well, it's fun. And just even being back and kind of dipping my toes back into the corporate world has been amusing. You have the pre-calls before the conference call, the eight hours it took to set up the corporate email the whole time I was going, just let me have access to the damn thing. I'll get it done in two seconds.

But there's a stunning amount of respect and graciousness and interest in hearing my opinion, which has been lacking for the past few years in my life, so this is good. You choose your jobs based on how much they coddle you. That's great.

Coddle is not the term I would use, but whatever. Whatever floats your boat. Fine, yes. If you kiss my ass, I'm yours. You're such a whore. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, at least you have valuable property now. You bought your house at the right time, it seems.

This was a big week for news about Silicon Beach, as it's been being referred to here, Venice Beach, Santa Monica area. Huge news. Yes, I bought at just the right time because this week, both Twitter and Google announced major moves into basically just down the street from me.

Twitter is literally just down the street from me. They're taking over some advertising buildings that are right over here in Santa Monica, and they're moving in big time. I mean, Google, which has been here for a little while already, just bought 12 acres of land just over by the Home Depot in Playa Vista, so they're moving in big time.

Yeah, that was an interesting one because they bought the hangar that the Spruce Goose was built in, which I didn't even know that was that building because I used to drive by it every day, and I'm like, oh, I would have had more respect for my boring-ass commute if I'd have known that. Yeah, yeah, so it's all pretty exciting. I mean, things are really blowing up here. I mean, obviously, we had Snapchat and stupid things like that flitting around, plus Electronic Arts and a bunch of other people have been in the area, but this is big, big tech is finally coming in, the ones that actually make a bit of money.

Even Apple has gotten into the game, but of course, Apple being Apple, they wouldn't come over to Silicon Valley. They're going to downtown L.A. for some godforsaken reason. Well, they're going to try and, you know, gentrify that, which is fine because downtown L.A. is kind of shitty. Yeah, they've been trying to gentrify downtown L.A. for about 10 years now. It's still not taken.

No, not at all. And Google has been, Google and YouTube specifically have been around your area for a while. I know Google's been in the Chiat Day building with the cool binoculars forever. Yeah, yeah, they've been here for quite a while anyways, but this is, 12 acres is a lot. That's a major move into the area. That's going to be a lot of jobs and a lot of hipster douchebags coming in.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Get ready for the man poo. It's coming. Yeah, but my property value is going up. You can afford lots of baggies. I can afford lots of baggies, and it's good because there are a lot of, obviously, a lot of our mutual friends and my friends are tech people that are living in this area, and it just, it really opens up the job market a lot.

So those of us that have been kind of scrambling around going, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? When you have these tech companies moving in and such force into the area, it's just like, oh, I guess I'll take a few interviews. And it's not like traffic couldn't get any worse anyway there, so. Well, that's true, but I mean, again, the plus of them being this close is you could bike to work.

That is true. That is true. But speaking of biking and things of that nature, I've given up the Fitbit. It's done. It's over. Wow. After four years. You've been all about quantifying your workouts. Yep. I noticed the other day, I looked at it, and it was my four-year anniversary, right?

And I was just like, what has this done for me? I really just sat down and thought about it. I'm like, I've been putting this thing on for me for four years. I was on my third or fourth one, so it's a couple hundred dollars of investment. And at the end of the day, there were no quantifiable results.

Meaning you haven't lost any weight. Absolutely none. Absolutely none. So I actually did a vapid episode about it called Quantified Masturbation. If you'd like to delve into that one, link will be in the show notes. But yeah, I'm selling my Fitbit and my Shine. So for Grumpy Old Geeks listeners who don't trust my advice, which most people don't, for a $20 donation, you can pick one or the other, and I will send it to you.

And you can clone me from my sweaty DNA. Oh, God. Way to sell it. Well, hey, if you also want to clone us, I'm selling the original Grumpy Old Geeks microphones. And you can clone us from our spittle. Lovely. I finally got all the microphones back in-house.

And since we've transitioned to different mics, we've got a Blue Yeti and an Apogee mic. I'm selling the pair for $200. It's not the original Apogee because I gave the original one that we used to Tim Ferriss. So he's been rocking that one for a while. But we have the one that we got to Dr. Teeter and you and I have used on remote shows.

So if you want a piece of Grumpy Old Geeks history, both of our microphones are going up for sale. All right. Well, there you go. Is the garage sale component of the show now over? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Well, I do have an automatic blowjob machine that's remained unclaimed.

Yeah, funny. We have no takers on that one. Interesting. Talk about wanting some DNA. There you go. Yeah. Well, maybe you should be posting these things on Facebook if you can get if anybody can see it past the deluge of the dear Mark Zuckerberg. You may not use any of my information, sick, corporate, corporate, legal, legal, corporate, corporate, legal bullshit that everybody's posting.

Again, every time Facebook announces that they're changing their privacy policy, these stupid fucking half-ass bullshit, not legal in any way, shape or form, not effective in any way, shape or form. Shit gets copied and pasted by a bunch of morons. This has been going on for since AOL and Prodigy were around.

It's nothing new. People just saying the same stupid shit over and over again. You give up your rights when you click I agree to your terms and conditions. Anything you say after that is moot, so you're an idiot. Yes, and copying and pasting some vague legalese that just uses bigger words than you normally use does nothing, so stop it.

Knock it off. Yeah, I've got a link here that is from Slate called One Weird Trick to Stop Facebook Hoaxes. It came in this morning, so I actually haven't had a chance to read it. It'll go in the show notes. You can check it out. But several people this week were actually posting that Axl Rose was dead, and I'm like, you're idiots too.

Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that. And actually, I woke up, I usually run through everything, and I got so upset. I think it was two days ago when I woke up and I saw the Betty White is dead, which is a fake link, and they posted it anyways. And, you know, filled with comments of, oh my god, we're going to miss her so much.

I'm like, ugh. And then there was another one that was a link to, if you drink, the value of drinking water first thing in the morning, and the fucking link basically claims that it can cure cancer, which I think these people should be sued out of fucking oblivion. And drinking fucking three glasses of cold water in the morning is not going to cure cancer, you fucking idiots, and all that sort of stuff.

But I read through this link in the show notes, which is the one weird trick to stop Facebook hoaxes. And I think it's a little bit interesting because, in general, we've been, Slate in particular, and a lot of technology writers have been writing about, you know, how Facebook should not be curating or editing our feeds at all.

And this entire article is saying, please, Facebook, edit our feeds and take this bullshit out, which I completely and 100% disagree with. Yes, I hate all these stupid links. Yes, I hate all these ridiculous things that get passed around. But I do, I in no way, shape, or form want Facebook to be editing them.

Well, they're already editing, but you know how they were going to have the satire tag a while ago? We just need a bullshit tag now. Yeah, or we just need a poster who was an idiot. A poster cannot be trusted. Yes, here's a pro tip for the Grumpy Old Geeks audience. Anytime that you see a celebrity has died, immediately go to TMZ, and if it's not at the top of TMZ, it's fake.

Or again, dead or not, dead or not.com. Well, TMZ is the ones that they do actual research, they have fact checkers, and they will call the celebrity and say, are you dead? And the person answers, no, not yet. I swear to God, Jason, if five years ago you would have told me that the phrase TMZ does actual research would be used, and we wouldn't laugh, I would have laughed.

I know, I know, but they are the one news organization that actually does news anymore. It's ridiculous. It's a crazy ass world that we live in. That's what happens when you have a lawyer run your network, you know? I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer, and I can post big notices on Facebook telling Mark Zuckerberg to not use my information.

Oh, God. Speaking of all this stuff, we've touched a lot on unplugging and stepping away and taking a break from the digital and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A long article on salon technology is making us blind, the dangerous complacency of the iPhone era.

It's basically just the same long argument that we've been making about how this is not, we're being sold a false bill of goods, it's really just, technology is just a tool, it's not saving our lives, it's not making our lives better, blah, take a break. It's all about control, man.

The man is trying to put us down with their fancy iPhones and swipe. Well, same as it ever was. You know, it's just the newest pony on the block. That's all it is. Yeah, and follow up to some medium stuff. There was an interesting article by this guy named Simon Owens.

He wrote, how medium is trying to bring back the web we lost. It was a fairly well-written piece talking about how some of the old guard of blogging have moved over to medium, and, you know, that's fine. I got no problem with that. My problem with medium has always been the fact that they are going to make money off of your stories, and there is no clear path to revenue for them because it's run by billionaires and they don't have to.

But at some point, they're going to get tired, they're going to leave, and the company's going to need to make money. And how they're going to do that? They're going to sell ads, and you're not going to get any. That's always been my problem with medium. So in the short term, trading your stories for what little bit of, you know, prestige or exposure you get from being on medium is a waste of time, so start a blog.

Oh, okay. Well, when I read the headline about them trying to bring back the web we lost, I thought I was going to have to dust up on Flash programming again. Flash! Yeah, no, no more Flash, thank God. Future Splash. Comment of the week.

A big thank you to Gregory Engstrom from Fort Worth, Texas, who sent us a lovely little donation that we put towards some new software to make the show sound better because, God forbid, we go more than five episodes without Jason wanting to change the way we record things. Yeah, that's right, baby. Yeah. So thank you very much for that.

Did I also send him the Among Us tracks for the donation? Well, that's up to you. Well, I sent you the thing. Okay, well, I believe I probably did. If you do send a donation, like we said, we are sending out some handpicked, personally curated selection of Among Us tracks.

Just mention that you actually want them because I don't, you know, I have no ego, so I don't feel like pushing unwanted things on people. Of course you don't. Except for this fucking podcast. So a friend of the show, Jeff Donaldson, sent us an awesome Portlandia clip called Rent It Out because he thought you might get a kick out of it.

I despise Portlandia. I find it to be the hipster sitcom from hell. I do recognize that there's some very clever writing, and this particular clip is, I was on the floor dying laughing. It is my personal nightmare of where we're going as a society, as an economy, and as an industry.

Yeah, it's very funny. I mean, it is exactly the dystopian future that I do not want to see happen. You don't want to rent out your toothbrush? That was hilarious. I mean, they really just took it, you know, they hit on Uber, they hit on Airbnb, and they took it to the next logical conclusion.

All right, well, that will be in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 87. Yes, and a friend of the show, Matt Quinn, gave us a little tweet right before we started recording. This is something we've talked about a couple times, so let's give him the run-through. He says, hey, dudes, do you have a WordPress setup and must-have plugins routine?

He has a new client, and he must use WordPress. I'm sorry to hear that. Me too, me too. In that vein, I have come around to moving a lot of my stuff to WP Engine, which is a customized WordPress hosting platform. They've got a lot of stuff that makes it really easy.

They do daily backups. You can do on-the-fly backups and restores, super easy, and staging servers. It's a little pricey, but they've saved my bacon a couple times. So for one-off WordPress sites, I recommend them now. As far as plugins go, I'm going to run through this real quick because we've done it before.

Yeah, and I've been using this exact same setup on the WordPress sites that I run, and it has been 100% better in terms of security and just everything running great. So go for it, Jason. Take it away. Brute Protect, anti-malware and brute force security by Eli, WordFence security, Redirection, Regenerate Thumbnails, WordPress SEO by Yoast, and Securi Security.

Yep. And also, as a couple little pro tips, never use admin as your admin username because that's the basics everybody searches for. And if you've got a high-volume site, use Cloudflare. They're like basically a free CDN level in between that handles a lot of the overhead stuff.

Yep. Agreed, agreed, agreed. So that should get you off to a pretty good start. And look at all that consulting for free. For free. Just like everything else. Want to rent my toothbrush? No, but if you would like to donate to the Grumpy Old Geeks to keep us on the air, feel free to go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and click on the little button on the right.

We're going to try and set up some Patreon stuff to make it easier over the Christmas break. But for now, we take PayPal. Yes, we do. Thank you very much, everyone.

In the news. So Kim Kardashian tried to break the internet and it failed and we all made fun of her. But guess who's back and actually did it? I thought we had heard the last of Gangnam Style, but nope. People are still watching that damn video. And it is so popular, it finally broke YouTube's view counter.

Gangnam Style. I, much like Friends, which I've never seen a full episode of, I have never seen the entire Gangnam Style video and I don't plan on it. Actually, it is quite good. I watched it more than a few of those views that finally took it over the actual integer that they had set up as the most possible views they ever thought they would have on their counter.

So there you go. It broke it. It broke it. They fixed it. This is something, actually, I really do think this is just more a publicity thing than anything else that got both YouTube and Gangnam Style back in the news. Got them some funny publicity. This could have been fixed. They should have seen this coming. It shouldn't have been a big deal.

See, this is where we disagree a little bit. I don't think YouTube needs any more news than they got. This was a slow fucking news day, to say the least. Oh, a counter broke on a fucking website. How is this news? No. But the change to take it from a 32-bit integer to a 64-bit integer for one video out of the billions of videos that YouTube has, that's a non-trivial engineering change because it takes up more database space because you have to allocate more memory for the slots in the database.

It's like, why do that unless you absolutely have to? And for one video, it's a pain. It could have easily been solved. They could set up separate databases for high volumes. You've got things like Star Wars or, well, back in the day, Lady Gaga, your Taylor Swifts. You know they're going to get shit tons and shit tons and shit tons of videos.

Set up a stratified system. Wouldn't be that hard. They've got the money. Yeah, but we're talking about billions of views. It took billions of views. A lot of these videos are going to get there at some point. Eventually, and now they have made the change, but I don't see why the engineering team would be bothered with that out of the gate, and I certainly don't see some PR wonk up in an office going, muahaha, we're going to get pressed because we can't count.

I know, I know. And, you know, of more interest to me is not so much that the, you know, Gangnam Style's views broke the internet. It's more YouTube's commenting system breaking the human spirit. I don't know if you've read through any of those recently. It is everything that's wrong with humanity. Oh, I read several different comments on a ton of websites this week just going through the news, and I can get two in, and then I just, I sigh and cry and die a little inside every time.

Yeah. Well, and now we've got a lawsuit that's trying to combat the very issue. Yes, the Supreme Court case of 2014. Facebook is in the news with this one because, what's his name? Anthony Alanis, the guy who had a really bad Facebook tantrum where he sprouted rap lyrics very unfunnelly towards his ex, was sentenced to 44 months in prison for it.

So he's appealing now to the Supreme Court, and we're going to get a decision on this in January or February, but this is a very dangerous case. I do not like this case. I do think that there needs to be some system put into play. I do think that we have to treat our digital and our social media as the same as, you know, shouting fire in a crowded theater.

You are spouting your things out to the world, but 44 months for quoting rap lyrics and making a shitty joke. Yeah, no, it's just the way that they're taking these comments and applying the law to them is very tricky.

You know, it's extraordinarily tricky, and I'm very curious on how this is going to come out because it could, you know, yeah, it's I don't want to I don't want to invoke the slippery slope, but it's it's a very tricky subject. Yeah, yeah, it is.

It's going to be interesting how this plays out now. Forty forty four months for bad rap lyrics is a little over the top. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, there are a lot of issues going on right now with with all of this sort of stuff, and we're going to talk about Zillow, which also just got sued for sexual harassment, which has been described as torture as part of this.

And we touched on this briefly when we were talking about she who must be named a few weeks back and about the Megadeth Arizona and and how women have have been having this challenges in the workplace because there are a lot of fucking idiots out there. And we kind of talked about how you and I approached it.

We're not even exactly the most evolved males in the world, but we're not sexist. We're not crazy. We're not doing any of this stuff. But there seems to be a shift in the culture. I can't believe what's happening at Zillow. Apparently, all these guys are just running rampant. According to this harassment case, there was a document that ranked all female employees by their breast sizes.

This woman allegedly received harassing text messages that included his supervisor sending her an unsolicited photo of his penis and emails about sex toys. What the fuck is wrong with you people? See, this is what happens when the Internet goes mainstream. This is where this is where, you know, we've had the Internet to ourself for so long that now we're we're remembering what humanity was like and what we were escaping.

This is this is what happens when jocks come to work for you. You know, we're back to the same shit. So we need to go have a new Internet. We need to get the fuck away from these people. I mean, Zillow is a real estate website. I don't know if you've met many real estate people. They're douchebags. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry to throw out a blanket statement out there, but you know it. Ninety nine percent of you motherfuckers are douchebags. And this is just an extension of it. It's all there is to it. It's it's the, you know, broification of the Internet. Yeah, yeah, it's not good. No, and I hope these guys get their dick knocked in the dirt because it's inappropriate and it's not funny and it's not cool.

Or they'll get the same sort of reaction that the Uber disciplinary actions against New York got, which likely involved high fives. That's just a great title from an article that Pando did. I know everybody's sick of me talking about Uber, so forget it. Let's forget it. Yeah, and it is from Pando who does have a vendetta against them.

And again, I only took that one for the title because it's a good one. Likely involving high fives. You put it in for the lulls. Oh, my God. I did. But I will also like people don't want me to go on about Uber anymore. Let me just run through a couple quick headlines because Uber is continuing to be a shitty company.

They've basically been shut out of Nevada now. The Nevada court basically said you can't do this. But again, that's mostly because the mafia runs taxes or taxis in all of Las Vegas. So I don't really blame Uber for that one. But good luck. And it's a good precedent. And I want to see what happens in the case. There's a story on Salon.

I quit miseries of an Uber driver runs through her experiences actually driving for Uber and they were not pleasant. Shocking. Also, on that one, I don't trust that article one bit because she could just be a lift plant. Hey, you know, this comes back to not trusting shit you read online.

And this is from not a journalist. It's from a mom who was an Uber driver. OK, straight out of the Portlandia video. Yeah. Grain of salt on that. Another article in Slate, when is driving for Uber actually worth it, which runs through some serious statistics in terms of money when they were driving, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

TLDR on that one is not very often. Yeah. Uber drivers do not make anywhere near the amount of money. The takeaway, particularly from that one, is we talked a few weeks back about the magic unicorn Uber driver that's supposed to make the amount of money. Uber executive says we have many of those in New York, but then still managed to not get back to the writer, the journalist, and provide any names or any examples.

OK. Slow down there, chief. Slow down. There's a few more. An Uber job applicant says he was given access to passenger data for an entire day. Good security there. That makes me feel really secure. And did we have any more or is that all of the ones that I had? There was the interesting one called Uber.gov that talks about how fucked up the taxi situation is in Las Vegas already.

So it's kind of like about Uber, but not really. It's more about how the taxi situation is screwed. And if you find yourself in a tunnel while you're taking a cab to the strip, you're getting bilked by the taxi driver. Yep. So Obama is going to put aside $263 million of our tax dollars for 50,000 body cams over the next three years for police.

And the elephant in the room is also in that plan that he's got, is training for all the cops for all of this wonderful military equipment that they've been getting handed to them from the DOD. So yeah, let's like, let's use our tax dollars to have the equivalent of a standing army in the continental United States.

That's pointed right back at us. That's the world we've created for ourselves. Isn't this awesome? Um, look, you can't, you can't, you can't close up Pandora's box. They've got this stuff. You can't take it away from them. Yes, you can. Well, I, in a perfect world, they would, and I would like that very much. It's ridiculous what they have, but at least train them if they're going to have it.

I'm fine with that. I don't really want my tax dollars spent for it. And yes, I agree. Take it away from them. The body cams in theory, I'm totally behind this, except as in, let's not get too political on grumpy old geeks here. But as we've seen in recent news, you can have a fucking cell phone recording of somebody killing someone else and nothing fucking matters.

And actually the only guy that gets indicted is the guy holding the fucking cell phone. So what fucking difference does it make? Well, then maybe if we put the cameras on the cops, since then they have the video equipment, they'll get indicted for taking the photos. Hey! That's what they're doing. Bingo! Loophole! Yep.

Excellent. Yeah. So, uh, whatever. None of that fucking matters. So, just, just, so disappointing. Ugh. The interesting technology behind the body cameras, though, that, uh, made me think of it was they have a system in place that when the cop gets back in the car, the video is automatically uploaded to the servers.

I love that. That is cool. That is very cool. That is a cool piece of tech. But I wonder how many politicians that are running this through have shares in Taser Inc., which is the company that's doing all of this shit. But that, that is a different story for a different podcast. Okay, I found an interesting article in the New York Times called, When the Forces of Media Disruption Hit Home.

This is a really good article talking about how things are getting screwed up at the New York Times. So, I thought it was pretty cool that they actually put it in their paper. Yeah, I, I like this too. It's, it goes a little meta and they're, they're covering themselves and I'm happy about that. The interesting, uh, the interesting takeaways was, I think it was the Orange County Observer was asking, you know, their reporters to answer the phones in exchange for, uh, credit for crustaceans.

Basically, if you answer X amount of calls, you get free lobster or, or get up early in the morning to go deliver the newspapers and you get free gift cards. I'm like, oh my God, oh my God. Don't we have teenagers anymore? That's what they were invented for. Get the little fuckers out of there on their bikes at five in the morning to go deliver newspapers.

It builds character, gives them grit. The teenagers don't work anymore. They just take selfies. That's true. Yeah. Anyways, again, another stunning example of the world that we're creating for ourselves. Isn't it fun? So, uh, music publishers are finally getting pissed at ISPs.

Well, they've, they're running out of other ideas to be, to be bad at that. You know, who do you go after anymore? And I think this battle is dumb and lost already. And everybody's just kind of hoping that streaming will make it easier than people just stealing things.

But, uh, I don't know. I don't know. Why is it? Why is music still fighting the battle when it actually should be the movie industry at this point? Well, yeah, this is the last gasp of the music industry. So Rights Corp is a company that, you know, follows all the breaches of online piracy.

Yeah. And two of their, two of their rights holders are actually going after Cox Cable, who is basically not following through with their promise on delivering the cease and desist noticed, notices to the people who are offending. Yeah. And infringing.

So it's, it's, it's, it's, this isn't new either. There's been previous lawsuits about this and they ended up coming to nothing. You can't really, there's a privacy issues. ISPs can't turn over a certain amount of information unless it's to the government, not to, not to private industries. And the, yeah, just the, the, the music people need to like figure out their shit and stop suing people and, you know, get their, get their licensing in order and deal with it.

Yeah. But suing, suing your, suing your fans has historically not worked. No. Why they're still trying to revive this, this, I don't, I don't even want to call it a business model. It's just trying to punish people for seating is what it is. And it's a money grab. That's all it is. Yeah. And to the people who are getting busted for this, it's called a proxy.

You dumb fucks. Jesus. Yeah. If you're going to pirate pirate, right? Seriously, protect your ass. You know, you put, you put an article in our show notes that made me, made me very happy. I've been grumpy so far.

This, but I love this. This is, this is the best. It's from Ars Technica. Uh, I've railed about how every commercial is basically a straight up, flat out fucking lie. And why are we putting up with this anymore? AT&T was told to stop calling U-verse the fastest internet for the price.

Because it's not. It is terrible. Because it's a lie. And you can't have all your entire commercials based on lies. Yeah. But apparently you can, and nobody gives a shit anymore. So at least we got one story where they're like, you can't say that. I know.

And they're, they're calling it broadband when it isn't even broadband. The FCC says flat out broadband speeds must be at least four megabytes per second, or megabits per second. And AT&T's shitty U-verse, which comes in over coax, is a three.

Because it's basically DSL. Yeah. And DSL sucks. Yeah. And I've never had an AT&T router that did not fail after having more than one computer attached to it. Well, I mean, I think we should, this needs to start a roll. I think Verizon needs to be told that they can't advertise their shit the way that they advertise it.

I'm sick and tired of being told about how I can get a free iPhone 6 when I go into stores and ask about it. And I cannot get a free iPhone 6. There's no way to get a free iPhone 6, even though the commercial says you can have a free iPhone 6. It's lies, lies, lies, lies. And we need to start calling these people out on it. Yeah. Well, you know, call them out by not buying their services.

That's what I've done with AT&T. And I tell everybody when they ask me what they need to do, I hear U-verse is great. And I say, no, don't buy U-verse. And they don't. They go buy somebody else. And that's how you do it. Exactly. I got to tell you, though, my Comcast Internet speed is off the fucking hook.

I'm still getting 100 megabits down consistently, 20 up for the price of 20 down. I love them. My Time Warner cable has been fantastic as well. I am having problems with my wireless, so I am thinking about switching away from Verizon. But they're all liars, so I don't even know who to go to. Well, AT&T still does have that, you know, thing where they run a cable to your house and you can plug a phone into it, into the wall.

Well, that doesn't work when I'm down at the bar. Yeah. You know what you do when you're down at the bar? Stay off the fucking phone. Okay? That's the only time I talk to you. That's true. I'm going to start recording those. No, thanks. Okay. All right. Moving on. And then just moving on, a quick thing in the news that is actually a tad bit sad.

James Watson is selling his Nobel Prize because no one wants to admit I exist. The world-famous biologist James Watson, who is one of the co-discoverers of DNA, etc., etc., is selling the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 because he has been ostracized and he needs the money. Apparently, nobody in the scientific community likes him.

He can't make any money doing speeches. And there's an article on Slate that then talks about him and basically about how he's been a massive asshole, douchebag, racist for years and years and years. And you reap what you sow. Well, I bet Fox News could use him as a science course.

I'm a little surprised that he isn't out there. Yeah, Fox News, he could totally be doing well. He actually still believes in science. He's just a dick. Well, I mean, he's got half the credentials. That's true. That's true. All I can say is from years of working in the music industry, I can categorically say that being a genius does not mean you can be a dick forever.

It does catch up to you. Yes. And it has caught up to him. Sorry, James. Thanks for the DNA discovery. Stop being a dick. Security. Ha! It must have been another one of those weeks where you didn't have too much to do, Jason, because the security segment is fucking full.

Jeez, what have you been doing? The hits just kept on coming, man. Every time I'd open Twitter, somewhere else, there's more, more, more. Yeah, it was not a good week for security. Take it away, Jason. All right. This one came out today, I believe. PayPal accounts were one click away from hijacking for a very long time.

There was some cross-site scripting, referencing stuff that could have been done that a security researcher discovered, told PayPal. PayPal gave him the bug bounty and said, here, thank you. Here's $10,000. Go have a nice day and we'll fix the problem, which is how it's supposed to work.

Yes. So if you don't have a bug bounty program, get on it. Agreed. Thank you, random security guy, for making us safer. Yeah. Point-of-sale systems were breached at major U.S. parking garage operators. Oh, boy. So, yep. It's the same issue with these POS systems, you know?

It's the same one. Over and over again. Here's the deal. Pay in cash. Uh, yeah, I guess. The problem is they've taken that option away because so many of them are automated now. And, uh, the cash machines are always, like, the, the, the stupid standalone things, those things are always busted because stupid kids beat the crap out of them.

Yeah, for the most part. But, uh, most of the time you can, uh, do that. Or the other way to do it is get a prepaid card, which I have. I've got, like, an Amex Bluebird and another prepaid Visa. And if I'm out and about, I use those instead of my debit card or my credit card. And I just top it off every now and again. So, that, uh, reduces your exposure to risk when using credit cards out in the wild.

Smart. Interesting. Actually, I remember, this isn't in the show notes, but let me just throw this out to you really quick, Jason, because I saw this. I forgot about it. I forgot to, to save it for the show notes. There's a credit card company that, that is coming out with a digital card that's supposed to generate one-time use, uh, one-time use, uh, numbers.

Interesting. How genius is that? I would totally use that credit card. Every time you use it, it generates an automatic number. It's got some sort of weird connection system that they're using. It's supposed to be able to be used anywhere that you would use a normal credit card. Okay. Throw that in the show notes for next week and I will do a vetting of it. Okay. I just want to see it.

Yeah, me too. It sounded cool. I got to find it again. All right. So Sony's fucked. Sony is still fucked. Yes. And it seems that a lot of it is their own damn fault. Yeah. They kept thousands of passwords in a folder named password. You know, Sony, that's where you should have put the usernames.

Nobody would have noticed. Oh my God. Oh my God. I mean, just, we've got five other stories in here. I'm just, this one takes the cake though. I mean, honestly, it's like this. I saw this on Gizmodo this morning and I'm just like, oh my God. Oh my God. They, they couldn't even like, you know, get a copy of last pass or one password.

They just literally put everything in a folder. It's like, oh, here's the Facebook password. Yep. Yep. Everything in that folder is now completely owned. The FBI got in on the Sony attack to talking about the malware that was used and they sent out some press releases or actually under the, under the table releases to a bunch of companies saying be on the lookout for this because it's out there in the wild.

Yeah. I even got a pop-up from a Norton security about that actually. Wow. Yeah. That's, I can't believe you still use that piece of shit. It's only on my PC. I don't do much with that anymore. Yeah. And they're investigating a link to North Korea for this hack because of that God awful movie.

Yeah. And that smells more just like publicity for that God awful movie than anything else. Yeah, that really does. Since, since all the other movies that they had up on their roster have been shared on social networking thievery sites. So. Yeah. And I did see that one of the other bits of information that got out was a list of salaries.

Yep. And that also proved that it's good to be an old white male. Us young white males don't really get it. Get too much money. Uh, but the old white males are making a shit ton of money and the women are not making very much. Yeah. Standard. Shocking. SOP. SOP. Yep. Um, so Krebs on security had an interesting article on these new wiretapping, uh, systems that are being built in, not built in, but, uh, uh, being actually, yeah, being built into ATMs by crooks and they're almost undetectable.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, they're, they're, they're pretty scary looking. I mean, those are the things that I expect to see showing up, especially at the, like the parking lot machines, because those aren't really monitored. There's some crappy camera that doesn't work half the time. Somebody strolls in it, you know, two in the morning, taps one of these right in there. Boom. Done. Yeah.

It's, it's scary stuff. So if you're interested in that, uh, there'll be a link in the show notes for that. Uh, we've got credit unions press for data security mandate on retailers. I didn't read that one, but you can, cause it'll be in the show notes. Um, Twitter to start snooping at which apps you have installed. Hold on a second. Shocking.

And, uh, there are ways to opt out of it, but it's enabled by default and it can see whatever else you have installed on your phone, which is kind of bullshit. Why does Twitter of all people need to know what apps I have installed? Cause they want to, they want to tweet every time you swipe in Tinder. Not cool.

Not cool. Not cool. Um, yeah, this is, this is going around for a week. I'm sure that there's been movement on it at this point, but I haven't seen any follow up. So at this point I, I don't use the Twitter apps. I don't care. Yeah. But if you, if you do use the built-in Twitter app, maybe do some follow-up on this yourselves.

Yes. We are making, we're, we're crowdsourcing our security segment to the listeners now. Um, there's a lot of stuff in here. I didn't have time to get it all. I know. Um, Europe's going after the, uh, websites that silently track users. Good.

Every fucking website. Yeah. That's every website. I, and we talked about that site, uh, what, two weeks ago that I had listed in the show notes where for it's a voluntary opt out mechanism for, for tracking users, websites here in the U S. Um, we need this. This is bad. Yeah. The interesting thing that they're talking about is the fingerprinting technology that we talked about probably 20 shows ago that we thought was very cool.

It is a cool piece of tech where you use the canvas CSS, uh, functionality to basically check for fonts installed machine browser, clock speed, all that shit. And then by using all that data, you can fingerprint a specific browser and say it with, with a relative degree of certainty, know that that person is coming back because no, not no two people have like the same exact machine configuration, or if they do, it's, you know, very rare.

So they're going after that one. Oh yeah. You okay there? Yeah. All right. Take a, take a deep breath. It's all weighing on me, man. It's all weighing on me. There's an article on alternate about the, uh, common mistakes that people use.

Don't we know this by now? I mean, how many times do we have to have this article out there? I guess we have, actually we have to have it fairly often because clock speeds on computers and GPUs get faster, which means that they can crack passwords easier. So you need to make your passwords longer. Okay.

And, and a lot of the stuff that people do is like, you know, they'll do a word with like a number after it. Yeah. Uh, don't mix case or, and by, by using a special character, everybody just puts bang at the end exclamation point for you non-programmers. And, you know, that's kind of, they, they have filtered for these common patterns now in the, in the cracking software.

So they've got some tips on, uh, how to kind of beef up your password, but I'm just going to tell you right now, use one password, use one password and set it to the maximum string length that the site that you're using will allow, because some old ass sites will still say, you know, must be between two and 12 characters and no special characters.

It's like, Oh people, come on. I mean, if you can, if you can put in 128 character password, use 128 character password. You never have to type it in. Keep, you know, that's what the software is for. Keep in mind. It would require a budget for these sites to make those changes. Oh, but if YouTube can make their counter go bigger, then why can't people make their password go bigger, Brian?

I agree. I'm just saying it requires a budget. Uh, speaking of big companies, uh, Google has decided to get rid of captchas. It's the no captcha recaptcha, their new attempt at, uh, basically redoing security for when you're signing up to a website to see if you're a robot or not. They have the brilliant idea of basically taking those codes that you have to type in and replacing them with an HTML five animated checkbox that says I'm not a robot.

Here's the thing that gets me about this. I'm fine. I'm fine with coming up with new ways of doing captchas, but if I'm already logged into Google and I filled out like five of these things, they don't, they know that I'm a person already. Can't they just, you know, say, Oh, he's already logged into Google and he's done this like six times this afternoon.

Yeah. We kind of, we kind of have with a relative degree of certainty that he is a human. Yeah. I mean, I mean, yeah, you can sweatshop that out, I guess, but still it's a pain in the ass. Fucking captures. Captchas are a pain in the ass. But I mean, so a system like that wouldn't really work for you or I, because we like to turn off tracking so that they don't know where we're going to speak about yourself.

I don't do that anymore. I'm too lazy. Wow. I named my, my, my, my password's fluffy. One, two, three. You can just go. You're not only my shit. You not only took off that tinfoil hat, you've baked a pizza on it and threw it out. I made a meatloaf. Okay. There's an interesting article in Salon about the Amazon CIA partnership, which is, you know, that's a tinfoil Hattie Reed.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that didn't make me very happy. No, I mean, well, but you know, the newfound Jason doesn't give a shit. No, you can't do anything. You're the one that taught me that. That's very true. You can't. Now the CIA gave Amazon lots of money to run their cloud infrastructure, which also, you know, means that they probably privy to a lot of backdoor deals.

If the CIA needs to just sneak into this other server that's around the corner, why, why not let them? Yeah. Why not? There's a company called silence out there that put out a report on operation cleaver, which is a very scary read. It's very long. It's like 75 pages, but it basically says that Iran at this point has become a superpower when it comes to hacking.

And we should all be very, very frightened because at some point our planes are going to fall from the sky. We will have no water and cats and dogs will be living together. It's, it's, it's horrifying. Yeah. And, uh, not surprising at all either because, uh, being a superpower in the future does not involve a really, really, really, really expensive nuclear weapons, uh, program.

It involves getting a bunch of your crazy brightest hackers in a room together and screwing the enemy. Yeah. Everything's connected now. So be on the lookout for that. Yep. Uh, and again, nothing you can do about it, but again, you know, be on the lookout for it, but, uh, when it really happens, it'll be too late and we'll all be dead.

So, and we can't talk about it on Facebook because there will be no power. because they shut down the grid. Yeah. Which will basically send us a new term. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. That new Terminator trailer came out the other day. Oh God. That looks terrible. It does look terrible. Okay. So many people thought it looked cool on, on, on my phone.

I couldn't believe how many people were into it. I was like, this looks horrible. Oh, well. Oh, okay. Let's get back to some more scary. Oh, okay. Last one. Last one. Uh, the, the, the defense department is putting a lot of money into conversation recognition.

Software now. Yeah. Makes sense. And it, yeah. And it's not your run of the mill, like, you know, dragon crap that you get on your phone to, you know, be able to just transcribe your newsletter or stuff like that. This is like high tech software. That's meant to be able to recognize who is in a conversation in a multi-person conversation that you listen to from a drone that's going on in a tent in a desert.

Yeah. That, that kind of level of speech patterns, uh, pauses. Like it, for instance, it, to be able to recognize, like when I talk to you, cause I'll be, there'll be, be sighing every five minutes or so, um, that sort of thing. They just, they just have to grip for you're an asshole and they don't know you're talking to me.

Oh, that's true. So, uh, it's an interesting read and the technology is, is pretty crazy. So we'll see how that kind of shakes out in the future, but, uh, everybody's going to have to get one of those little voice tweaker boxes to have a chat anymore. I feel that tinfoil coming back, Jason.

I feel it. Okay. Let's, let's get out of here before, before I go get some Reynolds wrap. At the library. I finally got around to reading wool by Hugh Howey. Oh, it's like a, it's like a throwback Friday.

Well, we talked about it enough times where, you know, he kind of ended around the publishing system and got his book made and got to keep his digital rights and they're making movies and all that kind of crap. So I thought, eh, might as well get off my ass and actually read the thing. So it was a 17 hour audio book, which is a long one on the long side.

So, but I, I got sucked in at the beginning and I took it, I read the whole thing in a weekend. Right. And it was good. It was, it was good. It's a, the beginning was awesome. And then it kind of lagged in the middle, but it had enough momentum to keep me going until it picked back up at the end. Now was this 17 hour thing?

Was this all of them or just the first initial book? Oh yeah. Well, it's the wool compendium. It's like five books. Oh yeah. Okay. So he's got, he's got three other compendiums out there. I've got the second one. I haven't started it yet, which will, which will become readily apparent in the next section. Why?

And I gave, I gave it a B plus. I thought it was like B plus dystopian nerd porn. I'm pretty sure that's how I felt about it at the time as well. I enjoyed it, but I was mostly just impressed that he had kind of gone out and did it themselves. I thought, I thought they were good books. They weren't great. They weren't, uh, you know, it's not, they're not going to go up on my hall of fame of all time best sci-fi ever, but good, good, good stuff.

He did a good job. I thought, I think you'll enjoy the other ones as well. Okay. Yeah. It filled a weekend. It was good. So let's finally get around to Corey, Dr. Rose. Information doesn't want to be free laws for the internet age since it took us weeks to get through this thing. You know, we've been teasing it for so long and you're going to be horribly disappointed in me because I have very little to say about it.

Actually, uh, it was mind numbingly boring unless you're really too into the idea of, of the, the law and, and the machinations behind things like creative comments. Um, I find that his title is, is, uh, misleading. Absolutely.

110%. And he did not change his, his view on things being free, uh, at all. And I still completely a hundred percent disagree with him. So on his strategy, I finally found at the end of the book on page 143, a little mini essay entitled, uh, what was it called?

Something about fucking dandelions. The thing about the dandelions. If you put your content out there, it will blow out into the thing and sprout new sources of revenue, which from my experience is complete and utter bullshit. I disagree with you there. I think, I think it's a solid, uh, a solid strategy.

You want your name everywhere because one of his first internet laws is the fact that you can't be an unknown. You have to be known. And to get known, it's a, it's a great, it's a great system for getting known is to write good stuff and give it away. And then people will pay you to write other stuff. That's why he writes so many columns.

That's why he writes books and he still sells the shit out of his books. He sells physical copies, even though people will download it, read it, and then go buy it. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a viable strategy for him. So I can't knock him for, for sticking behind that. It works for him and it works for some, I don't think it's a be all end all solution for everyone.

And instead of arguing that actual point, uh, we should really just be focusing on the book, which is the book does not talk about what it claims to talk about. No, no. And it is horrifically boring and really, really hard to read. It took us weeks to get through it. So it is, it is broken down into like a hundred little mini chapters that are a page, page and a half long, which makes it great for the pooper.

But if you, if you, uh, aren't, if you don't have a high fiber diet, it's really hard to get through. Yeah. It's a long, rough read. And I think that, uh, you know, basically his entire purpose is summed up on basically two pages. Uh, the rest of it is all just kind of the history of how we've gotten here and the legalities behind how we could move forward.

And yeah. Um, yeah, I just, uh, I disagree and I didn't enjoy the book and I don't think it talked about what, uh, what we were told it was going to talk about. Yeah. Just go back to sci-fi, Corey, please. Yeah. Thank you.

I ran across this cool little drone that is basically made for taking selfies. It's called the Xano. It is a Kickstarter little drone. They've passed their goal. Their goal was 125,000 pounds.

They're at 531,000 pounds with 33 days to go with 3000 backers. And it's, you just throw it up and it takes some pictures of you. It's, it's kind of neat. Why didn't they call it the droney? Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. That's a good one.

Why don't you people hire us? This is what we do. And, uh, I found another site called noisely or yeah, noisely. It, it, it's, it's a white, no, it's a white noise generator. The white noise generator. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. It, but it's free.

If you don't want to drop coin on a iPhone app or what I, what I like it for is I can turn it on on my desktop computer when I go to bed at night and just let it play instead of having to worry about like all the battery draining out of my phone. And it's, it's a nice little noise generator and it's free. So check it out.

Media candy. I ran out of podcasts last week. That can't be possible. I only have 47 that I listened to on a regular basis and I was surprisingly out of episodes. So I reached out to the Twitters and friend of the show. Jordan Cooper sent me his OPML file from downcast, which put my number up to 162 podcast because he's a machine.

Apparently I have been listening to podcasts pretty much incessantly since I got that. My brain is about to explode. Um, but the first one I want to talk about today actually doesn't come from that list. Okay. Uh, hat tipped a friend of the show, Jeff, uh, Jeff Donaldson, who gave us the previous Portlandia, uh, episode.

Um, this is called the dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. Dave Anthony also does a show with my friend, Greg Barrett called walking the room, which is an awesome podcast, but has been on hiatus for a while. So I got this one and this is Dave Anthony reading a bit of American history to his friend, Gareth Reynolds, who's also a comedian and it is hilarious.

It is fucking hilarious. I was in tears. I hit my head on the desk. I was laughing so hard once I probably even peed a little. It was so good. All right. I, and the history part is, is awesome. They, they, they nail the history stuff.

It's just crazy stories that you never would have, uh, never would have known. It's so good. All right. I will have to check that out. Another one I ran across was, uh, by the way, in conversation with Jeff Garland, Jeff Garland is kind of annoying. I actually, I like him.

I'm a fan. I don't know if I could listen to a podcast by him, but I like him. Well, the, he does interviews and this one I put in for you specifically because you're a Stephen Merchant fan. That I am. And this was a really good conversation. So I, I highly recommend it. I will listen to that today while I'm editing down our podcast.

Another great show is called transmission. This comes out of good stuff. FM up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Uh, well, that's the, that's where the network is. The guys who do it are from orange County and, uh, somewhere on the West coast. They're two brothers and it's awesome. It is a great, uh, news, like tech news podcast.

It's, it's a lot like this show, but if we had more talent and we're more frequent with our episodes, they do it multiple times a week and I have no idea how they get it, get it so polished and so well down every, every episode. It's awesome. My guess is they're probably getting paid for it.

Not very much. Not very much at all. And, uh, I also tried the tech dirt podcast, which I gave it 10 minutes of. It was the Amanda fucking Palmer episode. They, they, they actually announced her as Amanda fucking Palmer, which I thought was kind of funny.

Um, and they're talking to her for a few minutes and one of the hosts mispronounced Neil Gaiman's last name. You can't be instant nerd cred out the window. You, you can't, you can't, you can't be a nerd. You can't be into tech. You can't, you can't, if you don't even know what exactly, exactly unsubscribed deleted out the door.

You're, you're dead to me. Tech dirt. Okay. Uh, in other news this week, Instagram stepped on their dick by, uh, spoiling the season, the mid season finale by posting a picture of who the dead character was this week.

Did the, did the intern forget that the show hadn't aired yet? Yes, apparently so. They have no conception of time zones. Uh, so before the West coast, uh, thing aired and actually it was ruined for a lot of people here in the Midwest and on the East coast that have these things called DVRs and are doing other things.

So it was a giant faux pas. But the reason I bring it up is, uh, they took the, they took the link down and then put it back up later. And, and the comments in the, in the thread on Facebook, it's a public thread. So you don't have to be a Facebook member to see them are classic.

They are so good. This is just another gentle reminder, folks, that, uh, you may know how to post on Facebook or upload a photo to Instagram. That does not mean you know how to run a media campaign. Stop outsourcing this to interns just because they grew up with a damn phone in their ass. Call us, pay us, we will do it right.

We won't spoil your show unless, unless your checks are late. Then, oh yes, all bets are off. Then we're going to kill everybody. Um, I talked about black mirror on the show before, which is a kind of a technology type of twilight zone-y show out of, uh, the UK and it's, uh, it's up on Netflix now.

So if you didn't see it before and you have a Netflix account, go watch it. They're amazing. Well, that's nice. That must've brought up the number of actual shows on Netflix to seven or eight now. I haven't actually used my Netflix account in a while because that very reason. Um, yeah, good times.

I say I, I, every time I try to even find anything on Netflix to watch, I can't, it's, it's gotten ridiculous. It's complete waste of time. Sadly, uh, you're, you're pretty close on the mark there. Yeah. That's what are you going to do? Yeah. So, uh, you took over the old school classic of the week for me this week. I say, yeah, you were a little late.

So I jumped in. Um, one of my go-tos that I listened to during the day when I'm working is, uh, American psycho by the kind of misfits. This is the, the Michael Graves misfits after they, they, you know, settled the lawsuit with Glenn Danzig. And so I don't think of it as the misfits.

I just, I, I won't, I refuse to think of it as the misfits because the misfits are walk among us, all the old classics. This is a completely different band with a completely different kind of bent. It's more tongue in cheek, but I love this album. I listened to it all the damn time. All right. I highly, I highly recommend it.

If you like the punk rocks and the kind of bassy meaty type of stuff, I've never listened to anything by the misfits post dancing. So, Oh, then check this out. Yeah. I believe they're all on the Spotify. Okay. Um, there's another one that they did years after they broke up called cuts from the crypt, which was a lot of the, you know, the B real stuff that they recorded when they were doing the first album and some other stuff along the way.

And I, it's amazing. I can't, if you like the first one and get the second one, I get all their stuff, all that Michael Graves misfit stuff, forget anything else that they've done. Forget it. It's terrible. It's un, it's unlistenable, but the, the Michael Graves stuff. I love to death.

All right. Excellent. Um, and I found an interesting link and this is a bit of a justification for me, a very much. And I told you so moment. Um, so I wanted to discuss it a little bit. The Mirror, the paper over in the UK, did some serious data crunching on pop bands and their lyrics.

Uh, they basically took all their song lyrics, ran them through a bunch of different well-known, uh, tests that basically shoot out things like reading levels, comprehension, word size, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff. And came up with the amount of years for most, uh, a handful of UK pop bands that you would have to spend in education in order to understand their lyrics, AKA how smart the bands are.

Uh, guess what was number one? Douche Mode. Depeche Mode, one of my favorite bands of all time. And I've always argued that Martin Gore is one of the most misunderstood songwriters of all time. He is a genius and this proves it. Damn it. Yeah.

So basically, you know how old you have to be? 15. Hey, well, you know, look at the ages for other people. Like the top 10 bands that Def Leppard somehow made the bottom of the top 10, unbelievably, you have to be 8.5 years old to understand them.

And then you go down to the 10 bands with the least sophisticated lyrics and the number one or the bottom is Coldplay where you have to be seven years old to understand their lyrics. Well, seven years of education. Oh, seven years of education. So, yes. But also the Smiths 5.5.

I was surprised by that. But then again, he's more, it's more poetry and it's more weaving in of, you know, kind of, you know, just a standard slang and things like that in a really interesting way. So I don't think that that test works for them. But yes, kids, kids learned at an early age what the word sad means.

I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad, I'm sad that he took my cookie away. Or something like that. I will never sing on this podcast again. But I just thought it was a really interesting article. Take a look at it. It's kind of surprising. And again, justification for my love of Depeche Mode.

Three things out on the web that tickled my fancy this particular week. The first one is a listicle. Sorry about that, but it's a good one.

It's actually a video, a mystical, a video-istical. Stop. Okay, I'm just trying to, it's got a shitty clickbait title. But there were some really cool tips that I was not aware of. It's called After I Saw This, My Bananas Never Went Bad Again. It was just horrible.

But there were some good life tips in there that I was completely unaware of. So I highly recommend watching it. I've actually used one. The putty banana, or not a banana. I'm on the fucking banana train. About the banana boat. If you have a bag of potatoes, throw an apple in there so they don't sprout.

I don't know how that works, but it must be science. I'm going to try that. There's some crazy science in there. They don't really explain it, but it's just some good stuff. And speaking of trains, this one got my eye and I was laughing hysterically. We finally found a good use for Twitter. There's a site called The Lad Bible, which you can also just follow on Facebook.

They do thousands of posts every day. Some of them are really quite amusing. This one was great. A guy in Britain tweeted to the Virgin Trains that he was on. And he said, I've just had a reasonably large poo, and there is no toilet roll left on the At Virgin Trains 1930 train from Houston to Glasgow.

Please send help. And they did. I just love that he has to put the size of his poo in. So we finally found a decent use for Twitter. That's all I got to say. And number three is actually an intelligent one and very, very awesome.

It's a YouTube video called Semantics Science vs. Music by Nigel Stanford. And he basically puts things like find sand over surfaces and plays different frequencies. And you can basically see that music is all math.

And it's pretty bitchin'. Ooh. Well worth the watch. Closing shoutouts. I woke up this morning and checked my Facebook. And I realized that it's one of those rare days where I have no listed Facebook birthdays. So I had to make note of that because there are so many people out there who I have to wish happy birthday to, even though I haven't seen or talked to them in 20 years or maybe never in person.

Thanks, Facebook. So I wanted to wish everybody a very merry unbirthday. Of course, right after I posted that, I realized it's friend of the show, John Resnick, from the Goo Goo Dolls' birthday today. Happy birthday, John. Happy birthday, John. See, a couple of years ago, nobody said happy birthday to me on Facebook, even with the notice.

So I have a no happy you day policy going on now. So even if it says happy birthday to somebody that I should go talk to them and wish them whatever for their birthday, fuck you. And this might explain why nobody wishes you a happy birthday.

Oh, cause and effect. Well, there you go. Bob's your uncle. Oh, God. OK, Brian, I got to go to the airport. Dr. Teeter's coming to cause trouble in my fair town today. So with his lovely lady, Chen.

So we're going to go try and not get arrested while bouncing around downtown Chicago. This fine, balmy, 35 degree weekend. Well, tell them that I said hello. It's always nice to hang out with friends at the show. And I think I've got to go get back on a pre-call for a pre-call for a pre-call of a conference call, followed up with a few emails.

Welcome, corporate stooge. Good talking to you, man. Talk to you later, man.

You'll see with the mighty hand, every man, every woman, every child with the mighty flash.

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

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