92: The World’s Greatest Yeast Infection

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Hello, Jason. Good morning, Brian. How are you today?

I am fine. I love the corporate world. It is so nice. Yeah, yeah. It only gets better as the days and months and years progress and your hair falls out and your soul diminishes down to a little wee nub of black.

Yeah, yeah. I'm getting that impression again. It's definitely a smack in the face reminder of why I stopped doing this a long time ago. But I like the group of people I'm working with. I like the project. I like a lot of things about it. And I'll talk more about that shortly. There's a big announcement coming soon, which is why everybody's going haywire and why I am starting to lose my fucking mind.

Yeah, you guys have been saying that there's an announcement coming for quite some time now. Does it keep getting pushed? No, no, no. It's always been set for next week. And it is next week. So as of the next podcast, I'll finally be able to announce what it is I'm doing. Don't get your hopes up. It's not all that exciting, people.

Well, yes, it is corporate. So what are you going to do? Yeah. So I finally made it home from California. Yay. How was your trip? The actual trip was awesome. I had a great time out there. I got a lot of work done, saw a lot of people, met a lot of new people, came home, got off.

Well, let's just put this in perspective. Tuesday morning, I'm driving to LAX. I take a nice drive over Topanga Canyon, which is a lovely drive if there's no idiots in front of you. And there weren't. Perfect drive. No slowness, no nothing. Right.

Drive up PCH. Beautiful sunrise. Surfers out in the water. It's just gorgeous. It's like 70 degrees. You know, I got the windows down. I'm cooking. Fly home. Land. Dark. Have to walk like three miles. Take two trains and a bus to get to my car. Get to my car. Covered in half an inch of ice that I then have to manually pick off. And I got a flat tire.

Well, again, there's a reason why we live here, which floats gently into the first link that you put in our show notes. Yes, the SFGate has an article saying that survey finds that Californians are the biggest boasters on social media.

I have two thoughts on this. The first one ties directly into your experience going home. There's nothing I like better than posting the weather when, because I have so many friends that are on the East Coast that have horrible, horrible winters. And it's fucking hilarious. So if that counts as boasting, even I do it as a Californian. I'm always happy to say, hey, it's Christmas. It's 85 degrees. I'm in shorts. How are you?

Well, it reminds me of that graphic that was going around last year when we had the Arctic, whatever the hell it was called, and everybody was freezing. And there was just a little picture of California on the side that just said, lol. Exactly. So I think that is a big part of the social media boasting that may happen. My other thought is what I've always said about, well, Los Angeles specifically, not so much all of California, but I certainly think that San Francisco has been picking up the slack on this.

Los Angeles is the dumping pool of the biggest asshole in every small town in America. They all fucking come here because they think they're the fucking biggest stars in the world, and they're here to let the world know that, hey, it's me. I'm here. Give me millions of dollars, and where's my mansion? And that's how they act online. So there you go. We get a bunch of, I mean, they're all here for about five to eight years until the plan doesn't work out, and then they go home.

Yeah, you basically are the world's largest narcissist magnet. Yeah, yeah. It's not those of us that were born here and live here by choice. It's all you fuckers that come here. And it also reminds me, like, I think the second vortex, like if there are ley lines for narcissism that intersect across the country, the bean in Chicago is definitely the second one.

Yeah, well, Ohio is nowhere near on this list, really. I'm not surprised by Washington, because Seattle and Portland have been making great inroads in being narcissistic shitholes. So there you go. And Nevada, well, you got Vegas. Yeah, but Vegas is transitory. The only people that live in Vegas are, like, you know, waiters and strippers.

But I'd argue that's pretty much Los Angeles, too, except they call themselves actors. Good point. Good point. I did get to wander around Hollywood at night for a couple evenings, and it's just – it's actually worse than it used to be. I just couldn't believe it. I was just like, oh, my God. Why? Why? Why do people live here? And then I get to my car. I'm scraping off the ice. I'm slipping, trying not to fall on my ass. I'm like, where the fuck do we live in Chicago? There's no reason for it.

We're not snow miners. Let's just leave. You get no argument from me. I love Chicago, but I'll only go there in basically the spring and the fall, because the summers and winters are miserable. Yeah, yeah. I seriously just almost threw a match to my car, got back on a plane, and said, fuck it, and disappeared.

Oh, well, I think there were some bets running around about how long it would take until you move back here, so we're going to start a pool online. I'm sure there are a lot of bets going around on that one. Yep. So I found another story, because we've talked a lot – and this ties into the social media thing – we've talked a lot about how basically the online 24-7 lifestyle really stresses people out, and it's not good for human beings.

Pew put out a little study that says social media actually isn't stressing us out. Now, here's a couple caveats. It's only a survey of 1,801 adults. Weird that they wouldn't just toss out the one and just do 1,800 even, but hey, I guess that's all they could get.

And it's focused only on social media, which I don't think counts, because the thing that you and I have talked about about being super stressful isn't so much Facebook updates from friends and things like that. It's the 24-7, your boss is texting you, you're getting emails at midnight, and you're stupid enough to look at your phone and all that sort of thing.

It's more the 24-7, always online thing, not social media. Social media is a part of it, which they say it isn't, but I disagree. But anyways. Yeah, I think this is a flawed study. But, I mean, if you are just trying to say, is our participation – let me try that again with words.

Once again, with words. Is our participation in social media the stressor or is it the – if you're trying to break down the component parts of our completely online 24-7 lifestyle, trying to break down the parts which are the problem is an interesting task.

But I agree with you. The problem is the whole problem. It's like you're stuck in a forest. You can't find your way out. It's not one single tree that's your problem. It's all the fucking trees. It's not just those damn pines. It's the rest of the trees that are screwing you up too. So, yeah, this is a study that basically just says social media really isn't stressing us out that much.

But I argue that being the 24-7 technology thing is. They did make one interesting point in here that I didn't even think about, which makes a lot of sense, especially given, you know, the psychology background thing that I did in college for some dumb reason. They talk about how actually social media for women de-stresses them.

And that makes a lot of sense to me because it is a very female thing to, you know, anything that happens. You need to talk about it with your friends. And this makes it so much easier for women to do that while men are the silent stoic types that just kind of put up with it and still just, you know, post their bell fees. But women actually engage when something bad happens to them.

They send around, you know, they're tweeting at each other. They're doing whatever. And it helps them out. And I never actually even thought about that. But that makes a lot of sense. That's why you're a dude. You don't think about it. Exactly. That makes sense. I don't think. That's how we're trained.

But yeah, it makes sense. Let the ladies do their natter-in and we'll just sit around and take pictures of our butts and take our belfies and our dickies and watch TV. Awesome. That's what we should do. And I found one other thing because I have a feeling we're going to be talking about this a lot.

This article actually has no meat to it whatsoever. It's called the 2015 Preview, Making Fashion Out of Wearables. But then there's no preview of any actual wearables. There's just talk about a couple things that are coming this year. But I do think that this year is going to be the year of the wearables. And from what I've seen of everything, they're all basically going to suck.

I think it's going to be more than a few years before wearables are either useful and or stylish. And probably they will never be both. Yeah. Yeah. This was one of the worst articles I've ever read on wearables. So I appreciated having to read that this morning. So thanks for putting it in, buddy. Anytime, man.

That's what I'm here for. Yeah. It was – there were no teeth to it. It had no information. It was a – well, it's on style.com. So I guess that's probably their trend over there. But yeah, there's going to be a lot more chatter about wearables. They're all the same.

Nobody's really doing any kind of evolutionary jump in this kind of stuff because there's only so much the technology can do. And the technology is pretty much commoditized at this point. So everybody's jamming as much crap as they can. And they're like the new Fitbit watch. It's like $250, but it has GPS, heart rate, multiple tracking vectors, all sorts of crap in it.

But it's the same thing. Yeah. They all have the same stuff. We're already wearing something on us 24-7. It's our fucking phones. There's only so much stuff you can jam into a watch. And even if you do jam it into a watch, it's not terribly useful because there's no real estate. I mean unless we get to the point where wearing those big wrist strap things that football players wear, that becomes fashionable.

Maybe something that size, like a big arm guard, we could do something with that. Well, yeah, I mean we just need cool straps for iPad minis or iPhone 6 pluses that go on your arm like a gauntlet. Yeah, I think Ricky Gervais actually did that as a joke a while back where he just strapped an iPad to his wrist and said, I got my iPhone or my iWatch.

Yeah, it's one of those things where I'm fine with that. I think the more the merry, then it's out of your way when you don't need it. Yeah, again, which ties into what we were talking about earlier. We have enough technology beating at us 24-7 already. Do I need it on my watch all the time? There's a sweet spot in here between these people that are doing the wearables like this new Fitbit where they are trying to put in everything that's already in your phone into the watch device.

Like where's that crossover? Where's that sweet spot where we can just say, you know, yeah, we've all got phones. They've all got GPS. We don't need it in the watch. But if you do want to go for a run and just have your watch on and leave your phone at home, I can see that. But then what are you going to listen to on your run?

You know, it's a complicated thing. It is. It's making me tired. But I do have a little bit of Fitbit follow-up myself. Okay. So I ran into a Catch-22 with this Christmas season. I've been talking to a lot of people about the Fitbit, and it was apparently the Christmas present of the year.

And, oh, about half a dozen – I mean, sorry, about a dozen people I know got Fitbit. And some of them don't listen to the show and were kind of freaked out by the fact that I wasn't wearing mine anymore. And they're like, oh, we got this so we could, you know, have challenges and, like, you know, push each other and all that crap.

And I'm like, okay. So I put mine back on two days ago just because I'm an idiot and I was pushing a thing that I had eventually given up. But you know what? Now that I've got it back on, it's fun to watch the wonder in other people. They're like, it knows how many flights of stairs I did, you know?

It's like they're like kids in a candy store. So I've got about four months to wear my Fitbit again until they all give up on it and throw it away or lose it in the wash. So we'll see how long it lasts. I'm doing this purely out of guilt for making them buy them, even though they're having fun with them.

I was about to say – hold on a second because the tease was – and you basically almost gave me clickbait. And you won't believe why I'm wearing it again in the damn show notes. And I came up with an entire theory, which is obviously not true. You're basically only doing this because of peer pressure.

And these people didn't even buy their Fitbits through the Grumpy Old Geek's Amazon.com link, damn it. I know. I know. No, it's not peer pressure. It's guilt. It's guilt. All right. Yes, that was a very link-baity lie. It was. And, you know, I got – you had to delay the podcast by a little bit because we have clients and things.

And so I luckily had enough time to do my workout. So as I was working out, I came up with all these theories about what it may be. And it's so boring in reality. It really is. There's nothing exciting about it whatsoever. Okay. But I am getting about 7,500 steps in not leaving the house.

That's impressive. Yeah. Well, I mean, so am I. I'm already at 7,500 today. But that's just because I did my stupid insanity workout in my house, which means I just leapt around like an idiot monkey. Jump, monkey, jump. That's – I did that for 45 minutes before this podcast.

I smelled delicious. Silly, silly, stinky man. Comment of the week. We have a repeat commenter this week. Mr. Billy – Mr. Billy Hayes. He was – he writes, hello, geeks. I was mildly shocked to hear my comment on the podcast.

Still pretty incredible you read it. I was assuming Jason checked this comment section. Well, we kind of both do. So, how's wrong was I? Or how's wrong I was? Oh, show – Jesus. Shows how wrong I was. Jason is also having problems with words today.

No, yeah. Jason is having problems with his glasses. I'll be cleaning them in between this next segment. I did not mean to offend you, Brian. I bought Cards Against Humanity due to your recommendations. Oh, well, I wasn't really offended, but thank you. And I'm glad – thank you for using the link. We appreciate that. Halfway through Demon, great recommendation.

That's two good ones. Awesome. So, I keep hearing you say friend of the show. To be a friend of the show, do you actually have to know the person? Or is it people who throw you some cash? Is it people who hang out with you on your mini trips? Or is it – I am having problems with words.

Yes, you are. Or is it people you have on as guests? To cover this real quick, friends of the show basically cover all of those, people we know in real life, people we meet at the bar who listen to the show, people who buy us drinks, people who give us money, people who engage us on social media, and all of the like.

If you listen to the show and you like us and you talk to us, you're a friend of the show. Yeah, pretty much. P.S. I actually like the show better without the girl's voice as intro to each segment. Next time maybe get someone who does not sound so enthusiastic. You are, grumpy old geeks.

She sounds like she is having a Laura Croft orgasm. I am more of a grumpy old nerd, but appreciate you both. Well, lucky you. We had Bob up last week and he – friend of the show, Bob, of course – and he recorded new bumpers, so we're going back to a male.

But I would have to say – I would call Bob's bumpers enthusiastic. Yes, yes. Some of them are mildly enthusiastic. Some of them are over-the-top enthusiastic. And some of them are just plain silly. Weird. So, yeah. So we are done with the Laura Croft orgasmic chick lady, Helen from London.

She is now out. She is out. But she is a friend of the show. Thank you, Helen from London. She's not a friend of the show. I paid her ass. Whatever. She was on it. I'm stretching the limit of friend of the show. Yeah. We are pretty easy. Yeah.

We're really easy, actually. Speaking of that, want to be a friend of the show? Go to iTunes, give us a five-star rating, and leave a review like some of these awesome people did. We got a couple to talk about really quickly. We got a five-star rating from B-Tile. Great show. The show is much better than The Kardashians.

That is a fucking low bar. Thanks, Matt. No doubt. I just wish there was more foul language. There. I just gave you some. That's where we roll, bitches. My favorite podcast, another five-star rating from a friend of the show. This is a real friend of the show, Tara Tiger-Brown. Thank you, Tara. We love the fact that you keep pushing us.

I love these guys, and not just because they have crushes on me. Well, you're cute. But because they are say what they – now I'm having problems with words. Yep, yep. Nope, nope, no. It's actually in there wrong. I will read it directly. But because they are say what they mean and don't add a bunch of syrup to it. Keep up the great work in 2015.

We shall. We shall. We shall definitely try. And another five-star rating from Adam Kagan. I LOL'd. Each week, these guys cheer me up and teach me the unbelievably weird nuances of tech nerdy stuff. Great show, and I can't recommend it enough. Well, thank you all. Thank you all very much.

You are all friends of the show. We bequeath thee. Friend of the show. Nerd. In the news. In tying in with the fact that we shouldn't have shit on us 24-7 and always be on the internet, Google Glass is dead.

Dead, dead, dead. Finally, officially dead. Yes, sort of. Not entirely. Google is ending sales of its Google Glass eyewear, but the firm says the kit is not dead, and obviously people are going to keep up with this. Expect this on Kickstarter soon. I don't think Google's moving to Kickstarter, but they are moving them out of their, like, you know, super secret Google Lab and into their own division to be run by the guy who runs Nest.

So. Yeah. We'll see how that comes out. We'll see what plays with that. But it's good to hear that this is a fail, because, ugh, how annoying. When something comes down to having pictures of Robert Scoble naked in a shower, you know the technology is doomed to fail. This is like the Dukakis in a tank moment.

When he put those glasses on and got in the shower, that's for you old people who remember who Dukakis is. That's a hell of a callback. You better be old. And speaking of fails, January 12, 2015 must go down in history as the slowest news day ever, because as I was browsing through my normal site, Slate and Salon, not only was this article even written in the first place,

it got homepage, gigantic graphic, massive eyeball coverage placement, and I can't believe this. All you have to do right now is read the title of the article, and then eyes will roll across the nation. Go ahead. Okay. Stop putting your email address in your email signature.

It's baffling and redundant, so why do we do it? Why does this article exist? Why is this news? Why is this on the front page of Slate? Why is it like 5,000 words? I don't know. There's no... Oh, they get paid by the word, right? I think they get paid by the share.

Okay, let's see how many... 346 comments on this. I hope most of them are, are you people, idiots, and why does this article exist? Top comment. It's actually very useful. Sometimes when a message is forwarded by a third party, the email address of the original sender will not come across, only their name will be in the email header.

Actually, that's a damn good point. It's a good point, but I tell you what, stop forwarding my emails to other people and giving them my address is what I'm saying. So, you know what, no, and the comment is signed, bullshit is their name. So, yes, yes, bullshit. Your point is invalid and, in fact, bullshit.

Right. Awesome. So, yeah, slow news day. Yep, definitely. In more happy news, Obama is getting on the internet train. He's trying to, I think, kick Al Gore off because, you know, Al Gore invented the internet and Obama's just trying to fix it.

He's calling to end 19 state laws that harm community broadband. Yay, good. Yeah, and there's some other things that he's been doing in the news about these corporate leaks, which we'll get into in another show. I'm still getting caught up on that stuff. But this is a good start because a lot of states have basically monopolistic laws in place that don't foster competition.

I mean, that's the state of cable or broadband anywhere anyways. I mean, that's it. Where I'm living right now, basically, I can get Time Warner. That's it. Yeah, but, I mean, this is like if your municipality or little city wants to have their own municipal broadband set up, a lot of states, they won't let them do it.

So the FCC has been going after these guys and trying to get these laws repealed, and Obama's jumping on the bandwagon saying, no, this is get them gone. Get them out. Yeah, I agree. It's good. It's good stuff. We like it. Good job, Obama. Yay. Yeah, so when these laws are repealed, we have more competition, and then we still have to pay for everything because there will be no more unlimited broadband because Brian is probably going to be right.

Probably, definitely. You, sir, are correct. Moving on. History will see me out on this. Okay, let's talk a bit about the Silk Road trial. Now, you probably know a lot more than I do about this. I've just dipped in a little bit. I want to point out one article, which I thought was a pretty good overview of it.

And then I want to – let me first point out a disturbing trend. Why are there like four separate titles for every article now? SEO bait. Okay. Is that why it is? Okay. Because title one, which is not the good one, the Silk Road trial proves the best place to buy drugs is still the street.

Subtitle, lessons from the Silk Road trial. The fun title, don't buy drugs from techno-libertarian dilettantes. You know, because every writer has to get their little stake in it now. That's what it is. It's like, okay, I'm going to write one title. You write another. We'll write another. And then we'll split the profits because we all have to share it.

And it's like, oh, hey, I got a title on this article. Well, whoever did number three should get all the lion's share of the money from this one. But this is a good, decent overview of everything that's going on with the whole Silk Road trial right now. And it kind of brought me up to date. So if you know nothing about it, read it.

And there are more articles coming out because Vice.com just actually has some breaking news that the defense in the Silk Road trial says Mt. Gox CEO was actually the real Dread Pirate Roberts, which would be an interesting turn because Mt. Gox is still under the microscope right now for all of their missing Bitcoin.

And, you know, the Japanese papers are coming out saying, no, it was an inside job. Those guys took it. So if it was the real Dread Pirate Roberts who absconded with the booty, then it would be interesting that he was also running the Silk Road. Yep. Yeah, it would be. And this would not surprise me at all. I mean, you know, there you go.

I'm out, bitches. And I'm taking the money with me. So this is an ongoing story. Next week we'll have more because the trial is ongoing. But it is entertaining, and I recommend following it. Wired's got some coverage. Vice has coverage. Slate has coverage. Everybody's got coverage of this thing. Just cruise around.

Probably Ars Technica will probably have some. Of the better coverage, but I haven't delved into anything there yet because I've got 3,000 unread articles from my trip to California. Yeah. Getting behind. And I'm always a big fan of what Vice does. Vice does really good journalism. I have not read that article yet because you literally put it in when we started the show.

So I'm looking forward to reading that. And in other news, Facebook restricts violent video clips and photos by putting up their little, you know, hey, this might be offensive graphic and stuff. So they're taking feedback from, you know, people reporting videos and now putting warnings on them.

I don't mind this at all. I was annoyed when they started the autoplay to begin with. I don't think videos should ever autoplay. So as long as they're still allowing these videos to be posted and they put up a little restriction and it's not autoplaying so my eyeballs aren't forced to see it, I'm cool with that.

Now, having said that, I would also like that. I would like a cat warning. I would like a baby video warning and I would like a few other different warnings. Now, is it sad that to get in the mood for the show this morning, I literally watched a four and a half minute cat supercut video of all the cutest cat videos this year?

And this is how we're different. My biggest problem with this damn auto starting video is, okay, it starts to play. You get a few seconds into it and then you hit the volume button because, hey, this looks like something you want to see. And then it just keeps playing the video from where it was. It doesn't go back to the beginning. So then you've got to find the scrubber, go back to the beginning.

From a UX perspective, it is just a shit show. So they should just stop the autoplay. I agree. Autoplay needs to go away, 100%. Look, if you're building a responsive design site with HTML5 and putting video in there, that'll work fine on a desktop.

It'll autoplay. But if you go to, if somebody brings it up on an iPad or an iPhone, you can't autoplay videos. They restrict it at the software level. So knock it off. Speaking of bad things, I love this whole concept.

There's a link in our show notes, again, over at Slate. Using AI to study poker is really about solving some of the world's biggest problems. Agreed. It's an interesting study, and the reason that, or it's an interesting article, and the reason this came out, because last Thursday, artificial intelligence researchers at the University of Alberta published evidence in Science Magazine that they had developed an algorithm that basically meant that a robot could beat a human at a specific type of poker called Heads Up Limit Texas Hold'em.

Flawlessly, but I would argue that is not artificial intelligence because poker is basically math. And it's just, it's Rain Man. Well, especially the kind that they chose, because it's only two people, heads up.

It's very limited in scope for the outcome of the game. And they said, hey, if we went to the other ones, it would be much harder. I'm like, well, if you're trying to solve hard problems, maybe go try and solve the hard problem. But I understand trying to fix the easy one first. You know, it's an evolution, but. But again, I, this is, this is not artificial intelligence.

It's just a mathematical algorithm. But I guess if you went all metaphysical, somebody would say, ah, but the brain is, but neurons spinning around. And that is just math and consciousness. And, and the soul is, but a mathematical algorithm. And they're probably fucking right. So, okay. Except I don't think neurons spin, but.

Well, they do. Anyways, moving on. Yeah, let's, let's move on. Let's talk about porn. Let's talk about porn. So the Oculus Rift gets more virtual reality porn with Red Light Center. Now, this is a company called, uh, Utherverse Digital.

And they've got a 3D virtual world that looks terrible called RedLightCenter.com, which is, you know, it really does look like you're out of the, uh, Spaceship Warlock days with the, uh, CD-ROM games. It looks terrible, but it's been around since 2003. But soon you will be able to use your Oculus Rift to Oculus wank.

My, um, I'd like to propose another Facebook video, uh, censoring thing. Uh, everybody that's sitting on a chair using an Oculus Rift going, ooh, ah, spinning around. I don't want to see any more of those videos. My interest in Oculus Rift is, is basically next to zero. Um, I like real reality.

I, I don't care to have virtual reality. I don't think it's anywhere near to the point where it's actually interesting yet. Eh, it is what it is. I mean, I'm glad that people are out there working on it. I just don't like all the buzz that Oculus Rift is getting for something that I think is kind of substandard. Well, yeah, we haven't seen it yet.

We haven't demoed it yet. The people I know that have seen it think it's pretty cool. And I, you know, you got to start small, but yeah, let's, let's, let's not use, let's, let's, we know what video games can do. So let's kind of move this forward instead of retrofitting a 10 year old porn site. Yes. You know?

Yes, that's true. It's like, okay, what are they going to do? Bring back, uh, what was the one, uh, not special life. I'm thinking, uh, second life. Second life. Yes. I remember that. What a, that was such an ugly piece of shit. But it was all the rage. It was. People went apeshit about it.

It was terrible. It was terrible. So speaking of things that are terrible and making a comeback, MySpace still reaches 50 million people each month. It turns out. How? Uh, here's the interesting thing. 17 to 21 year olds are digging into MySpace again.

Oh, why? Uh, what content do they possibly have? Why do people go there? I mean, really, they're just kind of a video site these days, right? I mean, they're sort of kind of like a paid YouTube. I don't know. I'm old. I'm not allowed to go there. I go there and it's like, you know, he said, get off my lawn, old man.

It's just, it shuts down my browser and I'm not allowed to go there. So I don't know. I just, I saw it in the wall street journal and thought it was a, uh, an interesting headline. The fact that people are actually still going to MySpace. That is, that is, is, is friend or friendster even still up? I, I don't know.

No, they turned it into a gaming site. Some crappy company bought them and turned them into like a flash game site. Ah, I see. Okay. Well, the only thing that I really laugh about with this news that MySpace is getting that much traffic still is, uh, God, those yellow guys must be pissed. Yeah, no doubt.

Yeah. I mean, see, I would normally go and check out MySpace to see what's going on there. But, you know, my, I have limits to the research that I will do for this show and going and trolling MySpace to see what's so interesting is, is pretty much at the limit there. I agree.

Yeah. I don't even care. If you're interested, go check it out. Maybe there's something that interests you. If you are one of these 17 to 21 year olds that are bringing back the, uh, the space of my, but, uh, I'll pass. Yeah, me too. And something else. I mean, you, you, you started us off with the email signatures.

Uh, article, this is from the Washington post and it says map literally every goat in the United States. Okay. Somebody needs to tell what the Washington post that literally means nothing anymore. So can you please stop putting it in your fucking headlines and maybe we can, uh, get a little stuff going on here.

And, you know, honestly, why are they talking about a goat map? Do we really need the Washington post telling us about a goat map? The funny thing about this is, is this has actually gone somewhat viral, at least in my circle of friends, this has been posted a lot. And, uh, to be fair to the wall street journal, it is part of their wonk blog, which has a lot of bizarre stories in it.

Um, I thought it was funny the first time I didn't click on it, but the first time I saw it in a friend's feed, I chuckled. So, I mean, and this was written by a guy who used to work at Pew and, and he, he signs off the article with in short goats are pretty much everywhere. Then why do we need a fucking map? Why do we need an article telling us a map if they're quote unquote pretty much everywhere?

Let's talk, let's talk about use of language here, buddy. Well, it's good to know that they're mostly concentrated in Texas. I'm just, I'm not going to touch that one. Okay. Security?

Ha! There's this thing that Google made called a project zero, which is a dramatically named initiative that looks to mitigate the risk of internet users getting hit by targeted cyber attacks, as they say. So that's not the Nine Inch Nails album?

No. Oh, that was year zero. Okay. No. Uh, so Google has this thing now where people find zero day exploits, you have, or, and they will publish them to the companies who are affected, like say Microsoft, and give them then 90 days to put out a patch.

If you don't put out the patch, Google releases the exploit into the wild. Well, that doesn't sound nice. No, it's not. Not very nice at all. And yeah, they, they pulled one out at Microsoft already this year. Um, and it's, it's interesting.

It's going to be something that next week we'll have a lot more on, but there's a bunch of stories going around where Microsoft and Google are in this big fight right now because of it. But Google also got caught up in it because some of their Android zero days are out there that they haven't fixed. And it's an interesting little cat fight that nobody's paying attention to at this point, but I think is probably going to get a lot more news if Google keeps putting these things out.

And hopefully the, you know, the thought behind it will get people off their ass to start patching their software faster. Exactly. I agree. Because Google really wasn't fucking around when they said, when they basically gave up on the do no evil slogan, were they? No.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's an interesting turn of events. So we'll see how, how many more they put out. And, uh, if Microsoft gets on the, on the bandwagon here and really starts to patch themselves. And it's just, just knowing what these large corporations are like, 90 days is not enough time. It really isn't, especially with the complexity of the code bases.

Yeah, especially, I mean, just in general, I mean, even to fix it, if you had 90 days, but then when you go through the corporate loopholes and everything that's involved with that 90 days is not enough time. Google up that. Well, and you don't even, so I made a patch. Let's, let's Q and A it.

Oh, no, you've only got about six minutes before Google says, fuck you and releases it to the world. Damn it. Yeah. So then what do you do? Rush to push it out, even though it may not actually work or there's a different hole in it or it'll break people's devices. I mean, that's stupid. 90 days. Yeah. I mean, I don't think Google understands how complicated things like, oh, an operating system is.

Cause obviously if they did, Android wouldn't be so full of fucking holes. Boom, zig, zap, pow. Okay. So you got something for us. Yeah. This is the biggest non-story of the week in security. U.S.

Sentcom's Twitter account got hacked by a pro ISIS group or IS group. I guess we're just going with that Islamic state these days. It's a non-story. I mean, yeah, it's funny and it kind of sucks and somebody's embarrassed, but it's Twitter. It's just a goddamn stupid password and I'm sure they didn't use it for anything else.

That's it. That's all I got on this. I mean, everybody freaked out about it, and I was like, so what? I have clients writing me that fired me four years ago that are asking for their Twitter passwords because they don't know it. I know. It's a Twitter account, people. It's no big deal. It does not have access to the button.

Yeah. There were no launch codes compromised here because we already know what the launch codes are. They're 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Or 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. Yeah, we found those out last year. So this is a non-story. And another non-story that was going around, a $10 phone charger-looking thing, it's a little Arduino-based device, will sniff Microsoft's wireless-based keyboards and report home.

Oh, eh, not really a non-story. I think it's pretty interesting, and it's pretty crazy, but you should be aware of that if you're using a wireless keyboard. And it's not just the $10 phone charger that can get that. Tons of stuff can. Yeah, I can point you to a website that has more innocuous-looking things that just look like wall chargers that will sniff your entire network, you know, and phone home via cell phone or, you know, encrypted tunnel.

Yeah. Yeah, they don't cost $10 is the thing. They cost, you know, a couple hundred dollars, but they look about the same and will do a hell of a lot more damage. But this was making the round, so I just wanted to bring it up. Yeah, I actually think this came out from somebody from the L.A. Makerspace. I think this kid was one of those guys, so.

Okay. Well, maybe we can get him on. Or not. Or not. You know, whatever. And the former acting director of cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison over his activities on a child abuse image website that was hidden but not particularly well on the deep web.

This comes from Naked Security over at Sophos. And, yeah, can't really say that that's bad news. You know? I'm just kind of sad it's only 25 years. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I enjoy the fact that it's at a Naked Security site.

Well, Naked Security is my favorite one because I've got another one from them right now. When a prank goes wrong, student indicted after hacking rival college's calendar. Yeah, this one's not good. Kid got arrested for basically hacking into the rival team's Google calendar and saying, yeah, November 29, 2014, 12 p.m., get ass kicked by the other school.

By Georgia Tech. That's just funny. It is a funny prank. But unfortunately, with our laws, it is a felony punishable by a maximum of 15 years in prison and a $50,000 fine. Okay. That's a little absurd for what he did.

Well, I mean, it's a blanket law on cybersecurity, which is just shitty. Yeah, it's a funny prank. And if you go back to the old Caltech-MIT prank wars, those guys should all be in Gitmo for the shit that they did if hacking a calendar is going to throw you in jail.

That's very true. Go back to the old days when pranks, you know, were taken in the spirit they were meant to be. Exactly. I mean, this shouldn't even get prosecuted. Anyways. No, hopefully it won't. The kid's out on bail for five grand. But yeah. And one thing that happened this week that I couldn't find any screencaps of is Crayola's Facebook page was hijacked and redrawn with a bunch of boobs and NSFW stuff.

I looked for this as well, and I could find no screenshots anywhere. So as far as I'm concerned, this is a not real story. Yeah. And I want to see some proof. I do, too. Show me the boobs. Yeah. It was making the rounds. And I'm just like, ah, without proof, I can't call this one as true.

Yeah, can't call this true. I really did look for it. And it's like, you know, they say nothing disappears from the web, but Crayola managed to get rid of all this. I know. Hmm. Who's their parent company? Interesting. I don't know. Okay. Well, next week I'll have a lot more once I can get through my thousands of backlogged articles.

But this was just the quickie highlights of the week. At the library. So on my trip home, I picked up, as you wish, inconceivable tales from the making of the Making of the Princess Bride.

That's the book that I mentioned on the previous show that Cary always wrote about the making of the Princess Bride. Turns out, fantastic book. Excellent. Absolutely fantastic. I devoured it in my travel day. One day. The whole book. That's great. I'm really interested in this.

I mean, I don't know a person alive that doesn't like this movie. No, it's a fascinating movie. I love it. And the story behind it was, I had no idea how much work went into making that movie. Oh, I'm sure. There was no CGI or anything back then. No, they worked every damn day on that sword fight scene.

Every day. The training that went into it was incredible. And just the stories of Andre the Giant and everybody else and just the making of Rob Ryan, the whole thing. It is just a delightful book. It made me smile. I laughed out loud on the plane going through it several times. People were looking at me like I was silly, but it was worth it.

So now I can't wait to watch the movie again. And much better than watching porn on a plane, as we discussed last week. So, yes, I'm glad this is good. I'm definitely going to put it in the queue. As I mentioned, I've been beyond busy recently and it's gotten to the point. Usually I always read for at least an hour a night.

And as Jason knows, I'm a pretty fast reader, which gets me through basically almost one to two books a week. But I've just been crawling into bed and like reading five pages and going. But I'm about three quarters of the way through a really interesting book that I can't wait to talk about.

So hopefully next week. No tease on the title? No tease on the title yet, but it's an author that we've talked about before. Okay. Okay. Well, I can't wait to hear about it. Excellent. Software, apps, and gadgets.

I have an app, Jason. Oh, my goodness. What's it called? Well, first off, I hate the name because I think this is the dumbification of everything. It's called Trivia Crack. Oh, Trivia Crack. Now, this app was recommended by a friend of the show, Hannah, while we were at Finn McCool's doing our small little grumpy old geeks meetup.

And I think we all downloaded it immediately at that point. But you have apparently not gotten addicted to it. This is like crack for me. I'm playing it all the fucking time. I played one round with it, and it could have been the beer, but I mean, there were 10 questions.

I got seven of them right, but I knew the answers to all 10, and the push targets were not right for me. So I may have just had a little bit of beer goggle, and I was missing the targets. It just seemed like the accuracy was not correct on it.

And honestly, we've been through the trivia mill before, you and I. Yes. You know, I know what you know. You know what I know. It's always just kind of really close, and I would rather just do something else. I agree. I enjoy it just because I play it a lot with the people that are on my weekly pub trivia team, so it's good to keep us up.

Trivia Crack is basically unlike a lot of the other trivia games, and oh, let me quickly mention, the one that I love the most, Trivie, they're gone. They're gone? They've completely revamped their business model. They're trying to do some sort of educational B2B kind of thing, so they stopped supporting the app, and it just stopped working, and it's just gone.

So because basically, as we've talked about a gazillion times, you can't make any money off apps. Oh, man, they are like the poster child for the shark fin because they were huge. They hired more staff. They got more funding. They were a big deal for like about seven and a half minutes, which is two and a half minutes longer than most are.

That's right, but they pivoted, so they are officially gone, which bummed me out, which is probably why I'm playing Trivia Crack so much. Trivia Crack is slightly different. This one is, you know, much more – this is basically a takeoff of Trivial Pursuit, so I'm sure they'll get sued at some point and have to change some elements.

The questions, some of them are quite difficult. Most of them are pretty easy, but I like the gameplay, and it's the first time I actually considered, hmm, should I toss a few coins at this and buy some of those shiny coin things? I almost got gamified for a second, and then I woke up and went, no.

Excuse me, but didn't somebody say that their entire New Year's resolution was around paying for things that they liked? Yes, that is true, but so far I've only been playing this for a week. We'll see if it lasts more than a week. If it does, I'll actually pay for the – I'm not going to pay for coins or the gamification, but they do have a $2.99, I believe, ad-free version.

And if I'm still playing this in a week, I'll chip in for that. Yeah, ad-free versions are worth paying for. I agree because it's so annoying. I cannot see that ad with Kate Upton any more times. I just can't. I'm still surprised about Trivue. They were such on a roll. Yeah, they were doing really well, but I mean, I've been playing it consistently for the last year, and I noticed over the last couple months, no new questions, slower performance, no nothing, and then all of a sudden it just stopped connecting.

And then I went to the site, and I found out that they had pivoted to some educational thing. Are they the Uber for Trivia now? Apparently.

Media Candy. So one of the upsides of being in California when I was there is that it's screener season. Okay. I know a lot of people who have access to lots of the movies, so I saw a bunch while I was out there. People actually brought over DVDs.

Wow. Believe it or not, they didn't have to go to Sweden to pick them up. Some of these are Academy nominees. Some of them are just like the stuff that's coming out now and stuff that I saw. So I'm going to go through four movies real quick and just do quick reviews on them. You ready? Excellent. I'm ready.

John Wick. Never heard of it. Keanu Reeves movie. He's an assassin. Somebody kills his dog. He gets mad. That's the premise. It's awesome. It is the best movie that Keanu Reeves has made since The Matrix. I loved it.

I was going to put in 10 minutes on it, and then I ended up watching the whole thing straight through and went to bed at two in the morning. Awesome movie. Now he just needs to get back to making Bill and Ted 3. Hold on a second. I'm just going to say I would love the idea of a Bill and Ted 3, but having sat through five minutes of Dumb and Dumber or two, no.

I don't know if we want this. I'm willing to hedge my bets on it because I hated Dumb and Dumber. Oh, I love Dumb and Dumber. Well, that's your own damn fault. Okay, moving on. The Hobbit, the Battle of the Five Armies. Yes. I am so fucking sick of orc porn.

I just can't tell you I fell asleep in almost every major battle scene. This did not keep my attention, and I'm done. I'm glad this is the last movie because I'm not even going to finish it because I just don't care. I'm super happy it's over. The Hobbit never should have been three movies.

Screw you, Hollywood system, for making that happen. It should have been one movie. It would have been fine, and it would have been good. Stretching this out over three bored the fuck out of me, and I love the Lord of the Rings series. I think that is probably the best nine hours one can possibly spend, and watching this just made me want to go home and put on the Lord of the Rings.

Yep, that's about it. It's worthless. So, American Sniper. Yeah. The book was better, and the book wasn't that good. That's the best review ever. I love that. Got it. I fell asleep halfway through this one, too. I see the trailers and have no interest.

No. I mean, yes. He shoots people. He goes home. His wife hates him. Then he goes back and he shoots more people. He comes home. His wife hates him. Then he goes and shoots some more people. And then his wife's not there when he gets home. There's the movie. You're done. Spoiler alert. Okay. You're supposed to do the spoiler alert first.

Please stand by. Your hosts are morons. Okay. Well, I wasn't going to see that anyways. Now I'm definitely not going to. Well, as far as the last part goes, I don't know if his wife's there or not because I seem to remember that from the book, but I never got through the rest of the movie. So, this is me just making shit up.

Cool. And speaking of making shit up, let's talk about The Imitation Game with Benedict. I really want to see this. With Benedict Cumberbatch. Yes. Highly historically inaccurate. Yep. Shocking. It's a Hollywood movie. Best movie of the year so far. Excellent. Good.

I'm glad it's good. I know Alan Turing's story. I, you know, suspension of disbelief for the movie, which I know a lot of people who know me in movies and say that's fucking impossible to do, but I loved it. I was sucked into it. I loved every bit of it. I loved the characters.

It grabbed me. It's beautifully shot and the soundtrack is amazing. The soundtrack is on Spotify. I've listened to it like four or five times this week. It's great background music. So, my picks for all of them, The Imitation Game, hands down. Excellent. Yeah, that is first on my list of things to go see.

I'm actually going to do, I'm actually waiting for Friends from Sweden or a release of some sort and I was going to do a double header with some friends of The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. I think it's a good combo to watch together. Yeah, I'm still waiting for The Theory of Everything. I haven't seen that yet.

John Wick you can get on iTunes right now. I highly recommend it because, like I said, Keanu Reeves, assassin, dog dead, mad guy. Go. It's awesome. That's all you need to know. Whoa. This week's Moron of the Week is Scott Dadich.

He is the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. I ran across this article just on Twitter. It was called, No Action Figures, Please, from Boing Boing. And it is a dramatic reading of a memo that was sent to the staff of Wired in their new offices.

Right. The memo is basically like, hey, we're professionals, quit being stupid kids. But the dramatic reading of it on Boing Boing in, like, you know, kind of British documentaries slash Zay Frank style was just, was well worth the watch.

And the fact that they don't even use real artwork, it's all Shutterstock, like, video clips with the Shutterstock logo. I'm like, pay for your, pay for your art, guys. But I understand that it was funny. But yes, Scott Dadich is definitely the Moron of the Week. I agree. This is a very, very funny video. And this is Wired, for God's sake.

If you don't get to have action figures and fun personalizations, what's the point? I know. That's why I'm not saying anything really about, like, the content of the memo, because it's kind of fun to get it revealed as you go. So just, honestly, we're not going to say much, but, I mean, the no action figures, please, kind of sums up a little bit.

But the rest of it is pretty funny. It's funny. Worth the three minutes that it takes. Links are in the show notes. The web's not dead! Oh, no, it's not dead! Now, in the olden days of the web, we used to have fun little one-off sites that we would just make in our spare time, one that was always, always my favorite was Zombocom.

Do you remember Zombocom? Vaguely. Zombocom was, it came out right around when Flash started, and it's just a bunch of, you know, flying ball graphics and some guy over the back saying things like, this is Zombocom.

And just running through a few lines, and I don't know why, the other day I went to go check it out to see if it still lived, and Zombocom still lives. And I had it on loop, I just let it play for like 20 minutes. I don't know, it's just mesmerizing to have Zombocom played in the background, because it just reminds me of a better day on the internet.

Yes, it was better days. It's still there, it's still in Flash. Wow, this guy is paying, what, 14 bucks a year, maybe, with the domain name and cheap hosting, just to keep it going. Hey man, good on him. I miss me some Zombocom.

Me too, I miss those days, and that's a fun reminder. I found a comic by The Oatmeal, the oatmeal.com, which is really good. If you've never been to the site before, I love this guy, he does good stuff. I've noticed the selfie sticks popping up everywhere recently, and this is Should You Buy a Selfie Stick, is the title, and as we all know, if the article lead is a question, the answer is no.

And the graphic and the comic is quite funny, including the fact that the person that is getting the selfie stick is also wearing Crocs. Now, I had a selfie stick. Of course you fucking did. Before they became a thing. Yes, you're going to say, I'm a photographer, and I have the blah, blah, it makes it okay.

No, selfie sticks are for morons. They are now, but that's why I got rid of mine. Okay. More about selfie sticks in a moment. Are you kidding me? Love it! One particular friend of the show, Fergal, is a beer connoisseur.

He knows more about beer than anybody in the world. He even brews his own, and unlike most of you that brew your own beer, his is actually good. And I found this article online and had to send it to him because now he can truly make his own real beer. There's a auto brewery syndrome. Apparently, you can make beer in your gut.

And the article goes through the story of a man, Texas. Is this surprising? Who basically, he was 61 years old, and he has a history of home brewing, who was basically drunk all the time. And he said he wasn't drinking, and everybody was like, well, of course he's drinking.

And then they finally went, huh, maybe this guy isn't, because he would get insanely drunk all the time. And they locked him in a room where they basically studied him and didn't let him have any access to booze. And he still got drunk. Now, this is awesome.

He had so much brewer's yeast in his body, just randomly, which came from other things. And his body decided to hold on to it for some reason, that any time he ate any starches, he would basically brew beer in his gut that then got him drunk.

That is the greatest thing I've ever heard in my life. I want this. I can guarantee there are scientists right now working on a pill. Yep. So apparently, this does happen every now and then. And people looked around and found that some reports in Japan date back to the 1970s of this occurring in people.

The infections usually occur after a person took antibiotics, which can wipe out the bacteria in the gut, thus making room for brewer's yeast to flourish and replacing your natural flora and fauna. And, you know, then you just eat a pizza and you're drunk. This is like the world's best yeast infection.

Pretty much. Not like there are any other kind of good yeast infections, but this guy found one. Yeah, I think it's the only good one. Yeah. So there you go. You can literally brew your own beer. That is pretty awesome. Closing shout outs.

Speaking of selfie sticks, I was on the internet outrage machine again. Episode number six, fish prison. Okay. We had a shtick on selfie sticks. This will probably be the last time I'm invited back to the internet outrage machine, but...

God, what'd you do? I was just off my game. I was off my game. I had a lot going on, and I really thought Jordan was pissed at me, because I made a comment in the previous Grumpy Old Geeks, or no, on my Twitter feed or somewhere, just saying that Kyle did all the hard lifting, and he was the amazing editor that got the previous internet outrage machine done that I was on.

But apparently, Jordan did most of the heavy lifting on it, and I thought he was just pissed and dinging me the whole time, so I just started to get mad. And also, I hadn't slept more than four hours in three days, so I was just a little off my game.

You just sold this one to me. I'm definitely going to listen. Hey, at least the title's mine. I came up with Fish Prison. Okay. I made mention of, you know, your office smelling like a hooker after running a marathon. Um, yeah. Wow. It was, it was, it was, uh, I was off my game.

I was definitely off my game. But, uh, somebody who's on our game, I want to throw a shout out to, uh, old friend of mine, Veronica Belmont. She's actually got a piece in Cosmopolitan on, uh, how she became a successful podcaster, TV host, and tech expert. I remember when she started in the business way back in 2005 on CNET, and for a short time, she wrote for, uh, Metblogs.

Very short time, because she was on an upward trajectory, and we were on a downward trajectory. But good on her for, uh, keeping up with it, and, you know, just rocking it. She's awesome. I read the article. She seems really cool. A lot of good tips in there. Uh, good on her.

I'm glad she's doing well. Uh, to bring back the yeast again, though, the one problem I had with reading the article was it's on cosmopolitan.com, and they break up the article with, uh, with little ads for other articles, such as, we recommend six vaginal odors to put on your radar. I am so glad that somebody else besides me saw that, because I was going to bring that up, but I thought they were, like, randomly rotated.

Nope. Yeah. There was, there was... Because I loaded the site multiple times to check. Yeah. Yeah. Those were some unfortunate advertisements in between her spot. I was just like... Yeah. But it's Cosmo. What are you going to do? Yeah. No, it was, uh, oh, they're, oh, they changed them up.

Oh, nope. Six vaginal odors to put on your radar. Nope. They did not change. I tell you, I've loaded this a couple times to make sure, because I was going to have to mention that. Uh, but still, well done. Uh, great article. Really interesting. And if you are somebody out there trying to do this sort of stuff, read that for some good tips. Uh, also, finally, a shout out to, uh, Bob for the new voiceovers, same as the old voiceovers, except much better sounding and more fun.

Uh, so thank you very much for coming up here and doing that. It was a blast to record them and I hope everybody out there enjoys them. And, uh, thanks to all the friends of the show that came down to Finns after we recorded the other week, uh, including Bob, Wendy, Mark, Devin, and Hannah. Yep. That was awesome to see everybody. We had some good food, good, good beverages somewhat.

I mean, if you can count Stella as good, but I mean, it was decent. Got the job done. Made me not win at trivia. So there you go. Okay. All right, man. Well, good talking to you. We're back to normal now. I don't have to stare at you the whole time. You don't have to stare at me. Yes.

This works better. I think. Okay. Oh, you think? Okay. So if you do move back to LA and I win the bet, we'll just still do it over Skype. Probably. Or no, I mean, we can go back to the old way of just, it's not staring at each other. Yeah. It's hard. Kind of side to side. Yes. Yeah. Side boob.

We'll do a side boob. With a selfie stick. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And for all of my selfie stick revelations, definitely check out the Internet Outrage Machine and also the After Dark where I go in deep. I go deep on the selfie stick and the history of the selfie stick.

You get into the weeds. I do get into the weeds. As they say in the corporate world, which is what I've got to go do now because I got an email saying we got to get into the weeds on this one. See, the nice thing about being in the weeds is you can put your camera on the selfie stick, stick it above the weeds, and then see where the hell you are. Yeah, we'll see if that works. All right, man.

I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week. Music for the show is by Among Us. You can find them on iTunes or 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.

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And as always, we appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 92. Ratings. And release.

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