94: Shiny Happy Puppies Holding Hands

Oh, we should probably cut that, but I know you're not going to. 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. Unfortunately, we're not doing a video podcast because if we were, you would notice, dear listeners, that Jason and I are playing with adorable puppies.

Oh, so many puppies. They are frolicking all about us, and they are so, so cute, and we're going to get 10 gazillion downloads because of that. But we can only do it for 15 minutes because then some nasty Uber driver will come and take them away from us. Exactly. So this was the week of puppies, and I think I've discovered the secret to PR, the appropriate use and weaponization of puppies.

Weaponization of puppies. I love it. Uber, I love the headline, so I'm just going to read the headline from time.com. Uber is hoping cute puppies will convince everyone it's not evil. Great headline. Uber's latest PR coup, and I've got to say, judging from my Facebook feed, it worked, was basically in a handful of major cities, Washington, D.C., L.A., San Fran, I think a couple others.

They announced, you know, puppy bowl kind of Super Bowl tie in that they're going to bring a bunch of puppies to your office from shelters and they will frolic and and everything will be joyous and wonderful. And we will all ignore the fact that Uber has many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many problems.

And it did seem to work. I mean, people were all about this. It was all over my Facebook feed, girls going, oh, puppies and, you know, putting in the Uber link and blah, blah, blah. Now, on the other hand, because we have contrasting studies, GoDaddy really fucked up with puppies. Oh, my God.

The only thing that they could have done worse is to shot an elephant in real time on the Super Bowl. Well, this is the funny thing. It's it's I said it's everybody forgot how horribly Uber treats humans by doing a cute stunt with puppies. But everybody seems to have ignored how awful GoDaddy was for years.

Elephant thing in particular until they made a bad commercial treating puppies poorly. So now everybody hates GoDaddy, even though they should have hated them all along. I know. Finally, they've done something to bring the rest of the world around to our side of thinking. Yes. GoDaddy is an absolutely horrible company. If you just Google GoDaddy horrible, you will see why.

And they've never had what you could call a good Super Bowl commercial. They've always had risque Super Bowl commercials that weren't very funny, weren't very entertaining. They were just controversial. Yeah, or just hot chicks, you know, standard. So but yeah, this was definitely the week of puppies.

So did you watch the GoDaddy commercial? No, no. You know how it gets to that point on the Internet where the outrage factor is so high and everything is hitting you from every angle and you get the point already. So why bother watching? You should have watched it. Yeah, it was really messed up.

I mean, it was messed up. Oh, I'm sure it was because the again, the outrage factor online from all my friends was very, very high. So I just didn't see the need to even watch it. And whatever. Who cares? Puppies, puppies, puppies. Are you going to watch the Puppy Bowl on Sunday?

No, I'm actually going to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday because I despise Boston. Well, OK, I don't know who's playing. I don't know who's in your sports ball thing, but, you know, you can watch Puppy Bowl because it starts before the Super Bowl. I have no interest in Puppy Bowl.

I've had my my puppy thing has been wedded by this entire week. No need. I don't care too much for the Super Bowl. I'm going for I've been on a diet for three weeks and it ends on Sunday. So beer and food. That's funny. Mine starts Saturday night at midnight. So tag, I'm it.

Excellent. So I found a video. I want to do a little follow up on the HoloLens because we bagged on it last week. And I found some video that was on the Microsoft site. And did you get a chance to take a look at it? I watched the entire thing and I have thoughts. OK, I don't see in any way, shape or form how it can be anywhere near what they're, you know, touting in this video, because it looks like, you know, just crazy sci fi bullshit that they're making up.

That is thought number one. This is very conceptual. It is no way going to be that. If it is going to be that, it'll be in 20 years. And I wouldn't mind it if that's what it actually was going to be. I do think that humanity is going to hell in a handbasket once these things come out and that's it.

And we can call it as a species. But pretty damn cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, if you merge that with some teledildonics, people will never have to leave the house again. That's very true. No, the video is great. I think everybody should watch it. It is certainly the dream of what these things will be.

But there's no way, no way that that's going to work like that. No, it would be it would be nice if it did. But we'll we'll just keep on going. But the link to the video will be in the show notes. So I encourage everyone to go take a peek at it and figure out how much of that is actually going to be anywhere near what we're going to get.

I wonder if you can take a guess which particular part of the video particularly hooked me on this and said, man, I need this. Keep in mind that I am a relatively new homeowner. Oh, I can't remember. Tell me. There is a sequence where a man is sitting on his couch helping a woman do plumbing.

And I was like, oh, I need that because I can't even tell you the number of times like I've stood around with my iPad trying to watch a YouTube video while I'm trying to fix some plumbing issues. I was like, I need this now. I must have this. Yeah, that I can see being very useful.

Yeah, extremely. Speaking of the iPad, which I just mentioned, it was five years old now. Can you believe that? No, no. It was I remember standing in line the first day when I got mine. Yeah, I waited until until version two came out. That was my first iPad. There's an article in Slate that we're linking to.

It's called the iPad is five years old today. You still don't need one. I disagree. The iPad has become an integral part of my daily life. It's not super integral in mind. But it is very necessary for bathroom reading and playing of games and things like that and reading at night.

You know, I don't use it for work unless I'm out and about and like I have to do a tweet or something like that. That's the only time I ever use it for work. But it is a very integral part of my day to day non-work existence. I read on it. I watch things on it. I check my email on it when I don't want to be sitting around my computer or have my laptop out.

It is. I love these damn things. And I completely disagree. I think most people, if they had one, would use it all the time. Yes, of course, there's we can define what need is. But yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I really kind of screwed up when I got the first round of iPads and I never got the cellular versions.

Right. And now that I've got a cell version, well, before they were just, you know, like pretty crappy cell versions. But now with the LTE in them, the thing's amazing. I mean, yeah, it was like 900 bucks and I still got to pay 50 bucks a month for it. But man, it it's like a little magic machine.

You just I take it wherever I'm at. I can shell into my servers. I can do whatever I need to do. Generally, I end up playing, you know, Candy Crush or Angry Birds. But the ability is there. And remember, I posted a year ago, I posted a grumpy old geeks from a moving train using using the iPad.

Yes, you did. So it is a very useful device. And I'm very happy that I have one. What I don't like about them is how quickly they become outdated because they are, as you mentioned, extremely pricey. But they're they're very useful. And I'm definitely due for an upgrade.

I mean, these things should last a bit longer than they do. This isn't like a phone. This is it's an iPad. You're sitting around reading with it and stuff like that. It's not something that I want to be locked into this like two year update cycle on. Yeah, I mean, I've got my I've got the air one and I don't see the need to upgrade this for a while, though.

It's you know, it's pretty snappy. It's got a lot of power in it. And the new one, it's oh, you know, cunt hair thinner. So I can really skip that part. And there's our explicit for the week. There you go. I wanted to follow up a little bit on on Windows 10, which I know I'm probably the only person that's going to do that on because everybody that is in the tech world is rabid Mac people and don't care.

It looks really good. I don't know if you've looked at this. Did you look at the article I put in the show notes? I glanced at the article. I saw some of the grabs. But until I can see it in person and use it, you know, you can't really until you can get a feel for it, like how it moves, how it works, then I really can't like make a, you know, any kind of decision on if it's good or not.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I've got this definitely, you know, I'm like I mentioned, I'm still running Windows 7, which is getting a little bit creaky is even it is the strongest and best operating system that's probably ever been released ever. It's getting old and I definitely want to be able to check out the new browser that they're going to release with it, Spartan or whatever the hell they're going to call it.

I'm definitely going to do this upgrade and it looks like they're going the free route with this as well, right? I think so. Yes. For the first year. For the first year. So this is going to be kind of make or break for my existence with PCs and Windows. As I mentioned a few times, I still, my main system is still a Windows PC running Windows 7.

I'm going to do this upgrade and I'll see if Windows 10 works for me. And if it does, I'll be very surprised and happy and talk about it a lot. And if it doesn't, it's going to be the push that finally makes me go all Mac. Okay. Well, I still think you should go all Mac anyway, because it's just so much easier. It's so much easier.

And when you need to run Windows, you just pop open Parallels and boom, it's there. Bob's your uncle. So I found an article that just had me in tears. It was a TechCrunch article called, This Industry is Still Completely Ridiculous, where the author talks about his new law.

Actually, he's about six months old. Yeah. But it's called Yo's Law. And it states, In the 21st century tech industry, satire and reality are not merely indistinguishable, but actually interchangeable. Yes. And it is so true. I agree with that.

We're going to cover a little bit about that later when we talk about LO and their denial about not being out of existence. Yeah. No, there's tons of stuff in here. Just go check out the article. It is. I mean, I was cracking up when I read it. And I just, Yo's Law is so genius. I love it too.

It was a very good article. And then speaking about just complete and utter idiots, I couldn't believe that this happened again. This has happened a couple times already. Facebook actually went down for a little while earlier in the week, and actual idiots need to be told not to call 911 about it. People are calling 911 when Facebook goes down.

And not even people like, you know, in the blizzard or anything like that. People in California. Yes. What the fuck? And then every time that I'm at some kind of conference or I'm sitting around with a bunch of techno nerds and we're just kind of talking about this stuff and they start off going with their Facebook is dead.

Facebook is dead. I just point out it is so integral to people's lives that they now call 911 if it goes down. Facebook is not dead. It is beyond integral. And I do believe it's pronounced integral, but. Integral. Okay. Point it out.

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. There's no extra R in there. Yeah. It's just, you go from genius to moronic. In two stories. I found a site that I just, you know, I talked about my, do I have Ebola.com experiment.

And I feel just, I'm so mad that I missed out on this one. Now go. I don't want to tell everybody what it is, but you have to go to this website. It's called how do vaccinations cause autism.com. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. How do vaccines cause autism.com.

Yes. That's it. Just go. Link will be in the show notes, but feel free to type it in. But yes. Yeah. I have a number of people on both sides of this debate on my Facebook feed, which I'm not entirely sure how, because if you're anti-vaccination, you shouldn't be my friend. Penn and Teller, the video basically covers it all.

Done. It's over. I have not seen the Penn and Teller video. Oh, really? Well, we will put that in the show notes. The Penn and Teller from bullshit basically destroys the anti-vaccination argument in 30 seconds. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure I saw it back in the day. It's not a new video. No, no, no. This is all years old now, which is why it's still amazing that this is still a debate.

Oh yeah. Because we don't care about science. Science. Speaking of science, iOS updated to 8.1.3 this week and it did not turn Bluetooth back on. They seem to be on a, on and off cycle. Yeah. It's switching every single time now.

An update will come. It'll turn it on. An update will come. It won't turn it on. An update will come. It'll turn it on. An update will come. It won't turn it on. They're going with the Star Trek movie principle. Like every other one is good. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Yeah. I did notice that. That's, that's kind of a thing for me now.

Every time there's an upgrade, I immediately, that's the first thing I checked. Did it switch my Bluetooth back on? No, it didn't. Into the show notes. I know. Well, because I, I actually keep Bluetooth on all the time. And so before an update comes out, I remind myself, turn it off just so I can see if it turns it back on. So Brian will, will know if to, whether to bitch about it or not.

It's our fun little game with Apple. It is. Uh, and I had one other personal experience this, this week, uh, which I wanted to talk about quickly. Uh, there is a massive market here, Jason. If it weren't so damn boring, I'd say we should get into this. And if it didn't involve so much government and politics and would be such a pain in the ass to get the contracts, we should totally get into this.

I don't know if you've gotten a traffic ticket in years. No, I, I basically have a, I'm, I'm kind of on a once every 10 year cycle at the moment. And I, I got my, a little speeding ticket a few weeks ago. And, uh, you know, I, my first ticket when I was like 17, there was no online traffic schools.

I had to go to a place and sit there for eight hours and take tests and be bored out of my mind to be able to get this expunged from my record. Uh, since then we have online traffic schools. They probably debuted about, I don't know, 20 years ago now, something like that.

They have not been updated. Oh really? In those 20 years. If you have to go to traffic school, by all means, immediately sign up for online traffic school. If you know anything about the web, you can basically download the entire site. You can hack the, the client side timers.

So you can get around the, you have to sit on this page for so long and you can easily forward straight to the test and then just do search and, you know, find and replace to in, in your downloaded version of the site to basically finish your entire traffic school in 20 minutes with the perfect score. Nice.

Now all of this could easily be upgraded. All of this should be upgraded. Well, actually I don't want them to because in 10 years I'll have to do this again. Um, but it's absolutely ridiculous because these are all certified, you know, they have to be certified by your local governments. I'm sure they're getting quite a lot of money to do all this stuff and it would be very easy to build these so they can't be hacked, but they don't.

And thank God for that. Oh man, it's, that's great. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Good times. Now, uh, we'll see if you get a notice in the mail that, uh, since you have it now admitted to hacking online traffic school, when you need to report to the sheriff's office for your, your internment.

Well, I see myself as an Edward Snowden of the traffic school world. Head over to Russia. Our first comment of the week comes from Bob Waltman.

He says, hi, Jason. First of all, love the show. I'm sorry. Love, love the show. Woo. Woo. I wait with bated breath for each new episode. Regarding Shazam and Siri, you can already use Siri to find what song is playing. Press and hold the home button. And when Siri activates, just ask, what song is this?

No need to say anything else. First, hope this helps. Keep up the great work, Bob Waltman. Thank you, Bob. Thank you very much. I did know that, but I was more concerned about being able to just press the button and say, Shazam! Because I think that's a hell of a lot more fun. That, that, that would be.

Well, it turns out, friend of the show, MXV, was like, I think you can do that. So he tried it. And sure enough, you can open up Siri and say, Shazam! And it will actually start to do Shazam. And you will look like a total idiot in the bar. Excellent. I strive for it.

Good times. We also got a five-star rating on iTunes from Lane Stew, who said, informative and entertaining. Thanks, guys. And a second five-star rating on iTunes. We do love those. Thank you very much. From Kelsey Kargith, which is a, I think I'm pronouncing that right.

I think you're pronouncing it right. It's an odd spelling. It is. It is. Or it could be Kelsi. I don't know. It actually looks very Game of Thrones-ian. Yes, it does. Interesting tech show with good personalities. These two are a delight to listen to. While you drive down the road or even exercise, the show is broken up into segments, which span from the media to security hacks throughout the week.

Brian comes from a heavy music background adjacent from a heavy computer background. They rarely get so deep into the tech that you get lost if you have a casual grasp of computers. They do curse sometimes. Fuck yeah. And talk about drinking often. Well, you know, we are adults. So if you dislike those things, this is not for you. Overall, for a mature show, I give it five stars.

I listen to this the minute it downloads, the only show I waste bandwidth downloading, and it stays in my stream, along with Planet Money, This American Life, and Hardcore History. Could a friend of the show be your uncle? Hell yeah. And thank you for putting us in with such good podcasts. That's pretty awesome. That's some damn good company to be in with. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone. And please do give us a rating and let us know what you think. In the news. In an interesting turn of news, some Instagrammers woke up to find nine of their photographs on the homepage of the New York Times the other day.

Huh. Nobody told them that they were going to do that, and they didn't really give proper attribution. And were they upset about this? Sadly, no. See, there's the problem. They thought it was awesome. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah, when you're not a, you know, a professional content creator, I guess it's kind of nice to have your work shown to the world.

Well, unfortunately, most of the working world has discovered that, and that's why you don't get really – us content creators don't get paid well anymore, because everybody has to run contests where you do it for free and win Doritos. Yeah. We were watching the series finale of Parenthood last night, and there was a great line on there.

These girls, like, asked this guy, the kid who was taking the photographs for a wedding, he's like, will you take a selfie with us? He's like, no, selfies are ruining my industry. Very funny. I thought it was – I mean, we cracked up. It was hilarious. But, yeah, these guys, they didn't even put their actual Instagram usernames.

They put their full names for credit, but didn't tell anybody, just grabbed them and used them. You can't do that. Apparently, when people don't – Apparently, you can. Yeah, when people don't complain or sue, which they should be doing, then these people think they can keep getting away with it.

I dare them to take one of mine. Oh, have their ass in court so fast? One of your favorite things to do is to battle your attribution rights. So, yeah, somebody please take one of Jason's photos. Please. Because it's always amusing for me. Little story about us trying to crawl up from being a basically third-world internet nation.

Google is bringing its ultra-fast internet to four more big cities. So, Google Fiber will soon be available in Atlanta, Raleigh, Nashville, and Charlotte. Okay, that's not 18. Those hotbeds of tech.

Oh, boy. Well, Raleigh is definitely – Actually, Raleigh is these days. Yeah, so is Atlanta, I suppose. I mean, you know, everybody is going to be able to get their Fox News a lot better now. Yeah, as far as I know, Atlanta is pretty up there with tech, too. Nashville is the only one I don't really know, but you've got – you know, it's the center of country music down there.

Well, it's actually the center of music these days, let's be honest. That's where all the writers are. It's actually – yeah, that's a good one for them because I particularly know a bunch of people that basically do online sessions with people in Nashville from Los Angeles all the time. So that will be helpful. I want this in L.A.

Come on, let's go. And I want – actually, if anybody out there has this and is using it, I'd love to hear your experience because Jason and I know next to nothing about how good it is. Yeah, I don't know anybody that's actually got it and has had a chance to try it out. So I haven't seen any speed tests or anything like that.

You know, what's your Netflix latency? Come on. We want to know these things, people. Yeah, I totally want to know that. So cops here in Southern California, the sheriffs are complaining and campaigning to pressure Google into turning off a feature on Waze that basically alerts people where cops are.

They are claiming that this makes it easy for people who want to go kill cops to find them. Well, that is true. But it's also the fact that they're losing – So do telephones. Yeah, they're losing speeding ticket revenue. Yes, that's – of which I just paid you some. I was going to say, you obviously don't use Waze.

I do not, no. Yeah, this is a bit of an – I mean, this is – and we're going to see these kind of things a lot because, I mean, all this information so readily available in ways that it never has been before, it's going to piss off a lot of people that basically, you know, make money on people not having that information.

So I don't think the police have a leg to stand on on this one. I don't think there's much you can do about it. I don't necessarily think it's that bad, but we'll see what happens. Yeah, and they quoted the guy in New York that killed the two cops. Apparently, he had checked in on Waze right before he killed those two cops, but he had ditched his phone two miles before he even got there.

So there's no real correlation with that shooting and Waze, but they're trying to kind of wheedle it in, so they use that as part of a leg to stand on, which they don't really. Yeah, and as we all know, it's easy to find a cop except for when you need one. Yeah, no shit. Uh, I'll just do one Uber story because, you know, I just can't help myself.

Well, we've actually already done one Uber story. I'll give you two today because the first one had puppies in it. Okay, I'll get to Uber did the did a study of themselves and they find that they're great. But of course, a study of yourself is basically called a press release. It's not a study.

And of course, it's flawed and there's an article on Slate going through exactly how it's flawed and we should not be surprised by this because the previous Uber study about their drivers and income, they were unable to produce a single driver that made the income that said that they did. So shocking, here's another press release that they're calling a study.

Okay. Well, in other Uber news, the state of California is actually thinking about making the drivers not be required to have commercial license plates. Okay. They've done a U-turn.

They flipped a bitch, as they say, as the kids say. Right. So that'll be an interesting one to see how that kind of shakes out. Sort of. I honestly don't care since I'm never going to be a Lyft or Uber driver. But yeah, I mean, the plates. I mean, I'm surprised by that because that's extra income because they cost more.

As far as recognizing them, they've all got the Uber signs in their windows anyways. It's no big deal. I'm more interested in the requirements for commercial driver's licenses than plates. Again, it's a regulation thing. So we'll see what happens. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah. So in other news, Twitter rolls out private group conversations and native video tools.

I wish everybody would stop with the native video tools. Yeah, I know. Because, I mean, Vine has the market cornered already, man. Why would you need anything else but Vine? Exactly. So I have read a tweet somewhere, which is funny, that people were talking about, you know, you think DM fails were pretty bad when you just had one person to DM, when you DM into a group and can screw up.

Other ways to screw up. Yeah, I find the whole Twitter DM system just to be unintuitive and clunky. I mean, it's probably just because I never, ever use it. But it's certainly, I'm somebody that's relatively versed in how to communicate online. And it even confuses me sometimes.

So I'm expecting a lot of spectacular fails with this. Yeah, the whole, everything on Twitter is a kludge that just came from, you know, years of people throwing shit at the wall and seeing what's stuck. Yep. But in other interesting Twitter news, besides the fact that they had the suitcase of body parts outside their office, they've been telling their power users to stop posting Instagram links and just use native Twitter photos.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's what everybody wants to keep them in their infrastructure, right? Don't use anything else. Just use us. Facebook wants, you know, Facebook is basically making it much easier for you to use Facebook video because they don't want you to link to YouTube anymore. Twitter doesn't want you to link to Instagram, use their own photo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

For those of us that actually do this for a living, we want to be able to use one source and post that everywhere because it's easier for us and we can track it better. Yeah, this is just turf wars. You know, everybody wants them, everybody wants them to stay in their ecosystem. Yes. But, you know, people like Instagram for Instagram.

I don't want to have to post the same picture twice. Exactly. I don't want to have to post the same picture more than twice. How about four or five times? Because you've got to be on a bunch of social networks now. Yeah, turf war, turf war, turf war. Big deal. Yeah, I mean, we could get into a conversation where you should have content specific for each network instead of posting the same thing to all five.

Yes, but find a client that will pay you to develop that. Ah, true, true, true, true. Now, Twitter is a place where people do like to bitch a lot. No. That's kind of where you go when you want to have a bitch fest, right? Well, the irony about that is Twitter is the place where anybody in the world can see you bitching as opposed to, say, on Facebook where you can at least control who sees it.

So I don't really understand that. But, yes, it's very true. And some careers have been completely ended because of that. Mine on several occasions, actually. There's an Ars Technica article about a study complaining on Twitter correlates with heart disease risks. Tweets prove better regional heart disease predictor than many classic factors.

Okay. The more you bitch on Twitter, the more likely you are to die young. And the more likely you're probably just sitting around all day and gaining tons of weight and will probably have a heart attack no matter what as you shove in those Cheetos. Good point. Good point. Get a standing desk and do some yoga.

Exactly. And then you'll find you probably won't want to spend as much time on Twitter anymore. So my friend sent me an article that I just could not believe when I saw it. It's in Wired and it's titled, Silicon Valley has lost its way. Can skateboarding legend Rodney Mullen help it? No.

Because it's a question, right, Jason? Actually, that's our rule. But it starts, it actually, it does start with a statement. Okay. All right. I was just, I've been a fan of Rodney Mullen since the early 80s, you know, since the first Del Mar competitions. He's, I've always been a fan of his and he's just an amazing dude.

And to find out more about him in this article, it's a very long article, but well worth the read. When he, you know, had really bad hip problems and was trying to recover from it, he turned to Linux and became like a Linux master, which I did not know. Wow.

Yeah, it's, it's crazy. And now he's got all these speaking gigs because he did the TEDx talk and got to be friends with a bunch of people like, you know, Tim O'Reilly and all this other stuff. It's just a fascinating article. And what I really liked was the way he broke down problem solving methodology and learning new things based on skateboarding methodology, which I completely agree with.

Everything that he talks about in there is completely true as a skateboarder of what, 15 years at least. Right. Like how you learn tricks and how you just get back up after you get your ass busted over and over again and just try little incremental things.

It's just a great article on just, you know, thought experiments and things like that. I just loved it. All right. Cool. And maybe, maybe Rodney can go over to Pinterest because they're, they're getting ready to finally start throwing in ads on all the crap that you pin, I guess.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Pinterest is a very interesting, interesting social network to me in that they are very, very good at their target market, which is, of course, you know, women. Basically, let's be honest. Yes. I've never personally used it much until recently.

And I actually find it kind of interesting. It's certainly a fun thing to kind of use. And I'm seeing some, you know, actual real data coming out of it that shows that this is actually somewhat useful. But I'm still frustrated by the fact that it is basically just a way to collect copywritten data.

Yeah, absolutely. All you're doing is collecting a bunch of other people's copywritten data. That's it. Yeah. I've said that, I've said that since the day they went online. I'm like, this is, you know, the, the biggest copyright theft in, in the internet history. Yeah. I like this little line in the article.

Pinterest is not a traditional user-generated content platform. Well, that's true because users are just taking other people's content. Yeah. It's thievery. Yes. It's a thievery platform. But there you go. So we'll see what happens. Now, in good news, the FCC has finally spoken about the personal hotspot Wi-Fi blocking thing that we talked about last week.

Right. In a PDF. Yes, in a PDF. It's an FCC enforcement advisory. I'm just going to read the beginning here. Warning, Wi-Fi blocking is prohibited. Persons or businesses causing intentional interference to Wi-Fi hotspots are subject to enforcement action.

Straight up says it right there. Don't fuck with our hotspots. Right. Good. Yeah. Good news from the FCC for once. Yay, FCC. Woo-hoo. There was another article going around that just had me scratching my head. And I pulled this one up because a guy I know, Chris Messina, was mentioned in it.

It's about polyamory and San Francisco and the tech sector. Yeah. I'm not going to spend too much time on this one. Ooh, music. Ooh. Who's getting funky? That ain't me. Fame.

So apparently when you pull up money.cnn.com, they feel like playing some music for you now. Eh, well, you know, a little more money in David Bowie's pockets. Well, that's, you know, to get you in the mood to listen to all the polyamory talk and... Eh, whatever. Nerdery. Nerd sexery.

Yeah. Just check the show notes for that one. Okay. So the Apple Watch, on schedule, coming in April. Are you excited? Not going to get one. No. Actually, I am extremely excited because I still have all my Apple stock. I can't wait, except I won't be getting one. I bought Apple stock.

I'm now a stock... I'm a shareholder in Apple now. All right. When they announced their huge news, which we're going to talk about in a second, the biggest quarterly earnings of any company ever, to the tune of $18 billion, I knew that their stock was going to drop and I was going to buy some.

Right. Yeah, there you go. So their stock always drops on good news, which is interesting. And that's when Apple announces really good news, that's when you buy some. Yep. And it... Because it will go up. I mean, this is ridiculous. It is the... Apple has made the most money of any company ever, ever. Yeah.

Ever. It's just ridiculous how much. It is ridiculous. Yeah. And there's no signs of slowing because people are very excited about the watch. The watch is not going to be cheap and they are going to sell a shit ton of them. Plus, you've got rumors about the 6S coming, which I will be getting because I'm on that particular track for iPhones.

And all reports are saying it's an even better device than the 6 was. Yeah. I'm on the S track too. So I'm looking forward to it. And I will definitely be buying more stock because, yeah, I think I got it at 109 and the next day it was back up to like 118. I'm like, I'll take that.

I'm in. Yes. Yes. So the state of Apple is strong. Now you posted the link called the state of Ello and I will just be, I will go into my presidential speech here. The state of Ello is not strong. It is not strong at all. They are, I don't know what they're thinking over there.

They must have just sand pits where they come into work and stick their head in it and then turn code underneath. The ostrich lawyers. Uh-huh. Because there's just no way these people are going to pull it out. And now they're actually filing for patents. Well, they basically said they will not sell user data.

They can never do that. Ello is the five users that they still have left. So the only chance that they still have for a revenue stream is to file for these patents and hope that A, they will be able to sue someone or B, someone will just decide it's easier to buy them out than try to fight the patent. Yeah.

It's like, okay, well, our t-shirts suck. Our service is a ghost town. We've got no traction. Let's just become patent trolls. Why not? Let's do that. That is basically what they've become. They've become a patent troll company, which is spectacularly sad. Oh, well.

And speaking of trolls, Hershey is apparently a chocolate troll. This is the worst news I've ever heard in my entire life. Hershey bans British chocolate from entering the U.S. What the fuck, Hershey? Because Hershey owns the rights to create things under the Cadbury name here in the U.S.

And they would rather keep the money themselves than allow the importing of the real chocolate, which tastes way better, from the U.K. This is sad news. It's horrible. I mean, I don't eat tons of chocolate, but when I do, it's U.K. version only.

Oh, my God. It's delicious. And as much as I can't stand the Cadbury cream eggs, that's another thing that's going on right now is they're changing the formula for the Cadbury cream eggs in the U.S. Yes, and it's going to taste like shit. Well, they look like they're filled with spooge anyway. I can't get past it.

I was like, no, no, no. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare candy. I am secure enough in my sexuality to be able to eat those delicious things and not worry about it. It's not about being secure in anything. It's about being just nasty. It's delicious. You're wrong.

Security? Ha! Yeah, drone crashed at the White House. Oh, joy. Woo-hoo! Was there a payload of, like, neurotoxins or C4 or anything like that? No, apparently the guy kind of either lost control of it and then he waited a few hours to kind of sheepishly say, oh, yeah, that was mine.

Yeah, you know why he waited a few hours? Why? Because he was drunk. Sorry, I guess I didn't read that part. That's awesome. Yes. Yeah, you probably shouldn't be doing that around the White House. And he works for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. It's whiskey raw.

Yes, he is an intelligence officer who got drunk and crashed his drone next to the White House. The Eagle has crash landed in Washington. Oopsie daisies. Now, here's the shitty part that comes out of this. Mm-hmm.

The maker of the drone. Yes. I always want to say Digi, but I think you're just supposed to go DJI, yeah. They are going to force people to get a firmware update on their drones that will not let them fly in Washington, D.C. anymore. I was assuming that that is going to be where the FAA goes with this anyways, in that they will all have to have firmware for no-fly regions.

Well, that's only for commercial drones. You can go down to the hardware store and buy enough stuff and build your own right now. That's true. That is very true. Yeah. So the DJI drones, the Phantoms and those, they've all got a lot of really sophisticated no-fly software in them already.

So if you get too close to an airport, it'll land or come home. They're smart enough already, which I think is how they got past a lot of the regulatory stuff to sell so many of them at this point, because they're definitely the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to the drones. And I want one, but they're just ugly.

I want a big octocopter, you know, so I can smuggle my heroin into Mexico. Right. Yes. I have no interest in having a drone. Oh, they look like so much fun. They do look like fun, but I'm also annoyed by them on Venice Beach, and I'm annoyed by all the news stories that come out of here, and I'm annoyed by the idiots that get drunk and fly them into the White House.

Yeah. Actually, I'm amused by that one. Yeah, we're doing a pretty light security segment this week. Drunken Drones is, you know, pretty much where we should cap it, but I saw an awesome story this morning where a Russian dating site was hacked. It was the, what was the name of that site?

Oh, I can't remember. I don't know. Oh, Top Face. Great name. Top Face. It's Top Face. They found the hacker. Oh. Because the hacker was selling the email addresses, 20 million hacked email addresses, and they said, eh, we'll just buy it.

So he won't release them. So he bought them all. That sounds like a very Russian way of doing business. And then they hired him as a consultant. They're like, yeah, we're not going to press charges. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to spin this. And we hired a new security consultant, and it's the guy that hacked us.

And they say, well, we're not paying for the email addresses so much as we're just going to consider it a bug bounty. Oh, boy. Yeah. They said, those lizard guys must be pissed off. I'm telling you, man. They went about it the completely wrong way. They're just called, Top Face is calling it a reward for finding a vulnerability.

Okay. So, well. Well done. Well done. Dosvidania. Dosvidania. I finally finished Firefight Reckoner's book two, the sequel to Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson, which you talked a bit about last week.

I enjoyed every second of it. Great read. It was excellent, wasn't it? It was, it was excellent. I'm definitely looking forward to the continuation of the story. I mean, the main characters written as a bit of a dopey young 19 year old, and it's a bit amusing from that viewpoint as a 41 year old to be reading it, and I probably would have loved this book when I was a kid.

But I do like it. The concept is interesting, and there's enough in it to keep me going, even though I kind of want to smack the main character around. Sometimes, yes. Yes. But overall, good stuff. Really good stuff. And as soon as I finished, I was like, oh, man, it's going to be like two years until I get another one of these, and I went onto Amazon to get another book for my awesome Kindle app, and lo and behold, he had had a short story out as well that is written in the world

called Metosis, A Reckoner's Story, which I bought and read very quickly. The interesting thing to me about this is not so much the story, but the fact that for $1.99, all these authors are starting to do this now instead of just kind of waiting and putting out a huge book every couple of years to keep the market going and to keep people interested and to keep the money flowing in, a lot of these authors are doing these short stories now and releasing them all the time.

So I think that's good. I'm up for anything that increases people reading. No, definitely. Keep the universe alive, you know? Yeah. It's like a show, you know, just little shorts here and there really kind of keep you interested while you're waiting for the next big dinner, you know? It's a snack. No, it's a great idea, and I'm happy they're doing it. And it's not new, because if we all remember and cast our minds back to before we were born, but if you're a sci-fi reader, you read a lot of that stuff.

There were always serials and serial adaptations, Arthur C. Clarke and all those guys used to always publish in magazines just little short stories from their universes before and in between books or as the process of putting a book together. So this is just kind of going back to the past.

Yeah, and it was a fun story. And it was interesting because they mentioned some of the stuff that happened in this short story in Firefight, which kind of annoyed me that they didn't actually tack this onto the beginning of Firefight because it was so short. Well, again, it's $1.99.

It's a little bit of extra income, and it's a separate beast. Yeah, I was thinking more on the audiobook side. Right, right. Because that would have been perfect, like a little perfect thing, or an extra at the end of the audiobook. Or you do the Hugh Howie thing for Wool, where you release a compendium after, which is everything collected into one edition.

I mean, there's so many different ways to package this stuff, so. Yeah, it was a good little story, though. Well worth $1.99, and it took me, like, what, an hour to read? Oh, it's like 60 pages or something like that. Or actually, according to Amazon, it's 35 pages. So it's a very quick read, but it was a good little story. Yeah, you read fast.

I'm slow. That was, we call that a one pooper. A one pooper, yes. Actually, that was a very, that was a post-Thanksgiving pooper then. That's a, your legs go to sleep and you can't get up when you're done. But yes, you can theoretically get a poop in out of that one.

Software, apps, and gadgets. I have finally come out of the dark ages and into the light. I upgraded my monitor. I've been basically using these same monitors and these same dual monitors set up for 10 years now. And got myself the Dell, a big long string of letters and numbers and blah, blah, blah.

I'll link in the show notes if you want to look at it. 27 inch LED lit monitor and it is glorious and it is fantastic. It's a stunning monitor, a huge screen. They've got a great price going on right now. And now I just have to retrain myself to use one big monitor rather than my dual monitor setup that I'm so used to.

It's unbelievable. One monitor is better than two. That's what everybody is saying. And I'm coming around to that. But I think this is going to be a month long process of me kind of fiddling around with all the various windows I always want to have open and trying to position them in the right spots. Yeah, it'll take a little getting used to. But once it's done, it's done and you're just so much more productive.

The more the more screen real estate you have, the more productive you are and then the less you have to work. Yeah. And I wasn't quite ready to go whole hog for any of the like 36 inch monitors that are out there yet because the pricing is just exorbitant still. But this one's great. And 27 inches, it's not bad. No, 27 inches is a good, good size.

Yeah, it's a good size. Yeah. I just got rid of my 21 inch iMac that I was using as a monitor and I'm just using my laptop now, but I've got retina on the laptop. Right. And it's really hard, like using a retina display all day and then going to a regular monitor again.

Yeah. It's really hard. So I just gave up and I'm like, eh, I got a little stand. I put my laptop on it. So it's at the high level and I'm sticking with that for now. Yeah. There you go. Until I can afford the 4k iMac. Yeah, that's, that's kind of what I'm going to be waiting for in terms of the next big upgrade as well in terms of monitors and things like that.

But for now, this is a great and it really, the price didn't break the bank at all. So this is a, an upgrade I should have done ages ago. Yeah, definitely. It's well worth it. And I'm sorry, it was a 5k iMac, not the 4k, the 5k. 5k. Yes. So you did Lumosity like our first year.

I did it. Yep. I did it for an entire year and, um, I did not get smarter, but I got much better at their games. Yeah. Yeah. I'm doing a peak right now. It's another brain training app just cause I got bored and I wanted something to do in the mornings. Yeah. And I'm enjoying it and I didn't get the whole year subscription.

I just got like a three month pro thing. Cause I figured by then I'll be just as good at the games as I can be. Yeah. And be done with it. I'm already in like the 94th percentile of people in my age range. So I don't have that much farther to go. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder how much they just ego stroke you and everybody in the world is at least in the 90th percentile.

I have thought about that. Yeah. I have run software companies before. I do know that it is very easy to fudge the numbers to make people happy. Yes, it is. Um, yeah, I think the one year of Lumosity kind of burned me out on doing those things, but I, I, I will admit that when I was doing it, I did like the routine of being up, you know, doing it every morning, kind of getting your brain fired that way.

Uh, it was good. Um, I wonder what is going on with Lumosity. Cause there was a period of time that you couldn't turn on the TV without there being Lumosity commercials every 10 seconds. And they seem to have gone away. No, they haven't. I see them all the time. I see them like every other day, at least. Maybe I'm not watching the right channels anymore.

Yeah, uh, you know, it's, it's worth a try. If you've never done anything like this, I would never suggest you buy in for a full year. Uh, cause you'll get bored with the games really quickly and they just really don't roll out enough of them, you know? Yeah. The, the ones that are on, on peak, they switch them up enough because you, you tell them what kind of training you want and you can modify that as you go.

And then you get different games for different types of training. So I noticed I was getting a little slack in one category. So I just kind of front loaded it with those games to get my score back up. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a time waster. It's a fun little time waster. That's all it is. And it's good.

But, uh, you know, take their claims of, of neuroscience and scientific validity with a gigantic grain of salt. Now, speaking of dumb time wasters, I bought what could possibly be the dumbest game ever made, which is utterly addicting. It's called desert golfing.

Okay. It's like two bucks and it, there's no instructions. There's no badges. There's no achievements, no settings, no social, no nothing. Just golfing in the desert, which is basically it's, you know, it's a little physics game where you just pull back and give it an angle and velocity and golf.

Right. And it's unlimited. Like the holes are auto-generated, I guess. And I've seen people that are on hole 7,500. I'm on like 570 right now. Oh, wait. So the only reason you could know that is because they are posting it themselves rather than through in-app.

So apparently people really do want those social functions in these apps regardless. People are doing screen caps and posting. Yes. Wow. Of golfing in the desert. On their iPhones. Uh-huh. I play on the iPad because, you know, I want the full vista of desert when I'm doing it.

I want full retina iPad. I want sand everywhere. Exactly. Now, I got another app that was quite possibly the biggest waste of cash I've ever made for all two, three bucks of it. It was called Sync Solver for Fitbit. Right. And since Fitbit won't hook into the HealthKit app for Apple, I'm like, okay, I found this one and it takes your data and then puts it into the HealthKit app.

Here's the problem. The HealthKit app is useless. It's utterly useless. There's nothing there for you to do with it. What's the point? Apple's Health app is probably one of the biggest disappointments I've experienced when they did that big upgrade. I had such high hopes for that app, but it's useless.

It's absolutely useless. And it came out of the gate broken. You know, it wasn't working half the time when it first came out. They released it way too early and it's just kind of silly. I don't get it. I don't get what you're supposed to be able to do with it. Me either. Waste of money. Waste of money.

I'm going to go golf.

Media Candy. I'm very happy that the Americans is back. I have not watched it yet. It is sitting on my DVR in addition to upgrading my computer monitor. I've also finally bought a big screen TV, so I'm waiting for that to show up before I watch it. But I love the show.

I've loved the first two seasons and I cannot wait. It's not Game of Thrones or anything, but I'm pretty damn excited. Yeah, it's still got traction. I tried it and I couldn't really get super into it, but I didn't have a lot of time then. So who knows? Maybe if I get snowed in, I'll hop it up on the Netflix. I highly recommend it.

Very good show. Justified is back for the final season and they're kicking ass. I have not watched that, so I should probably get on that too. You watched Deadwood, right? I did, yes. Okay. So Timothy Oliphant's in it. He's great in it. And everybody else. Just watch it. You love it. Okay.

I don't know if you saw this, Apex Twin supposedly secretly leaking an entire vault of unreleased music. Supposedly. I've listened to quite a bit of it. It's one of those things where it's hard to tell if this is actually Apex Twin because there are so many people that do, yeah, you could, you know, if you spend about $400 on software, you could make something that sounds Apex Twin-y.

Apex Twin-y. Without really any musical knowledge whatsoever. But I love the Apex Twin and I've listened to a lot of this. Some of it's very good. Some of it is just kind of bleepy-bloopy. I'm relatively sure this is him because the interviews that he's done, he's talked about how he's sitting on a, you know, just a mountain of tracks that he's never released.

And he's kind of given up on the thought of really playing the game or making any money or figuring out how to make any of this work anymore as a musician. So why not? I can see him totally doing this. I wonder if he's having to use like this pseudonym just to get around any kind of kerfuffle with his previous labels in the life.

Oh, I'm absolutely sure of that. Yeah. He would be getting in a significant amount of trouble if he was just doing this. So, you know, completely, it could never be proved it's him. So, and he's not making any money off of it. I'm sure the NSA could say if it was him or not.

I don't think that they're too concerned about the Aphex twin. No, probably not. Yeah. So this is an ongoing story that is kind of interesting. It's the Zoe Keating YouTube music story. Yeah. They're basically strong-arming her into taking their terms and saying that, yeah, you can't do like things like release your music early on another service, which is, she uses Bandcamp and that's where she makes the bulk of her money.

Yeah. And a couple of other things. It's been, it's been going back and forth. There's been no real clarification. There was an article that came out in Billboard where they're saying that the terms were clarified, but Billboard is definitely on the side of YouTube because they kind of poke fun at Zoe at the beginning of the article. It's, it's, it's kind of going back and forth right now.

Yeah. I mean, this is an in-progress story. It's a little difficult to tease out exactly what's going on. So I think we'll not try right now, but we're definitely going to come back to this. This is a big, major, massive, important story because YouTube is the music industry.

That's where kids go to listen to music. That's where everybody goes to play music. That's where people go to share music online and the monetization and ownership and every aspect of that is going to be the biggest story in music this year.

Now, Google obviously is Google and Google has gotten rid of their, you know, let just be nice slogan and they're not being nice and they're, but they're doing what anybody else would do in their position, which is saying, you know, everybody's coming here to listen to music anyways. You need to be here and we want, you know, if you're going to come here, we want certain things from you.

Yeah. These are our terms. Suck it if you don't like it. Yeah. Suck it if you don't like it. Go somewhere else then. The problem being, of course, that you need to be on YouTube. If you're a musician, you have no choice. There is, that is the first place kids go as the first place most people go to find an artist and listen to them.

I go to Spotify, but I'm not a kid. Yeah. But the interesting thing about this story is how Cory Doctorow did kind of lay this out in his last book about how once YouTube gets to be a certain size, then there will never be a competitor for them because it will cost so much money to replicate the things that they've done that they can set the terms.

And then they are, you know, you are beholden to YouTube. They hold the keys to the castle. Well, I mean, that's that's been a valid concern about Google in general. And then YouTube is as one specific arm of that is absolutely sure. Of course it is. This is a massive issue and it's going to be the big issue in the music industry this year, regardless of what Jay-Z thinks.

Yeah. So tell me, what's Jay-Z up to now? This is just announced like about 10 minutes ago as as we were recording a different segment. Hot off the presses, hot off the presses, Jay-Z is throwing his hat into the music ring as well. The music streaming service.

And he is buying a Spiro for 56 million, a Spiro being the company that we talked about title a couple weeks ago, a couple episodes ago, which is the the high quality streaming service that we both just kind of laughed at because it's a different shouldn't tell the difference.

Nobody cares. And the bandwidth issues that come with that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So one and the other service is called WIMP, which is a just horrible name, which I have not. Yeah, it's called capital W, lowercase I, capital M, capital P. I've never tried the service because apparently it's it's limited availability in Europe.

So and title is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. So he has bought them out and obviously is going to try to do a massive rollout to basically try to take on Spotify or potentially YouTube or any of these other streaming services that are RDO, which is still around and kicking very well, actually.

So another hat in the streaming battle, I guess. Just what we needed. Yeah. So more confusion and, you know, as as a music connoisseur, I kind of I gave up like I just went ahead and said, all right, well, Spotify seems to be the winner out there.

I'll pay for my $9.95 a month for for Spotify and go streaming because it's just impossible to do things the way that I used to be doing it. But I've got to tell you, like I started off really happy with Spotify, but Spotify is glitchy Now, Spotify doesn't work instantaneously for me anymore.

There's I always have problems when I'm switching from Wi Fi to, to, to streaming over. LTE. Sorry. Yes, I'm blanking out on that. I always have problems like I will lose connection for five minutes. That's unacceptable. Like I'm from walking out of my house listening to a song to go halfway down the block.

I get no music. Um, it's bloatware on the PC. It takes forever to load. Spotify is, is blowing it. And outside of the fact that they don't have entire catalogs, this is not the, this fracturing of the service is a real, real problem. And unfortunately it's Google and YouTube that can probably solve that.

I hope not. I mean, I, I was a RDO guy for a long time just because RDO is beautiful and Spotify is so damn ugly, but I've, I've seen the problems now. Cause I, I finally went all in on Spotify just because that's where my friends were. You know, that was the thing. That's where your friends are. That's where you go.

And the interesting thing about Spotify is they just got the contract for Sony music to be the music provider on the PlayStation network. Yeah. And Sony killed their entire streaming service. So that's score one for Spotify there. Yeah. But yeah, their service is definitely flapping lately.

They need to, they need to shore that, shore it up. Yeah. It's been really bad as of late to the point where I actually, you know, I never do this sort of thing, but I wrote an email to their. To their, uh, support. And I was like, what's going on? I'm paying you money for this to work and it's not working. So I'm what, what, what, what, what?

And of course they never got back to me. Look at you, Joe consumer. I know. Well, the Ralph Nader of the music industry. That's you. Yeah. Anyways. Uh, so we'll see what happens with all this. I mean, the YouTube stuff, I'm sure we're going to be touching on almost weekly because that's, that's the big one.

Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see how this goes. I know Zoe from her days in Rasputina. And I saw when she originally went solo and did her like first music thing in San Francisco. And it was pretty cool, but she's definitely got a niche audience. She is never going to be mainstream. So she's going to be fighting an uphill battle for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, she definitely is. And she's an artist that would be better served, not giving into YouTube and just saying, well, to hell with you guys anyways, and, and going off and doing it somewhere else. She's one of those types of artists where you will seek her out. If you are into her, you do not need to just go to YouTube and kind of poke around.

Well, yeah, especially since she says she makes most of her money on band camp selling, selling there. I think it would just be wise of her to just say, yeah, screw you, YouTube, take a stand for the, the other indie artists and see if they can get a better coalition of people, but apparently it's a long story.

And the indie music coalition is like, well, we're okay with them so far. So we're going to stick with them. It's a, I don't know. So there was another little bit of interesting semi music news that came out this week. And I just want to say that, you know, just to prove that the grumpy old geeks are fair and balanced and we don't just pick on things we, and people we don't like, like Oprah and Lena Dunham and Amanda Palmer.

The Daily Show took a big misstep. Now, technically not The Daily Show. Technically not The Daily Show. Yes. Yeah. The Daily Show podcast without Jon Stewart, which is a very funny name. They basically did the, the crowdsourcing for music for their podcast and have decided that, you know, being on the podcast with your music is good enough.

You don't need to be paid. You're getting exposure. They say it up front. They say it up front, there will be no compensation, but they're not giving like very, very good credits to the bands that are actually spending the time to do it. And yes. So yeah, this article was basically the things that we've been saying for almost two years.

It's like, Hey, if you're going to get something from somebody, pay for it. Yes. And you know, it's unfortunate because Jon Stewart himself has done rants about people that, you know, don't get compensated fairly for the work that they do. So it's, uh, this was a misstep on their part, but remember, this is the Daily Show podcast without Jon Stewart.

So to throw his name into the middle of it is kind of, you know, tenuous because I'm sure he's busy with his show and doesn't really pay attention to what's happening on the podcast. Although I bet he is now. Yes. I I'd imagine he would be now. And the best thing that he could possibly do was to do a segment about it on his own show.

Yeah. So I want to talk about the death of all good things. Ghostbusters, all new female cast with a reboot now. And here's the thing. I am not, I'm not busting on the, I'm not busting on the all female cast.

I'm busting on the reboot. Well, you have to, one of the guys died. You can't use the original characters anymore. Let it go. They never would have agreed to do. I, that is where I'm on the fence in, in one sense, Ghostbusters is an iconic, never to be bettered film.

It is genius. It is perfect in every single way. You should never, ever redo it. What I'm hoping is that they are not just doing a redo. I'm hoping it's a completely different story. I'm hoping they take it a totally different direction. The cast is fantastic.

I'm excited to see what they do with it. But I, that's again, like, I also agree with you. Yeah. I mean, there is, there is historical precedent for some reboots to be good. Battlestar Galactica being the poster child for it. Yeah. Cause the first show sucked. Let's be honest.

What you got against Lauren Green? Hey, it was good for the time, but come on. By your command. And so that one, you know, stands and holds up, but let's look at RoboCop. RoboCop sucked. Yeah. Dread was actually pretty good. The new Dread. So there's a, there's a, there's one in the plus column, but you know, go back and look at these things.

They're terrible for the most part. And they're talking about doing it again with Indiana Jones with Chris Pratt. That one drives me crazy. Now I am a hundred percent on board with you on this one with your comment in the show notes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I agree. We do not need an Indiana Jones revival.

There can never be any Indiana Jones that isn't Harrison Ford ever, ever. I know they tried to get that douchebag in, but he just turned out to be such a mess that nobody wants him in a movie. What was the kid's name? Uh, uh, the one that died at the Viper room.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about from Indy four. I'm not talking about river Phoenix. I'm talking about, and now if river Phoenix was still alive, he would have been good because he did do a really good job in Indy three. All right. Yeah. I'm still saying that, look, there, listen, Disney, there, there's a reason that there wasn't a star Wars reboot with a new Han Solo.

Harrison Ford is Han Solo and Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. That's it. Absolutely. And they should have stopped at three. Totally. Nuke the fridge. Now, having said all that, because we were talking about all these reboots, this is not a reboot, but this is a flashback back to movies from that general era that we all, if you're our age, these are iconic movies.

I'm so excited. Winona Ryder had just said in an interview that Beetlejuice two is happening. See, I'm fine with that. I'm okay with that. Me too. Michael Keaton back. I want everybody back. It's going to be amazing. And maybe Tim Burton will actually, you know, do something Tim Burton-y that I like again.

Yeah. Something without Johnny Depp. Yes. Please know Johnny Depp. If Johnny Depp ends up cast in this movie, I'm going to shoot myself. Yeah. If Michael Keaton gets booted for Johnny Depp as Beetlejuice, then we have a problem. But no, I mean, this is a movie I am excited about. I can't wait. I hope they do it and it doesn't go by the wayside.

And the word on the street is they're still doing a Bill and Ted 3. So I see. I'm looking forward to that one because I'm a Bill and Ted mark. But yeah, we'll see about that. I know. See, that's the thing. It's like hit or miss on these things. But stop it with the Ghostbusters, the Indiana Joneses. Stop taking the iconic movies that we all love and just tearing them to shreds and write some fucking new stories, people.

Oh, please. Hollywood's been out of that game for 20 years. Ooh, fancy! Fancy! Ooh, fancy! Now, we really need you to come and donate to the Grumpy Old Geeks at grumpyoldgeeks.com and help keep the lights on because I found something I really, really, really want to buy.

God damn it, Jason. I mean, I know you like to spend the money in donations before we even get them, but this is probably the next 35 years worth of donations. If we make this much in 35 years, I'd still be happy. Yeah, me too. It is a 1996 Lockheed Martin Swathboat support vessel.

Uh-huh. It is awesome. Where are you going to park this fucking thing? I don't, I'm not going to park it, man. I'm going to be out at sea the whole time. I'm going to get some satellite internet and, you know, just do it up total Bond villain style. I got to get a hairless cat. You can host the Pirate Bay? Yes.

I'll go out to Sealand a lot and that's where we'll be hosted. We'll do all of the podcasts live from Sealand. I've got to admit, this is a badass looking thing. It is. I mean, granted it's from 1996, so it is Mozilla era technology, you know. Yeah, it's going to need some upgrades.

But it's got, what was it, two diesel engines rated at 3,480 horsepower each. So it's got some balls and, uh, yeah, it just, I could totally bond this thing up. It would be awesome. You just see, go, go to the show notes, check out the pictures.

It's 180 grand. So if everybody that listens to this show pitches in 35 grand, we should be able to get it pretty soon. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's cool. Um, here's the difference between, uh, your spending and my spending, Jason.

I also found something that I'd really like to have. Okay. Uh, and I'm hoping the grumpy old geeks, uh, listeners will donate some money for, so I can get my, uh, $150 dragon faucet. Or the main reason I put this article in the show notes is the title, uh, because I love this writer as I've gone through and read all of her recommendations for cool house stuff here.

It's the motherfucking dragon faucet in your motherfucking bathroom. She is a big game of Thrones fans and, uh, really likes these faucets that she found online and I do too. They're cool as hell. Yeah. I mean, they're, they are pretty cool looking. I mean, they're, they're no smell dragon.

There's more puff, the magic dragon, but they're still pretty cool looking. Yes, there is. Uh, there's a link in our show notes. Uh, it's a blog called offbeat home in life. And, um, I ended up spending quite a few hours on, on this blog and enjoying her, her writing. Um, she, uh, in this particular article with the, with the motherfucking dragon faucets in your motherfucking bathroom, she also references some previous articles, including the steampunk dragon coffee table, the barfing storm drain dragons, zippy, the dragon mailbox.

So this is all some good stuff. Dragontastic. So thank you, Megan Finley. Let's give her some credit. All right. Good job, Megan. So I found a cool article on a site called earth porm with an M dot com.

And it says, uh, I noticed this tiny thing on Google maps when I zoomed in. Well, nothing could prepare me. God, I hate clickbait headlines. It is such a clickbait headline, but the picture that accompanied it looked kind of neat. So I checked it out and it's this, uh, it basically is a picture of an airplane with a compass from the top.

And it turns out that it's a memorial for a flight that was blown up a long time ago, back in 1989. Yeah. And the families of the people who were on the flight went back and built this thing in the desert where the plane exploded, got pieces of the plane, made this big rock sculpture, put mirrors around it.

It's really impressive. Yeah. It's very cool. So I, I just threw it in cause I thought it was a neat one. It's, it's definitely a short read, but you can get the history of the monument and what it's all about by going to earth porm. I don't get that. Porm.

Well, they didn't want to go porn apparently, but, uh, yeah, this is very cool. It's been floating around for a while. It's, it's one of those things that I, I'm so against clickbaity headlines. I won't ever click on them, but somebody finally told me, no, you really need to look at this one because it's, it's, um, yeah, it's very, it's touching. It is touching. It's actually quite touching.

Yes. Let the grumpy old geeks touch you and click on this link. Get a tissue closing shout outs. I'm not entirely sure why we're promoting this, but, uh, because it's nothing but a popularity contest, but we do a podcast and there is something called the podcast awards.

So please go to podcast awards.com and, uh, vote for us or, or nominate us so we can then be voted for and judged because we love to be judged. Oh yes. We love it so much. I mean, we judge enough. It's time for us to be judged too. Look, let's be honest. Jason and I really just want an excuse to both go to Vegas and hang out.

True. True to that. So apparently, you know, if we get nominated enough, uh, we will be in the running and then we get to go to Vegas and not win an award. We can go hang out at the podcast awards. So if you go to podcast awards.com and go under the tech section and just put in grumpy old geeks and for the URL, put in grumpy old geeks.com.

We would greatly appreciate it. Yes. And you can also vote for us for the people's choice awards. So please do both. It'll add an extra 10 seconds to your journey. It would make us very, very happy. Yes. And we get to go to Vegas. Yes. I want to throw a quick shout out to Ray Ortega from the podcaster studio.com.

I was, I've been going nuts with all this crazy new equipment that I got. Yes, you have. And trying to figure out how to make it work. And I finally found on his, his podcast, everything I needed to know for free. Didn't cost me, didn't cost me any money.

So I'm giving him a big shout out. If you're into podcasting, go check out the podcaster studio.com because, uh, I never would have figured this shit out without him, especially the mix minus setup and what a compressor actually does and how to set it right. It compresses Jason.

Yeah. I would knock on wood right now because this is, this is, the show is not done and we have no idea. Yeah. We'll see how we sound. So maybe, maybe Ray, you'll be getting things. Maybe that'll be cut. Okay, man.

Well, I guess I'll talk to you next week. I'll talk to you next week, man. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show. If you'd like to help keep the lights on and buy fresh puppies, you can donate at grumpy old geeks.com. $10 or more. We'll get you a copy of our official soundtrack provided by the band Among Us, who you can find on iTunes and Spotify.

On social media, you can find us at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast. We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars. We are hosted by Lipson. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free.

Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 94. Puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy, puppy. Bobsy, uncle. Tonight we drink! Ha ha!

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