Upgrade - 156: The Silly Season

Episode Date: August 28, 2017

Special guest Merlin Mann joins Jason to talk about Apple event rumors, why we care about Apple kremlinology, our approaches to keeping and deleting files in our digital libraries, and Jason's recent ...11-day road trip to the total eclipse.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 156 brought to you this week by Eero, Smile, and Encapsula. I'm Jason Snell, and I'm not just mocking Mike Hurley by reading his part of the show. He's not here. He is on vacation, and good for him. So instead of Mike Hurley, we are joined by a very special guest. It's Mr. Merlin Mann. Hi, Merlin. Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me on, buddy. Thanks for sitting in. I really appreciate it It's very nice of you to do that. It's my pleasure. How are things going up in your neck of the woods? Pretty good. Pretty good. It's been hot. We've had a heat wave here super hot, but nobody cares about that because it's time for Snell talk Oh, yeah. Well done. Well done you you got a future in this business. What is the what is the Snell talk question?
Starting point is 00:01:01 Do you have that there? Well people wanting to know things about Jason Snell can send things with the pound sign Snell Talk hashtag. This week, Chris Lanza asks, second favorite cheese? Oh, I love cheese questions. Now, is it stipulated for the record that Manchego bought at Whole Foods with Apple Pay is your favorite cheese? You know, it's not my favorite cheese. It's a great cheese, though. I know.
Starting point is 00:01:23 I know. They're going to rewrite the Wikipedia page now um the podcastpedia page i uh i like i like manchego it's very good but i i feel like it's taken on a life of its own i like i like lots of cheeses um i am not the biggest cheese lover in my family my wife is the cheese connoisseur i'm sort of uh second level i i learn from from the master but um cheddar good sharp cheddar i just love it love it love it love it um i had on on my on my road trip i had um there was a there's a a chain of sandwich restaurants called port of subs which i'd never been to before it's actually pretty good despite the kind of hunt for red octoberish name one sub only i would have liked to eaten this sandwich in montana
Starting point is 00:02:10 they may be in montana i don't know i i ate them in uh nevada but uh they had a smoked cheddar on uh like a salami and turkey sandwich was really good too so i like i like cheddar a lot and gouda which i never really got before but i've been really getting into gouda lately we had a barbecue chicken pizza on uh on our road trip at god where was that i think that was in tahoe and it was a barbecue chicken pizza that had gouda on it which um totally worked and was awesome and the next time i make a barbecue chicken pizza i'm gonna put gouda on it because despite the wrath of Syracuse, it will already be down upon me for making a barbecue chicken pizza. That's non-canonical pizza.
Starting point is 00:02:49 No, but I don't care because it's so good. I agree. Yeah. I don't know which one of those would rank first and second and third or whatever. Manchego is still really great, though. But thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Chris' last name unwithheld.
Starting point is 00:03:03 Let's do some follow-up. What do you say? Pew, pew, pew. Thank you. thank you chris chris uh last name on withheld uh let's do some follow-up what do you say thank you uh i wanted to mention to upgrade listeners which if you're listening to the show guess what you are an upgrade listener that the membership bonus is up this is relay anniversary month and if you are a supporter of, you get a bunch of bonus episodes this time of year from all of the great shows. Just walked right into that. And you can go to relay.fm membership to find out more. But we have many, many, many bonus episodes up. The upgrade bonus is once again an upgrade Cortex crossover bonus.
Starting point is 00:03:43 We're doing another text adventure last year we did the six gun showdown this year it's spooky manor featuring me as the parser your computer your apple 2 and mike and cgp gray are the players arguing about what things they should enter what commands they should enter into the computer in order to navigate through a scary, haunted, or not, maybe. Who knows? House. A spooky house.
Starting point is 00:04:13 I haven't heard this one yet, but last year's was epic, and your commitment to character was really inspiring. Commitment is a strong word for being a... Sometimes he's a computer, other times he's a person who's trying for the game to not run off the rails much like cgp gray yeah yeah there you go so that that's mine but the that it doesn't stop there because you and i merlin we both have other podcasts on relay and that means we both have other membership bonus things that are happening either they're up or they're coming up soon what do you have yeah these things are coming out like one a day. It's crazy balls.
Starting point is 00:04:45 Well, I'm very happy to say for the second year in a row, John Syracuse and I with our show we do called Reconcilable Differences, our member episode is up. It is called Peak Idiot. And it is, I think, a very entertaining visit with Alex Cox and Max Temkin from Cards Against Humanity with whom I do the Do By Friday podcast. And it's manic and funny and it's serious and long-winded. And I think if you like any of those shows, you should check it out.
Starting point is 00:05:12 Because these things are just, they're so good. A lot of the shows, I love that they do something different, mix it up a little bit. And like Syracuse says, I mean, I'm happy to have my show up there, but I really enjoy all the other, all the great shows. It's really great. You got another one, though, don't you? There's so many.
Starting point is 00:05:28 So, Alex, by the way, and Savannah, who do Roboism on Relay FM, they did, similar to what you did, a crossover with a different podcast from outside of Relay. We did a Roboism robot or not crossover where they quizzed me and John Syracuse about Elon Musk facts. So that's up as an extra for Relay members. It's not a draft. It's a quiz. And John would point out, and I'm surprised he didn't point this out during the episode, that the format of the quiz, which was basically each of us got to answer separately and sort of not even decide who would answer first uh was was questionable in the sense that once i was ahead of john by one point i
Starting point is 00:06:11 could have just kept guessing the same thing he guessed and guarantee my win which i didn't do but it was i questioned the game show structure of it but it was a lot of fun he's very competitive uh given that he's a good cop. Very competitive fella. Yeah, absolutely. You know, he's a gamer. He's a good player. We did a free agents episode that will be coming out on September 1st. David Sparks and I were in the same place at the Masters of Automation conference a couple of weeks ago. And so we recorded a couple episodes of free agents.
Starting point is 00:06:42 The current episode that's out, which is about David's sort of history and how he got where he is today. You know, going through law school, going to a firm, and then going out on his own. It's really, if you ever wondered about David's backstory, it's a great episode. But we also recorded a totally off topic, like the stuff that we do when we're not doing our jobs. Things we do for fun. A lot of Star Wars talk in there, because David's a huge Star Wars fan. I think I mentioned Star Trek at some point, just to try to counterbalance it a little bit so that's a good one we are going to do a download clockwise combo episode i'm not quite sure when that's going to happen we're still trying to work that out between me and steven hackett and dan and
Starting point is 00:07:18 micah and uh steven hackett and i have already, um, liftoff bonus episode where we watched last year, we watched Apollo 13. This year we watched contact, um, starting Jodie Foster, which is not, not, uh,
Starting point is 00:07:32 based in a true story. As far as you know, make it clear. Uh, it's, I don't think we contacted aliens in, uh, the Clinton administration,
Starting point is 00:07:40 but you never know. You're going to get a tweet from Neil, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maybe it's possible it's possible he's probably working on his book it's made me really i just want to say thank you to everybody who has joined up i here on the back channel things are going pretty well which makes me feel great and i've gotten a lot of nice little notes and toots from people to say that uh they went and they signed up i mean for as little as five dollars a month um it's not simply to have
Starting point is 00:08:04 my own pocket. I like that it helps the whole network. So I just want to say thanks to everybody who's done that. Yeah, absolutely. You can sign up for the All the Great Shows plan, which supports all the shows on the network. Or if you have one show like this one or one of the other ones that you really love, you can support it directly and the money goes there and uh and a common question is if i sign up for to support upgrade do i get all of the specials and the answer is yes you get all the specials for all the shows for this year and for last year they're all in one feed you get the feed information when you sign up for a membership so thank you and that ends our pledge drive this is
Starting point is 00:08:40 one thing also we don't we don't talk about this every week of the year this happens in pledge pledge time and then we go away so um more hardware uh draft stuff though to talk about for follow-up i think this this qualifies for follow-up last episode was the apple hardware draft me mike steven hackett john syracusa and alex cox uh drafted apple hardware and that was a fun episode that that totally could have been a membership member special but because oh i didn't even do it we're gonna do it right now get get ready everybody look at their look at your overcast if you have a chance here we go merlin is here therefore we are continuing the upgrade summer of fun yeah i choose skeletor that's right merlin you're part of the summer of fun put a uh put
Starting point is 00:09:26 some flip-flops on merlin it's time uh it's casual yeah it's the summer of fun yeah one one of the parts of the summer of fun was we did the hardware draft because we were i was traveling mike was traveling we pre-recorded that episode couldn't have it be about anything timely it was a lot of fun then we stuck around and professor syracuse took us to school about blade runner that was good that was good you really you are really stuck on your position you you again you stayed in character the whole time you did not capitulate which which position is it the one that deckard's not a replicant or the one easy text no your position that you know it's fine it's fine that's that's what i get from you every time you talk about Blade War. That's the classic Snell position, isn't it? It's like, it's fine.
Starting point is 00:10:07 Do you like our owl? Yeah. I think the owl's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Listener Jeffrey wrote in to say that Alex won his heart for taking the battery case, which I thought was an odd pick, but Jeffrey thinks, great. I freaking love that thing, he said.
Starting point is 00:10:30 And now I have a friend. Hasht i'm envious i got the big boy phone so they don't make it for mine but it's the people who have it seem to really love it yeah you got the big boy phone so you've got the big boy battery yeah you need a case i've been pretty happy with it but like it's funny how that started that was such a controversial release in so many ways because i mean the big story was, oh, look at this. Apple's even admitting that their battery sucks. But, you know, it's a little dim and short-sighted. But, you know, anybody could use more battery power. I'm lousy with Jackeries.
Starting point is 00:10:55 I've got so many batteries all over the place that I use for everything. But, like, having something on board like that can be really nice, especially if it's nicer to hold. Yeah, I hear that. I'm going caseless now. But I get it we on the road trip we had uh all of our phones at various points were were running out of battery life just being when you're once you're away from outlets all the time then you have that moment of like oh no right you take it for granted and then you you get to see your your battery life in action and lauren's phone is a i think it's an iphone 6 and it's
Starting point is 00:11:25 just getting long enough in the tooth now that it's having those kind of conditions where it gets down to the low voltage and it starts to get confused like i don't have any more battery power and then you plug it in for two minutes and it says now i've got 30 percent that's what is that what causes that my wife had that with hers as well it's a voltage thing i i went to the yosemite conference with a podcast listener who I believe works on the Apple or at that point anyway, worked on, on the Apple, uh, something about the iPhone team that was involved with batteries and charging and things like that. And he talked to me about, and it's like, this is one of the challenges with these chemical batteries that we use in all these devices is they don't know like the real capacity they're measuring the the power that's coming out of it and if the if
Starting point is 00:12:06 that uh measurement is they try they try their best right but that measurement is what it is and sometimes it can cause this scenario where it looks like it's less drained than it actually is because the battery is behaving different differently it also comes to that point where you if you've ever had that where like the phone shuts off and you're like what is going on and then you turn it back on it says says, oh, I'm fine now. Where what probably happened is that the phone tried to use more power than the battery could give it. It went into emergency shutdown. And then when you started to back up, whatever was the power drain is gone.
Starting point is 00:12:36 And so then it's like, oh, no, it's okay now. It's just, you know, it's not as Apple, you know, tries to cover up all of the, they sand off all the rough edges because they think like you don't want to be bothered by variability of battery life we're going to make it look like it's fine just like how when you charge to 100 it's not always at 100 like they don't because you can't keep feeding a battery that is it's not good to like let the battery drain down a tiny bit and then charge it back up again so when when you plug in your phone, it gets to 100%. It actually lets it, it stops charging, and it runs down a little bit. And they've written the software so it says it's at 100%, even when it's not, because they don't want people concerned about it,
Starting point is 00:13:16 but they want to do the right thing. Everybody would complain, like, but I had it plugged in, and it said it's 95%, right? So they just, they sand that little rough edge down. But the problem is that then when weird things happen all those edges are sanded off and as a owner of a phone you're like what the heck is going on right especially because that causes causes people such a panic i mean you post something on the internet that shows your phone at four percent and that's all anybody
Starting point is 00:13:39 notices yeah well that's true too there are people they watch those status bars i can see that your battery is running low that's right why would you reveal that to the world you should keep that perfectly private that opsec yeah uh todd wrote in uh listener todd to say steven hackett was close but no one picked his favorite which was the 2003 17 inch power book i hate you all. XOXO. See, again, it's, you know. And he also said, and no one picked a Newton. Shame, shame, shame. I think no one picked a Newton because we picked good Apple hardware. Oh, snap.
Starting point is 00:14:17 I said it. No, you didn't. Oh. And I have nothing particularly positive to say about the 17-inch PowerBook, other than that it makes a great lunch tray, but you had one of those, right? You had a 17-inch PowerBook. You sent me down memory lane with some of this follow-up. It's funny.
Starting point is 00:14:35 So I had, and I put this in your document, when I had my dot-com job, I got, I believe this is the one I got. I got an Apple Powerbook g3 400 i had the lombard where it had the little bays that you could have two batteries or one battery plus a dvd player you know an optical drive uh and i just i sent it sent you this link on every mac.com the thing weighed 5.9 pounds which is three approximately three of my macbook adorable it was it was it was a it was a beefy boy and i loved it i loved it so much it was my first laptop that i owned i used to take the old what are the ones that was the powerbook 100 i think you mentioned that on the
Starting point is 00:15:18 show that i used to bring that one home from work every night when i discovered the internet and that was it was so amazing and plug it into the modem and all of that. But I love, I love my, uh, my Lombard, but it was really, it was getting very long in the tooth. Uh, and then I eventually got a gig and I treated myself to the 17 inch power book and it was really, really big. What did that thing weigh? Do you remember? I don't. It was pretty beefy. It was beefy it was it was yeah i mean the way it was sold was essentially it's a desktop computer that you can fairly easily carry from place to place because it was yeah it was not i mean it was a 17 inch laptop it was really not meant to be portability wasn't the point other than like moveability so what we used to call back
Starting point is 00:16:05 in the classic mac days lugability i mean i imagine we're gonna get to this in a bit but it was such an interesting time where there was these these different ends of the spectrum that was for somebody who said well i'm reluctant to get a laptop because i need my big screen and it definitely served that but uh boy it was a monster i finally i think i finally i you know i need to go and make sure all of the batteries are out because i could you get the swelling batteries we've got some very swelly batteries especially the uh the 12 inch old 12 inch g4 so those boys get real swelly but uh yeah i just i just think that was such an interesting time i'm glad they made it you know they. They were swinging for the fences with that one.
Starting point is 00:16:45 This is always the question about Apple and what they make, that when they keep it super simple, everybody's like, ah, yes, Apple with its discipline and its limited product set. Always with Steve's two-by-two grid, right? Right, right. So that gets fetishized a little bit of like, oh, keeping it simple. But the downside of the super simple product grid, there's an upside the days before that grid right where there was like 10 different performa systems with different numbers and it was like super confusing and he wanted to simplify it down
Starting point is 00:17:14 but if you if you get to that point the downside of the of the simplified product grid is that if you want you know if you you can have any laptop you want as long as it's black basically like there's only the one laptop and that frustrates people too but if apple then says well what we're gonna here's what we're gonna do we're gonna have a macbook air and a macbook and a 13 inch macbook without touch bar and a 13 macbook pro with touch bar and the 15 with touch bar then people are like oh that's so confusing you have so many laptops where's the old apple that was so focused and limited and you know it goes both ways i think having more choice is better i think the challenge is that you know how much energy mental energy is apple focusing on the mac right now and do they really want i feel like they're already being kind of dragged reluctantly
Starting point is 00:18:00 into building a mac pro and a monitor for the mac pro and and they've got the imac pro so even though and they sell all of these laptops so much of the product line is laptops but i do wonder like how many macs can we expect apple to make today because i do think that yeah the more mac models you get this is the argument for the mac mini too it's like why does the mac mini exist it doesn't sell particularly well but it sort of sweeps up a whole bunch of people who are like i really need to buy a mac but and it answers a lot of those questions is like but i can't because and you say but mac mini will do that for you right like that it solves that and you know that's that's good to do as long as apple thinks that it's worth their their time and their
Starting point is 00:18:42 energy and their focus and it just feels like that's not the case like it used to be. Yeah. The other thing is, I mean, obviously the times have changed. So much has changed. You know, this was, we're talking about a time here when, so for example, on that PowerBook, on my Lombard, I got, I think it was an Orinoco card. So you'd have this kind of ungainly card sticking out
Starting point is 00:19:03 if you wanted to have Wi-Fi when Wi-Fi became a thing, which is kind of right around this time. But, you know, it's – I think – not to feed the anger, but I think if there's something that frustrates people, you look at somebody like – I think Marco has addressed this really well in talking about, for example, trying to take your Mac – maybe an extraordinary situation. But take your laptop somewhere where you want to be able to be connected to power and be able to record things etc etc etc it's just back then i think it really was presented as or at least it felt like it was presented as here's a trade-off right so i went from i had a g3 at the lombard then i had the 17 inch and then and maybe 2005 or 6 i picked up the 12 inch which i instantly fell in love with but they really you know they really were for different things and then i found i bought somebody's used one after that i used to complain about this on mac break weekly like why don't
Starting point is 00:19:52 they keep making this amazing laptop but you know you understood that hey that that 12 inch laptop was really that screen was crazy small but you had the benefit right you had the benefit of now having this ultra portable thing that was actually fine for writing if you had the benefit, right? You had the benefit of now having this ultra-portable thing that was actually fine for writing. If you had to do a lot of graphic stuff, yeah, you like that 17-inch. I think the feeling now, at least with some old Mac stalwarts who we may be shown our age and how out of date we are, but that's the frustrating part is where you feel like there is no truly high-end. Where, you know, the sort of like Fry throwing your money at the camera, like, take my want to have all the ports like it's not dell like you're not going to get that and i think that's what drives people a little crazy is that as marco i think aptly it was an episode of
Starting point is 00:20:32 atp where he talked about this even if you do everything the right way you still can't do all the stuff and have power it's like the the ecosystem is not where it needs to be to do anything where you would want a laptop as portable device that is a truly able replacement for a desktop. And I think that's what drives people crazy. It's funny, you gave back the five inches there to go from the 17 to the 12. Listener Andrew wrote in to say, I get not drafting it, but not considering the 12-inch PowerBook G4 as one of Apple's best. Well, I considered it. It was on, I think, my long list. Maybe I didn't mention that in the Bring Out Your Dead round at the end.
Starting point is 00:21:06 But I love the 12-inch PowerBook G4. I loved it so much. And, you know, I used those small – I used the iBook, the white iBook and the black iBook and the 12-inch PowerBook. And that's why I got the MacBook Air. I mean, and that's why I got the 11-inch MacBook Air ultimately, right? I love those little laptops. That 12-inch PowerBook G4 was amazing at the time. It felt pretty magical at the time.
Starting point is 00:21:30 I was doing stuff with my pal Danny O'Brien at the time and I had my 17-inch and he had that 12-inch and he'd sit there on a chair in my house with this thing in his lap and I was just sending arrows at him. I wanted it so much. I was like that tiny little... And then I got it and I loved it.
Starting point is 00:21:44 It was perfect for writing. It was great for stuff like that that's just like that scene on game of thrones last night where there's uh the mountain and uh and tyrian lannister are next to each other it's just like that it's a 17 inch 17 inch laptop 12 inch laptop right next to each other exactly like that the contrast enjoy the contrast um listener k lango wrote in to say thanks jason for picking what you picked last i was screaming it in my head when round three began which is that was my controversial choice of the laser writer which it's just funny i forgot i didn't realize that people had forgotten how important that thing was it changed if you didn't live through it it changed the game yeah totally totally did i. It's not just a printer.
Starting point is 00:22:28 That's what caused desktop publishing to happen, basically. It was a huge deal. Yeah, I mean, like in our Mac lab at my college, circa 1988, 89, there was a bunch of SEs. And then there was, I feel like the SE30 wasn't out yet, but we had a higher end one that could do more stuff. And the ability to run PageMaker on there and to graphically use those window shades to pull text down i mean that's how my career such as it is began was desktop publishing and graphics i wasn't very good at it but other people didn't
Starting point is 00:22:55 do it i knew how but that would not have been the same without the laser writer the laser writer that ability to just go print in a few seconds what you had on screen gorgeously what 300 dpi i mean it was it changed everything yep yep it was uh it's just one of those things where it's like it's so easy to overlook it now if you didn't live through it but um it's it changed the world and so that was and you know we're doing a draft i like to keep something in my best in my back pocket that's a little unusual right and uh remind people though when you when you get the you forgot syndrome from people you forgot so you know you kind of go well you know it's a draft we can't have all the things or it wouldn't be a draft yeah that's right i didn't maybe we didn't forget it so when people
Starting point is 00:23:37 write in say i can't believe you didn't pick yeah there's only which happens with every single draft that i've ever done right There's only two possible responses. And one is, well, we just didn't get to it. You're right. That was a great thing. It was on maybe somebody's list and we just didn't get to it. The other response is, oh, we didn't forget. Like, I know you wanted us to pick that one, but we don't like, like the Newton is one of those where I guess John might've picked the Newton at some point.
Starting point is 00:24:04 The Newton is interesting in some ways it was like in all apple history of hardware made by apple would i ever pick a newton it's like picking an eight track player it's like you remember that fondly but do you remember really actually having to have an eight track player as the way you listen to the music it was the worst i've angered all eight newton fans thank you very much to everyone for listening i have two newtons i have two newtons in my house it's a weird product uh they should i should put them together one of them is in a little leather leather zip up case and the mother of dragons yeah let's take a break uh from uh follow-up and let me tell you about a sponsor yes because mike is not here i will tell you about ero never think
Starting point is 00:24:47 about wi-fi again ero has created the dream wi-fi setup a fast reliable connection throughout your house even your backyard now is the best time to get on board with ero as they've just released their new super slick second generation devices i have them here they are powering the snell house wi-fi right at this moment. Super easy to add them in using the Eero app. And my network stayed up as I was adding in devices and then removing other devices. It was pretty great. It's a tri-band second generation model. And they also have the Eero beacon, which lets you build a Wi-Fi system that's perfectly tailored for your home. I got a box that had one of the main main era base stations and two of the beacons which uh communicate to the base station and extend
Starting point is 00:25:29 very easily without any fiddly setup extend your wi-fi around your home so now the wi-fi camera and the smart light bulb that i have kind of in an extended far front of the house get solid wi-fi i never knew that i would need to extend my wi-fi base station for a light bulb but this is where we are in 2017 the new second generation aero includes a third five gigahertz radio so it's twice as fast as before this lets you do more than ever whatever your wi-fi needs aero has the power to blanket your whole home and fast reliable wi-fi it sits flat on any surface plug it into the wall with the included power adapter and you're ready to connect your arrow either with ethernet or wirelessly
Starting point is 00:26:09 new arrow also includes a new thread radio which is going to let you connect to low power devices such as smart home devices and the new beacon you plug it into a wall that's it it expands coverage it's got a little night light with an ambient light sensor so it will also be a night light plus extend your wi-fi and uh that works great can i can i join in and endorse on this i don't want to interrupt you it's your show join join i was just gonna say people some people don't like the night lights they like i like well you can turn that off you can have the leds on we are all in on the ero lifestyle they were kind enough to send me this the second generation one uh it took about 15 minutes to set up. And I really, really like it. I do this really dumb compulsive thing where
Starting point is 00:26:50 when it occurs to me, uh, all of a sudden I'll be laying in bed as I do, and I'll pop open the app and I'll go in, I'll just go test the wifi and just go test the wifi. And then today, here's the crazy thing. I'm in my bedroom. I'm two beacons away from the actual source of internet. And I was getting one 30 megabits down in my bedroom. I don't have, I don't have Fios. This is with just a cable town, but we were getting like one 30 down with two beacons away from the actual
Starting point is 00:27:14 source. And you can also go in what I love. This is so anal. You do not need to do this, but you can go in and it shows you all of the devices that are currently on your network and all the devices that were recently on your network. So my sister-in-law was at the house this weekend and I saw that her phone was on there. And so I go in, I give it an emoji, I give it a nice name. And if I ever see something on there that seems super weird, I can block it. I love the app. It's
Starting point is 00:27:39 so rare in this age of terrible internet security cameras, don't get me started. But in this era, it's so nice to see an app that actually really works and is working for you. It's making sure that everything is working even when you're not using it. This is a great product. And you said two beacons away. I think that's the thing that if you're somebody who is skeptical of the idea that you aren't just getting your Wi-Fi from an Ethernet-wired base station, that all of these extenders are bad, right? That used to be the case. Extending a Wi-Fi with an unwired connection that was just a repeater used to be pretty janky. I did that for a little while, and it was not really reliable.
Starting point is 00:28:17 And these beacons from Eero, it's new tech. They have multiple radios, so they're talking to each other on one band while the Wi-Fi is on a different band, and the speeds are impressive. So if you've got a hard-to-wire house where you're not going to be able to run Ethernet or PowerLine or anything like that to other parts of the house, you can chain the beacons together and actually get good Wi-Fi where you need it, which is pretty great. Especially since now we do have these connected home devices that are in our backyards or front yards or whatever and are on wi-fi and they need now you need a wi-fi signal where you may never be but there's a device there that needs to get on your wi-fi so the new ero system starts at 399 that gets you one second generation ero plus two beacons to put throughout your home that's everything you need to get started listeners to upgrade can get free overnight shipping to the u.s or canada go to ero.com that's eero.com use the promo code upgrade for free overnight shipping to the u.s or canada go to ero.com that's eero.com use the
Starting point is 00:29:06 promo code upgrade for free overnight shipping thank you to ero for their support of upgrade thanks for the help merlin that was nice oh my pleasure it's a good good product yeah a little bit of a guest endorsement yeah they didn't tell us to say that that's because it's the summer of fun oh i'm hearing my flip-flops let's tell you you take them off now and put uh the sand between your your toes just visualize visualize hawaii so uh topic number one i think should probably be that it's the end of august which means september which is a big month for apple stuff it's just around the corner dying for something to finally talk about i know like it's the month it's the i i think we said back in june i said this feels like august at some point this feels like an august story to mike because there's that the the
Starting point is 00:29:54 after wwdc you get into this sort of like there's some rumors and all that but really you're kind of putting it in cruise control for the betas of the of the os and you know there's going to be a hardware event in the fall and the os's will get finalized and all that will happen and here we are at the end of august and um invitations to a new apple event could come out at any moment they they uh they haven't come out as we record this but they really could come out now or maybe now or maybe now could be now sometime in the next couple of weeks. There was a French website called Mac Forever that a few days ago reported that they thought the event was going to happen on September 12th. And I was like, okay, but I don't really know anything about this site. But a slightly
Starting point is 00:30:37 more reputable organization today confirmed that September 12th date, and that was the Wall Street Journal. So I think it's more likely that it'll happen. The Journal 12th date and that was the wall street journal so i think it's more likely that it'll happen uh the journal reported though that was kind of interesting that um they basically were like they want to do it at the steve jobs theater on the new apple campus but they don't know if they're going to be able to do that or not and um i'm pretty sure they know where they're going to have that event if it's going to be in two weeks right i think they probably know um but maybe the journal source doesn't know that it's also possible my guess is what they did was at some point they as they
Starting point is 00:31:12 always do they probably reserve some dates at a venue or even venues and plotted them out on the calendar like you know we're gonna we're gonna take september the 6th here and we're gonna take the 12th here and maybe even like we'll take the 19th at this venue and they might have been the same venue or maybe some different venues because i'm sure they weren't counting on the steve jobs theater being ready like they probably have to hedge that so but now with two weeks to go like at some point if they're if they're going to be at the flint center or at the mchenry convention center or at the bill uh bill graham civic auditorium in san francisco where they've been the last two they're gonna have to start like building stuff right because they they don't just
Starting point is 00:31:55 take the building as it is they they erect like demo areas and it depends on you know which the venue is but they they've for the flint center and for bill graham uh like the yerba buena events that they've done in the past they've actually built up like their own structures around the venue in order to get exactly what they want that's presumably the steve jobs theater gives them all of the stuff that they normally have to build they get to have complete control it's their property right but since these other places that's not the case i think we'll we'll see pretty quickly here that either they're going to be somewhere else and they've got to do the build or they really are going to do it on apple the apple park campus which that would be exciting if that was our first uh
Starting point is 00:32:40 our first view of the apple park campus was the iPhone event this fall. That would be awesome. But it sounds like at least this reporting can't pin it down. All it could do is say they'd like to have it there. And I have no doubt that they would like to have it there. I just don't know if they're going to manage it. Yeah, and I just don't have any information about this. But I would have to, I guess, guess that they would not want the first high profile event at the theater named
Starting point is 00:33:08 for steve jobs to go anything but flawlessly i do i do wonder about that like i had the thought of do you want i get wanting to make your big splash iphone event the first event at the at the steve jobs theater i also wonder like would you be better off with a slightly lower profile event like an october event where you announce some minor stuff or a or a you know a spring event where you announce some new max or whatever would that be a better time to to do a dry run at that theater rather than because the iphone event is the big event like the most people care about it um it's the one that generates the most web traffic it generates the most video streams it is the biggest uh attendance in terms of like press and vip attendance the wwdc keynote is bigger but that's because they're all the developers who are at the conference there but like the iphone event is the big event. And so it's going to put all the stress, maximum stress on this new venue and the
Starting point is 00:34:09 infrastructure, the networking infrastructure, like everything at the new campus. So I don't know, maybe they're going to go for that, but that's a big one if that's what they do, to have the first event be this high profile, big event. So I feel like if I had to guess at this point, given that I have yet to even talk to somebody at Apple who has moved into the new Apple Park campus, I know they're moving people in, but I keep running into people or chatting with people who are probably going to move there who are like, oh yeah, we haven't moved there yet. Now that's been a month or so, but it's like, I don't know. We're like, oh yeah, we haven't moved there yet.
Starting point is 00:34:44 Now that's been a month or so, but it's like, I don't know. My gut feeling is that if I had to pick, I'd say it's more than a 50% chance that they will be somewhere else. I know they really want to do it. I'm sure they really want to do it. And it's great if they do, but it is like high stakes for a brand new facility. They must have supreme confidence. high stakes for a brand new facility they must have supreme confidence um and it just it feels like i don't know we're getting we're getting down to the wire here but if they set a date they must have confidence or they've decided to not go with it that's that's the funny thing
Starting point is 00:35:15 because i figured like if they're doing it on their own campus they don't need to set the date right they could they could say well it turns out we're not going to do the 12th we're going to do the 19th or we're going to do the 26th they could do that they're free to do that if it's on their campus they can pick a date all of these old rules about venues outside venues are gone because they control that site it's completely theirs they they have they can call an event there on the drop of a hat i mean that's not really true because there's still lots of event prep they have to do even if it's an on-campus event but they control everything about it in a way that they don't when it's the flint center or or bill graham or something like that so i don't know but if it's
Starting point is 00:35:53 the 12th that's like the last two years it's been the wednesday after labor day this puts it back to where it was three years ago which is the tuesday the second week in september which i think is a better a better time. And all the rumors are that they're going to load up. I mean, it's going to be one of those packed events again because there's a rumor that there's a next generation Apple Watch. There's a 4K Apple TV. Of course, there's the new iPhone, which sounds like we may be seeing three new models, including the high-end OLED model that has been rumored so much.
Starting point is 00:36:26 And then the OS launches presumably would happen then too so there's there's just a huge swath of stuff it's hard they like to fit that in two hours right but that that that's a packed event that is the packed event if they're doing all of that plus possibly like homepod update um i don't know there's a lot going on that could be so much thing you get that feeling when you when you watch it i mean they feel like they are becoming more and more uh propulsive and and how quickly they move through them where like the last one i guess from dob dob was when uh it just felt like it was almost breathless how quickly they were moving through it there's so much stuff it's kind of like the news cyclone all right like there's so
Starting point is 00:37:04 much stuff that almost would have been its own event at one point that now becomes like a few words on a slide. It's crazy. And stuff gets knocked out and announced early, which is something that I actually do expect that to happen in the next couple of weeks, too, is that we're going to start getting some things that just get announced. Yeah, 4K Apple TV. I mean, I think that's something that probably doesn't need a huge amount of stage time.
Starting point is 00:37:23 Well, I think if they're really pushing the power of the Apple TV and they want to reset the narrative, which is currently like Apple stuff is overpriced and not as good and they're way behind in losing market share. I think you want it on stage if say yeah we're we've got all this hdr 4k content that we're making available on itunes or on our service that'll be on the apple tv like i feel like when mike comes back and we play keynote uh keynote draft that's going to be one of the draft items is like you know a a uh an entertainment industry executive extols the virtues of Apple TV with their new content on stage. Cause that,
Starting point is 00:38:08 that's, that's the thing is somebody from ABC comes out there from Disney comes out there and says, for the first time anywhere, we're going to put 4k movies. It becomes a little bit of a MacGuffin in some ways, but, uh,
Starting point is 00:38:18 just hearing people talk about seeing 4k, I think Mike talked about this, but seeing 4k, uh, in person, it sounds a little bit like VR where you can describe it and you can analogize it but like watching somebody use vr is not super persuasive and with the 4k it's like seeing that 4k on a tv that you're watching in the room yeah is apparently really quite a thing and i just don't know how well that's going to play in a non-analogized way
Starting point is 00:38:42 you know how do you show off hd on an sd tv you can't Well, yeah, how do you show off HD on an SDTV? You can't. You really can't. How do you show color on a black and white TV? You can't do it. So I agree it's a hard sell, but I feel like they'll probably put their shoulder into it a little bit because they want to plug this stuff.
Starting point is 00:38:58 But you're right, as a consumer, it's hard. The truth is I've got a 4K TV. I've got a 50-inch 4K TV. And I think it's too small and too far away from our couch for me to really notice the difference i do watch stuff in 4k on it and granted it's netflix so it's really compressed but the 1080 stream is really compressed on netflix too and maybe it looks better maybe that's just a placebo i think the reality is that 4k matters most if you're somebody who has a very big tv
Starting point is 00:39:26 and that's a slice of the market that cares but it's a relatively limited slice of the market the hdr stuff might actually be more interesting because that's what i that's what i hear yeah yeah it's in you know i guess eventually it's going to depend i guess more and more stuff is pushing this content out but like as of now we have a 1080p tv that's badly in need of replacement um but like i deliberately do not sit too i'll sit a lot closer to the screen for watching a pixar movie from apple than i will for watching say game of thrones because it's very disappointing to sit close to the tv for that you go yeah you go blind their compression their compression if you sit too close to the hbo's compression is rough it's bad yeah well compression compression is not good i mean when when you sit too close to a tv um and do this if you haven't like if you've got a digital source
Starting point is 00:40:16 of any kind um go walk up close to your tv and look at the uh at the compression because it's pretty staggering you're not you can't sit too close because it's meant to fool you from at least a little bit of a distance that's that's sort of the point yeah it looks like a jpeg from you know 10 years ago but the hdr stuff i think the idea that you can get blacker blacks and brighter brights and that there's more dynamic range across the the picture is something that's going to pop out more and so you put 4k plus hdr together and the message you know part of is, is this a conspiracy to sell more television sets? Totally, because 3D didn't work. And the HD revolution is over. Everybody's already got HD now. So they got to move on to the next thing. And 4K HDR is the latest attempt by the TV industry
Starting point is 00:41:01 to sell you a new television set and some people will get a lot out of it but it's not we're never going to see i think in our probably in our lifetimes unless there's like a headset thing that that ends up being amazing but it's going to be a while before we see something that's as dramatic a jump as sd to hd for the regular average everyday viewer where they're like oh yeah now i got a widescreen tv with hd it looks way better after that all of this stuff is way more incremental and i'm excited about it because i do kind of care more than the average person is it cares about it but even even i with my 4k tv look at this i'm like yeah you're also going to get into this is a whole other you know kettle of fish but then you're going to get into, I just recently reached your point
Starting point is 00:41:48 where I got the eh-eh-eh letter from Comcast. Oh, yeah, like you've downloaded a terabyte and you need to pay us a lot more money now. Yeah, you just got your first freebie. But after this, it's going to be real interesting because suddenly all of the providers of that pipe, I mean, that's going to get real interesting when even like a, I imagine,
Starting point is 00:42:08 even a fairly small number of their audience starts getting, you're talking about a very, very, very large file at that point. But anyway, ecosystems. Yeah, it's, they're still going to want your money. You're just going to pay it to different people for different things, but they're still going to get their money
Starting point is 00:42:23 if you want to watch this stuff. And yeah, 4K streams streams the 4k streams use uh more the high efficiency video codec stuff so okay they are they are better than a comparable you know uh mpeg4 stream but still it's a higher bit rate and i think we can all agree it's uh times of confusion times of confusion well said uh we We should mention the iOS 11 beta. There's new beta today, in fact. Oh, I didn't see it. They're going to be recording this a couple hours later. Usually they release during the show, but they released it right before the show this time.
Starting point is 00:42:55 I was traveling with my iPad running iOS 11. I love iOS 11. You're on iOS 11 too, right? Yeah, look at that developer beta 8 is out. I have it on two ipads but not my phone because i'm not a crazy person i did that i did that this last week i realized if i'm gonna write about ios 11 i i need to finally bite the bullet and put it on my phone well i mean it's i bet it's pretty far along well you know what it was it was just cost benefit of
Starting point is 00:43:19 you know am i likely to see i mean this is so obvious but it's worth saying because there are people who will go out and and like it's a different era. They will just go out and put stuff on their device. Well, that's your phone. Like you're not going to, if your kid falls down a well, you don't get the call. You're going to be bummed. But I have been loving iOS 11. I'm not even doing that much with the drag and drop, but there's so much, there's so
Starting point is 00:43:40 few things that I hate and a lot of things that I just really, really, I love having a ton of apps down in that little dock thing. I love that. I wish they'd bring back easier now playing controls because I live in Overcast all day long and the big swipe to get to Overcast is still kind of a bummer. But being able to control the Apple TV with one click from the control center is so boss. Yeah. I added...
Starting point is 00:44:03 I just customized the control center on my um on my phone since i went to 11 on my phone and that's pretty amazing like i got to remove some stuff that i don't care about and like launching the apple calculator it's like i'm gonna use pcalc i'm not gonna use your calculator but you must feel like captain kirk you got it all right there right i got low i got low energy mode here i got uh i got the wallet i got uh i got screen recording i got i got home kit it's all it's all there and of course the flashlight which now has a little uh little uh scaly thing so you can like step it up and down just right it's very nice very nice i love it love it yeah are you on the tv os beta no i did that just for uh poops and
Starting point is 00:44:43 giggles and i haven't noticed much except for there's two things i've noticed both of which i like one is you know auto switching to dark mode but one my daughter discovered uh this weekend is you know how like you're watching something and if you just kind of lightly brush the area the mousing area you get a pop-up with the scrubber yeah if you lightly do that again it shows you the current time and the time that area you get a pop-up with the scrubber yeah if you lightly do that again it shows you the current time and the time that what you're watching will be finished which is really nice for bedtime reasons you don't have to do any arithmetic it's really cool no math that's no math that's cool i did that today with faithful findings i was able to see it in nine at 9 35
Starting point is 00:45:18 faithfully greatest ending of a movie ever oh boy i wonder yeah that's one of those that's one of those flop house movies that i've actually seen ending of a movie ever will come. Oh, boy. Oh, Faithful Findings. I wonder, yeah. I have seen it. That's one of those Flophouse movies that I've actually seen. I know.
Starting point is 00:45:29 It's one of the very, very few that I've seen. It's very dramatic when he's on the steps of the Supreme Court giving his speech. Well, what you have to understand that he's hacked in.
Starting point is 00:45:36 He's got all the documents and he's discovered all of the secret government and corporate secrets. Dear listeners, all I have to tell you is don't watch Faithful Findings. What?
Starting point is 00:45:44 Just don't do it. Oh, you're so wrong oh my god snow was wrong pound sign oh no this is one of the great movies if nothing else treat yourself go search on youtube faithful findings end and treat yourself to arguably the greatest ending to a movie of all time marlin i have really enjoyed watching fateful findings but i want to just when somebody who's a complete innocent and stumbles on it um i want to i want deniability i want to be able to say it's so nice to watch because because people say things i this i'll give you i'll let the cat out of the bag this is the challenge for this week's dubai friday and and people always say similar things we're like oh i'm not into bad movies and i say oh sweetheart this this is not a bad movie this is way more they go what is this
Starting point is 00:46:23 like the room i'm like no the Room is so much more competent than this. Oh, yeah. This is like if an alien got a fax. Described it that way. It's like this is as if a movie was made by someone who's never seen a movie. Should I have more shots of people's shoes? Yes. Oh, the shoes.
Starting point is 00:46:42 The shoes. Watch for the shoes. And you do watch Faithful Findings, and I'm not saying you should. Oh, not saying you should oh watch the shoe shots there are so many shots of people so much blood dripping and and shirts hitting the ground with the thud we should probably put that in show notes that episode of the flop house is is is unimpeachably one of the great flop house episodes one of the greatest um uh final judgments ever i think yeah it's a it's amazing uh and i think that's still on amazon i think you can just go watch play tell you tell you secret uh i could not used to be on but uh i don't know if it's on amazon but there is a version on uh the site that rhymes with schmoo tube okay good
Starting point is 00:47:18 all right well i don't want you to pull it don't't pull it, Neil. This is important. Give Neil Breen your money. Whatever. Yeah. All right. Before we move on, you want to talk about, we're doing all this tea leaf reading. We're doing all this criminology. We always do this. I can make this very short. I can make this very, very short because this is something I think about a lot.
Starting point is 00:47:40 I'm just curious because this is the time of year when, you know, I like to give you a little bit of stick about this stuff because this is your job and that's what I do is give people stick. But, you know, you've come through this summer of fun where you don't get a lot of Apple news. And then the news starts kind of spinning up. And you start getting the purported leaks. And everything goes a little crazy. I think Gruber even has a name for this. But it's that crazy time of year when there's so much ludicrous stuff that's getting so much traffic.
Starting point is 00:48:02 And, you know, we are idiots and we will click on it. So my question to you, Jason Snell, is... It's the silly season. Silly season, that's it. When you're thinking about this stuff, I mean, obviously, you want to cover what's out there, because that's your deal. But I'm just, like, when do you think, I'm calling it Apple tea leaf reading or Kremlinology, when, how, and for whom is this kind of guesswork the most useful? Apart from the fact that we just enjoy it as a fun thought exercise, for whom especially do you think this stuff is most useful?
Starting point is 00:48:36 Is that a well-formed question? When is this guesswork useful to people? Well, I'm going to take you back in time for this because I get to do that. I have the right. Which is, I remember back in the for this because i get to do that i have the right which is i remember back in the day if you go back you may remember this too there was um back in the day there was a a newspaper basically a weekly newspaper called mac week you get a free subscription if you said you were uh somebody who bought stuff for your company they give you a free subscription right well and that is the key is is it was controlled
Starting point is 00:49:03 circ which meant that it was free but you had to prove that you had this amazing demographic which is that you bought lots of it equipment basically and that was because that was the target and then the advertisers would want to reach those people and that was the whole business model and that's why it was free you could not buy it it was not available on the newsstand you had to qualify as a power buyer and that i always was fascinating because i worked at the same company but i worked at mac user at the time and then later at mac world that mac week the whole premise was the reason that they reported on apple what apple was doing and other companies in the in the tech industry especially around apple in advance why they would get leaks why they would say say, here's what's coming next.
Starting point is 00:49:45 The premise was that it was for those qualified buyers who have a big budget to be aware of what's coming and plan their purchases accordingly. That was the foundation upon which this entire thing was built. Now, we know that lots of the people who subscribe to mac week lied about what was on their card because they wanted to know what apple was doing for fun basically like they were following it's like sports yeah it's like following a drama following a soap opera or something it's like a narrative it's peeking at the back of a book um it is it's rumors about what happens in the next star wars movie it's's that kind of thing. I want to know what happens next. And that was a portion of what drove that.
Starting point is 00:50:30 And I always felt, and I never worked there. So I'm sure people who worked at MacWeek would probably tell you, no, there really were people. The core audience of that publication was people who actually did have huge budgets and cared about what Apple was doing next so that they could plan. I'm not going to buy these Macs today because there's a new mac coming in two months and i'm going to wait for that or there's a new technology they're putting firewire in the max so i don't want to buy these old macs with you know whatever crappy wire is not fire full i want to buy the firewire max so you wait a couple of months and you buy the firewire max i get that but i feel
Starting point is 00:51:02 like and that that can work on an individual basis i'm thinking of buying a new imac i don't want to buy it today i want to buy it when the new one comes out in two months like there is a value there so there's some of that it's not it isn't so much of your buying decision it's you're not buying decision right so if there's about to be a revolution like i'm always asking syracuse like when is the right time for getting which kind of tv a tv yeah because that's a that's a really big investment and if you're some kind of an it operation and you're gonna getting all these seats and there's new licenses and all this kind of stuff like it's a it's good to know that like like you say if this is going to have the wire that's fire like i
Starting point is 00:51:37 will wait for that yeah exactly right so i think i think there's an aspect to that, but let's be honest. Like, we are also in the entertainment business. And it's weird to think of it that way, but... It's show business, not show friend. I think we... Oh, man, I have a story about that. I'll share it later. I think, you know, a lot of people who listen to these podcasts and all that, we care about this stuff.
Starting point is 00:52:03 We love it. And we want to know what's coming next. And Apple is the perfect company to talk about that because they are secretive. And they do interesting, weird stuff. And they surprise us or they try to surprise us. And that's why there's a whole industry of reporting on Apple stuff that still happens like in advance, these rumors and things like that, because Apple is the company that's conducive to that. Is everybody who's interested in this stuff doing it because they have a direct financial responsibility? No. A lot of the listening, and this is true for me too, is because it's entertaining. It is more than that. A lot of our people do work in the computer industry. They are the people who their friends come to and say, what should I buy?
Starting point is 00:52:40 And they want to be informed. That's all true. But the criminology stuff, especially about what Apple's doing next you know it's not just about being a very savvy uh institutional buyer of macintoshes right it's not it's not it is also about i want to know what's next you know i want to know tell me now tell me now and apple fights that and says no we want to make the splash when we want to make it we want to tell you the story when we're ready to tell you that story and that's why they're you know doing their doubling down on secrecy and all of that and that's fair enough i mean it's part of their marketing to be secret
Starting point is 00:53:12 and have uh have these surprises and i would argue it's probably part of their marketing even though they don't choose to do it this way i think it benefits them that there's a buzz about their stuff in advance and that people are buzzing about their products for months before they get announced. I think that benefits them too. Ultimately, as long as too much doesn't get leaked, I think it helps them that they get months and months and months of, oh, this might be a new feature in the new iPhone. I think that's good for them. So I think that's the truth of it is.
Starting point is 00:53:41 The Kremlinology stuff is fun and it can be informative especially in a what not to buy kind of thing what am i waiting for but um we shouldn't pretend that part of it is just not we all want to peek at what's coming in the next chapter yeah it's a little bit like any any little kid by say december 20th is gonna start rooting around you know i'm saying like even if you want to be if you're see i'm the kind of person i like being surprised my my daughter is constantly trying to tell me surprises for things that i'd like to be surprised about when it actually happens but you fight that impulse but eventually you're going to start rooting around seeing if
Starting point is 00:54:18 there's like a viewmaster waiting for you somewhere you know what i'm saying yeah uh in the chat room we got a comment about useful for developers to get an idea uh for the next ios release but the thing there is that that's the most boring release of all right ios and and mac unless there's a specific like interim release like we we all get the we know wwdc is going to happen in june and they're going to release the final in september thing that that's when you make uh underscore david smith's ad is in june i think yeah so you know i think i think keeping that in mind is important that it's not the uh it's not the i guess financial institutions like the wall street journal uh covering financial
Starting point is 00:54:55 perspectives of this that would be the other argument here is knowing more about where apple is going affects the uh investment and the stock price and people who are concerned about, you know, they're investors in Apple and they want to know where the company is going. And that is an argument that I don't make a lot because I am not an investor in Apple. I am not a financial journalist. I do not pay attention to Apple stock price. I don't cover the company as an investment. I cover it as a maker of products. And so for me, I don't care about that. But that is another aspect of this is you're an investor and you're trying to get every last little bit of information in advance
Starting point is 00:55:32 about what Apple's doing because that affects how you invest in Apple. Fair enough. But, you know, I think the bulk of it is we just want to know what the new toy is. I'm not here to yuck on a yum. I think it's of it is we just want to know what the new toy is. Yeah, I'm not here to yuck on a yum. I think it's fun, too. I just think it's – it is important to remember that it's not – that you not turn it – that one, not you, but that the consumer of this not use it to fuel a rage machine. That's the part where it gets a little silly. The silly season gets silly for me is when people take speculation about speculation, and then that becomes this sort of tribal thing where you're like there's there's really nothing of any consequence it's like imagine like fantasy
Starting point is 00:56:08 football but it's fantasy football of like football that doesn't even exist yet it's like how can you even speculate there is definitely a human nature thing um i had this come up about something i think on the incomparable where a uh a movie or tv project was announced. And my immediate thought was, oh, that's really clever. That could be good. Now, you never know. It could be good. It could be bad.
Starting point is 00:56:30 But it could be good. And somebody responded to me and said, no, that's terrible. What a terrible idea. It's going to be like this and it's going to be really bad. And my response was, you just invented the worst possible scenario
Starting point is 00:56:43 and then took it as proof that it was bad. But it's like you just did a little finger. You came up with the bad idea. You did a little thought exercise where you think about what if somebody was doing this for the worst possible reason? That's all I'm going to say about that. Yeah, but that's not necessarily the case. I think that's human nature in some ways is to crank up the outrage machine and you get a rumor and you imagine the worst and then you attack that as why are they doing the worst and sometimes it is the worst right i mean
Starting point is 00:57:10 that does happen but um sometimes it's not and that's i just think it's our human nature sometimes to to jump to those conclusions that's the face the face recognition thing with the new iphone is a good example of that and gruber and i talked about i was on the talk show last week with Gruber. We talked about this quite a bit and I know Mike and I have talked about it here and, and on both shows said the same thing, which is, um, you can look at the face ID rumors and say, Oh boy, is that really going to work or is it going to be bad? But I think it's a mistake. If you just jumped to the conclusion that it's going to be bad, touch ID was the same way. Oh, this is going to be janky. Nobody's going to that it's going to be bad touch id was the same way oh this is going to be janky nobody's gonna nobody's gonna believe this it's not going to work um and i look at that and think that biometric stuff is so core to what apple does that uh if they're doing it
Starting point is 00:57:54 it's because they got it right like and that's not me saying everything apple does is great and we should just love everything apple does that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is sometimes apple pushes things that are not quite right and they're but they're not key like the uh like the the um portrait mode or right in the in the six plus success plus where it kind of was in beta or it wasn't even there and in the first release it's like it wasn't a core feature it was nice but it wasn't super core um this is core to the product i feel like it's so so important that if it if it wasn't working it would not ship like it literally they would not do it it it can't be bad or they they have ruined their most important product if it's bad so um but you see people out there who
Starting point is 00:58:40 immediately see a rumor about something like that and they say oh well this is going to be terrible of course it's like okay i guess you can think that but um i don't think the evidence is is is that way and that's human nature i just think that we all we all tend to do that from time to time about something when we're not particularly enthused about it right that happens i get it thank you for your answer i am satisfied with my care all right don't watch fateful findings or do there'll be a link in the show notes. Don't miss. I think you misspoke.
Starting point is 00:59:06 You missed. You forgot Fateful Findings. Oh, okay. All right. Let's take a break. We have more to talk about. But first, I want to tell you about our next sponsor. This episode of Upgrade brought to you in part by TextExpander from our friends at Smile.
Starting point is 00:59:19 You can communicate smarter with TextExpander. Use it to power through repetitive communication by standardizing and improving those written replies you send every day. Boy, I need to do this. I have a couple of replies that I find myself typing from memory in email like once or twice a week. And I know that if like a year ago, I just sat down and set up a TextExpander macro for that, I would be able to save so much time. I need to do that because you can recall all your best and most frequently used words, create a keyboard shortcut, text expander pulls in the phrase or sentence or letter that you need, an email sign off, an introductory greeting,
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Starting point is 01:00:22 So there's so many reasons you can save time by using text expander and you can try it for 30 days for free on the mac ipad iphone or windows by going to textexpander.com slash upgrade fm to start your free trial today thank you to text expander for the support of this show for For instance, this entire conversation about TextExpander, if podcasts were like computers, I could put it in a little macro, and all I would have to say is, T-E.
Starting point is 01:00:56 And the whole ad would come out. But podcasts don't work like that, so we can't do that. Or you could be like me, and you got tired of misspelling your own name. Oh. And now I don't do that so much anymore, because I used to type Melrin. I would type Melrin.
Starting point is 01:01:09 I always type J Snow. You're a very fast typist. That's what I hear. That's what people tell me. I don't know. Where's that stick again? I don't measure it. S-D-A-T-E.
Starting point is 01:01:23 I can't even tell you how many times a day when I'm doing stuff, especially in text files. S-D-A-T-E is short date for me. So that would be know 2017 yeah nice bloop and uh it's the best you you will you will feel like you have boxing gloves on your hands once you start using this app and you go somewhere that doesn't have it it feels crazy you want it to be everywhere it's the best we should talk about so there was news last week about CrashPlan getting rid of their consumer online backup product and trying to migrate people to their small business product. And other people use Backblaze. Some people aren't doing online backup at all. There was a good conversation last week. This is, I guess, follow-out on ATP.
Starting point is 01:02:01 Yeah, it was a very good conversation. Every time I thought to myself oh they didn't mention this then they mentioned it it was like they really did a a good job so i think people should listen to that um one of the things i liked was um was marco talking about he gave like a cautionary tale and i feel like it's not necessarily like that he was practicing everything he preached but he wanted to have all of us i think a lot of us computer nerdy people have a pack rat tendency which is you know i'm gonna i'm gonna save this file because you never know or i'm gonna rip this blu-ray or dvd because i want to have all my movies or blu-rays on on my server and i might as well start now and marco was basically saying you know
Starting point is 01:02:45 every byte that you upload depending on what you're using it could cost you in time it costs you in money and do you really need it or is it readily available like itunes if you've bought it on itunes it's streamable you know you don't you don't need to have a copy that you also convert and save or something like that and i thought that was good i thought because and i find myself you know i resemble that remark a little bit but i i thought about that like when you've got terabytes and terabytes of storage it's just easy to never delete anything and that's great but at some point i think you have to realize like maybe there's a tier of stuff that i have that i don't need at all and I should delete it and then there's another tier
Starting point is 01:03:25 of stuff that I have that it's okay that I've got it but I don't need to back it up because it's easily replicable from somewhere it's got to be in there somewhere yeah right that's I think again that's not a very mindful thing to say but I that's my my beef or my so anyway to listen to that atp i found it very thought-provoking because it really got me thinking about the way that i do stuff and it was really sobering uh to me because it feels like in the age or era of like post drobo post dropbox you know our storage options have gotten very diverse and it's i think about where i was whenever super duper first came out and super duper i mean i'm not a technologist but super duper essentially will take a given uh hard drive whether that's your mac or whatever and turn it
Starting point is 01:04:17 into like a dmg so and it does it's a backup app and you can give it rules about what to do do you want to replace this do you utterly do you want to just update it but i used to be i used to have that uh i eventually had a shell script that was doing it for me maybe it's a launch d thing whereas automatically every night it was uh moving between two different i'm not putting this well i had two different dmgs for the sake of argument let's say odd and even number days and each night it would update to that one so if i had some kind of dumb thing i didn't realize i still had an update from two days ago probably overkill but the truth was i did not have unlimited storage space so i had an extreme amount of redundancy locally and i was great about it and then yeah you know what i also had a reminder to go in and test them periodically not that often but at least you know
Starting point is 01:05:04 your backups are only as good as what you can actually restore the time machine comes along dropbox certainly comes along uh you get a you get a you get a nause as i like to say you get these these devices and i think it made me a little more careless i think i don't on the one hand i don't think about it because i don't have to economize um i tend to go like meh just throw a bunch of stuff on there but But there's a cost to that. It's not a cost in money. It's a cost in clutter. It's a cost in certainty, for one thing.
Starting point is 01:05:31 Like, I used to be wired a lot more tight about this stuff, and I think it's time for me to revisit that. I mean, not least because do you really want to have that much of your stuff in that many places if you don't need it? Yeah. that much of your stuff in that many places if you don't need it yeah and and the fallout tends to happen now that i've got because i've got the uh i got the drobo and it's got like huge amounts of space and so i i don't need to do this and i i have um i have movies and tv shows and stuff for sure and some of those are probably unnecessary and i have gotten lax at it i've got podcast stuff too and this is a case where, um, I've, I've tried to apply a little bit of discipline where my podcasts that are not time that are not timely. I want to save
Starting point is 01:06:13 those files because I do occasionally go back and take like, do a special version of an old incomparable. And I, I saved the files and I can actually like clean it up and, and I pull the ads out and I, I put it out as a new version or something like that, like years after it's it's been out there. So I'll do those. But like this, this show or TV talk machine or clockwise back in the day or download, like, I save those files, because in the moment, if something is wrong, I need to go back to them. And then they sit there for ever, basically in my archive. And they don't need to sit there to them and then they sit there forever basically in my archive and they don't need to sit there unless it's a special episode or something they really just should die and i
Starting point is 01:06:51 thought about setting up like a hazel um script or something to just like look if there's a download episode for more than a month ago just wipe it out because there's no point in keeping it right and um where where the the rubber meets the road to me is not the free space on my on my uh raid array it's when we start talking about online backup which is why the crash plan thing came up which is that's unlimited online backup which is great but when you've got terabytes and terabytes and terabytes even on a fast internet connection it takes basically forever and i realized that one of the things i should probably do is start prioritizing like um what stuff really needs to get backed up and what stuff doesn't i actually
Starting point is 01:07:32 did this a few weeks ago with crash plan actually where i started to say you know what i'm not going to back up the clockwise folder and the download folder and the tv talk machine folder because i'm keeping some episodes around there but those episodes are done i'm done with those projects i'm probably never going to go back to those files if if i lose my server i don't care about losing those files other files i care about but but those i don't but if you don't have a current accounting of what all you're backing up it becomes a little bit you like i i ran into this with kid with kid photos where I've got kid photos, some are on the Drobo,
Starting point is 01:08:07 some are on Dropbox, some are here. I've been pretty good about it, but I, but I started starting in 2007 because I had this, this, uh, all of this space.
Starting point is 01:08:15 I just started going, man, it's here somewhere. It's gotta be here somewhere. And sometimes it's five copies of this one subset of the first six months of our life. But we've got periods where I feel like I should probably have more photos from this era. And I'm not even sure where to start looking. Like, am I going to go and like pull out these four naked hard drives with a rubber band around them
Starting point is 01:08:32 and just start going through all of these on the Drobo? I mean, there's a cost and then that creates anxiety. And then now you don't trust your stuff. Well, the last thing you want to do is what if I throw this hard drive away? It looks like there's nothing on it, but what if this is actually the only copy that's still in existence of those baby photos yeah that'll dog you forever and so then you end up just holding on to everything forever until you can't read it anymore it's so sobering like i i am a fan of i know there there are many apps that do this but i like daisy disc so there are many apps out there that will allow you to get a, usually a somewhat graphical look at a given hard drive
Starting point is 01:09:10 to see what files are on there. And the special benefit of apps like this or other ones, and I'm sure you can reel off other ones, is that it gives you this viewport to say, okay, let me go, show me my drive. And then you go into your home directory. And then you say, oh, so the biggest thing here is the one with my name on it. Well, that makes sense.
Starting point is 01:09:27 I go into there. The biggest file in here is application or is a library. That's weird. I go into library. I drill down further and I realize, oh my gosh, I've got iTunes backups of a device that I haven't used in two years. It might blow your mind to know how much of your drive is being eaten up with stuff that you really,
Starting point is 01:09:46 really, really don't need again. And if you treat all of that as being as important as the weekly podcast episode you just put out and will never listen to again, like that's a good time to reflect. Yeah. I will say that all of their talk about media and like, do you really need that media, did remind me of something that we've also, I think, talked about is these streaming services like you can't count on them if there's something you really love and you want to have access to you can't count on them i happened uh i was sick like a couple of months ago and is sick in bed and i decided i was going to look for stargate sg1 which is a one of my comfort food shows. I love that show, especially the
Starting point is 01:10:25 first like five years of it. Just love that show. Great sci-fi, fun show. And I realized it was only streaming on Hulu, which I have. And then I started to play an episode and it was this like four by three episode, which you'd think that's an older show. It probably was shot in four by three. But no, I have the DVDs of the first four years of stargate and they're all widescreen they shot that show in widescreen it was on showtime it was in hd way before a lot of shows were and it was in widescreen way before a lot of shows were and i realized oh my god um my dvds that are in a box in my garage are way better quality than what's available and i actually went and i ripped all of those and that's an example where that's a show that i had the dvds but i just assumed that i didn't need them anymore because it was streaming and the
Starting point is 01:11:11 fact is it's only streaming on one service and what's on that service is not very good and this has happened with like with buffy where it's gone from one place to another or it's disappeared dr who you know it goes off of one service and moves to another or maybe it doesn't for a while burrs was all up on netflix and now it's gone it's on hulu now i actually had to my my daughter is getting reacquainted with bob's burgers which she loves now because i i said oh no we've got a hulu account you can log into that too and watch that because she loves that show so that's that is part of it that i will point out is like if you've got a beloved movie um don't count on that streaming service being there like don't count on it like if you buy it on itunes or you buy it on blu-ray or whatever at least you'll have access to it
Starting point is 01:11:50 for more or less forever in in uh but on netflix it could just go away so that's one of the reasons why i i do rip some stuff and why i have those stargate episodes now on my on my drobo is because um i realized i had those discs and it was way more convenient. Like Lost, I have all the Blu-rays of Lost. Lost is on Netflix in HD. It's beautiful. I never need to go back to those Blu-rays again until it disappears from Netflix, at which point, or until I want to take it on a flight because I believe ABC's stuff is not downloadable in the Netflix app. I think you can only stream the ABC stuff stuff so if i wanted to be on a plane and watch lost i would want to go to the blu-rays and and rip copies of that to load on my ipad so there are reasons right but i do feel like it's messier now and there are a lot of cases
Starting point is 01:12:34 where our old habits our old instincts of i gotta save this i gotta save all this stuff are probably not um are not necessary anymore because so much of that stuff is, is just, you know, a couple of clicks away. Yep. Talk about times of confusion. Yeah. Oh, indeed. Indeed. Well, I, I am, it's funny that ATP episode also, because they kind of talked themselves into the fact, John pointed out that crash plan is offering the small business plan and it's a great deal. It's a discount for existing users. And I did buy a year of backblaze to try it out again it's been a while since i used backblaze but i also upgraded my um crash plan account to the new account because i have that my one big my mac server with the big drobo
Starting point is 01:13:16 attached to it is the most important thing that i want backed up and so backing up a single device even under that small business plan and it is technically it is for my small business right my podcasts and things i write and all of that the media not so much but the podcast archives are actually my small business so i did that too so um and i the other thing i did uh when this is going on is i downloaded arc which is the backup uh right app that uses like you bring your own data with it and my thought there was you know i've got almost a terabyte on dropbox that i don't use and almost a terabyte on one drive that i don't use so i'm now doing a second a second set of backups when i used arc it was this must have been a million years ago it was just for amazon i feel
Starting point is 01:14:02 like oh no it's got all of them. Oh, that's cool. It's got many, many different services. So it can back up to Dropbox, and then I just have my Macs that are on Dropbox. Selective sync, yeah. I just uncheck that folder, and now it's backing up a set of my podcast archive of a little less than a terabyte to those cloud services
Starting point is 01:14:23 because I've got the space. And I've been thinking about doing that for icloud drive too but if you're not doing it already even if you have a big hard drive you might want to go in and do a daisy discord similar and then do yourself a favor and do some selective sync because remember that like if you're sharing folders with people you will inherit their pack rat tendencies as well so if there's like raw episodes of shows that you don't need to have access to and you can just go and flip that off without actually deleting it yeah exactly right exactly right i'm gonna remove this game of thrones episode from the incomparable transfer
Starting point is 01:14:55 folder right as we're talking because that's an example of that there you go it's just gonna sit in there forever and that was last week's episode of game of thrones i wasn't even here to do it so they they used a shared dropbox folder to save it and now it's just sitting there taking up space on everybody's hard drive well not anymore ancient history uh i want to talk about my road trip but before that let's talk about one more sponsor it's encapsula these are website security tools and a content delivery network that makes any website safer faster and more. Not to be all spooky and scary, but every day websites of all sizes are attacked. Criminals use giant botnets to scrape website contact. They try to break into databases and bring sites down with denial of service attacks.
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Starting point is 01:16:56 of driving wow um where did you go to we went so we went we went to tahoe and then we went to salt lake city and then we went to park city and then we went to just uh near idaho falls idaho for the total solar eclipse for people who want to hear me talk in some more detail about the eclipse there's an episode of liftoff where steven and i both went to uh places in the path of the total eclipse. And that was pretty awesome. Especially awesome was the fact that I realized my family, my family loves me and goes along with the wild ideas I have. Like, let's go see the solar eclipse two days drive away, you know, and make it a road trip because they seemed really impressed with the total solar eclipse.
Starting point is 01:17:44 And I realized it was great. Like my kids said, it was one of the most amazing things they've ever seen. They were legitimately like they're, they're both teenagers now, as of last week, when we were on the road trip, my son turned 13. So they're both teenagers and they dropped all kind of teenager skepticism or cynicism or anything. And they were just you know there were tears there were there was shouts and there was that is the most amazing thing i've ever seen which is great but the i had to i had to say part of what i realized is i don't know what they were expecting and it sounds like what they were expecting is that their father was dragging them along
Starting point is 01:18:19 thousands of miles for something that was just going to be kind of okay oh so but you did you ended up doing good expectation management i guess i yes i guess i set a low bar because they they leaped right another one of dad's donkey drills yeah it's another one of these well i think from my from my uh daughter's perspective it's like oh honey we're gonna go outside and watch the uh watch the lunar eclipse and like look the moon is red and she's like yeah great this is a big pattern in parenting i'm realizing this is a big pattern in parenting is that you don't realize how disappointing you are to your family until they are genuinely happy about something where the the reaction is basically well that didn't suck as much as i expected and you're like hey i'm trying here you you uh that this wasn't one of your stupid wild goose chases this was actually good yeah okay i so i may never be
Starting point is 01:19:05 able to top the total solar eclipse but i did nail it and they were all very grateful that i i said that we needed to do it but i did have that moment i think i think it goes back to like we had an eclipse here a few years ago that was like 50 or 60 or something and you know we dragged the kids out onto the street and we got pinhole cameras and we're we're looking and it's like look there's all there's a shape in the sun and all the all the shadows are weird and they're like oh yeah that's kind of cool can i go back inside now where it's like it's not that it's dumb but it's just like it's a science thing and it's okay but it's not like a dramatic anomaly but it's not that weird there's a pretty good nova uh this past week about the eclipse the i think very rapidly
Starting point is 01:19:45 produced a nova about the this particular eclipse and they talked to this guy who's a big eclipse chaser and he describes exactly what you're saying which is like it's all the difference in the world even if you see a and like if you're at the angle where the moon like mostly covers the sun and there's a little bit of a ring it's not the same no he says it's not the real deal 99.5 percent total is more dramatic than 50 percent right but not not that much more once you get to 100 it is a completely different event because and this is the this is the moment with my daughter where i don't know when the penny dropped but like 15 or 10 minutes before totality um we're talking about you know it's getting colder and it's getting darker and she says wait it's gonna be dark like night and i say yeah like yeah the sun gets covered there's no sunlight we are in darkness like nighttime
Starting point is 01:20:40 you'll be able to see stars and that was the moment where she's like oh like she finally got it it was things were getting weirder and weirder and we got to that moment she's like oh i see now and then things were super exciting after an hour of really boring kind of like dad why did you drag us up here i'm cold why are we here we came a long way slept in a tent why are we doing this and then everything got magical but it just it took her final realization that yeah total eclipse is is not like other eclipses because the sun goes out completely you can see the shadow rushing towards you and then you stare at where the sun used to be and it's not there anymore um that was great um and we took a family you know we took a family road
Starting point is 01:21:20 trip too so we got we we stayed in different places with varying degrees of good and bad internet uh we blew through our cellular data cap because that was a that was an interesting post you had on that i wish you'd have me back to talk about this i know we don't have time today but i think there's a real art to traveling with your family and how you choose to prepare and set up in different kinds of locations how to learn from your own mistakes and be less of a dummy because it can really make all the difference yeah well i mean i think it's worth talking about at least a little bit this is um for me you know my lessons well first off my lesson was uh truck stops in the middle of nowhere nevada now have every adapter and cable you can possibly buy for any electronic device because
Starting point is 01:22:00 you're not the only one who is out in the middle of nowhere in the desert in nevada on the interstate and realizes that you're missing a cable that you need so that your son can continue to play on his nintendo switch like it's not it's not like the 90s where you have to go to the other part of town to get a scuzzy 50 adapter no there's a wall of of of just arcane adapters at the truck stop right next to the like uh by the erectile dysfunction pills they got everything you need it's all there it was it was more by the uh by the the jerky maybe that's our 7-eleven but yeah it's amazing our 7-eleven has lightning cables it's it's uh that is a world i never would have predicted yeah it's it's so that was that was something i've learned the other lesson i learned is when the rental says it has wi-fi that's not
Starting point is 01:22:41 a guarantee that they have internet the wifi may not go anywhere because we went into one place and it was like oh yeah we got wifi and it was like DSL and every 30 minutes it cut out when I read that I was oh I felt for you and there's also so many things the rental that we had in New England
Starting point is 01:22:57 it just went out at one point and I had some drinks my family had gone to bed and I said you know what I'm going to troubleshoot this and I said, you know what? I'm going to troubleshoot this. And I went in and I did what I would do. I did the whole process. It was like conflict capture for the internet. I went in and did the entire process of elimination.
Starting point is 01:23:13 Like, oh, that's interesting. So they had the presence of mind to get this particular thing and they've got a separate Wi-Fi router and all that. I thought it could be any of these things. I went through all the passwords that usually work on those things and they didn't work.
Starting point is 01:23:24 But you're right. You can say, you know what? there's not even a law you're allowed to say there's wi-fi even if it doesn't work very well yeah it's true and you know that changes that changes the event you know it's on vacation and you know my my kids have learned to download videos from netflix and youtube red and stuff before they go which is good um but you know i i wanted to watch game of thrones on that first sunday night and we were at the dsl place and i ended up i think i i i turned on wi-fi assist so i think basically i downloaded that episode or i streamed that episode on cellular and that's what blew out our our cellular plan but you know we wanted to
Starting point is 01:24:01 watch the show and yeah you're on vacation you don't need internet but at the same time this is sometimes that's what enables you to take the vacation is that you're going to be able to stay in touch at least a little bit the irony of it and i told this to gruber last week is since we were staying in the summer at places that are uh ski resorts in the winter for the most part park city and tahoe we were both staying in ski resorts um the cellular connection is great because skiers are there for the day or maybe they're there for the weekend um the internet connection in the in the uh in the condos doesn't really matter so much it's sort of like when you're on the slopes you want to be able to check your email on the i don't i don't understand that but
Starting point is 01:24:40 that like that is a big deal among cellular carriers is to like cover the ski slopes have the data it's something they do like at&t i think has coverage at every california ski resort at this point or all but one something like that and i'll tell you the cellular connectivity of these places was amazing the difference the problem was that we were already at our cap for that so but we were we didn't even at the volcanic butte in Eastern Idaho, we had LTE with a couple of ours. No kidding. So it was never an issue. So that was an amazing kind of living in the future moment.
Starting point is 01:25:13 And if I had not been speed rated by AT&T, I would have been even more marveled about it. But we had, we'd spent our 10 gigs for the month and we're done. I think that it takes a savvy for a family trip, vacation, whatever you want to call it, especially any kind of a car trip, it takes a canny combination of managing expectations and happy self-talk. So we got to our place, and it was like, this is fine, this is fine. And it's like, oh, the TV's a big CRt with nothing really on it and the serious thing didn't really i had a vhs uh tv oh we had dvds oh we can finally watch that sherlock holmes movie
Starting point is 01:25:52 we never wanted to see but so we but then we did the happy self-talk and we said oh you know happy self-talk this is we don't need that we don't yeah we don't really we don't need to watch sherlock just because that's what we want to watch but then the funny thing we opened a little panel to play a blu-ray or a dvd rather and they had some kind of like because I had done a like a visual inspection and gone like uh you know I'd done the heads-up display like like scan scan yeah crappy crappy tv crappy little crummy sony d. Guess what? It occurred to me to change, not the input, but on the menu to go and see, just to like look around.
Starting point is 01:26:31 And it turned out that their DVD player was an internet connected device and they were logged into Netflix and Amazon Prime and you can get YouTube and it was all, suddenly we didn't have to do happy self-talk anymore.
Starting point is 01:26:44 It was like oh oh my god we can we could totally watch sherlock now well that's how lame we were but it made the vacation more fun okay before we go i have i have one last travel story i want to tell no please lay it on so we're um we're in park city so we stayed a couple nights by the university of utah in salt lake city it was very nice we're going to going to Park City because Lauren's parents are on a trip to Yellowstone and that was separately scheduled, but it turned out that we were basically going to be able to intersect for a couple of days and it was during my son's birthday, which was great. So we're going to stay. We got a place together in Park City for a couple of days.
Starting point is 01:27:21 I don't think we would have stayed five days in the salt lake city park city area otherwise but it was like it was good timing with them so we did it and uh lauren's mom made the reservation but it doesn't matter i think it was vrbo or something like that it's one of these one of these places that this is what you do now is unless you want to stay in a hotel you go to one of these places where there are condos and and and ski condos and things like that. And she got a place and it looked great. And we all shared the information about how to get there and the code and all that. So we pull up and they're about 30 minutes behind us because they're coming from a totally different direction. And I've got the code and I open the code because they say, well, you can park in the driveway, but the driveway is kind of small. So you want to put in the code and park one car in the garage so i put in the code garage door opens
Starting point is 01:28:07 there's a car in it oh no and i think huh car with tennessee license plate like oh no interesting so i look at lauren and we're like there's a car in that that's not great well let's see what happens so we go in the door and it's big steps up because this is just you know it's an area that gets a lot of snow so all of them are sort of like living floors above the the main level i think in case you need to dive out a window in if there's a lot of snow i don't know i don't understand snow do it do a shining yeah do a shining about that high window you gotta yeah you gotta you gotta have the second floor available because the first floor might just get totally snowed in
Starting point is 01:28:45 and then you gotta dive out the second floor window. Anyway, so walk in at the base and Julian actually starts walking up the steps and the door at the top of the steps is open and we say, hello? And a very nice Southern lady from Tennessee were there already tennesseans in there uh appeared at the top of the stairs oh no um they're the owners they had apparently at least thought that they had blocked out the month of august from their
Starting point is 01:29:19 rental company meanwhile apparently the rental company didn't know had a mistake we don't really know because we got all their their stuff um and you know it was just one of those moments of like this is the problem with um with with the i don't even know what you call it now the uh it's a problem with a lot of things jason it's a problem with codes it's the modern house sharing uh economy yeah is is all of a sudden we're a thousand miles from home and it's late afternoon because we've actually been uh doing things to keep ourselves entertained uh in salt lake city in order to get to after checking out of the hotel in order to get to the point where we can drive to park city and check in and all of a sudden there's a lady and her little dog who from memphis so maybe she knows steven hackett although i mentioned steven hackett and she claimed not
Starting point is 01:30:11 to know him i mean how many people can it be in memphis tennessee really exactly and um yeah she's the owner and her husband was asleep upstairs she's oh boy so she couldn't have been nicer she got us drinks she got us cookies uh we sat in the back they had a croquet set out on the lawn in the back the it was a very nice lawn it was a very nice deck they had a hot tub it was very nice in other words the place we were supposed to stay well selected beautiful place what was the resolution did they leave or you left calls were made to all of the people involved and the resolution was about an hour later after playing a game of croquet and playing with her little dog and eating some cookies an hour later um they had
Starting point is 01:30:53 booked us at a condo that was not right by downtown park city but was kind of out of town about a mile and a half and um i i mentioned this because you mentioned before about like the happy talk yeah so we get this is fine so we get to the happy talk place and that was it it was like oh this is as generic a ski condo as there could be it's uh it's made for skiers it's uh not which is which is code for you're not going to spend that much time caring what the room is like. Well, yeah, it's,
Starting point is 01:31:26 it's, it was fine, but it was like, it has no, no nice touches. It's really, so you can pack in a bunch of skiers who are going on a ski vacation and it was fine. Right?
Starting point is 01:31:34 Like, I think if we had gotten there first, maybe it wouldn't have been that bad, but it was like the, the lady's place was so nice and she gave us cookies. So there was a lot of happy talk at that place. Um, but you know, at the same time it was also not sleeping in the van, so we'll take it. But it just, there was a lot of happy talk at that place um but you know at the same time it
Starting point is 01:31:45 was also not sleeping in the van so we'll take it but it just it was a it was a funny moment uh magnified by the fact that about two hours after we got there a guy walked in the front door and said hello oh no way twist turns out and i thought oh no oh no and he said oh no bob the owner said that i could come by because i'm looking for a long-term rental i i didn't know there would be anybody here and we said well until about two hours ago neither did we and uh we all had a good chuckle and he looked around and and made some small talk and left and then nobody interrupted us the rest of the time and the moral of the story is the alfalfa field we stayed at in idaho um nobody was in that spot we got to pitch our tent there and nobody tried to make us move so magnifique
Starting point is 01:32:30 wow i'm glad you made it back that that sounds like a hell of a trip it was a great trip it was a great trip but uh that was a funny moment nice very nice lady can't recommend the nice lady from tennessee who gave us uh drinks and uh and uh cookies. She was great. I would love to stay at her house sometime, but I prefer that she and her husband... She's not there. Her husband's not sleeping there. That'd be a nice place to stay. We were there for an hour, by the way.
Starting point is 01:32:52 Husband, sleep the whole time. Because he's a heavy sleeper. That sounds like some kind of a jam up. He might be dead. Geez, I hope not. She seemed very nice, though. They all seem nice, Jason. Well, Merlin, thank you so much for being on Upgrade this week.
Starting point is 01:33:07 Oh, thanks for having me, buddy. It's a pleasure. I enjoy your show very much. I really appreciate that. We will be back, by the way, Mike, who's on assignment on vacation right now, will be back next week. We're going to do that episode, I believe, a little late. I think we'll drop it on Wednesday next week. And if the rumors are true, i think that's the draft i think that's going to be the upgrade keynote draft if the rumors are indeed true and we get a uh an announcement of an event on the 12th then that's going to be the upgrade keynote draft so i look forward to that that is good that could be that could be big stuff big stuff very exciting so um as always i want to thank our sponsors of course encapsula ero and smile makers of text expander and uh you can always get our
Starting point is 01:33:53 show notes relay.fm slash upgrade slash one five six for this episode you also there's a uh there's a link on there i am am J Snell on Twitter. Merlin is hot dogs, ladies on Twitter, by the way, if you'd like to reach Merlin and we'll be back next week, or at least Mike and I will be back next week. And Merlin, thank you again so much for being here.
Starting point is 01:34:16 Thank you. Welcome home. Thank you. We'll see you next week, everybody. Bye-bye.

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