Overview

We share a couple car stories and then delve into the current status of buying cars. What should we look for in a car? New, used, or lease?

Recommendations

https://carvana.com

https://autotrader.com

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:02] Stephen: oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So go ahead. No, go finish your thought. We started talking some tech stuff, so let’s, we were gonna talk cars and tech anyway, and exactly travels. So go ahead. Continue your time. Yeah.

[00:00:13] Alan: So a little bit All the transitions that we’re going through.

Like we, one of the things we talked about in your talk today was things have changed drastically. So you, whatever skills I learned when I was a computer guy back in the late seventies, and then going to today, how much of that is just, I learned the underpinning of how to write a good programming and I learned enough computer languages so that I can write in Cobal and Fortran and P PL one and PLC and C plus, and C sharpen, all that stuff.

Expecting your Coball skills to come in handy nowadays is ridiculous unless you’re exactly in that situation where a big bank, big iron is still running Coball and their last good Coball programmer just got hit by the bus and they need someone to come in and [00:01:00] A lot of that is happening.

Not only in the computer field, so about cars, it used to be that mechanics were really good at, Hey, let’s listen to the car. Ooh. That is sounds like a carburetor or not now there’s no carburetors. There’s no, there’s nothing to hear. It’s all solid state. And yet there still has to be some.

Skill that you gain over the course of time. So that we’ve talked about troubleshooting before, you want to be like, I can make a good guess relatively quickly instead of just starting at a and going through to Z and every time that it’s a T problem, it’s man, I had to go through a, to S to get there.

Not if you’re better, not if you’re smarter at how to divide the solution space in half and do things, that’ll give you the most information quickly. You’ve been having car issues lately. Yeah. And are they diagnosable or is it like so many things are becoming, Hey, it’s broken, I’m gonna get a new one.

[00:01:51] Stephen: What I mean? Here, so here and we’ve all been. In this situation, probably most [00:02:00] of the people I know haven’t been fortunate enough to start at age 16 and buy a $40,000 new car every four years. That’s

[00:02:07] Alan: dependable

[00:02:08] Stephen: and yeah, exactly. We’ve all had the key. Yeah. And due to some circumstances, not.

My choice. I ended up with the worst car out of the whole family. Oh boy. Partly because I don’t drive it a lot, but partly be for other reasons, other people ended up with different cars. Yeah. So a car that’s not super wasn’t super well maintained before I got it. And it’s slowly been disintegrating so let me give you the problems with the car.

And this is different. This is a PT cruiser and it is so difficult. My serpentine belt was screeching and rubbing and it broke. And I could not. Get a new serpentine belt on there. I couldn’t even find where it went at first. You basically have to pull the whole engine to get the serpentine belt on

Overview

Some name dropping going on today – Weird Al and Armin Shimerman specifically.

But before that, we discuss getting a new car and what the options are. Plus, we don’t get the big RV’s and why people get them.

The Weird Al concert was awesome if you like Weird Al. There weren’t too many of the big hits, but for Al fans, its awesome.

Recommndations

Armin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Shimerman

Weird Al – https://news.yahoo.com/weird-al-yankovic-postpones-detroit-192554435.html

http://www.emophilips.com/

Discovered Wordsmiths Podcast

YouTube

Transcript

How’s that? You’ve got the California background and the,

[00:00:07] Alan: this is my parents’ kitchen where I’ve set up the sky net mobile node. It’s funny. I might’ve talked about this a little bit, maybe a month. It’s I have a laptop, a Mac book air that I bring with me everywhere I go. And I was discovering that it just wasn’t going to be sufficient to the task of handling my parents’ bills or staying fully connected, checking into things that doesn’t matter.

But I’ve discovered that by buying like a nice 24 inch HP monitor and are better mouse and a backup drive, I could for just a little bit of money. 250 $300. Duplicate most of what I wanted, which was free real estate, which was know, it didn’t make my process or any faster. And I still have some limitations, but I was much.

And of course you’re going to have to go, okay, do [00:01:00] I have all the adapters that I need to be able to go from the Mac video out to an HTMI port and that kind of stuff. But. My getting capable out here in California was such an interesting exercise of, okay. So I got this working. Let’s see. I don’t really like their cable TV because it’s largely with commercials.

If I bring my own Roku box or my own Chromecast. Yeah. We’ll be able to have that boat that late night not be a terrible exercise and trying to find a movie that’s not been butchered by comedy central by loading it with commercials and whatever else it might be. It’s cool to be able to in my laptop bag that’s the, I have everything I need to set up a pretty full Al’s virtual environment for just a little bit of money.

This being in the tech field, it’s just a wonderful thing. Things become more capable and for less money and that isn’t the case with so much of the rest of the world. We’re getting so much inflation now in all kinds of mechanical thing. [00:02:00] Good Lord. I just saw an ad on TV and they actually showed the.

On TV, $91,000 for some kind of SUV wagon near some kind of to go anywhere. And aren’t you

[00:02:14] Stephen: ashamed?

[00:02:15] Alan: That’s not like a Porsche or a Lamborghini. I’m sure that those things are long past a hundred thousand dollars, but a regular car that you would advertise to regular folks is $91,000.

Overview

Once again, we are here to help you and solve all the problems in the world. we start off by talking about bucket lists. Where did the term come from and what does it mean? What a better life? Make a bucket list and then go do those things. #1

If you put travel on your bucket list but are stopped by things like lack of money or a pandemic – well, get some Oculus tech and visit everywhere you want. #2

There are apps on the Oculus that allow you to see and hear concerts that you might not be able to go to. Problem solved. And the bonus is that you can experience it from many angles. #3

And if you think things are bad for you, lighten up. There’s probably another universe/dimension where a version of you is having a great day – like in the new Dr. Strange movie. So let that make you feel better. #4

And to top it all off, some of the tech advances in medical health are even better than the fun stuff. Diabetes may not be cured, but with some of the new things you can use to monitor it and better understanding to control it – we help you solve that. #5

Recommendations

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Alan: There’s Allen and here we go. Okay. Got some Northern lights, so forced legs. And I still have not seen these, but that’s definitely on our bucket list. We And actually Kelly and I were just talking about that the other day, how their bucket list is such a handy term and it really didn’t exist until that movie people usually want having a life list and various other ways of things to do before you die.

But bucket list is just such a nice, condensed distillation of it before you kick the bucket, it’s even got like colloquialism built into it and stuff like that. Yeah. And I’ve tried to live that way, especially with my kids, but man, even with all the stuff I tried to do with my kids, there’s so many things I’m like, oh, we didn’t do this it.

[00:00:54] Stephen: And even sometimes simple little things. Like last night I was playing rock band for the first time in [00:01:00] long time. And I’m like, man, I really wish we had played rock band a little bit more just things like that. It’s funny when w. When I first sat down to do one, it was so easy to come up with a hundred things.

[00:01:15] Alan: I honestly, it wasn’t two or three or, and most of it was places to travel to. You know what I mean? I’m really hungry to see more of the world. And more specifically, when you read travel books about, oh, here’s an active volcano and here’s the painted not desert, but actually like mountains that have striation with colors in them and stuff like that.

It’s I’d love to stand on this Ridge and look at that and see this beautiful stuff. And but also Colleen and I have said we’ve done so much cool travel and been around most of the United States. Not yet Europe, Australia, other places who want to go, but at this point, the bucket list, isn’t that a half to do.

It’s more. Everything is bonus. You know what I mean? There’s things that are on the top or prints. I really want to go to ake Watsu [00:02:00] falls. You know what I mean? It’s that it’s right on the border of Argentina and Brazil, I think. And it’s just a massive amount of water and noise and power and stuff.

Overview

This past weekend Alan and Stephen attended Fan Expo in Cleveland. This is the old Wizard World convention.

While we enjoy the comics, there is so much more to enjoy. Both Stephen and Alan enjoy supporting artists and other creators by purchasing their wares.

There are also tons of great speakers and talks. And plenty of timeto talk to great artists that you’ve admired for years.

Recommendations

https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpocleveland/

All Comics

Sourcepoint

http://www.travislangley.info/

YouTube

d

Transcript

[00:00:36] Alan: Okay. We were both at the fan expo in Cleveland this weekend. What were your highlights? What did you like?

[00:00:43] Stephen: There were a lot of things. First of all, if anybody listening doesn’t know what van expo is. It’s what used to be called Wizarding world here, but they disappeared. Whatever. Yeah. A wizard world. Yes.

It’s a convention. It’s a fan. It’s

[00:00:59] Alan: like [00:01:00] even whose rule is based on the Comicons of old until San Diego asserted its claim to the term Comicon. And so now New York and Chicago, and maybe there’s a couple others that could be grandfathered in, but they don’t. Now they’re a branding, a new with various different things.

And especially because it’s no longer just comics, it’s everything. It’s Harry Potter and it’s professional wrestling and it’s anime and it’s a lots of TV and movies and all that kind of stuff. And. But it’s right along our lines, but to run this geekery fast, they have every single type of fan base covered.

[00:01:36] Stephen: And you and I mentioned that too, cause we’re old enough to remember, uh, when a comic convention was like an old swap meet, like for car parts or electronics, you’ve been to plenty of electronic stuff where it was really cool back in the nineties with all the parts and stuff,

[00:01:53] Alan: the new and the show floor was nothing but comic books.

And this is before they didn’t have pull [00:02:00] bookstores full of graphic novels and stuff like that. This was box after box of comic books. Most of them not slapped or some graded. Plastic bags. And with the dealers grading back when the Overstreet guide is what, let you know what the difference was between mint near mint, very fine, et cetera, et cetera.

But it was nowhere near the precision that CGC and CBCs and others now have specific.

[00:02:25] Stephen: Okay. All right. So it’s totally different. So like you said, it’s a geeky nerdy fan thing, but there’s a lot of, it’s more pop culture now there’s because of the MCU, a large part of grew people in people that didn’t use to oh, comic books, superheroes, other for kids is wow.

Ironman is so freaking cool. It’s the catcher day song. Now I’m the one that’s cool. But we were just 30 years ahead of our time.

[00:02:54] Alan: Exactly. It is a celebration like that, where, and it isn’t just comic books.

Overview

We conclude our tech talk of the last couple weeks – at least for now. This time, it’s still a bit about remote work, but how things synch up and you can keep settings across platforms.

Then we talk about life on earth – how did it start? Based on a recent science article, it could have been from asteroids that crashed into our planet.

Recommendations

Machi Koro

https://www.mensamindgames.com/about/winning-games/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/scientists-find-dna-s-code-for-life-in-meteorites/ar-AAWCPx0?ocid=uxbndlbing

https://www.seti.org/drake-equation-index

Legend

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Stephen: I hear a noise.

[00:00:02] Alan: Try this again.

[00:00:05] Stephen: Ooh, comic background.

You disappeared. I heard you.

[00:00:10] Alan: Let’s try it again. Okay. It’s funny. I didn’t do anything to change the desktop setup. I was doing everything on the laptop while I was out of town. Yet I come back and zoom must have some idea that it’s always me from place to place and it leaves little remnants of settings behind.

So

[00:00:31] Stephen: we were talking that in the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking tech and remote tech and doing all that. And that is something a lot of them do. If I look something up on my phone, on Chrome, I can send it to my Chrome desktop and it’ll be there when I get back. And if you save a bookmark, it goes everywhere.

I now even click the thing and I went, oh crap. Now my safari on my Mac is getting all my Chrome bookmarks. I don’t care for that, but okay. Whatever,

[00:00:58] Alan: I don’t mind the [00:01:00] synchronization, but it’s this kind of thing where if it’s smart enough to say, Hey, I know that you’re on your desktop instead of your laptop system, then it should also be smart enough to say, but your screen real estate on your desktop is different than on your laptop.

And so it should adjust. And only those so much,

[00:01:18] Stephen: the scary ones that I think everybody’s seen is you stop at a shopping mall and you just walk into a mattress store because you’re looking at mattresses and then you get on Facebook and suddenly you’re seeing ads for mattresses. I didn’t do anything.

He said, if walk into the store, that’s where it’s starting to get a little.

[00:01:36] Alan: Yeah. It’s I, when I first so I had a Mac set up and I, now I have everything on parallels and I run windows still on my Mac before I actually had a windows box over to my right.

Overview

Al is back in California, so we have a lengthy discussion on how much easier it is to work remote compared to several decades ago.

We talk a bit about how open source software has helped us and when we like to use open source. This is more than just on Linux.

We discuss Boy Scouts and Eagle Scout a bit, because one of Alan’s nephews is in the background. Stephen talks about his cool Eagle project.

Recommendations

YouTube

Transcript

[00:07:27] Alan: Let’s get started up.

[00:07:31] Stephen: Wow. You’ve got a nice background today. How would you find that one?

[00:07:36] Alan: It is a matter of fact here. In fact, uh, this is the kitchen table at my parents’ house and it’s actually kind of weird because with no light source, I’m looking really like shadowed here. Um, let me get a light on overhead and see if that the, yeah,[00:08:00]

I should have done a little experimenting that doesn’t put a lot on me. Does it better? All right. One more.

That’s a little bit more from the kitchen. Does that balance me out? The big thing of course is that the sun is coming right. So against the patio door here. And so, you know, uh, this is the best I got for today, but over the wait, I just tilted it and that made it better. Who knows? So, no,

[00:08:41] Stephen: we, we we’ve got clouds here, but the whole side over here is like shiny.

That’s true.

[00:08:47] Alan: I don’t have a direct reflection, so I’m doing fine. Thank you. Well, I don’t have anything cool on it. I just have a generic. Uh, this isn’t really geekery, but I [00:09:00] guess it is one of the interesting things about being out in California is how much of my fantastic working environment that I have at home at the Skynet home office.

Do I, how can I recreate it? How much do I bring with me? So right now I’m on my Mac book, air laptop, which it’s reasonable sound and reasonable camera, which is kind of a miraculous thing, you know, compared to, I don’t know, however many, 5, 10, 20 years ago, um, when they first started to have FaceTime for starting to have any kind of presuming and stuff like that, you really had to.

Have a matched equipment to make sure that your teleconference worked correctly and that there wasn’t constant stuttering that interrupts of each other didn’t wreck it. And boy, they really seem to have solved so much of that. You know, there is still a little bit of cutting in and out, but my ongoing assumption now is as long as I have my laptop or my phone and zoom, you really can do this from pretty [00:10:00] much anywhere, you know, and they have noise cancellation.

So if I was sitting there in an airport, we could still have a conversation without worrying about being drowned out by it all announcements, all the kids, screaming, all that. So,

[00:10:11] Stephen: and like you said, your phone too, I mean, it’s amazing how, you know, like you said, 10, 15, 20 years ago to go on any type of.

Out somewhere to a client to do a meeting, anything. I have a laptop, I have my phone, I have this charger, I have this cable, I have this extra thing. You know, it was just this big bag of stuff. And now literally,

Overview

The times have changed with tech. We focus on the weird HDMI issues and copy protection. And the connectors? Do you know all the problems caused by people plugging things into the wrong ports?

Besides our geeky tech talk, we discuss the new Moon Knight show a bit and how much we are enjoying it. For a hero that not many people know, we like that they are delving into the character.

Recommendations

2600 Quarterly – https://store.2600.com/

Masters of Doom

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/history-cgi/

https://thedisinsider.com/2020/12/21/20-weeks-of-disney-animation-the-great-mouse-detective/

YouTube

Transcript

rg 94 – tech

[00:00:00] Stephen: Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you tired of only hearing the same, the goal sports or catastrophe talk. Yeah, we feel that way too. Join to high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week, because we don’t know where our brains will take us.

It will be an interesting conversation though. So hang on and join us. Here comes the relentless

[00:00:37] Alan: and you get good morning. I’m not sure if I had this same background last time. I apologize if I did. And mucking around enough. I don’t know. I don’t tend to make sure that I wear an outfit that someone hasn’t seen before. Like my wife and maybe other ladies really are about that. And I’m, don’t care enough about it.

Think about it each. Yeah. [00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Stephen: I don’t get a background because my hook broke for putting my green screen up. So my other one, but yeah. Did you ever read the odd Thomas series by coats? Oh yeah, they’re really good. He talks about that. He w he has jeans and t-shirts and tennis shoes. And I used to always say, just have a couple pair of jeans, because any shirt you wear will be.

[00:01:25] Alan: In college. I was very much like that. I had my, a couple of pairs of jeans, so that I’d be able to wear one while I was washing the other, if I had three or four, actually. But yes, everything goes with everything. And I don’t know, remember in the fly, Seth, Brumble had the thing where you just got all the black pants and all the white shirts and he doesn’t have to put an ounce of thought into where is he?

So I’m not quite like that. I have many pairs of lounge pants and now I have so many like long sleeve t-shirts. I can almost always find a color to match into some color in the pants. And so Colleen is very complimentary about how my [00:02:00] Garanimals sense has gotten better and better thanks to match, but it just, I don’t know, it’s one of those things that it’s an amusement to me, but that’s what I wanted to take is two seconds in the morning.

Overview

COVID is still around and still has people catching it – and there are new variants. We don’t usually complain, but we have complaints about non-COVID believers and the other thinking of these type of people.

On better news – the new Batman movie. I mean – wow, we loved it. If you haven’t seen it, we don’t give away too much, but we can’t say enough good things about this movie.

And Moon Knight. We didn’t talk much, but we discussed what we hope it is and isn’t.

How manly is it to drink through a straw?

Recommendations

YouTube

Transcript

They actually had a video game with those two it was a split screen and you ran around and you had to hide bombs and try and catch each other. So it was it’s perfectly

[00:00:52] Alan: appropriate. It’s amazing for that premise of them trying to outwit each other 40, [00:01:00] 50 years worth of work out of it. And I think that Peter Kuyper or somebody took over after him, but he was amazingly prolific and inventive for that relatively simple premise, good stuff.

[00:01:11] Stephen: Yeah. Always fun and low in the little margins. Occasionally use it it’s just all that great stuff Matt always did. So how are you, Ellen?

[00:01:20] Alan: I’m doing fine. It some. Tough news. My mom was diagnosed with COVID. Ooh, geez. She’s in a memory care facility out in California, and it’s already relatively locked down in isolated.

Nobody can get in without testing for temperature at the desk and making sure that you’re fully vaccinated and stuff like that. And yet two people in her area herself included have now tested positive. It’s always that little weirdness of, Hey, I’m all the way here in Cleveland. And she’s in near San Diego and my, my younger brother and his family [00:02:00] are out there.

So they’ll be able to visit or not visit depending on what their new protocols are. It just is I dunno, helpless making. And I just inspired by that. I signed up to get my fourth booster. You know what I mean? The CDC just approved for anybody 50 or over that has various different health compromises and anybody 65 or older period.

And because I’ve had my melanoma and my atrial fibrillation, I check enough boxes so that I seem to get first dibs when things become available. So this very afternoon one o’clock, I’m signed up to get my next booster. And we’ll see, usually there’s a rough two or three days where while your body is building its defenses, it gives you a little bit of fever, a little bit of headache, but the fourth one that’s what I’m hoping is my body will say, oh, we’ve seen this before.

And we’ll just re gear up from according to the science, the vaccine fades with time this one in particular, because [00:03:00] it’s, I should, I don’t know why because it’s MRN because it’s not dead versus a vaccine. And your body’s immune response there, your body’s always working to fend off various different things and whatever your body gets trained to do about this one, it gets lesser priority, perhaps, so that it’s not, it hasn’t turned to nothing, but efficacy goes down from like 95% to 80% still good armor.

Overview

Stephen and Alan discuss something that is more philosophical and less geeky, yet it ties in with Nathan Fillion and how he has guided Stephen in life choices. You just need to listen.

We do touch on the Ukraine/Russian thing going on, but we don’t focus on the politics of war.

We talk about upcoming talks Stephen is doing at the Dayton Rg, which Al will be attending.

don’t fret – we still have some great recommendations:

Recommendations

Castle – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219024

The Rookie – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7587890

New Girl – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1826940

Death Stalker

Def Leppard Diamond Star Halos

https://tv.apple.com/us/show/ted-lasso/umc.cmc.vtoh0mn0xn7t3c643xqonfzy

YouTube

Transcript

Okay. Hey, jeez, we got lists, but I’m going to ask you a question to get us started today. And this is a little outside the geeky realm, but I know our viewpoints on these differs. So I think it’s a cool conversation. And I’ll tell you why I’m asking this after I ask it, because I don’t want to bias [00:01:00] it.

So give me your thoughts and feelings on receiving signs from the universe or a greater power, or what you think of those types of things. And I know that really sounds witchy. Woo. I know. It’s absolutely that we make of those things, what we want. There is no higher power.

[00:01:24] Alan: There’s no outside forces that are acting on us. The world is all what it is. It’s chemicals and physics. And we find patterns where we want to, and sometimes we listen to those things because we want to do whatever we think we’re seeing in the signs. I am very much a naturalist instead of a supernatural list.

I guess I get how people want to think. That there is benevolent or malevolent forces and that somehow the universe is talking to them to tell them what to do with their life, whether that’s astrology, whether that’s visitation, whether we know what I mean, there’s all kinds of ways in [00:02:00] which we’ve decided to interpret those kinds of things.

But when you look at it from science, when you look at it from repeatability, when you look at it from predictability, all it is because we want to find patterns. Human beings are pattern, finding animals. That’s even the name of a prog rock band because it’s deep in our survival. To be able to say, what’s going on?

What might happen next? How do I prepare myself to be able to handle that next situation? Whether I’m predator or prey, you it’s all about we, we have an incredible capacity for finding faces in things because nothing lights our brain up more than interacting with a...

Overview

Alan with his orange skynet starts us off today. Actually, it’s only briefly mentioned before we are off on tv and movie zoom backgrounds and then mental health. Not overall health, but witnesses and how our brain remembers what was seen – and how that can be different for different people.

Have you seen Castle with Nathan Fillion? You should, and we tell you why.

Then Stephen reveals his origin story as a writer, which involves Nathan Fillion. See, we really do jump around but it all ties together, right?

And believe it or not – Pink Floyd has a tie in with Dr. Strange, and we talk about how geeky Smucker’s is.

There’s a few 3d prints of a beholder, angel, and werewolf to show.

Recommendations

Castle – https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1219024/

Dr. Strange 158 – https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Strange_Tales_Vol_1_158

Trivia

Triple trivia – Who wrote the “Lub Nub” Ewok Celebration song, what famous band did he front and who is his father?

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:41] Alan: Ooh,

[00:00:43] Stephen: movies and DV.

[00:00:46] Alan: Uh, it’s amazing how many zoom backgrounds there are available by the way, let me get every possible memory user off that will get, you know, no stutter. So, yeah, so I [00:01:00] kind of funny how, you know, we often talk about. Um, things that are very current, but already game of Thrones is not quite fading from public consciousness, but this is nowhere near the oo that it would have been seven years ago, eight years ago, trying to think of how long it took for them to finish the series.

And now there’s been an interim before we get to the pre Quill. Right. You know, where they first target area in the, uh, the insane put powerful family that doesn’t have any precedents in history at all.

[00:01:27] Stephen: Right. Yeah. And I’m hoping Maverick finally comes out one year. I mean, it’s been sitting in the camper like two years.

COVID started is that I

[00:01:36] Alan: think unfortunately like maybe Tom cruise still looks eternally young, but I wonder how how’s the Iceman, how’s the other character names. Do any of them

[00:01:45] Stephen: now Kilmer is a little rough for worse for the wear. It seems, but I mean, you know, we all do if we really, I mean, heck I look at my martial arts pictures from 10 to 12 years ago and I’m like, wow.

I looked like that. I’m like, [00:02:00] dang.

[00:02:02] Alan: As we always do. I love Val Kilmer. I know that he’s had occasional press where he’s sometimes difficult to work with, but I think it’s a matter of him really trying to do well. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hoffman was known for not suffering fools gladly, but because he was turning into a great performance and wanted everybody to rise to the occasion, if you will.

So that’s what I’ve seen. Val Kilmer and all kinds of things. It seems like he’s often the best thing in the movie. And not even as the star, when he played doc holiday, right in tombstone, what a performance, what a, what a, an understated yet powerful who could give a line? Like I’ll be your huckleberry and not sound ridi...