Taken from Yodel Anecdotal, the Yahoo! company blog:
We here in Sunnyvale would like to wish our friends in Mountain View a happy birthday today. Rumor has it we may have sent them some balls.
I didn’t realize Google was missing their balls, but I’m happy to see that we’re making a friendly gesture by sending them some. 
This amazing ad greeted me tonight when I logged into Facebook tonight. Evidently this wholesome woman makes $4,000 per month “typing” at home…and so can I.
It’s good to see such highly targeted advertising. I’m happy to see that Facebook did a bang-up job matching my batchelors degree in computer science to a typing job. I spend all day typing during my day job, I might as well make some money on the side moonlighting as a “typist”…right? Unfortunately, judging by the picture, I appear to be unqualified. Perhaps I could fill in the gaps in my education with some night courses at the local junior college.
It’s too bad we don’t serve more relevant ads like this on Yahoo! Mail, they’d probably get clicked a lot more often. I’ll have to take that one up with the ad department.
Some genius wants to unionize bloggers. It’s like trying to unionize people who write. Like unionizing little girls who write in their diaries. It is, in other words, stupid.
If anything, you want to unionize the “journalists” that use blogging platforms to generate their self-made newspapers/magazines. I’ll leave it to those people to decide whether or not they really want to be unionized. In the meantime, leave me out of it.
During my lunch with Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider, Matt asked if I was using the WordPress Stats Plugin. I wasn’t at the time. I was between flip-flops between several different stats providers. I decided to give it a whirl. It’s incredibly easy to set up, although I had to dig through my mailbox (thankfully the search in Yahoo! Mail is really good) to find the password that was auto-generated for me to be able to log into my wordpress.com account.
Anyway, while looking through the referrers for my blog, this one caught my eye:
Evidently, this site (myFeedz) is some sort of social newspaper that’s run by Adobe Labs. Anyway, one of my posts on the London Hack Day was tagged “asses” by a myFeedz user. I’m not sure who the “asses” are. Is it me? People at the event? People working on the event? Oh well, amusing nonetheless.
I have a hack day tradition. It’s not something cheesy like wearing my favorite shirt or having a certain type of food for breakfast. My new tradition is having my demos bomb.
The tradition started back in September 2006. I was chugging through my slides and made it to the point where it was time to show some running code. Right at that moment our Chief Product Officer, Ash Patel (pictured above), walked in. There’s nothing quite like going from “hey, awesome…an exec is here to see my talk” to “*$&! my demo just bombed in front of Ash.”
Today, the tradition continued. Dan managed to make it through his half of our talk with no issues. I took the podium to take up the second half. I was flowing through the simple slides I had put together and was heading right into the online demos I was going to do. I brought up the site, clicked a link…nothing. Checked another site…nothing. Someone in the crowd yelled out that connectivity was down. Crap. Deep down, I knew what happened. Ash had arrived…
So I started calling out, “Ash is here, isn’t he?” I did it jokingly, I hadn’t actually seen him. Sure enough, 30 seconds later, Ash was standing at the back of the crowd, waving with a smile. Now…I don’t want to say he’s a jinx, but it is becoming an awful coincidence that he’s around during my most spectacular bombs.
Photo courtesy of davglass.
It might seem like a good idea. It’s so innocent, you can see the sign calling you from across the street. You could just pop in, place an order and walk out. I’m talking, of course, about fish ‘n chips. The quintessential British food or so movies would have you believe. I’ve eaten my share in the states and I’m quite smitten by the combination.
So…when in London…you must have the real deal…right? Yes. Well…sort of. There is one rule to abide by:
Under no circumstances should you ever purchase fish n’ chips from a place that appears to specialize in falafel’s…NO MATTER HOW HUNGRY YOU MAY BE.
I saw on Engadget that evidently solid state lasers are nearing the point where they pump out enough energy to be somewhat battlefield ready. But seriously, I think these people are forgetting something…the sound. I bet these weapons have no moving parts, which means they probably produce no sound!
I don’t think laser weapons should be declared ready for the battlefield until they make Star Wars/Star Trek/GIJOE type laser sounds. Can you imagine silent weapons 10 years from now? Sure, they may be a fantastic tactical asset. But how will they translate to the big screen? Would Dirty Harry have struck any fear into you if his .44 Magnum were a silent weapon?
Following up on my earlier post, “Which superhero are you?“…let’s take a look at the sinister side. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m burdened by vanity.
Your results: You are Dr. Doom
|
Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity. |
Don’t worry…I totally won’t let this go to my head. And no, I have no idea why I’m 47% Supergirl, 30% Catwoman and 27% Wonder Woman…
Your results: You are Superman
|
You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.  |
I like using Democracy on my MacBook Pro. Mostly I use it to watch Ze Frank, but it’s a nice application overall. Anyway, today it let me know there was a new version. So I downloaded the disk image and upgraded. When I was done, I went to eject the disk image. I’m not sure which is more funny, ejecting democracy or copying it.
Most people already know that Google acquired JotSpot. First, congrats to Joe and the JotSpot guys. I never got to meet Joe during my time at Excite, which is unfortunate. Anyway, the first line of the post makes me laugh:
OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn’t be more excited.
“I couldn’t be more excited“. I feel like there ought to be a rimshot on the end of that somewhere.
I was checking out Guba tonight. I was curious to see how up to date the movie selection was, so I did a movie search for “Harry Potter”. All I know is, the first result is for Funky Monkey. What’s even better is, Any Which Way You Can also shows up in the search results. Why does searching for “Harry Potter” bring up so many monkey-related results? I’m not complaining, everybody knows I’m down with monkeys. It just seems a little odd.
On a related note, I just noticed that Matthew Modine is in Funky Monkey. He can’t seriously be that hard up for work…can he?
Seems like good advice to me. Check out some 1984 video of Steve Jobs.
I’m riding the train (Amtrak) down from Sacramento to Sunnyvale this morning. We just pulled into Davis and on approach we stopped rather abruptly…not to mention about 50 feet short of the station.
We finally pulled into the station, safely, and shortly before pulling out the conductor came on the PA system to inform us of “an unexpected application of brakes” that had to be checked out. I can only assume that means the train opted to stop without being told to do so. Frightening, I wonder what else the train can do without explicitly being told what to do.
I remember back in the day (college) when I’d challenge myself to eat anything and everything put in front of me. During the Week of Welcome, I took part in a taco eating contest (put down about 15 Taco Bell hard shell tacos). For a little while I had a quarterly ritual of putting down the Baron of Higuera. Of course, back then I was about 170 pounds. Now I go more like…well…let’s not talk about it.
I’m very glad I didn’t know about SupersizedMeals.com back then. Otherwise I’m sure I would have been eating even more stupid things. Although, I must say…I am getting mighty hungry looking at El Bocadillo Del Diablo. I wonder what Barney would say about that.
I figured after spending 3 of my last 5 posts ranting about Bloglines, I should talk about something else. I want to talk about a very serious topic, one that could change your entire life…shaving your ass hair. Unfortunately, Tadpole already wrote about it…so I’ll just link to it and suggest you give it a read.
I can’t stop laughing. Is that wrong?
While poking a little fun at tinyurl earlier today, a coworker decided to put together GiganticURL. I created one for my blog:
http://www.giganticurl.com/url/aHR0cDovL3VuY2xlaHVsa2EuY29tL3J5Y
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My blog is worth $3,951.78.
How much is your blog worth?
Evidently my blog is worth some money. I used the Business Opportunities Weblog’s blog valuation tool. It uses the AOL-Weblogs Inc acquisition to determine how much an inbound link is worth, uses Technorati to figure out how many inbound links you have and determines a dollar value for your blog.
Obviously this is all in fun for a blog such as mine. Who on earth would actually pay $4,000 for this site (seriously tell me…I’ll send you the pink slip once your money reaches my account)? You can see the inherent flaw in the calculation since this blog is really costing me money to run (I pay a hosting fee and I have no ad revenue). But it’s amusing to look at.
Contextual ads in email are evil, but sometimes they’re amusing.
