by Jason on September 2, 2010
OK, modernized “not in the dictionary” jokes aside, I couldn’t resist blind-typing Gullible.com into my browser last night, pretty much at the same time as the idea occurred to me. Seriously folks, forget about Facebook privacy settings, this is the habit you want to develop to make sure you never get a job at a company that cares about stupid things instead of output.
(Oh, have I got output.)
I kinda wish gullible.com was an actual site that did something. What, I don’t know, but it’s yet another Great Parking Tragedy… Or is it?
Where to start? OK, there’s the weird bit of dating advice, for sure. Oh, and then the demon stuff. What’s going on there?
Companies that run parking pages aren’t stupid. They’ve got lots of data to sift through, and they want to make the most of every page visit, so I figure they’ve got some clever split testing going on. Maybe I just happened on an outlier test that didn’t survive to the next round, but maybe, just maybe, parked pages are a better arbitrator of keyword relevance than the Google Keyword Tool (I just checked it for “gullible” and found no demons therein.)
Taking this a whole other direction (my coffee supply is nigh-infinite,) I think a cool movie or TV gimmick would be to hide information in plain sight on a parked web page. You could leave the URL anywhere you want, and people would just go to the site, see it’s crap, and leave. Meanwhile your secret agents could share info on link #5. Of course, this wouldn’t work at all because more people than we’d care to acknowledge actually click on the links… OK, a distant second choice would be to buy Adwords for a really really obscure search term, if it’s possible to even have a reverse Googlewhack anymore. (Technically, a Googlewhack involves just two words, not an obscure phrase, but I was a little surprised to see that I could even invent the phrase “reverse Googlewhack” – I just searched for it and didn’t get a million references to exactly what I’m talking about.)
Back on point: Gullible.com – dating advice and demons. The only other thing I’ll add is that the whois info for the domain contains a crazy Easter egg. For serious.
by Jason on August 31, 2010
Ah, memories...
Angela pegged me to a music promotion on Dose.ca where you can get 15 tracks from some pretty decent bands for the low low cost of free – not even an email opt-in required.
Back when Dose launched in 2005, it had one of the only online music stores in the country, which was kind of nifty as an add-on to the site and not a standalone store – if memory serves, Puretracks was the largest, with iTunes having just opened their Canadian store the past December. I worked (for a vendor) on the Dose music store, which, like PureTracks at the time, used Microsoft DRM but apparently the purchase process was a little more seamless, or so I’d heard (in the crush of launch, I don’t think I so much as sketched what the music store pages were going to look like, let alone sampled the competition – the site just evolved as a series of classic ASP scripts with some hand-coded (in Notepad, because I didn’t have a VS2003 license) ASP.NET 1.1 to make a few things easier.
Anyway, the Dose store did a few promotional giveaways in the summer of 2005 where you could get a free track each week in exchange for giving your email address to the sponsor (possibly SnapTax and then Virgin Mobile, but don’t quote me.) It was a little cumbersome; I think you had to confirm your email to get a coupon which you could then use to get a free track in the store, but there weren’t any user accounts like in iTunes, so you still had to fill out some forms for the DRM to take hold. This is all from memory. I suspect the DRM servers are still running (it was a 3rd party service that seems to still have clients) so the recipients of those tracks have so far dodged the “Plays for Sure – until we stop it” mess that went down a few years back.
That was then. Last night I clicked a link, then a button, and then entered my iTunes password, and 15 tracks started downloading, which are now fuelling my morning work session. And I haven’t kept up on this stuff, but I believe they’re DRM-free.
5 years took us this far. Yes, it’s still very hard to “just start” a music store with major label approval, and things have consolidated to an even larger degree, but it’s progress just the same, and record labels are getting better at music promotions as well. And hey, if I want to hear a particular song these days without actually downloading it, I can probably find it on YouTube – which also launched in early 2005.
Looking back like this helps every once in a while, both to get excited about what’s next and to remember that companies need to be constantly moving forward – the user experience of 5 years ago would get you laughed off the stage of any DemoCamp today, so what’s it going to be like 3, 6, or 18 months from now?
by Jason on August 26, 2010
After my last “big office” job, but before I decided to avoid offices altogether, I came up with the idea of “domain roulette” where two co-workers would take turns typing in a random, plausible-sounding .com into their web browser.
First one to find porn loses. Or wins. It all depends on who in the area was dumb enough to leave their computer unlocked. What, you’re not going to play this game under your own login, are you?
Anyway, I don’t work in cubicle-land anymore, but I have this urge to type random domains in from time to time (loading GoDaddy for this purpose takes too long.) So, inspired by Grant Hutchinson’s Available Domain Name of the Week, I figured I’d share some of my findings.
And to be clear, I don’t just look for random porn all day. Most of the time I’m driven by the idea that something cool might be behind these names. It just happens that this episode’s theme is a little pornish, is all. I’m a family man, honest.
Today we have a twofer: microporn.com vs macroporn.com.
And in this case both exist, but both are parked.
I wonder, did they originate as two separate companies with grand visions of the future of internet pornography, which as we know fuels most, if not all, technical innovation? Did these two companies wage war against each other, gathering affiliates in exclusive agreements, or whatever else it is that porn companies do to compete with each other? Was there an IPO that was narrowly averted by a market spike?
There’s a story in there somewhere. The whois information doesn’t yield anything conclusive in the “where are they now” afterstory, thanks to domain privacy settings, so this might be lost to the ages. My great-grandchildren may start a foundation to uncover the truth someday, which is as much of a paternity test for my son as anything else I can think of.
I’m going to award bonus points to microporn.com, whose parking page is funnier:
Ovens are HOT!
Also, that “make this your homepage” link? Pure gold. I’m installing 5 more browsers just so I can make it even more my home page.
OK, back to work – this is just the thing that distracts my brain when I’m entering database seed data, is all, and it’s the only way to get it out of my mind. Trust me, you don’t want the terms microporn and macroporn in your head when you’re seeding a database. See? It makes phrases like “seeding a database” sound dirty. Dirtier, anyway.
by Jason on July 20, 2010
OK, I want one of these:
see more Monday Through Friday
Yes, I work mostly from home, but innovation doesn’t mix well with excuses. I’ll commence camouflaging our Fisher Paykel as soon as everyone else (foolishly) leaves the house for a few hours.
by Jason on July 16, 2010
Word on the street (depending on the street) is that Firefox now runs on the iPhone – kinda. Rather than try to get an actual alternative browser into the App Store, this is a way to provide access to your Firefox browser history, open tabs, and bookmarks by way of Firefox Sync.
I’ve been using a single computer for most of the year, so I’d forgotten about Firefox Sync, but I remember it being fairly handy, and yeah, I could see this as being pretty useful if I actually used my iPhone browser in cases where it wasn’t absolutely necessary (the iOS 4.0 upgrade really killed my enthusiasm, but the reality is that I haven’t been in a lot of situations where I’ve been away from a desk and wanted to browse the internet.)
What gets me most about all this is that it highlights the widening gap – in some areas, at least – between Firefox and Safari. I’m using Safari pretty much exclusively right now, but the lack of remembered tabs keeps pulling me the other way, frankly. Things like this just keep reminding me to think about switching again.
by Jason on July 15, 2010
I’m sure I’m far from the first to make this observation, but I suspect Obie Fernandez had this planned for a few years:
"Rails Threeway. Huh huh huh."
In related news, I’ve been working with Rails 3 (beta 4) for a while now and it’s saved me a ton of time, which is handy, since I have no time with the baby and all that.
In other related news, Beavis and Butthead might be returning to MTV. It’s a perfect storm, people…
by Jason on May 25, 2010
So 24′s done, at least until someone comes out with a movie, and just like with Lost, I’m OK with the ending.
But.
I really think the Seinfeld route would have been more appropriate:
When Seinfeld ended after (to lazy to Google) seasons, the characters were judged for their past actions and put away for a really long time. Let’s take a moment to judge 24 and the Counter Terrorist Unit over their eight years of operation:
Moles within CTU: 3
Times CTU was attacked: 5
Nuclear explosions on their watch: 2
To be fair, I think they stopped at least two other nuclear explosions, so that’s something. Also, those stats are on an “at least” basis, because I used IMDB’s episode list to pull them together. To their credit, IMDB is at least a little aware of the concept of spoilers, with some entries coming in like this:
Yeah, I didn’t bother to make a count of how many times that happened. I also skipped counting “Jack kills a guy,” though others have done that homework already…
So… Lots of disasters averted, but lots of disasters altogether as well. I’m really curious what we’re all going to be afraid of now that the show’s gone. But let’s take a moment to figure out at least one point of failure.
24: a case study in sleep deprivation
Here are the time periods of 24, by season:
Season one: midnight to midnight
Season two: 8AM to 8AM
Season three: 1PM to 1PM
Season four: 7AM to 7AM
Season five: 7AM to 7AM
Season six: 6AM to 6AM
Season seven: 7AM to 7AM
Season eight: 4PM to 4PM
I’ll be honest, I thought more of these seasons started later in the day, but in the cases where it did (seasons 1, 3, and 
you’ve got people up for most of the day already, and then staying up for 24 hours. Staying up all night isn’t fun in any event, and back in 2000, before the series even began, we knew that staying up just 17 to 19 hours was the mental equivalent of having a blood alcohol level of .05.
By the way, why do we never see CTU agents slurping down coffee? Do they get special government “go pills” instead?
So, builders of CTU 2.0: consider working in shifts. Maybe add a nap room. And then see if you don’t get blowed up quite as much.
(And thanks for 8 years of me getting to yell at the television.)
by Jason on April 14, 2010
From the latest Canadian Business: The secret shipping news: Intelligence services use import manifests to help clients identify consumer trends and keep track of rival products. Briefly, it’s often possible to learn key strategic information about a company from its shipping manifests, which can be found through US Customs declarations or companies like Import Genius, which can provide you with a searchable database for as little as $99/month.
From this, I can learn even more about the companies in question: their logistics executives are probably in their 50s or older and have no kids. Or at least they don’t follow Batman’s adventures.
I’m sure it’s come up in the comics more than once, but can I recall an episode of Batman: The Animated Series from 1993 called The Mechanic where exotic car part orders were traced to deduce who was supplying Batman with service for his Batmobile. Hell, didn’t this even come up in the Dark Knight movie where that accountant found some irregularities?
How hard is it for big companies to create shell companies that move their stuff around? I know if I had an on-site legal team, the first thing I’d do every morning would be to send them a list of company names I wanted registered for future nefarious purposes. True, if I were CEO you could deduce most of my activities by searching for companies with the words “pants” and “donkey” in their names, but I’m not CEO of anything at the moment, for reasons that escape me.
It’s settled then: big companies need to hire a comics writer if they’re serious about security. As long as it’s not a writer for Superman, that is. I mean, “wear glasses” probably isn’t the be all and end all to privacy protection.
by Jason on March 18, 2010
OK, this isn’t a tech post per se, but I read about this when I was a kid, and while the latest update came from a TV show, I love how the internet has made it possible for me to see it.
In Nova Scotia, there’s a place called Oak Island, and a long time ago (1795, actually,) someone found something interesting: a tackle block hanging from a tree. That’s not terribly exciting in itself, but logic suggests that there’d be something under that, and 1795 logic isn’t that much different from the logic of today, at least my logic, so they started digging.
Flagstones a few feet down. Layers of logs every ten feet or so. Layers of charcoal, putty and coconut fibres at 40, 50, and 60 feet. At 80 or 90 feet, a stone with an encoded inscription. Oh, and somewhere in there, some kind of water channel booby trap to flood the chamber (though this might be a natural occurrence.)
Six people have died to date in the excavation attempts, and theories abound about the nature of what’s buried at the bottom, mostly involving treasure – the stone with the mysterious inscription has theoretically been deciphered to be “forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.”
I’m calling shenanigans: given that I don’t know how to dig a pit like that with today’s technology, and I figure that means it’s pretty hard to do with technology from hundreds of years ago, I think there’s only one reason someone would dig such an elaborate system on a then-mostly uninhabited continent:
There’s a demon buried below.
Yep, a good old fashioned demon. Some group of badass knights captured the thing and imprisoned it deep in the ground in Nova Scotia, theoretically never to be seen again, or maybe to be held until the technology existed to properly dispose of it. And hey, maybe the demon will get hooked on Twitter and YouTube when it finally gets out.
Just to make this a perfect theory, I think it’ll get out in 2012 to loop the whole Mayan calendar thing into it. I don’t know how they knew, but it’s clear that defeating a demon requires a whole new calendar system. According to one of the leading Oak Island websites, a new dig permit is pending, so 2012 might be the year we finally get answers.
And then I’ll need a new mystery to (passively) obsess over, assuming we all survive. I’m sure the internet will provide something.
by Jason on March 17, 2010
There’s a running joke in pretty much any high tech detective show these days where the analyst can take a blurry image and do a series of enlarges and enhances until… the murderer is revealed! If that doesn’t ring any bells for you, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you need to watch more TV. Here’s a parody to give you the general idea, in any event.
It’s gotten to the point where I wanted to start a new company just so I could call it Enhance Sector Four. I don’t know what it would have done, but the business cards would have some blurry stuff on it. Maybe lenticular business cards – money’s no object if you have no potential clients!
Here’s the thing though: someone actually figured out how to do it.
There is math involved, which is probably why it took as long as it did, but the potential ramifications are huge. At the moment the big win seems to be in medical imaging, where shots can be taken much faster and the missing data reconstituted algorithmically, but the compression possibilities for images and video (why store things you can derive later?) could be game changers.
Plus, enhance sector four!
I imagine most of that stuff is still a while away, but in the meantime if you want to live the dream, I found this page incredibly fulfilling – hack the URL to put your own images in (via neatorama)
