Ned Your Always Wrong

Let me explain this one, because the picture is pretty crappy, because it was pretty dark, and my iPhone has no flash (in more ways then one ;-p)

So I am driving down the road, kind of stuck behind an SUV that is doing about 10-15 under the limit… I finally get around her, and I see that she is chatting on her cell, add to that her dog is in her lap and in her face as she keeps taking her “free” hand off the wheel to get the dog out of her face…
Sometimes the stupidity of people just makes you go all WTF!

sorry about the quality, but it was dark, and I did wait until we got to a stop light to take ghe picture..

Going through Giz today I came across this Jingle Bells article… I immediately thought back to the “largest drawing in the world” scam.

The first part of the video looks almost feasible, but then as they are pulling in the power, the cords they pull in to power the array seem kind of skimpy to power 49 microwave ovens.

Then you take a look at timers, a lot are those pseudo analog timers, that I don’t believe are all that accurate, and they are only set able in 10 second intervals.

Then there is that big gap in time from when the fire them up walk away and turn out the lights.

The last thing is that when the timers go off on the ovens that appear to have clocks, it seems that when the timer goes off so does the clock…

Yes I am probably over analyzing it, but what else do I have to do…

Came across this tonight, and wondered how much work goes into making a fake iPhone. Just the case and electronics have to be a few rubles… Then there is all the hassle of trying to make the deal, I cant think there is a huge ROI here, you’d think it would be more cost effective to hit them with a baseball bat and take their wallet…

Then again, if you are buying an iPhone on the street in Russia, you get dinged heavily for being stupid…

The story was the same…
My brothers friends cousins sister knows a guy, who works for xyz, and they said… (someone also told me they also heard this on the radio)
This one was that gas stations were raising prices to $5 a gallon, and limited to 10 gallons…
In reality, prices did bump up about 10 cents at most places, and others took advantage of the situation and kicked prices by 30 or 40 cents a gallon.
The $5 a gallon did have some basis in reality, well if you were evacuating Houston, you would have been paying that…

The Shell station kicked it 30 cents... it is hard to read...

Evil Exxon the low priced leader

Our "local, community-minded supermarket" sticking it to us

 All the Citgo’s (Hugh Chavez’s favorite gas station) is passed were all approaching the $3.89 mark, most above $3.69…

The simple fact is that the lowest prices of all the places I went by was Exxon, the oil company that everyone hates, simply because they make a profit. I don’t see people working for free, besides News flash, they don’t set the price of oil, nor are all their profits from the US market….

I ran across this one today, and I had to share it…

Who else besides the Germans, is going to come up with the idea to crash test segways…

The video is all in German, but you’ll get the gist of it…

It wasn’t a primary reason for buying a Sirius Satellite Radio, but it was a reason, Commercial Free Music and other programming.

I hope that when the merger is complete that the way that XM programs their music channels is the way the new entity programs it’s music, MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC, with the occasional station ID, and the elimination of the annoying DJ’s and the shilling to buy another radio constantly.

In my book, when a DJ come on and tells you that you should buy an additional radio, that is a commercial…

I totally understand the need for commercials on live talk shows, it is hard to sit there and talk for several hours at a stretch with out a break. I cannot understand the need for commercials on any of the channels that are playing taped items, such as any of the comedy channels. The comedy channels have almost become unlistenable due to a near constant barrage of commercials, and the seem redundant like playing the same one twice during a break, and its not like there is someone queueing up tapes on the fly, the system at Sirius is totally automated, and I don’t think there is any human intervention required after the audio is loaded in the system. 

I don’t listen to any of news channels, because I am pretty much over broadcast journalism, so I really can t comment on the amount of commercials there….

So come on guys lets drop the pushing of radios during the breaks on the music channels, because that is really a commercial, and get rid of them completely from the programming that is not live, and limit them on the live shows, at least 15 minutes of commercial and bumper on Bubba the other day. I don’t think Howard has taken that long of a commercial break, even when Artie was going ballistic…

P.S. If your an NAB shill, don’t bother with one of those boilerplate Satellite Merger is bad comments, because it will not be approved….

I saw several articles on “The biggest drawing in the world”, and when I read it was done using DHL, I had to laugh. Every time I deal with a new vendor, and they tell me they ship through DHL, I toss a coin to get an idea on if the package will arrive in a timely fashion, or make it at all. It seems that from my past experiences, DHL drivers are incapable of checking a building directory, for a suite number. I have waited days with DHL making multiple attempts to deliver a package, and because of an error somewhere, the full suite number does not appear on the label, something like Suite 40 when it should be Suite 402. But they can’t seem to take the extra 2 seconds to check the building directory, etc…
Ok I am digressing, but now back to the point…

So now this comes out that DHL has assisted in making the largest drawing in the world (well it’s not, more on that later), to make this alleged largest drawing, the “Artist” shipped a GPS with big ass batteries, with the exact instructions (Just like my packages) on where the package needed to go, and 55 days later, the GPS showed back up, with all the Data to make the picture. Then the guy breaks out a map, a pen, and tracing paper, and using a lot of artistic license, proceeds to connect the dots.
I am very skeptical when it comes to this based on past experience, as recent as last week, that only took 4 days to straighten out.

Now to the biggest drawing claim…
Since when is a drawing on D sized paper, the biggest drawing in the world? For it to be what the artist claims, wouldn’t there need to be a large ink line all over the world? Because what he has is just a representation of a GPS track, and that is only 110k kilometers, what about that picture that NASA is constantly drawing, that is track of the International Space Station ISS, jeez that has to be billions of miles/KM, since an average shuttle mission does millions of miles. So as far as I am concerned, unless I can see big lines on google earth, I ain’t buying the Biggest Drawing In The World claim, at least he could have done is draw it on a really really big piece of paper.

I used to do a lot more travel then I do now, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I remember that when the whole thing started with the drought out west, and that hotel visitors should d their part to help save water, from the shower flow restrictors from hell, to use less towels thing, by hanging them up and we wont replace them thing. The hotels spent a lot of effort in trying to get guests to do their part to help save water, or guilt you into it. Now we fast forward a few years to the late ninety’s, and on top of the never ending drought that now has every hotel in the country doing their part to end, the hotel operators in California have a new problem to solve, it is the lack of power generation capacity due to the new spiffy de-regulation of the California power companies. So suddenly, hotels are brought in to help, they remove all nonessential lights, in some cases I had seen brighter caves, and on top of this they also add a $2 to $5 a night “Power Surcharge”, and it didn’t take long for hotels elsewhere to also impose this surcharge, including locations where power was/is abundant and cheep. As I understand it, this charge has pretty much gone away. I guess I am confused by the whole “less for more” philosophy that governs the hotel industry.

So now lets go forward, and by the looks of all the little placards all over my room last week, that the hotel industry has saved us from the drought, and is now moving on to save the world from global warming, because that cards no longer talk about saving water for drought purposes, but now it is the whole spectrum of cleaning the room linens and towels. The cards told me of how much energy is expended in the laundry process, and that all this laundry and cleaning is increasing my carbon footprint, and that I should do my part to help.

Enough is enough guys, stop acting like you have some kind of green soul, and you hugged the trees that were chopped down for paper to print all those USA Today’s that are delivered to every room, not to mention all those silly little placards. Why is the outside of most hotels lit up with big bright lights, thats not very green.

If you want me to help you save money, that you can apply to the bottom line, why don’t you just say so. Give me the option to stay in a “Green” room, without a big TV, and reduced lighting, and where the towels and linens will only be replaced every third day, and charge me less… I’m sure that will go over real big…
Don’t treat me like I am as dumb as dirt (or you), and plaster my room with all the propaganda on how socially conscious your company is, when you are really not, you are in business to make money, but you should at least be honest about it…

Okay one last thing, I had a sign like this in my room, never thought about hanging stuff from the fire sprinkler, but I wonder how many people have gotten a surprise shower, apparently enough flooded rooms to motivate hotel chains to start posting these signs….

I have several websites out there that are more of a hobby then anything else, a lot of proof of concept stuff, some public service, but all pretty much niche stuff, and nothing I am ever going to get rich off of, well maybe never, I can hope…

Ok enough background, I used to get, still do I guess,this stupid email about once a quarter per website, from some alleged Elmer Fudd (aka PHD) telling me how he has analyzed my website, and tested it against search engines globally, and how much better it would be traffic wise if I was more reachable to non english speakers globally. Well first of all I really don’t care who can find that website, more then a couple hundred miles from where I am, and anyone who actually looked at the site would easily figure that a out. The other thing is I went ahead and looked at how that site fared against the likes of Google China, and guess what I actually rate number 1 in a lot relevant search terms. Same with India, number 2 in Russia, and Pakistan, but always top 5. I can’t figure out where all that foreign traffic is, I guess no one in outer Mongolia cares about that stuff.

So now I want to know, what do these guys actually do, and how much do they charge. Well it seems that for the low low price of ~$400 per language they’ll convert my meta tags and submit my site to relevant search engines for the language. Plus they offer all kinds of other translation services for a fee, I guess I’ll just stick to babelfish.altavista.com for my translation needs..

I have to believe that this whole SEO thing is just a big scam, maybe a short term bump, and what all the search engines say, that the best SEO is good relevant content. I have to believe this, because as much scamming that goes on with the Internet, that if SEO actually worked as advertised, BillyJoBobs Chevy Emporium on Rt 5 would stand as much of a chance for the number 1 spot as Chevrolet when searching for Chevy…

After today, I guess I should add sheep to the list of answers to the question “People Are”…

I dropped my daughter off at work this afternoon, and was initially taken aback at the traffic at the shopping center, then I saw the lines at the gas station, they occasionally do some big time discount, and I normally ignore it, unless I happen to be there etc… Well it was complete pandemonium lines of cars 15+ deep, because they had gasoline at $2.99 down from $3.35 a gallon. Now I estimate it was probably taking 3 to 5 minutes per car, so if you do the math, you’re looking at close to an hour wait to save about $4.00 based on the average person puts in about 10 gallons when they gas up (Or at least used to)…

Considering that people working fast-food are making $6+ per hour, I am trying to figure out where the savings are… My logic says that if you make $6 per hour, and you wait an hour to save $4 you have lost $2 in income, and and hour of your life that you will never get back…

So now it is past 10 at night, My daughter is home from work, and guess what people are still waiting in line, well there are only 3 or 4 cars in each line…

I just got a live report from a neighbor, and my estimates where about right, he had 3 or 4 cars ahead of him and it took about 10-12 minutes for him to get to the pump. I was giving him a hard time, but he said he needed gas anyways, and he was already there… So I didn’t give him too much of a hard time…

Quit being sheep…