FLICK OFF is a Canadian government run energy reduction initiative.

It really should have gotten a less provocative name.

Or do I have a dirty mind?

via http://www.thisisbroken.com/

Today one of my longest-lasting geek t-shirt goes to meet its maker. It was an MSN beta tester shirt, sent to me in 1995 just after the Windows 95 release. It now has too many holes in it to be of use anymore.

Back then, of course, MSN was not a web site. It was the anti-Internet, a closed proprietary network using a bunch of jumbled technologies (some, like MediaView, were really really ugly) that I somehow got involved in testing… In retrospect, it was always doomed to failure given the rise of the Web, though I admit, I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. I blogged about it here, some time back.

So, hasta la vista, MSN t-shirt.

Why are iPods never on discount?

Because Apple Computer says no.

Those of us in AU who used to frequent Tandy Electronics might recall that they always asked for a name and address — ostensibly for customer service, but in practice to send you catalogues. I had a CompSci teacher in year 12 who refused to provide it; he found it ridiculous to do be asked, especially when buying something like a single resistor.

Raymond Chen writes about this happening at the affiliated Radio Shack stores in the USA, and tells a funny story refusing to give his name.

Ha! But, I guess that’s why they’re the Top Ten Stock Photography Cliches. But, still, funny.

An observation: iStockphoto has about an order of magnitude more photos that Yotophoto. Perhaps it’s because the photographers get rewarded for the photos used from iStockphoto.

What if Microsoft was marketing the iPod? (Article about the origins of the video here.)

In case you’ve been living in a virtual cave, VMWare’s basic VMServer product is now free.

Google is beta trialling GMail from your own domain, primarily aimed at organisations to start with. (via Patrick)

Found an old quote of mine:
To me, reading Perl is a little like trying to understand Norwegian. A minority of things - essentials like “Help!” or “Hello” - I can probably understand. The rest is just gobbledygook. (Quoted here, originally posted here.)

Yesterday I answered the ‘phone. Because I was home, having a holiday, which is soon to be rudely interrupted by a short working stint, but that’s by-the-by. I could tell that whomever had called didn’t know anyone in the house; the phone’s listed in my girlfriends name. “Hello, Mr [Girlfriend’s-name]?” is a dead giveaway that they’ve pulled the number from the phonebook, and immediately puts me on the defensive. Which is why I have no interest in having the phone in my name. I can spot low-life scum a mile away with the arrangement as it is.

Now, the first thing I do when I have a telemarketer on the phone is to get them to tell me who they are. The lass weasled about, talking about a survey. Surveys don’t care about the identity of the respondent; this was marketting. Eventually she said she was representing the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at which point I terminated the call; religous fundamentalists get up my nostril.

Neither Cathy nor I get any telemarketing calls - oh, well maybe we get a couple a year from local gyms. It’s because we’re signed up to the ADMA’s do-no-call list. If you’re not signed up, stop reading, and go sign up now. The local gyms get the line “we only purchase goods from members of the Australian Direct Marketting Association” and they’re taken care of.

So, here we have technology being used for evil. Evil, not only because it’s evangelical fundamentalists at work, but because they claim they’re doing a survey about how people in the local neighbourhood feel about stuff. Because it’s a survey, that would be covered by the Australian Market & Social Research Society, which (they would claim to keep the statistics clean) doesn’t operate a do-not-call list (in spite of the fact that people that don’t want to be surveyed are going to do all sorts of bad things to their stats).

Worst of all, I don’t think there’s much I can do about it, except I remember hearing about a guy who had installed a PABX with and IVR - “if you want to talk to Cathy, press 1 now. To talk to Josh, press 2 now. Pressing 3 now will let you talk at Owen, but don’t expect a cogniscient conversation out of him.” Apparently, in the US, he was getting zero telemarketing calls - which is quite a feat.

Questions:

1. Has the obesity epidemic reached the point where the Jehovah’s Witnesses can’t be bothered leaving the house to recruit souls so that they can, pyramid-sales-scheme-like, go to heaven?
2. Why don’t the Jehovah’s Witnesses tell people up front you’re not going to heaven, even if you convert (there’s only 144,000 spots - what are the chances you’ll be goody-two-shoes-super-converter enough to get in)?
3. Why doesn’t the AMSRS operate a do-not-call list?
4. Why doesn’t the government ban harrassment like this?
5. What can I do to stop this from happening again?

I was browsing through the junk mail the other day and came across a Tandy catalogue, selling stuff for Mother’s Day, with the slogans such as “Mums prefer Tandy to Candy” and “Mums prefer MP3 players” and “Mums prefer printers”.

Now hear this, all geeks. Just in case you thought Mother’s Day was a great excuse to go out gizmo shopping: This is bollocks. Mums don’t prefer electronic toys. Mums do not prefer them to chocolates. My mum would find an MP3 player overwhelmingly useless. She’d know what it was, but she wouldn’t want it. She would not want a printer. In fact I don’t think there’s anything in that catalogue that she’d want.

Okay so there’s probably some hip young groovy mums who might like a new camera phone, but reality is most would consider a new gizmo to be in the same league as the bowling ball Homer Simpson bought Marge for her birthday.

Google is testing ads in RSS.

I was reluctant at first to switch geekrant.org to providing full RSS feeds (entire posts, not just extracts), as it would reduce the already-paltry revenue from Adsense. But really, any revenue from Adsense is a bonus in this game, it’s not the end game unless you’re racking up a gazillion hits a day. The main point is to get your blogs read.

This however has the potential of re-gaining some of that advert revenue, even if readers are getting to you via an RSS aggregator. Question is, would people find it too annoying to find adverts mid-feed? If I personally found it too annoying, could I bring myself to include ads in my feeds?

Here we get about 4 times as many hits on the RSS feed as on the home page. But of course we have no idea how many people read that RSS feed, since it goes to places like Newsgator which might get it seen by hundreds of people.

It’ll be something to watch, anyway.

PS. Friday 8am. Dave Winer on RSS ads: “If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads.”

Steve Rubel reckons Microsoft’s new Office marketing campaign is all wrong, and misses out on opportunities for “conversational” marketing, such as blogs and podcasts.

Me, I reckon they should at least have designed an animation that doesn’t have a character that looks at first glance like a giant penis.

… Or is it just me?

An article from The Economist on Robert Scoble, and the whole corporate blogging thing, and also revealing why Microsoft’s developer TV “channel” is called Channel 9. (And here’s Scoble on the tree in the picture in the Economist article.)

Corporate blogging has certainly taken off in the States. But will it be worldwide like personal blogging? Will it move out of the IT industry into other sectors? Does the rest of the world enjoy evangelising for their companies like the Americans do? Do companies in the rest of the world have that kind of online community that American IT companies do?

Indeed, since the IT industry is largely driven by American innovation, are there companies elsewhere that have the kind of geek following needed to bring corporate blogs up to the kind of readership where senior management consider them worthwhile?

Scoble is unrepentant, considering it inexusable for a corporate web site not to be doing this and making it clear it’s not technology for technology’s sake: it’s marketing, and feeding your web site with visitors.

Despite the global village, in some respects those of us in AU remain a little way behind the pack. Mick at G’day World talked on one of their recent podcasts about trying to set up a corporate blogging conference, and it seems to have died for now for lack of sponsors.

I recall that I saw URLs on US TV ads in early 1996. It must have been another year before they popped up in Australian TV ads. Maybe there’ll be a similar delay until corporate blogging takes a foothold here and worldwide.

(Corner Swanston and Bourke Streets, Melbourne)