10 Principles of Effective Web Design
Principle One: Fill half the screen with Google ads right below your headline.
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Elsewhere... Infomercial Aesthetics, via my new favorite site, The Triumph of Bullshit.
infomercial aesthetics from holzman on Vimeo.
Honestly, I live for this kind of thing. I should live for hunting prey and spreading my DNA, but I live for insane remixes of infomercials. Isn't that sad?
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On the SocGen "rogue" trader who lost $7 billion:
Kerviel could not be reached for comment. A headshot of him cut from a trading Website showed an earnest-looking young man. At the start of the afternoon, when his identity was revealed, he had 11 friends listed on the facebook.com social website. That number later dropped to four.
Some friends they are.
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The Fred Thompson story, in headlines
If the USA operated anything like Silicon Valley, Dubya would have been replaced by Bill Clinton some time in 2005. Also, the Dakotas would have merged to be more competitive with Nebraska.
To the left is another high-larius riff on the whole LOL-Catz/I Can Has Cheezburger meme that is taking the Innernets by storm. This one is apparently making the rounds inside Yahoo!
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Even funnier have been the LOL Ed Jew riffs. For those unfamiliar, Ed Jew is a family man from Burlingame -- a suburb many miles from San Francisco -- who claimed he lived in the Sunset, ran for the SF Board of Supervisors, won, and immediately shook down a local business for $40k. But the $40k was supplied by the FBI, who promptly raided his office.
How Floridesque! And just to assure maximum Floridesqueness, he lied and lied and lied (Actual claims: "The money was for a public playground!" "That house in Burlingame is an extra house I keep for my in-laws to have parties in!" "I take all my showers at the Chinatown flower shop!"). And then, after his indictment, he rallied his allies to play the race card.
Ed Jew is going to jail.
Ed Jew is also Chinese-American, but his last name has caused some interesting issues. The Chron has struggled with writing headlines that don't appear ripped from an Islamist pamphlet. Here are some recent headlines with his first name removed:
"City attorney moves to remove Jew from office"
"Jew in hot water. Again"
"Supporters say Jew is victim of racism"
"FBI's cash paid Jew, source said"
"Jew tries to give $10,000 to playground, but it's given right back"
Six thousand years of persecution, and no way out of the desert.
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France we come from France.
If you'd like to appreciate fully the disproportionate size and prosperity of these United States compared with the rest of the known universe, peep this map of states renamed after countries with similar GDPs. And you thought Alabama and Iran only had their penchants for theocracy in common...
And yes, North Dakota (Ecuador) + South Dakota (Croatia) = Omni-Dakota = Bangladesh, but with holsteins instead of monsoons. Watch out, Czech Cornhuskers!
Word to the indispensible AdamRiff for the discovery.
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Finally, is Web 2.0 making us dumber? Are the Deal or No Deal crowds really wiser than people with fancy diplomas and expertise? Andrew Keen says, nyet, user-generated content is making us dumber.
Can we all agree that open systems are full of chaos and risk? Last Friday, I deleted the following paragraph from the Wikipedia entry for Bea Arthur (don't ask): "Arthur died in a plane crash on June 15th, 2007. Trace amounts of LSD, cocaine, and PCP were found in her system. She likes dildos and her favorite color is yellow."
I can has wizdum?
In case you needed one more reason to ditch your Internet Explorer and spread Firefox all over your tragicallt cluttered PC, apparently Fandango will cut you a price break.
I was logged into Fandango trying to beat the geeks to the advance tickets for X-Men III this weekend. Using IE, I got up to the order screen.
(Click to enlarge.)
Note the service fee is $2 per ticket.
So I took a break, and later went back to Fandango, but this time using Firefox:
Note the service fee is a mere $0.99 per ticket. Same movie, same theater, same showtime, radically different price.
I closed both browsers and retraced my steps. Same results.
What gives? Anyone able to replicate or have a clue?
Remember when you were seven, and you loved Garfield, because you were seven? The Garfield Randomizer will bring back that feeling.
Thanks to MattyMatt for finding this.
KRON guest-blogger Pepper points to Mike Taht's discovery of the greatest one-page resource of the decade, the IVR Cheat Sheet. Yes, next time you call a company, you will know the secret combo-move that will get you to a live human.
Now if only there were a button to make those people competent, or to cut hold time to less than 20 minutes. I'm looking at you, HomeDepot.com!
Everyone's buzzing about Oracle's takeover of Seibel and EBay's 1999-style cash bonfire for Skype.
But I really think that Stuff on My Cat needs to make run at Beedogs.com, "the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes." Need I detail the obvious synergies?
I was doing a couple vanity searches on Dogpile this morning. This is the fifth most-relevant image that pops up for my full name:
"All this time we thought he was learnin' from us, turned out we were learnin' from him!"
I think he/she exaggerates, but just a little.
Semel out, Yang back in.
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