raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Privacy or Not
The internet is not a friendly place. What you do in the privacy of your own home vaporizes the moment you go online. Imagine walking out of your house naked, having a flashing billboard over your head spewing out every private thought you have. You get tracked, sliced, diced, spun dry, and become a demographic, that anybody with a checkbook and an ad campaign can pick up for a song.

Every site, click, comment, posting and purchase gets sucked up into someone’s data bucket. Without notice, discussion, or acknowledgment. Websites value your privacy right up to the point there is a buck in selling this information. They are called ‘partners’ and ‘third party managers’. They like to say they serve you, like a kindly domestic bringing you a drink at the end of the day, when in reality, they are more like a group of home invaders, force feeding you with a fire hose.

Blocking Ads, rejecting cookies, using an anonymiser, are steps you need to take to try to take your privacy back. Understand that these are active steps you must take. The default is walking around naked with a billboard.

Behavioral Targeting
BT is the catch phrase used by marketeers that all of the above mentioned privacy stripping activities are lumped in an attempt to obscure its purpose. Not unlike tying a brick to your penis, as a Natural Male Enhancement Method. Both of which hold an almost fatal attraction for segments of the population. Never mind, people do weird shit.

From a marketing standpoint the internet is a target rich environment.
The invention and expansion of the internet is really the best thing that has happened to companies since the first advertisement rolled off a printing press. Global Reach, extremely low publication and distribution, open 24/7, and qualified sales leads, when done properly.

The number of companies that do it well is extremely small in relationship to the number of commercial sites out here. Companies realizing that their websites suck, turn to what they know, which is plastering ads on other sites, driven by the evangelists and fundamentalists of Marketing. They in turn do what they know, which is to place ads on sites and with companies who live by advertiser support. The first casualties are the newspapers and magazines, whose dead tree publications are being decimated by the online world.

VRM
VRM aka Vendor Relationship Management is the latest attempt by Doc Searls to bitchslap companies into realizing what Peer to Peer means. The problem that I have been wrestling with for months is that VRM has at its core, the idea that we have to be receptive to companies and their advertisers. Without this principle there is no management required. This is just as disingenuous as the Opt Out method, which is the new black in privacy, or so they would have you believe.

The US Congress is learning about Behavioral Targeting from the companies that are doing it. Letting the inmates run the asylum comes to mind.

No surprise as having a Presidential candidate who doesn’t use computers, a congress critter who describes the web as tubes, and others who don’t answer email, and think that the internet is something that kids use.

From this article Legislators Apparently Unaware of Adblock Plus, TrackMeNot, comes this Money Shot;

Google wrote in its letter to the Committee. “To ensure the continuation and proliferation of responsible behavioral targeting practices, we are supportive of efforts to establish strong self-regulatory principles for online advertising that involves the collection of user data for the purpose of creating behavioral and demographic profiles.”
Source: Google’s Letter to the Energy Committee[PDF]

Think about that.

Car leasing for individuals has never been a good idea, as the first time you turn the key, the car loses value, and the terms and conditions of car leases always end with you upside down.
The NYT has this nugget:
Plummeting Resale Values Lead Chrysler to End Leases
Chrysler may be the first, but will not be the last, and only because the new ownership team is quick enough to chop it off.
There is no money in used cars. There is very little in new cars either.

Businesses are gonna take a big hit soon as this ripples into the commercial markets. When the leasing stops businesses will lose that tax deduction, and need mechanics, in house or shops.
Expect free shipping offers and UPS, FedEX, and others to raise rates.

Environmental Deficit Disorder is a term I made up for the practice of over packaging products, by companies who should know better.

My personal EDD story is the Canon Ink Package. This package contains only 3 cartridges. It would seem that I am not alone in thinking that this is a stupid idea. On a tip from the Dell Blog is this gem from the Register. 17 boxes to protect 32 A4 sheets

Can’t quite figure it out. Is this a printer company problem in that their profits on ink are so vast, that environmental concerns are out the window, or is it just stone cold stupid?

EDD stands for Environmental Deficit Disorder.You heard it here first! EDD.
I have been recycling since before a lot of folks could pronounce it, let alone understand it. I worked in auto junkyards for almost 9 years, which may account in small part my sparkling personality, but more importantly exposed me to recycling in a big way,(when you are crushing dismantling and crushing 5 cars a day,about 10 tons of scrap metal, 6 days a week for two years, you build up a bit of a carbon credit) as well as networking, as auto wreckers have telephone hotlines that connect each other together to find parts for customers.
Great sales training also, as you have a vertical sales challenge. You are selling used parts from wrecked cars to folks who are pissed off because their cars are not working, they cannot afford to buy new, and they do not know how to install it.
Couple of years of this, I can sell your sister back to you, and have you thank me. But I digress…

In the post global warming, save mother earth, go Green or Die Brave New World, there are a couple of things that annoy me. Packaging is a big one. I have already saved the planet enough.
Specifically Canon Printer ink packaging. This is a Canon Color Ink cartridge bought at Costco. It has a shrink wrap to hold the orange cap in place.

So you are thinking WTF? here is the package it comes in.

You are thinking WTF? It is a value pack! Says so right on the front.

This is the back side. There are 3 cartridges only. One of each color The package is huge in relationship to the product.

This is  Environmental Deficit Disorder, of the first rank. Canon is not alone in this. It is just the stuff I use.

I am not buying an anti theft argument, as just about anywhere that sells printer ink, keeps behind the counter, or under lock and key, and then holds it for you on your way to the register, like you can’t be trusted not to make a break for the door to the getaway car piloted by your office assistant.

Getting the package open is an exercise in danger also. You need a blade sharp enough to cut through plastic thick enough to be used as bulletproofing, yet not so sharp that you end up slitting your wrists, or that of your trusty henchmen. You have already generated this big pile of garbage, arguably recyclable, before you ever get to actually use the ink.

Really what the hell are these folks thinking. You had me at the first photo. I like my printer, and want to use it, rather than dealing with a package designed by some deranged designer who didn’t make the cut for reality TV. I would like to buy them 6 of one at a time also.

Next up is Polident 5 3 min. denture cleaning tabs. Yes it is a bulk pack. But they individually wrap them, leaving more crap to dispose of.

They could package them in little plastic tubes like Alka Seltzer used to come in. EDD for sure.

The Ready Kilowatt Guilt Trip
The electric company ads that say if everybody in America replaced just one bulb with a CFL, it would save enough energy to power every home in Arizona.(probably have the same ad in your state, but I live in Arizona) and my bill has not gone down, leading me to the conclusion that the rest of you are red zone, suv drivin’, planet raping fools of the first order. Maybe you have and my bill will go down next month. Yeah Right!

Don’t get me started about what an environmental disaster that the mercury in CFL’s are going to cause in a few years. The good news is that places like the Home Depot are accepting used ones for recycling. As well they should, thinking back to the Asbestos litigation of a few years ago.

So there you have it! Another acronym you can use in your next conversation or round of golf.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

161 characters

Microsoft is buzzing about the money it has made in the last quarter. A 32% increase in revenues is an astounding number for any industry, let alone one as fractious as Software.

Vista, the newest OS that comes in a number of flavors, is being reported as being on 95% of retail shelves. So Microsoft is honking about 85-88 million units shipped. Think about that for a moment.
This does not represent sales or money in the bank . What it does mean is that they have a large inventory of product, ready to go, sort of like cars. They get built, but sit in lots until dealers order them.
I went to Costco, the other day to look at laptops. All with Vista. I asked the folks about getting one with XP or even without an OS, but no soap.
This is a numbers game. Like AOL, and now Facebook, who count everybody who ever signs up.

Microsoft is trumpeting about the traction Vista will have. When the only way you can get a Ford is in Black, the sales numbers always look good.

Facebook gets BorgedLast week’s darling sharecropper social network, Facebook has taken 30 pieces of silver from none other than Microsoft. The technoweenies are all aflutter, atwitter and posting their little fingers off by using the calculator that comes with their various operating systems and figuring that MS’s 240 million ostensibly for ’staffing’, and being called a marketing coop for Ballmer the Borg, means that Facebook is worth 15 billion bucks.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other. Bring toilet paper.

The value of every one of these walled garden spots plummets in a direct proportion to the increase in membership. For those of you that have drunk the Kool Aid and want to argue, save your breath, I have been on the web longer than you have had pubic hair.

Now in the WEB(what’s your monetization(click-thru advertiser) strategy)2.0 world, Microsoft is going to be the exclusive ad server for Facebook. Good business move in the short term (help pay all those fines in the EU, and pump more marketing dollars into the Flatline OS Vista) as they really are the gang who couldn’t shoot straight on their own properties, but the darkside is that they will be tracking every move and click across their new partners network. And yes they will sell your ass down the river.

Enough about fools with no sense of history since last week.

do not screw with hippies with money
Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz (the Big Cheese), has decided to turn loose the lawyers and bitchslap Network Appliance, who is suing them to stop them promoting Sun’s file system ”ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers.” Dumb move on the part of Network Appliance since Sun released it as Open Source, but litigation seems to be the new business contact sport.
This is the money shot:

So later this week, we’re going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license - on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

The rest of the posting is priceless.

My neighborhood has an enormous number of dogs. A lot of folks around here like the idea of a dog, but have no clue what a dog is, how to care for it, or what to do with it. Consequently, there are stray dogs around. There are a lot of things that I will tolerate, but animal cruelty is the one thing that will bring out a side of me that you really do not want to experience.

The other morning, I was woken up to the heart rending sound of a dog crying out in pain. I flew out of the house and discovered a small puppy that had got his paw and wrist entangled in a piece of prickly pear cactus. The guy at the house the pup was at had no clue as to what to do. So I removed the spur and pulled the spines out. I had no intention of adopting anymore dogs. I have three and that was enough. I told the guy that I would check back in a couple of hours to see if the owner showed up. No soap. sigh….

I took the pup home, and put the word out that I had this pup. The backstory was that the dog followed one kid home, whose parent said no, who gave the dog to another kid whose parents said no, and so on. (discovered that I am known as the crazy white dog guy now) So I ended up with another dog.

Yesterday morning, Pecan had a large fast moving swelling on his paw and wrist. In Arizona, we have ticks, brown recluse and black widow spiders , all of which will kill dogs in a very short time. Packed up Pecan, and zipped to the vet. My vet is open 7 days a week.

700 bucks later, we have rehydrated, tested for the usual suspects, discovered this dog is about 8 weeks old, and will probably grow into a monster dog. This is Pecan. coat looks like a pecan shell.

His expression of gratitude? If you look close you can see the streak of urine by his right rear leg. Yep that is my thank you.

Weeds - Season One Mary Louise Parker is astounding.

If you never inhaled, this is probably not the show for you. If you did, this is funnier than hell.

This is one of the bastard paper plastic cases. It contains two dvd’s, that could have been slipped into a simple clamshell.

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Cheap slipcase for this season seems to be a waste of time. Plus this edition is full screen rather than wide screen. Major suckage there. The blurb in the pocket on the left is an episode guide.
Weeds - Season One

Back in the 90’s, when personal computing was starting to make inroads into our lives, software came on CD’s, in big boxes that you bought at the computer stores. For you youngins’ this was before online downloads, when having a 14.4 modems made you the geek of the week. Everyone of these products came in a cereal sized box that opened differently than every other one. They all had a jewel case holding the CD, and the box was more of an intelligence test than the contents were.

VCR Tapes on the other hand had a constant size and package. DVD’s have arrived to replace tapes, There was a brief interval with a crossbreed paper plastic case, but a stake was driven into it’s heart. The standard DVD package is a plastic clam-shell containing a circle holding your movie and maybe some weird blurb sheet. Straightforward, consistent packaging. Holds 1, 2 or 3 DVD’s. With the arrival of TV Series on DVD, we have been thrown under the bus again, by either the return from the dead zombie bad package designers, or their hell spawn possessed get.

The resurrection of bad package design

Multi DVD sets present challenges, between the desire to package them for the lowest possible cost of production, vs the desire to embellish the cases with information about the contents, maybe an ad for other series, and simple things like disc numbers.

Some of these folks are having a problem with the idea that this is one of the areas where the contents are much more important than the package. You had us at the cash register.

This has led to some interesting (in the sense of the chinese curse) formats and packages. (this is one of those places where recycled plastic could be very big in the holder) It has also led to the return of the paper/plastic halfbreed. The photos are by yours truly, so they may not have that vaseline glass, no blemish look, but I think you will get the idea. I also have a link to Amazon in case you want to get your own copies:) (yet another stab of becoming filthy rich online by selling stuff to get you offline.)

Here in no particular order are some series and the design choices made.

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House, M.D. - Season Three is the third season on DVD.House stars Hugh Laurie as a diagnostician in a New Jersey regional hospital whe runs a department that takes on cases that the rest of the staff can’t solve.House is a cranky bastard whose bedside manner is nonexistent, has his own health issues, and his staff gets run through the wringer of his intelligence and dry wit. If you are looking for kittens, butterflies and rainbows, you will be sorely disappointed.It is one of the few highlights of commercial television in a desert of clone reality and what will you do for money shows.

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Season Three comes on a Flip flop, double stack, open top and bottom sleeve package.

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I hate double stacking. The chances for damage go up, and it is a PITA to juggle the discs when you are settling in for some serious viewing.
House, M.D. - Season Three Highly Recommended.