To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Today’s mail contained 2 Bank of America World Points credit card offers with the same nonprofit group branding:
The only difference is the free gift offered.
The next step, of course, is five credit card offers in a day with no difference whatsoever! Since I’m not interested, perhaps someone who’d steal my identity by stealing my mail or taking advantage of a misdelivery will!
This even beats my last batch of credit card offers.
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A phish disguising itself as a warning about phishing scams. Brilliant!
Although this phising scam warns the recipients that Citizens Bank Money Manager GPS users have been the target of phishing scams containing misspelled words, it obviously does not note that phishing e-mails often contain weird capitalization or lack punctuation, but then again, valid e-mails often contain these problems.
To be really helpful, it would include a tip about checking your status bar (that bottom line of text in some e-mail clients) or the mouseover text (in some e-mail clients) to make sure that the target of the link is the same as the link text, or it would explain that subdomains with legitimate-looking text are irrelevant if the actual domain, that is, the last thing before the .com, is not what it’s supposed to be (such as vbv75.com).
But that would sort of spoil the phishing exercise, wouldn’t it?
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In yesterday’s mail:
The thing is, I have actually only attended one of these schools. Of the others, my wife has contributed money to one and we established a scholarship at the other.
Special thanks to the development departments at the last two for selling my name in vain and to Bank of America for its unsolicited and unwarranted come-ons.
In the mail for BOA the day after tomorrow: three post-paid envelopes containing nothing but the cardmember agreement.
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You know the phrase “wouldn’t be caught dead in”? Doesn’t that phrase really identify the garment in question as some sort of zombie accelerator? I mean, seriously, if you’re planning your life-after-death, I guess it’s worthwhile to think what sort of outfit will make you faster and all, but I have better ways to spend my time.
Like making long almost-puns that amuse no one but myself.
(This musing based upon this post.)
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The ch sound is not the same in the words lich and lichen.
Do not expose yourself as a former or current roleplaying gamer to respectable members of society by making this mistake!
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Rocket Jones leads me to contemplate:
What will today’s youth tell tomorrow’s youth in When I Was Your Ageisms?
My first shot:
When I was your age, radio came over radio waves.
Ah, I got nothing.
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Anger is not zero sum; that is, if everyone is angry, it doesn’t mean that one person is winning and another person is losing. An angry tide raises all boats, and it makes them run in ship-shape fashion.
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It took me two days to review all 414. But I did.
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At least this fellow is taking steps:
Advertising for one.
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Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, and he did, and on my most recent trip to Wisconsin I retrieved said machine.
When I first tried to boot it, it failed. So I planned to make it a teach-yourself-electronics project to resuscitate it, but all it took was a new fuse in the power supply. So I didn’t really learn much at all, but it works beautifully.
And darn the luck, the only television with an RF switch attached to it was in the living room. So behold:
Oh, my. I was so excited, I hooked the Commodore 1571 disk drive up and I’ll be durned if it didn’t work right out of the box. So I dug through my archives of my old disks and found some of the programs I had written in the first Bush presidency. As you might know, the Commodore 128 was my first computer, so Basic 7.0 was my first language. And I wrote a number of programs.
Including Adventurers’ Guild, a program designed to keep track of my D&D group’s equipment and character list. It wasn’t truly data-driven, but it did use the Commodore 128’s graphics to their ability. I mean, high res graphics, brother:
The main program was just a routing piece that called a subprogram allowing the user to look at the various and sundry keeps, characters, or stockpiled equipment:
For example, if you wanted to see the roster, it would go into a subprogram for the roster and you could see all characters past and present that played in the campaign:
For example, here’s my brother’s favorite character as seen when the user has chosen to view all:
And even when I was a junior in high school, I was building help into my applications. Here’s one of my first help files:
When the user logged out, the Commodore went into hi-res graphics for a moment, painting an exit door:
Then it ended turning the screen to default colors and with a final message from the dungeonmaster:
Hmm, lightning is misspelled. I’ll log a defect on that right away.
I wrote a couple of other things, too, including a DMV quiz program after watching the movie License to Drive over and over as only a kid in the boondocks with only Showtime could.
The instructions included my address back in the day and welcomed correspondence. Back in those days, that’s how you did it without the Internet and e-mail addresses that worked wherever you connected:
And the Weird Al Wannabe Quiz:
Of course, after I released them to the wild of the Commodore CG BBSes, I’d expect they were never downloaded. I know no one ever came across with a shareware donation. I did, however, make some money programming, as the high school baseball team’s manager wanted a program to keep track of stats. At Stellar Soft, we were happy to gather his requirements, deliver a quality program, and support it with new features as requested for the princely sum of like $50:
I see that in the instructions, I listed it as a division of Triple N Enterprises:
Considering that Noggle, Noggle, and Neiderriter was our lawnmowing business, I guess I did that for taxing purposes.
Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. What’s my point? I don’t know; I have 20 years of software development experience? Or perhaps to boast once again that I have more Commodores than Michele?
Aw, who cares, I got to post some pictures of an old computer.
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Crikey, I thought I was going to coin the word hipnoxious, but someone has beat me to it.
Well, there goes my fame and fortune.
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Worked all night, but it won’t last:
Hey, buddy? You missed a spot.
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If pro-life advocates assert that life begins at conception, how come they never include that period when discussing someone’s age?
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A short video from Summerfest shows people dancing; my goodness, I remember cutting a picnic table or two in my time. My friend Doug and I were unabashed in our appreciation of the music, much to the amusement of passersby and chagrin of those with whom we came. It probably also explains why we were unable to impress women we saw at Summerfest.
Why, I once went to Summerfest alone and danced on a table by myself. That shows the depths of….well, something.
I haven’t been to Summerfest in a decade, but watching the video takes me there again.
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You know, I don’t call it Fourth of July; I call it Independence Day as diligently as I call Autumn what others term Fall.
In my own mind, it makes me sound more formal.
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Am I bruchleidend?
I saw this ad inside the back cover of the Milwaukee America Kalendar 1924 I bought this weekend, and it asked a question we all must ask ourselves daily: Bruchleidend?
Because if I am, I definitely need to send off to a far away city to get a set of four suction cups I can wear around my waist to help with my bruchleidend condition.
Heather informs me that I cannot suffer bruchleidend, as those are obviously a woman’s hips in it. Google’s translator tells me that bruchleidend means “break-suffering,” which I sometimes have been known to feel (if bruchleidend means “Dreading the last minutes before you have to punch back in after scarfing a submarine sandwich and a quart of orange juice in 7 minutes”).
Given the language barrier in addition to the archaic nature of the advertisement, I cannot be clear whether this was an actual, outdated, treatment for something, snake oil of some sort, or some mechanism to part German immigrants from their American dollars. As a matter of fact, given that it appeared in the back of a magazine and has a tarty line drawing, perhaps I’ve blown my PG-13 rating on my blog by including it.
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So Greenville, Illinois, home of FCI Greenville:
Has a realty company named:
Does anyone else find that a bit peculiar?
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The sad, lonely life of an unrequited lover recounted using the date due flap of an obscure academic tome as the metaphor:
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I’ve found myself watching YouTube renditions of various and sundry commercials and “viral” advertisements lately. Once a series grabs me, I like to watch a pile of them, which makes them amusing if not effective. Brand awareness and affinity? You bet.
First, thanks to a post on StLRecruiting.com, I started watching the “Making Things Right with Pete and Red series” for Haggar:
These represent an extended version of some television commercials. You can find the HaggarFilms list on YouTube here and on the Haggar site here. And, if you search around on YouTube, you can find others and the 30 second cuts that appeared on television. Makes me want to go out and buy pants.
Secondly, when Carl’s sued Jack in the Box for its Angus commercials, I went right out to review the advertisements in question. Here’s one:
Using YouTube’s related suggestions and search mechanism, I found a number of other of the commercials I liked. I watched some that I’d seen on television. Particularly “The Intern,” which I watched again during the creation of this post. Carl’s probably made a mistake bigger than hiring Norm MacDonald to voice its star.
So then I went to find an old Bud commercial with the beavers because every now and then I think the tagline Naughty little beavers and want to use it in professional conversation but I cannot without it sounding, well, worthy of a call to HR. But I’ll embed it here because the more it becomes known, the less chance I’ll have to think of euphemisms for “fired for sexual harrassment” to use in job interviews for “Why did you leave your last job?”
Or the “Willy! It’s go time.” commercial:
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t drink Budweiser if I was drowning (which, ultimately, makes no sense). However, I like the commercials.
What’s my point? Oh, yeah, if you’re all slavering to get into Web 2.0 advertising–that is, to save money on actually distributing/running your adverts, you probably ought to spend money on the production of them and make them amusing and funny enough to warrant further watching. Sure, it’s cheap, but so’s a blog, and if this blog serves any lesson for you it’s that you can have a steady Web presence, but just because you put it out there doesn’t mean you’re doing your clients any favors or garnering any attention.
And here’s the only YouTube commercial I have ever bookmarked: Folger’s Happy Morning:
The last coffee I bought was Folger’s, partly because I was trimming expenditures from the $20 a pound stuff but partly, perhaps, because I enjoyed an amusing video that I could watch over and over again for the same set of amusement.
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