MSN says someone loves me
Microsoft Messenger has always been my least favorite IM app. I hate them all actually, with their two hundred buttons, endless ads, etc. But MSN Messenger is the worst because it has no antispam protections. Everytime I log in I get one or two of these popups.
Most websites go to lengths to hide their phone number. I think that’s silly. Most people are looking for your number for a reason. Here is one website that gets it: they prominently display their phone number, and make it clear that you won’t be on hold forever.
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I like reading articles, but I definitely like reading the comments more. Here is an example of a comment putting the article in a whole new context. We read a standard puff piece, how company ( Caterpillar ) is having tough times, but they have a hot new product, analyst says it will do well when ‘economy turns around’. Then you read the comment and figure out that the company is actually behind their competitor ( Komatsu ) and they are playing catch-up. I wonder if there is a sophisticated software program that pulls in a bunch of quotes and churns out these ‘articles’.
BusinessWeek : Comment outshines article
Cough up 40 bucks or so for webex…and then try to figure out where to login. Yeah, people can claim that ‘Host A Meeting’ is the login button, but why not say that?
Much has been said about Google having some kind of algorithm that predicts when employees will quit. There were 83 articles on this at Google News. But this is really not that big a deal. Google has thousands of employees, it gives them surveys, questionnaires, etc., and feeds that info into a data warehouse. Then, after a bunch of people quit, it takes that data, analyzes and figures out who else fits the pattern of those who quit. A complex problem, but hardly rocket science.
More surprising to me is how GMail comes up with these wacky results, as shown below:
So….chemistry.com equates to gonorrhea and car crash photos. hmm.
I have been laid off before. I didn’t go crying to my mamma afterwards. I accepted it as a fact of life, and moved on.
But I am very annoyed by the constant whining of the car dealers who are losing their precious franchises. I looked at the list for Los Angeles, and it is mostly dealers that I have never heard of, in locations that no one buys cars anymore. These guys should have moved on long time ago, turned their real estate in 99cent stores, anything other than selling junky American cars.
Now comes CNN and does a little cry-me-a-river-piece on a Chrysler dealership, “Claxton Chrysler Jeep Dodge” closing in a small town called Claxton, GA. Every bit about this piece is intended to elicit little sobs and sniffles from the ith-tho-thad crowd. I feel that CNN has lost any pretense of substantive journalism with this piece. Its writer, Jim Kavanagh, should be forced to turn in his keyboard.
The piece writes about all these locals who supposedly love the dealership. Now, considering that overall, auto dealerships are ranked lower than dentists in terms of customer experience, I pulled up the record of this Dealership with the local BBB.
To no surprise, the BBB rated this dealership an “F”.
Now let me show you some choice quotes from this article, with my comments. Quotes in italics, my comments below the quotes.
“It was like standing out in the road and having a bus run over the top of us,” he said.
Wrong. You most likely knew it was coming, based on your customer feedback, your revenues, etc. If you didn’t, then you deseve the shutdown even more.
“We all know each other, we see each other every day. I spend more time with this group here than I do with my own family.”
That’s a sad reflection on your personal priorities in life.
Take Gary Sapp, for example. The military veteran, wounded in Vietnam, stopped in Saturday, as he does just about every day, to say hello and maybe talk about cars a little bit. He said he might come back Monday and make a deal, just as he’s done there three times in the past 10 years. But it’s not really about the cars and pickup trucks. “These are good folks here,” Sapp said.
No, you just have way too much time on your hands, Mr. Sapp.
“How the hell they gon’ sell to those people in small towns?” he said. “They’re a different breed. They’re not gonna go no damn hundred miles to buy a car.”
They won’t have to, there are three other dealers within 30 miles. Just like Wal-Mart.
“It’s just a cryin’ damn shame, is what it is,” he said.
No, it’s a necessary change that’s been a long time coming.
America is crying out for high-tech investment. Please, please, please build a factory, a design center, an assembly line, ANYTHING, in America. We need jobs. Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, goes ahead and does exactly that, invests half a billion dollars.
So what thanks does he gets? An ugly, ugly photograph in the NY Times. Shame on you, NY Times. You could have at least shown a nice picture.
A pet peeve of mine is the country lists on websites…someone went to the United Nations website and compiled a list of all the countries, and everyone blindly uses those lists. Here is another example of how websites blindly copy other websites. In this case, it is even stupider, because this Kern County Community College lists the U.S.S.R as a choice…even though it ceased to exist BEFORE the WWW was invented.
Youtube only shows you the first x letters of the title, so they all look the same. They need renaming.
They say reality is stranger than movies.
Globalization has gone wrong, very wrong if a Bangladeshi man has to travel 6000 miles to sells tacos on the streets of Mexico City.
Add to that the fact that this man is sure to be a Muslim-and therefore eats no pork. And he got swine flu?
Or perhaps it is Mexico’s work visa program that has gone wrong?
