When Pseudomation Attacks!

Ok, I like Jason Fried just as much as the next guy, but this page on Meetup.com is a little ridiculous, no?

“Meet with local fans of Jason Fried to discuss signals, noise, better things, EK, ML, SU, JF, and 37signals’ New Album!“

Whoa! What’s going on here!? Can we look forward to a compilation of Jason’s best dive-bar karaoke in the coming weeks or did Meetup.com make that all up?

What’s happening here is something I like to call “pseudomation”. A web site, in an effort to expand their offerings and encourage participation, scours the internet, scrapes data from popular web sites, and attempts to use that data to personalize their own pages. It can be done automatically, by an intern, or automatically with a human “check” performed afterwards to make sure it makes sense.

What’s weird about this one though is that I can’t really tell which method they used. It seems pretty automatic, with the initials “EK”, “ML”, “SU”, and “JF” just plastered on there fairly nonsensically, but the main “theme” of the page appears to be Jason. Furthermore, the url is “37.meetup.com” and not “jasonfried.meetup.com” which is just even weirder to me.

Anyway, just a random Friday morning finding. Anybody know of any other examples of pseudomation gone bad?

Baseball’s Latest Scandal: Milk Suspensions

ESPN has word of the latest scandal to hit baseball: milk consumption contests. Much like The Saltine Challenge, these competitions test the human body’s ability to ingest an uncomfortable amount of food over a very short period of time.

The Milk Challenge has been around for a long time and is, in my opinion, much tougher than the Saltine Challenge. The idea is to consume an entire gallon of the white stuff in less than an hour without throwing up. I’m not even sure I could do that with water, but with milk? Certainly not. Too much lactose makes the stomach very, very angry.

So you’d think that if someone could actually defeat the Milk Challenge, he’d be showered in glory and valuable prizes, right? Well, not in baseball. Brad Penny, former pitcher for the Florida Marlins (now with the Dodgers), challenged a batboy to complete the challenge with $500 in cash as an incentive. The poor kid ended up drinking the gallon, held it down, but didn’t come in under the one hour mark so he never got the payout. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Marlins then suspended him for six games! 10 games for steroid abuse and 6 games for milk abuse. Good times.

I only hope Penny ended up giving the kid his $500.

Bad Blur Jobs

I just read this entry on Scott Fegette’s blog about a really nice new feature of Dreamweaver 8 called “Code Collapse”, but that’s not really what got my attention about the blog entry. Check out the blur job on the screenshot below:

You blur out two phone numbers that are already fake (415.XXX.XXXX) and then don’t even blur out your own e-mail address enough to keep people from guessing exactly what it is? I mean c’mon… it ends in macromedia.com, doesn’t it?

Anyway, sorry Scott… I’m sure someone else is the guilty blurrer here. I just felt like bringing it up. UPDATE: Guilty! :)

And hey, great job with Dreamweaver 8! I can’t wait to try it out.

Most Ineffective Spam Opening Line Ever

A peculiar e-mail from China landed in my inbox this evening. It began:

“We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents.”

Mitch Hedberg – Rest in Peace

Mitch Hedberg has died. The news is just now percolating across the web and details are tough to find, but this is extremely sad news to all who have ever listened to or met Mitch. Mitch was only 37 years old and the cause of death appears to be a heart attack.

Rather than write an unsolicited eulogy or anything like that, I’ll just say that Mitch was and is my favorite comedian ever, and I’ll leave you with these two clips from his two albums:

From “Strategic Grill Locations”

From “Mitch Alltogether”

Costanza Loves the McDLT

So one of my friends e-mailed me yesterday to tell me that he had just moved to St. Croix and that they are so far behind the times over there that you can actually still get a McDLT. Yes, the McDLT… possibly the best sandwich to ever come out of the Ronald McDonald School of Culinary Arts.

The McDLT hasn’t been seen in America for about 15 years, but you remember it well: The hot stays hot. The cool stays cool. One half marketing genius, one half environmentally-unfriendly styrofoam waste.

Upon hearing of the McDLT sighting, I immediately hit Google to feed my nostalgic lust. There isn’t much current McDLT news to speak of, but I did find this gem of a commercial featuring George Costanza, circa 1985, who in the words of the site’s author “seems to love the HELL out of the McDLT.”

The spot is great. Extra points for the white Miami Vice jacket with the rolled-up sleeves and the kooky mid ’80s “Fame” dancing.

Playing Along with African E-Mail Scams

With all the genuine relief efforts going on in the world right now, it’s easy to lose sight of the fake ones. Particularly the plight of poor Augusto Nandu Savimbi, son of Jonas Savimbi, recently slain leader of the UNITA movement in Angola (pictured at right). If you’ve ever received one of these e-mails, perhaps you’ve been tempted to help poor Augusto or one of his siblings out of the horrible predicament that has been thrust upon them by the oppressive government of Angola.

Or, perhaps you’ve just wanted to play along via e-mail and see how much of “Augusto’s” time you could waste.

As it turns out, a designer I work with, Stephen Lodefink, has a friend who has been doing just this for the last month or so, and it’s one of the more entertaining e-mail exchanges I’ve read in awhile. This friend Patrick has been trading e-mails with “Mr. Savimbi” stringing him along and setting up a fake meeting in Dublin to transfer funds and make them both millionaires.

The e-mail chain has gotten a bit long and Mr. Savimbi has grown quite frustrated, but I’m going to go ahead and post the entire transcript before the saga is complete. I will add new e-mails as they come in. The whole thing starts off rather tame, but once Patrick’s broken english and “kooky-kitten-kat” stories kick in, it goes way over the top.

The transcript follows:

Read more…

I Found Some of Your Life

“Double Accidental Excellence / Awesomeness”A few times a year, you find something new on the web which you just know is going to get contagious. Today, via Phillip Torrone, I discovered such a thing.

Here it is in a nutshell: A few months ago, someone found a memory card in the back seat of a New York taxicab. The memory card was filled with 227 photos of some frat boy’s life over the last year. Trips to Amsterdam, keggers, ridiculous mugshots… the whole bit. Rather than just deleting the memory card, this extraordinarily creative (and a bit diabolical) person started a blog and is posting one photo per day from the reel. This, by itself, would not be so entertaining, but in addition to posting the photos, the blogger narrates each photo pretending it is his own life with his own friends. What a great premise for a blog. Seriously, it’s hilarious.

You could say that this is a mean thing to do, but really, can you think of a better way to get this person’s photos back to them? I can’t.

Check it out at: ifoundsomeofyourlife.blogspot.com.

Another Reason to Drop IE

I was at a bar this weekend telling a couple of friends how I’ve reflexively stopped using the grammatical device “i.e.” lately because of the industry I’m in. Whenever I have the urge to use it in a sentence, I’ve begun using “e.g.” instead. It’s really quite silly but I just can’t help it.

This sparked a bit of a dorky discussion (see: chick repellant) about what the two abbreviations really mean. “i.e.” seems the most common, but I’ve always assumed they were just two interchangeable ways to say “for example”. Turns out they aren’t, and friend #1 lost twenty bucks to friend #2 because of it.

According to the dictionary, “i.e.” means “that is to say” while “e.g.” means “for example”. So the difference would be as such:

“There are many ways to lose a race (i.e. there are a lot of obstacles to winning).”

“There are many ways to lose a race (e.g. disqualification, injury, sickness).”

So it turns out that by reducing my use of I.E., I am actually a more grammatically correct person now.

E.G. is the new I.E.

Apple Flunks First Grade Math

Something happened today which shook the very foundations of what I’ve always believed about computers. See, maybe this was just a crazy notion, but I was always under the impression that if there was ONE thing computers did well, it was math. Simple math, algebra, geometry, calculus… it didn’t matter. Computers have always been equation solving machines. Or so I thought.

As it so happened, I was catching up on three months of procrastinated Quicken transactions and I had a slight discrepancy in my numbers. I typed in Command-Space “cal” to launch the built-in Apple calculator via LaunchBar in order to check my figures. Here is the equation I typed in:

9533.24-215.10

… and here is the garbage Apple babbled back at me: 9318.139999999999

What? How is that possible? I’m subtracting two decimal numbers and the result is a repeating decimal? Thinking something was wrong, I began experimenting by simplifying the equation:

9533.24-.1

Result: 9533.139999999999

Convinced I had the calculator in some whacked-out Reverse Polish mode or something, I began checking the menus. The only relevant menu item was a setting called “Precision” which went from 0 to 16 and was defaulted at 12. How about Precision “Infinity”? I want my damned calculator to be precise enough to subtract simple decimals and apparently 12 isn’t enough to do this. As it turns out, “Precision” is a bit of a misnomer for this setting because it just represents how many decimals you want to see before the number gets rounded. Anyway, that still doesn’t explain why an equation which needs no rounding to begin with is giving me a repeating decimal.

Upon more experimentation, I discovered the following:

1. The error doesn’t seem occur on numbers less than 1000.
2. The error only occurs on some numbers greater than 1000.
3. The error doesn’t seem to occur on addition, but only subtraction.
4. The principal software engineer at my company couldn’t tell me how this was even possible.

And so there you have it… what was once simple is now apparently difficult again, thanks to the otherwise brilliant piece of engineering that is OS X Panther. I’m sure the explanation has something to do with floating-point calculations, whatever the hell those are, but that doesn’t make this bug the least bit more acceptable. My worst nightmare is that the repeating decimal answer actually is the correct answer from a computing standpoint but most computers are smart enough to round it for us, knowing what we really want. That would really alter my perceptions of low-level computing quite a bit.

On the bright side, we finally found something PCs are better than Macs at.

Subtraction.