Archive for February, 2008
Web 2.0 Broadband Marketing
I just found this amazing blog about blogging, and various other web 2.0 marketing techniques. There’s a lot of great info on broadband video, viral marketing through social networks, and more great buzzwords. It has nothing to do with content quality, and it will blow you away with how much cutting edge, next gen, ajax, and web 2.0 buzzwords, ???, profit. Go here to find out more.
Mayonnaise Makes Me Angry
Seriously. The more I think about how much of that crap I’ve ingested in my life for no good reason, the more angry I get at mayonnaise. The amount of flavor it adds to, say, a bacon cheeseburger is not a good enough reason to ingest that much more fat and sodium. And it not like there’s any protein or food value out of the stuff from the containers. Just more chemicals in the form of preservatives, and who knows what else.
Want to know a great alternative? Guacamole. It doesn’t even have to be fancy guacamole. Just some avacado with a little lime juice, and some garlic mixed in can make any sandwich really fantastic. No, I don’t know how well that would go on abacon cheeseburger, but really, I’d prefer to stay away from those as well. And if I had vegetarian sandwiches with guacamole on them as an alternative to eat on a daily basis, I honestly might not be all too interested in a burger.
My Book Idea
I’ve been kicking around the idea that I should write a book one day, and it would pretty much be useless theories, and completely over analyzed breakdowns, and charts of why simple things are the way they are. Oh, there would be graphs, and theories, and all sorts of goodness.
One such theory of mine that would be an obvious topic, is my bathtub curve of humor. It started out as a simple observation with my older brother about 5 years ago, and it has yet to fail me. The theory is simply that dumb inside jokes, and their ability to make you pee your pants with glee, or have orange soda come out of your nose, will have a high point, followed by a sharp drop off. There will be a seemingly long unfunny period, that i like to call the “inside laugh zone”, or ILZ for short. Then depending on the delivery, and timing, there will be a gradual increase of the inside joke effectiveness. This is due to the irony of using something that is no longer funny to such a point where you begin to laugh at the fact that you said, or made use of the inside joke, rather than how funny the original usage was. This is where the old joke is dead, and the new fun begins. The curve itself can actually have many layers, as inside jokes like this tend to spawn children, or perhaps even by accident, two very distinct inside jokes can combine into something of its own. Then there is also 3rd party mutation syndrome, where there is a noticeable evolution of a joke based on 3rd party inside joke pick ups. This can happen when a 3rd party individual can pick up a joke somewhere during it’s life cycle, and because of possibly mis-interpretation, or inappropriate use can add new meaning, or life to a joke.
One other thing I’ve noticed is that the longer the ILZ, the more unpredictable the timing of of the curve can be. Humor can be very fragile, but never give up on something, even when you’re pretty sure it’s completely dead. These are moments that can never be lost if you time everything correctly.
Anyway. I hope to shore more of my thoughts like this very soon.
Zend Frameworks
Have you ever heard about how awesome something was, but assumed it was hard to learn, and never bothered with it? Well, I’ve recently been looking into PHP resources, and open source frameworks, and libraries to become a better programmer. Well today I was looking into a handful of frameworks, and Zend Framworks was kind of recommended as one of the better frameworks out there.
I’m really impressed with how flexible it is, ans far as how you could structure an application with it. The recommended structure is the model-view-controller, and it seems to make the most sense, but there is no defined structure. In fact, there is only a library folder. You do the rest. You could very easily integrate your favorite PEAR library, use Smarty, or even extend classes within the frameworks.
I’m very excited to see what I can build with this now that I’ve seen what’s possible. I’ve also found a pretty handy video tutorial that helped me learn the basics pretty quickly.
Guitar Hero III’ed
Yes. It’s true. I was always firm on the idea that spending time playing Guitar Hero was a huge waste when I could be playing my real guitars. But it’s been calling at me ever since I downloaded Frets on Fire and decided it was a buttload of fun. And I still stand by the fact that Guitar Hero is a time sink, and I kind of regret spending the $120 on one game.
But is this game ever fun. I pretty much played it all day yesterday, and finished the easy mode, and unlocked a bunch of stuff. This morning I’m trying to work on medium, and at least get to a few of my favorite songs. One thing is that I almot wish I had just skipped through easy mode. It took a little bit of the sense of achievement away for me, as I kind of just ripped through it all.
I’ll be posting an update when I beet (yes, beet) medium, and give a better review of the game. For now I’ll just say it’s a fun waste of time.
Frakken Awesome
I really love this word! I saw this license plate posted, and I think I’d have one if they weren’t so frakken expensive. Anyway, the following video is a pretty good compilation of some of the more memorable fraks on BSG. Enjoy!