Ordinary Nothing

Sometimes PR speak is so bad, that it prevents any actual info from showing. Well, alright, that sometimes was a bit gentle, it happens a lot with PR speak. But still , this is one of the more amusing cases I encountered lately.

My boss was checking possibilities for a new computer, and noticed a very cheap option from some seller. So he asked me to take a look at the spec. The computer was a barebone Asus Terminator C3. As a barebone system, it has the CPU as an on-board component, and is pretty weak, but I wanted to see exactly what is it and what can it do.

Which brought me to this amusing paragraph from their site:

Instead of meaninglessly looking for high frequency processor, ASUS Terminator C3 brings you into a new world – it is strong enough to do your office/school job as well as fulfill your multimedia needs. ASUS Terminator C3 is built to be silent, space-saving, and cost effective.

Or in other words: Instead of looking for something that can prove it’s good, trust us, this one can do what you want it to, and we don’t even need to ask what you want to do with it in order to know that.

Very reassuring, isn’t it? Why check for specifications? Why check how fast a computer is. This one would do the job. It’s a wonder the big companies are releasing different kinds of processors, isn’t it, if you can just make one that always fit…

And that’s not even the best part. I found another site selling it, which had even more to say:

Confused about all those CPU naming rules? Do you really have idea about 530, 540, 550, 560 or the difference from them to 2600+, 2800+, 3000+? With on-board CPU, ASUS Terminator C3 offers you enormous DIY fun while sparing the trouble over CPU selection.

Yes, you read that right, they just plain go out and say: Confused about the names and models that big CPU manufacturers use? Don’t worry, we don’t give you any name or model details, so you have nothing to be confused about.

Which is the same thing, but put even better. How does this solve the problem? If getting names and models of CPUs doesn’t help their intended audience avoid confusion, why would no info at all be better? With no info at all (except for trust us of course), I’d expect people would be even more confused, no?

And what about poor people like me, who are actually not confused with all these name? People who want to know what their computer is. Are they saying this one is bad for them? Because, you know, if it has to be bad for the people with technical knowledge, it doesn’t inspire the rest that it would be good for them. And, well, DIY fun?! That surely isn’t what people who don’t get these names and models would be interested in, doing it themselves.

Odd.

I’m subscribed to Nature magazine for years now. The sciences are a hobby of mine, and Nature is one of the best, and oldest, interdisciplinary journals out there.

My current subscription was nearing the expiration period, and I logged in to the site to renew. I don’t usually use the site much, since I read everything on the paper, but when it comes to registration it beats filling a paper form and sending an envelope, hands-down.

Before starting the renewal, I took a quick look at my account details, and noticed a problem. I was listed as working in the pharmaceutical industry. I certainly never provided that information, so it must be a mistake. This is one of the information fields that doesn’t have any effect on me, and only interests them, since it gives them better data about their subscribers.

I decided I can spare a minute to be nice and go and change this. I entered the account details page, changed to a more appropriate category, and tried to update the data.

No such luck. They have required fields which were not filled. Mind you, these are required field that didn’t contain any info previously, so how can they really be required? But specifically, they require that I also fill in my Secondary Speciality, my Main Activity, and my Professional Qualification. Even ignoring the fact that I’m not entirely sure what the heck they’re talking about, why would I be required to provide that info? I don’t want to, and don’t need to.

I’m a paying customer, have a subscription for years, and nobody forced me to go change my details. I’m doing them a favour of updating some details, and they won’t let me do that without divulging even more personal information? Yes, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I could either tell them more than I wanted to, or let them keep the wrong info that I was willing to correct. So I said goodbye, and left them with the garbage info. This makes no sense, why demand to receive more information, when the info isn’t really required? Do they really prefer to get no information about people, than partial info? Why?

And, oh, as a side-note, while the new subscription page works great, the renew subscription page is a total bust. The help system has a page saying something about the entire on-line subscription being inoperational, but the page is entirely undated, so it’s impossible to know how close it is to apply. And the support rep, by email, said that she doesn’t know why the renew pages don’t work, and offered me to send her the credit card details by phone, fax, or email. Yes, clear-text unencrypted email. Sloppy all around.

I was following some posts in a Yahoo group, when they showed a pop-up message, asking me to answer a survey. The message gives the strong impression that it’s yet another survey about Yahoo, probably about the groups, so I decided to see what it’s about this time.

You do agree that having it titled as coming from Yahoo! Research, and saying that it’s time to tell Yahoo what I think, indicates it’s about Yahoo, right?

Well, wrong. It started asking me about my opinion on various American airlines, and how likely am I to fly with them. But never mind, Yahoo! need to make a living, and since I don’t pay direct money for the services I take from them, I can see this as payment.

What the problem was, is that I kept being offered to take this supposed survey again, and again, and again. It only appeared when I was logged in, so they could easily know I already took it. Why bother me with it, then? Even if they don’t want to keep a list of Yahoo! IDs that took it, they can surely store something in a cookie. In any case, once I took it, I’m not supposed to see the pop-up again.

And it wasn’t just a rare occurrence. There were a few days where the thing kept showing in nearly every second page load. Sometimes on each page load.

And when I tried to press the Take the survey button image, I was taken to a page telling me that:

Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, you do not qualify to take this particular survey today.

Nice, isn’t it? Because it was me who was really interested in going there again, without being prompted at all, sure. And I did not qualify? Qualify ?! This gave me the strong feeling that they decided they didn’t want to say "Sorry, we screwed up, you already took the survey, sorry for bothering you", and instead decided it’s better to tell me it’s my fault, that I’m not up to some standard. Not a way to make people happy, guys. If I don’t qualify, tell me why.

Even better (well, worse), this page opened instead of the original Yahoo page I was viewing, not in a new window, and not in a pop-up window. And yet they put a "close" link on the page, like you do on pop-up pages that can be so closed. Except… This wasn’t a pop-up page. So there was this "close" link there, and it didn’t do anything. At all. I tried, I knew it was out of place, but was intrigued as to what it would do. It didn’t do anything. Very professional, I was so impressed.

Instead I pressed the browser’s back button, returned to the original page I started from, and… Guess what? I got this pop-up image asking me to take a survey…

When it comes to phone carriers in Israel, there is only one company that provides in-country land line phone connection. But cellular phones, and international calls, are open for some competition.

My boss at work signed with one of the International carriers, called Barak. And for some reason they decided to be nice. So when you call out, instead if just connecting the line and keeping it quiet, they play this chirpy little tune, and have an announcer thanking you for calling with them.

If you make the rare call once in a while, I suppose it could be alright. But when you make lots of international phone calls, as we do from the office, this is maddening. I’m getting sick of hearing their tune, and want to yell back at the recorded announcer to stuff it when I’m hearing the thank you…

They provide the service of international phone calls. So if I make a phone, I should get a connection. Why the incessant self-advertisement? It doesn’t help! it’s annoying! And if it was up to me I’d really switch to another carrier just so I won’t have to listen to this message ever again.

I had some purchases in the UK version of Amazon in the past. So they’re sending me (with permission, this isn’t the problem here) the occasional promotional emails about new releases and special discounts.

The latest such message contained some interesting offers. Like:

The 4 DVDs for GBP 20 promotion applies to listed titles only, which are subject to change and availability. DVDs may be purchased individually for GBP 4.97.

Now, let me run this by you again. You can purchase, in a special promotion price, a pack of four DVDs, for a total of 20 GBP. Do the math, it comes to 5 GBP each. Or, you could forgo the special offer, and buy them individually, in which case they will cost 4.97 GBP each. Which is less. So for example, if you really want four, you’re better off getting them as four individuals instead of using the special promotion. Brilliant offer, isn’t it?

But wait, there’s more:

The 3 paperbacks for GBP 12 promotion applies to listed titles only, which are subject to change and availability. Books in this promotion may be purchased individually for GBP 3.99.

Yes, that’s almost exactly the same thing. It’s not as bad here as in the previous case, but you’re still either better off, or the same, buying them individually instead of in the special offer pack. Would it have really hurt them to say that each one is 4 GBP and be done with it, without any special offers?

With passover approaching, as with a few more of the main holidays, many companies and businesses feel the need to get a holiday gift to their employees (That’s not an altruistic feeling, in particular. It’s so ingrained that people deserve it, that companies will face serious disaffection and disgruntlement if they won’t do it. Cheaper to get the gifts, and retain the good feelings of the employees. Some places, it may even be in the contract).

And a gift which is becoming more and more popular is a multi-coupon, that’s worth a certain amount of money in a large amount of store networks – clothing, music, books, toys, and supermarkets. Actually, there are people using the opportunity to buy these things privately, since if you buy at the included stores anyway, you save money. the coupon price is less than it’s value in the store (not that big a problem for stores, they give up a little of their mark-up for a chance of getting more customers. If they didn’t think it was worth it, they wouldn’t do it).

Now, in most places, it’s easy. If the coupon has a stated value of 100 ILS, then you can buy 100 ILS worth of goods in it. Simple enough. But for a long time some of the large clothing stores, and supermarket network, accept these coupons for a reduced value, so the same coupon will be worth, for example, 95 ILS there. These are probably the places that get lots of traffic anyway, so they assume nearly all shoppers will be regular one that take advantage of the coupons, rather than new customers that wouldn’t have bought anything otherwise.

Personally, I found this irking enough that I wouldn’t go there with the coupon out of principal. It feels too much like being cheated out of money.

And now, one of the supermarket chains had these radio commercials that I’ve been hearing over the last few days. And it’s a very sad state of affairs that this sort of thing is considered by their PR flacks to be an advantage worth publishing. It’s even sadder that many people may actually see this as the special discount offer that those commercial presents.

See, what they claim is that, very special offer, the coupons will be worth their stated value in their store. Yes, you read that right, this amazing and unbelievable offer, you could buy things in the sum stated on the coupon as it’s value. Now is that the best deal you’ve heard of in a long time, or what?

I was discussion with Yahoo!’s customer support a problem causing my Yahoo! Messenger to be always marked as on-line from web pages and Yahoo! Groups. After a few days they managed to sort it out, and that was that.

Then I got an email asking me to take an on-line survey about their customer care. I took the survey. The survey was very badly designed, and had some serious flaws. They did provide an email address to send other comments about the survey, so I took the opportunity and emailed them (Satmetrix, which was running the survey for Yahoo!. I’m not sure why, Yahoo! are big enough to be able to make bad surveys by themselves. A good survey is something else, and may require previous practice, but this?) my main complaints.

First, They had a series of question of the rate between 1-5 the following aspects kind. One was for "Professionalism and courtesy of response". This is something I saw on several past surveys, and it always ticks me off. Courtesy and professionalism are two entirely different things when dealing with technical support. Courtesy is how nice and polite the person is. Professionalism is how much it seems like they have a clue what they’re talking about.

Yahoo! support emails are always very courteous. I dealt with them several times in the past, and I can’t fault their courtesy at all. But part of it is because they use pre-written responses, which were went over to assure they’re courteous. They are also usually entirely irrelevant. This specific incident was much better than previous ones, but still the level of professionalism was way below the level of courtesy.

So do I give a low mark, and risk them making the responses even more meaningless, yet friendly? Or do I give a high mark, and risk them thinking that quoting unhelpful pages, and telling me the problem was resolved when it wasn’t, is professional enough for me?

Second, they had a question about the "Time to receive a response after sending email to Yahoo!". This is again very unclear. I got a response straight away, but it was an automated response, copying the same help web page that didn’t help me a single bit originally (which is why I turned to support in the first place, after all). This response told me to reply to it if it wasn’t helpful, which I promptly did. The next reply, which is the first one I’d actually term a response, was fast, but took a little longer.

But which do they refer to here? Which do they call the first response? If I give a lower mark, would they think that they need to send the meaningless response even faster? If I give a high mark, would they think that the brain-dead automatic response was good?

Third, they had a field for free text commentary, but limited to "one" thing that Yahoo! Support needs to improve. Just one. This is silly, what if I have several comments? Heck, I did have several comments. But I didn’t say them, since they were asking for one.

Result? I was annoyed since I had things to say, I even took a survey which is supposed to let me say them, and then I wasn’t allowed to say them. And Yahoo! loses as well, since they got reviews from actual customers that they didn’t get. If this is the case with me, this is the case in aggregate. They lose valuable customer feedback, and annoy customers. Why?

So I sent my message. I wasn’t sure how much attention it would get, but I did my bit, and tried to help.

Guess what, I received a response. Is that a good thing? Well, considering the response, no! Satmetrix made themselves appear entirely unprofessional (and discourteous <g> ).

Of course the response was automated. That’s alright, I expected an automated response. But I expected one saying that the received my comments and will later review them, or something of the sort.

Anyone want to guess the method of automation used? An "Out of Office AutoReply". They just set the email address as a personal email address, with a setting used generally when someone is on vacation and want to notify people that they won’t be able to reply for a while.

Technically, it does the job, yes. But this is so unprofessional. It feels amateurish. It’s really not that difficult to send automatic replies that don’t look like that. When I get a response from a company after sending comments to an address they specified, I do not want to see the subject of the response message telling me that someone isn’t at the office. I sent it to an address meant to be a recipient of messages for further processing, not a personal one.

In addition, they had spam filters installed to monitor this address. How do I know? Because it added the word "[spam]" to the subject. You do not put automatic spam monitoring on an address set to autoreply to everything, or one meant to receive public comments. Yet they did.

So the spam filter thinks it’s spam, adds the word "[spam]" to the subject, and let the message go on.  Once past it, it gets caught be the Out of Office AutoReply mechanism, which replies to it with the pre-written text. And as a result I am told that they believe my message is spam. Good to know. That’s rude, people.

Either you don’t filter this address, or you don’t reply to messages you think are spam. But doing it like they really did it, bad, bad, bad.

All in all, if I had to fill a survey about my experience with Satmetrix, they would get very poor marks.

Just a tiny little blooper.

This looks like a nice and friendly shop for little children’s clothing.

Check the file name for the right-side image (Right click on the image, and choose "Properties").

Now, isn’t that very nice of them?

Hat tip to NTK.

PS. In case they found out about this and fix it, this is a nice picture of a cute young Asian girl, but the file name is chink.jpg

Last week we were in the Technologies 2005 exhibition in Tel-Aviv. It’s a purely Israeli event, but there are representatives from many of the major suppliers (and buyers) in various hi-tech sectors.

The exhibition itself was fairly interesting (well, some aspects more, and some less, there were very myriad types on things presented).

One mistake many presenting companies made was in the design of their stands. Everyone made sure you could see the company name, but some where so enthusiastic about having colours,  graphics, and eye candy, that they made it very hard to know what they do. If someone came over to search for then, that’s fine. For people who intend to spend time on each stand, and talk to reps of each company, that’s fine too. But most buyers were either generally browsing, or looking for specific kinds of items/technologies. And when someone makes it very hard to discern at first, or second or third, sight what it is they’re selling, many people would not spend the effort of coming over to talk to the rep.

And there seemed to be extremely bad judgement exhibited by many of those presenting thin LCD screens for embedded systems.

One supplier had a wall full of a large amount of models and sizes of screens. And what did they show on them, to demonstrate the display quality? The standard Flying Windows screen saver. So the screen was black, with the occasional fast-moving splotches of colour. Not helping to know anything about the screen at all, and mostly made me wonder what were they trying to hide…

Another vendor did worse. They also had a wall covered with LCD screens. And two huge problems. The first was a nice screen that was so totally out of synch that the picture looked sliced and flickering. Nobody should show that when they’re trying to sell something. It’s a huge run away – this product we’re selling is defective sign. The second one was that the lovely hi-res flower pictures they showed were often replaced by a notice that this is a free demo of some commercial screen saver product, with web address and contact details to buy the full version. And if it’s not clear, this was not by the company making the presentation. That’s right, they probably took a demo version of a screen saver of the Internet, and used it for the exhibition. This is both serious copyright infringement, and plain stupid. It looked so unprofessional. And they didn’t mind, it was like that for two days…

A third vendor of those screen had a more conceptual problem. I heard a discussion he had with one of the exhibition’s visitors that was taking a look at his stand, and it was obvious they completely misunderstood each other. The mistake of the visitor was understandable, he didn’t come from the right field. But the vendor had to know what he was talking about.  The visitor was mainly aware of computer screens as things you connect to personal computers. But the screens were meant for embedded systems (closed systems that also need to display information. Like hand-held computers). So the screens didn’t come with a connection to a regular computer’s graphical card, since they were not meant to be connected externally to a full computer. They were meant to be connected to computer boards for embedded systems, which have special types of connectors built directly into the circuitry of the board (TFT and LVDS). So the vendor was repeating the claim that you don’t need a graphics card in order to use the screens (which is true, but pointless for him to mention since hardly any of those systems use external graphics cards anyway), and the visitor kept claiming that you have to use a graphics card since there isn’t any other way for the computer to use a screen (which is also entirely true, for full computers like the visitor know from home). It was a long argument, and they both ended it feeling that the other person is an idiot…

Plus, as usual in these exhibitions, many of the traders brought all sorts of silly gifts and trinkets, such as free food-stuff, candies, pens, markers, flashlights, candles, toys, and up to a company that gave free wine (good one, even) plus the wineglasses themselves. All a colossal expenditure of money, which I doubt helped sales in any noticeable manner, since the people who came just to take the free stuff rarely paid attention to what was actually sold.

It looks like the Norwegians have joined the bandwagon.

Anyone heard of the large furniture selling network, IKEA ? Well, most of the furniture comes in pieces, as "flat pack", with instruction manuals explaining how to assemble them.

So what’s the problem? Some manuals contain drawing of human figures alongside the pieces of furniture, illustrating positions and movement needed for the assembly. And the Norwegian prime minister is furious because all the figures are either of men, or of indiscernible gender. So it must be sexual discrimination, you see?

Do you? Really?

Especially those indiscernible gender figures. Have they no shame?!

He’s absolutely right. Next time I buy something in IKEA I want the instruction manual to be jam-packed with drawings of scantily clad females. And be accurate and elaborate, so there won’t be room for confusion. We have to know these are real women, and not men in disguise. Equality is important, dammit! Are you listening IKEA?

On a side-note, the CNN news article managed to get IKEA’s name wrong in the title. The web page title, in the HTML, not the headline. The article itself is correct all the way, but on the title it’s spelled ‘Ikea". An overzealous copy editor?

Hat tip to Common Knowledge.

After the pharmacy from the previous post, I went into a different store. At some point their public announcement system (a bunch of low quality, but high volume, speakers spread around the store) came to life with a loud "To all our customers! To all our customers! Your attention, please! A special offer! Only today!".

And that’s it. Silence.

People were staring at each other a bit puzzled. And nearly a minute later again an announcement. "Attention, customer! Pay attention please!". And died again, this time with a low quiet trace in the background of someone whispering to someone else a sentence along the lines of "… not working, I don’t know what…".

I never did get to find out what was the special offer. And the announcement system wasn’t dead, if the thought occurred to you. It went on perfectly in it’s usual work of calling personal to come to specific stations.

Most odd. They got my attention, then did nothing with it…

The trade-in idea isn’t new. Various sellers in various industries offer customers a discount if they bring in an older product similar to the one they’re buying.
You see many trade-in offers for cars, for televisions, lots of home electronics equipment, phones, refrigerators, and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, there are some things that you would normally not see offered as part of a trade-in deal. Like this tantalizing offer that I saw in the newspaper today…
A trade-in discount for… toothbrushes. Yes, you read that right. Bring in your old used toothbrush, and get a discount when buying a new one.

I mean… who would go to a store carrying a used toothbrush, for crying out loud ?! The discount price is small, the price for a brand new top of the line toothbrush is small. Would this really overcome the gross factor ? Would it overcome the reaction of other potential customers that would get out of the store when they see people brandishing their used toothbrushes about ?

Personally, I may buy another competing brand of toothbrush just to avoid being asked if I carried the old one with me…

And from a different point of view, this also doesn’t make much economic sense. Trade-ins are done as a sort of partial price discrimination. Trying to attract the customers who won’t pay full price because they have a similar product, but who may be willing to pay less to get a sort of an upgrade. Well, newsflash:

1. Everybody has a toothbrush. Everybody.
2. The features of a new product are meaningless in the toothbrush industry. People replace a toothbrush when it needs to be replaced. They will replace it in the same time, regardless of price variations of the new product or the available features.

So this trade in does not make their toothbrushes appealing (although maybe appalling) to more people. It does not attract extra customers beyond those that would by them anyway.

The only idea is to try and shift some people who already buy a toothbrush from the competitors to them. I admit that it is a valid economic purpose, but is this really the way? Somehow, I don’t quite see that.

If anyone wonders, the offer is for new Colgate toothbrushes. So if you happen to be in Israel, have your old toothbrush with you, and want to get a shiny, new, dirt-cheap Colgate toothbrush, now’s the time.
Me, I’ll buy Oral-B next time…

Let me start by saying that I’m not a The West Wing viewer. Mostly for historical reasons (Didn’t start to watch the first season, didn’t have the time to catch up a little afterwards, was told it’s not really worth it to catch up during the later seasons, and don’t have the time to catch up on six whole seasons now). The reviews I hear from people who watch it are that the latest is season is really good, and on par with the first ones.

But they are making lots of noise in the media lately. It seems that hardly an episode goes by without someone getting insulted.

Early on December, they had an episode when they were dissing the hospital in Anchorage. And the mayor was greatly offended.

Last week they ran an episode saying some not-very-nice things about the NASCAR races. And about the races’ fans. Which in turn got very upset.

And in the latest episode, they managed to rile the corn industry.

And I’m not sure why. If the latest season was bad, I’d believe they’re desperately trying to get more viewers. But that’s not the case…
Naturally most shows could easily manage to anger someone. It’s easy to anger most people. But The West Wing is doing it best lately. I don’t follow The West Wing on the news, and yet I heard about these. That’s more than for other shows.

And it may be that Americans need to start taking their entertainment TV shows a hell of a lot less seriously. And fast. That would be another way to make everyone happier.

I ran across this article, where a Greek reporter complains that the FCC in the U.S. is considering censoring parts of the Greek Olympic Games opening ceremony. Which would be very stupid and ridiculous of them, and which I agree with her can be seen as an insult to Greece, but it would be far from the first time the FCC has made a stupid decision.

In any case, I decided to try and look for myself on the FCC website exactly is it that they have to say about the issue.
I entered the search screen, searched for Olympic Games, and clicked the link to sort results by date, since this is a new issue.

Should be simple enough, right?

Wrong.

Click the thumbnail to open a picture of the returned results I got, or just go ahead and run the search yourself (to see if they fixed it, maybe).

The dates are clearly listed on the right-side column.

If you’re wondering whether maybe those dates are wrong and the sorting is done on a different and correct date field (Which would be a problem all by itself), that’s not the case. Some of the summaries contain the date as text inside them, and you can see they all match perfectly.

It seems sorted by relevance, despite the fact that it clearly states that the results are sorted by date. And after requesting a sort by date, sorting by relevance is not very… relevant.

The relevance factor seems skewed as well. How can the same document published on the same day(check the file names and summary), once in a plain text version and once in a Word document, have different relevance values? The text should be identical…

Oh, well, making important telecommunication decisions that effect the U.S., and often the entire world, doesn’t require being able to perform basic sorts.

Note: I also sent this to This is Broken, but since the auto-reply let me know that it isn’t likely it will get posted there, and will take a long time even if it does, I decided to post about it here as well.

It’s so nice when people botch up translations.

I just logged into my Hotmail account, went to the inbox, and on the top of the page there appeared an ad from Microsoft. The ad was for the MSN Toolbar, and in Hebrew.

I think what they wanted to say was along the lines of "The pop-up blocker is one click away", or something of the sort. What they did say was "The ad blocker is one click away"… In their banner ad…

Which is a good point, I don’t want to see this ad. It’s quite refreshing to see simple ads that can not only describe a product, but also demonstrate that you really need it.

I have my doubts that the MSN Toolbar will work on my Firefox browser, though. But I do have the (quite wonderful) AdBlock extension, so I’m proud to report that I will now no longer need to see this ad. And they were perfectly right, it was just one click away… Thanks for the reminder.

BTW, I am aware that using the free service without seeing the ads is not very nice. But if they can discriminate against me just because I don’t live in the US or in Puerto Rico, then I’m allowed to be pissed off and not see their ads.

My father received an envelope sent to him from abroad by Time Magazine. In contained a page with a subscription offer. I’m not sure where they got the name and address from, since he definitely didn’t have any previous relations with them.

In this simple subscription offer where two noteworthy problems:

1. They presented the prices in a very interesting way. After a supposed discount, the price came to "Ns249". I have no idea what this "Ns" is. The obvious explanation is "New Shekel", but nobody writes that as "Ns", and certainly not as a prefix to the number. The official way to denote Shekels is by "ILS" that stood for "Israeli Shekel" and now stands for "New Israeli Shekel". Everybody that does international commerce in multiple coins manages to find this hardly hidden info, so it’s surprising Time couldn’t. There’s a different abbreviation that is sometimes used "NIS" for "New Israeli Shekel". It’s not correct, but it’s common. But no, they had to go and invent "Ns". Not very inspiring. Unless of course it means something else, in which case I think it’s worse since it’s even less clear.
2. They offered a free (assuming you believe a "price includes" kind of offer, possibly after a matching price increase, can be considered free) digital camera to subscribers. I took a short look at the camera’s details, and one line caught my attention: "High Resolution 100K Pixel". Yep, they said "High Resolution" in the same sentence as "100K Pixel". Because, you know, a simple mainstream mid-low-range digital camera today would take pictures of about what ? 3.1 megapixels ? 4 megapixels ? That’s only roughly about 40 times more pixels. So 100 kilopixels would fit the definition of high resolution about as much as a 14Kbps modem dial-up connection would fit the definition of broadband. Cute. Or maybe the envelope was just delayed at the post office for a few years…

And in case anyone wonders, no, Time Magazine did not gain a new subscriber.

Hotmail still did not increase the size of my free mailbox from 2MB to the much vaunted 250MB. Not that I can really complain, considering how much I’m paying for it. And really, that’s not what I’m complaining about, but rather the timing of their publications and announcements regarding the same size upgrade.

They actually started to publicize the intended change a long while ago. Not too long after Google came with the 1GB GMail accounts. Rumors that Hotmail will offer 250MB mailboxes for the free accounts started to circulate almost immediately. In the meanwhile Yahoo almost instantly upgraded their free mailboxes to 100MB. A long after that Hotmail started to slowly upgrade users. Much later Yahoo started to upgrade their mailboxes to 250MB and finished with all of them, this all happened relatively fast, and Hotmail still didn’t finish with their own upgrades. However, this relatively very slow upgrade speed is also not what I’m complaining about.

What annoys me is that during the last week or so the general login screen to Hotmail announces that all new mailboxes are at the new size. According to the login page a new account will automatically get 25MB storage, and will be upgraded to 250MB within 30 days.
My account on the other hand still has 2MB. This means that if I create a new account right now, they guarantee that it will begin with much more storage than my current one has.

That’s just wrong. If you can’t upgrade everything at once, start with existing customers. Offering new customers a service that current long-time customers can’t have is vexing, to say the least. It doesn’t really foster any loyalty. It makes customers feel that, even among the free and so not very valued customers anyway, they are second rate. If you can afford the storage space, upgrade people. If you can’t – don’t offer it to anyone else that just decides to open a new account.

This is just too amusing.

The Guardian has published a correction to an article:

Jonny Wilkinson (Gregan’s Wallabies plot new England fall, page 27, November 23) is recovering from a biceps injury, not a bicep injury. The singular of biceps is biceps. The plural of biceps is biceps.

This doesn’t sound like an explanation, or an attempt to be educational. This rather sounds more like head-bashing.
The scene I imagine is of an editor catching the poor writer of the original article and repeating this to him in an angry what-kind-of-an-idiot-are-you patronizing tone of voice…
All that’s missing in the correction is the end of the quote going like "Now repeat this 100 times until you get it", which caused the writer such a trauma that they automatically also added the mantra to the apology.

And what may be slightly more amusing – while it’s true that The singular of biceps is biceps and not bicep, the plural can be biceps, but can also be bicepses.

Oh, well. As long as mine works.

Like almost anyone with an email address these days, I’m quite used to getting the general Nigerians needing help to smuggle money, or offers to enlarge my… err… mortgage. These are all non targeted. The senders got the email address from someplace or tried it randomly.

Today I got a new message, offering me to help promote my website. They had the real website address on the subject line and message body. It was even a website I know. Only it wasn’t mine.

Sans images and other HTML bits:

Hi,

I visited http://stupidsecurity.com, and noticed that you’re not listed on some search engines! I would like to introduce to you an affordable service where we can help enhance your online presence globally.

Search engine submission is an integral part of the success of your web site. Building a web presence means more than just having the right keywords. We offer a star solution that will produce guaranteed results. Our unique search engine positioning technology helps submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

It takes only minutes to sign up for our service. We’ll do the rest! You’ll be surprised how simple it is to now reach out to an international market and increase the visibility of your website.

Do let me know how I may assist you better with workmiracle.com!

Best Regards,
Elisabeth Brown

Sales and Marketing
E-mail: Elisabethbrown@workmiracle.com
http://www.workmiracle.com

Not interested in our www.workmiracle.com service? To be taken off our mailing list, please follow the instructions here.

Now Stupid Security is an excellent and most interesting site, but it’s hardly mine. It is on my blog-roll here, and I have a link to it on some post, but it doesn’t justify deciding it’s mine. And I didn’t get other copies of these message regarding other sites I link to from this blog.

The other option is that they got my email address from there, which is possible since I do have an account there. This seems even more silly, though. Someone should harvest email addresses from a website about security, and then go to all the posters there and offer them to promote the site ?

Yet I find it very hard to believe this was random. The likelihood is too small…

It’s a very targeted message, only targeted at the wrong person, and they had to know that by the way they got the addresses. That would make them both clever and extremely stupid.

Or was this the brainless human engineering trick where I’m supposed to think I got it by mistake, and why not take advantage of the wonderful offer myself? Some people are dumb enough for this, but how many of the people that post on Stupid Security are?
It would take more than a miracle to work…  ;-)

The offer of being indexed in no less than 300,000 search engines is very tempting, though. Especially since an alt tag on an image linked to from the message (not posted here) reads "Guaranteed search engine submission promotion optimixation services".
Who can resist being optimixed on so many search engines, by such professionals, eh?

Either Ask Jeeves have some bored new employees, or they officially have some serious concerns about they way people see them (Nice, but not too good in relevancy) and believe that their blog indexing abilities are somewhat lacking.

During the last day this not particularly popular blog of mine has gotten two hits from the ask.com domain. Both from a Bloglines subscriber running a search (a subscribed, repeated search. Not a one time search) there (and not in Ask Jeeves). Says something about how well they believe they index blogs.

One search was for "Ask Jeeves" and one for "Jeeves".
Since I have one entry (Hey, that’s two now) that mentioned Ask Jeeves, it was shown in both their search results. And despite it being very obviously not relevant (but then again, we did say that Jeeves had a relevancy problems with searches, no? Maybe it starts with the real humans and propagate to the engine from there?) they clicked through to read the full post.
And yes, the excerpt is enough to ascertain that the post does not talk about the search engine, but only mentioned in passing that it’s about the question that got into my referrer log.

Is this a good thing, that they show an interest about what people think about them? Or is that an indication that there are problems over there and they’re desperate for something to help?
And what should it mean that the team of a large search engine uses a different search engine to constantly monitor themselves? Is it OK since they don’t index blogs purposefully? Is it an indication that they just now decided blogs are important and are in fact working on it?

Or was it all just a bored employee that wants to know what people think about their company, and picked what they thought to be the best tool for the job? Still says something…

I find it amusing, in any case. Maybe Jeeves won’t.
At least this post is somewhat relevant, if they get here.

What a truly appalling idea. Sending ads to people’s cellphones when they come near a store, and charging a fee if the person (or at least their phone) enters the store.

Personally, receiving ads on my cellular phone would actually strongly discourage me from buying anything from the ad sponsor. I might, however, go in and out of the store repeatedly, just to make them pay (pun intended).

More than that, this idea has some serious technical problems which I don’t quite see as solvable.

If people receive the ad when they come close to a store, then any person intending in advance to shop there will receive it too. And when they get into the store, the store must then pay for a supposed ad-induced entry… Unlike a web click-through, there’s no good way to separate people that entered because of the ad from people that entered regardless (or despite) of it.

Just brilliant.

The comparison to web advertising would be more like placing an ad at the home page of a site, promoting that selfsame site, and having the owners pay for every viewer of the ad.
Or more realistically (if I must), it’s like tracking who saw an ad, and making a site owner pay when they go there, even if not by a click. Hey, since large ad provider actually track ad viewing today, they could implement it right now. Whenever you see an ad, they can check their cookie to see if you saw a previous ad for the site you’re browsing now. And if so, make the site owner pay. It’s the exact same model. Yet somehow I don’t see people paying for it… So why should it work better with brick-and-mortar?
Paying for anyone who shopped at your place, and who have also seen an ad, is not a good idea. The connection is too tenuous.

Not to mention, since some people are like me in the great love for being spammed with ads on their phone, would the ad service also offer a refund for people getting the ad and not going into the store? After all, the ad sponsor could claim that it was a potential customer who was lost due to the ad… The connection between seeing the ad and not going in, and seeing the ad and going in, is of about the same strength. If you accept one, you should accept the other, no?
Hmmm… This actually could catch up on the web. Anyone buying ads would love to get paid for ads that people saw without ever going into their site afterward. If an ad provider offered this, I’d consider buying ads from them myself…

I was looking at my referrer logs (currently not yet a time consuming task, if anyone wonders), and saw that someone decided to ask Jeeves how to "stop customers switching from margarine to butter".

I guess the reference was due to this entry re trans fats (although as usually happens they got to the home page, much after the relevant post was no longer there).

Margarine is bad and unhealthy. It’s to be expected that customer who switched to it from butter, mistakenly believing it’s the healthier alternative, will go back to the better tasting (and healthier) original. And yet there are those who want them to stay… I assume margarine sellers, since apart from greed there’s really no reason for anyone to so…
If this was before the US elections, it would have been worth checking whether the margarine industry supports Bush or Kerry…

Unless… Hmmm… There is another option for people who will want to keep everyone on the health-hazard alternative… Terrorists!
This must be it! I’m not sure if it should fall under bio-terrorism or under usage of chemical weapons. Maybe both.
Osama must be eating fresh butter, and laughing gleefully of all the westerns killing themselves with their margarine.
Listen customers! Switch from margarine to butter, or the terrorists win!

I’ve recently made another order of several CDs from CD Baby.

This latest order arrived with a few problems: one of the CDs was missing¹, and two were cracked.
The missing CD was clearly their fault, so I wouldn’t have expected problems from anyone. But in this case they also made no problem at all about sending replacements for the cracked CDs.
They didn’t demand that I’ll mail them the defective CDs back. They didn’t say it was a problem in shipment, or my own fault for asking the CDs without the plastic jewel-box. They just emailed back that they’re sorry, and shipped a new package straight off.

This is the proper way to do it.
I can get the stores that demand returning the original, they’re probably worried about fraud. But from the consumer POV it would create a very bad experience, and anyone demanding I’ll ship something back internationally would have probably lost a customer, especially considering it’s not a repeated occurrence.

While I’m at it, some other (good) things about CD Baby:

1. They have a very wide selection of artists, some extremely good, and all from RIAA-free independent labels (So if you care, there’s no need to go check the RIAA Radar before purchasing).
2. The you-may-also-like recommendations made overall much more sense than what I’m used to in other places like Amazon. I’m not sure why, since I suppose both are based on purchase statistics and recommendation of real people, but that’s the way it is.
3. For returning customers, they send an extra surprise CD in each shipment. From my experience (In the cases where it wasn’t a collection, of course) the match for my taste wasn’t perfect, but still good. And they might have done better if I’d bought in smaller batches, since the obvious matches they had – I already saw and bought.
4. They are willing to send CDs without the plastic boxes. This both reduces the original shipment charges (less weight/volume), and drastically reduces the chances that someone in border customs will open the package (it being small. You can fit about 10 CDs in the volume of one plastic CD box)). Of course it can result in cases where rough handling will damage the CDs, but this is the only case it happened to me so far, over several purchases. And I’m still not sure this is why these CDs were cracked, considering the cracked ones were inside the package surrounded by perfectly whole CDs.
5. Samples for audio tracks are usually available for most tracks, are long, and are in MP3.

Certainly, unless I want a specific artist which they don’t sell, they remain my preferred audio CDs store.

¹ For which I noticed they have a sort of an excuse. The band changed the name, and reissued the CD with a new cover and track order. Possibly there was someone that didn’t find the requested CD, and another person that knew there is no problem and they have it in stock…

[Update: Got a reply from Charlie]

In an article in the Inquirer a certain Charlie Demerjian rants about how stupid and greedy are the MPAA and RIAA in their effort to insert DRM to use.
He is of course absolutely right, even if he sometimes uses overly strong and excited language (it IS labeled as a rant after all). This is a bad idea, bad for consumers, and on the medium to long run bad for the main players in the music and movie industries themselves.
Worth reading.

He does however state at one point:

Let me put a personal spin on this. I have not bought a CD since 1998. When the record companies sued Napster, I sat back and said ‘this is wrong’. I thought I would wait it out, and not give them my money until a decision was reached. If the record companies prevailed, I would never buy another CD or give any RIAA member my money. If Napster won, I would go back to buying more than the CD or two I bought every week.

Fast forward. The RIAA won and lost. They spent Napster into the ground, and while I think the fight is far from over, Napster is gone. Sticking to my morals, I have not bought a CD since then, and I have the dubious honor of being able to say the last CD I ever bought was Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause. The sad part is that I downloaded most of the album from Napster before I bought it, and said ‘hey, this isn’t bad’. I then bought the album. God, I need to bathe.

Hmm…
Not buying CDs at all, although the resolution was “I would never buy another CD or give any RIAA member my money“. There are plenty of CDs by labels and artists not members in the RIAA. What gives?

So I sent him an email:

Overall I, and probably most other people, agree with almost everything you wrote in this article.

What I have a problem about is that part of your personal solution was to stop buying CDs completly.
Not buying copy-protected CDs I get, I actually do that myself.
Not buying CDs from any RIAA associated company, that I can get as well, and have noticeably reduced the amount I buy myself. I haven’t stopped completely, since the artists deserve something even if they are stupid enough to stay signed with the RIAA, and even if they get extremely little, but I can understand.

There are however labels which are not associated with the RIAA. And artist that choose to work with independent labels. Yet you don’t buy these either… This should imply that you are:
A. A consumer by the RIAA model, who stopped buying music because he can download it, end ergo should not go around attacking the RIAA for their practices.
B. Only like mainstream RIAA artists. In which case you should admit they provide a good service by screening all the music you like, and they do deserve to get paid for sorting the wheat from the chaff for you. And ergo you should not go around attacking the RIAA for their practices.
C. Do buy CDs, and falsely make this statement to help make your point in the rant article. Which tends to drastically lower the reliability of everything else you say, and hurt the causes you try to promote. And Ergo you should not go around attacking the RIAA for their practices.
D. Are not even aware of independent labels and artists, and never noticed that someone releases CDs without being a RIAA member. This is the best option here, but it’s quite sad. In which case you should try resources like the RIAA Radar ( http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/ ) to help you find which CDs are probably not RIAA, or go to stores that deal only in independent labels, like for example CDBaby ( http://www.cdbaby.com ). Or just run a search, I’m sure you’ll find more. This does however mean that you haven’t got a clue what is going on in the music industry, and ergo you should not go around attacking the RIAA for their practices.

Although the RIAA practices do deserve all the criticism and attack they get, of course.

I wonder what, and if, I’ll get in reply…

Charlie replies:

Actually, I do promote non-riaa music. My record company of choice is Go-Kart. :)

So he’s familiar with the concept of Indie music (Though, as a totally irrelevant side note, maybe not so much on indie publishing).
He even likes Go-Kart. A shame he thinks that “All record companies are evil, when they dry up and blow away, I will celebrate. Well, all except one.“, since there are actually one or two (or much more) additional record labels which are not associated with the RIAA, but hey, it’s a start.
And from Go-Kart he gets MP3 files, not audio CDs, so he was honest when he claimed he didn’t buy any CDs. The quality differences are noticeable IMNSHO, but maybe he’s not that discriminating, considering he didn’t hear an actual CD in years.
By the same reasoning, however, he won’t buy CDs even if the RIAA change their ways, but rather buy compressed audio files from them too. Which means claiming that he no longer buys CDs is pretty much empty and hollow. The issue is the purchase of music, not purchase of CDs. So why didn’t he just state that he stoppedt buying music from the RIAA? It would have made a much stronger case for his article…
Well, I’m not the one with the publishing and writing experience…

During the last few years it has become a well known fact that trans fats (aka trans fatty acids) are evil. Nowadays, out of the long list of things you really shouldn’t be eating, trans fats probably take first place. Shocking news to all the people who replaced butter with margarine because they thought it was healthier, but that’s scientific progress for you. (While we’re at it, I’ll also take the opportunity to comment that eggs are healthy as well, so long as you don’t eat more than about 3 per day)

Knowledge about the dangers of trans fats is so well spread, that almost everyone have heard by now. Including the owners of a certain large bakery here. Only they must have heard it in conversation, not writing, and didn’t quite make the effort to check what all the fuss is about.
The one important thing they did notice is that it’s considered bad, so customers must be told they don’t get trans fats in their foods, or they’ll stop buying, and the bakery will lose revenue.
Ergo, I recently saw this label on bread packaging:

This bread does not contain the fatty acid “Trans”

They got the name right. Only it’s not a name, but a type.
Not sure if this label is really reassuring. Since they don’t know what they’re talking about, how reliable is their claim that they don’t use it?
Can I be sure it’s not just that the owner asked the baker “Say, are you using any acid fats by “Trans” company?”, got a reply that “We’re not putting in any acids at all in our fat, just plain margarine”, and decided everything is alright then?

A very good friend of mine has received wedding invitation from relatives living in Florida.
They seem to have spared little expenses. The place where the wedding will be held at is quite pricey. The events will go on for three days, with food and celebrations both on the day before and on the day after the actual wedding ceremony.
The invitation themselves were very elegantly printed on quality paper. And it was not just an invite. It also contained a larger note talking a bit about both families, and an RSVP note and (pre-stamped) envelope that can be used to confirm attendance and food preferance.
And of course the invitation itself, detailing the events of the three days (I changed the dates a I write here from the originals to the 12-14, to prevent the unlikely case that someone will make a connection. The actual selection I made is not entirely coincidental either <g>)
It talk about how on the 12th of November, the day before the ceremony, there will be a big lunch, and so on.
It states that on the 14th of November there will be a large celebratory breakfast.
And it mentiones that the ceremony itself will be held in the evening of the 13th of October.
…

Did you catch that? I did.
Unfortunately, before printing all those invitations, the happy couple didn’t.
Which naturally left my friend no alternative to returning the RSVP envelope with a note saying that they regret not being able to attend an event that took place before the invitation arrived (OK, so not, this friend have a much nicer sense of humor than I have. a pity).

I’d practically pay good money to see the look the happy couple had (will have? Surely someone must have told them by now?) on their faces when they found out… And no, I’m not being very mean. It’s terribly embarrassing, but not actually damaging. So it’s alright to enjoy it.
Those were really <chuckle> really very invested and expensive invitations…

This clinic, doing various eye surgeries for visual disturbances, have come up with a nice promotional material. They sent many ophthalmologists (Possibly other people as well, but I’ll stick to what I know) this small folded page to show clients/customers. On the outside a text instructs to Open the page, hold it in front of you with a stretched arm (about 40cm), and check your visual acuity. If you open the page, the inside have an almost standard visual acuity test page, with lines of text in decreasing sizes, each line marked by the visual acuity level matching the ability to see it clearly.
So far so good. You can look what is the smallest line you see clearly, and check if it’s the standard vision, or if you have a problem. And hopefully (from their POV), if you have a problem you’d notice their company logo and consider contacting them for treatment instead of buying glasses.
As a nice touch, it’s been the Jewish New Year recently, so the lines consist not of random numbers but of a text telling you to have a happy and successful (and so on and so forth) new year. Not good for a proper professional examination, but cute for this crude check.

If you go to an optometrist, or a doctor, to have your vision checked, you’d notice that there are two different checks. One is for distance vision, where you’ll usually sit in a chair a few meters from the test patterns you’ll need to try and read. The second is near vision, where you’d be given some card to hold in your hand at reading distance (about 20cm officially). The near vision of course you’ll only get if you’re over 40 years old, unless there’s a specific medical reason to consider a problem earlier. The important thing here is that there are two different systems, measuring two different problems. Well, not entirely separate of course, you’re using the same optical system after all. But the optical problems that glasses or laser surgeries address are commonly the result of different problems.
When looking to the distance (Infinity officially, but a couple of meters are close enough) you don’t focus your eyes, that is the lenses in the eyes are relaxed and stretched. The common optical problems are caused when light passing through the lens doesn’t focus on the retina, but either in front of it (Myopia – Nearsightedness. More common) or after it (Hypermetropia). This tend to change with age, since as you grow your eyes grow, resulting in light focusing in a larger distance from the front of the retina. That’s why usually glass numbers tend to grow, you need more correction to offset the distance. At about 24 years old, the body stops growing, and you no longer need to change your glasses.
Near vision, or reading, problems start at about the age of 40. In order to look at close objects the muscles around the lens need to push it. The closer the object, the more force needs to be applied in order to allow you to focus. With age the tissue of the lens becomes less flexible and it becomes harder to apply enough force. Then you need reading glasses to provide some of the optical correction. And unlike distance, using reading glasses increases the pace in which the problem grows, since the muscles become less exercised and weaken faster.
There are of course more problems, some also corrected by glasses, contact lenses, or these surgeries, but that’s not the issue here, so I won’t go into them.

Why the long explanations? To emphasize the point that checking near vision and checking distance vision are two different things.
And 40cm has a lot to do with near vision. Not entirely, that’s true, but enough. What you see from 40cm is not very relevant to your visual acuity for distance.
I tried to check myself with their test page. It was very interesting to see I get to 20/15. That’s wonderful! I didn’t see that well for more than 10 years… What an amazing improvement. Nowadays I’m actually more at the 20/20 or 20/30 range. Which is also good, but is normal good, not above normal good like 20/15 would be.

Which brings us to another alight problem with this test page, beside it being irrelevant and showing a clear lack of understanding about how visual acuity is checked (And I’m supposed to let these guys operate on my eyes after that?!). They had the Ft. scale and the 20/x scale. Would have been very nice for most Americans for example, that probably heard someplace you want to see 20/20. But around here the used system is 6/x mostly. Conversion is extremely trivial, but still it’s hard to believe someone around here would have come up with it. Which means they probably stole the idea from some American clinic doing the same thing…

These Y/X scales, if anyone wonders, are not at all complicated. The numbers say that what you see from Y meters an average person would see from X meters. So 20/20 means that you see from 20 meters what an average person would see from 20 meters. 20/40 would mean that what you see from 20 meters, an average person could see just as well from 40 meters. What matters is the ratio, so 20/20 is 6/6 is 5/5, and 20/40 is 6/12 is 5/10.
And these averages were measured a long while ago, and not extremely accurately. And they’re only averages, so seeing 6/7.5 (20/25) is perfectly fine and not reason to go buy glasses (or do some other things like this clinic sells).
Though IMNSHO the law here is a bit extreme, allowing people to drive if they see 6/12 in one eye. Putting a person with one blind eye (so having no stereoscopic vision, depth perception, at all), and another eye that needs to get to half the distance a normal person would in order to see a problem on the road, behind the wheel of a car, strikes me as not particularly safe. But maybe it’s just me, other people probably don’t need to see anything in order to drive safely.

Anyway, to get back on track, these people are using a scale which is rarely used in this country, and employ a meaningless method to do the check. And all that in a promotional material which is meant to attract customers who will pay them a lot of money to perform precise medical procedures on them.
I can’t see that happening.

This AdWord is in Hebrew. Since that doesn’t quite make it a world-wide seller, and the site I was seeing this on, The Register, did not have anything else relating to Hebrew or Israel on the page, I assume it means the ad was selected by IP geolocating and not just by matching words…

Regardless of this, As you might have noticed, it didn’t come out particularly readable (Yes, there are other characters in Hebrew beside “?“. Honestly). Not that I’m surprised or anything. But even when I tried to manually change the page encoding to various Hebrew and Unicode formats, the ad retained its original appearance (Well, I shouldn’t expect these changes to propagate like that, should I ?).
Which made me wonder why bother? Someone paid good money to place that ad. Newsflash : Unintelligible text doesn’t sell, fellas. No one will click on the link out of idle curiosity.

Yes, the text is there. Yes, it’s just an encoding problem. But I need to work and waste time in order to read it, and quite frankly ads are meant for people that don’t already feel strongly enough about you to waste time and effort.

Hmm… Maybe it looks alright under some defaults with some versions of IE? I hope it at least looked alright on the computer of the marketing guy (or gal, I don’t discriminate. Idiotism is a cross-gender issue) that wrote the ad and bought it. I wonder how tweaked their system was for this.

English can be read everywhere in every browser on every Internet connected computer (I’m ignoring whatever modifications China may require, of course). Even if you look for a targeted audience, do stick to English. I probably won’t click on your ad anyway, but at least it will be because I know it doesn’t interest me, not because I’m not curious enough to waste time finding out if it does…

I followed a link to a news story on some AsiaOne site.
At the side of the page there was a very large flash ad, published by AsiaOne, for… Google AdWords.

Oh, I admit they couldn’t replace it with an AdWords ad, since they want a specific ad on their own site, and that’s not what AdWords does.
Still, I find the whole concept of placing one ad in one medium, in order to publish another ad service using a different medium, to be very amusing.
I mean, OK, you can’t use AdWords to publish AdWords on your site, but you can at least place a text ad and not a flash one. You are after all trying to convince viewers that text ads work, no?

Needless to say, their website contain many other adds. All I saw were either by themselves, or by DoubleClick. Not an AdWord in sight on any page.
I wonder if it’s because they think it’s good enough for their viewers but not for them, or if it’s because Google didn’t want them…

Another serious goof on the Hotmail / MSN site. They’re getting good at that lately
They are posting links to their own shopping site, with a nice Shop pink! (And raise breast cancer awareness) link. That’s good.
But on some pages, the area they reserve for their sidebar with the links is a bit smaller. OK, so it does not seem smaller, and has the same width, but the pictures may be larger resulting in smaller area of text per item. To solve that they have those wonderful automated scripts that just clip the end of long sentences and replace them with ellipses. Saves space. Problem is, if the object the sentence is right at the end, it might get a bit… lost.
So on the main login page, everything is fine, when seeing various other hotmail pages everything is fine. When sending a message however, that nice clipping thingy starts to work…

End result? MSN encourages everyone to help raise breast cancer

Hmmm… Should increase their sales of related products and medicines. But I’m not sure overall it’s such a good idea for everyone. Don’t do anything MSN tells you to without thinking about it first.

Better be aware of things before you start to raise them, that’s what I always say. Mabye if they heard that, and had exhibited a tad more awareness, they wouldn’t raise anyone’s hackles…