In the overwhelming sea of spam, there is hope… Two of my favorites right now are Cobra Commander and the recent hit Kayne West is gonna LetYouFinish but.

Cobra Commander is a classic and hopefully will always remain so. LetYouFinish will probably die out in the next couple days as people grow bored of the novelty… The person running that account looks to already be losing a little steam. All the same, it’s worth a read.

Thanks for sending me all those great offers in the mail. Although I love shiny paper, please stop. The vast majority of the mailers I get from you are for deals that only apply to NEW customers. I am not a new customer. That bill you you also send me should be enough to tip you off.

At best, I throw your glossy adverts in the bin. Typically I do skim through them because the deals sound too sexy to ignore and I’m a big fan of heartbreak that is called Fine Print. You know what fine print is, right? It’s that little tiny-font paragraph that no one’s grandma can read without a magnifying glass. It always starts out with a sentence that sounds like “This offer applies to new residential customers only” or something like that.

You are wasting your money (which you don’t mind because you pass those expenses on to me) to tell me that you don’t care about your current customers and that you only concern yourself wooing people away from other services. I know you get discounts for mailing stuff out in bulk, but paper/printing costs + postage x a few million customers x thirty some adverts a year has to add up.

Oh but wait. Maybe you are sending me all those great offers that don’t apply to me because you think I will pass them on to friends. That idea might work, but there isn’t anything in it for me to do your footwork. No discount for me, no feel good moment, nothing…

Why not pretend you care and save money at the same time? It’s brilliant if you think about it. You annoy fewer customers and create less garbage and lower operating costs… All in one fell swoop. Considering sending all the New Residential Customer only deals out to existing customers is generating ZERO sales, it won’t hurt you to try.

Sincerely,

Existing Residential Customer

I saw this in the news and instantly thought of Boomsday by Christopher Buckley. If you’ve read the 2007 novel, by the author of Thank You for Smoking, you might have thought the same thing.

I grabbed the book via B&Ns bargain section just a few weeks ago so it the book is fresh in my mind. I let it sit in my “To Read” pile for a while but now that I’ve started I don’t want to put it down. It is good stuffs.

If you haven’t seen the 2005 movie adaptation of Thank You for Smoking, you should. Here is the trailer for starts:

I’m pretty excited about the conference because there will be some well known people from the blogging and social media world there that I follow. It’s not that I’m all “OMG! Chris Brogan is a rock star! I wanna have Jason Fall’s baby!” It’s more of a “these guys are well respected in the real world for making the Internets the real world” and their blogs are very informative so I can imagine that they will share great info for people who pay.

Maybe I’m wrong. All the same, I’m more excited about this conference than pretty much all of the other work related conferences I’ve attended. The only thing I’m not so hot on right now is accommodations. Downtown Indy is cracked out on conventions/conferences during Blog Indiana.

With 30,000 extra people downtown just for GenCon (and more in the area for the state fair and the home preseason Colts game and Kelly Clarkson and 40 dozen other things), I still haven’t got my housing for the event set in stone. I’m only a little worried at this point.

I was trying to be clever and save some pennies by staying in a downtown area bed and breakfast instead the nearby hotels. Supposedly there was an available room for about 50% less than the hotels (inflated pricing for the events of course). I’m waiting to hear back to see if my reservation is an actual reservation or just a thanks for letting us see your credit card number…

The book is a dairy of sorts written by an ESL secret operative posing as a foreign exchange student. It’s not hard to decipher what’s going on in the book. It’s easier to understand most create your own Engrish results. So what if the sentence structure is a little out of whack. It’s still an interesting social commentary with enough bizarre twists to keep you guessing.

I wouldn’t suggest this as a first book for someone who was pointed in the direction of Chuck Palahniuk’s books. It’s not the worst, I don’t imagine this will the next to get its film rights sold.

Like normal, I like to keep my reviews very light. I’m not a fan of having someone give away the story before I’ve had a chance to crack open the book so I’m not going to do that here. If you’d like to ramble about it though, feel free to leave a comment and I will gladly join in.

I think the site still needs some turtle wax though. Using IE 7 (why use IE?), I found problems with two of the five themes currently on the site. One theme gave java errors, another disappears after it loads. It’s framed so it’s hard to tell what the problem is.

So far all the themes listed cost $69 (or more if you want the .psds), which in knocks most folks out of the running in terms of considering the theme for use. The site is relatively new so it is one designer putting his themes against each other. I’m sure that will change though as the site grows.

Because the site is geared towards premium themes, I don’t think it will go very far unless they can somewhat regularly showcase cutting edge designs. I could be completely wrong, but I don’t think that the majority of people who would buy themes are the same group of people who care to spend time voting on them.

Still, it’s an interesting concept. What can be done with their idea to make something that has a better chance at earning the love of the masses? That’s when question ThemeWars/UnqueBlogDesign was trying to answer changes to become “How do you moneytize a site based on the American Idol model that uses free blog themes?”

Free themes will draw the visitors/voters. I’m sure you could find some design-for-hire places willing to advertise. In addition to that, there is are plenty of blog related items that aren’t themes. Hosting, support/consulting services, custom coding, premium plug-ins, etc. There’s always good old fashioned contextual ads if you think have to go that route.

No matter high of a pedestal we put them on (even if it is so high that they are immune to child molestation charges), they do eventually tumble back down to planet Earth plus six more feet. I know MJ was kind of a big deal like 15 or 20 years ago, but come on…

It was reported that at least a dozen fans who were Whacko for Jacko decided to join him in the happily ever afterlife. Or how many people joined MJ related social networking groups after he died? Or people running out to buy albums like they can’t make more now that he’s in a bag. Seriously… If you didn’t care enough to buy the music or join a facebook fan page when he was alive, why now?

I don’t understand the celebrity worship, not even on a small scale. It’s almost like people have to inject themselves into something so they can claim a little piece of history. Speaking of that, go to twitter and check out the recent twitter trend of posting your #lameclaimtofame.

F-Secure’s free Online Scanner is a great place to turn if you need to clean up viruses or spyware. Like with all products I would suggest for a cleanup, use them in Safe Mode w/Networking and with System Restore disabled.

Now for a note to F-Secure (even though they will likely never read this)… PLEASE CHANGE THE FORCED WINDOW SIZE FOR YOUR ONLINE SCANNER! It is kind of hard to get to the buttons to progress through the scan process when the screen resolution is limited by Safe Mode. If you don’t want to change the window size, at least consider moving the buttons a little. Please. I promise more people will use your product.

Don’t let my pleas to F-Secure scare you off from their product though. It is definitely worth the trouble of wrestling with positioning the window just right so you can barely reach a sliver of that scan button.

Like any good carny game, your chances of winning weren’t good. Only on this midway, the price to play is time and not money. Oh, and the prizes usually aren’t highly flammable children’s toys.

Not anymore. Woot’s distribution of the famed burrito of chorizo (see woot filters) is different this time. Instead of simply selling the bags of crap first come first server like normal, they are holding a raffle of sorts. Buy woot-off lights for $8, your receipt also mentions that “You ordered 1 Crappy Anniversary Promotion (see below).” The “see below” part references to the rules of how you can win your bag of crap. Their numbers game is based on ponies the DJIA end value for 7/13 or something like that.

There have been debates in the forums on the legality. Legal or not, this will be my last bag of crap attempt if this is how the rest of them sell. I’m not a fan of the lotto. With 1 in 10 odds of scoring a bag of crap, I don’t want to have to buy $80 worth of raffle tickets (and $3 novelty items that I don’t really want) to land a box of stuff that sometimes is only worth $30. Granted my bags of crap have all been great. More than $100 retail, sometimes more than $200. Still. No thanks.

Hopefully woot figures out something else for the bags of crap. I don’t understand the problem with a captcha or changing up the title/pricing a little to get past the bots. Customers would understand. And I’m sure they’d like it better than the raffle route.

UPDATE: Good on woot. They just sent out emails saying that everyone who bought themselves a birthday raffle ticket also got themselves a pair of $5 off coupons for future purchases. The coupons help smooth over the buyer’s remorse a bit. Thanks woot for making this a better deal.

The only real new “news” of interest is that we are getting ready to kick off an contest where we will be giving away an iPod Shuffle. I know… It’s not a Touch or a new car or anything exciting like that, but still.

Now I just have to think of interesting contest to use so we can give this thing away. Any ideas? I’ve got a few but I’m sure there is something better out there… Once I do post the details over at BlogExplosion, I’ll post them here too.