Friday, September 28, 2007

the eternal shrine of foosball girl and bean bag girl



Since they seem to be coming up in arguments over on wtf again.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The Mythical Business Layer - Worse Than Failure

The old daily WTF seems to be taking a turn towards the slightly serious.

Monday, September 24, 2007

ok, one more


another "video"


whoops.. forgot the obligatory music "video"


Scott, if you're reading this I have a question..

Is the future of WREK currently secure?

Because I'd like to re-endorse this venerable institution.

The standard rotation is, if anything, way too random and eclectic for my fragile middle class mind. It's good to know there's a station out there playing this stuff, but the real gold is in them thar specialty shows. (Which you can listen to here for the whole week after their broadcasts).

This week, I am particularly indebted to Stonehenge for alerting me to the existence of the band Buffalo. It is hard to locate mp3s of this band through the, ahem, usual channels. And while I may in fact eventually buy the CD, in the meantime I've resorted to extracting a copy of the song "Sunrise (Come My Way)" from WREK's audio stream. (Yes, you can losslessly cut sections out of the middle of 30-minute mp3)

Which is of course, exactly the sort of thing that should make "the man" afraid to make radio station shows available on line like this.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

exactly what demographic are they going for here?

Ads seen during late-night syndicated Simpsons:

* phone sex line
* Lucky Charms cereal

Seriously, I saw these back to back.

My guess: 18-24 year old males who are stoned out of their minds.

phptocoldfusion.com

"The journey from PHP to Coldfusion - one step at a time"

Friday, September 07, 2007

department of "duh"

Most big industries are just like railroads. Except they don't run trains. You know what I mean. You know how all big companies these days are conglomerates made up mergers of mergers of mergers?

Like, for instance, Bank of America. What we now know as the Bank of America is an empire built out of hundreds of smaller, older banks. Some of them dating back to the 19th century. Same with media companies. Time Warner, anyone?

Guess who did all this stuff before, bigger and badder than everybody else?

Railroads.

Check out the family trees of Union Pacific and BNSF.

Google and Yahoo are starting to look like this too.

Even the lesser known companies, like the ones some of us work for, have complex twisted roots stretching back into the past.




?------> Fiserv
/
/
XP Systems
\
\ 1995-ish
Digital Insight-------------- Digital Insight
/ / 2004 \
N-Front / \
Anytime Lender / \
Vi-Fi / \
/ \
Magnet Communications \
.: 1995 \
.: \
: \
Disk Access Intuit
\ / 2007
\ Turbo Tax /
FundTech Lacerte /
etc. /
/
Intuit
1983 \
\
\
Quicken Loans


(I cannot vouch for the absolute correctness of this.. the line from Disk to Magnet is dotted because it's not a legitimate corporate spinoff, but all the old timers came from there so everybody kind of thought of it as an unofficial forking. There are probably many more of those that could be shown, if I could remember them.)