disenchantedtech

…. or are you just a failure?

I’m seeing and hearing the phrase “I’ve been set up for failure” more and more; my take on it is that it’s a way for people to pre-plan an excuse for when they finally do fail.
In the past people would describe a difficult task as a difficult task, now if the task isn’t simple they claim they are being “set up for failure”.

If you hear someone using this phrase then it should be a red flag - people who aim for failure are usually pretty good at meeting their targets.

The BBC reports that acupuncture works based on the following conditions.

3 Groups, group 1 received conventional therapy, group 2 received acupuncture, group 3 received “sham” acupuncture - i.e. putting needles in the wrong place, not as deep and not rotating them.

Improvements were reported as follows - 27% of group 1, 47% of group 2 and 44% of group 3.

Problems

1. 47% versus 44% is not statistically significant in a group of 1100 people
2. group 2 received more treatment due to the needles being manipulated and rotated.

Either it’s all in people’s heads or randomly sticking needles into yourself is good for back pain - someone should ask Pinhead from Hellraiser how his back is.

You have 2 choices

1. Take a benefits cut and you may be able to compete with Indian automakers for a few more years
2. Go on strike and end up unemployed.

Guess what the UAW members voted to do

GM aren’t trying to make cuts so that the owners have more cash, they’re doing this to survive.

Welcome to my world autoworkers of America, please enjoy your unemployment, let me know if you need any tips on begging.

Being British does have it’s advantages even if they mainly revolve around jokes to do with pounds (£) and Tap Dancing.

A good friend of mine recently went out and bought a one thousand pound cat - I can hear 2 sets of footsteps right now, Americans running away screaming and Chinese running forwards with chopsticks raised.

RE: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/07/maternity-ward-.html 

Woman rushes into hospital screaming “I’m having a baby”, hospital staff reply “and how would you like to pay for that?”

Sorry - your card has been declined, we’ll have to put it back…or keep it until you pay up.

There’s a time and a place for being a “customer” and then there’s a time and a place for humanity and compassion.

Haggle4me was a site where you went when you wanted to buy something (online) but didn’t know if you had found the best price. You entered the details of what you wanted and the best price you had found and other site visitors could use their bargain hunting skills to find the same item cheaper; you then split the difference (minus an admin fee)

I don’t know why it has ceased operation - lack of popularity is the usual reason, maybe the type of people who would use such a system were the same people who were pretty good at finding the bargains. Maybe the people who didn’t know how to find bargains also didn’t know how to use haggle4me.

For me, once I’ve decided to buy something I want it asap, not wait x days for someone to possibly find it cheaper., so the service didn’t really appeal to me however the last time I looked some people seemed to have found some amazing bargains - prices I couldn’t find anywhere.

“Fail fast, fail often”, most successful website owners will be able to reel off a list of their previous failures, often the failures STILL look better on paper than the successes so I hope the haggle4me guys don’t give up.

According to the BBC at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6755789.stm
eBay’s annual advertising budget on Google is $25m which, quite honestly, is a drop in the ocean to Google. It may be the biggest but it’s still not significant in the grand scheme of things.

eBay would easily lose more than $25m in annual sales if it pulled Google advertising (otherwise it wouldn’t be spending the $25m).

Google checkout will never make it as long as Google keeps backing down like this.

Maybe I just don’t get it.

I was looking through the top UK sites as ranked by Alexa to see if I was missing out on anything good and stumbled upon thebestof.co.uk which I hadn’t come across before. After a few minutes browsing the site I came to the conclusion that it was a pretty appalling site and that the Alexa stats must be wrong.

On closer inspection from here
http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=thebestof.co.uk
You can see that currently 34 percent of visits are to the sub-site oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk and 5 percent visit forums.thebestof.co.uk.

Since only the site owners and local area sub site owners can access oldadmin.thebestof.co.uk and since most of these owners will also look at their content to see if it uploaded OK it seems that almost all visitors to thebestof.co.uk are simply the site editors themselves. Also the forums get 5% of visitors but are virtually empty - 5% of the UK’s 68th most popular site should be a pretty busy forum.

According to thefranchisemagazine.net at http://www.thefranchisemagazine.net/franchise/Thebestofcouk/It-Really-is-Phenomenal/599 they charge between £9,999 and £24,999 per local sub site - that’s a lot of money for a web site that only you visit.

Fools and their money…

I was using FeedYes for converting a sites updates content into an RSS feed however they’ve started spamming my readers big time by injecting fake spam posts.

In fact they were sending more spam messages to my feed that there were legitimate messages, I wont be using them again and strongly recommend against anyone else using them either.