Future Man Speaks Up

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Future Man On Twitter

Tags: future, Man, Twitter
Posted in Humor | No Comments »

Financial Crisis in Simple Terms

Friday, April 24th, 2009

This is the best explanation yet. The financial crisis explained in simple terms.

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Berlin. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers – most of whom are unemployed alcoholics – to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans). Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Taking advantage of her customers’ freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognises these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed. Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager (subsequently of course fired due his negativity) of the bank decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. However, they cannot pay back the debts. Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy. DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95%. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.

The suppliers of Heidi’s bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor. The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties. The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the non-drinkers.

[Kudos to Kobus who mailed me this article and kudos to the original author]

Tags: crisis, financial
Posted in Humor, info | 2 Comments »

Niched jargon more overrated than sliced bread!

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

It’s amazing, every second person following me on twitter is a Guru … “Hello, my name is xxx and I’m a guru at internet marketing” or “Are you in need of more woman? Subscribe to my newsletter and get some tonight”

Or how about some real life examples, here are the Twitter Biographies of a bunch of so-called Gurus:

Giving you the INSIDE SCOOP, PREVIEWS and GOSSIP on all the Internet Marketing LAUNCHES, big and small! Tweet me or DM if you have insider info!
Internet marketer, animal lover, U.S. Marine, fitness maniac, Cuban, blogger, affiliate marketer, movie lover, many other things including super cool dude
I am a successful internet marketer from the UK, I love to Ski and keep fit at the gym and walking my dog, dream – to make it as a full time internet marketer.
Helping others achieve financial freedom. Receive FREE training on how to get leads to your website, just for following me.. Click the link above!
Masterminding with winners is my passion.
Make Your Customers Fall in Love With You … (And Recommend You To All Their Friends!) ASK ME HOW!
Some call me the Extreme Marketer. I guess you can see for yourself at my blog
Teaching men the subtle art of becoming more attractive to women. Watch for the release of my upcoming book, … !

Everyone claiming to be a Guru is trying to sell you something you don’t need, especially all these hyped up MLM schemes which is nothing other than scams plastered with jargonatic adjectives.

Do You Believe The Claims Made On Late Night Infomercials? Sign Up For Our Newsletter Today!

I’m reading through a marketing e-book which I got for free because I was able to respond and enter my email address before the respond-before timer ran out … actually it ran out and then started counting all over again telling me the free offer has been extended due to popular demand. And guess what, the e-book used to cost $1997 and I’m getting it for free, apparently I should be grateful for not having to pay $1997 for it. Just scanning through the index, I’m being bombarded with hyped up jargon …

Wait, just received an email from another one of these Guru marketers badmouthing the hype around the book I’ve just downloaded for free …

I’m a little frustrated with all the crap that’s going on.

There are SO many “miracle” product launches
happening, and people are shelling their hard earned
cash on every single one of them.

Today it was xxx – everybody
seems to be promoting it.

I’m not.

Not to say it isn’t a good deal or it won’t help some
people, but here’s the deal…

I’ve discovered a few factors that are consistent
among successful internet marketers, but one that
REALLY stands out is…

Where was I before I got distracted by another Guru that knows it all … oh, the index page of the book … the page where I downloaded it said something about the niche jargon being a little bit outdated and it’s being adjusted to reflect the jargon of WEB 2.0 (another overhyped keyword, I bet these marketers doesn’t even know what powers WEB 2.0 applications). Back to the book … the index reads like a typical marketing handbook, all fluffetyfoo and full of power punching poo that will make your product the niche that everyone else wants to do (while 5 million other people are trying the same thing after downloading the free ebook with the magic formula of how to make it online). Before I get distracted again, Viral Marketing, Marketing Funnel (another word for MLM where the people at the top of the pyramid just milks their participants for a lot more money), Dumb Down the Site, Powerful Admin Sections, Split Pay for Affiliate Programs, Pop-unders (It’s like a popup, only more annoying as it pops up behind your browser), OTO (The acronym for The One Time Offer Phenomenon), List Building, Lead Generation, Social Media (which is a buzzword for giving a company an online presence through whatever floats their boat), etc …

Online marketers are the new spammers of the internet, they aren’t good at anything, except for inflating their status by deflating the status of other marketers.

When You Aren't Any Good At Your Job, You Can Always Just Turn In Your Competitors.

All these internet marketers have blogs, if you set your “looking for” status on Facebook to Networking, you’ll be swarmed with internet marketers trying to promote their blog which in the end might as well have been a Huffman keyword algorithm generating random hyped up buzzwords which holds very little value seeing as the “Secret To …” is always on another page for which you have to click a trackable link to an affiliate’s page.

Those Who Have Nothing Important To Say Often Speak The Most.

Forums dedicated to emarketing are just as bad, especially if the forum was created by a Guru who wants to sell a niche and have millions of users who worship him …

Multiply An Enormous Number By Zero And You're Still Going To End Up With Zero.

“Social Media” became a buzzword amongst some of the Gurus while the real experts will throw you with a brick if you just mention the phrase. If I were to meet up with a group of marketers and you start throwing me with the “Social Media” jargon, expect to be thrown with a brick and drowned under concrete, the world wants practical solutions, not hyped up rubbish. Giving a brand an online presence is fine, but it shouldn’t be the be-all of your marketing campaign.

Maybe Your Peers Don't Make The Best Judges, Better Make Some Sock Puppets.

SEO Gurus, the internet is so full of people claiming that they are the best at cheating search engine results, it’s like calling yourself an expert at pushing yourself into the front of a row and getting payed to do so.

Let's Face It, If We Were Really That Smart, We Would Have Been Buying Generic Domain Names.

Most of them claim to be White Hat SEO gurus, in other words, they ask politely before they push themselves in front of the row, they follow all the so-called rules and regulations that were made up by search engine companies and they are generally too afraid to play outside the barbwire electric fence on top of the 10 foot thick concrete wall.

Just Because You Follow The Rules Doesn't Mean You Can't Rank For Competitive Terms. Oh Wait, Yes It Does.

Some of these White Hat SEO Gurus will tell you they specialize in link building. From what I’ve read in several sources, Google will actually penalize your page rank if you link to an outside source and not use the “nofollow” flag (unless the link is relevant, not sure how Google’s new double standards are working); thus link spammers will have their own site’s page rank dropped to zero pretty quickly diminishing the impact they have on the other site’s page rank.

Look At Me Mom! Hey! Are You Looking? Over Here! Watch! Are You Watching? Please!

Black Hat SEO Gurus will always have a dark secret that nobody must know about, yet they want to sell you this secret on how to get an “unfair” advantage in the market. Some of the techniques include link building wherin the Guru does a link / banner exchange with random webmasters and then simply use the robots.txt / .htaccess to block all spiders from accessing the links or toggling the “nofollow” flag based on the user’s IP address so that spiders see “nofollow” and users doesn’t see it (which effectively leads to having only links pointing to your site and nothing pointing back to the other site according to the web crawler’s point of view).

The biggest “niche” is to scrape the web for content around a certain niche and simply steal that content for their own automated / generated blogs while stacking those fake blogs with a crapload of ads. This is especially true for Gurus trying to make money of the highest paying keywords (where the competition is tough, for $70+ a click on a Google AdSense ad, I can understand why being the absolute number one and getting the highest cut out of click-pie is so important). Get caught using Black Hat SEO techniques and your site might get blacklisted or severely penalized … but that’s ok, these Black Hatters have plenty of sites they can use to conduct their mischief and overpower the search engine algorithms.

Cloaking Scraped Content Written By A Markov Generator Is Just Another Way Of Enhancing The User Experience.

Calling yourself a Guru is a dangerous thing, you better be able to live up to those incredible high standards if you want to go around calling yourself a Guru.

Any other annoying “Gurus” that you can think of?

Tags: Black Hat, blogging, Forums, Guru, Link Building, SEO, social media, spam, White Hat
Posted in Humor, Rants, SEDO, SEO, Scams, Techno Blabble, info | 6 Comments »

Dear Microsoft …

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Dear Microsoft

In reviewing our relationship over the past years, it occurs to me that I haven’t been falsely accused of being a thief enough lately. In that regard, rather than spending time, money, or energy developing new features or making the features you have work, I would greatly appreciate it if you could spend time making sure that I haven’t ripped you off.

If possible, it would be best if the new version of the anti-ripoff tool had as many false positives as possible. Also, I’d like it if the tool could be as large as possible and updated as frequently as possible. Finally, every time I download an update from you, including critical security updates, I should need to download a new version of the anti-ripoff tool.
My thinking here is that downloading updates from you isn’t difficult and painful enough, and I don’t yet feel enough of a need to get down on my knees and pray that your update process doesn’t foul up again. Also, the updates I have been downloading are just too darn small, and happen too darn fast.

Anyway, I know that you’ll do what’s right and invest the largest amount of money, time, and effort into the item with the smallest possible return, and the greatest possible annoyances for me, your customer.

Regards
Cecil

PS – I finally figured out all of the differences between the 8 different versions of Windows Vista, the 4 different versions of Office, and the 8 different versions of Windows Server 2008. This is very disappointing! You can do better than that, and I expect to see better from you soon! Why not 78 different editions of each OS and Office suite? That would be much better. I’d never figure out those differences unless I hire a consultant!

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

@Cecil, if you’re being falsely accused of having a pirated copy of XP, here’s a patch that will fix just that and stop that annoying WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) popups: removeWGA. The alternative is Linux, any one of the gazillion distros.

Tags: Microsoft, WGA
Posted in Humor | 6 Comments »

Kill Internet Explorer 6 once and for all!

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Internet Explorer 6, your time is up, it’s time for you to return to the source! If you choose exile, beware of the consequences, you’ll be starved to death and there is nothing you can do about it! Moehahahaa!!!

Internet Explorer 6’s market share is rapidly dropping and that is definitely good news for web developers who’ve been slaving away to patch their code in order to fix all the bugs that are caused by the horrible Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft should be ashamed for releasing a browser that doesn’t adhere to standards, but that’s just typical of a monopoly, give a company a monopoly and they’ll stop caring about quality.

At the moment, Internet Explorer 6’s market share is below 20% and rapidly declining if you take a look at the Browser Version Market Share.

The question is, how can we kill it once and for all?

Google started a campaign to warn Internet Explorer 6 users (using Gmail) how crappy the browser really is and giving them an alternative in the form of a link where they can at least upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 (it’s still Internet Explorer, but it’s a million times better than its predecessor). Facebook is also giving users a big fat warning that the site might not work properly while using Internet Explorer 6 and also gives the user a list of supported browsers.

I believe something a bit more drastic will kill the browser once and for all, what if all webmasters suddenly decided that they are no longer going to load stylesheets or simply display anything if a user is using Internet Explorer 6?

That is exactly what I’m doing on this blog (and soon the rest of the site), if somebody is using Internet Explorer 6 or older, I give them a big fat warning saying:

ATTENTION: MyCee no longer supports old versions of Internet Explorer.
Please upgrade your browser or switch to something better, like Firefox, Opera or Chrome.

Also, I don’t load any stylesheets when a person is using Internet Explorer 6, if they want to be stuck in the stone-age, using tools from the stone-age, then let them view the web as if they were in the stone-age.

It’s really simple to exclude stylesheets from loading in Internet Explorer 6 by simply using their own proprietary feature called conditional comments:

<!--[if gt IE 6]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../base.css" />
<!--<![endif]-->

Anything you want excluded in Internet Explorer 6, simply put it between

<!--[if gt IE 6]><!-->

and

<!--<![endif]-->

Anything you want exclusively displayed in Internet Explorer 6 or older versions, simply put it between

<!--[if lte IE 6]>

and

<![endif]-->

(lt means less than, lte means less than or equal, gt means greater than, gte means greater than or equal, if you remove the gt, gte, lt, lte, it becomes a simple equal to)

Let’s take the big red attention notice from above for example:

<!--[if lte IE 6]><h2 style="color: red;">ATTENTION: MyCee no longer supports old versions of Internet Explorer.<br />Please upgrade your browser or switch to something better, like <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/download/">Opera</a> or <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Chrome</a>.</h2><![endif]-->

The only way to kill Internet Explorer 6 once and for all, is simply to refuse coding for it, not loading any stylesheets when the browser is Internet Explorer 6 or older and to warn the user that Internet Explorer 6 is rubbish while giving the user some links to decent browsers.

If you really want to be nasty, how about warning the person that Internet Explorer 6 is rubbish (on the entry page) and then crashing his browser (and maybe even computer) if the user ignores the warning (and continue to browse beyond the entry page). Here’s a piece of code that will do exactly that (haven’t tested it on browsers older than IE6):

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Crash IE6</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!--[if lte IE 6]>
      <style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>
    <![endif]-->
  </body>
</html>

I’m proudly Internet Explorer 6 non-compliant, are you? (leave me a comment with a link to your site if you’re supporting the cause)

Only when we all work together, can we destroy Internet Explorer 6’s market share and take revenge for the injustice done to humanity and lack of technological advancement due to developers having to waste countless hours patching code for Internet Explorer 6.