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Selling Snow & Warm Air on eBay

Colorado woman selling snow on eBay – reports the AP:

“Starting bids were holding steady Friday at 99 cents for snow from “Blizzard I and Blizzard II” being offered by Mary Walker. She and husband, Jim, got the idea for selling snow after shoveling mounds from two storms a week apart that together dumped more than 4 feet along the Front Range.”

This is hilarious – and it’s not even April 1stsmile_tongue.  I looked up the actual eBay bid – low and behold, the current bid amount is $56, $77 $102.50 and the bid was viewed 8968 times. 

This gave me the idea: so many people are unfortunate, stuck in cold climate, while I’m walking around in spring-like sunny California.  I think I’m gonna put up a few bags of warm air for sale on eBay.

Note: despite rumors, the Golden Gate Bridge is not for sale.

Update (12/31):  Here’s another interesting item to buy: dehydrated water.  smile_eyeroll

 

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NASA / Google: It’s Not What You Think

They want you to believe it’s to establish a “relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.”  

This could cover “Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle”.

“Yes, two of the biggest names in geekery have joined forces to give the gift of virtual space exploration to the masses” says Gizmodo.

No, no, and no.  They all are missing the point: it’s all about building the next Google Campus on the Mars. smile_shades

 

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Winner of the “Not My Job” Award

Winner of the “Not My Job” Award

Originally uploaded by Bully-fied.
  

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Yahoo Switching to Low-fat Peanut Butter?

TechCrunch seems to know that Yahoo is switching to low-fat  peanut-butter this afternoon, in a company-wide webcast.  The trimming is expected to be about 20%, and starts at the top…

Quiz: what’s wrong with my peanut-butter metaphor?

(Answer: peanut oil is one of the good fats, unlike Yahoo, you don’t want to reduce it…)

Update (11/5):  If you read this post before and clicking on the above link took you to a 404 error page – my apologies.  Apparently TechCrunch did the absolute no-no by deleting their original post and replacing it with a new one.

Update (11/5):  TechCrunch has a new summary post here, COO Dan Rosensweig is leaving.

Update (11/6):  I may have been wrong about that low-fat peanut-butter: Good Mornign Silicon Valley thinks Yahoo added some chocolate to the peanut butter. That would be … Nutella?

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Things to Avoid If You’re Planning an Embezzlement Scheme

  • Do not call your company VaporTech. In fact do not call it Vapor-anything.
  • Do not lease a Ferrari and a Mercedes at the same time
  • Do not hire a former prosecutor as a corporate officer.

Full story at the SF Chronicle.

 

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Machine-translated Blogs? No, Thank You.

I made fun of the sorry state of machine-translation a few times before:
TechCrunch “Narcotic”:-) (or the state of machine translation today)  and
Sans Accent; Marc Fleury’s Feet in the Dish and the Walk of the Waiters  so when I received a Mybloglog invitation to check out the English version of a blog, the last thing I expected was a machine-translated version of the French original.

The motto of the blog:

“The transformation of our company thanks to information technologies deserves a lighting… and reactions! My DataNews deciphers without turnings the topicality of the information systems, technology, the WEB, and the associated trades.”

The most recent post title:

The point on the function “Dated Management” (Management of the data)

“…Although shy person, this recent evolution is very positive, because it more stresses from now on the contents (the data customers, products, markets, suppliers) rather than on a technical container (the data base)”

Although with great effort I could guess what the blogger is trying to say, as written, this is pure crap.  Crisptophe, whoever you are (incidentally, messaging “Hi Zoli ! You can now read my blog in English !!!” to a totally unknown person is not the best way of introduction), I’m sure you are smarter then this, and you write a quality blog.  But for now, if you want it multi-lingual, you have to do what Mike Arrington did at TechCrunch: hire translators – or do it yourself.  But do yourself a favor, remove the machine-translated version, it does not do you any good. smile_sad

 

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Laptops are "Safer" than Desktops :-)

Laptops are “safer” in certain situations smile_shades

 

…although they can be harmful in other ways smile_sad

 

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Speed Bandits in Denmark

But what do they do in winter?

 

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Turkey Exit Strategy

While they are just planning their exit strategy:

Talking Turkey

they’ve already executed it  (oops, bad choice of wordssmile_wink):

NJ Transit officials reported seeing a dozen or so wild turkeys waiting on a Ramsey train station platform. Dan Stessel, a spokesman for NJ Transit, said “… it looked like the turkeys were waiting for the next outbound train,” he said “Clearly, they’re trying to catch a train and escape their fate.”

 

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Blog Affairs…

Heart Shaped Blog

Can you imagine how this joke would sound if Nick Carr had his way?

“Are you funging someone else?”  smile_embaressed