The Sh*t L*st

According to slashdot, people are getting a lot of spam thanks to Ameritrade. It's not that Ameritrade is sending it. It's worse -- it appears Ameritrade database has been breached from the outside. The worst news is I think I have an Ameritrade account.

I've been working from home a lot lately, listening to KCRW. Usually, I only listen while I'm in the car, and when my clock-radio goes off in the morning. But now I've been listening for like hours at a time. And I've noticed something with their music programming. They'll play a new song to death. I mean, you think your local bubble gum Top 40 station plays from a short playlist, listen to a couple days on KCRW. I've must have heard that new Feist song a dozen times.

Still better than anything else on the radio. Just an observation that even the eclectic has its limits.

Jeff from Prize Claim Center just left me a voicemail informing me of my prize! To claim it, I'll have to call David Mitchell at 1-800-821-2678. Unfortunately, I can't do that, so I'm giving it away. You can just call David and tell him I told you you could have it.

Labels: numbers

Like me, are you receiving magazines your didn't subscribe to and being billed for it?

Just talked to my friendly neighborhood postal worker about my growing magazine problem and he gave me the following advice:

1. with magazine, take a thick black marker and write REFUSED across the address label and put it back in the mailbox

2. with invoice, write "did not subscribe, did not receive across it" and mail it back. I think I'll add a note saying: "do you outsource your subscriptions and marketing?"

The publisher will be paying for the postage both ways.

Labels: magazine slamming

Motherfucking scumbag marketers. I've started receiving magazines I didn't order again at my parents' address. Along with the bills! Of course, the bills don't include a number to call. I'd like to just tell the post office I don't live there any more, but I still get some important mail there every once in a while.

Quick Google search turned up this:

WHDH-TV: Help Me Hank! Magazine subscriptions

Same problem. But no solution. (You suck, Hank.)

Someone somewhere is obviously getting paid to sign me up for these and I gotta believe it's the magazine that are paying to boost their subscriber number. So I am going to start a list here of these derelict magazines. (Haven't been by the parents to pick them up yet.)

Also considering sending a letter from a lawyer friend of mine to the publishers demanding information on who signed me up as part of an identity theft and mail fraud investigation.

If you have any advice, please comment.

Labels: magazine slamming

and, in heaven, where he can now direct the wrath of god at deserving American cities unhindered by the petty office politics and bureaucratic red-tape of this world.

Suck it, secular progressives.

If ever someone begged to be on the Shitlist, it is this guy. Slinking off to the Far East to spread his FUD. This guy makes Dennis Miller look cool.

Full /. roundup

Had to see it to believe it. I'd say Dennis Miller was the biggest douchebag sellout since Sonny Bono, but really I find it all kinda tragic. Felt like Woody Allen in that scene from Annie Hall where that hack comedian is going on about how he likes to tell Fifi jokes. It's that pathetic.

Remember when Dennis Miller was the Jon Stewart of SNL? Well, that's ok -- not many other people do either. On the Simpsons, they refer to it as the Dennis Miller Ratio.

Your math homework: draw a Venn diagram of the O'Reilly viewers and Dennis Miller fans. Remember to use the Dennis Miller Ratio.

When your clusterfuck goes really awry. (Or, for the 16th c. scholars out there, clusterfuck in an Elizabethan pamphlet.)

e.g. That upgrade that my manager authorized for my workstation while I was out of the office yesterday turned into a real cluftersuck.

Noticed that all of the sudden that, starting Wed. 2 May, my visitor numbers were way down. Not that they were ever huge. But after a steady, sharp decline, yesterday I showed no visitors whatsoever. Zero, zilch, nada. That's the first time that's happened in years.

So I looked at the site stats and saw the drop-off started 2 May. What did I post at that time that might explain it? That's right, on 1 May, I posted that evil hex number that nearly brought down Digg.

So I've reset the suspect post to draft to remove it from the site to see if the traffic returns.

That's one fucking evil number. From one fucking evil industry.

A co-worker in Sales just heard about SecondLife and was asking me what it was, like I'd be the just the uber-loser expert to consult on the subject. Luckily, he'd just read Neuromancer, so I told him, it's kinda like what Gibson imagined way back then -- you know, the Matrix -- but in its early, lame infant stages.

For anyone else with questions, here's my SecondLife FAQ, lifted straight from the comments of Slashdot:

The real question is... Who the hell actually plays Second Life? I see tons of stories on /. and digg about it, but out of all the incredibly geeky people I know, none of them plays Second Life (or at least they wont admit to it).

I'm convinced that the only people "playing" second life are the people writing these articles. I think that technology columnists are fascinated with the idea of second life, and love to write about it. I can't fault them for that, because the idea does have interesting implications, but I think they do us all a disservice by continually giving attention to a "phenomenon" that no one actually cares about.

After reading countless articles about this wonderful new world of second life, I decided to check it out. What a piece of bloated crap-ware. I don't think the idea behind second life is worthless, but it's current incarnation is a joke.

I don't have a PS3, and have no plans currently to purchase one, but I think their new "Home" has a better chance of becoming popular than second life ever will.
source: /. comment #18476401

Do you have a SecondLife character?
Hell no. Plus, I have a crappy video card, so I couldn't play even if I wanted to.

For more information, see:
second life safari (somethingawful.com)
wikipedia

Small Tits, Big Cleavage.

Look, I don't know why my friend and I talk about this kind of crap. We're guys. We just do. My friend's even gay and he still talks about this.

Anyway, the observation was his, the acronym mine. Thanks to mind-boggling advances in female under-garment technology, it's not the contradiction you'd think it was.

This was inspired by that scene in the latest Sopranos where AJ asks his Puerto Rican girlfriend to marry her. They're in a nice restaurant. She's showing off some hella wicked décolletage. My gay friend pointed out her cleavage. Like I didn't notice. But that got us on the subject, because neither of us felt her boobs were big enough to justify that kind of cleavage.

But then I told him about some of my girlfriends and their ability to bump up two cup sizes with the right hardware.

So there you have it. Tell Urban Dictionary to stop the presses.