On My Own Eating Habits

Apparently, my eating habits are so routine at this point that if I go to my local greasery* and order a "barger and frims"** for takeaway, they will know exactly what I want. I confirmed this through experimentation.

*Emphatically a real word, my dude.
**Not actually real words; I just made them up.

Features That Need To Happen

So I hit command-A, command-O (select all, open) only to discover a millisecond too late that I wasn't in the window I thought I was and had accidentally opened over 500 diverse documents in a dozen-odd apps between them all at once.

Obviously not the end of the world, but definitely annoying.

Way back when Macs were actually Macs instead of PC clones running a Unix-based OS, typing command-period immediately after making such a dumb mistake would nullify said mistake and make everything right again by canceling the app openings before they started fighting over RAM and clock cycles. It was a very useful feature that fixed a lot of boneheaded mistakes in the past.

Unfortunately, that feature is no longer in place. And it needs to come back.

Advice To Ad Agencies

In order to further transition ITIHAB into "Why Marketers Suck," here's a post containing some advice to them.

This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one who knows me in real life given that I'm perpetually broke, but I take market research surveys for money. This fact is also unsurprising to people who found my blog through some random Google search because they don't know or care about me, and it's not particularly surprising as far as facts go; if I had revealed I was secretly an alien, or the Queen, or that I had recently used the Book of Parallels that showed up in my postbox anonymously to retrieve a cure for cancer from an alternate universe, then that would be surprising but that I take market research surveys for money is generally more of a resident of the "meh" territory, like revealing I had a movie about aliens, or that I was a queen, or that I just made up the Book of Parallels and you shouldn't bother googling it because it's not a reference.

I typically can't share any juicy (or gruesome) details about experimental products because of confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements and most surveys not actually having any. However, I can share my comments from these surveys because they're, you know, mine.

One survey asked, on its final page, if I had any advice I'd liked to give to ad agencies and the people who make adverts in general. As it turned out, I did have some advice, and so I answered thus:

On balance, an ad is a BAD THING. By definition. If it supports content, then "ad + content" might total out to a positive, but "ad" is ALWAYS negative. Nobody *wants* to see ads, so stop trying to pretend that you can make your ads "better" so people will enjoy them. So basically, telling us that an invasion of privacy is justified because it means you can show "more relevant" ads doesn't just insult our intelligence; it makes you look like some freakish alien that's doing a really poor job of trying to imitate human behaviour.

As for what will make your ads "work" (in the sense of actually driving traffic/sales/etc), I can't help you. My browser has an adblock, and my mind has an adblock as well, so I can't remember ads once I'm no longer looking at them. If a company advertises, I will interpret this to mean that their products are inferior or overpriced since they obviously can't rely on quality or price to drive sales. I have never clicked an online ad unless I was (1) paid to click on it or (2) clicking on it repeatedly because it was offensive and I enjoyed the prospect of making them pay for a dozen-odd clickthroughs for zero conversions. I have responded to direct mail adverts by filling business reply envelopes with various items including (1) rocks, (2) direct mail adverts that didn't come with prepaid reply envelopes, or (3) the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley and mailing them back at advertiser expense. And I don't watch TV so don't think you can advertise at me there either.

Oh, and happy new year and stuff I completely forgot to blog about at the time. Cheers!

I'm a moron.

I was watching a video just now. One line was spoken quietly (and I was eating loudilly), so I said "Hm?"

Instead of, you know, rewinding it because it's a video and he can't hear me.

Also, is it "loudilly" or "loudally?" It's a real pain remembering how to misspell correctly.

Youtube Video Suggestions

I just watched one of Stuart Ashen's videos on Youtube. For those unfamiliar with Stuart Ashen, he has a series of videos called "Terrible Old Games You Probably Never Heard Of" and also reviews electronic tat dolled up to look like popular items.

As I watched said video, I took a look at the sidebar containing ostensibly related videos that Youtube's algorithm decided I might be interested in watching next. Can you spot the one that doesn't belong?

(Well the image file got et, probably when I killed my Yahoo account. I'll try to get around to re-uploading it if I can find it, but basically it was a long list of Ashen's other videos with a single incongruous My Little Pony vid wedged in the middle. The title text for the image was: "I think my little sister used my computer once and now my Google profile is permanently contaminated with whatever she looked at." Also, the alt text, which is meant to appear when the image can't load but appears on mouseover instead of the title text in Internet Exploder said: "Apparently, My Little Pony is now in some way related to electronic tat. And if this appeared when you pointed your cursor at the image, then upgrade to Firefox you wally.")

I knew you could!