Online Circus

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Back pains ? Is your wallet in your back pocket... ?

Yesterday, during a long meeting, I grew painfully aware of the uncomfortable wallet stuck in my back pocket.
It's nothing new - I've been keeping my wallet in my back-pocket for as long as I can remember , although at a short moment of enlightenment I tried hard and couldn't explain why a grown man that spends many hours every day sitting on a chair, decided to place this annoying wallet just there in the first place. Contemplating some more on this absurd issue, it seemed only logical that if someone just took a minute to analyze this weird behavior, he would certainly find that sitting like that can't be good for your lower-back.
It appears (duh) that it's a well known fact that prolong sitting while your wallet sits safely in your back-pocket can cause back-pains and even damage key nerves. They even have a name for the condition - hip-pocket syndrome or wallet-neuropathy (who wants to be the first to Wiki those terms... ?).
What's the solution ? You most likely need at least some of your wallet's content on you daily (Credit card, money, ID, etc.), you usually can't just leave your wallet lying around and you can't leave it in your front pocket as it interferes with the annoying habit of placing your hands in there. I suggest keeping less change and raising a consumer protest for Levi's to introduce a lower wallet pocket in their pants.
On the same note, I should find a better location to place my cell phone other then my front pocket - nearest to some important vitals...

Where do you keep your wallet ?


Saturday, January 28, 2006

Everybody enters cryogenic sleep until Earth heals !

Two excellent books I read recently sparked what I think is an interesting thought-experiment/movie-plot I wanted to share.

Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch - The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" envisions a future society that finally reached serenity just to realize that after its share of past struggles, their environment has passed the point of no return and all they can do is sit down and watch their heritage dissolve to nothingness, or is it ? [Story begins here...].
Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" (Successor to "Guns, Germs, and Steel") studies patterns of past societies collapses attributed to environmental
misuse and correlate it to the current situation on our planet.
Overdosed on apocalyptic stories of environmental hell, I read Professor Diamond's explanations regarding the unavoidable per-capita impact of human waste on the environment (after all, we're not in cryogenic storage). And then it hit me, my very own movie plot ! Here it comes -

"Humans not many years from now realize that the environment is marching towards a point of no return after which all our technology will not stop planet Earth from deteriorating until it could support no living form. At this point of time, while Earth can still regenerate and slowly heal its past wounds our society is determined to take a brave step - put everything on hold, enter cryogenic sleep and wake up ten thousand years from now as if only a minute passed in a planet earth that is healed past the wounds of our ancestors. Everybody is prepared and the countdown begins. Ends. Our hero feels as if he just woke from an afternoon nap, walks out of the cryo chamber and find that something went terribly wrong... "

A sure blockbuster isn't it... ? How would you continue from here ?


Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Can your search terms be used against you ? Part 2

In a previous post I've mentioned that the US government may contact your favorite search engine and with a mere subpoena access your favorite search terms. Reuters reports that this annoying scenario has already taken place.

In court documents filed on Wednesday, the Bush administration asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena to reveal the search terms of the search engine's visitors. The subpoena is part of an effort to test the effectiveness of a 1998 law, the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which penalizes Web site operators who allow children to view pornography. It's fair to note that the requested search results do not expose information on specific home-users but are a random sampling of COPA relevant search terms and web site accesses.

It's interesting to note that Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo have all already handed the requested selection of search requests and indexed Web sites, but Google is standing firm.

Watch out what you're searching for...


Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Parking a $800,000 Domain ?

DNJournal reports that the domain earth.com has changed hands for $800,000, one of the three biggest reported domain sales this year.
Now, how do you utilize a $800,000 domain ? Looking at what the buyers, InnovationHQ Inc., DnStrategy.com and Logicbank LLC, just did, it appears that parking the domain with Google ads is a winner solution...
You can argue that Innovation HQ's that owns more than 12000 domains isn't all for Google ads and they are just waiting for the right buyer, but looking at their homepage
Innovation HQ, Inc. Is currently interested in purchasing high quality generic domain names that do not infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights such as grants.com, robot.com, and creditcardprocessing.com.

It starts to look like the $800,000 domain is worth its google ads in gold.


Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Civet Coffee - Best Marketing Campaign Ever ?

Civet Coffee or Kopi Luwak is sold for more than 300$ a Kilo making it one of the most expensive coffee beans in the world.
What's interesting (beside the price) is its method of preparation. Civets are cat-like animals living across southeast Asia that like to eat the best and ripest coffee berries. Enzymes in their digestive system break down the beans. Workers collect the "pre-processed" beans from the plantation floor after they've been "expelled" from the cats. They wash away the dung and roast them to produce the unique coffee.

300$ a kilo for "cat poop coffee" ? Praises for their PR guy... !