Despite a few work-related chaotic moments, my brthday was a wonderful day. I was overwhelmed with friends and family's well wishes. And thank you to everyone.

I don't know if you have noticed this, but the targeted ads on Facebook are getting ridiculous.

I am all for them making money, but it seems every ad on there lately is:

a) Stupid and useless to me (ie: not at all relevant or targeted)

b) Using the worst kind of scummy ad techniques

Listen, I am not against Facebook making money. I love Facebook, and they should make millions from that idea. But I also prefer the ads I see to be more subtle AND useful. The idea behind targeted ads is that advertisers know I am a male, late 30's, make a decent income, married, etc. etc. And so they show me golf club ads. Gadget ads. Car ads. You know, THINGS I ACTALLY MIGHT LIKE. Targeted advertising is great on paper.

Instead, Facebook delivers me this:

 

 

ARE YOU 35-39 YEARS OLD?

Really? Really? Come on, really? That's the STUPIDEST thing I've ever seen. And if the "tagline" wasn't the worst kind of targeted ad I can imagine, the product itself - free samples? So you want to trick me into giving over my name address and income data for no gain?

I am an adult male with disposable income. SELL ME SOMETHING. I want to buy it. I spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on stuff I really didn't need. And with all this demographic information you have on me, the best the computational algorythm can come up with is... free samples?

I'll just refresh the page here. Get a new ad...

What's the problem? Why won't they advertise good things to me? Why is it always dumb stuff?

 

 

An extremely interesting article from FreelanceSwitch, one of my new favourite blogs.

It just happens to be an infallible truth that people are more motivated by what they stand to lose (and who they stand to conquer) than by what they can gain. By leveraging the success of their competitor against their fear of losing business to someone else, you’ll easily persuade them to want to work with you and they’ll think it was their idea to ask you!

 

Back in the 1990's, Microsoft was plagued with a problem known affectionately as the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Whenever Windows encountered a problem it couldn't gracefully recover from, it threw up a blue screen instead and that was it. You had to reboot, losing whatever you were working on. This happened sometimes frequently.

Now in the 2000's that problem seems to have gone away. But the Xbox 360 picked up the baton and is running with it. Original 360's are plagued with Red Rings of Death (RROD).  This has happened to a significant number of people - upwards of 50% by some estimates.

My 360, which I have owned for about 2 years has just been RRODed. The latest symptom is that the xbox freezes after only a few minutes of playing with it. But I've received the Red Rings a couple of times.

I'm in the process of sending it back to Microsoft for repairs. The basics of the problem is overheating. The original "compound" used to disperse heat on the CPU and GPU apparently was faulty.

I hope they repair it. Or replace it with a new one. Or whatever. I'll post an update if and when they do.

 

Anyone have a recommendation for a legitimate MBA degree that can be taken online?

I have friends who have gotten degrees from the University of Liverpool. But checking their web site, the fee for an MBA is currently $34,000. Obviously, the value in getting an MBA will exceed $34,000, so although high priced it is not necessarily a bad value.

Now, on the low end, there is a program called Aspen University offering Masters degrees "for under $6,000" according to their Google Ad. Now, looking at their web site, it appears their MBA program consists of 11 courses, and courses are $900 each. But buried in the fine print is the detail that most courses are only $200 if purchased in advance, so that's significant savings.

There's a Canadian University called Athabasca U, which claims to have the world's first online MBA. Well, they're asking for $42,000 and I think part of the course is done in person at their campus. So I think I'll pass on that one.

Hmmm, not sure what I will do. Some of the MBA programs look appealing (MBA in Entrepreneurship for instance). But for $30,000-$50,000, I might be better off buying myself a small BMW.

I ran an experiment for a few years, hosting a Wiki site to discuss Microsoft certifications and real estate. Well, I revisited those sites recently after a few months of being away, and noticed they had been overrun with spam.

So that's that. Goodbye to the wikis. Deleted.

Wikis, as represented by sites such as wikipedia, are great ways to crowdsource content. The ultimate Battlestar Gallatica wiki, or the Star Wars wiki, and sites are examples. If I go to a web page and see inaccuracies, or have more recent content to add, click-click-click and I can add it. Instant gratification.

But I was using a wiki as a convenient content management tool for me. The easy click-click-click CMS made it easy for me to add new MCSD content for instance. But it also made it easy for spammers to fill the page with crappy ads, and it was a hassle trying to roll back to the correct version. Yes, believe it or not some spammers edited the same page 50 times, so I had to go WAY back to find the right version.

Anyways, wiki is now dead. I don't even see it as a great content management platform any more. Well, except for the original Wikipedia which rocks.

 

If I were to say to you, "Can you keep a secret?"
Would you know just what to do? Or where to keep it?