K-Squared Ramblings

GeoCities / Com & Line

• GeoCities lingered for a day, but has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. # Over at Speed Force, I wrote a piece on GeoCities, RIP: Fandom’s Lost Pages.
• Interesting typo seen on a mailing list: “com and line option.” (command line) #

Starbuck(’)s Coffee

I found this sign on the day after National Punctuation Day. You can still see the residue from the adhesive where the extra apostrophe was attached.

Someone clearly got Starbucks Coffee confused with Starbuck’s coffee. Of course, in some cases, they could be the same thing:

Flickr photo by amidalasrogue

Words, Words, Words

• It’s National Punctuation Day! (via @ThisIsTrue) # In honor of it, check out our collection of sign mistakes.
• This CAPTCHA wants me to type “gosmut” O_o #

I Have A Preposition For You

Lost in Translation

Critical Miss

Take a look at this press release for the Los Angeles Science Fiction and Comic Book Convention and see if you can figure out what’s missing: Read the rest of this entry »

Coming Soon! Or Not.

Clearly there’ve been a few delays.

This photo was taken in October. It’s November, and the place still isn’t open.

Saftey First – En Español

Just to show that English-language sign writers don’t have a monopoly on misspellings, here’s a sign we spotted at a construction site in Irvine:

Literally it means “Think Safety” — or it would if it said “Piense seguridad.” The typo makes this the Spanish equivalent of “Saftey First.”

Backwards

From a food allergy alert released today:

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc., is recalling “Chocolate Covered Almonds” due to undeclared peanuts and “Chocolate Double-Dipped Peanuts” due to undeclared almonds. [emphasis added]

I have to wonder: are they just really bad about keeping their ingredients separate, or did they get the labels switched on a couple of batches?

Stupid Scammer Tricks: Forgetting BCC

There’s something delicious about irony in spam. Yesterday, the spamtraps netted an advance fee fraud scam message that started out like this:

Let me be honest with you. This information is just for you alone [emphasis added]. I would suggest that you try to fix it instead of making any trouble with it as my job might be put on the line here.

Your name has been on an awaiting list of payment roaster submitted by the Nigerian Government For your lottery/inheritance reasons of no banking particulars on which transfer should be made to until two days ago when the paying Bank personnel brought in another payment roaster for the replacement of the former that had your name on it.

The funny part? (Well, aside from the “payment roaster.”) There were about 300 recipients in the To: line.

Gee, I don’t think all 300 people have the same account info…

Most spam doesn’t run into this problem, since it’s generated by special programs that don’t even bother filling in complete headers. But from what I understand, a lot of 419 scams are still sent by people sitting in internet cafes, copying and pasting bits from templates. So it’s easy to imagine someone pasting their list into the wrong field. Kind of like the classic “Reply All” fiascos.

Getting Propositioned

Oddly, the usual deluge of election propaganda hasn’t materialized yet, and the election is less than a week away. While looking through the scanty haul, most of which is focused on a quartet of propositions on Indian gaming, Katie found an intriguing statement:

Wait… pubic services? Whoa! And here I thought gambling on tribal lands was hot. This could blow it away… or alternatively, screw everyone over.

Not Exactly…

Icy?

I found this photo while looking for the UCI Student Center pic. This was taken on the way back from a camping trip with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program in the Angeles National Forest in April 2000. IIRC it was along Angeles Crest Highway.

A permanent sign isn’t necessarily the best way to indicate a transitory condition.

Politicians in Washington

Yesterday, President Bush reportedly said, “Politicians in Washington shouldn’t be telling generals how to do their job.”

I guess he’d better recuse himself from any further military decisions for the rest of his term. Commander in Chief or not, the President of the United States is a politician in Washington.

Hmm, maybe he can give orders while traveling?

Opera Really Satisfies

The Opera Web Browser is in the news today. First, they’ve just released version 9.20. In addition to the usual security, stability, and compatibility fixes, they’re promoting a new feature called Speed Dial, to make it easier to reach your most-frequently-visited websites.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by NetApplications and Surveyware found that while Firefox is widely considered the best browser, Opera’s users are more satisfied than users of any other browser. NetApplications’ current marketshare shows 79% IE, 15% Firefox, 4.5% Safari and 0.8% Opera for March 2007. (via OperaWatch)

While Opera is an excellent browser, this high level of satisfaction may be in part because of the size of its userbase. Often, when something is only followed by a small fraction of the potential audience, it’s mainly the hard-core fans. The only way to grow past that size is to bring in the casual users, who are less invested in it. Only time (and increased marketshare) will tell.

Webuser decided to lead with the Opera findings, which is great news for what they call “one of the internet’s best-kept secrets.” But they made an odd choice on the image to run with the article:

Maybe they figured the Firefox logo was more recognizable, and would get more people to stop and read?