K-Squared Ramblings

Those sushi chefs are such cut-ups!

Well, technically, the fish is severed…

Based on which recent purchases?

I let Amazon.com send me notices every once in a while, just in case something interesting pops up. This qualifies, though not in the way I expected:

Based on your recent purchases, we thought you might like to know that you can save up to 65% on summer favorites in men’s, women’s, children’s, and shoes.

The thing is, I’ve never bought clothing from Amazon! Books, CDs, the occasional DVD, some computer software. But no clothing, though they’ve tried to convince me. T-shirts aside, I prefer to be able to try something on before I buy it.

Assuming they actually are using their recommendations system, I think they must have just checked the clothing category for the mailing, and left the “based on…” phrase in the template. Though sometimes cross-category recommendations can be strange. I’m often amazed at things I find in my rec list that have no relation to the things I bought or rated that supposedly triggered the recommendation, simply because those items are popular enough to cut across multiple interests. Of course, right now the only thing they recommend for me in “apparel” is a Darth Vader mask, which I find somewhat disturbing…

Allergen-free? Try again!

Saw this sign on a display in Whole Foods the other day:

Okaay… but what if you’re allergic to fish?

What it all Mean’s

Katie spotted this example of apostrophe abuse in an office parking lot.

The best service mean is…? Statistical analysis of dumpster service?

Is there any *ahem* meaning for which this would actually make sense?

Title goes here

I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

Small parts will be what?

Here’s a candidate for Engrish.com if I ever saw one… except it’s aimed at the US market. This is from the back of a small metal Justice League figurine:

OK, I understand what they’re saying, it could break into small parts that could be a choking hazard. But the phrasing is awkward at best, and sounds like it belongs in a tech manual, not on a simple toy.

10% of nothing

This is a credit card offer I received today. What’s wrong with this picture?

The two offers—10% of your interest returned, and 0% interest—both look great by themselves…but put them together and that 10% looks rather uninteresting.

Well, the state bird is the Quayle…

The local Ralphs has been remodeling. New tiles, new signs, new carts, everything’s been rearranged—heck, they even have a new logo. So keep in mind that this isn’t a leftover sign, it’s brand new:

I’d say Dan Quayle left more of a mark on America than we might think.

Mailing Mishap

I’ve been getting a lot of what Katie calls “concrete spam” (i.e. junk mail) from charities over the last few months. Eventually I’ll track down who sold my address. But this was an interesting one because they seem to think I’ve gone back to college:

What, did my evil psychic twin get a doctorate over the Internet?

I’ll have to look for this on other mailers and see if anyone else thinks I’m a professor. That may help track down one source.

Wow, PHP is older than I thought!

Screenshot of the PHP RSS news feed:

Wow, when they said “archive,” they really meant it!

While SharpReader is the best aggregator I’ve tried for Windows, it does have problems with dates from time to time — sometimes articles will be stamped with the time they were downloaded instead of the time they were posted.

And I suspect in this case, it’s missing a date. (In UNIX, and as a result across most of the Internet, time is measured in seconds since GMT midnight January 1, 1970. If you somehow end up with a time of -1, this is what you get.)

Always proofread carfully

Believe it or not, this is on the front of an elementary school!

It kind of reminds me of the “They’re just putting the S in principal” story.

Cross-platform?

This is from an ad for Comcast cable-modem service that arrived in today’s mail. I almost threw it out, but then I noticed something very odd about the middle picture on the front:

Now it may not be obvious at this resolution, so how about a closer look at the corners:

Wow - that’s the first time I’ve seen Windows XP running on an iMac!

I guess with Comcast you have to fire up VirtualPC just to run Internet Explorer.

Give me an N!

For the procrastinator in all of us

From an email I got this morning:

Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 01:55:22 EDT
…
Hurry, the clock is ticking on your taxes! Pay your federal taxes with your Discover Card

Last I looked, the deadline was yesterday. And while it may technically have still been April 15 here on the west coast when they sent the message, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a post office open at 11pm.

Aside from that, I find the idea of putting taxes on a credit card somewhat disturbing, though if you don’t have the money on hand, I suppose it may be the best you can do.

May contain articficial coloring

From a can of cherry pie filling: