K-Squared Ramblings

Comic-Con Sellout

I’m floored.

Absolutely floored that 4-day passes for Comic-Con International 2010 have sold out.

I mean, it’s the first week of November, and the convention isn’t until next July!

Tickets with access to Wednesday’s Preview Night sold out a few weeks ago, but at the time, CCI didn’t provide any information about how many regular 4-day passes were left. This Monday, they posted a progress gauge at 70%. The last time I looked yesterday, it was up to 89%.

Today? Sold out completely.

I can’t help but think it would have taken longer if they hadn’t provided a gauge to let people know just how scarce a resource memberships were going to be. There’s nothing like the fear of a shortage to get people to run out and buy up what’s available (and create a shortage). But I also can’t complain, because without that feedback, we might have kept putting off plunking down the $200 for the two of us, and we might have missed our chance.

Single-day tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, so it’s still possible to go if you haven’t already bought your tickets. You can of course buy more than one, it just means standing in line each morning to pick up the next badge. (Even the more relaxed WonderCon, run by the same organization, doesn’t let you pick up a Sunday badge on Saturday, as we discovered last year.)

If you’re planning on going to San Diego next year, keep an eye on the website. Four-day passes went insanely quickly, and I would expect the one-day passes to do the same.

(Cross-posted at Speed Force)

Thoughts on #AmazonFail (or is that #SorryAmazon?)

At this point, the only (useful) official word from Amazon as to why thousands of books with LGBT themes disappeared from search results over the weekend is the “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” statement sent to Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other sources, also mentioning a number of other categories impacted. This article also has the unconfirmed word from former Amazon employee Mike Daisey that it was a matter of user error where someone mixed up some tags while working on the site, and the change just propagated globally.

Now, some thoughts:

1. If this was intentional, on anyone’s part, it was both wrong (as discrimination) and stupid (as bad PR and as throwing away potential sales). If it was unintentional, it was still stupid.

2. Amazon really dropped the ball on PR. They should have responded much sooner (yes, it was a holiday weekend), and with something more detailed than “It was a glitch.” Something like, “We’re sorry, it was an unintentional error and we’re trying to fix it” would have gone a long way toward preventing the outrage from spiraling out of control. And we still don’t have anything more detailed than “ham-fisted cataloging error,” or (as has been pointed out) an apology to the authors and communities affected.

2a. And seriously, you’re an internet pioneer: use the Internet. You have email, you have official Twitter accounts, you have a space to put messages on your home page. Use them.

3. Twitter demonstrates that the internet is now fast enough and ubiquitous enough that people can develop a mob mentality without actually being in close proximity to one another. This includes not just people whipping each other into a frenzy, but people taking more permanent actions (deleting accounts) based on incomplete information.

4. No matter how many times something has been debunked (i.e. the “hacker” who claimed to have hacked the site), someone will see it who hasn’t seen the response and repost it as true. (You’d think I would have learned this from comics discussion forums by now.)

5. Canned responses from customer service are not authoritative statements of company policy. Half the time they’re not even answering the question you asked.

6. There are really two issues: (A) Adults-only books are being hidden from search results. (B) Books were being misclassified as adults-only.

7. Combining #5 and #6, when a CSR monkey answers A, that’s not an official statement of policy on B.

8. Removing adults-only books from sales rankings is a dumb way to hide them from search results. Add a flag and let the user choose whether or not to include them like Google, Flickr, etc.

I Read it for the Articles!

There’s something odd about this offer for magazine subscriptions.

They just don’t seem like a good fit for a student and teacher discount. Newsweek maybe, but…Maxim? Cosmo? Playboy?

The Singing Fly

The latest newsletter for the Center Theatre Group includes a mention of The Fly: The Opera.  Yes, The Fly, based on the sci-fi film about a scientist who gets combined with a housefly in a teleportation accident.  And its remake. As an opera.

Plácido Domingo conducts the U.S. premiere of the LA Opera-commissioned opera written by Oscar®-winning composer Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings)based on the original 1957 George Langelaan short story as well as David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, with a libretto by the Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly).

I used to figure, if someone can turn The Phantom of the Opera, Little Shop of Horrors, and Jekyll and Hyde into a musical, nothing should surprise me.  But… seriously…  The Fly? And not just a musical, but an opera? And the creative team: Placido Domingo and David Henry Hwang working with David Cronenberg?

Free Gas with your Spam List!

Wow… you know gas is expensive when the spammers start hawking gas cards.

Our support contact address received a message touting “Finest List of Nurses Including Email Addresses – Free $50 Gas Card” I had to wonder what the heck it was, so I took a look at the message. They were trying to sell “sales leads” — i.e. names and contact information — of nurses, and were offering to throw in the gas card if you spent enough on “leads” to do your own spamming.

There’s a convention for everything

Here’s a weird one. it turns out that ROFLCon, dedicated to all those Internet fads, was held at MIT this past weekend. Found via the Mozilla blog: Firefox Spotted at ROFLCon (look there for a picture of a life-size Firefox mascot with Tronguy).

Skiffy Links

The Beat has a couple of follow-up posts on the San Diego Comic-Con hotel issue: first, a wrap-up of the experience, then a post that puts San Diego into perspective, what makes it different from cities like New York or Los Angeles, and why just moving to Las Vegas won’t solve everything.

GTD In Space: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Spaceship Captains ranging from James T. Kirk to Malcolm Reynolds. (via ***Dave)

And, for the WTF-worthy, there’s Computer Love Day. As Mandriva puts it in their mailing:

Valentine’s Day is nearly here… February 14th, 2008. But think about it, who do you hang out with, who shares the good times and the bad ones, who drives you crazy but keeps your life together?………..Your computer, and it’s time to say it out loud: I love my computer!

Jumping the Gun

Today’s “Super Tuesday,” on which a whole bunch of states hold their primary elections. We still have have Democrats running against other Democrats and Republicans running against other Republicans, hoping to get their parties’ nominations for this fall’s Presidential election.

So it was weird last night to see an ad for Republican Mitt Romney contrasting himself against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Unless he’s changed party affiliation, he isn’t running against her. We don’t know if he ever will run against her. The Republican party hasn’t opted into California’s open primary system, so only registered Republicans are eligible to vote for Romney today, and they’re not likely to have considered voting for Clinton in the first place.

So who the heck was the ad aimed at?

Keep in mind that I don’t watch much TV, so this sort of thing might have been going on for a while, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

Double-Decker Truck

Spotted this several months ago, and recently found it in my photo archive.

New Age Drinks?

Okay, maybe I’ve missed a memo or something, but can someone tell me: what exactly is a new age drink? Nothing in the aisle stood out as being particularly new-agey.

Not a problem

Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be anything odd about this sign. But look at the placement.

Why do they need a No Parking sign in the middle of the lawn? It’s a new sign, too—they just redid the entire lawn last year.

Seriously, I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with people parking on the lawn in front of an office building in Irvine.

Come to think of it, though, this is only 50 feet or so from the crosswalk warning device.

Pro-whaaat?

A piece of spam came across the abuse desk the other day hawking something called “Viagra Professional.” Just as some songs aren’t suited for elevator music, some products aren’t suited for Microsoft-style naming schemes.

Think about it: Outside the pharmaceutical industry, what *ahem* profession would have a use for Viagra?

What people look for

It’s always interesting to see what people are searching for when they find this site. It’s even more interesting to look at the bottom of the list, the long tail full of one-off searches, some of which… can be really strange.

• “what to do with tumbleweeds” — Hmm. Mash ’em, boil ’em, put ’em in a stew. Probably hit one of these.
• “starbucks receipt fraud sandiego” — Now I’m curious. Unfortunately the search results seem to be mostly keyword farms (Only in San Diego)
• “slave girls photos” and variations — I was lazy enough to use Google to pull up the two cosplay photos that tripped this one, and discovered a site called Leia’s Metal Bikini. Proving once again that there’s an interest group for everything on the Internet.
• “can i get some free verse poems” — I’m not sure whether they wanted to get some poems, or read poems about people who want to get some.
• “is raven real?” — No, and she wasn’t two years ago either.
• “what is avocados number” — The number of particles in a guaca-mole, of course.
• “mopee stories” — Thankfully, these have been removed from continuity.
• “hyena pitchers” and “pitchers of the hyena” — These are a mash-up of two hits from the last time I posted on this subject. Oddly, the only other instance of the word “hyena” on this domain isn’t there anymore.
• “free verse poems about me” – Wow… I guess that article on self-esteem programs raising a generation of narcissists was right!
• “hentai raven starfire teen titans” — You people scare me.
• “where can i find free video for bare feet” — Um…. okaaayy.
• “toe orgasm” — … I really don’t want to know.
• “diy laptop battery” — Because nothing saves money like putting a homemade acid bath inside your computer.
• “herakles pumpkin” — This could only pull up an archive page with unrelated posts.
• “hot dogs logos” — They probably weren’t looking for the flying hot dogs Flash logo.
• “do not play these songs at a wedding” — good idea.
• “evil comics csa com” — well, there’s a Crime Syndicate of Amerika, but I didn’t realize they put out evil comics.

Sushi…Coffee?

I was catching up on my brother’s Flickr posts and found this photo:

©Brion Vibber, used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Not a combination I’m used to seeing…

He’s got a handful of other photos tagged wtf.

Enhance your… mortgage?

I suppose it was only a matter of time before these two genres of spam collided. Today I received a spam advertising body-part enlargement products, with a link to a site called bmsMUNGEDcommercialmortgage.info (without the MUNGED).

Apparently, getting a new mortgage is supposed to increase my ability to handle huge tracts of land.