Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Incoming Clue Missile!

Today I was privileged to hear a young woman declare loudly to a friend that she couldn't sleep on trains.

This announcement was delivered somewhere west of Jamaica (not the good one) after an unbroken stream of loud conversation begun twenty minutes earlier before we set off from Brooklyn.

It was followed by a continuous stream of loud sonic infotransfer until she and her friend disembarked in Farmingdale, one stop before Wyandanch (Pearl of the East).

I should like to offer the opinion that the first step to sleeping on a train is probably to stop bloody talking for a few seconds.

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

I Have A Target (dot com) Painted On Me

I bought some parts for a model helicopter just after Christmas.

Mrs Stevie had bought one of those tiny electric helicopters for me as a present, but she got bait-and-switched with a cheap knock-off that would not fly at all and was, as a result, very sad.

So I pulled it apart and replaced the works with some from a more reliable brand and she was thrilled that the little thing flew. Almost as thrilled as me, but I digress.

Since that purchase, I have been plagued in my web-browsing by peripheral ads featuring helicopters to the point I'm sick to the back bleeding teeth with sub-miniature rotary wing aircraft of any sort. Well done that vendor for "enabling" the "web community" to "enhance" my web "experience". Left alone I would have probably graduated to larger, more expensive models over time, as I got caught up in the fad. Spurred by my enhanced web experience I shall probably never buy another electric helicopter as long as I live since I now associate them with boring, uninspiring repetition.

However, it has given me an idea.

I plan on purchasing a number of items of feminine undergarmenture. No, I haven't decided to explore my feminine side1. Within hours my web-browsing experience will be enhanced by a variety of scantily clad models oozing from the sides and top of my browser in a desperate bid to enhance me into another buying spree.

If I'm going to be targeted, I'm damn-well going to be targeted by something worth looking at.

  1. at least, not when there are witnesses around - that sort of thing should be done in private with only a webcam for company

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Google Knows Where I Live

So, apparently Google has been collecting data on me since nitrogen formed in the atmosphere and plans to use it to properly tailor my web experience.

I'm not sanguine about this for two reasons:

a) I have been refusing Google Chrome since the nagware for it debuted and they haven't yet figured out that my tailored web experience is a Chrome-free one

2) Job one upon loading Google's splash page is to turn off the ridiculously nasty one-character-at-a-time attempt to jump the gun and pre-guess what I'm trying to search for while shielding my eyes from the psychedelic cascade of gibberish happening on my computer screen. If Google were the data interpretation geniuses they believe themselves to be they would have figured out long ago that this is not so much "enhancing" my web experience as "annoying the living piss out of me" and they would have stopped delivering the search page with the settings set to "stupid".

þ) Amazon's attempts to enhance my purchasing experience by tailoring it according to what they know about me is laughably off-the-mark, leading me to believe that the clever young things in charge of the web are still under the daft impression that data is information. Accordingly, I have been widening my browsing habits in order to add as much entropy to the process as I can.

Each evening I spread my search terms to land me on monster trucks, clerical garb, pony play accessories, roller derby games in Brooklyn, flower arranging supplies, hammers, male enhancement supplements, Google (for a dash of recursion), egg and spoon racing, cross dresser footwear retailers, plywood, solar power, global warming denial sites, extruded aluminum wholesalers, air bottle recharging specialists, telescope and binocular suppliers and erotic piercing forums. It's exhausting. I imagine the Google database on me must resemble this picture.

Sadly this has backfired somewhat in that when I'm signed on I can only search sites in Bellarus dedicated to nun-heavy industrial dungeon pron.

Or that is what I'm telling Mrs Stevie.