Greg Pilling

My friend Dave sent this to me as a suggestion, so I thought I would do the math on the idea. Here is what I found:

So while I think the idea would be successful at border defense, I also think it would be too expensive. However, if the military-industrial complex needs a highly paid advisor to consult on this project I am available for a nominal fee – and a tank for personal use.

Just call – I’ll answer for a juicy govment contract..

Over at Compete.com they have a nice little statistical fact – 40% of the people logged in and shopping at GGW are female. Check it out

If you have ever watched a GGW episode, you can see that the girls are not very shy about getting undressed. With some of them they strip down as soon as the camera person identifies himself as being with Girls Gone Wild. I mean, how could you end up in a large tour bus with a 10ft tall GGW logo on the side of it and NOT know what was going to happen?

Compete’s blog has a lot more statistical facts about sites – they even have mine listed in the top 50 sites of the internet.

So it’s not, but I made you look!

I really LOVED this!

I just ran across this handy website DrinkMath. It tells you how many calories and vitamins you can find in your typical mixed drink. So if you are concerned about your health, this becomes an indispensable tool.

For example, on my way into the office today I stopped for my traditional morning pick-me-up. I breezed into the CircleK and got my 64OZ on, filling that beauty with your basic morning mix:

I have disabled google buzz. The privacy issues of publishing my email list among other things bothered me. The buzz went through contacts from work, from selling on ebay, and went ahead and followed/recommended them. Now any of those could see any one of my other contacts and make a connection with them. The last thing in my life that I need is some stranger to buzz my lovely wife and ask her “age, sex, location?” –

Step One!

There is a little link at the bottom of your screen in Gmail. Clicking this will turn your Buzz off. WARNING! if you do this ONLY, any Buzz contacts, posts or website linkings will still be visible to anyone on your lists. Why is this here in Step One you ask? It is because you might have seen this, clicked it and thought you were done. You aren’t.

the link at the bottom of the screen

Step Two!

(or one depending on how you look at it!)

Go to http://www.google.com/profiles and delete everything you can find. Kill it all. Delete your followers, delete your followed, block everything, remove personal data, and remove any links associated with your account. Delete Delete Delete

Step Three!

Now you can turn off Google Buzz in the picture above.

Spread the word to anyone with a google based email address (seach your address book for “@gmail.com”)

Email them this link: http://gregpilling.com/2010/02/disable-google-buzz/

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.”

NY Times

I thought we were supposed to kill all the lawyers first? And how would he define this genocide of journalists? Surely the crap that spews out of my keyboard wouldn’t count, so I am safe right?

Rupert Murdoch is the face of change these days, and what an ugly face he has (just a personal opinion).  They want to start charging for news content, since the current newspaper business model is so flawed and will never make any money and has no future. I don’t think it will work however. I personally read the NYTimes.com site every couple of days because it has interesting content, but I think I would just move on to a different site if they wanted to charge me money. There are many alternatives after all – as Mr. Mutter noted in the quote above – who write interesting stuff on their own blogs and have the same qualifications as the people at NYTimes.

One noteable comment that I have heard is that all these blogs lack the resources to report global news effectively. There is no way a blogger in a spare bedroom in New Jersey can report on the scene from Baghdad for example. This is a valid critique, but ignores the secondary effect of that financial constraint.  The secondary effect is that a US blogger that wants to have some sort of report on the local goings on in Iraq will need to rely on the local bloggers in Iraq – voila! – instant foreign bureau. Also, since there is a local person reporting then the views will have a local flavor, not the current US bias that we get today.

As a Canadian living in the US, it was a culture shock to realize once I moved here how insular the US is. The news reporting seems to ignore the world at large (except for the current war zone) and pays little attention to the other 95% of the global population. This is contrasted with the generous foreign aid that the US provides to the world. A strange contrast. There is a couple of simple fixes of course – just watch BBC America and read news from foreign countries online. Also, look at a map once in a while and if there is a country there that you don’t know anything about, then do a Bing on it and find out something. A little unstructured self paced geography class.

But back to killing all the journalists – do it right after the lawyers and politicians. They deserve it more.

I was quite lucky – I was able to get into the first round of financing for only $100,000 !!! Thanks kids for letting me use your college fund – just don’t tell Mom.

Jeff was unable to raise the cash! Score one for me!

This is an actual response after a interview with a company about their website:

Thanks for coming in today.  I know you asked me to send you more details about what needs to be done.  There is no way I can give you a list of each and every thing that needs to be done.  So please base your quote on what you already know.

Thanks,

Name Deleted

So after not stating what need to be done, the customer now wants us to figure out what he wants.  If you are this type of customer please read this nice article on web design then call me.

Actually if you are like this guy and have no idea what you want, please DON’T call.

… is a woman. Amber is the owner of Handichik.com and here is a list of the things she has done for me in the last few months  -

• Repaired some minor roof leaks and whitecoated (2 coats) my 6000 square foot roof
• Re-hung an exterior door wrecked by the last tenant of a small apartment
• Ran network cable 100′ in my warehouse so the shipping computer was online
• Fixed a leaky toilet in a tenants house
• Installed some metal fence that she recycled from a house being demolished
• Installed some underground irrigation so my plants would live through the summer and Tucson Water wouldn’t bankrupt me

It is not that I couldn’t have done these things myself – I am a fairly handy person too – but with the current business cycle I am quite buried in work at my business and I don’t have the time. Besides that, Amber always seems to have a knack for finding bargains on new stuff, or having that connection to the great used stuff.  When she says she will take care of something I have found that I can forget about it – the job will be done.

So in my opinion, the best handyman in Tucson is a woman. I highly recommend her – but maybe I shouldn’t. If too many people know about her, then she will end up on one of those TV shows and land a contract endorsing a big box home improvement store like Lowes. Then I will never get anything done.

Look out Ty Pennington – she is coming!