Keith’s Complete Waste of Time

While driving down to Gilroy, taking some out of town visitors to the Gilroy Outlet malls because that’s where they wanted to go, and listening to the “3+ stars rated songs” on the iPod, I remembered a line from some Tolkien novel I read long, long ago. Since I’m terrible with quotes, and am probably misremembering it, I’ll paraphrase: “And so came to an end the age of the Elves and began the age of Man.” It’s near the end of the third book, the last book, after the bad guy has been defeated, and the hero has been crowned king, and the hobbits find their way back to their homes.

Which, assuming that I’m actually remembering the quote somewhat accurately, and given that it’s been years since I read it, an that I’m really remembering the first time I read it, back when I was probably about 14, so that it made more of an impression on me than it would not ( although, again, if I’m remembering it at all correctly ) is still one heck of a line.

And, the reason it came to me, while heading to what was to be a somewhat boring afternoon, is that coming on about the 1,000th page of a long, intricate adventure where stuff has happened and ( worse ) where lots of stuff hasn’t happened in between all of the stuff occasionally happening, was that at the time it surprised me because, up till then, the elves had been pretty kick ass. Sure, there was too much poetry and “Go here and tell random Elf-name-starting-with-the-letter-G this.”, and back and forth, but you wouldn’t want to fuck with the elves because they had power and abilities beyond those of the average folk. Among other things, they were pretty much immortal, so they could take their time before screwing you over completely.

And yet, it was the end. Sure, they didn’t really know it. Not yet; at least for lots of them. The upper level ones knew, and the rest were slowly coming to the realization that the world had moved on past them, and what awaited each of them was a trip on a boat to the lands over the sea to the east—to their deaths, essentially.

So, why do I mention this? Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe this is exactly where the USA is today—on top of the world, don’t fuck with us for a long time, and then… well, its over, save for the cleaning up and packing of the bags. It’s someone else’s turn.

And, if the age of the Elves is past, whose age is it now?

A couple of us were talking the other day at lunch over a predicament another friend found himself in, after an evening of drinking and heading home with a new girl he’d met at the bar.  The next morning was, well, somewhat uncomfortable.

So, to address this, we thought of a product that should exist, and probably does, but we’re too lazy to google and find it so we made it up ourselves.  Yours for $9.99!

I’ve been a Lego addict for, well, forever. The need waxes and wanes—as a child I played with my Lego so much that the school had me meeting with a psychologist who was concerned that I didn’t have any friends. At least I assume that’s why I was seeing her.

Anyway, I’ve bought a lot of Lego sets recently, because since I don’t have children I’m forced to buy my own toys and I’ve got disposable income for stuff like…

the Lego Death Star II.

It took me about 6 months to complete, but most of that time it was set aside because I didn’t have room or time to work on it. All told, I probably could have finished it in about 2 weeks of evenings if I’d worked straight.

So, I’m riding home last night after Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, where I was speaking and talking with developers, and I had a thought:


If, say, a married guy with two kids ( one boy, one girl, both cute as a button ) comes here from Texas and falls in love with another dude, and gets a quickie marriage, is he a bigamist in Texas?


Even though Texas doesn’t recognize the gay marriage?


Obviously, I have too much time on my hands.

As most of you know, I’ve gone into the fake pills business, because I’m not sure this “being a highly paid” engineer thing is panning out. Instead, this being the land of opportunity, I’m going to try to get rich selling sugar pills to gullible folks or folks who are really smart and get the joke. Since most celebrities don’t fall into the latter group, but have advisors who do, I’ve had trouble lining up celebrity-type endorsers.
However, I’ve been sending them out to various folks to try to interest them. Back in March, after I saw Stephen Colbert talk about how he had a huge set of cahones, I knew he could use a dose of my product, so I sent him a set. Totally free, because I care about people on television whom I have never met.
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Then, anxiously waiting for it to get delivered. For a while I was afraid I’d sent it to the wrong address, but eventually someone did pick it up…

Now, go take a look at this clip from the Stephen Colbert show, Tuesday May 13th. In particular, pay attention around the 3:00 minute mark.

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See! He got my product and he’s been using it! I’m so happy!

Back in January, I opened the finest store on the internet selling penis reduction placebos, at www.PenisReductionPills.com. In the months since then, well, sales have been better than zero, but I’m not a millionaire yet.

Since I’m running out of jokes about penis reduction, and still have lots of little bottles in my house, and mostly because I’ve apparently got way too much free time on my hand, I’m please to open an ever newer store, at www.PlacebosAreUs.com. There, I’m happy to say that I have the finest placebos available on the market, addressing some of the concerns of our modern lives.

So, back in January, at MacWorld, a guy out in front of the center handed me a flyer. Anyone who has been to MacWorld knows that folks are constantly trying to hand you brochures and information sheets, and occasionally glossy pictures of strippers. Most of the time I politely refuse, but I took this one because it piqued my interest.

It was a flyer for the website Signed by Woz, where various bits of computer history can be purchased after Steve Wozniak. Suddenly, a flash of inspiration: If I have Steve Wozniak sign the “Signed by Steve Wozniak merchandise” flyer, it itself becomes “Signed by Steve Wozniak merchandise!”

And so, I present to you my very own little bit of Memorabilia signed by Steve Wozniak:

I’ve just learned that sometime back in February someone hacked into this site, and added stuff to some of my posts which directed to sites that tried to load malware onto folks’ computers. I think I’ve cleaned it up, but…

f*cking spammers and hackers. You’re giving the internet a bad name.

Although Apple was founded on April Fool’s day, there isn’t a big emphasis on it within the company. Folks don’t really plan much in the way of jokes, and it’s reasonably safe to believe what you read in emails and conversations much of the time.

That said, I did pull an April Fool’s Day prank many years back, and it caused one idiot at Apple to spend much of the rest of the day trying to get me fired. Back in 1994, I was working in Apple’s information systems division on the application which everyone used to look up phone numbers and email addresses ( and Applelink IDs! ), etc for everyone else. It was the Apple Directory, and it had been around since 1988 as a desk accessory. I was working on a rewrite of the entire thing, mostly on the client ( which I rewrote an an app, 68k and PowerPC native ) and also on the back-end server and system, which used Oracle and a custom ADSP/TCP server process.

At the time it was a pretty useful app—a fast way to find out how to call someone, or their email address, or even a map of their floor with their cube location highlited so you could find their office. Since I was still working on the system, it was in a late beta, and so I had a couple hundred users, while most folks still had the old version. We didn’t restrict who could get it—if you could get the client, it would work, and since it automatically updated itself to the latest version, my beta pool kept growing as folks would show the new ‘cool’ app to their coworkers.

For April Fool’s day, I decided that everyone at Apple should have a nickname. So, since I knew the back end server reloaded all of the data every day at 4:30am from Apple’s Human Resource system, I set an alarm for 5am, then got up and connected into campus using Apple Remote Access, then telnet into the back end server machine, then ran a query to change everyone’s first name in the table the new client was using to end in “-o”. So, “Keith” became “Keith-o”; “John became John-o”, etc. Viola! Everyone has a secret Apple nickname.

I’d also put something into the client and server a few days earlier so that the “-o” part wasn’t searchable. If you searched for John Vink; you’d see John-o Vink; if you searched for John-o Vink you’d seed John-o Vink. In effect, the nicknames didn’t keep anyone from finding anyone.

And, during that morning I got emails from my beta list of folks, mostly complimenting me on the joke. I got one or two bug reports saying that everyone’s name seemed to have been corrupted by the server, and so I explained that the problem would be resolved the following day. Everyone was happy.

Everyone, that is, except a certain lead engineer over in Apple’s Copland group, who decided that because I’d stuck “-o” on the end of everyone’s name in a beta, I should be fired. I know this because he called me just after lunch and screamed at me for a bit, then let me know he’d be calling my boss to get me fired. It kind of pissed me off, but I wasn’t going to let this idiot ( let’s call him “Wayne” ) bug me, so I did what I thought was reasonable: I telnet-ed back into the server, and changed his name in the table back to “Wayne” from “Wayne-o”, then went and warned my boss.

And, “Wayne” did in fact call my boss, who essentially told him to take a hike, so he called my director, who told him to screw off, so he called the vice president of IS&T, who was out of the office, so I think that’s where it ended. “Wayne” got shown the door at Apple a couple months later, not because of this but because Copland failed, but I did a little happy dance that day.

Well, I’ve been in business for a month, and I’m proud to say that sales are strong. Well, maybe not strong, but not anemic. Well, not anemic, but, um, well, there’s room for improvement. Let’s just say that sales can really only go up, because if they went down then we wouldn’t call them sales anymore, we’d call them no sales.

Ok. So, I sold one. That’s what I’m saying. Not bad for the first three weeks, but, again—room for improvement.

Thus, I remember my “how to be a millionaire” class, and say “Hey—I’ve got to get some eyeballs on my website so I can make sales.” And, how to get eyeballs on the site? That’s right. I’m buying ads for it.

Well, trying to. Here’s the funny thing. The places I try to buy ads all don’t want my money. They’re like “Um, I don’t think we can take your ad for a placebo that reduces the size of the penis, because, well, ick.” And stuff like that. Google, worth like a trillion dollars? Won’t take it for the content network; will take it for the “text ads” network, but only when folks search for specific things. Try it out—go to Google, and search for “Penis Reduction“. Odds are I’m the only “sponsored ad”. Don’t click on the link, though, because you’ll cost me 50¢ or something. payday loan on lineno faxing needed payday loanfaxless loan online paydayfast payday loanadvance cash loan payday quickinstant faxless payday loanfast cash advance payday loanfast easy payday loaneasy payday loanone hour payday loancash loan payday tilno fax required payday loan24 hour loan paydayameriloan payday loanonline payday loan applicationadvance cash loan loan paydayfax guaranteed loan no paydaybad credit payday loan,bad credit same day payday loan,bad credit payday personal loanpayday loan in toronto,payday loan toronto,loan payday torontoten dollar payday loanaccount bank loan no payday1000 loan payday,payday loan up to 1000,1000 loan no payday telecheckfax free loan paydayconsolidate debt loan payday,consolidate payday loan debtno credit payday loanday loan payday same,day loan no payday same teletrackadvance america loan payday1 hour payday loanhour loan online paydayinstant loan online paydaycash loan payday tillpayday loan no faxing requiredloan till payday,info loan payday till,loan payday tillonline no fax payday loanloan payday yahoopayday loan cash advance loanadvance america payday loanadvance cash net payday usasonic payday loanapproval instant loan online paydayinternet payday loan law,internet loan payday,business internet loan payday startloan payday software,ca in loan payday softwarefax free payday loanchicago in loan payday store,chicago loan payday storecost loan low paydayadvance cash fax no paydayhour in loan one payday,hour loan one payday,faxless hour loan one paydayconsolidation debt loan paydayfax loan no payday requiredno faxing payday loan Instead, go to my site direct—Penis Reduction Pills.com. Then, buy something.

Oh, and Yahoo? Couldn’t figure out how to place an ad. I’ve only got a Masters of Science, so I guess that’s expected, because as near as I can tell they don’t actually want my money because I can’t see how I buy ads on their network, assuming they even have an ad network. Plus, I’d just be giving money to Microsoft, and I hate that.

So, I thought—Facebook. Yea. That’s filled with college students, and recent graduates, and they’ve mostly got senses of humor and disposable income. Nope. Facebook doesn’t want the ad. “Adult content”, I think, since I’ve had no luck figuring out what particular bit of their rules I’m tripping over. Their site is fine for pictures of skantily clad, underage, drunken college students bragging about their recent “scores”, but an ad for a penis reducing placebo? Not appropriate. sigh ( Oh, and if you’re on Facebook, join my fan club!

My biggest success was when Dave Barry linked to my site from his blog, which got me a metric buttload of hits—about 3,000, all told, which was about 3,000 more than I normally have. Woo! Success! Boo! Nobody thought to buy them. On the plus side, I sent a box out to Dave ( because I’ve always loved his writing and such ), and when it arrived his assistant posted to the blog showing his mailbox, and said that Dave was quite amused by it. So, I amused Dave Barry, however briefly, so I can die happy.

One thing that I’m sure is going to pay off is buying an ad on the Million Zimbabwe Dollar Home Page. I bought 9,000 pixels, which cost me ( I think ) 9 billion Zimbabwe dollars, which I think was around 40¢. I’m sure that it is going to pay off big. Go there and take a look at the ad!

Got an idea for what else I should do? Right now, my plan to make huge piles of cash with this is looking kind of broken. Given that it appears I’m willing to throw cash down this hole until it’s full, what next?