Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com (home of the fascinating How Much is Inside? series) noticed the same model showing up in a lot of his spam (often wearing the same dress). He collected the advertisements, and linked them together in what he calls An Unsolicited Commercial Love Story.
Since he first wrote it up, other people have spotted the same model on banner ads, MSN articles and even a kiosk at UCLA. Where will “Alicia” show up next?
Aren’t stock photos fun?
(Via SpamBlogging)
Across the street from the Irvine Civic Center:
This brings back memories of days in UCI’s student housing. There were rabbits everywhere. The complex was right next to a big empty field, and rabbits would hop through all the time. “Oh, look, a rabbit!” “Yeah, yeah, same old, same old.”
But this is the first time I’ve seen a road sign. Of course, given that even the people in Irvine can’t stick to crosswalks, I expect there will still be problems with jaywalking (jayhopping?) rabbits!
After four drive-bys, I finally managed to get a picture of the Gondor street sign. It was far enough away that it’s barely readable (this is the native resolution on a 5 megapixel image — it’s not shrunk, it’s just cropped). Eventually I ought to turn onto a side street, park the car, and walk to a nice vantage point instead of just holding the camera with one hand while zooming by and hoping I get an image.
I’ve updated Living in Middle Earth.
For quite a while now, the always-excellent This Is True newsletter has been advertising writer Randy Cassingham’s latest (?) project: JumboJoke, a weblog-style daily joke post. I finally took a look at it, and thought I’d share the following pair of lists based on our political parties’ often contradictory platforms and rhetoric:
Now this is interesting: the Amus worm will verbally taunt the user using Windows XP’s speech-generating features. F-Secure has posted a .wav, and McAfee’s writeup has an MP3.
Oddly, Symantec’s entry says nothing about the speech. Maybe they don’t have speakers on their test boxes.
Oh, this is good!
You may have heard a few days ago that the latest MyDoom variant includes a request for work in the antivirus industry.
Well, the comic strip User Friendly has come up with the perfect solution!
On the way to work this morning, Katie noticed one of those ubiquitous catering trucks and remarked, “With a name like ‘Superior Coffee,’ you know it probably isn’t.” It’s a useful guideline: if a company has to tell you something is gourmet, for instance, that means it can’t count on its reputation alone.
That reminded me of a story David Weber told at a convention about the first Honor Harrington book. They were almost ready to go to press when he got a call from his editor.
“I’ve been thinking. Your viewpoint characters are in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The villains are the Republic of Haven. Isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t the monarchy be the bad guys?”
They went back and forth a bit, until one of them said, “What if it’s the People’s Republic of Haven?”
They agreed that was a good solution, and then proceeded to look through the proofs for a place where they could insert the word without moving the page breaks around. As I recall, he said they only found one spot, and possibly the map, but he used the full name in the rest of the series.
