Quick Hitts

Marketing failures can teach you as much, if not more, as marketing successes.
I just received an e-mail from a company I’ve done business with.  The headline was “Free Ground Shipping from <Company Name>.  I opened it and saw a very attractive ad, which I clicked.
Instead of  taking me to http://companyname.com/ it loaded http://marketing.companyname.com/ and requested [...]

Pfizer is abandoning the New London, CT site where their greed led to abolishing property rights for every single American.
The city of New London sold 24 acres of land to Pfizer for ten bucks, but Pfizer didn’t want to have to look at the older houses that dotted the waterfront.  They claimed they wanted the [...]

Once again Big Brother is mucking around in the market, and once again the consequences are horrible.  Trade in your old gas guzzler for a new car and your Uncle will suck money out of your fellow tax payers’ pockets and stuff it in yours.
For cars a 4 MPG increase gets you the $3500 bonus, [...]

The Eighteen Million Dollar Web Site.
This morning someone had one of those talking heads infotainment morning “news” shows on in another room, and I was half listening to a story about the stimulus bill.  Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on roadside signs telling us that millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on sign [...]

Several people sent me this article by Michael Moore.  Once again he proves that he’s not just a genus, he’s a Super Genius, on a par with Wile E. Coyote.
He starts out expressing nearly orgasmic joy at the failure of GM.  He pretends he’s not really all that happy, but we can practically hear his [...]

I just got an e-mail from SiteUpTime which listed a monthly summary of all the times my site has been down in the last month.  The list was blank.  When StartLogic was my host I used to get at least one notice, and often two or three, every day.
A recent comment to this post reminded [...]

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re deeply in debt (I know that’s a big stretch for most of you).  You’ trying to deal with a bill for $1,000 and you’ve got no money to pay it.
Your son has just thrown a quarter in a fountain.  A quarter!  Like you can afford that.
You berate him, condemn [...]

No comentary neccssary. This is perfect as is.

Source

My company just laid off about 20% of their workforce, and I was one of the causalities. Now I get to go job hunting in an economy that’s sinking faster than Palin’s image as a folksy soccer mom. Oh joy.
This is the reality of working in IT. For every IT worker [...]

I want to put out a newsletter, (The Smartenizer) so I’m looking at various services and sending some of them questions.  This is one of the few times I’ve clicked on the ads that appear next to Gmail messages.
One was for RDH Marketing.  The link showed me a generic 404 page.  (Not even a custom [...]

As promised there is now a Quick Hitts podcast that provides an extensive review of Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” It’s the Moore Nonsense” episode (#56) and you can find it here.

Big Brother and Best Buy Compete in a “Who Can Be Stupider Contest”
We don’t usually get to see the internal policy manuals for companies or government agencies, so we have to guess at their contents based on the actions of their employees. Based on this article, the policy manual for Best Buy evidently states:

When [...]