Saalon Muyo

If you love your country, you won’t catch Syphilis.

Also, buy War Bonds.

I’m out for a week.  Heading down to Florida to hit Disney World and go on the Disney Cruise.  It is, I assure you, a much needed vacation.

I’m oscar mike in 60 mikes.  See you on the other side.

10. Kingdom of Heaven, by Ridley Scott

9. Freakangels Vol. 1 ends, by Warren Ellis & Paul Duffield

8. My New Twitter Obsession, via the iPhone

7. U.S. Women’s Beach Volleyball Gold, courtesy Misty May-Treanor & Kerri Walsh

6. Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug

5. Dinosaur Comics, by Ryan North

4. Google Docs

3. At Mount Zoomer, by Wolf Parade

2. “Three Of Us”, cover by We Were Pirates, Lyrics by Starlee Kine, Music by Joe McGinty and Julia Greenberg

1. “Tropic Thunder” Viral Video - by Ben Stiller, Robert Downy Jr., Jack Black and Carl

Ok, so maybe the banner image is about four times too large in technical, web design terms, but I haven’t laughed at one as much as this in a really long time.

I cannot hope to match this statement, not even with all my words from earlier today.

So on Saturday I get to my computer and there’s an iChat window up from someone named ColdTrout.  It says one thing: “hi”.  Thinking it’s one of my friends who’s just changed their screen name, I respond with a “hi” of my own.  And I get this in response:  “Who are you?”

Ok, so this is some kind of stupid game.  “You said hi to me,” I reply.  “No,” ColdTrout says, “you said hi to me.”  Screw this crap.  I close the window and go about my day.

Later in the day, another person with Trout in his name hits me with a “hi” and I ignore it.  I probably know the person, I think, and they’re being stupid and immature and if I wait they’ll just come clean.  Or it’s someone I don’t know, and I’ll ignore them and they’ll go to find someone else to play with.

Sunday night rolls in and SeveredTrout sends me a message.  This one is a little creepier.  “are you going to die.”  Hmm, ok, so the game is escalating.  This time I reply.  “Everyone does, eventually.”  Because the proper response to stupid internet mind games is to reply with banal philosophy. Clearly.

By this point I’ve googled every *Trout name I’ve heard from to no avail.  I’d search for “trout,” but we all know that would get me nowhere.  So I’m really happy when SeveredTrout himself gives me the clue I need.  “why do these trout bots keep finding me?”

A Little LISP for our bot

Trout bots!  Got you!

As soon as I realize I’m talking to a bot I start looking at the conversation differently.  I find people making vague references to these bots that pop up on IM and how they used to be Salmon bots but as of August 3rd these TroutBot things have been rearing their head.  And the TroutBots might be more malicious, fishing for information and occasionally dropping the personal information that led them to contact you into the conversation to freak you out.

I think back and decide the responses I’ve gotten could have been bot-generated, except that they are occasionally a little too in-response to things I’ve said.  And either way, this entire phenominon is starting to weird me out a little bit.  I flash myself into some kind of cyberpunk world and wonder if I’m the target of a copy without an original.   Then I actually, you know, read the Wikipedia entry on them and it all makes sense.

The Laughing Man strikes!

The TroutBot is not responding at all. Its purpose is to randomly connect two screen names and route their messages between each other.  So each person thinks they’re talking to *Trout, but truly are talking to each other.  The big difference with the *Trout is that, unlike the *Salmon, *Trout drops in random questions and phrases to further confuse the issue.  I’ve also heard that it occasionally changes words in actual responses.  Interesting.

It’s possible the purpose of the *Trouts is to use a now familiar hack to get people to reveal personal information about themselves.  I’m not sure.  It was fun to get a genuine sense of online creepout, which doesn’t happen very often anymore.  If you get hit with one, try playing along for a bit.  It’s fun.  But be careful with what you say, since this is a hack and could have malicious intent.

Or maybe there’s a ghost in the wired.

There’s some seriously annoying bug in Apple’s iPhone Crash Reporter Tool.  It crashes.  Seriously.  Every time I plug my iPhone in  Isn’t don’t anything bad, thankfully, but seriously.

I’d be angry if the error wasn’t the best error ever:

mutating method sent to immutable object

Have I gotten that much bigger since the last time I ate Cheerios, or have they gotten a lot smaller?

1. Monday
2. Tuesday
3. Wednesday
4. Thursday
5. Friday
6. Sunday

So you have a software company.  Your customers are other software developers.  You’re selling them beefed up controls, and you want them to buy from you and only you.

Clearly, your best option is to hire a marketer who can’t tell when he’s lapsing into self-parody.   Someone who will find the stereotypes in every department and forcibly shove them down our throats.  Nothing sells like a cliche.

I wish that was a joke.

“Capital letters, unfortunately, will push back delivery two weeks.”

“Too bad the marketing department hired that bimbo instead of me.  And that no one at our company has great ideas.  Do we have a latte machine here?”

“I took one semester of Software Engineering in college, but the girls were hotter in the business school.  Would you like to see some UML diagrams I made?”

“Coo-coo-ca-choo.”

…

Seriously?  You drive strategic direction through technology initiatives?! At least we know who hired that asshat of an architect.

Please, fire me as soon as possible.

Good work Mr. Marketer!  Sign me up for your excellent product! With your obviously keen understanding of software development learned through hours of research reading those three User Friendly strips your friends sent you I feel absolutely confident that your product won’t suck!