So there’s a site online where you can generate your own church signs. I just found out about it today through a friend who received an email with a bogus “church sign” message they thought was amusing. Anyone who knows me well is aware of my loathing of all things forwarded. If you don’t actually want to tell me anything, simply don’t email. Thanks.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the church sign image maker is actually pretty funny. Here’s one I got from BuckBuck (slightly modified), admonishing me to work rather than read fake church signs:

Or, in classic Simpson’s style:

Good times.

So as sort of a perk for working with Vizad lately, I got to go with them up to Culinary Crafts in Orem. They typically just do corporate or wedding catering, so you can’t just swing by for lunch as a general rule. I tell you what. I was blown away. Amazing baked asparagus, a sensational salad, Thai wraps, fresh sourdough bread, and a slightly spicy pasta with a creamy marinara topped with fresh pine nuts made for the best lunch I’ve had in… well, for lunches, maybe best ever.

It made me seriously consider some potential life changes. Maybe I’m working at the wrong place. I mean, Sewell barbeques are fun, but just aren’t on the same page with what Culinary can do. It also made me wonder how odd it would be to do a renewal of vows just three years after your wedding just for catering purposes. Maybe that’s extreme, but I really do have to give mad props to Culinary Crafts and officially recommend them for any Utah catering needs you may have.

So I noticed this new series of commercials for Alltel. They make the ‘Alltel guy’ a nice, respectable gentleman while the Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cingular, etc. guys are all overweight and or uber-nerdy. What gave marketing America the right to start going all political-style mud slinging with their TV ads?

Rather than simple self promotion, it seems like it’s becoming more commonplace to just come out and say not only “we’re better” but “they’re inferior.” Granted, it’s kind of implied in saying you’re better than someone or something by showing you’re own superiority, but for that same reason it seems like you simply don’t need to see it. It feels really demeaning to me as a viewer and almost like the marketing guys at Alltel just ran out of ideas. What do you do when you run out of ideas? Copy Mac’s marketing approach.

Post Script - The TV’s on right now and I just saw a commercial for Mazda - same deal. C’mon people.

OK, I don’t normally support simple posting of YouTube videos as a blog post, but I thought this was funny stuff. These guys over at the BBC have mastered the art of spoofing that style of videos that you had to watch through public education. I simply can’t describe how on point it was. It also appealed to my deep-rooted love of British humor (what can I say? I grew up on Monty Python and was under the impression that anything said with a British accent was funny - don’t deny it, you thought it too…). Anyway, enjoy learning about water, chemical symbol H-Twenty.

So, there’s a “leaked” version of the 7th Harry Potter book floating around on the Internet. I heard about it through a friend who got me a copy. I read the first page and the only leaky thing about it is that the author probably still wears diapers. Read a few paragraphs and you’ll see it’s a blatant fake, if you’re familiar with any of the other HP books. People like messing with people. I get that. Here’s what I don’t understand…

The fake manuscript is 659 pages long of original false content. Who in their right mind spends that kind of time on something that they’ll never be able to take credit for? Original content is like pure gold online. This guy (or gal) should really have just thrown up a page on fishing in the Ozarks and at least monetized it a little. Maybe I’m missing something here, but what a waste of time!

Download the (false) Deathly Hallows Transcript

So my boss at Sewell is really into Boba drinks, the slushy flavored drinks with marble-sized tapioca balls in the bottom. He’s been looking for a place to buy them in Utah county lately but had not had much luck… until yesterday. Our FedEx rep happened to know of a little place called Munchies down in Provo.

They not only have the boba drink, but have a variety of meals and a full-fledged bakery inside. The breads smelled (and were) delicious, the meals were really good, and the whole thing was really affordable. Oh, plus they have Hi-Chew, which is my new favorite candy. It’s like Starburst, but without the “stuck in my teeth and painful” feeling. Munchies takes a place with my new favorite hole-in-the-walls in Provo.

So, now that I’ve thoroughly talked up the Samsung Blackjack, I have to say that I found my first real pet peeve of the device (that’s not to say that it was infallible before, just that there wasn’t anything that really bugged me). On the top left of the device, there is a place where you attach the charge/sync USB cable. The plug is covered by a rubber tab that pops in and out to protect the port from dust and whatnot.

This is a nice little novelty and wasn’t a major hassle by any means. That is, until recently. I’ve now had the phone long enough for it to not be under warranty (of course), but not long enough to merit looking for a new phone (although I do have phone schizophrenia, apparently). The problem? All night, while the phone is charging, the little rubber thing is unplugged (so the charger can be in). After time, the little rubber cord that ties the plug to the phone starts to bend in such a way that it no longer keeps the plug in place, but pushes it out of the hole. This is highly irritating and not a consequence of any phone hardware abuse, either. It’s just poor engineering. I hope one of my 2 readers is a bigwig at Samsung.

This is actually originally from a comment that I wrote on MetaFilter in response to some people talking about the “new” Google personalized homepage. It’s logo says “iGoogle” which is very reminiscent of a popular portable music player released by Apple. Someone suggested that maybe Google and Apple were merging. To which, I replied:

I could only imagine the ads that came out of a Google/Apple merger.

‘Hi, I’m the Google Algorithm”
“And I’m the Yahoo! Algorithm”

“Hey, what you got there, Yahoo?”
“Oh, this? It’s a new server. Yeah, finally had to upgrade.”
“Really? Congratulations.”
“Yeah, we hit our 10,000th user.”
“Wow, for the day?”
“No, just overall.”
“Oh. Well, good luck with that.”
“Thanks.”

I feel cheap reposting material, but I thought it was pretty good.

The world of online search algorithms is a dynamic beast, to say the least. That’s why it’s nice that there are tools out there like WebCEO to keep track of how your sites are performing in the search engines. Basically, such a program will go out as if it were a web surfer and virtually type in keywords in the searches on your behalf. They then tell you how far down the list you are on those keywords.

This is useful, not just to see if you can expect some increased traffic, but to see what actions have what affect on your site. For example, my pagerank just went from 0 to 4 on my Brian Regan fan site (rare, but it happens apparently). I saw that it started ranking better on the term “Brian Regan” on MSN as well. Does MSN care about Google’s ranking system? Maybe.

I also submitted the site to dmoz, an open community directory. But I don’t think it could have posted in time to have such a quick effect. This leads me to conclude (not a conclusive conclusion, methinks) that MSN at least lightly weighs Google’s PageRank system. Not surprising that they’d try and take something back from a company that’s taken so much from them.

So I was recently doing an interview for an information site I’m working on for the Cook County Jail and it really opened my eyes to a lot of the horrible things that go on in nasty jails. I have to specify the ‘nasty’ part because there are some that really aren’t all that bad, as evidenced by what I’ve learned about the Utah County Jail.

What? TheGoont thought jail was fun before? No, no, silly. Of course I’ve seen TV and movies where jail or prison is portrayed as this incredulously horrible place with the gangs and the violence and other detestable things that go on behind bars. However, movies and TV also teach me that Nazis stole the ark of the covenant and Harrison Ford got it back. There’s a level of disbelief or separation as a result.

Listening to an ex-inmate give his opinion of his time he spent in jail in Chicago was a completely different approach. I was talking to a real person who was really there and really hated it. He was offered protection by a black gang leader in exchange for some of his goods from the commissary and/or meals. He brought to light the depressing nature of being made to line up like children, not speak out, and wait in line in your underwear to trade out the uniform you’ve been wearing for a week straight. It really makes you appreciate some of the things it’s easy to take for granted.