Ben's 40 acres on the web. (Where's my mule?)

So, looking at my buddy list, most people know about the I'M initiative, which is a marketing / charity campaign microsoft has been doing for the last 7 months that donates money to any of 9 organizations based on a string people put in their friendly name on messenger (which shows up as a little colorful I'M icon).  The funny thing is that, looking at the most recent stats, unless things pick up, that I'M icon will end up having been pointless.

 

As of fairly recently, the page was updated to say that $143,500 dollars have been raised so far.  It sounds like a lotish until you look at the FAQ:

    Each of the nine organizations is guaranteed a minimum of $100,000 during the first year of the program.

I think that was a pretty generous stipulation by Microsoft, but the irony of it is that (as I understand it) the final result will be Microsoft donating exactly $100,000 to each organization after the first year, because none of the 9 programs will have received enough to go over the minimum.  (the distribution is definitely not even, but I'm guessing there won't be one that gets enough to go over $100,000).  I could be wrong, and they could be adding donations raised on top of the minimum, but that's not how it's worded - and if that was the case, then they would say that the total raised so far was $1,043,500.  :-)

 

It would appear that microsoft has mimicked the problem of picking political candidates - if everyone picks one that matches their views exactly, their vote ends up not making a difference, so we all just pick whoever we like most (or dislike least) between the two.

 

In the spirit of that, everyone on the internet please pick the two that you all like the most, and then each one of you just pick one or the other, because right now, I'M looks like a presidential primary debate.

So I was reading an article about a woman who is suing archive.org for archiving her site - when she's apparently too lazy to add a robots.txt file instead of posting copyright warnings in all caps on every single page.  Anyway, so I was browsing around her site, which is a fairly paranoid website thinking that the government is trying to steal your children from you, and I started thinking about all of the "crazy person" websites I've ever seen, and how they all have a similar look and feel.  They all use colors that don't go together, they all use multiple fonts in multiple sizes, and flashing or blinking text.  It's as if paranoia causes you to have no sense of aesthetics.  Either that or they're both a result of some sort of brain problem.

 

It seems like all of the crazy people on the internet could seem a lot more credible if they would stick to maybe one or two fonts, a smaller set of colors that are more compatible, and try to only use capital letters to start words at the beginning of sentences.

 

Take heed, crazy people, you may be able to get people to listen to you after all.

 

 

"Is obesity child abuse?  We take a video of this obese shirtless 8 year old boy that has been taken from his parents and put it on the internet to investigate."

 

Thanks MSN video.  How would I gawk at those less fortunate than myself without you?

Dear everyone reading this,
  I would like to see if I can get IM spam by distributing my e-mail address to the far reaches of the internet.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use my IM screen name every time you encounter a website that asks for your e-mail address and you think they might use it in a spamalicious way.

(It's for work - I want to see how bad IM spam can get)

bendavidgarrison@hotmail.com

go to it, tiger.

I think I'm giving up on trying to blog on spaces.  As trivial as it is, the slowness of the page loads gets to me.  Hopefully it'll continue to improve and I'll be able to come back to it.  :-)

 

But for now...here's my old blog.  http://www.xanga.com/bdg

 

You're not allowed to make fun of me because I have a xanga blog.

 

For the first time ever, I thought the comments marked as 'funny' on slashdot were actually funny...

 

It's crazy how just a little symbol of goodwill can go a long way.

 

Cake to the gaim team when they ship 2.0.0, anyone?  ;-)