I hate it when marketing junk floods out of the interwebs, television or radio [and magazine subscription inserts, but that’s different].  It comes out as ‘change your world’ kind of stuff and then you buy the product and end up shoving pencils into your eyes because you don’t want them to see lies any longer.  After the expensive reconstructive surgery to your eyes you become a skeptic to all things marketing.

I am a marketing skeptic.  I hate most of the junk that gets thrust before me because it is so manipulative.  Turns out that the folks at Parallels are not lying and their upgrade for Desktop from 3.0 to 4.0 is actually faster.  Dang it!  I hate it when I can’t be a skeptic all of the time.  Thanks Parallels for making a solid release in 4.0, its worth the upgrade.

I have implemented on this blog a little bit of a banner that will show up if you happen to be using Internet Exploder 6 or lower.  It will tell you about how you are ruining the quality of life for potentially thousands upon thousands of web developers.  It will tell you that you should consider understanding the problem by going to StopIE6.com.  If you have your own personal site and would like to do the same, feel free, just make sure that you do it kindly.  We don’t need to be jerks, but we need to give a little love to the users who just might not know that the internet could look better than it does right now in Good Ole’ IE6.

Simple code for adding the banner are available at the StopIE6 site.

I just unsubscribed to an email newsletter from the Kodak corporation.  One I did not expect to receive.  One that should NOT be coming to my work email address.  The fine folks there made me jump through hoops to unsubscribe from their email, something that should be simple to do.  The ’email preferences’ part of their site didn’t even offer me the opportunity to unsubscribe, but their privacy section did offer me a link, in smaller print, to a place to insert multiple email addresses to unsubscribe from.

I got the ‘unsubscribed’ email to confirm the unsubscription.  It told me that I’d most likely be unsubscribed within two weeks.  I think that’s because the squirrels have to carry the message out from the large oak tree that the server is running in and carry the unsubscribe request to the carrier pigeons who fly to the coast where they then give it to gophers who burrough into Kodak’s secret email spamming center to have the name removed.  That can take time.  But two weeks?  That’s silly.

Abby in the Leaves

Originally uploaded by RandyPeterman.

I took this picture of Abby today after school. The crazy girl is just so cute!

My brother in law posted about big government and jobs: read it.  Funny.

Today is Nevada day, just in case you don’t live in Nevada or were unaware of it over all.  Have a happy one.  In Jr. High and Highschool I had to march down Carson City’s main drag with some form of percussion strapped to me playing some cadence or song.  It amused me that the rest of the band got a break, but we drummers/percussionists/morons had to play the whole length of the road.  At least we were cool.

I’m thankful for growing up much of my life in Nevada.  I learned a lot there, I met my wife there, I met many friends there, and I have family that still lives there.  I hope this Nevada day or all saints-eve-eve finds you well.

I am on the twitter.  You should be, too.

Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/randypeterman

For those of you wondering: Twitter is like slow-motion instant messaging out in the open.  Kind of like your dreams about being naked in school (that was awkward, wasn’t it?) mixed with that weird slowed down ‘dream weaver’ music that they always play in the flash-back segments of movies.  You get 140 characters to say whatever you want… but since its 140 characters, you have to be terse.

My buddy Dave Warren and the late Douglas Adams have said about the same thing.  Here’s Douglas Adams on the presidency:

It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it…anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. – Douglas Adams