Big Brother of the World

I was asked today by an irate American caller why he is being made to pay surcharges used to fund the war of 1812 -- Huh? (war against England) I played along and learned that there's a feeling of resentment by some Americans about Puerto Rico -- being treated as "an American province yet the citizens don't pay taxes" . . . "Are you an American?" -- this after i confessed ignorance of American war history (except that 'war' between America and Philippines). Thereupon (naks!) he softened and went into an analogy of how Puerto Rico is to the US as Falkland Islands is to the UK (more :| ) --

Well, there's certainly the opinion that might makes right -- i write this just after an American customer in the Internet cafe talked loudly at the counter how he spent two hours writing emails and failed to send them (why he had to wait for two hours before calling the attention of the attendant is beyond me) -- he complained ("I'm talking, let me finish") about "your computers are bullshit" and berated the hapless kid (the other customers -- including me (albeit feeling murderous) -- just looked on) -- I sympathize with the boy as i also am in the customer service industry (i work mainly as a well-paid doormat [umm, well paid compared to my previous job -- one-meal-a-day (however the perks were good -- free housing, free electricity and water and unlimited Internet)] -- mostly to the D-Z markets requiring a spending limit -- mostly minorities). I'm thankful some of my customers are really nice and intelligent -- minorities among minorities. . . .

The bully mentality is all too common . . . related to "if you got it, flaunt it" thinking . . . thank goodness for guerilla warfare -- the smaller ones get to strike back. [Which is why powerful sectors want to control the Internet . . .]

Pinoy Big Brother? Nah! -- I like a less subtle sort of porn...

Comments

Create 'Fake Identity Generator'-style email addresses and passwords in Excel

Last week I needed to compile a list of several hundred fake customer names with fake (but verifiable) email addresses and passwords to test a client's eCommerce site. Fake data generators At that time, I knew of only two online identity generators: Fake Identity Generator (FIG) and GenerateData.com (GD). By accepting three user-specified parameters (country, gender, age range) FIG outputs a lot of nice fake data, including disposable (but accessible) YopMail email addresses and relatively easy-to-remember passwords. However FIG doesn't provide free bulk identity generation so I had to generate and copy-paste identities one at a time – a very slow process – along with manually creating accounts using these fake identities at the client site (I had no access to the client content management system so I couldn't bulk register the fake identities). On the other hand, GD allows bulk generation of identities (up to 100 at a time) for free (and with more paramete

Make a quick-&-dirty repeating pattern in Inkscape (using hexagon base)

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on January 29, 2016 . I am making it available here to add to the Inkscape pattern tutorials.] This is based on a tutorial for making hexagonal tiles for David White’s “The Battle for Wesnoth”, but you can skip the 72×72-pixel requirement. You can make your base hexagon in any size that looks good at 100% zoom. First, make a hexagon using the “Create stars and polygons” tool. Press the CTRL key while you’re dragging the cursor to make a proportioned hexagon like this: You may have to move the cursor around to have the hexagon lie on its side. Next, with the hexagon selected, remove the outline by holding SHIFT and left-clicking the ‘X’ swatch in the color palette: Replace the hexagon’s color with what you want by left-clicking the color swatches in the color palette – almost black, in this case: Next, add your main decoration. I just dropped-in a dragon I found at Wikimedia Commons: Group the hexagon and the object (selec

Quick AdWords keyword match formatting in Google Docs and Excel

If you often work on AdWords text ads, you'll like this little spreadsheet that will make the keyword matching tags automatically for you. As you know, the matching convention for keywords is: Exact Match Phrase Match Modified Broad Match [this is a keyword] "this is a keyword" +this +is +a +keyword Imagine how tiresome doing this would be, for every word, if you have hundreds of keywords (or search terms). Here's a Google spreadsheet that will do this for you: Keyword Match Tagger . You just paste your search terms (one search term per line) on the "Keyword" column, and the other columns will populate with the keyword matching tags which you can then copy to your own spreadsheet. If you pasted in keywords with duplicates, those will be highlighted in red. Since modified broad match does not consider the order of the words in a search term, the "MMB Duplicate Detector" column will rearrange the words alphabetically in a search term and highl

Man On A Street

Search This Blog