Customer: I just arrived at my lake house for the summer, and the satellite TV isn’t working! Why is it off?!

Customer Service Rep.: Sir, please stay calm. It’s simple: we just need to reset your receiver since you’ve been away for a while.

C: How long will that take?

CSR: It’s easy, sir. Do you have a potato handy?

C: Um, let me see… (Pause) Yes, we just picked some up at the store on our way in — stocking up.

CSR: Great, sir. An apple would also work. Now, what I need you to do is to cut that potato in half. Then I need you place one half of the potato face-down on top of your receiver. Please make sure it’s dry.

C: What?

CSR: Trust me, sir, I’m a professional. We’ll have your service back on in no time.

C: Okay… (Long Pause) Alright, done. Now what?

CSR: Great, sir. The potato will act upon your receiver’s magnetic field and will bring the service back online momentarily. It’s a built-in security feature so that no one can use your dish while you’re away for most of the year.

CSR sends a reset request, satellite transmits ‘wake up’ signal to inactive receiver, TV comes on.

C: That’s amazing! Who’d have thought… a potato! Will this work every time?

CSR: Just give us a call if you have any problems in the future, and thank you for using this service.

(Rudely ripped from Overheard in the Office.)

I don’t see these kinds of things very often anymore. (Probably because, lately, I spend more time on .NET forums and CSS design sites than the “Joe’s WAV page” ilk.) But I needed a WAV file for a new tool and ended up here.

In FireFox (my browser of choice), the page’s title screams so loud you can’t even understand it. “AMA…” Whoa! Try some decaf Gunga Din!

But, if you check out the site in IE (ala FireFox: Right-click, “View This Page In IE“. Nice.) all is well with the world and “Amadeus” is a tame as a kitten.

“How could this be?!” you ask. Well, a quick perusal of the page source shows you what this page’s owner never saw. The WYSIWYG editor he/she used when a little nuts on the formatting.

<big> <big> <font color=”#ffffff” face=”Arial”> <big> <strong> <em> <big> <big> <big> <big> <big> <big>Amadeus</big> </big> </big> </big> </big> </big> </em> </strong> </big> </font> </big> </big>

IE sees all that silly over-formatting and ignores it. “Ha! Silly user. You must be using FrontPage®.” But FireFox faithfully answers the call and explodes your text all over the page.

If you’re thinking I’ve already talked about this, you’re right.

It’s been almost nine months since I posted “Who’s Your Favorite MythBuster” and that post is still responsible for the most inbound search engine links to my site. So far this year, I’ve had almost 300 hits from people searching for “Scottie Chapman” alone, not to mention all the variations of “Kari Byron” and “Silver Paint”. (Hee hee. You noticed how I just threw all those top search terms into this post to boost my traffic? Sly, man. Sly.)

Well, I’m still a huge MythBusters fan. I am painfully jealous of Steve at “The Sneeze” who has personally interviewed Adam Savage and seems to keep in touch with him.

I wasted a few minutes today over at the MythBusters official web site taking a few of the MythBusters’ Quizzes. I only got a 60 on the sports quiz and eeked out a 70 on the word myths, but nearly aced the candy quiz with a 90/100. Imagine that. Can you believe I know more about food than about sports.(</sarcasm>)

Anyway. Head over there and take some quizzes. Then come back here and let me know how you did!

I was looking over StatTraq today (a really cool statistics tool for the WordPress blog). I noticed I’d gotten a lot of hits from search engines for my Crazy Boromir post. I looked at the post and, what to my surprise, the links didn’t work! So, I scoured the web until I collected all the files for myself. Now, here they are for your viewing pleasure. (Also, the original post has corrected links.)

Boromir’s Imaginary Phone

Boromir’s Ninja Wizard Plan

Boromir’s Catapult Plan

This is so wrong. Wronger than wrong. Wrongest! Eww! Icky-poo yucky-ville.

MARSEILLES, France — Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux, calling himself “The Prince of Pleasure”, spent weeks chatting with a sensual woman on the Internet, going by the name “Sweet Juliette”. The two were genuinely falling for each other.

“The conversations even got a little racy a couple of times. But I really started to fall for her, because there seemed to be a sensitive side that you don’t see in many girls. She sent me poems she had written and told me about her dreams and desires, and it was really very romantic,” the chat room Casanova said.

She even sent him a picture: a super hot, barely clothed model that just happened to be featured in a men’s magazine.

He finally got up the courage to arrange a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach.

“I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams. And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she’d said she would. But when I got close, she turned around — and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn’t know what to say. All I could think was, ‘Oh my God! it’s Mama!'”

That’s right. This playboy hooked is own mom! But it got worse. Just as the mortified mother and son realized the error of their ways, a patrolman passed by and cited them for visiting a restricted beach after dark. And, since police reports are a matter of public record, a local TV station got hold of it.

“The next thing we knew, our picture and our story was all over the 6 o’clock news. People started pointing and laughing at us on the street — and they haven’t stopped laughing since,” said mom Nicole.

And what about Dad? Paul, Nicole’s husband of 27 years, wasn’t too happy when the story hit the news and his beer-drinking buddies made him the butt of their jokes.

“Dad was ticked for a while and he forbid Mom to talk to anybody on the Internet ever again,” said embarrassed Daniel.

*Groan* Why, oh why, do people think that chat room romances are a good thing?!

Short answer: No.

I remember seeing a picture where some folks tiled their bathroom with those annoying, unsolicited, AOL “Free Trial” CDs. I thought that was funny. But this… This is just sad.

Randypants sent me a link to AOL CD and Tin Collecting. It would be funny if it weren’t true. This guy has a huge wish list, an eBay store, even a book all about collecting “rare” AOL CDs.

This book vividly discusses ways to organize your AOL CD collection and help it grow, the financial worth of rare AOL CDs, codes, packaging and much more. There are over 50 photos that bring to life the allure of these frequently overlooked disks.

“Vividly”?! How can you vividly discuss junk mail? “Financial worth”?!! Dude, seriously. If you pay anyone anything for a junk mail CD, you need to have your bank account taken away. I’d be willing to bet that this guy lives in his mom’s basement.

You’ll notice the price of the book has been “slashed” to $5 (plus $3 S&H). Maybe he’d do better if he sent the book out, free and unsolicited, to everyone in America and then charged them $30 if they read it. It worked for AOL, right?

Oh! I am in 80’s Geek heaven. I just found RetroJunk.com which hosts all sorts of old TV clips and movie trailers from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

They even have the ORIGINAL Mrs. Fletcher!!

How do you rank in cyber space? Are you googlable? (Ooooh! New word!) I’ve always ranked pretty well because my name is a bit unusual. When you search on “Trint Ladd” you don’t end up with a bunch of links to some English professor or small town city council member’s web site. You get me.

I think it also helps that my wife is famous. *wink*

So, anyhoo, not to gloat or anything, but my combined Web Ego is over 4500. (Bill Gates scores almost 13,000, so I’ve got room for improvement.)

Give it a try! (http://www.EgoSurf.org) Be sure to click “more options” and check all the different search engines. (Warning, it takes a long time for the page to finish searching you. Let it finish.)

Congratulations to Surely You’re Not Serious for not being nominated for the 2005 Weblog Awards. Not only was I graciously not nominated, but none of the blogs I frequently read made the list.

Actually, one of the blogs I read DID get a nod: Michael Yon, the self-described non-journalist reporting from Iraq, is in the running for Best Media/Journalist Blog.

You can vote once a day every day until the contest ends. And remember kids: Don’t take democracy for granted. You have no right to complain about the blogosphere if you don’t vote!

Frap… It’s the term my mom always used as a hollow threat when I was a teenager. “Straighten up or I’m gonna frap you!” To my knowledge, she never did frap me, so I am still not sure what it means… Until NOW!

Yet another weird Google beta project is making the rounds. Frappr seems to not much more than a pin map for groups of people. Cuz, of course, everyone wants to have a pin on a map that represents them… *blank stare* …I guess.

For my loyal fans, and anyone else who feels an urgent need to be frapped, you can put your own pin in the SYNS Fans Frappr map. Go on, knock yerself out! It’s free!! (Then again, so are dried leaves in autumn, but I digress.)

So does this mean that all that time, my mom was just threatening to indicate my location on a map somewhere? Jeez, I would have been much more rebellious if that’s all the consequences were.