Live from Austin!

There’s a new service out there called PayPerPost. Basically, you get paid for posting ads in your online journal.

So far, so ho-hum. One thing that makes this one a bit different is that the ads aren’t separated into their own section alongside your postings, like Google AdWords; rather, the postings themselves are the ads. Furthermore, buyers get to dictate the wording of the links.

In addition, the question of disclosure is left entirely open. Maybe all your postings are ads; maybe some of them are. Maybe you tell people, maybe you don’t. It’s up to you.

I decided to take a look at what the result was like. In the forums I found some people who were pimping their web sites; here are some URLs.

• http://www.juliesjournal.com/
• http://anaisamy.vox.com/
• http://www.whateverifeellike.com/
• http://www.simplekindoflife.com/

Reading the above is an interesting experience. Sometimes it’s blatantly apparent where the ad is. (In these quotes, underlining shows where the links were in the originals.)

I really need a Caribbean vacation. It’s time to stop dreaming of going somewhere like this and just start to plan and save for it. [...] Warm Islands.com is a perfect place to read about all the things I can do when I get there.

I just know a friend of mine needs to reduce cholesterol in his diet. I think this is the reason he gets sick so often, and feels winded so easily. I’m going to have him try Vasacor an all natural cholesterol supplement.

Another thing that I used to be big into a couple of years ago, but kind of let go by the wayside is taking women’s vitamins. [...] Osteo Essentials is clinically shown to support bone protection - which to me means will help strengthen them. I want to promote and develop strong bones now before it’s too late.

I don’t think any human being ever uses the phrase “…is clinically shown to…” in conversation. Sometimes it’s not so clear, though:

After lugging my laptop bag around all day for three days and seeing other people with their wheeled laptop cases, I’m starting to think I need one. My new laptop is lighter than my previous one, but it’s still damn heavy, especially when walking through the enormous hotel here from my room to the business areas.

Check out Tumi at Luggage Online. Isn’t that bag sweet? It’s got room for everything: laptop plus all my paperwork in really nice organized compartments. I want it!

On the one hand, the author had already said she was attending a show in Las Vegas. On the other hand…

Here’s a quote from a posting which, to me, demonstrates the problem with the whole thing:

This time last year…we were caribbean bound! I had already been on one cruise, and was about to embark on another. In September 2005, we went on an adults online cruise with a few other couples, my sisters, a brother-in-law, and an adult nephew. [...]

During our day in Jamaica, we visited a beatiful garden at the top of a hill overlooking the city of Ocho Rios. After that, we headed to Dunn’s River Falls - a must see! You can literally climb up the side of the mountain by walking up the falls. [...]

I think the best way to visit the Caribbean is by cruise ship - and if you need help choosing the right cruise for you, look no further than these cruise ship reviews. Our 7 night cruise was with Carnival, on one of their newest ships, the Carnival Victory.

I started out reading it as reminiscence, triggered by her noticing that it was a year since her last cruise vacation. It starts to sound kinda interesting, approaching a travelogue. But then suddenly, you hit what looks like blatant paid linkage. Does she really think cruise ships are the best way to visit the Carribean, or is she just being paid to say so? Maybe the whole September 2005 cruise is fictitious, planted at the request of the advertiser in order to seed the idea of taking larger family groups on cruises. Are the sisters, brother-in-law and nephew real? If so, why don’t they have names?

The thing about trust is that once you lose it, it’s hard to get back. Once you realize someone has lied to you, you tend to view everything else they say with suspicion. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to read a personal web site where you had good reason to believe the author was lying a large proportion of the time. Then again, even Jason Fortuny has fans.

US air marshals in Vegas have revealed that they have a quota: they have to report at least one suspicious person a month.

The latest LiveJournal Abuse Team abuse is “nipplegate”. Someone on the Abuse team decided that female nipples were offensive. When this was challenged, the terms of service were promptly rewritten to retroactively justify the decision. (Which, if you’ll recall, is something I suggested as a resolution for my disagreement with the abuse team, and something they rejected out of hand and claimed wasn’t possible.)

If anyone had any hopes that the purchase by sixapart would lead to a little more maturity and professionalism from LJ Abuse, it seems like that day is a long way off. They claim that a total ban on female nipples is essential, but that pictures of a dead baby with congenital defects are OK.

A bunch of people have temporarily deleted their journals in protest. I’m sure that’ll achieve precisely nothing; save LJ money on bandwidth as a protest? Who thought that one up? If you want to protest, take your content elsewhere. But I’m doubtful anyone will do that, though it does seem as if the number of active accounts on the system has started to drop.

Anyhow, I mention this because coincidentally, I’ve just finished migrating my Vegas pictures and writeups. The pictures are now on Flickr, you can find the writeups via search or tags. In particular, back in 2004 I wrote:

Which brings me on to the subject of breasts. They seem to be a major source of fascination in Las Vegas. You take an otherwise tired concept like a bunch of women dancing on stage, add a sprinkling of tits, and magically you have compelling entertainment.

I notice that one of the shows has two versions. During the day you can see the clothed edition, which is billed as suitable for children of 5 and up. In the evening, there¿s the topless version of the exact same show, which you need to be 16 to see. From this I deduce that young American children will be traumatized if exposed to the sight of human breasts; presumably they are all bottle-fed, which would also explain their later fascination with watching Vegas showgirls.

Ah, those funny Americans and their bizarre puritanical ideas. I remember being amazed back in 1997 when I discovered that Victoria’s Secret airbrushed the nipples from the photos of women modeling their products. Then again, since breasts can shut down an airport and cost a TV station $550,000, maybe it’s best we try to protect children fromlearning about them.

Wait, what am I saying? They’re just breasts. Get over it, America.

Well, here I am back in Las Vegas for another big IBM event. The flight here was pretty uneventful, except that I was so early to the airport that I was able to get bumped up to a standby seat on an earlier flight to Dallas, giving me time for a relaxed (albeit crappy) lunch.

When I arrived at the Venetian Hotel in Vegas, they didn’t have a reservation for me. Or at least, not for the day on which I was actually arriving. Fortunately, the company that had arranged the hotels and travel for IBM had a desk right there, and I queried the situation with them. They had a different view of the world to the hotel’s. I stood around for 15-20 minutes for a reconciliation to take place. First I was offered a smoking suite instead of my booked room, and asked if that was OK; I said that no, not really, it wasn’t. There was some more discussion with someone in an office out of sight. It turned out to be worth the angst and the wait, however, as I ended up with my own room. That may not sound like much, but IBM generally requires people to share rooms, even if that means sleeping on a fold-out sofa bed. Last year, that was my assigned sleeping arrangement, and I took the floor instead.

The café area containing the pedestal I’m helping to staff was a complete zoo last night, and I was already exhausted from a sleepless night followed by plane travel. As soon as possible I returned to the room and went straight to bed. I slept pretty well, and through the miracle of time zones managed to wake up in time for breakfast.

IBM takes the view that I’m definitely not here to enjoy myself, as breakfast starts at 6 and ends at 7:30. This is a deliberate ploy to push people to attend the first sessions, which start at 8. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the days typically go on until the other 8, and I’m the kind of person who doesn’t usually see 6am unless he’s failed to go to sleep the previous night.

As was the cast last year also, the Venetian Hotel was hosting another event at the weekend. Porn queen Jenna Jameson returned to her home town (they must be so proud!) to host yesterday’s big AVN Awards. I haven’t seen anyone who’s obviously a porn star this year. I did think it would have been cool to get my picture taken with Ron Jeremy, if I had happened to see him wandering past. I’d also have been willing to do my best to settle the question of whether Asia Carrera is really a Linux geek.

This morning’s big kickoff didn’t really have anything to compare with Steve “Monkey Boy” Ballmer, and didn’t seem as good as last year’s. Part of the problem is that the star guest was some Olympic sports athlete I’d never heard of; I’m sure there are lots of sales guys who get pumped up by tales of sporting triumph, but I just don’t get sports at all. Bread and circuses, people!

After that, I unexpectedly turned out to have the afternoon free. However, it’s cold and rainy outside, the network’s down, and I’m tired again already, so I think I’m going to take a nap… Oh, the exciting life I lead.

Think you’re registered to vote? Better check, if you still have time…

An employee of a private voter registration firm alleges that his bosses trashed registration forms filled out by Democratic voters because they only wanted to sign up Republican voters.

[...]

Russell worked for a company called Voters Outreach of America, along with 300 other people. He says he got into a beef with the company over a pay dispute, and witnessed his bosses ripping up registration forms that had been filed by democrats.

“They were thrown away in the trash. I grabbed them out,” said Eric Russell. One of those forms belonged to Daren Gray, who was shocked to learn that the re-registration form he filled out was never turned in.

“I’m pretty mad, upset. I’m still gonna vote,” said Daren Gray. Russell doesn’t know how many democratic registrations were tossed in the trash but guesses the number could be very high since Voters Outreach of America operated in Las Vegas for more than two months.

[...]

The Republican National Committee acknowledges that it hired Voters Outreach of America to register voters, but in a statement said it had zero tolerance for any kind of fraud.

Local party officials said there is no way the GOP would instruct the company to trash democratic registrations. However, similar problems have been alleged elsewhere. In Washoe County, the registrar says he too has turned over information to the FBI about Republican backed registration efforts.

In Oregon, the same company that was operating here has been criticized for its tactics in signing up voters. There, it used the name America Votes, which is actually the name of a Democratic organization.

—KLAS-TV

eBU is in Las Vegas for the first time. Previous years it has been held in Orlando, Florida, in Disney World; and also in a European city, Berlin one year and Barcelona the next. The move to Vegas has allowed IBM to consolidate and have everyone from around the world attend one huge show.

To be specific, there are 17,000 IBM people in Las Vegas at the moment. That’s enough to fill the conference facilities of the MGM, Mirage and Venetian, with a few hundred excess people at the Paris and a couple of other hotels. Walk the streets and you’ll see IBMers everywhere.

And no, this is not the IBM of the 1950s, 60s, or even 70s. There are no suits and ties. The Brazilians are in party mood: they smashed their sales targets, so they’ve all been wearing bright yellow IBM T-shirts with the Brazilian flag on the front, sitting together in blocks, and starting Mexican (Brazilian?) waves. They look like the Brazilian football supporters who flood the streets of Somerville whenever Brazil wins a game.

There were other people in Las Vegas on Sunday, though. It was also the last day of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, America’s top porn tradeshow. As I found my way back to my room, I saw a woman with melons the size of… well, melons. And I’m talking watermelons, not cantaloupes. She was wearing a black leather outfit that had presumably been reinforced with kevlar to take the strain, and the rest of her body was somewhere between trailer park and heroin chic. I’ve no idea if she’s famous, and if there are naked pictures of her on the Internet I don’t really care to know where.

I’m here for a big IBM event called eBU, the e-Business University. It’s a big training event for sales people worldwide. Since my job for the last couple of years has been making sure that sales people have the information they need to do their jobs in accordance with corporate strategy, I get to attend too. The idea is that if I have some idea what the strategy is, I’ll be better equipped to build the web sites and database systems needed to assist people in following it.

By the time I got to the hotel, it was 19:45. Event registration was supposed to finish at 20:00, but as it turned out they had (a) decided to pack up early and (b) decided not to bother staffing the registration booths in all the hotels anyway. I checked in to the room I had been assigned.

IBM shareholders will be pleased to note that everyone attending eBU is expected to share a room with someone else, to keep the costs down. I’d been assigned a random roommate. It looked as though he had already arrived—there’s no mixed-gender room-sharing allowed, which strikes me as silly. There was no sign of anyone. I was disturbed to note, however, that the room only had one bed. The other half of it was occupied by one of those ghastly fold-out metal sofa contraptions. It looked like that was mine.

I tried it out. It curved like a hammock. I realized my back would never forgive me if I tried to sleep on it, so I dragged the thin mattress off onto the floor to use like a futon, and folded away the metal torture equipment.

The next problem was to get to the first meeting I was late for. It was at the MGM, but according to the timetable there was no reason for anyone to be at the Venetian, so no IBM shuttle buses were running to there—only the other way. I snarled and strode out onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

When viewed from (say) the Stratosphere, the Venetian and MGM look very close together. They’re not. To add to the problem, the MGM is huge, and the conference center part of it is about a block away from the casino part. Still, I got to the meeting before it finished, and got to talk to a few people.

Ah, meetings! America’s #1 alternative to actual work! Where else would you hear sentences like this actual example:

“The overall umbrella that holds the whole thing together is the management gearbox.”

That was from a UK colleague, who had perhaps been watching too many episodes of “The Office”.

Ah, Las Vegas. It seems like only a couple of weeks since I was last here.

I left Cambridge on Sunday. The taxi company called back at 09:30 to tell me the taxi was outside. I looked, and told them it wasn’t, that I was sure, that I could see the entire length of our street from the doorway, and that I was standing on the front steps of the house.

I then got to hear the taxi dispatcher bawling out the driver. “You had me call back, and you’re not even there!” She repeated the address, and explained to him that the word “Seven” in the street name really was part of the street name. “He’ll be there in a minute.”

He was. He seemed a bit sheepish. I think he must be new to taxi driving, because he took the most bizarre route to the airport I’ve ever seen, zig-zagging down back streets until he hit the Charles River, then crossing the bridge and going via the new Big Dig tunnels which have finally opened.

I got to try a new airline this time. America Worst… Sorry, America West. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re not quite up to (or down to) the standards of AirTran, in that they do actually have their own gate at Logan, and real electronic flight boards rather than ones with little plastic letters. Nevertheless, their gate area is about the size of our apartment, and has no bathroom, so I sat in front of the ticket desks for a while and went through security close to boarding time.

The flight to Phoenix Arizona was straightforward, and they were good enough to warn us they wouldn’t be serving any food and that we should come prepared. On the flight I heard people talking about the beauty of the areas around Flagstaff, and I found myself pondering the mad idea of abandoning the whole eBU thing and hunting down Gita in the desert.

I found the gate at Phoenix easily enough, but when they plane came in they announced that it was broken. Some men with helmets on stood on ladders and poked the ailerons a bit, then they announced that they would need to find a replacement plane. They told us that this one had been vibrating unusually, and would need a complete test flight before they would be allowed to fly passengers in it.

I stretched out on the floor to give my back a rest; they were estimating that it would take them a couple of hours to get a replacement plane in place. I’ll give them one thing—their estimate was spot on. As I lay there I overheard other announcements. I couldn’t help noticing that there were two other America Worst flights delayed by hours because of mechanical faults, just in the nearby cluster of departure gates. An old woman was telling anyone who would listen that the America Worst plane she had arrived on that morning had had no heating working, and that it had been freezing cold at cruising altitude. Another old woman one-upped her with a tale of woe involving an America West plane and malfunctioning undercarriage.

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people who would have been praying at this point, but I was pretty calm. Sure, I was doomed to be hopelessly late arriving at my corporate event, but I was deep in the realm of Things Which Are Somebody Else’s Problem. There was absolutely nothing I could do, so I found an AC outlet and recharged the iPod, and played a couple of games of Snood on the GameBoy Advance.

I didn’t think about mechanical failures, because I know that it’s not rational to do so. On a statistical basis, I put my life in more danger when I cross the street. If I have any faith, it’s a faith in the power of random chance, chaos and probability.

So I certainly didn’t worry when they told us our flight had been moved to gate 13.

The replacement plane turned up, we embarked, it took off, it flew for around forty minutes, it landed in Las Vegas. Nothing untoward happened at all. It makes for a boring story, which is why you usually only hear about the times when strange coincidences do in fact foreshadow disaster. So next time you hear about an eerie coincidence, remember the canny and explicable tale of Flight 547.

The trouble with stories like Woz in Vegas with a sheet of $2 bills is that as soon as I read them, I want to go order a sheet of $2 bills myself, grab a pair of scissors, and go shopping…

At this point, we’d had three very active days with lots of walking. We were both pretty tired, it was Christmas Eve, and we were supposedly on vacation. It was time to slow things down a little and relax more.

We start off with breakfast at Krispy Kreme. I pick out three doughnuts for myself—one chocolate glazed with cream filling, one “classic” glazed fresh from the cooling rack, and one festive donut with red, white and green Xmas sprinkles.

The chocolate frosted cream doughnut is light and fluffy, and the Xmas donut has the added crunchiness of sprinkles… but it’s the classic KK frosted plain doughnut that is of legendary perfection. Sweet but not too sweet, and so light and fluffy you can hardly believe you’re eating it. It makes Dunkin Donuts’ best efforts seem like a Clif Bar. Krispy Kreme’s coffee is good too—rich, with no trace of bitterness. It’s good enough to drink black, which is something I wouldn’t advise trying with Dunkin Donuts’ coffee.

Next we head to the middle of the strip to visit the Venetian, the Bellagio and the Mirage. The Bellagio is across from Paris—which, of course, has a large replica of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a cheat, though—the real Eiffel Tower has diagonal elevators which climb the legs, whereas the replica just has a conventional vertical elevator.

The Bellagio is known for its amazing water fountain shows. We catch a surprisingly moving aquatic interpretation of the US national anthem; the majestic towers of water really do seem to add something, and in the noonday winter sun they form a beautiful rainbow too.

The fountains have over 1,200 nozzles, which shoot water up to 75m into the sky. It’s truly amazing to see. They somehow get the water to look as if it’s a curtain of standing columns, then suddenly the entire structure collapses into mist.

The inside of the Bellagio is beautiful as well; it turns out to be decked out for Christmas. One giant hall has a small pine forest in it, with topiary reindeer and giant Christmas baubles, plus a small snow machine scattering occasional drifts of fake snow over the guests. Plastic icicles decorate the trees.

The Venetian’s decor is slightly more austere; in fact, it’s minimalist by Vegas standards. Marble floors and painted ceilings. Oh, and an indoor reproduction of a Venetian canal, with bridges across and shops on either side. Painted skies look remarkably convincing as gondoliers serenade their passengers.

The external architecture is quite Italian-looking as well, if you overlook the giant video screens which seem to be ubiquitous in Vegas. The canals emerge into the piazza outside the hotel.

In the evening, we head downtown. This is the “original” Vegas, containing the casinos you see James Bond speed past in “Diamonds Are Forever”. Nowadays most of Fremont Street has been closed to traffic and turned into a giant pedestrianized mall, with the world’s largest LED screen overhead as a roof.

“World class topless girls” are on offer, from “exotic locations” such as Cleveland, Ohio. There are also endless stores filled with cheap trinkets, so if you’re ever in Vegas and need to get small gifts for everyone this is a good place to do it.

We decide against taking our photo outside The Four Queens, and the famous Golden Nugget doesn’t have the neon to compete with its neighbors, so here we are in front of the Horseshoe.

Some old neon signs have been preserved as a kind of “museum of neon”. Most are still in working order.

As far as food goes, the cuisine on offer seems rather limited, so we decide to head back to our end of the strip to find food.

We drop in at the Tropicana, which James Bond namechecks in “Diamonds are Forever” (although the location shooting for the film took place at the Hilton). The Tropicana has made no attempt to become anything more than a casino with hotel, and pretty much still targets the James Bond market—its main attractions being things like topless showgirls and blackjack tables in the swimming pool. The food choices are decidedly unimpressive, so we end up eating at the Luxor again.

When we get back to the room, we channel surf until we end up watching “America’s Funniest (Holiday) Videos”. A clip of a kid trying out his new snowboard and sliding face first into a bush leaves me in fits of laughter.

“I can’t help it,” I gasp, “I’m a bad person, I always laugh at the ones where the little kids get smacked in the face.”“That’s why I love you,” replies sara, laughing.

After that we flip channels and end up watching a documentary about Mormons. Ever since that highly educational South Park episode, we’ve been wanting to know more…