S. Segal nickle
What’s your GWAM? This game won’t tell you
80′s music videos anyone?
I know how old the internet is
17 Dollas
singing horses
addictive game here
handbell hero (read: Christmas)
blank sheet of paper

More fun stuff coming soon!

Kept me busy for nearly 13 minutes!

Billy Mays has been described throughout the blogosphere by any number of adjectives. It seems though he is one person we love to hate. Despite many a degrading review, old Billy boy remains as powerful as ever – pontiff of all product hawkers, king of the infomercial court.

Billy started out as an Atlantic City, NJ-based boardwalk vendor. His time spent here enabled skill set development to the point he was able to take the show of the road. For twelve years he paid these dues traveling the United States pandering to hesitant crowds and honing his craft.

In 1993, Billy had his big break. He met the man behind Orange-Glo  at a trade show and after a conversation,  wound up becoming their pitchman. The rest was sweet history for May as he racked up endorsements for OxiClean, Orange Glo, Kaboom, Engrave It, tMighty Putty, Hercules Hook, and Steam Buddy. Most recently, May is promoting ICan Benefit Group, LLC.

Today, Bill runs his own promotions business called Mays Promotions, Inc and is based in Florida.

So Billy Mays has made it from big to small. There isn’t too much to the story after all. Just a guy who kept doing what he enjoyed until it paid off – dividends. Guy has a mullion dollar estate in Florida that Wikipedia had to include in his bio.

And for all those who continue to hate on Billy, there are at least 500 couch potatoes that will continue to snatch up whatever he is selling. Believe that.

We all know that he is incredibly successful, but

what bothers me, and in fact causes me to say he sucks, is the Donald’s ability to use his marketing skills to circumvent traditional business principals. [Maybe I am just jealous. That's what the ney-sayers will say!] During this process, I am willing to bet one hundred too many of our genius ‘masses’ will attempt to imitate. After their imitation fails, I (taxpayer) will be left to pay for it…so I do have a stake in this you see.

Before I go further, I will say that I enjoy his show and watching him in action. DjT’s feud with Rosie O’Donnell is perhaps one of the funniest things going in what today is classified as news. How can you not chuckle at the absurdity of it all regardless if you choose a side?

Niceties aside, my argument comes in three parts and follows:

DjT ignores the traditional employment of bankruptcy filings. Instead, DjT thinks that bankruptcy in his case is shameless. I suggest that it is shameful. Manipulating the legal system to escape $544 million in debt during the collapse of Trump Hotels and Casinos should have been avoided at all costs as all bankruptcy filings. While DjT suffered little, many suffered greatly. Mismanagement caused the loss of jobs for hundreds. It caused loans to be defaulted on. It hurt our economy in a micro-economic sense. It hurt all of us. Have a sound business plan before entering into business ventures. Bankruptcy is not a good thing. DjT can be shameless..

Real business success is achieved through incremental improvements. DjT blinders allow one to believe business success is all about shock and awe (YOU’RE FIRED!). This is not the case in 99.999% of what we do. Trust is earned, outcomes are accumulated, results are proven. People should be given the chance to prove their metal. Hasty firing decisions are never advisable. Patience breeds insight. Insight allows for measured action in accordance with environmental factors. Build your business at a planned rate. Don’t grow faster then you can accommodate for. And certainly don’t force your company into unbridled growth at any cost. DjT doesn’t have time for this though. It makes for boring television afterall.

Small businesses and enterprises are the pulse of our economy. You cannot overlook this. Trump is famous for big things and all that entails. Real business should not be like this. Real business in most cases can’t be like this. Few are lucky as DjT in having the enormous capital with which he began. Focus on the small things. Practice good customer service. Build repeat business. Make people feel good about doing business with you. DjT thinks its all about the tangible and sense manipulation. I am here to cheer for the small business. To support the practice of fundamentals. To champion the cause of marketing sensory deprivation. Enough already. Your company is huge and flashy. We know it….we paid for it. If this isn’t an excuse to choose a small business, you are probably a smart business person. — you know, more logical reasoning should be used then that. One last fact – all business start somewhere…as a small business perhaps?

Final thought: what I am saying here is that NOBODY should ever look to DjT as a business model. If nothing else, his is morally flawed. I pine for the day that Trump finally confesses to being a smarmy actor rather then the smarmy business man he purports to be. In the meantime, i will continue to enjoy the sophisticated banter between the Don and his lady, O’Donnell.

While looking to uncover today’s state of game emulators and ROMs, i stumbled upon this great site that allows you to play classic NES games online without downloading anything. It works through porting the game via a Java interface and is quite well done.

vNES is a free site sans advertising with 765 games online for continuous play. It is, without a doubt, the best free web-based emulator I have seen to date. Enjoy!

• http://www.virtualnes.com/index.html

What ever happened to the guy who sued for the Harrier jet in the mid 90′s pepsi point promotion?

I know you remember this. Pepsi advertised a jet in a commercial designed to promote it’s Pepsi Points campaign. Guy collects points and turns all 7 million of them for his prize. Prize denied.

Why? The gentleman had 15 existing points, paid $0.10 a point for the remaining 6,999,985 points and a $10 shipping and handling fee. He had only collected 15 points and ventured to pay for the rest exploiting a loophole in the contest rules…or so he thought.

The case was finally decided in 1999, and the claim was refuted on three grounds:

1. It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer.
2. The court found that even if the advertisement had been an offer, no reasonable person could have believed that the company seriously intended to convey a jet worth $22 million for under a million dollars.
3. The value of the alleged contract meant that it fell under the provisions of the statute of frauds but the Statute’s requirement for writing between the parties was not fulfilled, so a contract had not been formed.

Leonard, a 21 year old business student at the time, should have done a bit more research. These aircraft can be purchased from the government at a cost of approximately $33.8 million. Critical, though, is the fact the the planes will come unable to fly as all crucial war mechanisms are disabled including the engine and the aircraft’s desirable vertical take-off mechanism…but that point is now long benign.

I was curious about this story and it’s outcome and now i know. And knowing is half the battle…

We are loving these ungodly temps in the mid-Atlantic region right now. Feels like 104….seriously. That’s what the weather channel tells me and what my senses confirm.

Unfortunately, my 1800′s factory turned apartment does not have the ac power to render me comfortable. I have been forced to acquire the monstrosity below – and believe it or not, it is still 80 degrees in my living room!!!

Did you ever listen to this Y100 classic radio show?

Check this out for the Michael Jackson skit, Frankenstein calls Le Bec Fin…among others.

is in progress.

If you haven’t checked out this site yet, i highly suggest you do before they get shut down. muxtape allows users to submit songs as mp3 mixtapes and listen back online. This service acts as an alternative to the cassette tape and has a clean and simple interface. wikipedia has a small stub about muxtape – although since this site launched in March of 08, there is a dearth of information.

http://cthomas81.muxtape.com/

Eric Bland, Discovery News
May 28, 2008 — A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.

While this bacteria-based computer is more proof of concept than practical, a living computer might one day solve complex mathematical problems faster than silicon supercomputers.

“The computing potential of DNA far exceeds that of any other material,” said Karmella Haynes, a researcher at Davidson University and lead study author. “If we figure out how to increase that capacity in a practical manner we will have much more computing power.”

The Burnt Pancake Problem works like this: Imagine you are a diner owner. To promote your delicious fare, you want to create a golden pyramid of pancakes. Using a spatula, you have to rearrange an existing stack of different-sized pancakes, each of which is burned on one side. The aim is to sort the stack so the largest pancake is on the bottom and all pancakes are golden side up.

Each flip reverses the order and the orientation (i.e. which side of the pancake is facing up) of one or several consecutive pancakes. You want to stack them properly in the fewest number of flips.

If there are only a few pancakes, it’s a relatively easy problem to solve. But as the number of pancakes increases, the possible number of solutions skyrockets.

For six pancakes, there are 46,080 possible solutions. For 12 pancakes, there are 1.9 trillion permutations.

A traditional, silica-based computer would run through every single possible solution to the problem, one at a time.

In a biology-based computer, each bacterium becomes a single computer that runs a different part of the problem simultaneously. Since a million bacteria-based computers can fit into a single drop of water, all of them working together could speed up the calculations dramatically.

Obviously E. coli can’t flip real pancakes. Instead E. coli flip a section of their DNA. The “spatula” is a protein called flagellin, which was taken from salmonella bacteria and injected into the E. coli bacteria.

In salmonella, flagellin works like an on/off switch, determining which of two proteins will be produced to help hide, and keep alive, the bacteria when it infects an organism. In the computer, the proteins make a bacterium resistant to antibiotics and keep it alive — but only if it solves the problem. If a bacterium can’t solve the problem, i.e. flip the pancake into the correct order, antibiotics kill it.

So far the computer has only solved a two-pancake problem which, admittedly, isn’t terribly difficult. Creating bacteria that can solve the Burnt Pancake Problem using multiple pancakes will be difficult, said Haynes.

Once a solution is found, however, it will be cheap to reproduce.

“All it would cost is about a tablespoon of sugar,” said Haynes.

Don’t expect to see a bacterial super computer at Best Buy any time soon though. According to Tom Knight, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “this will open the door to a wide variety of biological computing.”

Wowawooee. That is amazing. As the line between organisms and electronics is blurred, so too is our ability to determine what is real and what is artificial. I am simultaneously excited and nervous