Recently at the train station near my work, the following billboard has gone up:



What the hell? OK, it’s for a Sony Vaio laptop. Quite what it promotes about said laptop, is a mystery to me. It is used by women with too much makeup? When you open it, three pictures of women fly out? I can coordinate my top with my computer, finally?

Ad departments. Gotta love them. Somebody probably got a bonus for coming up with that campaign, too.

Just a reminder that September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so be sure to inform the rest of the landlubbers. Yarr.

Below is a video of a 1/5th scale radio controlled B-29 bomber, the ‘Dina Might’ which in real life was shot down by a Japanese fighter on June 26, 1945. According to Gizmodo, it has four, 160cc engines, a wingspan of nearly 30 feet and weighs 463 pounds. That’s 210kg!

 

Found this on Youtube - somone mounted a camera on a 1:6 scale rock crawling radio controlled jeep - here is the footage. A nice touch, filming throught the windscreen like a 1:6 scale driver would see. It’s something I always wished I could do with my R/C cars as a kid - but back then video cameras were so big the car would have barely moved.

Back on the first of February I tried a little experiment to see if I could get more visitors to look at this webpage. I tried a number of things - listing the site on Technorati and del.icio.us got a few people looking at it. Mentioning a few keywords of the moment got some views - in particular the post about ordering a Dell PC without Windows Vista actualy got a view from someone at Dell, according to the records.

But the main thing that got the visitors in was getting this site on stumbleupon, a site that has a firefox extension allowing you to just go to a random site found by other members of the stumbleupon community. In only a few days, the number of readers went to over a thousand.

After that though, the number of views dropped off and is now back at around zero. Which goes to show that you need consistency, and a lot of entertaining content, to keep the readers you get initially. It can be a bit of a drain coming up with new posts, and it is easy to get distracted with other things… such as gettting mythtv set up. But that is a story for another time…

I have had this blog up and running now for about three months, and I would like to get a bit more out of it. So, I have decided to try a bit of an experiment. I have gone to a few sites that have tips on how to boost traffic and I’m going to try some of the ideas. So here we go:

1. The first tip is to use lists, so here we are.
2. Don’t be boring. Uh-oh, I’m in trouble already, and I’m only up to point two.
3. Don’t just be a reblogger, by constantly posting news that is available elsewhere. I did this when flash player 9 for linux was released, however, and I got my first google hit from it. Now (as of February 1) after a few more posts this site is the first listing for the search "Bort’s Load of Bollocks". Hooray!
4. Listing your blog on Technorati is apparently a good way of getting word out. I have therefore listed this one.
5. Another one of Seth Godin’s tips is "don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links." Well, I’ve kinda stuffed up there, but that is probably due to learning from the master, Daniel Rutter, who has a link on roughly every third word. And he gets lots of readers.
6. An ugly, poorly designed site with lots of rude colours and dodgy stuff from 1996 like blinking text and sounds playing in the background will drive readers away. So, I think the rule here is, look at someone’s MySpace page and make sure that your blog doesn’t look like that. Anyway, this site design is basically what blogsome randomly assigned me when I signed up. I’ve only done a few tweaks around the edges. But it’s a simple, black text on white background, unlikely to offend, kind of page. With an image of god knows what below the title.
7. Getting the site on digg will apparently unleash an angry mob of idiots. I don’t know if I want to go down that route.
8. Again, borrowing (OK, stealing) from Seth’s article, another tip is to write about blogging.
9. Tagging the site at del.icio.us can also help, according to a number of sites. That is something else I have tried.
10. The final tip I found is to write interesting things about stuff that people want to read about.

Hopefully these tips will be of some help to get some visitors here. I would really like to bring the count up from oh, zero. Anyway, I learned a lot of stuff putting this together. If you are now reading this after finding it on google or somewhere, hopefully some of the above links will come in handy for you, and good luc to you. And me.

While watching some videos on YouTube, one of the related links showed up as Stanford Prison Experiment - Psychology of imprisonment. I watched it, and it ended up being quite fascinating. There is a Wikipedia link here, and the videos are below:

Part 1 
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Each part is just under 10 minutes long. The experiment, done in 1971, which was to have lasted two weeks, ended up finishing after only six days. The volunteers who were either guards or prisoners fell into their roles so well, the ‘prison’ went into a state of chaos. Riots, punishments, solitary confinement, two prisoners having breakdowns and having to be removed - all in just six days. Quite eye-opening viewing - I don’t know how anyone could survive in a real prison, as either an inmate or a guard, without some sort of emotional scarring.

Every time I hear of some new 16 year old dipshit with a record deal with some mindless bubble-gum pop tune, or a new Celine Dion album, a little piece of me dies. Because what it means is that you and me will be subjected to that for the rest of our lives. It will be on the radio, on TV, everywhere. It is unavoidable. People say, "Just turn off/switch stations on the radio/TV", but you can’t escape it everywhere. It will be coming out of someone’s ipod headphones while you’re on the train. It will be the hold music when you’re calling a company. It will be playing in shops.

Eventually though, it will fade away, not getting as much airtime, but it will never completely go away. Like herpes. Then, without warning, you will hear it again and the feeling of dread will come over you as you hear the first few notes.

This happened to me last night. I was at a chinese restaurant, which has Karaoke on some nights. Other nights, it plays music videos. After an Everly Brothers reunion concert DVD finished, it started playing some love songs from the 1980s and 1990s, including the slightly creepy, stalker-ish video to Lionel Richie’s Hello. That wasn’t what bothered me. A while later on came Glenn Medeiros’ one, and as far as I know, thankfully only video, Nothing’s gonna change my love for you. Years of repressing it got it virtually out of my consciousness, until it came on the screen last night. There was no escape. Damn you Glenn, damn you to hell. I still have the song stuck in my head as I type this.

There has been a small amount of distress in the Bort Household, as Mrs Bort’s favourite breakfast cereal has vanished from supermarket shelves - Uncle Toby’s Plus - Lite Start. Virtually all the other varieties are still available, including my favourite, Plus - Fibre Mix. Or, as my wife calls it, Shit Mix.

There has been difficulty finding a replacement too - as she doesn’t like sultanas, it rules out nearly all other types. Special K has been bought for now, but it is bloody expensive. An email has been sent to Uncle Toby’s, but so far there is no reply.

Things look pretty grim though, as on the box of the new cereal they have, Protein Mix, the list of other flavours (yes, including Shit Mix) does not show Lite Start any more.

If a reply ever arrives, I’ll let you know.

Today while out driving I saw a carpet cleaning van with a rather unfortunate company name - ‘Kum-Kleen.’

Must get a lot of business from the adult industry…