Archive July 2007

Today I went to the gym, and, when signing out, pressed some of the various informationy buttons, because I like information. One of the pieces of information was that in total I have used about 1250kcal in my visits to the gym (excluding the day I forgot my techno-key). On the way out I purchased my usual bottle of lucozade from the vending machine. Then I had a thought, and looked at the nutritional information. 308kJ per 100ml. That's 73kcal per 100ml. The bottle is 380ml. That's 277kcal per bottle. In five visits, and five bottles, that's 1387kcal. Good job I'm visiting the gym for tone rather than to lose weight. (Mind, the forgotten key day would make the calorie-burn actually more like 1560, so it's not quite as silly as it looks.)

In other gym-related gubbins, all the machines that monitor heartrate and are cardio-focused start swearing at me whenever I use them, and screaming "DANGER WILL ROBINSON, HIGH HEART RATE, YOU WILL EXPLODE" and flailing their arms. Silly machines, a heart rate of 180 is only unexpectedly high for filthy decrepit humans, it is quite low for mice and apparently in the appropriate range for optimal exercise results for the average two-year-old human (using the common (220 - age) formula for max heartrate, and 75-85% as optimum). [08:57] [2 comments]

I would like all advertising slogans to be subverted. The two examples that sprang to mind were the one that first inspired it, "I'd rather have a bowl of coco pops", which I'd like to see popularised in contexts such as "watch a Doctor Who episode written by Russell T Davies? I'd rather have a bowl of coco pops!", and the old "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label", which obviously can be reapplied to any situation where you see someone doing something utterly stupid, or doing something incompetently.

What other advertising slogans can readily have their intended implications reversed without altering the wording? [17:30] [1 comment]

Sunday 8 July 2007

Am I the only one who sees ads for nicotine gum or patches and, as a non-smoker, is tempted? After all, I appreciate the effects of caffeine, and I'm told nicotine is similar. I'm a non-smoker because I don't like the smell of smoke or the feel of inhaling hot airborne solids, but neither of those are an issue with patches or gum. Especially patches, such a convenient drug-application mechanism, not even using up an orifice. Caffeine-like effects dispersed gently over the entire day, surely that's a good idea? [07:21] [10 comments]

Tuesday 3 July 2007

So, I was being annoyed by Norton Antivirus being on a computer, because said computer ~~runs like~~ barely runs at all, and the general opinion I've gathered of Norton is that it is a resource hog, not actually very effective, causes other software to crash, and makes the crashes behave more annoyingly than a crash normally would. So, then I thought, I wonder if there's some way I can measure the general low opinion of various antivirus software. At first I thought maybe just searching for the product and seeing what opinions came up on early pages, but basically all you get that way is shops selling it and some shills. So then I thought, I know, something like a googlewhack game. How about the ratio between the number of occurrences of the software name and the number of pages the software name shares with the word 'fuck', as in "fuck Norton Antivirus"? I also found an antivirus review site to see whether the world's apparent annoyance level matches up with the reviewers' opinions at all. Thus:

	Pages	Fucked	Fuck/Page	Review score
Norton Antivirus	2660000	810000	30.5%	21.5
AVG Antivirus	2670000	595000	22.3%	22.5
BitDefender Antivirus	2220000	222000	10.0%	28
McAfee Antivirus	2520000	399000	15.8%	20.5
PC-cillin Antivirus	2160000	93700	4.3%	22

While performing these searches, though, I noticed that several of the top 'fuck' pages tended to resemble the form "fuck Norton Antivirus, use X instead." So I thought, hm, I wonder what the intersection is. To be fair, there are several that are of the form "fuck Norton Antivirus and fuck AVG" too, for example, but still, the numbers are compelling:

	Fuck	Norton and fuck	Norton/fuck	Norton-unrelated fuckrate	Adjusted fuck/page
AVG Antivirus	595000	311000	52.3%	47.7%	10.6%
BitDefender Antivirus	222000	204000	91.9%	8.1%	0.8%
McAfee Antivirus	399000	288000	72.2%	27.8%	4.4%
PC-cillin Antivirus	93700	61200	65.3%	34.7%	1.5%

Draw your own conclusions. Also draw your own graphs. [15:44] [0 comments]