alex chiang: web 6.0

I received several thousand emails at work today thanks to Novarg, Outlook, and my company’s global address book. Whee. I really hate stupid sysadmins who feel compelled to setup their servers to bounce a mail back to a From: address informing you that your mail was naughty and contained a virus.

This behavior is retarded because just about every email worm ever written will forge the From: field. Then, the mail just gets bounced to an innocent bystander. What are you trying to do? Perform a helpful service to the “sender”? Or perhaps trying to shame the “sender” into running a virus scan on their system? Or maybe, just maybe, you’re being a fucking dumbass and making the problem worse rather than better, you no-brain cheese-eating slashdot monkey.

I estimate 15% of the thousands of emails I received today were due to idiot sysadmins.

Update:The Register agrees.

Had our 3rd No Limit poker tourney last night. About 20 people showed up, and we played from 6 pm til 1 am on Sunday. Whew. It was my third time at the final table, although only the first time that I finished in the money. Fourth place earned me about $18 or so on my $10 buyin. Not too shabby, and a good time was had by all.

Yeah, so this is late to the game, but who cares? I read Savage’s article when it originally came out and am just now participating in the google bomb. What is Santorum? Find out what it means at the official Santorum web page. For some further history, check out rotten.com.

I’ve been thinking about the $249 price point for the miniPod a bit. As a consumer, I’m pretty disappointed, because hey — everyone wants cheap stuff, right? On the other hand, the more that I think about it from the business standpoint, the more I like it.

Lots of people (like me) see the $249 price and think “That is dumb. For an extra $50, you can get so much more. If it were only $149, I’d buy it in a second.” So the people who think that (like me) are people who wouldn’t have bought an iPod at $300 anyway. Never would have considered it. But we may have bought a flash memory player for $200 that could hold 256 MB of music.

Now we have to think to ourselves “Do I spend the extra $50 for the miniPod and get 4 GB of space + the iPod interface?” For a mere $50 more, you can get a minipod vs a flash player and get “lots more”. But the thing is, once you’ve converted to *that* mindset, you look at the $300 iPod and see that you can get 15 (!) GB of space for “only” $50 more.

So now you’re actually considering a piece of hardware that you absolutely wouldn’t have bought before the minipod. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the psychology of marketing, but I bet that getting a “no-way” to change his/her mind to a “maybe” is one of the hardest parts of marketing.

So maybe you only spend the extra $50 over the flash player and get the miniPod, but maybe you’ll spend an extra $50 over the minipod and get the real iPod. Either way, Apple wins without cannabalizing the (presumably) more profitable $300 iPod model.

Of course, this analysis ignores the intangibles that minipod offers, like different colors and smaller form factor. But from a pure pricing perspective (and looking at it as someone trying to
make a PROFIT), the $250 price doesn’t seem so dumb after all.

Also, I’m ignoring the other players that offer lots of GB for $200 — $250. My belief is that the mass market is not as “value-focused” as the geek market. The mass market is willing to pay for “cool” or whatever you want to call it, whereas the geeks can only think of things in terms of GB / $.

In other news, I’m off to Aspen to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther the King day.

Killing Me Softly — what a truly awful movie. I was intrigued at first because there was some mountaineering and good sex scenes where you get to see Heather Graham’s boobies, but the initial excitement soon turned into “what the fuck is going on” at first, and “this is bollocks” later.

Here’s the plot with spoilers so you can save an hour and 29 minutes* of your life: Hot chick meets quiet intense mountain climber guy and ditches previous boyfriend. After three days of crazy animal sex that occasionally involves bondage, they get married, whereupon hot chick starts getting mysterious letters about hubbie’s past implying that he may be a murderer or rapist. Hot dumb overacting chick starts investigating and the movie ends when it turns out that hubbie’s SISTER is jealous of hot chick stealing hubbie/brother away. Yes — entire plotline is driven by INCEST. Whee. Big fight scene ensues where sister is about to kill hubbie/brother for “leaving her” and hot chick kills crazy incestual sister by shooting a flare gun into her chest. Apparently this is too much for hot chick to handle, so they break up and the movie is over. The end.

*The unrated version of the movie is actually listed at one hour and 40 minutes, but I figure it took you about 1 minute to read that above quickie review. You will want to spend the other 10 minutes watching the sex scenes, which are pretty good.

The UK Critic has a good review with a classic line regarding the 20,000 ft. analogy Fiennes makes during the film.