FoxTrax Blog

A friend of a friend of a friend is in the Missouri National Guard, and was having a hard time deciphering an acronym that showed up in an e-mail. He scoured the manuals trying to figure out what this new acronym "ROFL" might stand for until someone kindly clued him in:

"Rolling On the Floor Laughing"

Not so much a military term, just another product of the instant message culture. And ROFL is just the tip of the iceberg--whole sub-dialects of English have emerged, ushered into existence by text and instant messaging and the need to save time/characters by abbreviating common phrases. New "words" emerge regularly--indeed, half the fun seems to be in guessing what some of the new acronyms might mean, and sometimes they can get a little bawdy. The letter "F" shows up quite often, but unlike the above example, it typically doesn't stand for "Floor".

This is proving to be problematic for the DMV, who try to avoid issuing plates that say rude or potentially offensive things. It seems the North Carolina DMV issued several plates that began with WTF (a very popular acronym, not at all new, standing for "What", "the", and... use your imagination) before someone's teenager let them in on the joke.

Of course the real problem for the DMV is that the language of text messages is ever-evolving. Something innocuous today might turn out to be horribly obscene in two years. And it's not enough to know what things mean, you have to also keep track of how popular they are, because it should be no surprise that an overwhelming number of 3-4 letter combinations are acronyms for something, often for several things.

For example, NASA, which we know as the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration", also stands for "National Auto Sport Association" and "North American Saxophone Alliance", and Space-NASA has been ubiquitous for decades. What about the wealth of acronyms that serve as short-hand for, I dunno, skinheads or call-girls? Most people wouldn't recognize those acronyms, but some people would, and they can be truly, deeply offensive. It's not a huge feat to imagine that these might slip through and be issued (accidentally or otherwise), and it's not much more of a leap to think that maybe a few already have.

Part of me wants to believe that anyone old enough to drive a vehicle is old enough to behave sensibly and maturely about the accidental possibility of unintended and obli1que references to obscenity. But it doesn't last long.

So the DMV is probably going to have to let things slide and learn responses like "you didn't think WTF was offensive when we issued you the plate". In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if we got another form to fill out that shifts liability from the issuer to the issue-ee, something to the effect of "My name is John McCain and I approve this license plate."

Either that, or we're going to start seeing more license plates with their characters seated letter-number-letter-number-letter-number.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.FoxTraxGPS.com

Labels: current events, humor

One of the things that I love about the English language is that it's a technical language, so new words can be created from old ones on an as-needed basis. For example, take "hyper" + "mile" and make it into a verb. The gerund form of it would be "hypermiling", which has recently entered the lexicon as "increasing your car's gas mileage by changing your driving habits".

Examples of hypermiling practices include accelerating and decelerating more slowly (0 to sixty in twenty seconds as opposed to, I dunno, 5) or turning your car all the way off if you're going to sit at a stoplight for more than thirty seconds, or finally cleaning all that junk out of your back seat.

The overall vibe of hypermiling websites seems to be that aggressive driving is inefficient. The farther down you push the pedal, the more gas you use. So telling people that they can save money by chilling out at the wheel is a good thing, right?

Mostly. Hypermiling is not without defect.

First, some of the things they tell you are slightly questionable. Run your engine filled up to the "low" oil mark. Fill your tires to their maximum pressure rather than their recommended pressure. These sort of things can't be good for the life of the car, and is it possible that you increase the risk of a blowout by running your tires to so high? Wouldn't that be more expensive than the gas you save?

Second, some of the hypermiling suggestions are extremely questionable. Drafting behind semi trucks, for example, is not safe, even though it allows you to go for miles and miles without actually using your accelerator. Turning the car off while coasting down hills--also dangerous (since steering wheels frequently lock if the car is turned off). In the interest of full disclosure, I'll add that most hypermiling sites don't list theses two, and the ones that do list them explain that they're less-than-ideal from a safety perspective.

Third, it's highly possible that the culture of hypermiling has only sprung up to sell MPG meters.

And finally, it's totally geared towards non-commercial driving. Okay, it's true, hypermiling.com offers training for commercial drivers (at $210 a pop), but you can't very well shut your diesel off at a stop light. The problem is that hypermiling requires a fair amount of individual effort, and it's a lot easier to justify that effort when the gas is coming from your own pocketbook. So you can train your drivers to hypermile, but will they actually do it? In my experience, it's hard enough to make your drivers drive their routes without taking creative detours, let alone micro-manage how far down they press the gas pedal.

If you're looking to save some gas money, or want another metric to out-elite your buddies who drive hybrids, then hypermile away. Just don't draft behind me or blow a tire next to me! If you have a fleet, and you want to save gas money, better to track routes using GPS.

I'm just sayin'.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.FoxTraxGPS.com

Labels: business, GPS, technology

Here's a strange story coming out of New York City. The street performer known as the Naked Cowboy is suing M&M for trademark infringement. He plays his acoustic guitar in the Time Square wearing only a cowboy hat, boots, and underpants, and has become something of a New York icon.

Enough of an icon, in fact, that the Mars Corporation dressed a blue M&M up as him on a billboard and people got the joke. The problem is that the "Naked Cowboy" image has in fact been trademarked by Robert Burck, the street performer who created the persona. He's suing for $100 million in punitive damages.

That's a little steep, in my opinion. It's like, what, 400 gallons of gas (in New York)? In all seriousness, though, if M&M is going to use his likeness to sell their product, it stands to reason that he should be compensated, but if they had approached him about it and he had asked for $100 million, methinks that M&M would have gone a different route.

But I have one burning question. Actually, I have a lot of questions, but most of them are sarcasm and rhetoric. What I want to know is: how much money is he making as a street performer that he trademarked his appearance?

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.FoxtTaxGPS.com
888-779-8870

Labels: current events, humor

So this weekend Samsung released their new "Instinct", their computer-in-your-pocket answer to Apple's iPhone. They've had some amusing mock-trailers that have been running in movie theaters (which, between that and Honda's Navi commercials in theaters, is GPS the new Coke?). It's an entertaining spot: lots of explosions, and it manages to poke fun at movies, movie trailers, and product placement, all while explaining its features and instilling some name-recognition.

Problem is, it kept comparing itself to the iPhone. Rather than let it stand on it's merits, it essentially billed itself as "the other iPhone", and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it just goes to show who really owns the market for these sort of devices. Maybe if they'd only said it once.

Either way, seeing this commercial over the weekend while waiting for Get Smart to start has led me to one inevitable conclusion about Apple's next product line.

The iShoe.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.FoxTraxGPS.com
866-686-2780

Labels: humor, movies, technology

Today Kent Couch has announced that he will be taking to the skies again next month. Last July he flew 193 miles, no small feat when you consider the type of craft Couch pilots.

He flies a lawn chair.

He uses some amateur instruments to measure speed and altitude, five gallons of water for ballast, 105 large helium balloons for lift, and a parachute for landing. He'll be tracking his progress using a GPS device and you'll be able to track him as well in real time on his website: www.couchballoons.com.

Couch's original flight took him from Bend, Oregon to Union, just shy of the Idaho border. His launch is scheduled for July 5th.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: current events, GPS

I have a fond memory of a commercial that used to run on local St. Louis stations. It featured 3 people in faux gypsy garb standing an area rug that had been blue-screened in front of a helicopter shot of the arch. It was supposed to look like a flying carpet. Instead, it looked like three mid-westerners dressed as pirates on a blue-screen stage. It was poorly acted, had that grainy shot-with-a-home-VHS-camera look, yet it had a certain charm, nonetheless.

Yesterday I was pointed to a site called Spot Runner that makes pre-fabricated, customizable TV advertisements and sells them for as little as $499 apiece (they do other things as well, but this is what caught my attention). They've been fairly successful, and their success in the small business advertising realm led them to branch out into another lucrative field.

Politics.

For $500, you can make a classy political ad. Fade from a statue of Thomas Jefferson into your face while you talk to police officers (about issues, of course, not your overdue parking tickets). They have lots to choose from, even attack ads ("A vote for Jon Doe is a vote against public education"). I don't know whether to be frightened or impressed. On the one hand, it gives less-well-funded (read as "third party") candidates a slightly more level playing field, since they are able to produce quality ads on a budget. On the other hand, it does point out the vapid, generic nature of political advertising.

Then again, maybe that's a good thing.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: business, current events, technology

So I ran across the following headline on CNN.com:


My first thought was, "that's not a very nice thing to say about Iowans", but I read on and learned that Iowa is actually the home of North America's lead orangutan and bonobo research centers. Research has been at a standstill with the rising water.

I don't mean to make light of an ongoing catastrophe, merely to comment that science and technology are wonderful things, but apparently we're still beholden to natural disasters. Decorah, Iowa, issued an order to its citizens to not flush their toilets for fear that the sanitary system might fail. And it got me to thinking. Today it is virtually impossible to get around in life without a cell phone. Ten years ago this wasn't the case, but today we take that technology for granted. My grandparents have a cellphone. It's considered a necessity.

And I imagine suddenly having to do without a flushing toilet might change one's perspective on that.

The good news is that, thanks to the experience with rising rivers in 1993, Iowans have been better-prepared for this flood and a lot of the potential damage has been averted (although a lot of damage has still occurred). The estimated death toll is between 1 and 6, which is pretty encouraging as disasters go. Also, the citizens of Decorah are allowed to flush their toilets again (albeit they're encouraged to do so carefully... whatever that might mean), and the apes, well, the apes are just fine.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: current events, weather

With all of the recent entrants to the GPS vehicle tracking business, I have seen a proliferation of location reporting strategies. Some are just not worth having when you consider what you can get by using newer technology. Here is a rundown of the reporting strategies I've seen lately.

1. Limited Pull Reporting – The device only reports its location
   when asked by the customer. The customer is limited to a certain number of queries per month. Typically, these are legacy systems that report on a wireless network via SMS (text) message. The cost per report is very high because the wireless companies make a lot of money on text messaging.
   
   
   • If you want to log into a system at 5:00PM and see where your
     vehicle has been during the day this system isn't for you.
   
   
   • If you really, really need to know where the vehicle is right
     now this system is not for you. The unit might not be able to get a fix or wireless connection when you ask if it is in a metal building or parking garage. A "push" system with a good reporting strategy, discussed next, will leave a bread-crumb trail that ends at the entrance to the parking garage or other wireless dead spot. So you will be able to locate the tracker even if it can't currently get a fix.
   
   
   • If you want to calculate stop and drive times for a vehicle's
     daily route this system is not for you.
   
   
   • If you want to calculate daily mileage driven this system is
     not for you.
   
   
2. Fixed-Interval Push Reporting – The device pushes points out
   at a regular interval and the providers system stores the points for later review. Generally, the intervals are 1-minute and up. These can be good systems, but the stone-ax simple reporting strategy still falls short in some respects. The customer pays a penalty in terms of cost vs. benefit because the provider has to pay the wireless provider for transmitting tons of useless data. Consider a fixed 1-minute reporting interval. Much of the time the reports are not interesting because the tracker is sitting still. But sometimes you need more frequent reporting data. As an example, try driving around the block in 60 seconds. It's not too hard to do. Now think about the distance that would be measured from report to report. It would fall far short of the actual distance driven. A smarter reporting strategy knows when to report and when not to.


3. Flexible-Interval Push Reporting – Here, we have nirvana. The
   system reports based on multiple factors. Typically, these systems will have a minimum reporting interval -- report no more often than x seconds, a minimum reporting radius – do not report if the device hasn't moved at least x meters, and a maximum reporting interval – report at least once every x minutes. It might even report based on speed and direction changes. With these systems you get lots of interesting data and little uninteresting data, and you are not paying data transmission costs for useless, repetitive data.
   

Reporting interval isn't the only consideration in buying a tracker.
Some companies might need satellite-based systems for tracking in remote areas. Some very simple schemes might be very cost effective for other applications. Containers, for instance, can be tracked effectively with a once-daily fixed report. But as always, the motto is "Buyer beware." There are plenty of providers, particularly those who sell a year's worth of tracking in one payment, who will sell you a system that does not do what you need.

Patrick Brannan

President
FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: business, GPS, technology

GPS stands for Global Positioning System. But apparently it also stands for a lot of other things. So, courtesy of Wikipedia, here are a few of the other GPS's you might run across.

There's an Englsih Progressive Rock band GPS, which is derived from the last names of the three principal musicians: Govan, Payne, and Schellen.

A GPS could be a Gunner's Primary Sight on an M1 Tank

GPS also stands for GNAT Programming Studio, a programming development environment (IDE). Wait, GPS is a GNAT IDE? OMG!

Then there's Generalized Processor Sharing, a theoretical communications discipline that isn't actually possible. And speaking of not-quite-useful applications, there's the General Problem Solver GPS, a computer program designed to systematically solve puzzles like the Towers of Hanoi or find chess solutions. It turned out to be incapable to handling real world problems, but it eventually paved the way for future programs.

"gps" is a linux command, and GPs is often used to abbreviate "Gold Pieces" used as currency in some older video games.

Then there are a handful of schools that go by GPS. GPS Schools is an association of private boys' schools in New South Wales. Australia also has the Great Public Schools Association of Queensland Inc. There's the Greenvale Primary School, Arizona's Gilbert Public Schools, Chattanooga's Girls Preparatory School, and for you John Cusack fans out there: Michigan's Grosse Pointe South High School.

And lastly, GPS is the abbreviation for Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square show on CNN.

Have a good weekend.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: GPS, humor

A company in the UK called Bladerunner is offering a jacket with built-in GPS tracking. Originally intended for mountain climbers, their biggest customers now are actually parents worried about their children being lost or kidnapped.

While slightly macabre, it's indicative of an emerging world in which GPS is ubiquitous and we're getting used to the idea of always knowing where our loved ones and friends are. Echoes of this creep up in social networking sites, again, designed to let your friends know where you are and what you're doing at every moment.

How long will it be until we start to notice the pangs of withdrawal when we can't find our friends after being so used to having access to every last detail about their life? Like nowadays when we wonder how we ever got by without cell-phones. I remember the last time I was at an amusement park--when our group broke up into smaller pairs to go pursue various rides and activities, rather than arrange a rendezvous point/time, we knew to call each other when it was time to meet for dinner. We had grown so accustomed to the convenience of the phone that the idea of navigating an amusement park without one struck us as oddly foreign.

Strange.

FoxTrax GPS Fleet Tracking
Clever solutions for vehicle tracking
www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: GPS, random, technology

I think it’s hard to say whether the iPhone will kill traditional GPS.

First, this kind of application has been available on phones for a while. My phone has Google maps and Microsoft maps. Both work fine. Neither are anywhere near as good as my wife’s $250 Garmin Nuvi.

Second, there's the concept of “Ergonomic niches.” There is an ergonomic niche for a device with a big screen that sits in a suction-cup mount attached to the windshield and does nothing except find restaurants, find gas stations, show maps and deliver directions.

There's also the technical limitations of tracking on a phone. Battery life is one issue. And, oh, by the way, what do you do when you to make and receive calls while driving? I guess that he figures everyone will finally get on the Bluetooth bandwagon after 10 years of not doing it. But we know that won’t happen because nobody can keep track of the little headsets.

The price of dedicated GPS navigators continues to drop as well. Many people will look at the convenience and continue to decide that it is worth the price to have a reliable dedicated navigation device in the car.

So I think that there is an ergonomic niche for a navigation device that you don’t also hold up to your head and talk on. Mapping on smart-phones is great but will not replace dedicated units.

My guess is that Garmin’s stock is not dropping because of the iPhone. It’s dropping because they are in a competitive market in which the easy pickings have been taken.

Labels: business, current events, GPS, technology

Big tech news this week:

Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 3G, which will cost $199 and is poised to decimate the consumer GPS industry. We're not worried--we're more of a fleet-management service--but Garmin and TomTom are. Their responses to Apple are quite different.

Garmin has announced the Nuviphone, which will be GPS, internet and phone all in one. There's no word on pricing or carrier yet, but unless it's a popular (or open) carrier and unless it costs less than $200 (which is unlikely, given Garmin's other lines), then they're sole selling point is going to be that the Nuviphone speaks driving directions while the iPhone doesn't. Yet.

TomTom's reponse was a write an app for the iPhone that speaks driving directions.

More and more in the telecommunications industry, we're seeing formerly separated markets blur together--established players suddenly become competitors. Look at AT&T's U-Verse, poised to wreak havoc on Charter and Comcast. If you had told me that ten years ago cable companies were going to be seriously threatened by a phone company, I'd have given you a funny look.

And now we have the iPhone, an affordable mp3-player/computer/e-mail-client/GPS device with a longer battery life than the last generation and internet speed that's almost as fast as Wi-Fi, not to mention an army of brand-devotees. Retailers won't be able to keep them on the shelves. Personally, I don't think Garmin has a chance.

Of course, Google still hasn't shown their hand with Android yet, and I've heard rumors that we'll be getting some news to that effect sometime next week. Should be interesting.

Labels: business, GPS, technology

Wall Street seems to be recovering slowly from the 400 point drop at close of business Friday. Of course, it's only 10 am now, so the day's fire sale may be yet to come, but I'll be cautiously optimistic that prices will pick up at least a little throughout the day.

This has not been a good year for stocks in general, but last week's dip was triggered by the new jobless numbers, which were much higher than expected. To count d(i.e. to be counted) as "unemployed" a person must actively be seeking employment. A full-time homemaker, for example, doesn't count as unemployed because he/she isn't trying to find work. Analysts suggest that the numbers were high, not because people have been out of work, but because more people entered the workforce than was anticipated. You get a spike this time of year anyway, what with high school and college graduates suddenly throwing their names into the labor pool. So why were the numbers so high this time?

Well, there are a couple of possibilities. First of all, it could be that fewer high school grads are going to college (I have no numbers to support this, by the way, just a theory). In that case, the added spike now will eventually be offset by a reduced spike four to five years from now when those people would have left college.

But I've got an even better theory. One of my old econ profs told me that one of the shortcomings of only looking at those actively seeking employment was that it left out people for whom employment was only one viable option. For example, if someone found themselves out of work at the start of an economic downturn and reasoned that they would likely be out of work for a few years, then they might decide to go back to school and complete their masters or something like that. They would effectively be taking themselves out of the workforce and not be counted as unemployed, even though they would have been employed if the economy were stronger.

People in this situation are essentially under-reported by the current unemployment index. So here's my idea. The post-9-11 prolonged economic downturn (or stagnation, or recession--whatever you call it, it's not a boom) has steadily driven people into continuing their education and now, six years on, they've run out of schooling and are trying to re-enter the workforce. That caused (at least partially) the spike in unemployment which led to the surge in oil speculation, etc, etc, etc.

Just a theory.

Bonus rant: the other drawback to the unemployment index is that it doesn't count "underemployment", e.g., people who have a degree in meteorology and work at McDonald's. It is another sign of economic strength, but it isn't represented. That said, the unemployment index is quite useful in spite of its imperfections, so I don't mean to rag on it too much. Any metric is going to be a mix of uses and shortcomings.

Labels: current events

Who We Are:

FoxTrax GPS Vehicle Tracking provides affordable, real-time fleet management solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. We offer cost-effective ways for businesses to manage their employees by tracking routes, drive times and stops. With our tracking service, you can reduce maintenance and fuel costs and have a better picture of how your drivers are using your equipment.

We have trackers starting as low as $84.99 and offer service packages without contracts or hidden startup fees. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, FoxTrax operates all over the continental United States. We have the clever solution to your vehicle tracking needs!

www.foxtrax-online.com
866-686-2780

Labels: business

Here's an idea, for anyone adventurous enough to try it. Ever heard of the game Assassin? You get a group of people with water-guns, and over the course of a designated period of time (typically a week or a few days), they try to "assassinate" each other without being caught. What's fun about this game is that, with the exception of taking time to hunt and kill your friends, it doesn't disrupt daily life.

It's quite popular on college campuses, where you have a lot of people who know each other (and all live in relatively close proximity) and have unstructured schedules with lots of free time. Not so easy with people who have day-jobs/kids/mortgages, and live and work farther apart from each other.

So here's my idea. GPS Assassin. Organize it on the web. Get 10 people, each person posts a picture and is issued a GPS tracker that they have to keep on and in their vehicle or on their person. Anyone can see anyone else's device. When you get "killed", you turn off your tracker and identify yourself as such on the site. Everyone should live and work within, I dunno, fifty miles of each other, and you'll be looking at a time frame of about a month, rather than a week or a few days.

The twist here is that with GPS, not only can you stalk your "victims", you can see who's stalking you. I think getting online in the evening to see a co-player a few blocks over and on the move could be quite exhilarating. Last man standing wins. Or spice it up, play on teams and restrict it to a week. I think there's some potential, here.

Have a good weekend, and be careful out there.

Labels: GPS, random

GPS is kind of like the internet, in that it doesn't really do anything by itself, but by providing people with information, it can be an extremely useful tool. As such, it's interesting to see what people do with it.

For example, who would have imagined ZebraNet? It's a kind of pony-express, but with stripes! Actually I made that up. Really, it's an academic ecology project.

Daniel Rubenstein, director of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and Princeton engineering professor Margaret Martonosi got together and started ZebraNet. The goal: use GPS collars to track the daily habits of zebras in Kenya.

They provide more information than the traditional radio-transmitter collar, and researchers have been able to remotely gather information about everything from eating and mating habits to velocities and turning angles. Especially useful: being able to collect data at night.

But something like this could only be a result of GPS, never a cause. What I'm saying is that if you were to try and setup the immense infrastructure for a project like ZebraNet like this, you'd be laughed out of the financier's office. "We want to track zebras nocturnal behavior, and to do so we will need to launch at least three satellites over Kenya." Never happen. But since the satellites are already there, the network is in place, we can implement it to gain knowledge about useful (if not necessarily practical) information.

And I draw my comparison back to the internet. When Al Gore invented it back in the day (I'm only telling this joke because if I don't, you will, and I'd hate to let you take credit for it), he could never have imagined e-commerce, the dot-com explosion, or eBay. The designers simply understood that if you give people a way to communicate, and give them access to information, they'll figure out interesting things to do with it

Labels: GPS, technology

Found this courtesy of the Windsor Star. Ah, those wacky Canadian criminals.

In Leamington, Ontario, a funeral director went outside the funeral home to discover that his hearse had gone missing. Two men had stolen the six-month-old Buick while the service was going--the keys were inside.

Apparently the funeral staff were accustomed to leaving vehicles unattended for the 15-odd-minutes at the end of the service before the procession. And (because I know what your next question is) while the news article I read didn't state anything explicitly, I'm assuming that the body hadn't made it into the vehicle at the time of theft. Seriously though, what if there had been a body in there? Which leads to a whole series of bizarre questions: Do chop shops handle caskets? Would a criminal organization dispose of a body that they weren't responsible for? I digress.

The hearse was equipped with OnStar's GPS service, so the vehicle was quickly recovered and the thieves were apprehended. And that's a comfort, body or no. We here at FoxTrax are of the opinion that GPS technology, when properly used, can save lives. It's nice to think that it can save the dead as well.

Labels: current events, GPS, humor

The other night I watched There Will Be Blood, the 2007 film by P.T. Anderson that was up for Best Picture at the last Oscars. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as an independent oil man and is based loosely on the 1927 book Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Very loosely. In fact, it retains practically none of the story, characters, or socialist underpinnings that would have been found in the original novel.

But if you're looking for a 3-hour film about an oil magnate and his deaf son that is wonderfully acted and beautifully shot, then accept no substitute.

Curiously, out of the entire movie, the most memorable bit comes towards the end, in which Day-Lewis's character is explaining (screaming about) how a particular piece of land has no oil left, even though it hasn't been drilled, because it has been drained via nearby operations in the surrounding lands. This culminates with the thundering delivery of the film's best-remembered line "I drink your milkshake."

This was a revelation for me, because I'd seen a number of T-shirts and other merch across the web emblazoned with that four-word phrase that, by itself, sounds rather stupid, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it meant. If you type "I drink your milkshake" into Wikipedia, it takes you to the There Will Be Blood page, but it makes no effort to explain why unless you are willing to read through the entire plot synopsis.

So, while not a meme, per se, "IDYM" falls neatly into the category of Bizarre Redirects. It joins Blue Harvest, which was the covert shooting title of "Return of the Jedi". Consequently, if you go to www.blueharvest.com, you wind up at the official Star Wars website, which is downright confusing if you've heard something about "Blue Harvest" and are trying to find out more about it. The Wikipedia redirect used to be just as bad, but it's better now that there's a Family Guy special called "Blue Harvest," which clears a few things up.

"Bite the Wax Tadpole" is another great one. This refers to an extremely amusing story about the Coca-Cola company, which I'm not going to tell you. But if you have heard the phrase, which shows up in weird places every now and then (I think Dave Barry used it as a chapter heading once), and are curious about it, and enter that phrase into Wikipedia, you are re-directed to Coke without so much as a hint of what one has to do with the other. And the website bitethewaxtadpole.com brings up an Irish software firm (no help).

So, yeah, have fun figuring that one out over your lunch break!

Labels: humor, movies

(courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com)

Lolcats are one of those bizarre phenomena called memes.

A meme (in the modern context anyway) is something that spreads like wildfire across the internet for no apparent reason! Have you or someone you love recently opened a webpage only to be confronted with that awful Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up"? As anyone ever told you that all "your base" were "belong to us"? Has someone ever forwarded you a webpage of dancing hamsters? These are memes.

A bizarre side effect of the information age is the apparent need for people to share mindless, yet amusing, trifles with complete strangers.

Enter the LOLcat.

How, exactly, it occurred to anyone to write over pictures of cats using cutesy broken English and phrases like "gimme teh bukket" eludes me. But it's a big enough thing that you see it referenced on shirts, in pop culture, there are websites of lolcats, there are websites that parody lolcats, there's even a LOLCode programming language being developed that uses the bizarre sub-English prominent in LOLcat photos. Here's a snippet:

---

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
 YARLY
  BTW this is true
  VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
 NOWAI
  BTW this is false
  VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
 KTHX
KTHXBYE

---

And once again, I sit back and thank my lucky stars that I'm lucky enough to live in a world where things that make no sense and have zero practical application can exist. Not only can they exist, they can propagate and flourish. Doesn't that make the world a far more interesting place?

kthxbye

Labels: GPS, humor, technology