Swine Flu Mortality Rate (infographic)

Having survived the N1H1 virus recently, I find the topic especially interesting.  Swine flu was no vacation, but it sure wasn’t as bad as everyone assumes it is.  I had one day of severe symptoms (102°F temperature, horrible aches & pains, nausea, dizziness & appetite loss), but after that it was like a mild cold.

I just stumbled upon a great infographic via Digg.  If this isn’t a commentary on the American culture of fear-mongering, I don’t know what is.

Take a peek at the graphic linked to the right. Looks like Leprosy is just barely less deadly than N1H1.  Wait…what?  Leprosy, a word you probably haven’t seen since the 1960′s, is almost as deadly as this “epidemic” of Swine Flu.

Why isn’t the media telling us to be afraid of Leprosy too!

Hey Fox, why haven’t you explained this one:

For every ONE Swine flu death, there have been 2,521 (two thousand five hundred and twenty one!) deaths from Cardiovascular disease.

What this says is, its much better to be SICK than to be LAZY.  This should also tell you to go outside and jog somewhere.

So how do you survive Swine Flu? The answer is simple: stay healthy and active. Go outside and DO THINGS.  You’ll be saving yourself from a plethora of much deadlier diseases as well.

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So, you’d like a Google Wave invite, eh? Well, the first 5 people to follow my devious instructions below will get their very own Google Wave invite. Follow along carefully, I have to be fair about this or I’ll get complaints. Do exactly as I say below:

Tweet this: “@empirenine is giving away Google Wave invites. Please follow him and RT this!”

or you can just click here to magically tweet it.

YOU MUST HAVE MORE THAN 500 FOLLOWERS TO QUALIFY!!!

Once you tweet it (and if you’re one of the first 5), I’ll ask you for your email address.  Tweet on y’all!

(I know that this may seem like a pain in the ass, but I also know that Google Wave invites are in high demand.  My friends and family are begging me for the invites but I’m actually spreading them out into the public.  If you know how to get a Google Wave invite by other means, go for it!)

Its not often that you hear someone screaming to themselves…

“Damnit, I’m desperate to get traffic school”

Believe it or not, I was cursing this at the top of my lungs last week.

While returning home from northern California a month ago, I happened upon a county that employs aircraft to catch speeders.  Having always been cynical about those “Patrolled by Aircraft” signs, I was both surprised and skeptical of the citation that a CHP Officer was handing me.

“No thanks, I’ve got plenty of those at home”, I said to the officer as he tried to hand me the ticket.

“The airplane caught you at 84, I insist“, he replied as he pushed the ticket further in the passenger window.

I submitted, and proceeded to drive 5 mph under the speed limit for the remainder of the 13 hour drive.  Memorable drive to say the least.

Several weeks passed and I received the details about my ticket in the mail.  Being true to my roots, I waited until the second-to-last possible day to pay the ticket.  I visit the county’s courthouse website in order to pay my fine and notice the ticket says (in very small print, might I add):

“In order to be eligible for traffic school, you must call the court prior to paying your bail”.

Okay, no big deal.  I call the courthouse only to get a voicemail box…a FULL voicemail box that won’t take anything from me.  Assuming this was just a fluke, I decided to call again in a couple hours.  Same full voicemail box.

Even after having spent several hours using my finely honed research skills, I was never able to find someone at that courthouse to pick up the phone.  I called everyone in that f@#&ing town short of 911 (and boy was I close to doing that).  How can a public office simply not pick up the telephone?

Enter Plan C.  I proceed through the payment process hoping their system was as antiquated as most other courthouse sites are.  Seeing a Microsoft VB Script error in the left frame, I’m fairly confident I can accomplish what I need.  Firebug, don’t fail me now!

I get the the first confirmation screen regarding my payment due.  It tells me $202 is my bail, but I know that in order to get traffic school, my fine should be $252.  So I delve into the late-90′s era HTML in search of a <form> using Firebug’s inspector.  About 8 nested tables and 500+ lines of code later, SUCCESS!   I found the form, and given the obscurity and sheer number of input values within that form, I decided to simply change every instance of $202 to $252.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure if this would actually change what was submitted to the court, but I had to give it a try.  I click the “Proceed” button, reach the “Confirm Your Payment” page and see that its confirming my payment for $252…did that just work?

I’m delighted to tell you that in the mail yesterday was a confirmation of my request for traffic school!  Firebug saved me countless headaches, and countless extra money paid to insurance companies over the next 5 years.  For that, Firebug, you have earned a well-deserved donation in my name!  Kudos!

Nessy the Magical SEO Tool skeptic

I’ve due to attend a meeting today at 1pm with BusinessOnline, which as I was told, has an “SEO tool that predicts what would happen if you change certain things on your site”.

I stared blankly back at the person that presented the information to me, and finally blurted out: “Niiiiiice.  I’ll be at the meeting”.  I probably sounded as skeptical as I feel.

Maybe I should give them the benefit of the doubt since I haven’t seen the presentation yet, but here’s my first thought:

How can an SEO tool realistically predict what changes on your site will do?

Can it predict, simultaneously, what will be happening on your competitors’ sites?

Can it predict, simultaneously, what algorithmic changes will happen to Google in the interim?

Needless to say, I’ll be updating this post later after the meeting.  Nessy, you coming to this one?

UPDATE: I retract my previous skepticism of BusinessOnline.  They knew their shit, and for the most part, I think they will add value to our company.  The “magical tools” that were mentioned to me were simply a case of the Telephone Game and some bad information that got passed along.  They’ve got tools, but tools that appear to do manage unweildy websites and the site’s SEO data.

Did you go for a .CM Domain in the recent .CM domain landrush? Let’s hope you made out better than I did.

I was skeptical of the process at first, especially after the repeated delays in opening up the registration.  After all, Cameroon is a rather obscure place and who knows what their intentions are (aside from huge profits on domain names, that is).

So I put in my landrush application for a domain and plunked down my $150.  While I won’t tell you the exact domain, I will say that it was a misspelling of a large retailer’s domain, and it was probably one that will get a TON of accidental traffic.  I was actually fairly hopeful that I would get the domain as I didn’t think there would be much competition.

I was wrong.  I got a call from my registrar telling me they were charging my card, and I assumed that meant I had the domain.  Days later, I check the domain and it was occupied by a lackluster ad-placeholder page.  What a waste!  I don’t doubt that I could have generated $20k plus a month in referral fees had I gotten the domain, but alas:

“Regret is a wasted emotion.”