mikeswitzer.com

So today a friend wrote some stuff, and that reminded me that I should update the Three Little Words Project. I thought I’d be bold and take today’s (5/25/10) date – regardless of the results. Based on Google Trends as of this moment, the top searched keywords are;

1. Nate Berkus show.
2. eHarmony.
3. eHarmony login.

Now I know the latter two are essentially the same – but I didn’t make the rules…

..Oh wait. Yes I did.

Anyway, once again – I had to Google Nate Berkus to find out who he/she/it was. Turns out she/it’s a he. And he is the owner of ‘Chicago’s most sought after interior design firm’ (Which is barely a compliment. I would like to know why they’re searching for him?)

Apparently today he left ‘Oprah’ to pursue his own show. It’s called, surprisingly, the Nate Berkus Show, and I can’t find anything online about what it will involve. I’m guessing he will arrive at a couple’s house, tell them how poorly they live, redecorate in a way only a Mother could love – then reveal the change with a swish of flouncy shirt and watch as the couple go through the natural emotions of;

1. Shock.
2. Surprise.
3. Realization it looks like something a freshman Art student would produce.
4. Anger.
5. Suppression as they realize the cameras are rolling.
6. Forced grin, and tears that they tell us are ‘happy tears’. But they’re not.

So good luck Nate. I hope they never catch up with you.

Then I looked up eHarmony news for today.

There was an interview with the CEO of eHarmony which talked about the ‘algorithm’ they use for matching people. The interviewers (Nightline – ABC) were also talking to people who had met through eHarmony and were asking them if they were getting married. Because, of course, that’s the only point at which you really love someone. Until then you’re just a drain on their disposable income. (Not my words – those of Nightline. I would imagine.). I’m also guessing a fair proportion of those couples weren’t terribly impressed with being put on the spot in the middle of a reasonably pleasant dinner. If you’re a guy and someone asks you if you would marry the lady you are dining with – there are only three possible outcomes;

1. You say yes. She thinks you’re too clingy and leaves.
2. You say no. She thinks you’re a dick. And leaves.
3. You break down and cry under the pressure. She leaves – with the cameraman.

I’m fairly sure the algorithm wouldn’t take too much thought to calculate though… Presuming you want to be 10/10 -

If you are over 18 and live in your Mother’s basement : -1
If you sleep in your Mother’s bed : -10
If you lock your Mother in your basement : +/-5 (Depends on the Mother)
If you like Doctor Who : -1
If you dress like Doctor Who : -10
If you think you are Doctor Who : -/+10 (Depending on whether or not you are actually the Doctor).
If you have ever used the phrase ‘bigger on the inside’ as a ‘Doctor Who joke’ : -50
If you like football : +2
If you like playing football : +5
If you like playing football online : -25
If you have ever played a game that only uses dice and no board : -25
If you wore the ‘gauntlet of despair’ while playing : -25
If the gauntlet of despair was actually a mitten : -50
If the gauntlet of despair was, in any way, attached via a piece of string to the other mitten : -100

Essentially, I’m saying that the sum of ‘Proximity to Mother’ + ‘Doctor Who’ + ‘Mittens’ multiplied by ‘Football’ (divided by the number of times that football game has been ‘in the Matrix’) = Loveability.

This is why those internet videos of cats do so well. Cats are usually far away from their Mother when they grow up. They are not, nor have they every been, Doctor Who. They are sometimes called Mittens, but rarely wear them. And if you give them a ball they will do that bat-bat thing with their feet – but they will never bat-bat if you show them a ball on the TV. Cats are therefore extremely loveable. In fact, if you Google ‘loveable cats’ you will get 6,430,000 results. However – if you Google ‘mother Doctor Who mittens’ you will get only 292,000 results.

Clearly this proves my point.

Although to be fair and impartial about my clearly correct point of view – The latter search also introduced me to the Blog ‘bloggingwithmittens.wordpress.com’ (as the first hit). This appears to be a blog where a lady lets us know about her baby, Mittens, and what she gets up to. It’s charming. Just to be clear – this Mittens may undermine my entire formula.

This particular ‘Mittens’ is extremely cute. Now – In a crazy world where ‘Mittens’ can, in fact, be extremely loveable – The potential is there that my entire algorithm could by inverted. In that case, it’s even possible that you could be loved even if you do live in your Mother’s basement.

However, don’t get your hopes up. I’m guessing the love, in this scenario, would come from a still-on-the-run Nate Berkus looking to give your basement a makeover.

…Well, you take what you can get.

Reproduced by kind permission of Fangnut.com

Remember when you were a kid, and the amount of interest you had in something was directly proportional to how big and shiny it was?

…Welcome to the iPad.

Let me be clear – I’m a self-professed geek. I love gadgets. I obtained my iPad pretty soon after the day of release. I bought a screen protector because I didn’t want any harm to come to it. All of which should tell you how much I wanted to love it.

However, it is fairly useless.

..And I still love it.

Now calm down – I know some of you could tell me that I can take notes on it – or that I can play board games on it – or that I can use it to make me look far cooler than I actually am. Yes, there are thousands of apps already available for it. But that’s not the point. The point is – it’s pointless.

Look, there are a few products which, over the years, have been released to the general sound of the public being unsure what to do with it. (The sound is ‘uhrm?’ if you’re unsure). But if these products appeal to enough geeks/nerds/fangnuts – you find a whole industry will spring up to fill what must obviously be a gap in the market.

Let me give you an example –Texting.

First we had phones – then carphones – then mobile phones. Then, suddenly, we could text. It was exactly like talking to someone, except misspelled and it gave your thumbs cramp.

…Why would anyone, therefore, bother texting?

- Because it looks cool, that’s why.

And soon enough, phone texting lost the prefix and became known as ‘texting’. And then my kids grew up and decided there were too many vowels in the world, and now it’s ‘txtng’.

Now clearly you can’t reduce that anymore without it becoming a non-word (or ‘Welsh’, as we call it in England).

So txtng needs to find a new direction – but it won’t die because it’s still cool.

Where does txtng go when it won’t die? Twitter. That’s where.

So now I can Tweet! And Tweeting is insanely cool. Celebrities are doing it – Politicians are doing it – Musicians are doing it. Txting has successfully evolved, and now we’ve got an entirely new type of texting that goes to loads of your friends all at once. In the next couple of generations there will probably be yet another form of texting that goes to everyone and involves no keyboard at all.

…Oh no, wait. That’s shouting.

But Apple has made a living from creating things that there is no purpose for. Then a strange old man tells you that you must have one. And you buy one.

…Hm. Okay – I buy one.

And you know what? You’ll spend around two weeks desperately trying to find the things that will make it ‘click’. That will make it fit that spot in your life in which there wasn’t a gap until you bought the damn thing in the first place.

So let me tell you how well it fits in my gap. (That didn’t sound as dirty before I typed it).

1. If you have a wife who frequently threatens to kill the computer to death because it doesn’t load quickly enough – An iPad ‘just works’ so you will save yourself some frustration.
2. If you enjoy walking around with a clipboard. It’s exactly like that, but shiny.
3. If you like that iPhone app that looks like a glass of beer, and now want to drink a pitcher of beer. It’s good for that.
4. If you like looking at your own fingerprints on glass. – It’s good for that.
5. If you like Flash Video and changing batteries – It’s not very good for that.

Okay, so there are some limitations – and I may be an Apple fanboy but I understand the reasons for ‘no-flash’ and think it’s probably for the best overall.

In reality, I currently carry my iPad with me wherever I go. I’ve loaded a few videos on it so that I can watch something locally if I’m bored. I’ve downloaded a couple of books so that I can read on it if I’m bored. I’ve downloaded an App called Office2 (Squared) that allows me to read and write Word/Excel files (which is usually what makes me bored).

The form factor is perfect. The first two days are spent with your hands desperately trying to figure out how best to hold it. It usually ends in some kind of manic juggling – but presuming the iPad makes it through in once piece, your hands call a truce with it and it ‘just fits’.

I think that sums it up – It ‘fits’. And I’m sure that in about six months someone will release the thing that we don’t yet know should exist. But when it does exist, it will justify all the iPad carrying I am currently doing.

In short – Welcome to the iPad. It’s the most essential non-essential item you are ever likely to look forward to regretting buying.

Soooo…. I haven’t updated this blog in just under twelve months.. ‘Why?’ I pretend to hear you ask. Well, mainly because I lost my mojo. (If you were born after 1974 – look it up…).

I felt like this blog didn’t really have a direction or purpose. It just felt uncomfortably like I had forced my way into your life and was droning on like the most boring guest at a dinner party about my opinions and thoughts without ever having the decency to ask you if you were interested in what I was saying. (And let’s be honest, there’s probably only around three of you who read this regularly – so it wasn’t even a dinner party. I was essentially just ruining a nice game of scrabble).

So I decided to stop. And I wouldn’t start until I came up with a plan.

Last week I had inspiration… After watching Julie & Julia, I realized that a bunch of the more well-known blogs/books have an ‘event’ theme. You know, the kind where (as in the movie) the author cooks a different recipe every day for a year or (as per the book I’m currently reading) the author decides to live literally by the word of the Bible for a year.

The problem is the only thing I’m really interested in doing over the course of a year is paying another 1/30th of my house off. But it’s more than that – these authors are using another source to drive their narrative. And occassionally, that narrative hits a collective nerve and they get more than three people reading their blog. (Don’t misunderstand me – I think you three are wonderful, wonderful people. I just think we should possibly talk about things other than Star Trek and Mathemagic.)

So I started to look at other blog communities to see what there was out there that could inspire me. I started reading about ‘getting hits’ and ‘finding the right tags’ and so on. I was in some seriously geeky internet soup. And then, while reading a posting on a newsgroup, I had a moment of clarity;

dmobile215 said “Well we all that that traffic problem, its your tags, or keywords I should say you got to make it simple. not difficult for people to find your articles there are millions of people surfing everyday and night like myself you just have to make it easy.. reading articles on the best keywords is a good idea.”

…This is precisely why dmobile215 gets invited to a lot of dinner parties (and dmobile’s 1 – 214 just sit at home in their Mother’s basement). Aside from the fact that dmobile215 has clearly never heard of the word ‘grammar’, he/she/it speaks the Truth. People find your site by having it presented in Google when they search certain keywords. So if I find the top 3 words each time I blog – I must be writing about things that people want to hear about, right? Which means I have a permanent source of inspiration – and I drive traffic to my site (hopefully with your help).

This will obviously lead to huge readership (let’s say seven or eight people) – which will clearly lead to a book deal – which should ultimately lead to a movie deal. At this point I will obviously redistribute my vast wealth throughout the three people who were my original readers. (Please note – the last bit is a lie. Not going to happen).

Ladies & Gentleman (And whatever the third one of you is)… I give you ‘Project: Three Little Words‘.

Here are the rules;

1. When I’m terribly bored, I will use the ‘Google Trends‘ tool to find out what people are searching for most on Google.
2. I will use a date sometime between the date I’m writing, and the last update, as my reference point. This allows me to avoid terribly dull or terribly sad subjects.
3. I will pick the top three words for the selected dates (and then probably have to find out exactly what they mean) then write some irrelevant nonsense about them.
4. If the top two words are ever ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Mathemagic’ I will give everyone who reads this blog a brand new car.
5. Rule 4 is also a lie.

So, naturally, the first thing to do with Project: Three Little Words is decide who is going to play me in the movie… I know, I know – this may seem premature, but I hate it when they get someone in a movie that looks nothing like the person they are supposed to be. So, in lieu of auditions at some indeterminate point in the future, I visited MyHeritage.com to use their celebrity look-a-like thingy.

Below are the results…

…Yup. The celebrity that looks most like me is K. D. Lang.

Awesome.

Oh, and apparently I have a touch of Catherine Deneuve about me as well. There is some upside in that Colin Farrell appears as a look-a-like. But you’ll notice there is a 64% match. Essentially, it’s telling me that one of my arms and both of my legs look exactly like Colin Farrell.

Oh, and then there’s Carson Daly. Unfortunately, I already have more people reading this blog than watch his show. (Although think how disappointed he’s going to be when he gets ME as his celebrity look-a-like..)

So that was, unfortunately, not the life-affirming exercise I thought it would be. Let’s move on…

The three ‘hot trends’ in Google for the day I selected (Feb 22nd 2010) are;

1. Lincoln Tunnel.

2. Air Car.

3. Nastia Liukin

Hm.

I’m beginning to think this may not be such a great idea.

…First of all I need to research Nastia Liukin, which I figure is either a disease or a character in the next Harry Potter movie. Apparently she is, in fact, a gymnast. She is also dating Evan Lysacek. (Who is a figure skater). Unfortunately, I’m not a particularly big fan of gymnastics. Any sport where you get points for not falling over doesn’t really appeal to me. Really the whole thing consists of you putting yourself in a situation where you are extremely likely to fall over, and then not doing that. It’s all a bit anticlimactic.

Speaking of anticlimactic – the Lincoln Tunnel is reported by Google because it was ‘partially reopened’ today. I’m not sure how you ‘partially reopen’ a tunnel. Do they only let you in and not back out? Of course that leads me neatly onto the ‘Air Car’.

The Air Car appears to be a revolution in automobile engineering. It seats 3 and you steer it with a joystick. Yes – a joystick. Bear with me for the next bit – I’m not making it up… The driver steps in through the windshield, and the passengers – through the rear window.

No, really.

…And it looks like this;

The Air Car. Awesome.

Really. At every designer’s office there should be someone who is paid to take a step back – look at the final design – and say ‘Have you actually talked to anyone other than your Mother about this?’

So that’s the first round of Project: Three Little Words. And I think I enjoyed it. I guess it felt somewhat like we all learned something. You learned what an Air Car was – and I learned that I mostly look like a Canadian lady who’s nine years older than me.

…I’m so glad I’m back…