You have new Picture Mail!

I'm sure you have seen those ridiculous pop up ads that try the strangest methods of getting you to click on an ad - such as "your computer has been infected, click here to clean it" or "you won $1,000,000 - click here to claim". I don't really understand the economics of this. These advertisers obviously do not care about having qualified leads, they just want any user they can get - and the publisher that hosts them obviously does not care about user experience, they are just there to get the all might dollar. So my question is, why go through this strange absurd ad mechanism - why not just have the publisher spawn a new window with the advertiser landing page instead of the ad. The advertiser then gets 100% of the users (or as many as they want), and the publisher gets the $ for all of users that the advertiser is willing to pay for. Is it any more evil to the user? I would argue it is less evil as the user knows they are now on a site for X, as opposed to seeing a fake ad that does nothing for them. Is it possible that there is some psychological boundary here that publishers (or advertisers) are not willing to cross? Who knows.

I noticed in Zurich that when cars approach a stop sign at in intersection, the street is marked for them to stop much closer to the intersection than they would be in the States. The expectation seems to be that they will stop essentially right before the intersection, and pedestrians will walk behind them instead of in front of them. This turns out to be a really great idea, as this results in the pedestrian not holding up the car when there is an opening in the traffic. The problem for me though, is that I was expecting the cars to stop for me as I was walking to an intersection, and they didn't - they kept going a bit further and did not stop for me. That was a bit of a close call the first time it happened :-)

Yesterday was a pretty splendid day. I was super productive at work in the morning, then I jetted out of work early with three other folks, and we rented a plane and flew around the Swiss alps which was amazing (picture to follow). Then came back for a bit more work, and then went over to Rote Fabrik (an old industrial complex converted into a restaurant/bar/hangout as well as other facilites). Hung out there for the evening, and ended the evening with a pommes kebop (Kabob with french fries in it).

What percentage of people are employed doing core human necessity jobs? For example, growing food, building houses - I would also lump in making clothes, most medicine related jobs, and jobs related to core infrastructure? This would be in contrast to things like graphic design, law, most things related to computers, and most things related to the arts. It would be really interesting to see it broken out by country - a "% of workforce in basic human needs" score.

I am in Zurich for the next couple of weeks, so posts may be somewhat sparse. It turns out the freakish weather we are seeing in the states also applies to Europe. Zurich has no snow, and the temp has been in the 50's. Needless to say, skiing is sparse. I can't say I'm complaining though - it is really nice to be able to explore the city for hours and not get cold. I actually only brought with me a spring jacket - which turned out to be a good decision.

You have new Picture Mail!