Jakob Neilsen’s latest alertbox column lists the top most hated advertising techniques on the web.

Unfortunately, Yahoo’s still doing many of them.

Loads slowly: There are horrible ads on Yahoo that load javascript from pointroll.com and questionmarket.com among others. These are being served from third party sites and often they’re ridiculously slow. When javascript is loaded by the browser, all other rendering stops, so you just have to wait. It makes Yahoo look slow even when it’s not techinally Yahoo’s fault.

Tries to trick you into clicking on it: Sponsored links on Yahoo search click through when you click anywhere in the blue area at the top. Example. I often click in pages to set focus and scroll and this always annoys me because it doesn’t look like a link. Even the holy Google does this. If I click in the blue area on the way right of the page, do you really think I was aiming my mouse at an ad for buying a toaster 600 pixels to the left?

Moves content around: The Yahoo! home page occasionally has ads that move around and “takes over” the page. You usually only get them once per session and they’re quick, but still not very friendly.

Automatically plays sound: There’s a nasty ad for the Army that’s been running around for years that says “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie” everytime it runs. At least that one’s obvious. Some are so subtle you can’t even tell which page it comes from.

Occupies most of the page: The sign-out page is one example, but these ads are all over the site.

Thank God Yahoo don’t do popups anymore. Yahoo! Companion even provides a pop-up blocker, even if most modern browsers have this built in now. You also won’t see flashing “You are a winner” ads or jiggling fake dialog boxes about your computer being slow.

Some of the other ones are questionable, but I’m sure you could find an example of most of them somewhere on Yahoo. That’s at least 5 out of 11 on Jakob’s list.

Still, it’s time for Yahoo to clean up their act. A lot of these ads are for trashy sites which can’t be paying much anyway.

12/8 Update: Yahoo is running a Dell ad today that moves around the front page. I also found the annoying army ad.

My Epson 777 printer ran out of color ink today, so I dug into a drawer and found a generic replacement cartridge I bought a while ago. There are all these tabs you have to pull off, so I decided to read the instructions to see if I did everything right.

In doing so, I think I may have discovered a new dialog of English, which I am calling “Printlish”. Here’s what it said.

Guide to use of Inkjet Cartridge

Caution: In order to assure the desired printing quality, please replace another new cartridge when the ink level indicator light begins to flash.

The reverse side is in Spanish. We would be really interesting to carry on that!

I always seem to watch a lot of movies over the holidays. Thanksgiving was no exception I watched 4 which is a lot for me. They weren’t necessarily great movies either. Just ones that were available on the plane or the movie no one else in the room had seen yet (and probably for good reason.)

Here’s what I ended up watching.

8 Mile
Source: Borrowed from my sister
Eminem plays a poor rapper in a bad neighborhood. His friends and family have real problems. In the end, he wins a rap contest against the reigning local champ and walks off into the “sunset” (in this case a dark alley). It’s kind of like Rocky, but with rap. Emimem manages to not smile or laugh once in the whole film. Now that’s acting.

Dodgeball
Source: “DVD” from New York’s Chinatown made by some guy with with a video camera in a movie theater
A wacky story of competing gym owners who play in a winner-take all dodgeball contenst in Las Vegas. “Milton” from office space plays one of the dodgeball players. The good guys win in the end. I must see more movies with Vince Vaughn in them.

Anchorman
Source: In-flight movie, Chicago to San Jose
Will Ferrell does what he always does, which is act stupid. It’s still funny though. This time it’s as a chauvinistic faux-player news anchor from San Diego who’s struggling against the rise of women in media. It’s always fun to laugh out loud at movies on the plane.

Reindeer Games
Source: Netflix movie we’ve had for months, watched mostly before and after Anchorman
Ben Affeck plays a smartass pretty-boy (i.e. himself) ex-con who gets conned by his former cellmate in a plot to rob a small Indian casino. Charlize Theron works an impossibly complicated plot by showing off her chest to three different men. We were right in the middle of the last 5 minutes of this movie during the bad guy’s monologue when the plane was about to land and I had to shut down my laptop. Annoying.

I really dislike rechargable batteries. Not necessarily the standard sizes (AA, C, D, etc.), but all those weird batteries found in most portable electronic devices these days.

I was in the airport last Tuesday when I realized that I had forgotten the charger for my Treo. The battery in the older Treo 300 is not the best and runs down quickly when you used the phone or data from it. As a result I’ve had to just keep it off.

I considered trying to go out and find a power adapter, but I didn’t want to drive around town for something no one probably carries anymore. Plus with my new phone on the way it makes little sense to buy more accessories at this point. Once again, the updated Treos have different ports and different chargers.

On Thursday, I went over for Thanksgiving part II with Anne’s family 45 minutes away and realized I forgot the power cord for my laptop at my parents house. I could have gone back for it, but we might have been late for dinner.

There are two other laptops here and a gazillion other gadgets, but they all use different power devices. Of course, I hadn’t charged my laptop recently and when I turned it on, it only had 19 minutes of battery life left.

What we need is a wireless standard for charging any device. Just like bluetooth ans wifi are making device and network cables obsolete, we need to do this for power as well.

Now I’m not suggesting that we irradiate peoples homes with microwaves, but simply standardizing on some device plugs and protocols so our devices can get some juice when we need it.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen in this area is a pad that one startup was making that could charge devices just by placing them on the pad. The device and the pad communicated and automatically charged. Keeping your mobile phone charged would just mean dropping it on a table. No more frickin’ wires.

Or maybe the next Treo will come with an optional hand crank accessory. That would be fine too. For now, I just dumped an iGo Juice universal adapter on my Amazon wishlist. Maybe Santa will help solve my technology problems.

I bought my Treo 650 today. Well, kinda. I ordered it from Amazon. Here’s the problem.

Shipping estimate: December 22, 2004 – January 5, 2005

I’m really hoping that Amazon is being pessimistic about this since some people got their phones today.

The total price will be about $307.75 or 49% off!!

$599.99 retail
– $30 amazon discount
– $8.95 A9.com Instant reward
– $150 Sprint Rebate
– $50 Amazon Rebate
– $36.46 Amazon Associates Referral Credit
– $16.83 Amazon.com visa credit
+ Free shipping
+ No tax
—–
$307.75

Not sure if I will have to get a new phone number to get the rebate, but I don’t really care. No one ever calls me anyway. 🙂

I may actually take a $50 hit and sign up for a one-year sprint contract ($100 rebate) instead of the 2-year contract. Two years is a really long time to be stuck with any provider.

I’m really looking forward to the new phone. My Treo 300 is looking pretty ragged. Now I just need to hunt down a Bluetooth adapter, car charger and maybe a case…

Amazon’s Search Inside the Book is neat, but for most part it just drives me crazy.

Maybe I’m not like other people, but most of the time I’m not buying books at Amazon. It’s DVDs, electronics, and other random stuff. Try a search for Treo 650. They have it listed, but it’s at the bottom of the page. The first listing is for a headset, followed by more accessories and books (which have nothing to do with this particular version of the Treo.

It’s worse when they don’t even have the product you want. It just shows you an endless listing of books, which you have to scroll through anyway.

The solution is simple – give me an option to search everything BUT books OR just turn off searching inside the book. It’s hard to believe that Amazon doesn’t have an advanced search page.

And while you’re obeying my every whim, Amazon, you can get rid of that hugungous movie on the home page. I’ve already watched it. Thanks.

Recently some spammers have started to use random @boulter.com addresses as the return addresses for their spam. This means I’m getting tons of bounces from emails I never sent. I’m able to filter and toss most of them, but a few custom replies make it through.

This is one of the most entertaining I’ve recieved, from someone else who seems to have the same problem.

Subject: Stop the madness
From: [email protected]

This is an automatic reply. This account is unused because it is innundated with delivery failures due to some heinous spammer using my valid address for their bogus return address, AND a virus that sends mail from “James” @ the recipients domain.com, which for people on Road Runner is Lucky Fucking Me! I’m not currently using this account and all messages will be deleted. If you work for Time Warner Road Runner or another ISP, do something about this BS. If you are another victim, don’t get all stupid and blame me, because I didn’t send you anything and my computer is not infected. You will only make things worse. Thanks.

You end up solving a lot of anagrams when Geocaching. Any strange-looking title is probably an anagram (and a hint). Often the hint is an anagram or parts of the description. Some caches are even entirely anagrams.

There are a number of tools out there to solve anagrams, but they all seem to try to spit out every possible combination of words which is impossibe to sort through. I got frustrated with them, so I decided to write my own, partially based on code from The Scrabble Rack.

My tool is an incremental solver, allowing you to pick likely words and refine, producing much more managable list of words to review.

It even works for me (notice the longest word).

Well, the past weekend was Halloween, which meant one thing – we needed to hide from trick or treaters. We had planned to head to Mono Lake, but snow hit the Sierras early this year, and the pass was closed.

So we cancelled that trip and booked a hotel in Carmel, or Carmel-by-the-Sea. We headed down on Saturday morning and geocached our way down through Monterey to Carmel, stopping at The World’s Largest Artichoke on the way.

I haven’t been down to that area in quite a while and forgot how nice it was. We checked out Fort Ord, then wandered around downtown Monterey. One place we discovered was Coast Guard Pier, the end of which was covered with sea lions. They were lying up against the fence and you could just reach in and pet them. Not that they seemed to like that at all (started barking), but it sure beats Pier 39.

We went around the peninsula, watched the sunset over the Pacific and headed to Carmel. Then we took a walk from our hotel to find a place to eat downtown. Carmel is a nice and cute town, but it sure is dark. They don’t really believe in street lights. They do however believe in uneven sidewalks and oddly-placed trees. Hey Clint, how about springing a few bucks for better lighting? We ended up eating at The Hog’s Breath Inn, all decorated with Clint Eastwood stuff. Mmmm, steak.

The next morning we went out for more geocaching and touring. One of the odd things we saw downtown was the Batmobile. Yes, the batmobile from the 1989 movie. I’m not sure if someone was really going all out for Halloween or the dark knight is a Carmel resident, but a few hours later it was gone.

Later we headed down to Point Lobos State Preserve which was really nice. It’s actually worth the $8 entrance fee, even though we parked outside and walked in. We walked around the whole park and enjoyed the beautiful scenery, picking up a cache along the way. We even ran into a guy from New Hampshire and chatted for a bit.

Back up to Monterey, we found a few more caches, then took a butt-kicking hike up to the top of the Presidio of Monterey. There were great views from up there and we could still hear the sea lions on the pier.

It got dark depressingly early and we headed home soon after. We had a problem though – the trick or treaters would still be out. So we went out to eat at 7:30 to kill another hour. After a satisfying meal, we headed home to a neighborhood free of kids on a sugar high. Mission accomplished.

I’ve heard a few people say they would go to extremes if Bush wins the election. Just in case he does, here’s a link those people might want to keep handy. You were serious, right?