Ho John Lee's Weblog

Me at Barack Obama’s inauguration, via FotoFlexer’s MyInauguralPhoto service. Just call me Zelig. (via TechCrunch)

A fine depiction of field positions in a typical youth soccer match, from Rhymes With Orange.

Spring seems to have brought on a new variant of the Nigerian “419″ spam fraud campaign, substituting Benin for Nigeria. Going through the e-mail that came in during spring break, weeks I’m seeing a lot of e-mail with titles like

“FINAL NOTIFICATION OF RECEIVING YOUR HERITANCE FUND IN ATM MASTER CARD”

“CONTACT YOUR ATM MASETR CARD”

“CONTACT EMS IMMEDIATLY ON +234 8022856155″

“CONTACT FedEX EXPRESS COURIER COMPANY LIMITED FOR YOUR CONSIGNMENT IMMEDIATLY”

“CONTACT REV DR.KENNETH OKOM DIRECTOR OF ATM CARD BANK”

“CONTACT MR FRED IKEM FOR YOUR $950,000.00″

The general theme in this sort of spam is “We’re waiting for you to confirm your bank information and send a small processing fee so we can send you a lot of money.” This campaign mostly mentions a program from the Republic of Benin to give away money through funded ATM/Mastercard accounts for various reasons ranging from inheritance to payment for previous services. Some of these have an interesting wrinkle though:

THIS IS TO OFFICIALLY INFORM YOU THAT WE HAVE VERIFIED YOUR CONTRACT /INHERITANCE FILE AND FOUND OUT THAT WHY YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED YOUR PAYMENT IS BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT FULFILLED THE OBLIGATIONS GIVEN TO YOU IN RESPECT OF YOUR CONTRACT / INHERITANCE PAYMENT. SECONDLY WE HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT YOU ARE STILL DEALING WITH THE NONE OFFICIALS IN THE BANK ALL YOUR ATTEMPT TO SECURE THE RELEASE OF THE FUND TO YOU. WE WISH TO ADVICE YOU THAT SUCH AN ILLEGAL ACT LIKE THIS HAVE TO STOP IF YOU WISHES TO RECEIVE YOUR PAYMENT SINCE WE HAVE DECIDED TO BRING A SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM.

Maybe this would sound plausible to someone who had already responded to a previous scam email? “The reason you haven’t been paid yet is because you have been illegally dealing with the wrong officials, so please send us the money instead?” Perhaps this reflects a finely tuned understanding of the likely responders to this campaign…

Links: 419 Scan: Advance Fee Fraud and Fake Lotteries, Nigerian Fraud E-mail Gallery, Michigan CyberSecurity – Example of Email Fraud 

This quiz has been circulating during the holidays. I did this three separate times without trying to think over the responses, and got three different results. I’m apparently on the cusp of Superman, the Hulk, and the Green Lantern, depending on the time of day.

You are Superman

Superman 70% Green Lantern 60% Hulk 60% Robin 60% Spider-Man 55% Supergirl 50% Batman 40% Iron Man 40% The Flash 30% Wonder Woman 20% Catwoman 15%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

You are Hulk

Hulk 70% Green Lantern 70% Robin 70% Spider-Man 65% Iron Man 60% Superman 55% Supergirl 50% The Flash 40% Batman 35% Catwoman 25% Wonder Woman 20%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 70% Superman 65% Spider-Man 65% Robin 55% Hulk 55% Supergirl 50% Iron Man 50% The Flash 45% Batman 35% Wonder Woman 20% Catwoman 15%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

It’s been a while since I’ve come across something I haven’t seen before online. Ms. Dewey fits the bill. It is a Flash-based application combining video clips of actress Janina Gavankar with Windows Live search.

As a search application, it’s fat, slow, and the query results aren’t great. However, as John Batelle observes, “clearly, search ain’t the point.” This is search with an flirty attitude, where the speed and quality of the results aren’t at the top of the priority list.

As short-attention-span theater goes, it’s quite entertaining.

If you can’t think of anything to search for, Ms. Dewey will fidget for a while and eventually reach out and tap on the screen. “Helloooo…type something here…”

It’s far more interesting to try some queries and check out the responses. I spent over half an hour typing in keywords to see what would come up, starting with some of the suggestions from Digg and Channel9. The application provides a semi-random set of video responses based on the search keywords, so you won’t always get the same reaction each time.

The whip and riding crop don’t always appear when you’d think, the lab coat seems to be keyed to science and math (try “partial differential equation”), and I’m not sure what brings on the automatic weapons.

“Ms. Dewey” also has a MySpace page with more video clips. The way the application is constructed, they can probably keep updating and adding responses as long as they want to.

I briefly tried using Ms. Dewey in place of Google, as a working search engine, but it takes too long to respond to a series of queries (have to wait for the video to play) and the search results aren’t great (Live is continuing to improve, though). At the moment this is a fun conceptual experiment.

I wonder if we’ll see a new category of search emphasizing style (entertainment, attitude, sex) over substance (relevance, speed, scope). Today’s version might already work for the occasional search user, but imagine Ms. Dewey with faster, non-blocking search results, a better search UI, and Google’s results. It all vaguely reminds me of a William Gibson novel.

“Indexed” features sketches on 3×5 index cards, heavy on graphs and Venn diagrams. If you’re reading this, there’s probably something in there for you. (via Korean Jurist)

See also Gaping Void (blogging / tech cartoons drawn on business cards) and xkcd (math / grad student humor).

It can be difficult to have a lot of confidence in financial statements published by publicly traded companies. Companies built on intellectual property or financial instruments are especially prone to varying interpretation of their finances, but accounting issues seem to plague companies from every industry these days.

This tale was posted by Wavesmash in the comments at Bill Cara’s site today:

Re: how can we ever trust any financial statements at all? An old joke an accountant once told me…

A business man was interviewing applicants for the position of divisional manager. He devised a simple test to select the most suitable person for the job. He asked each applicant the question, “What is two and two?”

The first interviewee was a journalist. His answer was “Twenty-two.”

The second was a social worker. She said, “I don’t know the answer but I’m glad we had time to discuss this important question.”

The third applicant was an engineer. He pulled out a slide rule and showed the answer to be between 3.999 and 4.001.

The next person was a lawyer. He stated that in the case of Jenkins v Commr of Stamp Duties (Qld), two and two was proven to be four.

The last applicant was an accountant. The business man asked him, “How much is two and two?”

The accountant got up from his chair, went over to the door and closed it then came back and sat down. He leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, “How much do you want it to be?”

He got the job.

“Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home…Camelot!”

An amazing mashup of Monty Python’s “Knights of the Round Table” song, with singing and dancing by the cast of the original Star Trek.

If this doesn’t leave you rolling around on the floor, it probably means you’re completely baffled and/or younger than 30 or so.

Try naming the episodes for extra credit…

via The Big Picture

Featuring Kermit, Miss Piggy, and friends. YouTube, via 500 Hats

Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School, was recently considered as a potential replacement for Alan Greenspan as head of the US Federal Reserve. Watch this, and think of how much more entertaining the Humphrey-Hawkins reports could be if Hubbard had gotten the job.

You might also be amused by “Dean, Dean, Baby!”
(not Vanilla Ice)

More productions from the Columbia Business School follies

These clearly demonstrate that B-school students have too much spare time on their hands.

Postscript: I see from this post that it’s actually a close look-alike (student), not actually Glenn Hubbard.

Update 04-28-2006 9:49 PDT – This clip has been making the rounds pretty quickly. They just showed it on CNBC, where they’ve also got the Columbia Business School students who made the video. 15 minutes of fame…

Is Google headed for a downturn? Not only is it featured in a generally negative cover article in this week’s Barron’s, but now it’s featured on the cover of Time as well. These magazines cater to very different audiences, so turning up on both at the same time could be considered a sign that Google is reaching a peak of sorts on both the financial and general cultural fronts.

There’s a long tradition of things going badly for companies and people after getting this sort of high profile magazine cover treatment. If Google turns up next on the cover of People or Entertainment Weekly they’re probably doomed…

Update 02-12-2006 18:31 PST: John Battelle suggests that having made the cover of Time, Google has “jumped the shark”, while Matt Cutts offers a recent historical perspective of Google’s non-shark-jumping behavior while simultaneously demonstrating effective link baiting technique.

I don’t consider myself an expert on shark-jumping, but I do think that hitting the covers of Barrons and Time is qualitatively different than the counter-examples that Matt offers. Google is transitioning out of being loved for being better, new, and whizzy, and into a stage where people expect it to “just work”. Google has gotten large enough that people are developing a love/hate relationship with it (and web services in general) like they have with e-mail, and where the discussion about privacy, media, and commerce is just starting to get some critical attention from people outside tech land.

This randomly turned up while I was looking into something else and will make absolutely no sense to you unless you have played Dungeons and Dragons at some point in your life.

Digital Pantheon

Lawful Good: Steve Jobs (Apple / Pixar)

Neutral Good: Larry Page/Sergey Brin (Google)

Chaotic Good: Linus Torvalds (Linux)

Lawful Neutral: Bill Gates (Microsoft)

True Netural: Peter Norton (Norton Utilities / Antivirus)

Chaotic Neutral: Shawn Fanning (Napster)

Lawful Evil: Nobuyuki Idei (Sony)

Neutral Evil: Steve Case (AOL)

Chaotic Evil: Ruslan Ibragimov (Spammer / SoBig virus)

Original post at LiveJournal, with comments.

See also: Wikipedia entry on character alignment in role playing games.

As financial systems become more automated, there more opportunities for humans to key in an extra zero or transpose a digit or two, with instantaneous results. Last week there was yet another “fat finger” trade, this time in India on the Bombay Stock Exchange, during the first day of trading for Tulip IT Services. Someone offered to sell shares at 25 paise (less than one US penny), a fraction of the market price of 171 rupees (around US $3.80), and found many takers.

It looks like the buyers are going to have to pay the market rate after all, though.

The BSE today said some trades executed at 25 paise in the shares of Tulip IT Services on Thursday will not be settled at this rate.

The exchange said trades executed below Rs 96 would be transacted at Rs 171.15. This means that investors who bought shares at 25 paise will have to pay Rs 171.15 and sellers will get the money at such rate.

A followup article in the Hindu Business Line recaps some notable fat fingered trades, and notes:

However, the record in fat finger trading is still held by a trader of Mizuho Securities, the broking arm of the Mizuho Financial Group of Japan. The trader had managed to sell shares worth £1.6 billion in a local recruitment agency, J-Com, which had just been floated and had a market value of little more than £50 million. The December 8, 2005, “sell” order, was mistakenly placed for 600,000 shares, despite the fact that J-Com had only 14,000 shares in issue. The order had created chaos in the market and had resulted in a 301-point fall on Japan’s main stock market index, the Nikkei 225.

Along these lines, there are some entertaining (staged, I think) cameraphone photos of the Mizuho trading floor over at TripleWitchingFriday (via Paul Kedrosky). More on the Mizuho trade here.

Update: 02-17-2006 12:16 PDT – Various participants in the Mizuho trade are donating 20 billion yen (US $170 million) to a fund for improving Japan’s stock trading system.

More business comics – the latest installment of Googlepark is up at Channel 9 (via Google Blogoscoped)

If you haven’t seen the previous episodes of Googlepark, here are links to the other installments: Googlepark.

Dilbert meets Vijay, the world’s most desperate venture capitalist.

See also: VC Comic Strips, GooglePark

I haven’t noticed getting one of these in my e-mail before:

Becouse of a lot of complaints about our malings
we need to buy expensive balk bullet-prof hosting
for our sites. It costs a lot, please, send us
small donation to:

Nordea Bank AB, Sweden, Surte, SWIFT: NDEASESS
to Isa Dzhabrailov, account number: SE 163 000000000 6510032599

I guess they don’t take Paypal…

Ammazon Mechanikal Truk:

Artificial…um…Real Smart Truk

See also: Amazon Mechanical Turk: Putting Humans in the Loop

(via Turk Lurker)

Andrew Wooldridge has built a web application which will instantly generate a web2.0 buzzword-compliant startup name and concept.

Web Two Point Oh!
Create your own Web 2.0 Company

Below you will find a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!

Hit reload to create another potential million dollar idea

Some of the candidates I got were:

• Rieeent – rss-based dating via ajax
• Riink – rss-based blogs via Ruby on Rails
• zVonowy – community apps via microformats
• Tripkoent – greasemonkey extension for photos via bittorrent
• Tripya – social news on the desktop
• Yahonomodoo – web-based search engine via api mashups
• Tripelihub – social apps via microformats

Just to be safe, he adds an editorial footnote:

Note: this is just a little programmatic satire. Any semblance to an actual company is purely accidental and not intentional! It’s supposed to be funny

Before too long, someone may start to automatically generate examples of these on Ning or something along those lines…

See also: The Cambrian Age 2.0, The Home Pages of this New Era

Catching up on the backlog of paper newspapers in my office, I came across an article in this week’s Barrons about a guy who’s been saving his incoming “hot stock tip” spam e-mail and set up a model portfolio tracker to see how it would have done.

On May 5th, 2005 (05/05/05 spooky!) I set out to determine just how much money I could lose by trusting SPAM.

What if I purchased 1000 shares of stock from EVERY stock tip mentioned in a SPAM email? Could we all really be missing out on a great opportunity?

Of course, I don’t have the money to actually waste on an experiment like this. I made this little web site to keep track of the value of those stocks… without my actually purchasing anything.

In other words I haven’t bought any of the stocks listed here. This is just pretend. BUT if I did actually buy them, this is how much money I could be making or losing as of today.

The model assumes that he purchased 1000 shares of each hot top when it came in. As of this weekend, his theoretical investment of $17,405 would have a current value of $9,897.90, for a net loss of $7,507.10.

The one winner among the 37 stocks in the portfolio is Sniffex, Inc., up 188% from $1.17 to $3.37 since June 27, 2005.

More from thestreet.com

Brad Feld points out this awesome comic series that went by on Channel9 recently featuring Larry, Sergey, and Scoble (among others) as the South Park kids.

• Scoble goes to Google.
• The Inevitable Sequel — the Plot Sickens.
• The Umpire Strikes Back.
• The Conclusion

Update 11-06-2005 19:39 PST A new installment! GooglePark: Disruption
Update 12-19-2005 14:35 PST The Battle For AOL

Update 02-13-2006 18:33 PST The Spaghetti Code