Shyzer.com

When I first heard about Color Wars, it seemed like one of those collaborative projects that sounds cool on paper, but doesn’t quite pan out in the real world. Oops. Looks like I should have learned by now never to doubt Ze.

I thought about starting my own team and trying to recruit people from Shyzer and HIF to play, but then I said to hell with that and joined some random team (Team Sweater Vest) that I felt bad for since they didn’t have many players. If anybody else has a Twitter account and loves interacting with goofy and creative people, come on out and play.

I just uploaded a guest post to AdamJCohen.com, one of my buddy’s sites. Since I’ve been lazy around these parts lately, I figured I’d link to it and call it a day. Go read it, it’s not half bad if I say so myself. Possibly best of Shyzer worthy, if I wasn’t drugged up on wine at this point and thusly had the ability to edit it a bit semi-professionally.

I’d originally written a paragraph or two of it for a post here on Shyzer, but that never amounted to much. Go figure, huh? Still, I like it so much that I’m reproducing it here below since I question y’alls ability to click a link and read something on a secondary site. They say write to your audience and I’m pretty sure most of y’all are idiots!

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I’m sitting on hold at 2:30am and have been listening to a variation of elevator music for the past 3 1/2 hours. They really shouldn’t call it 24-hour support if you can’t get support for this long.

Maybe they meant you had to wait 24 hours before you get the help.

One of the cool things about running a site as big as Hey, It’s Free! is that whenever I need a break from working on it, I can spend some time looking through all the different ways people got to the site through Google. I won’t lie, Google is awesome when it comes to driving traffic to HIF. Without it, I very well might have given up on the site long ago. But, as things played out, the Google Gods apparently liked what they saw and started rewarding us with traffic.

The only thing is people have no idea what they’re doing once they go to Google.

I think I’ve written about this before on Shyzer, I’m not sure. I distinctly remember mentioning once how God-awful Clay is at Googling something. I’m mentioning it again simply because I still find it hilarious. If he’s looking for the phone number of a local pizza joint, I’d fully expect him to go to Google and type “pizza call ring ring hello” and then wonder why he’s getting crappy results. But I’ve come to realize that he’s not alone. There are plenty of other people out there who don’t know how to converse with a search engine.

Take for instance the pizza scenario. If I wanted to ask you the number of the local Papa John’s, I’d say something like “hey, what’s Papa John’s number?” and you’d know instantly what I was talking about. Yet try asking Google that very question and you’ll get anything but the local phone number. For some reason, people in 2008 still don’t grasp the differences between asking a human and asking a computer the same question.

For those of you scoring at home, the correct way to ask Google that question is to type your zip code then the business name, so this would be “12345 Papa John”

In other awesome Google news, Shyzer is #3 for “Somebody please punch the free credit report guy.” I love that.

Remember how I went to South America last year and wrote about how horrid Frommer’s Travel Guides are when compared to their Lonely Planet counterpart?

Turns out the guy writing those LP guides made it all up.

A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay…Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

Bravo, Frommer’s. Not only do your travel guides suck, but they are worse than the musings of a plagiarizing drug addict. He could have written about his drugged up hallucinations of magical unicorns mauling evil zombies and ninjas and Frommer’s STILL would have sucked more as a travel guide.

How that company stays in business, I’ll never know.

And just like that, I forget how to post on here again

You might have noticed that Shyzer is looking a bit wonky today and will continue to look this way throughout tomorrow. Why? Because April 9th is the third annual CSS Naked Day, where every participating site strips their theme and any CSS off. I was simply curious to see what Shyzer looked like without my countless hours of work I’ve put into it over the years.

Early verdict? Not all that bad, but certainly nothing fun to look at.

Things will be back up and running correctly by Thursday. Until then, just watch the videos in the posts below over and over.

Two follow-up videos to the one I posted yesterday. They’re done by the same guys and even better if that’s possible.

I’ve always loved stop motion videos. The only problem is 90% of the ones you find are beyond crap because the creators were too busy to take enough photos to make the video look realistic. You can’t have a stop motion chase scene with ten freaking photos, people!

For a guy who knows absolutely nothing about college basketball, picking the five past winners of the tournament has got to be worth something. Next year, I’m going to Vegas.

I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, so it’s probably not in my best interest to make fun of a site that links to HIF.

But….wow. That was a painful experience and I hope that all of you click the link and suffer along with me.

This is a bit of a filler post, I understand that. I’ve once again stretched myself too thin, starting way too many projects that I’ll never finish. Hurray for good intentions and trying to help other people though! I actually sold off two of my old websites that I never really talked about. Facebook Talk might soon follow, as the Facebook-fan site market is exploding and I have absolutely zero interest in continuing it.

The video below might be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.

Oh, and the Mariners still suck. Good times.