Shyzer.com

In my quest to find a suitable chat software for the freebie forums, I was led to God knows how many different forums on the web. Unfortunately for me, in order to test out their chat software, I had to register on them all and make a few posts before I was granted access to the rooms. In doing so, I was reminded of something that I find peculiar about the Internet.

People love virtual Yes Men.

Time after time and time, I found forums that were dedicated to certain niches and which made little to no effort to bring in people with opposing views. I fully understand seeking out people with similar viewpoints and interests. But making it a closed group of only like-minded individuals sitting around in a virtual circle jerk kind of seems counterintuitive to me.

Auburn University has seven Olympic medals so far, more than India, Brazil, and every other nation except for about a dozen. Phelps swims for the University of Michigan, which means they’d probably rank in the top 5, but unfortunately their athletic site was last updated in July so screw them.

Or how about this. The nation of Georgia is in the midst of an invasion by Russia and has three medals in the Olympics.

Canada has zero. There’s really no correlation between a war and Olympic medals, but it’s still funny as hell.

I don’t mean to make light of the situation in Georgia though. I’ve been absolutely glued to a million different news outlets in an attempt to absorb as much info as possible. I’ll spare the lecture, but I do want to share this amazing Slate article about the cyber warfare that’s going on now.

At first glance most people think of cyber warfare as some futuristic War Games type of fantasy. But it’s not only real, it’s here and it’s effective.

Long story short, pretty much all of Georgia’s main websites are down. Some of the news agencies have moved to Blogger (it says something when Google is the most secure option a company has) and nobody knows if the attack is being coordinated by the Russian government / military, a collection of “hired guns” by the former, or an outright loose coalition of random hackers who saw this war as a perfect opportunity for a little fun.

Needless to say, the latter is the scariest scenario. It’s only a few steps away from a handful of people being able to shut down a country’s entire Internet infrastructure. Think of it like Die Hard 4, but without the crappy acting and shitty plot.

What do you get when you combine Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris, and Nathan Fillion? Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog!

Lucky for you, free viewing is now available through Hulu (of course, that happens THE DAY AFTER I buy the season pass on iTunes, but whatever). There’s no telling how much longer it’ll be offered for free, so get in on it while you still can.

Act 1
Act 2
Act 3

They’ve just announced plans to do a 4th act, so hell to the yes for that! I never thought I’d enjoy a musical as much as this.

While perusing through my Shyzer e-mail account the other day, I wound up skimming through my junk folder looking for a verification e-mail that unluckily and incorrectly was flagged as spam. I wasn’t really paying attention to what all the other subject lines read, but then I noticed Favre’s name out of the corner of my eye. And what, is that Mandela beneath his? Wait a minute…

Now let’s break this down. In the span of 25 messages or so, we get the following headlines:

Cindy McCain Talks About Her Boobs
Brett Favre Signs With Vikings
Mandela Found Dead on Birthday
California Serial Killer on the Loose

Who are they targeting with these?! On my list of people I want to hear and/or see talk about their boobs, Cindy McCain is at number Eleventy Billion, right between my mom and Barbara Walters.

Favre signing with the Vikings is obviously tailored towards me, but why in the world would I want to read something about that? My first reaction to such a headline would be to vomit in the nearest trash can, not open the damn e-mail. And what do they expect me to do upon realizing it’s just spam for a Viagra knockoff? Feel so relieved that I want to rewards myself with a prolonged erection?

Mandela dead on his birthday? What the hell? Why drag the name of one of the world’s most respected men into this debacle? Although I’d be willing to bet most people think he’s already dead, so what percentage of the public would this be effective on? 10%? Lower?

And finally, the serial killer running amok is a nice page out of the major media playbook. “Tonight at 11, tune in to find out what will likely kill you and your entire family before dawn. Also, Skip brings you the latest sports highlights and Phil has the weather!” Lucky for me, I don’t live anywhere near California. So unless he gets a wild hair up his ass and decides to go on a roadtrip, I think I’m safe.

EDIT: I just checked my spam folder again and found these two nuggets of awesome: “Bodyguards Positioned Outside Jolies Vagina” and “Senator John McCain Wishes To Have Sex With Model Heidi Klum; Others” – HAHA. The mental image of the first one totally makes it and the second one only turns awesome with the addition of “others.” Oh come on, tell me! I feel like it’s that news tease all over again!

In my eternal quest to “grow up” in the most absurd ways possible, I’ve begun to purchase music. I still don’t feel bad about freely obtaining music from huge bands worth millions, but the thought of stomping on the head of a struggling newcomer just doesn’t sit that well with me. Who better to give your money to then the guys still playing in dive bars and hole in the walls across the Tri-state area? Fuck, what better people to be friends with, for that matter?

Anyway, I used iTunes for the first few dozen songs I bought. What did I get? A ton of 128kpbs music ensnared by DRM. Nightmare, let me introduce you to Goob and his six computers running three different operating systems all synced with various iPods. You two are going to be great friends.

Then I found Amazon MP3. Better quality (256kbps), DRM-free, and cheaper to boot! I love my Mac, iPods, Apple tech support (I was sent a brand new Macbook battery last week, which is a whole other post altogether), and pretty much the entire efficiency package of everything Mac-related.

Yet Apple needs to realize that sleekness and ease of use are no substitute for superior product and cheaper prices. Just ask Wal-Mart.

Boo iTunes, Hooray Amazon MP3 (even more so if you drink Pepsi and save those codes under the bottle caps).

As the bass guitarist for the rock band The Shyzer Siblings, I can vouch for how awesome this video is. Ok, so what if we haven’t quite progressed from playing on Rock Band to playing real instruments. I still say we could rock into any bar in the tri-state area with our xbox360 and some speakers and give the people their money’s worth. Yes, we’re simply that damn awesome, but I digress.

I’m surprised it took so long for a band to realize that if they wanted their new music video to be a YouTube hit, then they simply needed to stuff it to the rim with Internet memes.

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.

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.

Is it wrong that the only things I can think of after watching the video below is who made the music and what program were the animations made in?

I completely agree with the video, though. As opposed to some of the far out videos I’ve posted on here before, this one takes a pretty fair assessment of the future to come. Just as I’ve ranted and raved against businesses that have yet to figure out how to harness the Internet, I think it’s pretty clear that any individual at this point who doesn’t know the difference between a wiki and a widget is a step behind the pack.

At the same time, it’d be nice if they referenced their facts at the end of the video………