March 2008 Archives

There are much worse ways to spend one hundred and twenty seconds than watching these three advertisements for John West Salmon. Sure, it's not the best link from a couple of vegetarian / vegan bloggers, but it's a slow news day. Besides, I'm still laughing from that first ad...

According to Wikipedia, I am probably the last human to be let in on this joke.

A user with an especially attractive handle ("bleachedanus") posted one of my blog entries to Reddit. I didn't ask for this, but it was nice I suppose, and it did give me the opportunity to look at some interesting Reddit user statistics.

The story stayed on the "hot" (front) page for about 10 hours on the "overnight" shift, from approximately 20:00 PDT on a Friday to 06:00 PDT the next day. Because this blog gets comparatively little traffic (sigh) I could easily carve out some analysis by looking at the visits to that one page. I'm restricting my number to just the data from the first night (20h to 00h), as that let's me do an "apples-to-apple" comparisons.

The Reddit link produced about 14,500 unique visits the first night. Reddit visitors overwhelmingly use Firefox (68%), with Safari a distant second (17%), and IE (8%) and Opera (3.5%) behind that. Quite a few people also seem to be using mobile phones to read Reddit (2.5%). Most folks are still on a flavor of MS Windows (56%), but Mac OS X (29%) and Linux (12%) have respectable showings.

More interestingly to me, because I could count the number of times that page was served from the web server, and compare it to Google Adsense and Analytics data, I can make some guesses about the percentages of  browsers that use ad-blocking and JavaScript-blocking software.

The Google Analytics numbers are running about 15% behind the web server logs. Since Google Analytics uses JavaScript to track the visit, I'm guessing that means around 15% of Reddit users have JavaScript blocked by default (probably with the excellent NoScript extension, which I also use) or just block Google Analytics altogether. Probably about one-fifth of Firefox users blocked JavaScript.

Comparing the web server logs to the Google Adsense counts is a bit trickier, as I have to discount the 15% of the NoScript users who won't get the JavaScript-served ads. However I think it's probably reasonable to assume that if someone if selectively blocking JavaScript, they are also blocking most ads (I know I do that too). Only 65% of the visits resulted in a served ad. That means that about 20% of Reddit readers are running some sort of ad blocker without NoScript. (Or in other words, about one-third block ads).

Geographically, the results might be a bit skewed as the link was mostly on the Reddit front page overnight in North America. Still, just looking at the 8 PM to midnight numbers, the vast bulk of the visitors are from the US (79%), with Canada (8.5%), Australia (2.8%), and the UK (2.2%) making up most of the rest.

Finally, of the 18,000 new visitors, only about 2% clicked around the site a bit from the initial landing page. If this were a commercial operation, that would stink. But since we're just a little old country blog I don't mind too much. Also, 1.2% of you Reddit folks are still on dial-up lines -- WTF?

or Gray Lady 2.0

I quote from and link to the New York Times a fair amount in my postings. I am not a subscriber of the newspaper, but I spend at least an hour or so a day reading their website.

The Times have done an amazing job revamping their online product from the days of posting a few of their print articles, to the "TimesSelect" subscription experiment, to the current, completely free-with-registration, ad supported offering. But in dropping their pay-wall, they have gone way beyond just going back to "online is a free version of print". The NY Times online is now a much richer experience -- filled with blogs from interesting people, reader contributed conversations, videos and slide shows, and of course the huge archive (the last 25-ish or so years of which are free).

Instead of the website feeling like a minor echo of the printed newspaper, it's just the opposite. The printed newspaper -- when I actually see it -- feels like it's missing something. Both have their place I suppose.

In contrast, I do subscribe to the printed edition of the San Jose Mercury News, but I can't imagine that continuing much longer. The SJ Mercury content I find interesting is the local news and a couple of columns. The New York Times represents a brand I trust and can count on to provide well written, interesting articles. The SJ Mercury News to me stands for nothing but wire reports, one local article about San Jose (I live on the Peninsula -- their coverage of that area has dropped considerably), and not much else. I get all that from the free Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Daily News and Topix.

To me, brand is very important in the news business. I don't live in New York, but with it's national and global focus, the Times is emerging as one of a handful of sources that I generally (though never completely) trust and regularly consume.

The AP reports on the allegedly accidental discharge of the pilot's gun on board a US Airways flight on approach to Charlotte, NC. (Be sure to click on the pictures for extra fun!)

Wow, there's so much fun here I don't know where to begin. First of all, the gun was on the plane legally pilots are allowed to have guns (assuming they have had the proper training). I'm guessing the training doesn't include the part where the pilot says "hey check this out" while playing with the gun... Next, the plane was at 8000 feet on approach. Being at 8000 feet, and being "on the approach" are important, as it means the plane was in a phase of flight that requires complete and total concentration on the job at hand (flying the plane).

This is the so-called "sterile cockpit" rule -- and for US commercial flights this usually means below 10,000 feet. I'm guessing the flight crew was doing their approach checklists, and the conversation went something like this:

co-pilot: "approach localizer frequency 109.50"

pilot: "localizer 109.5 check"

co-pilot: "20 degrees flaps"

pilot: "flaps 20 degrees check"

co-pilot: "autobrake lock. please trigger"

pilot: "Glock. Squeeze trigger" <bang!>

co-pilot: "???"

or something like that.

I sat in a presentation yesterday by Lee Crawford, CEO of twofish.com. They're building a platform to enable others to embed virtual economies into their applications. Judging from the trends I've see with virtual goods on QQ, Gaia Online, Hot or Not, Facebook, and of course games like World or Warcraft, this is definitely a massive trend for the future. Asian countries like Korea, China, and Taiwan have already embraced virtual goods, and they are becoming a staple on both social networks (as Lee says, to give increased weight to certain connections; not all friends are equal) and within games. Here's what Gaia Online has to say about their collectibles market:

Buying Collectible Items is the best investment you can make on Gaia.

Since Collectibles are sold for a limited time only, they usually skyrocket in value. Many older Collectibles are now worth hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Gaia gold.

This month's Collectibles might make you rich!

The New York Times, MS-NBC, The National Post, Forbes and just about everyone else reported yesterday on a study on happiness from researches at the University of British Columbia and Harvard, published in this month's Science Magazine. Subjects were given a couple different amounts of money and asked to spend it either on themselves or others. Here's the money quote (pun intended) from the abstract:

"...participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves."

What amazed me about this story is not so much the conclusion, as one of the three authors -- Lara Aknin. Holy crap my little cousin -- who I remember holding as an infant -- is published in Science Magazine (!).

Next I'm sure she'll publish a study that proves that older cousins who are not yet published in prestigious scholarly journals get depressed when considering the accomplishments of their own lives...  just kidding Lara -- way to go!

The White House press secretary Dana Perino just keeps the laughs coming. Long time readers of this blog (both of you) will remember she was a bit fuzzy on the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- like what it was, when it was, and even (wait for it) where it was ("Cuba, right?").

Now she claims that boys just naturally know more than girls about, you know, war stuff.

Here's the money quote:

Some of the terms I just don’t know, I haven’t grown up knowing. The type of missiles that are out there: patriots and scuds and cruise missiles and tomahawk missiles. And I think that men just by osmosis understand all of these things, and they’re things that I really have to work at — to know the difference between a carrier and a destroyer, and what it means when one of those is being launched to a certain area.

Patriots and Scuds and Tomahawks, Oh My!

This little bit of Javascript demonstrates a clever hack using Unicode characters to generate upside-down renditions of your text.

¡spuǝıɹɟ ɹnoʎ ǝsnɟuoɔ oʇ ʎɐʍ unɟ ɐ sı ʇı ʇnq 'lnɟǝsn ooʇ s,ʇı ʇɐɥʇ ǝɹns ʇou ɯ,ı

While I touted SeeqPod before a good music search engine, I'm drawn to imeem more these days. I like them because it's really easy get a link to each song and share it with friends. Here are some songs I listened to recently:

The Sun Always Shines on TV – A-Ha
Butterfly in Reverse – Counting Crows
I Go Astray – Jason Falkner
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head – Ben Folds Five
The Blower's Daughter – Damien Rice

(OK, this isn't really very interesting or insightful, but I want to see if the reach of this blog can help me with recruiting. I'll let you know in a future post.)

 

I'm currently working at a venture capital firm on a small incubation team focused on consumer-based experiences for the web, mobile, and devices. We are continually working on new ideas; we toss out the ones that don't work (while of course learning from the experience) and pull together a team of entrepreneurs around the ones with promise.

Design is a key differentiator for all of our projects. There are 5 people on the incubation team: a product manager, a designer (me), and three developers. I think it says a lot about the vision behind this incubator that a designer occupies such key role on the team. I partner closely with the product manager to ensure that design is an integral the vision and business model of every single venture we take on. This is unique in the world of start-ups.

Most start-ups don't invest much in the design until they've already gotten their Series A funding, hired a technical team, product, sales, marketing, etc. Our first seed-funded company hired a full-time designer as the 3rd employee—after the CEO and CTO—before they even pitched for their Series A funding. This is very early stage, indeed!

The other advantage to joining a start-up from our incubation team is that you get ongoing support from me (and the whole incubation team) when needed. If you need someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to talk about overall design vision, or even just need some help with some tactical design work, we can help.

If this sounds like the kind of environment you'd be passionate about working in, send me a note; I'd like to talk with you.

·Dave Cortright
 Chief Design Officer
 dave dot surfs at yahoo dot com

P.S. We're also looking for Product Managers, Developers, and even CEOs. So if you have these skill sets and are interested in early-stage start-ups, let me know.

This article points out just about the craziest thing I have seen about Microsoft Windows. I know that Microsoft in
Read the linked article if you're really interested in the details, but basically Windows XP and friends are designed to pretend to be certain kinds of WiFi networks that you might have connected to in the past (a so-called AdHoc or peer-to-peer WiFi network). AdHoc networks aren't that common, but the point is that if you ever tried to connect to one with your WinXP laptop, later on it will broadcast to the world that it is that network.

Then other laptops will see that network, and some will try to connect, and they are then "infected" with this broadcasting "virus." It's not a traditional computer virus of course, just a set of behaviors that spread virally. The most widely spread early names will continue to spread even more because of the nature of this system. Ever see a network called "Free Public WiFi" but when you connect, it didn't work? Congratulations, you are now part of the problem....

This isn't a bug -- it was designed to work that way. Dumb. Now folks with WiFi enabled laptops -- nearly everyone -- try to connect to "Free Public WiFi" and it doesn't work. They are not only spreading the behavior virus, but are convincing themselves and others that public WiFi must be rife with evil people setting up nasty WiFi access points to infect computers with a real virus, and they have just been duped. They tell others "don't connect to open public WiFi networks." Fear of public WiFi spreads, and so it becomes less used and hence less valued and so less valuable, and then goes away.

For some reason I stumbled on the biography of "Dr." John Gray on Wikipedia yesterday. He's the author of the famous (and lucrative) "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" series of self-help books. I put "Dr." in quotes above because it seems Mr. Gray acquired his degree from a diploma mill.

This reminded me of a controversy that erupted in 2004, about Hamilton University -- another diploma mill that counted a senior government IT manager and the CEO of Cessna Aircraft among its graduates. The government official at least had the decency to resign in disgrace. And Jack Pelton (the Cessna CEO) at least removed the degrees from his official biography.

Mr. Gray however continues to publish as "John Gray, Ph.D." and refers to himself as "Dr. John Gray" on his web site.

All this crap is really too bad -- Cessna makes some nice planes under Jack Pelton, and maybe John Gray has a some interesting things to say. I will never trust either of them however, as they both thought it was perfectly OK to lie in a big, big way.

I recently gave a talk on interface design to some Stanford students. Here's the most essential distillation of that talk:

I was taken to iFly—an "Indoor Skydiving" place for my birthday today (thanks Lisa!). It was fun. Since I've never done this before, I was pretty focused getting the technique right. I think I was fighting it a bit too much. My arms got pretty sore at the shoulders. I don't have a tremendous kinesthetic sense. Luckily I could make out my body in the reflection of the plexiglass wall and that helped me adjust and figure out how to tweak my body to keep steady.

I'm not sure I'm going back; I still prefer bungee jumping for extreme thrills. But if you're ever bored and looking for a unique experience, I encourage you to check it out.

Today is Pi Day. March 14, or 3.14 -- get it? Math geeks the world over are explaining that to their friends today (and probably all getting the same "uh huh..." response).

I have a theory. I actually have a lot of theories which I'll share from time to time here, but here one in particular.

I noticed recently that musical artists I like fall into two categories. Those who I like a few songs, and those who I like nearly all of their songs. Of course the latter is a rare artist indeed, and I'm always ecstatic when I discover another. Here is my current list:

• Toad the Wet Sprocket
• Guster
  
• Ben Folds
• Barenaked Ladies
• Vertical Horizon
• Counting Crows
• Jason Falkner
• McFly
• Fountains of Wayne
• Sting
  
• Matchbox Twenty
  
• Third Eye Blind
• Pink Floyd
• Def Leppard
• Peter Gabriel
• Queen
• Abba
• ELO

In fact one thing I did a few years about is to search for misc. compilation albums where these artists appeared with one song, and I found some real gems I wouldn't have otherwise known about: Ben Folds Five doing an amazing cover of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, or Counting Crows equally great cover of Big Yellow Taxi.

Do you have favorite artists where you love practically every song they've done? Let me know who they are in the comments!

coffee this morning
fresh, or left from yesterday?
ack... blech... try again.

Yes, it's true. a long, long time ago in a state far away, I entered this world. And I post for your listening pleasure the most infective viral sugar-coated kids birthday song you'll ever hear. I heard it at my niece’s and ended up buying it off of Amazon because I could not get it out of my head.

To the person who added the following paragraph to the Wikipedia article on hiccups: thank you.

"... Additionally, another respiratory remedy appears to be one of the most effective in treating persistent hiccups. One breathes out all the air that he is able to in one long exhalation then breathes in all the air he feels he possibly can in one continuous inhalation. The person then attempts to breathe in even more air in a series of short powerful puffs, until his lungs cannot hold any more. The person remains in this state for as long as he feels a small gas bubble coming at the very base of the throat, ready to be burped. Although the success rate is not 100%, many people find this method consistently works."

100% of the people in my family that have tried this method (i.e. 3 people) have found it to be immediately effective, every time.

(*) and yes, I know that title can be interpreted at least two ways. I meant "it's better than an old wives' tale."

I'm sure you're all familiar with getting an Amazon (or other e-tailer) shipment that comes with a bunch of marketing pamphlets in it for other totally unrelated products and services. My thought is to apply that idea on a smaller but more targeted scale.

Say you're a band and you're trying to get the word out to people who might like you. Demo CDs are cheap to produce, and you could easily drop them into the shipping package for items you may have sold on eBay. But the odds of someone buying your bread maker would also be interested in your trance-metal crossover soundtrack are pretty small. So get targeted.

Acquire a large number of CDs that are popular enough to sell quickly on eBay, and similar enough to your music to ensure high likelihood that buyers will be interested in your stuff too. Of course for music these days, shipping atoms is not very efficient. But this was just the random example I picked. It could be done for any product you produce that you think could be successfully marketed to buyers of a second product.

Note you can also list items on Amazon's Marketplace. Just click the "I have one to sell" button on the product page.

Phun is a 2D physics simulation "sandbox." That description might not sound like much fun, but Phun is, um fun! It's obscenely interactive -- grab and draw and push and turn all you want. Stuff is always happening. Watch the video demonstration to see what you can do.

It's currently only available for Linux and Windows (I'm running it on my Asus EeePC under Linux of course!), thought the author says a Mac OS X version is "coming soon." Binary only, unfortunately.

This will have a large (negative) impact on my productivity...

If you work in the software development industry, then Getting Real is required reading. It's the most pragmatic process-oriented thing I've read in probably 10 years (back when The Mythical Man Month, Code Complete,
and Is Your Project Out of Control? were the pinnacle of of the thinking on this topic). But the 37signals guys are even more pragmatic than all of that, with great stuff in there like:

Embrace Constraints

Let limitations guide you to creative solutions

There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not
enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace
them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and
force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to
your advantage.

…

What’s the Big Idea

Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app

What does your app stand for? What’s it really all about?

Before you start designing or coding anything you need
to know the purpose of your product – the vision. Think
big. Why does it exist? What makes it different than other
similar products?

This vision will guide your decisions and keep you on a consistent
path. Whenever there’s a sticking point, ask, “Are we
staying true to the vision?”

Your vision should be brief too. A sentence should be enough to
get the idea across.

…

Forget Feature Requests

Let your customers remind you what’s important
…
So what do you do with all these requests that pour in? Where
do you store them? How do you manage them? You don’t.
Just read them and then throw them away.

Yup, read them, throw them away, and forget them. It sounds
blasphemous but the ones that are important will keep bubbling
up anyway. Those are the only ones you need to remember.
Those are the truly essential ones. Don’t worry about tracking
and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be
your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind
you until you can’t forget.

And finally, a great anecdote that I think neatly summarizes much of the thinking in this book:

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to
some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when
people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do [x]?”, “Do you plan to add
[y]?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait – put your hands down. Listen: I know you
have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But
we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about
saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”

If you still have a fax line at home it's time to move on. For the last three or four years we have been using maxemail. For $24 per year (yes year) you get a phone number that receives faxes and sends you a copy as a PDF via email. We just use our regular land line to send faxes, since that's still pretty convenient. It's been rock solid the whole time, and easily paid for itself in a couple of months, since we disconnected the second land-line.

I know that faxes are going the way of the dinosaur, but I suspect they will remain a valuable tool for another few years (especially when dealing with medical insurance, doctors, mortgage companies -- i.e. life).

Somehow (I suspect my father-in-law) we wound up with a copy of the book "Selected Verse of Ogden Nash," (published 1931). It never fails to put a smile on my face. Here's a couple examples:

The Termite

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good,
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.

and

The Rabbits

Here's a verse about rabbits
That doesn't mention their habits.

I think I stumbled upon Jason Falkner through Pandora, and it was a truly serendipitous event. The man is a musical genius. He uses complex and interesting chord progressions in his songs, and they are all unique (no doubt a result of his classical music upbringing). Probably his best one is I Go Astray, embedded at the right. Just look at these chord progressions from the song:

Verse:

C     G/B     Am     Dm     E7     Am
A7    Dm   D7   G7     Am    F#dim...

Chorus:

C    F    G    Ddim7    A    D7
Dm7    G7     Am    (G-A-B)

OK, maybe a bit meaningless to some of you, but trust me, if you look at most other pop songs out there, they have a lot fewer letters involved.

The AllMusic Guide got it right for him: start with his debut album Presents Author Unknown, then it's a toss-up between his second album Can You Still Feel? and his latest I'm OK, You're OK. Unfortunately the latter is a Japanese import, so it's pretty damn expensive. But I think it's worth it.

David Pogue of the New York Times wrote an article last month about the good, the bad and the ugly of product design. In particular he reviews a variety of digital picture frames, but his comments apply to just about any consumer product design.

However one thing irks me a tiny bit about Pogue's comments: he never quite says it (and I don't think he truly believes it), but he sure implies that good product design is easy.

So I think we've established that it's easy to know what's right. ... The only question, then, is why manufacturers don't actually bother doing what's right. I’m sure they have all kinds of excuses for compromise: "That would cost money," "That would set us back a month," "That would limit sales in Eastern Europe," whatever.

But earlier in the article he hits are the real truth of the matter:

A ten-year old could have identified the design flaws in the frames I tested this week.

Aha -- that part I believe. I too know good and bad design when I see it  -- at least for products I can imagine using. Creating a great design from a blank sheet of paper is hard. That's why I have such respect for my co-bloggers here. (There may be other reasons too, but the checks haven't cleared yet.)

This Best-of_Craigslist post made me laugh out loud:

i almost crossed the street ...before you hit me with your car. i guess it's not exactly a "missed" connection. i figure i don't have much else to do here in my hospital bed so i'll write you a little note and let you know what i was doing out there alone in the middle of the intersection. basically, i was trying to get to the other side of the street. then i saw you: starry-eyed, entranced with whoever you were talking to on your cell phone. i wished it was me on the other end of that line instead of under your car. i wish we could've met some other way or even at all for that matter. i don't blame you for just driving away; not noticing the unconcious speed bump that loves you. you're not ready for this and i'm not sure i am either. i do know this . . . if you're interested maybe we could meet up next month when i'm released and i could help clean up some of the blood i think i might have accidentally spurted onto your vehicle. maybe we could get dinner or something. i'll drive.

PurposeGames is nice site hosting Flash games, mostly of an educational and trivia nature. They range from  a massive list of geography quizzes to parts of automobile engines to the "greatest album covers of all time" (for those of us old enough to remember "albums."

Even better, the content is user-generated, and all the games seem to tie into a big high-score database. Unfortunately several of the games I tried seem to be just slightly too big for my Asus EeePC screen -- though they are still playable with a bit of scrolling.

Don't expect to play any of the games on your iPhone though....

Microsoft Research has developed a piece of software called MySong that will automatically generate a chord progression that accompanies any given melody. Check out the video for a demo.

It does a reasonably good job, but it's not going to generate the next big hit.Still, it seems like an interesting tool for people without the song-writing skills to do something unique for loved ones, or even for song-writers to use as an input or starting point for writing a song.

I'd love to see this in a future version of GarageBand, or whatever the Microsoft equivalent will be. And of course, I for one welcome our computer music generating overlords.

In the spirit of posting something every day, I give you another in the FAIL series—FAIL Dogs!

Following up on Dave's post about a "name the countries" game, here is another geography game. This one comes courtesy of everyone's favorite German national airline Lufthansa (and via my mother-in-law, who told me about it). How well can you identify major European cities on an unlabeled map? What if the map shows only national borders? How about a map with no cities or borders drawn at all? You lose point if you're off by more than about 10 miles. The bigger the error, the fewer the points earned.

Just to lay down the challenge, my best score out of about five or six games is 26,755. 29,271. 29,370! :-P

An interesting perspective on the Microsoft takeover bid of Yahoo!. It reënforces the theory of my collaborator, Phil, who asserts that great vision can survive poor design*, but great design cannot save poor vision†. From the article:

Designers and enlightened business thinkers alike are fond of touting the strategic importance of design, the competitive edge that a strong design sense can provide to a business. I’m a believer in that logic, but given Yahoo’s less than flattering position as an ailing company subject to the whims of stronger players, I have to ask: “did design make a difference?”. Yahoo had a very good design sense. Actually, Yahoo had great design sense. And it apparently didn’t help them.

* e.g. plentyoffish.com
† e.g. WebVan

I'm about halfway through reading Bertrand Russell's amazing and voluminous A History of Western Philosophy. Philosophy in general and the history of the evolution of thought has been a blind spot of mine. I blame everyone except myself of course -- my teachers, college requirements, family, cat, etc. For some reason nobody told me that it might be important to study how people think, and know, and know why they know.

I discovered this blind spot by reading Karen Armstrong's The History of God (which is also a great book that I will comment on in more depth in another post). Not surprisingly, it turns out that thinking about the supernatural is just another kind of thinking; and that how we think about things like knowledge is influenced by, and a part of how we think about our relationship to the universe.

That all seems like a complex and not-so-succinct way of saying that I believe we could all benefit from reading up a bit on philosophy in general, and the history of philosophy in particular. It's been said that "there's nothing new under the sun." While I don't think that's quite right, it's probably not too great an exaggeration to say that any interesting thoughts you have, so did Plato or Socrates 2000+ years ago.

Russell's book is a great read because he takes the time to explain the history of the times in which his subjects were working. However is does go on and on. Rumor has it that he wrote all his books essentially in one pass -- churning out the complete text in long hand and then sending it off to be published. True or not, it could use with a bit of editing. A much more succinct account of a similar topic is Richard Osborne's Philosophy for Beginners. It takes a comic book (or "graphic novel") approach to the same topic. The two books could not be more different in their approach, but each is greatly valuable and enjoyable.

A new meme is sweeping the Internet, and it is FAIL. The concept is simple. Take a picture of a pretty bad mistake—ideally at the exact peak moment of maximum suckiness—and put a big bold “FAIL” label on it. FAIL blog is the dedicated source, but you can see them other places like Uncov, LOLcats, and more.