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San Francisco, CA – Terry Childs, 43, is in jail.  It seems that his employer upset him enough for him to cause a little problem on the job.

Did I forget to mention that Childs works (worked?) for the City of San Francisco as an IT Network Administrator?  Because yeah, he does/did.  It seems that after being disciplined on the job for lackluster performance, Childs felt the need to prove that he had mad skillz and proceeded  to set up a master password for the city’s FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) that only he has access to.

According to a press conference with San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris,  Terry Childs stands charged with four felony counts including improper tampering with computer systems as well as causing a denial of service that locks city admins out of the network.

After refusing to give up his own master password and reportedly giving police several fakes, he is being held on a $5 Million bond.  The network is still operational, but concern has been expressed as this network contains sensitive data ranging from confidential official email communications to police records and city employee payroll records.

It is estimated that the damage could end up costing the city millions of dollars, though the extent of the problem has yet to be revealed.

The lesson to be learned here?  Always stay on the good side of your company’s IT people.

S to the E to the O – Listen Hommies (and by that i refer to the people who have a homepage…) – who said rap is only about gangs, money and foul language stuff?

Erasing the name Cingular off the face of the earth is no easy job, especially after investing millions to raise high blue bars at every corner. The wireless carrier’s ads were ubiquitous before evaporating in an instant. Well, perhaps AT&T is feeling some remorse for killing off Cingular, so it’s promoting the creation of new names to express the strength of their cellular. Such is the case with New Sanfrankota*, a place somewhere between New York, San Francisco and the Dakotas, or Kantukornia*, where Kansas, Kentucky and California “meet.”

For their new Where Do You Live campaign, AT&T collects your submissions–via a simple and clean Flash interface at www.attwheredoyoulive.com–and quickly makes fun merchandise available for purchase including shirts, mugs, bags, and stickers, all featuring the name of your new place and it’s motto.  Its a fantastic example of 360 degree online branding; you create their promotional items and then pay for the right to display them!

* Click here for specific directions to San Frankota and Kantukornia, some errant traveler in our company might have already visited there.

I just received a spam email, Unsolicited Commercial Email, which was titled “Faith Based SEO Services.” If you read the email the two individuals seem sincere enough but its still spam, which seem to me to be a contradiction, even with the claim that I opted in.

Well, they’ve done it again. And they got caught – again. When are they gonna learn?

Big business has been producing phony blog sites in promotion of a consumer product – only to be exposed, as both meretricious (of course) but also stupid. The whole maneuver wins no friends – indeed alienates potential buyers in this increasing web-savvy universe.

The latest clumsy fraudster to be exposed is Sony, trying to sell its hand-held game console, PSP, through a site called Alliwantforxmasisapsp, which went live at the end of last month.

But the blog was so obviously fake that visitors immediately voiced suspicions. And finally this week (Wed Dec 13^th) Sony released a statement acknowledging the deception. “Sony Computer Entertainment America developed alliwantforxmasisapsp.com as a humorous site targeting those interested in getting a PSP system this holiday season,” it read. “We’ve now added a posting that provides this clarification to consumers visiting the site.” The company did not comment further.

It wasn’t even handled very well as a trick. The marketing agency that created the site, Zipatoni, first registered the domain name under its own name. Don’t such marketers know that this information is so very easily trackable?

What’s more, the content was all-too-obviously not consumer-generated. One post dated Nov. 22 read, “stick this ad in your girl’s vogue cosmo people who live real simple or your dad’s national maxim geographic sports for men, whoever. They’ll get the point.”

Smells a lot like Madison Avenue to me – not like teen spirit.

The ad accompanying that post showed a downloadable picture of a PSP located amid text that claimed: “This is not an ad,” and “It’s a reminder that… someone close to you wants a PSP for Xmas.”

Since the effort was neither smart nor funny nor edgy, it’s hard to imagine how any genuine bloggers would encourage their readers to print and hide the message in friends’ and families’ print magazines (not such a great or subtle selling technique, anyway, I would have thought).

Plenty of people agreed, and judged the whole effort as simply an insult to their intelligence. The blog’s comments are now shuttered. Sony’s irate consumers, however, aren’t easily silenced.

One enterprising YouTube user, “Babylonian,” created and uploaded a 50-second video montage of the offending blog’s pages. “This is a video response chronicling all the obvious evidence against alliwantforxmasisapsp.com,” Babylonian wrote. The clip, prefaced with the caption, “Sony’s failed attempt at viral marketing,” ends with the commentary, “Sorry, Sony. We’re not that stupid.”

Of course, Sony is only the latest company to be caught trying to pass off corporate phonies as “real people” in peer-to-peer communication. The Japanese-owned giant was preceded by WalMart, to name but one. The retail giant’s effort in October involved its PR agency, Edelman, in creating a fake travel blog called “Wal-Marting Across America”.

Edelman holds a seat on the board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which tries to uphold ethics in this murky business. After the subterfuge was exposed by Business Week magazine, the association urged Edelman to review its blogging strategy.

By the way – I like the nickname such sites have gained: “flogs” (a contraction of “fake” and “blog”). In London’s cockney slang, probably originating among street-vendors, “flogging” simply means “selling”, but with a frequent overtone of “selling over-aggressively”. It’s a usage that likely derives from the notion of “flogging a dead horse”. Big corporations’ marketing departments should take note of this etymology.

Ahh.. baby is born and what better to do than wrap him/her up in a cushy new baby blanket.  BabyBlankets.com is dedicated to none other than; baby blankets

A novel idea for a truely great product… These blankets generally last through childhood and often time become a piece of that childs security.  It’s great to see a site dedicated to the art of gift giving for new borns and we highly reccomend all new borns get their own soft, warm, lifelong baby blanket.

someone pointed this out to me earlier in the week, and i thought i’d share..

On Wednesday of this week (today), at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00
in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06

Beatlejuice, Beatlejuice, Beatlejuice… was the last time i’d heard of consequences for saying a word 3 times in a row. But that was in a movie (Beatlejuice is the name of the movie in case anyone didn’t know). Well, mark March 27th, 2006 as the new ‘last time’… but this is in real life, not a movie. It seems in some far off places saying certain words 3 times in a row actually does have consequences.

Poor Sohela Ansari was lying in bed one night when she overheard her deep in sleep husband say the word “talaq” 3 times. Turns out, talaq translates to divorce.. and if said 3 times in a row the marriage is over.. Unconscious or not.

Here’s the full story

Some interesting quotes for those not wanting to read the whole article:

“When local Islamic leaders heard of the sleep talking, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.â€?”

“The religious leaders ruled that if the couple wanted to remarry they would have to wait at least 100 days. Sohela would also have to spend a night with another man and be divorced by him in turn.”

The following is a quote in the man’s defense…

“The law clearly says any action under compulsion or in a state of intoxication has no effect. The case of someone uttering something while asleep falls under this category and will have no impact whatsoever,�

The funniest part about the last quote is that it shows that “triple talaq” is actually a real thing.. just not when one is sound asleep saying it.