Ask and ye shall receive, Dave.

Exhibit A :

Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. Well, as long as you're here, let me tell you about term life insurance.

You see, ever since Julie died, the funeral bills have been piling up. If only we had gotten this life insurance sooner.

Exhibit B :

Oh, darling, what is that you've put into the shopping cart? All new Smart Shakes? But those can't be good for you! WHAT? THEY ARE? They're packed with vitamins and anti-oxidants? That sounds great. Let's get 2!

These are two examples of lazy marketing. Some people refer to these as the "idiot nets" because if you just scoop these through late night TV, you are bound to catch a few easy sales.

So what does this have to do with all of us? Today, I was the recipient of the following "idiot net" email. I have crossed out the names to protect the guilty:

"I was reading your blog today. It was super funny. Tough break about the AOL thing. That 850 would have been nice to have. I have been to Chicago but I have not yet been to Montreal. Chicago was great so I can only assume that all the stories about Montreal are true. I wanted to check it out for UFC but the tickets sold it in like 20 seconds. Ah well, what can you do.

My name is ---- and I work for -----, a word of mouth marketing company in Toronto and we're looking for people in Montreal to try out a new ipod charger. All that we ask in return for you testing it out is your feedback. Hopefully you own an ipod and can get use out of a charger.

If you're interested you can check out ----- or you can email me back at ------.

Alright man, keep writing your blog, it's really funny. Take care,

-----"

After reading the email and clicking-thru to the website, here is the juice of that:

Is this you?

* Live, work or go to school in urban Toronto or Montreal
* Between the ages of 18-35
* Commute daily or travel long distances for work or school
* Own and regularly use an iPod
* Are active online and an outgoing social connector online and offline

What’s the catch?

There is no catch - all we ask in exchange for the ---- is that you use it as much as you can, show it to all your friends, talk about it whenever the opportunity arises, and provide us with your honest feedback about your experience...

My initial positive thoughts:
1. His grammar, though not great, is passable.
2. He obviously has a grasp on how to google "iPod + Montreal + blog".
3. He has proven to me that he has at least read the first post of my blog.
4. He also seems to be a very trusting person since he equates my former residence in Chicago and current status in Montreal as somehow validating the idea that "Greatness of (CITY) = truthiness of stories about (OTHER CITY)" and that is a good thing.
5. There is no catch! They say it right there! That's a huge relief.
6. He thinks that I am an "outgoing social connector" and is correct.

My initial negative thoughts:
1. It's some crappy corporate scam.
2. He is a jackass.

What do you think? Should I do it?

St. Patty.

So here we are. One more St. Patrick's Day down the drain, and I still don't have long-flowing red locks.

So it turns out that AOL was actually buying some shitty MySpace-ripoff website, so I am not going to see any part of that sweet sweet $850mil. Incidentally, if anyone knows about a good tattoo-removal service in Montreal, I may have (in all of the excitement) gotten a tattoo of the AOL guy on my head.

Hey, don't judge. You never know how you will act if you think that you're getting almost a billion dollars from this guy:


Yesterday, Kat and I experienced a first. It was our first neighbor complaint. I was in the kitchen cooking us some nice little pasta for dinner, when suddenly there is a knock on the door. Kat answers and says some gibberish in French, and then comes back and says that the guy upstairs asked if we could open a window because the garlic was bothering him. Apparently, we live directly below a vampire. An asshole of a vampire.

I have always imagined my first neighbor complaint to be over something silly that I could easily explain away and gain a nice friend out of it. "Oh, I'm sorry. That loud sound you heard will never happen again because that was me beating up a burglar. You're welcome for making our building safer." I would say. And they would love me.

But instead, we get Dracula in 3E with the sensitive olfactory. And he's not here because I just bested a would-be robber in a game of fists. He's here because he sucks and wants to piss me right the hell off.

Mission accomplished. I think I will fry up some garlic and then go suplex his Transilvanian ass.

Gettin' ready for some cash.

As some of you may know, I am expecting a great amount of cash in my near future. Like, specifically, a shitload.

You can read all about it here.

To give you a little sampling...

"The Time Warner-owned Web pioneer said Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Bebo... for $850 million."

Whobuntu?

So now that midterms are all, mercifully, over, I turn my attention to what matters most - anything that isn't midterms.

When I was recently in Chicago, I was having a problem with my computer because of something or another and every time I typed, it would skip like every 3rd keystroke. It was the most annoying thing that I could imagine. Actually I can think of hundreds of things more annoying, but that doesn't quite have the same punch, does it? After evaluating all of the possibilities to fix it, I naturally took the most drastic approach - I installed a whole new operating system.

That's right. I've been a non-Microsoft Windows user for a bit over a week now and, my gosh, is it fantastic. What I'm rockin' now is Ubuntu which is a type of Linux. It's something that I've been thinking about for a while and I'm very glad I did. The community-driven principles are something that I wholeheartedly believe in.

The irony is that I have a bit of a history of making fun of Linux users and computer-nerds alike. They are generally ranked just above Republicans and slightly below art-school students in terms of groups that are both easy and gratifying to make fun of. And, like all good Windows-using, Democrat-voting, business-school students, I basked in the itty-bitty perceived moral superiority I had over the "others".

So, when I finally bared my soul to Kathryn and told her that I was going to be switching my digital allegiance from the safe Redmond umbrella of non-geekdom that I have cowered under since I first used a computer to the masses of Open Source geeks, nerds, long-hairs, 1337 h@x0rZ and the like, this was her response:

"So are you going have to make fun of yourself now?"

Well played, m'lady. Well played indeed.