Sometimes things just make me laugh. Keep in mind that I laughed at a Burger King commercial last night so my bar is set pretty low.

My senior of college we paid a small fortune every month to have an ISDN line hooked up to the house. That ISDN was then run through a crappy old “Hey I’m a router now” computer to allow four different workstation computers access the Internet, such as it was back then.

Oh yeah, it was a fly setup.

Well, more fly than sharing a modem connection, less fly than cable modems and DSL which didn’t exist in our city yet, and a whole lot less fly than a bank-breaking T1 would have been.

We also had a cable TV hook up for two televisions, one in the downstairs living room and one in the fireplace of the upstairs computer room. I realize that a TV in a fireplace probably isn’t exactly Feng Shui but it did sit in the focal point of the room and bring together the post-apocalyptic technology theme nicely.

Anyhow, I bring this up because the other day at home I was sitting on the couch with one notebook computer while my wife was sitting at the desk with another. Both of us were connected to the Airport and were browsing away when I noticed we hadn’t bothered turning on the TV after the kid went to bed. Thinking back to the days when giving up TV would see impossible (I mean, what else is supposed to go in a fireplace) I had this conversation:

Me: Which would you rather give up, TV or the Internet connection.

Her: TV.

Me: That was a quick answer.

Her: That wasn’t exactly the most challenging question in the world.

Back in the proverbial day trading TV for Internet would have been just crazy talk. I shudder to think what would have happened to the parties that we threw, we would have essentially been hanging a Chateau de Geek sign on the front porch. But today with entertainment like available at your fingertips like this:

Or this:

What Really Happened At The X-Wing Launch - Watch more free videos

…who needs TV?

Yes my geek sign is being built right now, but at least it will remote controllable via a web interface. Oh wait, that doesn’t make it any better does it…

So since I was home and not on the road yesterday I got to see Jesse extract some revenge on the team that tried to send him home. It also turns out that old Jesse is apparently the champion geek of giving massages.

Words can’t describe that one.

It looks like all that time we had him debugging socket and stack trace code came to good use. (Work with me here, he won a massage competition for pete’s sake.)

We’ll have to tune in next week to see if he pushes another team under a bus outwits the competition. We are forced to watch, of course, since he refuses to spill the beans on what happened.

Stupid gag orders.

One of the most super fun, navel-gazing pursuits a person can undertake is digging around in Google Analytics. For just the cost a few lines of Javascript a day you too can see all the traffic statistics of everyone who visits your website. While looking at the analytics for this blog the other day I noticed a spike in traffic. Searching further I found the keywords that were leading to all this traffic.

“Jesse Yeary”

It looks like the cast has been revealed for his television show which I’m going to assume has lead hordes of reality TV followers to my digital doorstep. In case they come back do I have a treat for them.

I emailed Jesse after my last post to give him a warning that I was selling him out promoting him and got a quick response. I also asked a lot of questions, questions that I got answers to back in response.

What are the answers you ask? To channel my inner Captain Jack Sparrow, I now know that he knows that I don’t know what he knows about what everyone wants to know. Savvy?

Toward the end of Swingers, Vince Vaughn climbs on top a table at a diner and drunkly yells to the world because Jon Favreau has just gotten a girl’s telephone number. Specifically he says:

“Cause you’re growns up and you’re growns up and you’re growns up!”

You try to feel the same about your interns and co-ops. You try to teach them right from wrong and instill good habits while beating the bad ones out of their impressionable brains. Then one day you have to send them on their way. You pack them a care package, a C compiler and a Mountain Dew, and watch them walk out the door. In the end you hope they succeed.

Or that at least don’t have to program in something like VB.

Or Perl.

Dear god Perl.

It is the rare occasion though that you find out though that a former intern goes on to claim television fame. Jeff said it best in the email he sent out about it:

Recently former TestTrack intern and engineer Jesse Yeary disappeared without a trace for a month. When he returned, he was not at liberty to say where he was or why he was gone.

Over the weekend though, conditions changed. Today I can tell you what I’ve been keeping secret for about a month now (I knew ;)). Jesse will be appearing on the reality TV show Beauty and Geek this fall (FYI - Jesse plays a geek).

“FYI - Jesse plays a geek.” I know good one-liners when I see them and that’s a gem. Best of luck to Jesse, I hope he wins whatever he is supposed to win on the show.

(Does he win a girl? Can you do that? Is that legal? Maybe I need to watch more reality TV.)

All right, today I have a little experiment for you. Open up a new tab or browser window and head over to eBay. I have a feeling that is experiment is going to be very timely, meaning if you are reading this post three years from now it probably hasn’t aged well. That just rewards all the first day readers, all five of you.

Enter the following in the search field and click search:

ps3

Now take a quick look through the first page of results. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

*Checks email*

*Ties shoe*

*Whistles*

Everyone back? I’ll bet it comes as a surprise that there is a pile of PS3’s going for thousands of dollars. I wonder if there will be any buyer fraud today…

What’s more fun to me though is looking through the lower priced auctions of PS3- related (and I use this term VERY loosely) items. For instance:

A .com domain name that has PS3 in it.

What I really love about this one is that it has been “Professionally appraised for $125,000.” This of course has given me an idea for a can’t-miss TV show. I can see it now, in five years PBS is going to start running Domain Name Roadshow, just like Antiques Roadshow. People will bring in 3×5 cards with their domain names on it and the appraisers will give all kinds of back stories before getting to what the people really want, the “how much is this piece of junk worth” moment.

Regular Person: “Yeah I was cleaning out my grandfather’s attic and I found this domain name in an old trunk.”

*Holds up card that reads “playstation2rockstheworldbigtimesuckers.com”*

Appraiser: “Ah, what you have hear is a beautiful example of early 21th century domain squatting. Notice the liberal use of letters and the beautiful, even whimsical, story that is told by the words. Really a fine example.”

Regular Person: “Yeah, that is really neat.”

Appraiser: “Do you have any idea what it would it go for at auction today?”

Regular Person: “I have no idea, but it must have been really special to my grandfather to keep it all these years. I couldn’t see myself selling it.”

*Regular Person’s eyes dart around to see if anyone has bought that line*

Appraiser: “Well, it is a wonderful period piece, but I’m afraid that a domain that long is going to take a very specialized buyer, which is going to drive the price down. That being said, I can comfortably say, after talking it over with the other appraisers, that at auction you could get upwards of 15 cents for it.”

*Regular Person gives stunned look at camera as graphic comes up on screen*

“Domain name worth practically nothing”

Now I just need to find someone in the TV business. I can’t see how something like this can stay off the air for long.