racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

If you liked the RIAA prank, which I wrote on previously, you’ll like the Credit Card Pranks (part 1 and part 2).

In my lifetime, I have made nearly 15,000 credit card transactions. I purchase almost everything on plastic. What bugs me about credit card transactions is the signing. Who checks the signature? Nobody checks the signature.

Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?

This guy actually has the guts to sign his name in hieroglyphics, among other crazy signatures.

So no one actually verifies your signature against the one on your credit card or on the card companies’ database, eh?

Hilarious!

The RIAA is going to sue you for downloading that bootleg copy of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

Really.

Check out the RIAA prank, an interesting and entertaining series of articles about the RIAA and the music industry, in general.  In the first article, for instance, the author muses on how ironic it is that the RIAA wants to uncover the addresses and contact information of the criminals file-swappers, but they themselves have an unlisted number.

The succeeding articles involve phone calls to recording companies, and even Apple (what, you can’t use iTunes on Windows?), and sending checks and used underwear directly to the artists.

Sweet.

(via DIGG)

Wow! Talk about slip-ups in design. This Microsoft website on the Windows Server 2003 R2 trial features an image with an Apple iBook in the lower-right corner.

Ain’t this hilarious?

(Via DIGG)

Check this out.  The Philippine Blog awards home page features this tagline:

“WHERE FILIPINO BLOGGER GET RECOGNIZED”

Wow.

What about this one, from the Philippine Web Awards (which has since been revised; screencap from IA)?

“View the list of semi-finalist!”

These guys should hire good copy editors.

At any rate, the Philippine Web Awards night will be held this 7:00 p.m.  Two of my colleagues are going: Randy (for ninasoulsiren.com) and Jolo (for the i.PH website).  Good luck, guys!

Cassandra Ponti is the number one search keyword / keyphrase my site has been hit with for the whole of September and for the past three weeks of October.  Interesting, since Pinoy Big Brother has been hitting the Filipino televiewing public like the perfect storm.  There’s great buzz on- and offline.  And there are many bloggers (quite a handful of whom in high regard in the Pinoy blogging community) who are focusing their writings on Pinoy Big Brother.

For those not aware, Cassandra Ponti is a housemate or a member of the Pinoy Big Brother cast (I say “cast” as this may be the more appropriate term than “contestant”).  And to the uninitiated, Pinoy Big Brother is the local version of the popular reality show by Endemol (Endemol homepage; wikipedia entry).  Check out this nifty Wikipedia entry on PBB.

Things are going so well search-engine and traffic-wise that some bloggers have chosen to focus their sites on PBB, like retzwerx.com and showbizpinoy.blogspot.com.  Some enterprising individuals have also set up their own web-forums, like mypinoybigbrother.com.

My only gripe is that you can not vote online–once every two weeks, the audience gets to vote between/among housemates nominated by their peers for eviction.  Yes, I understand the
networks earn a few million (or billion?) pesos from the SMS and telephone voting
proceeds (about 15 to 30% of which goes to ABS-CBN,
the network producing the show), but come on, they earn gazillions from
ad revenues already.  This is super prime time, and they can charge exorbitant amounts for a few seconds of airtime!  Isn’t that
enough?  Perhaps they can also post advertisements on the online voting
portals.  Or maybe their contract with the telcos explicitly prohibit
any alternative venue for voting.

At any rate, traffic from Cassandra Ponti is going great.  Might as well blog about it.  Oh,
if you happen to stumble upon this site, but you were looking for
Cassandra ponti pics, you might want to check out this gallery.  And get this, I hear of even more intriguing stuff about another housemate, Chx Alcala.

Trivia: Fear Factor is yet another “reality” based series produced by Endemol.  Cool, huh?  I didn’t know that.