Ryan goes to Fenway! It’s an MS Paint children’s story cautionary tale. There’s something awesome about really, really crappy MS Paint pictures. That, and the use of Comic Sans MS as a font. You can’t really combine unprofessional with unattractive in any other way.

This tale is a cautionary tale to be careful of those blasted sidewalks which pounce on you after a few shots of Jager. Sure, when you’re sober, sidewalks just sit there, but get a little buzzed, and watch out!

Ah, to be a professional MS Paint artist. Now that would be the life.

The digital revolution has completely revamped the way business and personal life are conducted, but with a cost: identity theft is at an all time high. In the old days, the most that people stole was your social security number. SSN theft typically lead to a rash of credit card grievances for the victim, from which they might never recover, as the government doesn’t re-issue SSNs.

As life itself shifts towards the online world, more of your life is up for grabs, and with less difficulty to steal. Nowadays, everything from online banking to message board accounts are vulnerable, leaving a would be victim with so much more to lose. Now, it’s not just your credit that gets dragged through the mud: so also go your name and all your hard earned money.

One of the biggest problems with this is the proliferation of passwords. Before, one might remember basic useful information, like social security number, mother’s maiden name, or *gasp* a PIN. In the online world, however, passwords are king, and with every site out there requiring registration, people are forced to remember more things just to get around. Got email? Got instant messaging? Shop at a few different sites? Read the news online? You can easily rack up several dozen passwords in a short time, and it’s harder than ever to remember everything.

So what’s one to do? Supposedly, you’re supposed to come up with incredibly difficult passwords to guess, and use a different one for each place you go. Somehow, this is preferable to using easy to remember passwords, or even the same hard password. Yet, the human mind doesn’t work that way. Remembering three difficult passwords is okay for the common person. Remembering a couple dozen is not so good. A Microsoft tech manager even suggested that people write down their passwords, which in the security field, is a no-no.

It’s a growing problem. You can’t use unchangeable metrics, such as a fingerprint, because someone could steal that and have access to whatever else is so protected for life (kind of like the SSN issue). You can’t use easy to remember facts, because hackers prey on that, so your favorite pet’s name or first girlfriend are out. You’re supposed to mysteriously come up with complex gobbledy-gook passwords on the fly, and remember them.

The solutions to this vary. Bruce Schneier’s Password Safe is an encrypted place to store all your passwords. Solutions such as SplashWallet allow you to keep your passwords on a Palm PDA. The idea is simple: if you have to keep a lot of passwords, you might as well keep them easily available in an encrypted format, so that you only need to remember one password, and can ignore the rest. This is okay until you find yourself away from the vault, and have to generate a password on the fly. Then it’s back to square one, remembering a password.

Another solution is to generate passwords based upon the site you visit. For instance, if you visit example.com, make your password some hash of the site name, such as take every other letter of the domain name, and add ‘pass’ to the end, e.g. ‘eapepass’. This is a terribly insecure password, but allows you to generate different passwords per site.

Yet another solution is to create a hard to guess password, and then use it everywhere. This is all fine and good…until just one of the sites you’ve visited gets hacked, and their unencrypted back end lets your password rosetta stone out into the wild.

Identity validation is basically a problem that rises at the same pace as identity theft: how does one verify identity, without crushingly difficult usage for the end user? There’s no good solution now, and no good solution in the near future. Until vendors as a baseline of business consider your information as extremely sensitive data and take measures to ensure its security, it’s a bit of a crapshoot as to whether or not you’re safe on whatever site you might peruse.

The best we can do is to be as safe as we can, use as much security as is not too inconvenient, keep a close eye on what information you give out, and wear our tinfoil hats while generating what we hope are sufficiently strong passwords. There’s a real problem with security these days, and unless you want to go off the grid, you’re going to have to make do with what we have. I just worry for the less computer-savvy: no one takes them by the hand and shows them what’s possible. Let’s hope our technology catches up before they experience serious problems.

Mozilla is quickly growing in marketshare, helping fight back the onslaught of IE. While I’m happy for their success, I know that little details like just having the browser work out of the box with Flash will still annoy end users. Another problem is that background music (considered by some to be as annoying as the “blink” tag in web design) doesn’t work either. Anyone who’s familiar with ytmnd.com understands the paramount importance of background music, however. Fortunately, it is fixable, rendering yet another reason to use IE as moot.

What you do is install Quicktime, then adjust your browser preferences to let QuickTime handle those filetypes. This article on Mozillazine provides information on how to do this.

Backwards web designers who refuse to make standards compliant sites by using the bgsound tag, however, will find that their web pages still won’t work. For that, install the BGM Conductor extension, which in addition to translating bgsound tags into embed objects, will allow you to start and stop background music.

Ah, now I can get back to viewing the important pages on the web.

In the old days of the Internet, site stickiness was a key metric. How long did you have eyeballs on your web page? What was the average user session length? At first, it was good to see how long you could keep people there. 5 seconds? 30 seconds? 3 minutes? 15 minutes? Depending on the content, people stayed on your site for longer or shorter periods of time. The theory was that the longer you had people on site, the longer you could show them more ads.

Then, a re-evaluation came. Site stickiness became not good. People who had good site stickiness complained that people were spending too much time on their site. Fresh eyeballs were the new cool thing. By having a steady stream of different eyeballs coming in, you could do short ads, and then get a fresh audience for the same ad. The lower a site’s stickiness, the better (though presumably, longer than 5 seconds).

We appear to have come full circle in our measuring, and now think that site stickiness is good. Keep people on your site, and you can have a good run of it. Sites like Grab.com and MySpace offer a whole world of options to keep you on site, interacting with both the community and the technology for as long as possible. Beer.com’s Virtual Bartender certainly keeps people interacting with the site to see what they can do. (If you for some reason prefer Portuguese, then check out Bavaria Beer’s knockoff virtual bartender. Some quick commands for you non-Portuguese speaking folk: “beijo”, “dança”, “cerveja da bebida”, “foda”, “tira”.) I’ll leave the reader to inject an off color joke about site stickiness here.

We can probably relate this change to improvements in ad serving technology. In the past, ad rotations were limited to showing one ad. It was coded on the page, and changed whenever someone got around to it. Site stickiness is bad then, but no one really thought about it much. Then, ad rotation came into play, so random ads flourished. Site stickiness became good, meaning that the longer someone was on site, the more ad rotation could come into play. Better uniquing (such as IP and cookie uniquing) entered the foray, offering uniquing roughly by user. Hence, it’s not necessary to have the stickiness to show different ads; you can pump through as many people as possible, and let the uniquing take over. Stickiness was bad, because it meant less fresh traffic.

What’s happened now is that contextual advertising is on the rise. So now, ad targeting is much improved. By layering on top of the previous ad serving improvements, stickiness once again returns to good status, by allowing multiple targeted ads to be shown in a session.

On the whole, I think it’s a good thing: the more a site focuses on site stickiness, the better web content must be. Think about it: if a site has content that only has a passing interest, you’re only going to be on that site for a short period of time. Alternatively, if the site has compelling content, you might be on that site for quite a while. For the publisher, getting the opportunity to display more targeted unique ads is also a win. The branding doesn’t hurt either.

The publisher kind of gets dinked in the end (being, of course, the ever pressured and competitive-driven creators of content), but so it goes with any industry. However, it’s nice to know that advertising and consumer interests are converging right now, as far as content goes.

The Canadian National Post reports that recent translations of the oldest version of the New Testament currently available show that the original mark of the beast, traditionally 666, might actually be 616. The world of rock music must be terrified.

People have researched 666 ad nauseum, wondering how the mark of the beast might make its appearance. 616, on the other hand, is relatively unresearched. Here are some facts about 616.

• It’s the telephone prefix code for Grand Rapids, Michigan. I always thought the Michigan Militia must be up to something.
• In this year in history, a shrine was founded on the site that would become Westminster Abbey. All that goth architecture looked evil, didn’t it?
• As with any other freakin’ number imaginable, 616 has been processed biblically, with such useful matches as “The Law”, “The Vengeance of the Lord”, and “The Territory of Wickedness”.
• A Googlism of 616 will turn up even more uninteresting gibberish!

Of course, like its predecessor, 616 can also be tipped on its head, and create 919, perfect for exploitation by modern horror movies. Hollywood, get on it! We don’t really care, but we know you’ll do it anyway.

• 919 is the area code for Raleigh, North Carolina. Meaningful if the end of the world happens in the US.
• There’s a 919 Marketing agency, and as we all know, marketing is evil.
• RFC 919 is about broadcasting Internet datagrams, so the Internet must be evil. (That is, unless most RFCs weren’t about the Internet anyway.)
• When you read publication 919 from the most evil organization ever, you learn how to adjust your tax witholding. Like you can withhold anything from them.
• 919 wasn’t that fascinating a time in history.
• Yes, more Googlism nonsense on 919.

More numerology will turn up, because you can pretty much find relations to anything these days and patterns in the chaos. All you people with 666 tattoos, prepare to get lazed!

The Meowinator! The latest breakthrough in people to cat communication technology! At long last, we have the tools to translate our words into the words of cats!

(Okay, so I was a little bored.)

It’s already getting rave reviews — “I’m speechless,” noted Andrew Teman, “You can use that as a testimonial — I’m speechless.” Okay! With great feedback like that, you can bet that Meowinator v2.0 will be sure to take the world by storm, right after it finishes clawing your couch. Yet another stunning example of what happens when you put the power of technology in the hands of someone who’ll implement anything just because it’s amusing. I fear for the world. Enjoy.

Yes, I know I just posted about the Sony PSP. However, I’ve been seeing the PSP come up time and again. Has the PSP reached critical mass as a content platform? It is, after all, a gaming system, right? Apparently, it’s that and a little more.

Having just shipped 2.97 million units to Japan and the US, they’re at least getting to the point where people need to begin paying a little attention. They project that they’ll ship 12 million units by year’s end. This is not a huge market sampling, but it’s worth investigation. Certainly, due to its hefty price tag, it skews in favor of the higher income market.

Other people are jumping on the bandwagon, though. Atom Films is releasing some films for PSP. The Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” music video is available as a download in PSP format. Heavy.com provides some of their content in format as well. Sony’s been keeping a page of downloadable PSP media on their PSP Connect site, where you can download videos formatted for your PSP. What’s even more interesting is that ABC News is releasing some news segments on that site. Add some RSS feeds tied to auto-downloaders like Videora, as well as a good way to sync, and I think they might have something here: PSP videocasting. (Yes, Videora and PSPVideo9 thought of it first, but they don’t have ABC News.)

Even the movie sites are getting into this. The Fantastic Four movie site provides a secret section with a PSP exclusive downloadable movie. The new Jet Li flick, Unleashed, provides their trailer in PSP format. I guess if Playboy can do it, so can they.

Sony is on the verge of doing something that no one else has done successfully yet: developing a successful mobile content platform. Content distribution, promotion, video casting…this player has the hardware to make it happen, if only they can build the critical mass, and make it simple enough for mom to use. Unfortunately, neither of these two things have happened. Their window is limited, however. Bill Gates may be right when he said, “The phone sort of trumps everything.” Sony has a limited window of opportunity here, provided they can bring it all together.

That’s okay, though — I’ll settle for the games anyway.