If you live in the Colorado front range you have undoubtedly been following the hysteria regarding the sale world series tickets, or more aptly the lack there of. It’s a literal panic out there for tickets and having participated in my fair share of high pressure, high bandwidth launches I must say the Rockies and Paciolan (MLB’s ticket vendor) have botched this one good.

It’s funny because just today, The Times ran an article on just how unreliable web traffic figures seem to be. It’s a complicated problem. Just for this little site I have Stat Press, Google Analytics, Google Ads and a couple log parsing offerings from my hosting provider all giving me slightly different data, derived in slightly different ways. From the best I can tell I average around 20 hits a day, but my spikes are sporadic and quite significant. Predicting traffic is more complicated but there are plenty of tools out there to help so these guys have no excuse. A shout out to the Sponsor Keynote for providing a great third party load testing solution for just this problem.

I’ll be sure to let you know if I get any tickets

Popularity: 6% [?]

Posted on Oct 22.07 to Home, Technology   

New York times has an interesting article on the power of Gossip today, and how gossip stacks up against facts when it comes to making a decision. Here’s a quick excerpt.

If the first player refused to give the money, he’d save 1.25 Euros, but if others found out about his miserliness they might later withhold money from him. As the game progressed, with the players changing partners frequently and alternating between the donor and recipient roles, the players were given information about their partners’ past decisions.

Sometimes the donor was shown a record of what the partner had done previously while playing the donor role. The more generous this partner had earlier been toward other players, the more likely the donor was to give him something.

Sometimes the donor was shown gossip about the partner from another player. When the partner was paid a compliment like “spendabler spieler!” — generous player! — the donor was more likely to give money. But the donor turned stingy when he saw gossip like “übler geizkragen” — nasty miser.
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But here’s the disconcerting news from the experiment. In a couple of rounds, each donor was given both hard facts and gossip. He was given a record of how his partner had behaved previously as well as some gossip — positive gossip in one round, negative in another.

The donor was told that the source of the gossip didn’t have any extra information beyond what the donor could already see for himself. Yet the gossip, whether positive or negative, still had a big influence on the donors’ decisions, and it didn’t even matter if the source of the gossip had a good reputation himself. On average, cooperation increased by about 20 percent if the gossip was good, and fell by 20 percent if the gossip was negative.

This is an interesting concept in the age where Gossip has gone digital, and social computing is emerging as a valid form of exchanging such tid-bits. I find my actions are consistent with the study. I look at news and data all day, but I really pay attention to personal recommendations or warnings.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Posted on Oct 18.07 to Home, Technology   

Well, I decided to end my brief stint in the ad world. I had a good time and an amazing experience working in the agency world but it wasn’t the right fit for me.

I am currently a free agent, so feel free to check out my resume if your looking for a talented developer, producer, and manager.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted on Sep 11.07 to Home   

After a five year stint at a financial software company, I decided it was time to cash in my chips and take on something new. It feels good, and there’s nothing like a vacation with a truly clear head. Seeing as I live in what is essentially a high desert, a trip to the pacific rim sounded especially appealing. I decided first a cascade ski sampling was in order.

I capped it off with a trip to Maui to visit some family and do some island adventuring. Nothing like a vacation from my vacation, and of course the weather was perfect.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Posted on Mar 23.07 to Galleries, Home, Ski, Travel