garry’s subposterous

At least several hundred mile-junkies discovered that a free shipping offer on presidential and Native American $1 coins, sold at face value by the U.S. Mint, amounted to printing free frequent-flier miles. Mileage lovers ordered more than $1 million in coins until the Mint started identifying them and cutting them off.

Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.

Wow, what a scam. Even better than buying pudding for airmiles.

Stradivarius made c. 10 violas. 8 remain and only 2 are playable. One of these, the "Archinto viola", is coming out of a museum to be played at the Proms in the Tippett triple concerto in 2 weeks. It's the first time it's been played in nearly 10 years.

The podcast features Philip Dukes, Britain's top concert viola player, who will be one of the three soloists in the piece at the Royal Albert Hall. It compares the sound of the Strad with that of his own viola, a modern Japanese/American instrument and allows listeners to try to tell the difference. Peter Kingston reports. (13mins 33s)

Listen

The Stradivarius actually sounds like it has more body. Amazing.

A fun quote from the earlier days at Google -- it's from a "letter to the editor" at the Wall Street Journal, in response to their "Boom Town" column about Google:

J. Claude Tenday writes: Old habits die hard. For Sergey Brin to expect to grow a $100 billion/year business from an obscure $60 million/year niche player in an already mature Web-search market shows that Mr. Brin is still California dreamin'. And for the Wall Street Journal to take him seriously shows reporters may still be prey to dot-com hype!

They had 39 young heterosexual men drive both "a 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet estimated to be worth over $150,000" and a "a dilapidated 1990 Toyota Camry wagon having over 186,000 miles," each for an hour, split evenly between city and and highway driving.

Maybe consumerism is more of a drug than you can possibly imagine.

Hat tip @andrew_chen

Grew up ENTJ, then became ENFP in college. I think the big flip was becoming more humble. If you're ENTJ, you know you are better then other people. After college, I realized there are people who are better than me at most everything.

It's interesting to note this only measures whether someone is *identified* as gifted as a child. Maybe it's a mix of that extroversion and openness that causes ENFP's to be picked out by teachers. Weird to see such variance though!

We nanotargeted more than 125 niche groups, with more than 1,000 pieces of creative, for less than $100,000. On Google alone, an acquisition budget of less than $20,000 got us more than 20,000 clicks, 5,500 active e-mail sign- ups, and more than 2,500 donors. We were able to reach persuasion niches (this is akin to someone opening up and reading a mail piece) for a fraction of a penny per impression, and less than 50 cents per interaction.

They targeted geographic and demographic niches online.  They tested messages to see what worked best.  Here's an example:

In real terms, Minnesotans who were searching for cheap gas or researching fuel-efficient cars saw ads about Franken’s plan to lower gas prices.

They worked on every conceivable niche group with online ads tracking what worked and what didn't.  What ads convinced viewers to click on them and view the message from the campaign.  What messages from the campaign convinced viewers to donate and/or volunteer.

So the long tail is real and so are online ads? Neat.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings.

Wow, this would be brilliant. It would also give a lot of engineers reason to get paid more to make sure the site works fast.

And any idea that gets engineers more money, I'm for. Woo.

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

At posterous we are doing 3 day a week in-the-office, 2 days from home. Less interruptions = way more coding time. I pulled an all-nighter and got some gnarly architecture work done yesterday that there is NO way I could have gotten done in such a small amount of time if I knew I had to live on a normal schedule and get into the office the next day!

He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks. With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance.