Interesting

Oldie: the salesman

A young guy from Saskatchewan moves to Vancouver and goes to a big ‘everything under one roof’ department store looking for a job. The Manager says, ‘Do you have any sales experience?’

The kid says ‘Yeah. I was a salesman back in Saskatchewan .’

Well, the boss liked the kid and gave him the job. ‘You start tomorrow. I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.’

His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down. How many customers bought something from you today?

‘Just one’ says the kid.

The boss says ‘Just one? Our salespeople average 20 to 30 customers a day.
How much was the sale for?’

The kid says $101,237.65’.

The boss says ‘$101,237.65? What the heck did you sell?’

The kid says, ‘First, I sold him a small fishhook. Then I sold him a medium fishhook. Then I sold him a larger fishhook. Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the
boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4x4 Expedition.’

The boss said ‘A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a BOAT and a TRUCK?’

The kid said ‘No, the guy came in here to buy Tampons for his wife’, and I said, ‘Dude, your weekend’s shot. You should go fishing.’

Stephen King Reads Shining Sequel

Last September, Stephen King announced he was writing a sequel to The Shining, entitled Dr. Sleep.

King has read an early excerpt from Dr. Sleep before, but he recently unveiled the beginning of the book during an appearance at the Savannah Book Festival.

Dr. Sleep pits a grown-up Danny Torrance, now working at a hospice facility and using his mysterious powers to help the terminally ill comfortably pass on to the other side, against a group of psychic vampires called The Tribe, who want to feed on his supernatural energy.

Danny also uses his powers to bet on horses, something he learned from Dick Hallorann — the chef who died in Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining, but survived in King’s novel.

King said in November that he had finished the first draft of Dr. Sleep, but he hasn’t yet announced a release date for the Shining sequel.

[geektyrant]

Non PC Billboards

Being president is like running a cemetery: you’ve got a lot of people under
you and nobody’s listening

“

—	President Bill Clinton

Geeks and Repetitive Tasks

Disabled? Josh Dueck, a Canadian alpine skier who became paralyzed from the chest down after breaking his back on a ski flip in 2004, returns eight years later to attempt the first-ever backflip on a Sit Ski.

[thd.]

Random thoughts: Collecting Flags Expeiment (1). By Ron Barak.

A few days ago I added the FlagConter vanity to the bottom of my Tumblr page.
The global distribution of my blog’s visitors is quite uniform, and tend to cluster around specific geographical areas.

This led me to thinking: could someone somehow manipulate Tumblr and thus gain visits from unusual places?

So, experiment time: I wend to the Canada page, which now looks like so:

4. Canada9June 12, 2011 Province/TerritoryUnique VisitorsLast New Visitor 4.1.British Columbia5June 12, 2011 4.2.Ontario4June 10, 20112 out of 13 collected.

and found those provinces/territories that I have no visitors from. Of these, I chose the least likely to contribute visitors (based on gut feeling of disparate interests and spoken language), these are: Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon Territory.

I decided to enter tumblr tags that would be interesting to people from these places, so - went to Google News, and these are the four top stories for each place:

Prince Edward Island

Quebec

Saskatchewan

Yukon Territory

The first experiment was to just create tags based on the above headlines, without looking inside the news and then letting the page “simmer” and come back to check 24 hours later.

The tags I created are:

And we wait.

P.S.: my apologies to the good people of Canada who were dragged into this experiment without their consent. Maybe some of my other postings would be of interest to you anyway (look for the humour tag) and compensate.

New jobs don’t budge unemployment

Fight over retirements spoils sparkling record

PEI fisheries minister decries budget cut to DFO, saying it will …

Orthopedic service demands expensive: Health PEI

Volunteer cleanup effort in Quebec flood zone continues

Thousands volunteer to clean up Quebec flood zone

How Quebec’s massive mistake may cause big power vacuum

Defections shake PQ to the core

No deal for teachers after week of mediation

Saskatchewan Roughriders practice in Saskatoon

BC man dies in car-surfing stunt; driver arrested

1 dead, 1 missing in northern boating accident

Killing wolves ‘biologically wrong’

Drilling has commenced at Radius’ Sixty Mile Project, Yukon Territory

True north’s allure is strong in the Yukon

Century-old remains of convicts executed during Yukon Gold Rush buried