Lessons from Amazon referrals

For the first time in a long time, I've had a quick squiz of my amazon referrals. And I was met with just a few little surprises.

Someone, somehow, bought a 'thing' called Playboy - Women of Starbucks [NSFW] after reading the 'geek.

Now if I can believe amazon then this is a piece of film media which features barrista-ladies in mininal, or, more frequently, entirely absent, clothing, who are linked by a common place of employment: the afore-mentioned bucker of stars.

Now I am certain that i didn't recommend this particular work of cinema. If you know me at all then you know of my disdain for bad coffee. (apart from the beloved Nescafe Granulated FoodService Blend of course).

I've also been perusing the refunds that have happened at Amazon via the old secret geekiness.

Someone, somehow, thanks to this very site, bought a paperback called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later returned it. Sorry dude, but we could've guessed from the name that it weren't worth the shippin'.

But the real shock belongs to the only other return:

Someone *returned* a copy of Joel on Software!

What a fool! I'd expect people to donate extra money just to indicate that this book was worth triple the postage and quadruple the cover price. And then some.

That's a pretty strong protest from me. You know that i hand-write all my html. And you'll notice that i surrounded the word 'returned' (above) with not only asterisks, but an <em> and a <strong> tag as well. Thus you can tell that this is true, Raw emotion speaking to you. The sort that hemingway and shakespeare only shared on a particularly warm day.

JOS is a brilliant book -- i constantly find my self spouting opinions as if they are my own; only to find they either come from JOS or from The Best Software Writing I. The guy in the next cubicle said, just today, "Do you mind if i take this home?" meaning, Joel on Software, "it's good isn't it?"

In other news: leaked information about yet another new thing from Google: it appears that they too will be leaping into the adult content market.

I suppose that with their unfathomable statistics about what people are really surfing for, they have a better idea about where the next internet boom is going to be than any number of etech conferences.

Expect to hear more about this in the next week or two. Very hush, hush for now.

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