At some point I’m also going to move off DreamHost to my on personal server, but until then …

*looking for round toits*

A forum post: “Hello developer.  I am offering you 1000+ 5 star review on your google play store apps/games.  If you are interested in review then please send to me your whatsapp number …” [or maybe just a scam to get your info]

Gaming the system: for a variation on this re customer support surveys, see my old “A Visit From DEC Corporate” post.

One of the lowest forms of advertising is “clickbait” sites, which FaceBook loves to inject into your feed. My current practice is that if I see a clickbait site’s “promotions” scroll by more than once I permanently block that site.

On rare occasions, in moments of weakness, I will be lured in by a new site that offers “10 Ways to Painlessly Remove Nose Hair” or “40+ Little-Known Facts About Some-Forgotten-80s-Sitcom” or similar nostalgia-invoking titles, where the “40+” means that an infinite number of ad pages will be displayed until your carpal tunnel pain or mind-numbing overload prevents you from making any more mouse clicks.

On one of these journeys I was amused at how far these sites will go in reducing content. I calculated the average screen area of one of these site’s pages: about 112 square inches (5-3/4 inches iPad screen width x 19-1/2 scroll inches).

The actual “content” consisted of a small bland image and a sentence or very brief paragraph, sometimes actually related to the image. This area was typically about 3-1/4 inches x 4-1/8 inch — about 13 square inches.

So, roughly 12% of each page was content. The rest was some minimal site boilerplate and about 10 advertisements. They need to tune their ad selection algorithm, however, because sometimes a single ad was duplicated up to 5 or 6 times (though I suppose that could be intentional).

Fortunately they put the content and the “Next” button near the top of the page, so scrolling wasn’t actually needed to read and proceed — I’m sure that will be corrected in a future revision.

Way back in time, either through mistyping or bad OCR, the “Horn” in “Larry O. Horn” got turned into “Honr”, which led to some interesting mail. That “Honr” became “Honorable”, so I received mail addressed to:

    Larry O the Honorable

with the affectionate salutation

    Dear The Honorable O

For some reason that sobriquet never caught on at work.

I’m also grateful that no one turned it into a play on the movie titled “The Story of O”.

This did remind me that in my high school days I began signing my homework as “L. Olin Horn”. Perhaps I was tired of “Larry”, or tired of people assuming that it was short for “Lawrence” (not my name). Or maybe I was just pretentious.

While I was working at Millsaps, the Olin Foundation funded a new building — “The Olin Building”, of course. I was amused by the number of times I was asked, sometimes half-seriously by new acquaintances, if the building was named after me.

In one of my instantiations as a college student, I lived in a quad with two other Larrys. We solved that issue by me being “LO” (el-oh), one being “Doughnut”, and the other just plain “Larry”. Fortunately the “Hello, LO!” phrase died out rather quickly.

So far, I’ve been spared the variations of “Olan” and “Olen”, and “Horn” getting transmuted into “Horne”, but I figure it’s only a matter of time.

Perhaps it’s the bogus listing I just discovered at buzzfile.com. It claims that I — just plain “Larry Horn” — am an employee of said “tax preparation company” which has been in business at my home address for two years. It even includes my old residential phone number as the company phone.

Of course I can’t change or delete the listing unless I register a login. Riiight …

Just for the record, I don’t run any type of business, neither from my home nor elsewhere.

Personal correspondence:
– Larry Olin Horn (lohnet 2015) <hornlo:FOO:lohnet.org>
– Fingerprint: 8267 80C1 4E42 C842 2531 7C50 35B3 5C3A CFC9 65AD

Business:
– Larry Olin Horn (ptk 2015) <larry.horn:FOO:ptk.org>
– Fingerprint: 2696 A2E1 278E C783 F974 C9E7 ABFD 5366 8564 9882

Personal correspondence:
– Larry Olin Horn (lohnet 2014) <hornlo:FOO:lohnet.org>
– Fingerprint: 6CE1 684B 51FA 154A 3E9F 90E9 CD10 42E5 74D3 FFB3

Business:
– Larry Olin Horn (ptk 2014) <larry.horn:FOO:ptk.org>
– Fingerprint: EFAF 86A6 4B75 C2DD FC6F BC7A 6A9D 2055 2B9D E7CE