Over at cricketschirping, old boy has stumbled upon a new and fantastic Web 2.0 ideavirus meme. You just fill in the blanks to “It’s like blank, but for blank instead of blank”. This is something like a wacky start-up elevator pitch gone madlib. I offer my following creations to the Lazyweb.

• It’s like catnip, but for the elderly instead of helldogs!
• It’s like Hobnobs, but for squirrels instead of the corpulent!
• It’s like the Internet, but for pensioners instead of the underemployed!
• It’s like IRC, but for your phone instead of your computer!
• It’s like VOIP, but for a grapefruit instead of an eraser!
• It’s like Cheezits, but for weimaraners instead of octogenarians!
• It’s like Ruby on Rails, but for mathematicians instead of the incandescent!
• It’s like elevators, but for anthills instead of buildings!
• It’s like Captain A.H. Bogardus, but for Jenga instead of shooting glass balls!
• It’s like a shovel, but for candy corn instead of dirt!

According to Ruby on Rails it is. WTF!?

irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> require 'active_record'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> Inflector.pluralize('feedback')
=> "feedbacks"
irb(main):004:0>

Discuss.

You can subscribe here: .

I went on a new book buying rampage yesterday using Rachel’s mom’s credit cards. I love consumer products like a hungry man loves a basket of wings (also a consumer product).

AWDwR2
Purple Cow
Dreaming in Code
Derrida (DVD)
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Within the past two days, I found a torrent of the big Derrida thing that I’ve been searching for and learned that The Bad Plus’s new album, “Prog” comes out on Tuesday, May 8th. Unfortunately, TBP are releasing preview songs through myspace (the Chernobyl of websites). Derrida would not be pleased at this turn of events. That’s not quite enough to keep me from buying the album though. I still consider Dave King one of the good guys ever since he signed my copy of “Blown Shockwaves and Crash Flow” outside of the Blender bar in 2004.

The idea of trying Nicorette has always appealed to me. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, but I’ve always wanted to try nicotine gum. For a while in high school, I plotted with one of my delinquent friends to see what would happen if we put nicotine patches all down our arms, chewed Nicorette and smoked three cigarette all at the same time. Nevertheless, due to lack of initiative and courage, this little stunt never came to fruition.

So, at the new place, I’ve been watching a jubilant young coder from New Zealand named Jonathan Gifford fight off his bad smoking urges using Nicorette. Feeling my oats, I asked him for a hit after lunch today. He obliged and broke a piece of the nicotine-laced confectionery off the blister pack, adding “knock yourself out, kid”. I unwrapped the gum and started chewing . Mmmmm, minty! Jon then started on about “seating” the gum between my lips and my gums for a while, chewing and then reseating. I did this for about thirty minutes or so, it had no effect on me whatsoever. Around this time, Jon let Jochen, the spry German CTO of the company, in on my experiment. Jochen warned me that this wasn’t going to turn out well. I scoffed, “Nicotine is just like caffeine, THEY’RE BOTH AMINES!”. He shot back, “So is strychnine!”. This blew my mind.

One hour into the ordeal I had to fax a letter. I got up off my chair, but felt rather light-headed and stumbled. No one noticed though. As I was walking, I started to sweat more profusely than George W. Bush at a math test. Then, I felt the familiar pre-heave, just-stepped-off-the-merry-go-round loss of equilibrium. I bee-lined for the bathroom and hid out there for about twenty minutes hoping that this episode would subside quickly. It didn’t. I stumbled back to my desk, with Jochen quipping, “you look green, man!” He and Jon were both laughing at me as I resorted to using one of my running towels to soak up the gallons of perspiration leaking from my pores. This was my body’s way of punishing me for being retarded.

After about 10-minutes of being berated, I made a second trip to the bathroom and donated about $20 worth of Henry’s Hunan to the big white telephone. One month in San Francisco and I’m already tossing my cookies on the 16th floor of a skyscraper in the financial district. How far I’ve fallen. I waited for over a year before heaving-on-the-clock at IBM. Finally, I declared defeat, left the bathroom, picked up my Macbook and what little dignity I had left, and headed home. Later on, the CEO got wind of my calamity and sent an email that read, “I know you are interested in having life experiences, but come on!!”.

So, I moved out to San Francisco last month, and lo and behold I come to learn that Wilmer van der Gaast and Andrew Grimm followed me out here. I hadn’t seen Andy in something like seven years, and I’ve never seen Wilmer before because he’s always lived in Europia. Wilmer finally smuggled himself out of that dreadful land of castles and dragons in a shipping container. A few months later, he wound-up working for the Google! They’re busy indoctrinating poor Wilmer over at the Googleplex with free ice cream, GFS internals, and a new regime for living that will optimize how fast he can transform coffee into code. Once that’s finished though, we’re going to boostrap a Web 3.0 startup that will monitor and control all folksonomies and taxonomies through a most powerful ncurses interface to the semantic web.