First, the video, then the explanation…

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I am quite certain that 15 of the 28 people who show up in a Facebook search for Ooma employees are not, and never have been, associated with the company in any way. Which leads to the question, “why?”. We’re not that cool.

I know you’re in it for the ad impressions and referrals to your horribly-overpriced online store, but when you’re retyping a press release for a new product announcement, could you at least identify the product correctly and link to the goddamn press release. Especially when it includes useful information like a release date and a price.

For instance, today’s little gem is the new Buffalo USB-powered 3-port Ethernet Switch. Note the link to the press release. Note the fact that I correctly describe it as a switch, where you mistakenly called it a hub. This is a difference that may matter to customers.

I’m sure you’ll be selling it at an 80% markup in your store soon, so here’s the Amazon Japan link that’s taking preorders for 15% off with free shipping.

Congratulations on your new implementation of Usenet. That is, “FAIL”.

The Product: Sylvania 20682 CF13DD/E/827 Double Tube 4 Pin Base Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

The “active discussions in related forums”:

• (health) My daughter has ulcerative colitis...help!
• (health) how do you get your wife to lose weight?
• (health) Is Spanking a lovable or harmful form of disipline?
• (health) Are Gays and Lesbians a future endangered species?
• (health) How come it burns when I pee?
• (home improvement) Are energy saver halogen bulbs green enough?
• (home improvement) What your local contractor doesn't want you to know.

I’m transcribing lyrics from an album I found in the discount bin at Kinokuniya, 草原の人. It’s the soundtrack from one of Hello!Project’s musicals, featuring Aya Matsuura and Melon Kinenbi, and the songs are short and mostly missing from the Project!Hello lyrics site.

I’ve done this a few times before, and the hard part is figuring out the names of the songwriters and arrangers. They’re usually printed smaller than the lyrics, and my usual electronic dictionary doesn’t have names. I can get placenames and family names on my Sharp Papyrus, but first names are tricky, and in one case, the reading was so unusual that Enamdict didn’t even have it (知枝 as かずえ instead of ちえ or ともえ).

My fallback solution in such cases is Google, doing mixed searches of the kanji, kana, and romaji until I find a person who appears to be in the correct business. Instead, I found two partial name matches in an adult video titled 巨乳携帯ショップ (NSFW! NSFW!). It’s not what I was looking for, being the erotic adventures of the busty staff of a cellphone store dedicated to support and アフターサービス, but it’s amusing to come across. By the way, the store’s called PAIMOM, from the slang phrase パイ揉み.

(I wouldn’t buy it, because Japanese porn tends to focus on domination, but I might look up the pretty girls in the cast to see if they’ve done anything less explicit)

[Update: Amazon has one that is trending toward five-bladed razor territory for fetish overload: 巨乳女子校生中出し, Volume 4]

Report-processing FAIL:

You are receiving this email because our reports indicate that you have sent users directly to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca or www.endless.com through paid search advertisements that were displayed to users who searched on keywords which you bid upon and purchased in search engine keyword auctions.

Um, no, I haven’t. It would never have occurred to me to try, and I wouldn’t have expected it to work very well. Did you maybe get your report query backwards and send this to all the associates who didn’t pull this trick? Or just to everyone, on the assumption that 94.72% will just ignore it?

I seem to have finally gotten my Amazon profile into a reasonable state, because the top 15 items it recommends for me are: 6 books on grilling, 7 fan-service anime DVDs, a Scalzi novel, and a Grimjack collection.

It won’t last, I know. A few days ago I had to delete 30 “classic horror” films from the list, because my purchase of the comedy film Dead Time Stories convinced it that I loved slasher flicks.

Latest headline on Slashdot:

Mozilla Mulls Dropping Firefox For Win2K, Early XP

Took me a moment to parse that the way they intended…