Strangeness in Advertising

Today as I was checking my email at Yahoo! and I noticed this advertisement from home builder Centex:

Take a good look at the family in that picture. It is a rather tan and rather obviously not Japanese family wearing kimonos standing in front of what

appears to be some wood, perhaps the wood frame of a new house.

I have to wonder what they expected me to think. "I'm a tan person who is obviously not Japanese. My

wife, three daughters and I are all out of space to store our Kimonos in our current house. I will see what Centex homes has to offer." That just

seems like they are targeting a rather narrow demographic there.

Yeah, more likely someone just searched some image database for "family" and picked the first image that showed up and pasted the family over the

picture of wood. I wonder if it was outsourced to some country where people don't know what families look like in the country Centrex sells homes.

Something about it bothers me.

New Useless Feature Added

I added that Twitter thing over on the left. I was going to make fun of Twitter and go on about how silly it is, but lots of people have done as good a job of that as I could already. I kept reading about Twitter in the various forms of geeky Internet media I consume. Eventually I didn’t feel like I had a choice, and I opened an account. I messed around with the API a little, although I didn’t do much with it. The widget over there on the left is just javascript that Twitter supplies. Yes, not that impressive. I can send meaningless telegrams of 140 characters or less to myself and they can be seen right here. Woo.

This is the first update in many months to old dylanbright.com. It really is a mess. It started out pretty sloppy because it was one of the first asp.net things I ever did, and then as it was tweaked here and there over the years mostly increasing the slop. Style sheets are sort of half implemented, and all the html is basically slop. The asp.net bits were absolutely ridiculous a couple years ago, but they’ve been cleaned up a little. There has been many a weekend that I started out replacing the hole thing, but I could never settle on how to do it and eventually I would lose interest. I’d like to write something that just generates it as static html, kind of like the way blogger works. That really makes a lot more sense; since there really isn’t anything here that requires server side code. I often thought about changing the visual design of the thing too, but every time I tried to make it look more modern, it just started to look like everyone else’s website. I’m also not good at making things pretty.

Actually apologizing for the website is a bit of a theme on the website now that I think about it.

Oh well. I also fixed the dylancam.