Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I got an extremely clever personalized spam email today, something that I’ve never seen before. They took my first name and used it to address me, and then took my last name and suggested I “move the Back family there.” Wow! Check this out:

From Homes4Half [info@lafdeb.com]
date Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 6:24 PM
subject A Half-priced Home in ITHACA for the Backs

Dear Elliott,

Imagine moving the Back family into a fabulous new home in the ITHACA area that you bought for HALF it’s market value! You can find homes priced as LOW as $10,000. Search the ITHACA area for the best bargains today!

They even spelled my name right, which is fairly amazing.

I found this via The Triumph of Bullshit; it’s a real gem:

Just plug your SnūzNLūz in and either connect it to your network via the RJ45 jack on the back, or via WiFi (WPA supported) if available. Then simply configure via the embedded web browser configuration utility. From here it’s a snap. Simply select your online banking institution from the list of supported banks (currently over 1600 are supported). Supply your login information and then select your favorite HATED charity or non-profit from the included lists (over 6200 currently supported). Then plug in your donation amount per snooze incident ($10 or more), set the time, and alarm, and voila, instant time profit!

This advertisement for a NY-based programmer showed up on Craigslist, and I expect that more will follow:

YOU CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER?
YOU HAS A FLAVUR?

If so, you may be the right fit for this Midtown Manhattan Web Design Startup! We are a small company looking for a Senior LOLCode Developer, preferably with at least 1 month experience developing LOLapps. Please send a resume, along with links to any web-based LOLapps you have developed.

KTHXBYE

The recently invented LOL.NET has a compiler for the Microsoft CLR which you can use with MS Visual Studio to write and compile code. For example, to loop from 0 to 9 and print each number and then exit, you would write (it’s horrible, brace yourself):

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    VISIBLE VAR
    IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

This can be compared to a normal language which might write:

void main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
    for(int i=0; i < 10; i++)
        printf(”%d”, i);
}

Among other things, they have an Eclipse syntax highlighter, an Erlang bytecode compiler, a Ruby interpreter, a javascript implementation, C and C++ support, and some translators into LUA, JS, and other languages. Check out the lolcode 1.2 language spec if you’re bored.