A Conflagration of Randomness

I have discovered four domain valuation tools in the last few months. Both calculate the value of a domain in very different ways leading to very different results. I tested both with my domain name http://shopthe.net. One came out to $700,000 while the other resulted in $100.

The first was Leapfish:

This gives a very generous estimate of a domain, obviously based on only popularity and not actual traffic, since I basically get none.

You can try their search for getting the value of your domain:

The other site is called Website Outlook:

This gives a much more modest and accurate result.

Search on Website Outlook. Enter your domain.

In addition there is another tool called Estibot.  This offered the lowest price of all.

Estibot

Finally I tried a tool called Valuate, which gave me the second lowest appraisal.

Results:

So which domain tool would you trust the most?

Yesterday my friends and I went to see Avatar (during the day since we’re on winter break from college and the high schooler’s are still in school). I must say that was some of the best CGI I have seen. Though the movie is long (nearly 3 hours) it really comes to life. The alien species are very well portrayed and very believable. They even have their own religion. I would highly recommend seeing this film this weekend (even though we are having one of the biggest snow storms ever in our area) though I do wish they would find a better way to view 3D. Having 20/20 vision really makes the polarized glasses irritating.

Google recently launched a tool to help you view your website in a new way, the way the majority of the people in the world view it.  Their tool, Browser Size, shows web developers the percentage of web users who can see sections of their site without having to scroll.  This is determined by monitor size as well as whether the browser is resized.  So now web developers know if that visitors can actually see that ad or poll they posted there.

According to Google:

The data is generated based on the browser size of users who visit Google.com. Google says that it found that the install rate for Google Earth increased by a whopping 10% simply by moving it 100 pixels higher on the page.

Below is a screenshot of what this blog looks like on browser size.

One of my friends’ AIM statuses today was “PC Load Letter… What the f*** does that mean?!” She’s a CS Major and I didn’t know what this meant so I assumed she was having an issue with her computer. So I googled it and found out that this message is actually what old HP Laserjets used to say when it needed more paper.

This message is confusing (I had no clue what it meant) and confused a lot of people:

The non-intuitive message confuses people for several reasons. The abbreviation “PC” is misleading because it is widely understood — especially in the context of electronic office equipment — to mean “personal computer“, suggesting to many that the problem lies in the computer, not the printer. The word “LOAD” is also ambiguous, as it can also refer to the transfer of electronic data between disk and memory. Furthermore, the word “LETTER” is only associated with paper size in the US and Canada as A4 is the standard size used in the rest of the world. Thus, users encountering this message may believe that they are being instructed to transfer the data or content of their letter to the printer, even though they have already sent the job to the printer.

The particular quote my friend had was from the movie Office Space when a printer in the film displayed this and the main character exclaimed the above quote.

Linked the the PC Load Letter on Wikipedia was an article with the title “lp0 on fire.”  Relating to a printer article this really caught my eye since I knew that lp0 was short for laserjet printer on port 0.  I read this article and this is what it said:

The origin of the “on fire” message was in the 1970s when line printers were large mechanical affairs with a high speed drum rotating at 1200 to 2400 RPM and impact printing heads. Misaligned operating components could cause the paper to come into direct contact with the high speed rotating parts, generating quite a bit of paper dust and increasing the likelihood of a paper jam. If a jam was not detected soon enough, the accumulated paper dust, ink dust and paper could generate enough friction along the rotating drum to start a fire. Furthermore, the cleaning solutions used in the printers were usually alcohol based, the fumes of which also presented a fire hazard. However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires.

I think it would be really scary if my printer caught on fire, but thankfully these were the old printers.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Everyone knows the creepiness that Facebook brought to the online word in terms of cyber stalking.  All you need is a name and assuming your account has limited privacy, anyone can view most if not all of your information.  However, this form of stalking may soon end as a new form begins.  Enter Yatedo, a search engine to find anyone on the web.  On their main page they say the following about themselves:

Yatedo is the new generation free People Search Engine which lets you find and contact anyone on the entire web with any kind of information you have about the person you are looking for.

Now you will not have to have Facebook open when you are doing a school research project on Albert Einstein.  Instead just open Yatedo and search for both Einstein and your best friends.  I have requested an invite to this service, so I will see more of what it is like once I get one, but for now here is a screenshot of an info page.