How my website bought me a car

Thank you Google. Thank you Da Vinci. Thank you me. This is nothing more than a total trumpet-self-blowing but largely due to the Da Vinci Code film, and the persistance with which I covered the Da Vinci Code online puzzles, through very little work, last months Google efforts bought me my car. Now, I’m not allowed to give the precise details, much less encourage you to click ads, but for a minutes work in stuffing a few ads up on the pages, it’s turned into quite a pleasant little cash-cow.

If only I knew a little more about all this sorta stuff – I wonder whether I could have done even better!

Do you read my blog?

The key to a horrific weekend

It actually took me a long time to think of a title to this post. There are many aspects to this post… positive, negative… the works. I’ll tell the story.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why you’re stupid (but you don’t know it)

1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it–be it their own or anyone else’s.
3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

Damn Interesting.

Basically: if you’re stupid, you’re not clever enough to realise you’re stupid. Hence you don’t know you’re stupid. Genius!

Get Fuzzy – e=mc2

This was my “one-a-day” Get Fuzzy for 30th May, and it tickled me.

You can get a free daily Get Fuzzy email from Comics.com.

How not to sell a car

So I’m looking to buy a cheap to take to the beach and fill it with sand and dripping wetsuits. If it gets ab it scuffed, I don’t care. And after a few weeks of scouring the local rag, I think I’ve found the perfect beast – a Ford Sierra 1.8. Yep, it’s old (over 15 years) and a bit tatty, but in my totally uneducated opinion would do the job perfectly. It even comes with a roofrack – perfect for the surfboards and it’s already cheap – the guy has it advertised at £375. Perfect. So having taken it for a quick spin, kicked the tyres a couple of time and sucked a LOT of air in through my teeth, I start to haggle.

“Well mate, I’m interested, but, well you know, it is an old car, the front tyres haven’t got much life left in them so I wouldn’t want to pay more than £300 for it. ”
“Yeah, that’s fair enough, no worries. I’m happy with it.”
“Cool.”
–more idle chitchat–
Him: “I tell you what, if you’re interested, you can have it for £250.”

Should I be concerned? We agreed on £300 for it on the basis of a few faults I’d already identified, yet he then, without asking, volunatarily did himself out of £50! Is he just an idiot?