Pie(Rate) Chart Tee on Woot, So Happy!

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Woot’s daily t-shirts often amuse me, but until now I haven’t felt compelled to buy one. Lets count the reasons the Pie(Rate) Chart shirt is awesome, shall we?

  1. Pun on pirates featuring the word pie. Obviously awesome. (*cough* PieRat *cough*)
  2. Features a pie chat detailing stereotypical pirate attributes.
  3. Pie chart does not appear to add up to 100%, which will perturb friends and strangers.
  4. Pleasure experienced in explaining the joke to the unenlightened.
  5. Last but not least, it’s a geeky pirate math joke on a t-shirt. Come on, people!

If you’re still wondering what the punchline is, here you go. I love a geeky discussion thread even more than a geeky t-shirt.

From the shirt’s description:

“Well, ye blasted fool, did ye not notice that the circle has a great big patch in the center? Aye, lad, and that patch be coverin’ a missin’ 9%, most likely! And don’t ye be feelin’ foolish now?”

From a forum geek:

9% missing
“i” is the ninth letter
i = eye
Patch = to fill
therefore: eye patch fills in the missing value
It is a simple case of pirate math people

From the shirt’s creator:

haha, sorry the lack of 100 percent add-up has made some people jump overboard on this shirt’s purchase! There were actually two reasons/jokes we were going for here and both have been mentioned already:

1. 9 percent eyepatch!

2. Pirates ain’t no good at mathimacation, land lubbers!

As for some of the pie slices not matching up to their percentages perfectly, we felt melding the pie colors in a visually pleasing way was more important than aligning to the exact percentages. For instance, the red pie slice is supposed to vaguely look like a sideways pirate hat, as well as the peg leg placed around where the leg might be on a person, the squawk on the shoulder, and the booty…well, I won’t sink as low as our tee does on that front.

Thanks again for the love/indifference!


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Musings on The Danger of Algorithms

I have a love/less-love relationship with algorithms. Yes, you choose what content to consume, but algorithms choose the pool you get to choose from. Mostly I love algorithms — professionally they’re the reason I’m employed, and personally they help me weed through the overwhelming amount of information that floods my life. But I do often wonder and occasionally worry about what I’m NOT seeing that I should.

Interesting TED video on algorithms and the control they wield via The Next Web: The Danger of Algorithms. The speaker is Eli Pariser, Moveon.org’s Board President, a co-founder of Avaaz.org, and the author of The Filter Bubble.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Back in the Blogging Saddle

Howdy Web PieRat pardners. I’m back in the blogging saddle, though some of my giddyup has got up and went with a new job, new city, new house and all that other stuff that comes along with big life changes.

Practical Ecommerce will be publishing my SEO articles monthly again, starting today with a post on SEO for businesses with models or niche targets that make SEO a bit more challenging.

In my monthly column, I’ll be focusing on the challenges of in-house SEO and the struggle for competing resources. I must say, it has been more of an eye opener than I thought it would be. Having done in-house online marketing for Intel and agency SEO for large ecommerce sites with Netconcepts/Covario, I naively thought that those experiences would give me some foundation for the challenges of in-house SEO. More on this topic soon, but for now I need to get back to my day job: Creating an architecture to sell more restaurant deals and discount massages for Groupon’s local businesses.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Hello, World! It’s Me, Web PieRat

When WordPress welcomes new blogs to its platform, it posts a default “Hello World” post to get the aspiring blogger started. Ever wondered why?

Hello World” programs are commonly used to teach fledgling programmers how to code. Their first assignments typically revolve around writing a simple program that prints “Hello, World!” on the screen, makes a nifty design, or something of the sort.

When I was a kid attempting to use my Commodore 64 as more than an Atari wanna-be, I remember being giddy at printing my name in a never-ending cascade of rainbow colors over and over again. That’s pretty much all I got that computer to do, besides play TrashMan for hours on end. I destroyed more joysticks on that game.

In my college years, Karel the Robot taught me the basics of CS — recursion, conditions, logic sequences. At the time, I hated Karel the f!@#$%ing robot with a passion. Mostly because whether Karel languished forever in that stupid maze I had to program him to find his way out of or not seemed to have very (VERY) little relevance to my shining future as a journalist. Yeeaaahhhh…..

So here I am now, after a single year as a professional journalist, 8 years at Intel in Internet Marketing and 4 at Netconcepts doing SEO. Thanks, Karel, it all makes sense now. Recursion rocks and life is full of conditions.

Hello, World!

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Originally posted on Web PieRat.