Ads that suck: Tax Masters

My wife often jokes that the ads here in the US are extremely complimentary — half of them entice you towards more and more (junk) food; the rest sell you medications that seem to create more problems than they solve. In honor of the remarkably consistent bad ads on television, I’m starting an “ads that suck” series. To kick-off the series, I present to you, the Tax Masters commercial:

Some observations:

  • If you have not filed your tax return for years, the IRS should be coming after you and auditing you! The IRS should relentlessly pursue you for your unpaid taxes.
  • I’m sure there are a lot of folks out there who are hurting and are not able to pay their taxes for legitimate reasons. But the ad does not convey that at all. It almost sounds like “Hey, I’m going to tell you how you can get away from the IRS and not pay your taxes”
  • Everyone knows how targeted television advertising is. For instance, if you watch Comedy Central, you’ll see a lot of ads around dating websites, calling services for singles etc. I see the the TaxMasters ad on CNN all the time. Wonder what that says about CNN’s audience.
  • This ad sucks because it doesn’t really engage the audience, the value proposition is not clear to me at least and there is absolutely no creativity.
  • But I gotta hand it to TaxMasters — I was pleasantly surprised to discover their blog and their sense of humor.

More to come.

Thoughts on the Rupee symbol

This post has been sitting around in my “drafts” for more than a year now. I just figured I would get it out of the way — better late than never.

In March 2009, the Indian government (specifically, the Finance Ministry) announced a contest to design a symbol for the Indian Rupee. Sometime in April, the Ministry put out a press release listing all the eligible applicants; there were around 2300 eligible candidates it seems.

At some point after that, images of a few of the designs started surfacing:

Rupee Symbols
Rupee Symbols

As is the case with most Indian Government websites, the Financial Ministry website is a disaster. There is very little useful information there, there is no way to search for information. Case in point — I was not able to find any information about the design contest on their website. The image above is the result of a Google search.

Couple of thoughts on the designs above (note that I do not know if these are even actual candidates. I’m assuming they are):

  • It isn’t entirely clear to me why we need a symbol in the first place. Sure, writing ‘$’ is probably nicer than writing ‘USD’, but ‘Rs’ isn’t all that bad.
  • Any symbol for a currency should be really simple to draw. Simple. You should be able to draw it by hand in a few strokes. How many of the above designs do you find that simple?
  • Even if we pick a symbol, for it to actually start getting used, it has to be readily available on all computing platforms. Does Unicode have a provision for adding new symbols?

In December 2009, the Economic Times reported that the Ministry had shortlisted five finalists. Really? Wow. Again, no information to be found from the Ministry itself. It would have been pretty amazing (and easy to set up) if the Ministry had set up a public poll and asked Indian citizens which symbol they liked best.

Does anyone know what happened to the Indian rupee symbol design contest? I couldn’t find anything on Google after December 2009.

How the mouse moves

Random interesting find of the day: IOGraphica. Here’s mine for about 7 hours at work:

Such a simple app, but such a fascinating output. An easy way to create computer generated art! Couple of observations:

  • I have a dual-monitor setup at work. I use the left monitor for email for browsing and the right monitor for code. The mouse patterns clearly reflect this usage pattern. I tend to rest the mouse roughly equally on the both the monitors.
  • I was very intrigued by the fact that most of the mouse motions are very smooth. Most curves almost look parabolic. There are very few jerks and jittery lines. Once again, nature seems poetic even in the most chaotic and random actions.

Throw away mailing lists

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are on a mailing list and you want to send an email to all but 2 members on that list? A common case here is planning a surprise for someone on that list.

Photo by http://www.anna-om-line.com/

In general, I find myself on (long) email threads containing a different subset of people for different occasions (birthdays, anniversaries etc) several times a year. The email threads quickly become long and unwieldy. People keep adding other people as the thread progresses, and the only way the new adds can figure out whats going on is looking at the content of future emails. There is no way for anyone to go back and read all the discussion so far.

That got me thinking, wouldn’t it be great to have a service that provide throw away mailing lists? Hear me out. Here’s how the service would work:

  • To start a new mailing list, I simply send an email to newlist@mycoolservice.com. In the email, I also include a list of email addresses I want to seed the list with.
  • The service sends me back the address of a newly created throw away list. This could be of the form some-random-number@googlegroups.com.
  • For all practical purposes, this is exactly like any other mailing list (or Google Group). We can add more members, search the messages etc.
  • Start your discussion and let the thoughts flow.
  • …
  • At some point, the purpose behind the list will cease to exist (successful surprise, for instance). Needless to add, further discussions on the topic will also cease.
  • You forget you even created this mailing list. After the mailing list has been idle for some time (say two weeks), the service automatically deletes the mailing list. Any future messages to that address will bounce back saying that the list has been deleted, please contact the administrator.

Does anyone else think this could be useful?

Google Government Requests

Have you looked at this yet? www.google.com/governmentrequests/

First, I’m really happy to see Google at least trying to become more transparent. Second, I was very intrigued to see that India is in the top 3! Just in the last 6 months of 2009 India made over 1000 data requests to Google and upwards of 140 removal requests. Here’s the current breakdown:

  • 1061 data requests
  • 142 removal requests
    • 77.5% of removal requests fully or partially complied with.
    • 2 Blogger
    • 1 Book Search (court order)
    • 2 Geo (except Street View)
    • 119 orkut
    • 1 SMS Channels
    • 2 Web Search
    • 15 YouTube

Thankfully, bulk of the removal requests (119 out of 142) are for Orkut and given the spammy state of Orkut, I’m not really surprised. I’m more interested in the data requests, but right now that (possibly inaccurate) number is all Google can tell us.

Here’s another weird thing, Brazil made 291 removal requests of which 119 were for Orkut. India also made 119. Co-incidence? Perhaps. Or may be it was a common set of bad URLs that both countries ended up getting rid of. Of course, more than 75% of Orkut users are either from Brazil or from India, so there’s definitely some connection here.

All in all, another interesting data source.