In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

via: The Pudding Guy |Futility Closet.

Why is this not a surprise?  Wouldn’t have something to do with there being no Flash on the iPhone or iPad?

[T]he latest publication of HTML5 is now blocked by Adobe, via an objection that has still not been made public (despite yesterday’s promise to make it so).

via: Hixie’s Natural Log: Consistency.

Adobe also claimed 7 million attempts to download Flash from iphones. According to Marc Edwards, that’s way less than the hits he got on Bjango’s web site since the iPhone was released.  Adobe should be putting their efforts into making Flash good software rather than trying fight alternatives.  Apple wouldn’t have been choosing alternatives if Flash wasn’t rubbish on Mac OS X.  Not surprisingly though, Adobe are working on Flash for Windows Mobile 7. Not sure what good that’ll be with Windows Mobile use dropping like a stone.

Edit: According to John Nack at Adobe, the claim that they are blocking HTML 5 is bullshit. This doesn’t negate that Adobe spin a load of crap themselves though.  The most ironic thing is that John Nack says he is working to ensure that HTML 5 isn’t hijacked by vendor interests, yet Adobe wants to be dominant with Flash and can’t handle the truth when someone like Steve Jobs calls them lazy.  They made their own bed and now they must sleep in it.

ReadWriteWeb published a story, Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login which seems to have shot to the top of the Google results if you search for “Facebook login”.  However the downside of this was that many clueless people appear to be logging in to Facebook by Googling “facebook login” then hitting the first result.  This was made apparent by the comments posted on the article, such as

“Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work…”

“ok cool now can I get to facebook”

“The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.”

etc ad infinitum.

Is anyone else as worried as I am about people’s level of intelligent and computer knowledge these days?

Cruising through various blogs led me to a few photos from inside Apple’s headquarters.  Reputedly photography inside is forbidden, so I do wonder what happened to the worker who allowed his office to be photographed in one of them. Click on the photos for the gallery.

Via: Office Snapshots » Apple HQ – Cupertino Campus.

…The internet speeds.

That’s about 8 MB/sec down and 1.2 MB/sec up or so.