![]() Yea! It’s Wednesday! We start the downhill slide into the weekend! Yesterday evening, more information was revealed as to Cousin Fred’s plans for his new dating service Lovesick Leftovers. He says the service is designed for everyone who doesn’t already have a matchmaking or dating service designed for them…like the Farmer’s, Over-50’s, Christians, Non-Christians, Splotched, Pet Lovers, and Terminally Horny people do (to name a few). As the “natural” (?) outgrowth of that philosophy comes a new web site (of course) for the lovelorn - Lovesick-Leftovers.com. Seriously, he’s moving out on this thing. Okay, actually I have no idea what he’s moving out on…or words to that effect. But, it is Cousin Fred. He says the idea behind the web site is to create a spot for the lovesick to go to gather more information about being lovelorn and possibly meet others in the same condition. Always hoping that Cousin Fred can find a way to make some cash, I asked if he was planning to charge or sell ads or something on his web site. He looked genuinely offended that I would even ask and responded that it’s all for the “greater good.” Whatever the hell that means. He did say that he hopes to create a blog on the site soon. That got my attention. I pointed out that writing a blog is serious business, a responsibility he should take very seriously. I know, I’ve been doing it daily for more than a year now…well, okay, almost daily. He also told me that he plans to write a weekly column for the Woodward News called Cousin Fred’s Call of the Lovesick. He says they pay good money over there for that kind of stuff. After that, I kind of tuned him out. Although, come to think of it, that might make an interesting addition to the page with Ask Dr. K. and that darned Bridge column that no one has read since the early 1980’s. Just sayin’… Eh, I’ll let him wallow in his self-pity for a while. This likely won’t last long. Cousin Fred has all the attention span of a rusted and bent trashcan. In the meantime, though, he told me that he’s come up with a way to bring some additional cash to The Compound. Always interested in hearing something along those lines, I was all ears. He told me about an article that originated in the Washington Post, but had been picked up by KFOR along the way, again with news from KFOR. The channel we don’t get BECAUSE DISH IS HOLDING IT HOSTAGE. How is it that he’s getting it? But I digress… Starting back in 2004, some couple in southern Kansas (it’s cheaper there, you know) began getting harassing calls and visits from law enforcement. All because some company called MAXMIND (they map IP addresses) had pointed 600 million (yep, 600,000,000) generic IP addresses at the location of their home, which happens to sit at the geographic center of the Continental United States (38°N, 97°W for you geography nerds and 38.0000, 97.0000 for you digital freaks). As a result, these poor Kansas church-going farmers found their front yard had become the default location in those cases when MAXMIND could only get information linking an IP address to the country. I guess this is like entering Woodward, OK into your GPS without a specific address sends you to a house just north of Main on 5th Street, I think. At one point, a blogger (I swear it wasn’t me) created a heatmap of internet usage in the U.S. according to MAXMIND’s data from April 2011. These poor Kansas farmers were responsible for more web usage than New York City or the Silicon Valley combined. Law enforcement has shown up at the door more than once over the years, first looking for child pornographers and another time looking for runaways and still other times looking for stolen vehicles. Someone even threw a broken, well-used toilet at the end of their driveway. What the heck is that about? The couple has now filed a lawsuit in federal court against MAXMIND. MAXMIND in an effort to finally fix the problem is now pointing generic IP addresses to the middle of a lake near Wichita. Cousin Fred’s point is that having those IP addresses mapped to The Compound might prove to be a money-making proposition. As I was listening to this, I asked the all-probing, concrete question, “How?” Cousin Fred hadn’t figured that part out yet, but told me that if people have figured out a way to make money from YouTube, then this should be easy. He also pointed out that this is a Compound, so we can likely defend against pissed off people looking for blood. And, what’s a broken toilet or two at the end of the drive in the big scheme of things…particularly compared with the pile of beer cans left out there by marauding unsupervised teenagers rat-racing their pickups through the night. He may have a point. That’s what genuinely concerns me. Cousin Fred having a point. Comments are closed.
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