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CitizenRE's ShitheadderyNovember 25

Uncov got its first legal threat yesterday! I know that my post volume has slowed to a crawl, but I've been busy with a new job. In any event, this is an exciting new milestone.

CitizenRE is a company who is running, in my opinion, a hustle in the solar energy business. You sign up for CitizenRE, pay them a $500 "security deposit", and then monthly fees to rent solar panels for your house. You can sign up today, but the solar panels won't be delivered until they magically raise $650 million and build a solar panel plant that's the most efficient institution in the world. You'll pay them roughly what you'd pay your local electric company for solar energy. If this sounds like snake oil, that's because it is.

A solar rig for your house costs roughly $50,000. CitizenRE will hold you to a multi-year contract for their equipment, stretching up to 25 years. This is in effect an unsecured loan of $50,000. Oh yeah, this can't miss.

Furthermore, the company is running some kind of Mutli Level Marketing scheme where "Ecotrepreneurs" peddle this shit to unsuspecting homeowners. In fact, Rob Styler, the cocksteak who sent me the legal threat, was involved with a company called Equinox, a MLM company that was shut down for consumer fraud in 2000. He claims innocence, but has clearly never had a lesson in guilt

Valleywag Dies; Takes Internet Celebrity With ItNovember 13

Valleywag was Nick Denton's great experiment in pathological narcissism: if you make fake celebrities out of a microcosm of people, can you generate enough pageviews and ad revenue to make a profit? The short answer is no, you cannot. It seemed like it would have worked, though. People in Silicon Valley are self-important enough to believe that they are real celebrities after being mentioned on a web site.

Now, Valleywag is going to be relegated to a column on Gawker.com, where it's going to be abundantly obvious that nobody cares about a group of well-to-do twenty-somethings going on vacation to Cyprus. This is actually Web 2.0 coming full circle. In the beginning, nobody cared who you were, and in the end, nobody cares who you are.

Fuck me, this is satisfying.

Here Is A List Of People Who Never Mattered, And Still Don't

With the death of Valleywag, here are some people who are no longer internet celebrities:

• Leah Culver: attractive white girl who programs in Python. Became internet-famous by virtue of dating around Silicon Valley. No marketable skills in the real world.
• Dave Morin: works at Facebook, is somehow important as such.

HousekeepingNovember 2

Anonymous comments are back! I'm trying out a service called Mollom for spam prevention. If your comment sucks but doesn't suck enough to be classified as spam, you'll get a captcha.

That's really about it. Keep on keepin' on.

Thanks For Fucking My FutureNovember 2

[Ed. Note: promoted this meandering college-student whine from the peanut gallery because a lot of CS majors are about to enter the School of Hard Knocks]

Fuck. Simply, fuck.

OK, maybe with a little Goddamn and a pinch of facepalm. Why all the obscenities and and blaspheming? I'm a third year Computer Science major about to walk into the steaming pile of brown-bag-on-fire that is the tech industry. I don't even get to enter it now while it's still ablaze. I get to enter it two years from now - ya, it'll take me five years. Wanna fight about it? . It's facts like this that almost make me want to hang up my Lisp compiler for good. (I'm one of those CS majors. Go fuck yourself).

I Would Gladly Take It Up The Ass From SBCL

Steel Bank Common Lisp, how I swoon for you. I can hear the collective groan of the Uncov community now. I care not. We will elope in a couple years and get married by Elvis. Just because I have an inordinate amount of love for this language doesn't mean I'm all that good at it yet. Maybe that's why I love it, we're still at the lust phase and haven't moved on to the complacency-I'd-rather-fuck-one-of-your-hotter-friends phase. As Theory and Intelligence are the foci within my CS degree, it is probably a good thing that I enjoy th

Crime Is Up In Palo Alto. Yes, This Is Funny.October 31

Crime has spiked in the city of Palo Alto, which is home to Facebook and a couple of other walking corpses. Since June, there have been twelve street robberies, eleven of which remain unsolved. There have also been 146 home burglaries so far this year, up from last year's total of 128.

Why is this awesome? Because try as it might to be genteel, Palo Alto is still within driving range of some poor communities. If you've got no qualms with crime and you lose your job because the economy goes to shit, who better to knock over than a bunch of rich pricks? The median home price there is $1.3 million, so your chances of a score are pretty good. Shit, if you rob someone on the street, you've got a 91% chance of getting away with it.

Voting for Obama Makes It All Better

In response to this, the citizens of Palo Alto have turned to the police for help. The police, having been relegated to arresting shoplifting Stanford students for years, don't know what to do. The only thing they can come up with is to start interrogating black people, no joke. At a town meeting this past week, Palo Alto police chief Lynne Johnson said:

We do not want to create an environment of fear of people of color in this community, absolutely not, but on the other hand we have to do due dil