Random Links and Random Thoughts

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Random Links and Random Thoughts

Posted on 16. Dec, 2007 by Brad in WTF | Twitter: @bradhart |

Some days I wonder is random links really are as random as they should be based on the mathematical equations that govern them. I have been online before we called it being online. For those of you who remember the glory days of hours in cue to log onto ISCA, or for the hour your favorite MUD was allowed to be accessed (think of the five o’clock crash runs on Jedi MUD). Those were fond memories of days of old, and where it all started for many of us. I reminisce on those moments occasionally, usually when I think that my DSL connection is just too damned slow, but I digress to the point of this post. Back around ’96 long after I had entered the world we now know as the web, I started playing with JavaScript and learned of the many faceted ways of making things seem random on websites. The possibilities even in simple random generators which are still controlling random inline advertising, is staggering. One should have far fewer truly funny combination of pages and links these days, but it seems to happen to me far more often than mathematical probability says it should. Maybe I notice it more the older I get, maybe I just spend too much damned time online, I don’t know but it does happen never the less. If you have a few funny moments with random links please share them.

Last years funniest by far was the seemingly random ad appearing for an Elton John concert at the bottom of a dictionary.com entry. They were pretty much everywhere you expect them to appear, but the fact there was a big smiling picture of Elton at the bottom of the definition for “poof” still makes me laugh to this day, even though I can’t for the life of me remember why I went there or what I was actually looking for when I typed in poof (an expression my son regularly used to explain how things disappeared). Never the less it was just too damned amusing to forget.

Todays offering doesn’t seem random at all is from my Ads.click tag cloud (something I occasionally click just for the hell of it). The word Prom popped up. It seemed a little early to be thinking of that annual spring rite of passage, but never the less I clicked on it thinking of future posts to draw in traffic. What I got was certainly nothing to do with pretty young women in interesting dresses. The link took me to iVillage Total Health’s: Pregnancy Basics Center. Certainly relevant for prom goers especially since we no longer tell high school kids to insist on a rubber in sex education classes, but it certainly wasn’t expected and certainly struck my sense of amusement.