1f90 Yaron is Writing » 2006 » August

Archive for August, 2006

Subliminal, in an unnoticeable way

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

Wikipedia link of the day:

“Mommy and I are one”.

According to a 1985 study, this phrase is “the most effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation”. Evidently it triggers feelings of comfort to enable people to get over their anxieties and, I don’t know, quit smoking and such.

Something about the whole thing makes me a little bit suspicious, like the fact that this whole conjecture is based on a single 20-year-old study that, as far as I know, has never been duplicated. Still, if it’s true, it might have practical uses. If you could sneak the phrase into a sales pitch, you might see a significant sales uptick. And of course if you could somehow make that the name of your product, it would be like a license to print money.

My first plug

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Here it is, the first released site of my new web-programming career: NewYorkNabes. It was originally my friend Jared’s idea: why can’t there be a site that shows, at a glance, the average current rental prices for all the neighborhoods of New York? It’s such a basic piece of information, that would be helpful to anyone who’s moving to New York or planning to move within the city, but it didn’t exist anywhere. We (along with another friend of his) took that basic grid idea and added a description and links for each neighborhood, plus a map, and some helpful tips for renters. Also, we changed average prices to median prices, the more realistic metric. The site’s free and advertising-based. The rental data comes from the good folks at New York Backpage; we have a process that automatically gets the data from their site once a week. I did the programming, in Perl and PHP; our database is Postgres.

Check it out and, if you like it, tell all your friends about it! NewYorkNabes: you heard it here first!

My first post

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Welcome to my new blog. I hope you like it!


0