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You know when you encounter something (taste, smell, thought) so unpleasant that you scrunch up your face and bleat out "erk"? You know the face... the kind your mom warns you will stick.  I had that today. And then when I told someone else what had caused my face, they involuntarily did it, too.

I was reading an article from the other Robert X. Cringely today and he mentioned two companies that shouldn't exist:

Yo - an iPhone app that lets you send "Yo" to others who have the app installed. One million dollars in venture capital was thrown at it after it reached 50,000 users who'd sent a combined four million Yos. That's a quarter a Yo. And we thought cell phone companies were overcharging for text messaging. And that's before it was discovered the app was so poorly built that you could find the phone number of any user and sent them unsolicited Yos or other words or even music that apparently would play on their own.

Speaking of quarters, here's a subscribe-and-lose offering for you... Washboard will let you subscribe to a service that will mail you quarters on a monthly basis. Let me repeat that. You can subscribe to have someone mail you a roll of quarters.  $10 worth of quarters for $15 or $20 for $27. Nice looking website. I used to get quarters from the grocery store or any bank or change machines or the manager's office at our apartment complex. Before they switched over to the reloadable keycard. Quarters? Really?

It finally dawned on me. It's not that I can't come up with any good ideas, it's that I don't have the nerve to foist absolutely horrid ideas into the marketplace where supremely ill-advised people will undoubtedly fall for them.

I guess I just have too much respect for my fellow humans.