I have finally entered the 21st century. I blew some of my FreeNameAStar.com money on an MP3 player. Almost everyone told me to buy an iPod, but as far as price goes they are too much. I researched MP3 players at AnyThingButIpod.com and I read the requirements for an MP3 book reader at Audible.com and I began to search the discount sites and eBay. Price was my main criterion and storage was the second. It was also an absolute must that the MP3 player be able restart at the point it left off when I turn it off. MP3 books are long and you don’t want to listen to 45 minutes of previously heard novel to get to where you left off.
There are several players that meet these requirements, but I found that I could buy an INOi hard disk player quite reasonably. It has a 20 gig disk drive that can be used to hold backups and software for my PC’s as well as play MP3 and WMF files. It has very rudimentary controls, but it starts up where it left off when you restart it. I am not sure, but it should hold about 500 hours of books or 250 hours of music. I have it loaded up with some stuff that Ward gave me. and some music that I ripped from CDs.
The positives: The INOi is simple to use. The volume is loud when I need it. It works for 13 hours and charges from my USB port. I can use it to store data as well as sound. It was very cheap and about half the cost of a 20gb iPod. It’s not much more than the price of a 20gb 1.5 inch drive alone. It does not mess with my mp3 files or try to convert them like Apple products.
The negatives: I can’t figure out how to fast forward through a file. I have not found a bookmark function. It does not play AA, FLAC, OGG VORBIS, or WAV files. These files are not a requirement as there are converters around, but some of these compress better and it would be nice to fit more stuff on the drive. There are sporadic reports of failures on the reviews, but all MP3 players are fragile and do not survive a drop to hard floor. I just have to be careful with it. INOi is an “off” brand as far as I can tell. It may be the manufacturer of many “name” brand items, but I am not familiar with INOi, so there is no brand trust.
One negative is that I found that I cannot work writing a program and listen to a story at the same time. I keep concentrating on the code and missing things and since there is no fast forward or reverse, I find that I can’t follow the plot. I have a half a dozen blues albums on the thing so I’ll try listening to those next.
My friend Gary Primich died. He was only 49. I learned more about playing harmonica from Gary than anyone else. He was an amazing teacher. He was one of the smartest persons that I have ever known.
Perhaps he never made it big because he sort of looked like Curly in the three stooges, but some of the greatest players agree that he was possibly the greatest harp player that ever lived.
Here is a video from youtube of an interview that Dave Barret did with Gary last month. Some of Gary’s sweet personality and thoughtful nature comes through.
I also told some Gary stories on JT3.com, my harp blog.
When you talk about the shape of cyberspace, webrings are one of the ways that cyberspace can be twisted into a circle. A webring is a ring of links. There are probably webrings for everything and they are good for small sites that need readers. People like to follow the ring links to find more pages like the one that they are on. You can see the ring badge over on the right side of this page, down below the recent posts and the amazon ad.
Webrings are a tried and true promotional tool. You don’t get many hits, but they are steady and they grow fast as the ring grows. If you have a blog, you’ll benefit from the traffic on other sites in the ring. When a surfer finishes reading your page, they can click on “next” and go to the next page in the ring. It’s a win-win situation.
The hard part, however is getting the ring code on your page in the right place. When you join up, the webring site gives you a code snippet that you have to copy into your blog template. In Geeklog, you create a widget with the Javascript in it. In Blogger, you have have to edit the template. In Wordpress, there is a plugin for putting javascript on your blog, or you can edit the template directly if you are techy enough.
The easiest place to put the javascript is way down at the bottom of the web page template, just before the /body tag. This effectively hides it, though so try to get it into the left or right side panel near your links or blog roll so that it is closer to the top.
The Spec Fic Bloggers badge is 160 pixels wide, just the right size for most blogs.
I just updated the code to bring it into the 21st century. It uses fancy css and gets rid of the clunky table format.
Please join up. The traffic grows exponentially with the number of sites in the ring. 10 sites get four times the traffic as 5 sites. 20 sites get 16 times the traffic as 5 sites. If you know any spec-fic bloggers that have control over their blog templates, send them this way. It will help all of us.
When we were discussing the to 20 great Science Fiction Movies, I forgot this one. It was syndicated to one of the New York City TV stations (probably WPIX) in the late 50s. I watched it one Saturday morning and it scared the hell out of me. There was a shadow of tree branches on the window one night that looked exactly like tentacles coming down from the roof. I had a vivid imagination when I was 8 years old.
The movie stars Forest Tucker who later starred in F-Troop. The effects are cheesey, but when you are a little kid, you don’t notice things like that. It has been called an under appreciated gem. John Carpenter said that this film, with its creatures hidden in the clouds, was the inspiration for his film The Fog (1980). It has been suggested that the E.S.P summoning of the characters to the swiss mountain was, in part, inspiration for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It was released in England as The Trollenberg Terror. It was actually a TV serial that was turned into a movie. It would be fun to find the original TV show.
I haven’t really sold a story in many months, mainly because I haven’t written much. Recently, Tyree accepted a 150 word short-short for “Between Kisses” and I placed a flash story with “Souther Fried Weirdness” for some time in October. Both are no pay and I always hate when I do that, but I was trying to get down my inventory of unsold stories.
I made a list of the stories that I have completed and have yet to sell. I spent the morning submitting a few of these. Several were written about Hurricane Katrina.
Speed Trap – At 28 and counting this is the King of the Rejections. I love this story and each rejection makes me love it more. Dark story about a man who lays traps for speeding cars so he can rob the wrecks. I just need to find the right market.
La Soer Sans Merci – Flash (not spec fic) about a woman in an evil nursing home during Katrina.
Girl with the Error message Eyes – Story of war, the inescapable media and grieving parents. I thought this was an easy sale, but the story is too dark and has little action. It is had 6 rejects so far. It’s been out at an anthology market for a little bit, but I don’t like selling to anthologies.
The Duke’s Left Eye – Medieval fantasy S&S – hard sell lately. Only OK, not great.
On Ben Klibreck – Scottish ghost story. There is no market for this. It was fun to write, but I am not sure it’s such a good story.
The Window Washer Murder – Cyberpunk – first in a series. I have sold others, but this one is a tough sell.
At the Submarine Races – silly alien contact. I just reread it and I like it, but it may be too much for most markets.
You Can’t think about it – Flash – Vietnam war story (not spec fic) based on a story a friend once told me.
Rescue Boat – Flash Katrina SF story.
The Shunned Well – Lovecraftian short horror (1800 words). Odd, but not that compelling.
Please Leave a Message – short (2k) horror about premature burial – ending is a little too obvious.
Marching Saints – Gruesome horror flash. Another Katrina story.
Gran Gator – Silly flash story about rescue workers and a Huge Gator during Katrina.
A Nest of Flames – 5K Story about fire eaters in the early 1800s. (Currently subbed to TOT). This is the best of the bunch. TOT has had it two months, which is a good sign.
The answer to this is to finish some of the stories that are more than half done. I have a dozen of these that are decent stories and should sell eventually. It’s this damn job. I have to work all day. Waisting my time blogging doesn’t help either.
William Gibson published Neuromancer in 1984. I didn’t read it until I bought the used paperback at The Book Exchange in Philadelphia around 1988. The book altered the way that I think about Science Fiction and inspired me to write a Cyberpunk novella (lost in a failed backup about 15 years ago). Neuromancer was the first book that, when I finished the last page, I went back to the first page and started reading again. I bought Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive as soon as I could find them. I even had to buy the last one in hardcover, because the paperback wasn’t out yet.
These books are hard as diamonds and not an easy read. They are dense with information and full of assumptions about the reader’s ability to keep up with difficult concepts. I sometimes hesitate to recommend them.
I identify most with character Gentry in Mona Lisa Overdrive who is searching for the shape of the nets. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:
“Well, then,” Gentry said, turning, click as the beam died, the light of his obsession burning bright, bright behind his eyes, amplified so powerfully by Kid Afrika’s derm that it seemed to Slick that the Shape must be right there, blazing through Gentry’s forehead, for anyone at all to see except Gentry himself, “that must be just what it is. . . .”
My favorite character is Molly Millions, who first appears in the short story Johnny Mnemonic (avoid the movie – not like the story at all). Molly starts out in the early works as an young woman who has lost the love of her life and is full of anger. She is the love interest of Case, the hacker. By the end of the last book, she is much older and quite jaded, but risks all to save the lives of two young lovers. Did I mention that she has fingernails that extend into razors when she needs to kill someone?
Gibson’s influence on SF is amazing, even twenty years later when the genre seems to be much softer. I prefer the hard edgy writing of the cyberpunks, even now, when many of their themes have turned into cliches. I have a bunch of cyberpunk themed stories in the trunk that I know I can’t sell because the sub-genre is so compelling to new authors. The Matrix and Blade Runner have ruined it for writers like me who admire Gibson’s sentences, which read like well written computer code.
Gibson’s books after the Neuromancer Trilogy are less than interesting. Gibson gave hundreds of interviews, but began to believe his own press. I read Virtual Light, and tried to read Idoru and Pattern Recognition, but I couldn’t get interested in them. I am not going to buy Spook Country, his latest. The CNN blurb reeks of hype. The book can’t be as good as the press is painting it.
I received an email asking how old a Science Fiction hero is supposed to be. Of course, the answer is “old enough”, but I am thinking that in many of the best SF stories, the hero is a teenager. They say the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 14. SF heroes tend to be young because the readers are young. Even older readers like me are teenagers in heart and spirit.
Hi! Might you have some sense of the approximate age of sci-fi heroes? We have a project intended for an adult audience, and the hero is nineteen. When I think of heroes in other genres, the hero seems to be in his early thirties. Thank you in advance for your input. Of course I would appreciate hearing from you at your earliest convenience. Best regards, (Name withheld on request)
This is a store where you can buy copies of Heinlein’s files. It consists of scrapbooks and notes, works in progress and other stuff that was found in Heinlein’s filing cabinets.
I am a little disappointed that you can’t buy any originals or hard copies. Originals would be very expensive, though. They sell you a PDF that you download (just like my name a star site).
Fr $3.00 you can buy a copy of Life-Line, Heinlein’s first short story, just as he typed it out to submit to Campbell. I might just go for it.
Check out this close call from an IED that was either buried too deep or didn’t have enough enough fire power. The IED is amazing and extremely frighting. It is hard to understand the people who sign up for this kind of abuse, but one must respect them.
I read military.com because it is mostly geared toward the average guy in the field. Its politics is definitely ant-Bush, although they are not an overtly political site.
Back in the early 1980s, I got my first PC. It was a “luggable” computer that I got cheap through an IBM employee. It was an XT that was about the size of a portable sewing machine or a vacuum cleaner. It was an XT with one floppy disk drive, 256K memory and a small amber screen. I upgraded this with a second floppy, bumped the memory up to 784K and a VGA Wonder card that could display full color (in shades of amber) on the six inch screen. I eventually got a 40 meg drive and I even replaced the motherboard with a 386 cpu with 4 megs of ram. (To put thing in perspective, the crappy Dell desktop that I use here at work costs 1/10 the price in 1984 dollars, and is about 10,000 times as powerful, although only a little more useful.)
I wrote a whole s—- load of code on this machine. I took it to my job at Lockheed every day for four or five years. ( I was the manager of the microcomputer development department, but they would not buy me a PC.) The most useful part of the PC was the modem. I was hooked on the bulletin boards systems (BBS). I partook in many interesting and active threads. I wrote shareware and freeware and was voted one of the top ten shareware authors of 1988. My big hits were image viewers. My software could display hundreds of image formats and convert back and forth between them. I am afraid that often the viewers were used for porn.
The success of windows put me out of business. I did not like writing in C language so I stopped writing shareware until I discovered PHP language about five years ago. I have written a bunch of small PHP utilities that are fairly popular and used on numerous websites. None of them achieved the popularity of my Optiks program in the late 1980s, because non have anything to do with the main drivers on the internet.
The internet seems to be driven by:
1) Pornography. 2) Free Music Downloads. 3) Gaming. 4) Social Interaction.
This seems cynical, but it is a well known fact. The most popular search term at all of the search engines is “Free Porn” and its variations.
There is a school of thought that believes that if you want to make money on the internet you have to have a website that is free, offers porn, ring tones and music, has time wasting games and allows you to have friends.
A friend of mine recently said he was looking for Vernor Vinge Torrents and received about 400 hits a day from that combination of words. (A torrent is a way to steal files with a bit of anonymity, Vernor Vinge is an author whose works are not available in audio). If I were to mention “Oscar Delahoya Torrents” or “Last Comic Standing Winner Torrent” in my blog I can guarantee thousands of hits. (These the two top non-porn search terms of the moment at Google Hot Trends). I have stopped my spoof pages, but Britney Spears Naked made me about $300 dollars in six months. I decided it was just too creepy to make money this way.
This doesn’t mean that the internet is full of porno freaks or ethically challenged music downloaders. It just means that these people are doing a lot of surfing for what they are having trouble finding.
In a previous post, I mentioned Blogger Play and how addictive it is. After watching this site for about 20 minutes, I was impressed with how positive the blog world is. I hear about war and death and pain on TV, but the pictures uploaded to blogs by ordinary people are all about peace and life and happiness. The pictures are almost all uplifting and makes me think that there may be some hope for the internet and the human race.
So… It may appear that the internet world is driven by our baser instincts, but I think that the search engine stats are misleading. I don’t need search engines to find my friends on the internet. I read about 25 blogs a day. Several hundred people read my blog every day. I send a dozen or so emails out every day and receive as many or more from good folks. People like us make up for and then some the negative elements on the nets. I don’t have porn or illegal music or even much social interaction on my websites and I make money. Call me an dope, but I think that what drives the internet is much more good than bad.
Beetlejuice Ghost House on Haunted Hill (the old one) A Christmas Carol (with Alister Sims) maybe misspelled Jacob’s Ladder Poltergeist 1408 (with John Cusack) probably also misspelled The Entity Constantine Volvere (yes, I count this as a ghost movie, so get over it) The Frighteners ( with Michael J. Fox) The Gift
My star naming site has suddenly taken off. It got picked up on some discussion boards last night and I have had 5000 hits in the last 8 hours. I made $10 in ads revenue and $50 in sales. I have spent all morning trying to help people who don’t know how to use a printer.
It’s time to revamp the site. I need to add an additional cost item to mail a certificate if they don’t want to print it. I figure it costs about $2 to print out a certificate and put it in a stiff mailer, then another $2.50 to mail in the US. I think people would pay $10 or even $12 for the certificate to be mailed. This is a good profit for 10 minutes work, but you have to count gas and time to go and stand in line at the post office. This needs some thinking.
One of the few artists and illustrators from the golden age of science fiction still living is Edd Cartier. Along with Virgil Finlay, Kelley Freas, Hannes Bok, Lawrence Sterne Stevens and Ed Emsh, Edd Cartier drew the illustrations and painted the covers of the pulp magazines of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. You can pick up almost any copy of an Astounding Science Fiction magazine from the early 1950s and find the fantastic work of Edd Cartier.
This Saturday, before Erica and I went out garage sailing, I decided to bring my camera. I had not brought a camera along on my travels since last fall. I am glad that I did. We followed yard sale signs down through the small towns in New Jersey until I was thoroughly lost. We stopped on one street where there were three different sales. I stopped at the one at the end and bought two Galaxy magazines from the 70s. One thing led to another and I found that I was talking to the son of Edd Cartier, the writer Dean Cartier. The nice old guy “supervising” the garage sale was none other than Edd Cartier, himself.
Edd at 93 is sharp and friendly and was glad to talk about his friend John W. Campbell, Jr. and his friendships with Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, L, Sprague deCamp and others. I am afraid that I made a pest of myself. I wound up Buying two books from Dean and having his father autograph them. I bothered Edd and Dean for at least 45 minutes and I wish that I had not had to leave.
Here I am with Edd checking out his book. (I’m the big doofy one.)
I am afraid that I was a little bit of pest and I got into the house and took pictures of the framed art. The statuette is a bust of Lovecraft, the World Fantasy Award!
Edd is holding his book Edd Cartier: The Known and the Unknown. Dean wrote the text, and it is chock full of Edd’s art. It is a limited edition and mine is numbered 603 out of 2000.
One thing, I had to promise not to reveal Edd and Dean’s address. That is no problem because I had no idea where I was or how I got there.
When you upload an image to blogger, naturally blogger.com keeps track of it. One of their programmers wrote an app to watch what was being uploaded. It is mesmerizing. I am amazed at the continual beauty of the images being uploaded.
Warning! if you click you will be hooked.
I slowed the speed down a bit, as I need a little more time to take each picture in,
The thing about Squidoo.com is that it has a google page rank of 6 – page rank gold. A link from squidoo is worth more than other sites. I am going to put a few of my essays there and go crazy with the links. You can also make money from the ads on Squidoo. I run off at the mouth and much of it makes it here or on my other blogs. I am going to try putting some of the unpublished ones out and get links back to my other sites.
John played fast and loose with what he calls a Ghost Movie claiming that he couldn’t think of that many good ones. I disagree. Harvey is not a ghost story, even if it is one of my favorite movies.
Basically I don’t think there are ten great ghost movies, as the genre is inherently ridiculous, and I’m not aware of ten great ghost movie spoofs. So for my list I have taken the liberty of expanding the definition of ghost to include not only a disembodied formerly living being, but also a psychological projection (which, after all, is what so-called ghosts really are) — and also to include situations where a dead being haunts the action of the flick like a ghost. If this definition is too liberal, please feel free to junk my note. Yet I think the validity of my liberal definition tends to be proven by the fact that coming up with even ten films to fit it is still going to be a hard slog.
The Uninvited — Among the many reasons it’s the best of its kind is because of the presence of the mentally disturbed Gail Russell (who died very young) and which I think is only fitting, as all so-called spiritualistic phenomena is the result of psychological distress — that is, when it isn’t atrributable to either unexplained natural phenomena or simple human fraud.
The Innocents — A disappointing rendition of a Henry James story, but still better than just about everything else in this wretched genre.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir — Not a great movie, but still better than most in this genre.
Rebecca — Hitch’s first Hollywood picture and one of his best, includes a superfluity of gothic trappings, and shows the haunting effect of the dead upon the living. It also illustrates the idea that the evil that men (and women) perpetrate in this world lives on after them. If you consider this a ghost story, then this is probably the greatest of them all as far as the big screen is concerned.
Keeper of the Flame — Tracy and Hepburn’s strangest movie, which like Rebecca also shows the effects of the dead upon the living. There is also a political lesson in there concerning the inherent fascism of the so-called elite, a lesson for which most Americans, alas, remain clueless to this day.
An American Werewolf in London — If you can make the stretch into thinking that the undead might be ghosts, then this is a very entertaining flick, whatever genre you might happen to label it w/.
Citizen Kane — As in Rebecca and Keeper of the Flame: a dead dude continues to freak the living. Kane’s a ghost story, dude.
The Seventh Seal — If the grim reaper isn’t a ghost, then what the heck is he?
Hold that Ghost — All I know is that it beats the heck out of Ghostbusters. . .
There are probably two ghost comedies I could use to fill out my list to ten — Ghostbusters not being one of them — but I can’t think of them.
I got this from Jim. There are some here that I’ve never seen and I will have to check out.
The Uninvited Field of Dreams The Innocents Its A Wonderful Life Between Two Worlds Stairway to Heaven The Haunting Portrait of Jennie Topper Ghost Breakers
October is coming. I will be reading Something Wicked This Way Comes for the 40th time. I will be looking for something good to watch on Halloween. Here is a list of 13 great Ghost Stories. I expect you to email me your lists so I can put them here.
The Uninvited (1944) – by far the best ghost movie. It has a good story and is not just some scary special effects.
The Innocents (1961) – based on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw
The Haunting (1963) – based on Shirley Jackson’s chilling The Haunting of Hill House.
Blithe Spirit (1945) – Wonderful screwball comedy involving dead people. My Dad saw the stage play in London during WW2 when he was stationed in England.
13 Ghosts (1960) – I saw this with the special glasses in the Rockland Theater in Nyack and it scared the hell out of me.
Topper (1937) – I actually liked the TV show better. Cary Grant made a great ghost, though.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) – The most romantic story in the list. You’ve got to love Gene Tierney.
Ghost (1990) – Sappy, but I like the crazy guy on the subway.
The Shining (1980) – Here’s Johnny! Way over the top, but still a scary story.
House on Haunted Hill (1958) – One word: Vincent Price.
The Canterville Ghost (1944) – has one of my mother’s favorite actors, Charles Laughton.
Poltergeist (1982) – Perhaps too slick, but a cool ending and the clown was cool.
Hold That Ghost (1941) – best Abbot and Costello movie.
I didn’t like The Sixth Sense. I wanted to put one of the Laurel and Hardy ghost movies, but I can’t remember the name. There were too many Stephen King ghost stories and I disliked most of them. Others choices that I did not list might be any of the many Christmas Carol movies. I think there are a lot of great Japanese ghost movies, but I haven’t seen any. I have not seen Blair Witch or other modern movie because I don’t have a DVD player, I don’t rent movies, and I don’t go to the little cramped things that pass for movie theaters around here.
I crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge today and deliberately didn’t look south towards the city. On a clear day you can see the Manhattan skyline. On that day, all I could see was a pillar of smoke. I don’t like to think about it – too much pain and too many tears.
I went home early that day via the Bear Mountain bridge, 20 miles to the north. My brother Larry and I gathered a bunch of kids from the old neighborhood, ages 5 to 10. We brought them to the top of Clausland Mountain where you can see the city. I pointed to the smoke and said “Remember this. This is the most important event of our times. It changes your future.”
(picture is view from Clausland Mountain looking away from the city, north, towards the Bridge and Hook Mountain)
I know Don through poker, but it turns out he’s a distant cousin. Anyway here’s his list and comments (and the thing was played by James Arness, better known as Matt Dillon in the 50’s horse opera):
I put these on my Netflix queue. I believe I saw The Thing years ago. Does Peter Arnes play the thing? My list is very similar to yours with some personal favorites added.
The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 Forbidden Planet, 1956 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan, 1982
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956 The War of the Worlds, 1953
Frankenstein, 1931 The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957 A Clockwork Orange, 1971 The Time Machine, 1960
The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976 Starman, 1984
Enemy Mine, 1985 The Terminator, 1984
Some personal favorites: Twelve Monkeys Outland Star Wars IV and V Robinson Caruso on Mars The Fifth Element Dark City The Matrix
I learned today that the black pipe used for gas installation uses NPT or tapered thread and not NPS, which is not tapered. The difference is that the tapered pipe self-seals and does not need pipe dope. (I’m going to dope the hell out of it anyway, just to be safe.)
I am sure you are glad to hear this, because I will be cutting and threading black pipe to finish my furnace install. If you will remember the old furnace burned up. The new furnace failed last March, and I spent a week in August reinstalling the new furnace. I am all done (no leaks) except that the gas pipe, which used to be a Rube Goldberg maze, is not done. I ripped it all out, but I did not have a pipe threader to install the new pipes. My brother Ward has Uncle Eddie’s tap and die kit. I never thought that I would need it. I bought a 3/4″ 14 NPT hex die today for $16 from a company in Michigan. It should be delivered from a warehouse in PA so I should have it by Thursday.
If the blog stops after Thursday it means that the gas piping didn’t go well.
I’ve been comparing clicks on my pages with Google ads to what is reported by MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a free utility that keeps track of links to and from your pages. It is interesting because it reports on where you readers are going when they leave your page. MyBlogLog typically reports about ten times as many links to ads as Google reports.
I have discovered some of the probable reasons why.
1) Google clicks don’t count if the surfer doesn’t remain on the target site for some minimum time, thought to be 20 seconds. A surfer must stay long enough at a target site to do a little reading. I don’t know how they determine this unless the site has Google analytics, but it is what I read.
2) MyBlogLog is not actually recording clicks, but is recording the mouse location when the page closes. In the case where a Google banner is right under the menu, they record a Google click when none occurred. This is especially true of StumbleUpon tool bars and someone on the nets was able to trace a large number of non-clicks to StumbleUpon. Since my sites get lots of StumbleUpon-ers, I assume that this is happening.
3) The more ominous reason is that Google has decided that clicks to you pages are likely to be fraudulent or not result in a sale or positive action at the target sites. This would require Google Analytics to be installed at the target site, which usually is. If you have real slacker surfers or evil or drunk surfers then their clicks are worthless and Google makes some kind of judgment about clicks from your site.
I panicked last night and I started replacing Google ads at HarpTab.com with Chitika ads. Chitika ads are moving banners that look very much like ads, but are said to pay well. I was very disappointed. After 10,000 banner displays, I made 30 cents. This is not good news. I was making a very low amount from the Google ads, but at least I made something and there were days that I made $10 or more from HarpTab.com. Lately I’ve been making about a buck a day. I think that I’ll let the Chitika ads run a few more days as a test. I’ll let them “cleanse the pallet” at harptab and maybe when I come back, the Google ads will do better.
By the way, there is an excellent article on Banner Blindness at Jakob Nielsen’s AlertBox. The current article is about how a link that looks too fancy will trigger an ad reaction and surfers will avoid it. Links should look like normal links. Surfers will actively avoid anything that looks like an ad.
Here’s a list of healthy food that you should be eating every day. I don’t eat these every day, but I love them all.
I just bought 5 bricks of frozen leaf spinach, because Erica was tired of the broccoli mix.
Erica grows her own blueberries, but she finished the last of the season and has to go back to store bought.
Our tomatoes did not come out well this year (deer got to them), but local tomatoes are still around, cheap and tasty (not the green apples made to look like tomatoes that you buy in the grocery store).
I have cans of organic low sodium black beans in the pantry. They are hard to find without the tons of salt. We have not been eating them very often though, so I’ll have to start up again.
We usually buy almonds instead of walnuts. I like both and will eat either like candy if given the chance.
We use yogurt as a substitute for mayonnaise. I put it on sandwiches and to make salad dressing. Russian dressing is yogurt with some ketchup added for color. I buy low salt organic ketchup when I can. We use yogurt in tuna salad. I like the Greek yogurt. It is stiffer and and has a sharper flavor than the American brands.
I do not eat anything with oats in it regularly. I like oatmeal and should make it for breakfast, but in the morning I am concentrating on getting to work on time and don’t eat anything except strong coffee.
I like to have sweet potatoes twice a week, but they are not on the list. Sweet potatoes are nearly a perfect food.
I would love to go to the Singularity summit, but it has been slash-dotted and I can’t even get the page to load. The link is to the SlashDot article. I’ll try again after the brouhaha has died down.
Madeleine L’Engle passed away. I love her books and she will be missed. I found a tape of an interview with her recently at a garage sale. I converted about a minute of it so I can share it with you. It will give you a flavor of who she was. She explains why A Winkle in Time was rejected over 40 times.
This is from something called the Trumpet club and the tape was made for educators, but I can find no information on the internet. It appears that the NY Times obit is quoting from this interview. I have the whole thing, (about 20 minutes). If you are interested, I can send you a link to the full mp3.
I know Eric through my brother. He is a manic guitar collector as is my brother. He is also a bicyclist and has a vintage recumbent bike. I occasionally see him zipping along, lying on his back, miles from Nyack.
He sent me a short Sci-Fi list:
I’m not enough of a fan to pull 20 of my favorites out of my head (or ass)….here’s some I can remember that you haven’t listed…
Bladerunner Alien Aliens Terminator II Jurassic The Fly (Help ME!!!)
I am writing a story where the McGuffin is a large scale worm that is used to solve a difficult problem. (I know, I’m shooting myself in the foot again – too techy for the average dopey reader.) Here is an Australian news article via slashdot about the findings of researchers at MessageLabs.
In essence the article says that there are as many as 2 million Storm Worm controlled computers sending out spam. If you add up the computing power this is the most powerful computing grid in the world. It is thousands of times smarter than a human brain, although programmed only to send out spam. If it’s computing power were turned to good, who knows what complex questions it could answer? In my story, the hero is able to find a vulnerability in the worm itself and take control over it and program it to solve his own sticky situation.
I found this in the junk at the side of the road. It is a real work of art compared to the junk you get when you buy a stereo system these days. I checked eBay and the run about $30 each. It seems a shame. I have no room for it, and I only have one of them. A pair would be worth keeping.
I have finally entered the 21st century. I blew some of my FreeNameAStar.com money on an MP3 player. Almost everyone told me to buy an iPod, but as far as price goes they are too much. I researched MP3 players at AnyThingButIpod.com and I read the requirements for an MP3 book reader at Audible.com and I began to search the discount sites and eBay. Price was my main criterion and storage was the second. It was also an absolute must that the MP3 player be able restart at the point it left off when I turn it off. MP3 books are long and you don’t want to listen to 45 minutes of previously heard novel to get to where you left off.
October is coming. I will be reading Something Wicked This Way Comes for the 40th time. I will be looking for something good to watch on Halloween. Here is a list of 13 great Ghost Stories. I expect you to email me your lists so I can put them here.
I crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge today and deliberately didn’t look south towards the city. On a clear day you can see the Manhattan skyline. On that day, all I could see was a pillar of smoke. I don’t like to think about it – too much pain and too many tears.
