Giornale Nuovo

One of the blogs that I read, Giornale Nuovo, has this watercolor from the early 1800s. It would make a good book cover, I think, if I ever publish a book of short stories. I would have to write a story that fits the picture, though.

Soehnée Between May 1818 and May 1819, Charles-Frédéric Soehnée filled three albums with an extraordinary series of watercolour paintings and sketches.

Justine's Boxes and Miscellanea

I received two more boxes from Justine. She is cleaning out her closets. I hope that I can convince her to send another box, because there is so much stuff missing.

These latest boxes contained a 4 year old Dell XPS desktop computer. This is the biggest mother of a computer that I've ever seen. It has lot's of bells and whistles, but for all of it's size is not as powerful as the bargain basement version that I use here at work every day. It came with a very large LCD screen that I think Erica should use. At least I get a decent computer for the Fortress of Solitude in the basement. I have been without a desktop since the time when all three of my 'puters failed at once for some unknown reason.

I now have four non-working laptop computers and two very good working ones. Justine failed to provide batteries, power supplies and external CD drives and stuff for the 4 laptops. A power brick is $50 and batteries cost $100 to $150 and these computers go for $100 to $200 with all the parts on eBay. They are all 800mhz or a little more. There is one cute Solis 200mhz with win 95 that I like quite a bit, but I can't upgrade it without the external cd drive. I ordered a "universal" power supply quite cheap from MeritLine.com and I will use that to power these puppies up and see how they do - after that it is "free to a good home" or put them on eBay for parts at $10 with $15 shipping.

Justine also put a Dell Axim X3 in the box that I think she got free with the big XPS computer. The Axim is a cute little thing that is almost impossible to use. Unlike the Palm Treo or Blackberry PDAs, these are useless for anything exect as extensions of a computer. They are difficult to use standalone and they can't connect to the cell phone system. Luckily, I have written several programs for Axims at work and have all of the software and experience to make it semi-useful.

This Axim has a nice wifi connection that eats battery power, but it does allow me to walk around the yard and view my gmail account. I bought a $10 travel charger for it from MeritLine and I will use it as an MP3 player. It is very clunky to use that way because you have to pull out the stylus and tap the screen to control the audio - hard to do when driving. I might write an MP3 player with big finger size touch screen buttons to play and pause the thing. I will also experiment with css media directives. Google products can tell when I am on a PDA so it must be possible to create zine pages that are readable from PDAs. I can then make a site that does things like translates stories to small screen format on the fly for cell phones and PDAs. A neat exercise, but people like to read from paper, not print, and you would only read from a pda or cellphone when stuck somewhere without a book or magazine, something no real reader would ever do.

I found a magazine named Southern Gothic that is paying for weird flash stories. Coincidentally, I have half a dozen weird flash pieces set in New Orleans that I wrote for ScienceFictional last summer. I will perform serial submission to these people until they beg me to stop or I sell one.

I sent a story to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress #22. This is a long shot as they are a "pro" market and probably swamped. I just happened to have a three year old Sorceress story that I sold to an anthology that went bust. I have not submitted since the Coyote Wild Story and I haven't finished a story in 6 months, even though I write a lot of 1000 word beginnings and 500 word outlines. Programming seems to rock my world more than writing something that requires months of rejections for an unsatisfying sale.

I finished transferring my archives to the 200 gig drive last night. I found lots of half finished stories and a bunch of forgotten outlines. I should spend some time and finish some of these, just to get them out of the way. There is another Sword and Sorceress story there that is done but needs a rewrite. The MZB site accepts multiple submissions until April 24, so I should get to work. Here's an idea for those writing S&S. Editors are sick of stories set in a generic medieval Europe with Norse cultural elements like wizards with long beards. Try recasting the location to 8th century Arabia, 5th century India, Ancient China or 12th century Peru. The magic still works and the stories seem fresh. The wizards still have long beards, but they wear different hats. Ten minutes of googling will get you all the background that you need.

I installed Tax Cut last night. I will be spending the next few evenings doing my taxes. This is always frustrating, even with the computer. Tax Cut makes it very easy, but I hate having to compile all the data. The stocks are so time consuming and this year I'll have expenses associated with teaching which is painful to figure out, but I have to do it. I will also be collecting my web hosting expenses to use them to offset the Google and FreeNameAStar income. This stuff is meticulous and gives you a headache very quickly.

Worlds with Double Sunsets Common

I once read that it would be difficult for a binary sun to have planets. The complex gravitation would pull the planet apart or eventually bring it so close to one or another of the suns that it would boil away any water. This has recently been shown not to be the case.

Many binary systems are far enough apart - much further than Pluto from the sun - so that planets can easily orbit one or the other sun without ever getting caught up in the other sun's gravity. In other systems, the suns are close enough together that the physics makes them basically one star and a planet can orbit the pair without being pulled into the dangerous areas between the suns.

This is a relief and greatly increases the number of stars that are potential nurseries for intelligent life. A while ago, I tried my own variation on the famous Drake's Equation that is used to estimate the probability of finding another intelligent species in space. I figure that there is at least one intelligent life form within 1000 light years of us right now. I excluded binary stars. By including binaries the number could be ten times that! By my poor math, the odds are 50/50 that there is an intelligent species right now within 100 light years of earth - that's just a hop, skip and a jump away. Alien invaders could be on their way right now.

I don't think I ever blogged those calculations, but I have no idea where I put them. I'll search and if I find them I'll make a page on CthreePO.com.

SPACE.com -- Worlds with Double Sunsets Common

Web Metrics Part One - Web Log Analysis

I am sorry, but I can't stop writing these techy pieces. Those of you who need more on the status of my house and yard, where I go on weekends, or what stories I've written recently; please be patient, I will get this stuff out of my system eventually. I am sick of the damn cats, but I will get pictures onto the cat blog, I promise.

Web Log Analysis

One key to making your web site a success is measuring the traffic. It makes sense that you measure how popular the pieces of your web site are. You need to know who is visiting your site, what they look at, how long they stay and how often they visit. This is called web metrics.

The obvious place to find much of this information is in your web logs. Web servers add a line to a log every time they do something. There are software packages that analyze your web traffic and produce nice reports. As your web site grows, you will have to take a statistical viewpoint, but on small web sites it is easy enough to read the raw log files.

There are many measurements of traffic.

Hits: Hits is the sum total of every action that the web server has taken. It includes all images, scripts, css files, robot.txt access and even includes misses and redirects in the total. Obviously, total hits is a meaningless term and does not tell you how many human eyes visited your site.

Pages: A page is an html page. It includes PHP, ASP, and other scrip languages, but it does not include images and text files like javascript or css files. It may or may not include mp3 files, flash files or Adobe PDF files. If it is a file type that is normally formatted in HTML then it should be included as a page view.

Visitors: When a person comes to your web site and clicks on a link, they send along with the request for the page, the URL of page where they clicked the link. A good web statistics program can tell if a visitor arrives at a page from somewhere else or is just clicking around inside of the web site. Visitors don't identify themselves and you can't tell who they are, so the Visitors statistics is a good guess based on the how they were referred to a page.

Pages per Visit and Duration of Visit: It is nice to know how many pages a visitor looked at before they left the site. It is also good to know how long they stayed. This will give you an indication of how closely they read the content on the pages.

Entry and Exit Page: Some pages are good landing pages. When a user searches for something it is good to know what is the first page they looked at on your site. This is not always your home page. You might want to make some pages more friendly and welcoming, especially if you expect the visitor to have come into it from another page on your site. It is also good to know the last page that a visitor viewed. It might be nice to look at your top exit pages to see what encouraged your visitors to leave. Perhaps these pages need target=_blank directive on the links so that the user can hang around a little longer. Maybe there is something on the page that the visitor doesn't like.

Errors: A 404 error can indicate a broken link. It might indicate that a page has been deleted (never delete pages) and that a search engine thinks that it still exists. It might mean that somebody else, on another site has a typo in a link. It could also show you the activity of hacker probing your site for weaknesses. You should have a 404 error page. Most sites allow you to place a web page with the name 404.shtml in each directory. You can then format this page to say that you are sorry but the page you are looking for is missing and then give them a list of page suggestions that they should visit. In this way, you don't loose the visitor because of a missing page. If the 404.shtml file doesn't work you might have to use an .htaccess file to tell your web server what to do on a 404 error.
404 errors are created every time a search engine spider tries to read your robots.txt file and can't find it. If you don't have a robots.txt file you should create one and put it in your root directory. This will cut down on the 404 errors and it will allow you to fine-tune how the spiders see your site.

Spider traffic: Depending on the type of site that you have, spiders can make up a good chunk of your traffic. I have websites with thousands of pages and there are spiders looking at all of these pages repeatedly. Spiders usually come from the search engines and they are looking at your web pages to include them in searches. They look at the links for new pages and they record the keywords so that others can find your pages. Other spiders look at your web pages for telephone numbers, email addresses and other personal information that they can sell. Some spiders are looking for older versions of software that have security holes that can be exploited.
Spiders are not humans and if you want to know how many humans are looking at your site, you have to subtract out the spiders. Most spiders announce themselves. Some can be identified by their actions. Some are identified by their IP address. Good web log analysis software makes an attempt to list spider traffic separately and subtract it out from normal traffic.

Key Words: Every time you get a hit from Google or MSN or Yahoo, they pass along with the hit, the search phrase that was used to find you. A good web statistics package can pull out these search phrases and tell you what the top keywords and phrases were. It is nice to know that if you have a root beer site that people are finding you by searching for root beer. If they are finding you because they are searching for cooking turnips in beer, then you might want to figure out what you are doing to attract this user and perhaps change the wording or other Search Engine optimizations to avoid getting hits from people who aren't interested in your page. Conversely, if you have a root beer page and root beer is not your highest rated search term, you might need to make changes. If you get hits on a search term that you did not expect, but is a good term, then you might want to make sure that it is included in other pages.

Free web site analysis tools abound. Many web hosting companies install AWStats, which is free. It requires PERL and a little configuring, but it is the best all around package. My web hosts also have Webalizer, a package called Analog and a neat script that shows the last 100 web visitors and what they looked at.

Raph Koster on magic and games

J Erwine is working on some gaming ideas and has asked for input. I'm to old to have played the D&D variety of game, so I did not respond, but I saw this link in BoingBoing.net this morning and followed it. A blogger posted the transcript on a Ralph Koster's talk about game development.

I particularly love the idea that songs are made of songs and games are made of games. This is a truth that is so obvious as to be invisible. Novels are short stories spread over a larger canvas. Short stories are smaller stories, images and epitaphs spread over a plot. I will make a note of Ralph and watch for him to do a talk in the northeast. I read some of his stuff, like comparing non-techs to muggles, and I like the way he thinks.

Wonderland: Etech 07: Raph Koster on magic

Now, game playing brings up my mandatory boring recollections from my childhood in Central Nyack, NY. I wrote lots of stories and read quite a bit as a nerdy bespectacled kid. Growing up in Rockland County's equivalent of The Hood, though, I could play basketball with the best, I owned guns and went hunting, and in the summer every kid in the neighborhood played Army. Our army games were based on the TV show Combat, which the neighborhood kids all liked and watched. Army evolved into a sword and sorcery game where we used sticks for swords and plywood shields and a kill was made via a touché. We called the game Draconia after a story I had written (long since lost).

Draconia was very popular in the summer with about 20 kids playing. We moved it inside in the winter time. I took the ping pong table in a neighbor's basement and turned it over. I painted a map and then drew in black magic marker 1/2 inch squares. I made game pieces by making clay molds and pouring melted wax into them. I had red, white, blue and black candles so we had 4 teams. I made a spinner out of cardboard with move options on it and we would take turn moving armies around the map. There were rules for fighting, there were walled cities with rules for sieges. There were ships for the rivers and seas. It was all very complex and games took weeks to play before there was one winner. There were secret alliances and all of the strategies of the battle games that would later become popular. There were dragons and sea monsters and randomly moving hazards. It was all very complex and we added rules all the time.

The neighbors moved to Nebraska and the table went with them. I now watch the domain name Draconia.com so if it expires I can register it in homage to the game I played as a kid. Maybe I can make a flash based MMPRG based on the old Draconia ping pong table rules. That would be a project. Maybe if J creates a good game, I'll find time to make the online version of it.

New Toys

I received a bunch of stuff from Justine via FedEx. I expect more tomorrow. It is all out of date computer equipment that she used at work. I have a total of 6 notebook computers that she sent me. I've got several working, but two are missing batteries and several have no power supply. Most are 800mhz up to about 1.8mhz. Justine always gets lots of memory and large hard disks so these are decent computers if I can get them working. I'll have to find them good homes.
I am using the cute little panasonic with the chinese keyboard to write this. I still can't touch type on it yet.
She put an older X3 version of the Dell Axim in the box. I charged it up and it worked ok. I had to download the activesync software from Microsoft. It connected right away to my wifi and I was surfing the net on the little screen. I tried writing using the handwriting recognition and it works well. I don't think that I could write a story that way, though. I will put in a 1 gig sd card and use it as an mp3 player. Ward gave me the a dvd of Neil Gaiman stories recorded as MP3 files. I will copy them over and see if I can listen to them in the car.

Old Rhyme

I bought a 200 gig disk drive and last night was transferring as many of my old archives as I can to it. I have it in a USB box and I can carry it between work and home. I found this old thing written perhaps 30 years ago. When I was writing Fumets, I dug it out and I thought about using it as a preface. Thank goodness I don't write this stuff anymore.

If worm or man should downward slip
beneath the leafy mould
and sough a song of hidden things
where longings wither cold,
then kindle thoughts of ancient times,
and epics long since told
when senses blazed with intense light,
and passions glittered gold.

Stardust

Neil Gaiman's Stardust has a website. This is such a cool looking movie. I may actually go and see it. It is not often that I see a movie trailer and it makes me want to go see the movie. It comes out in August. Maybe Ward or Robert can get me a bootleg dvd before then.

Of Data, Drives, and the Winchester Model 1894

One of my stories that I would like to work on again, but was lost in a computer upgrade, had a cyberpunk plot about a character that dealt in stolen data. The MacGuffin of the story was a data brick the size of a bar of soap. In my story, this solid state storage device held 100 terabytes of data. It was thought that it was the financial modeling system of a large corporation but it turned out to have the stored memories of a dead scientist. I know, it's not real original, but in 1992 it was the latest thing. I have been trying ever since to write the not-just-another-cyberpunk story that uses shared man-computer memories, but I don't think it can be done. (Or it has been done too many times).

I felt at the time that monolithic memory was going to replace disk drives. Hard disk drives are mechanical devices of wheels and springs and levers. They are Victorian devices, like fine watches. The reason that they break (although disk drives are incredibly tough) is that the mechanical parts wear out or are damaged due to dropping or the motor burns out. These are all failures of the moving parts. Solid State memory has no moving parts.

Samsung announced today that they have been taking the flash memory technology, the same technology commonly used in USB drives and the memory cards used in cameras, and they have made tiny non-disk drives that are three times faster than the disk drives currently use in computers. These solid state drives will be smaller, cheaper, cooler, use less electricity, and more reliable than the mechanical variety.

It is probably possible right now to store 100 terabytes in a package the size of a bar of soap. My story from 15 years ago is already out of date. When I wrote it, a one gig disk was big. At the time that I wrote the story, I was programming a device the size of a refrigerator that held 12 inch optical disk platters with a mechanical arm to swap them and it had a total capacity of 600 megs. That $200,000 disk juke box is the equivalent of $100 in disks at todays prices.

All disk drives are descendants of the IBM Winchester drives. They had multiple brown magnetic platters with a mechanical arm that moved a read/write head over them. It was like tape drive but instead of the tape moving, the arm could jump to read the magnetic tape-like coating on the platter.

The IBM disk drive was called a Winchester because it was designated model 3030. 30-30 is also the name of the kind of ammunition used in the Winchester model 1894 rifle. I always thought that calling the 3030 disk drive a winchester was cool. I used to work with these big clunky winchester drives. I wrote a program in IBM 370 Assembly Language (BAL) that would move the heads to one side of the drive and then then out to the other side. I tried to time them to move back and forth and rock the drive so that it would fall over. (I used to work late nights in the computer room and payroll programs used to take hours to run so I kept myself busy).

Samsung Announces 64 GB Solid State Drive

Monetizing Your Web Site - Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs for Writers and Publishers

Affiliate programs are different from pay-per-click advertising. When I started using affiliate links several years ago, I made a little money by pointing people to Amazon. Amazon drops a web cookie when someone clicks on the link. If that person bought anything while the cookie was active, a period of several days, I would get a percentage of the transaction. Over the years, Amazon and other affiliates have made the cookie more volatile and my affiliate revenue went down. I found that pay-per-click advertising made me more money so I mostly ignored affiliate links. Affiliate links are great for small sites, though. By pointing your readers to an affiliate link you can make a few dollars here and there without much effort.

There are a few scenarios where affiliate programs make money. The first is when your website is closely bound to a product on an affiliate's website. An author, for instance, hawking his books on Amazon, will get 4% of the sale price of his own book on Amazon. A publisher who sells on Amazon will get 4% back by selling his own books in addition to any other profit that he makes by selling the book.

Another scenario where affiliate programs make sense is including affiliate links on your page that will appeal to the interests of the surfers who visit your page. If you are a Speculative Fiction author or webzine, you can put affiliate links to Speculative fiction magazines on your website. You can join affiliate programs to sell Analog, Asimov's and other magazines from your website and get $3 for a $30 sale. Your web page reader gets a discount on Analog's standard rate and you get a finders fee.

Another scenario is to open a store. Amazon and other affiliate programs let you select a whole class of products and create a virtual web store. The store will include a variety of products, not just ones that appeal to the readers of your web pages. They will have popular products, including music, tech toys and big ticket items. The problem with stores is that they look too slick and the surfer won't feel like they are buying from you. As a web site owner, you have a trusting relationship with your surfers. They come to you and you give them you thoughts and stories so they feel comfortable clicking on a link that you suggest. The store, even if it is on your site, is too slick and commercial.

You can try unexpected connections. One of my favorite affiliates is eBay. If you are hosting a speculative fiction site, it might make sense to offer you readers an eBay search box that has back issues of vintage magazines or Science Fiction Convention memorabilia. It's easy to add a panel showing autographs of Battle Star Galactica TV stars. If you are a little creative, eBay pays very well and seems to be much more attractive to readers than the traditional book stores.

Another way is to have affiliate links to services such as web hosting, PayPal, and links to the affiliate programs themselves. Surfers may want to buy these services, sign up for PayPal or join an affiliate program. These links pay your new customers.

My experience is that affiliate links vary quite a bit during the year. My strategy has been to make Gift lists and Christmas lists targeting my readers. Around the holidays, you can sometimes make money if a reader follows a link and then buys several other things. Readers always appreciate reviews. When I do reviews, I try to make an affiliate link to buy the book or product that I am reviewing and this seems to work very well.

I stopped using affiliate links when I started putting pay-per-click ads on my sites. The click ads pay much better than affiliates. I used to make a hundred dollars or so a year from low volume sites using Affiliate links. Since click ads work best on high volume sites, a modest site will make more money in the beginning by the creative use of affiliate ads. There is also the legend that Google will penalize you if your website has lots of affiliate links. I don't know if this is true.

One other problem with affiliate links is that the Ad Blocker FireFox plug-in makes them invisible. As more and more people use FireFox, I have noticed that the affiliate reports show much lower volume of exposures than my web logs show. This is because the ads are masked, either by Ad Blocker or by the old trick of modifying the .hosts file.

It is also possible to run your own private affiliate program. If you publish a magazine, you can open an account on one of the big affiliate programs to sell your magazine. Then your writers and readers will be able to put links to their favorite magazine on their websites and make a little money when they send you a customer. You'd think that your loyal readers would be doing this anyway, but I bet you get quite a few of them signing up when they can make a dollar or two. I have not tried this, although I have thought about it. ShareASale.com encourages small sellers to create affiliate programs.

You evaluate affiliate programs based on how much they pay per sale, plus how much the average website makes per exposure. Some affiliates pay very well, but don't be mislead. It has to be a link that someone wants to click and when your user gets to the store the product must be right and the price must be right. It doesn't matter if an affiliate will pay a high commission if their products are way too expensive. Do a little research before you join an affiliate program. Look at the affiliate from the eyes of a potential customer.

Still, if you have a web page and you don't monetize it with affiliate links or link ads, you are nuts. These things take little effort to set up and they pay while you sleep.

Here are some of the Affiliate programs that I have used. If you want to sign up for one of these (they are free), just follow the links below.

Amazon, one of the first and best of the affiliate programs. They sell almost everything so this might be the only affiliate program that you will ever have to sign up with.
http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join

Commission Junction has gobbled up BFree, Reporting.net and other big affiliate programs. They have literally thousands of websites selling millions of products. Look here for those odd sites selling cool stuff that you just can't find on Amazon.
http://www.cj.com

ShareASale Affiliate programs are for the rest of us. They have thousands of tiny shops selling one of kind items and they welcome new sellers. If you want to create your own affiliate program, this might be the place to start.
http://www.shareasale.com/

Cafe press is not a regular affiliate. They sell coffee cups and tee shirts with your picture or slogan on them. You can set the price and make a profit, if you want. I think that they make more money off of the website owners than they do off the surfers who come and visit. It might pay to have the cover of the latest issue of Martian Wave Magazine on a tee shirt or coffee cup or thong. It's free to set up, but I am sure that you will buy a coffee cup with the cover of your latest book and take weeks or months to make it back in commissions.
http://www.cafepress.com

Static Movement Online

I just heard from Chris Bartholomew, the publisher of StaticMovementOnline.com, that due to some personal upheavals, she will not be working on the zine for a while. When Static Mo started, I gave her some web space on one of my servers to host it, so I have been watching her work on the site. It has been a labor of love for her and I think she has done a wonderful job.

Chris has limited access to a computer right now, but watch Static Movement, the Razar forum and Chris Bartholomew's blog and she will have more information soon, I hope.

I hope Chris can put things back in order quickly, because the Static Movement family needs her back.

Climate Change Myths

J Erwine blogged the MySpace version of this. Since I am blocked from MySpace at work, as are many others, I thought that I would blog the main site.

Met Office: Climate change myths: "Recent coverage has questioned the influence of humans on the climate. While the arguments used might have been regarded as genuine areas of sceptical enquiry 20 years ago, further observed warming and advances in climate science render these out of touch."

By the way, this is it for global warming for a while. It is too contentious. One of my poker buddies called me up and called me a f-ing Hippie. He does this regularly, so I am used to it. It is also true.

Objet Volant Non Identifie

"Objet Volant Non Identifie" are the French words for UFO. Is it me or does the French language always make for a better short story title? I've added this to my idea list.
I found this on an article about French UFO records. France has opened up their UFO files to the public to shut up the conspiracy theorists - a futile act. The site is unreachable because of internet traffic - or is it the Frenchmen in black trying to keep us out?

Pre-Demolition Sales

I forget where I found this page. It is a company that tears down houses, but sells the house first. You go with a truck and a crowbar and settle on a price. Just about everything in the house, attached or not, is for sale. They sell the doors, windows, the front walk, the picket fence as well as anything in the house. As long as you can get it out before they demolish the house, you can get it cheap.

The interesting thing is that there are beautiful houses being torn down, much better than mine. I guess that whoever bought the house is going to build three MacMansions where there use to be a nice cottage.

These are mostly around Philadelphia. That's a two and half hour ride from here. I love Philly, but I haven't seen anything on this site that would justify the $50 in gas it would take.

(I hate the site design. It is one of those sites that uses JavaScript to draw the page. Google has trouble with these sites.)

Lighten Up!

The last few posts were way too heavy, so here's a change in pace.

I just finished Robert B. Parker's book Small Vices on tape. I like the Spenser novels, but I really liked this one. I buy these for my Mom, who loves mystery novels. Since her cataract operation she has gotten hooked on books on tape. I get to listen to the good ones first, though. This one is a real thriller. I like the characters Spenser, Hawk, Susan and Pearl, and I like the relaxed almost offhand way that he writes.

The plot of this one is that Spenser must prove a bad guy, who is in jail, was framed. The bad guy is very nasty sort who abuses women and everyone agrees that he should be behind bars. The only problem is that the real killer paid for a cover-up and he is now free. There are some good scenes and the character of the gray hit-man is very scary. It kept me on the edge of the seat while I was driving.

Over the weekend, I was coming down Sickletown Road and a guy pulled out from a side street without looking. I pulled over and stopped, but he kept on coming and side-swiped me anyway. I was STOPPED for chrisake. I popped in the Parker tape while waiting for the cops to come and fill out an accident report. It was lucky that I had it, because I wanted to punch the guy, and I needed a distraction.

If your ever see a Robert B. Parker book or tape at a garage sale, buy it. It is not Science Fiction, but one needs to cleanse the palette once in a while. (I tried to listen to Jane Austin's Emma, but it was talk-talk-talk-talk-talk and nothing much interesting happened and I didn't make it though the first tape. Mom liked it, though.)

Fun with Global Warming

Jim Shannon has been making some interesting arguments in the comments to a post that I did a little earlier. I thought that I would bring it up to the top with another post so Jim, J, and I could continue the debate. The chart below is a longer scale chart that shows a natural 100,000-125,000 year cycle of ice ages and warm periods. This chart is the one that critics point to when they try to debunk global warming. Critics of global warming claim that the current warming trend is part of this cycle.

My contention is that the cycle in this chart is 100,000 years. We are talking about a local and radical change with a span of under 100 years that doesn't even show up on the scale of this chart. In other words the critics are trying to say there are no apples by pointing to the oranges. OSC's criticism of the slanted statistics of Global Warming, that Shannon linked to, are not a critique of the science so much as a critique of the scientists. It reeks of Ad Hominem arguments. Card argues the politics of Global Warming and knows nothing about the science. (how's that for ad hominem!)

I think it is common sense to think that the huge amount of greenhouse gases that industries pour into the atmosphere combined with the drastic losses of the rain forests and die-backs of ocean plankton has an impact on the earth. The degree of impact is the question that is under argument and the overwhelming majority of climatologists feel that global warming is real and dangerous. The vocal minority of dissidents are usually arguing politics rather than science.




Temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere since 400 000 years

Notes: This post references Jim Shannon's Blog, J Alan Erwine's Blog, Neal Asher's Blog and an entry on Orson Scott Card's blog. Let's here it guys!

Getting hits: The Mechanics of Creating Quality Traffic

The way to get traffic is to have quality inbound links to your websites. If your site has original and interesting content, you don’t have to do anything, The links will find you. The spiders will cover your site and gobble up your valuable keywords and spit them out as good placement in the search engines.
There are some purely mechanical things that you can do to increase inbound links. There are various ways to manipulate the web to get traffic, but I have found that link farms, pay-for-links, and free-for-all links are useless and can even have a negative impact. Getting quality links is an art. Here are a few things that I’ve be using that work for me.

Natural Links:
These are links from other websites that you deserve to get. You have content that some webmaster thinks is important. These would be mentions in blogs, forum postings, or from the links pages of sites similar to yours. These are the best links. People click these links and Google places a high value on these links. These are the links that you want.
If your are a resource, you can get listed in resource sites (like Ralans and SpiceyGreenIguana if you are a spec-fic publisher). If they haven't listed your site, suggest that that they should. If you have a zine, getting all of your writers to link back to you from their home pages is a good idea. Ask them to link to the website main page a well as individual articles.
You can write for other websites and make sure that they include a link to your home page at the end of the article or story.

Link Exchanges:
You can contact other websites like yours and ask for reciprocal links. You should have a links page where you add all of your friendly competitors and then they can create a similar page with a link back to you. This is less effective than natural links, because Google takes away a little Mojo from interlocking links. The idea is that the links have less value if you are patting the back of the guy who is patting your back. The clicks that you get directly from these are good surfers who will bookmark your site and come back for more.

Webrings:
Webrings are interlocking links of similar websites. There are webrings for most everything and most of my sites belong to at least one webring. I have even started a Spec Fic Bloggers webring. The links in webrings are JavaScript so that Google can’t see them, but Google spiders the webring’s home sites and a link from a webring site is good link. Most webrings are moderated and good ringmasters don’t allow off topic websites to sneak into their rings. Join a few webrings or start one of your own at webring.com.

Blog Carnivals:
I just found out about these. A blog carnival is a regular blog consisting of links to other people’s blog entries. It is a blog of blogs. The idea is that people use blog carnivals to read about tightly focused subjects written by a variety of authors. Most Blog Carnivals have tools where bloggers can suggest their blog entries to the blog carnival blogmaster. These are good links. I have been trying them out on a few specific subjects. I am also working on some tools and I will create a few blog carnivals of my own. I am guessing that Google spiders these and gives appropriate weight to the link. I did notice a modest increase in traffic coming from them and I will keep testing.
From now on, whenever I make a blog entry that I think might have some general appeal, I am going out to the blog carnival sites and see if I can submit the link somewhere. This article, longer than I usually write, was designed to check out the blog carnivals to see how well they work.

DMOZ:
A listing in DMOZ.org is at the heart of getting hits from search engines. Almost all of the search engines pull their default description of your site from DMOZ. If it can’t find it on DMOZ it uses the description meta tag in your web pages and if it can’t find that it grabs some random words from your web page. A listing in DMOZ guarantees that you get a decent place in the search engines (not just Google) when people look for specific data on your site.
An entry in DMOZ is a very good thing for traffic, even if the traffic doesn’t come directly from DMOZ.
Similar to DMOZ is the Librarians Internet Index, LII.org. This is a harder to get in than DMOZ, but every search engine takes the sites listed in LII seriously.

RSS Aggregators:
If your site doesn’t have an RSS feed (most blogs do), see if you can create one. Keep it updated when you make changes to your site. Register it with FeedBurner.com and some other RSS Feed Aggregators. Every website needs a feed even it hardly ever changes. There is a whole world out there that doesn’t surf, the web, they surf RSS. Get yourself listed and you can tap into these RSS-ers. The Aggregators create a good deal of traffic and it is good quality traffic consisting of readers who will keep coming back.

Digg, Del.icio.us and other bookmark sites:
Digg.com lets you put a little icon which allows surfers to rate your site. Del.icio.us is bookmark service. StumbleUpon.com lets users look at sites that they are likely to enjoy based on their surfing history. These sites produce quite a bit of traffic because they are a compilation of human opinions and not the result of an algorithm. Getting Digged (Dugg?) or bookmarked in Del.icio.us or getting a positive rating in Stumbleupon produces a steady flow of traffic. Register with all of these and put the icons on your site.

Writing Free Articles:
If you have a specific skill you should write about it. You need to create articles from 500 to 2000 words that you don’t mind giving away free. There are a variety of sites that will offer these articles to the public. Websites that need content will then either buy them (you might even get a royalty payment) or most likely use them with a link back to the author. The link back is often more important than a few pennies royalty.
I haven’t used this, but I understand that an good article can be worth a few hundred back links.
Very technical articles with MBA action keywords like Managing, Publishing, Programming, Installing, Creating, Coping, and Generating, seem to be the ones that people want. (don't forget Free!)

Google Sitemaps:
Create a sitemap of your site and register it with Google Sitemaps. This almost guarantees your web pages get listed in Google almost as soon as you create them. I suspect that a site with a good sitemap has a good chance of getting links from Google.

Google Adsense:
I suspect that a site with Adsense ads has more inbound clicks from Google than a page with no ads on it. Google makes money by directing people to a site with Adsense ads on it - it would be logical if they gave the Adsense ads preference. Google denies this, but I don’t believe them.
You’re crazy if you don’t have Adsense ads on your site anyway. It’s free money. There is also some evidence that your site is spidered faster if you have adsense ads.

Google Adwords:
If you want to pay for clicks, use Adwords or possibly Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). You can pay as little as a nickel per click and budget yourself so that you don’t have to pay much a month. Clicks coming in through these ads are often good clicks from potential new friends who will bookmark your site and stop by again.
I only use Adwords for websites where I sell something. I can see traffic coming in and I use Google Analytics to see if it pays and so far, it always has.

Shelf Space:
Use lots of pages. Divide long pages into multiple linked pages. An ideal page has 250 to 500 words of good content (not counting links, ads and repeated information). If you have one website that covers a variety of subjects, break it up and spread it out over different domains. Link pages together with descriptive links and put a site map link on every page.
The more pages that you have in a website with good content on them, the more likely that one (or more) of those pages will appear in a web search and hook a surfer.

Keywords:
Put keywords in Bold or Italic. Use keywords as the name of named anchors on your site and use links on the page to jump to these named anchors. Try to figure ways to call attention to your keywords, like putting them in headings and links. Put keywords in the title of your page. Make sure that the name of your page is not something like page2.htm. It should include keywords like Creating_Traffic.htm. Put similar pages in directories and the name of the directory should be keywords, not an abbreviation, but a verbose set of keywords.
Use the word Free somewhere in your site. Put it in an H1 tag, but use a css style to bring it back to ordinary size text. Everyone is searching for free stuff so they if they search for Free Quality Traffic they will be more likely to find you. If you are bold, use the word Porn in conjunction with free. Free Porn is the still, by far, the highest rated search phrase, even if the traffic you get from these freebie hunting voyeurs is not that good.

Don'ts:
Don't use banner exchanges, link farms, automated link exchanges, free-for-all links, pay-for-links or anyone who guarantees a certain number of clicks. You need natural quality links, not links from flashy animated gifs or sites that force surfers to click in return for something.

Measure the results:
Register with MyBlogLog.com and Google Analytics and watch your website traffic. The free version of MyBlogLog gives you great information about who is surfing your site, where they came from, what pages they look at, and where they go when they leave.
Unlike raw web log analysis, MyBlogLog and Google Analytics don’t show you spider traffic or hits on graphics, css and other files. It shows you real traffic by people who have JavaScript and are looking at your website. Yahoo bought MyBlogLog and they have a lot of community features and I actually get some traffic back from their website.

None of these mechanical methods for building inbound links will replace a good site with useful information. Surfers are looking for a payoff. They won't come to your site unless you promise them something. You have to pay the surfer when he gets to your site or he will never come back. You can promise the world, but if there is no payoff, the surfer click the back button before the page has finished rendering. Natural links are gold, search engine links are your bread and butter, but a link from a surfer who has bookmarked your site is money in the bank.

CO2 concentrations, 1000-2100

One picture is worth 1100 years.

CO2 concentrations, 1000-2100

I found this in a political argument in alt.music.amplifiers of all places. Global warming? Look at the graph and tell me what you think.

Here's another graph from the same site.

Martian Wave Test Feed

Over lunch, I was waiting for someone at Rye Playland to call be back about an issue in their accounting software. Never one to waste the gift of free time, I wrote an RSS generator that can be used for zines. I created a feed for three stories at The Martian Wave and I used feedburner to create one of their animated widgets. Here is what I got:

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

All that I have to do is clean up the code and publish the link. There is quite a bit that can go wrong, though. I have a huge problem with non-roman characters and there's the old garbage-in garbage-out thing. If people start trying to include html tags or large amounts of data it will break. It is also up to the webmaster of a zine to create a new rss.xml file with the same name each time the zine changes. Feedburner expects the new file to be in the same place with the same name.

John Backus Died

John W. Backus, the man who developed the FORTRAN computer language, died last Saturday. FORTRAN is the first computer language that I learned and I owe a lifetime of job security to this man. Learning FORTRAN was like remembering something that I already knew. It was natural, easy, orderly and made so much sense to me that I never thought about doing anything else with my life. Thanks, John!

You need the willingness to fail all the time, You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work. - John W. Backus

Unexpected New Traffic

I don't monetize this blog. I don't actively promote it. The blog is, after all, for people who know me or have some other relationship with me. I don't write much for the random surfer who winds up here by accident. That doesn't mean that I don't welcome new people to the KG Wanderings Community.

I recently signed up with feedburner.com after reading an article about simple things that you can do to a blog to make it more interesting and "sticky". (Sticky means that people explore your web pages and come back for more.)

FeedBurner.com is a set of tools that make subscribing to rss feeds easier. It turns out the many more people prefer to read websites as rss feeds than I would have ever guessed. MyAOL, MyYahoo and a bunch of other portal type websites allow you to put feeds on the home page. It is possible to read the latest "KG Wandering" on your MyAOL page. If I ever have a magazine again, I will make an rss feed for it so people can subscribe to it this way.

Blogger creates an rss feed, even if you are not aware of it.

FeedBurner.com was easy to configure. Feedburner has a page for creating links so people can subscribe to your page easily. I made a whole slew of them that you can see on your left and a little down. I have been averaging 9 or 10 NEW feed subscribers a day on my various websites. They are subscribing via Yahoo, AOL, Google and Roho (whom I had never heard of before). All of my blogs now have sign up links.

I added Digg.com "digg-it" links to all of my individual blog entries. Digg is supposed to be one of those communities that people trust more than a search engine. I am hoping that people will start Digg-ing my posts and I will get hits back that way.

I signed up for a Del.icio.us account and bookmarked all of my sites. I was amazed to find that most of them already have bookmarks by people that I've never heard of. Del.icio.us is one of those sites that is an alternative to search engines and if you get on the popular list, you get millions of hits.

I get quite a few hits to FreeNameAStar.com from www.Stumbleupon.com. Even this blog gets hits from stumbleupon from time to time. You have to join stumbleupon and install their browser plugin and use that to rate sites that you like. Use it to rate your own sites and ask other people to do the same and eventually people will star stumbling in.

I added MyBlogLog.com code to my blogs a long time ago and since Yahoo bought them out I have been adding the code to all of my sites. They have some neat features, including a myspace style community of surfers. You can list the images of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page, which is cool. They also keep link statistics on outgoing links so you can see when people link off your page where they are going.

Use Technorati.com or Google blog search to make you pages more accessible. Add the "search status" firefox plugin to your page and keep track of your Alexa rank and your Google page rank. These stats will help you monitor how users find your page.

I've tried a few other widgets, with little luck. If you want to see all of them in action, go to Katheryn Cramer's blog. She has so much crap on her pages that it takes a couple of minutes to load, sometimes. She is a widget collector. Right click and view source and you can see a whole bunch of these little JavaScript-lets on her page. Her web page is like the little girl with the curl.

There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

As a result, I have seen a 10 percent jump in readership over the last few days at all of my sites. The JavaScript widgets and the rss subscriptions from feedburner seem to account for this. I am surprised that it was this easy. I expect that the growth will continue for a while. I am always happy to welcome new readers.

Dropping Smeerp and Wapfiction

I am letting several domains expire. They don't pay their way. I have copied the code at Smeerp.com to Strangetales.net/smeerp and Wapfiction.com is going away completely. Smeerp has half a dozen zines using it and a hundred or so users, but nobody was ever interested in my wapfiction idea of getting stories on your cell phones as WML pages. At the end of the month Smeerp.com and Wapfiction.com will expire forever and some domain sniper will park them and try to make money off of the traffic. Smeerp had a page rank of 3, which means it gets a small amount of random traffic from the search engines.

Smeerp users will still be able to use the slush management at www.strangetales.net/smeerp.

This saves me 18 bucks a year. Fumets.com and the Astounding series all expire next fall. That will save me another 50 bucks a year.

SF Writers Rejected

Rudy Rucker and John Shirley, two of my favorite spec-fic writers are having a hissy fit for being snubbed by a new Cyberpunk short story anthology. These guys practically invented the sub-genre of Cyberpunk (along with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson) and made it popular. They deserve to be included in any new Cyberpunk anthology and I might agree with their annoyance, except for one thing. I don't know if they were even asked to submit, but if they were, I don't know if the stories that they submitted were any good.

These guys are capable of writing a crappy short story. They are better at their craft than the rest of us, but what if the stories that they sent in for consideration just really sucked, or weren't right for the anthology? Rudy has been off in math-land lately, writing stories not really intended for the rest of us and John has been making money writing film treatments and horror novels that seem like they should be heavily illustrated in a manja style. Have these former gods of Cyberpunk wandered too far from the true path?

It seems to me that you need a thicker skin if you want to be in the spec-fic market. There isn't much money to go around. Anthologies make pennies, even the ones that sell. Both of these guys admit that they are over-reacting, and seem to be having fun with their outrage. Rudy's blog entry is funny, but I don't think that it was a good decision to write it.

The image of the cow magically appeared in my blog when I hit my Blog This! button. I don't know what it means, but I left it in. It was on Rudy Rucker's blog and he didn't explain what it means, either.

Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop

NASA runs the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for writers who want to know a more about astronomy.

It runs for a week in July in Laramie, Wyoming, and it is FREE! You need to pay for the hotel, of course and get yourself out there, somehow.

If I had the cash for a plane ticket, I'd go. There are only a couple of seats left and they will be sold out soon, so sign up now! I am book-markng this and maybe next year or the year after - who knows?

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a "crash course" for twelve attendees in modern astronomy science through workshops, guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming's two large telescopes.

This year's guest instructor is Jerry Oltion, amateur astronomer and science fiction author. Other lecturers include University of Wyoming professors Michael S. Brotherton, PhD and Jim Verley.

Super Capacitors - Future stuff

WIMA has announced a new breed of super capacitors. Let me tell you why this is cool.

I am interested in large capacitors because I like to repair and refurbish old vacuum tube amplifiers and one component that goes bad is the large capacitors. These act a little like batteries in that they store electricity for a short time until the circuit needs it. They dry out and get old and have to be replaced.

Recently, I have thought about capacitors and hybrid vehicles. I have been doing the math and a conventional battery can be replaced by an array of capacitors. The caps are cheaper than a battery and they don't wear out as fast. They are lighter. The limitation is that they don't quite have the storage of a chemical battery.

So today I read a press release from WIMA about their new capacitor. The principle that they use was actually discovered in 1856 by Helmholtz, but is just now starting to build up steam. The higher the voltage, the more you can store in a capacitor. The storage goes up with the square of the voltage so if you make a cap that can take 10 volts instead of 1 volt it has 100 times as much power storage. High voltage capacitors are difficult to handle and hard to make. WIMA gets around this by putting a 100 million low voltage caps in a small box. A capacitor that weighs 90 grams or about 3 ounces can store about 900 joules (a joule, as my physics professor once said, is the energy used by a mosquito to do a push-up). 900 joules is not much, but the things are tiny and you can put quite a lot them in a car in the unused spaces in doors and ceilings and behind seats, or even where the engine used to be.

50 pounds of WIMA SuperCaps can store 1.1 million joules. This is a good chunk of power and is the same as 30 kilowatt-hours. The average daily usage of electricity for a house is about 30 Kilowatt-hours per day, so 50 pounds of WIMA caps can power a house for a day. In a car you use .37 kilowatt-hours worth of gas to go a mile. If you could charge up 50 pounds of WIMA capacitor array you could go 81 miles at 1/3 the cost of gas. If you use braking action to recapture energy, you can make this well over 100 miles. If you want to go hybrid, you can put in a small, efficient gas engine to charge the caps while you are away from a wall outlet.

If you pack in 400 pounds of SuperCaps into the space where the engine used to be, you get over 600 miles to a charge.

I am guessing that the cost of the capacitors is a little prohibitive right now. I can't find pricing on these SuperCaps (if you have to ask, you can't afford it). I predict, though, that they will be selling for 1/10 the price in a few years as they production costs go down and competition kicks in. In 10 years these caps will be very cost effective.

Why aren't the automobile companies all over this? Beats the hell out of me. Are the gas companies paying them off to stick to conventional engines? Why are the Japanese 10 years ahead of us on building hybrid cars? These capacitors are going to get cheaper and smaller very fast. If you are looking to put a few thousand into a long shot, I would invest it in companies like WIMA. Either that, or sell short on GM.

Video Hosting

Over the weekend I went to mark Hummel's harmonica blowout featuring my heroes Charlie Musslewhite and Kim Wilson. Kim Wilson is the reason that I took up harmonica playing. I took some pictures with Justine's camera. The fancy Kodak takes movies so I took some video of Linda Geiger playing drums in the big finale. Linda is a blues drummer and I met her at one of the local jams. She plays drums for my brother's band when she can schedule it. It turns out that she knew all the famous harp players at the blowout and they called her up on stage at the end.

The video was 106 megs and therefore too big for YouTube.com. I could not get the google video beta to work at all. I tried several other video hosting solutions and I got Grouper.com to work, but my favorite is Vimeo.com. Grouper did a good enough job, but they put a grouper watermark on the video. Vimeo was much faster and I think I'll use vimeo as a better choice over Youtube or Grouper.

Here's the video:

Linda Geiger, Musslewhite, Wilson, Hummel, Zinn on Vimeo

It's too bad that the finale was such an uninteresting song. Kim tried to liven it up, but the song dragged in spite of Linda, guitar player Rusty Zinn, and Kim Wilson trying to kick it from time to time.
I will have more video and lots of pictures of me annoying the talent on jt30.com and harpamps.com. I had a good long conversation with Kim Wilson about various microphone topics. He uses a t-3 modified by Dennis Gruenling. I like Dennis, but I do a better job on the T-3's.

Why a career in computer programming sucks

I found this entry and I have to admit that most of it is true. I have been a programmer for 30 years or so and the field has kept me fed and stimulated (until recently), but being a programmer does have some drawbacks. Work Conditions Suck, is one point that has bothered me in my present job. I don't like sitting at a table in the middle of a busy traffic pattern when I need to concentrate on my projects. Their #1 reason why programming sucks, Temporary nature of knowledge capital, is actually one of the things I like about the job. I like learning the new languages and programming styles (I still think that Rational programming is a stupid waste of time, but that is another issue).

Why a career in computer programming sucks

Michael Z. Williamson

Michael Z. Williamson is an SF writer who stopped by my site and took umbrage with the Clichés page. People don't like seeing some of their favorite plots in the list. Just because it is a good plot or idea or image, doesn't mean that it hasn't been used-to-death. Clichés are unavoidable because so many writers have been writing for so long. It is hardly likely that you will come up with a completely new plot, character or idea. I attempted to make my calm level-headed explanation,as though explaining to a small child, what is meant by Cliché.

He refuses, though, absolutely refuses to give up Nazis. I think that Nazis have no place in any literature. They are a lazy writers way of creating a villain. Just like serial killers, psychotic killers, and multiple personality disorders are cheap ways of making someone bad. It is much harder to show a villain as a disturbed character in need of help, than to paint them as essentially evil. Anyway, I am not much of a believer in evil people, only evil acts.

In any case, we very rarely encounter Nazis or Psychopaths and other evil people, so write what you know should be the whole of the law.

Just thinking back though, my barber (about 30 years ago) was a Nazi and once while shaving me, he whispered: "Hitler had the right idea." into my ear. He had a straight razor in his hand, so I let the matter ride.

My piano teacher molested a small boy and did prison time.

When I was 10 my friend's stepfather shot his mother with a shotgun and then turned it on himself.

In my life, I have known at least five murderers, before and after the fact.

None of these people were essentially evil, just sick, or desperate, or very confused. However, thinking back, the barber was pretty scary.

How I Spend My Weekends

I've been installing a new floor in the kitchen. It is Chicago bricks. They are split about a half inch thick. My old floor, installed 30 years ago was quarry tile. The tile has been shattering over the years and when I put in the new cabinets, I couldn't match the old tiles. I decided to go for a new look and this is the one that Erica chose.

The diamond patterns have to be cut and I figure that I've cut over 800 little pieces for the trim.

The top picture is the landing going into the kitchen. Erica just finished coating it with a clear finish. The cats walked all over it while she was working and Gracie even threw up on it. It looks pretty good in spite of the cats. The bottom picture is some progress pictures of the "mud room", a space as you enter the house before you step up into the kitchen or living room.

I'm supposed to be a Math guy

I had trouble with this. It wouldn't work for me. It turns out that I did the math wrong three times in a row.

Can you see the trick? It's very easy (unless you are too dopey to do the math in your head).

Flash Psychic

New ID Badge

The County of Westchester re-did my id card. They put this old homeless guy on the photo-id. Next week this guy will be 56 years old.

John C. Dvorak

Back in the late 80s, I went to COMDEX in Las Vegas. I don't gamble (at least not at casinos), so I spent a bit of time in the show looking at computer geek stuff and actually evaluating document imaging solutions for my job. I was there 4 or 5 days and one night I went to a blues club and one night I watched a joust (I was staying in the Excalibur, a very nice hotel with a King Arthur theme.) The last day, I drove out to the Grand Canyon - everybody, please plan to visit the Grand Canyon before you die - it's worth the trip.

One night I went to John C. Dvorak's private party. John is a columnist at PC Magazine and I guess you could call him a pundit. I sat up with John doing some heavy drinking and we got along well. Once or twice a year for several years afterwards, he would call me and ask my opinion on some new technology or hardware, so I must have impressed him as much as he impressed me. I have changed jobs a few times and and he never did have my home phone so I haven't heard from him in a while. I don't read PC Magazine - too many ads and the articles are often rehashed press releases, with only one or two meaty pieces in the zine. John works on the other side of the fence from me, so I have not really thought about him. I am a programmer. I don't care much about marketing and the latest fad in computers. I only want the hardware so I can program it. My interest is like that of a watchmaker in a watch: I am interested in the gears, not the time. John is watching the impact of new tech on people, society and institutions. I am mildly amused by this stuff, but I am still just a hacker.

Today, John was slash-dotted, and I rediscovered his column. His article on the Killing of Wi-Fi was intense. He hit the nail on the head in his column about Search Engines. I went on and read for nearly an hour. I've added John C. Dvorak to my "Good Morning" group that pops up when turn on the 'puter. Either John has gotten better or I have gotten older. His writing has a jaded, cynical edge that I don't remember. I think John C. Dvorak's column is required reading in the pre-singularity era.

Why I am proud to be part Irish

Why I am proud to be part Irish. What amazes me is that the Unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act is still on the books after 170 years. It must have been necessary.

From GalwayFirst.ie

Lonely man brought donkey to hotel room, court told

A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised "to get out and meet people," the local court heard last week.
Thomas Aloysius McCarney with an address in south Galway was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.
Solicitor for the accused Ms Sharon Fitzhenry said that her client had been through a difficult time lately and that his wife had left him and that his life had become increasingly lonely.
"Mr McCarney has been attending counselling at which he was told that he would be advised to get out and meet people and do interesting things. It was this advice that saw him book into the city centre hotel with a donkey," she said. She added that Mr McCarney also suffered from a fixation with the Shrek movies and could constantly be heard at work talking to himself saying things like "Isn't that right, Donkey?"
Supt John McBrearty told the court that Mr McCarney who had signed in as " Mr Shrek" had told hotel staff that the donkey was a family pet and that this was believed by the hotel receptionist who the supt said was "young and hadn't great English."
Receptionist Irina Legova said that Mr McCarney had told her that the donkey was a breed of "super rabbit" which he was bringing to a pet fair in the city. The court was told that the donkey went berserk in the middle of the night and ran amok in the hotel corridor, forcing hotel staff to call the gardai.
McCarney was found in the room wearing a latex suit and handcuffs, the key to which the donkey is believed to have swallowed. He was removed to Mill St station after which it is said he was the subject of much mirth among the lads next door in The Galway Arms.
He was fined €2,000 for bringing the donkey to the room under the Unlawful Accommodation of Donkeys Act 1837. Other charges were dropped due to lack of evidence.