Guest blogging

July 30th, 2007 • blog, chatter, coffee

I’ll be doing a spot as a guest blogger over at Mission To Be A Millionaire this week. I’ll be writing about how to save money on my most coveted vice: premium coffee. It’ll be a two part series of posts discussing how I’ve managed to save a good deal of money on premium coffee while getting more value from it.

The first part will be up this week while the second part will take a bit more time since I’ve got more “math stuff” to do on the back-end before I can finish up.

Is masturbation evil?

July 29th, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, confusion

Culled from the 1% (up from 0%, mind you) of reading worthy links I see on Digg everyday, someone posted on Yahoo Answers asking if masturbation is bad for you and if they were going to hell. This is an obvious hoax but if it’s not, “wow” is all I have to say.

Written from a fear-of-God perspective, it’s interesting to see the responses given to this question. While very few recognized this as a hoax, most respondents said masturbation is OK, obviously. However, it’s interesting to note the Christian responses:

Easy big fella. Its as natural as breathing which means God knew we would do it when he made us. So lighten up and enjoy your special moments alone. All the rest of us do.

Last I checked, my parents “made” me, not some perverse godhead.

john you are fine that is a natural reaction to discovering yourself and god does not judge you by the bad things you do you are rewarded by the good things you do so relax.

(God does judge the bad things you do, it’s called “sin” and in this case, it’s most likely fueled by lust.)

Lol its ok, masturbate is not a sin in christan view and its a normal part of life, i started masturbate when i was…um 14 and i often get disgusted with my self but any ways, its normal, ever one has the experanice in their life time, even your church’s pastor, they just dont ever talk about it

“we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15-16 NKJV).

Wow. Let me explain. I’m 27 and everyone I know has masterbated @ some point in your life. No you will not be condemed to hell and yes you are completely normal so you will not have to worry about having a abnormal life or girlfriend or whatever. Women as well as men find that masturbating is a sense of relief and a whole lot safer than having sex with someone every time the urge strikes. YOu are very normal dear and theres nothing to worry about.

I guess those three haven’t read their Bibles in quite a while:

Gen.38:9-10
And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.

God wants you to have as much sex as humanly possible but only to procreate and only with the person you’re married to, if you believe in that sort of thing. I read this Yahoo Answer twice before I even wrote this post up and I’m utterly flabbergasted by the sheer amount of fear portrayed. This kid — tossing aside the fact that it’s probably a hoax — is scared out of his wits about doing something that I’m pretty sure everyone does or has done in their lifetime. He’s terrified of being plummeted to Hell for a sin less noteworthy than the lascivious activities being played out by the big evangelists around the country.

Personally, I’m more worried about the atrocious spelling kids these days think is acceptable than what’s going to happen to me if I decide to rub one out.

Misissippi Sweets BBQ on North…

July 28th, 2007 • tweets

Misissippi Sweets BBQ on North Federal has great southern style sauce and hearty portions.

Interesting posts, part 3

July 27th, 2007 • chatter, interesting posts, web

Digg dumps AdSense for some Microsoft love. This is an interesting business move by the web’s most loved/hated Mac fanboy Kevin Rose. Apparently Google just can’t deliver the goods — or monetization — that he wants. And in a double whammy decision Microsoft the AdeCEN advertising platform this week. Coincidence?

Jill from the University of Wisconsin reports that more teens and young adults know more about Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than they do about current national news. I would have never had guessed, neither would anyone else over the age of 21. The current MTV generation is far more concerned with who’s sleeping with who, who’s doing what drug(s), or what the latest reggaeton song is than who the current Presidential candidates are. This is not by chance, it’s by design, partly due in fault to the popular media itself. Since I was younger, I noticed a slow trend on cable channels such as MTV where they were moving away from their core audience of music lovers and onto molding their key demographics into robots. More adolescents watch MTV and read gossip magazines/sites than they do their school textbooks and the major news outlets are now aiding this along by making the latest celebrity scandal “breaking news” rather than the gossip column fodder it was merely 10 years ago. I can walk into the Town Center Mall and approach any male or female between the ages of 10 and 24 and almost all of them will know more about pimped out cars, lascivious celebs and the latest fashion of the day than they will know about Charlie Crist, our state’s governor or what the FCAT really measures.

Astronauts are now gettin’ crunk before shuttle missions. I guess this gives a whole new meaning to the term DUI.

Telstra, Australia’s biggest ISP, bans Facebook from corporate networks. For once, I say good for them. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been banned from offices — or had employees banned from it — because it’s a huge time sink hole. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are banned from our company’s network because everyone, from top to bottom, wastes half their day futzing about instead of working.

IPTV mogul Joost, started by the same guys behind Skype and KaZaA, boasts 1M beta users (I saw this analyzed on about 10 different sites, I couldn’t link them all) but how true are these numbers? They’re definitely gaming the analytics system by saying they have 1M user accounts signed up in a “private” beta but honestly, how many of those users continually use the service? My guess — I am not an analyst — is probably less than 10% and more than likely closer to 5%. This could be seen as a falsification of market penetration and user reach by simply going on the numbers alone and has bitten other social media networks before.

And in a last minute “out of left field” appearance, “secret” web sites such as 4chan and 7chan hoard the vast nameless hacker group called Anonymous. They do it for the “epic lulz” and this almost made me fall out of my chair with laughter. I troll 7chan regularly and this whole piece was definitely full of “lulz” and “win” and the tipster who went to the news channel is lambasted on Encyclopaedia Dramatica — which is fueled by the people he used to call “/b/rothas” — and is quite funny. I cannot fathom how slow of a news day it must have been for them to not only cover 4/7chan but to actually use the word “lulz” more than twice. It’s a fine piece of fear-mongering and extreme disinformation. (Most Anonymous, myself included, really do not care to hack your computer/MySpace/Facebook/Photobucket/email. We prefer lolcats (cat image macros), flaming furries and weeaboos, and an endless stream of memes to keep us occupied. Those profiled actually fit far more into /i/nvasion idiots and ra/i/ders than the typical fare of /b/tards (the appropriate name of those who frequent /b/).)

Next book purchases

July 27th, 2007 • reading

I think the next few books I’m going to purchase and read will be as far from Python and religion as I can get. I just added Extreme Metal by Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris to my Amazon wishlist. His PhD thesis was the basis for the book and provided much of the first hand interviews he needed for the book. Who says smart people don’t like metal?! (That’d be the same people that think a social anthropologist turned field investigator can’t make a DVD about metal pretty damn interesting.)

I think I’ll also purchase Never Shower in a Thunderstorm… by Anahad O’Conner after reading Shalini’s review of it last month. I suppose one day I’ll eventually pick up another fiction novel — or the Bible — if I ever want to have something to read for escapism and fantasy.

Changing up monetization options

July 26th, 2007 • 2 comments blog, monetization

I’ve had this blog monetized since I started it. This has been a double-edged sword in the fact that with no traffic, I’m not earning any money however it avoids the down-the-road issue of monetizing later and alienating longtime readers. If there’s always been ads, there’s never the worry about the latter because I’m not fundamentally changing anything about the site itself. The site is young so I do not expect a ton of money to be coming in from such a niche market however, I’ve changed my ad provider tonight from Google’s AdSense back to Adbrite for content delivery.

In the 4 months since I put up the AdSense ads, I haven’t even broken $3.50 but I didn’t expect to. When I first stated using AdBrite, there were no ads shown however, there are ads showing now so I’m going to try their revenue streams to see what I can generate. I admit that some of the ads will be garish and a bit unsightly but I did not see a way to use text ads solely with their service.

So please forgive any stupid looking ads, I’m starting to approve or deny any ads that come my way.

100th post!

July 25th, 2007 • 4 comments blog, chatter

This is my 100th blog post and to mark this occasion, my girlfriend dug up a funny picture from half.com:

Are big Search Engines finally concerned with privacy?

July 23rd, 2007 • privacy, search engines, web

Consumers and privacy groups have been talking about online privacy — or lack of it — for years now. Sites keep insane amounts of data on every user, registered or not, whether the end users know about it or not. We discussed this on Saturday at BR407 and it was quite illuminating. It’s even easy to explain especially when you put it in terms people understand the most: money. For example, everyone loves Amazon.com and it’s the largest online store in the world. Hell, I spend over $500 a year there. But have you ever wondered how they know what you want or would like just like you know? That comes from data mining. Amazon tracks everything you do on the site and I mean everything. They know what you’ve searched for, when you searched for it, what other products or searches match yours, if other customers bought the same item — and how many did! — or a similar item and the list goes on. Now, some of you even have the Amazon.com credit card to make your purchases even easier. Now guess what? They know your entire credit history and know everything about you, financially. What a great way to target markets and target you specifically. That’s not the greatest thing to realize is it? They know that you may have purchased some *ahem* adult toys in the past and well, they may even offer you discounts on any future purchases even though no one knows you bought said toys.

How does this example pertain to search engines? Amazon has its own search engine: A9.com. I hear good things about it however, I’ve never used it. I’m a die hard Google-fu master. Last week, Ask.com announced that they would now let users delete their entire search history that Ask.com has ever archived in the user’s account. That’s great for you Ask.com users — who are you, anyway? Now Google has stated they’ll bring their retention limit from 31 years in the future (2038, the end of the UNIX-based calendar) to 18 months. I’m glad that the last 7 years of data they have from me will be wiped clean in just 14 more months — their initiative began in March of this year. I guess that means my latest search trends will disappear next year surely to only be replaced by trends just as odd.

On Saturday, TechCrunch has reported that Microsoft and and Yahoo will be following suit, according to the WSJ. It’s odd to see both Microsoft and Yahoo trailing behind Ask.com in this initiative but it’s more interesting to see that big Microsoft is teaming up with little Ask.com to try and start a search engine industry-wide initiative to standardize privacy standards for everyone. If this goes over, it’ll mean all data is kept a uniform amount of time across platforms and when switching engines, you’ll be able to gauge when your identifiable data will be set free into digital oblivion.

I’ve spent the last 7 years of my life dealing with the fact that there’s absolutely no privacy on the Internet and it seems more and more people are starting to realize this as well. With this, it also means that end users are now ushering in some forms of online privacy forcefully on those who wholly thrive on data and its monetization. So perhaps by the time my kids are 25, there just may be privacy on our Internet.

Interesting posts this week…

July 22nd, 2007 • 1 comment chatter, interesting posts, web

Shalini talks about her recent debate with a creationist on male nipples and how (??) men evolved from women. I really fail to understand this argument completely.

Researchers have found possibly the most rapid in place evolution ever scientifically observed. I guess that sort of puts Creationists into a corner about how impossible it is to observe evolution.

TipMonkies gives up 9 easy to remember WordPress shortcuts for use during writing/editing. Extremely handy, I never even knew these existed and I’m a sucker for keyboard shortcuts!

Those wanting to kill some nosy web spiders can thank Perishable Press for writing up a very handy comprehensive mod_rewrite list for giving those spiders a handy 403.

Ebonmuse offers up a good argument against using religion as a basis for morality. Since us non-theists lack religion, people think we lack morality but we counter with the fact that they lack common sense.

Tim O’Reilly (yes, the same Tim O’Reilly who started O’Reilly Media, Inc.) discusses, with pure web data only, Ubuntu’s rise in popularity versus Red Hat, the most recognizable name in Linux distributions today. Simply by using web analytics as his metric, Tim definitely shows with ease how quickly Ubuntu is gaining ground as “the” Linux distribution of the masses.

I think I may have others open on my work PC but I’m not sure. These are definitely some of the more interesting posts I’ve seen this week, culled from my feed reader.

Sponsored Ads and Black Metal

July 18th, 2007 • chatter, metal, web

Normally I never pay attention to the ads Google places inline with my emails in Gmail but today, I got a real kick when I checked an email from Dark Horizon Records about a new sale going on to see some pretty humorous ads Google decided to give me:

Sorry for the tiny thumbnail but the picture itself is rather large but it’s a good laugh. I like how I’ve got ads for baptism, fortune telling, ghosts, low cost Paris apartments, and some forex from New Zealand. It’s good to know that Google likes reading my email as much as I do and serves me up pertinent ads! The last time I got this much of a laugh was when I took a screenshot of Super Paper Mario and emailed it to myself only to see ads for the PS3 and Halo being served to me.