Google Ad Earnings – $99.98

Over two years ago in May of 2004, I added Google ads to my blog and reported my first $4.08 in earnings. It has been a slow climb to get to the $100 mark that will trigger my first check from Google. Since I took this snapshot, it rolled over that mark, so the check should be in the mail at the end of this month.

Ted got his first check much faster and has gotten other checks from other ad sources. Helps to be an engineer-consumer-writer guy.

google-adsense-99.98.gif

The CIA’s Chief of the Bin Laden Unit

This is a point of view worth hearing. It doesn’t contain a lot of the rhetoric in right-wing and left-wing positions (although Harper’s is pretty anti-establishment.) It doesn’t necessarily square with what I think, but it certainly influences what I think.

http://harpers.org/sb-seven-michael-scheuer-1156277744.html

I’ve copy/pasted the entire article just in case the link stops working.

Continue reading

Canon PowerShot A70 E18 Error

While at Anna Maria Island this summer, my Canon Powershot A70’s screen went blank and showed a little white E18 code in the lower left corner. The lens was stuck partially open. Shutting the camera on and off in review (vs shoot) mode let it recover enough to take more shots.

I’ve sinced used it to take other pictures including white water rafting with Kelly. Kelly then used it to take a lot of pictures on the Life Teen retreat this weekend. She saw the error, too. She asked me if I had tried Google to find out what is wrong. Just did that. The first link was to a sponsored website called www.e18error.com. Amazing. It includes information about how to try to fix it the problem yourself. Basically I’m guessing a piece of Anna Maria sand has gotten in my camera, and it will be a matter of blowing it out.

9, H, Brown, B Flat

After delcaring that Pluto was no longer a planet, the same group of scientists decided to extend their meeting and make other decisions. Today’s announcements included:

  • 9 is no longer a number. It is just a shape.
  • H is no longer a letter. It will join 9 as a shape.
  • Brown is no longer a color. It will only be a last name, and
  • B Flat is no longer a musical note because none of the scientists like the way it sounds.

“B flat is the same as A sharp, so we don’t think it should matter,” said one of the scientists.

In an ironic twist, one of the scientists will no longer get to be a scientist because the panel of 309 had to be reduced to 308 to comply with the loss of the number 9.

More decisions will be announced tomorrow.

Katie & Pluto?

Pluto may be declared to no longer be a planet. Doesn’t seem fair, but in this article it says that Xena is bigger that Pluto, so that isn’t fair either.

So the name may become available, and Katie’s new brother could be called Pluto.

StarSlab’s

Ted’s story about the reporter who started a newspaper to fill the void left behind by Katrina is inspiring. It makes me want to quit my job, move down there, start up a Craig’s List kind of website, put the girl out of business, then take my mom to that restaurant and show her how everyone is reading my website on their BlackBerries. Kathy wants to buy the slab restaurant and turn it into a Starbuck’s. (Composed on a BlackBerry en route to the Gulf.)

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Sent via BlackBerry

Graphing Mac5

Salal built a tool that will graph a web page, displaying the different tags like images, tables, and links. The resulting graph provides a visual clue to the organization of the home page (or any page.) This is Mac5:

graph-of-mac5.png

Color indicates the most used tags in the following way:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Kaleidoscope Pope

Sitting in the basement office I picked up a kaleidoscope and wondered if I could take a picture with it. Putting the settings on manual, I was able to adjust light and focus to pull it off. The light sources are

1. a laptop showing Mac 5 (That’s Pope JP II inserting a letter at the Wailing Wall)

2. a desk lamp

3. a window looking into the back yard. For about 30 days, the sun sets and lights up the backside of our house, so sun rays actually come in the basement window for 15 minutes or so.

Kaleidoscope-Mac5.JPG