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I didn’t think I was going to make it, but due to some big days at the end of November my Google AdSense revenue reached $100. That’s how much you have to earn before you get a check, though now they do direct deposit. Last time it took a year, but this summer I broke $20 during a few months and was able to reach the mark in five months. I have decided to save up to buy a new iPod. It could take another year or so, so maybe it will be something we can only imagine now. The ideal thing would be a PDA that includes a big hard drive and acts a MP3 player. I carry a PDA all the time anyway, so that way I would always have music with me. It wouldn’t have to be an Apple product actually.

The dejumbler continues to get the most traffic and the most revenue. The car stereo page and the battery pack pages for iPods do pretty well too though. The iPod pages definitely get more revenue for the number of views. I’m getting a total of 7,000-10,000 views per month and a fairly consistent number of monthly ad clicks of around 130, though some days I get nothing and others I might get 10.

I think it’s interesting that I could have made the same amount of money by buying one share of Google at $300 5 months ago.

Today I took Susan to the Georgia Aquarium for her birthday. Though she doesn’t usually like to take MARTA, tonight downtown they were having the Georgia high school football playoffs at the Dome, a Thrashers game at Philips Arena, and the Georgia/Georgia Tech game further uptown, so we opted for public transit. The aquarium is a hike from MARTA, at least a 15 minute walk, at the northwest corner of Centennial Park. Even though I had reserved the tickets before the aquarium opened, we still had to stand in line (though there was a second line for walk-up tickets that was longer) to get through security. I was stopped because I had my swiss army knife on my keychain and no knives or guns are allowed. I tried to talk the guard into letting me go through but she said my only choices were to throw it away, take it back to my car (40 minutes away), or hide it somewhere outside. I finally decided to hide it and picked a spot just outside the aquarium. I came back and thought I could have probably just stuck it in my shoe and she’d have never known the difference. Anyway, it was good hiding spot I guess because it was still there when I got out.

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At Kroger they have Cape Cod brand potato chips that are kettle fried. One of the varieties is a reduced fat version that has 40% less fat. It is kettle fried too, but also baked. I tried them. They seemed just like regular kettle fried potato chips to me except they use little potatoes that yield small (but almost always whole) chips. They don’t come in nearly the variety of flavors (just plain), but they are worth trying, especially if they are on sale. I think they are just as good as the Ettensohn favorite, Krunchers.

After my birthday even though I really liked all of my presents, I decided I still needed to get some headphones, a U2 CD, and a Palm stylus. So I ordered them that night. The headphones and CD were ordered from Amazon, the stylus (I ended up ordering one for each of my two Palms and one extra to defray the shipping cost) from Styluscentral. Monday I got an e-mail from Styluscentral saying my order had shipped. Amazon listed my order as preparing to ship and I was not allowed to change or cancel the order. Today the styluses arrived in the mail. However I checked several times over the last couple of days and Amazon still had my order preparing to ship. When I ordered my AirClick it took weeks for it to arrive and I wasn’t looking forward to that again. I checked out buy.com and nearly placed an order for both of these things for the same price except that buy.com’s free shipping icon disappeared once the headphones were actually in my cart and they wanted $7 for that. Just before writing this entry, Amazon sent an e-mail saying the items had shipped, but that’s still four days before the item shipped. Earlier this year an order of CD’s took 6 days to ship, a headset took 5 days, and it took an amazing 26 days for the AirClick though Amazon warned it wouldn’t ship for 1-2 weeks (still took almost four).

Here’s my solution: don’t let them combine items into one shipment. Even though you would think they have just about everything in a big warehouse somewhere, apparently they have millions of warehouses with one item in each one. So you always end up waiting longer. Also, don’t hesitate to use buy.com who ship faster (on three orders this year they always shipped the next day) and are usually about the same price.

It is harder to get everyone together and we were still lacking Bob, but I certainly am thankful for everyone coming to my 40th birthday. It was great to see Michael running around and I was very surprised to see Danny come up from Spring Hill and glad Nicole could make it too. Susan really enjoyed seeing everyone too since she is usually out of town for the big holiday get-togethers and vacations. The food was delicious! Thanks too for all the great presents; when I got home I got really, really drunk, baked cookies, and watched movies.

Thanks for all the good food and the loud company. It was an XLent birthday!

(XL is 40 in Roman numerals – ed.)