Can't tell you more than I told you already
I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Ireland. So far everything has gone really well. I was really tired from the overnight flight, but we’ve been seeing all kinds of stuff here in Dublin. Mom would be glad that I went to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells and the exhibit on scribing there.
We’re about to go on a trip to the Museum of History, so I have to get going.
See pictures!
After horrible results in the first quarter of 2008, things got a lot better. A big part of this had to be going back and putting up my web pages on Speedfactory again. This caused some growth in traffic (still off from last year but holding steady at about 200 visitors a day), got most of my page rank back from Google, brought back my advertising deal, and seemed to cause a general increase in Amazon sales. For the quarter I had $2,700 in sales for commissions of $121.73. This is way off, but I didn’t re-post at Speedfactory until the end of May. The most popular thing is still the Maxell battery pack, with 19 sold. I also sold 7 Griffin TuneJuice 2’s, 7 PAC Sony-iPod adapters, and 5 Turbo Charge chargers. The most expensive thing sold were some Bose noise-canceling headphones. Other than a very weird book about exercise, the most unusual thing sold was a Magnum pepper mill for $31.
AdSense remained pretty anemic at less than $15 per month. Even though I deleted all of their ads off of the iPod battery pages in lieu of the new ads, revenue in June was still up a little bit from Dejumbler and iPod-Sony ads alone, perhaps because the higher page rank boosted the price of those ads.
Our office was located near the Capitol since the 1930’s. For unknown motivations, a decision was made to rent some space in Atlanta. After looking at several spots, an office building in Midtown was picked and I am on the 24th floor. My office (actually a cubicle) has a south facing window that lets me see all of downtown. I used the camera to take multi-part panorama and then some Canon software to stitch the 3 separate photos together on my computer. The picture below represents my view looking South down West Peachtree Street. In real life there is more detail. For instance, to the right of the Westin Peachtree Plaza there is a building with a V shape on it. Just to the left of that building there is a tiny spec in the picture on the horizon. That spec is the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport control tower.
I got my first letter from Nicole yesterday. Unfortunately it was just after I had mailed my fifth letter to her (every Saturday so far!), so our communications are substantially crossed. In the letter she included my name in Armenian letters and signed it with her name in Armenian letters. Since I type my letters on the computer and I know that there are fonts built in to Windows with Armenian (unicode fonts like Arial), I started trying to figure out how to incorporate some Armenian letters in my letters.
Nicole
Նիկոլ
To create these letters on the web you have to know the 4-digit unicode number of each letter. Nicole’s letters are: 1350, 1387, 1391, 1400, 1388. Each number has to start with an ampersand and pound and then end with a semicolon. It helps if you increase the size of the font.
Ted (1359-1383-1380)
Տէդ
To do the same thing in Word 2007, you have to use the hexadecimal version of the number. You just type it in, then you highlight the 4 letters and press ALT+X. The hex codes for Nicole are 0546-056B-056F-0578-056C. For Ted it is 054F-0567-0564. In previous versions of Word I was able to hold down ALT and then type in the 4-digit decimal number. When I let go of ALT the character appeared. Using Character Map is practically useless for this exercise.
It was helpful to refer to this page which lists all of the letters and codes as well as this page which includes the sounds each letter makes.
Now I need the word for “uncle.”
I was leaving the house today and there was a really neat butterfly on my purple cone flowers. In fact there were two of them. So I went back in the house and got the new camera, set it to macro, and tried it out. I don’t think the butterflies liked the infrared autofocus, but they hung around long enough for me to get this one.
It seems to be an American painted lady, Vanessa virginiensis, in the family of brushfooted butterflies. It looks very different on top than on the underside of its wings which you see here.
I liked the picture so much that I cropped it and added it to my banner pictures at the top of the page. The pattern of the red-tipped flower spines is pretty dramatic up close along with the butterfly’s pattern.