I’ve done a bit of tweaking with the ads on the site and I’m wondering if it’s too much. A banner ad now greets you at the top of the screen on the homepage and there’s also a square ad in between the blog content and comments on each of the post pages. After getting a check from Google a few weeks back (which effectively dropped our monthly hosting costs to 86¢/month), I’ve been pretty enthused about putting them back on the site. But, I don’t want to go too far. 
What do you think? Too much? Too little (!)? Just right?
Archive for October, 2005
??The Star-Ledger??: “Newark unveiled as a force in the art world”:http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-3/1129269680123470.xml&coll=1
??Paul Ford??: “Followup/Distraction”:http://www.ftrain.com/Followup.html
Distraction is necessary. Minds need to wander to get anything done. But the Internet is sort of the mental equivalent of the snack aisle at a convenience store, filled with satisfying fatty chips and tasty cream-filled cakes.
No, really. Apple may have announced their “new iPod”:http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html today, making it just as dificult to choose between the Nano and the iPod as it was to choose bettween the Mini and the iPod a year ago (and, yes, I want one). But, don’t miss the new front in Apple’s blitz to become an “entertainment company.” I’m talking about the iMac G5, which ordinarily is not something worth drooling over if you’re already satisfied with your existing computer.
“And then I saw this.”:http://www.apple.com/imac/tour/
Go ahead and take a minute to spin through the demo of Apple’s latest application called “Front Row.” On the face of it, it seems like a nice piece of software to navigate through the media on your computer, and you kind of think, “gee, that’s nice.” Then you watch a DVD on it. And you listen to a playlist from iTunes on it. Then you watch an on-demand television show on it. Then you catch up to your favorite news podcast on it. Then the first thought hits you: “Wow, it’s like a giant iPod.” Then the second thought: “What if I hung one of these on the wall?” Or, if you’re a home theater enthusiast, you might think, “What if I hooked it up to a projector?”
Now the third thought: “If I did that, why would I use a television anymore?”
My wife and I started out our marriage without television because we thought it would be a good way to make ourselves commit more fully to spending time with each other. At the end of a year, we took another look at our decision and found out that neither of us really missed TV. It’s been over three years since we’ve had television service into our apartment. Reading books, watching DVDs and browsing the web have all replaced time wasted in front of the “idiot box” where I spent way too much of my teenage life. When we first got rid of TV, I thought we were being countercultural. Now, I wonder if we were just ahead of the curve.
That you can replace two or three or more remotes with Apple’s rediculously simple two-button device is staggering, but, then, they did it with the iPod, right? Will Apple’s ease-of-use engineering beat out Microsoft’s floundering efforts to get a “Home Media Center”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/ into the cultural consciousness? Hard to say. But my first glimpse of Front Row tells me this: I’d use it in a heartbeat.
And, once you’ve got an Apple in your living room, a dozen other thoughts spring to mind like:
* How cool would it be to have a conference call with three of my friends on iChat AV on a 42-inch screen from my couch?
* Can I stream content such as movies, photos and music from my laptop (or friends’ laptop) to my Apple set-top box?
* Could this mean that Apple will start selling huge LCD screens “like Dell”:http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/tvs?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs? (Oh, wait, don’t they kind-of “already do this”:http://www.apple.com/displays/?)
* What do we make of ??Steve Jobs??’ statement that “TVs and computers won’t likely merge”:http://www.macworld.com/2004/02/features/themacturns20jobs/index.php? That you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on
?
* Who cares about “TiVo”:http://www.tivo.com and similar PVR devices that “time-shift” the TV networks’ content when you can just order your TV a la carte?
* Could it be possible that the analysts are “missing the big picture here”:http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1205949?
All very interesting questions, indeed. But the question that I really want answered is this: the “Mac Mini”:http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html already ships with built-in S-video, so when do they ship it with an infrared port and an Apple remote?
??InterVarsity??: “Communal Discovery Bible Study Method”:http://www.intervarsity.org/biblestu/communal/ has some additional resources for Bible study leaders. I’ve linked to the “Color Me Meaningful”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2004/10/07/color-me-meaningful/ article before (circa 1986), and was suprised to find out that IV has renamed the Inductive Study Method and tweaked it a bit. I’ve printed some of the articles here, but haven’t read them yet, so I’ll reserve judgement ’til then.
??Slate??: “Giant Squid: Don’t mess with them”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2127109/. The podcast “audio version”:http://media2.washingtonpost.com/media/slate/Podcasts/Slate_05093001.mp3 of this article is hilarious and almost had me laughing out loud as I was approving function point counts at the office.
…since I unloaded a whole ton of links in one go. Enjoy.
* “TNEF’s Enough”:http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/index.html lets you open attachments sent by Microsoft Outlook on a Mac
* ??Scott Berkun??: “How to Run a Brainstorming Meeting”:http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay34.htm. Scott’s site has been increasingly useful to me, lately. His book, The Art of Project Management, is also quite good.
* ??PBS??: “Street Fight”:http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/streetfight/. This documentary on PBS tells the tale of Cory Booker, an upstart Newark politician looking to unseat 6^th^ term mayor Sharpe James. It was actually a bit creepy: Newark politics are not the cleanest, and it was amazing to watch as Booker’s campaign was thwarted by whatever means possible. It’s unclear if James will be running again next year as incumbent, but you can be that Booker will have learned from a lot of his mistakes from the 2002 campaign.
* The “Christian Classics Ethereal Library”:http://ccel.org/index/mp3.html is offering free MP3s of some classic Christian writings such as Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Of course, to make downloading these files anything near reasonable (they don’t offer FTP downloads), you’ll want to flex your “curl muscles”:http://www.hmug.org/man/1/curl.php.
* ??Rands??: “Use Your Misery”:http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/04/17/use_your_misery.html. Among my favorite quotes: Similar to getting starting procrastination, ‘I’m a unique voice’ procrastination can be deal killer. If you believe that you must be completely original in whatever your creative endeavor is, you will never ever finish. Like it or not, you’re going to steal.
* “Newsfire”:http://www.newsfirerss.com/: beautiful, but I like “NetNewsWire”:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ better
* “Stylegala”:http://www.stylegala.com/ is an awesome web design reference (and I wonder if its recent existence is the reason “these guys”:http://alistapart.com/ redesigned). I also found this “incredibly designed site”:http://web.burza.hr/en/ via Stylegala.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Following Christ”:http://www.intervarsity.org/followingchrist/audio/. This was a conference that IV hosted for young professionals three years ago. I was still in college at the time, so it was very encouraging to see that they posted their 2002-equivalent of a podcast. While there are a few quality issues with the MP3s, the ones of talks by ??Vinoth Ramachandra?? will totally rock your world. High quality stuff that deserves a much longer blog later.
* Here’s a “crib sheet”:http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/GettingThingsDone for Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I’ve been really into GTD, lately (along with “a lot of other bloggers”:http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/getting-hicks-done), finding that ??David Allen??’s model for personal productivity is very helpful, even if I don’t follow it exactly.
* I’ve been calling my wife Schmoo for well over a year now, only come to find out that there really was “such a thing as a Schmoo”:http://www.lil-abner.com/shmoo.html (sort of)
* ??Fast Company??: ” Can’t We All Just Get Along?”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/artifact.html Fast Company demystifies the marks on all those electric gadgets we consume. “Darin”:http://www.peznet.net asked me four or five years ago if I knew what the “CE” meant on the backs of these devices. Now we know.
* ??St. Petersburg Times??: “The Newark You Never Knew”:http://www.saintpetersburgtimes.com/2004/05/02/Travel/The_Newark_you_never_.shtml. That picture at the top of the article is the bakery where I get coffee most mornings.
Ever get the feeling that you’re not doing enough with the resources you have? My brother-in-law “just recently wrote”:http://www.posegate.org/russ/Oct2005/givin_it_up/ that he’s thinking of moving over to a free “Blogspot”:http://www.blogger.com/start account–primarily because he’s trying to squeeze the most out of his single-income, graduate-student, baby-on-the-way budget.
It occurred to me that our use of our hosting account is way underutilzed: we’re using 19% of the web space we have available and we have three domains registered out of our unlimited domain hosting. Our host costs us about $115 a year (which doesn’t include incentives like the $40 gift certificate they just sent us), and Google just mailed us a check for $100 for “hosting their ads”:https://www.google.com/adsense/ for 18 months.
*Aside:* Why did Google send us this cash? As you can see, we haven’t hosted ads here since our “Wordpress migration”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/02/12/migrated-to-wordpress/ back in February. However, while Wordpress hosts the majority of the pages you see on this site, the MovableType HTML pages are still on the server (I never removed them), and they still get traffic from random search engines or bloggers. So, we’re basically getting paid for hosting ads that 90% of our visitors never see. This will change, though: now that I realize we can get real money for hosting these ads, we’ll be adding them to the Wordpress site real soon.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that it costs a whopping $4.50 a month for us to host the blog here, and we’re not making the most of it. Donating some space is totally not a big deal for us at all, so I think we’ll do it if Russ wants in. What have you done with your free web space?
“Google’s building a news reader”:http://www.google.com/reader, which is freaking awesome because I’m getting a wee bit tired of synching my news feeds between different computers. It’s Ajax-y, and running really slow right now (I think because of the load from the clicks of a thousand bloggers). (“via Matt”:http://photomatt.net/2005/10/07/google-aggregator/)
“iMote”:http://www.mkd.cc/imote/, a plugin for iTunes (on Mac only–sorry Windows folks), that pretty much does the same as “Synergy”:http://wincent.com/a/products/synergy-classic/ (“previously mentioned”:http://www.kennsarah.net/2005/05/23/basking-in-the-consumer-glow/#comment-1050), only free. Control iTunes and rate songs while in any application with a quick shortcut key. Sweet. (“via MacTips”:http://www.mactips.org/archives/2005/10/06/pimping-itunes/)
Update: Whoops. “I was wrong about the free part”:http://store6.esellerate.net/store/catalog.aspx.