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Civ 4 is here and I’ve had most of a weekend to play with it.  The most obvious improvement is the graphics.  I’m pleased that with Civ games, graphics improvements add to the gameplay and aren’t just there for show, like they are with most games. (more…)

Let me just say, I make a darned cool lion. Unfortunately I forgot to put my memory card in my camera before I left for the party, so I didn’t get any pictures. Kim went as an anime warrior, which involves a long Chinese dress, a cool, foamy, pink hair piece, and some nunchucks, which Gabe just happened to have lying around. (more…)

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I’m making this post with the del.icio.us (how I store my bookmarks/favorites), Flickr (where I store my photos).  So far I like Flock, and am going to keep playing with it.  You can drag your public Flickr photos into a blog post, which is kinda cool so I’m going to do that right now (a picture of me looking SOOO cool).  There’s things that could be slicker (able to login to flickr to drag private photos, better formatting of the picture you drag into your post, spellcheck in the blog post would be huge), but it’s already pretty slick.

UpdateOkay, after posting that last bit I went to look at it and it’s not so slick. It converted all my html so that it displayed as text. I guess this is cool if you only write text, but I’m used to doing some html formatting. There doesn’t seem to be a setting to let you type in html. It also very badly aligned the photos, so I had to go back in and fix that up. It’s got potential though.

I haven’t tried the rss aggregator, but I really like using BlogLines so far. With Bloglines I can check my feeds from anywhere and don’t need an installed program other than a web browser.

I haven’t made a cent since the first day. If anything this AdSense experiment has shown me that writing almost completely for myself, unless I have people reading this using RSS feeds that don’t register as a page view in the AdSense stats. Of course, I started of mostly writing this blog for myself, followed by friends and family, so I’m not surprised that my traffic is so low.

I think to make AdSense worthwhile and effective I would need a blog about a specific topic, and then I would have to do some work to get links to the blog, join networks, maybe have some sort of marketing campaign. In other words a lot of work.

You can get an interesting comparative sort of idea of how much your blog might be worth in advertising based on some numbers from AOL’s purchase of the Weblogs, Inc blog network. I was surprised that my former political blog www.ministryotruth.com was worth about $5000 according to them. Of course, it really isn’t worth that if nobody will pay me for it, but it goes to show me that I had a few more links than I thought. It was too much work though and it didn’t turn out to be as collaborative as I had hoped.

• Reading: Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such thing As Hypnosis by Steven Heller & Terry Steele

I think I found out a small part of how Google prevents you from just going to your own website and clicking ads: they just ignore a bunch of clicks all coming from the same source. I’m sure this is obvious, and I wasn’t trying to run up my ad revenue by clicking my own ads, but in testing my ads I did click on them a lot, and my revenue for yesterday was nada. Zilch. Zip. Not even the 7 whole cents that I made the first day. I think I was the only one visiting my blog though.

It seems like they don’t update your daily earnings until the end of the day. I’m sure there’s forums or guides out there that explain all this, and I may invest the time to read one if I ever get serious about using this kind of advertising, but for now I just want to get a feel for how it works.

I never wanted to have ads on my website, but I’ve become a big fan of Google’s AdSense ads. I’ve actually found the targeted advertising to be sometimes useful instead of being a distraction – like advertising normally is. (more…)

• Reading: Truman by David McCullough

My coworker Dennis and I frequently have discussions about politics, business, and technology and where all are heading. Dennis raised a good point to me the other day: since he and I are so constantly exposed to ways technology is being used, why aren’t we thinking up some new way to use the internet as a business platform. The main driving force behind this questioning was the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. (more…)

The pumpkins that we got last weekend needed some carving so we invited a bunch of people over to carve with us. We got some really, really cool pumpkins out of the deal thanks in large part to Art, Amanda’s boyfriend, bringing a pumpkin carving kit of little saws and stencil designs. Thao and Thai and some of their friends showed up for a little while just to say hi but didn’t carve pumpkins. Brian and Bridgid carved theirs without stencils and had to leave a bit early to get up the next day and run a race in costumes. Jesse and Deborah also did their own designs, Jesse carving 4 faces into his pumpkin, one on each side. Art made an amazing pumpkin with the face of their new puppy in it, his own design. Jessie (sp?) carved a cute pumpkin with freckles. Kim, Amanda and I all used stencils and I’m a big fan. I’ve never used them before and it makes me want to do it more often, or even better, design my own. Jacob finished his pumpkin carving of the symbol for pi late as can be expected of Jacob.

Kim made and awesome pumpkin pie where everything was from scratch except the crust. I was just sorry she was nice enough to share it with everyone because I only got one piece :-( We roasted everyone’s pumpkin seeds too, so we made out good on that deal. Mmmmm, pumpkin seeds.

Art and Amanda slept over rather than going back to Bremerton late, and today we went to the farmer’s market in the U-District. It was a gorgeous sunny day for it and I wore shorts and a t-shirt. After filling up on samples at the market we went to the dog park at Magnuson Park to give Art and Amanda’s puppy Gretchan some exercise and social interaction. I’ve never been to a dog park and it was a blast. It was really fun watching all the dog – dog, dog – people, and people – people interactions. I’m frequently surprised that dogs even recognize each other as the same species since so many of them look soooo different from each other. The park is really big and goes all the way to the water where dogs chase all kinds of toys into the water to retrieve them.

Art and Amanda went back to Bremerton and Kim is off tonight doing volunteer work at some cooking event to satisfy her community service requirement for her culinary program. So I’m writing, researching and programming. Weekends need to be longer cause I get so much more done than I do during the week.

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Someone knocked on our door tonight for a free window audit from Statewide Windows. In addition to the free audit we get a $25 gasoline card. Sounds like a good deal to me since I spend nothing, get someone to tell me about energy efficiency, and they give me $25 in free gas. The company looks reputable online, so we’ll see how it turns out when they come to do the audit. I’ll update here.

Update October 22nd, 2005. A sales lady named Cindy came to the house and measured our windows and gave us a presentation on windows. The UniFrame window that only Statewide sells was very impressive in the demo, blocking a ton of heat (supposedly R10 value), and being very well made. We have a window in our downstairs bedroom that is too small to make code since it’s a slider, which only allows half the window opening to be used as an egress and the whole opening just barely would be big enough for code. We wanted to replace that anyway, but Cindy told us our upstairs bedrooms weren’t big enough for code. So we got price quotes to replace all those windows and expand our downstairs bathroom window. The quote looked really, really good, so Kim and I talked about it and decided to just get it done, especially since they offer a “success discount” of 11% if you place your order that night. However, she messed up her math. The quote ended up being about 70% more than the original. We were exhausted at this point as we had been talking windows for 4 hours and just wanted to go to bed so we agreed to the price knowing that we had three days to cancel the contract, so we just signed it and went to bed.

The next morning I measured the upstairs windows and found that they were just barely code. One of them had an opening that was just over 5.7 sq feet and the other was less than 5.7, but was on the ground floor and more than 5 sq ft. This code mistake and lack of knowledge, combined with the higher price that changed on us gave us a bad feeling and we decided to cancel the order. Kim called and said that we wanted to cancel and Cindy said okay, but didn’t bother to tell us that we had to send a notice of cancellation in by certified mail. It’s a good thing I read that before the date that I needed to make the decision.

Overall it seems like Statewide has a good product and is a good company, but the make a decision now sales tactics and pricing raising math errors were enough to make us reconsider doing business. Perhaps in the future after we’ve done some more research we’d consider statewide, but I have a feeling that their prices may be a little higher than I’m willing to spend.

Update October 25th, 2005 Despite calling Cindy twice to say that we wanted to cancel, faxing in a copy of the request to cancel, and sending a certified letter yesterday (which to be fair I doubt they’ve received until today), someone from Statewide today stopped by and put their sign in our yard and wants to setup a time to do the precision measuring of the windows. I’m hoping this is just a mistake in the paperwork and not another pushy business tactic.

Update November 1st, 2005 My money was all refunded no problem. I’m planning to shop around and get some more bids before I go any further with this project. I don’t know enough to make a good decision yet.

Even though I was fasting, I had a lot of fun this weekend for my birthday. Friday night I went over to Stephanie’s place after not having seen her for about 10 months. It was nice to catch up and hang out with friends. Betsy, Jacob, Jesse and Deborah were all there. Kim was hanging out with Bridgid so didn’t come. We talked and they drank and ate a birthday cake that I only got to taste since it was the let down day of the fast.

Saturday I mostly relaxed and read some. I didn’t know what Kim had planned, but just before dark she drove me, Violet and Bridgid out to a corn maze and pumpkin field north of Seattle. It was a blast! Jake and Kimmy met us there. We all picked pumpkins, and as it got dark we headed into the corn maze. It was a huge 5 acre maze with the goal in the center. It was really, really muddy too. My two complaints about the maze were that there were a lot of places that people had pushed down the corn where there wasn’t supposed to be a path, and the goal of the maze didn’t have anything cool there. It was just a big open space. There wasn’t even a light. After the end of the maze though was a haunted section. I’ve never been in a haunted house with Kim before and definitely wasn’t prepared to. She freaks out! In a really fun way, but wow, she scared me more than anything in the maze. At one point an extremely tall scarecrow jumped down off it’s perch and started after us and Kim jumped up and wrapped both arms and legs around me and started screaming! Poor Violet realized after we got out of the maze that she had lost her phone, but fortunately she got it back the very next day.

Today I slept late, relaxed, did some work around the house, and went to see Grizzly Man since it had finally come to the Crest. Good film. It’s one to make you think. Now I’m not tired but feeling very hungry. I can’t wait to eat tomorrow…

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