29 August 2005 Archives

I had to borrow the car today so I took my roommate into work and picked him up. As usual, I hung my arm out the open window when I drove, and when I got to roomie’s place of business, I noticed I had these tiny little blisters over most of my arm. I knew it was burned from the trip last week, but it looked more tanned than not. I guess the exposure to the sun today was too much.

I look like I have white measles. But you don’t want to hear that. You might want to hear, though, that I’ve removed the Google Ads. Again. See what you miss when you read this through an aggregator?

I’m not sure if it was the fundamentalist religous ads that kept popping up, equating disasters such as hurricanes to loss of faith; or the ’sell your blood’ ad associated with the posts encouraging people to donate blood to the Red Cross. I do know that the pennies I get each day to run the ads aren’t worth seeing crap like that in my weblog. Once I went to full syndication feeds, the click through rates tanked, and I don’t want to take time to tweak the ads through channels to filter out the type of businesses that seem to be making Google rich.

If I embedded the ads directly in my posts, I might break a buck a day; but I’m already feeling a little disassociated from the weblog by providing the full feeds–I don’t want to add yet more ’stuff’ to the site. What can I say? I suck at marketing.

I think ads work when you have a focused site on a ’safe’ topic, like photography. They’re also profitable if you really work it, like those who supposedly make thousands of dollars a month. If I have a focused site, I may add them back, but not in Burningbird; not when I talk on so many different topics. Yeah, I know: I suck at marketing.

I’ll have to send a note into Google to cancel the account. They take up to 90 days to pay when you cancel–it takes so long for them to process an email since they won’t automate the cancellation process. I guess the company is a lot like the Hotel California: you can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave. However, Google doesn’t suck at marketing.

New Orleans wasn’t hit as badly as it could have been, but it was hit badly — the weather service says it is suffering from fresh water flooding, and there was extensive wind damage. Already the police are being swamped with calls to rescue people from roofs in the city and surrouding area. And New Orleans wasn’t even the hardest hit community. I can’t even imagine what Gulfport will look like. Or Mobile.

We’ll get some of the effects of the storm, but in a minor sense — some wind, some rain. Arkansas is under high wind alert, and several states are at real risk for some significant flooding.

Just because New Orleans wasn’t hit directly, and smashed to smithereens with a category 5 hurricane, don’t discount the effects of this storm. I think it’s going to have a lot more flood and storm damage than Camille, so if you were planning on giving to the Red Cross, don’t decide to spend that money on something else. Lot’s of folks will need help for some time to come, and the Red Cross is always there.

In fact, if everyone skipped one dinner out and one movie, or one music CD, or book this week, and donated that money to the Red Cross, I bet the organization would have enough to make it through the rest of the hurricane season. We’re not even past peak hurricane season yet, and the organizations that help need help, themselves. You can, of course, just give without skipping anything, but I don’t think this is the same thing. Consider it equivalent to spilling a few drops of wine as libation to the gods. Or God, if that’s your thing.

I don’t have any spare cash, and until I get paid for some jobs, am living on kindness and roast cat*. But I do have blood so am off to donate blood this week. And I hate donating blood. I’d rather give money. Sigh.

My server is getting a little bit swamped by Google search requests for Hurricane Katarina, Katrina before I caught my typo.

Though not in a storm, it is warm and humid and uncomfortable at home, today. The french doors leading off from the kitchen developed dry rot, and the management is currently replacing them. In the meantime, I caught a screenshot of this doppler image that I bet the folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and so on would rather be the truth.

I call the image, “Wow, that prayer stuff really works!”

*Just kidding on the kindness.

A nice story on how the Red Cross is helping the folks impacted by Katrina.