Category: General

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the last week, I’m not dead. I haven’t been online much and haven’t been on campus since a week from yesterday.

On Nov. 7th, I was sitting in my structure geology lab when I started to feel really light headed and dizzy. Sometimes this happens and it passes so I didn’t think much of it. This time it didn’t go away. I managed to get through the day, drove home and literally stumbled into my house. I could barely walk. It was just like how you stumble if you get really really drunk or when you get off an amusement park ride.

The next day wasn’t so bad, but on Thursday it got worse. On Saturday it got so bad that I went to the emergency room. I would literally get nauseous turning my head. I puked in the ER and was stumbling as they had me sit and fill out forms.

They ran some tests and the doctor in the ER figures it is some sort of inner ear inbalance. I’m fine so long as I don’t move around. I can lay in bed, or sit sort of reclined at my computer, but walking around is akward. The nausea seems to be gone, but I haven’t been moving around a lot. I’m not sure if my balance is coming back or if I’m just getting used to it….or if there is even a difference.

They guy in ER said I just need to adjust to whatever happened to my inner ear. It could have been a small hair that detects the fluid in my ear that came loose, it could be the fluid itself, or it could be some sort of small sand grain sized thing in my ear that formed and dislodged.

I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about school. I don’t want to be running around and have this come back while I’m there, then have to have someone drive me home.

So I installed this new theme for wordpress and when I was at school looking at my website, I noticed that I had color along the right column where the links are. I didn’t notice color on my computer at home. The right hand column was totally white.

I start playing with my computer and noticed that I can see the images and the color when I looked at the page on my 2nd monitor (LCD) but not my main monitor (CRT). I monkeyed with the brightness and contrast and nothing. Then I went into the video card settings and monkeyed with the brightness and contrast and finally got it to work.

If you don’t see a green square to the left of the title for this post, it seems that the contrast on your computer isn’t set correctly. There was literally a point where once the contrast crossed it, it would appear. Really weird. It wasn’t a browser issue as I had the same problem with IE, Firefox, and Flock.

Oddly enough, now everything looks better on my computer. I didn’t have anything to reference before to know what the settings should be. I had my brightness turned up too high the entire time.

As you can see, I’ve changed the site.

Visually, I just moved to a new, cleaner theme and removed a bunch of the junk links I had up. I’ve increased the version number to 4.5.

On the back end, I did a bunch of stuff:

• Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2
• Incorporated the Akismet Spam filter. I didn’t get much comment spam to begin with, and this should eliminate what little would sneak through.
• Installed a lighter version of the main admin page. The old one would grab stuff from the WordPress site and would take forever to load.
• Installed a plug-in on the admin side that will let me insert Flickr images easily to posts.

The header photo up top is the generic one that came with this theme, so I’m going to replace it with photos I’ve taken.

Most of the pulg-ins and themes I got I discoverd by just typing “wordpress” into the search field at Digg.com. I really need to spend more time figuring out how stylesheets and css works. I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be productive.

Also, as I was going through my comments trying to clear out the spam that was there, I ran across a comment I haven’t seen from March from Robin Alciatore. She is a pianist whose music I’ve downloaded from the old mp3.com. It was neat to see she actually read my post and left a comment. She’s probably has done as good a job as any classical musician in promoting herself online. I see she has her music for sale on iTunes, so I’ll have to throw her a few bucks.

1) I found a bunch of photos from my travels I didn’t have up on Flickr. They are now up. I don’t know why but they were up on the kodak photo site, which I think used to be oPhoto.com (which in a brilliant branding move ~not~ was changed to Kodak Galllery).

2) You can read the comment from Nate and Bietz regarding my previous post on Myspace. I got an account last night and went randomly searching profiles of kids from the Twin Cities and Appleton. What I noticed is that hardly anyone is overweight, everyone is good looking, has photos and all the comments seem totally generic. Most of the profiles seem generic too with nothing specific about any places or events. Most of the comments people would leave were the type you’d get in a spam mail that was trying to trick you into thinking it was from a friend. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Also, while I don’t doubt that many high school kids are on myspace, the number shouldn’t overwhelm the number of college kids, the vast majority I’ve noticed use Facebook.

3) I finally found a desktop weather application I like. Weatherpulse. No ads, no garbage, stable and free. Temperature is sitting right there on my toolbar.

4) I mentioned a long time ago that one of my favorite pieces of software is a product called World Watch. Its a simple little app that is a software version of a geochron. World Watch hasn’t been updated in a looong time and I’m now looking for an alternative. So far, I’ve found Sun Clock, which is OK. I’ve always felt that there was huge potential in an application like this. There is lots of free data now available online which uses lat/long data where you could use a map like this as a front end.

I think this would make for a great open source project. Weather maps and other geo data is freely available. I’m sure you could even tie in Google maps and satellite images somehow. Your just taking data in a standard format (lat/long) and plotting it on a map with set coordinates. Creating a standard interface for accessing geographic data would be extrememly useful.

From a Wired Magazine on myspace.com:

By any measure, MySpace is one of the top sites on the Web. It racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August – more than Google – and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. But these aren’t the only numbers that drew the attention of Rupert Murdoch, chair and CEO of News Corp., which agreed to buy MySpace’s parent company in July for $580 million: The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web, more than any other site. MySpace should gross $30 million to $40 million this year, says John Tinker, an analyst with ThinkEquity in New York. And with News Corp.’s sales force behind it, he estimates the company could double that figure in 2006.

I don’t doubt the financial numbers, as they can be verified and they were probably audited prior to purchase, but in no way do I accept that they get more traffic than Google. Also, at 3.5m new users per month, they would have quickly exhaused the population of who would probably visit a site like this on a regular basis in a year.

Furthermore, I know a lot of people into music and deal on a regular basis with college and high school kids. No one has ever mentioned this site before. Even if they are visiting it, I’d think if it were this big you’d hear some sort of buzz about it.

Something is inflating the numbers here. They claim there are 400,000 bands registered on the site. Assuming a band with 4 people, that’s 1.6m people in garage bands, or about 1% of the population. Considering the median age in the US is in the 30’s I really doubt that this much of the population a) are in garage bands, and b) have a band website on myspace.com.

I have no doubt its a popular site and probably even a really big site, but bigger than google??? There has to be some sort of inflated number from the same people hitting forum pages over and over.

Moreover, if they are doing 9.4b page views in a month, and to be conservative we assume they have no growth over a 12 month period, that’s 112.8b page views per year. They expect to gross $30-40m this year. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they make $40m, and assuming 100% of revenue comes from advertising, that gives them 2,820 page vies per $1 of revenue, or a CPM of about $0.35. This is giving them all the benefits of the doubt. Drop the revenue numbers a bit, assume less than 100% of revenue is from ads, and assume that the page view growth continues, you are looking a CPM in the range of $0.25-0.10.

Oh, and that’s assuming 1 ad per page, which they don’t do. On the front page I count 4 ads, 2 of which are text ads. If they are serving up 12% of the ads on the internet, it is because they are giving the ads away.

They claim to be like Craigslist. Check out their classified ads for your city and compare it to Craingslist. They claim to be like friendster. How many people do you know on myspace compared to friendster??

Something is really fishy or I am really out of touch with what is happening on the Internet.