jr conlin's ink stained banana

i just added a spam rule that dumps any mention of Pedi-Paws in my mail. This doggie dremel has now unseated various overseas pharmaceutical offers and pleadings from former Nigerian heads of state as the number one item clogging up my spam traps.

i think there's actually a pretty important lesson here for all you would-be marketing people: Don't offer affiliate programs.

Sure, they sound like a great idea, right? Pay someone a fraction of the profit to pimp your crap and you save yourself serious cash from hiring a professional sales person and running an ad campaign. Folks'll do it for you for pennies! What's not to love?

Well, yeah, they will. So will every two bit spammer looking for their gold. Hell, i do it with links to crap i talk about on Amazon (Oh, by the way, that's netted me exactly $.60 over the past two years). Truth is, if there's money to be made for doing the bare minimum, regardless of exactly how much, spammers will jump onto that like starving flies on the last cow pie in the meadow. This means that people will not only get your product, they'll become irritated by it. It will become the bane of their existence. They will happily go back to trimming FiFi's nails with a chainsaw just to avoid ever dealing with your product, you or your company.

Need i remind folks of X10's near constant barrage of popunder ads and just how well >that company is doing today.

Seriously, if you've got a good product, it'll sell itself. Pitch it the old fashioned way and build word of mouth. If it's actually worth using, folks will send friends and family your way.

Otherwise it's like handing out branded tank tops in high crime areas hoping to get some free air time on COPS.

Ok, let's look at a few things, shall we?

For close to eight years now, Google has been openly proclaimed as "The One Solution" and "Welcomed Overlord" by, well, damn near everyone with a keyboard and net connection. i'll admit that the do two things exceptionally well. They've got very good search results for recent materials (things become less good the older the source material), and as a byproduct, they've got a fairly good mechanism of matching ads to content. Neither of which are stellar as far as i'm concerned, and i'd really wonder just how popular they'd be on websites if they didn't pay for placement as much as they do, but that's also beside the point.

Kind of beside the point.

Truth be told, that's actually one of the bigger points. See, what google has is a tremendous distribution network with lots of little sites that run google ads on them and rake in a few cents per click to the site owner. That means that google has a huge inventory of pages they can run ads on, which means that your ads get distributed to a hideous number of pages, meaning that if your and advertiser and want the largest distribution network for your ads, you're going to go to Google (Oh yeah, and since that network is so freaking huge, better buy A LOT of clicks so that your ad stays up for longer than five minutes.) Granted a large number of those are spammy sites, but inventory is inventory.

Now, on the opposite side is Yahoo, a company that is no longer the newest, so it has a few notches against it, a company that has a bad habit of killing off the things it loves and being a bit more scattershot about what it decides it wants to be when it grows up (A portal! No, wait! A movie studio! No, wait! a search engine! No, wait! A social site! No, wait! AOL! No, wait!…) Say what you will about it, but it's a site that has a horrific amount of traffic and users and because of that schizophrenia, has something for damn near everyone (Although i'm a bit disappointed that they removed the pet horoscopes and curling sections). They also have an ad system that they use, (actually, several) and they do match a number of times. i'm not saying they're perfect, actually, far from it. Yahoo has made some absolutely insane decisions and has done more to seemingly fight against themselves than help themselves, but i'll also grant you that they're a profitable company.

The only problem is that since they're not the latest and greatest, nor do they pay people to run their ads, searchboxes and what-not, they don't have the sort of deep reach and choir of faithful that Google has. So when some of those self same choir leaders are now cautioning against Yahoo taking Google's money for ads, well, to quote a future philosopher "The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote."

Now, if i were for some reason were able to hold sway over at Yahoo, i'd encourage them to do pretty much the same thing google did when they were providing search results on Yahoo's dime. Use the time, money and metrics of running google ads to build and test your own replacement ad system. Forget "building the airplane while it's in the air". That's a retarded way to build airplanes. Instead, realize you need a new one, ground the f–ker and build a damn site better airplane than the ones you're borrowing to keep your airline running. This is a chance to catch up by going completely stealth, take it. Make google have to go through the same thing in a year or two. If you were really smart, you'd take the time to build a componentized system where you can hot-swap elements so that next time some cool new thing comes around, you're not caught off guard.

Do i care that Yahoo+Google would be a huge company controlling damn near every bit of ad space on the net? Nope. It's temporary at worst and best. No matter how crappy the ad system, someone will buy space on it. Marketers want competing services because that way they can game them against themselves. If they don't have one, they'll create one.

Mookie asked me earlier: "Which would you want? Permanent invisibility or the ability to fly?"

Sad thing is, i knew the answer because i thought about it already. Then again, i'm a dork.

The problem is that either are useful at times and not so useful at other times. Both can be "turned off" in various ways (e.g. lots of clothes and makeup for invisibility vs. not flying) but obviously one can be turned on and off a good deal easier.

Of the two, i'd pick flight. Invisibility just seems like too much of a hassle. Yeah, sure, you can hang out in changing rooms whenever you like and in theory, never have to worry about paying air fare costs ever again, but lets face it, you're naked all the time, you stand out in the rain (literally and figuratively) and while you're not "visible" you can be detected in any number of other ways (e.g. pressure sensitive plates, CO2 detection, echo location, etc.) You just get a false sense of security.

With flight, you have an avenue of escape that's unavailable to many others, can be disguised (e.g. fake a talisman to give your enemies a focus instead of you.) That sort of thing. Plus, you can get stuff off the top shelf without a ladder, and you are the perfect sniper position with an immediate way to get out.

For what it's worth, if i'm going to have any single super power, i'm going for mind control. Make folks forget they saw me, have a bunch of them carry my stuff, set myself up as a benevolent dictator of some country, i tell ya, it would be the good life.

Code is art.

It's what i like to tell myself when i'm trying to figure out some insane bit of crap like why Java has five different ways to do a regular expression match against a string, and only one of which is actually useful.
(for those playing at home, you want Pattern.compile(regexp).matcher(string).find(), DON'T USE matches() since that's the equivalent of doing $string =~ /^regexp$/ and will cause you to say many naughty things about the core Java programmers.)

Still, like any other creative process, you have bursts of inspiration and.. well.. what i seem to be going through right now. Coder's Block.

Mind you, i'm nicely productive at work, pounding out patches and methods with swear filled aplomb. Where things break down is when i get home. i'll sit at the desk staring at the laundry list of things i really ought to be working on, and then distract myself by reading my MBL stream and watching whatever youtube videos Andy found.

There are supposed to be exercises that artists can do to get past the block. i believe they involve doing little tasks or possibly sitting in a starbucks with a mac sipping overpriced coffee and talking about how emo they are, but this usually just winds up getting ugly and i'd hate to have to explain to the nice officer why i was assaulting myself.

Plus i hate coffee.

i'm just going to have to get coding, aren't i?

Fine, let me finish watching this volume of Haruhi Suzumiya first.

Well, the turtle must have hitched a ride, because the Archos arrived this morning.

First: Teh Suck

1. You'll need new everything. The USB cable, DVR station and pretty much everything else isn't compatible with the older version. This is major suckage.
2. This thing is such a fingerprint magnet that it came packed with a few on the back.
3. Case? Ha-ha-ha-ha. Look, they gave you a little bit of cloth to smear around the fingerprints…

The good.

1. The screen is noticably bigger.
2. It has more 'heft' to it.
3. It's more responsive than the 605

i'll post more once the EIGHT HOUR CHARGE cycle finishes.

The Annoying:

1. i never removed the protective plastic screen thingy on the 605. It was applied so smoothly that i figured i'd just save myself buying a scratch protector. Can't do that with the new 5 series.
2. it's going to cost me another $130 or so to get it working as a replacement for the 605.
3. Ok, maybe this one is me, but i kinda like not having a glossy, shiny exterior. My 605 is a year old and i can clean it with windex to look good as when i opened the box the first time. Not really sure i'll be able to do that with this one.

REALLY don't want to get an iPod, but at least apple realized the value of making a STANDARD proprietary connector.