As you can see, my little advertising experiment with Commission Junction is pretty failtastic.
Which is strange, because the ads are fairly targeted based on a few specific, popular pages of mine. I’m not a big fan of advertising to tell you the truth — I ripped Google Adsense off here a few months ago. To me, it’s worth $10 a month or whatever not to have them pollute my main page. I was testing a new concept though with more targeted ads that I choose, but so far it’s not working.
Is anyone here actually making money with your blog (i.e, enough at least to pay for hosting)? ...
I love the smell of Saturday in the morning. The sleeping in, the sound of traffic that pulls me out of bed at 11am. It’s not very often I get full days to myself these days, so when I do get them, I definitely enjoy them. I’m just demolishing my second cup of coffee, and then will probably hit the open road for a few hours.
I went by the hospital last night to see my friend Clay. Clay had a quintuple bypass surgery, but is doing relatively well. As I well know, being in the hospital totally sucks, so I’m gonna swing by for a bit. Then, who knows. Maybe down to Urban Fare to get some groceries. ...
While many of you may be out tonight doing something for Valentine’s day, just hope that you don’t hurt yourself and end up in an emergency room in New Westminster. Apparently the fire marshal was called in yesterday and was forced to clear part of the ER due to overcrowding:
The fire marshal has ordered an area of the emergency room at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster to be cleared because of overcrowding. Fraser Health Authority spokesman Michael Bernard said the fire department was called to the hospital after receiving a complaint about crowding.
“He took a look around the ...
I picked up a book the other day that I’ve been meaning to read for a few months now. It is a book by a scientific journalist named Gary Taubes entitled Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) (although after reading it, I think a more appropriate title might be something like “The People’s History Of Diet And Nutrition.”)
For those of you who follow nutritional research, you may remember Gary from a controversial article he wrote in 2002 in the New York Times called ‘What If It’s Been A Big Fat Lie?” In that article, he ...
Yes, I think it’s true. HD-DVD, my friends, is dead, or at least in the last of its death throes. Being an early adopter, I went out a few months ago and picked up a HD-DVD player, thinking that at the bare minimum both formats would exist for a year or more. It turns out my timing was rather poor.
A few of the major studios moved from HD-DVD to BluRay last month, and the move was so dramatic that the HD-DVD guys cancelled their talks at the CES show in Vegas (which actually probably did the most harm to their effort). Reuter’s is reporting that HD-DVD is basically dead, and a leak from WalMart ...
So while many of us suffer from the end products of love, and some of us end up broken hearted, my friend Clay is the only guy I know who actually has, quite literally, a broken heart.
Photo from here.
Clay is currently down at St. Paul’s hospital getting a coronary bypass operation. Not a very enjoyable way to spend Valentine’s day. I just called down and he’s still in surgery. I’ll probably swing by later tonight if he’s out of the ICU, or more than likely tomorrow. If anyone has that stupid fish game with the hoops and the water, let me know. I’m sure Clay will swing by my blog ...
1977, in front of the House Agriculture Subcommittee of Domestic Marketing, talking about the recent recommendations by the USDA and Food and Nutrition Board towards a low-fat diet:
However tenuous that linkage, however disappointing the various intervention trials, it still seems prudent to propose to the American public that we not only maintain reasonable weights for our height, body structure and age, but also reduce our dietary fat intakes significantly, and keep cholesterol to a minimum. And, conceivably, you might conclude that it is proper for the federal government to so recommend.
On ...
I just caught this video over on Tony’s blog. I have a hard time watching confrontations like this — I don’t even know what I’d do if I were ever put in a situation with an asshole cop like that. ...
My first MRI was actually fair bit shittier than I imagined. I got to the hospital about 40 minutes before my scheduled time, and went to the Jim Pattison pavilion (like I was told). Unfortunately, there was no MRI facility in the JPP, and at that hour there wasn’t really anyone to ask. I found an information kiosk that showed a MRI lab in the Centennial Pavilion, so I hurried down there and took a seat in the waiting room.
Of course, there wasn’t anyone in the reception booth so I just sat in the corner hoping that it was the correct place. There were a few other people in the waiting room ...
There is a relatively new device called “The English Mosquito” which is being used in England to control where young people typically gather.
The device works by emitting high-frequency sounds that only young people (typically younger than 20 years of age) have the ability to hear. Because it’s fairly annoying, it causes young people to eventually leave a particular area. Human right’s groups are obviously unimpressed with the blanket use of the devices:
Aynsley-Green said about 3,500 of the devices are in use across England to split up gatherings of youth in areas such as parks and shops.
“These ...
I’ve been dabbling with a new caching engine for WordPress over the last few weeks. While WP-Cache does a pretty decent job, it falls short in a few areas, and it’s something I’ve been trying to fix. In particular, here’s what I don’t like about it:
It relies on the entire WordPress engine to do it’s caching
It doesn’t make use of proper HTTP caching headers
The problem with the first item is that even if you have a cache hit, the entire WordPress PHP core is parsed and partially executed. What that means is the caching system will always be limited by how fast the PHP parser is ...
I’ve decided to do a multipart series on how to take your WordPress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box WordPress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog.
The first topic I’d like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don’t, here’s a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called “Bots” that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google’s little guy is called “GoogleBot”, ...
For all of you who have been waiting patiently for the new 10.5.2 update, the wait is over. 10.5.2 is now available on software update. I’m installing all 350 MB of it right now.
For all of you about to update, I salute you.
Oh, and for all you people on shitty broadband, you should know I just downloaded 352 MB in 4 minutes here. ...
Tomorrow I should be getting a brand new 8-core MacPro for my desk at work. In honor of that, I did up a little Mac desktop last night for anyone who likes to laugh from time to time.
Enjoy.
if (is_single()) { ?
digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/apple/The_MacPro_When_Seven_Cores_Of_Porn_Doesn_t_Quite_Cut_It';
} ?
...
Part of the reason I went back to Chilliwack this last weekend was to get caught up on sleep before all the craziness begins this month and next. Thankfully I managed to do just that, and often slept in until 11:30 or noon. I actually feel fairly refreshed, which is a nice change.
Chilliwack RainbowOne of the things I’m going to try to do over the next two months is to lose a few pounds. Before being in the hospital and all my surgeries, I was in a fairly happy place with regards to health. But this last year has been tough and I haven’t really been that vigilant with watching what I eat and ...
I just did a quick check of my Google calendar for the week, and it’s look pretty jam packed for the next few weeks. Things start off with a bang tomorrow — I have to go to St. Paul’s Hospital for some intestinal tests in the morning, and head down to Vancouver General Hospital tomorrow evening for an MRI (two hospitals in one day people, good times). Just did some reading on an MRI, and it’s not a very dangerous procedure, unless you have certain types of implants in your eye socket. I’m fairly certain mine is ok, otherwise we wouldn’t be going ahead with this, but I’ve seen one ...
So I’m currently at my mom’s place looking at her new computer. While checking out her new monitor, she spilled the goods:
Mom: “Hey, you know that blog entry about people getting to your blog by googling duanestorey.com”
Me: “Yah”
Mom: “Don’t tell anyone, but it was us.. That’s what we do”
So there you have it. My mom needs a few lessons in how to browse the web. I still love her though. Even though it means I might be adopted. ...
Rebecca fired me off a link this morning asking if I’d like to be a part of Team Blogging for a big bowling charity fundraiser. Since I like bowling and I like blogging, I figured it would be a cool idea.
You can read more about the details over on Rebecca’s blog. I’m trying to raise $150 to go towards the event, so if you can help out by sponsoring me, I would really appreciate it.
You can sponsor me by visiting this page. ...