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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
BTRIPP's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 | |
| 6:28 pm | I guess I "overdid" it ... Yikes. I used to be a real "walker" ... hell, when I had my Cubs tickets, I used to regularly walk the four miles to the ballpark (and back) twice a weekend ... now I spend 18 hours a day at the keyboard and only occasionally make it out of the house. Anyway, between walking 2 miles (dragging a cart full of supplies) down and walking 2 miles back (with same cart, only slightly lighter) for the fireworks, and today's mile up, 2 hours of standing around, and a mile back, I was wiped out ... totally "losing gas" about 3 blocks from home. I did make it back, but ended up crashing for nearly 5 hours. Sure, I'm usually rather sleep deprived and could use the shut-eye ... but it really bugs me when my body takes control of the scheduling! Now I'm WAY behind on all the projects I'd hoped to get done today. Bleh.  |
| 8:39 am | Fireworks ... Chicago is a wise old city that understands about the weather. As such, they have "tentative" scheduling for the main city fireworks that start a day ahead. This was a Good Idea this year, as tonight they're forecasting thunderstorms! We ended up with a Major Undertaking this year. Daughter #1 had 3 friends along and Daughter #2 one, giving us six girls to keep reigned in. We started up by us, with two big carts full of stuff, walking the two miles down to the north end of Grant Park.  As you can see in the above, the spot we picked was somewhat "out of the way", especially in regards to the masses attending Taste Of Chicago in the area centered on Jackson & Columbus. The sort of crowds that would have been down in that part of the park would have been horrendous. So, we got down there fairly early (arriving at 3:45), blocked out "our space" with blankets, and tried to keep The Girls amused for the 5 hours between setting up and the fireworks. Fortunately, some of their teachers were in a party nearby, and they went to hang out there for a while. Between snacks and games and eventually dinner, boredom was limited.  This was the view to the south of us ... don't know any of these people. This was at about 6:30, when things started to fill up (a lot of the "gaps" between early-arriving groups were starting to get muscled in on by latecomers). By the time it started getting towards dusk, folks were wandering right through our area ... very irritating (we should have come with "caution" tape like some of our neighbors!).  And, of course, there were fireworks. We'd brought a radio so that we could tune in to the musical accompaniment to the show. I'm hoping that one of these days I'll be able to again afford toys like a camera that can take quality pictures of fireworks. I took several dozen shots that all looked pretty good in the back of the camera, but were blurry once on-screen. Bummer. The above was one of the sharper images. All six girls slept over last night and we're in the process of whipping up some breakfast, then we're heading up to the Chicago Historical Society for their annual 4th of July thing (activities, music, speeches, etc. ... we go every year) and then send the others home. We may (weather permitting) end up back down in Grant Park this afternoon for a concert The Wife wants to attend ... but we'll see how accurate the thunderstorm forecasts are! |
| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | |
| 8:50 pm | Tech: good and bad The Good: Once again, Tiger Direct amazes with next-day delivery. Daughter #1's computer, which we've been doing battle with for at least a year (it has a strange allergy to XP's SP3 ... totally gets fucked up by it ... we wiped and "res-set to factory" and it was working OK, MicroSoft eventually sent through SP3 and it was even worse than before ... can't even get it into Safe Mode to be able to backtrack to a restore point!) finally got to the stage where I had no more ideas on how to fix it ... and she needs a computer (activity-wise now, for real in the fall), so I had to bite the bullet and get one. I was very pleased to get an "off-lease" HP system (yeah, "used"), with a gig of ram, a fairly fast P4 chip, and XPpro installed for $200 delivered. What is AWESOME was that I ordered this on-line yesterday evening and it was sitting in our package room by 1pm today ... gotta love having one of their major shipping centers just out in the suburbs (even though the shipping was supposedly "3-7 days")! The Bad: I can't find my cell phone. Now, (this might be TMI) there are only three places where my cell phone is likely to be ... in its carrying case on the belt on my jeans, in its carrying case on the belt of my tan slacks, or on the charger out in the kitchen. Unless somebody is coming over (very rare) or I'm heading out (intermittent these days), I don't wear pants around the house, so these locations are fairly finely determined as being on a particular chair out in the living room. But the phone (when we were heading out to Dojo tonight) was NOWHERE to be found. We tried calling it, but the call went right into voice mail, so its battery is no doubt kaput. I don't know what to do ... I'm an extreme creature of habit, and things NEED to be where I expect them to be or they are LOST ... and, although the odds are 99-1 that the phone is "here somewhere" without it being somewhere, it's as good as being nowhere. I just hope that folks aren't calling me on that line, since I have no clue of how to access that voice mail except via that phone. The Ugly: OK, so that wasn't in the header, but I was in a total freak-out melt-down today about money anyway, only exacerbated by the missing phone, new computer, spendy, spendy, spendy, spend. I spent all day cranking out resumes, which didn't help. Unless it does help ... I really need to get a paycheck going in the next 12 weeks or so or we are deeply, horribly, dreadfully fucked. |
| 8:55 am | That's nice ... This morning I discovered that LibraryThing has added a "Tweet your review" button to all the places on the site that one's reviews appear ... mighty handy! |
| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | |
| 8:56 am | Well ... Tomorrow will mark 24 years of sobriety. The Wife thought that today was the anniversary, but I was pretty sure that it was tomorrow ... went back into my journal entries to make sure. That was depressing. Check out this entry from 8 years ago. Not much has changed, has it? Oddly enough, the only thing that's changed is my emotional response. While I will on occasion get into a "panic attack" or take a swing through a depressive state, emotionally I am more detached from the joblessness/hopelessness this time around. It's there, it's horrible if one takes a close look at it, but so far it's not "inside me". I guess the decision to STOP WRITING POETRY back then was the right one, although it was hugely traumatic for me, as writing poetry was one of the key elements that defined who this Brendan Tripp guy was, and without it I was, to a very large extent, "not really ME". However, my perceptions of the poetry creating an NLP-like "feedback loop" appears to be quite accurate ... for me to reach down inside and find the "expressive font" for writing my poems involved dipping into some seriously poisoned streams. Putting those feelings into words "crystallized" them, and gave them a solidity, a reality, that they did not have before. These then fed back into my consciousness (by writing them, transcribing them, proofing them, reading and posting them) as the atmosphere of my existence, and with each poem the cycle ran lower down the spiral, deeper into the dark. Whereas my quitting drinking (as noted in that post on the other end of the link above) was "the most perverse act" that I could imagine at the time (and sufficed as a big "F-you" to the world), not writing was about as close to a suicidal act as I could come without physical harm. It was killing off a very important part of myself, in the hope that the sacrifice would allow the rest to live. I have been more numb and less human due to this, but closer to equanimity. I just wish that at some point I would be successful at something. I had so hoped that my recently imploded company would succeed despite my being involved, but I seem to be a "Typhoid Mary" for companies ... I have never QUIT a job (or been fired), they have all died with me on deck, casting me adrift again into this limbo. So, if you're a drinker, how about doing a shot for me tonight? The lush that's still lurking below the 24 years of being a "good boy" would appreciate the gesture. |
| Monday, June 29th, 2009 | |
| 12:11 am | Fascinating ...  I have long had an interest in (and a taste for reading books on) the subject of a forgotten ancient civilization which pre-dates the "early" civilizations, and which might be the seed for these. This concept is, of course, extremely heretical in "official" circles, and the subject of both mocking and suppression. Yet the traces are there, from the megalithic ruins around the world to inexplicably detailed knowledge of things that "pre-historic" man had "no way of knowing".In Civilization One: The World is Not as You Thought It Was Christopher Knight and Alan Butler go on an intellectual journey of discovery in this shady backwater. The first concept that they put forth is one of "framing", calling it the "Great Wall Of History", which is traced out by the invention of writing in around 3,200 BCE and the "dawn of civilization" in places like Egypt and Sumer. However, modern humans go back at least 100,000 years, leaving a very, very long gap. The homo sapiens living 10,000 or 50,000 years ago were not much different from us today, yet because they are "on the other side of the wall" we (as a culture) dismiss them as "primitives". There is a much bandied-about quote (frequently mis-attributed to various real-life personages, but actually coming from the pen of Ian Fleming via the Bond arch-villain Auric Goldfinger) which goes: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” ... which keeps coming to mind while reading this book. Time and time again, the authors find situations where not only did "primitive" man seem to have measuring standards that were not only remarkably accurate, but are found again and again in cultures across the planet. Much of this work starts with Prof. Alexander Thom's discovery of the "megalithic yard", a measure that figures repeatedly in the ancient stoneworks of the British Isles. A cube that is 1/10th of this yard will hold a pint of liquid, or a pound of grain ... remarkably preserved through folk custom in the UK (no wonder the English-speaking world has fought so much against the metric system and the Euro!). In fact, a whole spectrum of weights and measures relate to this one basic "yard". This also relates to the Sumerian system of weights and measures, units of which fit remarkably with measurements of the size and weight of the Earth, and even of the speed of light(!). Now, I've not delved into this to check the math, but from what's presented in the book, there is "enemy action" all over the place, as "coincidence" hardly covers the fine-grained correspondences between what the ancients used for measure, and things that we currently know only from modern science. The British Isles, Sumer, Egypt, Minoan Crete, ancient Japan, the same figures keep appearing, all which relate to the size of the Earth, the dynamics of the solar system, etc. ... it is fantastic stuff, but presented here as an unfolding of the authors' own search for answers. Frankly, they express constant disbelief in what they're finding, but again and again the numbers play out the same story. Unlike theorists such as John Anthony West, the authors of Civilization One do not necessarily posit a global antediluvian civilization, the stunned remnants of which crawled out of the ruins of a shattered world to re-boot culture along the banks of the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, and the Indus. Rather, in the closing chapters of this book, they drift towards the zone occupied by Zechariah Sitchin, taking the most ancient records at their word about super-humans that came from elsewhere ... teachers that brought knowledge to the scattered groups of humanity, and then left ... i.e. the "space alien" hypothesis. Given the deliberate pace and general caution exhibited through the course of the book, this must have been a very difficult conclusion to write! Anyway, this is a fascinating read, and the level of "coincidence" of how the numbers work out on these widely-spread systems points to there being something well beyond that at the root of these traces. It's still in print if you want to check it out at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor, but the Amazon new/used vendors currently have it in "like new" condition for as little as $3.48 (plus shipping). |
| Sunday, June 28th, 2009 | |
| 10:00 pm | Wow ...  Every once in a while I will hit an absolute gem at the dollar store, and this is one of those times. I just finished this, and simply had to write about it before the glow wore off.Now, I really wasn't familiar with Robert Fulghum, but I'd heard of some of his books (All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, etc.), still I launched into What On Earth Have I Done?: Stories, Observations, and Affirmations with some caution, as I have a low tolerance to both preachy and syrupy books, and this, from the outside, held the possibility of being either or both of those. Fortunately, it was not. I must admit, there was part of me (that frustrated writer whose sole outlet over the past decade or so has been blog scribblings) which was VERY envious of Fulfhum's wandering lifestyle, spending part of the year in Seattle, part of it in Utah, and part of it in Crete (and parts elsewhere at conferences and such), and wondering how one gets to live that way on writing. Obviously, his "hook" is reaching out and touching his readers. Of course, he had a bit of a head start with me, being an older white guy, a UU minister, etc., hitting many trigger points for me to connect with him, but I really feel that his musings would effect other readers as strongly, although possibly for other reasons. "Musings" is what I saw most of this book as. It appears that he writes (or at least wrote this) in sort of a journal, daily or weekly commentaries on things he thinks of, encounters, or recalls. Everything in it has a bit of a misty, dream-like characteristic, full of details but not hard and sharp in the telling. The book starts with the premise of "Mother Questions", "What on Earth have you done?", "What in the name of God are you doing?", "What will you think of next?", and "Who do you think you are?", which he turns around and asks of himself. I don't know if the rest of his books are as self-reflective as this, but it is a bit like finding a personal journal in a used book store and staring through it into the writer's soul. From his telling, this Fulghum guy is a bit of a character, a trickster, a dreamer, a big kid, etc., and sounds like the type of guy I'd like to hang out with. He weaves in and out of social situations with a playful eye, being at least reasonably non-judgmental of those who don't care to play along. Perhaps most vividly, he paints a picture of the small town in Crete where he goes to write several months of the year, running off into several sidetracks about the history and personality of the place and people, probably to give a more vivid background for his stories of interactions there. Many of his tales are quite touching, especially the one about a highschool basketball coach, and his "secret weapon" ... which I won't spoil for you just in case you do pick this up! What On Earth Have I Done? is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it to all and sundry. What is very strange (to me) is how this ended up in the dollar store. It still seems to be in print (Amazon has it at one of their standard discounts), and my copy even has a price sticker on the back that is more than the cover price of the book ($26.50 for a $22.95 edition) ... it's only been out a year and a half, and yet the new/used guys have "new" copies for as little as 36¢ so you know that something funky must be going on with the publisher. Anyway, if you can find it, get a copy ... I'm not sure I'd pay retail (although I'd hate to take away from the author's travel funds) for this, but it's a real treasure for the used/discontinued rate! |
| 7:48 pm | Hmmm ...  As I've probably detailed in this space previously, I encountered "The Enneagram" via Gurdjieff's work, which is, I believe, the ultimate source of all the current threads. However, most of what I've seen outside of "Fourth Way" teachings is some sort of half-baked fortune telling system, which has stripped away all the "difficult" parts of Gurdjieff's Enneagram, and left something of questionable use and doubtful validity. An example ... a number of years back I was at a networking event with a speaker, who was talking about how his consulting firm "worked with the Enneagram", and did a presentation of the watered-down variety. After his presentation I asked him "what about the 'outside shocks'?", which are key elements in the Gurdjieff system ... it was clear that this fellow had never heard of the concept, and yet he and his organization were pitching themselves as experts!So, it is with a certain trepidation that I approach any book on the subject of the Enneagram, as the "signal to noise" is getting more staticky every passing year. Unfortunately, Don Richard Riso's Understanding the Enneagram: The Practical Guide to Personality Types does not disabuse me of the disdain I hold most of the works in this genre. You might well ask why I picked up this book ... and I can only say that it's been sitting around in the "to be read" boxes for nearly 20 years, was a bookclub edition, and probably seemed like a thing I'd enjoy reading back in the days when I could afford to buy books without a lot of discrimination! In Riso's defense, his approach is not "newspaper horoscope", but neither does it take into account the systemic elements of Enneagram work. He all but admits the failings of this book, begging off on the history of the Enneagram, and on the "abstract theoretical aspects". Rather, he presents this as an expansion, and "practical guide" to the material he published in a previous book, Personality Types. In this he deals with nine "personality types": 1 - The Reformer, 2 - The Helper, 3 - The Motivator, 4 - The Artist, 5 - The Thinker, 6 - The Loyalist, 7 - The Generalist, 8 - The Leader, and 9 - The Peacemaker. Each of these nine types are subject to "nine levels of development": 1 - Liberation, 2 - Psychological Capacity, 3 - Social Value, 4 - Imbalance, 5 - Interpersonal Control, 6 - Overcompensation, 7 - Violation, 8 - Delusion and Compulsion, and 9 - Pathological Destructiveness. This gives him 81 type/levels to play with in his descriptions. He also talks about "wings", sub-types on either side of one's "type", which (depending on dominance) provide a whole additional layer of combinations to write about. In addition to this there are "misidentifications" where somebody thinks they're one type when they're actually another, and how one type at one level can look like quite another type at some other level. Again, a lot of "stuff" but not necessarily very much "content". While it ultimately might be on the level of your typical internet meme, the most interesting part of the book was the self-assessment questionnaire which is comprised of 20 "statements" for each of the 9 types, you go through and mark down which of these 180 items you "agree" or "strongly agree" with. Your main "type" should have fifteen or more of these. Interestingly, my results cooperated, with 17 for Type 5, 11 for Type 6, and 9 for Type 4, showing a primary type with its two "wings", while the others ranged from 1-6 (with a mean of 3). This suggests that Riso is perhaps onto something, although having my results pointing to "The Thinker" might be clouding my perceptions. Again, I believe that Riso is trying to present something of value, but has "lost the key" in following the non-Gurdjieffian versions of the Enneagram work. I kept being frustrated by his "brushing off" the questions of theory, as I would have been more interested in reading about that than the various factors ("Childhood Origins", "Basic Fear", "Basic Desire", "Secondary Motivations", "Healthy Sense of Self", "Hidden Complaint", "Key Defense Mechanisms", "Characteristic Temptation", "Characteristic Vice", "Characteristic Virtue", and "Saving Grace") that he spins out for the various types here. While I really can't endorse this book, it's also not the worst of its kind, and has its moments. I'd just have preferred reading the book that Riso says he can't write! If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, however, you're in luck as it can be had for cheap ... the Amazon new/used guys have "very good" copies for 1¢ and up, and "new" copies for as little as 58¢ (plus shipping, of course). |
| 9:00 am | New kitties ... (sigh) ... I always get out-voted on what a "proper mourning time" is. When we got Dusty, I, at least, wasn't over the loss of Nikki, but The Wife and The Girls wanted a new cat, and that was months afterwards. However, The Wife (whose birthday was on Thursday) said she wanted a new kitty for her main b-day present, so we all took the day off. I'm still "processing" this, as the time we didn't even have Dusty's "cremains" back when we went looking for a replacement. Anyway ... here are Jackson and Lilly ...  We had started the morning going down to the ASPCA (where we'd gotten Dusty) but they weren't open for adoptions yet when we got there, and looking in the window into the "cat rooms" there weren't any cats that particularly said "take me!". Both Nikki and Dusty were calico cats, and The Wife sort of wanted to stay with that. Since it was very hot and we had an hour or so to kill, we opted to take the El north and start at PAWS. We got there just as they were opening, and went through their extensive vetting process, and then finally got a "pass" to go in to look at the cats. I've never had much exposure to kittens, but this is what everybody else was focusing in on (I would have probably picked a "senior" cat that was a beautiful calico), and of those, Lilly was the most attractive calico. However, she had a brother, and they were the last of their litter, and had been fostered together for the past few weeks. Rather than split them up, the consensus was to take both of them. These kitties have had a bunch of names, they were "Gail" and "Justin" at the shelter, and their (evidently rather Leftist) foster family had named them after a couple of historical radicals (supposedly their 6-year-old had picked the names, so you can imagine how that kid is going to turn out!). Needless to say, between The Girls, a tumble of names were bouncing back and forth, and somehow they settled on "Lilly" (I'm guessing following up on Dusty "Rose"), and "Jackson" (notably not named for the dead President on the $20 nor the recently deceased pop star ... although, creepily, the name did get stuck on the kitty right about the time the latter died!). So ... there are our new family members. I'm still trying to convince them that my office is NOT the most cat-friendly place in the house (Jackson likes climbing up stacks of books until they start falling over on him!), but I'm thinking I'm going to have to clear the doorway enough to get the door closed. |
| Saturday, June 27th, 2009 | |
| 8:13 pm | That worked well ... I usually bring a book to read while The Girls have their martial arts classes on Saturday, but this usually leads me to falling asleep, and so isn't as productive a use of my time as it might look on paper. Today I looked at the huge stack of un-reviewed books sitting here, looked at that cute little "netbook" I got a couple of months back, and said ... "hmmm ... I could write reviews while I wait!". So, I tucked in a couple of already-read books in my briefcase, tucked in the netbook, and headed out to "new territory". As it turned out, once i got something (an empty plastic bin from the little kids' play area, as it turned out) to use as a "desk" on the bench, it was a pretty good writing environment. I'm still getting used to the cramped keyboard (well, they keyboard per se is not the challenge, it's that area just in from the space bar that thinks it's a mouse and insists on doing stuff when my thumbs end up resting on it!), but it was certainly OK for a first go. The bulk of the previous two postings were written there ... with just edits made once transferred over to my main system. I now have just thirteen books awaiting my reviewing attentions. |
| 5:42 pm | A Classic?  I'm surprised that I hadn't read this one “back in the day” as this was the sort of book that would have easily fit into my late '70s and early '80s reading. I'd certainly been familiar with the name, but had never gotten around to picking up a copy until I encountered one at last summer's Newberry Library Book Fair.The first thing that stands out about The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ is its attribution simply “by Levi”, which (with a little bit of Googling) turns out to be one Levi H. Dowling (1844-1911). When encountering “oddly named” authors one has to wonder what the story of the name is (some are simply fruitcakes, of course). In this case, I believe the author was at least trying to flag the book as having been “channeled”. I had gotten about 20% into the book (which is set up like a Bible, with two columns a page of small sections, collected into larger sections, all numbered, etc.) and had one of those “what the heck is with this?” moments and went off to the Internet to fish up info. It turns out that Mr. Dowling was a sort of fringe preacher who was enamored of (and I guess at least somewhat connected with) the Theosophists. I found this amusing, as my first thought was how much this sounded like Blavatsky's stuff from a similar period. However, rather than showing up in stacks of crayon-scrawled papers in the morning, Dowling directly set himself a program of “visualizations” which he claimed enabled him to “travel in time” and see the events of the past, in this case the life of Jesus. The Aquarian Gospel is probably best known for “filling in the missing years” of Jesus' history, that big gap that the Bible doesn't bother much with between “miraculous birth” and “ministry & death”. According to Dowling, this information has now been “transcribed from the Akashic Records” … good for us, eh? The book is more-or-less in two parts … the early years of John, Jesus' family, and “Jesus' travels”, and then the standard New Testament stuff, retold. Frankly, the second half of the book is a real drag, as everybody knows the story, and Levi isn't adding much, just “spinning” things differently (notably, going out of his way to make Pontius Pilate look like a great guy) from the “usual version”. The early part of the book is “the good stuff”, with various teachers of John, Mary, other relatives, Jesus, etc., including transmuting “Abrahamic” religion into the “religion of Brahm”, and relating that to various Persian and Indian (ala Brahma) cults and thence into Buddhism. Eventually, Jesus “hits the road” and first spends a lot of time bouncing around India and interacting with the Hindu teachers ... inevitably, he gets on the wrong side of the priesthood and has to flee to Nepal, working with Buddhists, then to Tibet, and then back to India. From there he goes to Persia, Assyria, Chaldea, and Babylon before headed home just long enough for his mother to put on a big dinner for him and (I'm extrapolating here) do his laundry. The next stop is Greece, where he briefly hangs out with a guy called Apollo, and heaps tons on praise on the Greeks who weep when he leaves. After Greece it's time for some schoolin' and the Aquarian Jesus is off to Egypt to study with the big boys … the “Sacred Brotherhood” at the temple of Heliopolis. Here he passes through seven specific challenges, the last of which gives him the title of “The Christ”. Passing this degree appears to have “changed the age” and the next thing is a meeting of “the seven sages of the world”, conveniently all folks that Jesus was hanging out with in his various travels (who'da thunk?), in Alexandria. Following this, the “standard” tale picks up again, albeit strongly flavored with Theosophical doctrine. The focus moves to John, then Jesus' early ministry, assembling his posse, and endearing himself to the mob while pissing off all sacred and temporal authority. You know the rest. The spin gets heavy after he's crucified, with a lot of “sacred brotherhood” stuff worthy of red and blue crayon, then dips back into the traditional story for Pentecost, and the book ends. Frankly, as I struggled through the last half of the book, I wondered why this book didn't end up creating a cult of its own … after all, this is “more canonical” than the Book of Mormon, and certainly no less wacky than Dianetics ... how come those went big-time and this stayed (while still in print a hundred years since its publication) on the sidelines? Must be not having a “huckster” to be pushing it … Dowling died within 3 years of penning this, while Joseph Smith and L.Ron Hubbard were able to market the heck out of their books! Anyway, as noted, this is still in print more than a century down the road, but, because of its vintage, it's also available free on the web … so if you want to check it out, it's only a few clicks away. Used copies (I got mine for $1.50 on “half-price Sunday” at Newberry), are available for as little as a buck forty-five in “good” condition via the Amazon new/used guys, so if you want a dead-tree version you might consider that, were this little bit of channeling something that you felt you couldn't go without. |
| 5:07 pm | Another ...  OK, so I was sort of mocking the “for dummies” books the last time I reviewed one, but here I am again, with another awaiting review! Frankly, I pretty much ordered Jerri Ledford's Google AdSense for Dummies by mistake … I have some projects where I'll be using Google's Ad Manager but the specific terminology was not set in my head when I went looking for something to get me up to speed with that, and saw books on Google's AdWords and this one on AdSense and figured this was the one I was looking for, only realizing after it arrived that it wasn't the “manual” that I was hoping to be reading. However, AdSense is a product that I'm likely to use at some point or another, so I figured “what the heck”, and launched into it. This wasn't quite a quick a read as the Ning book (which I plowed through on one afternoon/evening), but that's because it wasn't something that was really holding my interest in the way that something that I was actually working with would have.I don't generally read other reviews of a book before I write about it, but in this case I took a peek at the Amazon scribes and found very mixed reviews of it, some folks savaging it for perceived inaccuracies, some raving that it was a very useful introduction to the Google program. Having no functional experience with AdSense, I really couldn't speak to the accuracy of the book, but I found it informative, if a bit irritating in parts (the author appears to be some sort of religious fanatic and almost all her “examples” eventually got around to preachy sites). Of course, the sine qua non of the “For Dummies” books is their ability to take the reader from total cluelessness to the ability to at least reasonably function in a program. Judged by this standard (and with the caveat that I haven't tried anything outlined in the book), I suspect that this fulfills its purpose, as I believe I have a pretty good sense of what's involved in running an AdSense campaign. The most interesting parts of the book for me were on the “general website coaching” side of things … recommendations of how to keep stuff fresh, how to incorporate profitable “key words” into your pages, and how to stay on the good side of Google (despite the many temptations out there that would lead you to the exile of the banned). While I have had many web sites and blogs over the years (obviously, my main blogging platform is LiveJournal which does not offer ad options, so it's never been something I've thought at looking into except at the far end of having to make a massive content move to another service!), this at least gave me a context of what one might be able to produce off of one's sites. Honestly, none of my personal sites have ever had the sort of traffic that would make the effort involved (and resulting page clutter) worth the pennies that it might generate via a program like this, but this at least gives me some context from which to discuss the option with others whose sites I may be working on. As is frequently the case, I got this via the new/used vendors on Amazon, with this running me a relatively high $8.42 (plus shipping) for a “new” copy, still a good discount from the $24.99 cover price and Amazon's own 34% discount. Given that the author has "tainted" the book with her religion (where it hardly belongs!), I'd wholeheartedly recommend getting this though the “used” channels (heck, the same vendor I got this from now has a "new" copy for just $3.79!) to deny her the revenue … something that I usually feel genuinely bad about when pointing out the after-market option. I do feel, however, that this is a useful introduction if you're looking to make some change on your web sites. |
| Friday, June 26th, 2009 | |
| 9:55 pm | Wow ... One thing from this little video tour of FireFox 3.5 has me excited ... It's at about 2:00 in ... DOWNLOADABLE FONTS! This has been something that has been sort of "MacGyvered" by some programs, but will allow a web site to have font file associated with the HTML file and display the fonts on web pages even if they're not installed on the viewer's system! Yay! That's a feature that's been a long time coming. |
| 6:55 am | Cool ... Another "trick of the eye" B&W-to-color illusion that was linked out of David Blaine's Twitter feed ...  The better you're able to focus steadily on the central black dot, the better the effect. |
| Thursday, June 25th, 2009 | |
| 3:42 am | Cool Stuff ... How is YOUR neighborhood for walking? Mine rated 100/100 ... but I knew that. Check yours out HERE! |
| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | |
| 5:12 pm | Another goodie from Penn Jillette ... Here's Penn musing on his having "called out" the redistributionists ... ... I want this guy as MY President! |
| 12:26 pm | Arrrgh! Another frick'n SCAM! Over the weekend I got my resume out to dozens and dozens of job sites and boards and services, etc. And I'm now getting some responses, which vary from outright MLM pitches to things that at least sound legit. I had a call this morning from a "Bankers Life and Casualty Co." which was purporting to want to interview me tomorrow for an "executive position". I say "OK" and start to look them up on the web. Needless to say, it's never a good sign when the first few things I see on Google include the word "scam". It's too bad to find that the company that funded the MacArthur Foundation has ended up like this. Given the company's history (and it seems to be a part of a big insurance conglomerate) I'm very tempted to give them a chance, but there are red flags everywhere on this. The main HQ for the company is actually in my neighborhood, but I'm being asked to come to a small suite in a non-descript office building out in Des Plaines. The stuff I'm reading on-line talks about these high-pressure "group interviews" (that nobody is told is for a group until they get there), that once you're "hired" you have PAY for your training and then PAY for your state accreditation, and that the jobs involved are "boiler room" sales positions. And, to top it off, there is NO WAY to contact the company ... I just spent the better part of an hour between various phone numbers and web sites, NONE of which will let you get through without entering a policy number (or putting you name on a contact list for a sales call). The number I was given on the phone goes to an obvious "call center" and I got transferred to a full box. With all these factors, I can't see spending the time and/or money to put myself through what is very very likely to be a bogus interview. It really pisses me off that folks try to take advantage of the desperation of the job seeker to hook them into what is clearly a scam. But, i guess there are enough people that fall for the "Nigerian Scam" that it shouldn't surprise me that that a lot of folks fall for these much more subtle (if less costly) sleazy hoaxes! |
| 10:33 am | Ah ... SHOW BIZ ... I was AFK all day yesterday, helping out the Lombardi Street folks with their Chicago auditions. This is a project started by my former boss at Simuality, and was the template on which we'd been basing the ill-fated "Planet's Best DJ" contest. They've been getting some key production companies partnering with them over the past few weeks, but up to this point, pretty much everything has been "crowd sourced" with all the writers, techs, producers, and directors (many seasoned industry pros) coming out of the folks on the Lombardi Street site.  More pics available HERE. The auditions where being held at the Act One acting school down on LaSalle, and the local coordinators weren't sure what equipment we'd have available to us, so I ended up schlepping down some of my stuff just in case it was needed, and was prepared to operate the cameras (which I did for the first hour or so), however, I was pretty much there to lend moral support and "hold space" for Antony who wasn't able to make it, being in South Africa for a family funeral. Shooting on the "pilots" (there are going to be six 10-minute "episodes" introducing various characters / backstories / sub-plots) begins in August, and while the main characters will be cast by the first week in July, if you're interested, there are still TONS of secondary/side characters who need to get set, so get on over to http://lombardistreet.com and sign up! |
| Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | |
| 3:08 am | Busy day ... Well ... The Wife (and The Girls) sort of over-did themselves on the planning today ... taking whatever vague musings I might have had over the past couple of weeks as to what I'd like to do for Fathers Day and making a schedule out of them. Things started out early, with breakfast pastries and some gifties (heavy on the fancy cheeses they know I like, plus the ever-popular Amazon gift certificate so I can indulge my book buying habits). Then we headed out to the Field Museum for the Pirates exhibit.  We had thought that we'd be seeing more than that, but it took us nearly 2 hours to get through it (there was a lot to read, with almost every element in the exhibit having contextifying/explanatory copy associated with it), and The Girls were hungry by the time we got out, so we moved right in to activity, #2 ... Dim Sum down in Chinatown.  We went to our "usual place", Three Happiness, right across from the Chinatown El stop (despite recent recommendations for other places down there), and The Girls got their favorite (sticky rice), I got my favorite (shrimp toast), and The Wife got a random sampling of other stuff. We then headed home for a bit. This was the first time I can recall that I had the presence of mind to have suggested we stop off before things got underway and pick up some CTA day passes. These run $5.75, but given that the basic fare is $2.25, if you're pretty sure that you're going to end up with 3 full fares (as opposed to being able to get around on transfers) they're a great deal ... by the end of the day, I think we saved four bucks a piece over what the fares would have totaled on the regular transit cards. Our next stop was up to the unfortunately-named "Summer Fest" (notably not the huge one by the same name up in Milwaukee!) in Lincoln Park. This is a fairly low-key neighborhood festival, but for one of the most famed neighborhoods in Chicago ... it's a couple of blocks of booths (about half "stuff", half food), and a big stage out in the street right where Lincoln Park West peels off of Clark Street.  When we got there, a group called "Wedding Banned" was playing ... very good (albeit covers) with a humorous shtick of being a somewhat off-kilter wedding act. The Girls, who almost never get out to hear live music, enjoyed it quite a lot. We hung around for a while, and got a number of songs into the next act's set, before hopping back on the bus and heading up to dinner.  As is frequently the case for "special" events involving me, we went to our favorite Indian place, Standard India up on Belmont. Aside from having fabulous food, the also are one of the rare places that has a dinner buffet (and a BYOB policy, and it's only $10.95!). Plus, if you go there on the weekend they have their famed Butter Chicken, which is quite a treat, and a favorite of The Girls. Fortunately, The Wife likes their food almost as much as I do, so it's a place we can easily agree on most of the time. By the time we were done, it was already 9:30 (which on The Wife's and Daughter #2's schedules is "bed time") so we dragged ourselves back over to the El and on home. The Wife had got in some cheesecake for a special dessert, but we were too wiped out (and full) to deal with that, so I have another treat to look forward to in the next couple of days! It was exhausting (and kept me AFK all day so I "didn't get anything done"), but a very entertaining day with The Family ... which is good way to spend Fathers Day. |
| Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | |
| 7:19 pm | Maaaaaaan ... Nobody came to look at the videos I was busting butt to get up on my new site? Bummer.  I don't suppose that a screen grab of the site in all its awesome greyness is going help either, is it? |