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The biggest problem of course with moving to digital is how are you going to get the videos or music to where you want them to be.   I’ve really fought with this problem literally for over a decade now (yes in 1995 I had a computer hooked up to a stereo and a TV).

The last incarnation I was using was a first generation Mac Mini.  The problem was that the streaming wasn’t fast enough for the Mac Mini (ironically every other computer in the house streamed just fine).   So I would have to copy video files over to the computer manually to get completely stutter free playback.  I dealt though until just a couple months ago.

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In November I purchased my first original X-Box (yes I’m behind the times).   I had always wanted to run XBOX Media Center on it, but didn’t want to go through the soldering effort to put a mod chip in, or track down esoteric software with the action replay kit to soft mod it.  I did manage to find instructions on how to mod the x-box and install XBMC with things I already had, such as a computer and screw drivers.  The most frightening thing about it was hot swapping a live IDE hard drive.   Years of tech work has told me this is a no-no, but I did it anyway and it worked.

I even went out and purchased a remote control for the X-Box and can now browse from the couch.   I went back and forth on whether to get a wireless controller or the remote, I settled on the remote because it was cheaper and more intuitive for anyone other then myself.

For MP3 playback we sometimes use the X-Box installation, but more then likely we are either using ipods, our N810′s, or the whole main floor audio we have going.   In the basement we have a computer working as an MP3 jukebox.  Off of this machine there is 3 different sets of speakers (one is the main stereo system) – that can cover the whole first floor of the house in zoned audio.    Each room has it’s own volume control and it works fairly well.  In the next year I will more then likely start running the cables upstairs to work on whole house audio.

This post has multiple parts to it, so fair warning I’m guessing this one is going to be long.   Lately I’ve been more and more annoyed at traditional hard copy media.  It’s a pain in the butt to deal with and takes up way too much physical space (for those that know me you find that sentence greatly amusing).

Pictures

This started happening over the last year with photo albums.   Photo albums are terrible.   It means normally that one person has a copy of the image and you can’t share them.  It is essentially technology of the last generation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in having prints, but the pictures themselves.

I’ve made it my mission to start getting the family photos and scanning them in.   I’ve managed to get most of my father’s photos from the era he was with my mother.   The ones I’m missing are any he has of the kids hanging on the walls in his house.   My next run is going to be the pictures from his current family (so a good 15-16 years worth of pictures to go).

My grandmother on the other hand has been very tightfisted with her photos.  I can understand her being protective, but so far I’ve managed to get 59 photos out of her to scan (out of literally over a 1000-2000).   I have managed to scan my photo album, and more recently used the digital SLR and took pictures of my scrap book from high school.   So both of these can be tucked away in boxes that I don’t need to look at and take up physical space in my house.

All the photos I have are now uploaded to Flickr.   You can also read about my photo sharing issue with my mother over here.

Continued tomorrow in part 2

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A little over ten years ago, before debit cards became ubiquitous and people cared more about having actual bits of paper for the monetary worth, I had a discussion with a friend about how the world would  eventually move to a cashless society.   I argued over the cost and extent of such a venture going forward.   He did have one good point in his argument – anonymity.

He believed due to corruption (or anything else you wish to argue for) that there would always be cash money to allow for citizens to have an anonymous usage of money in society.   I had several more arguments going against this back then, but I couldn’t truly get around the anonymity factor, especially with small unmarked bills.  I don’t believe the anonymity factor is going to last too much longer though.

Enter in RFID dust, this effectively will destroy anonymity in a cash based society.   The technology was developed as an anti-counterfeiting method.   With this knowledge in hand we can make some assumptions.  The first is that the dust can be used to verify the authenticity of the bills.   The second, when it is truly embedded in the bills and not sprinkled into batches of money – that the RFID will contain a serial that will match the serial number on the bill itself.

If the dollar can “beacon” the serial number, then how does it become anonymous.   In theory before you use any paper money you could microwave it, but eventually that will no longer work either.  The next argument would be that only the government has the readers – this would be a “for how long argument”.   Think of the theft and tracking of the flow of money analysis that could be gained solely on a research perspective.  I can see in 20-30 years as the technology becomes cheaper and centralized databases are more available – that this type of tracking could be the norm.

I’ve written about software currently that can track the flow of money, there is no reason we wouldn’t be able to see real time tracking of every single penny in circulation by utilizing this technology.   The only thing stopping it right now is cost, which will drop.

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We hear time and time again about all the newspapers and magazines going out of business.   How much longer will they survive in the same sense that we have seen during our lifetime?  More importantly how are we going to explain them.  In one sense we can it would be easy to explain them since we’ll still have them in libraries aging the perfect yellow gracefully, surviving on microfiche since the companies and libraries don’t seem too interested in digitally converting them, and being used as padding in boxes in the dark reaches of the attic.   So there will be some visual styling and physical copies that they can examine.   What was there purpose though?

We will explain to them it was to deliver news to the general public so they could be informed about the world around them.  It was in the pre digital era (which may as well be prehistoric to them) so these papers were printed out by the millions on a daily basis so there was a communal knowledge shared amongst the populace.   That on Sunday’s we got full colored comics to entertain the kids and full color coupons to entertain the families.   That we got our daily stock quotes from it.   If we wanted to sell something in the town next to ours we used the classified system.   If someone died we would be alerted.

Let’s look at this though – I’m thirty-two years old, so we are going to speak of this in the context of my lifetime.   Why did we have newspapers, except because we didn’t want to read a chapter of a book.   News was piped into our lives via the nightly news on TV and all day via radio.   It would have been simple for towns to start a local (by local I mean town level) radio station for news, classifieds, and obituaries.   Most municipalities already do that though through the local cable company. I remember people buying “classified” ads on it.   Obituaries were missing from that system.   So what have we left, stock quotes and obituaries?  This transition could have been done literally decades ago.   How about an all stock quote radio station?

Let’s look as some other aspects of this picture – in theory most of us are evil human beings since we don’t utilize public transportation  and drive our oil guzzling vehicles around the country daily.   What about all the trees and wilderness decimated by using wood pulp to supply the newspapers (millions a day) for the little bit of news that we couldn’t get somewhere else?  This was rampant going well into the age of recycling, if it wasn’t for the ubiquity of the Internet we would still be doing it today.  What example does this set.   We could have used hemp as paper, since hemp is infinitely more renewable then wood pulp paper, but we didn’t.   Some people didn’t like that idea and wanted to increase their own wealth.  This is also not to forget all the oil trucks used for transporting, the coal and oil used to power these places that printed them.

The other thing I can see my child asking when he becomes aware, doesn’t it give too much power to one entity?  Some towns managed to have two newspapers that provided coverage for their area, but what we are stuck with is just two viewpoints.   What if there was a story that neither wanted to print, in that era it may has well never have happened if it didn’t make TV, radio, or newsprint.   History and stories have been lost for decades since the story wouldn’t get more readers, so these companies could not sell more advertising.  Then I would also have to explain the theory of Yellow Journalism.

Now I’m sure in the age of digital living that these children and grand-children will understand advertising sponsorship to the news.  What they will have a harder time is news that was set typographically so that it couldn’t be manipulated.  A system where you had to buy the paper just to know the news (a news tax as such).   A system where if you wanted to sell something you were lucky if you had the audience of a fifty-mile radius.  That we gave the control of so much to so few and enjoyed it….  That we were so wasteful in our resources, when looking back it was just pure gluttony.   I’m not sure how they will ever understand.

I can say I used wrestle the comics from my grandfather as he read the paper so I could enjoy them, and that is a fond family memory.  I can’t say looking back that even I understood their purpose.      This story is coming from someone who was a newspaper boy, yet has never had a newspaper subscription in my life.

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the NYPD want the ability to turn disable cellphone coverage in the case of a terrorist attack. Now it seems that states and local governments are fighting for their own ability to do that.   In my previous story I pointed how fruitless and ineffective it would truly be during a terrorist attack, I think it’s insane.   The question I have now has anyone thought about how this is a terrorist attack against our own people?

The idea of a terrorist is that they use fear as an attack weapon.   If there is an emergency going on and people can not get through to there loved ones that this wouldn’t inspire fear.   Heck it may scare some people if they can’t send a message about the emergency to Twitter or Facebook.  We’ve all seen enough movies that we are ingrained as a people if hte enemy is going to attack they will cut off our communications so we can not coordinate a counter offensive properly.   This is an of it’s self stupid since something will always get through, example Independence Day and the Morse Code maneuver.  Yet this would scare and dare I say terrorize people since not only would you be scared since you can’t call, no one around you can call and is freaking out also.

This is a sad side effect of living in the era of constant communication, we take it for granted.   When it would be ripped away form us, and we wouldn’t know what is going on, what ideas is that going to put in your mind.  People in the middle america may think a cell tower is down, what if they drive an hour – even the most idiotic person isn’t going to think all the towers are down.   Some people may think since I’m saying that the government has an inadvertant take on an idea that could become a terrorist weapon that I’m a nut job.   I however think this is a fairly obvious look at human psychology.

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Why are MSRP’s so far off of the real price of an item?  Even non-internet shoppers are quite aware that you almost never pay the MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) for anything.   It’s not even their fault 99% of everything in life is priced below MSRP.   Let’s look at the big things first, with the exception of the buy one get one free deals that seem to be in vogue with Kia there is almost no one on the planet that expects to pay the sticker price on a new car.  There are times that in retail companies have been caught trying to control the price of their wares, but in normal scenarios it doesn’t work out.

My problem however is when they say for example a 2 GB flash memory card has an MSRP of $20.00.   Now almost everywhere in the planet you can get this same card for $9.99.    Most stores will advertise that the price is fifty percent off the MSRP and it’s a huge discount off.   Unfortunately they are merely price matching.   In some scenarios the vendors themselves  try this tactic.  Now if a vendor is selling something (full time mind you not a once in awhile sale) for $9.99, how can they say their MSRP is $20.00.   Sorry just another advertisement about MSRP and comparing the “low price” you can get it for (standard price) bragging about the sale set me off.

Sorry for the rant.

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The stupid mile long pier.    It’s located in Huron, Ohio and at the end of the pier is the Huron Lighthouse.   Growing up in Vermilion, Ohio there wasn’t much to do that we didn’t do on a regular basis.  One of the odd-ball things we did was go out to the mile long pier.   The official name wasn’t the mile long pier, but it is supposedly a mile long – so the local nickname stuck.  For some reason the trips were a bit more frequent once I managed to get the woman who would one day be my wife.

My wife always enjoyed the mile long pier, except when she managed to get to the end of it she had to use the restroom.  This almost always made it a pain since as soon as we made to the end of the end of the pier we immediately had to turn around and head back in most occasions.   When a group of us wanted to head out there we started making her use the restroom at the Riverview Bowling alley just up the street from the pier.

It was one of those places that youth go and hang out in groups.   Usually the minimum number of people we took was three, but I can think of a couple times it was almost a dozen of us.   Climbing from rock to rock to make it to the end of the pier.  Since most the time it was in the evening or close to it, we watched the sunset down.   Otherwise we just headed out and stared into the darkness that was the water of Lake Erie at night time.

Was it a fantastic experience, not in anything that I say that you must do.  It was a time period where the friends and the memories make it important.   Too many times the pier started off as a springboard for other activities.   Whether it was friends in high school or friends from my early twenties.   It was a gathering spot of sorts.  Eventually I’ll get around to heading back and taking some pictures – for now it has to exist solely in memories.

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I’m going to go out on a limb and call out ages here, I could be wrong.   The first time my brother operated a vehicle he was four years old, which would make me around nine at the time.  The location – my grandparent’s house.  My grandparent’s driveway used to be on a hill.   I always enjoyed just speeding a bike down that hill – if I had to guess it was probably about five cars deep.  So it was about fifty feet long with about twenty of that being mostly flat.

We were getting ready to leave my grandparent’s house and my mother sent my brother and myself out to the car.   Now since this was along time ago (in a galaxy far far away?) some details on which family car this was has been lost in the ages.  I remember one car and different parents remember others.   I’m fairly sure at the age my brother was he doesn’t remember which car it was at all.   What I can tell you is that it was a stick shift.

I was sitting in the back seat of the car and my brother was climbing around the front of the car.   I was reading a book or comic book in the back seat of the car and I noticed my mother coming out of my grandparent’s garage and walking towards the car.   At some point in this my brother had removed the parking break and managed to get the car into neutral.  The car started rolling down the hill.   My mother saw this and started running towards the car.  She made it to the driver’s side car door, but she couldn’t open it.  Somehow my brother had managed to lock the car door.  I was in the back seat frozen in fear (shock?) at what was going on.   My mother was yelling at me to jump in the front seat and stop the car or unlock the door.   I just couldn’t move.

Down and down the hill we went, I know that it took less then a minute or so , but at the time looking back it felt a lot longer.   We passed the end of the driveway and were moving into the street.   We crossed the street and ended up in the yard of the house across the street (luckily my grandmother lived in a cul-de-sac and there was no cross traffic).  In the yard across the street my brother managed to scratch the side of the car across a telephone pole, just missing hitting it by inches.

Since he didn’t hit the pole I guess you could say his first experience was a success.   That isn’t what it felt like for me sitting in the back seat.

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The other day I was browsing Craig’s List and noticed a listing for some free software.   It wasn’t anything I was interested in, but I did stop an think about it.   We talk about all the time about verifying where you download software from.   We hear all the time about pirated software that looks the same as legitimate software.     So why would you take free software from Craig’s List?

I guess this is just more an observation.  I’m just pointing out common sense that people should be thinking.  I’m just trying to point out that there is no such thing as a more trustable anonymous source.   It would be easy to compromise a computer by offering free software on Craig’s List and manipulating it before handing it out.

I’m not saying not to take – just think twice.

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Google reader, I love you – I also hate you.    You are like a bad relationship that I can’t break.   You save me so much time on the web since I no longer have to jump from site to site.   You however do not give me any good reason to use you and save items.    You are a cruel mistress who mistreats me and wastes my time.   Here are things you need to work on.

The first and only thing you need to work is how saved “starred” items work within your interface.     I have been trying to clear out “starred” items since the list was getting unwieldy for me.  Let’s start off by how I use starred items.   I use it to save personally interesting stories that are not relevant enough for me to share the story.   They are also too mundane in most occasions to e-mail to myself.    Yes I know this is in essence using you as a bookmarking service – a service mind you that Google has not officially ventured into.  You are designed to display information rapidly from multiple sources and your saved items is really an after thought.    Or it it?

You attempted to rectify some of this with tagging, the first problem I have with tagging – is other then by using search I can not find a way to find the “folders” made by creating a tag.   It’s all fine and great that we can create tags, but if you can not quickly get to them, what is the point other then to give me hope.   Maybe I’m just retarded when it comes to tags, but tags do not answer the second problem I have, only the bookmarking aspect (and answers it extremely poorly).

The second thing I use you for is saving stories that I can come back and read later.   I get in on Monday morning and I have 367 unread items that have shown up since Sunday when I cleared them out.   I don’t have time to leisurely read the stories, instead I go through and star the ones I want to come back and read later.   By Friday I have over one thousand story I want to come back and read, but who has the time or effort.  The other day to get back to my oldest starred items it took me over 5 minutes of scrolling all the way down and waiting for you to load.   There has to be another way.

A few methods I came up to help the starred overload issue:

Saved feed items by date – if you could categorize items in folder by month/week/or even day that you starred them that would be fantastic and save on a hell of a lot of scrolling.

Starred item by feed it came from – by being able to filter our starred items by source feed would also be awesome.   This would allow me to quickly dig into the stories I want to read when I sit down.   Sometimes I don’t feel like going back to starred items from feeds 6, 5, 89, 90, etc. – when all I want to do is read stories from feed78.     There should be a simpler way to do this then forcing me to tag or search.  I can set up labels and see them on the left in Gmail, why is the reader data so different?

Well next week I plan to publish articles of some of the saved links I have saved by subject.   I’ve been working hard, but like they say you go two steps forward and you end three steps back.     We’ll see how it goes.

Love,

Creeva

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For all those Trekkies out there (or do you really prefer Trekkers?) Brent Spiner just joined Twitter today.  I looked at who he was following, and there we get Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton.  So now you can get your Trek on with Twitter.   Go forth and follow – and while you are there you can give a little follow to me also.   Please let me know if you find any other Star Trek performers on twitter and I’ll update this post as necesssary.

I look at my data on Flickr and I get overwhelmed.  I’m missing meta data, missing tags, missing proper titles.   Though when you are looking at organizing and maintaining  over 3000 images anything you can do to start to organize them can get a little overwhelming.

I’m assuming the number of pictures I’m going to upload to Flickr this year to my account is going to at least double.   That means if I do not get a handle it on it soon, I’m going to be looking at 6000 photos to edit by this time next year, and I think that is being selective.

How do the rest of you handle problems of this magnitude?

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I know I just gave a post on using creative commons based works, and about the problems of dealing with international public domain laws, but Youtube has cracked down on me.   Over the past few weeks I’ve been getting e-mails from youtube that say the following:

Subject: A copyright owner has claimed content in one of your videos

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video [redacted]. The audio content identified in your video is [redacted]. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Replace Your Audio with AudioSwap

Don’t worry, we have plenty of music available for your use. Please visit our AudioSwap library to learn how you can easily replace the audio in your video with any track from our growing library of fully licensed songs.

Other Options

If you think there’s been a mistake, or you have other questions, please visit the Copyright Notice page in your account.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

Now in theory I could fight this, but I know I am in the wrong.  I had videos on my profile that did include copyrighted music.   For the most part they are not videos that I created, I was merely archiving them in a central location so people could find them.   All the videos that have been taken down are Machinima videos that were “filmed” in Star Wars Galaxies.  I can’t really take them up on the music swap suggestion, since the person that originally made the videos had a specific intent that went along with the chosen music.

This all goes into the idea of fair use and when is it ok to use something to create something else.   This argument is a bit out of scope for this post.   What I can say is all of these videos still exist online, archived in far off pages.   It is sad that they can’t be displayed to wider audiences since most of them do have true genius in their design.

I thought this apt to add before anyone thought I had a holier then thou attitude in anyway because of my recent conversations.   I knew the risks and issues involved with posting these pieces.   I never claimed any part of the work was mine, and the most important thing is – I knew where it stood in the grand scheme of things before I did it.   I’m not saying you will never run into a spot where you won’t ever use copyright material.   Just be aware of what you are doing if you do.

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While I don’t really blame NYPD from wanting to evolve and learn from other terrorists attacks, I think they are very short sighted in the idea of  blocking cell phone service in a terrorist attack.   I first read about this story on a Wired.com blog entry, I thought how asinine an idea just reading the headline.

The historical aspect where they are working form is the terrorist attacks in Mumbai that happened last month.   The terrorists used cell phone networks, GPS, and anonymous e-mail to coordinate their attacks.    The NYPD think that if they shut down cell phone coverage in the Big Apple terrorist cells  won’t be able to coordinate attacks in the big city.  There are a few things that they don’t seem to be aware of.   Terrorists are smart in most cases, citizens are ignorant.

We already saw in the Sept. 11th attacks the panic that is caused by the loss of cell  phone service.  If there is another large attack, normal people in NYC will panic, since the communication infrastructure was supposed to be strengthened post 9/11.  If they can’t reach their loved ones, if there isn’t a way to get news in and out, people will panic and make the problem larger then it would be otherwise.   This is just how the normal citizens would react, what about the terrorists.

Well this news has made it to the web, so terrorists can now plan for this eventuality.   They can now be ready to act if their cell phones are blacked out.  Also NYC is the land of open wi-fi hot spots.  Anyone with and sense could easily work with a wifi phone or a laptop and still have communication with one another.   So the next thing they would have to look at is blocking out cellular coverage and all internet access in and out of the city.   This is also if they are not coordinated ahead of time.   This is all a smoke screen to give teh police more power then is needed.

Remember -  “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” ~ Ben Franklin

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I’m the crossposting whore – I write once and I have everything designed to publish everywhere (well at least when things aren’t broken like Ping.fm to Myspace blogs).   This however is not syncing, it’s distribution and publishing.     A true sync across all platforms would be amazing.

The example I would love is I make an edit to a blog post, then every place and profile that I’ve published that post on would update with no manual intervention.   Since I can’t do that, Creeva.com is considered my authorative location for all blog posts.  If I wanted to edit those other sites I would have to do each one manually.  Granted I’m sure without using syncing it saves on bandwidth.

Things that I can sync?   Well my contacts and calendars with Plaxo, but that kind of is just the tip of the iceberg.   My biggest issue write now is syncing Flickr photos to Facebook.  I am aware of Flickurbook, but this still uses your local machine – there is no reason this can’t be done “in the cloud”.    It’s all soooo sloooooow.   Seriously at the speed it moves I could just reupload all the pictures to Facebook faster then this thing goes.  It’s free, it’s the developers fault, it’s great what he did; but it’s not the solution I’m looking for.

Finally using my distribution chain I chase all over the web to answer comments.  I don’t mind doing that.   However, wouldn’t it be better if across all platforms and services these comments were kept in sync?   Then I could use the spam filters I wanted to from a central location.  I could reply to comments from a central location.

I’m just pipedreaming again…..

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I could pick on a few things actually, once again I didn’t vote for the guy, but I don’t absolutely detest him.   I’m in wait and see mode.  Ars Technica is reporting about Obama’s plead to push back the transition to digital TV.   If we look at the digital TV migration timeline, we can see the originally scheduled date was Dec. 31 2006.   Because of multiple issues it was pushed back and brings us to this upcoming Feb. 17th as the transition time.

We can argue that the government hasn’t done enough to inform the public or make it easy for the public, but I would argue otherwise.   I was well aware of this migration when it was first discussed over 10 years ago.   All in all the government has pushed out this transition longer then necessary.   You can say that’s it’s a good cautious thing they are doing by waiting and delaying, but every delay costs the tax payers more money.

If we truly want to get through this we need to pull the bandage off as quickly as possible.

You would think from the image I chose for the header that I was doing something cool with the Nintendo Entertainment System.   This unfortunately is not the case.  Where the Nintendo came into play was that it was the object of my desire.   I desperately wanted an NES.  This was sometime around seventh or eighth grade so the years would have 1988 -1989 and the Nintendo was in full swing, you can see one of the commercials below.

Now my father didn’t believe in video games.   About five years earlier he got us a Commodore Vic-20, this is all fine and dandy – my parents fell for the whole “give you kid a computer and he’ll be computer literate for life” crap that they were handing out in the eighties.  A computer was meant for learning and yes there were a few games we had for it, but it was meant to learn something on.   I learned I never wanted to be a programmer, that’s what I learned.  I could go to my neighbors and play the Atari 2600 or play Ultima on his Mac Classic – but me – I was going to have the Vic-20 and like it because I wasn’t getting anything else.

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We moved to Vermilion the summer before my seventh grade year.   I’m sure I started begging for a NES around that time if not earlier.   I’m sure the logic explained to me was that if I wanted a Nintendo I was going to have to earn it.    This meant getting a job.   I don’t know about your area but for Vermilion, OH there wasn’t much call in the work force for 12-13 year old kids.   The one thing that did open up was the ability to get a paper route.  The area where we lived in Elyria was a bit too rough for a 11-12 year old to deliver papers, but Vermilion was a quiet small town where such things almost seem nostalgic.

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Another boy was giving up his paper route that was a year younger then me (should have been a sign) and did a week long transition with me so that I could learn the route.   By the end of the week I learned the route, I had my little punch card slip ring for billing, I had a carrier bag, and I also had baskets on the back of my bicycle to carry newspapers in.   I would try to say it was pimp, but I can’t even type that with a straight face.   I rode my bike to school and I got mocked by how stupid it looked.  Of course being a geek on the nth degree anyways there is always other things to get picked on then a bike, so I struggled through it.  I was a newspaper boy for the Lorain Morning Journal.

You may say that I learned character and fiscal responsibility because of that job.   You would also be wrong.  I hated that job with a passion.   I struggled for the first couple months to get through it.  The NES was the apple of my eye and I was going to save the 99.99 (plus tax) for the Action System which included Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt (and the pimp NES Zapper).   I was impatient to get it, so impatient that I gave my mother the money to get it while I was at school.   You would think this being the first large purchase of my life I would have wanted to go and hand over the money and buy the system myself, nope I just wanted the damn thing home.

I get home, my mother isn’t there.   I go do my paper route and get back home, my mother isn’t there.   I sit in the grass on the front yard and wait.   Eventually my mother pulls up in that blue dodge caravan (minivan) we had.  She had done other shopping and had a ton of bags.  Which one was my Nintendo?????

My mother stopped me and said she talked to the sales person who told her the Sega Master System was the better system to buy since it was faster and supported more colors.  WTF?  I had worked my butt off in a job hated to have my mother go out and buy me a Sega Master Sytem.  No one owned a Sega Master System, only people with no friends owned a Sega Master System.   I was not going to own a Sega Master System.    I told her with certainty that she had no right to spend the money I earned to buy a Sega Master System.  We were going to get back in the car right then, go to the store and exchange it for a Nintendo Entertainment System.

My mother then started laughing.  Out of the back of the van she pulled out a Nintendo Action Set.   You do not mess with a pre-teen in that way – ever.   She said she was going to go upstairs and use the restroom, after which she would come down and help me hook it up to the TV.  I think by the time she flushed the toilet I was already on World 1-2 of Super Mario Bros.  I had hooked up the Vic-20 so many times that I knew how to do it in my sleep.   The NES was more of the same.

At this point I did not want to do the paper route any more, but my grandfather thought it was good for me so I kept plodding along.    I delivered papers a 3 AM Christmas morning wasn’t that quite the thrill, not.   I would definitely preferred to have been sleeping.    More and more of my customers were moving to prepaid accounts, which cut into my money.   You would think it wouldn’t have effected  my bottom line, but I lost out on tip money from these customers – and to this day I believe the Journal used some creative account billing to the paper boys.    My grandfather thought I was just doing it wrong, but I was let off the hook after about a year.

Me and my grandparents a year or so after the paper route.

My brother took over the paper route with the help of my grandfather and my mother in delivering the newspapers.   Now I don’t know about you but if someone would have driven me on the route every day, I may have been more likely to actually like the job.   He is five and half years younger then me, so they were not going to let him go off alone to do it.  The funniest thing was after about a year they started loosing money also and it became not financially viable for them either.    I guess it wasn’t just me.

You would think that this would end my families relationship with the Journal after so many bad experiences, it didn’t.  For the last few years my sister (now 22) has a motor route in Vermilion delivering papers.   I guess she makes really good money at it.   It would seem the third time is a charm.   I don’t think my brother or my sister ever hated it as much as I did.   I did get my NES though.

Below is a link to Google Maps that shows the actual route location of my paper route.

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Every once in a while I get comments from SEO professionals that try to advise me on how to re-arrange ad placement.   They tell me I should put ads in the middle of the posts instead of at the end like I do.   Their theory is this would cause more people to actually click these ads.  There maybe some truth in that logic, I find the breaking up the text annoying that way.   I have it set up to work in a certain flow, this is my personal preference.

I could be writing sell out articles where I’m paid to review a product, but you don’t get paid by others if you are known for negative reviews.  So I don’t bother trying to get involved in that.   The biggest money loss I’m sure from an SEO stand point is that I cross post to other sites that do not show my advertising, and in some cases no advertising at all.   A free pass to read my articles without any pressure.   Hundreds of people I know on facebook and myspace read my articles for “free”.

So for those SEO’s that hate me and think about the money I waste – please don’t e-mail me to try to optimize my revenue.  I’ll handle it, or I’ll come to you when I decide otherwise.   This year I should make a profit even though I’m throwing money away.

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I have a Palm T|X (well since my wife abandoned hers I have two).   I loved it.  It was useful.  It was helpful.   I even managed to get it online.   I moved on over to my Nokia N810 now though, and it does everything I used to use my TX for.   So does anyone have ideas on what I can do with the Palm without completely putting it out to pasture?