In case you have not noticed, off to the left of this site are two small ads served by Google AdSense. If I was asked why I put them there, it was mostly an exercise to see how they worked, what it takes to set them up, and to generally get a fell for the Google AdSense system.

When I first set up the site, I was lacking on categories. While one can easily argue I still am, and have a haphazard way of categorizing stuff, the fact remained I was short on something to stuff over there. The ads sort of “fit” and don’t take away from the site, so they were added in. In case you were wondering, AdSense is very easy to set up.

I should also mention, I have not made a single penny off of the ads, though the sheer amount of times they are clicked on is a bit perplexing. More perplexing, is that they rarely seem to change. I consistently have the same two ads served, both to blog hosting sites.

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In the spirit of being a day late, always, looks like Dan Wood has beat me to the punch and starting the Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday. Mine was going to be called something a little less nice, but you get the point. Dan’s execution probably will be a hell of a lot more elegant than mine anyways.

His bullet points so far for bugs are:

• Safari, please detect if a page has an RSS feed available (fixed!)
• Please add PDF viewing directly to Safari (fixed!)
• iTunes needs a way to store cover art in external files (I hate having to embed image data into every song file in an album; wastes precious iPod space!)
• System needs to look inside files to find metadata (see “man 5 magic” at the command line)

I am not sure how I feel about his second item, on stuffing a pdf into a browser. I just don’t know if I would have been able to justify reporting it as a “bug”. Nonetheless, it was, and seems to have been remedied.

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I just finished up a pretty large commerce site, Fedex integration, shopping cart, pretty custom stuff in this case. All in all, it was a bear, perhaps the most impressive site I have worked on.

Traffic is picking up and I peek in on it from time to time to see how the orders are looking, making sure everything is up to snuff. I have a page where I can at quick glance look at the billing and shipping data for the order. I would say, one in five are in UPPERCASE.

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I am going to be really short on this, as I am sure the image below speaks volumes. Apple, come on, you are smarter than this. This borders on a cruel inside joke, but we all know that is not the case.

And yeah, it does matter, cause it overflows into other areas as well, this is just one example. Ever try to make a .webloc of a site that some moron made the title tags have a string value that was insanely long? Menu’s just have no business being wider than a 23″ display, period, or in this case, period period period, as in … (hint hint)

Why is it that to be filthy stinking rich, being dumb has to also come with the territory? I have one person on my mind right now, and thats Jessica Simpson. (Ugh!, loud annoying music to follow that link)

It’s not that I have anything against her personally, but shit, can anyone be “more stupider”. Her entire show on MTV is only popular because of the pure comedy in how retarded she actually is. The strange part, aside from the fact that I watched the damn show, is I genuinely like her hubby Nick.

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Once I read a list of the top five most commonly used passwords. I am sure it was not based on any empirical data, but one of them was “boobs”, which just cracks me up. It almost makes me laugh as much as this. (Warning, boobies to see)

A friend of mine just got a new dog, w00t! My feelings on the matter are of the “could care less” nature. I don’t know why it happened, but a decade or so back when the “interweb” was first getting going, people felt a burning desire to put up images of their pets.

To some degree this was understandable, given the time. Animated gifs were not even part of the web yet, it was all new territory. Putting up an image, any image at all was pretty high tech stuff. One did not want to step out on a limb too far and just toss up nudes and pr0n, the interweb was still respectable and people were accountable. Websites were scarce enough that they would be tied to you in some way, to come out with goatse was just not the direction things were going in.

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Years ago there was a skateboard magazine called Big Brother, often they would have humorously written articles about t-shirt tag-lines. One of those that stuck with me over the years was “Jack off to Liz Phair”. While I have never taken the time to rig up one of these shirts, it’s been on my todo list for ages.

Turns out, Liz Phair was playing a show this Friday in San Francisco. It was sold out, tickets on Craigs List were sparse, I did not have anyone to go with anyway. On a whim, I decided to trek down to S.F. and see if I could not scalp a tick and get in. Turns out I stood in the cold for half an hour for no good reason, as the guy at the door was just letting anyone in who had the courage to ask. Thanks “door guy”!

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I know, the title is pretty lame, but I have my reasons. In a long shot effort, I want the searchy engines to pick up on the term and hopefully draw some attention. There is simply no way in hell I am the only one out there privy to two cases of utter retardation on the part of Kaiser Permanente.

I intend to tell you about my most recent run in with the lameness that is Kaiser. Perhaps in another post I will outline a much more serious case in which I was directly involved.

Yesterday, Wednesday, at about 3:30 AM in the morning I ended up in the emergency room. My issue was not entirely an emergency, but I was in enough personal pain that my options were limited. It boild down to a sore throat, and yeah, I know, that makes me one hell of a pussy for taking my ass to the emergency room for a little throat pain, but you do what you have to do.

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I happened to stumble on the TSA’s website, where they have a handy little list of the items you are allowed and not allowed to being on an airplane. I thought it would be fun to comment on the ridiculousness of this all.

My general sentiment is that if someone wants to circumvent airline security, and cause harm to others, with a little creativity, there is nothing at all that can be done to stop them. In the end, we have created a situation where 100% of all legitimate travelers are inconvenienced, with the bonus of no real additional security being added.

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I can’t say for sure that these guys read my previous post on Tivo torrents for the rest of us, but I have to say, they are pretty much nailing it. DTV Beta is out, and it looks very promising.

It definitely is a beta, for me, I can say it is damn near useless at this point, but the foundation has been laid, this is going to be huge. I commend them for getting a beta out so we can all play with it, and while I don’t want to spend a lot of time on hashing out the specific issues I had with it, it goes without saying, there are some rough edges.

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A while back, slashdot picked up on a story, What OS X Could Learn From Windows, by Chris Howard. I prodded it with interest, thinking perhaps there would be some good points in the article. Apparently, my thinking was hugely flawed. I don’t really know what the criteria are for getting a blurb on the front page of slashdot, I for one, could ask for a much more strict system.

I really wanted to give the web ample time to calm down on this article before I commented on it. A number of other sites picked up on it, which makes you wonder, how many sites out there really generate new content, or do they all just scrape slashdot? I try my hardest to only post new stuf, things that matter to me, every now and then, something hits a note and I may have to put in my penny or two, but I do try to keep it to a minimum.

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Every now and then I find myself in discussions where I need to hunker down defend my ideas. It was not too long ago when a friend was just deabting my ideas that our energy problems could easily be solved if there was a greater push for nuclear power plants. At the time, I had no empirical research data to support my claims, just a gut feeling and some applied logic.

I really don’t want to turn this into a liberal versus conservative issue, but sometimes, try as I might, i have to get a little down on liberals. To me, it sure seems they have a tendency to take issues for surface value only. My gut always tells me they are wrong, logic will almost always show contrary data to their gut instincts.

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drunkenbatman has a short little article on some issues he is having with his mouse and the various drivers that are used to control it. I have to say, on first read, I thought I had a solid answer for him, as I have been down this road in a more detailed way than most could possibly tolerate. I am not entirely sure my case is related to his, however, it may help. It may finally get me closer towards what i have wanted to do to deal with this for a long time. This is going to be a little on the long side, but it will eventually wrap around to a possible solution to drunkenbatmans issues, maybe.

I little background… I started on the mac a long time ago, when publishing was at its infancy. Along with the territory came using large monitors. I don’t think I have ever really sat in front of anything less than 17 inches, and generally always 20 inches, at least not for extended work. Large monitors just came with the territory. While I am no longer in graphics, it is a habit I picked up and have since been running stuff in the more pixels arena.

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For no particular reason I was conned into hanging out at this bar and grill with my girlfriend and some of her friends. If you know me, which I have to say is impossible, considering my own damn girlfriend rarely reads this, then you know this is pretty out of character for me. Bars are just no place for me, at least not while sober, then again, bars are the antithesis of sobriety, so it did kind of work out.

I am a smoker, so it was off to the lepers camp out back to get my fix. This sucks in a few ways; First, if your group is not large enough to take over an entire table, you end up sitting with other “randoms” who you don’t know. Across from the table, an overweight Indian bitch. I did not take notice what she was drinking, but from what I remember about her clothes, more than likely wine. In a nutshell, she was way too cool for me. To my left, drunk hippie.

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