Death by blogging

I was recently having a chat with some friends (and my dad as well) on the subject of the history of monetized writing (e.g. how writers have made money over generations). My point was something to the extent of bloggers are the new novelists in terms of what's hip and what is commercializable (sorry business side revealing itself). My point was that blogs were the new (ish) way that writers could expect to ply their trade and expect reasonable compensation. I believe I even said that bloggers now can run mini media empires.

What I forgot to mention was that bloggers are killing themselves doing it:

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/insight/story.html?id=85f81527-dcdf-4ea4-8f25-2109c1540518

Interesting that in the modern day, one man armies of data miners and web surfers have usurped news bureaus and pools of foreign correspondents. Evidently this responsibility takes it's toll. So please blog responsibly, I need to go see about this pain shooting up my left arm...

Ode to a blue collar Urinator

For about five months I have been reasonably convinced that I have been chosen to be part of some sort of social experiment, and the experiment has been constructed thusly: get an ordinary joe (your humble author) to move to a quaint little town, tax the hell out of him and then provide him with city services that are not just poor but actually value detracted. Somewhere, a municipal government has commissioned this experiment to try to establish just what level of abysmal service can be offered before an average citizen tries to stage a town hall coup. It just so happens that I am in the test group.

So, I guess I would have been surprised, recycling man, if you had not urinated on my street last Tuesday morning in plain view. I understand that any city service which is not an insult to my intelligence and senses might not be consistent with the experiment that is being conducted…I am almost comforted that I was disappointed, as per usual.

Perhaps the problem lies with me… I am too harsh on this town and those who work for it…you are not just a guy with a small bladder and an utter disrespect for the neighborhood that you serve. Your act was actually symbolic: you are demonstrating the cycle of consumption and return of waste to the earth in a piece of inventive street theatre. You are the ultimate environmentalist acting out against the wasteful practice of employing indoor plumbing for human waste disposal. I am one of the honored citizens lucky enough to see your act of urinary rebellion.

“subject has shown high level of aggravation, has not yet acted out against city property and continues to fabricate wild stories to rationalize deplorable city services”

My inbox owns my life...

Great article from one of my friends shared Google items on controlling the "efficiency tool" that is email:

http://lifehacker.com/357666/how-to-stop-checking-email-on-the-evenings-and-weekends

It is a quaint and totally impossible plan to implement without getting the shakes, cold sweats and convulsions.

Funny though how some managers actually equate productivity with email volume. By this logic we should all have a dashboard that measures our email sends. I will need toread up on mass email marketing strategies to have any hope of career advancement... Maybe I need to hire someone in the Ukraine to create a ryan johnson email-bot

Email is also the soap box of the modern office...even the shy types can get in on the office politics from the safety of their cube. I wonder how many office coups are coordinated by Microsoft Outlook on a daily basis? Maybe MSFT should create an advertising campaign touting this fact... "Microsoft Outlook: ensuring that management lives in fear since 1997"

ok I need to check my 3 email accounts...maybe, just maybe someone has sent me mail...

Must we always need a naval incident?

I'm beginning to think that the US gov't always requires a naval incident to begin (or try to begin) a war.

Think about it:

WWII: Pearl Harbour (ok aerial attack on naval)
Vietnam: Tonkin gulf incident
Iran: Persian Gulf incident

Problem is only Pearl harbour seems to have been the real deal:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/12/6335/

So why does the false naval encounter often seem to be in the playbook?

Great reading...

Reading a great book in the Freakonomics vein (seem to be addicted to books by unconventional economists...think I will need to read some Milton Friedman to de-tox...not)

The book is called Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

Very interesting look at the practical application of statistics (regressions and randomized trials) are pulling the guesswork out of everything from public policy to internet marketing. Mentions Monster's use of Offermatica to test web offers.

Actually the title of this book was chosen using A/B testing with Google adwords...though I'm not a fan of any title that suggests that the book contains info on the "the new way to be smart"

The click is dead...

Yikes:

"The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643

How Google's logo came to be...

Cool article on the the thought process behind the logo...

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/multimedia/2008/02/gallery_google_logos?slide=1&slideView=8

Open letter to the town of Montreal West

I moved into your quaint little town last june, and until now I have kept very quiet about the shortcomings of our town's services, feeling oddly like the guy who spent too much for a concert ticket and is compelled to say that the "show was great".

Well, let's face it. the show sucks. We paid for the Stones, and we are getting the rotary club polka band (apologies to the Montreal West Rotary Club polka band if a Montreal west Rotary Club polka band exists, god knows you must be a damned good polka band because I suspect that is where all the municipal tax dollars are going).

Let's summarize the key points:

-Snow and it's requisite removal, are a fact of life in Eastern Canada. There is no use in pretending snow doesn't exist. We are wise to the "let's wait for the snow to melt game". In early winter, the odds of winning this game are low. Nice try, but we all know the odds, so don't piss us off.

-The dude on the plow who pretends to clear snow is not fooling anyone, because everyone knows that this guy is running a snow shell game; moving snow from one mound to the other.
It is snow "removal", not snow "moval".

-Pedestrians are creatures mobile on foot. Sidewalks are important to that mobility. When you don't clear a sidewalk on a street for a month period, you are keeping pedestrians from their natural habitat, endangering the survival of their kind.

-I like landscaping, I really do. Trees and gardens are nice, and so are lawns. Thank you for sending your plow riding consultants over to reconfigure my front lawn. The two massive divots removed where my lawn meets the sidewalk really do add some character... I'm thinking of naming your masterpiece "revolution en terre", and it will be a commentary on how lawn fetish has run amok in western suburbs. The piece will display until such time as I have saved enough money to get my damn lawn fixed.

On a final note, did you dress the xmas tree in front of town hall after a town hall xmas party? Because that two meter gap in xmas light coverage has too much egg nog written all over it. I mean really, do you think that people coming up the hill from Ville St-Pierre deserve any fewer lights than those going down? Do they not celebrate Xmas in Ville St-Pierre? is the town that e- lightist?