rianjs.net

I only took pictures one day when I was in Cali, but they're pretty; taken at the LA Arboretum.

I plan on fixing the older image gallery at some point in the near future.

http://rianjs.net/fotos/

It's been a long time since I've gone a full 24 hours without having any AdSense clicks on any of the 3 sites I run. I don't really mind since I've demolished my earnings goals for the month, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

In fact, it hasn't happened since… June 24. Hah!

I suppose that's actually pretty good for just getting started. OTP, as usual, remains my biggest earner by far, despite having been slashdotted here on rianjs.net. Now that IS surprising, even though tech-savvy traffic typically doesn't click on advertisements.

AdSense

I've read several articles in the Boston Globe and my local paper lately about how auto insurance fraud in Lawrence — where my mom lives — is so bad. The average insurance premium per year is something like $2600. Ouch.

A 20 minute drive up the road to New Hampshire, where I live, and the bottom falls out. Just for fun, I decided to go to my insurer's website and compare the two premiums. I plugged in the values for the coverage that I currently have, with the only difference being the location.

Lawrence, Massachusetts:
$2,579 per year

Windham, New Hampshire:
$1,428 per year

Difference: $1,151
Distance between the addresses: 18.1 miles

That Massachusetts quote is the lowest I've ever seen, but it's still ridiculously high. According to most of the articles I've read, the real difference between registering in southern New Hampshire is usually around $500 per year. In my case, it's $1151.

Unbelievable. And they wonder why people play the auto insurance fraud game. You'd almost be crazy NOT to. In my case, if I lived in Lawrence, and registered in NH, I could realistically get two violations for being registered in NH but living in MA, and still come out ahead.

And that, my friends, is absolutely hilarious and shows just how messed up auto insurance is there. Officials sit around and scratch their heads. Maybe they should actually DO the math.

Auto insurance, Lawrence, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, fraud

This is one of those stories I really don't feel like telling, but ultimately it will be easier for me to simply write once and point people here rather than re-tell the story 100 times. I haven't edited it for grammar or smoothness. As such it probably won't read that well. But I don't care.

Anyway, some of you know I'm on vacation in California visiting my friend David. Got here Wednesday night, and I'm here until Tuesday (tomorrow). On Friday, we were supposed to go up to Big Bear Lake, and we did. We were planning on going fishing and maybe playing some tennis and relaxing. Unfortunately, I started getting sick on Thursday night. Bloating and waves of pain about once every 3-4 minutes. It felt a bit like lactose intolerance, but taking lactase enzyme didn't help, so it obviously wasn't that.

I didn't want to go to the hospital because I knew what they'd do to figure out what was wrong: more barium and a CT scan. I HATE barium. I'd almost rather die than drink barium. More on that later.

Continue Reading »

Hey Eric, could you put in a good word for me with the folks over at the WaPo's new Blogroll project for OnThePharm. OK THX. <3

I've been doing some back-of-the-envelope math lately, based on estimations after my recent slashdotting, calculating, on average, how much a page impression is worth based on Google AdSense from a relatively tech-savvy demographic. I've told some of my close friends my plans for world dominationbuilding a media empire (something I'll eventually expound upon here), and I've calculated that with minor AdSense optimization and a decent amount of tech-savvy readers (that tend to not click ads), a page impression is worth $0.0033495.

Based on my calculations (number of posts + infrastructure costs + authors + misc.) I need $66,240 to operate for 12 months, assuming I didn't make a single cent in advertising revenue, and figure an extra $3,000 for expenses I didn't think of.

Assuming a page is worth that fraction of a cent, I'd need 1.6 million page views to break even, assuming Google AdSense was my only source of revenue. (Which it wouldn't be, but I'm figuring worst-case scenario.)

Oddly enough, technology infrastructure at this point is but a drop in the bucket compared to what paying good writers would cost, so it would make no sense to skimp on the backend. Serving pages on a robust platform costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent in an all-in-one package that most dedicated server packages offer. (The machine is yours to serve as many pages as your bandwidth will allow.) Colocation, on the other hand, tends to charge more in terms of bandwidth. In other words, 1GB of colo bandwidth tends to cost more than 1GB of dedicated server bandwidth thanks to overselling. Colo customers tend to have a better handle on how much bandwidth they'll use in a given month — in theory, anyway.

Fun, fun.

Money, entrepreneurship, writing, start-ups, business, media, Internet, AdSense

I just posted this over at OnThePharm, but I thought you guys might like to read the story, too.

I got call before work this morning to swing by and pick up a mis-delivered crate on my way in. Its contents was worth over $15,000. Underneath all the packaging, how much did the goods weigh? About 2 ounces.

If you enjoy reading it, please digg it.

I've been using Gmail since November 13, 2004. Before then, I was loathe to have anything stored on a remote server that I didn't directly control: be that photos, email, documents, whatever. I always wanted a local copy.

And webmail sucked: Hotmail and Yahoo didn't give you enough space, and besides that, the interface was clunky and slow. You couldn't really interact with multiple emails very easily.

It didn't hurt, of course, that I had lost about 500MB of email in a catastrophic Windows corruption thanks to some minor overclocking that I was experimenting with. That really sucked. Thank God all of my documents and media were on two non-system drives. I lost my iTunes ratings, playcounts, playlists, etc. Toast. In a matter of minutes. Worst of all, though, was my lost email. Irreplaceable.

Then I actually bothered to play with Gmail, having received an invitation months earlier but never done anything with it. I discovered that "conversations" — sort of like forum threads in chronological order — were freakin' awesome. (Screenshot.) And labels. What? An email can be in more than one place? No way! 1GB storage? Phat.

And of course Google doubled that amount of storage to 2GB on Gmail's second birthday. And then some time later they started increasing that storage automatically. First pretty quickly, and then they started slowing the rate of new storage. But it's still going up.

I found this nifty page which calculates when you'll run out of Gmail storage based on how long you've had a Gmail account, and how full it is now.

Of course that really means that I'll never run out of Gmail storage. Which I rather knew anyway. The rate at which I add email to my account is greatly decreased these days because I don't save every little notification I receive anymore. I've always been a deleter, but I don't feel a need to save those lovely little ING emails telling me that my interest rate has gone up. (Because really, I don't care.) Same for my daily comics page and forum digests.

Nonetheless, this was a fun little experiment.

Google, Gmail, Web 2.0

I should start out by saying that I don't like MySpace. I think it's the Mos Eisley of the Internet ecosystem. Basic ugliness aside, it does have its uses, much as I hate to admit it. But this morning it took me nearly two minutes to log in.

And this time, my Internet connection was not at fault.

You better bet your ass that MySpace will need to improve their usability now that they've got some $900 million in cash coming from Google with their new advertising and search deal. Maybe they can invest in some better infrastructure. Google will want the most for their money, and I bet they'll be putting some pressure on MySpace and its parent, News Corp, to make it happen.

You'll also notice that many movie studios are creating MySpace sites rather than registering their own domain names as was the fad for the last 3 years. They're recognizing the value of social networking: friends tend to share interests which drives success. Dane Cook would be the penultimate poster child for this phenomenon. Do you think the movie studios are going to stand for unreliable service in the long run when they're shelling out for that space? (You didn't think they got to play for free, did you?) I can assure you that they won't. Money is exchanged for a certain level of service, implicit or explicit, and while I don't doubt that they're given their own server or three, what good does it do when the same users they're looking to connect with and sell to cannot even login to participate?

MySpace is housed in the Garland Building in Los Angeles, a building which is notoriously plagued by power outages and poor fail-over systems. This is the reason MySpace went down for half a day a little while back. It might be in their best interest to move to some place that isn't plagued by rolling blackouts — even in a post-Enron power market — as a precautionary measure. Last I checked, the DirectNIC datacenter in New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina without too much trouble.

Let's face it: LA ain't cheap when it comes to living and/or doing business. $900 million buys more in middle America than it does in Southern California. (Ignoring, for now, the costs associated with a relative dearth of knowledge workers in places outside the Coasts.)

More important than changing datacenters, though, is MySpace's apparent lack of server capacity and/or poor back-end infrastructure. If MySpace is going to be taken seriously a major Internet player — and Rupert Murdoch has bet $500 million that they are — they're going to need to start acting like a grown-up company. That means fixing basic useability issues by building a grown-up infrastructure and a more robust user platform.

What do I mean by a more robust user platform? Well, I like to open multiple tabs, especially when a site is mind-bogglingly slow, like MySpace. The idea is that if I can read one page while others are loading in the background, I'll spend more time on your site because I don't leave in frustration. It's a more efficient use of my time. As it stands now, I can't do that, because most user profiles have music playing in the background, and more than one open profile with embedded music means a browser crash. And that, my friends, is worse than simply being slow.

Two minutes to perform a simple login? Absurd.

Image from Busted Tees.

MySpace, social networking, business, Google