I Got Your Awkward Family Photos

In this blog post, I highlighted the awesome Awkward Family Photos website. The reason that site works so well is because it is so universal – we all have awkward moments captured on film. I’ll discuss one of the awkward photos from my past in this post.

Here is the back story on the photo to the left.

The Place: The backseat of Dad’s Invicta, parked outside Aunt Jean and Uncle Jimmy’s cottage in Ardenheim, PA on the Juniata River.

The Time: In the last few hours on the last day of one of the week-long vacations we took at the cottage in the early 70s.

The Anguish: I had made a simple request to Mom to take one last swim in the Juniata before the return trip to Altoona and had been shot down (with extreme prejudice). So I pitched a fit, shut the mother down, and sulked off to the backseat of the Invicta to suffer in silence and solitude.

The Social Network

I have a love-hate relationship with the Internet. In my last post, I briefly touched upon how the Net has naturally evolved into yet another in a long line of advertising and marketing mediums (albeit an incredibly efficient and optimized one). Newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, Internet. The beat goes on. I am sure another one will come along soon. The Next Big Thing.

The anonymity of the Internet also seems to bring out the worst aspects of our human nature. Ever visit some of the leading Left and Right Wing Websites and actually read the public comment sections? I’ll admit that, when reading them while shit-faced, they do provide some level of entertainment. But, Jeez Louise, what is the point? Nobody is going to change anybody’s mind – you can’t even get basic agreement on facts anymore. You think you are going to sway “The Other Team” over to “Your Team”? Sigh.

It is just a great big steaming pile of Race-to-the-Bottom where the most “successful” are the loudest, rudest, and most-willing-to-caricature, lie, and offend (Hi Bill Maher). Of course, since there is good money to be made in that gig and all the talking points have been so well-refined and market-tested by slime-ball political operatives, we are pretty much guaranteed status quo forever on that front. A deadlock in the truest Computer Science sense of the term. Each team (Go Team!) is waiting for the other to release the lock (be converted). I know how we deal with software deadlocks - time to kill the process.

Monetizing Your Content

The Internet has become probably the most efficient mechanism ever devised for selling us stuff we don’t need.

There are all these sophisticated advertising engines available that can be integrated into your website and serve up relevant advertisements based on the content of your website, the geographical location of the user viewing your site, and other contextual information.

By using one of these advertising engines and, as they say, “monetizing your content”, the content owner (like Your Faithful Servant) can actually get paid based on ad traffic that your site generates. The key metric here is something called Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a ratio between the number of times an ad is displayed on your website and the number of times a visitor to your site clicks on the ad. CTR and your overall site traffic (page views) determine whether you can make any money.

GasBuddy

This post is a topical and quite relevant Public Service Announcement on an “Oldie-But-Goody” website: GasBuddy.

These days, who among us isn’t interested in getting the best deal on their fossil fuels?  Anybody doesn’t want that? The premise behind GasBuddy is quite simple: maintain an up-to-date database of gasoline prices for major markets in the US and Canada by enlisting the help of your volunteer user base and provide capabilities to search this database for your geographical location of interest. It is certainly not a unique concept – there are other sites just like it. But it works for me: I find the user interface acceptable, and most importantly, the data accurate and current.