I was doing some random web browsing tonight and ended up back on a page at my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, or CWRU (actually, it’s not CWRU any more, it’s just Case, due to lame marketing reasons). Tuition has gone up over $10,000 dollars since my freshman year (see the data). It went from $16,300 in 1995-96 to $26,500 in 2004-05, for an increase of 63%.
Holy crap.
Dear ABC and ESPN:
I turned off Monday Night Football when you brought that guy from Desperate Housewives into the broadcasting booth. I wanted to watch some football, not a promo for a late-night soap opera. Overall, I’ve been disappointed with your college and NFL football broadcasts this year, each one having at least one tie-in with an unrelated ABC show that I have no interest in watching.
Please let me watch my football in peace.
Thanks,
Mike
Technorati tags: television abc espn monday night football desparate housewives
I’ve set up a blog for Foodry where I’ll be posting stuff, if anyone’s interested:
(Oh, and foodry now has maps! That’s right, it’s a mash-up.)
Writing about my last project got me in the mood to put together something a bit more useful that what’s currently a bunch of Google ads. I was also looking for a good reason to do a little web 2.0 and AJAX programming, so I’ve used an hour here and there to put together [trumpet fanfare here] foodry.
What is it? Well, not a lot at the moment, but it’s got a nice web 2.0-sounding name, doesn’t it? That’s what you get when you try to register a domain name an hour and a half after you should have gone to bed. Actually, as of this posting, it’s a mostly-empty database of its users’ favorite restaurants. A bit more work will allow the users to mark others as friends and see their reviewed restaurants and other social-networky type things like that. Also, there will be tags. There must be tags. This is web 2.0 we’re talking about here.
So, if you have a moment and the desire, sign up for an account and give it a little test spin. It’s not guaranteed to work. It’s probably guaranteed not to work in some places. If you find anything incredibly broken or ugly, send me an e-mail to info at foodry dot com.
Please note that there is no AJAX or other neat shiny things yet. Those will come, do not fear.
Also, Firefox 2.0 has neat spell checking built right in. I like that.
Update 10/04/06 11:38 PM: We have tags!
Update 10/05/06 6:43 PM: Tags work for real, now. I mean it.
To the few people subscribed to this blog:
I’ve been playing around with FeedBurner and have decided to use them to host my blog’s RSS feed. I’m doing this for 2 main reasons: it’ll reduce the traffic on my webserver and it gives me neato stats on what kind of RSS readers are reading my feed. So, if you get a chance, change your reader to point to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MoreMundaneMeanderings
Thanks.
I set up a website and Google suddenly started sending search traffic to my pages, boosting my ad revenue by a significant amount. Just as suddenly, the search traffic dried up, sending me back into the gutter with the rest of the low-page-rank bums. Read on for the details and graphs.
A few months ago I got my period itch to throw together a new website in my spare time. While trying to figure out what to do, I ran across the US Census Bureau’s Zip Code data set while browsing Wikipedia (see their article on Zip Codes for more than you’d ever want to know about the history of postal zones). The data is a list of every Zip Code in the US with its population, longitude, latitude, city, and state.
It’s hard to resist parsing a huge batch of data, as I’m sure you understand, so I wrote a script to jam it into a few useful database tables. I now had something to get my website project going: a list of 25,701 US cities and 29,467 Zip Codes. That’s not an exhaustive set, I’m sure, but it’s good enough for government work. I also found the populated-weighted geographical centers of cities so I could find the distance between cities. Limiting the results to cities within 100 miles of each other, I still came up with over 6 million pre-calculated distances. My poor PowerBook was chugging all night working that out.
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| The vast majority of my traffic comes from Google. |
That was the fun part. Figuring out what to do next was harder. For lack of better ideas, I started setting up a local job search site called Click. Hired!. It’s not a great name, I know, but it was the best unused URL that I could find at the time. I set up some quick search functionality and put in a few placeholder links to local results for Monster, Hot Jobs, etc., on each page and dropped some Google ads on there, for good measure. I even created a Web 2.0-compliant cloud of search terms. It wasn’t entirely useful, but I had plans to add user-submitted job listings, assuming I had some users. Until then, you can still find some useful links if you’re doing a search for jobs in Tacoma, WA, jobs in Elizabethtown, PA, jobs in Sarasota, FL, or pretty much any where else in the US. (I also set up a sister site for local hotel searches.)
After that weekend, I pretty much forgot about the websites and the world pretty much ignored them. That’s not much of a surprise, since I only linked to them from the sidebar of my blog. I did, however, set up a Google Sitemap, telling the search engine about the 25,000 or so pages I had set up, one for each city in my database. Google did what Google does and started crawling my site, and I found a hit every now and then resulting from Google searches like “looking for job in hernando, ms” and searches for other places in the long tail of US cities. The traffic was sporadic and resulted in fewer than two Google ad clicks per week through the end of August. At that rate, it would take a month to buy a cup of coffee.
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| My visits jumped dramatically for a period of 5 days. |
Then, on September 9, my site’s page rank must have gotten a boost, because the traffic coming from Google searches jumped significantly. I didn’t notice until two days later, at which point I tweaked my ad placements. I went from 2 clicks a week to a peak of 10 clicks in a day. That’s still not enough to retire, but it would by me a grande latte at the local Starbucks. I got a bit excited thinking about how I could actually make the site useful and increase the traffic even more.
Just as suddenly as the traffic spike, Google changed its mind about the page rank of my site. Visits returned to their former trickle, and with them went my dreams of a daily subsidized espresso drink. Most of all, though, this episode gave me more insight into importance and power that Google holds over the fortunes of those trying to do business over the web. I certainly don’t begrudge the search engine for dropping me in its results, but for someone trying to actually make a living from their website Google can make them and Google can break them.
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| My ad impressions and earnings jumped with the traffic. The earnings lagged a bit until I tweaked the ad placements. It looks like I missed out on the biggest days. |
I think I’ve been living in the Seattle area long enough now that the general liberal vibe is starting to rub off on me. Not only that, it’s rubbing off in a high-tech sort of way. I just made an online microloan of $25 to a man in Ecuador named Kléber Villafuerte through a site call kiva.org.
Mr. Villafuerte runs a small business selling fabric and making clothes and is looking for a $700 loan to buy fabric, thread, scissors, a mannequin, and similar supplies. Kiva lets you lend small amounts like $25 to entrepreneurs like these via a local microfinance organization–Mifex in Mr. Villafuerte’s case. As a lender, I’ll make no interest on the loan and could lose my money altogether if he defaults, but Kiva so far has a 100% repayment rate and microfinance in general has something like a 97% repayment rate, so the low risk of a little amount of money is worth it, if you consider helping a poor entrepreneur get on his feet a good social investment.
A few months ago, I saw a program on PBS about microlending and wondered how I could get involved with something like that. I just saw a post on I Will Teach You To Be Rich about Premal Shah, one of the founders of Kiva. It can’t get much easier to get involved than to go to a website, pick a business to fund, and make a payment through Pay Pal.
I should be repaid over the next 12 months. I hope the $25 dollars will do much more in Ecuador than it would in my bank account.
I took a few minute to play around with the new feature in Amazon’s suite of Associates tools: the aStore. With a few clicks, you can set up a storefront selling featured Amazon products and specifically chosen browsing categories, filtered on whatever search terms you want. It also provides sidebar boxes with similar items, listmania lists, and the customer’s wish list. Pretty neat.
It took me about 30 minutes to pick out my 9 featured products, narrow down the browse categories, and tweak the colors to come up with a store that matches my food blog. Check it out:
Blog: Throwing Food
Store: Throwing Food Store
Over at Lookout Landing, they’ve posted First Half in Review: Mariners Go Camping. It’s funny stuff–if you have an unhealthy need to watch every Mariners game like I do. Here’s a quick excerpt (to set the scene, the M’s are lost in the woods and have been wandering for days):
Everett: “Hey, I think I know where we’re supposed to go.”
Petagine: “You know, I have a map here in my pocket-”
Hargrove: “What’s that, Carl?”
Everett: “I said I think I f-cking know where we’re supposed to go, grampa.”
Meche: “This again…” :rolls eyes:
Hargrove: “Which way?”
Petagine: “…it’s a detailed map…creeks, rocks, it’s got everything in it…”
Everett: “We gotta go over there. See that moss? Moss always grows in the shape of an arrow.”
Woods: “What?”
Hernandez: “That’s not true. In the Boy Scouts we learned that moss always grows on the…on the…”
Hargrove: “Sounds good. Guys. GUYS! Follow Carl, he knows where we’re going.”
In last night’s Mariners game, the team lost a close one to Detroit, which was not a big surprise. What was surprising was to see Ichiro get upset and argue with the umpire after a bad call. Ichiro foul-tipped the ball with two strikes, and because he made contact with the ball, he should have not been called out. The umpire, however, said he missed the ball for strike three and was therefore out. Ichiro was not happy. He’s a low-key player, so he did not yell and scream, but it was obvious he was upset. What’s interesting was that it seemed he was more upset that the umpire didn’t take his word that he fouled the ball off. As was reported on the Seattle Mariners News page,
“I reacted that way because it was so obvious that I hit it,” Ichiro said. “If I had missed the ball, I would have run to first base. So for him to say what he did is to say that I’m lying. I’m disappointed and sad that he saw me as a player that would lie.
“It has happened to me a few times, but as a policy to myself, I don’t like to lie to myself. Even if it’s a bad result, I don’t want to lie to myself. I consider myself a player who honestly plays in that sense. If I were a rookie, I could understand the umpire’s reaction, but I’ve played many years in Japan and six years in the U.S. now and I wanted that part of me to be noticed. And if that part of me isn’t noticed, then I’m disappointed.”
I appreciate this sort of attitude. Ichiro is a guy who clearly has integrity and I believe that should be taken into account. I do believe it was to some degree with this play, since the umpire conferred with the rest of the officiating crew to confirm the call, which was upheld. If it had been most other players, I think that would not have happened.
I get very disappointed in professional athletes when they lie about how a play turned out, when they clearly knew it went the other way. You oftentimes can see ballplayers pretend they caught balls that obviously hit the ground before the catch or see players pretend to get hit by a pitch when they didn’t get touched. What’s almost worse is when the announcers praise that sort of behavior, reinforcing that cheating is part of the game. (Don’t get me started on the World Cup where players writhe in the ground in mock pain when barely brushed by an opponent).
I can’t remember where I read it, but I recently saw a comment on a website complaining that it seems that we’re turning from a people who do the right thing to people who do what they can get away with. I’m not sure this is just a recent development in our culture as that commenter was inferring, but in sports, at least if you can’t win without cheating, without having integrity, you deserve to lose.