Head Examined

The Statue of Safety

2007-04-13T12:55:00.000-06:00

This post reminded me of an incident on our vacation to New York a couple weeks ago. There were only a few items on my list of things to do while visiting NYC that I felt were "must-do" items and one was to visit the Statue of Liberty. To me it is the very symbol of what makes this country great, Freedom.

Access to go inside the base of the Statue are by reservation so I got reservations for my wife and me and was excited to see the inside of the statue. To get into the statue you first have to go through an airport-style security system (they have a sniffer that blows air on you but at least you can keep your shoes on). As it turns out you can only climb the stairs (or take a small elevator) up to the base of the statue but you can't go any further than that.

Upon reaching the top of the stairs below the statue, there was a ranger who would turn on lights so you could look up inside of the statue. I knew they had stopped allowing people to go all the way up to the crown but didn't know when that had happened so I asked the ranger. He said it had closed on 9/11. I thought that was odd and questioned him "so we lost the liberty to go into the Statue of Liberty on 9/11?". He took slight offense at the question and told me that it was for safety reasons to be able to evacuate the public in case of an emergency. I wish I had thought of it at the time but recalled later this quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Shouldn't we have the choice to sacrifice our safety for a chance to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty?

Toddlers Have No Exit Strategy

2006-10-27T11:24:00.000-06:00

What is the world coming to? For some strange reason there has been a spate of boys getting stuck in vending machines recently. Can't a boy covet something soft and cuddly without having to be trapped by its allure?

First there was the boy in Sheboygan, Wisconsin who was just killing time while waiting for his dad to get off the phone.

Then, in Elkart, Indiana, 3-year-old James Magnes took matters into his own hands when his mother said he couldn't have a toy.

In Austin, Minnesota, another 3-year-old boy decided to escape the real world and spend time with his plush friends.

And who could blame the lovable toddler, Joshua Walk from Abilene, Texas who just wanted freedom for his favorite toys.

Just when you thought it couldn't happen again, another Texas toddler found himself in a similar predicament.

Google's Hidden Query

2006-10-23T23:21:00.000-06:00

I am using Google's Adsense for Search feature on a website and I wanted to restrict the search to just a subset of the site. Unfortunately, you can't just set the search domain (via 'sitesearch') to something like "example.com/foobar" to restrict it to the 'foobar' area of the site.

Knowing that Google searches could be modified with query modifiers, I figured that I could just add "inurl:foobar" to the query. You can achieve this using javascript on the search form by inserting this javascript in the google search's <form> element:

onsubmit="this.q.value += ' inurl:foobar"

This does work but it's a little ugly because the search results page exposes this hack by showing this added bit on the search results page.

Likewise, when you backup to the page where you did the search from, now it will contain both the user-typed search text and the appended ' inurl:foobar' text which isn't pretty.

Fortunately, and quite by accident, I stumbled on a better way to do this. Google has an undocumented way of adding hidden query elements to the search with a field named "hq". With this field you can add any type of query modifier and it will be executed as before but it won't show up on the query results. Just add the following to your google search form:

<input type="hidden" name="hq" value="inurl:foobar"></input>

The resulting search query will be restricted however you want without the ugliness of showing the restriction on the results page. And you don't have to use any javascript tricks to get what you want. It's a geek win-win.

Add Sudoku to Your Website

2006-10-18T19:37:00.000-06:00

I like to play an occasional game of Sudoku. When I play online I like to play at websudoku.com but they don't provide a version that you can embed on your website. So I thought I'd see if I could find some versions that allows you to embed the puzzle on your site by simply copying and pasting some HTML. Here's what I've found.

This one is from a play-sudoku.de and it allows you to change font size, cell size and centering:

The embedding is done with an iframe. They make you give them an email address which is annoying but overall it's a pretty good implementation.

Another version, from medyaoyun.com, comes with a pretty big default size but it does respond to resizing and scales down accordingly:

It is a flash-based application embedded via an <object> tag. The interface isn't my favorite since it only allows you to enter numbers by clicking so that you have to click 9 times to enter the number 9.

Neither of the above two versions seem to have a way to regenerate a new puzzle when you're done but the version from sudokulive.net does.

They give you the choice of large or small (small shown above). The interface on this is similar to the first one but you are stuck with the ad banner on this one.

There are a few others out there. One was so annoying with the sound that I decided to not show it. And some of them rely on javascript to run which isn't allowed in this blog so they won't work for anyone who wants to include them in a blog like this.

None of the reviewed versions has all the features I would like to see. The biggest missing features are (1) a timer so you can see how fast you solve the puzzle and (2) the ability to enter multiple guesses in a box while you solve the puzzle until you figure out the correct answer.

Of the three discussed above, the websudoku.com and sudokulive.net versions seem to be the best. If you don't mind the ads then sudokulive.net is my favorite because of the ability to generate a new game by clicking a button. But the websudoku.com version is a little cleaner and has less obtrusive advertising attached to it so it will look nicer on your website.

I'm sure there will be more and better versions in the future so please do let me know if you find any by posting a comment and I will update this article.

Blogging for Money

2006-10-14T10:37:00.000-06:00

I recently read how this guy Steve Pavlina claims to make approximiately $2400 per article on what is essentially a blog about personal development. I don't expect I will make that much money from this blog but it does give me hope that this blogging habit could lead to some extra pocket change. So I felt inspired to share how easy it is to get create a blog that can make money.

Setting up a blog that can make money is simple. Creating a blog that does make money is another story. I thought I'd show you how to do the former since you won't make any money if you don't set one up in the first place. There are a large number of packages for blogging. But, in the interest of keeping this article short, I'll walk you through getting a blog going on blogspot.com and earning money with Google's AdSense.

Organize

The first thing you need to do is find a place to host your blog. If you go with blogger.com then this is easy because not only do they have the blogging software but they also host your site for you. I thought about stepping you through each step of the process but it's really very easy. All you do is create a user account. Then blogger.com will step you through creating a blog title and URL address.

Creating the address for your blog is probably the hardest step because all of the easy names are taken. So you may have to be creative to find something that suits you. But do try to keep the name simple enough for your future readers to remember. What are you waiting for, click that link and get going!

Monetize

Now that you've got your blog going it's time to configure it to help you make money. There are a couple of ways to make money. First, you can have ads show up on the page and you will be credited some small amount of money each time your users click on those ads. Another way to make money is with an affiliate program where you have links back to an e-commerce site such as Amazon.com and you make money when somebody buys one of the products that are shown on your site.

Whichever method(s) you chose, it's frequently just a matter of pasting a snippet of HTML, provided by the advertiser, into your page. Because Blogger.com is owned by Google, they have made it even easier to insert Google ads into your site.

The first thing you need to do is get an adsense account. Google has a guided tour of adsense that walks you through how it all works. Follow their directions and get an account. Go ahead, I'll wait...

Now you just log back into your blogger account and click on the "Change Settings" link. From there click the Template tab and the AdSense tab underneath that and you can easily switch ad formats without even touching the HTML.

Of course you still can edit the HTML that your blog uses. In blogger you click the Template tab and the "Edit Current" tab under that to see the actual HTML that is used to create the template for your blog. If you have an adsense ad then you should be able to find something within your template that look similar to this:


<div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;'>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client="ca-pub-1137447718577367";
google_ad_width=234;
google_ad_height=60;
google_ad_format="234x60_as";
google_ad_type="text";
google_color_border="FFFFFF";
google_color_bg="FFFFFF";
google_color_link="474B4E";
google_color_url="474B4E";
google_color_text="7B8186";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

The blogger.com adsense piece only puts ads at the top of your blog. If you also want ads on the side (like on this blog), first go to adsense and figure out what type of ad you want. When you have done that, google adsense will give you a section of HTML code to copy. The trick is where to paste it. Go back to your blogger account and in the template look for the div tag that looks like this <div id="sidebar">. Insert your HTML somewhere between that and the closing </div> tag. You might have to experiment to get it where you want it.

Now you have a blog and ads showing up on the blog and maybe even an interesting article or two. But if a tree falls on your blog and nobody is there to read it, does it make any money? No. It's time to get the word out.

Advertise

Getting the word out that you have a blog that's worth reading is not easy. If it's really worth reading (it is right?) then maybe you'll get lucky and people will stumble on it. But it doesn't hurt to prime the pumps a little.

Probably the most popular place to advertise blogs is through technorati. This is yet another website you will have to sign up for in order to use it. After you have completed the signup you have to, in technorati terms, "Claim your blog". This just means that you are claiming that this new blog you have created belongs to you and that you'd like to have technorati tell the world about the marvels within.

As the sample image above show, you enter the URL to your shiny new blog and then follow the directions after that. It will ask you to give some keywords about the types of things your blog will contain. Then technorati will ask you to paste one of their links into a post in your blog. It's all very annoying but I guess technorati wants to be sure that you really do own the blog. After you have followed their instructions then technorati will be able to track your blog and will magically know when it has new content. And presumably they will let the rest of the technorati world know when there is somemthing new on your site to read about.

Another way to advertise your blog is to publicize the RSS feed of your blog using FeedBurner. They make it very easy to get started. You just enter the URL of your blog on the front page then it walks you through all of the options and creates an account for you. After that you can add new blog feeds in your account easily as well.

FeedBurner also makes it easy to generate RSS icons to paste on your site for people to add your feed to their favorite aggregators. The easier you make it for people to include your content the more likely they will be to come back.

These are a couple of ways to get the word out about your blog. But all the advertising in the world will not help you if unless your blog is worth reading.

Verbalize

There are a ton of worthless blogs out there. The blogs that talk about what the writer had for breakfast or what they did last weekend are only interesting to the writer and his or her family (only because the family is being polite). If you want to make one of those blogs, go ahead, but don't expect to make any money unless you happen to be somebody famous enough that people actually care about whether you had jam on your toast.

I can't tell you how to write good articles that people will want to read (since nobody is reading this, see what kind of example I set?). But I will suggest that if you want people to come back to your blog from time to time, you want to write articles that have value. They should either inform, educate or entertain your readers. Think about whether your articles will have value a year or 10 years from now. If the answer is no, then you may be writing artciles that are too narrow in focus or interest. The goal is to write about things that keep people coming back or, if you're lucky, get people to tell their friends about too.

So drop me a comment if you found this article informative. And I want a link to your newly created blog in the comment so I can see how good your are at following directions. Better yet, tell your friends and have them drop a comment.

Boom!

2006-10-10T12:28:00.000-06:00

Connect the Dots

2006-10-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

Here is the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005. It's not his best delivery but the messages are great.

You've got to find what you love.
Don't settle.
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Divided We Vote

2006-10-07T20:21:00.000-06:00

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about fair votings systems partly because of the websites I work on that involve voting (Squeat, Vote Monkey) but mostly because of how divided the country seems to be these days. And it seems to me that our country will remain divided unless we change the way we vote.

The United States uses a plurality voting system that decides the winner on who has the most votes. The simplicty of the system is appealing as you only have to count each vote once and see who has the most. Unfortunately, this simplicity is what leads us to elect people that are more likely to be hated by a large percentage of the constituents. To understand that last claim, I need to give an example.

Let's say the first primary candidate, Mr. P. Nut Salty, is pro-peanut and promotes things like peanut butter and and nutter butter cookies. Mr. Salty has 45% of the voters on his side because lots of people love peanuts but many voters are allergic to peanuts and others just don't like the way peanut butter sticks to the roof of their mouths. The the other main candidate is Ms. Coco Nut who loves to eat Mounds bars and drink coconut milk. Ms. Nut has 46% of the voters, a plurality, on her side but the people who don't like her hate the funny taste of coconut and there are many others who are also allergic to coconuts (it could happen). The 3rd candidate, attracting 9% of the voters is Mr. Potato E. Head (running mate Dan Quayle), who really doesn't like peanuts OR coconuts but loves to eat tubers in many forms (fried, baked, boiled, diced, curled, chipped, broiled, frittered, etc.).

We have a situation where Mr. Salty's backers love him but hate Ms. Nut and are indifferent about Mr. Head. Likewise, Ms. Nut's backers love her too but hate Mr. Salty and are indifferent about Mr. Head. Neither set of voters is likely to vote for Mr. Head because they don't think he can win and that voting for him will be a "wasted" vote. But really Mr. Head might be the best choice for all voters because he hates both peanuts and coconuts. In other words if Mr. Head were to actually win, the voters from both sides wouldn't be really happy but they also wouldn't be too disappointed either. In other words, Mr. Head is a "uniter" and would be just about everybody's people's second (or first) choice but he wouldn't be elected in a plurality system.

I'm not sure that Mr. Head would or even should win. For the sake of this artcile let's assume that his voters would prefer Mr. Salty over Ms. Nut since peanuts are brown and lumpy like potatoes. So even though Ms. Nut has a plurality FOR her, she also has a majority AGAINST her.

There are plenty of other voting methods. A couple that I like are instant runoff and the Borda count methods.

People who are familiar with how Heisman candidates are selected understand how the the Borda count method works in which points are awarded based on how candidates are ranked. In the case of the Heisman trophy, 3 points are given for each 1st place vote, 2 points for 2nd, and 1 points for 3rd. Using the Heisman system of points in my example above, if the Mr. Salty and Ms. Nut voters all put Mr. Head as 2nd then Mr. Head would get 34.83% of all points. Assuming Mr. Head voters all put Mr. Salty 2nd then Mr. Salty would receive 34.67% and Ms. Nut would receive 32%. So even though Ms. Nut receives the most 1st place votes (46%) she would receive the LEAST Borda count points because other voters really dislike the taste of coconut (I bet you didn't know coconut was hated that much). And even more interesting is the fact that Mr. Head, with only 9% of the first place votes would WIN this election mostly because he is the least hated of the 3 candidates. The wikipedia entry on Borda describes it pretty well:

The Borda count tends to favour candidates supported by a broad consensus among voters, rather than the candidate who is necessarily the favourite of a majority. For this reason some of its supporters see it as a method that promotes consensus and avoids the 'tyranny of the majority'.

I like Borda count but I think the instant runnoff method is my favorite. With that method, the votes are ranked as with Borda but candidates are eliminated one by one based on who has the least number of #1 votes. As candidates are eliminated, ballots with that candidate are adjusted to move the remaining candidates up. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. Using the same numbers as above, Mr. Head would be eliminated first and Mr. Salty would then get those votes and the win with 55%. This is just like having another runoff election when nobody has a majority, but without the hassle of having to go back to the polls.

Both of the Borda count and instant-runoff methods seem to reduce 'wasted' votes which is the problem with the plurality method. If people feel like their vote is not being wasted they might actually vote more for the desirable 3rd party candidatess. And who wouldn't want to be able to vote for Mr. Potato Head?

Fantasy Life

2006-10-03T09:33:00.000-06:00

I enjoy fantasy football just like the other 18 million people. But sometimes I wonder what this is coming to. Might we some day live our lives vicariously through others? I wouldn't be too surprised to see a fantasy celebrity life where you get a team of celbreties and they earn points as follows:

Engagement (+2 points): Equivalent to a safety.

Breakup (-2 points): Like a fumble in the red zone.

Wedding (+6 points): Like a touchdown, without the extra point.

Honeymoon (+1 point): The extra point.

Honeymoon with video (2 points): Going for two!

Affair (-1 points): Like having your quarterback sacked.

Baby (+3 points): Small humans are like field goals that smell funny.

Jail Time (-2 points): Like an interception.

Child Molestation (-100 points): Don't bother putting Michael on your team.

Divorce (-7 points - half of all points earned so far): Should have had a pre-nup.

Win an Oscar (+7 points): Touchdown + extra point.

Forget to thank spouse after winning Oscar (-1 point): Missed extra point.

Jumping on Oprah's Couch (-4 points): Unsportsmanlike conduct (and ejected from the game).

I think I'll stick to real life for now.

Potential Lunch Winner

2006-09-30T11:43:00.000-06:00

I've always rebelled against labels. For a long time I told people my title was "May Contain Peanuts". And that was true. At any point in time there may have been peanuts in my body. So it was a public service for me to alert the peanut allergy sufferers of my potentially peanutful condition.

But do we really need job titles? Being that I'm recently unemployed, I've seen the job posting ads with the ominous sounding job titles like "Senior Java Developer", "Senior Web UI Developer", "Java J2EE Support Engineer", etc.. It seems like the people who are hiring usually have a very specific round holes to try to fit square developers into. I suppose I understand a company's need to fill specific positions and weed out unqualified candidates. But I am more drawn towards the jobs where the title is "Senior Programmer" without all of the specific references to current technologies. After all, aren't good programmers fluent in many languages and idioms. I'd rather hire the person with a breadth of experience than the one with a specific skill set but maybe that's because that describe me.

But what about job titles within a company? Some titles are important like the guy who runs the company should be a 'President' or 'Chief' of some sort so that everyone knows where the buck stops (what would happen if the buck didn't stop?). And the person who counts the beans should probably be called an accountant or maybe put a "chief" in his title since he's got such a boring job. What about all of the other titles? Aren't their first names sufficient? Or maybe we could call them by their salaries: "let's get the $70k to do that job because $90k is too busy and $100k's time is better spent on project $1.1M". If people were named by their salaries then everyone would know where they stood in the company. But raise time would be confusing. It would be like everyone got married and changed their name at the same time (except for that poor bastard $50k who didn't get a raise).

Ultimately I think it's best to just let people pick their own titles. If someone wants to be called "Code Czar" or "Super Genius" then let them! It's not like it matters when the shit hits the fan. It just might turn out that "Butt Sniffer" is the guy you turn to when things are in a state of crisis because he's the goto guy while "Big Brain" crumbles and mumbles something about his Mommy. But letting people pick their titles is harmless and boosts morale by giving employees the pleasure of picking clever things to put on their business cards. If you please, my title will be "Potential Lunch Winner" so as to reflect what business cards are really good for.

Congruency & Courage

2006-09-25T18:01:00.000-06:00

At the end of August I left a cozy job for the uncertainties of unemployment. After 20 years of running on the big wheel of the rat race, I am hanging up my rat jogging shoes to pursue other endeavors. In some ways it all happened pretty quickly but in others it was just a matter of time and the ball was already rolling in that direction. I've been meaning to spend more time working on Squeat and other website ideas and I now have the opportunity to focus all my energies on these endeavors. In other words, I feel like I finally had the courage to lead a more congruent life.

That last sentence probably only makes sense if you have read Steve Pavlina's articles about congruency and courage. If you haven't read them and don't want to read those lengthy articles I'll summarize for you (they are worth reading if you have the time).

My abridged interpretation of Steve's congruency article is that you shouldn't compartmentalize your life. Every area of your life affects every other area so you need to approach life with a consistency across all 'compartments'. More specifically you should approach all areas with passion (Steve uses the word 'love'). If your job sucks then that will leak into your home life. If your home life sucks that will affect your job. If you want to be happy you need to attack all areas of your life in a way that ties together everything. Merriam-Webster defines 'congruous' as 'being in agreement, harmony, or correspondence' which seems to fit pretty well with this idea. But you can't lead a congruous life without the courage to make the changes needed to get there.

The courage article is all about having the courage to live your life in a way that matches your values. And in part I think it's about having the courage to recognize when your life has turned down a dead-end and that you need to make changes to get things back on track. It's all too easy to let things go on indefinitely in one direction then suddenly realize that you didn't want to go down that path until it's seemingly too late. How many people really aspire to be middle managers or sit behind a desk in a soul-deadening job of one kind or another? For most people those things just happen. You get a promotion or get a "secure" job then, before you know it, you are miserable and don't know what happened. Having the courage to deal with that is not always easy. You have to overcome the fears of uncertainty that come with making a change to get out of the rut you're in.

Those two articles in particular resonate with me because of my current situation. I actually stumbled onto those articles after giving notice at my old job. Like I said earlier, that was just a matter of time. Leading up to this, I had recently moved into a cheaper house to reduce the mortgage payment. The whole purpose of that move was to enable me to be able to quit without the financial burden becoming too large to cope with. The financial fears were reduced as a result of that move. The move for me also was about moving to an area that more closely matched the type of community that I'd like to live in. And I now have an office in the new house that wouldn't have been possible in the old place.

So now I'm off to the unknown world of trying to make a living by my various websites (and future ones too as the ideas come). Wish me luck but, most of all, wish me the courage to live congruently.

What's the point?

2006-09-23T10:45:00.000-06:00

This blog is my way of documenting my life and the things that interest me. In part I will be documenting my own life but also will use this blog as a forum to just talk about things that are interesting to me.

So, welcome to my blog! I hope you find it interesting.