Information Week's The brainyard's Debra Donston-Miller has another in the latest meme "you know you're from..." 

You know you're from IT in the 1990s if...

OK There's only a couple of these I can't recall - the Pentium bug instruction that was broken - but I have one of the chips in a drawer here so, does that count?
And sorry - but Scott/Tiger struck out...

Well, maybe some of them are not quite accurate for me:
46 - I used my own name
45 - vi is still my HTML editor of choice
 

I'm not attending Linuxcon for various reasons - but I'm certainly aware it is on - and watching the proceedings via live stream as and when I can.

One of the attendees, Dave Täht, invited me to lunch yesterday and, as we'd never met in meat space, I accepted. We met about 11:30 just outside the Hyatt and I drove us to a little Greek place near Thurlow and Davie. 

Dave was suffering mildly from lack of sleep and other maladies, including having lost his glasses "some time in the past 2 weeks." He set up a recorder to document our conversations and I'll get a copy some time in the not too distant future he assured me, so I'll detail things then. In the mean time I wanted to give a bit of background to our meeting and some of the things Dave and others are doing that will affect all of us in the internet community.

Paying for advertising on other sites to drive "interested" people to you site where you really don't have direct income generation to support such ads has turned out to be a "money pit" that simply is not sustainable. I've come across an advertising facility that is working at redressing this problem - ads "paid for" by simply showing other's ads on your site - Clickochet.COM

The basic premise is - show ads and earn "credits" - and then place ads and use the credits.

The kicker is - if you have more than one site, where one gets lots of page (ad) views, you can use the credits from that one to boot-strap another site. In my case, I'm using the large number of views of a couple of my sites to kick-start a new one; placing text ads on sites across the internet that tell people about it and hopefully drive traffic to it.

You can sign in to Clickochet with your Facebook or Twitter account. I have not hit any limit to the number of sites/places I can show ads in, but there is a limit of 10 ads that you can create for placement in other's ad areas.

The interface and ad presentation algorithms are "changing daily" but all for the better. If nothing else, you can use this facility to tune your ad wording and landing pages for use in paid ads - I expect the response to be similar to things like Google's text Adsense ads - and the format is pretty much identical.

Let me know how you do if you try it. I'm always looking for feedback

richard

I have 3 Sony video cameras, 2 Sony TVs, a Sony surround sound system and a "boom box". Those are just the Sony products I can think of off the top of my head that are still in current use.

They're the last Sony products I'll purchase - ever.

Why you might ask. Let me tell you.

The United States Department of Homeland Security has seized over 70 domains for Copyright and Trademark Violations - at least in their opinion. No notice, no court conviction, and in at least one instance, no real reason IMHO.

Of course the concept of "Homeland Security" seizing any internet domain for reasons of copyright is pretty outrageous in any case - talk about overstepping their original mandate.

This is an excellent reason for all outside the US to at least add their local country's domain to their list of domains instead of relying upon COM, NET, ORG, EDU, and of course the GOV and MIL which are supposed to be US only anyway.

If burning oil and coal are the cause of global warming through the release of all that stored carbon, why don't we just start the process of making more oil and coal to capture the same amount and start  the cycle all over again?

OK - it might take a few million years to reproduce the oil and coal we'll run out of some time in the next century or so, but who are we to not at least try to give our great^⁵⁰⁰⁰ grand children the opportunity in the future to start the cycle all over again?

All it takes is to simply start piling up carbon-bearing plant products and left-over carbon-carrying goods such as newspaper and cardboard.

Farmers would no longer plow under the stalks of the corn they've harvested - but instead simply push it off into a pile and keep adding to the pile over the years. No need to cover it with dirt or anything else for that matter. Over time the weight of the new stuff, along with the lack of oxygen in the pile, will cause the chemical reactions to turn it all into oil or coal, depending on how high the pile is. There are no other environmental impacts - and the carbon is taken out of the cycle completely.

Add some newspaper and cardboard too. Why expend the extra energy to gather and recycle this stuff when making new is easier? Maybe my brother and all the others at the pulp mill in Port Alberni would have long-term jobs again too!

Anyway, the article that started this though process is in the Washington Post. It talks about the millions that one power plant is expending to capture just 1.5% of the carbon it emits and pump it down into a sandstone formation a couple of thousand meters underground, and the fact that simply piling up the plant waste from 12,000 acres of farm land and leaving it to eventually turn to coal would cost less and be every bit as effective.

Think about it!

I'm going to start a garbage pile in my backyard as my contribution to lessening global warming. The recycling trucks won't get another piece of paper, and my grass clippings are going in there too.

Hmmm... wait - back of the envelope calculations show that the pile would have to be several times the size of my house to really keep the oxygen out. Well, maybe I'll just petition the local council to start the process out on one of the fields that are around here.

richard

Around the World with David Ingram is being re-launched and I'll be co-hosting with David. We're going to focus less on financial and tax and more on general subjects in much the same manner as David's award-winning cable TV show a few years ago.

Our first show was last Wednesday and the archives are up now, all 22 pieces of the almost 3 hour show hosted on YouTube.

Our topic for the show, other than letting you know we are launching, was Globalism and the Internet, in keeping with my recent series of articles on this subject. 

We'll be doing future shows on such topics as the Insurance Corporation of BC (ICBC) and other government departments and topics as well as talks with authors, businessmen and other interesting people.

The major difference between our show and the typical talk-show is the depth we'll be doing on any individual subject. Most guests and topics will be on for at least an hour, and you'll be able to call in and ask questions of them and us about the topic.

Tune in every Wednesday evening to www.david-ingram.com and call us with your comments and questions.

I just spent about an hour listening to Clay Shirky, a New York University "Internet Thinker", talk about what is happening to the newspaper industry as it struggles with the online world and the changes to its market.

My morning newspapers of the past have shrunk to a single one because their individual sizes did not add up to what one used to be - so we cut back to one and find more news on the web instead. With the crop of new e-book readers being shown this week in Las Vegas at the I may find one that will satisfy both my wife and myself for sitting at the breakfast table - then we'll cancel the last remaining one.

The problem Clay Shirky talks about is not the fact that the newspapers are dieing - but that the whole industry is fragmenting and we, the consumers who purchased the newspapers in the past, have to work harder to find our reliable sources of "commercial, long-range" journalism (as opposed to opinionism which is so rampant on the web, this blog being not much different).

Without the money generated from the newspaper's captive advertising market - where the advertisers paid because there was no alternative - there simply isn't any incentive, let alone money, for the types of journalism that exposed things like the Watergate affair or the Catholic church covering up pedophilia in their numbers. So the question is - who is going to replace the newspapers in doing "accountability journalism"? How are they going to be funded? Will the exposure-style of journalism die?

Yesterday I took a short drive from my home in Pitt Meadows, across the new Pitt River Bridge, to the marina just downstream on the Port Coquitlam side of the river. I was lucky enough to get there just as one of the residents was coming up the dock and he kindly let me go to the end of the warf to take a series of pictures of the dismantling of the oldest of the pair of swing-bridges that the new bridge replaces.

I've stitched them together to make a single shot that shows the whole bridge in huge detail.