A place to store my thoughts until I figure out what to do with them.
I was listening to one of my podcasts that teaches deep mathematical concepts. While listening today, they were talking about Game Theory. This caused them to bring up a story one of them saw in the news about the Rock Paper Scissors Championship. I did some looking and came up with the World Rock Paper Scissors Society.
They have a championship coming up in October if you want to go.
???
The last time I mentioned that the ads seemed to pick up on the paint story from my helmet painting post. Now it is picking up on a lot of podcasting comments and bankruptcy. Bankruptcy? I have not said anything about that. Where did that come from?
Also there have been a consistent stream of religious ads being fed to us.
At the bottom of the page is another ad box that I added (pun intended) which serves up more ads. If you can’t get a good laugh out of the ones to the left, try looking at the ones at the bottom.
Of course, whatever I mention here will end up being different by the time you read this post, but it is fun to see what the robots pick up on. Over time it will probably feed lots of podcasting, running and religious related ads.
I have been lax on updating you on the DRM/EMI/iTunes news. It happened! We are now able to buy EMI music on iTunes without DRM as of last week. I was holding off saying something about it because I wanted to buy some tunes first to show my support. I am in the process of getting an older Christopher Parkening CD that I don’t have, Simple Gifts. It is a CD that I have heard much about, but never have gotten to hear. There are a few others I would like to get my hands on.
There is some talk that they are doing “digital watermarking” on the tracks you download. What this means is that you can play the song on any player that plays that file type, but it has (if they are really doing this) your personal information tied to it. So if you share it out on the peer to peer downloading sites, they can track down that it came from you. I think that is fair and don’t personally mind it.
This is the first time I have bought a whole album off the web or iTunes. I have avoided buying music this way because of the DRM that is tied to it. If you are unfamiliar with DRM, have a listen to My Thought Spot podcast episode 1 or see some of my earlier posts about it.
Have you noticed my Google ads to the left?
The way these work is their computers look at the content on the page and try to tailor the ads to fit the content. They have really picked up on the posting about my football helmet being painted. Most of the ads for the last 2 days have been related to paint and body work.
I just find it interesting. Look at them each time you load the page and see how they change and what it seems to be picking up as being important. If you click on a post to leave a comment, then you should get a new set of ads that will be targeted to the information in that post. Or, at least, it should.
This works better on a blog that has somewhat of a running theme (which often I do talk about running). When you have a consistent topic, then it is more able to tailor ads specifically for your readers.
Today I hit the post office for the first time in a couple of weeks. We don’t have much mailed to us, so we only check when we are expecting something. I have been eagerly awaiting my microphones which probably will never arrive. That is based on the conversation I had with the post office lady today.
Today I had a nice pretty brown package slip in my mail box. I was thrilled until I saw from whence it came. It was not the state that the microphones should have been mailed from.
The package cost me $35 in custom’s fees. It was a box that had a music CD and some CDs of sermons from a conference. All of which I very much appreciate. The music CD I would probably have paid money for. The conference CDs I might have paid for, but not at the end of the month when I don’t have any money. But the deal at the post office is, I either pay it, or they destroy it. I have 2 weeks to pay it. Since I have not been there a while, I have already passed 1 week and won’t get paid for a few more days. So I took all the money I had in the gasoline fund in the glove box (don’t tell anyone I keep my gas money in the glove box) and paid the custom’s fee.
Fortunately customs did not open the package and steal anything out of it. The custom’s form that was filled out by the church which sent me the CDs had all the information written out. So customs just used the information on the form instead of pawing through the box. The problem is that they said there were 1 audio CD and 45 DVDs. In fact, they were all audio CDs. So I had to pay the custom’s fee on 45 DVDs instead of CDs.
They also listed the value at the full retail value of the items. While they could sell these for $200, it certainly did not cost them that much to produce. They should be honest on a custom’s form, but couldn’t they put the actual cost instead of the retail value? The form just asks for “Value.” It does not specify retail or actual value.
So, anyway, I had to pay $35 for a gift today. Last year it was $50. I was so torqued last year that I never listened to them. They still sit on my shelf waiting to be loaded into my MP3 player. Maybe I will catch up on last year’s and eventually get around to this year’s CDs.
An email might have to be sent to tell them that I would actually appreciate NOT getting the “gift” next year.