Apple Town Prince

The thought of managing accounts with 450 different ad networks made my head hurt so I signed up with Rubicon Project .  They claim to optimize the ads on your blog and show better performing ads more frequently. It’s been running for over a week on my blog and (as you can probably see on the sidebar to the right), I’m still running public service ads for the Red Cross. The dashboard on Rubicon Project’s website says that it’s still activating, though.

Update: The reason no ads were running is that I had forgotten to add baseline ad tags from Google and Rubicon Project has limited inventory in the 200×200 size that I had chosen (since it fits nicely in my sidebar). Their customer service is very helpful, though, and they were excellent at clarifying what I’d done wrong.

If you want to share video and visual information from your desktop you should check out Dyyno. They have combined some pretty cool video compression technology with a peer-to-peer networking layer and the result is very slick.

Their technology provides the plumbing for Xfire’s live video service. It’s still in beta but if you need a WoW fix, that’s the site to visit.

US consumers need to break their bondage to bling. On the other hand, there is talk of public debt in the US rising from 40% of GDP to 80% and even higher over the next ten years. For perspective on where this would fall on the spectrum of public debt, take a look at the CIA factbook figures on public indebtedness by country.

Bear in mind, that government spending as a percentage of GDP is about 25%.  That means that the public debt will be rising from 160% of public spending to 320% of public spending. That’s some pretty hefty leverage from a government in an age when most “American people” have concluded that leveraging oneself to the hilt is no longer a core component of the American dream.

One of my favorite websites, Memverse, has added a list of the top 100 most popular bible memory verses. It’s pretty cool because you can compare popular verses in the various different translations.

I use Memverse on a daily basis. What I like most is that I no longer have to keep track of which memory verses I need to review and when I need to review them. The algorithm seems to do a very good job of tracking which verses are due for a refresh in my memory. I am currently memorizing about 100 bible verses (about 50 are already classified as memorized) and spend about 10 minutes per day.

Another cool feature is that Memverse reports how much time you will need to spend per day (on average) to maintain your current list of verses as memorized. It seems to be fairly accurate and declines as you learn your verses. Whenever the time required drops below 10 minutes, I simply add another verse or two. That way, I always have new verses that I am learning while I am maintaining my list of memorized verses.

I frequently meet with the executives of alternative energy companies. Unfortunately, in most cases, the price of the electricity they’re generating is too high or the payback period for the required capital investment is too long.

In the past two years (April 2007 to March 2009) my wife and I have used 13,226 kwh at an average price of 13.3 cents per kwh (including all the taxes, distribution costs etc.). The total cost was $1,761 which amounts to $2.42 per day. We are fairly efficient and only use about 18.2 kwh per day which, according to PG&E, is a lot lower than average.

Nevertheless, it is hard to contemplate spending $10-20k to install any type of edge electricity generation when we can so easily pull it off the grid.

California, though, has a tiered rate system. Similar to tax rates, the more electricity you consume the higher your rate per kwh. The following are the approximate rates in California as of today.

• Baseline
• Tier 2 (up to 130% of baseline) — 13 cents per kwh
• Tier 3 (up to 200% of baseline) — 21 cents per kwh
• Tier 4 (up to 300% of baseline) — 37 cents per kwh
• Tier 5 (over 300% of baseline) — 44 cents per kwh

The baseline rate varies by geography and season but is priced around 11.5 cents per kwh and includes about 23 kwh per day currently.

If you are consuming enough electricity to be hitting tiers 4 and 5 then it begins to make sense to install solar panels or fuel cells such as those provided by ClearEdge Power.

This graph of the Iraqi stock market index says it all:

2004 - Feb 2009

Never underestimate the capacity of men to abandon that which is complex but provably true for that which they can understand. That’s why we abandoned the mystery of God for the seductions of neo-Darwinism.

WebDesignerWall has a great introductory jQuery tutorial. There are ten tutorials, including ones on animated hover effects, collapsible panels and menu accordions.

I was using the Rails helper observe_field to monitor a text entry form on my web app. I couldn’t figure out why the relevant method was not being called until I realized that it was happening every time there was a single quote in the text entry. The solution is simple. Use the escape_javascript function as shown below:

[ruby]
<%= observe_field :guess,
:frequency => 0.5,
:update => 'ajaxWrapper',
:url => {:action => 'feedback', :only_path => false},
:with => "'correct=#{escape_javascript(@text)}&guess='+encodeURIComponent(value)" %>
[/ruby]

Quote of the week from Perry Noble at NewSpring Church in Anderson, S.C. (full article):

“I believe a bailout will occur when our bondage to our bling is broken”