Monthly Archives: June 2004

FDR\’s unfinished revolution

Salon has an article titled FDR’s unfinished revolution detailing FDR’s proposal for a second bill of rights that, more or less, never happened. There’s also some speculation on what would happen should Bush be re-elected: striking down the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, right to privacy, Roe vs. Wade, affirmative action, etc. Salon also has an excerpt of the book that prompted that article.

An AdSense Experiment

Dan was telling me a month or two ago that he’s using Google AdSense on his blog. Now that I’m actually doing this regularly, I figured I’d try it out, and while I’m at it, on a few parts of my other sites.

I’m highly curious what sort of ads it will dish up. There isn’t exactly a massive market for products related to developing Russian languages patches for FreeCiv, for instance. Initial results are not all that positive, but we’ll see. It may be a very short-lived experiment :-)

This is presently deployed here on The ChangeLog, on the directory indices on the HTML-to-Gopher gateway on quux.org, and the message pages of the list archives on lists.complete.org.

On the monetary side, running all this costs me about $600 per year. While I would be quite surprised if AdSense brings in that much, maybe it would at least bring in enough to pay for some more disk space for the Gopher server…

I’ll keep you updated.

Dubyaspeak

Found a cool site today: DubyaSpeak.Com. Lost of quotes from the guy that a few million people voted for. I especially like the Dubya Quiz, where you’re presented with several questions. Each question has two options, representing quotes from George W. Bush and Dan Quayle. You have to pick the one from Dubya. It’s tought than you may think — I only got 50% right my first try.

I found it linked to from a site that provides fortune files of Dubyaspeak for your enjoyment.

Dumb Words: \”Sticktoitiveness\”

It seems that a lot of people are using the word “stick-to-it-iveness”. There’s even a page for potential authors that lists “stick-to-it-iveness” as a critical trait.

As this excellent rant points out, people seem to ignore that we already have a word for that: tenacity.

Even sadder: Google reports 995 hits for sticktoitiveness, 2810 for stick-to-it-iveness, and more with various other spellings. Argh.

Babylon 5, Sherlock Holmes, and Blogging

I am a person that is easily fascinated. I find the might of a massive steam locomotive almost a century old to be fascinating, and I think that the nanoscale engines now in development are fascinating as well. Programming languages, philosophy, music, other sciences — all are interesting.

But there’s something more fascinating: people. Sometimes they’re annoying (such as anyone on the Jerry Springer show; I’ve failed to grasp the fascination there for years). Sometimes they’re mysterious. Let’s see where this little observation can lead…
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