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With polls on the east coast a little more than 4 hours away from opening, it’s time to turn our attention to the election.

Regardless of which side you’re on, it’s hard not to get swept up in all the excitement surrounding such an historic event. Since a presidential election only happens every four years, the anticipation is comparable to that generated by the Olympics, if not more so. Making it even more important that those of you who are of voting age go out and vote.

Why live in a democratic country (even if it is a representative democracy) and not exercise your right to vote? Go vote. Seriously.

Some helpful resources if you’re unsure on who to vote for:

• Vote By Issue: Learn about the candidates through their platforms, not their personalities.
• Project Vote Smart: An objective presentation of the facts. No agendas.
• Candidate Calculator: Find the presidential candidate that agrees with you.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Just a reminder for y’all, today is free burrito day at your local Chipotle restaurant. Simply wear an article of aluminum foil (wrap some around your wrist if you don’t want to go all out) and get a free burrito.

Just remember to get there before/after the rush to avoid waiting in line all day. Happy eatings!

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Some loyal visitors wrote in and asked what happened to the amazing relevant ads that used to show up on my sites. I’d like to thank them for their concerns, and kinda give an idea of what happened.

About two weeks ago, I got an email from my advertising provider saying that they had detected fraudulent clicks on my ads and had, in return, disabled my ad feed.

As the advertisements are a significant source of income (~$200/month), I took it upon myself to investigate and figure out what happened.

I looked through my raw web server logs, my own visit tracker, and Google Analytics, and came across some surprising numbers.

The Wallsaver website’s daily unique visitors jumped from ~1,300 to ~4,500 after the launch of wallsaverapp.com.

The click through ratio of ads on the Wallsaver website had jumped significantly, resulting in a huge jump in monthly revenue.

Several reports of an image ad depicting a “Download Mac Screen Savers” button that led users to believe that clicking on the image (which they did not know was an ad) would let them download Wallsaver.

I packaged up all this information in an email to my provider and waited for their response.

A few days ago, I finally got a reply saying that they had determined that the clicks had incorrectly been determined as invalid because of the statistics I collected above.

So my ads (and revenue) have been restored and I’ve configured all of my ads for wallsaverapp.com and nwwnetwork.net to be text-only. This should prevent this confusion from happening again.

Thanks for caring!

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It’s well known that Apple purchased the rights to the new Magnetosphere visualizer found in iTunes 8, but it seems they forgot to remove/change some text in the visualizer’s on-screen preferences (accessible by pressing ? while the visualizer is playing).

Most (if not all) of Apple-shipped software doesn’t contain any information aside from “Designed by Apple in California” and/or “Copyright 20xx Apple Inc.” so I find it surprising that the QA folks over in Cupertino let this slip by.

Will they fix it?

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If so, I just might sell my MacBook Air for one of these babies! We’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks to find out.

[source]

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