Here’s what I learned from that experience:

• Blogging is a lot more of a time-sucker than I originally expected. It takes work. Luckily, it’s mostly a labor of love, but it’s still more time and energy than most people who don’t do it would guess.
• The best use for it was as a way to share with friends the links I found every day, replacing the need to run down my buddy list copying and pasting links (Actually that’s what “Web Logging” was originally about, before it was online diaries and news).
• Engaging with other people is even harder work, one I never got the trick of. I enjoy debates and I’d hoped that there’d be more people challenging me as they might in a forum, both on other blogs and by commenting, but it seems most of my readers were pretty passive. Integrating yourself in the blogosphere conversation is a challenge.
• Because I’m better at point-counterpoint arguments, I tended to respond to articles I read more than anything else. I’d have liked to offer more original content, but this was the style that was easiest for me to adapt.

I also quickly outgrew the Livejournal platform. Livejournal is great at what it does, just not at what I was doing with it. After looking at some options, I decided to move up to a more professional blogging platform - I got some web space and hosted a wordpress blog on it. My intention was to use AdSense revenue to cover the meager cost of web hosting, and I’d have a site I could play with to my heart’s content.

Eventually, I did get to a point where I was happy with the blog layout (though some persistent minor CSS issues remained that I never had the energy to fix), and it had and could do everything I wanted. In the process of setting up and operating this new blog, I learned a couple of other things. Primarily this:

• Growing blog traffic is a difficult task.

I got some traffic from Technorati and search engines, but that’s been pretty flatline. Occasionally I’d get an inbound link from elsewhere that would send traffic my way, but it that was always a spike that would return to normal. I never attained more than the 12 subscribers I had initially. Converting inbound traffic into new subscribers never really happened.

Of course, it’s not too hard to figure out why.

• I wasn’t providing enough quality original content to earn many inbound links from other bloggers, and I really wasn’t offering any compelling reasons for those who happened by my blog to want to subscribe.
• The stuff I did talk about, I didn’t explain very well - I wrote as if everyone knew what I was talking about, and had the same level of understanding I have. This is especially problematic given the diversity of topics I cover.

Now, those are problems I’d love to fix on this blog right here, as there are things I do love about “Musings of the Great Eric” as it stands today. I do like the template and layout I found, with the sidebar toggles. I’m proud of a number of posts I’ve written, and I’m proud of the positive feedback I’ve gotten.

However, the core assumption I made when I started this never materialized. The amount of traffic I get, while I’m generally happy with it, is hardly enough to justify maintaining my own web space, and doesn’t translate into enough Adsense clicks to come close to covering the modest cost of running this site. Given that, it doesn’t make much sense for me to keep this as is: It’s time for a reboot.

I’ll be migrating to free blog hosting at Wordpress.com. I’ll lose many of the customizations I’ve come to love, but I think it’s an acceptable trade off. The biggest downside is that it will break all the permalink URL’s that I’ve built up here; inbound links and search engines will no longer work. It’s a little sad to kill all the work I *have* done to get to that point, but at the end of the day I’ll live with it. I’ll put all the contents of this blog and my former livejournal blog into an archive, so they’ll still live on the net. But other than that, I’ll be starting fresh.

I’ll point the Feedburner URL at the new blog, so those of you who are subscribed shouldn’t even notice the difference. Eventually I’ll point thegreateric.com at the new blog, but for now I’ll keep it here until my subscription runs out and the site goes offline.

Here’s the way it’ll be from now on:

• Linksharing will be done with the aid of Del.icio.us - the interesting stuff I read and find will get automatically posted daily with a brief description; it makes more sense than what I was doing previously, where I was using a whole post for some of these with little substantive comment. The other side-effect is it means there will probably be more links, as it’s fully automatic.
• Posts will have less quoted areas, more links, and more writing by me. I’ll be doing less highlighting and more thoughts, commentary, and analysis centered around topics rather than particular articles. It’ll be rough at first but I believe the net result will be more interesting reading.

Maybe one day I’ll build up the traffic to justify going pro again. In the meantime, here’s the way it will be set up:

https://thegreateric.com - this site, until it goes offline, probably about a month from now. After that I’ll forward the domain to the new wordpress blog.
http://thegreatericarchive.wordpress.com - Archive of all posts from here + my old livejournal posts. Not at their original links, but at least they’ll be preserved on the web.
http://thegreateric.wordpress.com - new blog, and eventually where thegreateric.com will point to.
The Feedburner Feed   - currently points to the new blog; if you’re subscribed that way you shouldn’t even notice the change.

So update your links, and do let me know what you think of the changes.

Last November, Shawn Hogan received an unsettling call: A lawyer representing Universal Pictures and the Motion Picture Association of America informed the 30-year-old software developer that they were suing him for downloading Meet the Fockers over BitTorrent. Hogan was baffled. Not only does he deny the accusation, he says he already owned the film on DVD. The attorney said they would settle for $2,500. Hogan declined.

Now he’s embroiled in a surprisingly rare situation – a drawn-out legal fight with the MPAA. The organization and its music cousin, the Recording Industry Association of America, have filed thousands of similar lawsuits between them, but largely because of the legal costs few have been contested and none have gone to trial. This has left several controversies unresolved, including the lawfulness of how the associations get access to ISP records and whether it’s possible to definitively tie a person to an IP address in the age of Wi-Fi.

Hogan, who coded his way to millions as the CEO of Digital Point Solutions, is determined to change this. Though he expects to incur more than $100,000 in legal fees, he thinks it’s a small price to pay to challenge the MPAA’s tactics. “They’re completely abusing the system,” Hogan says. “I would spend well into the millions on this.”

It had to happen eventually, I applaud this guy for being willing to fight it. Hopefully it’ll bring an end to this madness.

Technorati Tags: MPAA, Lawsuits

But do the capuchins actually understand money? Or is Chen simply exploiting their endless appetites to make them perform neat tricks?

Several facts suggest the former. During a recent capuchin experiment that used cucumbers as treats, a research assistant happened to slice the cucumber into discs instead of cubes, as was typical. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could ‘’buy'’ something sweeter with it. To the capuchin, a round slice of cucumber bore enough resemblance to Chen’s silver tokens to seem like another piece of currency.

Then there is the stealing. Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment. All seven monkeys live in a communal main chamber of about 750 cubic feet. For experiments, one capuchin at a time is let into a smaller testing chamber next door. Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them — a combination jailbreak and bank heist — which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

The world’s oldest profession.

Technorati Tags: Economics, Psychology, Monkeys, Animals, Prostitution, Money, Sociology

However, off-Earth romantics will have to cope with some practical challenges:

* Sex in space would likely be “hotter and wetter” than on Earth, Bonta said, because in zero-G there is no natural convection to carry away body heat. Also, scientists have found that people tend to perspire more in microgravity. The moisture associated with sexual congress could pool as floating droplets.

* The physics of zero-G make the mechanics of sex more complicated. Bonta said it was challenging even to kiss her husband during a zero-G simulation flight they took recently. “You actually have to struggle to connect and stay connected,” she recalled. Partners would have to be anchored to the wall and/or to each other. To address that need, Bonta has come up with her own design for garments equipped with strategically placed Velcro strips and zippers.

* Although zero-G could be a boon for saggy body parts, Bonta said males might notice a “slight decrease” in penis size due to the lower blood pressure that humans experience in microgravity.

* Romantics will also need to guard against the type of motion sickness that space travelers often encounter, especially if they get too adventurous right off. “Save the acrobatics for post-play vs. foreplay,” Bonta advised.

For all these reasons, Logan said spontaneous sex in space could be “a little underwhelming.”

Boo!

Technorati Tags: Sex, Space

Martin Spence of Bectu points to a recent UK jobs survey as proving that such conditions exist in England, as well. “The results debunk some of the glamorous myths about working in media,” he says. “The hours are long and although on face value the average salary looks high, when you consider the costs of living and working in London, which most media professionals do, it’s not a huge income.” But how long are those hours, exactly?

The Skillset survey (PDF) to which he refers show that media professionals work 44.6 hours a week—not particularly long by US standards, but well above the UK’s 33.8 hour average for all workers. Video game developers, in fact, actually work less hours than any other group in the entertainment industry: 8.6 hours a day, on average. Web designers put in 8.8 hours, while those designing and producing commercials put in 11.1 (see p. 64).

Many Americans would no doubt prefer to be spit out of such a mill; more than 40% of them work above 50 hours a week already, regardless of their industry. The fact that putting in 8.6 hours a day feels like a heavy workload to UK workers says much about the cultural differences found on opposite sides of the Atlantic. While US workers may be the most productive in the world, if you break that productivity down by the hour, Americans come in behind the Norwegians, French, and Belgians.

The time poverty that most Americans live in has been a pet peeve issue of mine for a long time. 33.8 hours seems like an impossible dream in this country - and that doesn’t even bring up the depressing reality of vacation time (five weeks vs. two weeks).

Technorati Tags: Time Poverty

Technorati Tags: Funny, Sex

Technorati Tags: NASA, Moon, Apollo 11, History, Astronauts, Space

Technorati Tags: Funny, Star Wars, Yoda

Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest.

When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day.

Ah, so now I have an excuse!

Technorati Tags: Health, Sleep, Brains, Intelligence

Yahoo Music Blog:

You can buy a personalized version of the new Jessica Simpson song “A Public Affair” from Yahoo! Music’s Web Site (Music.Yahoo.com) for $1.99, and it’s an MP3. Dear digital consumer, even if you’re not into Jessica Simpson, and you’re not excited about spending $2 for a song, let me tell you, this is a bigger deal than you might think.

As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.

We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway! And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.

I’m not about to buy Jessica Simpson music, mp3 format or not, but if they start to offer good music in that format I’ll definitely jump on board. It’s nice to know some people in that business have their heads screwed on straight. I hope they are successful in their bid to convince the RIAA idiots of the above.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Music, Mp3, RIAA, DRM

Technorati Tags: Mars, Rovers, Spirit, NASA, Photos

Technorati Tags: Bush, Stem Cells, Funny

The only real question in my mind now; will Vanilla Ice be doing the soundtrack of the new Ninja Turtles movie?

Turle Power!

Technorati Tags: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Movies, Animated

The straight-laced government of communist-run Vietnam, where pornographic Web sites are banned, plans to offer downloadable movies on an Internet site to educate married couples about healthy sex, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The official English-language Vietnam News quoted Khuat Thu Hong, Deputy Director of the Institute for Social Development, as saying “an orthodox sex Web site” would help couples learn more about “healthy sexual intercourse”.

Hong cited cases of married couples who had not had sex for a year, a rising divorce rate and rampant prostitution as reasons to publicise more information about sex.

Government sponsored porn. *shudders*

Technorati Tags: Porn, Funny, Scary, Vietnam

Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get “edgy”; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky’s still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video.

I don’t post anything to YouTube so this doesn’t affect me personally, but it bugs me nonetheless. It’s annoying nice that they bend over backwards to protect and enforce the copyrights of big media - but it just makes them a bunch of hypocrites when they claim the right to pirate the content of their user base for their own benefit.

It’s a shame - I think YouTube has a lot of potential to become *the* web video platform, but I still don’t see them making it as a company. If selling their users videos is how they plan to get into the black, then I suspect they’ll be gone by this time next year.

Google Video, for all its faults, keeps looking better and better.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Video, Web, Copyright

Technorati Tags: Bush, Veto, Stem Cells, Science,

Yesterday’s House debate on same-sex marriage was pure dead horse: The Senate last month rejected — emphatically — a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to ban same-sex marriage, so there was zero chance the amendment could be approved this year. But members of the House were answering to a Higher Authority.

“It’s part of God’s plan for the future of mankind,” explained Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.).

Rep. Bob Beauprez (R- Colo.) also found “the very hand of God” at work. “We best not be messing with His plan.”

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) agreed that “it wasn’t our idea, it was God’s.”

“I think God has spoken very clearly on this issue,” said Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), a mustachioed gynecologist who served as one of the floor leaders yesterday. When somebody quarreled with this notion, Gingrey replied: “I refer the gentleman to the Holy Scriptures.”

If God is choosing these assholes to speak through, we’re all fucked.

Welcome to the Theocratic States of America.

Technorati Tags: Church and State, Religion, God, Congress, Gay Marriage

Here in Washington, there is nothing more amusing than watching business interests work themselves up into a righteous frenzy over a threat to their monopoly profits from a new technology or some upstart with a different business model. Invariably, the monopolists (or their first cousins, the oligopolists) try to present themselves as champions of the consumer, or defenders of a level playing field, as if they hadn’t become ridiculously rich by sticking it to consumers and enjoying years in which the playing field was tilted to their advantage.

The fundamental problem here is that there really isn’t a free and open “market” for recorded music.

It starts with copyrights, which are nothing more than little government-issued monopolies. As a result of the recording industry’s lavish political contributions, Congress has extended the copyright for music to absurd lengths of time (70 years after the death of the artist) and absurd situations (singalongs at Boy Scout campfires). This is well beyond what is reasonably required to meet the aim of encouraging artistic creation.

The copyright laws also effectively set up the record labels as a cartel that can bargain as a group with satellite and Internet radio operators over royalties and other terms. Not surprisingly, the same cartel-like behavior appears to extend to the industry’s negotiations with Apple’s iTunes and other download services, which seem to strike suspiciously similar deals at suspiciously similar times with all of the major recording studios. It’s perhaps no coincidence, then, that the industry has already settled an antitrust suit over price fixing of compact discs and is reported to be the subject of another antitrust probe regarding prices for music downloads.

The interesting thing is that the RIAA isn’t anything unique here; the first paragraph is a template that fits almost any extablished industry you could name. Anti-trust laws created a disincentive to become a monopoly, enough of one that true monopolies are rarely seen these days (the only one I could name offhand is Microsoft, and that’s a special case in many ways). So now corporate slimeballs seem to gravitate towards the next worst thing: oligopolies, represented by “trade associations” like the RIAA. But you can see the same thing in industries across the board. Two to five companies make up 90% of the industry, and soon enough innovation screeches to a halt and the products become impossible to differentiate. Then they just take to clobbering anyone who threatens their cash cow business model.

It’s a sad state of affairs; unfortunately though it’s not one I expect to change anytime soon.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, Business, Monopolies, Oligopolies

There’s No Way I’m Saving That Guy

By Jesus Christ

All right. I realize I am supposed to be all-merciful, universally loving, the Light and the Way and everything, but even a divine avatar of the Supreme Being’s loving grace has His limits. I know I’ve said many times that there is always room for one more—even the lowliest—at the table of the Lord, but even so, there is just no freaking way I’m redeeming this S.O.B.

I don’t want to name names, but his initials are Gus Feigert, owner-operator of Fei gert Automotive down on Seybold Road, by the gas station. There, I said it. And you know what? I don’t care. I’m glad I said his name. If he’s going to suffer damnation for all eternity—which, I assure you, he most certainly is—then I don’t see how much more damage revealing his identity during his brief time on Earth is going to cause the bastard in the long run.

The guy is a jerk.

Ha!

Technorati Tags: Jesus, Onion, Funny, Religion

From Independent Sources:

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com

5. Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com

6. And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com

7. If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always
www.ipanywhere.com

8. Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. Their website is
www.cummingfirst.com

9. Then, of course, there’s these brainless art designers, and their whacky website:
www.speedofart.com

10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com

They almost hurt to read…

Technorati Tags: Funny, Internet