I have the worst of all colds.

Like other colds, this one saps your energy, fills your throat with vile phlegm, and keeps you coughing all day long. But unlike other colds, this one destroys something far more vital--your hope.

This isn't even like H1N1, which seems to hit like a ton of bricks and then flies away never to be heard from again. This thing is like a cancer, going into remission from time to time and then coming back with a vengeance. My wife has it as well, so we share our suffering and thus lessen it, but watching it come back and attack her again after she was getting better is just too much for me to bear.

Like an idiot, I've tried to make being sick not impact my work schedule, so after taking only a single day off I went back to work. It's something that we all tend to do, thinking that loyalty to the company trumps one's own personal well-being, and I don't subscribe to that philosophy at all, yet here I am. Jen is temping so her schedule is a bit more flexible, but now she has a new assignment, right at the worst possible time.

Well, having let all that out, I'm not actually sure if it will make me feel better or not. Obviously I've let blogging slide during this period, as something had to go. This post is at least a way of acknowledging this.

One good thing: I've finished responding to all my Amiga game developer emails, and I'm ready and itching to start writing the article, which should be a good one.

I haven't felt much like blogging this week, but here's a quick update:

• Started my Project Management Professional (PMP) course last Saturday. Thinking of doing a big blog post titled "PMPing ain't easy"
• Got invited to fill in on an Dungeons and Dragons game at a coworker's place this Saturday. REALLY excited about this!
• I am about 3/4 of the way through answering all the Amiga gaming emails I received. Some of them have been really amazing.
• At work we've started this huge important project using a brand-new platform with conflicting (some may say incompatible) goals for delivery, a hard due date, and nothing but problems. This has been causing some stress, as you can imagine.

Life is certainly interesting. I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I tentatively put up my very first web page (preserved in all its horror here), I had this idea that I would never sully my site with advertising. When I decided to open a web-based forum, OSY, part of my selling point was that it wouldn’t have any ads at all. The web was still in its awkward growth phase back then, and some advertising was truly horrible (although not as horrible as it has become recently!) My web site was just a personal project, so ads weren’t necessary.

When I decided to put up a blog, my thoughts changed. Everyone else was getting money from ads, so why couldn’t I? The idea of Google ads really intrigued me. Text-only, non-intrusive, and—best of all—tailored automatically to my content! I’d just plug them in, slowly build up my readership, and watch as the money rolled in.

Well, as you can imagine, the result was nothing like this.

Money from views alone, apparently, is nonexistent—somewhere in the realm of billionths of pennies. You only get paid if people click on your ad links, and of course nobody with half a brain ever clicks on ad links. In the meantime, Google made my life difficult by requiring authentication on top of authentication. I had to wait for letters with secret codes in the mail, phone strange numbers and talk to even stranger robots, and repeat the process as often as Google felt necessary. No doubt they consider this necessary to prevent fraud and abuse of their ad system, but I wonder sometimes how hard it would be to make robots that can pick up a phone and call other robots. Then to make matters worse, Google only sends out a check (a paper check!) after the total reaches $100. There must be millions of blogs that never reach that point before the authors give up in despair. All those fractions of $100 are basically free money for Google—they certainly charge the advertisers right away—and they get to keep vacuuming them up, year after year.

The promise of context-appropriate advertising was equally a lie. Seeing what crazy ads Google would come up with for any given page was certainly humorous, but not useful in any way. They didn’t track with my blog at all. Maybe that’s asking too much, as my topics wander all over the place, but they were way off.

I thought maybe it was just me with my very modest blog that was having these problems, but then I heard Jeff Atwood talk about his adventure with Google ads on his Stack Overflow podcast, and he confirmed everything I thought. Stack Overflow was already a massive success, pulling in millions of page views a month, and yet the revenue from Google ads was practically zero. He very quickly decided to pull the Google ads and replace them with specific advertising that he procured himself.

What amazes me is that Google makes millions of dollars from this system that is so obviously broken. How can they get away with this?

Not that the alternatives are any better. The so-called “ad networks” that place banner ads on many places on the Internet are actually much, much worse. The ads run by these networks were never that great, but in the last year something horrifying has happened: two particular ads have completely taken over the entire network, the Internet equivalent of saturation bombing. I’m referring, of course, to the horrible cartoon people who cut belly fat with “This weird old tip”. Just seeing that makes me want to punch someone, and I’m not a violent person. Then there are the teeth-whitening ads utilizing a trick “Discovered by a mom”. Ironically, with a quick Google you can discover that both these “miracle” cures for belly fat and stained teeth are complete frauds—absolute wastes of time and money, and yet they are taking over the entire Internet. I saw one of these ads the other day on Hotmail—Hotmail! Is there no escape from this idiocy?

So I’m going to slowly replace all the Google ads on my site with ads for my own projects. I’ve started this at the top-left, and will continue until they are all gone. Maybe one day when I get more substantial traffic I might try and negotiate my own ad deals, but for now that’s just a pipe dream.

Someone on Ars posted this image, and it instantly triggered an amazing flashback memory from eight hundred zillion trillion years ago, when I was in elementary school, probably around Grade 6.

My best friend Andrew Knowles brought in this exact Game and Watch one day to class. He always had the best tech toys—I played the original Sears PONG and Mattell hand-held football and a whole bunch of other cool things at his house, including the above device, which looks a lot like the Nintendo DS, no? Anyway, a bunch of us were having way too much fun playing it (at lunch, as we'd never get away with it during class time... or did we??) and it does this thing (shown in the picture) when you nudge the battery and it power-cycles, basically showing every possible character in every position.

I remember this girl, her name was Astra, tall, dirty blonde, not super-pretty but she had boobs which was a magical new thing in Grade 6, and she was kind of aloof and didn't talk to the tiny proto-men that we were back then, which was probably a good thing as we would have just teased her anyways.

Anyway, someone handed her the game and it did the reset thing, and she stared at it for a bit and then started laughing, and I remember what she said then as clear as day:

"There are.... too many men!"

Everyone laughed. It was so awesome.

Even to this day, whenever I'm watching a hockey game and they get a too many men on the ice penalty, I think of this moment.

For the second year in a row, I was determined to make a fondue. I took extra care this year to not load the oil into the pot before I had the fondue fluid lit, but unfortunately I didn't count on the fondue fluid container collapsing just after I lit it, resulting in an exciting moment:

"Jen: I'll have to call you back OMG fuck! fuck!"

(Jen puts down phone, runs to kitchen, opens cabinet and gets fire extinguisher and hands it to me as I stare dumbly at the burning tablecloth)

(I leap to action, ripping the plastic safety cord from the fire extinguisher and pull the trigger)

The noble tablecloth gave its life to protect the table, and ourselves:

Fortunately, the damage was minimal, and I was able to get the fondue going:

After the fondue, it was time for Dungeons and Dragons! I haven't DM'ed since high school, and I remember sucking and being a terrible DM back then, so I was determined to do better this time!

The Wizard was a little drunk already, and not even that clued in that she was in a dungeon, so I decided to have one of the goblins throw a javelin at her shoulder to get her attention!

Go nerd crew!

Am I happy? Am I happy??? Damn right I'm happy! I'm a DM again, and I'm kicking ass!

The night is done; the battle won. Time for bed. I had SO much fun.

Happy New Years everyone!